Has anyone ever investigate which backroom dealings resulted in this decision? Decisions like this, with a multi-billion profit guarantee to a specific vendor, aren't made for technical merit. If you really believe that neither MS nor someone else with stakes in it (maybe some reseller?) was involved, I have a few bridges for sale...
Well said.
This tale still might have a silver lining, though. A single security vulnerability, properly exploited, could turn the entire economy of South Korea into a cautionary tale. For a decade afterward, at board meetings where purchasing or standardization decisions are being debated, people will randomly interject "But we could end up like South Korea!".
This is slashdot. Do we believe what we say about the perils of vendor lockin and closed-source? If so, then we should also believe that South Korea's predicament will eventually become a clear and obvious error.
Right now, he patent clerk's job is to assess prior patents (easy) but not prior art (expensive).
[...] it would be much better if the patent clerks did a better job screening the patents [...]
That would require the patent clerks to be, or to hire, experts in the relevant field. That's possible but expensive. The cost of doing so is almost certainly higher than the cost of the current system: hire experts only when the patent gets challenged.
Since very few patents ever do get challenged, we are probably all saving money with the USPTO the way it is.
This time they posted, on their website, a picture of the actual key used to open all of their Diebold voting machines.
Voting machines should not be relying on physical security in the first place, because it is not practical to physically protect them 24/365. Their trustworthiness should be the result of double-handshake cryptographic authentications between the touchscreens, consoles, memory cards, and the central tabulator. Being able to open the cabinet should not be a vulnerability, because poll workers are invariably going to need to do so.
So, if Diebold machines implement proper authentication, then the cabinet key is not an interesting exposure. But if they don't (and we already know that they don't), then the cabinet key doesn't make them significantly more vulnerable than they already are.
Parents should teach children how to behave, peers have a lot of influence also, but its the parent's job to give the child a strong enough foundation to know what to accept from peers and what to reject.
Teachers on the other hand, have no moral authority at all, and knowing many of my fellow college students who became teachers, I would not trust them with rasing children.
Let's try inverting that sentence, and see how it sounds:
Parents on the other hand, have no moral authority at all, and knowing many of my fellow college students who became parents, I would not trust them with rasing children.
Whaddaya think? Is there such a thing as an objective standard of behavior that a "reasonable man" would agree that every child should be taught?
In other words, is there any behavior standard that is so ubiquitous that a child would suffer lifelong perils if he or she was not taught to abide it? How about "Do not initiate violence against other people."?
If there is such a standard, and if a child's parents have failed to teach it to him or her, then isn't the school obliged to perform the relevant mental programming?
I don't know if bullying and other emotional abuse qualifies as a universalizable taboo, but it is certainly an arguable border-case.
Please present your calculations on how big antennas these probes would need to communicate back any findings.
Instructions for spacegoing nanoprobes:
1. Make a profound interstellar discovery.
2. Clone yourself, and tell the clones to clone themselves, and so on, until there are a quadrillion of you.
3. Line yourselves up in space, with each nanoprobe joining its external antenna couplings to the nanoprobes adjacent to it.
4. Generate power and charge up your internal centripetal storage batteries to maximum charge.
5. Use the combined meta-antenna to transmit a single petawatt pulse back towards the motherworld.
6. Separate and go your separate ways.
7. Profit !!
And don't say "fewer attacks and/or security exposures on this OS as compared to Windows", because right now all non-Windows platforms are benefiting from "security through minority".
There's even a dorky genius here on slashdot who posts from his Amiga, and one of the benefits he lists for using steam-powered computing hardware, is the complete absence of any attacks targetting his box. Although he probably has to worry about termites eating his DRAM.
All of that would change if AmigaOS or Linux or whatever became the de facto standard.
Evolution does not have any right or wrong directions. That's devolution fallacy.
Humans set goals which evolution can work for or against. In the case of the goal "All humans become smarter and more peaceful, and achieve worldwide safety and comfort, and stop shooting each other over which hand the invisible man in the sky wants you to wipe your a** with", the goal is nearly universal, at least among men who have thought at all about the optimal future state of mankind.
It is implied, and obvious to everyone except for pedantics like yourself, that value judgments about evolution are using that goal as the standard of value. And therefore evolution can move in 'right' or 'wrong' directions, relative to that goal.
Several European countries have birthrates acceptably above the replacement rate (hello from Finland). The real problem with Europe's birthrate is not that they may lead to extinction of ethnic majorities (a possibility in some countries, not all), but that government services cannot be adequately maintained without enough of a growth in population.
Roughly speaking, a Ponzi scheme is one in which the perpetrators make false claims in order to lure investors. Once they have some investors coming in, they begin to pay back the earliest investors in order to create hype and garner more investors. People make money in ponzi schemes, but only by being at the top of the pyramid. What separates a Ponzi scheme from an actual market is that in an actual market, the items being traded have value outside of the system itself, and that access to liquidity is therefore available at levels other than the top. The article claims that because cash exchanges and the corresponding exchange rates are controlled by the people at the 'top', they are the only people with the ability to achieve substantial liquidity, and therefore, to make any money. This is why they say it resembles a Ponzi scheme more than an actual market.
'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'
If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.
Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.
Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)
The US Dollar isn't based on anything other than trust now - fiat money. What makes second life, or any other currency, any different?
True enough -- but it is trust in something that has a certain reliability. Anyone who accepts US dollars in exchange for real goods is trusting that the US government will behave a certain way. That's a reasonable article of trust -- it is not the act of faith that some imply it is.
Trusting the government of Weimar Germany to behave similarly would be an unjustified act of faith.
Same for US treasury bonds. The buyer of such bonds is trusting that the US government will not default on the necessary collection of taxes and repayment of mature bonds, and that the US economy will not crash bad enough to be unable to make such payments. That too is a justifiable act of trust.
Of course we all disagree over just how justifiable that trust is. The world's collective estimation of our trustworthiness is expressed in the interest rate that bonds fetch on the open market. Trustworthy countries get to pay lower interest rates on their bonds; risky countries pay higher interest rates... just like any consumer loan.
Looking for a bedplate material recently for a heavy vibrating system, I couldn't find anything better, in terms of performance and price, than European oak supported by steel beams. If I had been able to replace the oak beams with diamond, I rather think the vibration would shatter it along the fault planes in no time.
What are you doing in that bed, that you need so much structural strength?
And: "a heavy vibrating system" ?!
Wait, don't answer that. I keep forgetting that this is/.
but not having to perform surgery on the nervous system has many advantages,' [he] says."
Unless, of course, one happens to be an evil genius and/or mad scientist bent on evil world domination. I for one have had it with the constant anti-evil spin you brief mortals are constantly putting on scientific breakthroughs like this.
"What are we doing tonight, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky... no-longer-necessary surgery on the nervous system!"
...that with ancient texts, the challenge is more in the decyphering of the language in which they were written, not the storage format (be that stone, papyrus, cuneiform or whatever else). The issue here is that if the content is locked up in a proprietary format, it stops the decyphering of the content.
In the case of ancient texts, the system of writing used is the storage format. The stone or papyrus or whatever else is merely the storage medium.
And just look at how much trouble those formats have given us. Were it not for the Rosetta stone, we still wouldn't understand ancient written Hebrew. And we have no clue how to decipher Linear A.
The problem is that writing is the storage format for spoken sounds, which in turn are the storage format for words, which in turn are the storage format for concepts. Any one of those transitions can befuddle future generations... and I'm not even going to elaborate on how much trouble it would be to decryp^H^H^Hode Microsoft's.DOC format.
The only reliable solution is a multimedia presentation device. If we could build an extremely long-lasting, solar-powered ultra-basic laptop computer, capable of playing movies and narrating them as it goes, we'd be golden.
The Same reason why us heartless americans dont provide basic amenities to blacks and the spend more than half of the world's defense expenditure on needless wars. Shame on us too.
The only thing broken about America in this regard, is that some of her citizens are still so racist as to propose that blacks need to have basic amenities provided to them. No Caucasian belief could be more destructive to a black's career aspirations than that.
India, by contrast, still reinforces a caste system that prevents vertical mobility no matter how clever and productive a person is. A black person in America may have to work harder to move vertically, but at least the barriers set in his or her way (such as asshats like you) are soft.
If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
You, obviously, have never compared (say) Weetabix to (say) Oatmeal Raisin Crisp. American cereals are teh pwnz!
Hell, you don't even have to imagine. We already live with the incompatibility of low voltage power connectors... Only now instead of replacing an adapter when we get a device from a different manufacturer, we can buy all new office furniture! Joy!
And there's the reason why this inductive-charging scheme will not be adopted quickly by gadget companies: accessories are a cash cow.
Indeed, it is possible to sell a gadget at a loss, and earn all your profits on things like wall adapters, car adapters, USB adapters, data transfer cables, earphones, etc. etc. etc.
Think about it: how many different connectors are really needed to support the world of devices? My f***ing camera has a proprietary USB connection that requires a proprietary cable. WTF? And the power connector is similarly weird -- just weird enough to create an aftermarket for the manufacturer but not for any third party manufacturer of power adapters. Damn MBAs are running amok at our expense.
This desk would permanently end a lot of that monkey-business. There could even be a small cupholder version that you'd install in your car, and just plonk your gadget into it while you're driving.
Of course if this profit center dries up, gadget manufacturers will have to find another one. Everyone's got to make their 10%, no matter how you slice it. The gadgets themselves would have to become more expensive. But that's okay, because that would be a wash on a personal level yet a significant savings on the overall social level.
Oh good grief. You can tell that slashdot is full of teenagers and college kids when you can post "Money is teh evil!!!11!!" and get modded +5 insightful.
As another poster already pointed out, money is nothing but a proxy for real resources, so any waste of money is -- in principle -- bad for the environment.
Distributed power is the answer. No more centralized points of failure, targets for terrorism, or sources of pollution.
Distributed power means massive redundancy, with the benefits you noted. But massive redundancy is very expensive. Even if you've got volume discounts for batteries and converters and the like, you're still going to have to purchase lots and lots of them, and allocate space for them, and in$tall them, and maintain them over time. Maintenance requires technicians driving around in vans, and a lot of expensive training and spare parts.
Not to mention accidents, because now we've got lots more people spending lots more time around objects that are storing multiple kilowatt-hours of power. Whereas today, central powerplants are highly automated, and the components are safely isolated from wayward humans and critters.
Also, small power-generation components are rarely ever as efficient as municipal-sized components are. Or as clean. Or as easy to defend from floods, bombs, and theft.
Regarding terrorism, although centralized power is an easier target for terrorists, the probability of actual terrorist attack is low... and it has a calculable cost. The threat of terrorism almost certainly doesn't tip the risk/reward analysis of decentralizing our power generation.
For these reasons, distributed generation is not obviously better than centralized power generation.
The smart thing to do would have a bunch of homeowners pool their resources, distribute the solar cells and then put the hydrogen storage/generation plant in one spot. The cost and failure rate would be significantly reduced.
This train of logic will eventually lead us to conclude that power should always be generated (and possibly stored) centrally, rather than on a house-by-house or block-by-block basis. It would also cut down on the rates of theft and vandalism, which would otherwise go through the roof if $olar cell$ became commodities.
Now that first-time costs of research and design have been met, the price would be about $100,000, Strizki said."
The TVM ("time value of money") on a $100,000 investment is $5,000 to $10,000 per year, depending on your investment preferences. That means that it costs the owner of the house ~$7,500 per year just to own the house. That is to say, the house costs its owner an amount of money equal to the wealth that the $100,000 could've created elsewhere (such as in a small business that needs money to expand operations).
I pay an average of $150/month for electricity, $50/month for natural gas, and $200/month for gasoline. That's $4,800 per year in energy costs. So even if this guy's solar house could provide all of my energy needs, it wouldn't be worth the investment even at the discounted price.
And this doesn't include the maintenance costs of all that stuff. Electrolyzers wear out. Solar panels get broken by hail. Batteries degrade. I wonder what the annualized maintenance costs are? The net annual cost of ownership, including TVM, could be $20,000 a year!
The problem is lack of creativity. In 0.5 seconds, I thought of nano-UFOs. Send one, or trillions of those, and let them dig into a moon or planet to rebuilt itself into a fully fledged macro-sized "UFO". Or, maybe if you want to "recreate yourself in your own image", why not send out organic "bombs"?
We already do.
Whenever a big rock hits the Earth, billions of bacterial spores are blasted off into space, where they float away. Eventually they'll land somewhere, perhaps on a planet that can support organic chemistry. They'll reactivate and continue the CHON/GCAT cycle. Eventually they'll evolve an intelligence suitable for the terrain. At that time they'll be able to continue the noble and ancient job of killing each other over the matter of whose pretend god is less nonreal.
A bacteria is the most sophisticated thing you can randomly fire (in spore form) onto a random planet in order to get life going without any help from the motherworld. Indeed, perhaps life on Earth began this way ("panspermia").
...with only a single CCD pixel, they can spend all their resources making it exquisitely sensitive, so as to outperform normal array CCDs.
Of course, they'd have to do that anyway, because to get a decent shutter speed they're already going to have to 'scan' the viewed area extremely quickly. It's the old tradeoff of serial versus parallel processing.
With the world view of the US now, if somehow we DID have a working model, what do you think the geniuses in the administration would do if they could attack other countries, and know we could knock down a retaliation?? Not use it?? That would pave the way for using nukes in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.
The purpose of the BMD is not to shoot down missiles. Its purpose is to defang the political value our enemies derive from having ICBMs -- at least in the small numbers that North Korea, Iran, and the like will shortly own. This is a noble purpose, because it knocks the wind out of any sabre-rattling that the aforementioned troublemakers have already begun to do.
It doesn't pave the way for us to initiate nuclear war, because our enemies have never needed an ICBM to get a nuke to us. They could always just load it on a little boat and drive it into New York harbor. We know it, they know it, everyone knows it. The ICBM delivery vehicle is required only at the negotiating table, and that -- as I said -- is why we are building BMD.
You should know this, because you understood how Reagan used it against the Russians.
If this is relating to computer fraud how the fuck can they justify over 100 years of punishment?
Rapists and murderers get less.
Consider the total social cost of this dirtbag's activities...
A billion spam emails * 1000 bytes each * ~15 hops each = ~15 TB of traffic
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 1000 bytes each * ~2 weeks stored on disk = ~5 TB-days of disk storage
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 10% penetration of spam filters * 5 seconds for the user to read and delete = ~5 person-years reading and deleting
Plus all the intangible costs, such as legitimate emails lost due to spam traffic overflowing the mail servers, and people losing money on scam products and the like.
I'd say it's perfectly fair to charge the guy exactly what he cost society: 10 years in jail per billion emails sent. How many billions do you suppose he's sent in his lifetime?
Not to mention all the other, more concrete frauds he was involved in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said.
This tale still might have a silver lining, though. A single security vulnerability, properly exploited, could turn the entire economy of South Korea into a cautionary tale. For a decade afterward, at board meetings where purchasing or standardization decisions are being debated, people will randomly interject "But we could end up like South Korea!".
This is slashdot. Do we believe what we say about the perils of vendor lockin and closed-source? If so, then we should also believe that South Korea's predicament will eventually become a clear and obvious error.
Right now, he patent clerk's job is to assess prior patents (easy) but not prior art (expensive).
That would require the patent clerks to be, or to hire, experts in the relevant field. That's possible but expensive. The cost of doing so is almost certainly higher than the cost of the current system: hire experts only when the patent gets challenged.
Since very few patents ever do get challenged, we are probably all saving money with the USPTO the way it is.
Voting machines should not be relying on physical security in the first place, because it is not practical to physically protect them 24/365. Their trustworthiness should be the result of double-handshake cryptographic authentications between the touchscreens, consoles, memory cards, and the central tabulator. Being able to open the cabinet should not be a vulnerability, because poll workers are invariably going to need to do so.
So, if Diebold machines implement proper authentication, then the cabinet key is not an interesting exposure. But if they don't (and we already know that they don't), then the cabinet key doesn't make them significantly more vulnerable than they already are.
Let's try inverting that sentence, and see how it sounds:
Parents on the other hand, have no moral authority at all, and knowing many of my fellow college students who became parents, I would not trust them with rasing children.
Whaddaya think? Is there such a thing as an objective standard of behavior that a "reasonable man" would agree that every child should be taught?
In other words, is there any behavior standard that is so ubiquitous that a child would suffer lifelong perils if he or she was not taught to abide it? How about "Do not initiate violence against other people."?
If there is such a standard, and if a child's parents have failed to teach it to him or her, then isn't the school obliged to perform the relevant mental programming?
I don't know if bullying and other emotional abuse qualifies as a universalizable taboo, but it is certainly an arguable border-case.
Instructions for spacegoing nanoprobes:
1. Make a profound interstellar discovery.
2. Clone yourself, and tell the clones to clone themselves, and so on, until there are a quadrillion of you.
3. Line yourselves up in space, with each nanoprobe joining its external antenna couplings to the nanoprobes adjacent to it.
4. Generate power and charge up your internal centripetal storage batteries to maximum charge.
5. Use the combined meta-antenna to transmit a single petawatt pulse back towards the motherworld.
6. Separate and go your separate ways.
7. Profit !!
And don't say "fewer attacks and/or security exposures on this OS as compared to Windows", because right now all non-Windows platforms are benefiting from "security through minority".
There's even a dorky genius here on slashdot who posts from his Amiga, and one of the benefits he lists for using steam-powered computing hardware, is the complete absence of any attacks targetting his box. Although he probably has to worry about termites eating his DRAM.
All of that would change if AmigaOS or Linux or whatever became the de facto standard.
Humans set goals which evolution can work for or against. In the case of the goal "All humans become smarter and more peaceful, and achieve worldwide safety and comfort, and stop shooting each other over which hand the invisible man in the sky wants you to wipe your a** with", the goal is nearly universal, at least among men who have thought at all about the optimal future state of mankind.
It is implied, and obvious to everyone except for pedantics like yourself, that value judgments about evolution are using that goal as the standard of value. And therefore evolution can move in 'right' or 'wrong' directions, relative to that goal.
George: "There's porn. And stock quotes."
Interesting... because in an earlier slashdot article we read this:
How very amusing.
If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.
Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.
Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)
True enough -- but it is trust in something that has a certain reliability. Anyone who accepts US dollars in exchange for real goods is trusting that the US government will behave a certain way. That's a reasonable article of trust -- it is not the act of faith that some imply it is.
Trusting the government of Weimar Germany to behave similarly would be an unjustified act of faith.
Same for US treasury bonds. The buyer of such bonds is trusting that the US government will not default on the necessary collection of taxes and repayment of mature bonds, and that the US economy will not crash bad enough to be unable to make such payments. That too is a justifiable act of trust.
Of course we all disagree over just how justifiable that trust is. The world's collective estimation of our trustworthiness is expressed in the interest rate that bonds fetch on the open market. Trustworthy countries get to pay lower interest rates on their bonds; risky countries pay higher interest rates... just like any consumer loan.
What are you doing in that bed, that you need so much structural strength?
And: "a heavy vibrating system" ?!
Wait, don't answer that. I keep forgetting that this is /.
Unless, of course, one happens to be an evil genius and/or mad scientist bent on evil world domination. I for one have had it with the constant anti-evil spin you brief mortals are constantly putting on scientific breakthroughs like this.
"What are we doing tonight, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky... no-longer-necessary surgery on the nervous system!"
In the case of ancient texts, the system of writing used is the storage format. The stone or papyrus or whatever else is merely the storage medium.
And just look at how much trouble those formats have given us. Were it not for the Rosetta stone, we still wouldn't understand ancient written Hebrew. And we have no clue how to decipher Linear A.
The problem is that writing is the storage format for spoken sounds, which in turn are the storage format for words, which in turn are the storage format for concepts. Any one of those transitions can befuddle future generations... and I'm not even going to elaborate on how much trouble it would be to decryp^H^H^Hode Microsoft's .DOC format.
The only reliable solution is a multimedia presentation device. If we could build an extremely long-lasting, solar-powered ultra-basic laptop computer, capable of playing movies and narrating them as it goes, we'd be golden.
The only thing broken about America in this regard, is that some of her citizens are still so racist as to propose that blacks need to have basic amenities provided to them. No Caucasian belief could be more destructive to a black's career aspirations than that.
India, by contrast, still reinforces a caste system that prevents vertical mobility no matter how clever and productive a person is. A black person in America may have to work harder to move vertically, but at least the barriers set in his or her way (such as asshats like you) are soft.
You, obviously, have never compared (say) Weetabix to (say) Oatmeal Raisin Crisp. American cereals are teh pwnz!
And there's the reason why this inductive-charging scheme will not be adopted quickly by gadget companies: accessories are a cash cow.
Indeed, it is possible to sell a gadget at a loss, and earn all your profits on things like wall adapters, car adapters, USB adapters, data transfer cables, earphones, etc. etc. etc.
Think about it: how many different connectors are really needed to support the world of devices? My f***ing camera has a proprietary USB connection that requires a proprietary cable. WTF? And the power connector is similarly weird -- just weird enough to create an aftermarket for the manufacturer but not for any third party manufacturer of power adapters. Damn MBAs are running amok at our expense.
This desk would permanently end a lot of that monkey-business. There could even be a small cupholder version that you'd install in your car, and just plonk your gadget into it while you're driving.
Of course if this profit center dries up, gadget manufacturers will have to find another one. Everyone's got to make their 10%, no matter how you slice it. The gadgets themselves would have to become more expensive. But that's okay, because that would be a wash on a personal level yet a significant savings on the overall social level.
Oh good grief. You can tell that slashdot is full of teenagers and college kids when you can post "Money is teh evil!!!11!!" and get modded +5 insightful.
As another poster already pointed out, money is nothing but a proxy for real resources, so any waste of money is -- in principle -- bad for the environment.
Distributed power means massive redundancy, with the benefits you noted. But massive redundancy is very expensive. Even if you've got volume discounts for batteries and converters and the like, you're still going to have to purchase lots and lots of them, and allocate space for them, and in$tall them, and maintain them over time. Maintenance requires technicians driving around in vans, and a lot of expensive training and spare parts.
Not to mention accidents, because now we've got lots more people spending lots more time around objects that are storing multiple kilowatt-hours of power. Whereas today, central powerplants are highly automated, and the components are safely isolated from wayward humans and critters.
Also, small power-generation components are rarely ever as efficient as municipal-sized components are. Or as clean. Or as easy to defend from floods, bombs, and theft.
Regarding terrorism, although centralized power is an easier target for terrorists, the probability of actual terrorist attack is low... and it has a calculable cost. The threat of terrorism almost certainly doesn't tip the risk/reward analysis of decentralizing our power generation.
For these reasons, distributed generation is not obviously better than centralized power generation.
This train of logic will eventually lead us to conclude that power should always be generated (and possibly stored) centrally, rather than on a house-by-house or block-by-block basis. It would also cut down on the rates of theft and vandalism, which would otherwise go through the roof if $olar cell$ became commodities.
But we knew that already, didn't we?
The TVM ("time value of money") on a $100,000 investment is $5,000 to $10,000 per year, depending on your investment preferences. That means that it costs the owner of the house ~$7,500 per year just to own the house. That is to say, the house costs its owner an amount of money equal to the wealth that the $100,000 could've created elsewhere (such as in a small business that needs money to expand operations).
I pay an average of $150/month for electricity, $50/month for natural gas, and $200/month for gasoline. That's $4,800 per year in energy costs. So even if this guy's solar house could provide all of my energy needs, it wouldn't be worth the investment even at the discounted price.
And this doesn't include the maintenance costs of all that stuff. Electrolyzers wear out. Solar panels get broken by hail. Batteries degrade. I wonder what the annualized maintenance costs are? The net annual cost of ownership, including TVM, could be $20,000 a year!
We already do.
Whenever a big rock hits the Earth, billions of bacterial spores are blasted off into space, where they float away. Eventually they'll land somewhere, perhaps on a planet that can support organic chemistry. They'll reactivate and continue the CHON/GCAT cycle. Eventually they'll evolve an intelligence suitable for the terrain. At that time they'll be able to continue the noble and ancient job of killing each other over the matter of whose pretend god is less nonreal.
A bacteria is the most sophisticated thing you can randomly fire (in spore form) onto a random planet in order to get life going without any help from the motherworld. Indeed, perhaps life on Earth began this way ("panspermia").
...with only a single CCD pixel, they can spend all their resources making it exquisitely sensitive, so as to outperform normal array CCDs.
Of course, they'd have to do that anyway, because to get a decent shutter speed they're already going to have to 'scan' the viewed area extremely quickly. It's the old tradeoff of serial versus parallel processing.
The purpose of the BMD is not to shoot down missiles. Its purpose is to defang the political value our enemies derive from having ICBMs -- at least in the small numbers that North Korea, Iran, and the like will shortly own. This is a noble purpose, because it knocks the wind out of any sabre-rattling that the aforementioned troublemakers have already begun to do.
It doesn't pave the way for us to initiate nuclear war, because our enemies have never needed an ICBM to get a nuke to us. They could always just load it on a little boat and drive it into New York harbor. We know it, they know it, everyone knows it. The ICBM delivery vehicle is required only at the negotiating table, and that -- as I said -- is why we are building BMD.
You should know this, because you understood how Reagan used it against the Russians.
Consider the total social cost of this dirtbag's activities...
A billion spam emails * 1000 bytes each * ~15 hops each = ~15 TB of traffic
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 1000 bytes each * ~2 weeks stored on disk = ~5 TB-days of disk storage
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 10% penetration of spam filters * 5 seconds for the user to read and delete = ~5 person-years reading and deleting
Plus all the intangible costs, such as legitimate emails lost due to spam traffic overflowing the mail servers, and people losing money on scam products and the like.
I'd say it's perfectly fair to charge the guy exactly what he cost society: 10 years in jail per billion emails sent. How many billions do you suppose he's sent in his lifetime?
Not to mention all the other, more concrete frauds he was involved in.