Whether it's openly on the bill or not the fee is still there already. And if it's there already and even if this "obvious" fee gets shot down they'll still add it.
It's barely about greed, power companies are among the most highly regulated businesses in the U.S. (My power company has to get approval from a public commission to change their rates).
The size and structure of the fee matters a great deal when deciding how much sense it makes, and until I actually face a situation where my (currently non-existent) grid-tie system is punitively expensive to keep attached to the grid, I have trouble getting real worked up about it.
Except that as people have already pointed out they are _already_ paying a connection fee on their bill. (I just checked my ComEd bill and it's right there in plain sight.)
As for the power companies being regulated - you don't think that they can't buy the government regulators off?
The whole point of this is that if you give them their $10 then next year they'll raise it to $20. Then $30, then $40, etc. Eventually they'll price it high enough that it won't be worthwhile to generate your own power.
My connection fee is $10 a month. No way can I get off the grid for $120 a year.
That's a good point too. But if the connection fee is only $10 then shouldn't that already be subsidized by the power generated during peak periods that a PV grid-tie system produces for the electric company?
You can bet that the electric companies are not going to keep this fee small either. It's in their interest to keep a monopoly on power generation so they'll likely make an annoying enough fee to keep people from immediately putting up grid-tie systems then lobby to make it illegal for anyone but the power company to attach to the grid among other things.
And if you don't pay them the monthly fee then you don't get connected.
If they want to charge a connection fee then so be it. The gas company and other utilities often charge those so there's a track record of that and I doubt you'll be able to fight the lawyers and politicians they own without a lot of trouble.
The money you would spend to fight them could be better used to move yourself off the grid so you don't have to pay them. Anything. Ever.
But that's a lifestyle change too so I doubt enough people in the US are going to be motivated enough to do that.
Note - I live in the US and am reducing my usage until I can find a way to get off the grid. You can do it even in a suburban home if you plan well enough.
Well I don't know about anyone else, but I *HAVE* boycotted Blizzard since then. I missed out on the LoD expansion of D2 because of it, and honestly I ha ven't missed it much at all.
The only two exceptions made in all that time were playing Warcraft 3 over at a friends house (WC3 will forever be Wing Commander to me.), and picking up one of those 2 dollar Trial CDs to check out mangos with.
Honestly given both of those I saw nothing visually, play, or character-wise that made me feel particularly impressed with them, with the exception of maps that actually allowed jumping/flying in 3d. The few other MMOs I played all do the invisible wall thing, or had no jumping at all, which annoyed me to no end.
But then I'm in the minority, and 10's of millions of players of WoW and Blizzard products can't be wrong?
You aren't the only one. I've not bought a Blizzard product since they hammered bnetd. I've missed out on a number of things but I'm still holding to it and will not be purchasing SCII when it comes out.
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
They likely will as this is almost certainly a violation of ITAR regulations.
Northrup Grumman does very little that is non-military.
They most certainly will not lose their contracts over this. They'll find a way to blame the lost data on some tiny sub-subcontractor that the subcontractor responsible for disposing of used equipment hired to wipe the drives, and they'll get fired. Or maybe they'll fire the person who kept the data on their hard drive instead of the network drive, and trot out the click-through policy that says "we told you we could fire you for violating this policy."
There's always a weasel-way for companies to get out of these situations by blaming someone for the failure.
ITAR is pretty strict but you're probably right in that they'll blame the recycling firm or some such nonsense. From my experience they can at least expect a fresh ITAR audit courtesy of the federal gooberment because there is now "reason to question" their security.
Personally I don't let a hard drive out of the building unless it's been at least wiped (non-secure data) if not destroyed (secure data). Usually I destroy them just to make sure.
Your inability to comprehense the feasibility of this design does not make it "pie in the sky".
I comprehend the idea just fine. But looking at our track record of growth I maintain that we won't get to this project without a close permanent manufacturing facility in space or space elevators.
My whole life, I ran into people claiming that this and that is so far away and today still impossible, because they did not remotely know what was already done and possible.
Project Orion (same thing, but with fission bombs only) was already completely possible in the 60s!. Fusion bombs have since been perfected. They are not much harder anyway. So this is no far thought. It's the logical next step. At least if we want to see interstellar travel in our lifetime.
And there's nothing in the world that I would like to see more.
I too would love to see that in my lifetime but hoping and wishing won't build a starship and nobody I know of is going to commute both themselves and materials from the surface of the earth to high orbit or open space to construct a ship of this nature for the 5 - 10 years minimum it would take our slow asses to build one.
But neither problem is insurmountable as an engineering challenge.
My point is that either one would have to happen to create a practical material source in space _before_ a serious interplanetary ship would be feasible.
There's no way shipping ANYTHING up from the gravity well would allow us to build a ship of this nature within any reasonable time frame with the exception of using absolutely huge space elevators.
*THE* gravity well?
The moon has one too. Asteroids have a different but similar problem in being so far away and having such different orbital mechanics.
What exactly are you proposing?
For practical engineering purposes the gravity well of the moon is weak enough to not be a problem for the transportation of materials off it's surface.
Asteroids do have gravity obviously but almost nothing due to their size. Thus materials transported from them are again easy to move into open space.
What I'm proposing is this:
1) Establish a colony on the moon or at L5.
2) Use moon materials to build the manufacturing framework.
3) Construct mining ships for asteroid field work.
4) Mine asteroids and use the materials to construct the large-scale interplanetary transport.
Now while this is a workable plan it is _also_ pie-in-the-sky as we can't even get our collective butts to agree on how to get a primary established off planet.
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
Under what set of conditions does it make any sense to launch a manufacturing plant into space, then send up raw materials? I assume that's what you mean by "locally sourced" because there isn't any 'local' material at the L5 point.
How would that ever be cheaper than launching pre-built sections and assembling them in orbit?
No what I meant by locally sourced materials was either moon mined materials or asteroid mined materials. Probably the latter as I believe things like iron are a little weak on the moon.
There's no way shipping ANYTHING up from the gravity well would allow us to build a ship of this nature within any reasonable time frame with the exception of using absolutely huge space elevators.
I'm all for ideas like this but we won't be building things like this until we, as a planet, have a permanent manufacturing presence in space.
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
It was always about the cash for production. From Businessweek at about the time of the G1G1 promotion opening:
"While the highly quotable Negroponte has been a master at getting publicity for OLPC, this effort is mostly about cash: "It has become important for us to raise money this way," says Negroponte. "I have met with about 30 heads of state. They're all enthusiastic. But there's a huge gulf between a head of state shaking your hand and a minister making a bank transfer." Negroponte won't predict how many laptops might be sold through Give 1 Get 1, but factory capacity presents no limitations: Quanta Computer in Taiwan can produce 1 million XO Laptops a month, if need be. "
If he truly had wanted that to work he would not have restricted the program in any way. Just from the above clip the factory production wasn't an issue so what else could it have been? Hmm?
He personally chose to restrict the sale of those laptops. Since his stated goal was cash for production he shot himself in the foot - nobody else did it for him.
It didn't succeed because Negroponte wouldn't let anyone who wanted one buy it.
Wouldn't or couldn't? I still wonder if they really got the price point right in parts and manufacturing. Maybe it wasn't getting the power and functionality but all the durability issues that caused the profit loss. So they could afford to take the loss as long as the massive consumer machine of the big countries didn't come crashing in.
Possible but if he had generated more cash by allowing the average person to buy one at the regular price it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
The G1G1 _doubled_ the price of the laptop for a lone purchaser thus putting it closer to the range of a standard cheap notebook for the average purchaser. This alone was enough to push people away from purchasing it for their own use.
If he had just let people buy them in single units for the stated original cost he would have considerably more money to produce more units and would have likely hit that one million unit mark much much sooner.
He also started the G1G1 program only AFTER people complained they couldn't buy one for themselves. Furthermore he STOPPED the program instead of just letting it run and gaining whatever money he could get out of it.
As for citations do your own damn research - the rest of us have been watching this train wreck since it started.
I don't see why Negroponte's OLPC project didn't succeed before. I can buy a netbook on Newegg for 250$... yet a laptop with a quarter of the power and less functionality can't be built for less than 200$ for the OLPC.
It didn't succeed because Negroponte wouldn't let anyone who wanted one buy it. It's that simple. Had he done that he would have sold enough of them to get them into the field and had money to continue development and produce them faster.
If I am unable to use my expensive surround sound speakers, and I'm stuck with the cheap speakers in my TV, I'm going to be very pissed.
You'll do the same thing the rest of the people will do when that happens.
You'll either wait for someone to provide a HDCP "dummy" inline module that "pretends" to obey HDCP - OR - you'll wait until some corporation battered media employee puts it up for download from one of the original digital sources.
Regardless of it's Blueray or HDCP or whatever the flavor of the day is, DRM will always eventually be cracked.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest.
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
I've USED Vista and I've supported Vista. It has nasty security holes, upgrades from apps like anti-virus programs can easily make it unbootable (McAffee I'm looking at you), and it requires at least twice the hardware requirements of XP. Those are the least of the problems it has.
I am still recommending people stick with XP if they have it or buying a Mac if they are buying a new system.
You are the exception and not the rule. For most people Vista just doesn't work.
I can't imagine why businesses are fleeing overseas
The US has on of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, so businesses move overseas to avoid that. If we lower the rates, the businesses would probably come back here, and those tax rates would actually start generating some revenue, rather than forcing business overseas and producing no revenue.
WHAT!? Logic in the US tax system?? Unheard of!
A better plan would be to tax bananas because suits are sometimes called "monkey suits" and therefor by taxing bananas we'll be taking money from the sale of each suit to a CEO.
/sarcasm
You're right of course. If we lowered the corporate taxes AND closed most of the loopholes those taxes would definitely produce a but better.
I think that it is sad that people are such cowards that having their prescription histories made public would worry them.
It isn't about cowardice.
It's about not wanting your employer to maybe fire you because you have an AZT prescription or are on chemotherapy or are on medicine for ADD/ADHD and have a job working with million dollar custom surface-mount circuitry or are a neurosurgeon.
why would your employer fire you if you have one of those diseases when you are doing a good job?, I don't see why a competent employer would fire its best employees just because they have a disease
You're assuming an honest employer. Many companies would fire people with health problems on the chance that they might cause a heavy health insurance burden or if their medical condition might cause a future liability problem.
They won't say it's because of the medical issue of course - they'll find some other excuse.
I think that it is sad that people are such cowards that having their prescription histories made public would worry them.
It isn't about cowardice.
It's about not wanting your employer to maybe fire you because you have an AZT prescription or are on chemotherapy or are on medicine for ADD/ADHD and have a job working with million dollar custom surface-mount circuitry or are a neurosurgeon.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it's openly on the bill or not the fee is still there already. And if it's there already and even if this "obvious" fee gets shot down they'll still add it.
It's barely about greed, power companies are among the most highly regulated businesses in the U.S. (My power company has to get approval from a public commission to change their rates).
The size and structure of the fee matters a great deal when deciding how much sense it makes, and until I actually face a situation where my (currently non-existent) grid-tie system is punitively expensive to keep attached to the grid, I have trouble getting real worked up about it.
Except that as people have already pointed out they are _already_ paying a connection fee on their bill. (I just checked my ComEd bill and it's right there in plain sight.)
As for the power companies being regulated - you don't think that they can't buy the government regulators off?
The whole point of this is that if you give them their $10 then next year they'll raise it to $20. Then $30, then $40, etc. Eventually they'll price it high enough that it won't be worthwhile to generate your own power.
Which is their whole point.
My connection fee is $10 a month. No way can I get off the grid for $120 a year.
That's a good point too. But if the connection fee is only $10 then shouldn't that already be subsidized by the power generated during peak periods that a PV grid-tie system produces for the electric company?
You can bet that the electric companies are not going to keep this fee small either. It's in their interest to keep a monopoly on power generation so they'll likely make an annoying enough fee to keep people from immediately putting up grid-tie systems then lobby to make it illegal for anyone but the power company to attach to the grid among other things.
And if you don't pay them the monthly fee then you don't get connected.
It's all about greed.
If they want to charge a connection fee then so be it. The gas company and other utilities often charge those so there's a track record of that and I doubt you'll be able to fight the lawyers and politicians they own without a lot of trouble.
The money you would spend to fight them could be better used to move yourself off the grid so you don't have to pay them. Anything. Ever.
But that's a lifestyle change too so I doubt enough people in the US are going to be motivated enough to do that.
Note - I live in the US and am reducing my usage until I can find a way to get off the grid. You can do it even in a suburban home if you plan well enough.
Well I don't know about anyone else, but I *HAVE* boycotted Blizzard since then. I missed out on the LoD expansion of D2 because of it, and honestly I ha ven't missed it much at all.
The only two exceptions made in all that time were playing Warcraft 3 over at a friends house (WC3 will forever be Wing Commander to me.), and picking up one of those 2 dollar Trial CDs to check out mangos with.
Honestly given both of those I saw nothing visually, play, or character-wise that made me feel particularly impressed with them, with the exception of maps that actually allowed jumping/flying in 3d. The few other MMOs I played all do the invisible wall thing, or had no jumping at all, which annoyed me to no end.
But then I'm in the minority, and 10's of millions of players of WoW and Blizzard products can't be wrong?
You aren't the only one. I've not bought a Blizzard product since they hammered bnetd. I've missed out on a number of things but I'm still holding to it and will not be purchasing SCII when it comes out.
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
They likely will as this is almost certainly a violation of ITAR regulations. Northrup Grumman does very little that is non-military.
They most certainly will not lose their contracts over this. They'll find a way to blame the lost data on some tiny sub-subcontractor that the subcontractor responsible for disposing of used equipment hired to wipe the drives, and they'll get fired. Or maybe they'll fire the person who kept the data on their hard drive instead of the network drive, and trot out the click-through policy that says "we told you we could fire you for violating this policy."
There's always a weasel-way for companies to get out of these situations by blaming someone for the failure.
ITAR is pretty strict but you're probably right in that they'll blame the recycling firm or some such nonsense. From my experience they can at least expect a fresh ITAR audit courtesy of the federal gooberment because there is now "reason to question" their security.
Personally I don't let a hard drive out of the building unless it's been at least wiped (non-secure data) if not destroyed (secure data). Usually I destroy them just to make sure.
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
They likely will as this is almost certainly a violation of ITAR regulations. Northrup Grumman does very little that is non-military.
Your inability to comprehense the feasibility of this design does not make it "pie in the sky".
I comprehend the idea just fine. But looking at our track record of growth I maintain that we won't get to this project without a close permanent manufacturing facility in space or space elevators.
My whole life, I ran into people claiming that this and that is so far away and today still impossible, because they did not remotely know what was already done and possible.
Project Orion (same thing, but with fission bombs only) was already completely possible in the 60s!. Fusion bombs have since been perfected. They are not much harder anyway. So this is no far thought. It's the logical next step. At least if we want to see interstellar travel in our lifetime.
And there's nothing in the world that I would like to see more.
I too would love to see that in my lifetime but hoping and wishing won't build a starship and nobody I know of is going to commute both themselves and materials from the surface of the earth to high orbit or open space to construct a ship of this nature for the 5 - 10 years minimum it would take our slow asses to build one.
You've got me on both points.
But neither problem is insurmountable as an engineering challenge.
My point is that either one would have to happen to create a practical material source in space _before_ a serious interplanetary ship would be feasible.
There's no way shipping ANYTHING up from the gravity well would allow us to build a ship of this nature within any reasonable time frame with the exception of using absolutely huge space elevators.
*THE* gravity well?
The moon has one too. Asteroids have a different but similar problem in being so far away and having such different orbital mechanics.
What exactly are you proposing?
For practical engineering purposes the gravity well of the moon is weak enough to not be a problem for the transportation of materials off it's surface.
Asteroids do have gravity obviously but almost nothing due to their size. Thus materials transported from them are again easy to move into open space.
What I'm proposing is this:
1) Establish a colony on the moon or at L5.
2) Use moon materials to build the manufacturing framework.
3) Construct mining ships for asteroid field work.
4) Mine asteroids and use the materials to construct the large-scale interplanetary transport.
Now while this is a workable plan it is _also_ pie-in-the-sky as we can't even get our collective butts to agree on how to get a primary established off planet.
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
Under what set of conditions does it make any sense to launch a manufacturing plant into space, then send up raw materials? I assume that's what you mean by "locally sourced" because there isn't any 'local' material at the L5 point.
How would that ever be cheaper than launching pre-built sections and assembling them in orbit?
No what I meant by locally sourced materials was either moon mined materials or asteroid mined materials. Probably the latter as I believe things like iron are a little weak on the moon.
There's no way shipping ANYTHING up from the gravity well would allow us to build a ship of this nature within any reasonable time frame with the exception of using absolutely huge space elevators.
I'm all for ideas like this but we won't be building things like this until we, as a planet, have a permanent manufacturing presence in space.
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
"As for citations do your own damn research" (Cheerio Boy (82178) )
You made the claim, You are being asked to back it up. Burden of proof is on you.
Fair enough my anonymous friend: Here you go.
It was always about the cash for production. From Businessweek at about the time of the G1G1 promotion opening:
"While the highly quotable Negroponte has been a master at getting publicity for OLPC, this effort is mostly about cash: "It has become important for us to raise money this way," says Negroponte. "I have met with about 30 heads of state. They're all enthusiastic. But there's a huge gulf between a head of state shaking your hand and a minister making a bank transfer." Negroponte won't predict how many laptops might be sold through Give 1 Get 1, but factory capacity presents no limitations: Quanta Computer in Taiwan can produce 1 million XO Laptops a month, if need be. "
If he truly had wanted that to work he would not have restricted the program in any way. Just from the above clip the factory production wasn't an issue so what else could it have been? Hmm?
He personally chose to restrict the sale of those laptops. Since his stated goal was cash for production he shot himself in the foot - nobody else did it for him.
It didn't succeed because Negroponte wouldn't let anyone who wanted one buy it.
Wouldn't or couldn't? I still wonder if they really got the price point right in parts and manufacturing. Maybe it wasn't getting the power and functionality but all the durability issues that caused the profit loss. So they could afford to take the loss as long as the massive consumer machine of the big countries didn't come crashing in.
Possible but if he had generated more cash by allowing the average person to buy one at the regular price it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
The G1G1 _doubled_ the price of the laptop for a lone purchaser thus putting it closer to the range of a standard cheap notebook for the average purchaser. This alone was enough to push people away from purchasing it for their own use.
If he had just let people buy them in single units for the stated original cost he would have considerably more money to produce more units and would have likely hit that one million unit mark much much sooner.
He also started the G1G1 program only AFTER people complained they couldn't buy one for themselves. Furthermore he STOPPED the program instead of just letting it run and gaining whatever money he could get out of it.
As for citations do your own damn research - the rest of us have been watching this train wreck since it started.
I don't see why Negroponte's OLPC project didn't succeed before. I can buy a netbook on Newegg for 250$... yet a laptop with a quarter of the power and less functionality can't be built for less than 200$ for the OLPC.
It didn't succeed because Negroponte wouldn't let anyone who wanted one buy it. It's that simple. Had he done that he would have sold enough of them to get them into the field and had money to continue development and produce them faster.
So what stopped Negroponte was....Negroponte.
If I am unable to use my expensive surround sound speakers, and I'm stuck with the cheap speakers in my TV, I'm going to be very pissed.
You'll do the same thing the rest of the people will do when that happens.
You'll either wait for someone to provide a HDCP "dummy" inline module that "pretends" to obey HDCP - OR - you'll wait until some corporation battered media employee puts it up for download from one of the original digital sources.
Regardless of it's Blueray or HDCP or whatever the flavor of the day is, DRM will always eventually be cracked.
It just doesn't work.
Astronaut 1, "But where in my contact does it say that I have to eat the same food for breakfast everyday for three years?"
Astronaut 2,"Paragraph 47, subsection 19, cause 9a. You can find it in the index under S.U.A.E.I."
Astronaut 1,"S.U.A.E.I.?"
Astronaut 2,"Shut up and eat it."
Apologies to Babylon 5.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest. Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
I've USED Vista and I've supported Vista. It has nasty security holes, upgrades from apps like anti-virus programs can easily make it unbootable (McAffee I'm looking at you), and it requires at least twice the hardware requirements of XP. Those are the least of the problems it has.
I am still recommending people stick with XP if they have it or buying a Mac if they are buying a new system.
You are the exception and not the rule. For most people Vista just doesn't work.
The US has on of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, so businesses move overseas to avoid that. If we lower the rates, the businesses would probably come back here, and those tax rates would actually start generating some revenue, rather than forcing business overseas and producing no revenue.
WHAT!? Logic in the US tax system?? Unheard of!
A better plan would be to tax bananas because suits are sometimes called "monkey suits" and therefor by taxing bananas we'll be taking money from the sale of each suit to a CEO.
/sarcasm
You're right of course. If we lowered the corporate taxes AND closed most of the loopholes those taxes would definitely produce a but better.
Gahh! Damn broken neurons! I meant meaningless not "meaning less".
I don't know how it works in the USA, but here in Canada we don't measure electricity in gallons.
Of course not! In Canada electricity comes in bags!
...
I'll get my coat...
All joking aside the mpg rating on electric vehicles is truly meaning less. Hybrids obviously no so of course.
I think that it is sad that people are such cowards that having their prescription histories made public would worry them.
It isn't about cowardice. It's about not wanting your employer to maybe fire you because you have an AZT prescription or are on chemotherapy or are on medicine for ADD/ADHD and have a job working with million dollar custom surface-mount circuitry or are a neurosurgeon.
why would your employer fire you if you have one of those diseases when you are doing a good job?, I don't see why a competent employer would fire its best employees just because they have a disease
You're assuming an honest employer. Many companies would fire people with health problems on the chance that they might cause a heavy health insurance burden or if their medical condition might cause a future liability problem.
They won't say it's because of the medical issue of course - they'll find some other excuse.
I think that it is sad that people are such cowards that having their prescription histories made public would worry them.
It isn't about cowardice.
It's about not wanting your employer to maybe fire you because you have an AZT prescription or are on chemotherapy or are on medicine for ADD/ADHD and have a job working with million dollar custom surface-mount circuitry or are a neurosurgeon.