It will be about creating the most mass producible solution. True
The best solution will be the one that relies on the most abundant resources.
This is true, but not relevant to your point; manufacturing facilities are only limited resource in the short-term. In the medium to long term more factories can always be built to meet demand (assuming demand is at least slightly predictable).
The more Prius vehicles produced means the fewer HEVs that can be produced by other manufacturers....... One factory produces seemless containment units for nuclear reactors. They produce 8 a year. That means that only 8 reactors based on that technology can be opened each year.
Both of those statements are true only in the short-term. Perhaps only 8 reactors based on that technology could be build next year and perhaps it isn't economical to build 10 of them per year, but if demand reached 16 per year (or you got enough of a backlog) you could simply build a new factory. Similarly, the HEV parts that are limited are limited because there has been a recent spike in demand and the manufacturing facilities haven't had a chance to catch up.
They aren't worth the paper they are written on. I write financial software. My clients (financial firms) don't even want to let clients pretend that they have separate financial assets from their spouse, regardless of what paperwork they have signed.
Because they can't get paid upfront, unlike the work done by most people.
That's not necessarily true, it's just not "how things are done". As many./ers know, most software development is protected by copyright, but the programmers don't get royalties, they get paid for the work they did, not the product itself. Copies of something someone has done cost that person nothing to produce, so nothing is intrinsically owed to that person except perhaps citation. The problem of course, is that if goods that can be copied very easily (say a song vs a car) had no additional protection, very few of them would be produced. So we offer a "carrot": if you produce a recording, we will give you exclusive rights to copy it for X years. The purpose of this is to induce people to produce things that society values, NOT to "fairly compensate" people. No one is forced to produce these goods, so by definition any compensation they receive (assuming that the rules don't change after-the-fact) is fair because they chose do do the work for that level of compensation.
You forgot about the big T. Taxes. You can write off the interest you pay on the house. Yes, I believe you can, in the US. Here in Canada you can't. There are people who claim you can, but what you are really doing there is calling the mortgage a loan used to pay for other investments. This only works in the case were you don't really need a mortgage anyway, and the tax-man is likely to close this loop-hole soon.
No one is going to spend more on upkeep of the house then they're receiving for rent. You are right, of course. But you overlooked one statement I made, if I wanted a FULL house it would cost less to buy. But even a good-size townhouse is smaller than a full house. It has perhaps 2/3 the floor space, 1/2 the roofing, 1/2 the external walls etc. so the landlord can maintain it for less than it would cost to maintain a house. Now you could argue that I'd be better to buy a Condo, and you might be right, but that's a different issue.
Because renting is money thrown away. Money spent on a mortgage is only partially thrown away.
100% true, but it overlooks two major factors 1. A mortgage is usually 25% to 75% more expensive than your rent 2. A mortgage doesn't pay for upkeep, land tax and other things included in rent (in many buildings some or all utilities are included in rent).
So the real question is: Is the portion of the money being thrown away due to the mortgage, plus my property tax, plus all the upkeep and some utilities less than the money thrown away due to rent?
What's Netflix's bussiness advantage over the cable companies? Simple, it's hard to push 7.6GB of dvd info over the wire. It's faster to mail it
I have 5Mbps service and from a good server I can get sustained downloads around 4Mbps. By my math I could pull down a 7.6BG video in around 4.5 hours; I could start watching it after about 3 hours for a 2 hour movie... better than my mail service. But that's sticking with MPEG2. I'm fairly sure that if you re-mastered to MPEG4 you could send a substantially smaller file for DVD-quality "nearly on demand" service.
Now, I'm not saying that the bandwidth costs for the provider would be less than the postage, just pointing out that the limitation isn't technical at this point.
During the east coast power failure a couple of years back, cell phones were useless because the towers were dead.
Depends where you lived. I was in Waterloo Ontario at the time, and never lost a signal with my provider (Telus). The signal started getting weaker after the first day or so, presumably as the backups on some of the towers started to die. On the other hand, I had friends with another provider (Rogers) who's phones went dead or got only a poor signal when the power went out, but started to get a signal later as the provider dispatched generators to the towers. For me a bigger problem was that I had no way of charging my phone, so in another day or two it wouldn't have really mattered to me +if the towers were up or now.
IANAL, but isn't it pretty much impossible for a state law to apply outside state lines? I don't think you bring your state's laws with you when you travel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Can't comment on US state laws specifically, but in general that isn't true. For example I know that here in Canada, our laws on sex-abuse now apply to any Canadian citizen even if you are not in the country at the time. Now I don't think the government is going to send some special force to kidnap you from a foreign country if you leave, commit a Canadian crime, and stay there; but most countries have extradition treaties, and in practice you're probably going to want to come back, or at least go to a Canadian consulate to renew your passport.
Switching to grid electricity is good for national security.
Am I the only one who remembers the blackout of pretty much the entire eastern portion of Canada and the US not so long ago? An entire collapse due to one line going down at a bad time. I've also heard numerous stories about researchers complaining that our power grid is poorly protected (remotely-configurable high-power transforms/breakers that can be adjusted by anyone with the right phone number, a modem, and a user-manual). One researcher claimed he could easily take down the power grid for most of North America in such as way that huge amounts of equipment would be destroyed fairly easily. I suspect that taking down the power grid would be MUCH easier than a blockade of North America.
We can't do quantum computations by hand, so we have no real experience with the theory, and the underlying statistical methods are relatively recent developments: quantum computers do not use the classical logic that we're all familiar with
I'm not an expert on Quantum computers, but I think the math/computer science is WAY ahead of the physics on this one. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a Quantum computer is to a normal computer as a NFA is to an DFA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_fin ite_state_machine). In this case it's really not a new idea at a fundamental logical level. I realize these only apply to regular languages, not general Turing problems, but that's because you can convert one to the other, so in THEORY they are equivalent anyway. Similarly, conventional computers can solve the same set of problems that quantum computers can solve, they just require an expansion of the problem which in the real world requires much more time and/or space to complete.
Of course, we don't have (that I know of) nice high-level compilers for them yet, but I think that's a whole different issue.
I have to admit I haven't heard of Fair Tax, but here in Canada we have seen the notion of a flat income tax proposed. The trick to it however is that you have a relatively high personal exemption limit (around 10k/person). The idea is that the personal exemption is around the amount of money you would need to pay rent and put food on the table, so you only pay tax on the money that you are using to live more comfortably, not the money you need to 'get by'.
As I recall, the actual plan proposed was poo-pooed by social groups, though it would have saved families earning under about $35k/year quite a bit of money.
There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.
There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.
Let's follow this logic through. Some quick research turned up that a phono pickup runs at about 0.1v and 22kohm. This gives 4.54e-6 Amps. Recall that 1Amp = 1 coulomb/s. Now, divide this by 44khz (the sample rate of CDs) and we get 1.03e-9 C/sample. Divide by 1.6e-19 coulombs per electron and we get 6.4e9 electrons per sample, vs 65535 for a CD . Thus, according to this logic, records have roughly 9.7e4 (ie nearly 10,000) times the resolution of CDs.
Now, I'm not really arguing that phono is better than CD (nor am I arguing against it) my point however is that the granularity of the electrons in the wire is several orders of magnitude finer than the granularity of a CD and not really relevant to the topic.
why did you buy a player that won't play but a couple of more or less non-free formats?.....If the true reason is that you just don't care, hell, say so
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I'm in the same situation. I wanted a player that would handle ogg Vorbis, and I had dozens to chose from a local shops, and none of them did. The problem is that you don't just have to want Vorbis to get it, you more-or-less have to demand it, and be willing to sacrifice convenience (when buying) and possibly price/form-factor to get it. Granted that was about a year ago. I hope things have/do change.
1-Buy 2 or more files from them 2-do a bit comparison 3-modify a copy to reflect a random profile of all removed info
Really, there is a MUCH easier way to do this, it's called cash. You buy the move (on a physical medium) for cash and don't give the teller your name and address. Now this won't work for downloads, but it's probably easier/less expensive than downloading multiple copies.
I believe that Nintendo Canada actually commented and said that they have had no such complaints here either. Perhaps Canadian/European idiots are just more willing to own up / pay for breaking stuff?
That said, a friend of mine did break his wimote (not the strap) the first day he used it, but Nintendo replaced it right away. What more do you really want?
And unfortunately, you can't just switch to a more honest phone company, because I don't believe such a creature exists.
Don't know about the US, but here in Canada Telus is quite reasonable most of the time. They've made a few small billing errors, but corrected all of them with an apology. Once after putting me on hold for about 40 minutes they called back to apologise for that and gave me my choice of freebie calling feature (worth about $5/month) for the duration of my plan - still have it.
The worst thing that they did is put me on the "Western" version of a plan rather than the "Eastern" version- same price but the evenings start an hour later than the plan I wanted. But then, I did ask for a phone number in British Columbia (but bought the phone in Ontario). I didn't notice for 2 years, by which time the original plan was no longer offered.
I'm sure than when you consider the onboard GPS, the heated cup holders, high-end surround sound, leather interior, etc, that a BMW stacks up rather well compared to a Kia of comparable features (if Kia made such things:)). Bottom line though is that a lot of us simply don't want all that stuff.
Kia does make such a car, the Amanti. It sells for around $36,000 Canadian.
I don't think the extra 2-5 minute wait is worth higher unemployment numbers.
Did you even think before you said that? You would rather pay people to do work that you actually don't want done (making you wait), than to have them unemployed and looking for useful work. Clearly you're no laissez-faire capitalist, but even for a socialist there are better options: - improved (un)employment insurance and/or welfare programs so that people can get by while looking for useful work - Make-work projects - you overpay people, but at least something useful gets done. - Government subsidied apprenticeship etc. programs
It's the voting system. The very nature of our plurality system ("one man, one vote," winner take all) will inevitably lead to a two-party system
Sorry to disagree, but here in Canada we have a similar do have more than 2 parties. Granted, in any given election there are only 2 parties who have a serious chance of winning, but at any time there are 1 or 2 other parties that can get a non-trivial number of seats. I think you'r argument hinges on "winner take all". If that's literally true, you're right, only 2 parties. The more power you give your opposition parties, the more parties you get. For the last 2 terms we've had minority governments and two "minor parties" the Bloc and NDP have had a significant say in government policy. Our current governing party has strong roots in a former regional party (Reform -> Canadian Allliance, Candian Alliance + Progressive Conservative -> Conservative) because that party grew powerfull enough to become the official opposition for a few terms and basically wiped out (then absorbed) the most similar party that came before it.
In short, you're only doomed to a 2 party system if the non-governing parties has no say in governance.
The confusion arises when the writer attempts to equate the annual output by a CIGS factory (measured in megawatts of power) with the annual output of a coal power plant (measured in megawatt-hours of work). My guess is that they are really stating that a coal power plant can produce 500 MW of power. Of course this indicates a deeper flaw in the discussion in that a coal power plant can continuously produce 500MW of power (presuming a constant supply of coal). Whereas a solar plant can only produce 500MW of power for half the day.
There is a bit deeper problem than that. He is comparing how quickly the CIGS factory can produce generating capacity (ie MW of Capacity/year) to how quickly the power plant generates energy (MWH/year or MW). A reasonable comparison would be the CGIS factory against a company that builds coal power plants, or how long it would take the CGIS factory to produce enough pannels to replace 1 coal power plant.
In the world of publicly-traded companies, a stable company that makes a great product and loyal customers but doesn't continue to grow is a very bad thing. Only since the 1990's(and possibly the 1980's)
Let's not forget the tax difference! In Canada stock apreciation is a capital gain so only 50% of it is taxable, but you pay full tax on dividends. If your marginal tax rate is 40% (middle class) then you take home 20% less with dividends than with capital growth.... of course no one wants to see a lot of dividends from a stable company. The benifit is even greater if you factor in the fact that you don't have to pay any capital gains tax until you sell the stock, essentially letting you keep money invested that would otherwise already be sitting in government coffers.
Right now, I'm looking at this book filled with conversational Arabic expressions I picked up in the U.A.E., most of which make absolutely no sense when translated into English. Do you know what "The son of a duck is a floater" means? Neither will U.S. troops or this device.
Seems rather obvious to me that if your book can contain it, there is no reason that an electronic translator could not.
On another note, while electonic translators might not work well for conversation, I have no doubt that they can facilitate communication. When using it, people can speak using simple, redundant terms to convey thier meaning; like you would do with someone who is just learning a language. Don't think of it as a replacement for a human translator, but as a HUGE improvement over sending people off with a "Arabic for Dummies" book.
I think that in some countries there are debit cards that work like a credit card. Here in Canada, debit cards use a seperate system (INTERAC) and cannot be used for online purchaes. I had a debit card for ages, but couldn't buy anything online until I had a (Visa) CREDIT card.
Skype is a closed secretive disaster..... If you want simple, use Gizmo ( http://www.gizmoproject.com/ [gizmoproject.com] ) which has a very economical and functional interface to the regular phone system (POTS).
Tried that, the POTS interface was totally useless (at least to the locale I was calling, in a rural part of Canada). I was lucky to catch two-thirds of what the other party said to to buffering/latency issues. Skype can be a little choppy at times, but is generally quite usable.
I am forced to ask whether or not the people using pirated music, movies, books, or software were actually going to buy these things to begin with (especially with software, especially when it costs more than $100). The problem is that basic economics does not apply here; the fact that music is available for free does not mean that people will automatically flock to the free stuff, as we learned that they should in economics 101
While I agree with your main point, I think you missed the bit about "basic economics".. I fact I took Econ 101 (at U Waterloo) not too long ago. If music is essentially free & unlimited, you move very far along the 'demand curve' to the point where it isn't worth the effort to download more. If music costs $10-$35 / CD (or $1/track) then you move WAY BACK because, as you said, students don't have much money. Product differentiation is why CD sales themselves don't go away (a downloaded track is not completly interchanable with a purchased CD). So really is IS basic university economics, but not basic "joe sixpack" economics.
Slashdot Mirror
True
The best solution will be the one that relies on the most abundant resources.
This is true, but not relevant to your point; manufacturing facilities are only limited resource in the short-term. In the medium to long term more factories can always be built to meet demand (assuming demand is at least slightly predictable).
The more Prius vehicles produced means the fewer HEVs that can be produced by other manufacturers.
Both of those statements are true only in the short-term. Perhaps only 8 reactors based on that technology could be build next year and perhaps it isn't economical to build 10 of them per year, but if demand reached 16 per year (or you got enough of a backlog) you could simply build a new factory. Similarly, the HEV parts that are limited are limited because there has been a recent spike in demand and the manufacturing facilities haven't had a chance to catch up.
I don't recall what is wrong with a prenup.
They aren't worth the paper they are written on. I write financial software. My clients (financial firms) don't even want to let clients pretend that they have separate financial assets from their spouse, regardless of what paperwork they have signed.
Because they can't get paid upfront, unlike the work done by most people.
./ers know, most software development is protected by copyright, but the programmers don't get royalties, they get paid for the work they did, not the product itself. Copies of something someone has done cost that person nothing to produce, so nothing is intrinsically owed to that person except perhaps citation. The problem of course, is that if goods that can be copied very easily (say a song vs a car) had no additional protection, very few of them would be produced. So we offer a "carrot": if you produce a recording, we will give you exclusive rights to copy it for X years. The purpose of this is to induce people to produce things that society values, NOT to "fairly compensate" people. No one is forced to produce these goods, so by definition any compensation they receive (assuming that the rules don't change after-the-fact) is fair because they chose do do the work for that level of compensation.
That's not necessarily true, it's just not "how things are done". As many
You forgot about the big T. Taxes. You can write off the interest you pay on the house.
Yes, I believe you can, in the US. Here in Canada you can't. There are people who claim you can, but what you are really doing there is calling the mortgage a loan used to pay for other investments. This only works in the case were you don't really need a mortgage anyway, and the tax-man is likely to close this loop-hole soon.
No one is going to spend more on upkeep of the house then they're receiving for rent.
You are right, of course. But you overlooked one statement I made, if I wanted a FULL house it would cost less to buy. But even a good-size townhouse is smaller than a full house. It has perhaps 2/3 the floor space, 1/2 the roofing, 1/2 the external walls etc. so the landlord can maintain it for less than it would cost to maintain a house. Now you could argue that I'd be better to buy a Condo, and you might be right, but that's a different issue.
Because renting is money thrown away. Money spent on a mortgage is only partially thrown away.
100% true, but it overlooks two major factors
1. A mortgage is usually 25% to 75% more expensive than your rent
2. A mortgage doesn't pay for upkeep, land tax and other things included in rent (in many buildings some or all utilities are included in rent).
So the real question is:
Is the portion of the money being thrown away due to the mortgage, plus my property tax, plus all the upkeep and some utilities less than the money thrown away due to rent?
What's Netflix's bussiness advantage over the cable companies? Simple, it's hard to push 7.6GB of dvd info over the wire. It's faster to mail it
I have 5Mbps service and from a good server I can get sustained downloads around 4Mbps. By my math I could pull down a 7.6BG video in around 4.5 hours; I could start watching it after about 3 hours for a 2 hour movie... better than my mail service. But that's sticking with MPEG2. I'm fairly sure that if you re-mastered to MPEG4 you could send a substantially smaller file for DVD-quality "nearly on demand" service.
Now, I'm not saying that the bandwidth costs for the provider would be less than the postage, just pointing out that the limitation isn't technical at this point.
During the east coast power failure a couple of years back, cell phones were useless because the towers were dead.
Depends where you lived. I was in Waterloo Ontario at the time, and never lost a signal with my provider (Telus). The signal started getting weaker after the first day or so, presumably as the backups on some of the towers started to die. On the other hand, I had friends with another provider (Rogers) who's phones went dead or got only a poor signal when the power went out, but started to get a signal later as the provider dispatched generators to the towers. For me a bigger problem was that I had no way of charging my phone, so in another day or two it wouldn't have really mattered to me +if the towers were up or now.
IANAL, but isn't it pretty much impossible for a state law to apply outside state lines? I don't think you bring your state's laws with you when you travel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Can't comment on US state laws specifically, but in general that isn't true. For example I know that here in Canada, our laws on sex-abuse now apply to any Canadian citizen even if you are not in the country at the time. Now I don't think the government is going to send some special force to kidnap you from a foreign country if you leave, commit a Canadian crime, and stay there; but most countries have extradition treaties, and in practice you're probably going to want to come back, or at least go to a Canadian consulate to renew your passport.
Am I the only one who remembers the blackout of pretty much the entire eastern portion of Canada and the US not so long ago? An entire collapse due to one line going down at a bad time. I've also heard numerous stories about researchers complaining that our power grid is poorly protected (remotely-configurable high-power transforms/breakers that can be adjusted by anyone with the right phone number, a modem, and a user-manual). One researcher claimed he could easily take down the power grid for most of North America in such as way that huge amounts of equipment would be destroyed fairly easily. I suspect that taking down the power grid would be MUCH easier than a blockade of North America.
We can't do quantum computations by hand, so we have no real experience with the theory, and the underlying statistical methods are relatively recent developments: quantum computers do not use the classical logic that we're all familiar with
I'm not an expert on Quantum computers, but I think the math/computer science is WAY ahead of the physics on this one. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a Quantum computer is to a normal computer as a NFA is to an DFA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_fi
Of course, we don't have (that I know of) nice high-level compilers for them yet, but I think that's a whole different issue.
I have to admit I haven't heard of Fair Tax, but here in Canada we have seen the notion of a flat income tax proposed. The trick to it however is that you have a relatively high personal exemption limit (around 10k/person). The idea is that the personal exemption is around the amount of money you would need to pay rent and put food on the table, so you only pay tax on the money that you are using to live more comfortably, not the money you need to 'get by'.
As I recall, the actual plan proposed was poo-pooed by social groups, though it would have saved families earning under about $35k/year quite a bit of money.
There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.
Let's follow this logic through. Some quick research turned up that a phono pickup runs at about 0.1v and 22kohm. This gives 4.54e-6 Amps. Recall that 1Amp = 1 coulomb/s. Now, divide this by 44khz (the sample rate of CDs) and we get 1.03e-9 C/sample. Divide by 1.6e-19 coulombs per electron and we get 6.4e9 electrons per sample, vs 65535 for a CD . Thus, according to this logic, records have roughly 9.7e4 (ie nearly 10,000) times the resolution of CDs.
Now, I'm not really arguing that phono is better than CD (nor am I arguing against it) my point however is that the granularity of the electrons in the wire is several orders of magnitude finer than the granularity of a CD and not really relevant to the topic.
why did you buy a player that won't play but a couple of more or less non-free formats? .....If the true reason is that you just don't care, hell, say so
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I'm in the same situation. I wanted a player that would handle ogg Vorbis, and I had dozens to chose from a local shops, and none of them did. The problem is that you don't just have to want Vorbis to get it, you more-or-less have to demand it, and be willing to sacrifice convenience (when buying) and possibly price/form-factor to get it. Granted that was about a year ago. I hope things have/do change.
1-Buy 2 or more files from them
2-do a bit comparison
3-modify a copy to reflect a random profile of all removed info
Really, there is a MUCH easier way to do this, it's called cash. You buy the move (on a physical medium) for cash and don't give the teller your name and address. Now this won't work for downloads, but it's probably easier/less expensive than downloading multiple copies.
I believe that Nintendo Canada actually commented and said that they have had no such complaints here either. Perhaps Canadian/European idiots are just more willing to own up / pay for breaking stuff?
That said, a friend of mine did break his wimote (not the strap) the first day he used it, but Nintendo replaced it right away. What more do you really want?
And unfortunately, you can't just switch to a more honest phone company, because I don't believe such a creature exists.
Don't know about the US, but here in Canada Telus is quite reasonable most of the time. They've made a few small billing errors, but corrected all of them with an apology. Once after putting me on hold for about 40 minutes they called back to apologise for that and gave me my choice of freebie calling feature (worth about $5/month) for the duration of my plan - still have it.
The worst thing that they did is put me on the "Western" version of a plan rather than the "Eastern" version- same price but the evenings start an hour later than the plan I wanted. But then, I did ask for a phone number in British Columbia (but bought the phone in Ontario). I didn't notice for 2 years, by which time the original plan was no longer offered.
I'm sure than when you consider the onboard GPS, the heated cup holders, high-end surround sound, leather interior, etc, that a BMW stacks up rather well compared to a Kia of comparable features (if Kia made such things :)). Bottom line though is that a lot of us simply don't want all that stuff.
Kia does make such a car, the Amanti. It sells for around $36,000 Canadian.
I don't think the extra 2-5 minute wait is worth higher unemployment numbers.
Did you even think before you said that? You would rather pay people to do work that you actually don't want done (making you wait), than to have them unemployed and looking for useful work. Clearly you're no laissez-faire capitalist, but even for a socialist there are better options:
- improved (un)employment insurance and/or welfare programs so that people can get by while looking for useful work
- Make-work projects - you overpay people, but at least something useful gets done.
- Government subsidied apprenticeship etc. programs
It's the voting system. The very nature of our plurality system ("one man, one vote," winner take all) will inevitably lead to a two-party system
Sorry to disagree, but here in Canada we have a similar do have more than 2 parties. Granted, in any given election there are only 2 parties who have a serious chance of winning, but at any time there are 1 or 2 other parties that can get a non-trivial number of seats. I think you'r argument hinges on "winner take all". If that's literally true, you're right, only 2 parties. The more power you give your opposition parties, the more parties you get. For the last 2 terms we've had minority governments and two "minor parties" the Bloc and NDP have had a significant say in government policy. Our current governing party has strong roots in a former regional party (Reform -> Canadian Allliance, Candian Alliance + Progressive Conservative -> Conservative) because that party grew powerfull enough to become the official opposition for a few terms and basically wiped out (then absorbed) the most similar party that came before it.
In short, you're only doomed to a 2 party system if the non-governing parties has no say in governance.
The confusion arises when the writer attempts to equate the annual output by a CIGS factory (measured in megawatts of power) with the annual output of a coal power plant (measured in megawatt-hours of work). My guess is that they are really stating that a coal power plant can produce 500 MW of power. Of course this indicates a deeper flaw in the discussion in that a coal power plant can continuously produce 500MW of power (presuming a constant supply of coal). Whereas a solar plant can only produce 500MW of power for half the day.
There is a bit deeper problem than that. He is comparing how quickly the CIGS factory can produce generating capacity (ie MW of Capacity/year) to how quickly the power plant generates energy (MWH/year or MW). A reasonable comparison would be the CGIS factory against a company that builds coal power plants, or how long it would take the CGIS factory to produce enough pannels to replace 1 coal power plant.
In the world of publicly-traded companies, a stable company that makes a great product and loyal customers but doesn't continue to grow is a very bad thing. Only since the 1990's(and possibly the 1980's)
Let's not forget the tax difference! In Canada stock apreciation is a capital gain so only 50% of it is taxable, but you pay full tax on dividends. If your marginal tax rate is 40% (middle class) then you take home 20% less with dividends than with capital growth.... of course no one wants to see a lot of dividends from a stable company. The benifit is even greater if you factor in the fact that you don't have to pay any capital gains tax until you sell the stock, essentially letting you keep money invested that would otherwise already be sitting in government coffers.
Seems rather obvious to me that if your book can contain it, there is no reason that an electronic translator could not.
On another note, while electonic translators might not work well for conversation, I have no doubt that they can facilitate communication. When using it, people can speak using simple, redundant terms to convey thier meaning; like you would do with someone who is just learning a language. Don't think of it as a replacement for a human translator, but as a HUGE improvement over sending people off with a "Arabic for Dummies" book.
I think that in some countries there are debit cards that work like a credit card. Here in Canada, debit cards use a seperate system (INTERAC) and cannot be used for online purchaes. I had a debit card for ages, but couldn't buy anything online until I had a (Visa) CREDIT card.
Tried that, the POTS interface was totally useless (at least to the locale I was calling, in a rural part of Canada). I was lucky to catch two-thirds of what the other party said to to buffering/latency issues. Skype can be a little choppy at times, but is generally quite usable.
I am forced to ask whether or not the people using pirated music, movies, books, or software were actually going to buy these things to begin with (especially with software, especially when it costs more than $100). The problem is that basic economics does not apply here; the fact that music is available for free does not mean that people will automatically flock to the free stuff, as we learned that they should in economics 101
While I agree with your main point, I think you missed the bit about "basic economics".. I fact I took Econ 101 (at U Waterloo) not too long ago. If music is essentially free & unlimited, you move very far along the 'demand curve' to the point where it isn't worth the effort to download more. If music costs $10-$35 / CD (or $1/track) then you move WAY BACK because, as you said, students don't have much money. Product differentiation is why CD sales themselves don't go away (a downloaded track is not completly interchanable with a purchased CD). So really is IS basic university economics, but not basic "joe sixpack" economics.