I am completely in agreement with you Falcon. But I'm actually giving money to the guy which I've never done before. There is something compelling about Ron Paul. The republican talk show hosts are tearing into him inexplicably viciously here in Houston. They even invited him on their show and then spent the entire hour cutting him off and twisting everything he said as negatively as possible. I don't think they realize how clear their agenda is.
He couldn't shrink government like he would like given the congress.
Since I'm a fiscal conservative/social liberal the current administration is the worst thing that could happen. They are making a socially conservative court while spending like drunken sailors.
As a person that dislikes both of them, I think that would go to Giuliani.
Hillary is capped at 40% of the electorate. A lot of people will not vote for her. Giuliani is a "hold your nose and vote anyway" republican candidate.
I'm supporting Ron Paul until he drops from the race. He's the only candidate who I trust to say the truth. I may disagree with him in several ways but at least he will do what he says. The others will all lie to me and then do something else random. He's the only one who sticks to his principles.
I dislike Microsoft but I have to be honest about the fact that I never have to do any maintenance on my windows home network. It took me under an hour to set it up about four years ago and I have swapped in and out new machines (win98se to win2k to winxp).
I have used a linksys, airlink, and d-link router over the years. I use VPN to connect to my windows work machine which runs at 95% of the same speed as if I was sitting there (gone are the painful screen scraping days). I've never gotten a virus- I use AVG free virus checker.
I use a large, OS agnostic software stack (azureus, audacity, vlp, openoffice (not quite there yet imho but SOON will be as of 2.4 perhaps)). I'm ready to go to Linux and Microsoft is pushing me to it by getting in bed with the entertainment industry. I've bounced off linux a couple times. I'll probably go with Ubuntu as well. Everquest is the main reason I still use windows.
I can't imagine what takes you so much time for your windows machines at home unless it is your relatives screwing them up.
Among the decision makers, the ratio of good to bad guys is pretty poor. Only people who are aggressive scammers are promoted by the management who are aggressive scammers.
However, all of this effort is about locking in businesses and governments. The real world cost of Windows for most of us is less than $50. Most of us working for the government or a large business can legally get office for under $50 as well.
Microsoft does a lot of good software which works very well for small businesses and home owner types. It really is plug and go.
The problem is that they are evil bastards to other businesses and anyone that competes with them. They cheat, lie, scam, and don't follow their own rules.
My personal problem is that in part, but mostly the fact that they want to lock us in and then go to a subscription model like cable TV for Windows and the software. And they are getting into bed with RIAA and MPAA and taking control of my box away from me as well as sending all kinds of information about my behavior to unknown central databases.
They have really good products and they are literally forcing me to leave them as a customer because hundreds of billions of dollars isn't enough for them. They are just so damn greedy they don't know when to admit they won a reasonable victory and instead they must push their win to the point of obscenity.
Well, for one thing, the $15 CD cost $.50 to physically produce and $2 are "reasonable" profits.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage artists to produce work which will fall into public domain. Not to "make artists (and everyone associated with them) richer than the queen of england for a few years work.
Let me put it this way..
The minimum wage person has about $50 "free" money. Is it fairer to have a system where that money goes to make one or two artists (and their distributers) rich or to make 100 artists a decent annual living for one year? With a market of 3 billion people, songs could be sold for 1 cent profit for each person fairly involved and those people would still be incredibly wealthy. Selling the songs (especially 30 year old songs) for $1 each is absurd.
---
Secondly, you are conflating pro-GPL people with anti-copyright people. There is probably overlap but they are not the same people. Some GPL folks hate copyright. Some GPL folks love copyright. Some GPL folks religiously buy every thing. Some anti-GPL folks secretly p2p and infringe constantly. I watched people recently who are strongly anti-pirating, pro-copyright, none the less accept an offer for a DVD of songs (corrupted by the dark side!) and then still be pro-copyright later the same weekend (illogical- yes).
---
Many of us would say some IP rights are entirely reasonable. Hell, I think a band should be able to make $500k to $1 million off of a huge monster hit as well as the company backing them. I don't agree with the Disney eternal copyright, the travesty of the happy birthday song, or the rumors of attempts to change copyright to extend the copyrights on beatles songs (after two of the guys are dead and buried and will not benefit).
I especially despise the two bands that sued people for 'stealing their melodies' when I would bet dollars to donuts you could find very similar note sequences in old songs in the public domain.
I often see the intent of GPL as "we prefer that there were not copyright laws but if you insist there are then you have to obey them with regard to this code".
I don't see why people get so worked up about it. I mean just write the 500mb of video and audio codecs yourself or else obey the terms for using the code.
£10 is huge when you consider that at most 20 people worked on the song vs 500 working on a movie and yet the movie sells for £2.5 after 3 months while the music CD still sells for £10 (or even £11) after 5 years.
Let's put it this way. If you sell 100 million copies and you are making a profit of £1, the profits would be enormous. In reality the profits are £8 on your £10 CD. That covers a lot of coke and groupies.
The cool thing about that pandemic is that it killed mostly young and healthy BECAUSE they were young and healthy. Their immune system was strong enough to go completely psycho and essentially dissolve their own cells trying to fight the flu while older people couldn't muster that strong a response.
But you are correct- huge numbers killed. In part because of army camps but today substitute airplanes and cube farms.
The last time the world was without fuel and fuel based fertilizers it was supporting between 630 and 980 million people. We are headed towards a very nasty place. Just like deer, we are going to overbreed until we collapse. There is no point in getting upset about it because nothing you or I (or anyone else on slashdot) can do will slow that day significantly. We will breed and breed until there are no fish in the sea, until the soil is barren, until the fuel is gone. Because babies are wonderful. Everyone should have several.
Considering a lack of fuel and fuel based fertilizer would return us to about the 1750 to 1800 period that shows support for about 629 to 980 million people.
1.5kw is our average load but we can surge to triple that.
I thought like you did when I did the napkin calculation and I was really surprised how few houses we could convert per year.
See the other posts in this thread for more detailed calculations but essentially 100 million homes would cost 100,000,000 * 36,000 = 3,600,000,000,000 to convert assuming no battery backup, no government waste or corruption, and no increase in price given demand that grossly exceeds current supplies. That's 3,600 billion dollars (aka 3.6 Trillion). At 3 billion per week (high estimate of current iraq war weekly cost) we would be converting 83k houses a week. At that rate it would take 23 years. Clearly this is something capitalism will take care of better than the government.
If you add batteries- it gets a lot worse. Add 100,000,000 * 7,000 = 700 billion dollars worth of batteries. Those are replaced very 7 to 10 years (for a total cost of 2.1 Trillion dollars in 23 years).
OTH, if we can drop the prices by an order of magnitude, it takes 360 billion dollars and could be done in 2.3 years-- or we can leave it to capitalism. Since we won't convert at 100% efficiency, it will take longer. As soon as solar replaces 2% of other forms of energy consumption, all of those other forms will drop in price- in some cases very dramatically. Estimates are that the "real" price of oil (cost to get it out of the ground plus a reasonable 10% net profit) is 30 dollars a barrel!
Solar is going to change *EVERYTHING* very soon. In our lifetimes! It is exciting- but it is not quite there yet.
If they tried to do this at my company, sarbanes oxley regulations would prevent us from implementing the required code changes to log code for at least a year.
However, logging the IP addresses as they are written to ram is clearly possible to do with a software change.
"Not economically feasible" is used for someone 500' away.
As a side note... I have a friend who could probably shoot that trench in 2 days. When we put in my sprinkler system he finished 75% of the yard while 3 of us did the other 25%. He was a gas man for 12 years and apparently you learn how to dig well.
Likewise, plumbers wanted $125 per foot to dig down to a broken line in 1997. It took me about 6 hours to dig that hole- saving over $1,000 which works out to about $166 per hour. At that point it took $19 and 30 minutes to fix the broken pipe (tho it was disgusting).
So if you put in sweat equity it looks like trenching and laying a line can be pretty cheap.
If it costs $450 a month for a line, then you have to consider that against the cost of moving to within the coverage area. In some cases, those lines cost a few thousand dollars to lay.
Right now- today- there are articles about how people are buying small cars again. All it takes is 2% less usage per day and the price of oil collapses. And really our usage per person has gone down- apparently the only reason oil usage in america is going up is because the number of people has been increasing. People really are cutting back, combining trips, etc. It just is hidden by increasing population.
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I am completely in agreement with you Falcon.
But I'm actually giving money to the guy which I've never done before. There is something compelling about Ron Paul. The republican talk show hosts are tearing into him inexplicably viciously here in Houston. They even invited him on their show and then spent the entire hour cutting him off and twisting everything he said as negatively as possible. I don't think they realize how clear their agenda is.
He couldn't shrink government like he would like given the congress.
Since I'm a fiscal conservative/social liberal the current administration is the worst thing that could happen.
They are making a socially conservative court while spending like drunken sailors.
Sigh.
They need to develop standards for standardizing their decision process for developing standards.
It shouldn't be a big deal... it's a fairly standard problem.
and other than a company that went out of business I have not had problems.
Still I will pay $10 bucks more to avoid a $50 rebate.
As a person that dislikes both of them, I think that would go to Giuliani.
Hillary is capped at 40% of the electorate. A lot of people will not vote for her. Giuliani is a "hold your nose and vote anyway" republican candidate.
I'm supporting Ron Paul until he drops from the race. He's the only candidate who I trust to say the truth. I may disagree with him in several ways but at least he will do what he says. The others will all lie to me and then do something else random. He's the only one who sticks to his principles.
But your post has both!
I must mod you up!
And yet I must mod you down!
Ahhhhhhh
[head explodes]
Cato,
I dislike Microsoft but I have to be honest about the fact that I never have to do any maintenance on my windows home network. It took me under an hour to set it up about four years ago and I have swapped in and out new machines (win98se to win2k to winxp).
I have used a linksys, airlink, and d-link router over the years. I use VPN to connect to my windows work machine which runs at 95% of the same speed as if I was sitting there (gone are the painful screen scraping days). I've never gotten a virus- I use AVG free virus checker.
I use a large, OS agnostic software stack (azureus, audacity, vlp, openoffice (not quite there yet imho but SOON will be as of 2.4 perhaps)). I'm ready to go to Linux and Microsoft is pushing me to it by getting in bed with the entertainment industry. I've bounced off linux a couple times. I'll probably go with Ubuntu as well. Everquest is the main reason I still use windows.
I can't imagine what takes you so much time for your windows machines at home unless it is your relatives screwing them up.
However,
Among the decision makers, the ratio of good to bad guys is pretty poor. Only people who are aggressive scammers are promoted by the management who are aggressive scammers.
However, all of this effort is about locking in businesses and governments. The real world cost of Windows for most of us is less than $50. Most of us working for the government or a large business can legally get office for under $50 as well.
Microsoft does a lot of good software which works very well for small businesses and home owner types. It really is plug and go.
The problem is that they are evil bastards to other businesses and anyone that competes with them. They cheat, lie, scam, and don't follow their own rules.
My personal problem is that in part, but mostly the fact that they want to lock us in and then go to a subscription model like cable TV for Windows and the software. And they are getting into bed with RIAA and MPAA and taking control of my box away from me as well as sending all kinds of information about my behavior to unknown central databases.
They have really good products and they are literally forcing me to leave them as a customer because hundreds of billions of dollars isn't enough for them. They are just so damn greedy they don't know when to admit they won a reasonable victory and instead they must push their win to the point of obscenity.
Well, for one thing, the $15 CD cost $.50 to physically produce and $2 are "reasonable" profits.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage artists to produce work which will fall into public domain. Not to "make artists (and everyone associated with them) richer than the queen of england for a few years work.
Let me put it this way..
The minimum wage person has about $50 "free" money. Is it fairer to have a system where that money goes to make one or two artists (and their distributers) rich or to make 100 artists a decent annual living for one year? With a market of 3 billion people, songs could be sold for 1 cent profit for each person fairly involved and those people would still be incredibly wealthy. Selling the songs (especially 30 year old songs) for $1 each is absurd.
---
Secondly, you are conflating pro-GPL people with anti-copyright people. There is probably overlap but they are not the same people. Some GPL folks hate copyright. Some GPL folks love copyright. Some GPL folks religiously buy every thing. Some anti-GPL folks secretly p2p and infringe constantly. I watched people recently who are strongly anti-pirating, pro-copyright, none the less accept an offer for a DVD of songs (corrupted by the dark side!) and then still be pro-copyright later the same weekend (illogical- yes).
---
Many of us would say some IP rights are entirely reasonable. Hell, I think a band should be able to make $500k to $1 million off of a huge monster hit as well as the company backing them. I don't agree with the Disney eternal copyright, the travesty of the happy birthday song, or the rumors of attempts to change copyright to extend the copyrights on beatles songs (after two of the guys are dead and buried and will not benefit).
I especially despise the two bands that sued people for 'stealing their melodies' when I would bet dollars to donuts you could find very similar note sequences in old songs in the public domain.
Copyright today is about raw greed.
Sort of.
I often see the intent of GPL as "we prefer that there were not copyright laws but if you insist there are then you have to obey them with regard to this code".
I don't see why people get so worked up about it. I mean just write the 500mb of video and audio codecs yourself or else obey the terms for using the code.
After three decades of this.. I believe the only mistake was putting in email what was said in undocumentable private meetings and telephone calls.
vote "like microsoft 1998"
£10 is huge when you consider that at most 20 people worked on the song vs 500 working on a movie and yet the movie sells for £2.5 after 3 months while the music CD still sells for £10 (or even £11) after 5 years.
Let's put it this way. If you sell 100 million copies and you are making a profit of £1, the profits would be enormous. In reality the profits are £8 on your £10 CD. That covers a lot of coke and groupies.
Indeed,
Dale Carnegie courses teach that 90% of an argument is emotional and only 10% logical in many cases.
A lot of time the decision is just arbitrary.
The cool thing about that pandemic is that it killed mostly young and healthy BECAUSE they were young and healthy.
Their immune system was strong enough to go completely psycho and essentially dissolve their own cells trying to fight the flu while older people couldn't muster that strong a response.
But you are correct- huge numbers killed. In part because of army camps but today substitute airplanes and cube farms.
We depend on JIT inventory way to heavily.
As an FYI,
I have read that Tamiflu is excreted essentially unchanged in your urine.
If it comes down to life and death keep that in mind.
No Somersault,
The last time the world was without fuel and fuel based fertilizers it was supporting between 630 and 980 million people. We are headed towards a very nasty place. Just like deer, we are going to overbreed until we collapse.
There is no point in getting upset about it because nothing you or I (or anyone else on slashdot) can do will slow that day significantly. We will breed and breed until there are no fish in the sea, until the soil is barren, until the fuel is gone. Because babies are wonderful. Everyone should have several.
Mostly out of my ass... :)
however...the basis was my rough memory of world populations at different times in history.
Looking here for hard data: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html I was a little bit low.
Considering a lack of fuel and fuel based fertilizer would return us to about the 1750 to 1800 period that shows support for about 629 to 980 million people.
I'm sure we can manage a population of 600 million without fuel just fine.
Hmmm. what to do about those other 5.4 billion people.
I mistakenly put 1.5mw when I meant 1.5kw.
1.5kw is our average load but we can surge to triple that.
I thought like you did when I did the napkin calculation and I was really surprised how few houses we could convert per year.
See the other posts in this thread for more detailed calculations but essentially 100 million homes would cost 100,000,000 * 36,000 = 3,600,000,000,000 to convert assuming no battery backup, no government waste or corruption, and no increase in price given demand that grossly exceeds current supplies. That's 3,600 billion dollars (aka 3.6 Trillion). At 3 billion per week (high estimate of current iraq war weekly cost) we would be converting 83k houses a week. At that rate it would take 23 years. Clearly this is something capitalism will take care of better than the government.
If you add batteries- it gets a lot worse. Add 100,000,000 * 7,000 = 700 billion dollars worth of batteries. Those are replaced very 7 to 10 years (for a total cost of 2.1 Trillion dollars in 23 years).
OTH, if we can drop the prices by an order of magnitude, it takes 360 billion dollars and could be done in 2.3 years-- or we can leave it to capitalism. Since we won't convert at 100% efficiency, it will take longer. As soon as solar replaces 2% of other forms of energy consumption, all of those other forms will drop in price- in some cases very dramatically. Estimates are that the "real" price of oil (cost to get it out of the ground plus a reasonable 10% net profit) is 30 dollars a barrel!
Solar is going to change *EVERYTHING* very soon. In our lifetimes! It is exciting- but it is not quite there yet.
Understand that emails will not cut it.
You need to walk around and talk to people.
Understand that seemingly intelligent adults will sit and do nothing when they just need a 60 second answer.
Work the process. Document things. Push big decisions up to the business.
Don't overwork your people.
It's good to see someone willing to kill for their illicit copy of Britney Spears latest hit!
If they tried to do this at my company, sarbanes oxley regulations would prevent us from implementing the required code changes to log code for at least a year.
However, logging the IP addresses as they are written to ram is clearly possible to do with a software change.
There are still lots of places without electricity and phone service.
for example: http://www.diychatroom.com/showthread.php?p=59783
"Not economically feasible" is used for someone 500' away.
As a side note... I have a friend who could probably shoot that trench in 2 days. When we put in my sprinkler system he finished 75% of the yard while 3 of us did the other 25%. He was a gas man for 12 years and apparently you learn how to dig well.
Likewise, plumbers wanted $125 per foot to dig down to a broken line in 1997. It took me about 6 hours to dig that hole- saving over $1,000 which works out to about $166 per hour. At that point it took $19 and 30 minutes to fix the broken pipe (tho it was disgusting).
So if you put in sweat equity it looks like trenching and laying a line can be pretty cheap.
You can't run cable everywhere.
If it costs $450 a month for a line, then you have to consider that against the cost of moving to within the coverage area. In some cases, those lines cost a few thousand dollars to lay.
No.
Oil can easily drop to $30 a barrel again.
It can also fairly easily go up 10% per year.
Right now- today- there are articles about how people are buying small cars again. All it takes is 2% less usage per day and the price of oil collapses. And really our usage per person has gone down- apparently the only reason oil usage in america is going up is because the number of people has been increasing. People really are cutting back, combining trips, etc. It just is hidden by increasing population.