"A. Use of Computer for Non-School-Related Purposes"
What about work? Is he allowed to get a job which requires use of a computer as a necessary part of completion of job duties? If you don't want people stealing, it might be helpful to allow them to get a job which may require the use of a computer. Yes, there are jobs which don't require use of a computer - but it does rather limit his options. Depending on how strict the court interpreted it, even doing something like using a digital 'timecard' terminal to log into and out of work could be considered use of a computer for non-school purposes.
So, you're saying that simply asking the court to re-consider the terms of probation is automatic cause to not reconsider the terms of probation? Funny that you speak of Tehran, because that kind of thinking sounds like something we're used to hearing from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Oh, BS. Not that many people actually *want* a pure electric car (I'm sure if the car makers thought there was a mass market today, they'd mass market a vehicle). I like the Volt concept, though - electric drive, electric range of 40 or more miles, then a gasoline generator to provide electricity to keep you running after that. The electric will work for most of your driving, but you can drive further when you want to.
(Aside: if by pure electric car, you actually mean roads with an electrified rail or overhead catenary for powering the cars [such as they use for electric trains], that could perhaps work, but nobody I hear talking about 'pure electric' cars seems to be indicating we should electrify the road network in the U.S. - I've always thought that concept sounded a bit dangerous, and hard to make work if you have multiple lanes of traffic, such as on an Interstate).
The problem is, even the *very best* battery technology today kind of sucks for vehicular use - low energy storage per pound (or volume) of battery, and it takes a long time (relatively speaking) to recharge. So, there really are some actual technology problems.
Also, why should we mass manufacture electric vehicles today? Right now, most of our electricity is produced by burning coal with, I believe, Nuclear second, and nat. gas. and oil kicking in a small bit, Hydro kicking in another small bit (in some areas it's much larger - like Las Vegas, but nationally, hydro doesn't account for much - I think it's like 2% or 5% of U.S. generation. Wind and Solar are starting to ramp up, but at the moment, they provide only a tiny fraction of our electric power.
Which means, basically, 'electric cars' today would be primarly powered by coal. Is burning lots of coal better than burning lots of oil? I suppose the argument could be made that since we have lots of coal in the U.S., if you don't care about carbon, toxic coal ash, or the radioactivity released by coal ash into the air every day (hint: it's much greater than the released radiactivity from operating nuclear plants), then perhaps using American coal instead of foreign oil is a good idea.
I'd rather see us building up more nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar to power those electric cars. Also, if we can make some breakthroughs in battery technology so they can hold more and/or charge faster, that would help a lot. That said, there is a place for trying to build up the electric car industry, in parallel with clean electric sources - but I don't see a 10 to 20 year 'ramp up' of electric car production being out-of-line with a parallel ramp-up in non-fossil electric power generation.
I'm sorry, but I agree with Oracle on this. They do have a very real conflict of interests. Not all conflicts of interest necessarily have to be about money. It can just as easily be about priorities - the LO people, as heads of the LO project *should* dedicate themselves as exclusively as possible to the success of the LO project.
I see no reason why Oracle/OOo cannot *cooperate* with TDF/LO people, but you shouldn't have the same people sitting on the 'boards', as it were, of both projects.
Now, some might ask - certainly someone can be actively leading two open source projects? Yes, but when they are so closely aligned in purpose as two competing Office Suites based upon the same ancestral code-base, a little bit of seperation seems very much in order. We're not talking about someone being a leader of say, X.Org and OO.org, where they are very different projects with little to no overlap/competition.
Now, all that said, I do hope the projects both cooperate in efforts such as the OpenDocument Format steering comittees - I think ODF is far more important than any single implementation. ODF can potentially be a true game-changer, as a well-documented truly open format for common user-generated documents.
I hope the disagreements between the parties doesn't in any way hurt that effort.
Oh, I agree - it's crappy, and it's still gonna happen, and it's going to break all kind of applications that really benefit from direct connections - for example, I think when a bunch of large ISP's around the world all start shifting their customers to Carrier-NAT, that Skype is going to sink like the Titanic, because there simply won't be enough 'supernodes' (or whatever they call people who actually have in-bound connectivity and high bandwidth) to proxy the traffic for everyone behind a NAT anymore - I think there were probably a lot of Skype users like myself who setup port-forwarding for the Skype inbound port on at least one computer on their network, to mostly carry the burden before, but now I won't even be able to participate in Skype like that any longer, and neither will hundreds of thousands of other users who previously had in-bound connectivity.
Well, I at least have IPv6 through a tunnel, currently - but I'm not sure that will even continue to work when there are two levels of NAT which must be traversed. If my local ISPs offer IPv6. . . well, I'll switch to whoever offers it first, if I no longer have at least one IPv4.
It only seemed inconceivable that IPv4 would run out because it was never expected to be used by pretty much everybody - it was originally thought the Internet would only be used in some government labs, military faclities, academia, and a few defense contractors. For the scope of that particular problem, 32 bits was conceivably "enough". However, the Internet grew out of that "scope" and become a globally available common communications system. Suddenly the old scope was no longer sufficient, so the IETF *foresaw* the problem 15 years ago that the 32-bit space was no longer sufficient.
So, we now have to decide what the new theoretical scope might be, right? But since the Internet already grew rapidly out of the first scope, what's to say any new scope is 'sufficient'. Well, look at it this way: 2^32 is approximately 4 Billion. Number of people on earth is approx 6 or 7 Billion - expected to grow to about 10 Billion in a couple decades. Now, not everyone necessarily needs their own IP address, but if you have *enough*, it's desirable to give an IP address to everyone (and, here come the people saying that using NAT increases security, so it's bad to give people public IP addresses, even though in reality a firewall with a default-deny inbound policy provides the exact same level of protection as NAT, while still allowing you the *option* of allowing traffic in if you choose - which for different types of applications, like games, VoIP/Video calling, direct file transfer between users, etc. can be very useful).
Of course, not all 6 or 7 Billion people can afford computer/electronics which would need an IP address. But, on the other hand, many people 'consume' more than one IP address - I have a computer at work, a computer at home, and a cell phone - that's potentially 3 addresses for just me; I might want to setup a home media player/DVR, which might need an additional IP address, and maybe I want to setup my own file server for sharing photos, videos, etc with friends and family. In addition to the addresses needed for users, you also need additional addresses for servers. Some servers will need a bunch of IP addresses because they are serving multiple domain names (that is, they are pretending to be a lot more servers than they are).
Well, we can't say for sure, but having somewhere around 20-30 Billion addresses available seems like it would be 'enough' *for now*, but as you ask, if you increased to 20 or 30 Billion, how do you know you wouldn't "run out in (say) 50-100 years".
So, the IPv6 people didn't increase the number space to 20 or 30 Billion. Every time you add one more bit, you *double* the address space. So, they started with approx 4 Billion, and they *doubled* it 96 times.
2^128 is approximately 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that is, 3.4 * 10^38). addresses. To give you some perspective, let's say that we invented a Faster-Than-Light ship, and began a great age of Galactic Expansion. Further, we somehow developed Faster-Than-Light communications, and wanted to connect all the planets in the Milky Way to the Intra-Galactic-Net. Wikipedia gives an estimated range of 100 - 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. Let's use the *worst case* scenario, and say that we have 400 Billion. Further, let's say that there is an average of 1 habitable planet per star (which is likely grossly over-estimating the number of planets), so we say there are 400 Billion habitable planets in the Milky Way. That would give us about 850,705,917,302,346,158,658,436,518 (that is, about 8.5 * 10^26) IPv6 addresses *per Planet*. Which means that, really, we have enough IP addresses, probably to colonize hundreds or thousands of galaxies.
Are you *really* still worried about us running out of IPv6 address space? In what application could you possibly propose we do run out? Individually addressing atoms? Addressing photons?
If you wanted to be nit-picky, you could say that 64-bits of each 128-bit address is reserved for individual hosts - that the IPv6 specification isn't r
They expect to allocate all 6/8 blocks available to them for allocation by sometime next year. 6 of them. So, let's say there's 6 more blocks worth of 'reclaimable' addresses - at the present rate of demand/consumption, you would also expect them to run out in less than a year, yes? Even if there were 10 or 12 blocks of reclaimable addresses, again, that only delays the inevitable - there's simply not enough addresses to keep up, indefinitely into the future, with the growth in demand around the world.
IPv6 on the other hand, gives you 128-bits of address space. It's pretty inconceivable that 128-bits will be exhausted in any foreseeable timeframe. 128 bits is a really astronomically (literally) huge number.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've come to the conclusion there will be no quick transition to IPv6. When the last blocks get allocated, I think we'll enter a period of several years at least where IPv6 is *starting* to get rolled out, but is not rolled out yet, and companies who desperately need public IP addresses for their servers will pay thousands of dollars to buy IPv4 addresses from the hoarders. It's not like the Internet will suddenly end when IP address exhaustion is reached, it will just become much harder to get a public IP for servers or for making your home computer accessible to the outside world.
Carrier Grade NAT will probably start to be used by large ISPs, further extending the life of IPv4 by making it so that instead of getting 1 public IP address for your home/small business network, you now get zero public IP addresses for your home/SB network. Through stuff like that, millions of IP addresses will be 'reclaimed' and made available. . . at a price.
The increased price *will* give an incentive, finally, to companies and people to start adopting IPv6, but we're going to go through an expensive transitional period for some period of time while that happens.
The sad thing is, I'm ready to use IPv6 today (and am using it a little through a tunnel broker), but there's no indication from my ISP that they ever have any plan to turn on IPv6 in their routers. The only U.S. ISPs I've heard of who are planning to test IPv6 are Comcast and Earthlink.
Yeah, this gets posted EVERY TIME there's an article about IPv4 address exhaustion, and every time the answer is the same - increasing assignment efficiency will at most buy us a few months, perhaps a year or two, of time. It doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it a little longer.
In truth, when the addresses are exhausted, I expect all the holders of/8's to start auctioning off their unused allotments to the highest bidder. There's a reason none (or most) of them have not given addresses back voluntarily - they are about to become a very scarce, very valuable commodity for trade. Those companies who got in early and got a Class A will make maybe hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars auctioning off the addresses. When companies who have IPv4 address blocks are going into bankruptcy or up for sale, the value of their allotments will start to be accounted for as assets.
Which, I think, is one reason that some tech companies are not pushing harder for IPv6 adoption - they stand to make a lot of money off of artificial scarcity.
You've still failed to explain why the power of the government to enact law should be used to force Hulu.com to offer content to customers of ISPs they don't want to? You're dancing around that issue on technicalities. Now, I could see the argument that if a customer had paid for the Hulu Plus subscription content, then was suddenly cut off from the content they *paid* for and that Hulu had agreed to provide, that Hulu would be in breach of contract or some such.
I don't care so much about 'economics' as an abstract academic discipline, and more concerned with the powers we grant government (though the discussion should certainly be informed by economics). The reason I discuss 'needs' even though you say that economics isn't concerned with needs, is that I think we can all agree that everyone should be able to have access to buy food - we shouldn't, for example, pick out certain people, and say that either we're not going to sell food to them, or we're going to charge them 2X as much because, e.g. they're black or hispanic, or catholic, or muslim, or whatever. So, we can say that although economics doesn't talk about 'needs', in a democracy we are very much concerned, when deciding what powers are appropriate for government, about 'needs'.
In a time of food scarcity, I think the argument can be made for government rationing and price controls (at least, the price that buyers pay - perhaps in order to promote the free-market principle of giving incentive for increased production by allowing the price that producers receive to go up, perhaps the government in such a case would pay the difference between what buyers pay at the market, and what producers receive in the commodities markets), in order to try to minimize starvation.
But in the case of the 'public' free content, nobody *needs* Fox content, so if Fox wants to hurt *themselves* by not offering their own customers access to their content because they use the 'wrong' ISP, how is that different from only being able to buy a Ford from a Ford dealership? Should the power of government be used to compel Ford to sell their vehicles through every dealership which wishes to sell new Fords?
This made me chuckle: "the oil at a solar thermal plant".
Not sure why that made you chuckle? The oil I was referring to is the medium at that plant which got heated. That is, the particular plant I remember reading about had the mirrors concentrate sunlight on a pipe with some sort of oil in it that is designed to get extremely hot, then transfer that thermal energy in a heat exchanger, to convert wather to steam to drive a turbine.
They didn't burn the oil in normal operation, but some of it set on fire in a mis-hap.
That's not to say that I think solar plants are actually very dangerous - I think that an occasional oil fire like that at a solar thermal plant is probably no big deal (I mean, it's a big deal if you work at the plant, and might get burned in such an accident, so it's an occupational safety issue, but from a larger *public safety* issue, I don't think there's much risk - it would seem to be much less risk than, say, a Gas-line explosion). Unless the particular type of oil used releases a lot of toxic fumes or something. If it burns fairly cleanly, then I think it's a very reasonable risk.
What conspiracy? I was just trying to see if I could 'suss-out' why they chose that particular myth, instead of any other. I mean, I'm all for any attempts to try to get more kids more interested in science and technology. I think it would work better, if the goal is to generate interest, to 'prove' something cool, than to disprove something (although, certainly, showing kids how something can be disproved has value too) which *would have been* cool IF it was true, but hey, it's not.
Although, as the other poster mentioned, it's a good point that perhaps the MythBusters failed to take something into account, like setting sails on fire instead of setting hulls on fire.
You know, I was going to ask about whether Mythbusters had already done this. I haven't watched many episodies of MythBusters (because I don't have cable, but I've caught a few Eps. at friends and relatives homes). I could swear I saw an episode all about this that they did in the early seasons, like 5 years ago or something.
So the question is, if the myth is busted, why would Obama want to use this as a way of promoting solar energy?
Perhaps he's really trying to show that Solar Energy is safe? Although, even though Archimedes might not have set a fleet on fire with mirrors, doesn't mean that real fires at Solar Thermal plants never happen. I believe I recall reading an account of the oil at a solar thermal plant in California catching fire back 5 or 10 years ago.
Ok, so we've got a project which we're being told is under development and which will be released "real soon", along with an "awesome demo video". This is sounding just . . . so familiar.
Again, you're arguing against what the author didn't say. The author didn't make any claim that adoption rates are a yardstick of a system's quality. In fact, the author specifically said that Linux's quality is great. Well, what he said was, "Over the past few years, modern Linux distributions such as Ubuntu have utterly transformed the open-source desktop user experience into something sleek and simple, while arguably surpassing Windows and Mac OS in both security and stability."
Nobody is arguing that Linux lacks quality. Or legitimacy. The author is just exploring what he thinks the reasons are that Linux didn't gain more widespread adoption. Is that a waste of time? For you, perhaps. Other people want to see more people using Linux, so they can experience the freedoms and benefits of it's open culture, and without understanding the root causes of why it's not gaining more popularity, we can't really begin to address that problem.
That's not to say I agree with all his conclusions, but I just hate that every time you come to a slashdot story, you can almost predict the ways in which people will argue against things they apparently *wish* the author said, or they just completely make it up so they can argue against it.
As for my sense of humor, I post my share of 'joke' posts, but it's not funny when the post makes a joke of a point the article doesn't even deal with AT ALL. It's just ignorant.
Wow, it's amazingly easy to argue against the things you *wish* somebody said instead of what was *actually* said. How can a site billed as "News for Nerds" be filled with people who have such a basic lack of understanding of language and discourse? Here, for the reading impaired, I reproduce the actual quote, as it appeared in the slashdot summary: "The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." (Why do I suspect that reproducing it here will have no effect, as the people who ignored it in the summary will just ignore and re-interpret it here, too, to fit their whim?)
That is a *much* different statement than "Linux is dead". Most of what you said after that only applies to the statement you wish the author had said, instead of the author's actual statement. The author didn't argue that Linux won't continue to be developed and updated, that it's 'not viable'.
You make one statement which does seem to speak to the article as written, and I even kind of concur: "Linux was always a niche system, and personally I don't want it to get too huge. That can only lead to massive marketization and commercialization, neither of which will be good for Linux."
I don't know that I necessarily agree fully that larger marketshare would be a *bad* thing for Linux, but I will say that being in a niche that is large enough to continue developing and innovating, while small enough to largely avoid being a target of viruses, trojans, and worms, certainly has an upside.
Thank you for being "that guy" that totally misses the point. The point isn't that some geeks and some businesses and even governments around the world in different parts aren't using Linux on the desktop. Sure, you *can* use Linux on the desktop. The point is simply that there hasn't been *widespread* adoption, and even more to the point, that there are systemic/market forces at work which appear to have a deterrent effect on the probability that Linux would become more widely adopted any time soon.
There's also the matter that Microsoft isn't the only software in the world. They could just as easily crack down on someone for pirated copies of Photoshop, Autocad, or any other commercial software that the group might be using.
We're not talking about matter of life and death here - food, clean water, clothes, heating, medicine, etc. We're talking about entertainment. Yes, people can just not watch TV shows. Also, not all, but a lot of the TV Shows on Hulu are broadcast over-the-air for free (SGU, however, being a SyFy show, is either cable or Hulu).
I've personally decided just not to watch SGU or Caprica anymore - they aren't that great to begin with, and I've decided I don't really want to deal with Hulu right now. Perhaps in the future I will come back and watch them.
As for "other entertainment" - it's *completely possible* that someone else could create other TV shows, and make them available on other Internet sites, that I enjoy just as much or more than the shows I like on Hulu.
"But I think much of this gets to the issue of non-economists talking about economic effects like they are versed in them and using language that's, well, simply false if the conversation were between two economists."
Well, that doesn't seem to be stopping you from talking about it.
I am a voter, a participant in a democracy. Us "non-economists" still must try to wrestle with and understand economics enough to cast an informed vote for different politicians who represent the different economic options available. While I think some regulation is reasonable, I also do recognize that there are market forces that bring about change, and in a land where we believe in freedom, and recognize that perhaps the government doesn't always know what's best, just maybe it's best to let the market sort out some types of problems.
I don't take that belief to the extremes that many on the Republican and Libertarian side of politics seem to often do, but I really think that when it comes to something like a website, such as Hulu, perhaps since it's really not a life-and-death situation, since it is just about entertainment and news, and there are many other sources for entertainment and news other than Hulu, that perhaps the government really doesn't have a right to butt into the issue.
You talk about the barriers to entry, but you use the example of a telco. However, in this case we're talking about a website. The barrier to entry for starting a website is much, much lower than the barrier to entry for setting up a telco. Almost anyone can do it, in terms of what the 'startup costs' are.
I can see Net Neutrality regulations to prevent ISP's from blocking traffic from websites, but in the end, I really do think that if they started to do that, they would lose customers to someone, anyone who would offer them the 'whole internet'. Even for something as hard as starting a 'last-mile' ISP, it can be done. The key is that you don't start a whole nationwide network at once. You pick a city somewhere in the U.S. where you think you have a particularly good chance to succeed in the market, and you pitch investors on starting up a small network in that city. To wire up just one small city might cost a few 10's of million, or maybe a couple hundred million. Expensive, but if the market demand is there, you can probably find investors to do it. Once you've shown that you can successfully compete in that city, you try to convince investors that you can compete in a couple other cities, and you gradually grow your network organically.
You'll probably run into problems with the incumbents trying to pull dirty tricks, I'm not saying it'll be *easy*, or fast even, but it's possible.
There's potentially other options, other than bootstrapping an entirely new company - such as a company which is a growing or established in another part of the country, moving in to compete in a market where they think they can compete with the local monopoly. Maybe locally there's only Cable and DSL, and the local telco isn't interested in running fiber-to-the-home, so a competitor convinces the local Utilities Commission or whoever to allow them to build a fiber network in the area.
I will admit though, that telcos and ISPs are the sort of indus
I'm not against net neutrality, but at the same time, in the end, when companies don't do the right thing for their customers, they do create an opportunity for someone else to start competition - basically, any company which enacts policies and procedures which alienate their customer base, they create a big opening in the market for a new competitor to step in and take business away from them. No monopoly or oligarchy can last forever with unhappy customers.
In the case of Hulu, nobody has to watch Hulu. I used to be a pretty big user of Hulu, but they've changed a lot in the last year, for the worse. I've decided I really am not all that interested in their content or their service anymore. Case in point - I was flirting with the idea of subscribing to their Hulu Plus service (to get access to back-catalogue material mostly), but I recently went back to Hulu.com after not using the site for months, just to catch a couple episodes from the new season of Stargate Universe. Well, they've apparently decided that on the 'free' Hulu, they won't give you access to any higher than 360p resolution. I can see not offering 720p or 1080 resolution on the free service, but 360 just looks like absolute crap. That's their right, but I've decided it's my right not to do business with them. I'm not interested in subscribing now, because of the way they they decided to run their business.
Maybe I mis-understand the publishing business, but isn't a huge part of what published do is to *publicize* the works they are publishing? I doubt most independent authors can do the marketing that an established publisher can, and even the very act of getting a dead-tree book on the shelves of bookstore, department stores (target, walmart, et al.) is promotion - people who are in the store browsing, might find your book when they otherwise wouldn't. Publishers can put money into ad campaigns, their PR people can get you interviewed or reviewed on NPR, The Daily Show, PBS, or a hundred other media outlets. They can arrange to get you on a book-signing tour which will also publicize the book, and probably a dozen other ways of getting people to know about and maybe buy the book
I wouldn't want to self-publish if I went into authoring, as I wouldn't even know where to begin to publicize my works.
Now, I realize that not all authors get the premium treatment - as a new author, your book will only get probably a relatively minimal amount of publicity - the publisher won't pull out all the stops, but if they are going to publish you at all, they will at least try to get your books some mindshare so they can recover the costs. If your first book are two make more money than they cost the publisher, and are generally received well, then they might decide to risk a bigger campaign the next time, right?
"The real question is why aren't bookstores doing this?"
Exactly. These people are just taking advantage of the fact that the bookstores and libraries are too clueless to do this themselves. Every library should be having their staff do the exact same thing - go through the 'for sale' piles with scanners and figure out what can fetch a decent price online. As a taxpayer, I'd really rather the public libraries get as much as possible when selling of their old inventory, instead of selling it all for 25 cents or a dollar. The only things that should be sold for 25 cents or a dollar are the things that are really only *worth* 25 cents or a dollar.
Thanks for the link to the Swiss FOoE - always nice to have a direct source for that type of info. I think it's pretty awesome that the Swiss get about 95% of their energy from clean sources (of course, not every country has as much hydro available to us to tap). Still the fact that you'll be able to almost eliminate freight trucks through the Alps (other than trucks servicing Switzerland itself, I guess?), and move the freight with clean power will be truly cool.
Unfortunately, as for that article you recommended reading, as they do not have an English translation available, and I do not speak German (I took a couple years of 'conversational' German in high school, and have almost completely forgotten it, I'm afraid - but never knew technical and scientific terms in German anyhow), I will be unable to read it. Perhaps someone else will find it informative.
Yes, this is true, but I wasn't sure if the rails would be powered from the main 'open grid', or if there might be some generation specifically planned for being the primary power source?
Someone in one of the other replies mentioned there are nearby hydro dams already powering some trains in the region, so it might be a lot of the power ends up coming from those. Hard to say without a more definitive answer from someone who knows more about the project and the specific plans being made.
Slashdot Mirror
"A. Use of Computer for Non-School-Related Purposes"
What about work? Is he allowed to get a job which requires use of a computer as a necessary part of completion of job duties? If you don't want people stealing, it might be helpful to allow them to get a job which may require the use of a computer. Yes, there are jobs which don't require use of a computer - but it does rather limit his options. Depending on how strict the court interpreted it, even doing something like using a digital 'timecard' terminal to log into and out of work could be considered use of a computer for non-school purposes.
So, you're saying that simply asking the court to re-consider the terms of probation is automatic cause to not reconsider the terms of probation? Funny that you speak of Tehran, because that kind of thinking sounds like something we're used to hearing from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Oh, BS. Not that many people actually *want* a pure electric car (I'm sure if the car makers thought there was a mass market today, they'd mass market a vehicle). I like the Volt concept, though - electric drive, electric range of 40 or more miles, then a gasoline generator to provide electricity to keep you running after that. The electric will work for most of your driving, but you can drive further when you want to.
(Aside: if by pure electric car, you actually mean roads with an electrified rail or overhead catenary for powering the cars [such as they use for electric trains], that could perhaps work, but nobody I hear talking about 'pure electric' cars seems to be indicating we should electrify the road network in the U.S. - I've always thought that concept sounded a bit dangerous, and hard to make work if you have multiple lanes of traffic, such as on an Interstate).
The problem is, even the *very best* battery technology today kind of sucks for vehicular use - low energy storage per pound (or volume) of battery, and it takes a long time (relatively speaking) to recharge. So, there really are some actual technology problems.
Also, why should we mass manufacture electric vehicles today? Right now, most of our electricity is produced by burning coal with, I believe, Nuclear second, and nat. gas. and oil kicking in a small bit, Hydro kicking in another small bit (in some areas it's much larger - like Las Vegas, but nationally, hydro doesn't account for much - I think it's like 2% or 5% of U.S. generation. Wind and Solar are starting to ramp up, but at the moment, they provide only a tiny fraction of our electric power.
Which means, basically, 'electric cars' today would be primarly powered by coal. Is burning lots of coal better than burning lots of oil? I suppose the argument could be made that since we have lots of coal in the U.S., if you don't care about carbon, toxic coal ash, or the radioactivity released by coal ash into the air every day (hint: it's much greater than the released radiactivity from operating nuclear plants), then perhaps using American coal instead of foreign oil is a good idea.
I'd rather see us building up more nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar to power those electric cars. Also, if we can make some breakthroughs in battery technology so they can hold more and/or charge faster, that would help a lot. That said, there is a place for trying to build up the electric car industry, in parallel with clean electric sources - but I don't see a 10 to 20 year 'ramp up' of electric car production being out-of-line with a parallel ramp-up in non-fossil electric power generation.
I'm sorry, but I agree with Oracle on this. They do have a very real conflict of interests. Not all conflicts of interest necessarily have to be about money. It can just as easily be about priorities - the LO people, as heads of the LO project *should* dedicate themselves as exclusively as possible to the success of the LO project.
I see no reason why Oracle/OOo cannot *cooperate* with TDF/LO people, but you shouldn't have the same people sitting on the 'boards', as it were, of both projects.
Now, some might ask - certainly someone can be actively leading two open source projects? Yes, but when they are so closely aligned in purpose as two competing Office Suites based upon the same ancestral code-base, a little bit of seperation seems very much in order. We're not talking about someone being a leader of say, X.Org and OO.org, where they are very different projects with little to no overlap/competition.
Now, all that said, I do hope the projects both cooperate in efforts such as the OpenDocument Format steering comittees - I think ODF is far more important than any single implementation. ODF can potentially be a true game-changer, as a well-documented truly open format for common user-generated documents.
I hope the disagreements between the parties doesn't in any way hurt that effort.
Oh, I agree - it's crappy, and it's still gonna happen, and it's going to break all kind of applications that really benefit from direct connections - for example, I think when a bunch of large ISP's around the world all start shifting their customers to Carrier-NAT, that Skype is going to sink like the Titanic, because there simply won't be enough 'supernodes' (or whatever they call people who actually have in-bound connectivity and high bandwidth) to proxy the traffic for everyone behind a NAT anymore - I think there were probably a lot of Skype users like myself who setup port-forwarding for the Skype inbound port on at least one computer on their network, to mostly carry the burden before, but now I won't even be able to participate in Skype like that any longer, and neither will hundreds of thousands of other users who previously had in-bound connectivity.
Well, I at least have IPv6 through a tunnel, currently - but I'm not sure that will even continue to work when there are two levels of NAT which must be traversed. If my local ISPs offer IPv6. . . well, I'll switch to whoever offers it first, if I no longer have at least one IPv4.
It only seemed inconceivable that IPv4 would run out because it was never expected to be used by pretty much everybody - it was originally thought the Internet would only be used in some government labs, military faclities, academia, and a few defense contractors. For the scope of that particular problem, 32 bits was conceivably "enough". However, the Internet grew out of that "scope" and become a globally available common communications system. Suddenly the old scope was no longer sufficient, so the IETF *foresaw* the problem 15 years ago that the 32-bit space was no longer sufficient.
So, we now have to decide what the new theoretical scope might be, right? But since the Internet already grew rapidly out of the first scope, what's to say any new scope is 'sufficient'. Well, look at it this way: 2^32 is approximately 4 Billion. Number of people on earth is approx 6 or 7 Billion - expected to grow to about 10 Billion in a couple decades. Now, not everyone necessarily needs their own IP address, but if you have *enough*, it's desirable to give an IP address to everyone (and, here come the people saying that using NAT increases security, so it's bad to give people public IP addresses, even though in reality a firewall with a default-deny inbound policy provides the exact same level of protection as NAT, while still allowing you the *option* of allowing traffic in if you choose - which for different types of applications, like games, VoIP/Video calling, direct file transfer between users, etc. can be very useful).
Of course, not all 6 or 7 Billion people can afford computer/electronics which would need an IP address. But, on the other hand, many people 'consume' more than one IP address - I have a computer at work, a computer at home, and a cell phone - that's potentially 3 addresses for just me; I might want to setup a home media player/DVR, which might need an additional IP address, and maybe I want to setup my own file server for sharing photos, videos, etc with friends and family. In addition to the addresses needed for users, you also need additional addresses for servers. Some servers will need a bunch of IP addresses because they are serving multiple domain names (that is, they are pretending to be a lot more servers than they are).
Well, we can't say for sure, but having somewhere around 20-30 Billion addresses available seems like it would be 'enough' *for now*, but as you ask, if you increased to 20 or 30 Billion, how do you know you wouldn't "run out in (say) 50-100 years".
So, the IPv6 people didn't increase the number space to 20 or 30 Billion. Every time you add one more bit, you *double* the address space. So, they started with approx 4 Billion, and they *doubled* it 96 times.
2^128 is approximately 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that is, 3.4 * 10^38). addresses. To give you some perspective, let's say that we invented a Faster-Than-Light ship, and began a great age of Galactic Expansion. Further, we somehow developed Faster-Than-Light communications, and wanted to connect all the planets in the Milky Way to the Intra-Galactic-Net. Wikipedia gives an estimated range of 100 - 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. Let's use the *worst case* scenario, and say that we have 400 Billion. Further, let's say that there is an average of 1 habitable planet per star (which is likely grossly over-estimating the number of planets), so we say there are 400 Billion habitable planets in the Milky Way. That would give us about 850,705,917,302,346,158,658,436,518 (that is, about 8.5 * 10^26) IPv6 addresses *per Planet*. Which means that, really, we have enough IP addresses, probably to colonize hundreds or thousands of galaxies.
Are you *really* still worried about us running out of IPv6 address space? In what application could you possibly propose we do run out? Individually addressing atoms? Addressing photons?
If you wanted to be nit-picky, you could say that 64-bits of each 128-bit address is reserved for individual hosts - that the IPv6 specification isn't r
They expect to allocate all 6 /8 blocks available to them for allocation by sometime next year. 6 of them. So, let's say there's 6 more blocks worth of 'reclaimable' addresses - at the present rate of demand/consumption, you would also expect them to run out in less than a year, yes? Even if there were 10 or 12 blocks of reclaimable addresses, again, that only delays the inevitable - there's simply not enough addresses to keep up, indefinitely into the future, with the growth in demand around the world.
IPv6 on the other hand, gives you 128-bits of address space. It's pretty inconceivable that 128-bits will be exhausted in any foreseeable timeframe. 128 bits is a really astronomically (literally) huge number.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've come to the conclusion there will be no quick transition to IPv6. When the last blocks get allocated, I think we'll enter a period of several years at least where IPv6 is *starting* to get rolled out, but is not rolled out yet, and companies who desperately need public IP addresses for their servers will pay thousands of dollars to buy IPv4 addresses from the hoarders. It's not like the Internet will suddenly end when IP address exhaustion is reached, it will just become much harder to get a public IP for servers or for making your home computer accessible to the outside world.
Carrier Grade NAT will probably start to be used by large ISPs, further extending the life of IPv4 by making it so that instead of getting 1 public IP address for your home/small business network, you now get zero public IP addresses for your home/SB network. Through stuff like that, millions of IP addresses will be 'reclaimed' and made available. . . at a price.
The increased price *will* give an incentive, finally, to companies and people to start adopting IPv6, but we're going to go through an expensive transitional period for some period of time while that happens.
The sad thing is, I'm ready to use IPv6 today (and am using it a little through a tunnel broker), but there's no indication from my ISP that they ever have any plan to turn on IPv6 in their routers. The only U.S. ISPs I've heard of who are planning to test IPv6 are Comcast and Earthlink.
Yeah, this gets posted EVERY TIME there's an article about IPv4 address exhaustion, and every time the answer is the same - increasing assignment efficiency will at most buy us a few months, perhaps a year or two, of time. It doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it a little longer.
In truth, when the addresses are exhausted, I expect all the holders of /8's to start auctioning off their unused allotments to the highest bidder. There's a reason none (or most) of them have not given addresses back voluntarily - they are about to become a very scarce, very valuable commodity for trade. Those companies who got in early and got a Class A will make maybe hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars auctioning off the addresses. When companies who have IPv4 address blocks are going into bankruptcy or up for sale, the value of their allotments will start to be accounted for as assets.
Which, I think, is one reason that some tech companies are not pushing harder for IPv6 adoption - they stand to make a lot of money off of artificial scarcity.
You've still failed to explain why the power of the government to enact law should be used to force Hulu.com to offer content to customers of ISPs they don't want to? You're dancing around that issue on technicalities. Now, I could see the argument that if a customer had paid for the Hulu Plus subscription content, then was suddenly cut off from the content they *paid* for and that Hulu had agreed to provide, that Hulu would be in breach of contract or some such.
I don't care so much about 'economics' as an abstract academic discipline, and more concerned with the powers we grant government (though the discussion should certainly be informed by economics). The reason I discuss 'needs' even though you say that economics isn't concerned with needs, is that I think we can all agree that everyone should be able to have access to buy food - we shouldn't, for example, pick out certain people, and say that either we're not going to sell food to them, or we're going to charge them 2X as much because, e.g. they're black or hispanic, or catholic, or muslim, or whatever. So, we can say that although economics doesn't talk about 'needs', in a democracy we are very much concerned, when deciding what powers are appropriate for government, about 'needs'.
In a time of food scarcity, I think the argument can be made for government rationing and price controls (at least, the price that buyers pay - perhaps in order to promote the free-market principle of giving incentive for increased production by allowing the price that producers receive to go up, perhaps the government in such a case would pay the difference between what buyers pay at the market, and what producers receive in the commodities markets), in order to try to minimize starvation.
But in the case of the 'public' free content, nobody *needs* Fox content, so if Fox wants to hurt *themselves* by not offering their own customers access to their content because they use the 'wrong' ISP, how is that different from only being able to buy a Ford from a Ford dealership? Should the power of government be used to compel Ford to sell their vehicles through every dealership which wishes to sell new Fords?
This made me chuckle: "the oil at a solar thermal plant".
Not sure why that made you chuckle? The oil I was referring to is the medium at that plant which got heated. That is, the particular plant I remember reading about had the mirrors concentrate sunlight on a pipe with some sort of oil in it that is designed to get extremely hot, then transfer that thermal energy in a heat exchanger, to convert wather to steam to drive a turbine.
They didn't burn the oil in normal operation, but some of it set on fire in a mis-hap.
That's not to say that I think solar plants are actually very dangerous - I think that an occasional oil fire like that at a solar thermal plant is probably no big deal (I mean, it's a big deal if you work at the plant, and might get burned in such an accident, so it's an occupational safety issue, but from a larger *public safety* issue, I don't think there's much risk - it would seem to be much less risk than, say, a Gas-line explosion). Unless the particular type of oil used releases a lot of toxic fumes or something. If it burns fairly cleanly, then I think it's a very reasonable risk.
What conspiracy? I was just trying to see if I could 'suss-out' why they chose that particular myth, instead of any other. I mean, I'm all for any attempts to try to get more kids more interested in science and technology. I think it would work better, if the goal is to generate interest, to 'prove' something cool, than to disprove something (although, certainly, showing kids how something can be disproved has value too) which *would have been* cool IF it was true, but hey, it's not.
Although, as the other poster mentioned, it's a good point that perhaps the MythBusters failed to take something into account, like setting sails on fire instead of setting hulls on fire.
They're both considered valid, alternate spellings. I checked. I decided to go with the more Anglicized spelling instead of the French form.
You know, I was going to ask about whether Mythbusters had already done this. I haven't watched many episodies of MythBusters (because I don't have cable, but I've caught a few Eps. at friends and relatives homes). I could swear I saw an episode all about this that they did in the early seasons, like 5 years ago or something.
So the question is, if the myth is busted, why would Obama want to use this as a way of promoting solar energy?
Perhaps he's really trying to show that Solar Energy is safe? Although, even though Archimedes might not have set a fleet on fire with mirrors, doesn't mean that real fires at Solar Thermal plants never happen. I believe I recall reading an account of the oil at a solar thermal plant in California catching fire back 5 or 10 years ago.
Ok, so we've got a project which we're being told is under development and which will be released "real soon", along with an "awesome demo video". This is sounding just . . . so familiar.
Again, you're arguing against what the author didn't say. The author didn't make any claim that adoption rates are a yardstick of a system's quality. In fact, the author specifically said that Linux's quality is great. Well, what he said was, "Over the past few years, modern Linux distributions such as Ubuntu have utterly transformed the open-source desktop user experience into something sleek and simple, while arguably surpassing Windows and Mac OS in both security and stability."
Nobody is arguing that Linux lacks quality. Or legitimacy. The author is just exploring what he thinks the reasons are that Linux didn't gain more widespread adoption. Is that a waste of time? For you, perhaps. Other people want to see more people using Linux, so they can experience the freedoms and benefits of it's open culture, and without understanding the root causes of why it's not gaining more popularity, we can't really begin to address that problem.
That's not to say I agree with all his conclusions, but I just hate that every time you come to a slashdot story, you can almost predict the ways in which people will argue against things they apparently *wish* the author said, or they just completely make it up so they can argue against it.
As for my sense of humor, I post my share of 'joke' posts, but it's not funny when the post makes a joke of a point the article doesn't even deal with AT ALL. It's just ignorant.
"So... Linux is dead."
Wow, it's amazingly easy to argue against the things you *wish* somebody said instead of what was *actually* said. How can a site billed as "News for Nerds" be filled with people who have such a basic lack of understanding of language and discourse? Here, for the reading impaired, I reproduce the actual quote, as it appeared in the slashdot summary: "The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." (Why do I suspect that reproducing it here will have no effect, as the people who ignored it in the summary will just ignore and re-interpret it here, too, to fit their whim?)
That is a *much* different statement than "Linux is dead". Most of what you said after that only applies to the statement you wish the author had said, instead of the author's actual statement. The author didn't argue that Linux won't continue to be developed and updated, that it's 'not viable'.
You make one statement which does seem to speak to the article as written, and I even kind of concur: "Linux was always a niche system, and personally I don't want it to get too huge. That can only lead to massive marketization and commercialization, neither of which will be good for Linux."
I don't know that I necessarily agree fully that larger marketshare would be a *bad* thing for Linux, but I will say that being in a niche that is large enough to continue developing and innovating, while small enough to largely avoid being a target of viruses, trojans, and worms, certainly has an upside.
Thank you for being "that guy" that totally misses the point. The point isn't that some geeks and some businesses and even governments around the world in different parts aren't using Linux on the desktop. Sure, you *can* use Linux on the desktop. The point is simply that there hasn't been *widespread* adoption, and even more to the point, that there are systemic/market forces at work which appear to have a deterrent effect on the probability that Linux would become more widely adopted any time soon.
There's also the matter that Microsoft isn't the only software in the world. They could just as easily crack down on someone for pirated copies of Photoshop, Autocad, or any other commercial software that the group might be using.
We're not talking about matter of life and death here - food, clean water, clothes, heating, medicine, etc. We're talking about entertainment. Yes, people can just not watch TV shows. Also, not all, but a lot of the TV Shows on Hulu are broadcast over-the-air for free (SGU, however, being a SyFy show, is either cable or Hulu).
I've personally decided just not to watch SGU or Caprica anymore - they aren't that great to begin with, and I've decided I don't really want to deal with Hulu right now. Perhaps in the future I will come back and watch them.
As for "other entertainment" - it's *completely possible* that someone else could create other TV shows, and make them available on other Internet sites, that I enjoy just as much or more than the shows I like on Hulu.
"But I think much of this gets to the issue of non-economists talking about economic effects like they are versed in them and using language that's, well, simply false if the conversation were between two economists."
Well, that doesn't seem to be stopping you from talking about it.
I am a voter, a participant in a democracy. Us "non-economists" still must try to wrestle with and understand economics enough to cast an informed vote for different politicians who represent the different economic options available. While I think some regulation is reasonable, I also do recognize that there are market forces that bring about change, and in a land where we believe in freedom, and recognize that perhaps the government doesn't always know what's best, just maybe it's best to let the market sort out some types of problems.
I don't take that belief to the extremes that many on the Republican and Libertarian side of politics seem to often do, but I really think that when it comes to something like a website, such as Hulu, perhaps since it's really not a life-and-death situation, since it is just about entertainment and news, and there are many other sources for entertainment and news other than Hulu, that perhaps the government really doesn't have a right to butt into the issue.
You talk about the barriers to entry, but you use the example of a telco. However, in this case we're talking about a website. The barrier to entry for starting a website is much, much lower than the barrier to entry for setting up a telco. Almost anyone can do it, in terms of what the 'startup costs' are.
I can see Net Neutrality regulations to prevent ISP's from blocking traffic from websites, but in the end, I really do think that if they started to do that, they would lose customers to someone, anyone who would offer them the 'whole internet'. Even for something as hard as starting a 'last-mile' ISP, it can be done. The key is that you don't start a whole nationwide network at once. You pick a city somewhere in the U.S. where you think you have a particularly good chance to succeed in the market, and you pitch investors on starting up a small network in that city. To wire up just one small city might cost a few 10's of million, or maybe a couple hundred million. Expensive, but if the market demand is there, you can probably find investors to do it. Once you've shown that you can successfully compete in that city, you try to convince investors that you can compete in a couple other cities, and you gradually grow your network organically.
You'll probably run into problems with the incumbents trying to pull dirty tricks, I'm not saying it'll be *easy*, or fast even, but it's possible.
There's potentially other options, other than bootstrapping an entirely new company - such as a company which is a growing or established in another part of the country, moving in to compete in a market where they think they can compete with the local monopoly. Maybe locally there's only Cable and DSL, and the local telco isn't interested in running fiber-to-the-home, so a competitor convinces the local Utilities Commission or whoever to allow them to build a fiber network in the area.
I will admit though, that telcos and ISPs are the sort of indus
I'm not against net neutrality, but at the same time, in the end, when companies don't do the right thing for their customers, they do create an opportunity for someone else to start competition - basically, any company which enacts policies and procedures which alienate their customer base, they create a big opening in the market for a new competitor to step in and take business away from them. No monopoly or oligarchy can last forever with unhappy customers.
In the case of Hulu, nobody has to watch Hulu. I used to be a pretty big user of Hulu, but they've changed a lot in the last year, for the worse. I've decided I really am not all that interested in their content or their service anymore. Case in point - I was flirting with the idea of subscribing to their Hulu Plus service (to get access to back-catalogue material mostly), but I recently went back to Hulu.com after not using the site for months, just to catch a couple episodes from the new season of Stargate Universe. Well, they've apparently decided that on the 'free' Hulu, they won't give you access to any higher than 360p resolution. I can see not offering 720p or 1080 resolution on the free service, but 360 just looks like absolute crap. That's their right, but I've decided it's my right not to do business with them. I'm not interested in subscribing now, because of the way they they decided to run their business.
Maybe I mis-understand the publishing business, but isn't a huge part of what published do is to *publicize* the works they are publishing? I doubt most independent authors can do the marketing that an established publisher can, and even the very act of getting a dead-tree book on the shelves of bookstore, department stores (target, walmart, et al.) is promotion - people who are in the store browsing, might find your book when they otherwise wouldn't. Publishers can put money into ad campaigns, their PR people can get you interviewed or reviewed on NPR, The Daily Show, PBS, or a hundred other media outlets. They can arrange to get you on a book-signing tour which will also publicize the book, and probably a dozen other ways of getting people to know about and maybe buy the book
I wouldn't want to self-publish if I went into authoring, as I wouldn't even know where to begin to publicize my works.
Now, I realize that not all authors get the premium treatment - as a new author, your book will only get probably a relatively minimal amount of publicity - the publisher won't pull out all the stops, but if they are going to publish you at all, they will at least try to get your books some mindshare so they can recover the costs. If your first book are two make more money than they cost the publisher, and are generally received well, then they might decide to risk a bigger campaign the next time, right?
"The real question is why aren't bookstores doing this?"
Exactly. These people are just taking advantage of the fact that the bookstores and libraries are too clueless to do this themselves. Every library should be having their staff do the exact same thing - go through the 'for sale' piles with scanners and figure out what can fetch a decent price online. As a taxpayer, I'd really rather the public libraries get as much as possible when selling of their old inventory, instead of selling it all for 25 cents or a dollar. The only things that should be sold for 25 cents or a dollar are the things that are really only *worth* 25 cents or a dollar.
Thanks for the link to the Swiss FOoE - always nice to have a direct source for that type of info. I think it's pretty awesome that the Swiss get about 95% of their energy from clean sources (of course, not every country has as much hydro available to us to tap). Still the fact that you'll be able to almost eliminate freight trucks through the Alps (other than trucks servicing Switzerland itself, I guess?), and move the freight with clean power will be truly cool.
Unfortunately, as for that article you recommended reading, as they do not have an English translation available, and I do not speak German (I took a couple years of 'conversational' German in high school, and have almost completely forgotten it, I'm afraid - but never knew technical and scientific terms in German anyhow), I will be unable to read it. Perhaps someone else will find it informative.
Yes, this is true, but I wasn't sure if the rails would be powered from the main 'open grid', or if there might be some generation specifically planned for being the primary power source?
Someone in one of the other replies mentioned there are nearby hydro dams already powering some trains in the region, so it might be a lot of the power ends up coming from those. Hard to say without a more definitive answer from someone who knows more about the project and the specific plans being made.