As long as the power company can recoup most/all of the added expense from the customer, they won't have any impetus to switch anything at all.
Do you have the option on your power bill to purchase "clean energy"? Now if there is some oversight of the power company that prevents them from passing the pollution costs on to people purchasing the electricity from solar and wind farms, then you have a strong economic incentive for the consumer which is the fastest way to create any large scale change. If if doesn't hurt people in the wallet, then everything will stay status quo.
I think to get improvements in the 30-40% range you need to make serious changes on all fronts. Buildings seem to be the largest consumer of energy, at least in the US, I'm assuming the same is true for Canada.
current energy use in buildings represents 39 percent of all energy use in the U.S. -- more than industrial or even transportation usage. It concludes that by 2020 building energy use can be reduced by 14 percent and total national energy use could be cut by 5.6 percent through the implementation of short-term, realistic energy policies.http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/factoid11.htm
But I think the more drastic changes that will help meet Kyoto targets are in the area of where power comes from. When the wealth redistribution costs to a country outweigh the cost of installing solar panels on every rooftop, then there will be change in that country. The same holds true for making more efficient cars or mass transit or wind farms, they will only ever be "the norm" when they cost less than just burning more fossil fuels. That Kyoto-carbon-tax is helping to push that day a little closer.
The people who get missed by a steered hurricane will never sue, obviously. The hurricanes isn't going to stop, it will go somewhere. Now if it's diverted from the Gulf Coast and Florida and makes landfall anywhere between Washington DC and Boston, there will be some serious problems of every kind for those doing the "steering".
"mind-blowingly awesome" also loses out to the problem of: Can we get them there and back alive? If everyone dies, suddenly it become mind-blowingly stupid. We will see long term inhabited space stations with centrifugal gravity and greenhouses before we will be sending live humans on multi-year missions outside of Earth orbit.
I'm a little curious about your sense of Fair Use. Are you suggesting that Viacom should just let full episodes of Drawn Together proliferate freely? That would not be an example of Fair Use so much as an example of Viacom releasing one of their assets into Public Domain. How do you think the stockholders and employees of Viacom would feel about having the companies assets given away freely? When someone abuses the concept of Fair Use, they weaken it's position and hurt us all.
There have got to be anti-monopoly laws about having a product that actively destroys your competitor's product. It sounds like a pretty straight forward lawsuit. You could probably get GreenPeace to provide the proof that it's the GMO destroying your seed crop, and provide the lawyers seeing as they are ardently anti-GMO.
These guys sell the "terminator seeds". Grows crops once and that's it. If you wanna grow another crop, you have to buy more Monsanto seeds.
If they are selling GMO seeds it's actually a good safeguard that they are "terminator seeds". If it's just a sceme to make farmers buy more seeds every year, then let the farmers do the math and decide if it's worth the extra annual cost. As long as Monsanto isn't shutting out competition it the seed supply business, let'em sell what ever DRMed seeds they want.
But these aren't really hybrids now are they. To make a car analogy: If you take the parts from two Corvettes and use them to make a new car it's still a Corvette. Now if you make a bunch of parts in your personal machine shop, and you build a car that is based off of the Corvette, it's still not really a 'Vette. I'm not saying I wouldn't eat NuCorn but it's not Corn, and it's not just a hybrid. It's a new different plant. I hope it's tasty.
I think they may well do that... as long as business is going well and the leadership stays the same. As soon as there is some need to "optimize revenue streams" then the potential short term earning power of the patent will likely be exploited. Until the big businesses that have to pay IBM for the right to be patent trolls push for legislation that actually fixes the patent troll problem.
The only real selling point of any MMOG is "community",
I prefer MMOGs to single player, not for the chatting or guilds, but for the fact that humans make for more interesting teammates or opponents, than the computer does. On the rare occasion that you have teammates in a single player game, they never do anything interesting or novel. Having other characters in my game world that make choices that haven't been tweeked by a game designer make the game more interesting for me.
On the 99% of everyone is an annoying twat thing: I've spent hours in City of Heroes, doing missions with a good team, where hardly anything not game related was said in the chat box. Sure there are a lot of junior high kids in MMOs who want to talk trash, but the same can be said for going to a baseball game or the mall or anywhere else in the world were there are teenagers. Usually they adore the PvP aspects of a MMOG. Personally, I usually stick to the PvE aspects of the game (and out of guilds or clans or whatever) and have quite an enjoyable time, with a minimum of immature brats and idiots. If MMOs aren't you cup of tea that's cool, but as the genre matures so do a fair portion of the players, don't paint us all with the same brush.
1.2 million people isn't really that many people when you are talking about a global release. If one in 300 people in the US and England bought the album you would have at least that many sales. Or if half of the people in New York City under the age of 18 bought the album you would have that many. Millions just aren't as impressive as they use to be.
Sorry to irk you, when I say "activist judges" I mean any judge who forwards their personal views by creative or selective interpretation of the law.
Yes, "interstate commerce" is a short phrase, and everyone I know with a good high school education is able to understand what it was meant to encompass. The reinterpretation of Consistution into legalese is what allowed such a short,clear phrase to be so exploited.
"physics, mathematics, biology and numerous other fields have the same specialization of knowledge" Very true, but those fields do not expect or pretend that the average citizen is supposed to an active participant in the development and regulation of those fields. By declaring ourselves a Democracy and giving the vote to every citizen over 18, we must make the working and business of government understandable to those who are supposed to be the ultimate governing power, the voter. To do otherwise is simply to pretend at Democracy.
let us not sully the integrity of our intelligent, inorganic offspring by dragging them into our petty conflicts.
Just who do you think is paying for the development of our "inorganic offspring"? All Governments gain and maintain power,control,and funding through military force.
"the whole concept of an automated killbot going nuts and wiping out its makers is also funny."
Now if it had blown away the engineer who forgot to put on a big Off switch, and blown away the General who was overseeing the development and blown away the Industrialist who skimped on the software development so they would have a bigger Christmas bonus, then this would be pants-wettingly funny. As some poor soldiers who were ordered to be near these killbots were the ones that died, it's only funny because I don't know them and some slashdotters have sharp wits.
"And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a seperate language"
I think you just hit on a major source of problems, not just with the patent system but with our "democratic" government in general. How can the voters understand sources of our various governmental problems when it is all written in a different language? Yes, I understand the need for linguistic precision. I also understand that having a special language for government locks out most everyone not in the aristocratic Ivy League strata. I understand that have the law written in a language that the voter does not speak makes it mush more difficult to hold a legislator accountable to their constituents. As for legalese being a precision language, why are things written in this allegedly precise language so freely interpreted by activist judges or congressmen wishing to expand "interstate commerce"?
The previous post is questioning why the patent system is "critical to the nation's health." I think it's a fair question, not flamebait. As with many things the answer is not a clear yes or no. Here at Slashdot there are frequent observations about how parts of the current patent system stifle innovation and progress. Of course with no patent system at all the R&D budgets would vanish in almost every field. But what percentage of patents are actual "innovation [and] technological progress"? Is a "Method of creating an anti-gravity illusion" (patent #5255452) really innovation or just a neat trick? Is it critical to our nation's health? How about patent 4773863, an "Amusement Device for a Toilet Bowl"? Critical or superfluous? What about those extra vague idea patents? Perhaps there should be an additional pre-filter for the patent system where things are quickly reviewed and voted as either an important innovation, or a non-critical neat idea. Non-critical neat ideas (for which even something as big as the iPod would qualify) may well be deserving of some short term protection, but the long term protection of every mildly original thought has lead us to a patent logjam that hurts our nation's economic health.
If you could have some sort of space based system beaming massive amounts of energy down to the ground,
If we give the Pentagon a giant space laser, why do we have to send troops at all? At very least we should be able to cancel any further developement on bombers with this thing.
Yes I know it's supposed to deliver a beam to create electricity, not a destructive beam, but be realistic this is the Pentagon we are talking about.
While I generally don't think the death penalty does much for crime prevention,
I don't think that Death is lacking in deterrent power. This spammer death will quite likely persuade many people not to run spam operations out of Russia, because the killing was sudden and highly publicized. I imagine that here in the US, the death penalty would be more of a deterrent if the same held true. If no one was ever on death row for more than two weeks and when the execution happened it was on the front page with a picture of the body. I personally disagree with the death penalty, but if we must have it then we should have to be conscious of it every time it is used. Both for it to be an effective deterrent and to acknowledge that someone was killed for the good of society. To have someone killed but not wanting to be made aware of it is the epitome of cowardice.
I think it's the ISP's fault, or more exactly their problem. The only way you will get Joe Sixpack to install and update an AntiVirus program is if it's free and automatic. Now most everyone accesses the internet via an ISP so they have the distribution network and the trust of the computer owners. The ISPs also have to deal with the extra bandwidth used by infected computers. The ISPs need to stop making virus protection an opt-in, download this plug-in, thing. Start making virus protection an automatic, only the computer savvy can figure out how to opt-out, thing. Block people who don't have some sort of antivirus from accessing the internet and redirect them to the free update.
But the unknowns who lack the resources to promote themselves on a national/global level need a record company with resources to do so.
The same could be said about any other fledgling business. The steps to national or global success are gonna be the same. Start locally and deliver a good product. Get a loyal fan base going and then grow into a regional band. Keep making good music. When you've been making good music for a decade or three, then you will be able to stadiums the way the Rolling Stones or U2 do. I think we will be culturally richer (aka much higher quality music) if there are more regional and local bands and only the truly talented veterans are national or global fare.
I strongly agree with you that both parties are broken. Voting between corrupt choice "A" and corrupt choice "B" is not democracy. But the thing that will get the fastest most bipartisan government action is anything one to actually trys to return some real power and control to the people. I read a very interesting story the other day about someone who is facing prison time for trying to get a referendum on the Oklahoma ballot. "If anyone thinking of getting involved as a citizen in the process has to factor in possibly going to prison for 10 years, a lot of husbands and wives will decide that sort of citizen activism isn't for them."http://www.reason.com/news/show/122839.html I think that if the ability to make real true governmental change through the ballot box has been lost to us, and the powers that be can simply refuse to acknowledge the law, we are left with only two sorry choices. Either we let our country continue to degrade into a Kleptocracy, or we somehow displace the current power structure. So I think that while the problem will become clear to someone who asks "How the fuck can government regulate our telephone lines when we have a First Ammendment?" The solution will be answered when we can answer "What will I do about it?"
What a pity that one of the first things that we think of when making such a step forward is 'How can we use this to kill our fellow man?'.
Science and Warfare have gone hand in hand since the beginnings of technology. An advance in technology almost always translates into an advance in the ability to wage war. Those that are rich and powerful because of war (every government ever) know this and often give a lot of support and funding to science. DARPA is an easy example. As this relationship is very old news, it is incumbent upon scientists and thinkers of the world to consider the more brutal applications of their advancements. Alfred Noble learned that the hard way.
Oh, thank you sir! I now have... let's see here, one... two... TWO data points to build my research around.
No you now have an additional piece of evidence that don't fit nicely with your earlier hypothesis. It also suggests that airborne pollutants like smoke might weigh more heavily in asthma than kids being exposed to germs. Just because the GP offers something that doesn't whole heartedly support your +5 theory doesn't mean you have to turn into a snarky jackass.
Our soldiers can have REAL Storm Trooper armor now! Wait...that's a bad thing, right?
No, it's a really good thing. Even for the most libertarian "the revolution is coming" pessimist out there, having the Infantry in top shelf body armor is a good thing. I can only think of two scenarios where this could be viewed as a bad thing. 1. If there ever where a need for the American people to violently turn on the government. - The Infantry would not be a major target. The political and economic elite would be. 2. American Infantry were invading your homeland. - You might as well fall quickly to unstoppable ground troops 'cause our leaders are nuts. They will bomb the hell out of you if you don't submit.
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As long as the power company can recoup most/all of the added expense from the customer, they won't have any impetus to switch anything at all.
Do you have the option on your power bill to purchase "clean energy"? Now if there is some oversight of the power company that prevents them from passing the pollution costs on to people purchasing the electricity from solar and wind farms, then you have a strong economic incentive for the consumer which is the fastest way to create any large scale change. If if doesn't hurt people in the wallet, then everything will stay status quo.
But I think the more drastic changes that will help meet Kyoto targets are in the area of where power comes from. When the wealth redistribution costs to a country outweigh the cost of installing solar panels on every rooftop, then there will be change in that country. The same holds true for making more efficient cars or mass transit or wind farms, they will only ever be "the norm" when they cost less than just burning more fossil fuels. That Kyoto-carbon-tax is helping to push that day a little closer.
The people who get missed by a steered hurricane will never sue, obviously. The hurricanes isn't going to stop, it will go somewhere. Now if it's diverted from the Gulf Coast and Florida and makes landfall anywhere between Washington DC and Boston, there will be some serious problems of every kind for those doing the "steering".
"mind-blowingly awesome" also loses out to the problem of: Can we get them there and back alive? If everyone dies, suddenly it become mind-blowingly stupid. We will see long term inhabited space stations with centrifugal gravity and greenhouses before we will be sending live humans on multi-year missions outside of Earth orbit.
I'm a little curious about your sense of Fair Use. Are you suggesting that Viacom should just let full episodes of Drawn Together proliferate freely? That would not be an example of Fair Use so much as an example of Viacom releasing one of their assets into Public Domain. How do you think the stockholders and employees of Viacom would feel about having the companies assets given away freely? When someone abuses the concept of Fair Use, they weaken it's position and hurt us all.
There have got to be anti-monopoly laws about having a product that actively destroys your competitor's product. It sounds like a pretty straight forward lawsuit. You could probably get GreenPeace to provide the proof that it's the GMO destroying your seed crop, and provide the lawyers seeing as they are ardently anti-GMO.
These guys sell the "terminator seeds". Grows crops once and that's it. If you wanna grow another crop, you have to buy more Monsanto seeds.
If they are selling GMO seeds it's actually a good safeguard that they are "terminator seeds". If it's just a sceme to make farmers buy more seeds every year, then let the farmers do the math and decide if it's worth the extra annual cost. As long as Monsanto isn't shutting out competition it the seed supply business, let'em sell what ever DRMed seeds they want.
But these aren't really hybrids now are they. To make a car analogy: If you take the parts from two Corvettes and use them to make a new car it's still a Corvette. Now if you make a bunch of parts in your personal machine shop, and you build a car that is based off of the Corvette, it's still not really a 'Vette. I'm not saying I wouldn't eat NuCorn but it's not Corn, and it's not just a hybrid. It's a new different plant. I hope it's tasty.
I think they may well do that... as long as business is going well and the leadership stays the same. As soon as there is some need to "optimize revenue streams" then the potential short term earning power of the patent will likely be exploited. Until the big businesses that have to pay IBM for the right to be patent trolls push for legislation that actually fixes the patent troll problem.
The only real selling point of any MMOG is "community",
I prefer MMOGs to single player, not for the chatting or guilds, but for the fact that humans make for more interesting teammates or opponents, than the computer does. On the rare occasion that you have teammates in a single player game, they never do anything interesting or novel. Having other characters in my game world that make choices that haven't been tweeked by a game designer make the game more interesting for me.
On the 99% of everyone is an annoying twat thing: I've spent hours in City of Heroes, doing missions with a good team, where hardly anything not game related was said in the chat box. Sure there are a lot of junior high kids in MMOs who want to talk trash, but the same can be said for going to a baseball game or the mall or anywhere else in the world were there are teenagers. Usually they adore the PvP aspects of a MMOG. Personally, I usually stick to the PvE aspects of the game (and out of guilds or clans or whatever) and have quite an enjoyable time, with a minimum of immature brats and idiots. If MMOs aren't you cup of tea that's cool, but as the genre matures so do a fair portion of the players, don't paint us all with the same brush.
1.2 million people isn't really that many people when you are talking about a global release. If one in 300 people in the US and England bought the album you would have at least that many sales. Or if half of the people in New York City under the age of 18 bought the album you would have that many. Millions just aren't as impressive as they use to be.
Sorry to irk you, when I say "activist judges" I mean any judge who forwards their personal views by creative or selective interpretation of the law.
Yes, "interstate commerce" is a short phrase, and everyone I know with a good high school education is able to understand what it was meant to encompass. The reinterpretation of Consistution into legalese is what allowed such a short,clear phrase to be so exploited.
"physics, mathematics, biology and numerous other fields have the same specialization of knowledge" Very true, but those fields do not expect or pretend that the average citizen is supposed to an active participant in the development and regulation of those fields. By declaring ourselves a Democracy and giving the vote to every citizen over 18, we must make the working and business of government understandable to those who are supposed to be the ultimate governing power, the voter. To do otherwise is simply to pretend at Democracy.
let us not sully the integrity of our intelligent, inorganic offspring by dragging them into our petty conflicts.
Just who do you think is paying for the development of our "inorganic offspring"? All Governments gain and maintain power,control,and funding through military force.
"the whole concept of an automated killbot going nuts and wiping out its makers is also funny."
Now if it had blown away the engineer who forgot to put on a big Off switch, and blown away the General who was overseeing the development and blown away the Industrialist who skimped on the software development so they would have a bigger Christmas bonus, then this would be pants-wettingly funny. As some poor soldiers who were ordered to be near these killbots were the ones that died, it's only funny because I don't know them and some slashdotters have sharp wits.
Out of my monkeysphere = potential morbid humor.
"And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a seperate language"
I think you just hit on a major source of problems, not just with the patent system but with our "democratic" government in general. How can the voters understand sources of our various governmental problems when it is all written in a different language? Yes, I understand the need for linguistic precision. I also understand that having a special language for government locks out most everyone not in the aristocratic Ivy League strata. I understand that have the law written in a language that the voter does not speak makes it mush more difficult to hold a legislator accountable to their constituents. As for legalese being a precision language, why are things written in this allegedly precise language so freely interpreted by activist judges or congressmen wishing to expand "interstate commerce"?
The previous post is questioning why the patent system is "critical to the nation's health." I think it's a fair question, not flamebait. As with many things the answer is not a clear yes or no. Here at Slashdot there are frequent observations about how parts of the current patent system stifle innovation and progress. Of course with no patent system at all the R&D budgets would vanish in almost every field. But what percentage of patents are actual "innovation [and] technological progress"? Is a "Method of creating an anti-gravity illusion" (patent #5255452) really innovation or just a neat trick? Is it critical to our nation's health? How about patent 4773863, an "Amusement Device for a Toilet Bowl"? Critical or superfluous? What about those extra vague idea patents? Perhaps there should be an additional pre-filter for the patent system where things are quickly reviewed and voted as either an important innovation, or a non-critical neat idea. Non-critical neat ideas (for which even something as big as the iPod would qualify) may well be deserving of some short term protection, but the long term protection of every mildly original thought has lead us to a patent logjam that hurts our nation's economic health.
If you could have some sort of space based system beaming massive amounts of energy down to the ground,
If we give the Pentagon a giant space laser, why do we have to send troops at all? At very least we should be able to cancel any further developement on bombers with this thing.
Yes I know it's supposed to deliver a beam to create electricity, not a destructive beam, but be realistic this is the Pentagon we are talking about.
We'll be letting murderers and thieves out of prison in order to make room for people with robot girlfriends
Dating robots will be a crime, because everyone knows that humans dating robots = the end of the world. All productivity will cease as kids stay home makingout with a Marilyn Monrobot. http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/121284/Futurama_I_Dated_a_Robot.html
While I generally don't think the death penalty does much for crime prevention,
I don't think that Death is lacking in deterrent power. This spammer death will quite likely persuade many people not to run spam operations out of Russia, because the killing was sudden and highly publicized. I imagine that here in the US, the death penalty would be more of a deterrent if the same held true. If no one was ever on death row for more than two weeks and when the execution happened it was on the front page with a picture of the body. I personally disagree with the death penalty, but if we must have it then we should have to be conscious of it every time it is used. Both for it to be an effective deterrent and to acknowledge that someone was killed for the good of society. To have someone killed but not wanting to be made aware of it is the epitome of cowardice.
I think it's the ISP's fault, or more exactly their problem. The only way you will get Joe Sixpack to install and update an AntiVirus program is if it's free and automatic. Now most everyone accesses the internet via an ISP so they have the distribution network and the trust of the computer owners. The ISPs also have to deal with the extra bandwidth used by infected computers. The ISPs need to stop making virus protection an opt-in, download this plug-in, thing. Start making virus protection an automatic, only the computer savvy can figure out how to opt-out, thing. Block people who don't have some sort of antivirus from accessing the internet and redirect them to the free update.
But the unknowns who lack the resources to promote themselves on a national/global level need a record company with resources to do so.
The same could be said about any other fledgling business. The steps to national or global success are gonna be the same. Start locally and deliver a good product. Get a loyal fan base going and then grow into a regional band. Keep making good music. When you've been making good music for a decade or three, then you will be able to stadiums the way the Rolling Stones or U2 do. I think we will be culturally richer (aka much higher quality music) if there are more regional and local bands and only the truly talented veterans are national or global fare.
I strongly agree with you that both parties are broken. Voting between corrupt choice "A" and corrupt choice "B" is not democracy. But the thing that will get the fastest most bipartisan government action is anything one to actually trys to return some real power and control to the people. I read a very interesting story the other day about someone who is facing prison time for trying to get a referendum on the Oklahoma ballot. "If anyone thinking of getting involved as a citizen in the process has to factor in possibly going to prison for 10 years, a lot of husbands and wives will decide that sort of citizen activism isn't for them."http://www.reason.com/news/show/122839.html
I think that if the ability to make real true governmental change through the ballot box has been lost to us, and the powers that be can simply refuse to acknowledge the law, we are left with only two sorry choices. Either we let our country continue to degrade into a Kleptocracy, or we somehow displace the current power structure. So I think that while the problem will become clear to someone who asks "How the fuck can government regulate our telephone lines when we have a First Ammendment?" The solution will be answered when we can answer "What will I do about it?"
What a pity that one of the first things that we think of when making such a step forward is 'How can we use this to kill our fellow man?'.
Science and Warfare have gone hand in hand since the beginnings of technology. An advance in technology almost always translates into an advance in the ability to wage war. Those that are rich and powerful because of war (every government ever) know this and often give a lot of support and funding to science. DARPA is an easy example. As this relationship is very old news, it is incumbent upon scientists and thinkers of the world to consider the more brutal applications of their advancements. Alfred Noble learned that the hard way.
Oh, thank you sir! I now have ... let's see here, one ... two ... TWO data points to build my research around.
No you now have an additional piece of evidence that don't fit nicely with your earlier hypothesis. It also suggests that airborne pollutants like smoke might weigh more heavily in asthma than kids being exposed to germs. Just because the GP offers something that doesn't whole heartedly support your +5 theory doesn't mean you have to turn into a snarky jackass.
Our soldiers can have REAL Storm Trooper armor now! Wait...that's a bad thing, right?
No, it's a really good thing. Even for the most libertarian "the revolution is coming" pessimist out there, having the Infantry in top shelf body armor is a good thing. I can only think of two scenarios where this could be viewed as a bad thing.
1. If there ever where a need for the American people to violently turn on the government.
- The Infantry would not be a major target. The political and economic elite would be.
2. American Infantry were invading your homeland.
- You might as well fall quickly to unstoppable ground troops 'cause our leaders are nuts. They will bomb the hell out of you if you don't submit.