Thing is apple laptops are usually pretty good in design, so even OSS people will buy one and then put distro of choice on it, problem? not really. Good hardware is good hardware.
The hardware's fine, but I'll agree with the original Thomas article, the user interface is the key. As Thomas said, "once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail." Not to mention his comment that OS developers, "because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use."
$38K? That seems expensive to me, but I don't know how big his system is. I'm putting one my house (waiting on electrical inspection) that is 4 kW, and it cost $22k.
Tracking down the original specs, he put in "27 Sunpower panels, each rated at 225W, for a total 6.1KW system." With various ancilliary installation features, such as the monotoring system, sounds like the price is about the same.
Sunpower makes very high end panels, for what it's worth-- he quotes 18% efficient.
Funny how so many people seem to want to find fault with solar energy, and use incomplete reasoning to look at only the possible negative consequences without looking at all the positives.
Just FWIW, I wasn't attempting to "find fault" with solar energy, just to put the economics into terms that seem more useful to me. In fact, considering what I've been getting on my personal investments, 7.8 percent/year looks pretty attractive....r
Three thousand dollar savings per year on a 38000 investment is a 7.8 percent rate of return on investment-- not bad, as long as the investment itself dosn't depreciate in value.
ROE is a much better way of calculating economics than "payback time," by the way
Furthermore, the solubility of carbon dioxide in water increases as temperature decreases (for example, as you go down deeper into the ocean) and also increases as pressure increases (for example, as you go down deeper into the ocean) . There's no reason to think that CO2, if injected deep into the ocean, wouldn't dissolve into the water.
I'm not sure what the impact of hypercarbonated deep oceans would be-- it would certainly take decades, and possibly centuries for the dense hyercarbonated water to diffuse upward to the surface, unless there are deep currents-- but I'm not sure why we think that it would be good to do this.
It would make a lot more sense to use real trees. They don't "cost as much as a Toyota," they grow by themselves from seeds, and are self-replicating. They don't extract carbon dioxide in the form of stuff that has to be liquified and then sequestered somehow; they extract CO2 and solidify it in the form of cellulose, a material that is naturally solid at room temperature and pressure.
Obviously, if the trees are then allowed to rot, the CO2 returns to the atmosphere, but that is an easy problem compared to the problem of sequestering CO2 for a few centuries. Just pile it up in the desert, where it won't rot. Or, heck, bury it and let geological forces compress it for a while, and you make new coal that our successors a few million years later can deal with. Wood is a heck of a lot easier to sequester than carbon dioxide!
In short, I can't think of anything more idiotic than designing "artificial" trees, when nature has been evolving real trees optimized to do exactly this task (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere)-- and has had a few hundred million year head start.
It was suggested that because Canadians live longer than Americans, it is their health care industry that was the cause.
To the contrary. It was the original claim that the Candian health care system is bad ("greatly diminished health care," in the original phrasing). The life expectancy data shows that, if it is in fact true that their health care system is bad, that "fact" cannot be discerned in the life expectancy data. (Nor in the life expectancy data of other western nations with nationalized health plans).
The burden of proof is the other way: for people who are claiming that going to some kind of government health plan would result in a health system that's as "bad" as Canada's, given the fact of greater lifespan in Canada, what is the evidence being cited to show that Canada's system is "bad"?
Well, if the answer "newspapers die because their business models no longer work" is fine with you, then you're right, from your point of view, there isn't a "problem."
I was pointing out why their business models don't work. Whether or not that's a "problem" depends on whether or not you think that it matters.
Classifieds are free now. They're called "Craig's list". Classified ad revenue used to drive newspaper revenue, but for newspapers that's now in the dumpster.
followed by advertising.
Local advertising doesn't pay when people read free online news from some paper a thousand miles away.
And yes, local content is king for newspapers:
For the most part, not enough interest there to sell a daily newspaper. A weekly paper, yes. But you're right, that's a niche that they could try to sell. It'll be a hard sale, though-- when you go to google news, what fraction of your time do you spend looking up local news?
Google News is not going to carry the local gossip.
Actually, Google news does carry local news and gossip.
The real problem with newspaper economics is that the cost of production is almost entirely fixed cost, and the marginal cost is very small. That is, the main cost is in gathering the news and putting together the stories and laying up the first copy; once you've paid those fixed costs per issue, an additional issue costs very little. Hence, the incremental cost of internet publication is almost nothing-- they've paid the fixed cost to gather the news already. This means that competition drives newspapers to put their content on the internet for free: there's little cost reason not to (they've already paid the cost of producing the content), and they're competing against other newspapers, who can also put it on the internet for free, so there's no way they can keep the content valuable by restricting access.
In the old "print" days of newspapers, this was not a problem-- there would be only a few newspapers in a town; and the customers were given the choice of buying a newspaper or not reading the news. With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost.
The only real solution is for newspapers to continue to go out of business. When this reaches the point where there are only a handful left, they might be able to start a model of restricting access to paid customers. They're still competing against bloggers and crowdsourcing, of course, but the actual professional (which is to say, paid) reporter model of newsgathering may have advantages in the quality of news, sufficient that it may be worth it for some customers to pay for.
(This is a general problem in free market theory, by the way, not specific to newspapers-- in a market with many small producers (rather than one or two large ones), when the marginal cost of production is close to zero, the equilibrium free market cost is zero, and thus everybody is driven out of business...)
Now... repeat after me... correlation does not equal causation.
I don't believe I said it did. However, if you're going to complain about how awful Canada's national health plan is, you had better deal with the fact that, awful health plan or no, they live two years longer than Americans do. That "rotten" health plan, which costs on the average about half what Americans pay for health care, doesn't seem to be producing worse results.
Interesting, In this one, unlike the Misisippi case, apparently the person sued by the RIAA "said she didn't have a computer in the house at the time."
Whereas in the other case, the computer itself was not an issue.
Say, wouldn't it have have been nice if they'd posted that, instead of the non-information that was posted.
About the best I can say about this paper, though, is that it works very hard to deliberately obscure what they did, in order (I presume) to hide the systematic errors with which the procedure is riddled. They're really good with the math of how they analyze the data... but they work very hard at hiding where the data comes from and how they turn it into "conservative" and "liberal" scores.
They bring part of it out into the light with this sentence:
The first problem is scale invariance. The parameters of interest alpha, beta, theta are only identified only up to an arbitrary scale factor."
OK. Basically, they're saying that their method can identify which justice is more liberal than another, and which is more conservative but their methodology can't put numbers on that. So those color scales, and how they vary with time? Meaningless. Bluer means more liberal, but don't give any credance to how deep the blue is, or how red the red is, the scale is not calibrated.
It's actually a lot worse than that, once you start reading it. The center is ill defined, as well-- they can identify who's more conservative and who's less, but can't tell if the position of court as a whole moves or stays fixed.
They also mention, in passing, the rotational invariance. They don't bother to mention that this is not merely a global problem, but a point by point problem-- they can only tell what's liberal vs what's conservative by looking at the positions of the liberal judges vs the conservative judges, and then they use that to determine who's liberal and who's conservative-- a closed loop. This can converge to the right answer... if the initial seed is "close", and if "liberal" and "conservative" are well defined, with judges varying only slowly.
Of course, fossils are three dimensional, so if it had been a fossil, grinding a few tenths of a millimeter into it would have revealed detail, not destroyed it.
This was an example. You wanted an example, I gave you an example, there it is. There were about eight hundred comments in three main discussion threads, and hundreds more in five secondary threads; if you want me to go through and comment on each post, sorry, I'm not going to.
If you believe that the overall flavor of the posts pointed to a different conclusion, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.
Yeah, you caught me, all I'm interesting in is karma. You can trade it in for valuable prizes.
Let's see, here's an example post from the very first article discussing the retrial, suggesting that:
(1) RIAA would drop the case, because they would be afraid to see it to the jury
(2) "the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers" were going to "tear RIAA a new one"
(3) "Rule 702" would kill evidence gathered by Mediasentry.
So what's to keep them from dropping this like a radioactive potato when the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers start to tear Mediasentry a new one? It would be nice if the case went on long enough for this Rule 702 thing to kill Mediasentry gathered evidence - which could hopefully be used as a precedent for other cases or requests for retrial. But at this point I'm not counting on the RIAA staying with this one long enough for even that much good to come from it."
None of these actually happened. The RIAA didn't drop the case, because they had a winning case before, and the facts hadn't changed. The "tech savy lawyers" did try to make a case that it was possible that somebody hacked into her internet connection and into her computer in order to post music files in her name, but didn't offer any suggestions as to who or how or why, and without any argument that this was a plausible scenario, it didn't change the jury's view that the "preponderance of evidence" suggested that it was probably her that listed for sharing files from her computer in her name using her internet connection. The "rule 702 thinigie" didn't prevent the mediasentry data from being presented, because it was ruled to be an argument without merit.
This is completely useless. Some guys named Martin and Quinn estimate positions on a political spectrum using "Martin Quinn scores", which are not explained (the link to the explanation explains nothing.)
So, what, they guess the justices' politics and then graph their guesses?
If they don't explain how they calculated the numbers, this data is useless, or possibly worse than useless, being opinion masquerading as fact.
If you read slashdot, you'd think that there would have been no possibility of RIAA winning because they are incompetent idiots without a clue.
Judging by the summary (No, of course I didn't RTFA.) the only real incompetent in this case was the defense attorney. What is the point of getting an expert witness if you're not going to use their testimony? Why wasn't the technical evidence challenged?
If you read the article, and followed the case, you'd realize that their technical expert turned out to have been shot down in flames : "Judge Davis ruled that Prof. Kim could testify about the 'possible scenarios,' but could not opine as to what he thinks 'probably' occurred. The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point. Similarly, because Kim explicitly testified that this case does not involve any "black IP space," or any "temporarily unused" IP space...., he is not permitted to opine at trial that hijacking of black IP space or temporary unused IP is a possible explanation in this case.' Dr. Kim was also precluded from testifying as to whether song files were conspicuously placed in a shared files folder or were wilfully offered for distribution."
My thoughts about this award is that it makes it quite clear that the average person posting on slashdot does not know anything about law.
If you read slashdot, you'd think that there would have been no possibility of RIAA winning because they are incompetent idiots without a clue.
The headline says "US Plans To Bulldoze 50 Shrinking Cities," but I don't see any trace of "plans" to do any such thing.
If you read the article, it seems to be a piece of political scare propaganda.
Note the sub-headline: "...proposals being considered by the Obama administration"! Wow... uh, wait, what do they mean "being considered?" The actual person quoted is "treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint." Not exactly a powerhouse of the administration. The "being considered" doesn't mean anything is "planned." It means, apparently, "hey, here's a plan that this guy is implementing in Flint, MI, and is talking about a lot."
But from that, you can sure whip up a frenzy. They're bulldozing our cities! Blame it on Obama! We knew he was going to do something evil!
Obviously the newspaper had to study the information closely and come to a conclusion as to the blogger's identity. An interesting conflict will arise the first time a mistake is made in exposing such a person. What if they have concluded his identity incorrectly? And how about a person's legal rights to prove that they are not the blogger if that involves exposing the real blogger?
Well, sure, but this is no different from any other kind of news a newspaper might print.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is apple laptops are usually pretty good in design, so even OSS people will buy one and then put distro of choice on it, problem? not really. Good hardware is good hardware.
The hardware's fine, but I'll agree with the original Thomas article, the user interface is the key. As Thomas said, "once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail." Not to mention his comment that OS developers, "because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use."
Instead of attempting to convert sunlight to electricity. Simply use the heat.
In the location he lives in California, I don't expect he needs much heat.
And as for evaporative cooling, I expect that in CA, water is even more of a resource to be conserved than electricity is.
$38K? That seems expensive to me, but I don't know how big his system is. I'm putting one my house (waiting on electrical inspection) that is 4 kW, and it cost $22k.
Tracking down the original specs, he put in "27 Sunpower panels, each rated at 225W, for a total 6.1KW system." With various ancilliary installation features, such as the monotoring system, sounds like the price is about the same.
Sunpower makes very high end panels, for what it's worth-- he quotes 18% efficient.
Funny how so many people seem to want to find fault with solar energy, and use incomplete reasoning to look at only the possible negative consequences without looking at all the positives.
Just FWIW, I wasn't attempting to "find fault" with solar energy, just to put the economics into terms that seem more useful to me. In fact, considering what I've been getting on my personal investments, 7.8 percent/year looks pretty attractive....r
ROE is a much better way of calculating economics than "payback time," by the way
If you aren't aware that adding ~e may change the meaning of a word, I should come round and rap your ears.
ROFL!
Trees work in places trees work. Trees don't work in many places, such as the urban areas where cars are more likely to be concentrated at.
What's your point? It doesn't matter where you put the trees; there's no reason to put them in the same place where the cars are concentrated.
Carbon dioxide is a global problem, not a local one. Put the trees wherever it makes most sense to put them.
I'm not sure what the impact of hypercarbonated deep oceans would be-- it would certainly take decades, and possibly centuries for the dense hyercarbonated water to diffuse upward to the surface, unless there are deep currents-- but I'm not sure why we think that it would be good to do this.
It would make a lot more sense to use real trees. They don't "cost as much as a Toyota," they grow by themselves from seeds, and are self-replicating. They don't extract carbon dioxide in the form of stuff that has to be liquified and then sequestered somehow; they extract CO2 and solidify it in the form of cellulose, a material that is naturally solid at room temperature and pressure.
Obviously, if the trees are then allowed to rot, the CO2 returns to the atmosphere, but that is an easy problem compared to the problem of sequestering CO2 for a few centuries. Just pile it up in the desert, where it won't rot. Or, heck, bury it and let geological forces compress it for a while, and you make new coal that our successors a few million years later can deal with. Wood is a heck of a lot easier to sequester than carbon dioxide!
In short, I can't think of anything more idiotic than designing "artificial" trees, when nature has been evolving real trees optimized to do exactly this task (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere)-- and has had a few hundred million year head start.
It was suggested that because Canadians live longer than Americans, it is their health care industry that was the cause.
To the contrary. It was the original claim that the Candian health care system is bad ("greatly diminished health care," in the original phrasing). The life expectancy data shows that, if it is in fact true that their health care system is bad, that "fact" cannot be discerned in the life expectancy data. (Nor in the life expectancy data of other western nations with nationalized health plans).
The burden of proof is the other way: for people who are claiming that going to some kind of government health plan would result in a health system that's as "bad" as Canada's, given the fact of greater lifespan in Canada, what is the evidence being cited to show that Canada's system is "bad"?
Cross-Threaded wrote:
I don't see a problem here...
Well, if the answer "newspapers die because their business models no longer work" is fine with you, then you're right, from your point of view, there isn't a "problem."
I was pointing out why their business models don't work. Whether or not that's a "problem" depends on whether or not you think that it matters.
The biggest earner is classifieds,
Classifieds are free now. They're called "Craig's list". Classified ad revenue used to drive newspaper revenue, but for newspapers that's now in the dumpster.
followed by advertising.
Local advertising doesn't pay when people read free online news from some paper a thousand miles away.
And yes, local content is king for newspapers:
For the most part, not enough interest there to sell a daily newspaper. A weekly paper, yes. But you're right, that's a niche that they could try to sell. It'll be a hard sale, though-- when you go to google news, what fraction of your time do you spend looking up local news?
Google News is not going to carry the local gossip.
Actually, Google news does carry local news and gossip.
In the old "print" days of newspapers, this was not a problem-- there would be only a few newspapers in a town; and the customers were given the choice of buying a newspaper or not reading the news. With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost.
The only real solution is for newspapers to continue to go out of business. When this reaches the point where there are only a handful left, they might be able to start a model of restricting access to paid customers. They're still competing against bloggers and crowdsourcing, of course, but the actual professional (which is to say, paid) reporter model of newsgathering may have advantages in the quality of news, sufficient that it may be worth it for some customers to pay for.
(This is a general problem in free market theory, by the way, not specific to newspapers-- in a market with many small producers (rather than one or two large ones), when the marginal cost of production is close to zero, the equilibrium free market cost is zero, and thus everybody is driven out of business...)
Now ... repeat after me ... correlation does not equal causation.
I don't believe I said it did. However, if you're going to complain about how awful Canada's national health plan is, you had better deal with the fact that, awful health plan or no, they live two years longer than Americans do. That "rotten" health plan, which costs on the average about half what Americans pay for health care, doesn't seem to be producing worse results.
Canada has a completely-free universal national healthcare system.
It is also a country where...
The average life expectancy is two years longer than in America.
Interesting, In this one, unlike the Misisippi case, apparently the person sued by the RIAA "said she didn't have a computer in the house at the time."
Whereas in the other case, the computer itself was not an issue.
http://mqscores.wustl.edu/media/pa02.pdf
Say, wouldn't it have have been nice if they'd posted that, instead of the non-information that was posted.
About the best I can say about this paper, though, is that it works very hard to deliberately obscure what they did, in order (I presume) to hide the systematic errors with which the procedure is riddled. They're really good with the math of how they analyze the data... but they work very hard at hiding where the data comes from and how they turn it into "conservative" and "liberal" scores.
They bring part of it out into the light with this sentence:
The first problem is scale invariance. The parameters of interest alpha, beta, theta are only identified only up to an arbitrary scale factor."
OK. Basically, they're saying that their method can identify which justice is more liberal than another, and which is more conservative but their methodology can't put numbers on that. So those color scales, and how they vary with time? Meaningless. Bluer means more liberal, but don't give any credance to how deep the blue is, or how red the red is, the scale is not calibrated.
It's actually a lot worse than that, once you start reading it. The center is ill defined, as well-- they can identify who's more conservative and who's less, but can't tell if the position of court as a whole moves or stays fixed.
They also mention, in passing, the rotational invariance. They don't bother to mention that this is not merely a global problem, but a point by point problem-- they can only tell what's liberal vs what's conservative by looking at the positions of the liberal judges vs the conservative judges, and then they use that to determine who's liberal and who's conservative-- a closed loop. This can converge to the right answer... if the initial seed is "close", and if "liberal" and "conservative" are well defined, with judges varying only slowly.
Of course, fossils are three dimensional, so if it had been a fossil, grinding a few tenths of a millimeter into it would have revealed detail, not destroyed it.
If you believe that the overall flavor of the posts pointed to a different conclusion, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.
Yeah, you caught me, all I'm interesting in is karma. You can trade it in for valuable prizes.
Let's see, here's an example post from the very first article discussing the retrial, suggesting that: (1) RIAA would drop the case, because they would be afraid to see it to the jury (2) "the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers" were going to "tear RIAA a new one" (3) "Rule 702" would kill evidence gathered by Mediasentry.
So what's to keep them from dropping this like a radioactive potato when the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers start to tear Mediasentry a new one? It would be nice if the case went on long enough for this Rule 702 thing to kill Mediasentry gathered evidence - which could hopefully be used as a precedent for other cases or requests for retrial. But at this point I'm not counting on the RIAA staying with this one long enough for even that much good to come from it."
None of these actually happened. The RIAA didn't drop the case, because they had a winning case before, and the facts hadn't changed. The "tech savy lawyers" did try to make a case that it was possible that somebody hacked into her internet connection and into her computer in order to post music files in her name, but didn't offer any suggestions as to who or how or why, and without any argument that this was a plausible scenario, it didn't change the jury's view that the "preponderance of evidence" suggested that it was probably her that listed for sharing files from her computer in her name using her internet connection. The "rule 702 thinigie" didn't prevent the mediasentry data from being presented, because it was ruled to be an argument without merit.
This is completely useless. Some guys named Martin and Quinn estimate positions on a political spectrum using "Martin Quinn scores", which are not explained (the link to the explanation explains nothing.)
So, what, they guess the justices' politics and then graph their guesses?
If they don't explain how they calculated the numbers, this data is useless, or possibly worse than useless, being opinion masquerading as fact.
If you read slashdot, you'd think that there would have been no possibility of RIAA winning because they are incompetent idiots without a clue.
Judging by the summary (No, of course I didn't RTFA.) the only real incompetent in this case was the defense attorney. What is the point of getting an expert witness if you're not going to use their testimony? Why wasn't the technical evidence challenged?
If you read the article, and followed the case, you'd realize that their technical expert turned out to have been shot down in flames : "Judge Davis ruled that Prof. Kim could testify about the 'possible scenarios,' but could not opine as to what he thinks 'probably' occurred. The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point. Similarly, because Kim explicitly testified that this case does not involve any "black IP space," or any "temporarily unused" IP space ...., he is not permitted to opine at trial that hijacking of black IP space or temporary unused IP is a possible explanation in this case.' Dr. Kim was also precluded from testifying as to whether song files were conspicuously placed in a shared files folder or were wilfully offered for distribution."
My thoughts about this award is that it makes it quite clear that the average person posting on slashdot does not know anything about law. If you read slashdot, you'd think that there would have been no possibility of RIAA winning because they are incompetent idiots without a clue.
Apparently not.
Note to self: don't depend on /. for legal news.
The headline says "US Plans To Bulldoze 50 Shrinking Cities," but I don't see any trace of "plans" to do any such thing.
If you read the article, it seems to be a piece of political scare propaganda.
Note the sub-headline: "...proposals being considered by the Obama administration"! Wow...
uh, wait, what do they mean "being considered?" The actual person quoted is "treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint." Not exactly a powerhouse of the administration. The "being considered" doesn't mean anything is "planned." It means, apparently, "hey, here's a plan that this guy is implementing in Flint, MI, and is talking about a lot."
But from that, you can sure whip up a frenzy. They're bulldozing our cities! Blame it on Obama! We knew he was going to do something evil!
Obviously the newspaper had to study the information closely and come to a conclusion as to the blogger's identity. An interesting conflict will arise the first time a mistake is made in exposing such a person. What if they have concluded his identity incorrectly? And how about a person's legal rights to prove that they are not the blogger if that involves exposing the real blogger?
Well, sure, but this is no different from any other kind of news a newspaper might print.