"encourage diverse, "fun" neighborhoods--residences and businesses intermingled, instead of huge, dull blocks of houses"
We had that. We left it. How come?
I'll guess; selfish capitalistic "keep up with the Jones" syndrome. Racism. Corporate hegemony. What else?
Screw it. Suburbia is nice. It's quiet, clean, and my property value is astonishing. Even seeing a police car near my home is unusual, much less an actual crime. Go find your ideal corner hovel in whatever city gets you off. Rot in it. I'm not coming.
"Why do you live 50 miles from work? Is there no affordable accomodation within 10 miles? If you (and everyone else with similar desires for change) actively sought housing closer to your workplace, you would create a demand for a different type of housing supply, rather than the endless monotony of suburbia."
Given your way, we would all live much closer to our workplace and your complaint then would be that corporations are dictating our lifestyle by coercing us to live in the endless monotony of cities. The problem here isn't that someone was selfish and wanted out of the cities and thus created suburbia. The problem isn't that suburbia is monotonous. The problem is that you enjoy so much liberty and wealth that, for lack of necessary ambient levels of conflict, you invent reasons to be dissatisfied with whatever situation you find yourself in.
Voice identification, natural speech recognition, facial identification, autonomous navigation (land, sea and air,) character recognition and an enormous spectrum of heuristic algorithms used throughout the modern world from thermostats to missiles...
I've been thinking for some time about awareness. After I read Creation: Life and How to Make it book by Steve Grand, I began thinking that perhaps awareness isn't the mystery it is sometime built up to be. What if we eventually discover that being "aware" doesn't require the phenomenal amount of computation that is often estimated? What if we discover that natures method of achieving it is actually highly inefficient (in terms of...physical complexity?) and easy to replicate using digital hardware?
At this point it is feasible to build a machine that can find you in a crowd (you, specifically, from among many others) talk to you, understand your commands and then travel where you tell it. This is already beyond the means of most animals.
If what I suspect is true, cognition is a relatively simple closed loop goal seeking (that seems to be a contradiction) parallel algorithm connected to a vast repository of highly lossy associative storage that ceaselessly works to achieve reproduction. Awareness is an emergent property of the process. You are a side effect, in the same way the useful work of a LISP function is often implemented as a side effect.
I'm not a professional AI researcher and it probably shows. I'll take it from someone who is. Martha Pollack, a professor at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Michigan and executive editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research recently said, "It's a crazy position to be in. As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system."
The significant progress made in AI to-date appears to be the result of reverse engineering nature until the core implementation of some basic function becomes clear. Just how many interconnected functions are necessary before you have a "who"?
You limited the possible set of answers to "for Linux." I'll ask the larger question; are there any good distributed filesystems? Good meaning; mature, stable, works on at least one platform well, and is as transparent as possible to that platforms software, within reason.
Truth is the only thing that resembles a distributed filesystem I have ever used is Domino. It does what I need quietly, efficiently and consistently. You can't open(...) the content you have stored from a C program (others APIs exist if you must) but maybe that expectation is what makes the existing DFSs on Linux suck...
Distributed Filesystems are attempts distribute things that most software assumes is only a couple microseconds away, exists atomically, is not accessed concurrently and is permanently available. Clearly a tough problem domain!:)
Is it even reasonable to expect to calculate the 'environmental' cost of a laptop?
Just calculating the environmental cost of a piece of paper appears insurmountable. Just how accurately (read, credibly) can this be done? What exactly is the environmental cost of a lumberjack taking a dump after hours? Since having paper requires a certain percentage of us be lumberjacks, we must consider the entire cost of having them. A truck used in hauling lumber has environmental effects across the entire planet; from fossil fuels to iron ore. Never mind that it probably has several computers on board and the whole calculation goes recursive (trucks making computers to make trucks...)
Now consider a laptop. Plastics, solder, various exotic bits like tantalum, manufacturing resources on multiple continents using a huge variety of techniques, transportation costs for all of the above... Here's a cost to consider; the environmental impact of supporting the guy who wrote the BIOS for the laptop, for that short period of his life that he did the work, and the time during which he was educated to do it. He most likely used a computer for that and once again we go recursive (computers making computers...) Just how far do you think you can take this?
Slashdot posted a story about the true cost of making a memory chip. Many posters were quick to point out that the water used in the process was recycled on the spot multiple times. The original story left the impression that the water was entirely consumed, but actually left the matter entirely ambiguous by not being clear about what the water figure actually meant. Naturally the suspicion is that the author intended to be ambiguous because it has more impact to say 'umpteen gallons per chip.' In the end the story assigned some dollar figure to the results and condemned modern technology as another great western destroyer of the environment.
How are environmental costs calculated? If I go strip mine an acre, presumably something somewhere much have incurred a cost. That spot of land? It's still there. Nothing is growing on it now, but it's still there. Eventually something will grow on it again. So are we to attempt to prorate a cost to that period of time between the moment the acre was last 'pristine' until the moment it once again represents something environmentally sound? Is there a price sheet somewhere we're working from?
At the very least admit the extreme ambiguity of any such endeavor. If you are concerned that acknowledging this would ruin some presupposed result, you really need to reconsider your motives. Too much of the research coming from the environmental movement reeks of junk science and is dismissed out of hand. You risk creating something that has the appearance of a result created to drum up outrage. If you want to influence my skeptical mind you need to be absolutely scrupulous in avoiding that. Just calculate. Don't even mention the word 'western.' Avoid ambiguity. Acknowledge this real limits of what can be known.
How? Life is short. Silly pedantic nonsense like this doesn't register. Priorities and all that. You probably rate movies high up on your priority list. Other people don't. I know I don't. My movie watching habits amount to randomly flipping into the middle of whatever happens to be on Cinemax at the moment. The last movie I actually saw in a theater was... damn, I can't remember. I can count all the movies I actually own on one hand.
I do appreciate the fact that if the studios get their way in every respect and turn the acquisition of movies into a expensive, complicated nightmare, I really won't give a damn. That's why I find all this hand wringing about copyrights so tedious. If there were more people around like me, the entertainment manufacturers would have a lot less leverage. Not to say being an enthusiastic fan is wrong, just try to understand my answer to your question; not all of us lose actual sleep when we learn that the first release of some megabuck blockbuster won't be wide screen.
ADC is awesome, I wish PC manufacturer's would adopt - I have _way_ too many cables behind my computer desk. Some goes for their slick way of hooking the mouse into the keyboard
Plugging a mouse into a keyboard ought to be trivial USB functionality. I don't know what the big PC vendors are shipping because I don't buy branded systems from them, but I would be really surprised to learn that daisy chaining a mouse from a keyboard isn't commonplace by now.
"its my opinion that the last thing these folks need is the corruption of the internet"
One mans corruption is another mans.... exercise left for the reader.
I wonder about this. One of the best ways to motivate people is to piss them off. If all you have in your third world village is state sponsored radio it's entirely possible you simply wouldn't know just how horribly bad you have it. I am convinced that most third world inhabitants are just plain ignorant of their relative condition. Even third world people who aren't dirt poor were staggered when Baghdad fell. They honestly believed Iraq had the means to defeat US forces, because they've been told so all their lives. When McDonalds first opened in Moscow, the patrons were often impressed with the quality of the food! What if the truth is that by providing uncensored access you do the greatest good by way of raising expectations?
Lord knows nothing else seems to work. The left would have us believe there is some unknown amount of money us selfish westerners are supposed to be using to make it all better. The right offers platitudes about boot straps. Why not give these people something to be angry about by showing them just how bad off they are? Being pissed off is often very motivational.
"I need money to buy a house free and clear, and then that's it. I'm gone."
Plumbing: "I'll dig a well and maintain my own septic tank!" Pumps, manufactured by whom? Tanks, built how? Don't even pretend you'll have an outhouse.
Power: "It will ALL be solar powered", using panels and equipment manufactured by...
Emergency Services: Let's see how you feel about that when you are 60.
Communications: Considering just how fucked in the head you are, mostly due to the crap you've allowed yourself to be fed, I imagine you won't allow yourself to do without some sort of uplink.
Yeah, "drop out". Be sure to buy a good Volvo so you can make it back to town when you figure out how much being "out" sucks, fool.
Besides, you're way behind the curve. Just go visit a trailer park sometime.
"Maybe you think a little loss of freedom is a small price to pay"
How do you arrive at this? What have I said to imply that I believe this?
I asked you precisely how this [AOL blocking spam] is dangerous. You respond by implying that this is a loss of freedom and that I am somehow indifferent to this.
A.) AOL can block all the mail it wants based on whatever byzantine criteria it can think up and this represents absolutely no lose of "freedom." AOL is not a sole provider of email. AOL has no say about what is said on my phone. AOL has no power over what I send through the postal system. Claiming that AOL has the means to infringe on actual freedoms is hysterical.
B.) Your presumptions about my concerns for freedom are based on sheer ignorance. You know nothing of me. Stop. Thanks.
C.) You made no attempt to actually answer my question. Exactly how is freedom threatened by AOLs attempts to block spam?
You make vague claims about how AOL is eroding freedom. I'm calling you on it. What, exactly, do you mean?
Interesting irony here. You accuse others of ignorance due to a "black and white" view point. You assert that they need to study history to understand what you believe is an equivalence.
The people that respond to you will, of course, point out that Soviet transgressions were far "worse" than what happened in the US during the McCarthy era. Worse is a relative term. They appear to be capable of detecting something other than absolutes. How do you reason that they live in a "black and white" world?
Yet, when you site the history of McCarthy in an attempt to demonstrate equivalence while ignoring the degree of transgressions, you appear to be the one incapable of discerning anything other than extremes. This ever occur to you?
Ultimately the only way to put a stop to spamming is a few civil trials (possibly criminal, too, wire fraud, etc.) and hang a few examples out to dry.
This will be fun. The very first time this happens you can count on spammer advocacy appearing, probably right here on Slashdot. Someone will take the spammers point of view, wrap it up in government oppression garb, blame Ashcroft and the entire Internet "community" will be bitterly divided.
We'll have blogs, advocacy sites and t-shirts! "Free Such-and-Such." The first time they grab up some spammers hardware it will happen. Slashsnotters just can't stand the thought of 'the man' taking away their hardware.
The Hydrogen Industry have been suppressing Nitrogen research for years. The Bush administration and cohorts in Congress are bought and paid for by the Hydrogen lobby. The DMIE at the University of Iceland discovered a design for a Nitrogen fuel injector that had an efficiency equivalent to that of an automobile getting 450KM per liter. Obviously such a design would threaten the profitability of Hydrogen bases systems, so the design has been withheld and the researchers have been forced to sign NDAs.
Wouldn't water be a bigger hazard on a sub than hammers?
Condensation, yes. But actual flowing water? By the time the pc-104 device gets wet you probably have bigger problems anyhow...
Submarines get torpedoed and depth charged. This tends to rattle the boat. Hard. Can't have your navigation system blink out just because someone is tossing bombs at you.
Yes, and this is important to AMD. It probably indicates that Opteron has some headroom for higher frequency. What are the hottest Pentium CPUs running, almost 80W? So the AMD core could do what, 2.4-2.5GHz before hitting that temperature? Those frequencies are what we're likely to see when the desktop x86-64 appears.
Good show so far. It's nice to know that if I had to build a >4GB Linux/Oracle box without breaking the bank I have a solution. Bank switching Intel's 32 bits does not appeal.
This thing is getting some serious support from the industry. Oracle and IBM have both signed on. I bet Dell follows soon; it's just fits so well in the 2way and 4way market.
Let's arrest former Enron employees for contributing to corporate fraud. After all, by allowing Enron to utilize their retirement funds they enabled, and profited from, Enron's criminal activity.
I'm sure this guy isn't stupid enough to make his "liscensing fee" more expensive than defending one's self in a courtroom
When you are convinced that business is motivated stickily by profit you might be tempted to believe this is viable. It isn't, because despite what so many appear to believe, business people are often motivated by pride. When some schmoo comes along and claims that you owe him something when you know damn well you don't, it's not hard to start overlooking costs and call the bluff. It's a minefield for a litigious bastard like Chuck. Soon or later, in each case, he runs into some self-righteous bastard that refuses to bend over.
What about hooking your sister/daughter/wife up with a phone that generates electricity when she's talking. That could really answer the worlds energy needs...
Another potential benefit here is that by converting the sound waves into energy you also reduce the amplitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"encourage diverse, "fun" neighborhoods--residences and businesses intermingled, instead of huge, dull blocks of houses"
We had that. We left it. How come?
I'll guess; selfish capitalistic "keep up with the Jones" syndrome. Racism. Corporate hegemony. What else?
Screw it. Suburbia is nice. It's quiet, clean, and my property value is astonishing. Even seeing a police car near my home is unusual, much less an actual crime. Go find your ideal corner hovel in whatever city gets you off. Rot in it. I'm not coming.
"Why do you live 50 miles from work? Is there no affordable accomodation within 10 miles? If you (and everyone else with similar desires for change) actively sought housing closer to your workplace, you would create a demand for a different type of housing supply, rather than the endless monotony of suburbia."
Given your way, we would all live much closer to our workplace and your complaint then would be that corporations are dictating our lifestyle by coercing us to live in the endless monotony of cities. The problem here isn't that someone was selfish and wanted out of the cities and thus created suburbia. The problem isn't that suburbia is monotonous. The problem is that you enjoy so much liberty and wealth that, for lack of necessary ambient levels of conflict, you invent reasons to be dissatisfied with whatever situation you find yourself in.
Voice identification, natural speech recognition, facial identification, autonomous navigation (land, sea and air,) character recognition and an enormous spectrum of heuristic algorithms used throughout the modern world from thermostats to missiles...
I've been thinking for some time about awareness. After I read Creation: Life and How to Make it book by Steve Grand, I began thinking that perhaps awareness isn't the mystery it is sometime built up to be. What if we eventually discover that being "aware" doesn't require the phenomenal amount of computation that is often estimated? What if we discover that natures method of achieving it is actually highly inefficient (in terms of...physical complexity?) and easy to replicate using digital hardware?
At this point it is feasible to build a machine that can find you in a crowd (you, specifically, from among many others) talk to you, understand your commands and then travel where you tell it. This is already beyond the means of most animals.
If what I suspect is true, cognition is a relatively simple closed loop goal seeking (that seems to be a contradiction) parallel algorithm connected to a vast repository of highly lossy associative storage that ceaselessly works to achieve reproduction. Awareness is an emergent property of the process. You are a side effect, in the same way the useful work of a LISP function is often implemented as a side effect.
I'm not a professional AI researcher and it probably shows. I'll take it from someone who is. Martha Pollack, a professor at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Michigan and executive editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research recently said, "It's a crazy position to be in. As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system."
The significant progress made in AI to-date appears to be the result of reverse engineering nature until the core implementation of some basic function becomes clear. Just how many interconnected functions are necessary before you have a "who"?
You limited the possible set of answers to "for Linux." I'll ask the larger question; are there any good distributed filesystems? Good meaning; mature, stable, works on at least one platform well, and is as transparent as possible to that platforms software, within reason.
:)
Truth is the only thing that resembles a distributed filesystem I have ever used is Domino. It does what I need quietly, efficiently and consistently. You can't open(...) the content you have stored from a C program (others APIs exist if you must) but maybe that expectation is what makes the existing DFSs on Linux suck...
Distributed Filesystems are attempts distribute things that most software assumes is only a couple microseconds away, exists atomically, is not accessed concurrently and is permanently available. Clearly a tough problem domain!
ecosystems recover.
Is it even reasonable to expect to calculate the 'environmental' cost of a laptop?
Just calculating the environmental cost of a piece of paper appears insurmountable. Just how accurately (read, credibly) can this be done? What exactly is the environmental cost of a lumberjack taking a dump after hours? Since having paper requires a certain percentage of us be lumberjacks, we must consider the entire cost of having them. A truck used in hauling lumber has environmental effects across the entire planet; from fossil fuels to iron ore. Never mind that it probably has several computers on board and the whole calculation goes recursive (trucks making computers to make trucks...)
Now consider a laptop. Plastics, solder, various exotic bits like tantalum, manufacturing resources on multiple continents using a huge variety of techniques, transportation costs for all of the above... Here's a cost to consider; the environmental impact of supporting the guy who wrote the BIOS for the laptop, for that short period of his life that he did the work, and the time during which he was educated to do it. He most likely used a computer for that and once again we go recursive (computers making computers...) Just how far do you think you can take this?
Slashdot posted a story about the true cost of making a memory chip. Many posters were quick to point out that the water used in the process was recycled on the spot multiple times. The original story left the impression that the water was entirely consumed, but actually left the matter entirely ambiguous by not being clear about what the water figure actually meant. Naturally the suspicion is that the author intended to be ambiguous because it has more impact to say 'umpteen gallons per chip.' In the end the story assigned some dollar figure to the results and condemned modern technology as another great western destroyer of the environment.
How are environmental costs calculated? If I go strip mine an acre, presumably something somewhere much have incurred a cost. That spot of land? It's still there. Nothing is growing on it now, but it's still there. Eventually something will grow on it again. So are we to attempt to prorate a cost to that period of time between the moment the acre was last 'pristine' until the moment it once again represents something environmentally sound? Is there a price sheet somewhere we're working from?
At the very least admit the extreme ambiguity of any such endeavor. If you are concerned that acknowledging this would ruin some presupposed result, you really need to reconsider your motives. Too much of the research coming from the environmental movement reeks of junk science and is dismissed out of hand. You risk creating something that has the appearance of a result created to drum up outrage. If you want to influence my skeptical mind you need to be absolutely scrupulous in avoiding that. Just calculate. Don't even mention the word 'western.' Avoid ambiguity. Acknowledge this real limits of what can be known.
it's tyops :)
"ADC does more then that."
Yeah, I gathered. I asked about what sort of contemporary USB hardware appears in the channel.
How? Life is short. Silly pedantic nonsense like this doesn't register. Priorities and all that. You probably rate movies high up on your priority list. Other people don't. I know I don't. My movie watching habits amount to randomly flipping into the middle of whatever happens to be on Cinemax at the moment. The last movie I actually saw in a theater was... damn, I can't remember. I can count all the movies I actually own on one hand.
I do appreciate the fact that if the studios get their way in every respect and turn the acquisition of movies into a expensive, complicated nightmare, I really won't give a damn. That's why I find all this hand wringing about copyrights so tedious. If there were more people around like me, the entertainment manufacturers would have a lot less leverage. Not to say being an enthusiastic fan is wrong, just try to understand my answer to your question; not all of us lose actual sleep when we learn that the first release of some megabuck blockbuster won't be wide screen.
ADC is awesome, I wish PC manufacturer's would adopt - I have _way_ too many cables behind my computer desk. Some goes for their slick way of hooking the mouse into the keyboard
Plugging a mouse into a keyboard ought to be trivial USB functionality. I don't know what the big PC vendors are shipping because I don't buy branded systems from them, but I would be really surprised to learn that daisy chaining a mouse from a keyboard isn't commonplace by now.
"its my opinion that the last thing these folks need is the corruption of the internet"
One mans corruption is another mans.... exercise left for the reader.
I wonder about this. One of the best ways to motivate people is to piss them off. If all you have in your third world village is state sponsored radio it's entirely possible you simply wouldn't know just how horribly bad you have it. I am convinced that most third world inhabitants are just plain ignorant of their relative condition. Even third world people who aren't dirt poor were staggered when Baghdad fell. They honestly believed Iraq had the means to defeat US forces, because they've been told so all their lives. When McDonalds first opened in Moscow, the patrons were often impressed with the quality of the food! What if the truth is that by providing uncensored access you do the greatest good by way of raising expectations?
Lord knows nothing else seems to work. The left would have us believe there is some unknown amount of money us selfish westerners are supposed to be using to make it all better. The right offers platitudes about boot straps. Why not give these people something to be angry about by showing them just how bad off they are? Being pissed off is often very motivational.
"I need money to buy a house free and clear, and then that's it. I'm gone."
Plumbing: "I'll dig a well and maintain my own septic tank!" Pumps, manufactured by whom? Tanks, built how? Don't even pretend you'll have an outhouse.
Power: "It will ALL be solar powered", using panels and equipment manufactured by...
Emergency Services: Let's see how you feel about that when you are 60.
Communications: Considering just how fucked in the head you are, mostly due to the crap you've allowed yourself to be fed, I imagine you won't allow yourself to do without some sort of uplink.
Yeah, "drop out". Be sure to buy a good Volvo so you can make it back to town when you figure out how much being "out" sucks, fool.
Besides, you're way behind the curve. Just go visit a trailer park sometime.
"Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project"
Strategic Defence Initiative = the star wars project
What was the thinking behind clarifying that to the Slashdot crowd?
Microprocessor, main processing unit of your computer...
"Maybe you think a little loss of freedom is a small price to pay"
How do you arrive at this? What have I said to imply that I believe this?
I asked you precisely how this [AOL blocking spam] is dangerous. You respond by implying that this is a loss of freedom and that I am somehow indifferent to this.
A.) AOL can block all the mail it wants based on whatever byzantine criteria it can think up and this represents absolutely no lose of "freedom." AOL is not a sole provider of email. AOL has no say about what is said on my phone. AOL has no power over what I send through the postal system. Claiming that AOL has the means to infringe on actual freedoms is hysterical.
B.) Your presumptions about my concerns for freedom are based on sheer ignorance. You know nothing of me. Stop. Thanks.
C.) You made no attempt to actually answer my question. Exactly how is freedom threatened by AOLs attempts to block spam?
You make vague claims about how AOL is eroding freedom. I'm calling you on it. What, exactly, do you mean?
Interesting irony here. You accuse others of ignorance due to a "black and white" view point. You assert that they need to study history to understand what you believe is an equivalence.
The people that respond to you will, of course, point out that Soviet transgressions were far "worse" than what happened in the US during the McCarthy era. Worse is a relative term. They appear to be capable of detecting something other than absolutes. How do you reason that they live in a "black and white" world?
Yet, when you site the history of McCarthy in an attempt to demonstrate equivalence while ignoring the degree of transgressions, you appear to be the one incapable of discerning anything other than extremes. This ever occur to you?
Ultimately the only way to put a stop to spamming is a few civil trials (possibly criminal, too, wire fraud, etc.) and hang a few examples out to dry.
This will be fun. The very first time this happens you can count on spammer advocacy appearing, probably right here on Slashdot. Someone will take the spammers point of view, wrap it up in government oppression garb, blame Ashcroft and the entire Internet "community" will be bitterly divided.
We'll have blogs, advocacy sites and t-shirts! "Free Such-and-Such." The first time they grab up some spammers hardware it will happen. Slashsnotters just can't stand the thought of 'the man' taking away their hardware.
This form of spam-filtering is very dangerous
How, exactly? You criticize AOL for implementing systems to identify spam, and then you make an assertion that this is "dangerous".
Precisely how is this dangerous?
I just had a stick of memory go from Nevada to someplace on the east coast, then get delivered in Denver. About 4000 miles extra there.
Why isn't it a more explored area?
The Hydrogen Industry have been suppressing Nitrogen research for years. The Bush administration and cohorts in Congress are bought and paid for by the Hydrogen lobby. The DMIE at the University of Iceland discovered a design for a Nitrogen fuel injector that had an efficiency equivalent to that of an automobile getting 450KM per liter. Obviously such a design would threaten the profitability of Hydrogen bases systems, so the design has been withheld and the researchers have been forced to sign NDAs.
Wouldn't water be a bigger hazard on a sub than hammers?
Condensation, yes. But actual flowing water? By the time the pc-104 device gets wet you probably have bigger problems anyhow...
Submarines get torpedoed and depth charged. This tends to rattle the boat. Hard. Can't have your navigation system blink out just because someone is tossing bombs at you.
Ebay: pentium class for $99m &item =2723531709&category=179
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte
Keep in mind this opteron only uses 40 Watts.
Yes, and this is important to AMD. It probably indicates that Opteron has some headroom for higher frequency. What are the hottest Pentium CPUs running, almost 80W? So the AMD core could do what, 2.4-2.5GHz before hitting that temperature? Those frequencies are what we're likely to see when the desktop x86-64 appears.
Good show so far. It's nice to know that if I had to build a >4GB Linux/Oracle box without breaking the bank I have a solution. Bank switching Intel's 32 bits does not appeal.
This thing is getting some serious support from the industry. Oracle and IBM have both signed on. I bet Dell follows soon; it's just fits so well in the 2way and 4way market.
Let's arrest former Enron employees for contributing to corporate fraud. After all, by allowing Enron to utilize their retirement funds they enabled, and profited from, Enron's criminal activity.
I'm sure this guy isn't stupid enough to make his "liscensing fee" more expensive than defending one's self in a courtroom
When you are convinced that business is motivated stickily by profit you might be tempted to believe this is viable. It isn't, because despite what so many appear to believe, business people are often motivated by pride. When some schmoo comes along and claims that you owe him something when you know damn well you don't, it's not hard to start overlooking costs and call the bluff. It's a minefield for a litigious bastard like Chuck. Soon or later, in each case, he runs into some self-righteous bastard that refuses to bend over.
What about hooking your sister/daughter/wife up with a phone that generates electricity when she's talking. That could really answer the worlds energy needs...
Another potential benefit here is that by converting the sound waves into energy you also reduce the amplitude.