Regurgitated? If they made a superhero movie featuring Captain Copyright, I'd pirate it in a heartbeat!

Or, maybe, I'll watch it for free by checking it out from the library some day, if they have it and I'm that bored.

Kudos to you for doing a solar panel installation. I've been thinking of my own, but feel that it is still too expensive. I think it is still "big dumb engineering", though I understand solar has gotten much better in recent years. A 30 year or longer payback period is just too long for me. There is so much that can happen in 30 years: technological improvements and price drops, and you may move or die, or your house may be destroyed by fire, tornado, earthquake, flood, or termites.

What I mean by big dumb engineering is exemplified by the double pane windows. Save up to 50% on your heating and cooling costs, they say. How much to replace all the windows and glass doors? Why, only $10,000! I spend about $700 per year on heating and cooling, so the windows only save me $350 per year at best, which makes for about a 30 year payback period right there. I very much doubt I'd see a 50% cut in my heating and cooling costs anyway. A better solution is to put curtains on all the windows. Way, way cheaper, and looks nice too.

Anyway, I've read the first use of solar should be for hot water. There too, I've had no luck. One business quoted me an incredible price tag of $17,000 for their solar water heating system. They quickly rolled out discounts and tax rebates and the like, and got it down to $6000. Nope, still too expensive. I replaced the tank water heater with another tank water heater for $350 (it's nearly the lowest quality available, warrantied for only 6 years), hoping to buy more time for solar water heating to come down in price.

I've gone for much more modest improvements. Replaced incandescent lights with CFLs, and now LEDs. The 4 ft fluorescent tube has been improved from 40 watts to 32 watts and the diameter shrunk a little, and I upgraded to 2 of those when an old ballast went bad. There was this 80plus program to improve the efficiency of computer power supplies. My newest computers are small footprint and low energy, using only 30 watts maximum, and I set them up to sleep after 10 to 15 minutes of inactivity. Tube monitors and TVs are all gone, replaced with flat screens. Most of all, I've let the temperature swing more with the seasons, living with 83F in the summer, and 70F in the winter. I'd go even colder, but the rest of the family whines too much. All that has cut energy use by about 50%. Was using around 10,000 kWh per year, and now I'm at 5200 kWh.

Thank you. I want to add a simple statement:

Doing something always helps the economy.

To create jobs, it doesn't matter what we do something about, just that we do something. All these cries that doing something about Climate Change will cost jobs and hurt the economy are dead wrong.

I thought I could ignore politics and focus on engineering and science. No professional employee gets to do that. Try it and you will not be employed much longer. You have to CYA. If you don't, at some point, morons will make you the scapegoat for something, no matter how idiotic and harmful it would be. Or maybe they will target you because they view you as competing for a valuable job they'd rather hand to a relative or friend, and you look easy to take down. Even if firing you is the equivalent to the company of cutting off their right hand, they will do it. Being able to say "told you so" if they do it, and end up going out of business, is cold comfort indeed. On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.

Welcome to reality.

All of us owe our existence to the big, free handout from the sun. Without that huge source of free, yes, free energy, known as sunlight, we would die. Further, animals, including us, are completely dependent upon life to convert that free energy into more usable forms. Everything we eat was once alive. Plants keep the oxygen in the very air we breathe at levels we can tolerate. We wouldn't last 10 minutes without air. We are totally, completely dependent upon the environment.

The next time you strut around acting all holier than thou than the "lazy people" because you're employed, think on that. We all mooch off the sun and the environment. If you want to beat up on some people, pick on the ones who are pushing us all closer to unsustainability, by having too many children and/or damaging the environment in their greed to have more, more, more.

I would like to see everyone gain greater independence. A hard life though it was, many had that in the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution forced many independent farmers to become factory laborers. Are you crowing about employment, about slaving for The Man, as if that's some kind of virtue? Employers have had entirely too much success pushing back some of the hard won standards. What happened to 9 to 5, to the 40 hour work week? Employer greed, helped along by compliant and fearful employees who've been convinced that it is even more virtuous to work overtime for no extra pay because they're in a "superior" salaried position, and who are afraid of losing their jobs if they say "no", that's what.

And I think we could be in a good position to regain a great deal of independence. It's possible to go off-grid, and not have to buy electricity from a central seller. Add an electric car, and you wouldn't need the oil companies either. You can grow your own food too. Would take a lot of work, but with employers trying to hold minimum wage fixed, and constantly scheming to cut pay even more, it could conceivably pay better to quit a low paying job and put your hours towards managing a vegetable garden. Live off the land. And tell The Man to shove his miserable job and pathetic pay. People did that once. For education and news, download from the Internet. Internet access ought to be treated more like the mail. Our government runs the post office because it was thought that communication was too important and valuable to be totally dependent upon private parties who could and would abuse such power. it has to be supervised by The People. These private telecoms companies have not served us well, preferring instead to monopolize the market and gouge us all for inferior service.

We've been asking this question for decades. We have some ideas and some answers, but aren't satisfied. Political Correctness makes it harder to check some ideas out. It's also just a plain hard question.

Yes, there are gender expectations that work against women going into engineering. But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap. It's not PC to suggest that, but not being PC doesn't make the idea untrue. And that's where we run into a lot of trouble. Testing hypotheses about high level thinking is very difficult. We have good progress on understanding small, more deterministic parts of our brains, like our vision system, but it is very hard to answer why people choose or reject an option that has no obvious advantage or disadvantage, an option that isn't clear cut, that isn't a choice between two chess moves, one of which immediately loses the game.

The article suggests that women are put off of CS by the boom and bust nature of employment in the field. There are a lot of parts to that notion. Are women more risk adverse than men on employment prospects? Is software engineering such an uncertain career path? When choosing a subject to study, do people think first and foremost of where the most and "best" jobs are, or do they try to discover what subjects they like on the idea that having passion for a subject makes one better at it, and therefore more employable? Or, employment opportunities being as arbitrary as they are, do people say the heck with trying to figure that out and merely try to find something they love and do that? In any case, often what matters is having a college degree. If it's not in a field that's in high demand, like STEM is supposed to be if the screams from employers are to be believed (take cries for more STEM workers and H1B visas and all with large grains of salt), then the particular field may not much matter. Lot of people end up working in fields that have nothing to do with their degrees.

This! Mod this up!

We do security theater to feel safer, while ignoring simple measures like facing the seats towards the rear of the plane. And let's face it. Much of what the flight attendant says is security theater. The odds of most of those safety measures-- the floating seat cushion, memorizing the route to the nearest exit-- actually saving a life is very, very low. Planes rarely crash. In most of the crashes, those measures made no difference whatsoever. It's total "Duck and Cover". School children should also memorize the the way to the nearest exit from the school building, in case a crazy person with weapons breaks in and goes on a shooting rampage. Or maybe they should quit worrying and stick to their studies.

She might do better to give everyone a lecture on the perils of obesity, and go all Richard Simmons on them, get everyone up out of their seats and doing calisthenics. Might save more lives doing that instead.

Seeming isn't always correct, and espionage is not something I feel tolerant about. But is this really espionage, or is this trumped up military hysteria over well known information?

I know the military. They exaggerate. They would like to make everything, and I do mean everything, into a secret. There is no downside to doing so. If unsure about some information, the default is to stamp it as secret. Covers their asses that way. This includes basic facts of nature that are well known, stuff that is taught in high school science and math classes. They are total suckers for Security Through Obscurity. That this strangles cooperation and collaboration is less important to them because they don't get into as much trouble if a project fails than if a "secret" gets leaked.. At the same time, they demand that their collaborators have no secrets, and go so far as to enforce this by insisting that work be done on a military base, on computers belonging to the military, and that encryption can't be used anywhere on the hardware without lots of permission. That means of course that the contractors have to get security clearances and permission to be on the base. They also want to be in control, and despite not knowing what the heck they are doing, will periodically make off the wall demands to which the contractors can't easily say no. Can really hamstring a project, so much so that it makes the difference between success and failure. It's so bad that many refuse military funding because it comes with all sorts of unreasonable strings attached. Many years ago, OpenBSD spurned military funding, and I'm sure it was because of that sort of thing. I know universities have turned them down, knowing that the money would not make up for their interference.

Did the perps really steal the software, or only copy it?

Not that it matters much. The army loves to go ape on "bad" guys. The army's reputation for paranoid overreaction to any threat involving computers is such that it wouldn't be surprising if the perps end up spending a very long time in Gitmo if the army gets hold of them. They'll be held without trial as, what do they call it, an imminent threat? They'll also be "aggressively interrogated" to find out how they did it. If the army has to hold a trial, they'll be found guilty of stealing, espionage, and of course (cue dramatic music) Hacking.

I'd rather hear about how to get paid to work on open source. The article talks a little about convincing your current employer to donate some of your time to a project. But first, you need an employer.

Then, your job has to have some down time. I've never had a job in IT with any down time at all. There are always bugs to fix, features to implement, fires to put out, and management to report to. Management is always pushing for more, questioning numbers and estimates or just simply cutting time, to the point that a deathmarch becomes a certainty.

We have plenty of standards and examples to define predatory. Detection of violations are never perfect. Nor does equipment always function as intended. There are always mistakes. This kind of theft of utility is predatory. Right or wrong, it forces you to pay to play, and does so immediately no matter how inconvenient or outright damaging. From what the article says, some of these devices can shut the car off while it is in use. Are these idiots looking to repeat GM"s experience with their infamous ignition switches, but this time being far more culpable because it was caused deliberately?

This kill switch is similar to wheel clamps used to coerce payment of parking offenses. What makes it especially bad is abusive enforcement. Some authorities purposely create situations where it is all too easy to violate parking ordinances. For instance, there's the parking meter with the clock that runs a little too fast. From my experiences at the university, there are the too tight parking spaces that are nearly impossible to fit into, and so you get busted because a bumper was over the line, and there is the parking spot that is missing a line on one side because they didn't think it necessary to paint the curb, so on that technicality it doesn't qualify as a valid parking spot and you get busted for parking illegally. There's the old rotating parking trick-- one city I know made it law that on Tuesdays and Thursdays you park on the south or west side, and on the other weekdays on the north or east. Meant you couldn't leave a car on the street for longer than a day, you would have to move it all the time. That might be impossible if a bad storm hits and your car is snowed in. Didn't stop Washington D.C. from trying to profit from the situation and issue parking tickets. Naturally, your car had better be facing the correct direction. Clamps are pretty universally hated. Too many mistakes made with them, too many cases of overzealous enforcement to generate revenue, too many needless tragedies caused.

If you're desperate, you're easier to victimize with a bad deal. You don't have the option to walk away because you can't do any better anywhere else, and doing without is even worse.

Exactly. Microsoft tried to secure the software against the users, and tried to tell everyone it was more plain security.

I'm glad users didn't swallow it. MS's lame attempt at confusing everyone got the ridicule and hate it so richly deserved.

This year, I went to the annual auto show in Dallas. What a total waste of money and time. The automakers who bothered to attend sent very junior people who didn't know anything. But they looked young and pretty. And that was their main selling point too: pretty. Pretty girls selling pretty cars. One of the few interesting cars there was a Nissan Leaf.

Don't know why they bothered having the show. If the show was an indication of the state of automobiling, I'd say they are out of ideas, and too gutless to try what few ideas they do have. Dealerships trying to stifle competition through legal technicalities makes them look really weak. Car makers need some serious shaking up, and Tesla may be the spark that sets off the forest fire. I hope batteries improve to the point that gasoline powered cars can no longer compete, and the public begins unloading them, rather like the way they unloaded SUVs in 2008 when the price of gas spiked, but more permanent.

Automobile makers do not get to dictate what their customers do with the cars they built. If the buyer wants to chop the car, make it into a lowrider, put different wheels on, change the paint color, smash it, bury it, or throw it with a trebuchet, there's not a thing the automobile manufacturer can or should be able to do about it. John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce offended some people. Some of these people had nothing to do with the automaker, they were just upset that someone did something they thought inappropriate to a product they admired. Lot of rock stars are great at puncturing sacred cows that people didn't even realize they had.

Some people get all bent out of shape over a flag burning. Others find book burnings offensive. Get over it. Let them throw copies of Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, and the Dungeon Master's Guide in the flames all they like. Nothing is lost, even more so if digitization has not been blocked. The best the arsonists can hope for is that nothing comes of it, as it could backfire and raise awareness of those works. On numerous occasions, vandals have tried to destroy works of art. If there are digital copies, destruction is practically impossible. In any case, a great work like the Mona Lisa can last only so long. It will inevitably deteriorate. If idiotic copyright laws and museum policies have prevented us from copying it into a more permanent form, for posterity, we deserve to lose it to the next time some insane person loses his mind and attacks the art. Rarities have been lost because the owner decided to destroy it. If there are good copies everywhere, the owner of an original can't deny a work to the rest of us out of spite, malice, revenge, or whatever, can't demand a big ransom not to destroy it. Can't mutilate it either through reckless bureaucratic policy, as was done to many paintings, including Rembrandt's Night Watch when they cut the painting down to size to fit a space. Then there are always Acts of God. Art has been lost in fires, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

I don't see why a work of art should be any different from a car. If the artists don't like it, it should be their responsibility to make copies or documents describing how to recreate it, before handing one over to a buyer. It's not like making a copy is so hard any more. Indeed, the biggest barriers can be legal ones.

It's a start. Lot of "owners" think they have such far reaching power over works of art, think they get to dictate what others may and may not do.

I've heard many a museum claim that copyright gives them the authority to forbid photos. It's one thing to forbid flash photography on the grounds that flashes put out UV radiation which can damage art. But they try to forbid photos, not just flashes. Claim that it would violate copyright, even though the work of art in question is long out of copyright, and they never held ownership of any copyright over the work anyway. The Alamo also claims it's "disrespectful" to the dead. A building near downtown Dallas, the Infomart, has signs that say you can't take photos of the building, and they include in that photos of the exterior from public locations such as nearby sidewalks. They claim it's for security reasons. Some museums reveal their real fears, crying that they will not have any more visitors, not be able to sell postcards. Was funny to hear this one old lady complain about the Internet ruining their business.

One place I know of that did have a change of heart is the memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing. They still have signs up that forbid photos inside, but if you ask them, they will tell you that you can take pictures.