Good point, but execution can't be reversed or otherwise undone if it was a mistake/DNA exoneration/etc.

"The moon is a harsh mistress" is a good reference for this.

I've always been impressed with Niven and Niven/Pournelle descriptions of ships and space combat. The generation ship of the fithp in Footfall, and the "Michael" nuke-pulse ship used to defeat them.

He's going to die eventually, and he thinks he's going to paradise. Why not let him rot in jail for the next 99 years, i.e. no chance of parole.

Execution just brings him to paradise that much sooner. If I understand it correctly, it's going to cost society more to proceed through the death penalty appeals process, than it will to imprison him for the rest of his life.

He probably doesn't want to die just yet, but he would expect the welcome of a martyr in paradise. Just make him suffer in jail in a country he hates, and make sure he gets a news feed to keep the anger burning away.

In other words, give him the chance to realise he's wasted his life, and he's not getting to paradise any sooner. Such despair is a suitable punishment.

Besides, why are individuals punished for premeditated homicide, but it's OK for the state to do it? You're only reinforcing that it's ok to kill people (and yes, there are justifications for self-defence, whether on a personal or country-wide basis).

I pay ~USD$70/year for ad-free on Live365. It's a service I'm 98% happy with; some stations have started to "offer premium products of interest to our listeners" - I mean, if I wanted to know about organic skin care cream, I'd look it up. I really don't see the link between organic skin cream and celtic music. I pay so I don't have to listen to ads, and those stations that start advertising anything beyond CDs or digital downloads quickly lose their place in my "favourites" list.

I've even told them I'd pay more IF AND ONLY IF the extra could be sent straight to the artists and not the middle men.

There's full shutdown, there's power left on at the wall, there's hibernate with wall power left on, there's sleep. Lots of laptops come with (toshiba, for example) "sleep-and-charge" where they will supply current to USB ports while asleep. I rarely do a full shutdown on laptops or desktops, would this be enough to avoid the problem?

Or would there need to be a BIOS feature to ensure current supply to SSDs as well as USB ports?

Well, yes, even the sun will run out one day - but I hope we as a species will have taken appropriate steps well before that happens.

Seriously, yes, even fissile material is finite, but it's a step in the right direction.

I use lead-acid batteries, 1320ah of them, and I'm off-grid, so I don't know very much about grid-tie systems and the issues they raise. I'm just saying it's possible to live with batteries, and there are even some advantages. They do need periodic replacement (every 8-9 years in my case), but much of it is recycleable, so it isn't just dumped in a landfill. I believe the price of lead in the last few years makes it much more attractive to recycle lead-acid batteries.

Not sure I understood you - did you mean that $13K is roughly equivalent to your conventional electricity bills over the lifespan of a Tesla battery?

It's not just about cost, either upfront or total costs over the lifespan of panels/batteries/whatever.

You could even step back from the issues about pollution, CO2, global climate change, and look at it this way:

Fossil fuels are a FINITE resource. Even coal will run out, and eventually oil and then coal will become very expensive to extract. Doesn't it make sense to take steps to transition to nuclear and renewable energy sources while conventional fossil fuels are cheap?

We should build nuclear stations with the very best and safest technology - they can handle the large-scale demands of industry, and be a backup for domestic baseloads. It's possible to supply great gobs of electrical energy via PV when the sun is shining - we have to manage that energy, sure, and it's going to cost more than we already pay, but with smart enough controllers, your domestic battery will supply you with a reduced but adequate supply during grid outages. Wouldn't it be great to have lights and refrigeration when the grid goes down? Put it another way: when the grid goes down, sometimes it's for long enough that the contents of your refrigerator and freezer have to be dumped. How much does that cost to replace, and how many times would it need to happen to make a $13K battery worth the cost? Doesn't have to match $13K in actual foodstuffs - what about the convenience factor?

Even simpler - point a 2K camera at a 4K screen. The result will be good enough for most people, and will quickly become popular on torrent sites.

Yep - copyright can only be owned by a human - not a corporation or a government. A human can licence reproduction of his/her works to another human for a period of time NOT TO EXCEED the lifespan of the creator. Might need to to have a catch-all there to cope with early death - see Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, etc. Perhaps the copyright will expire at the time of expected human lifespan at the time of the work's creation. But then the creator might live longer than that. Well, the licence to reproduce is for the lifespan of the creator, so birthdate+expected lifespan years, or the death of the creator, whichever happens later. But then that tends to discriminate in favour of creators from countries/races with longer expected lifespans - bad luck for Australian aboriginal artists.

It's complicated, isn't it? I suspect that's what drives the somewhat more simple "x years" or "creator's death plus x years" formulas. Fairer (or least unfair) for everyone, except that the value of 'X' can easily be extended with enough lobbying $$$.

I think the only way to pull back the influence of the "industry" and their lobbying $$$ is strenuous and sustained pressure on politicians. "If you vote for another copyright extension, I will not vote for you".

Now you've got me wondering just what one would do (have done?) before fucking christ.

Genuflect? Give the kiss of peace? (Oh, baby....) Take your clothes off, at least. A glass of wine, a couple of figs dipped in honey to set the mood.

What would mary magdalene have done BFC?

Sounds very similar to my own situation 10 years ago.

ArcGIS, while expensive, produced useful output, even to the point of other councils licencing our work.

Along comes a new IT Manager (my direct superior). Wanted to know why we were using BSD and not Windows for our internet-facing servers. Seriously, his question was "What's BSD?". He didn't trust anything without a gui, and was deeply suspicious of the Unix server running ArcGIS.

Yep. Imagine what Paramount would pay for that.

IF, of course, the IP lawyers could be kept on a leash, and not try to seek damages for associating ST with NASA.

Of course, NASA could triple its budget by renting the uniform out at comic cons.

Solar PV generates DC, which gets inverted to AC. Cheap inverters generate square-wave AC, less cheap inverters generate stepped or modified square wave AC, and even less cheap inverters synthesize sine-wave AC, just like you're supposed to get from the grid. What I've seen on an oscilloscope of the output from my "sine-wave" inverter looks more like a *lot* of tiny steps, but it looks more like a sine wave than stepped square wave inverter output.

Not that you're allowed to attach a square wave inverter to the grid here - it's got to match phase to begin with, and disconnect when it detects the grid has gone down.

From 0% in heavy rain, to ~10% under heavy cloud with no rain, to ~50% whenever a single cloud crosses the sun - so it's really too variable to make broad statements. There's some historical data available - my own charge controller keeps 30 days of data, and if I could be arsed, I'd regularly download it to a spreadsheet - that way I'd have years of daily datapoints, so detailed reports are do-able and could be correlated with daily weather observations, I just haven't bothered.