and approx. 5 popes per square mile!

US of course, Greece, Germany, Jamaica, Canada, and Mexico.

In the US, I've been to every state on my motorcycle except Hawaii. I understand I can ship my bike to Hawaii but I'd rather just rent a bike like I did in Greece.

I've also ridden my bike to all the Canadian Provinces and Territories except Nunavut.

I want to get a smaller BMW and take a ride in South America but I want to learn some Spanish before making the attempt.

[John]

I have trouble supporting someone who thinks I should be punished for doing what I want with my work. ""If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs." RMS

From de Icaza's article: 'To him, ridiculous statements like Linus "does not believe in Freedom" are somewhat normal [1].'

Isn't that true, though? I always thought Linus came down heavily on the side of open source as an engineering philosophy and against the ideological side of software freedom? I'd have expected Linus to agree with the sentiment RMS is expressing, to be honest, as I believe it matches his real world stance.

RMS is obnoxious in the things he says or the way he says them sometimes. He also frequently comes across as patronizing in the way he states his beliefs as if they are Truth. But at least the guy is pretty consistent. I'm not sure having a hardliner such as him is as helpful now as it was was but you can at least rely on him to take a fairly consistent take and articulate his principles well, even if you don't believe in them. I respect him, even though he's maddening sometimes.

The point here is that the works were public domain; Walking in and reproducing them only incurs the cost (to the customer) of paying for the reproduction, i.e. toner, electricity, copier maintenance, paper. That's it.

What this script did was bypass the arbitrary $0.08 "reproduction fee" for accessing these public domain works, and make them available free of charge (as they are by signing up to the library service, as I understand it).

AFAIK, he used a script to automate the procedure of accessing each page, and uploaded it elsewhere. Doing it on a computer which wasn't his was dumb, but hardly a big issue in the context.

$1.5m "value" is just idiotic. On the internet, reproduction costs decrease to zero in an insignificant amount of time.

I can't say that's happened to me in years and years... Maybe time to brush up on your typing skills? :) It's hardly a reason to lambast such a useful key.

Probably not. Like I said, Kodak doesn't seem to have suffered greatly from withdrawing themselves from the BBB, and that's an even more serious taint on their trustworthiness IMHO than not being USB-IF certified. Especially compared to also knowing why Palm is losing USB-IF certification: not because of defects or unreliability, but because of some silly rules which they broke in order to make their products work better. (Hypothetically assuming Palm loses their USB-IF certification over this, I mean.)

What an interesting conclusion especially since it is completely contrary to the current state. In the hand held computer market Apple encourages anyone and everyone to write applications for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Their only restrictions are related to digital signing (a reasonable restriction) and the use of the App store (a less reasonable restriction). By contrast Microsoft won't allow any 3rd party applications for their new Zune (their iPod Touch competitor) except from a few select partners.

In the personal computer market both Apple and Microsoft encourage any and all developers to write applications for their respective platforms. Apple's platform includes far more open source pieces than Microsoft's. For example, Mac OS X is built on BSD and Safari on Webkit and Apple makes considerable contributions to the open source community. Microsoft, not so much.

So what evidence led you to your conclusion?

It's all a matter of timing.

We know at some point petroleum will become impractical to support the energy needs of civilization as we know it. In 1979, people thought the end was nigh, when in fact it was just an oil cartel flexing its muscle. But the ability of the cartel to do this was a harbinger of peak oil. The US was no longer anywhere near energy self-sufficient. The same thing happened in 2008, suddenly the end was nigh. It wasn't.

Let me draw a closer analogy. During the Dot Com boom, lots of individuals made money, but very, very few web enterprises did. VCs were pouring money into startups with nothing more than a name and a PowerPoint presentation -- not a real business plan. There wasn't time. Money had to be spent. Why? Because everyone knew web commerce was coming. And they were right, web commerce was coming. Yet the vast majority of money invested in those days was wasted, at least from the perspective that investments should provide returns to the investors. In part it was classic bubble behavior, but even *solid* business plans had a huge element of uncertainty. If the business plan was timed *right*, it would be like buying Microsoft in 1986.

Some day, if the conditions are right, one of these photovoltaic "breakthroughs" may take the world by storm. The chance of any single "breakthrough" doing it is vanishingly small, but the chance of *some* "breakthrough" doing it is substantial. It has to be the right development at the right time.

There are basically three avenues I can imagine working:

(1) Really cheap cells. If it works and can be produced commercially, this is an almost certain winner, because there are many places we can use power and are throwing away photons. Probably won't change the world if it is really inefficient, because *other* costs around installation will limit success.

(2) Incrementally better cells. If it works with given production infrastructure and doesn't have any significant drawbacks, a nearly certain winner that will expand the utility of photovoltaics to applications that are currently marginal. Certainly not a big winner in the short term, but a step forward for the tortoise in the race.

(3) Radically more efficient cells. Least likely to succeed, IMHO. The best cells on the market are about 23% efficient; given thermodynamic limits there isn't a *great* deal of room for improvement. Super-efficient cells will probably have niche applications, but any "breakthrough" in this area needs to have the proviso "and costs about the same to produce as current photovoltaics" before it's worth sitting up and taking notice of.