As I said, 46% compared to 5% efficiency allows a 9x - 90% - loss in transmission, missing coverage, broken panels, etc. Present commercial cells are 30% effective total, so that would give us 6x rather than 9x. The present normal transmission loss is about 6.6%, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission), so that would also have to be taken out; that leaves us with a 5.6 loss factor inside the production facility. 5x seems possible (we'll only get to cover 1/3 or so of the ground, and there's some other losses); however, you're arguing another 50x loss.

For the other approach I described, powerplan-to-wheel efficiency for high pressure hydrogen is (as noted above) estimated at 22% efficiency; and the powerplant in this case is a heat source, which we can reproduce with mirrors. If we assume there's *no* loss involved as soon as the hydrogen has reached the car (which would the worst case for my computation), we can replace the car with a 60% efficient turbine, to get 13.2% efficiency. After transmission loss of 6.6%, this gives us 12.3% efficency (rounding down), leaving us a failure/non-coverage/etc rate of ~2.5 to hit 5%.

You are claiming that we will need a miracle to end up at .1%. This is over 120x losses compared to hydrogen efficiency with transmission, and 280x losses compared to solar cell efficiency with transmission. If you want to convince me, you have to point at likely sources for those big factors. Saying "we'll need a miracle" is just a random claim by a random dude on the Internet; it should not convince me (or anybody) of anything.

GP said 5% effective. Supposedly, the best capture systems of today have an efficiency of around 46%. The gap from 46% to 5% allows a 9x loss in transmission. If we get into hydrogen efficiency, the efficiency section of the fuel cell page on wikipedia indicate that the power-plant-to-wheel efficiency of a high pressure hydrogen system is around 22%. This means that at 5% efficiency, there's left a 4x loss possible in the 5% efficiency above - which should plenty cover e.g. capturing power with power cells and moving it to heat something locally (though in that case a mirror may be more efficient).

You raw materials point may be well taken; I've not looked into that at all.

(A) It's a very small amount of energy overall, (B) when we use energy it doesn't cause cooling; the energy is transformed to heat and released by our use.

I'll meet you halfway: It's both fraud and theft. The fraud happened when they sold it (and turned into fraud with the removal), and the theft happens with the removal.

Though it is hard to say if it would meet the common law definition of either fraud (it miss the "the speaker's knowledge of the fact being false" part of the fraud test), it is in my opinion both morally fraud and morally theft (removal of something that had been sold to another).

As for the theft: Even for people not using OtherOS, value gets stolen. The overall value of a PS3 goes down when OtherOS is removed - it means that the resale value to supercomputers based on PS3s is gone, and the ability to repurpose an old PS3 as a media player gets worse.

Actually, that means that this even affects the people that have slim PS3s: Less "fat" PS3s get repurposed, which means a glut of PS3s in the market, which means decreased value of the used slim PS3s. That connection does not see fraudulent/immoral, though - you'd have a similar effect of e.g. MS lowering the prices on the XBox360.

Well, I personally don't accept Sony stealing from their customers *even though this time that customer wasn't me*.

Sony first advertised OtherOS (combined with the ability to play new games and the ability to get on PSN) and then removed this.

Theft.

I don't voluntarily give money to thieves, even if they so far haven't stolen from me.

So I've boycotted Sony, and they can say bye bye to the $1000+ per year I used to spend with them.

Whether "lots of people" are happy with them is immaterial - I was happy with what they delivered, until they started stealing from people.

Everything follows a least resistance path; it's just a question of what is least resistance to the individual.

Anyway, a gene "for religion" or "against religion" don't have to deal with gullibility at all. Let me create an example. Assume you have

• A group where there some amount of church attendance, but not 100%, so there's some individuals that can reasonably vary their church attendance
• That there's some pro-religious effect of attending church - either the sermons to some degree work, or the social environment around it to some degree foster religious beliefs
• That church involve sitting to listen to sermons

Under these assumptions, a gene that makes sitting less comfortable is going to be an atheism gene. The gene could make you itchy, or it could make you sensitive to sitting on hard benches, or just make you restless. Any of these would be an atheism gene - the phenotype of a gene for not liking to sit would also express itself as atheism. Conversely, a gene that make it more comfortable to sit (say, creating more padding in the bearer's behind) would make the bearer of the gene more likely to be religious.

Assuming there's no genes that correlate to the likelihood of being religious seems odd to me. There's so many, many ways they can correlate - assuming there's no correlation seems odd.

They're technically handled extremely differently; the code for the main OS is directly edited and maintained in a single consistent source tree and build system, while the ports are just extracted, patched, and built using their own individual build system.

There's a slightly blurry line about some things in contrib vs ports; occasionally, things are moved to ports or moved from ports to contrib, and the code for contrib usually isn't edited that much, to facilitate updates. It could be argued that that code should go in ports and there should be "mandatory ports" rather than contrib.

I used to be an active committer in FreeBSD; I've never seen anybody say anything about using this to argue better security. All discussion about it has been about what's convenient in terms of what we do with code (and it being convenient to have a defined base system so we can deliver a consistent system).

There's a Porter's handbook. There's a port manager team to clamp down on it, and before there was a port manager team there definitively Satoshi Asami (or before that Jordan Hubbard) to block bad changes.

Is there a particular port or set of ports you've had problems with? In general, I've found that a polite mail to the maintainer will take care of things - but maintainers clearly aren't perfect, and sometimes it's been necessary to bring technical points up for discussion in the mailing lists (or, if it's heated before it gets to that point, take it up in private with the port management team.)

Eivind.

Let me start with your core argument.

That is immaterial. Please read up on and understand what a bait and switch is before you say anything about it.

Searching Google for "definition bait and switch" will give you some sort of reasonable answers; the first real result had a definition that should make this understandable.

Look at the first definition from Google after searching for "define bait and switch".

PS3 was sold with advertising for four different features (and more):

• (Explicitly) Ability to run OtherOS - was advertised even after the feature was removed.
• (Explicitly) Ability to use online services - still advertised at http://us.playstation.com/features/p
• Ability to play games as they came out and keep compatibility - still advertised at http://us.playstation.com/features/ps_ps3_softwareupdates.html
• Ability to play BluRays (including new BluRays) - still advertised at http://us.playstation.com/features/ps_ps3_bluray.html

Then Sony, unilaterally, said "You have to choose between either feature 1, OtherOS, or all the other features. You can't have both. If you choose to have the rest, you lose OtherOS permanently."

This was bait and switch. The bait was having all the features, advertised. The switch was removing it.

In (A) Ability to re-sell based on the value of OtherOS. Ability to use OtherOS yourself or (B) Ability to play online, play new games, and play new BluRays, either (A) or (B) was taken, depending on user choice.

OtherOS e.g. gives PS3 extra permanent value as a high quality media box.

I don't see the value in turning up in court in the circumstances, but I may see where you're coming from - something about getting some kind of "true judgement" of the situation?

My take on it is that not turning up in court would in general be considered a technical admission of guilt. There's no way to force a realistic non-technical judgement of guilt - somebody could choose to just go into court and say "While I do not admit to the charges, I refuse to spend the time and money to argue against them. I'll just pay the fine." With this, the non-technical (moral) judgement of guilt often wouldn't be present. Making it illegal to not mount a vigorous defense seems an unrealistic way of handling it, too.

I'm confused.

Why does anything beyond the maximum issuable fine seem reasonable?

As far as I can understand, if neither he nor his lawyer is present, he would end up getting the maximum fine. The bond is there to guarantee for him taking his punishment. If the bond is the same as the maximum punishment, then that punishment is perfectly guaranteed (they can just take the bond and he'll be punished).

Is there some other factor that should be taken into consideration that I'm missing?

Eivind.

Unfortunately, being a doctor isn't enough to learn how to judge religion. I think you presume too much of yourself if you proclaim the existence of miracles without being reasonably qualified in the relevant aspects of most of the below:

• Psychology, to understand how basic beliefs are formed and when they are rational and irrational
• Evolution, to understand what's the chance of features occurring naturally
• Statistics/maths, to understand what's the chance of features occurring naturally
• "Evolution" of beliefs (meme theory) in order to understand some of what happens with religions over time
• Persuasion/influence, to see what happens when there's direct attempts at influencing beliefs
• Social systems and cult forming, to understand how people get trapped in bad beliefs (so you can get some idea of whether this is a primary effect of religion)
• Belief inheritance - which beliefs come from our parents, and how? When are these rational?
• Hypnosis and stage magic, in order to see what happens in religious ceremonies and whether the effects people experience can be done in other ways
• Meditation, same
• Hallucinogens and their influence on brain chemistry, and how these experiences compare to "normal" religious experiences
• History of religions (if you want to be religious, you have to understand both the origin of your religion and other religions, in order to do a reasonable comparison)
• Computer Science, particularly AI, in order to understand the functioning of neural networks and natural selection on the practical level
• Physical brain systems, including how hormones and neurotransmitters operate, and the chemical cascades of the body and cells (as a medical chemist, I assume you know this part well)
• The elephant in the room: Why are there thousands of incompatible religious belief systems and why do you disbelieve most of them?

... and that's probably not all.

Eivind.

In Norway, juries are selected from a qualified pool - which means they tend to be educated and reasonably levelheaded. While certainly not perfect (there's wrong judgements there as everywhere), the system seems to work reasonably well.

For me, "space" has the advantage as an explanation that it can have much more parallelism and more time. Though I'm not sure that more is needed - even on earth, we get a lot of both.

I have less hope for that than you. Using libraries (modules/frameworks/whatever) written for another language isn't usually as nice as using something that's native. There's different conventions, and there's usually features in each language that makes for an improved experience - for that language.

For instance, in Ruby, I'd expect an API to actively use blocks (continuations) for resource tracking, and a DSL based on symbols and blocks would be common. Doing this in Python or Perl would be weird.

In Python, I'd expect docstrings, and I'd expect exceptions, and the use of the standard module system, with one module per file, and the need to use import to get at the right constants etc.

In Perl, I'd expect perldoc. I'd not expect exceptions, as that's not really well supported (at least in perl 5). And I'd expect there to be distinctions between references and 'real values'.

Overall, I think that anything that's written in one language and automatically accessed from another language will interface clumsily. And if you have to write an abstraction layer to make it work, you often might as well have a native module without the quirks.

Eivind.

3) So you have backups taken care of.
4) So you don't have to install software
5) So your machines are interchangeable. I love not having to care if I use my desktop or laptop.
6) So you can wipe your machines and things are still the same
7) "On the move" includes going from the bedroom to the living room

and for ChromeOS: So you can log in anywhere and still have your environment.

To me, the question is more one of "Why don't have everything in the cloud?"

The reasons I see are
(A) You don't trust your (potential) cloud provider.
(B) Too little bandwidth
(C) Too high latency
(D) The cloud apps for what you want aren't there yet
(E) The cloud apps are somehow too expensive
(F) You like to tinker

I can certainly respect all of these; but pretending the advantages don't exist seems narrowminded.