Just to clarify I don't actually think that government is an evil. Nor that people are stupid in general.

Did you even read the whole conversation or just the last post? I was just going for the same level of generalization as GGP. Point is it's silly to expect politicians to act fairly on this issue: I'd rather trust the "stupid" people than the "evil" government.

Yes, but they can't really be expected to apply such a policy fairly. You probably need a coalition of some sort between senators who are outraged (or respond to their constituents' outrage), those who support the policy because it helps their foreign policy agenda and those who just want to help out the competition.

So by it's very nature a consumer boycott should be more fair and tougher to dismiss.

But government is evil.

Mods, Slashdot does not have a +1 agree moderation. Parent doesn't attempt to seriously address even the most obvious objection to his philosophy. I guess it's interesting that some people can't make the distinction between a fact and their own opinion, but that too is not what +1 interesting was intended for.

That's backwards. Life would have been better because he'd be out sooner.

So it's not about freedom or democracy just good old Realpolitik? I don't hate the idea but why not let everyone decide individually if they want to boycott these companies? I'm sure Nokia does more business with consumers in the US than the government and Siemens could be hurt pretty bad if the moral outrage was strong enough.

Why would you want to do that? It seems like he didn't bother to put serious work into his book (and tried to hide the fact by not citing his sources) so it's probably a waste of time to read it. You would be doing a disservice to anyone who downloaded it from you.

Um, that's what he said. Almost all works are derivative. Hence the need to cite one's sources. It gives credit to the original author and allows the readers the better evaluate the extent of your contributions. Plagarism is simply not citing your sources. Copying paragraphs from wikipedia into your book is not plagarism. Not citing your source is. Of course if he did cite wikipedia he might have been exposed as a lazy hack. But that's much better than plagarism.

I don't know, when solar panel constructors and banks offer to install them for a monthly rate which is 80% of his electricity bill most people will listen.

It's debatable whether solar power will catch on when the effective cost is 120% or 90% of the price of electricity. But to claim that people won't switch until it costs effectively one fifth of what they currently have is pretty strange.

That's confusing enough where I can't be completely sure you are wrong.

Are you serious? 3 year payback time would be like printing money.

True, but even if the expected value equals the current price he's better off because his risk is reduced. Of course it could be that the price of electricity is expected to fall substantially but I think that's just not the case.

But if you do this kind of calculation it doesn't matter how long it takes to "break even". If he's even $1 up it's a good investment, since he could finance the whole thing by taking a loan and he'd be better off at every point in time.

Mod parent up please before the "OMG they let the asteroids kill us" folks arrive. This isn't about tracking Near Earth Objects.