The Blog of Harald

“An article on sofware theft by Nick Bradbury”:http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/01/on_piracy.html prompted several random thoughts, that are only loosely related (and don’t qualify as a counter-argument :-). (He’s since posted “an update”:http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/01/on_piracy_part_.html).

Nick Bradbury has a point: theft is theft. Compare this to the “but Dad, you steal satellite TV” ads running right now.

however:

To unfairly pick on one example: TopStyle sells for $80. While it looks like a very useful piece of software, for me personally, it’s not possible to justify spending $80(US) on software for personal / hobby use. To compare, my server hardware only cost me $300 (CDN, new). If I were doing web design and programming for a living, it would be a different story. (btw, I’ve never even downloaded the trial version, although I’ve tried FeedDemon a couple of times).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against paying for software; I use several other small products (that I’ve paid for :-), because I could justify the expense: HanDBase, Desktop To Go, Nelson Email Organizer (to name a few).

So then I started thinking about books. I know many successful book authors. I’m pretty sure I don’t know any who make a living from writing. The market has settled into an equilibrium where hardcovers are expensive, but few people buy them; mass-market paperbacks are cheap; $10 (CDN) or so.

Software is expensive (compared to books), particularly software that takes approximately the same amount of effort (an average novel is between six months and a year of full-time writing and editing). Authors get very little of that $10 book price; shareware authors in particular get all of it (minus transaction costs, which are small in comparison).

There is a strong lending economy in books; one person will purchase a book and then lend it to a couple of their friends. (This borrowing economy is truer of the more expensive DVDs; see an earlier weblog entry :-). There’s no way to lend software to someone (without violating EULAs). Granted, it’s hard to “lend” software, because of the perfect copying problem…

So those were my thoughts. I know it’s not as cut and dried as “make software cheaper and people won’t steal it”; the issue is more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth thinking about the current pricing and usage models for software, and how they could (should?) change…

In SciScoop || The International Space Station Is Running Out Of Gas, we read that the ISS has experienced a minor air pressure drop (11 mm of mercury, or the equivalent of going from sea level to about 300 ft above (Toronto is about 300 ft above sea level, if I recall correctly).

How does one go about finding a slow leak from the space station? You can’t immerse the whole thing in water and look for bubbles…

bq. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

bq. — General Herman Goering, President of German Reichstag and Nazi Party

(via “Reid”:http://rae.tnir.org/archives/2004_01.html#000446)

My friends and I have been getting DVD players and DVDs. We’ve been talking for a while about building a database at CFRQ to list the DVDs each of us own, and to keep track of lending. The discussion came up again last night over cards, so I did a bit of digging…

As per normal, someone else not only had this idea, but wrote the software. The Open Media Lending Database is a PHP + MySQL solution to the problem that is pretty sophisticated. It supports multiple “media” types: DVD, VHS, CD, Games, Books, etc.. You can add data by crawling IMDB and Amazon.com. It supports multiple users. There are some features that we don’t need, but overall it looks like it will be very useful.

So I installed it :-)

HoustonChronicle.com – Bird deaths causing concern about true value of wind farm

The wind turbine farm in Altamont Pass, CA has killed approximately 22,000 birds over its 20 year lifetime, so two environmental groups want the operator permits for the farm revoked.

Let’s look at these numbers, shall we? 22,000 birds over 7000 turbines is just over 3 birds / turbine, and 0.157… birds/turbine/year. Wow, are those things safe!

The article quotes someone saying that this is “a terrestrial Exxon Valdez every year”. The Exxon Valdez disaster killed an estimated 250,000 birds, including 250 bald eagles. If you _only_ count the bald eagles, I suppose you can force the statistic…

On the other hand:

bq. many more birds are killed annually in collisions with vehicles (60 million), window panes (98 million) and communication towers (4 million) than die nationwide in wind turbines (10,000 to 40,000).

bq. Even the common household cat […] is responsible for more bird deaths than turbines.

None of this takes into account the birds that would have been killed by the pollution generated by a non-wind powerplant producing the same power.

In conclusion: what are these people smoking?

Oh brother. (Or is that Big Brother?) The FBI has “issued an alert against almanac carriers”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=5&u=/ap/20031230/ap_on_re_us/fbi_almanacs

bq. The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.

I guess that means tourists with Rand-McNally road atlases and cameras should be pulled over too.

The nicest thing that can be said about this directive is that it is pointless; the net is too wide. There are nastier things I could say…

(via “Perverse Access Memory”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/005015.html)

“They’re poisoning our precious bodily fluids”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=624&e=2&u=/ap/20031227/ap_on_sc/human_pollution_3

bq. In March, California researchers reported that San Francisco-area women have three to 10 times as much chemical flame retardant in their breast tissue as European or Japanese women.

bq. Indiana University researchers reported at the same time that levels in Indiana and California women and infants were 20 times higher than those in Sweden and Norway, which recently banned flame retardant.

bq. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news – web sites) earlier this year released data from 2,500 volunteers tested for 116 pollutants and found such chemicals as mercury, uranium and cotinine, a chemical broken down from nicotine.

Naturally the jury’s out on the effects of this crap in our bodies. I can’t see how _anyone_ could claim that this stuff isn’t bad for us, but they’re trying anyway…

bq. “Everyone’s exposed to substances and there’s no evidence that the low levels people are exposed to are harming anybody,” said Steven Milloy, author of “Junk Science Judo: Self Defense Against Health Scares and Scams.” “It’s a waste of time and money that only serves to scare people.”

bq. Milloy noted that despite all the chemicals, the overall U.S. population is living longer and healthier.

I’d like to see those statistics, since the obesity crowd is currently claiming the opposite!

In a move that is eerily familiar, it looks like the USDA is more interested in convincing people that US beef is safe than it is in actually making it safe, according to “United Press International: USDA refused to release mad cow records”:http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20031223-103657-3424r

And naturally, they’re still “blaming Canada”:http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.asp?docID=516712 .

Maybe it really is time to stop eating hamburger, or to be truly safe, all beef. That would suck, but then so would variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease…

There are some interesting tidbits in the comments on this plastic article: Plastic: Is The Kyoto Protocol Melting?

Probably worth wading through the chaff. At least the signal to noise ratio is better than on slashdot…

Interesting. According to “an article in The Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1108853,00.html, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface has decreased by 10% over the last three decades.

bq. “Unlike many of the other symptoms of Global Warming, the evidence for Global Dimming is quite clear: there has been a marked and quantifiable decrease in solar radiation striking the earth every year since records have been kept, there have also been tests on the evaporation rate of water in metal pans and the Dutch (much of whose specialized farming is done in greenhouses) have noticed a definate decrease in their productivity.

The ties to global warming are interesting. The sun’s output has not dropped over those decades, so the missing radiation has to be going somewhere. “Recent NASA studies”:http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/stories/20030513/ have shown that atmospheric soot is a major source of climate change and potentially related to global warming. If atmospheric soot is absorbing sunlight (and converting it to heat), that could tie Global Dimming and Global Warming to each other.

Oh, and incidentally, drive another nail into the Kyoto coffin, since Kyoto is focusing on CO2 emissions. Much as I hate to admit it, CO2’s connection to global warming is still relatively tenuous…

(via “Plastic: Goodbye, Sun”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/12/21/07534647)

“The Fact: It is impossible to fold any piece of paper no matter how big, small, thin or thick more than eight times.”:http://educ.queensu.ca/~fmc/june2002/PaperFact.htm

Well, “Britney has proven them wrong”:http://www.osb.net/Pomona/12times.htm” …

I never did get my christmas tree ornament reflection picture. Michaéla got some good ones, though; I may post a couple later.

In the meantime, here is a _really good_ “ornament reflection”:http://www.meccapixel.com/archives/000053.php for you to enjoy…

h3. Before

!http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/files/before.jpg!

h3. After

!http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/files/after.jpg!

Hey, “DynDNS.org”:http://www.dyndns.org/ has added some cool new for-pay services since I last looked. Of particular interest to me, now that I’ve lost two of my three free server locations, is the Secondary DNS service. $14.95 per zone annual fee is pretty reasonable…

Wow, these sound appealling… “Carb-counting bagels”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/12/22/bagels … not!

bq. if I were to eat my daily sandwich on a “carb-counting” bagel instead of a regular bagel, and otherwise did not change my daily food consumption in any way, after three months I would lose one pound and kill myself.

Besides, you have to love someone who quotes Sandra Boynton!

Seen on “Not What I Expected”:http://www.plaidworks.com/lsefton/blog/001078.html:

bq. no, I really am on vacation

bq. And if you’re in high tech, that sometimes means that you’re working from 1600km down the road, rather than at work.

Well, about 20 km in my case. I got a phone call from the customer support manager on Monday morning, the first day of my vacation. Fortunately a relatively easy fix; most of the time was spent downloading source code over the VPN. I’m amused more than anything… :-)

We put the christmas tree up today. I was trying to capture my reflection in one of the ornaments, but couldn’t get the right combination of my position, camera position, ornament position. And the kids were “helping”, and then the camera batteries died… &ltgrin>.

I’ll try again tomorrow…

I’ve picked up a few photoblogs that I read regularly, presumably because I find them interesting :-).

* “Sensitive Light”:http://www.sensitivelight.com/blog/
* “86.net”:http://www.eightysix.net/
* “extrospection”:http://www.extrospection.com/ – Anders Jacobsen
* “meccapixel”:http://www.meccapixel.com/
* “Satan’s Laundromat”:http://www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/
* “shutterbug”:http://sh1ft.org/shutterbug/
* “[daily dose of imagery]”:http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/

Then there are weblogs that regularly contain photos, like “blatherings”:http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/, “ongoing”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/, and Tonya’s excellent “notebook”:http://www.adventurejournalist.com/notebook/. “Kasia”:http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/ doesn’t have a photoblog, but does have a “large collection”:http://www.unix-girl.com/gallery/albums.php of photographs…

Enjoy…

Will, especially when you combine “kites, kiteboards, and puddles”:http://www.sensitivelight.com/blog/archives/000339.html …

Inspired by “Ned Batchelder”:http://www.nedbatchelder.com/’s “How to make business card cubes”:http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/cardcube.html, I present:

Update 2007-01-30: Ned Batchelder has created “a Tabblo showing the constructions steps”:http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/shared/12817/w3a6qh48kegf1td ; check it out.