• Alice hires Bob to build a house and they agree to a payment of $100,000 for the service. Bob completes his work, receives his payment, and goes on his way. Fifteen years later, however, Bob decides that he deserves more money. He asks for another $100,000 - the law forces Alice to pay up. Bob keeps coming back, every few years, and extorts a new sum.
• Alice wants a house. Bob is a house builder. They hire Charlie, a lawyer, to put together a fair contract so that Bob can build a house for Alice. They eventually settle on the details, and Bob will be paid $100,000 for his services. After the house is finished, just before Alice moves in, Bob decides he deserves more money. He gets together with Charlie and rewrites the contract, extorting an additional $100,000 from Alice. Reluctantly, Alice eventually scrapes together the funds, and pays the new fee. Unfortunately, just before she takes up residence, Bob gets together with Charlie again to rewrite the contract. This time, the contract states that Bob gets the house, and Alice has to pay $10,000 per year for the next 20 years to have any chance of ever taking up residence. Frustrated but without any recourse, Alice waits patiently for the term to expire, during which time, Bob dies. Bob’s daughter DeeDee decides that she likes the house too much, so she gets together with Charlie and revises the contract yet again, tacking on an additional 40-year term to the previous contract.
• Alice hires Bob to build a house. They both hire Charlie to negotiate a fair contract. Being short of cash, Alice agrees to supply the land, while Bob supplies the parts and labor to build the actual house. In exchange, Bob gets to live in the house (or rent it out, or do whatever) for fourteen years, after which Alice takes possession. They both agree to the terms, Bob builds the house and moves in for a few years, then rents the place out for a few more, recovering his expenses. The fourteen year term is about to expire, so he asks Charlie for an extension - and gets another 14 years to live in the house. Alice is a little perturbed, but figures she’ll still get to move in eventually. Of course, Bob asks for extension after extension, and after he dies, his descendants keep getting extensions, and Alice never gets to move in.

Can anyone honestly say that Alice isn’t being screwed in these stories?

Substitute the American Public for Alice, Intellectual Property owners for Bob and his descendants, and Congress for Charlie, and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of US Copyright since 1910. Every single copyright extension has been a massive theft of value from the American public. It’s time we started getting angry about it.

• 40% ($103 million) - reserved for the tax man’s inevitable visit in a savings account. Any surplus after the visit gets dumped into the next category
• 30% ($103 million) - held until I can determine the best means of investment. With a smaller sum, it would likely start in a savings account, and then invested in index funds over the course of 6-12 months (to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging). With something this size, I’m not really sure where to begin, and would likely retain the services of a professional financial planner, at least until I have a better grasp on the magnitude of my holdings. In this specific case, I’d consider building some sort of education endowment or scholarship fund or contributing , without touching the principal.
• 10% ($26 million) - donated to a worthy charity. Specifically, I’d probably give to the Children’s Scholarship Fund, though I’d probably also consider breaking it up into smaller pieces and donating to multiple charities.
• 5% ($13 million) - invested for the long term using my current plans. In my case that means beefing up my Roth IRA and index fund portfolio
• 1% ($2.6 million) - spent on friends and family - in order, paying off any outstanding debts, financing education, providing for basic necessities, start-up capital for a small business. Specifically, right now I’d first finance my brother’s nursing education, then help my sister and her husband pay off their mortgage, then invest whatever remains in a home-automation start-up my friends and I have been working on.
• 1% ($2.6 million) - to be spent more or less on whatever want. Right now with this level of funds, I’d buy a Mini Cooper ($30k), some land in the mountains, start designing/building my dream home (a super-green 1500-2000 sq ft underground house). I’d almost certainly have plenty leftover, which would probably end up dumped into investments.

In the case of smaller windfalls (<$1000) I’d probably roll up all of the non-tax items into a single investment item.

Text messages are limited to 160 characters. Assuming a standard ASCII encoding, it takes only 1 byte to store each character - so a message is approximately 160 bytes in length. At the prices quoted above:

• $0.20 per message / 160 bytes per message = $0.00125 per byte = $1.28 per kilobyte = $1,310 per megabyte = $1,342,177 per gigabyte
• $0.01 per message / 160 bytes per message = $0.0000625 per byte = $0.06 per kilobyte = $65 per megabyte = $67,109 per gigabyte

Now let’s compare that to another great monopoly offender - Comcast. They recently announced a bandwidth cap of 250 gigabytes on their “unlimited” monthly service, which in my case costs about $50 per month. Doing the math, we get a cost of $0.20 per gigabyte. If Comcast decided to charge the text-messaging bulk rate for their service, it would cost a staggering $16 million per month!!! If Verizon et al. charged the Comcast data rate, then you could send an equally staggering 53.7 million messages for a single penny!!!

The only reason the phone companies manage to get away with this outright robbery is because few people actually take the time to figure out how exorbitant these fees really are.

Currently, there are two proposed projects on the agenda:

• Create a unified standard GAME file - this file contains all the game-relevant information. By creating a unified standard, we should be able to facilitate updating all the various card templates with the latest game information as quickly as possible after release. It will also hopefully minimize duplication of effort, since each designer need only design their templates to match the standard, and won’t have to manually enter all the game information.
• Create a program that can read the D&D Insider Character Builder’s XML output files. That information can then be used to create a customized character sheet based on any of a variety of user-designed PDF templates. The data is also used to create a custom set of printable cards using the Magic Set Editor cards.

To help track the project, I’m creating some pages on the wiki and forum.

Anyone who wants to help contribute - feel free to register or drop me an email.

In discussing a couple of the initiatives at work, my colleagues were somewhat impressed by my knowledge of the various initiatives and when I asked if they would appreciate a more thorough rundown, they all agreed it would be helpful. My basic plan is to post one issue each day, with Pros, Cons, My Bias, and My Verdict sections as best as I can present them. I will do my absolute best to make the Pro and Con sections as free from bias (mine or otherwise) as possible.

My General Biases

• Politically, I’m closest to a libertarian. That makes me socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
  • Fiscal Conservative - The government should be as small as possible to ensure the common good - i.e. low government spending, and as a result, low taxes. I tend to favor a “free market economy” and oppose governmental regulation of business unless it is necessary to correct a market failure or imbalance.
  • Socially Liberal - The government should interfere as little as possible with the private lives of its citizens. So long as something does no direct harm to a citizen, the government has no business sticking their nose in. As such, I’m strongly opposed to most “morality” based legislation which seeks to impose a tyranny of the majority.
• I tend to oppose special interest groups. The benefits allocated to special interests usually result in an increase in taxes and the size of government.
• When in doubt, I prefer the status quo. Unless there is a compelling reason to change the law, I prefer to err on the side of not changing it until such a clear reason becomes available.
• I have no affiliation with any of the groups behind the initiatives.

I’m very interested in hearing any comments anyone might be able to provide - discussion could very well reveal flaws in my logic and might change my opinion.

The article presents the hypothetical situation - if you find a watch in the forest, do you assume that it was the product of endless iteration and random chance, or do you assume it was made by a watchmaker? The only time the former is plausible is if you do not allow for the possibility of a watchmaker. Where this argument fails is that it simply presents a hypothesis, which is decidedly not the only step necessary in science.

The Scientific Method presents the following iterative sequence of steps:

1. Use your experience
2. Form a conjecture
3. Deduce a prediction from that conjecture
4. Test - run experiments both to confirm and falsify the conjecture.

If the conjecture is falsified, then you must go back to step #2 and form a new conjecture that takes into account the new information.

Intelligent Design fails as a scientific theory in two very crucial ways:

• Intelligent Design offers no predictive value. Given the theory of Intelligent Design, there is no way to make a logical prediction of how the universe works that is not already in evidence. Any prediction made by a proponent of ID is simply random guesswork.
• Intelligent Design is not falsifiable. There is no way to disprove Intelligent Design. Any evidence that is presented contrary to the theory can be hand-waved away by saying “God made it that way” - the “theory” never adapts to new information, it simply accepts any new information without any need for critical thought.

There’s also the infinite regression problem - Intelligent Design requires the axiom that a Designer exists. Taking the existence of a Designer as a hypothesis, the theory has the same problems as Intelligent Design - it provides no predictive value and is not falsifiable. In the event that unquestionable proof that Designer(s) exist is found, we’re still left with the question of how that Designer came to be, why he chose to design life, and most importantly why he chose to add so much superfluous “junk” DNA and otherwise pointless organs like the human appendix. It’s somewhat ironic that the latter can most easily be explained by assuming that the Designer was intelligent enough to realize that he could create an infinite variety of robust lifeforms using the relatively simple mechanism of genetic drift and natural selection - rather than spending billions of years hand-crafting lifeforms.

Currently, I’m hovering right around 240, so I’m looking to drop 40 pounds to a goal weight of 200. This morning, I restarted the Hacker’s Diet - a relatively simplistic diet plan based only on eating less and exercising more. I’m starting at Rung 16 of the Lifetime Ladder with the medium-term goal of reaching Rung 30 by August 1st. This morning’s effort felt pretty good, but I usually find that the first day back on an exercise routine is easier than the next few days. The first 30-day trial is focused on exercise, but I’m also planning to twitter all of my meals, with an eye to reducing my reliance on fast food and pizza. Since trying to change multiple habits simultaneously is more prone to failure, I’m not going to hold myself to a strict diet regimen until the second 30-day trial.

If you’re at all interested, you can follow my progress here and on twitter - and if you see me slipping, please give me as much harassment as you like.

All the parts arrived on Monday, and I had everything assembled and ready to install. I plug in the Vista install disc, and leave it to run overnight. After waking up, I find Vista is installed, and waiting for final configuration info - which I enter, and then start the OS. Everything runs fine for about five minutes, before the system mysteriously reboots. Figuring it was just some patch or driver install, I log back in, and about two minutes in, I get a lovely BSD, followed by a reboot. After getting back in, the troubleshooter tells me there’s an unrecoverable hardware error with either the CPU, RAM, Power Supply, or the Motherboard. I’ve gotten the occasional bad part before, so I take it at face value, and start testing the various components. Three days later, after running the most stringent testing programs running for over 16 hours each, I’ve discovered no errors, no reboots. Of course, my testing utilities all run off Linux kernels, so I’m reasonably certain there isn’t a problem with the hardware.

Still, every time I boot into Vista, I get IRQ conflicts, random graphics errors, and the repeated BSDs that Windows seems so fond of. I’m almost ready to break down and install Windows 2000 - since it served me so well for so many years - I actually managed to achieve a maximum uptime of 74 days. Of course, the video card manufacturers seem to have decided that Win2k is no longer viable, and have stopped writing drivers for that OS. If I do go that route, I’ll probably have to drop $40-$150 on a older video card, or I could finally take the Windows XP plunge I’ve managed to avoid for so many years, also at a cost of $130+.

Suffice to say, I’m not a fan of Microsoft at this moment.

First, there is no “correct” amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the concentration has varied dramatically throughout history, sometimes being many times the current value (such as during the Mesozoic Era). Using the weight of carbon dioxide is a poor metric, so I’ll use a percentage concentration value instead. Over the past 600,000 years (using a time-frame more appropriate to the evolution of our species), we can get a pretty good estimate of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere from ice core samples. Based on those results, the value has fluctuated from about 200 parts per million (ppm) to 300 ppm up until the time of the Industrial Revolution. Since that time, it has jumped nearly 100 ppm to almost 400ppm. Based on the Vostok Ice Core samples, a variation of 100ppm correlates to (but not necessarily causes) a 6-8 degree temperature change.

Your use of the hurricane example implies that humans are the primary source of energy. In truth, the sun provides virtually all of the energy driving any climate or weather. The human activity that may threaten global climate change need not be massive or focused. It need only take advantage of the effects of resonance - a small change made in the right circumstance can cause a dramatic effect. By increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere, we may slightly increase the global temperature. That small increase can perturb the normal carbon cycle - releasing greater quantities of natural CO2 from the oceans, increasing H2O (another greenhouse gas) evaporation, both of which will increase the temperature change. Those changes will in turn force other changes, eventually driving the climate to a new equilibrium when (and if) the forcing effects are either balanced or removed.

Your example on volcanism as a superior greenhouse producer is flawed in several points:

First, your use of Mount Pinatubo as a “typical” eruption is far from accurate. Pinatubo rated a 6 on the VEI scale - making it one of about 40 or so eruptions in the last 10,000 years. On average, we’d expect one such eruption every 250 years. Consider also that the VEI index is exponential, such that VEI 5 is only 1/10 as explosive as VEI 6. The typical “10 daily” volcanic eruptions have a VEI of 0 or 1. Therefore, your “for the cheap seats” calculation - that the volcanoes erupting daily were even 1/10th as powerful as Pinatubo - is off by several orders of magnitude. The daily eruptions are typically less than 1 millionth of Pinatubo’s power. That means that the actual daily volcanic contribution to global warming is approximately equal to about 2 hours worth of human pollution. Or, humans produce twelve times as much “pollution” as volcanoes.

If we instead use Pinatubo as the benchmark and based on historically documented eruptions, we’ve had approximately 200 VEI6-equivalent eruptions in the last 10,000 years, or one every 50 years. That would make volcanism approximately 6 times as effective at polluting as humans.

The EMA quote does mention that Pinatubo released the largest cloud of “climate-modifying” gases since Krakatoa. While the volume of aerosols is most certainly accurate, and far in excess of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. However, that statistic is misleading - it strongly implies that all the aerosols released in the eruption have greenhouse effects. It ignores the fact that only very few gases have a greenhouse effect (in that they strongly absorb infrared radiation at specific wavelengths). The vast majority of volcanic aerosols do not exhibit the greenhouse effect - I’ve seen estimates that CO2 concentration in volcanic aerosols is as low as 1%. In fact, the vast quantity of larger particulates - which act to shade the earth from insolation - dominate the relatively small effect of what few greenhouse gases are released. This is born out by worldwide temperature charts which routinely show a drop in temperature following a major volcanic eruption.

Still, let’s assume that volcanism is a significant source of atmospheric CO2 - on the order of 6 times more effective than human pollution (i.e. assuming that the entire volume of volcanic aerosols have greenhouse effects). Even at 1/6th intensity, the human contribution will have some effect on the equilibrium concentration of CO2. If the climate was “balanced” before the addition of the human effect, then that effect will serve to steadily drive the climate in that direction. It really doesn’t matter how large and dramatic the natural cycle is - human contribution represents an unbalanced variable to the equation. Imagine a scale with two 60-ton weights balanced equally - adding an extra ton to one side is going to tip the scales. If you add a ramp between the two 60-ton weights - such that the higher one pours material into the lower, representing the forcing effects in the carbon cycle - you may not even need a full ton, it’s possible a single pound difference may start the transfer, resulting in a dramatic imbalance.

Now, there is still plenty of debate on exactly how the climbing CO2 concentrations will relate to climate change. The effect will definitely increase global temperatures, but how much? Is it dominated by other effects (such as increased cloud cover)? While the Kyoto Protocol does recommend the prudent step of limiting CO2 emissions, it’s effect is not uniformly applied to the global community. Kyoto specifically does not address the potential dangers of the Chinese Industrial Revolution - the world’s largest population using heavily CO2-emitting technologies that have long been replaced in first-world countries. It’s probably not the time for dramatic or draconian measures to restrict CO2 emission, unless they are applied universally to the entire planet. Even if we were to stop all anthropogenic emissions today, some estimate it would take 60-100 years before CO2 concentrations return to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. If existing CO2 concentrations are going to cause a change, there is little (if anything) we can do about it. I’ll also agree that it’s possible that conditions in some areas will improve with climate change, but I strongly suspect that such changes will be balanced by deterioration in other areas, resulting in a zero-sum game. Furthermore, the primary reason to restrict CO2 emissions is to prevent the change in climate - if that change is already inevitable, we are likely better off investing our resources in minimizing the effects of that change than trying to prevent it in the first place.

Of course, the primary effects of global climate change will be felt by those without sufficient resources to cope with the change (mostly Third World countries). Given that those primarily responsible for the change are First World nations, the entire process of climate change is yet another massive transfer of wealth from the impoverished nations of the world to the wealthy. Thus it doesn’t seem particularly fair (at least to me).

Finally, I find it hard to take seriously the scientific opinion of a man who says 2.97E12 has no common English word for it. I’ve personally heard the word “trillion” bandied about in fairly pedestrian conversation. If he doesn’t know it, that casts some serious doubt on his scientific credentials. I’d especially call into question his “junk science” statement. I’ve read a several of the scientific papers in support of (and in opposition to) Global Warming - all of them were far more scientific in their presentation than his article.