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How many implementations are there out there? I've only read of one big corp trying to impose its version of the standard. When we have several, and they're all bad, then we'll talk.

A quick search turned up this,this, this, this, and this. But wait, those are more or less commercial offerings. It seems that individual states, districts, and schools are rolling their own implementations as well.

There is a reason for the disparity. During the Cold War, the US had achieved what the Soviet's promised. The book Mig Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko tells the story of a famous incident during the Cold War in which a Soviet fighter pilot, a privileged person in Soviet society, defected with his MIG-25. It is fascinating to see the US at the time (mid 1970s) through the eyes of this Soviet pilot. Below is a link to an excerpt from the book.

VIKTOR BELENKO'S VISIT TO THE SHOPPING CENTER --

Even if we had a full deceleration of surrender from the N. Korean regime, the people wouldn't listen to America. Too much bitterness exists from generations of brainwashing.

I'm not so sure about that. Some things that we take for granted can be pretty eye-opening, especially to a starving people.

Actually, surface tension PULLS water into a sponge. It's the exact same way that a tree sucks water up through the root system. If you look at a container with water it in, you will see a miniscus along the edges. If the tube is narrow enough, this pulls the water up and into it.

Come on slashdotters, this is grade eight science!

I guess I just can't help but reply to a highly-rated but retarded comment.

water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?

It's called Evaporation. In the United States, this concept is usually taught in 4th grade.

if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately.

70% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. Just 3% of the world's water is fresh, including all lakes, rivers, glaciers, snowpacks, etc. Thus, it's pretty unlikely that the water we're talking about will make
more than squat diddly bit of difference.

that would threaten to bring dramatic change to the fragile balance of the environment for marine life.

But not like the snapper you had for dinner last night, or the tuna sandwich you had for lunch? What about the ice-cream you ate? What happened to the turds when you flushed your toilet? Or what about the runoff from the farms that grew the food you ate, even if not seafood?

Seriously, dude. There is so much valuable information available for FREE - it might be a good idea to look up some of it before commenting.

when man plays with mother nature, we almost inevitably come out on the losing end.

Yeah. Sorta like playing with mother nature has screwed us over by providing massive increases in the amount of usable food. Like playing with mother nature has doubled our average life expectancy in just 100 years. Just like playing with mother nature has increased the per-capita wealth of even the poor by over 200% in just 30 years.

drain the swamps in new orleans, then lose 60% of the land's ability to absorb water.

But what about all the houses on that land? What, they don't count? Sure, they come at a cost. But they came. And those that live there have a better quality of life than before.

introduce pest-killing amphibians to the everglades, then they procreate without preditors and wipe out existing species.

(Ahem) It's called "evolution". Survival of the fittest. It's been happening for billions of years. Or do you happen to have a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex? See, your mammalian ancestors out-competed the mighty dinosaurs.

Sorry about the native yellow-bellied sap-frog. (or whatever) But species invade new areas, naturally, all the time.

water the deserts of nevada to make lush golf courses, then people in colorado go thirsty and firemen can't put out historically large forest fires covering hundreds of thousands of acres.

I remember reading about some newcomers to North California's central valley in the late 1800's. They described late summer nights as the "glowing of the devil" because of all the forest fires in the surrounding foothills. They were common, back then. Today, we fight those fires, and have massive bomber planes drop fire-retardant to stop the fires. By stopping the fires, trees are saved that would otherwise burn. They are logged, at a handsome profit to both the lumber companies and the local jurisdictions.

But try explaining that whole exchange to an environmentalist.

Are there environmental problems?

YES! But there were environmental problems long before we humans got involved.

PS: Properly formed sentences start with an upper case. It involves the shift key on either side of your keyboard. Try it: lower case UPPER CASE lower case UPPER CASE. It's easy!

The neat thing about your theory is that we can actually determine when this might be true. The reason is that network speeds don't creep upwards, the way hard disk space does. Networks speeds increase in large jumps when you go from one system to the next. E.g. ISDN was twice as fast as a modem, DSL twice as fast still, then fat DSL a few times that, somewhere you hit T1s and 10MB ethernet, 100MB ethernet and finally fiber to the home.

So once everyone has T3's, we can do this. Of course, by the time everyone has T3's, we'll also all be able to compress into H.264 on the fly and save a ton of bandwidth, so I would believe that we only need 10MB ethernet. So the question just becomes when we are going to have 10MB ethernet to the home.

I think a neat analogy is how some MP3 services work. Tethered services literally do stream the music over the network, and the user can barely tell the difference. It was just a matter of time before this was possible, and lo and behold we've crossed that line. So in that sense, as long as there is demand, it's only a matter of time before we can stream DVD as well.

I found this page recently, it has a listing of example file sizes for a bunch of different formats, data rates, and frame sizes/rates. I found it really useful when trying to convert a high quality source file to a certain size for the web.

My recommendation for a good cross-platform format is still MPEG-1. Will play on pretty much anything, and the quality is decent. You can get better compression with MPEG-4, but not all players can render it properly.

It really depends on the research application being used

... and still have enough left over for email.

The continent of North America has 25+ countries and territories, "each with their own government".

Maybe you should step down from your soap box for a minute and actually learn some facts about what you are ranting about, especially since you have only illustrated your blatent ignorance about the subject matter.