I have to agree, I wouldn't be surprised if we are only getting part of the story. It wouldn't really make sense for Google to give someone the power to delete any video they saw fit, and obviously that's not how its being used seeing as this is the first mention we have heard of this secret deal. It seems more likely that they gave UMG delete privileges on the grounds that they only be used on things they have copyrighted. Some mindless office drone at UMG made the mistake of deleting it and Google didn't catch it in time to restore it.
Google has learned that creating a quality product without being sued is not an easy task and sometimes you have to shake hands and play nice with other corporations. There are groups of people who flag videos as inappropriate just because they don't like the message in it and yet no one called Google evil for giving stupid people sitting at home the ability to get videos taken down.
Computers are far more powerful and should be able to demolish consoles in performance but they don't. With all the mobile technology advancements consoles now have the oppertunity to really rival desktop performance since consoles seem to be so much more efficient in playing games. As long as the console developers compete on price the average person will likely prefer to just buy one of the three main consoles at a few hundred dollars than look through the thousands of "gaming computers" available ranging from the same price as a console to up and over a thousand dollars.
The mouse and keyboard keep many gamers on the computer but developers could easily start supporting mouse and keyboard for consoles. At this point it seems like if Steam wasn't around the PC game market would be anywhere near as large as it is now.
I may have not expressed my stance correctly. I do not deny climate science but we are constantly learning more. To state that everyone who believes in "Global Warming" is in agreement on what it actually implies would be very ignorant. I have heard so many (sometimes contradicting) views on what causes global warming and what it will lead to, that I have a hard time developing a stationary stance against them.
What I should have stated more clearly is that I am thankful to climate science. Smog in LA had reached unacceptable conditions and were only getting worse. Desiring to lessen the damage we are doing to our world is very admirable. That is, in moderation. We are still learning how everything that influences our climate work together, only in recent years have we noticed that things such as sun spots may have a profound influence.
I simply do not want a scientist to get carried away and do some permanent damage. If we start to see dramatic changes in climate then I will argue that we need to look in to a solution. However, recently the weather has been fairly nice where I live and I don't think we need to jump the gun to "fix" it.
Seriously I can put up with this global warming hype as long as the scientists just use it to get free grants, but they better not start getting carried away and actually screwing stuff up.
I can totally see it in 100 years when we have caused an ice age after releasing something in to the atmosphere in an attempt to stop global warming.
Lets just sit back and see what happens, I remember not to long ago when people were afraid of global cooling.
Except that here apple is clearly not out to make a new standard, this is for their products only and they have shown many times before that they don't like to share. Sony will come up with their own and apple will sue them anyway and we can add 5 new cases to the list of patents being brought to court.
I was actually referring to the PSVita, guess I should have made that clearer but I wouldn't be surprised if down they road they looked in to combining the projects.
I meant the PSVita can do most of what a smart phone can do in that it has internet, can play music, play movies, can store files, and who knows what else will be added with software updates. The 3DS on the other hand does very little besides play games. While the PSVita could be considered multimedia device that your could get a ton of use out of without ever playing a game on it the 3DS has a very focused purpose.
Stow your sarcasm, don't you realize this could mean I wouldn't have to volunteer to be designated driver ever again!
Suddenly I don't think people are giving Google enough support, if China's cars can't drive at night what good are they, I'm not gonna start getting hammered mid day cause that's the only time my car can take me home.
Facebook requiring a real name was a rare case on the internet seeing as most similar sites that had gotten big up to that point did not require real names (yes I know there are exceptions). Now during Facebook's reign there have been tons of sites that work almost exactly the same as Facebook that do not require real names and yet have failed to gain ground. Now the biggest threat that we have seen yet is google+ and it has the same name policy.
I understand that there are way to many factors to consider here for us to use these examples to answer the question posed. However, I think what can be seen is that whether a site requires real names or not may not be very important to the majority of users. While most people here on/. are very careful about what they post on the internet I think we have seen most people on social networking sites have much lower bars on what they consider private.
I think you may be taking it to an extreme, it was inevitable that powerful phones that could play game would steal some of the handheld market but I wouldn't go so far as to say it doomed all handhelds. Just as it was inevitable that netflix would steal money from cable providers, but then it became the job of cable providers to adapt (something they are doing poorly).
However, just because many of technologies have died because they failed to evolve with the times doesn't mean handheld gaming devices will, in fact Sony and Nintendo are both very aware of the changes and have each developed new strategies.
*Apple has designed a phone that can play games. Problem is the games available are nowhere near as powerful or well developed as the competition, and will have a very hard time luring real gamers away from their current devices.
*Sony move the same direction but from the opposite starting point and is creating a gaming device that can do the same functions as a smart phone. This allows gamers to still play their favorite games while being able to get rid of their smart phone, however, it will turn away people who want the their device to be for more serious applications.
*Nintendo on the other hand has taken what I think is a very smart move, while Sony and Apple head in the same direction where one inevitably has to win, Nintendo has decided to distinguish their device and go their own direction. While many would argue Nintendo is doing a poor job currently, I would like to remind people how Nintendo has come from behind and turned a silly childish idea into a huge success. Just because they released one flop doesn't mean they have met their end, many didn't really like the GB Advanced but then they release the GB Advanced SP and sales shot through the roof.
The time may come where technology advances so far that there is no reason why our handheld device doesn't have a phone in it but that time isn't now. Apple may want to claim they are winning but Nintendo would state that they aren't really competing in the same arena.
It an unfair complaint to make because it grades all game on the same scale. It not a question of are the games realistic compared to real life, its are they close enough to realistic in the world they are in. A super hero game can exist on earth but in their "world" having powers is normal and we don't complain but even still in that world there are limits to what those powers can be.
I wouldn't say so much that games like CoD is unrealistic but pushing the bounds of realism. We don't mind health regenerating because that makes the game more fun but if a person can survive a headshot from a sniper rifle that's a step to far. Real life is boring but if a game goes to far over the edge then the player cant feel immersed.
The same can be said for movies, Bruce Willis does some highly improbable stuff (never thought Id state it like that), but it is just inside the bounds of reality that most people can sit back and enjoy the movie, while many other movies push the bounds too far. It's a very careful balance that must be maintained and games that do it well are the ones that are remembered.
For a long time I was in agreement that requiring real names was pointless, against privacy, blah blah blah.... More recently however I have begun to think otherwise, these social networking sites are based around YOUR identity, that way people find you, recognize you, and identify with you. I got sick of myspace because many people where changing their names weekly, trying to incorporate as many random characters as possible. Actually finding people I knew became next to impossible, on facebook I have found people I haven't talked to in years by recognizing their name.
As stated, there isn't really anything stopping you from using a fake name, in truth the only thing it really requires is that the name you choose looks real and that you don't change it often. I'm fine with that, there are people I know who have a made up name that they use on every site, that has become the identity I know them by online, and they feel safe in the knowledge that it is separate from their offline life.
All Im really saying is that I don't see many legitimate arguments against real names, as many people have pointed out its not really enforced, especially if your name looks legitimate. More people are accidentally banned by a bunch of people getting mad at the person and flagging the profile than facebook stumbling on to your name and locking the account. On the other hand the supposed rule of you having an identity that you are in some effect standing behind is what sets these social sites apart from all the forums filled with trolls.
and myspace allowed you to change your name to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and people left in droves to facebook which has managed to keep growing at a rapid pace despite all the complaining and all the other startup sites popping up that don't require your real name. Either people secretly like using their real name or it is uncorrelated to whether a site fails or succeeds.
They make it seem so sophisticated, "It's an 'encrypted, very secure..." I bet I could have made an account and figured out where they were going. People are now willing to post where they are going to strike next, open for anyone to see, and the police want to shut it down? Lets just face it, when even the rioters tipping off police ahead of time isnt helpful enough to do anything about the riot then you need to re-evaluate your law enforcement.
For one I still have to throw some doubt here because I dont remember us landing on any meteorites lately to be making this claim as intently as the poorly written article does. Still what significance if any does this have? As others have stated, we have shown that the building blocks of life exist all throughout the universe but actual life itself still evades us. It would seem that before we trouble ourselves with the question of where the building blocks came from we should figure out how they got put together. I believe I learned fairly early on in school that working backwards through a problem was one of the easier ways of figuring it out.
Its true that as stated there are very few plot directions and in truth you don't see much variation. Where originality comes in is all the in between stuff, the jokes used, the character development, the world they are in. You may say Star Wars was just the story of King Author but King Author did not have light sabers in it. This ability to insert truly original content in to something that at its base has been done before is what sets movies apart from each other. If you really walk out of a Avatar and all you got was, "ohh that was a man vs nature narrative" then I really feel sorry that you (for lack of a better word) fail at watching movies.
I agree that they are looking at it from a business view, but just as its dumb for consumers to ignore the business point of view its dumb for the provider to ignore the consumer point of view.
I really don't know what was happening behind the scenes, maybe they really couldn't sustain themselves without this price increase. Still they could have done it better. Offer some sort of silver lining, wait till you make a deal with ESPN to stream sports, make a deal with some channels to get tv series posted at the same rate as Hulu, or just save up a bunch of movies you already got the rights to stream and post them today.
From the user point of view the price did not gradually increase to make up for costs, it doubled and they aren't getting anything new out of it. Not to mention Netflix seemed a little cocky with the announcement, they might as well have said, "Ya we know you don't like it but in the end your not going to cancel so why should we give a ****."
Exactly, I would agree that NASA needs to take a look at their management chain but part of the chain they cant do anything about. The government is constantly readjusting their budget and not following through on promised funds. The politicians make the argument that there is work that needs to be done to bring jobs back. Yet despite all these cuts I don't see them doing anything useful, all the funding just heads to the military or bailing out some big business with worse management than NASA.
Now don't get me wrong I am not an anti military guy and I am all for them receiving a large budget but not if it means cutting other important programs to the point where they can not longer function. Military has made huge strides in R&D but it takes decades for it to reach the public. NASA brings the images and information about things light years from earth right to our computers as they discover it. But the government doesn't care about that they know most people wont notice a one or two decade gap in any new information about the universe outside earth.
Its not our fault if Hollywood doesn't want to jump on, I will be happy to see their death.
There is almost no excuse why a tv show shouldn't be available almost instantly after it airs. I love Hulu and I am glad to sit through the few commercials if I am supporting the shows I like, but for the shows that take weeks to post their episodes or refuse to post them at all then if I miss it on tv I see no better option than to torrent it. Not to mention prices, sometimes I want to start a new series, but fat chance I'm going to pay $100+ for a series I'm not sure I will enjoy.
As for movies Netflix is improving but they aren't there yet with their watch instantly stuff. New movies take too long to become available and there are some movies that were barely known and have been out for years and still aren't up. RedBox is great for the price, and sometimes when me and my friends decide we want to watch a movie late at night when stores are closed grabbing a movie from one of these is faster than downloading it.
Hollywood could easily start their own online distribution, something like Netflix but instead you rent the movie for $1 for 24hr, it would cut my downloading in to a small fraction. Obviously RedBox has found a way to make a profit off low prices and Hulu and Netflix has shown the success of instant streaming. Torrents are appealing do to low cost and high availability, both could be easily beaten or at least competed by Hollywood if they were smart.
That's not really the topic being debated, obviously clean energy has to be viable to some extent, the problem is they just aren't at a point where they can replace current power generation. The problem is so many people are pushing this technology to the market so fast that they are crippling it. Rather than spending money just experimenting and building on prototypes the money is all being put in to developing a implementable version of an unfinished product.
The point of the article was that on our current path these new sources of energy will never be truly viable as a replacement. The solution is simple, for a decade just stop pushing out these new technologies and send all the money to researching them and making them even more efficient. I would like an electric car for the gas mileage but I don't want to have to stop and find a place to recharge my car constantly on road trips, some of the research in capacitors could easily solve this problem but instead the research is slowed by the marketing cost of the cars on the market right now.
Someone needs to take the stand. I don't want to sound the the "stick it to the man" guy, but these are the only companies who can really make the stand for the users. Apple tried to play nice and make deals and there were a number of labels that outright refused. The record companies while actually relatively small have one of the biggest legal bites. As this cloud stuff moves forward soon some people will virtually be storing and hosting their entire computers remotely. If these three big companies bend over now it will just open the window for all the other digital medium providers to attack the issue until cloud computing is killed all but completely.
Now some may make the argument that these companies are just being cheap an not making a stand for the users rights. That may be true but I still say indirectly this has a huge effect for me. I already have a lot of music on my own private server and I sometimes log in remotely to listen to stuff. Google is technically just providing me with a dumbed-down server hosting service. If they have a case against Google then they technically have a case against me. I don't see how they would find me but its a little ridiculous that I need to keep music I bought a secret.
I love where in the attached article it said, "The main reason Blu-Ray took off was because the adult entertainment industry chose the format over HD." When the very opposite was true, they chose HD and while everyone expected that would be the home run hit, HD failed not long after.
While I believe the adult entertainment industry is big and powerful at its core, it simply follows the trends and doesn't really set them. I think this was a perfect example where the head of the industry thought that they would throw their hat in to the ring on the side of HD but without all the people who support the industry directly behind it, there was no weight behind the decision. It is an industry that tends to be pushed to the very front of technology but it is never actually leading.
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I have to agree, I wouldn't be surprised if we are only getting part of the story. It wouldn't really make sense for Google to give someone the power to delete any video they saw fit, and obviously that's not how its being used seeing as this is the first mention we have heard of this secret deal. It seems more likely that they gave UMG delete privileges on the grounds that they only be used on things they have copyrighted. Some mindless office drone at UMG made the mistake of deleting it and Google didn't catch it in time to restore it.
Google has learned that creating a quality product without being sued is not an easy task and sometimes you have to shake hands and play nice with other corporations. There are groups of people who flag videos as inappropriate just because they don't like the message in it and yet no one called Google evil for giving stupid people sitting at home the ability to get videos taken down.
Computers are far more powerful and should be able to demolish consoles in performance but they don't. With all the mobile technology advancements consoles now have the oppertunity to really rival desktop performance since consoles seem to be so much more efficient in playing games. As long as the console developers compete on price the average person will likely prefer to just buy one of the three main consoles at a few hundred dollars than look through the thousands of "gaming computers" available ranging from the same price as a console to up and over a thousand dollars.
The mouse and keyboard keep many gamers on the computer but developers could easily start supporting mouse and keyboard for consoles. At this point it seems like if Steam wasn't around the PC game market would be anywhere near as large as it is now.
I may have not expressed my stance correctly. I do not deny climate science but we are constantly learning more. To state that everyone who believes in "Global Warming" is in agreement on what it actually implies would be very ignorant. I have heard so many (sometimes contradicting) views on what causes global warming and what it will lead to, that I have a hard time developing a stationary stance against them.
What I should have stated more clearly is that I am thankful to climate science. Smog in LA had reached unacceptable conditions and were only getting worse. Desiring to lessen the damage we are doing to our world is very admirable. That is, in moderation. We are still learning how everything that influences our climate work together, only in recent years have we noticed that things such as sun spots may have a profound influence.
I simply do not want a scientist to get carried away and do some permanent damage. If we start to see dramatic changes in climate then I will argue that we need to look in to a solution. However, recently the weather has been fairly nice where I live and I don't think we need to jump the gun to "fix" it.
Seriously I can put up with this global warming hype as long as the scientists just use it to get free grants, but they better not start getting carried away and actually screwing stuff up.
I can totally see it in 100 years when we have caused an ice age after releasing something in to the atmosphere in an attempt to stop global warming.
Lets just sit back and see what happens, I remember not to long ago when people were afraid of global cooling.
Except that here apple is clearly not out to make a new standard, this is for their products only and they have shown many times before that they don't like to share. Sony will come up with their own and apple will sue them anyway and we can add 5 new cases to the list of patents being brought to court.
I was actually referring to the PSVita, guess I should have made that clearer but I wouldn't be surprised if down they road they looked in to combining the projects.
I meant the PSVita can do most of what a smart phone can do in that it has internet, can play music, play movies, can store files, and who knows what else will be added with software updates. The 3DS on the other hand does very little besides play games. While the PSVita could be considered multimedia device that your could get a ton of use out of without ever playing a game on it the 3DS has a very focused purpose.
Stow your sarcasm, don't you realize this could mean I wouldn't have to volunteer to be designated driver ever again!
Suddenly I don't think people are giving Google enough support, if China's cars can't drive at night what good are they, I'm not gonna start getting hammered mid day cause that's the only time my car can take me home.
but where is the proof behind that?
Facebook requiring a real name was a rare case on the internet seeing as most similar sites that had gotten big up to that point did not require real names (yes I know there are exceptions). Now during Facebook's reign there have been tons of sites that work almost exactly the same as Facebook that do not require real names and yet have failed to gain ground. Now the biggest threat that we have seen yet is google+ and it has the same name policy.
I understand that there are way to many factors to consider here for us to use these examples to answer the question posed. However, I think what can be seen is that whether a site requires real names or not may not be very important to the majority of users. While most people here on /. are very careful about what they post on the internet I think we have seen most people on social networking sites have much lower bars on what they consider private.
I think you may be taking it to an extreme, it was inevitable that powerful phones that could play game would steal some of the handheld market but I wouldn't go so far as to say it doomed all handhelds. Just as it was inevitable that netflix would steal money from cable providers, but then it became the job of cable providers to adapt (something they are doing poorly).
However, just because many of technologies have died because they failed to evolve with the times doesn't mean handheld gaming devices will, in fact Sony and Nintendo are both very aware of the changes and have each developed new strategies.
*Apple has designed a phone that can play games. Problem is the games available are nowhere near as powerful or well developed as the competition, and will have a very hard time luring real gamers away from their current devices.
*Sony move the same direction but from the opposite starting point and is creating a gaming device that can do the same functions as a smart phone. This allows gamers to still play their favorite games while being able to get rid of their smart phone, however, it will turn away people who want the their device to be for more serious applications.
*Nintendo on the other hand has taken what I think is a very smart move, while Sony and Apple head in the same direction where one inevitably has to win, Nintendo has decided to distinguish their device and go their own direction. While many would argue Nintendo is doing a poor job currently, I would like to remind people how Nintendo has come from behind and turned a silly childish idea into a huge success. Just because they released one flop doesn't mean they have met their end, many didn't really like the GB Advanced but then they release the GB Advanced SP and sales shot through the roof.
The time may come where technology advances so far that there is no reason why our handheld device doesn't have a phone in it but that time isn't now. Apple may want to claim they are winning but Nintendo would state that they aren't really competing in the same arena.
It an unfair complaint to make because it grades all game on the same scale. It not a question of are the games realistic compared to real life, its are they close enough to realistic in the world they are in. A super hero game can exist on earth but in their "world" having powers is normal and we don't complain but even still in that world there are limits to what those powers can be.
I wouldn't say so much that games like CoD is unrealistic but pushing the bounds of realism. We don't mind health regenerating because that makes the game more fun but if a person can survive a headshot from a sniper rifle that's a step to far. Real life is boring but if a game goes to far over the edge then the player cant feel immersed.
The same can be said for movies, Bruce Willis does some highly improbable stuff (never thought Id state it like that), but it is just inside the bounds of reality that most people can sit back and enjoy the movie, while many other movies push the bounds too far. It's a very careful balance that must be maintained and games that do it well are the ones that are remembered.
Just because he survived doesn't give him the right to kill the English language.
For a long time I was in agreement that requiring real names was pointless, against privacy, blah blah blah.... More recently however I have begun to think otherwise, these social networking sites are based around YOUR identity, that way people find you, recognize you, and identify with you. I got sick of myspace because many people where changing their names weekly, trying to incorporate as many random characters as possible. Actually finding people I knew became next to impossible, on facebook I have found people I haven't talked to in years by recognizing their name.
As stated, there isn't really anything stopping you from using a fake name, in truth the only thing it really requires is that the name you choose looks real and that you don't change it often. I'm fine with that, there are people I know who have a made up name that they use on every site, that has become the identity I know them by online, and they feel safe in the knowledge that it is separate from their offline life.
All Im really saying is that I don't see many legitimate arguments against real names, as many people have pointed out its not really enforced, especially if your name looks legitimate. More people are accidentally banned by a bunch of people getting mad at the person and flagging the profile than facebook stumbling on to your name and locking the account. On the other hand the supposed rule of you having an identity that you are in some effect standing behind is what sets these social sites apart from all the forums filled with trolls.
and myspace allowed you to change your name to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and people left in droves to facebook which has managed to keep growing at a rapid pace despite all the complaining and all the other startup sites popping up that don't require your real name. Either people secretly like using their real name or it is uncorrelated to whether a site fails or succeeds.
They make it seem so sophisticated, "It's an 'encrypted, very secure..." I bet I could have made an account and figured out where they were going. People are now willing to post where they are going to strike next, open for anyone to see, and the police want to shut it down? Lets just face it, when even the rioters tipping off police ahead of time isnt helpful enough to do anything about the riot then you need to re-evaluate your law enforcement.
For one I still have to throw some doubt here because I dont remember us landing on any meteorites lately to be making this claim as intently as the poorly written article does. Still what significance if any does this have? As others have stated, we have shown that the building blocks of life exist all throughout the universe but actual life itself still evades us. It would seem that before we trouble ourselves with the question of where the building blocks came from we should figure out how they got put together. I believe I learned fairly early on in school that working backwards through a problem was one of the easier ways of figuring it out.
Its true that as stated there are very few plot directions and in truth you don't see much variation. Where originality comes in is all the in between stuff, the jokes used, the character development, the world they are in. You may say Star Wars was just the story of King Author but King Author did not have light sabers in it. This ability to insert truly original content in to something that at its base has been done before is what sets movies apart from each other. If you really walk out of a Avatar and all you got was, "ohh that was a man vs nature narrative" then I really feel sorry that you (for lack of a better word) fail at watching movies.
I agree that they are looking at it from a business view, but just as its dumb for consumers to ignore the business point of view its dumb for the provider to ignore the consumer point of view.
I really don't know what was happening behind the scenes, maybe they really couldn't sustain themselves without this price increase. Still they could have done it better. Offer some sort of silver lining, wait till you make a deal with ESPN to stream sports, make a deal with some channels to get tv series posted at the same rate as Hulu, or just save up a bunch of movies you already got the rights to stream and post them today.
From the user point of view the price did not gradually increase to make up for costs, it doubled and they aren't getting anything new out of it. Not to mention Netflix seemed a little cocky with the announcement, they might as well have said, "Ya we know you don't like it but in the end your not going to cancel so why should we give a ****."
Exactly, I would agree that NASA needs to take a look at their management chain but part of the chain they cant do anything about. The government is constantly readjusting their budget and not following through on promised funds. The politicians make the argument that there is work that needs to be done to bring jobs back. Yet despite all these cuts I don't see them doing anything useful, all the funding just heads to the military or bailing out some big business with worse management than NASA.
Now don't get me wrong I am not an anti military guy and I am all for them receiving a large budget but not if it means cutting other important programs to the point where they can not longer function. Military has made huge strides in R&D but it takes decades for it to reach the public. NASA brings the images and information about things light years from earth right to our computers as they discover it. But the government doesn't care about that they know most people wont notice a one or two decade gap in any new information about the universe outside earth.
Dinosaurs became extinct because they had laser eyes and they killed each other. No one has yet been able to disprove this theory.
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19135208295
If there are any invites left out there Id sure appreciate one being thrown my way. justincase2090@gmail.com
It will be funny how many jokes these guys will have to put up with when they get back to earth.
Its not our fault if Hollywood doesn't want to jump on, I will be happy to see their death.
There is almost no excuse why a tv show shouldn't be available almost instantly after it airs. I love Hulu and I am glad to sit through the few commercials if I am supporting the shows I like, but for the shows that take weeks to post their episodes or refuse to post them at all then if I miss it on tv I see no better option than to torrent it. Not to mention prices, sometimes I want to start a new series, but fat chance I'm going to pay $100+ for a series I'm not sure I will enjoy.
As for movies Netflix is improving but they aren't there yet with their watch instantly stuff. New movies take too long to become available and there are some movies that were barely known and have been out for years and still aren't up. RedBox is great for the price, and sometimes when me and my friends decide we want to watch a movie late at night when stores are closed grabbing a movie from one of these is faster than downloading it.
Hollywood could easily start their own online distribution, something like Netflix but instead you rent the movie for $1 for 24hr, it would cut my downloading in to a small fraction. Obviously RedBox has found a way to make a profit off low prices and Hulu and Netflix has shown the success of instant streaming. Torrents are appealing do to low cost and high availability, both could be easily beaten or at least competed by Hollywood if they were smart.
That's not really the topic being debated, obviously clean energy has to be viable to some extent, the problem is they just aren't at a point where they can replace current power generation. The problem is so many people are pushing this technology to the market so fast that they are crippling it. Rather than spending money just experimenting and building on prototypes the money is all being put in to developing a implementable version of an unfinished product.
The point of the article was that on our current path these new sources of energy will never be truly viable as a replacement. The solution is simple, for a decade just stop pushing out these new technologies and send all the money to researching them and making them even more efficient. I would like an electric car for the gas mileage but I don't want to have to stop and find a place to recharge my car constantly on road trips, some of the research in capacitors could easily solve this problem but instead the research is slowed by the marketing cost of the cars on the market right now.
Someone needs to take the stand. I don't want to sound the the "stick it to the man" guy, but these are the only companies who can really make the stand for the users. Apple tried to play nice and make deals and there were a number of labels that outright refused. The record companies while actually relatively small have one of the biggest legal bites. As this cloud stuff moves forward soon some people will virtually be storing and hosting their entire computers remotely. If these three big companies bend over now it will just open the window for all the other digital medium providers to attack the issue until cloud computing is killed all but completely.
Now some may make the argument that these companies are just being cheap an not making a stand for the users rights. That may be true but I still say indirectly this has a huge effect for me. I already have a lot of music on my own private server and I sometimes log in remotely to listen to stuff. Google is technically just providing me with a dumbed-down server hosting service. If they have a case against Google then they technically have a case against me. I don't see how they would find me but its a little ridiculous that I need to keep music I bought a secret.
I love where in the attached article it said, "The main reason Blu-Ray took off was because the adult entertainment industry chose the format over HD." When the very opposite was true, they chose HD and while everyone expected that would be the home run hit, HD failed not long after.
While I believe the adult entertainment industry is big and powerful at its core, it simply follows the trends and doesn't really set them. I think this was a perfect example where the head of the industry thought that they would throw their hat in to the ring on the side of HD but without all the people who support the industry directly behind it, there was no weight behind the decision. It is an industry that tends to be pushed to the very front of technology but it is never actually leading.