That's a nice theory, but it doesn't actually work in practice.
There is a limit to how much water is naturally evaporated from the ocean each year (far, far less than we're dumping into it) and rained down onto solid ground. There is a limit to how quickly water absorbed by the soil will leech down into the aquifers it was drawn from (it takes centuries) and that's where most of our water supplies comes from.
And as for location, there's no place on earth where the rainfall would possibly exceed the needs of a densely packed urban population, without conservation. The troubles Atlanta is having are just a start. Being located in the desert merely brings the problem to the forefront more quickly.
Look at the farm-packed interior of the US, and you'll find ridiculous quantities of water being used, all drawn from a gigantic aquifer, which is now being dramatically drawn down, with no sign of replenishment. You're welcome to go tell them they're just imagining it, when they run out of water supplies.
I'd gamble that, over the next decade, cities all across the US will have to begin copying the water conservation measures that have long been in-use in the southwest. And if they don't, the cost of water is going to go through the roof, as the expense for finding new supplies, and building new recycling facilities, goes through the roof.
the first U.S. thermal power plant just getting into production
Way to mis-quote. According to TFA, that's the first solar thermal MANUFACTURING plant... As in, they make the equipment. There are several U.S. solar thermal power plants, dating back to the 70s.
Wow! That sounds painful. What do they do, hook you up to a high powered vacuum and pull it out through your pores? Might make a great 70% weight-loss program though.
I think the numbers speak for themselves... ATSC took 13 years;
At the start, ATSC was looking at all options for HDTV, including numerous and diverse analog options. It's simply that digital came along, and made any HDTV option practical, as opposed to the Japanese analog HDTV solution. If DVB had been around in 1983, they wouldn't have been able to come up with anything for a decade, either. They also had the opportunity to learn from ATSC... it's not nearly as difficult to take someone else's finished product and copy it, as it is to come up with something original yourself.
If Sony wins a format war, does that mean the end times are near? Should I be stocking up on canned goods and water and working on my underground bunker?
If so, you're a couple decades late. Sony+Philips were responsible for CDs. Sony was one of the companies involved in DVDs. Sony also won with PSX and PS2. etc.
Like the way we now have a separate HDTV standard than everyone else in the world because they advocated a NTSC replacement even though the existing European standard was perfectly fine?
The ATSC (HDTV) standard in the US predates DVB by years.
The ATSC organization was created in 1982. The DVB organization was created in 1993.
The (final) ATSC standard was published in 1995. The DVB-T standard was finalized in 1997.
So, you should instead be asking why Europe chose to develop their own incompatible standard, "even though the existing American standard was perfectly fine."
Never mind that solar activity has trended downwards since 1980, and yet we have experienced the most significant GLOBAL warming since then
Now you're the one being a lying, shameless propaganda shill.
Solar output HAS increased significantly, and scientists studying global warming DID have to adjust their future climate change estimates by up to 33% to compensate for the discrepancy.
That's no hand-waving, and is undeniably true whether you are a cheerleader or a denier of global warming.
That's a very interesting thing to say, given that the companies doing fixed-priced aerospace work are the small ones, and the companies placing cost-plus bids are the large ones.
Either the small companies are doing inexpensive work, small enough that they can eat any potential losses, or their company is perhaps a legally-independent spin-off that is simply gambling bankruptcy on every job.
Project management and cost estimation are problems that can be understood and solved, even when R&D is involved.
That's very easy to say when you don't actually have to do it.
Please estimate the cost necessary to build a sustainable fusion power reactor, and get back to me.
if you carelessly damage your media it won't play anymore,
Even if you're quite careful, you can expect small scratches to form, and cause problems. HD-DVDs are much more delicate than DVDs, yet they will continue to need cleaning...
However, I recall my first $200+ Panasonic not being able to support anything but vanilla DVD-Video and Red Book CDs, no mp3, no VCD, no mpeg
No doubt many newer Panasonic DVD players still don't. It's simply that people are now buying Chinese-made DVD players en-masse due to lower price.
My feeling is that if HD-DVD is virtually abandoned, the cheap manufacturers will be able to license the DRM cheaply
The DRM on HD-DVD is the same system used on Blu-Ray. I can't imagine they're going to be desperate for money. Ditto for codec patent licenses... With cheap DVD players, the patents eat up nearly all the profits, add 2 brand new video codecs, and patents on the disc format, and even years into the future, the player won't come down to $50.
there's no reason why writable HD-DVD discs themselves won't persist as a cheap media storage format (cheaper than BR discs)
Actually, there is. Economies of scale have a much bigger impact than you would imagine. If you look at Flash storage, you'll see that the bigger footprint formats, which used to be far cheaper, are now more expensive than SD/MMC. It's not that PCMCIA flash was technologically cheaper previously, and more expensive now, it's just that economies of scale now heavily favor SD/MMC.
CD-Rs are now more expensive than they have been for many years, all while DVD-Rs are getting cheaper, and will soon surpass CDs in price.
That may be the case, but the relevant issue is whether China will mandate its inclusion into next gen players.
China will not mandate something that will put it's companies at significant economic disadvantage. If you look at the adoption issues with EVD, you'll see that they even look the other way when a large company actively choses to violate their mandates. China is totalitarian when it comes to information, but is quite relaxed when it comes to business...
Solar Cycle 24 has been the subject of much speculation due to competing forecasts on whether it will be a highly active or a quiet low cycle. If it is a low cycle, it may very well be a test of validity for some CO2 based global warming theories.
...but far more importantly, how long it will take until my shortwave reception improves.
I have a 27" CRT that can do 1080i (picked it up for $200 in a sale). For normal viewing, I really can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080i
Funny, because when I got my 27" HDTV CRT, I instantly noticed all the artifacts with 480p that I had never seen before on a standard TV. Nothing subtle, big huge sharp artifacts everywhere over the screen.
Since when do movies play forever? HD-DVDs are easily scratched.
He can hope that his HD-DVD drive in the device is just an IDE ROM, so he can just plug it in, and rip his movies to his hard drive.
and you got an opportunity to buy a bunch of films in the very near future at fire sale prices.
Somehow, people didn't rush out to buy VHS tapes.
Don't minimize China's influence here, after all, old Chinese (S)VCD's are still playable on every new $30 player, some 10 years after they were obsoleted by DVDs.
You can't minimize China's influence enough... Their attempts to follow up their minimal SVCD success have been a nightmare. They've accomplished nothing, had no impact on the outside world, and even within China, their formats are failing miserably. They're years behind, their AVS codec can't even compete with MPEG-2, they've burned their business relationship with On2, etc.
They were able to create the SVCD standard because it was just a standard for a bitstream on disc, that only required using existing off-the-shelf parts to follow the spec. They even did a terrible job of choosing the resolution, something incompatible with both VCD and DVD, which results in nasty noisy video.
SVCD was only nominally successful because DVD manufacturers wanted to continue to maintain CD (and MPEG-2) support for other reasons, and so it only takes a trivial amount of code to support the SVCD disc layout.
Their attempts to define a new disc standard will be expensive, low capacity, low quality, etc. Nobody will use it inside or outside of the country.
You will not be able to buy players, and even if you could, there would be no HD-DVD compatibility. They would have to include numerous patented video and audio codecs to ensure they can decode HD-DVDs, as well as paying for the patents on the HD-DVD disc format itself. Even if they went out of their way to do so, their players certainly wouldn't be allowed to support the AACS DRM system, necessary for playing commercial HD-DVDs.
H-264 is set to replace VC-1 pretty much exclusively
H.264 is much better than VC-1, BUT, since VC-1 is required in players, and has been used on numerous titles already, Microsoft will be getting per-player VC-1 decoder royalties long, long into the future.
It would have been smarter to go with h.264 exclusively as the next-gen codec and avoid VC-1 licensing all-together. Not only is h.264 better quality, but the licensing is actually cheaper. MPEG-2 can stay, if only because the patents will expire in a couple years.
I recall reading somewhere that a blimp large enough to carry massive amounts of cargo can do so for the fraction of the fuel spent on ship-based transportation.
I don't believe it for a second.
Blimps have a huge aerodynamic footprint, and any propulsion has to overcome that area. Their cargo disadvantage is major, and I don't believe they can cross an ocean several thousand times using less power than one cargo ship.
Ships can carry HUGE amounts of cargo, thanks to the buoyancy afforded by the massive density of water. Ships use a lot of power, but they do so while hauling a huge amount of cargo, and have a relatively tiny footprint, as they are long and narrow.
As an added bonus, even though ships have to push through the water, they are able to propel themselves by pushing against water (see, dense, non-compressible liquid) whereas airships have to push against air, which offers very little power per area, requiring a powerful engine even for slow propulsion.
There are people out there (in most areas of the globe) who wouldn't mind taking potshots at an airship. It could be a drunk hillbilly who is playing with his new 30/06, or someone who has a RPG and is hoping to knock the thing out of the air completely.
An airship would barely notice a few bullet-holes. As for surface-to-air missiles, if they are out there, I'd much rather have them being wasted taking down a small amount of cargo, rather than a manned aircraft.
I wonder how hard it would be to factor in large, slow vehicles into the aviation corridors without impacting takeoffs and landings of jets and prop based traffic.
Blimps don't need to fly at the altitudes of jet aircraft, and they don't need pre-planned routes... They are going slow enough that avoiding collisions (assuming any visibility) is something of an exercise in slow motion piloting. Blimp air traffic should be compared to ships in the ocean... Unlike high-speed jet traffic, they can rather safely be packed together without much trouble. It might be a nightmare around packed airport airspace, but it would be quite easy to avoid the need to land at current aircraft-purposed commercial airports entirely... Build a good sized parking lot anywhere, and blimps can land and take off from there instead.
In general, I think fixed-price contracts would be a good idea.
Fixed-price contracts work for large companies, selling inexpensive products.
Smaller companies can't just eat the cost and recoup it in profts elsewhere. Large companies might not be able to either, with multi-million dollar contracts.
As such, you're guaranteeing that companies will never be willing to bid on a difficult or unique project, because they'd have to massively over-charge just to cover the risks.
but he has a means to backup the licenses, delete the existing ones, and then reload the licenses from the backup, but he doesn't want to do that.
One important thing you're missing is that restoring from backup requires Microsoft's permission. If he backs up his licenses, uses Netflix's program to delete the loaded licenses, and Microsoft's server decides NOT to allow him to restore his saved licenses, he is COMPLETELY SCREWED with no recourse.
Who said anything about HDTV? This whole discussion is about the DTV Converter Boxes that people will have to buy because their analog TV sets no longer work without them.
If you don't know what you are talking about, you could at least keep quiet and not make a fool of yourself.
here in the UK we've got loads of the things going cheap (as low as £20 a shot), but no coupons...
It's not nearly so easy in the US. The switch to digital is happening concurrently with the switch to high definition.
So, US converter boxes have to accept a much, much higher bandwidth signal, demodulate it with all error checking and correcting; decode a full 20Mbps of 1920x1080 MPEG-2 video, and downscale and output to standard TV resolution.
So, the boxes can't be nearly as cheap as those in DVB-land, which is a big part of the reasoning behind subsidizing the boxes.
but doesn't it say something about a society when TV is regarded as something important enough to subsidize?
Yes...
It says the society in question isn't stupid enough to think that 100% of the money you have should be spent on the absolute necessities to the detriment of all else.
It also says that the society uses TV for things other than entertainment.
It says that the society is a democracy, where most get their information on politics via broadcast TV.
It says that the society in question find TVs invaluable as an emergency preparedness and alert system.
It says that the society uses TVs to be informed about all manner of food and product safety.
etc.
What does it say about your society, that apparently doesn't get any benefits from TV, and so doesn't feel the need to help the poorest among you afford the necessary equipment?
I imagine that many people who need these boxes don't have internet access and will never see the phone number displayed anywhere
Unless, of course, they happen to watch TV... where they're showing the 2009 Analog Switchover commercial on every channel, every couple hours.
Or if they turn on their TVs at all during the month of January, when the vast majority of analog stations will have cut all programming, except for a continuous loop of a "How To Receive Digital TV" video.
80% of Americans get their TV from cable or satellite. Analog sets work just fine as monitors
Then they should have sold TVs without ANY tuners for those that wanted them. Continuing to sell TVs with an analog tuner is just asking for trouble.
Personally, I'd suggest the digital tuner route, only because we have no way of knowing how many will switch to OTA from satellite once they can get numerous channels, and a perfect digital picture for free.
I feel that any expenses endured due to the sale of the spectrum ought to be covered by the sale of the spectrum. If the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum can't cover the costs of selling the 700 mhz spectrum, then we shouldn't be selling it.
I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Selling the 700MHz spectrum doesn't require switching to HDTV in the slightest. Far from it... It's simply that it's easiest to eliminate the channels right now, while every station is already required to have two transmitters operating, and they can just switch to the one that isn't in the 700MHz range. Selling off 700MHz is a recent afterthought.
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By that logic, USB should never have taken off...
There's a reason we put printers on the Parallel ports, and Modems on the Serial/RS-232 ports.
And how about PCI and ISA? There's plenty of reason to put devices on the ISA bus, instead of the PCI bus.
And with PCI-E, you do put your video card and network card on the same bus (yeah, yeah: more or less).
Not to mention that a great many people do indeed put external hard drives on their USB2 bus.
That's a nice theory, but it doesn't actually work in practice.
There is a limit to how much water is naturally evaporated from the ocean each year (far, far less than we're dumping into it) and rained down onto solid ground. There is a limit to how quickly water absorbed by the soil will leech down into the aquifers it was drawn from (it takes centuries) and that's where most of our water supplies comes from.
And as for location, there's no place on earth where the rainfall would possibly exceed the needs of a densely packed urban population, without conservation. The troubles Atlanta is having are just a start. Being located in the desert merely brings the problem to the forefront more quickly.
Look at the farm-packed interior of the US, and you'll find ridiculous quantities of water being used, all drawn from a gigantic aquifer, which is now being dramatically drawn down, with no sign of replenishment. You're welcome to go tell them they're just imagining it, when they run out of water supplies.
I'd gamble that, over the next decade, cities all across the US will have to begin copying the water conservation measures that have long been in-use in the southwest. And if they don't, the cost of water is going to go through the roof, as the expense for finding new supplies, and building new recycling facilities, goes through the roof.
Way to mis-quote. According to TFA, that's the first solar thermal MANUFACTURING plant... As in, they make the equipment. There are several U.S. solar thermal power plants, dating back to the 70s.
Wow! That sounds painful. What do they do, hook you up to a high powered vacuum and pull it out through your pores? Might make a great 70% weight-loss program though.
At the start, ATSC was looking at all options for HDTV, including numerous and diverse analog options. It's simply that digital came along, and made any HDTV option practical, as opposed to the Japanese analog HDTV solution. If DVB had been around in 1983, they wouldn't have been able to come up with anything for a decade, either. They also had the opportunity to learn from ATSC... it's not nearly as difficult to take someone else's finished product and copy it, as it is to come up with something original yourself.
If so, you're a couple decades late. Sony+Philips were responsible for CDs. Sony was one of the companies involved in DVDs. Sony also won with PSX and PS2. etc.
The ATSC (HDTV) standard in the US predates DVB by years.
The ATSC organization was created in 1982.
The DVB organization was created in 1993.
The (final) ATSC standard was published in 1995.
The DVB-T standard was finalized in 1997.
So, you should instead be asking why Europe chose to develop their own incompatible standard, "even though the existing American standard was perfectly fine."
Now you're the one being a lying, shameless propaganda shill.
Solar output HAS increased significantly, and scientists studying global warming DID have to adjust their future climate change estimates by up to 33% to compensate for the discrepancy.
That's no hand-waving, and is undeniably true whether you are a cheerleader or a denier of global warming.
Either the small companies are doing inexpensive work, small enough that they can eat any potential losses, or their company is perhaps a legally-independent spin-off that is simply gambling bankruptcy on every job.
That's very easy to say when you don't actually have to do it.
Please estimate the cost necessary to build a sustainable fusion power reactor, and get back to me.
Even if you're quite careful, you can expect small scratches to form, and cause problems. HD-DVDs are much more delicate than DVDs, yet they will continue to need cleaning...
No doubt many newer Panasonic DVD players still don't. It's simply that people are now buying Chinese-made DVD players en-masse due to lower price.
The DRM on HD-DVD is the same system used on Blu-Ray. I can't imagine they're going to be desperate for money. Ditto for codec patent licenses... With cheap DVD players, the patents eat up nearly all the profits, add 2 brand new video codecs, and patents on the disc format, and even years into the future, the player won't come down to $50.
Actually, there is. Economies of scale have a much bigger impact than you would imagine. If you look at Flash storage, you'll see that the bigger footprint formats, which used to be far cheaper, are now more expensive than SD/MMC. It's not that PCMCIA flash was technologically cheaper previously, and more expensive now, it's just that economies of scale now heavily favor SD/MMC.
CD-Rs are now more expensive than they have been for many years, all while DVD-Rs are getting cheaper, and will soon surpass CDs in price.
China will not mandate something that will put it's companies at significant economic disadvantage. If you look at the adoption issues with EVD, you'll see that they even look the other way when a large company actively choses to violate their mandates. China is totalitarian when it comes to information, but is quite relaxed when it comes to business...
Funny, because when I got my 27" HDTV CRT, I instantly noticed all the artifacts with 480p that I had never seen before on a standard TV. Nothing subtle, big huge sharp artifacts everywhere over the screen.
Since when do movies play forever? HD-DVDs are easily scratched.
He can hope that his HD-DVD drive in the device is just an IDE ROM, so he can just plug it in, and rip his movies to his hard drive.
Somehow, people didn't rush out to buy VHS tapes.
You can't minimize China's influence enough... Their attempts to follow up their minimal SVCD success have been a nightmare. They've accomplished nothing, had no impact on the outside world, and even within China, their formats are failing miserably. They're years behind, their AVS codec can't even compete with MPEG-2, they've burned their business relationship with On2, etc.
They were able to create the SVCD standard because it was just a standard for a bitstream on disc, that only required using existing off-the-shelf parts to follow the spec. They even did a terrible job of choosing the resolution, something incompatible with both VCD and DVD, which results in nasty noisy video.
SVCD was only nominally successful because DVD manufacturers wanted to continue to maintain CD (and MPEG-2) support for other reasons, and so it only takes a trivial amount of code to support the SVCD disc layout.
Their attempts to define a new disc standard will be expensive, low capacity, low quality, etc. Nobody will use it inside or outside of the country.
You will not be able to buy players, and even if you could, there would be no HD-DVD compatibility. They would have to include numerous patented video and audio codecs to ensure they can decode HD-DVDs, as well as paying for the patents on the HD-DVD disc format itself. Even if they went out of their way to do so, their players certainly wouldn't be allowed to support the AACS DRM system, necessary for playing commercial HD-DVDs.
H.264 is much better than VC-1, BUT, since VC-1 is required in players, and has been used on numerous titles already, Microsoft will be getting per-player VC-1 decoder royalties long, long into the future.
It would have been smarter to go with h.264 exclusively as the next-gen codec and avoid VC-1 licensing all-together. Not only is h.264 better quality, but the licensing is actually cheaper. MPEG-2 can stay, if only because the patents will expire in a couple years.
I don't believe it for a second.
Blimps have a huge aerodynamic footprint, and any propulsion has to overcome that area. Their cargo disadvantage is major, and I don't believe they can cross an ocean several thousand times using less power than one cargo ship.
Ships can carry HUGE amounts of cargo, thanks to the buoyancy afforded by the massive density of water. Ships use a lot of power, but they do so while hauling a huge amount of cargo, and have a relatively tiny footprint, as they are long and narrow.
As an added bonus, even though ships have to push through the water, they are able to propel themselves by pushing against water (see, dense, non-compressible liquid) whereas airships have to push against air, which offers very little power per area, requiring a powerful engine even for slow propulsion.
An airship would barely notice a few bullet-holes. As for surface-to-air missiles, if they are out there, I'd much rather have them being wasted taking down a small amount of cargo, rather than a manned aircraft.
Blimps don't need to fly at the altitudes of jet aircraft, and they don't need pre-planned routes... They are going slow enough that avoiding collisions (assuming any visibility) is something of an exercise in slow motion piloting. Blimp air traffic should be compared to ships in the ocean... Unlike high-speed jet traffic, they can rather safely be packed together without much trouble. It might be a nightmare around packed airport airspace, but it would be quite easy to avoid the need to land at current aircraft-purposed commercial airports entirely... Build a good sized parking lot anywhere, and blimps can land and take off from there instead.
Fixed-price contracts work for large companies, selling inexpensive products.
Smaller companies can't just eat the cost and recoup it in profts elsewhere. Large companies might not be able to either, with multi-million dollar contracts.
As such, you're guaranteeing that companies will never be willing to bid on a difficult or unique project, because they'd have to massively over-charge just to cover the risks.
One important thing you're missing is that restoring from backup requires Microsoft's permission. If he backs up his licenses, uses Netflix's program to delete the loaded licenses, and Microsoft's server decides NOT to allow him to restore his saved licenses, he is COMPLETELY SCREWED with no recourse.
If you don't know what you are talking about, you could at least keep quiet and not make a fool of yourself.
DTV == ATSC == HDTV
It's not nearly so easy in the US. The switch to digital is happening concurrently with the switch to high definition.
So, US converter boxes have to accept a much, much higher bandwidth signal, demodulate it with all error checking and correcting; decode a full 20Mbps of 1920x1080 MPEG-2 video, and downscale and output to standard TV resolution.
So, the boxes can't be nearly as cheap as those in DVB-land, which is a big part of the reasoning behind subsidizing the boxes.
Yes...
It says the society in question isn't stupid enough to think that 100% of the money you have should be spent on the absolute necessities to the detriment of all else.
It also says that the society uses TV for things other than entertainment.
It says that the society is a democracy, where most get their information on politics via broadcast TV.
It says that the society in question find TVs invaluable as an emergency preparedness and alert system.
It says that the society uses TVs to be informed about all manner of food and product safety.
etc.
What does it say about your society, that apparently doesn't get any benefits from TV, and so doesn't feel the need to help the poorest among you afford the necessary equipment?
Unless, of course, they happen to watch TV... where they're showing the 2009 Analog Switchover commercial on every channel, every couple hours.
Or if they turn on their TVs at all during the month of January, when the vast majority of analog stations will have cut all programming, except for a continuous loop of a "How To Receive Digital TV" video.
Then they should have sold TVs without ANY tuners for those that wanted them. Continuing to sell TVs with an analog tuner is just asking for trouble.
Personally, I'd suggest the digital tuner route, only because we have no way of knowing how many will switch to OTA from satellite once they can get numerous channels, and a perfect digital picture for free.
I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Selling the 700MHz spectrum doesn't require switching to HDTV in the slightest. Far from it... It's simply that it's easiest to eliminate the channels right now, while every station is already required to have two transmitters operating, and they can just switch to the one that isn't in the 700MHz range. Selling off 700MHz is a recent afterthought.
That article is one big string of factual errors, from beginning to end. He can't even get the simple, well known, and easy to find facts correct.
Don't use press releases as factual sources. I've seen far too many that are outright lies.
Everyone in that thread is regurgitating second-hand information that they really don't understand.
I'd still look forward to reading some better sources for those facts...
You can, but those of us who have seen it will still laugh at you.
In other words, their talking heads are slightly more accurate than the talking heads on other crappy news programs.
Yes they do. Just not all the time ala CNN/FOX.
Talking heads aren't news. It's purely a debate show. Their actual news coverage is short, sparse, and superficial.