I live in KC and do have google fiber. Before that became an option, the only provider that offered video and internet in Westport was time warner. I could get DSL - but the speeds were worse than cable and AT&T only offered Dish.
There is a monopoly on the last mile.
You had several completely independent options for internet service! That is not a monopoly by any definition. That you dismissed one, because another was better, doesn't make them cease to exist!
Personally, internet speeds barely matter to me at all. I'd LOVE to be able to get 500kbps internet service for $10/month. Instead, the installation of FIOS means cheap DSL is gone, and their *cheapest* service options are $50+/mo. Fortunately cable internet was available for less, but when they raise their prices, I just sit and take it, until they surpass the astronomical prices of FIOS.
The only way out I can see, is restricting my internet usage to eliminate streaming video, and switching to cellular to get some severely limited (5GB/mo) pipe, for $30/mo.
Maybe you're too young to remember, but we had that system for wired telephone service and it was a disaster. The Internet only took off once those highly regulated monopolies were broken up. The resulting market is still over-regulated and far from efficient, but it's a lot better than what we had.
It wasn't deregulation that broke AT&T's death grip on telecommunications... It was TECHNOLOGY. When microwave links came along, and ANYBODY could put together a nation-wide network without physically laying copper lines across the entire country, AT&T was in trouble. Long-distance was the first to go, but it wasn't going to be the last.
Technology, again, is why the telcos are even competing with cable companies... DSL gave them the technology to provide high-speed internet, and even TV on their low-grade lines. Similarly, technology allowed cable companies to provide home phone service. Technology caused the rise of cellular phones, which are now keeping telcos from raising home phone prices.
Deregulation didn't help any of it along, one damn bit.
I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid.
I get TV over an antenna, as do a growing number of others across the US. No cord.
I have several options for internet access, and cable is just one. If they're cheapest, I'll go for them, but if not, the cable gets cut, entirely.
The term originally came about as people stopped paying for land-lines and used their cell phones exclusively instead, and there it made sense.
How does that make any more sense, when many or most of them continued to get internet service via DSL over their same phone lines?
MORE THAN DOUBLE THE MONTHLY PRICE, FOR JUST ENTRY-LEVEL INTERNET SERVICE.
The competition between cable and DSL has kept prices down for years. But now, with Verizon switching to FIOS with even more astronomical entry-level internet prices, you will have NO CHOICE in the matter, but to pay much more than you do now, for slower service. How many people are going to just go without internet, when they only occasionally browse the web, and their cheapest option is $40+? Comcast is trying to rape my mother...
That was the max, not typical/average, and I seriously doubt the average user will notice. Yes, it makes a difference if you're watching movies non-stop while taking a long flight, but people generally don't take just enough battery power along to squeak by, so the difference won't register too much.
Followed the link but couldn't see where it showed actual power consumption of the hardware decoder they used (their own I guess?)
You have to follow one whole link to find out:
"The logic consumes less than 25 milliwatts of power for 1080p video decoding and less than 5 milliwatts for 480p (TSMC65nm LP)"
either the screen is using a huge amount of power
That has ALWAYS been the case, and I don't know why you're surprised. Back to the very first laptops, back-light power draw absolutely dominates power consumption figures. Use an electrical meter and you can watch power consumption rise and fall when the CPU is maxed out, versus when the screen is turned off.
There is no patent-unencumbered video codec worth using.
That might be technically true... Google owns the patents on VP8. But since they've offered an irrevocable perpetual royalty free license to the entire world, it's unencumbered for all reasonable, practical purposes.
When Google open-sourced their hopeless purchase, the extent of the scam became apparent.
VP3 was open-sourced over a decade ago, and no lawsuits ever came out of that. Are you suggesting On2 only RECENTLY started stealing MPEG patents? When exactly? And let's not forget that VP9 was not developed until years after Google acquired On2, and just recently released.
What did Google do? Simple- it used its insane cash reserves to strike behind-the-scenes deals with the patent owners, paying the for right to use those patents in non-disclosure agreements.
All of H.264's patents must be worth many billions of dollars over their lifetime. If Google had paid out anything like that, it would be obvious from stock prices, SEC filings, etc., etc. Instead, Google paid a piddly little amount to MPEG-LA, and it's they who wanted the NDA to save face. MPEG-LA argued for years that they owned patents that covered VP8, yet after years only came up with a very short-list, and still most of that was found laughably irrelevant. H.264 is covered by THOUSANDS of patents, by HUNDREDS of companies. The deal Google entered into only involved 11 of those hundreds of companies, yet that was enough to get MPEG-LA to declare full stop on any harassment of VP8.
The reality: "This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8."
2) Google's fake free codec has the tiniest fraction of hardware support than is enjoyed by H264. Every modern device decodes H264 in efficient hardware
Actually, hardware acceleration isn't a big deal. The difference between VDPAU and software decoding of 1080 video on my PC is just a few percentage points. When my phone switches from hardware to software decoding (you can force this with "Mobo Player"), the performance and power difference is very small, and goes almost completely unnoticed. Hardware acceleration mattered a lot when mobile devices ran with 35MHz CPUs, but today, it makes a very tiny difference.
For the same quality, x264 video files are less than HALF the size of videos produced for Google's fake free codec.
Back in 2010 when comparing the just introduced an
it'll run terribly on anything but the most powerful desktop cpus
Be sure to spout-off lots of generalizations and pointless guesses, because that helps a lot...
Let's see... My 6 year old, single-core CPU manages real-time decoding of D1 video. But hey, you said it won't work, so I must have completely imagined it.
Freedom is letting people use what codecs they want, not forcing them to use a handful of really terrible ones.
It's the formats that are mandated. The "codec" is not. You can write your own VP8 codec from scratch, using the specs, if you choose. Do that with H.264, though, and you're liable for patent royalties. What's more, the MPEG-LA won't sell an individual a license to begin with, so there's no practical way for you to go legit.
And your terms are mixed-up... everyone does anything they want is called "anarchy". Calling that "freedom" is completely misusing the term. Being "free" to impose onerous terms onto others isn't any flavor of "freedom".
For me, the big draw of standard Android is maps/navigation/traffic.
You don't need Google services for that, Android, or even a smart phone for that matter. MapQuest is free for Android and iOS. And some stand-alone GPS devices are providing free "lifetime traffic" support with fairly inexpensive devices, no doubt to compete with phones:
Garmin: "Lifetime Traffic is included with select Advanced series nüvis."
The reality that you think the NSA has broken the key algorithms? You're not one to be talking about reality, kiddo
There are publicly known vulnerabilities in any crypto you care to name. Combining issues like those, with obscene amounts of money, makes it possible to decrypt anything in a reasonable time-frame. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be offering your uneducated opinion on the subject. When you're talking about *governments* and multi-billion dollar trade-secrets, the rules are very different than when securing your gmail password. Crypto is good, but it's not the magic pixie dust you want it to be.
And acting like it's oh-so-very simple to manage gigabytes of OTPs every day, and feeding it into the low-level protocols never designed for such a thing, won't make it true.
And let's not forget that I mentioned FOUR different things that were utterly and undeniably wrong with your ridiculous stance on this issue. Yet you haven't argued with any of the other three show-stopping issues.
there are platforms that don't have open source codecs installed by default, leaving the "average" user unable to view the videos.
There are fleetingly few of those... WebM support has gotten pretty pervasive. Chrome & Firefox have had it built-in for quite a while, as does Android, and more. In addition, there are native JAVASCRIPT decoders for Vorbis, Theora, and VP8, which could be used for any platforms that lack support, at merely a performance penalty.
Nobody is getting shot "in the foot" here. A small number of users may have a bit of difficulty displaying the content, but only very few. But ANY kind of progress requires someone being left behind, just as selecting MP4 *before* now would have caused some people problems, so too will this choice of FLOSS codecs. And their stand will only help to either encourage further adoption by those minority hold-outs (ie. Apple and Microsoft), or encourage users to avoid those companies.
If there has to be some pain, it's better than the pain is on behalf of pushing individuals and companies towards more freedom, and a long-term sustainable option.
But for the codec, is there a realistic alternative to H264 today? A format which can fit a feature-length HD movie in high quality in a file under 4GB so that it fits on any USB stick including FAT32, and that anyone can read?
WebM is certainly better than QuickTime's H.264 encoding quality. That's VP8 with Vorbis audio in an MKV container.
Oddly enough, your best bet for playback is to use the <video> tag to embed it in a web page. Both Firefox and Chrome natively support WebM, as of quite a while back. Internet Explorer never will, but their market share is dwindling, and all those users need for playback is to install the codec pack first: https://tools.google.com/dlpag...
If you want to keep it on QuickTime, there are QT components to support WebM, though I can't speak to their quality: https://code.google.com/p/webm...
They are only accepting Vorbis/FLAC audio, Theora video, in ogg containers?
You seem to be a few years behind the times... WebM is perfectly FLOSS, and much improved.
For lossy audio, in addition to Vorbis, there is the much better Opus codec. FLAC is the standard for lossless, as there isn't much room for improvement.
For video, VP8 (and soon, VP9) are vastly superior to Theora.
And WebM uses the MKV container... not the horrific Ogg.
Most web browsers support WebM... Chrome/Chromium and Firefox/IceWeasel have support built-in, though the later is lagging a bit behind on VP9/Opus. And IE users can play WebM videos by just installing the codec pack.
The "Video Without Flash" add-on for Firefox will allow you to watch all videos on the most popular video sites in native/WebM format. Not only does this help those who can't get Flash, but also native WebM playback is vastly less resource intensive and far more responsive.
One-time pads are extremely cumbersome, and the "distribution system" of which you speak is inherently highly vulnerable to things like interception, whether of the high or low-tech sort.
How would you propose to integrate OTPs with IPSec VPNs for instance? It's a very hard problem that you're treating like a minor detail...
While Android phones are almost always tied-in to Google, cheap tablets most commonly are NOT, and they do just fine. The success of the Kindle Fire should be a sign that you can sever those Google ties without too much trauma.
You're not getting all that much from the fees paid to Google.
You can find other free maps and navigation easily enough (MapQuest, OsmAnd~, etc.). You can find 3rd party YouTube apps, or you can just leave users to view YouTube in a web browser like desktop users do. You can set-up Gmail access without the official Gmail app. etc.
The biggest stumbling block is the app store. Google has market effects on their side. There are several competitor app stores, but none as complete as Google's. Still, as long as you have the most-popular apps, your customers won't complain. GetJar and Amazon are passable.
When you are up against a superpower, encrypting your data is little, if any, protection. They have secret programs dedicated to finding weaknesses in commonly used crypto, and the money and motivation to build supercomputers to brute force your communications in reasonable time-frames, in combination with whatever weaknesses they've found.
In addition, that only helps keeping the content of messages safe. There's a lot to be learned from info like who is sending data to who, how much data, when, etc.
And it only gets worse from there... With control of the telcom backbone, you can jump onto private leased-lines. Even if those companies use encryption on their private links, that still means they've got a number of targets for exploitation (like SCADA systems) which would never be reacably via the public internet.
And finally, there's always the option of just turning everything OFF. If China or random hackers break-in, and reroute 911 calls, or reroute EVERYTHING so entire network links go down, people are going to die, businesses and markets will see major losses, etc. In general, that threat is well worth spending more money on, to get equipment that isn't known to have obscene numbers of exploitable bugs in the firmware.
Re:Because you can doesn't mean you should
on
Star Trek Economics
·
· Score: 2
Now you are talking about moving massive amounts of water around from the oceans to locations where it would not have been ordinarily. You think that will have no ecological impact?
The oceans will be fine... They'll get almost all the water back in short order. The deserts will change, but most people would agree that they've IMPROVED from the change. A few desert plants and animals will have less habitat, but you'll get an abundance of other plants and animals as a result.
Just because we can build a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas in the desert doesn't make it a good idea*.
Actually, everything I've seen says it's the BEST idea.
How many old-growth forests have been cut down to make land for housing and farming? How many animals have gone extinct or are endangered because humans like to build on their habitat? Building in the desert has a vastly less significant ecological impact.
How many people are killed by snow, ice, cold weather, and diseases related to or strengthened by cold weather? You can avoid all those life-threatening hazards by living where it's simply warmer.
Desert residents are more frugal with water. Decades of regulations, high prices, news stories, or whatnot, has caused the situation. Taking from the water-rich and giving to the water-poor will result in the water being much more efficiently utilized.
There's much more cheap land out in the desert. The price difference will overwhelm the price of all the water used in a LIFETIME. The opportunity cost of paying an order of magnitude more for expensive East-coast land
Air conditioning is vastly more efficient than home heating. While you're complaining that South-Westerners are using more than their share of water, Northerners are using vastly more than their share of home heating oil, natural gas, and electricity. Those are more expensive, and in shorter supply than plain old water.
Solar power seems to be the only viable path forward for centuries of human expansion (unless fusion comes on-line soon). Putting people where there's more sun, is a great way to more efficiently utilize the large supply of solar power the desert areas have to offer. And their power demands will much more closely track with the supply of solar power plants, than northerners, who it seems will need to keep burning obscene quantities of coal...
People like more sun and warmth. The population of the US keeps moving south and west, and it's showing no signs of abating.
Slashdot Mirror
You had several completely independent options for internet service! That is not a monopoly by any definition. That you dismissed one, because another was better, doesn't make them cease to exist!
Personally, internet speeds barely matter to me at all. I'd LOVE to be able to get 500kbps internet service for $10/month. Instead, the installation of FIOS means cheap DSL is gone, and their *cheapest* service options are $50+/mo. Fortunately cable internet was available for less, but when they raise their prices, I just sit and take it, until they surpass the astronomical prices of FIOS.
The only way out I can see, is restricting my internet usage to eliminate streaming video, and switching to cellular to get some severely limited (5GB/mo) pipe, for $30/mo.
It wasn't deregulation that broke AT&T's death grip on telecommunications... It was TECHNOLOGY. When microwave links came along, and ANYBODY could put together a nation-wide network without physically laying copper lines across the entire country, AT&T was in trouble. Long-distance was the first to go, but it wasn't going to be the last.
Technology, again, is why the telcos are even competing with cable companies... DSL gave them the technology to provide high-speed internet, and even TV on their low-grade lines. Similarly, technology allowed cable companies to provide home phone service. Technology caused the rise of cellular phones, which are now keeping telcos from raising home phone prices.
Deregulation didn't help any of it along, one damn bit.
I get TV over an antenna, as do a growing number of others across the US. No cord.
I have several options for internet access, and cable is just one. If they're cheapest, I'll go for them, but if not, the cable gets cut, entirely.
How does that make any more sense, when many or most of them continued to get internet service via DSL over their same phone lines?
You don't need any in-depth analysis to figure out what's going to change.
Look at Time Warner's internet service prices:
http://www.timewarnercable.com...
$15/mo for 2Mbps.
Then look at Comcast's internet service prices:
http://www.comcast.com/interne...
$40/mo for 3Mbps.
MORE THAN DOUBLE THE MONTHLY PRICE, FOR JUST ENTRY-LEVEL INTERNET SERVICE.
The competition between cable and DSL has kept prices down for years. But now, with Verizon switching to FIOS with even more astronomical entry-level internet prices, you will have NO CHOICE in the matter, but to pay much more than you do now, for slower service. How many people are going to just go without internet, when they only occasionally browse the web, and their cheapest option is $40+? Comcast is trying to rape my mother...
That was the max, not typical/average, and I seriously doubt the average user will notice. Yes, it makes a difference if you're watching movies non-stop while taking a long flight, but people generally don't take just enough battery power along to squeak by, so the difference won't register too much.
You have to follow one whole link to find out:
"The logic consumes less than 25 milliwatts of power for 1080p video decoding and less than 5 milliwatts for 480p (TSMC65nm LP)"
That has ALWAYS been the case, and I don't know why you're surprised. Back to the very first laptops, back-light power draw absolutely dominates power consumption figures. Use an electrical meter and you can watch power consumption rise and fall when the CPU is maxed out, versus when the screen is turned off.
The hit isn't a very big one:
"with the hardware offload the battery lasted up to 36% longer"
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
And with each faster processor generation, the difference gets smaller and smaller still.
Possibly your video card manufacturer... Try VDPAU.
If not, for Linux on x86 or x64 Adobe probably did, and their Flash plugin will decode H.264 videos.
More sources:
Hardware acceleration only improves battery life "up to 36%". That's pretty insignificant to me.
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
Quality improvements have been going non-stop:
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
That might be technically true... Google owns the patents on VP8. But since they've offered an irrevocable perpetual royalty free license to the entire world, it's unencumbered for all reasonable, practical purposes.
VP3 was open-sourced over a decade ago, and no lawsuits ever came out of that. Are you suggesting On2 only RECENTLY started stealing MPEG patents? When exactly? And let's not forget that VP9 was not developed until years after Google acquired On2, and just recently released.
All of H.264's patents must be worth many billions of dollars over their lifetime. If Google had paid out anything like that, it would be obvious from stock prices, SEC filings, etc., etc. Instead, Google paid a piddly little amount to MPEG-LA, and it's they who wanted the NDA to save face. MPEG-LA argued for years that they owned patents that covered VP8, yet after years only came up with a very short-list, and still most of that was found laughably irrelevant. H.264 is covered by THOUSANDS of patents, by HUNDREDS of companies. The deal Google entered into only involved 11 of those hundreds of companies, yet that was enough to get MPEG-LA to declare full stop on any harassment of VP8.
The reality:
"This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8."
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archi...
In fact, the MPEG-LA's posturing was being investigated by the DoJ as anticompetitive behavior:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Yes they did. They even did so in court, and they unequivocally WON:
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
This is straightforward to disprove.
An x264 developer said of the first version of libvpx decoding:
"the current implementation appears to be about 16% slower than ffmpeg's H.264 decoder"
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...
But since then, numerous performance improvements have been performed:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...
Actually, hardware acceleration isn't a big deal. The difference between VDPAU and software decoding of 1080 video on my PC is just a few percentage points. When my phone switches from hardware to software decoding (you can force this with "Mobo Player"), the performance and power difference is very small, and goes almost completely unnoticed. Hardware acceleration mattered a lot when mobile devices ran with 35MHz CPUs, but today, it makes a very tiny difference.
Back in 2010 when comparing the just introduced an
Be sure to spout-off lots of generalizations and pointless guesses, because that helps a lot...
Let's see... My 6 year old, single-core CPU manages real-time decoding of D1 video. But hey, you said it won't work, so I must have completely imagined it.
It's the formats that are mandated. The "codec" is not. You can write your own VP8 codec from scratch, using the specs, if you choose. Do that with H.264, though, and you're liable for patent royalties. What's more, the MPEG-LA won't sell an individual a license to begin with, so there's no practical way for you to go legit.
And your terms are mixed-up... everyone does anything they want is called "anarchy". Calling that "freedom" is completely misusing the term. Being "free" to impose onerous terms onto others isn't any flavor of "freedom".
Those figures exaggerate IE numbers by more than 2X, according to practically any other source generating statistics on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And I forgot to include a list of SHA-2 weaknesses for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh good. Please describe your OTP negotiation algorithm for IPSec...
I'll ignore the rest of your mind-numbing trolling.
You don't need Google services for that, Android, or even a smart phone for that matter. MapQuest is free for Android and iOS. And some stand-alone GPS devices are providing free "lifetime traffic" support with fairly inexpensive devices, no doubt to compete with phones:
Garmin: "Lifetime Traffic is included with select Advanced series nüvis."
There are publicly known vulnerabilities in any crypto you care to name. Combining issues like those, with obscene amounts of money, makes it possible to decrypt anything in a reasonable time-frame. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be offering your uneducated opinion on the subject. When you're talking about *governments* and multi-billion dollar trade-secrets, the rules are very different than when securing your gmail password. Crypto is good, but it's not the magic pixie dust you want it to be.
And acting like it's oh-so-very simple to manage gigabytes of OTPs every day, and feeding it into the low-level protocols never designed for such a thing, won't make it true.
And let's not forget that I mentioned FOUR different things that were utterly and undeniably wrong with your ridiculous stance on this issue. Yet you haven't argued with any of the other three show-stopping issues.
There are fleetingly few of those... WebM support has gotten pretty pervasive. Chrome & Firefox have had it built-in for quite a while, as does Android, and more. In addition, there are native JAVASCRIPT decoders for Vorbis, Theora, and VP8, which could be used for any platforms that lack support, at merely a performance penalty.
Nobody is getting shot "in the foot" here. A small number of users may have a bit of difficulty displaying the content, but only very few. But ANY kind of progress requires someone being left behind, just as selecting MP4 *before* now would have caused some people problems, so too will this choice of FLOSS codecs. And their stand will only help to either encourage further adoption by those minority hold-outs (ie. Apple and Microsoft), or encourage users to avoid those companies.
If there has to be some pain, it's better than the pain is on behalf of pushing individuals and companies towards more freedom, and a long-term sustainable option.
WebM is certainly better than QuickTime's H.264 encoding quality. That's VP8 with Vorbis audio in an MKV container.
Oddly enough, your best bet for playback is to use the <video> tag to embed it in a web page. Both Firefox and Chrome natively support WebM, as of quite a while back. Internet Explorer never will, but their market share is dwindling, and all those users need for playback is to install the codec pack first: https://tools.google.com/dlpag...
If you want to keep it on QuickTime, there are QT components to support WebM, though I can't speak to their quality: https://code.google.com/p/webm...
You seem to be a few years behind the times... WebM is perfectly FLOSS, and much improved.
For lossy audio, in addition to Vorbis, there is the much better Opus codec. FLAC is the standard for lossless, as there isn't much room for improvement.
For video, VP8 (and soon, VP9) are vastly superior to Theora.
And WebM uses the MKV container... not the horrific Ogg.
Most web browsers support WebM... Chrome/Chromium and Firefox/IceWeasel have support built-in, though the later is lagging a bit behind on VP9/Opus. And IE users can play WebM videos by just installing the codec pack.
The "Video Without Flash" add-on for Firefox will allow you to watch all videos on the most popular video sites in native/WebM format. Not only does this help those who can't get Flash, but also native WebM playback is vastly less resource intensive and far more responsive.
Hand-wave all you want, you still won't change the reality.
One-time pads are extremely cumbersome, and the "distribution system" of which you speak is inherently highly vulnerable to things like interception, whether of the high or low-tech sort.
How would you propose to integrate OTPs with IPSec VPNs for instance? It's a very hard problem that you're treating like a minor detail...
While Android phones are almost always tied-in to Google, cheap tablets most commonly are NOT, and they do just fine. The success of the Kindle Fire should be a sign that you can sever those Google ties without too much trauma.
You're not getting all that much from the fees paid to Google.
You can find other free maps and navigation easily enough (MapQuest, OsmAnd~, etc.).
You can find 3rd party YouTube apps, or you can just leave users to view YouTube in a web browser like desktop users do.
You can set-up Gmail access without the official Gmail app.
etc.
The biggest stumbling block is the app store. Google has market effects on their side. There are several competitor app stores, but none as complete as Google's. Still, as long as you have the most-popular apps, your customers won't complain. GetJar and Amazon are passable.
When you are up against a superpower, encrypting your data is little, if any, protection. They have secret programs dedicated to finding weaknesses in commonly used crypto, and the money and motivation to build supercomputers to brute force your communications in reasonable time-frames, in combination with whatever weaknesses they've found.
In addition, that only helps keeping the content of messages safe. There's a lot to be learned from info like who is sending data to who, how much data, when, etc.
And it only gets worse from there... With control of the telcom backbone, you can jump onto private leased-lines. Even if those companies use encryption on their private links, that still means they've got a number of targets for exploitation (like SCADA systems) which would never be reacably via the public internet.
And finally, there's always the option of just turning everything OFF. If China or random hackers break-in, and reroute 911 calls, or reroute EVERYTHING so entire network links go down, people are going to die, businesses and markets will see major losses, etc. In general, that threat is well worth spending more money on, to get equipment that isn't known to have obscene numbers of exploitable bugs in the firmware.
The oceans will be fine... They'll get almost all the water back in short order. The deserts will change, but most people would agree that they've IMPROVED from the change. A few desert plants and animals will have less habitat, but you'll get an abundance of other plants and animals as a result.
Actually, everything I've seen says it's the BEST idea.
How many old-growth forests have been cut down to make land for housing and farming? How many animals have gone extinct or are endangered because humans like to build on their habitat? Building in the desert has a vastly less significant ecological impact.
How many people are killed by snow, ice, cold weather, and diseases related to or strengthened by cold weather? You can avoid all those life-threatening hazards by living where it's simply warmer.
Desert residents are more frugal with water. Decades of regulations, high prices, news stories, or whatnot, has caused the situation. Taking from the water-rich and giving to the water-poor will result in the water being much more efficiently utilized.
There's much more cheap land out in the desert. The price difference will overwhelm the price of all the water used in a LIFETIME. The opportunity cost of paying an order of magnitude more for expensive East-coast land
Air conditioning is vastly more efficient than home heating. While you're complaining that South-Westerners are using more than their share of water, Northerners are using vastly more than their share of home heating oil, natural gas, and electricity. Those are more expensive, and in shorter supply than plain old water.
Solar power seems to be the only viable path forward for centuries of human expansion (unless fusion comes on-line soon). Putting people where there's more sun, is a great way to more efficiently utilize the large supply of solar power the desert areas have to offer. And their power demands will much more closely track with the supply of solar power plants, than northerners, who it seems will need to keep burning obscene quantities of coal...
People like more sun and warmth. The population of the US keeps moving south and west, and it's showing no signs of abating.