Actually I think it's 59.94 and I believe it was done on account of colour signals.
When color came along, they had to add a high subcarrier to contain color information (3.58Mhz). This necessitated making a little bit of room in the frequency space, so the timing signal was reduced to 59.94hz (for a frame rate of 29.97).
Last, and AFAIK, the region coding thing can't be enforced in europe (even if all DVD players sold there are region coded).
I'm not sure about that. The EU has adopted similar provisions to those contained in the DMCA (based on the World Copyright Treaty.) The various member nations haven't yet signed them into law, but in theory they have to at some point. At that time, the MPAA should have the ability to enforce the CSS licenses and prevent the sale of region-free machines ("circumvention devices").
It's nice to see a Salon article used as inspiration for a Slashdot story rather than the other way around. I've been noticing that if you check out the Tech and Business section on any given day, you're more than likely to see some article on a subject "ripped from the headlines" of Slashdot.
PS Before I get flamed: I love Salon, and I realize Slashdot has linked to it quite a bit in the past.
All this gives way to an important truth about contracts: the words only stand up by the goodwill of the parties behind them, and similarly, cannot withstand the force of an able party who wants out
Unfortunately, the ability of a large law firm to defend/enforce its will is probably greater than that of most anyone else.
This is borne out by several case studies of young children who are scarred by
viewing their parents having sex
In most parts of this country it is not permissible for a woman to expose her breasts, even in a private establishment. It's not considered kosher by the FCC to broadcast a nude image of a human being, for even a couple of seconds. Sexual imagery that could not be in any way construed as violent is routinely censored, while cartoons feature gunfights in which people die in realistic ways. This is the sort of thinking that drives things like CIPA.
Your arguments, no matter how heartfelt, are generally nothing more than after-the-fact justifications for repressive religious and social mores enforced on our whole society. Perhaps it's because some psychiatrists believe that it's disturbing for young people to see the adult form, but human society functioned perfectly well for millennia without those taboos.
check out Scalia's dissent in Romer v. Evans -- it's pretty sickening
Wow. My favorite bit:
Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about [ ROMER v. EVANS, ___ U.S. ___ (1996) , 2] this subject, it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions in state constitutions
That's what I love about the strict constructionists. If the constitution doesn't say "a legislature in a state that doesn't yet exist shall not have the right to discriminate against a group of people carrying on a private sexual lifestyle that we barely understand today", then it's all well and good. Unless, of course, it has to do with voting rights. Then it's just darts on a board.
Quite frankly, I'm getting a little sick of the whole notion of wireless internet access and until improvements are made to both wireless input and output devices, the only thing I will use the "wireless web" for is to check a Red Sox score."
I recently convinced by boss to get me a Ricochet PC card (128K wireless in major metropolitan areas), and I have to say that's it's awfully nice. If this is the beginning of the wireless web, then it's something we should be excited about. Unfortunately, this seems to be a niche market. If we're betting the future on cellphones and pagers, we've got a long way to go. Ricochet works with the iPaq, but even that (relatively large display area) isn't very enjoyable for browsing.
I'm a little concerned for those friends of mine who are working at wireless startups (generally the only internet-related startups with cash to burn this year.) All the reformatting technology in the world isn't going to overcome the fact that the "wireless web" is nothing more than a stripped down version of gopher running on a cellphone.
Others claim otherwise, so I don't think it can be seen as an established fraud, just seriously questioned.
Are there any decent scientific studies showing the opposite (that sexuality does harm to minors?) This was the issue I had with the government's position in this case.
Not to be perverse, but if my choice was exposing my child to silly people in leather whipping each other OR silly people in leather shooting each other... I'd have no problems at all with the former. I certainly don't think it would make my kids any more deviant than they're already bound to be.
But there's no excuse for teaching a generation of kids that a human life is nothing more than an obstacle in a video game.
definitely, for some religions yes, it is implied by the statement itself
The Constitution would seem not to permit this justification (especially in a first-amendment case), as Congress can't pass laws concerning religion. Presumably the Supreme Court can't accept such an argument, either.
What I was looking for was some more traditional evidence showing objective harm (psychological difficulties, increased likelihood of violence, etc.) when children are exposed to pornography. Does Murray's book suggest any of this in a definitive way?
Exactly how much better off would the nation be if all that money was instead contributed toward, say, dealing with however many unsolved rapes there are each year in New York alone?
Better perhaps to simply spend the money on education and counseling for said minors. That all by itself would probably significantly reduce the crime figures in New York.
Is their a body of work supporting the statement that graphic pornography is "harmful" to children, or is this just fact simply accepted by America's judicial system? Not that I can see Antonin Scalia questioning the assumption very thoroughly.
It's hard to tell what's app-related and what's not. The memory manager was always a strange and convoluted thing, and fairly easy to crash even back then. If you were using any of the shakier sound routines, or anything that used interrupt calls to do "multitasking" or animation, you could pretty easily screw things up. The MacOS was a neat thing, but it was designed (re-designed?) by Jobs to be simple and cheap (the Lisa OS was much more advanced, and was actually multitasking, I believe.) Between the OS and the included apps, there was a certain tendency towards the occasional system-bomb.
To provide an unreliable OS in such a device is completely inconsistant with the target market
Ok, I'm not a Microsoft troll but I feel obligated to be fair about this. The version they were demoing was not the final architecture, it was essentially PC hardware running in emulation. So it crashed, and that's not entirely surprising. I'm sure the XBox will have its foibles, but we'll probably have to wait til the real thing arrives before we start picking it apart.
I should Never EVER have to tell someone that. Game Console users should certainly not have to deal with that.
I had this argument with a friend of mine. He insisted that console owners would never abide the occasional crash, and this alone would destroy the XBox. That night he was playing (insert PSII title here) and the whole thing hung up on him. He was somewhat contrite the next day. I think you're right that if the XBox crashes anywhere near as often as Windows, people will hate it. But if the number of crashes is under control, it's much more likely that your average person will judge it by its other aspects. And once they've bought one, they'll probably be inclined to gloss over the crashes to their friends.
See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded
MS has been putting out some pretty godawful software. But they weren't the first. As I remember is, MacOS 1.0 made DOS look stable as a rock. That little system bomb was the first step onto a long, dark road of quick and dirty releases of big, complicated software products.
Only the Verisign registry is, and nobody ever complains about that
On the contrary, that's exactly what people have been complaining about. Most everyone on this thread knows that there are a lot of competing registrars-- you didn't point this out for the first time. The monopoly is with the registry, and that's what this whole discussion has been about (what did you think people were complaining about??)
Verisign makes a lot of money off of the registry, and every registrar has to pay for it. The problem most people have with the decision is the back-room nature of the deal. This is a public resource, yet it has been granted to a single for-profit company for a large number of years (by Internet standards), with very little room for public comment.
In any case, to say "there are lots of competing registrars, so customers are never going to suffer as a result of the Verisign monopoly" does not an argument make. You could as easily say "there are lots of competing DSL providers, so customers aren't going to suffer because Verizon owns all the lines."
While I can see the usefulness of this device from the standpoint of the ratings biz, it's a bit surprising to see it casually accepted by end-user snoopees.
I'm not sure what's so unusual about it. Nielsen families have been letting the company snoop on their viewing/listening habits for years. This simply automates the task and eliminates the need for pesky diaries. It's totally voluntary.
You've also got to remember that some people don't care that much for privacy. There are folks who would like to live their whole lives in public, if they could.
Ugh. Damn those environmentalists. Their damn projections were wrong. This shows that we'll have oil and gas FOREVER!!!
Even if it were true that no more oil were being created constantly, there are enourmous organic energy reserves on Earth
We think that there are enormous reserves on Earth. Traditional models, as you pointed out, show us running out sometime this century. Those models have (not surprisingly) been shown to be somewhat innaccurate. Why this is seems to be a mystery to a lot of scientists; some of them have gone so far as to postulate that our entire understanding of the creation of fossile fuel is wrong, and that perhaps it's created by unknown geological processes.
Whether they're crackpots or not, the point is simply that nobody knows how much oil is out there-- not even Uncle Al. We could have enough for three centuries, or we could run out in twenty years. We just don't have enough information to justify betting our whole future on it.
And this all ignores the other issue of carbon dioxide production. There's some pretty good evidence that we've begun to make serious changes to our atmosphere just over the past 50 years. There are certainly people who believe that global warming is a fiction, or that the planet will just take care of itself (the cloud cover theory), but I don't see any evidence for this belief, and even if the planet does somehow compensate for our CO2 production, it's beyond optimistic to think that the ecosystem is solely designed to keep human beings (and their coastal cities) comfortable.
In any case, don't take your scientific advice from people with a political goal, whether they're Dick Cheney or myself. There are similar arguments similar to the one above deriding evolution, general relativity, etc. if you talk to the right people.
If this is such a great idea, there oughta be zillions of dollars in it. It ought to be cheaper than our current energy sources.
With advances in technology, the price of wind power has been dropping over the past few years. Given time to grow, and a subsidy to encourage development, wind power will become cheaper than fossile fuel (it's only a couple of cents per KWh, a difference which could easily vanish in a fuel crunch.)
As to the question "why isn't it here?" Well, it is-- increasing percentages of some European countries' power is generated by wind. We (the US) invested heavily in wind by subsidizing the construction of turbines a couple of decades ago. This is what created the wind farms of the Altamonte pass.
These subsidies created a booming wind technology industry, which promptly crashed for two reasons. The first was that the subsidies were for the construction of windmills, not the production of power. This created little incentive to produce more efficient models. The second reason was that the subsidies were yanked a couple of years later-- with justification, they weren't really working-- but nothing was put in their place. This was the same brilliance in energy management that gave us the current crisis in California.
The industry languished for a few years before it began to come back, spurred in part by European nations investments and subsidies. Europe began offering a few cents per KW/h to wind producers (mostly farmers-- the revenues from power production have the side benefit of keeping farms in business, which is something we spend billions on without getting power in the bargain.)
Spurred by a real market, wind technology has begun to see rapid advances. The new generation of windmills have blades the size of a 747's wingspan, and produce up to 2.5MW of electricity each. The turbine weighs half as much as it would have a few years back. It's also quiet, nonpolluting, and doesn't require fuel shipments. In a few years the subsidies will probably not be necessary any longer. If the US were to get into the game, this time span would probably be reduced.
But instead we're not even thinking about it. We're going to drill the ANWR, reduce standards of energy efficiency and build even dirtier power plants.
Fuel is expensive because supplies are limited because refinery capacity can not meet the demands of the "greatest economy in history"
If this is the case, Bush's plan does nothing-- drilling the ANWR will not increase refinery capacity. Supply is low because a major oil cartel has been deliberately reducing it over the past few years. OPEC could easily have pump prices under a buck if they wanted such a thing. Pumping oil out of the ANWR isn't going to give us any more oil (oil's sold on a global market), and OPEC will reduce supply again to keep the price where they want it. That's not a bad thing for the oil companies that bankrolled the Bush/Cheney campaign, though (nor is it bad for Cheney and his millions in un-vested Halliburton options.)
Furthermore, I'm not sure exactly which crisis you're even talking about? The one in California that was caused by ill-advised insta-deregulation in the 1980s? Or the one at the pump, which (as I just said) has to do with us relying so desperately on a resource controlled by people who (gasp!) don't have our best interests at heart. We could, of course, simply require autos to run more efficiently; the savings in gas would pay for the increased price over and over again, and the oil saved would more than eclipse anything that we're going to get from ANWR.
In any case, most electricity is made from coal, not oil. And the major problem with that is that people don't want coal plants (especially the dirtier coal plants allowed by the Bush plan) anywhere near them (these are regular people, not liberal environmentalists.) We've pretty much choked Native American Reservations with particularly nasty coal plants. Bush's plan aims to solve this by taking land away from people (not popular among the very strong land-rights lobby that generally would support him.) It makes no provisions to even think about wind power, which could easily be providing a significant portion of our power in 10 years (the time it will take for ANWR exploration to begin producing results.) Modern wind technology is rapidly becoming competitive, with enormous multi-megawatt generators bringing down the production price (actually, this stuff is very cool, you should check it out no matter how much you disagree with me on the rest of it.)
And finally, it absolutely rejects the possibility that there might be something to this whole greenhouse effect thing. I might understand questioning the existence of global warming, but to plow ahead with the most vigorous pro-fossile fuel plan since the 70s at a time like this is a waste of taxpayer resources and just plain stupid.
The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years.
Yes, they've been brewing since the 80s, when some silly people of Bush's political persuasion carelessly deregulated a monopoly and everything slowly went to shit. And as Bush has made clear, the problems in CA are not a Federal issue, they are explicitly a state problem. And as very little electricity is derived from Oil, an aggressive oil policy isn't going to help anyone.
Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you?
Well, I hate to point this out... But Gore is not the President of the United States, he's a private citizen. He "lost" the election, and the only upshot of that for him is that he doesn't have to be compared to Bush anymore. Al Gore could die his hair orange and become a Hari Krishna, and it wouldn't make Bush's silly political machinations any more justified.
Exactly, plus Bush and Cheney actually sold their oil stocks for propriety's sake before taking office...
Excuse me, I don't much like political flame-wars on Slashdot. But what you just said is wildly untrue. Dick Cheney still has multi-millions of dollars of options in Halliburton oil, many of which don't vest for several years.
There was a flap about this, and he made some noise about getting rid of them, but then it blew over and he quietly went ahead owning them. So please do some basic research before posting.
As far as the energy crisis... I'm not sure I see any solutions in the Bush plan except drilling the ANWR (a relatively small amount of oil, 10 years out), reducing emissions standards (which simply exacerbates the Not-In-My-Backyard phenomenon which is responsible for a lot of the power companies' troubles, not wild eyed environmentalists or democrats) and of course, Eminant Domain (which pisses off a lot of Bush's key supporters and is rife with legal difficulty.)
I should elaborate that drilling for oil in the ANWR does not mean that America will have more oil, as oil is sold on a global market. It simply means that a few American companies will make more money than they do now. OPEC will still be able to maintain the price, even if the most optimistic estimates of production are met. Simply raising efficiency standards on new cars would save an amount of oil that easily eclipses what's going to come out of ANWR. Now, if we could realistically find a lot more oil, maybe it'd be a real plan, but it's just silliness as it stands.
Don't forget biomass power solutions, which are essentially another way of harnessing solar power (of course, you could argue that oil is as well, but it tends to be non-renewable:)
First of all, any system beaming energy from orbit would use a laser based targetting system.
So on that subject, can microwaves handle cloud-cover? This would seem to be one of the biggest problems with the scheme. Unless you put the receiver in a desert.
the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood
Except that when a 747 crashes, it doesn't keep going. The damage here would be more like a small, but very destructive tornado-- cutting power lines, destroying roads, starting forest fires.
With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?"
For all of Bush's rhetoric, his budget has already slashed funding for alternative energy research. I think this particular idea would fall under the same axe. I'm not going to draw the obvious conclusion as to what his priorities really are.
Now, if we could bill these solar satellites as some sort of missile-defense...
95% of the world population doesn't have the DCMCA... Fortunately, it seems that the rest of the world is not as stupid as the yankees are
Unfortunately you're very very wrong. The DMCA law (US) was based on an international copyright treaty (the World Copyright Treaty) that has already been ratified by the EU and a handful of other nations. And more are on the way. Check some of the provisions (PDF, sorry) coming soon to an industrialized nation near you. Further developments such as the FTAA will certainly bring these IP protections to other countries that currently ignore them.
You are of course correct that a large percentage of the world's population doesn't have such laws. BUT a) the countries that are affected are the richest in the world, and therefore the most significant for the content-production industry. And b) they're us: I could care less if Chinese have the right to watch movies as they please, if I (and neighboring countries, for that matter) don't.
There are plenty of REGION-FREE DVD players on the market, available NOW
Those that exist are expensive, or not available for import to this country. The CSS folks still have control of the license. If you produce a region-free commercial DVD player for sale in the US (or other nations where and when applicable laws are in place), you'd better have a CSS license or you will be sued. Having a CSS license means you agree to a long list of conditions which the CSS folks will enforce upon you.
In any case, region coding is not the end-all example of player control. The movie studios aren't going to foam at the mouth if a few people are using such players. If everyone began using them, they'd probably have something to say about it, and the DMCA would give them the right to go after unlicensed CSS-enabled player manufacturers.
CSS is just a first step, a sort of trial balloon. It doesn't really prevent copying as we all know. It's purpose right now seems largely to test the laws in the courts. If they stand up, we will be seeing much more aggressive use of "encryption" used to permit legal shenanigans.
So, as long as the yankees will be stupid, they will have the DCMCA, and region-locked DVD players.
Hell yes. We are stupid. I only wish the rest of the democratic world were showing signs of brain life. Unfortunately, it looks like they're as bad as us.
Slashdot Mirror
When color came along, they had to add a high subcarrier to contain color information (3.58Mhz). This necessitated making a little bit of room in the frequency space, so the timing signal was reduced to 59.94hz (for a frame rate of 29.97).
I'm not sure about that. The EU has adopted similar provisions to those contained in the DMCA (based on the World Copyright Treaty.) The various member nations haven't yet signed them into law, but in theory they have to at some point. At that time, the MPAA should have the ability to enforce the CSS licenses and prevent the sale of region-free machines ("circumvention devices").
PS Before I get flamed: I love Salon, and I realize Slashdot has linked to it quite a bit in the past.
Unfortunately, the ability of a large law firm to defend/enforce its will is probably greater than that of most anyone else.
In most parts of this country it is not permissible for a woman to expose her breasts, even in a private establishment. It's not considered kosher by the FCC to broadcast a nude image of a human being, for even a couple of seconds. Sexual imagery that could not be in any way construed as violent is routinely censored, while cartoons feature gunfights in which people die in realistic ways. This is the sort of thinking that drives things like CIPA.
Your arguments, no matter how heartfelt, are generally nothing more than after-the-fact justifications for repressive religious and social mores enforced on our whole society. Perhaps it's because some psychiatrists believe that it's disturbing for young people to see the adult form, but human society functioned perfectly well for millennia without those taboos.
Wow. My favorite bit:
Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about [ ROMER v. EVANS, ___ U.S. ___ (1996) , 2] this subject, it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions in state constitutions
That's what I love about the strict constructionists. If the constitution doesn't say "a legislature in a state that doesn't yet exist shall not have the right to discriminate against a group of people carrying on a private sexual lifestyle that we barely understand today", then it's all well and good. Unless, of course, it has to do with voting rights. Then it's just darts on a board.
I recently convinced by boss to get me a Ricochet PC card (128K wireless in major metropolitan areas), and I have to say that's it's awfully nice. If this is the beginning of the wireless web, then it's something we should be excited about. Unfortunately, this seems to be a niche market. If we're betting the future on cellphones and pagers, we've got a long way to go. Ricochet works with the iPaq, but even that (relatively large display area) isn't very enjoyable for browsing.
I'm a little concerned for those friends of mine who are working at wireless startups (generally the only internet-related startups with cash to burn this year.) All the reformatting technology in the world isn't going to overcome the fact that the "wireless web" is nothing more than a stripped down version of gopher running on a cellphone.
Are there any decent scientific studies showing the opposite (that sexuality does harm to minors?) This was the issue I had with the government's position in this case.
But there's no excuse for teaching a generation of kids that a human life is nothing more than an obstacle in a video game.
The Constitution would seem not to permit this justification (especially in a first-amendment case), as Congress can't pass laws concerning religion. Presumably the Supreme Court can't accept such an argument, either.
What I was looking for was some more traditional evidence showing objective harm (psychological difficulties, increased likelihood of violence, etc.) when children are exposed to pornography. Does Murray's book suggest any of this in a definitive way?
Better perhaps to simply spend the money on education and counseling for said minors. That all by itself would probably significantly reduce the crime figures in New York.
Is their a body of work supporting the statement that graphic pornography is "harmful" to children, or is this just fact simply accepted by America's judicial system? Not that I can see Antonin Scalia questioning the assumption very thoroughly.
It's hard to tell what's app-related and what's not. The memory manager was always a strange and convoluted thing, and fairly easy to crash even back then. If you were using any of the shakier sound routines, or anything that used interrupt calls to do "multitasking" or animation, you could pretty easily screw things up. The MacOS was a neat thing, but it was designed (re-designed?) by Jobs to be simple and cheap (the Lisa OS was much more advanced, and was actually multitasking, I believe.) Between the OS and the included apps, there was a certain tendency towards the occasional system-bomb.
Ok, I'm not a Microsoft troll but I feel obligated to be fair about this. The version they were demoing was not the final architecture, it was essentially PC hardware running in emulation. So it crashed, and that's not entirely surprising. I'm sure the XBox will have its foibles, but we'll probably have to wait til the real thing arrives before we start picking it apart.
I should Never EVER have to tell someone that. Game Console users should certainly not have to deal with that.
I had this argument with a friend of mine. He insisted that console owners would never abide the occasional crash, and this alone would destroy the XBox. That night he was playing (insert PSII title here) and the whole thing hung up on him. He was somewhat contrite the next day. I think you're right that if the XBox crashes anywhere near as often as Windows, people will hate it. But if the number of crashes is under control, it's much more likely that your average person will judge it by its other aspects. And once they've bought one, they'll probably be inclined to gloss over the crashes to their friends.
See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded
MS has been putting out some pretty godawful software. But they weren't the first. As I remember is, MacOS 1.0 made DOS look stable as a rock. That little system bomb was the first step onto a long, dark road of quick and dirty releases of big, complicated software products.
On the contrary, that's exactly what people have been complaining about. Most everyone on this thread knows that there are a lot of competing registrars-- you didn't point this out for the first time. The monopoly is with the registry, and that's what this whole discussion has been about (what did you think people were complaining about??)
Verisign makes a lot of money off of the registry, and every registrar has to pay for it. The problem most people have with the decision is the back-room nature of the deal. This is a public resource, yet it has been granted to a single for-profit company for a large number of years (by Internet standards), with very little room for public comment.
In any case, to say "there are lots of competing registrars, so customers are never going to suffer as a result of the Verisign monopoly" does not an argument make. You could as easily say "there are lots of competing DSL providers, so customers aren't going to suffer because Verizon owns all the lines."
I'm not sure what's so unusual about it. Nielsen families have been letting the company snoop on their viewing/listening habits for years. This simply automates the task and eliminates the need for pesky diaries. It's totally voluntary.
You've also got to remember that some people don't care that much for privacy. There are folks who would like to live their whole lives in public, if they could.
Even if it were true that no more oil were being created constantly, there are enourmous organic energy reserves on Earth
We think that there are enormous reserves on Earth. Traditional models, as you pointed out, show us running out sometime this century. Those models have (not surprisingly) been shown to be somewhat innaccurate. Why this is seems to be a mystery to a lot of scientists; some of them have gone so far as to postulate that our entire understanding of the creation of fossile fuel is wrong, and that perhaps it's created by unknown geological processes.
Whether they're crackpots or not, the point is simply that nobody knows how much oil is out there-- not even Uncle Al. We could have enough for three centuries, or we could run out in twenty years. We just don't have enough information to justify betting our whole future on it.
And this all ignores the other issue of carbon dioxide production. There's some pretty good evidence that we've begun to make serious changes to our atmosphere just over the past 50 years. There are certainly people who believe that global warming is a fiction, or that the planet will just take care of itself (the cloud cover theory), but I don't see any evidence for this belief, and even if the planet does somehow compensate for our CO2 production, it's beyond optimistic to think that the ecosystem is solely designed to keep human beings (and their coastal cities) comfortable.
In any case, don't take your scientific advice from people with a political goal, whether they're Dick Cheney or myself. There are similar arguments similar to the one above deriding evolution, general relativity, etc. if you talk to the right people.
With advances in technology, the price of wind power has been dropping over the past few years. Given time to grow, and a subsidy to encourage development, wind power will become cheaper than fossile fuel (it's only a couple of cents per KWh, a difference which could easily vanish in a fuel crunch.)
As to the question "why isn't it here?" Well, it is-- increasing percentages of some European countries' power is generated by wind. We (the US) invested heavily in wind by subsidizing the construction of turbines a couple of decades ago. This is what created the wind farms of the Altamonte pass.
These subsidies created a booming wind technology industry, which promptly crashed for two reasons. The first was that the subsidies were for the construction of windmills, not the production of power. This created little incentive to produce more efficient models. The second reason was that the subsidies were yanked a couple of years later-- with justification, they weren't really working-- but nothing was put in their place. This was the same brilliance in energy management that gave us the current crisis in California.
The industry languished for a few years before it began to come back, spurred in part by European nations investments and subsidies. Europe began offering a few cents per KW/h to wind producers (mostly farmers-- the revenues from power production have the side benefit of keeping farms in business, which is something we spend billions on without getting power in the bargain.)
Spurred by a real market, wind technology has begun to see rapid advances. The new generation of windmills have blades the size of a 747's wingspan, and produce up to 2.5MW of electricity each. The turbine weighs half as much as it would have a few years back. It's also quiet, nonpolluting, and doesn't require fuel shipments. In a few years the subsidies will probably not be necessary any longer. If the US were to get into the game, this time span would probably be reduced.
But instead we're not even thinking about it. We're going to drill the ANWR, reduce standards of energy efficiency and build even dirtier power plants.
If this is the case, Bush's plan does nothing-- drilling the ANWR will not increase refinery capacity. Supply is low because a major oil cartel has been deliberately reducing it over the past few years. OPEC could easily have pump prices under a buck if they wanted such a thing. Pumping oil out of the ANWR isn't going to give us any more oil (oil's sold on a global market), and OPEC will reduce supply again to keep the price where they want it. That's not a bad thing for the oil companies that bankrolled the Bush/Cheney campaign, though (nor is it bad for Cheney and his millions in un-vested Halliburton options.)
Furthermore, I'm not sure exactly which crisis you're even talking about? The one in California that was caused by ill-advised insta-deregulation in the 1980s? Or the one at the pump, which (as I just said) has to do with us relying so desperately on a resource controlled by people who (gasp!) don't have our best interests at heart. We could, of course, simply require autos to run more efficiently; the savings in gas would pay for the increased price over and over again, and the oil saved would more than eclipse anything that we're going to get from ANWR.
In any case, most electricity is made from coal, not oil. And the major problem with that is that people don't want coal plants (especially the dirtier coal plants allowed by the Bush plan) anywhere near them (these are regular people, not liberal environmentalists.) We've pretty much choked Native American Reservations with particularly nasty coal plants. Bush's plan aims to solve this by taking land away from people (not popular among the very strong land-rights lobby that generally would support him.) It makes no provisions to even think about wind power, which could easily be providing a significant portion of our power in 10 years (the time it will take for ANWR exploration to begin producing results.) Modern wind technology is rapidly becoming competitive, with enormous multi-megawatt generators bringing down the production price (actually, this stuff is very cool, you should check it out no matter how much you disagree with me on the rest of it.)
And finally, it absolutely rejects the possibility that there might be something to this whole greenhouse effect thing. I might understand questioning the existence of global warming, but to plow ahead with the most vigorous pro-fossile fuel plan since the 70s at a time like this is a waste of taxpayer resources and just plain stupid.
Yes, they've been brewing since the 80s, when some silly people of Bush's political persuasion carelessly deregulated a monopoly and everything slowly went to shit. And as Bush has made clear, the problems in CA are not a Federal issue, they are explicitly a state problem. And as very little electricity is derived from Oil, an aggressive oil policy isn't going to help anyone.
Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you?
Well, I hate to point this out... But Gore is not the President of the United States, he's a private citizen. He "lost" the election, and the only upshot of that for him is that he doesn't have to be compared to Bush anymore. Al Gore could die his hair orange and become a Hari Krishna, and it wouldn't make Bush's silly political machinations any more justified.
Excuse me, I don't much like political flame-wars on Slashdot. But what you just said is wildly untrue. Dick Cheney still has multi-millions of dollars of options in Halliburton oil, many of which don't vest for several years.
There was a flap about this, and he made some noise about getting rid of them, but then it blew over and he quietly went ahead owning them. So please do some basic research before posting.
As far as the energy crisis... I'm not sure I see any solutions in the Bush plan except drilling the ANWR (a relatively small amount of oil, 10 years out), reducing emissions standards (which simply exacerbates the Not-In-My-Backyard phenomenon which is responsible for a lot of the power companies' troubles, not wild eyed environmentalists or democrats) and of course, Eminant Domain (which pisses off a lot of Bush's key supporters and is rife with legal difficulty.)
I should elaborate that drilling for oil in the ANWR does not mean that America will have more oil, as oil is sold on a global market. It simply means that a few American companies will make more money than they do now. OPEC will still be able to maintain the price, even if the most optimistic estimates of production are met. Simply raising efficiency standards on new cars would save an amount of oil that easily eclipses what's going to come out of ANWR. Now, if we could realistically find a lot more oil, maybe it'd be a real plan, but it's just silliness as it stands.
Don't forget biomass power solutions, which are essentially another way of harnessing solar power (of course, you could argue that oil is as well, but it tends to be non-renewable :)
So on that subject, can microwaves handle cloud-cover? This would seem to be one of the biggest problems with the scheme. Unless you put the receiver in a desert.
the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood
Except that when a 747 crashes, it doesn't keep going. The damage here would be more like a small, but very destructive tornado-- cutting power lines, destroying roads, starting forest fires.
For all of Bush's rhetoric, his budget has already slashed funding for alternative energy research. I think this particular idea would fall under the same axe. I'm not going to draw the obvious conclusion as to what his priorities really are.
Now, if we could bill these solar satellites as some sort of missile-defense...
Unfortunately you're very very wrong. The DMCA law (US) was based on an international copyright treaty (the World Copyright Treaty) that has already been ratified by the EU and a handful of other nations. And more are on the way. Check some of the provisions (PDF, sorry) coming soon to an industrialized nation near you. Further developments such as the FTAA will certainly bring these IP protections to other countries that currently ignore them.
You are of course correct that a large percentage of the world's population doesn't have such laws. BUT a) the countries that are affected are the richest in the world, and therefore the most significant for the content-production industry. And b) they're us: I could care less if Chinese have the right to watch movies as they please, if I (and neighboring countries, for that matter) don't.
There are plenty of REGION-FREE DVD players on the market, available NOW
Those that exist are expensive, or not available for import to this country. The CSS folks still have control of the license. If you produce a region-free commercial DVD player for sale in the US (or other nations where and when applicable laws are in place), you'd better have a CSS license or you will be sued. Having a CSS license means you agree to a long list of conditions which the CSS folks will enforce upon you.
In any case, region coding is not the end-all example of player control. The movie studios aren't going to foam at the mouth if a few people are using such players. If everyone began using them, they'd probably have something to say about it, and the DMCA would give them the right to go after unlicensed CSS-enabled player manufacturers.
CSS is just a first step, a sort of trial balloon. It doesn't really prevent copying as we all know. It's purpose right now seems largely to test the laws in the courts. If they stand up, we will be seeing much more aggressive use of "encryption" used to permit legal shenanigans.
So, as long as the yankees will be stupid, they will have the DCMCA, and region-locked DVD players.
Hell yes. We are stupid. I only wish the rest of the democratic world were showing signs of brain life. Unfortunately, it looks like they're as bad as us.