The UK was quick out of the blocks with widespread DAB deployment and despite the complaints in this story that it hasn't caught up FM, there are many millions of receivers in use which only only support an 80s era codec. Moving to DAB+ codecs will be hard in the UK, and while DAB+ would be more efficient, taking away bandwidth from DAB to broadcast in DAB+ for a cross-over period means reducing the number of broadcast stations. This will upset people who were sold DAB on the basis of the channel choice; witness the recent outcry when the BBC proposed to close the digital-only station 6music.
The article mentions that 24% of listening is digital; if that were DAB that would be pretty impressive. Unfortunately, in an article about DAB, the BBC is rather lax in the statistics it quotes by not breaking down "digital", which includes DAB plus radio over DVB-T, satellite TV and internet streaming. The last is quite popular with hours spent online streaming BBC radio vastly ahead of the more frequently trumpeted video iPlayer services.
What's so wrong with the solution that Europe uses?
Under WEEE legislation, the supplier is responsible for safe disposal at the end of life of the product (they can do so themselves or, quite commonly, subcontract out to larger schemes). This means that the cost of disposal in a manner that doesn't spoil the common good that is an unpolluted environment gets priced into electronics products up front.
It's not a tax, but regulation to expose an externality. Business is responsible for implementing the system so has an incentive to do so more efficiently than a government tax funded scheme. It also creates an incentive for manufacturers to invest in new technology for disposal/recycling and to avoid hard-to-dispose-of components just to shave a few cents from the BOM.
Phones haven't become 200% more expensive since its introduction; people really shouldn't be outraged at having to pay a cost of a few extra dollars to avoid polluting their environment. The alternative is to ship your crap to the 3rd world to pollute their environment and kill their citizens, and if America believes that is morally acceptable then God help it.
Good for you for making a living without taking employment from some company, but I do think you're talking at cross-purposes to the article.
You've either had a succession of job-contracts, or more likely have worked for yourself. Either way the government's statistics (and most normal people) would not consider you unemployed.
That's not quite true. A normal BSD license doesn't have a copyright cancellation clause. The WebM patent license rescinds the copyright license if you sue google over the patents.
This may well be a reasonable thing to do, but it is not strictly more permissive than BSD, in the way that a simple BSD plus separate patent grant would be.
... unless of course, you're horribly allergic to peanuts.... because you'd probably be dead:)
Peanut allergies are caused by a reaction to peanut protein not to the oil. Peanut allergy sufferers should not react to refined peanut oil. Of course unrefined, or poor quality oil which may be contaminated with nut protein could be dangerous.
If Utz use good quality ingredients then you probably wouldn't be dead. On the other hand, having a nut allergy, I would avoid them myself.
VC-1 didn't belong to MPEG either; it was released independently by Microsoft.
That didn't stop the MPEG-LA forming a VC-1 patent pool.
It's hard to imagine MPEG-LA not trying to form a patent pool. The question is how does Google respond. If Google maintain that none of the valid patents apply to VP8 then do MPEG-LA members sue, and risk having their patents challenged in an expensive legal battle with a very well funded opponent. This latter is one of the main differences between VP8 and Theora.
OK, xiph have made some questionable naming choices for their products, but I think we should cut them a bit of slack with a development code-name. Ptalarbvorm will become simply v1.2 of theora, just as Thusnelda became v1.1.
Monty clearly has some sense of humour about this; his codename for theora 1.3 is Eyjafjallajökull.
Actually I believe that US congress people are less likely to vote along party lines than UK parliamentarians. Just look at the trouble Obama had getting his health care reform through despite majorities in both chambers. The party whips (those in charge of party discipline in UK politics) wield considerable power in the Westminster parliament.
Not that this is necessarily a good thing. It does mean that US representatives seem to hold out for pork barrel concessions far more than in the UK system (though the minor regional parties in the UK are openly looking for these type of concessions to be part of any coalition). On the other hand, the way the UK parliament has become marginalised by the executive in the last decade or so, is bad for good government.
The unemployment rate in Spain is the result of their unrealistic spending spree and construction boom.
Right, and Greece couldn't be trusted with the low interest rates that suddenly acquiring a Dmark-like currency afforded her either. Recessions are usually the time when these things unwind. I'm sure Germany wishes it had pushed harder on enforcement of fiscal rules.
The average EU unemployment rate is not really an accurate measure of anything.
It seems to me a measure of the misery of tens of millions of affected people (maybe not all in exactly the same fashion, but still many unhappy families).
You are quick to point out that the social systems are expensive for Europeans, yet you have no opinion of the fantastic debt the US is in? It's not like their spending is any better, have you read about California's woes?
I'm no expert on the mess that is the US's fiscal situation. But California is a bit of a special case: at the liberal end by US standards, with a curious electoral system which allows the citizens to vote themselves spending commitments without ensuring the means to pay for it.
The US does have a lower tax burden, but not by all that much (at least compared to UK) when you consider the difference in services provided by government. Given this I have no clear idea why their deficit is so huge, but I expect the cost of America's military has at least something to do with it.
I question your claim that "EU citizens" will feel the debt. Each nation still controls its own economy after all, I doubt the Danes will be paying for Greek debt in the future.
I meant that to say eurozone, and, of course, the Danes hold an opt-out so like the UK won't be funding any bailouts. But europe is a connected economy and large shocks to the euro will have a ripple effect.
And while Europe will take longer to "recover" it is not at the expense of the people, unlike the US where a quick turn around is possible at the cost of people's homes, jobs and savings.
You can't have something for nothing; if it takes longer to recover, and leaves debt for future years then future citizens will be less well off (i.e. it is at their expense). What you might say is that the pain is more equally shared; everyone (or more people) suffer lower quality of life so that no-one (or very few) are destitute.
But, coming from a position of the centre-left in UK politics, I do find the US a strange place. Seemingly content with the huge disadvantages many of its citizens contend with. I just can't imagine the scenes we saw after hurricane Katrina in any european city.
You always have the option of moving to the US if you want higher risk and higher [possible] gains.
I didn't think it worked like that, does this mean you're handing out green cards?
And, I do think you're misreading the tenor of my language. I'm not apologising for the US system, merely pointing out that they've chosen to run their society differently and are living with the consequences.
I'm perfectly happy living where I do. I've been to the states, and do you know they don't even play proper sports over there? I won't be emigrating soon.
I'm afraid I still don't buy your argument. The recession has bit to a large degree in Europe (if not in every country equally).
If the outcome in terms of human suffering is different in EU vs US then that's because social systems are different. Universal healthcare in Europe means if you lose you job you don't lose healthcare, and in general have greater unemployment/social housing benefits. Supporting these has caused government borrowing to balloon in the EU causing the difficulties eurozone countries are having getting finance.
Major banks in Europe _have_ needed government bailouts and nationalisation to avoid collapse. Spain has an unemployment rate twice that of the USA. The overall unemployment rate in the EU is 10%, in the US 9.7%. Economies both sides of the Atlantic have felt this recession.
These differences in how the pain is spread through society are due to political differences between EU states and the US not the avoidance of recession, and EU citizens will be paying off the debt from this for decades,
I doubt you can find a European country that experienced the recession on the scale of the US.
Checkout Ireland, Greece (probably in need of IMF bailout just to stay afloat) or Iceland (whose economic difficulties make volcano troubles seem trivial). Here in Europe the acronym PIIG was used for the countries (Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, Greece) whose whole state finances are/were seriously threatened during the economic crisis.
Sure, these economies were not being as well run as Norway, but neither did they benefit from an oil windfall to fund investment (we in the UK did but we were too stupid to treat it the same way as you).
Mind you the world is larger than the USA, and if you think there are legal impediments to this happening in the US, there are certainly many parts of the world where the local government would not have any problem (moral or legal) in using such technology.
An attacker doesn't need a cert from the most trusted CA, the least trusted in any of dozens of countries round the world who operate CAs will do.
A CA who was caught doing this would probably be removed by all the browsers, but as yet there's no real mechanism for users to notice and make this known.
I've not got rtmpdump installed to the best of my knowledge (at least, there's no file containing that name on my system).
Do you have a file flvstreamer (which is a fork of rtmpdump used by get_iplayer)? If so it's the same thing, and if it works on the BBC's streams then it's been patched to get around Adobe's verification, so is a copyright circumvention device.
And just how are they going to know whether you have equipment to receive TV set up in your house? They have no right of entry to your property, unless you choose to allow it.
If they managed to witness you watching TV through a window then they might be able to make a case against you in court. Mostly though they rely on a system of sending threatening letters to every residential address which hasn't paid for a license.
That depends very much on what proportion of his current readership chooses to sign up, which is the big unknown in all of this. His advertising and other income sources will certainly decrease sharply when this comes in.
I think his hope is that people will start using devices such as kindle/iPad to read his content and he can sell access through these distribution channels. In order for that to make sense then the same content can't be free on the web. In fact if you make web access expensive enough then you can make your iPad subscription look like a good deal, making Steve Jobs happy to boot.
Giving 10.04 a proper go, I find that the fact that these commonly used buttons placed near to other commonly used buttons (applications and places menu and menu and buttons of the application) means that there's less skirting around with the mouse.
So far, I find two things. One that I move my mouse towards the top right, pause briefly to swear at Shuttleworth's arrogance, then veer towards the new close button location. Maybe this will change over time, but the ill-will created by the speed and manner of the change will probably last longer.
Two, I now have a concern that I will hit the close button when going for File/Edit menus (notice Mac don't have this problem as they don't locate menus at the top of application windows).
Plus, it reminds me of another favourite OS - Workbench 3.1
Onwards Ubuntu, into that UI design heaven that was the 90s...
As I understand it, each unit of methane has a consierably greater effect (more than an order of magnitude) than the same amount of CO2. But methane stays in the atmosphere for about a tenth the time of CO2.
On the other hand when methane decomposes in the atmosphere it becomes C02 and water anyway. So all in all, you're much better off burning the methane and benefitting from the energy than releasing it.
I’ve seen full feature tracking AR libraries back in 2004! And videos of their usage.
It's hardly the freshest news. Georg Klein's research on AR at Oxford goes back at least until 2005, and the PTAM software to 2007. According to the website linked in the summary he's no longer even at Oxford but left to work for Microsoft last year.
"99.9999%" of an operating system's relevance is in messaging and AJAX supported applications? That doesn't sound like much of a game plan for anything other than Ubuntu becoming the Cadillac of embedded systems. It's as if Mr. Asay thinks the future of the operating system is irrelevance.
And what's more, if that is their view, then they're competing with Google in the form of ChromeOS. Rather than doing that, I think I would go hunting for a different niche.
Mozilla Labs has started out on some great projects but they don't seem able to make it out into wider use. What happened to Weave, it's been kicking around for years? Ubiquity, a great start with developer/hacker interest, but the ball dropped.
I'm worried for how able Mozilla is to compete against the threat coming from Google and Chrome at the moment. Their core browser is falling behind on speed and stability and I think they'll find it hard to catch up given the size/age/complexity of the Firefox codebase compared to Chrome. Google had the opportunity to start from scratch with the knowledge of all the browser vulnerabilities in the last decade and have a much better architecture for security and stability. It's almost unfeasible for Mozilla to refactor firefox to match.
What they do have going for them is the collection of extensions and the new ideas from Mozilla Labs; if they don't get them out to the wider audience then their competitors will copy and popularise the best of them, essentially benefiting from free R&D.
Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree. But that big thermonuclear ball in the sky is.
Quite separate from the question of whether our previous actions *have* driven climate change as a side effect, we as a species certainly have the technology to bugger up the earth's climate if we actively tried. Large scale nuclear war, or any process which put enough dust into the atmosphere would significantly alter our planet's albedo and cause climatic effects which would last for far longer than our current civilisations.
Scientists are men that can be influenced by propaganda just like any man can be. I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money.
You're right that scientists are human (look carefully though, you'll find not all are men) and susceptible to various influences. You won't find perfect logic, behaviour or motives behind every scientist's action on both sides of any large scientific debate, but over time (and this issue had been studied for decades before the conclusions became front-line political questions) consensus tends to emerge, possibly to be overthrown later as new facts come to light. It's frustrating, but the best process we have. Certainly far better than listening to the voices of the lobby groups of those industries benefiting from the status quo.
I understand your mistrust of government by politicians, but I don't think they're behind this one. Really, it's just not a good sell "we need tax money to spend on mitigation for 3rd world countries and large scale, changes which may effect you lifestyle", surely if you want to get some extra tax dollars it's just so much easier to start a war.
You're right, H.264 is very much like MPEG2 in this respect, but I'm not sure that's ideal. The MPEG-LA considers that you need a license for every MPEG2 player ($2.50), every MPEG2 encoder ($2.50), plus a royalty on every distributed item (such as a DVD).
This is the reason that most Linux distros don't come with DVD/digital TV tuner playback without downloading a codec from a 3rd party. This may be legal or not depending on your jurisdiction (from the fact you use ATSC, I'm guessing you're in a country that does recognise software patents), but either way the fact it happened for DVD doesn't mean it's a good idea for the web.
The MPEG4 licensing agreement includes a licensing cost for every encoded stream on the internet, but has currently set that rate at zero for much online content (as an introductory rate). This is pretty explicitly a policy to encourage use and then, once it totally dominates online video, profit from it to a greater degree later.
The MPEG-LA is certainly an improvement from negotiating a separate license for every patent (not that anyone can guarantee that all applicable patents are in the pool), but it's not very compatible with open source software and a royalty free codec would be better for everyone.
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At 16m long they certainly wouldn't get in through my windows. Sounds like a good idea.
The UK was quick out of the blocks with widespread DAB deployment and despite the complaints in this story that it hasn't caught up FM, there are many millions of receivers in use which only only support an 80s era codec. Moving to DAB+ codecs will be hard in the UK, and while DAB+ would be more efficient, taking away bandwidth from DAB to broadcast in DAB+ for a cross-over period means reducing the number of broadcast stations. This will upset people who were sold DAB on the basis of the channel choice; witness the recent outcry when the BBC proposed to close the digital-only station 6music.
The article mentions that 24% of listening is digital; if that were DAB that would be pretty impressive. Unfortunately, in an article about DAB, the BBC is rather lax in the statistics it quotes by not breaking down "digital", which includes DAB plus radio over DVB-T, satellite TV and internet streaming. The last is quite popular with hours spent online streaming BBC radio vastly ahead of the more frequently trumpeted video iPlayer services.
What's so wrong with the solution that Europe uses?
Under WEEE legislation, the supplier is responsible for safe disposal at the end of life of the product (they can do so themselves or, quite commonly, subcontract out to larger schemes). This means that the cost of disposal in a manner that doesn't spoil the common good that is an unpolluted environment gets priced into electronics products up front.
It's not a tax, but regulation to expose an externality. Business is responsible for implementing the system so has an incentive to do so more efficiently than a government tax funded scheme. It also creates an incentive for manufacturers to invest in new technology for disposal/recycling and to avoid hard-to-dispose-of components just to shave a few cents from the BOM.
Phones haven't become 200% more expensive since its introduction; people really shouldn't be outraged at having to pay a cost of a few extra dollars to avoid polluting their environment. The alternative is to ship your crap to the 3rd world to pollute their environment and kill their citizens, and if America believes that is morally acceptable then God help it.
What's more VP8 also uses an integer approximation to the DCT, but a different one to H.264 (quite possibly the H.264 version is patented).
Good for you for making a living without taking employment from some company, but I do think you're talking at cross-purposes to the article.
You've either had a succession of job-contracts, or more likely have worked for yourself. Either way the government's statistics (and most normal people) would not consider you unemployed.
That's not quite true. A normal BSD license doesn't have a copyright cancellation clause. The WebM patent license rescinds the copyright license if you sue google over the patents.
This may well be a reasonable thing to do, but it is not strictly more permissive than BSD, in the way that a simple BSD plus separate patent grant would be.
... unless of course, you're horribly allergic to peanuts. ... because you'd probably be dead :)
Peanut allergies are caused by a reaction to peanut protein not to the oil. Peanut allergy sufferers should not react to refined peanut oil. Of course unrefined, or poor quality oil which may be contaminated with nut protein could be dangerous.
If Utz use good quality ingredients then you probably wouldn't be dead. On the other hand, having a nut allergy, I would avoid them myself.
VC-1 didn't belong to MPEG either; it was released independently by Microsoft.
That didn't stop the MPEG-LA forming a VC-1 patent pool.
It's hard to imagine MPEG-LA not trying to form a patent pool. The question is how does Google respond. If Google maintain that none of the valid patents apply to VP8 then do MPEG-LA members sue, and risk having their patents challenged in an expensive legal battle with a very well funded opponent. This latter is one of the main differences between VP8 and Theora.
OK, xiph have made some questionable naming choices for their products, but I think we should cut them a bit of slack with a development code-name. Ptalarbvorm will become simply v1.2 of theora, just as Thusnelda became v1.1.
Monty clearly has some sense of humour about this; his codename for theora 1.3 is Eyjafjallajökull.
Actually I believe that US congress people are less likely to vote along party lines than UK parliamentarians. Just look at the trouble Obama had getting his health care reform through despite majorities in both chambers. The party whips (those in charge of party discipline in UK politics) wield considerable power in the Westminster parliament.
Not that this is necessarily a good thing. It does mean that US representatives seem to hold out for pork barrel concessions far more than in the UK system (though the minor regional parties in the UK are openly looking for these type of concessions to be part of any coalition). On the other hand, the way the UK parliament has become marginalised by the executive in the last decade or so, is bad for good government.
The unemployment rate in Spain is the result of their unrealistic spending spree and construction boom.
Right, and Greece couldn't be trusted with the low interest rates that suddenly acquiring a Dmark-like currency afforded her either. Recessions are usually the time when these things unwind. I'm sure Germany wishes it had pushed harder on enforcement of fiscal rules.
The average EU unemployment rate is not really an accurate measure of anything.
It seems to me a measure of the misery of tens of millions of affected people (maybe not all in exactly the same fashion, but still many unhappy families).
You are quick to point out that the social systems are expensive for Europeans, yet you have no opinion of the fantastic debt the US is in? It's not like their spending is any better, have you read about California's woes?
I'm no expert on the mess that is the US's fiscal situation. But California is a bit of a special case: at the liberal end by US standards, with a curious electoral system which allows the citizens to vote themselves spending commitments without ensuring the means to pay for it.
The US does have a lower tax burden, but not by all that much (at least compared to UK) when you consider the difference in services provided by government. Given this I have no clear idea why their deficit is so huge, but I expect the cost of America's military has at least something to do with it.
I question your claim that "EU citizens" will feel the debt. Each nation still controls its own economy after all, I doubt the Danes will be paying for Greek debt in the future.
I meant that to say eurozone, and, of course, the Danes hold an opt-out so like the UK won't be funding any bailouts. But europe is a connected economy and large shocks to the euro will have a ripple effect.
And while Europe will take longer to "recover" it is not at the expense of the people, unlike the US where a quick turn around is possible at the cost of people's homes, jobs and savings.
You can't have something for nothing; if it takes longer to recover, and leaves debt for future years then future citizens will be less well off (i.e. it is at their expense). What you might say is that the pain is more equally shared; everyone (or more people) suffer lower quality of life so that no-one (or very few) are destitute.
But, coming from a position of the centre-left in UK politics, I do find the US a strange place. Seemingly content with the huge disadvantages many of its citizens contend with. I just can't imagine the scenes we saw after hurricane Katrina in any european city.
You always have the option of moving to the US if you want higher risk and higher [possible] gains.
I didn't think it worked like that, does this mean you're handing out green cards?
And, I do think you're misreading the tenor of my language. I'm not apologising for the US system, merely pointing out that they've chosen to run their society differently and are living with the consequences.
I'm perfectly happy living where I do. I've been to the states, and do you know they don't even play proper sports over there? I won't be emigrating soon.
I'm afraid I still don't buy your argument. The recession has bit to a large degree in Europe (if not in every country equally).
If the outcome in terms of human suffering is different in EU vs US then that's because social systems are different. Universal healthcare in Europe means if you lose you job you don't lose healthcare, and in general have greater unemployment/social housing benefits. Supporting these has caused government borrowing to balloon in the EU causing the difficulties eurozone countries are having getting finance.
Major banks in Europe _have_ needed government bailouts and nationalisation to avoid collapse. Spain has an unemployment rate twice that of the USA. The overall unemployment rate in the EU is 10%, in the US 9.7%. Economies both sides of the Atlantic have felt this recession.
These differences in how the pain is spread through society are due to political differences between EU states and the US not the avoidance of recession, and EU citizens will be paying off the debt from this for decades,
I doubt you can find a European country that experienced the recession on the scale of the US.
Checkout Ireland, Greece (probably in need of IMF bailout just to stay afloat) or Iceland (whose economic difficulties make volcano troubles seem trivial). Here in Europe the acronym PIIG was used for the countries (Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, Greece) whose whole state finances are/were seriously threatened during the economic crisis.
Sure, these economies were not being as well run as Norway, but neither did they benefit from an oil windfall to fund investment (we in the UK did but we were too stupid to treat it the same way as you).
So when do you expect the patent lawsuit from Apple?
Mind you the world is larger than the USA, and if you think there are legal impediments to this happening in the US, there are certainly many parts of the world where the local government would not have any problem (moral or legal) in using such technology.
An attacker doesn't need a cert from the most trusted CA, the least trusted in any of dozens of countries round the world who operate CAs will do.
A CA who was caught doing this would probably be removed by all the browsers, but as yet there's no real mechanism for users to notice and make this known.
I've not got rtmpdump installed to the best of my knowledge (at least, there's no file containing that name on my system).
Do you have a file flvstreamer (which is a fork of rtmpdump used by get_iplayer)? If so it's the same thing, and if it works on the BBC's streams then it's been patched to get around Adobe's verification, so is a copyright circumvention device.
And just how are they going to know whether you have equipment to receive TV set up in your house? They have no right of entry to your property, unless you choose to allow it.
If they managed to witness you watching TV through a window then they might be able to make a case against you in court. Mostly though they rely on a system of sending threatening letters to every residential address which hasn't paid for a license.
That depends very much on what proportion of his current readership chooses to sign up, which is the big unknown in all of this. His advertising and other income sources will certainly decrease sharply when this comes in.
I think his hope is that people will start using devices such as kindle/iPad to read his content and he can sell access through these distribution channels. In order for that to make sense then the same content can't be free on the web. In fact if you make web access expensive enough then you can make your iPad subscription look like a good deal, making Steve Jobs happy to boot.
Giving 10.04 a proper go, I find that the fact that these commonly used buttons placed near to other commonly used buttons (applications and places menu and menu and buttons of the application) means that there's less skirting around with the mouse.
So far, I find two things. One that I move my mouse towards the top right, pause briefly to swear at Shuttleworth's arrogance, then veer towards the new close button location. Maybe this will change over time, but the ill-will created by the speed and manner of the change will probably last longer.
Two, I now have a concern that I will hit the close button when going for File/Edit menus (notice Mac don't have this problem as they don't locate menus at the top of application windows).
Plus, it reminds me of another favourite OS - Workbench 3.1
Onwards Ubuntu, into that UI design heaven that was the 90s...
As I understand it, each unit of methane has a consierably greater effect (more than an order of magnitude) than the same amount of CO2. But methane stays in the atmosphere for about a tenth the time of CO2.
On the other hand when methane decomposes in the atmosphere it becomes C02 and water anyway. So all in all, you're much better off burning the methane and benefitting from the energy than releasing it.
According to wikipedia, methane has a global warming potential of 72x CO2 over 20 years and 25x over 100years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
I’ve seen full feature tracking AR libraries back in 2004! And videos of their usage.
It's hardly the freshest news. Georg Klein's research on AR at Oxford goes back at least until 2005, and the PTAM software to 2007. According to the website linked in the summary he's no longer even at Oxford but left to work for Microsoft last year.
"99.9999%" of an operating system's relevance is in messaging and AJAX supported applications? That doesn't sound like much of a game plan for anything other than Ubuntu becoming the Cadillac of embedded systems. It's as if Mr. Asay thinks the future of the operating system is irrelevance.
And what's more, if that is their view, then they're competing with Google in the form of ChromeOS. Rather than doing that, I think I would go hunting for a different niche.
Mozilla Labs has started out on some great projects but they don't seem able to make it out into wider use. What happened to Weave, it's been kicking around for years? Ubiquity, a great start with developer/hacker interest, but the ball dropped.
I'm worried for how able Mozilla is to compete against the threat coming from Google and Chrome at the moment. Their core browser is falling behind on speed and stability and I think they'll find it hard to catch up given the size/age/complexity of the Firefox codebase compared to Chrome. Google had the opportunity to start from scratch with the knowledge of all the browser vulnerabilities in the last decade and have a much better architecture for security and stability. It's almost unfeasible for Mozilla to refactor firefox to match.
What they do have going for them is the collection of extensions and the new ideas from Mozilla Labs; if they don't get them out to the wider audience then their competitors will copy and popularise the best of them, essentially benefiting from free R&D.
Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree. But that big thermonuclear ball in the sky is.
Quite separate from the question of whether our previous actions *have* driven climate change as a side effect, we as a species certainly have the technology to bugger up the earth's climate if we actively tried. Large scale nuclear war, or any process which put enough dust into the atmosphere would significantly alter our planet's albedo and cause climatic effects which would last for far longer than our current civilisations.
Scientists are men that can be influenced by propaganda just like any man can be. I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money.
You're right that scientists are human (look carefully though, you'll find not all are men) and susceptible to various influences. You won't find perfect logic, behaviour or motives behind every scientist's action on both sides of any large scientific debate, but over time (and this issue had been studied for decades before the conclusions became front-line political questions) consensus tends to emerge, possibly to be overthrown later as new facts come to light. It's frustrating, but the best process we have. Certainly far better than listening to the voices of the lobby groups of those industries benefiting from the status quo.
I understand your mistrust of government by politicians, but I don't think they're behind this one. Really, it's just not a good sell "we need tax money to spend on mitigation for 3rd world countries and large scale, changes which may effect you lifestyle", surely if you want to get some extra tax dollars it's just so much easier to start a war.
You're right, H.264 is very much like MPEG2 in this respect, but I'm not sure that's ideal. The MPEG-LA considers that you need a license for every MPEG2 player ($2.50), every MPEG2 encoder ($2.50), plus a royalty on every distributed item (such as a DVD).
This is the reason that most Linux distros don't come with DVD/digital TV tuner playback without downloading a codec from a 3rd party. This may be legal or not depending on your jurisdiction (from the fact you use ATSC, I'm guessing you're in a country that does recognise software patents), but either way the fact it happened for DVD doesn't mean it's a good idea for the web.
The MPEG4 licensing agreement includes a licensing cost for every encoded stream on the internet, but has currently set that rate at zero for much online content (as an introductory rate). This is pretty explicitly a policy to encourage use and then, once it totally dominates online video, profit from it to a greater degree later.
The MPEG-LA is certainly an improvement from negotiating a separate license for every patent (not that anyone can guarantee that all applicable patents are in the pool), but it's not very compatible with open source software and a royalty free codec would be better for everyone.