Hydrogen has some very significant prospects, but at present, it's to far off, diesel, and biodiesel are far more likely short-term replacements for Gasoline. The only problem with both is the public's long-standing dislike of diesel engines (they make a lot of noise, they make a lot of smoke...), and the current price of biodiesel (about 75% more then diesel in the US).
Diesel may be disliked for private cars but it's the regular fuel for trucks, buses, trains, boats, agricultural and construction machineary, etc.
They'll just be hidden in product placement form. Like that Lexus that Tom Cruise drives in 'Minority Report'
There is actually quite a bit of subtle product placement going on in both movies and TV.
To beat TiVo et al, the television industry will just make it more difficult to remove the ads from the content.
If it's reasonably subtle then removing it isn't likely to be an issue. If it's blatent then it looks kind of daft if a brand or company disappears. e.g. 2001 and the PanAm product placement.
The problem is that developing TV programming costs a lot of money.
But once a TV programme is made it dosn't (with the exception of royalties which are an entirely artifical creation) cost much to show it. The expensive bit is the actual production.
I don't have to read the ads in the paper if I don't want to.
You can also read a newspaper at a puhblic library, sometimes even on the web without having to buy a copy.
Nobody has to pick that cable programming up and carry it to my house. Once the cable is run, 95% of the effort of delivering content to my door is done. So much for distribution costs, eh?
The major part of this would be fees paid to other television companies for distribution. Rather than the cost of maintaining the cable infrastructure. Unlike telephones the various costs don't get itemised. Also channels are often only available in "packages"...
media advertisers don't have a direct way to see who's watching the ads, but they sure as heck have an indirect way, and that's if the advertising *works* or not.
The only kind of advert which gives direct feedback is one which requires someone to write to a specific address, telephone a specific number, etc. Attempting to work out how effective a TV ad is from ratings really makes about as much sense as working out how effective a billboard ad is by counting the number of people who walk past.
To me, all p2p has done is to change the business model. If the networks had any sense, they'd have every show available for download on a popular p2p app, with some major hosting at their end. Then they get to choose the commercials that exist in the de-facto standard download for that episode.
You'd still have no way to track exactly how many downloads. Also it wouldn't be long before someone distributed a version without commercials, even without any compression it would be 30% smaller.
Actually, the networks aren't afraid of copies. They're afraid of *perfect* copies.
Which is a meaningless term. You simply cannot make a "perfect" copy once something has been broadcast, even through a cable system the modulation and demodulation process makes such a thing fundermentally impossible.
In practice many such files are not even a simple video/audio capture anyway. Instead using various codecs, both lossless and lossy.
Those are separate. The money you pay to get the signal goes to support the distribution network. The bulk of the advertising revenue goes to support the production of the shows.
The advertising revenue goes to the broadcaster whilst quite a bit may then go to the production company it's certainly not a direct route.
I have yet to hear a compelling argument why targeted advertising is so bad, but if anyone out there wants to give it a shot, I'm all ears...
The problem is that attempts at targeting advertising so far have involved using poor algorithms on questionable data. Hence the results don't tend to target very well, with a big risk of offending viewers.
How could we have saved the buggy whip manufacturers? There was only one way: outlaw the horseless carriage. How could the Monks have kept a monopoly on books? Outlaw the printing press.
No doubt if these were new inventions right now there would be a "stables and monks" lobbying group trying to buy new laws to either outlaw the new technology or make it emulate limitations of the old. Copyright law itself originally came out of the printing press creating the new (at that time) busines model of the third party publisher. Which is more or less the same model the RIAA/MPAA use, with a few trivial modifications. Maybe an even better analogy would be with the ice cutters...
You are mistaking the medium for the message. Weather forecasts and agricultural techniques can be transmitted just as easily by AM Radio or print media.
Given that many of the people who might need the information cannot read, live in remote areas and encounter somewhat extreme weather. Radio makes a lot more sense than print media. Newspapers need transporting and arn't much use wet:) As for powering radios you can either use a bike generator or consult Trevor Baylis...
My God, if they live in a monsoon area, wouldn't it better for them TO MOVE WHERE IT FUCKING DOESN'T FLOOD AND DROWN YOU??!?!?!?
The monsoon area covers a substantial part of the planet. Whilst drowning might be a risk abundent water also helps with growing crops (especially rice). People have been farming here for a long time...
step 1. Use a laptop harddrive in case the computer gets bumped.
Actually probably best to use solid state storage, less to break.
step 2. use very low heat VIA C3 chips and massive heatsinks.
When your power source is a battery, charged by muscle power, you want as little wasted power as possible. Problem is that the display, even an LCD screen, tends to eat power.
step 3. Make system waterproof with a little $3 calking tube
2) The reasons the villagers need computers are (taken from the article):
a: a way to make phone calls so that they could communicate with relatives overseas
But wouldn't it make more sense to be able to communicate with nearby villages to save wasted journeys, carrying too many (or even too few) goods, summon help, etc.
b: to secure local crop pricing information.
sounds more like a need for a telephone than a computer.
c: the use of small spreadsheets and simple word processing so that they could bid on things like construction jobs.
How are these things usually handled? In what ways would having things printed out make sense here?
Why in the world are they paying $1,500 for a computer system for "the use of small spreadsheets and simple word processing"?
This may make some kind of sense, considering the hostile environment. Problem is that this 1,500 USD machine is still likely to be made up of complex components, not easily fixable locally.
And why does the village need a solar panel if they're going to generate electricity with a bicycle generator?
Actually makes sense if there is planty of sun some parts of the year and not at other times.
Why are they setting up a wi-fi network when much of Laos is mountainous and forest? That kind of terrain will eat up any 802.11 communication!
Hence they apparently need relay stations. In this kind of environment the last thing you want is unattended relay stations. 802.11 dosn't make sense here both because it's intended for data, with the real need being for voice and it's on entirely the wrong waveband for the terrain.
I'm just sick of the techno-fetishism that's taking the place of true humanitarian efforts and generosity. These people don't need cell phones and microwaves, they need basic living supplies.
Some sort of wireless telephone system might well be useful to such people. But the engineering issues are not really the same as for a cell phone system. Since most of the network would be at fixed points. Using Voice over IP over wireless ethernet appears to me to be an over complex way to do things. Especially if something breaks... Another immediatly useful thing would be electric lighting. Which unlike fires and oil lamps don't produce smoke, fumes or risk burning peoples's houses down.
People who live in primitive (by our standards) tend to be informed by the local leaders. In many cases whom which by idiology are very hostile to the 1st world. Either because of economics or religion.
Hardly all one way though.
To be able to get a foot hold in these places and give a voice to these people, alot of unfiltered info can be passes back and forth. The result hopefully is fewer trips abroad of our troops to have to go blow up foreigners.
Which might well be a, perfectly rational, reason for these people being hostile to the "first world". There are still plenty of people in Laos who can personally recall being bombed by the USA over some political idiology.
It looks to me like they are trying to give these people the opportunity to have some type of economy to build up themselves. It goes with that old saying "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach him to fish and he can eat for a lifetime"
But you probably wouldn't simply give him a trawler with fish finding radar, GPS, etc...
My only question is why the foot pedaling and not a small gas generator???
Because you'd have to establish an infrastructure to either transport fuel or manufacture it locally. This is a farming village, not an oil refinary... In order to turn rice into fuel you need to distil saki.
God forbid they have a way to get information on weather,
To someone who can't read text information is useless. Even a map requires them to know where they are. But a voice, be it from the next village or a broadcast radio station can instantly tell anyone listening what they need to know.
Did you bother to read any of the linked webpages? First of all, there are plenty of useful applications for the internet: to get accurate and timely information about crops pricing, to stay in touch with relatives scattered by poverty and war, to bid on things like construction jobs.
They can do this with a voice telephone system. Which dosn't require a highly literate operator.
I'm all for bringing the power of computing and the Internet to all people, but not before they can live long enough to use it.
A possibly more immediately useful technology would be that developed by Dr Irvine-Halliday for the "Light Up The World Foundation". It also sounds as though computers would be less use that some kind of (rugged) radio telephone system given the low level of literacy. Someone does not need to be able to read to understand (verbal) instructions of the form "do this to speak to someone in this place, do that to speak to someone in that place" , "when it makes a certain noise or a light flashs someone wants to speak to you", etc. Migrating office applications to a local langauge dosn't make much sense when the majority of people cannot read, write or type in any language.
On a hunch, I entered "HMS Exeter" into Google. It was a York-class heavy cruiser that saw action against the Graf Spee early in the war and was sunk in the Battle of Java Sea in 1942. It looks like it was one of the "not-a-battleship" classes that the RN was notorious for building in the 1920's and 1930's.
Odd that your search didn't bring up the current type 42 destroyer. Especially considering that its sister ship, HMS Nottingham has been in the news recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogen has some very significant prospects, but at present, it's to far off, diesel, and biodiesel are far more likely short-term replacements for Gasoline. The only problem with both is the public's long-standing dislike of diesel engines (they make a lot of noise, they make a lot of smoke...), and the current price of biodiesel (about 75% more then diesel in the US).
Diesel may be disliked for private cars but it's the regular fuel for trucks, buses, trains, boats, agricultural and construction machineary, etc.
They'll just be hidden in product placement form. Like that Lexus that Tom Cruise drives in 'Minority Report'
There is actually quite a bit of subtle product placement going on in both movies and TV.
To beat TiVo et al, the television industry will just make it more difficult to remove the ads from the content.
If it's reasonably subtle then removing it isn't likely to be an issue. If it's blatent then it looks kind of daft if a brand or company disappears. e.g. 2001 and the PanAm product placement.
The problem is that developing TV programming costs a lot of money.
But once a TV programme is made it dosn't (with the exception of royalties which are an entirely artifical creation) cost much to show it. The expensive bit is the actual production.
I don't have to read the ads in the paper if I don't want to.
You can also read a newspaper at a puhblic library, sometimes even on the web without having to buy a copy.
Nobody has to pick that cable programming up and carry it to my house. Once the cable is run, 95% of the effort of delivering content to my door is done. So much for distribution costs, eh?
The major part of this would be fees paid to other television companies for distribution. Rather than the cost of maintaining the cable infrastructure. Unlike telephones the various costs don't get itemised. Also channels are often only available in "packages"...
media advertisers don't have a direct way to see who's watching the ads, but they sure as heck have an indirect way, and that's if the advertising *works* or not.
The only kind of advert which gives direct feedback is one which requires someone to write to a specific address, telephone a specific number, etc.
Attempting to work out how effective a TV ad is from ratings really makes about as much sense as working out how effective a billboard ad is by counting the number of people who walk past.
To me, all p2p has done is to change the business model. If the networks had any sense, they'd have every show available for download on a popular p2p app, with some major hosting at their end. Then they get to choose the commercials that exist in the de-facto standard download for that episode.
You'd still have no way to track exactly how many downloads. Also it wouldn't be long before someone distributed a version without commercials, even without any compression it would be 30% smaller.
Actually, the networks aren't afraid of copies. They're afraid of *perfect* copies.
Which is a meaningless term. You simply cannot make a "perfect" copy once something has been broadcast, even through a cable system the modulation and demodulation process makes such a thing fundermentally impossible.
In practice many such files are not even a simple video/audio capture anyway. Instead using various codecs, both lossless and lossy.
I'm honestly surprised that Andromeda hasn't been canceled yet.
Isn't losing all of the original writers being cancelled by another name...
Those are separate. The money you pay to get the signal goes to support the distribution network. The bulk of the advertising revenue goes to support the production of the shows.
The advertising revenue goes to the broadcaster whilst quite a bit may then go to the production company it's certainly not a direct route.
I have yet to hear a compelling argument why targeted advertising is so bad, but if anyone out there wants to give it a shot, I'm all ears...
The problem is that attempts at targeting advertising so far have involved using poor algorithms on questionable data. Hence the results don't tend to target very well, with a big risk of offending viewers.
How could we have saved the buggy whip manufacturers? There was only one way: outlaw the horseless carriage. How could the Monks have kept a monopoly on books? Outlaw the printing press.
No doubt if these were new inventions right now there would be a "stables and monks" lobbying group trying to buy new laws to either outlaw the new technology or make it emulate limitations of the old.
Copyright law itself originally came out of the printing press creating the new (at that time) busines model of the third party publisher. Which is more or less the same model the RIAA/MPAA use, with a few trivial modifications.
Maybe an even better analogy would be with the ice cutters...
AM radios are cheap and can convey information from market to farmer.
Or any other people who need to communicate.
They can run on solar power.
Or a foot/hand turned generate, even clockwork. A radio does not require being able to read either...
You are mistaking the medium for the message. Weather forecasts and agricultural techniques can be transmitted just as easily by AM Radio or print media.
:)
Given that many of the people who might need the information cannot read, live in remote areas and encounter somewhat extreme weather. Radio makes a lot more sense than print media. Newspapers need transporting and arn't much use wet
As for powering radios you can either use a bike generator or consult Trevor Baylis...
My God, if they live in a monsoon area, wouldn't it better for them TO MOVE WHERE IT FUCKING DOESN'T FLOOD AND DROWN YOU??!?!?!?
The monsoon area covers a substantial part of the planet. Whilst drowning might be a risk abundent water also helps with growing crops (especially rice). People have been farming here for a long time...
step 1. Use a laptop harddrive in case the computer gets bumped.
Actually probably best to use solid state storage, less to break.
step 2. use very low heat VIA C3 chips and massive heatsinks.
When your power source is a battery, charged by muscle power, you want as little wasted power as possible. Problem is that the display, even an LCD screen, tends to eat power.
step 3. Make system waterproof with a little $3 calking tube
How do you calk a keyboard or a mouse?
2) The reasons the villagers need computers are (taken from the article):
a: a way to make phone calls so that they could communicate with relatives overseas
But wouldn't it make more sense to be able to communicate with nearby villages to save wasted journeys, carrying too many (or even too few) goods, summon help, etc.
b: to secure local crop pricing information.
sounds more like a need for a telephone than a computer.
c: the use of small spreadsheets and simple word processing so that they could bid on things like construction jobs.
How are these things usually handled? In what ways would having things printed out make sense here?
Why in the world are they paying $1,500 for a computer system for "the use of small spreadsheets and simple word processing"?
This may make some kind of sense, considering the hostile environment. Problem is that this 1,500 USD machine is still likely to be made up of complex components, not easily fixable locally.
And why does the village need a solar panel if they're going to generate electricity with a bicycle generator?
Actually makes sense if there is planty of sun some parts of the year and not at other times.
Why are they setting up a wi-fi network when much of Laos is mountainous and forest? That kind of terrain will eat up any 802.11 communication!
Hence they apparently need relay stations. In this kind of environment the last thing you want is unattended relay stations.
802.11 dosn't make sense here both because it's intended for data, with the real need being for voice and it's on entirely the wrong waveband for the terrain.
Second of all, internet access is not equivalent to food or health care, but it could be considered as part of a close third. Communication.
However the Internet is simply one specific method of telecommunication. It's not the only way to address the issue, nor always the most appropriate.
I'm just sick of the techno-fetishism that's taking the place of true humanitarian efforts and generosity. These people don't need cell phones and microwaves, they need basic living supplies.
Some sort of wireless telephone system might well be useful to such people. But the engineering issues are not really the same as for a cell phone system. Since most of the network would be at fixed points. Using Voice over IP over wireless ethernet appears to me to be an over complex way to do things. Especially if something breaks...
Another immediatly useful thing would be electric lighting. Which unlike fires and oil lamps don't produce smoke, fumes or risk burning peoples's houses down.
People who live in primitive (by our standards) tend to be informed by the local leaders. In many cases whom which by idiology are very hostile to the 1st world. Either because of economics or religion.
Hardly all one way though.
To be able to get a foot hold in these places and give a voice to these people, alot of unfiltered info can be passes back and forth. The result hopefully is fewer trips abroad of our troops to have to go blow up foreigners.
Which might well be a, perfectly rational, reason for these people being hostile to the "first world". There are still plenty of people in Laos who can personally recall being bombed by the USA over some political idiology.
It looks to me like they are trying to give these people the opportunity to have some type of economy to build up themselves. It goes with that old saying "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach him to fish and he can eat for a lifetime"
But you probably wouldn't simply give him a trawler with fish finding radar, GPS, etc...
My only question is why the foot pedaling and not a small gas generator???
Because you'd have to establish an infrastructure to either transport fuel or manufacture it locally. This is a farming village, not an oil refinary... In order to turn rice into fuel you need to distil saki.
God forbid they have a way to get information on weather,
To someone who can't read text information is useless. Even a map requires them to know where they are. But a voice, be it from the next village or a broadcast radio station can instantly tell anyone listening what they need to know.
Did you bother to read any of the linked webpages? First of all, there are plenty of useful applications for the internet: to get accurate and timely information about crops pricing, to stay in touch with relatives scattered by poverty and war, to bid on things like construction jobs.
They can do this with a voice telephone system. Which dosn't require a highly literate operator.
I'm all for bringing the power of computing and the Internet to all people, but not before they can live long enough to use it.
A possibly more immediately useful technology would be that developed by Dr Irvine-Halliday for the "Light Up The World Foundation".
It also sounds as though computers would be less use that some kind of (rugged) radio telephone system given the low level of literacy. Someone does not need to be able to read to understand (verbal) instructions of the form "do this to speak to someone in this place, do that to speak to someone in that place" , "when it makes a certain noise or a light flashs someone wants to speak to you", etc. Migrating office applications to a local langauge dosn't make much sense when the majority of people cannot read, write or type in any language.
The people of Laos don't need internet access, they need more food and a better standard of living.
Even if they don't that's hardly an excuse for a City in California to nick their TLD.
On a hunch, I entered "HMS Exeter" into Google. It was a York-class heavy cruiser that saw action against the Graf Spee early in the war and was sunk in the Battle of Java Sea in 1942. It looks like it was one of the "not-a-battleship" classes that the RN was notorious for building in the 1920's and 1930's.
Odd that your search didn't bring up the current type 42 destroyer. Especially considering that its sister ship, HMS Nottingham has been in the news recently.