We "played the politics" a few years ago, there was momentum with at one point chrome saying it was planing to ~remove h.264~ from its browser. But in the end that did not pan out. Firefox ended up supporting h.264, and wikimedia was left with very little video participation by its exclusive support for royalty free formats.
Assuming the point of wikimedia is promote free codecs ( not get free information to people that want to access it )... Its still too late to say to Apple.. hey if you don't support webm, you won't be able to view the near zero percentage of wikimedia articles that have video content. But when it comes to h.265 and vp9 or Daala, if Wikimedia was a large video player similar to youtube it could help add its weight behind free future free codecs guenteeing they have a prominante home on the web with an active video community.
Was browsing on my nexus 7 android chrome browser, surprised to see the video not load. Figured the whole HTML5 thing had caught on by now;)
Full Disclosure; I work with a competing html5 supporting OVP ( kaltura ) but still annoying I have to hunt down a browser with flash:-|
I think we already seeing the initial phases of this. Non-totalitarian societies will adjust and normalize to be more accepting of digressions, and otherwise damaging historic and contemporaneous behavior which will be more transparent for more and more people. What seems like absurd levels of privacy violation today / yesterday, will be taken for granted in the future / present.
To the extent of increased personal hardship from these databases; in non-totalitarian societies its unlikely to result in significant transition towards worse ( or better ) treatment of people outside social and political norms. People outside social norms have been "abused" in small circles for ages; in a larger more "anonymous" society the abuse is built into other layers of the social fabric ( id cards; state oppression etc ); Not to say all circles are created equal; but techno-deterministic dystopianism is a false premise. Technological social changes are bound to the societies in which they take place.
Within "our" global "democratic" "free market" capitalism context the macro implications of concentrated power being able to better micro manage public opinion with powerful tools for life pattern recognition models; may be more problematic then direct loss of privacy abuses that the article outlines. That is to say; all our search for "personal" connections with others may be easier to be mediated. i.e an online video chat "hang out" support group which is moderated by an inquisitive supportive digital agent. That in addition to connecting us to exactly who we needed to talk to and giving us heart felt sense of well being in the short term; is simultaneously creating voids in meaningful existence by commoditizing your values towards particular life style choices, entertaining distractions, and consumption habits that don't enable a sustainable social structure.
Where by every piece of information we look for and every social connection we make is mediated towards these "a-political" life style choices bounding political discourse and participation making it impossible to regulate such abuses enabling increasing concentration of power etc.; there-by creating a vicious cycle in which our autonomy is transformed even more dramatically then in the previous century of mass media consumption.
... But this is far from pre-determined, and these crude statistical models geared toward increased consumption of tomorrow; may in the near future give way to more holistic pictures of who we are with the disposal of much more computational resources and vastly more connected data about our increasing transparent existence. Independently of a slide towards totalitarianism; these databases and cognitive pattern recognition systems; could just as well support connections and social bridging of a cornucopia of personal identities; histories with digressions; and everything in between. If we expand access to build these system with human values we wish to amplify; it could just as well increase "freedom" "autonomy" and sustainable"well being" among the techo-societies participants.
The "game" is defined under terms that are illogical, we should not expect logical behavior. They aim to patent as broadly as possible push the boundaries, shift regulations in their favor. An ecosystem supportive for rapid distributions of disruptive technology may be lost... and society has to spend massive amounts of resources on patent absurdities, but we are living in times of absurd levels of innovation.
In other words If you have to find something positive of this whole mess, it does put a bit of a damper on our march towards singularity.
It remains unclear if the global economies can be aligned to play by these rules for slowing down technological progress, in which case we could see rise of more R&D centers in nation with more favorable systems for intellectual property management. Right now the investment trade offs have not been crossed. But at some point global innovation may transition to lots of smaller non-aligned free platforms of innovation. We can see this in non-aligned open source projects that are not subject to the more absurd patent games since they are not centers of economic power. We can see traditional of highly isolated vertically R&D centers having to reinvent the wheel on many layers of their infrastructure, or work around broad patents. This all helps slow down innovation.
Corporations will transition into organizations consisting almost entirely of lawyers that negotiate the legal implications of distributing something that is a commodity or otherwise freely available. We can see this as an extreme version of what Google is doing with android or what pharmaceutical and gene therapy research centers have become and where they are going... i.e more lawyers.
Its not a positive trend for innovation..But does damper relative investment into massive R&D projects with shared infrastructure and multiple layers of shared global IP, that is the basis of hyper innovation.
All this "unhealthy activity" may not be that "unhealthy" as it could help push singularity back a few years. Maybe even enable some legal and cultural framework for a structured roll out of the total transformation of everything that singularity will entail. Unnaturally stretching singularity out over the course of a few years instead of ripping apart global economies all at once. This may help avoid some serious problems, like total economic collapse in the "free" automation of "everything", that could leave billions of people without way to sustain their existence.
Really? I don't think graphics have "leveled off". The state of the art real time gaming engine looks pretty different to me from what we see on consoles today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&hd=1
Sure you can make the "game play is worse or the same as before" argument, but to say there are only marginal improvements in graphics does not seem accurate.
I am surprised at the callus disregard for what mozilla is trying to accomplish. Its like 5 years ago why did they bother with this open standard, royalty free, patent unencumbered html stuff, they should have just shipped a free Microsoft doc "reader" by default, or why bother with javascript standard, when Microsoft had perfectly good active X systems to tie into native windows apis.
Mozilla knows what they doing, yes they may lose market share, but that is the nature of taking a principled decision that many people don't understand. The web will be better by getting people used to the idea that they need to support WebM in addition to H.264. As today smart phones become tomorrows calculators we won't have to pay taxes on the math that mediates contemporary conversations. Thous removing one small barrier to entry for anyone that wants to design or create audio visual communications systems.
Again its not about piracy where you need near 1:1 ratios for seeds to leaches. Its about supplementing http distribution, so its fine if 60% comes from the http it still reduces distribution costs. Its fine if only a few dozen institutions or upload nodes to donate a few mbs here and there, rather than every visitor contributing an equal amount to an upload.
it spawn a separate process that stays open and seeding as long as your computer is on and you don't close the application. It has a small indicator in the lower right of your browser and a system tray icon. If you want to 'turn it off' you can disable uploading which is recommend over complete removal since you can still help reduce server load by using the extension even if you upload nothing.
my reading was $10,000 per year per local market service... assuming your internet services hits many thousands of local markets you would hit the maximum royalty for Participation ie millions. This may be an inaccurate reading. Your reading seems logical as well.
I think it by definition bait and switch. It is offered for free right now... once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized. This may surprise people that already purchased the encoder only to find that because their site is popular they have to pay once again.
hmm not the post I would have chosen for this news... Could have pointed out some of the sourcepostannouncements and avoid perpetuating a few misconceptions.
I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs
Hence the need for funding the Thusnelda enhancements. Theora is a pretty solid codec and can be greatly improved with a few enhancements on the encoder side.
I wonder if wouldn't be better to direct effort to Dirac, perhaps putting Dirac into an Ogg container
Dirac is best at high resolution high bitrate video and not so good for standard definition low bitrate video, hence an enhanced theora is the optimal way to hit the low bandwidth target. Enabling theora to be competitive or better than others codecs in the low bitrate range in the intimidate future with relatively small investment.
Furthermore dirac is planed for inclusion and will be explored in the tail end of this grant. (once liboggplay is more solid). Making liboggplay playback library solid will enable Dirac support to be solid as well. Since Dirac already has a maturing decoder/encoder library (Schrodinger) and already been mapped to an ogg container (what liboggplay plays).
It's relatively easy to add in additional free codecs with ogg mappings. if( FLAC, Speex or Dirac) and will not be the primary use of the funding so its not focused in on the announcement or secondary coverage of the announcement.
More info on the announcement here and the above mentioned links.
Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:
<video roe="my_roe_file.xml">
(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one
yea ofcourse its a BSD license but given how our US patent system "works" its near impossible to "prove" that any piece of software does not have submarine patent risk.
I did a post on this issue a while back. Key point is that even mpegla does not protect its clients from being sued..
The fact that the quality improvements for theora 1.1 put it on par with a base mpeg4 implementation while not on par with the most recent h264 encoders is not really relevant in the larger sense.
Once a free codec becomes widely adopted the chance of some proprietary codec coming along afterwards is near zero. Its just like today we can't imagine someone coming out with a proprietary image format and expecting people to adopt it.
Its relatively easy to add in support for Dirac or some future free codec once there is support for a free codec ecosystem. No one will pay h264 licensing costs when quality free alternatives are vibrant. The entrenched proprietary systems are being pushed aside for free alternatives. This 1.0 release is a step towards that direction, not as big of a step once firefox 3.1 ships but an important step;)
Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release
read on for some observations about the mozila html5 video situation.
I think 2008 will be the year open source video enters the online video ecosystem. Native html5 ogg theora/vorbis will be built into a firefox3 point release and into new versions Opera. Ogg theora is enjoying a growing momentum around tools, and usage (including much better support in at least one of the top 10 sites on the internet;) Also BBC's Dirac is quickly maturing for high end open source royalty free encoding/playback.
Our own little metavid wiki project also coming along;)
2008 should see millions of people playing back ogg theora videos in their browsers. While its not going to replace flash anytime soon it will begin to show up in many free software CMSs and begin to break down one of the last proprietary technologies in the web platform.
just like you can use any number of proprietary image formats and w3c never recommend a patent-free image format... oh wait.. there was the whole png standard. How many png images where used on the web before it was a recommended? MPEG as a "standard" is irrelevant as long as it remains non-free to implement, since distribution costs are inherently incompatible with free browser distributions. Ogg theora is on the other hand perfectly compatible with being distributed in a proprietary system.
A codec agnostic implementation of the video tag is next to worthless. A simple javaScript library could accomplish the same thing.. Codec agnostic video tag resents no significant difference from the object/embed tags that we already have today. If that approach is taken video will remain a second class web citizen wrapped up in proprietary encapsulations. The whole point of the w3c is to promote/develop interoperable
technologies, in the current browser environment non-free implementations are not interoperable. The w3c will be obsoleting themselves if they take the codec agnostic approach.
The drive for codec agnostic video tag is simply an effort to put a proprietary wedge into web video distribution platform. The codec agnostic video lets proprietary technology providers squeeze hugely profitable wedge into the web platform. This represents a new, undesirable, untested and unhealthy direction for the web. We are already well down with the consequence of proprietary video being felt worldwide. road of proprietary web with flash video and its network effect that pushes web technologies into service model more so than other web platforms that are based on open standards such as wikis and blogs that have been mostly distributed. of consequences that is only starting to be felt. So far Adobe/On2 has been very lax in enforcing their proprietary codecs with many sites getting away with using ffmpegs flash video encoding for "free". But we should not give away ownership key portion of the web platform to a single corporation. Its antithetical to what the web platform is and why it has been so successful.
yea either it will make the situation more calm.. or people will lose any sense of the reality of the situation and play it like a video game... similar to the effect of aerial bombing where the `costs` of war are hidden from the group that has the most firepower and capacity for destruction.
Long term we have to be a bit concerned with the 'efficiency' in controlling large population. The most violent systems of state oppression and apocalyptic weaponry always emerge from the most technologically advanced nations. As technology makes it easier to "fight" stateless wars (the only kind of war we will have until the end) Its only a matter of time before the powerful weaponry inevitable points inward to destroy "all" it's internal "enemies".
The margin in which democratic values overcome fascism is already pretty razor thin. And in fact already completely subverted for sectors of the global population under occupation. Here highly sophisticated military technology is deployed not to address the real social and economic problems that drive people to want to overthrown imposed governments or destabilize society...rather it institutes violent military control over peoples lives. The military solutions ofcourse never fixes the real social and economic problems so they linger and push those that do not accept oppressive social and economic systems to violence and within hegemonic logic necessitate more military resources and perpetuate a downward spiral of violence ie Iraq. Here one of two things happen the collective decides the "costs" of imposing control are not worth it and seeks a political solution or your left with a planet of "green zones" and violent urban warfare outside of this space carried out by loyal drones.
Reducing these "costs" may seem like a good idea for the short term, especially for those currently living the the green zone nations of the world... but eventually these low "costs" apply inward and subvert democratic systems. Making it easier to impose systems of control on others is the first step of reducing your own freedoms....Ultimately what goes around comes around...or more aptly put "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
So in conclusion we would be much better off supporting technologies that support democratic institutions and give people control over their lives rather than technologies that let the state violently impose a single ridged idea of what freedom is for others.
Slashdot Mirror
Not likely. HTTPS everywhere has put a damper on these schemes.
See ...Comcast is not so bad after all :P
We "played the politics" a few years ago, there was momentum with at one point chrome saying it was planing to ~remove h.264~ from its browser. But in the end that did not pan out. Firefox ended up supporting h.264, and wikimedia was left with very little video participation by its exclusive support for royalty free formats.
... Its still too late to say to Apple .. hey if you don't support webm, you won't be able to view the near zero percentage of wikimedia articles that have video content. But when it comes to h.265 and vp9 or Daala, if Wikimedia was a large video player similar to youtube it could help add its weight behind free future free codecs guenteeing they have a prominante home on the web with an active video community.
Assuming the point of wikimedia is promote free codecs ( not get free information to people that want to access it )
Was browsing on my nexus 7 android chrome browser, surprised to see the video not load. Figured the whole HTML5 thing had caught on by now ;)
Full Disclosure; I work with a competing html5 supporting OVP ( kaltura ) but still annoying I have to hunt down a browser with flash :-|
I think we already seeing the initial phases of this. Non-totalitarian societies will adjust and normalize to be more accepting of digressions, and otherwise damaging historic and contemporaneous behavior which will be more transparent for more and more people. What seems like absurd levels of privacy violation today / yesterday, will be taken for granted in the future / present.
... But this is far from pre-determined, and these crude statistical models geared toward increased consumption of tomorrow; may in the near future give way to more holistic pictures of who we are with the disposal of much more computational resources and vastly more connected data about our increasing transparent existence. Independently of a slide towards totalitarianism; these databases and cognitive pattern recognition systems; could just as well support connections and social bridging of a cornucopia of personal identities; histories with digressions; and everything in between. If we expand access to build these system with human values we wish to amplify; it could just as well increase "freedom" "autonomy" and sustainable"well being" among the techo-societies participants.
To the extent of increased personal hardship from these databases; in non-totalitarian societies its unlikely to result in significant transition towards worse ( or better ) treatment of people outside social and political norms. People outside social norms have been "abused" in small circles for ages; in a larger more "anonymous" society the abuse is built into other layers of the social fabric ( id cards; state oppression etc ); Not to say all circles are created equal; but techno-deterministic dystopianism is a false premise. Technological social changes are bound to the societies in which they take place.
Within "our" global "democratic" "free market" capitalism context the macro implications of concentrated power being able to better micro manage public opinion with powerful tools for life pattern recognition models; may be more problematic then direct loss of privacy abuses that the article outlines. That is to say; all our search for "personal" connections with others may be easier to be mediated. i.e an online video chat "hang out" support group which is moderated by an inquisitive supportive digital agent. That in addition to connecting us to exactly who we needed to talk to and giving us heart felt sense of well being in the short term; is simultaneously creating voids in meaningful existence by commoditizing your values towards particular life style choices, entertaining distractions, and consumption habits that don't enable a sustainable social structure.
Where by every piece of information we look for and every social connection we make is mediated towards these "a-political" life style choices bounding political discourse and participation making it impossible to regulate such abuses enabling increasing concentration of power etc.; there-by creating a vicious cycle in which our autonomy is transformed even more dramatically then in the previous century of mass media consumption.
The "game" is defined under terms that are illogical, we should not expect logical behavior. They aim to patent as broadly as possible push the boundaries, shift regulations in their favor. An ecosystem supportive for rapid distributions of disruptive technology may be lost... and society has to spend massive amounts of resources on patent absurdities, but we are living in times of absurd levels of innovation.
... i.e more lawyers.
In other words If you have to find something positive of this whole mess, it does put a bit of a damper on our march towards singularity.
It remains unclear if the global economies can be aligned to play by these rules for slowing down technological progress, in which case we could see rise of more R&D centers in nation with more favorable systems for intellectual property management. Right now the investment trade offs have not been crossed. But at some point global innovation may transition to lots of smaller non-aligned free platforms of innovation. We can see this in non-aligned open source projects that are not subject to the more absurd patent games since they are not centers of economic power. We can see traditional of highly isolated vertically R&D centers having to reinvent the wheel on many layers of their infrastructure, or work around broad patents. This all helps slow down innovation.
Corporations will transition into organizations consisting almost entirely of lawyers that negotiate the legal implications of distributing something that is a commodity or otherwise freely available. We can see this as an extreme version of what Google is doing with android or what pharmaceutical and gene therapy research centers have become and where they are going
Its not a positive trend for innovation..But does damper relative investment into massive R&D projects with shared infrastructure and multiple layers of shared global IP, that is the basis of hyper innovation.
All this "unhealthy activity" may not be that "unhealthy" as it could help push singularity back a few years. Maybe even enable some legal and cultural framework for a structured roll out of the total transformation of everything that singularity will entail. Unnaturally stretching singularity out over the course of a few years instead of ripping apart global economies all at once. This may help avoid some serious problems, like total economic collapse in the "free" automation of "everything", that could leave billions of people without way to sustain their existence.
Really? I don't think graphics have "leveled off". The state of the art real time gaming engine looks pretty different to me from what we see on consoles today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&hd=1 Sure you can make the "game play is worse or the same as before" argument, but to say there are only marginal improvements in graphics does not seem accurate.
I am surprised at the callus disregard for what mozilla is trying to accomplish. Its like 5 years ago why did they bother with this open standard, royalty free, patent unencumbered html stuff, they should have just shipped a free Microsoft doc "reader" by default, or why bother with javascript standard, when Microsoft had perfectly good active X systems to tie into native windows apis.
Mozilla knows what they doing, yes they may lose market share, but that is the nature of taking a principled decision that many people don't understand. The web will be better by getting people used to the idea that they need to support WebM in addition to H.264. As today smart phones become tomorrows calculators we won't have to pay taxes on the math that mediates contemporary conversations. Thous removing one small barrier to entry for anyone that wants to design or create audio visual communications systems.
Again its not about piracy where you need near 1:1 ratios for seeds to leaches. Its about supplementing http distribution, so its fine if 60% comes from the http it still reduces distribution costs. Its fine if only a few dozen institutions or upload nodes to donate a few mbs here and there, rather than every visitor contributing an equal amount to an upload.
it spawn a separate process that stays open and seeding as long as your computer is on and you don't close the application. It has a small indicator in the lower right of your browser and a system tray icon. If you want to 'turn it off' you can disable uploading which is recommend over complete removal since you can still help reduce server load by using the extension even if you upload nothing.
ah dude... chrome is shipping theora support. If Google is not a big pocket target than what is?
my reading was $10,000 per year per local market service... assuming your internet services hits many thousands of local markets you would hit the maximum royalty for Participation ie millions. This may be an inaccurate reading. Your reading seems logical as well.
typo :( ..meant impending
I think it by definition bait and switch. It is offered for free right now ... once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized. This may surprise people that already purchased the encoder only to find that because their site is popular they have to pay once again.
hmm not the post I would have chosen for this news... Could have pointed out some of the source post announcements and avoid perpetuating a few misconceptions.
Hence the need for funding the Thusnelda enhancements. Theora is a pretty solid codec and can be greatly improved with a few enhancements on the encoder side.
Dirac is best at high resolution high bitrate video and not so good for standard definition low bitrate video, hence an enhanced theora is the optimal way to hit the low bandwidth target. Enabling theora to be competitive or better than others codecs in the low bitrate range in the intimidate future with relatively small investment.
Furthermore dirac is planed for inclusion and will be explored in the tail end of this grant. (once liboggplay is more solid). Making liboggplay playback library solid will enable Dirac support to be solid as well. Since Dirac already has a maturing decoder/encoder library (Schrodinger) and already been mapped to an ogg container (what liboggplay plays).
It's relatively easy to add in additional free codecs with ogg mappings. if( FLAC, Speex or Dirac) and will not be the primary use of the funding so its not focused in on the announcement or secondary coverage of the announcement.
More info on the announcement here and the above mentioned links.
This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:
Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:
(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one
its #4 now.
yea ofcourse its a BSD license but given how our US patent system "works" its near impossible to "prove" that any piece of software does not have submarine patent risk.
I did a post on this issue a while back.
Key point is that even mpegla does not protect its clients from being sued..
The fact that the quality improvements for theora 1.1 put it on par with a base mpeg4 implementation while not on par with the most recent h264 encoders is not really relevant in the larger sense.
Once a free codec becomes widely adopted the chance of some proprietary codec coming along afterwards is near zero. Its just like today we can't imagine someone coming out with a proprietary image format and expecting people to adopt it.
Its relatively easy to add in support for Dirac or some future free codec once there is support for a free codec ecosystem. No one will pay h264 licensing costs when quality free alternatives are vibrant. The entrenched proprietary systems are being pushed aside for free alternatives. This 1.0 release is a step towards that direction, not as big of a step once firefox 3.1 ships but an important step ;)
Looking forward to a repeat performance of Dodd's speech. He laid it down pretty hard last time
Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release
read on for some observations about the mozila html5 video situation.
h.264 is not free. Here are the licencing terms
Our own little metavid wiki project also coming along
2008 should see millions of people playing back ogg theora videos in their browsers. While its not going to replace flash anytime soon it will begin to show up in many free software CMSs and begin to break down one of the last proprietary technologies in the web platform.
just like you can use any number of proprietary image formats and w3c never recommend a patent-free image format... oh wait .. there was the whole png standard. How many png images where used on the web before it was a recommended? MPEG as a "standard" is irrelevant as long as it remains non-free to implement, since distribution costs are inherently incompatible with free browser distributions. Ogg theora is on the other hand perfectly compatible with being distributed in a proprietary system.
A codec agnostic implementation of the video tag is next to worthless. A simple javaScript library could accomplish the same thing.. Codec agnostic video tag resents no significant difference from the object/embed tags that we already have today. If that approach is taken video will remain a second class web citizen wrapped up in proprietary encapsulations. The whole point of the w3c is to promote/develop interoperable technologies, in the current browser environment non-free implementations are not interoperable. The w3c will be obsoleting themselves if they take the codec agnostic approach.
The drive for codec agnostic video tag is simply an effort to put a proprietary wedge into web video distribution platform. The codec agnostic video lets proprietary technology providers squeeze hugely profitable wedge into the web platform. This represents a new, undesirable, untested and unhealthy direction for the web. We are already well down with the consequence of proprietary video being felt worldwide. road of proprietary web with flash video and its network effect that pushes web technologies into service model more so than other web platforms that are based on open standards such as wikis and blogs that have been mostly distributed. of consequences that is only starting to be felt. So far Adobe/On2 has been very lax in enforcing their proprietary codecs with many sites getting away with using ffmpegs flash video encoding for "free". But we should not give away ownership key portion of the web platform to a single corporation. Its antithetical to what the web platform is and why it has been so successful.
yea either it will make the situation more calm.. or people will lose any sense of the reality of the situation and play it like a video game... similar to the effect of aerial bombing where the `costs` of war are hidden from the group that has the most firepower and capacity for destruction.
...rather it institutes violent military control over peoples lives. The military solutions ofcourse never fixes the real social and economic problems so they linger and push those that do not accept oppressive social and economic systems to violence and within hegemonic logic necessitate more military resources and perpetuate a downward spiral of violence ie Iraq. Here one of two things happen the collective decides the "costs" of imposing control are not worth it and seeks a political solution or your left with a planet of "green zones" and violent urban warfare outside of this space carried out by loyal drones.
...Ultimately what goes around comes around...or more aptly put "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
Long term we have to be a bit concerned with the 'efficiency' in controlling large population. The most violent systems of state oppression and apocalyptic weaponry always emerge from the most technologically advanced nations. As technology makes it easier to "fight" stateless wars (the only kind of war we will have until the end) Its only a matter of time before the powerful weaponry inevitable points inward to destroy "all" it's internal "enemies".
The margin in which democratic values overcome fascism is already pretty razor thin. And in fact already completely subverted for sectors of the global population under occupation. Here highly sophisticated military technology is deployed not to address the real social and economic problems that drive people to want to overthrown imposed governments or destabilize society
Reducing these "costs" may seem like a good idea for the short term, especially for those currently living the the green zone nations of the world... but eventually these low "costs" apply inward and subvert democratic systems. Making it easier to impose systems of control on others is the first step of reducing your own freedoms.
So in conclusion we would be much better off supporting technologies that support democratic institutions and give people control over their lives rather than technologies that let the state violently impose a single ridged idea of what freedom is for others.