First of all, when I said "effective access control mechanism," I meant it in the sense that the law means it: left alone, region codes work to prevent DVDs from one region from being played in another region. That's the legal definition of "effective."
Anyway, yeah, you're right, it would be theoretically possible for you to just buy one DVD player from each region so you can watch any DVD in your home. There's nothing wrong with that idea at all, except that I believe it's illegal to import non-region-1 DVD players to the US. (I'm not positive, but I've been told this by people who ought to know.) A better idea is to have a friend smuggle a region-free NTSC/PAL DVD player in from Australia or the Pacific Rim. If you can get it past customs-- and you almost always can-- it's a good solution. You'll need to put an adapter on the electrical plug, but that's all.
None of that is illegal under the DMCA, because it doesn't involve circumventing the region coding system. You're merely using the correct tool to view DVDs from different regions. (Importing DVD players without region controls is a different matter; that's covered under trade laws, not copyright laws.)
But if you "de-regionize" your DVD player to turn it into a region-free device, that's against the law under the DMCA. That's circumventing the access control mechanism itself, and that's a no-no.
And don't get all PC on me - I use backwards not as a "cultural imperialist" term, but as a relative descriptive term
Yeah, but it just kind of rubs me the wrong way when people use terms like "backwards" that imply a directionality to these sorts of things. I'm right in the middle of getting ready for a primitive camping trip-- we're leaving in the morning, and we're hoping to spend Friday through Sunday in a place far from other people, or the things of man. The only metal items I'm taking, apart from things like aluminum tent poles and such, are a handgun (just in case), a couple of good knives, my cast-iron skillet and my dutch oven. Everything else will be stone age all the way.
I do this for fun. My idea of a perfect vacation is to go out into the middle of nowhere and live off the land for as long as I can; I'll take some food with, like pancake mix and rice and potatoes and some meat, but I don't pack enough food for the whole trip. If I can, I fish or scavenge to make up the difference; hunting is usually not allowed where we go, and anything bigger than a rabbit would be wasted anyway. In the worst case, we stretch our provender out a bit to make those extra two or three days; it's not a bad way to drop a couple of pounds of flab.
My point is that I do this for fun. I do it because I like it. Calling that sort of life "backwards" implies that modern life is the acme of human experience, and I just don't buy it. I don't mind expressions like "primitive" or "advanced" to describe relative lifestyles, but calling people who live in the woods and who don't watch TV "backwards" just kinda bugs me.
But that's more about me than it is about you, so don't worry about it.
I can see how things like mass media and communication might be absent - and your local convenience store - but basic technologies which are enormously time saving, and make our modern lifestyles possible - at the very least, in the absence of petroleum products and technologies, solar power?
Solar power for what? Electrical items are, for the most part, substantially less durable than their non-electric equivalents. Compare a kerosene lantern to an electric lantern. After a year or ten, the electric lantern's bulb is going to burn out, and it'll be useless until that bulb is replaced. Ever tried to manufacture your own electric light bulb? A kerosene lantern, on the other hand, will remain useful forever as long as you keep it stocked with fuel (which can be made more easily than manufactured goods, and thus would be far more readily available) and wicks (which can be made from old rags, or from rope, or from just about any pulped and dried plant matter).
You're thinking of the people on Firefly as being deprived; don't. It's not that electric lanterns don't exist any more, or that it's impossible to get them. It's more about the fact that kerosene lanterns are a hell of a lot more useful in that environment than electric ones would be.
Who has the TIME to make this stuff? 19th century settlers did it because there simply was no alternative. The people of Firefly would almost certainly have alternatives that were much cheaper.
Well, first of all, if you need a pair of socks and you can't buy them, you find the time to make 'em. In fact, you start making them in the spring, because you know you'll need them in six months when winter comes.
Now, as to why they can't just buy 'em. Imagine you live on another planet-- say, Mars-- and yours is the only pair of socks there. Literally, I mean; you're wearing the only pair of socks on the entire planet. But they're starting to wear thin, so you decide you need a new pair.
Where are the socks? Earth, millions of miles away. On Earth, you can buy socks by the truckload for almost nothing; they're manufactured in such vast quantities that the cost is acceptable to even the desperately poor.
But you're on Mars. In order to get socks, somebody on Earth will have to put a pair of socks in a rocket, and fire that rocket off toward Mars. Not an inexpensive proposition; the cost of blasting a pair of socks into orbit is only slightly less than the cost of blasting a person into orbit, and that cost is huge. So if you want to get socks from Earth, you're going to have to pay a fortune for them.
What can you pay with? You don't have anything remotely like the money it would take to pay for the cost of shipping your socks; you have to trade somehow. What will you trade with? You're living a subsistence lifestyle as it is; you don't have the energy budget to go digging for rubies to ship back to Earth in exchange for your socks.
Long story short: you can't buy socks. There's just no way to make it practical for anybody on Earth to ship socks to you on Mars.
So what do you do? By god, you go out to the pasture and you shear a sheep and you whittle a couple of knitting needles and you make your own socks.
Yeah, speaking of which, my respect for the guys who make Stargate SG-1 went up a few notches when I read the FAQ they publish on their web site. One of the questions is, "Why does every group of people SG-1 encounters speak perfect English?" The answer was, basically, "Uh... they don't. Each group has their own language, but they're close enough to Earth languages to make it possible for Dr. Jackson to learn them relatively quickly. Just assume that part happens off-screen. Look, it's only an hour-long show; do you really want to spend that time watching language lessons every week?" I have a lot of respect for a group of storytellers who aren't afraid to invoke magic when it's in the best interest of the story.
This comes up in Firefly, too. How does the artificial gravity work on the ship? Magic. It actually says that, right there in the series bible. Artificial gravity works by magic; it's not relevant to the story-- and never will be-- so it's not important enough to bother explaining.
I gave up on the show after 2 or 3 eps, but was any of thiese expalnations you give even hinted at in the show?
You mean apart from the fact that it's all covered-- albeit in super-brief summary-- in the V/O prologue? Well, it's a TV show, you know? The purpose of the show is to tell entertaining stories. While some people get entertained by this sort of "here are the rules" exposition, most people don't. So no, you probably won't see a "here's how we colonized this particular rock in space" episode.
But, for the record, the complete backstory is included in the series bible. I don't remember enough details of it offhand to quote chapter-and-verse, but it's there, and it's plausible enough to build stories on.
Oh, christ. Are you sure this isn't a joke? My ZIP code brought up this doozy:
Inner Cities Inner-City, Single Parent Families Age group: Under 18, 18-34 Blue-Collar/Service Household income: 16,500 1.86% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to... Buy baby food Buy soul/r&b/black music Pay bills by phone Watch pay-per-view sports Read National Enquirer
This PRIZM Cluster lives in neighborhoods like...
Detroit, MI Hyde Park, IL Morningside, NY
Somebody needs to tell the PRIZM people about this little thing called the "urban renaissance." Downtown areas aren't all ghettos these days.
The computer had all the old orbital details of the original set of planets and said "6 should be about _here_"; they went "there" and found a planet (5's orbit being more elliptical, now extending out as far as 6's used to be, and they were unlucky enough to find 5 in a place that would be reasonable for 6) and didn't do any more checking.
But, like a said before, an orbit that elliptical would result in a planet being completely unable to support human life. Khan and his posse survived on Ceti Alpha 5 for decades post-explosion. It doesn't add up that way, either.
How often would they find any situation in which that would give them any surprises?
Given the number of solar systems in the known galaxy, the number of starships visiting those solar systems, and the probability that an event like this is going to occur, I'd say fairly regularly.
Let's say each starship visits about 50 unique star systems per year. And, just to pull a number out of the air, let's say there are 2,000 starships in the fleet. (The US Navy has about 400 ships; Starfleet covers not only all of Earth but also the whole Federation, so it's fair to assume that it's proportionately larger.) That comes to 100,000 visits per year. (Yeah, lots of those are dupes, but let's ignore that for the moment.)
Those calculations give us a mental picture of a galaxy-- or a part of it, anyway-- that's fairly teeming with starships, coming and going hither and yon. With all that activity, the odds that a starship is going to end up in a solar system where something interesting has happened become pretty significant.
It's unreasonable to think that a notional starship wouldn't use at least some form of dead reckoning, if for no other reason than to make sure that they're where they think they ought to be. When you zap into the outskirts of a solar system, take a quick look to make sure that it includes the right number of stars and planets, just as a sanity check.
Yes, the whole premise of a fleet of starships zipping across space is absurd all by itself. But there's no reason to make it any more absurd than it has to be. This whole thing could have been avoided simply by replacing the name "Ceti Alpha 6" with "Ceti Alpha 4" in the screenplay. What a waste.
I'm not going to get dragged into a copyright argument with you. Yes, my opinion differs from yours. Despite the fact that you have a different idea, I stubbornly persist in believing that I'm right. I am, at heart, a pragmatist, and when I hear people get all up-in-arms over fair use rights on a TV show, of all things, it brings a bit of a giggle.
Yell about your rights all you want. I prefer to choose my battles.
My point is that people read your sig, know where it came from, assume that you also know where it came from, and then reach the conclusion that you are either a complete moron, a precocious but disaffected teenager, or, more likely, both.
If that's fine with you, then by all means, go right ahead. But in the meantime I will hold on to my impression of you as a mouth-breathing fifteen-year-old who read on AOL that Crowley was a Satanist and whispered, "Kewl!"
Bedouins and Quakers live their backwards lifestyles out of religious conviction.
WHAT? Your ignorance is showing. The Bedouin are the desert-dwelling nomads of the Arabian peninsula, and the Negev and Sinai deserts. The live their "backwards" (oh, the arrogance) lifestyle out of tradition and preference, not out of religion. The Bedouin traditions go back much further than Islam; before 600 AD, the Bedouin practiced a polytheistic and animistic religion. Now they're Muslims. There's nothing in the Koran about living the life of a desert nomad; they do it because that's their tradition and that's what they choose.
You expect me to believe that a zillion people on hundreds of different worlds all suddenly agree to adopt a cult-like belief that "the simple life is best"?
Nope. The world-- and, by extension, the fictional solar system in which Firefly is set-- is a big place. Some people prefer the simple life, free from government interference but largely bereft of luxuries. Others live in big cities-- or on highly developed planets-- trading a degree of independence for comfort.
And if that's the case, how come it's not ever mentioned in the storyline?
Jesus, dude, it's right there in the prologue, for chrissakes. "Here's how it is. The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much. The central planets, them as formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule. A few idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself."
That's it, right there. All the premise you need in about ten seconds.
I know it's really important to convey the "western" style that these people on backwater worlds are wearing handmade vintage clothing. Who is making it?
Uh... they, themselves, are? That's what "handmade" means. If you want to put socks on your kids' feet, you'd better either own a sheep or buy some wool and knit them yourself. If you get a hole in the seat of your best pair of dungarees, you get a needle (which you paid dearly for) and some thread (ditto) and you sew it up. You don't just throw them away and pick up another pair at the Try-n-Save.
Here's how I see things. Earth's used up. Big megacorps launch pre-fab factories to the other planets, and settlers come looking for work. They'll be the exploited third world labor of the future. This is the culture, clothing, and architecture you'll see in the future on these backwater worlds.
Okay, now throw in the impact of a system-wide civil war, armed revolt, and the mass exodus of the independently minded souls to the outer planets where they could live on their own terms. Somehow your premise and the show's premise end up in the same place.
If you rent a movie from Blockbuster you are allowed to show it to other people, or watch it on different televisions, before returning it.
Sure, within reason. (You can't set up a theater and charge people to watch the video you rented, for instance.) And a DRM system for VOD may include those features, too. But it probably won't. And the fact that it doesn't is no big deal at all.
The choice is simple here. Either we get a comprehensive DRM system for ephemeral media, or we don't get HDTV VOD over the Internet. As somebody who would greatly enjoy HDTV VOD-- starting, like, today-- I strongly support DRM for ephemeral media. If you want to oppose it based on principle or some other damn fool ideal, that's your prerogative. But to most people, life is a question of compromises.
the fact that it becomes illegal to circumvent the region coding
Yup. Region coding is an effective access control mechanism. Circumventing it is against the law. So don't do it. This is not a matter that warrants getting to a big snit.
What's with the Crowley quote? You do know, don't you, that that guy was a drug addict, a rapist, and a con man, right? I mean, you're not exactly associating yourself with credibility here.
Then again, I kind of imagine ol' Aleister as being kind of like Groundskeeper Willy from that Halloween episode of The Simpsons. "Boo! Augh! Bleah! Uh-- oh, stop! Aw, I left ma' gun on the seat. Stop! Uh... wait here, please." (runs off)
For example if you cannot buy a movie and then sell it on to someone else after watching it, the movie is very different to other kinds of property like a house or a bicycle.
That's never even been suggested. What we're talking about here is DRM for ephemeral data, stuff that you don't buy, but merely rent. If you rent a movie from Blockbuster, are you allowed to make a copy of it? Absolutely not. Same thing.
I think that the information should be tied in to a physical token which embodies the right to use that information. For example, if you get an on-demand download of some music, your computer will spit out a small disc which gives you the right to listen to that music.
So... you're unclear on the whole idea of download-on-demand, huh? That's okay. It's not for you, I guess.
Oh, there is, by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with DVD region codes. The fact that you don't like it-- cries of "artificial" or "arbitrary" or "manipulative" or whatever-- doesn't meant that it should or will be changed or abolished. If you don't like it, don't participate in it.
Now, my opinion of Firefly can be easily challenged being that I admitted right away I only watched the first two episodes.
That's a shame. "Our Mrs. Reynolds" is a great one, and the last episode aired, "Ariel," is a better 44 minutes of entertainment than you get out of most movies. Not only are they tightly written, but they're also really well shot and directed bits of filmed entertainment.
Besides, any show that's brave enough to establish a hard-and-fast "no sound in space" rule deserves all the chances they want.
a point of argument that is otherwise unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral in any and all possible physical implementations.
Oh, I think you need to just fuck off. Having no DRM technology at all would be a bad, bad thing; Internet broadcasting right now is essentially dead because there's no way for broadcasters to charge for their work, and if we can fix that problem, we'll see whole new worlds of entertainment and education open up. It's not going to be the advent of the printing press or anything, but it'll be cool if we can just get this piracy problem solved.
Remember when Stephen King released that e-book of his? You could download the book for a buck, or something like that. I remember reading that the publisher collected something like $100 on sales of the e-book through the web site, and that they found cracked copies all over FTP sites, web sites, peer-to-peer networks, and so on. Ever since, no cheap e-books. Great solution for those people who wanted to read e-books and were willing to pay for the privilege.
Now imagine a world in which the home theater PC, HDTV, broadband Internet, and compression technology like MPEG-4 come together. Your home theater PC is connected to your HDTV and to your broadband connection. You use your remote to go to a web site-- Blockbuster.com, maybe-- and select a movie. Say, Episode III or Return of the King or whatever. You don't watch it in real time; you don't have the bandwidth for that. Instead, you download it over several hours. Say you order the movie in the morning; you've got it to watch by that night. When you press "play," you get a pristine HDTV picture with DTS sound, compressed just to the point where it's visually indistinguishable from the HD master, and the whole thing cost you about a dollar.
Impossible without perfect DRM. Never happen.
Now, when I say "perfect DRM," I mean a system that can be used for ephemeral copies of media, stuff like video-on-demand where you merely "rent" the data instead of buying it. If you want to buy the movie, you can get it on HD-DVD or whatever; the system I'm imagining is strictly for stuff that you might call broadcast applications if you squint a little.
Perfect DRM will make it trivial for you to download and view or play media from the Internet, but practically impossible for you to save that media in an unencrypted form, or for you to play it back on anything other than the computer/device that downloaded it. Since the media is ephemeral, issues like fair use and backup copies and all that simply don't apply. And by "practically impossible" I mean so inconvenient that it's just not worth the effort.
Do I know exactly how such a system will work? No. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you; I'd tell venture capitalists and bank managers only, and then only if they let me hold on to one of their kids as a guarantee of good faith. Because whoever figures out how to do this first will be a very, very rich man.
Now, if you want to bitch about how my idea is "unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral," go right ahead. You'll probably be wrong, but I'd love to hear you give it a shot.
Way to put me in my place. I honestly did not think that you might really just not like TV at all; it seems like, if that's the case, this thread is a funny place for you to be posting.
Nevertheless, I respect the way you gave me a taste of my own medicine. The bit about scones really won me over.
If, however, you don't get a kick out of the writing on Firefly, then I have to respectfully stand by my judgment that you are-- and I say this with the utmost love-- a big, fat fuddy-duddy.
climate changes on worlds not fully studied (think Wrath of Khan)
(Hang on a sec while I wave goodbye to the topic as it recedes in the distance. Bye-bye, topic.)
See, that always pissed me off. Wrath of Khan is a movie so close to being flawless as to make no difference, but there's one glaring thing that drives me positively bat-shit every time I see it.
They put Khan on Ceti Alpha 5, right? Fifth planet out from Alpha Ceti, which is the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. (Astronomy geek.) Six months later, Ceti Alpha 6 (the next planet out) explodes. The shock shifts the orbit of Ceti Alpha 5, and that planet becomes a barely inhabitable rock.
Got the mental picture? There's Ceti Alpha 1-4, then Ceti Alpha 5 (Khan's planet), the smoking crater in space where Ceti Alpha 6 used to be, and then (just for sake of discussion) Ceti Alpha 7.
Years go by. Chekhov and whahisname come by and take a long, hard look at what they believe to be Ceti Alpha 6. They beam down, find Khan, learn about the whole Ceti Alpha 5/Ceti Alpha 6 mixup, have a good laugh, all hell breaks loose, and so on.
How the hell did they end up landing on Ceti Alpha 5, thinking it was Ceti Alpha 6? The way I figure it, it's impossible.
Let's say Chekhov and his buddies come flying in to the Ceti Alpha system and start counting planets. There's 1-4, there's 5 (better stay away from there, that's Khan's hood and we don't wear his colors), and there's 6. (Remember, 6 blowed up, so what they think is 6 is actually 7.) They beam down to Ceti Alpha 7 (which they think is 6) and find... nobody. Because Khan's gang is one planet sunward.
So they must not have counted planets. Instead, let's say they just started looking where they believe Ceti Alpha 6 should be-- based on the radius of its orbit-- and find a planet. Assuming that it's Ceti Alpha 6 (it's really 5), they beam down and get into all sorts of trouble.
But for that to have happened, Ceti Alpha 5 would have to be in a more distant orbit than it used to be. This is possible, thanks to orbital dynamics; if Ceti Alpha 6 exploded while Ceti Alpha 5 was either ahead of it or behind in orbit, the "shock wave" (yeah, I know, but nitpicking only goes so far, you know?) would give 5 a push, either speeding it up or slowing it down, which would have the net result of increasing the semimajor axis of its orbit. In other words, the orbit would become more elliptical, with its aphelion farther from the sun than it used to be. If you balance everything just right-- making the explosion the right size, and putting Ceti Alpha 5 in the right place relative to it-- Ceti Alpha 5 could be at just the right distance from its sun when Chehkov's ship arrives to pass for Ceti Alpha 6.
But what are the odds? Remember, Ceti Alpha 5's new orbit isn't circular; it's a more eccentric ellipse with a perihelion inside Ceti Alpha 5's original orbit and an aphelion near or outside Ceti Alpha 6's orbit. So the planet is only at the right distance from its sun to pass for Ceti Alpha 6 twice a year. The odds that Chehov and crew could show up at precisely the right time of year, and that they could, out of laziness or criminal misconduct or whatever, skip the part where you start at the sun and go "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, okay that's the one we want," are just too high to accept.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that an orbit sufficiently elliptical to put Ceti Alpha 5's aphelion at or near Ceti Alpha 6's original orbital radius would almost certainly render the planet completely uninhabitable, not just mostly so.
Why does this bother me so much? Simply because it would have been so easy to avoid it in the scriptwriting stages. If their target had been Ceti Alpha 4 instead of Ceti Alpha 6, no problem. Offscreen, Ceti Alpha 4 explodes, so when the white hats show up, they assume Ceti Alpha 5 is Ceti Alpha 4 (because 4 isn't there any more), and all is well with the world. Simple, easy, and with no impact whatsoever on the rest of the story.
The only reason I can think of for the writer's wanting to use Ceti Alpha 6 instead of Ceti Alpha 4 is simple euphony: Ceti Alpha 6 really rolls off the tongue, while Ceti Alpha 4 feels like you're chewing when you say it.
Okay, now that I go back and re-read this, I realize that this was a really long and essentially pointless rant about a matter of trivia so meaningless that other trivia looks at it and goes, "Pfff, whatever." Sorry about that. Can't do anything about it now, though; the backspace key on my keyboard is mysteriously broken all of a sudden.
How did these "primitives" get off of earth in the first place, if they don't have advanced technology?
This isn't a new idea in science fiction; for a point of reference, read either The Legacy of Heorot or Destiny's Road by Niven. They're both very easy reads, and they tell the story of extrasolar colonies that are basically designed on the seed-pod principle.
A plant normally needs light and nutrients to grow, but a seed is buried beneath the soil and has no roots with which to feed. So how can a seed sprout? A seed-pod contains both the embryonic plant itself and also a bit of tissue that feeds the plant while it's sprouting. As the plant sprouts, it "digests" that bit of plant-stuff to get the energy it needs to grow.
It's easy to imagine a colony that works the same way. The spacecraft-- a giant slow-boat, in this case-- is packed to the gills with lots of useful stuff: mining tools, farming tools, seeds and bulbs, livestock, pre-fab housing, a certain supply of prepared food, and so on. When the boat lands and the colonists get out, they have a great big party and start making babies willy-nilly, and then the next morning they start tearing their spaceship apart. All the stuff inside, and even the structure of the spaceship itself, gets turned into houses and mines and farms and fields and stuff to eat and build and use. This is like the seed-pod; it gives the colony enough stuff to set up a basic community, with shelter and sources of food and of minerals and all that, but that's all. After that point, the colony has to start squeezing out the pups and getting back to nature. Till the soil, milk the cows, real frontier-type stuff.
So to get the whole world off the planet, we have to postulate some of the spaceships. How many? Well, let's start by guessing that there are about 8 billion people on Earth when the shit starts to hit the fan. Due to disease and famine, say that population drops by 50% over a century: 4 billion people. Of those, half are going to get left behind, either because they're too old or too sick or too young or whatever: 2 billion.
Figure each spaceship can hold about 200 people, and the tools, equipment, and supplies they need to start a colony on a habitable world. That comes to 10 million spaceships. Ten million spaceships, each filled with stuff like goats and guns and clothes and lumber and pigs and wrought iron and seeds and medical supplies and books and ploughs and anvils and chickens, with a little room left over in the corners for the passengers.
Who could build such a vast fleet of spaceships? Oh, let's say in the West it was a joint venture of the National Geographic Society, the Gates Foundation (can't sell Windows if humanity is extinct, can you?), and Fox. (Fox got in by selling the ad rights to a yet-to-be-produced series called "When Space Colonies Go Bad." Check your local listings.)
The government of China, of course, accepted the responsibility for migrating its vast population upon its own shoulders; in 2250, Chairman Ken (China having become surprisingly Westernized in the past couple of centuries) proclaims the Great Leap Upward, and they start building Little Red Spaceships in low Earth orbit.
Improbable? Of course. Impossible? Probably. But remember that the fundamental purpose here is to establish a setting in which stories can be told. Maybe the number of people who got off the Earth is a lot smaller than 2 billion. Maybe it's more like 2 million, which would only require 10,000 spaceships, which is a hell of a lot easier to imagine. But whether you go with the high or the low figure, it's just plausible enough to make the reader, or watcher, or whatever go "Oh, okay, that's all right then, now get on with the stories."
Man, oh man. Whenever the topic of TV comes up, some asshole has to pull this same crap. "I only watch Masterpiece Theater, C-SPAN, and those delightful Taster's Choice commercials, cheerio, pip-pip!" A common variation is to throw in one inoffensive guilty pleasure to try to increase your credibility; it's always something like "The West Wing" or "CSI" or "ER," never "WWF Smackdown" or "General Hospital" or "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."
Stuff it, Lester. If you really don't watch TV, then keep your opinions to yourself and get your snobbish Thurston-Howell attitude the fuck out of this discussion. And if, as is far more likely, you're lying, quit puttin' on airs. Nobody will think any less of you if you admit that you get up early on Saturday mornings to watch reruns of "Chico and the Man" on your local Telemundo affiliate. We're all friends here.
The only thing worse than a snob is a guy who pretends to be a snob.
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First of all, when I said "effective access control mechanism," I meant it in the sense that the law means it: left alone, region codes work to prevent DVDs from one region from being played in another region. That's the legal definition of "effective."
Anyway, yeah, you're right, it would be theoretically possible for you to just buy one DVD player from each region so you can watch any DVD in your home. There's nothing wrong with that idea at all, except that I believe it's illegal to import non-region-1 DVD players to the US. (I'm not positive, but I've been told this by people who ought to know.) A better idea is to have a friend smuggle a region-free NTSC/PAL DVD player in from Australia or the Pacific Rim. If you can get it past customs-- and you almost always can-- it's a good solution. You'll need to put an adapter on the electrical plug, but that's all.
None of that is illegal under the DMCA, because it doesn't involve circumventing the region coding system. You're merely using the correct tool to view DVDs from different regions. (Importing DVD players without region controls is a different matter; that's covered under trade laws, not copyright laws.)
But if you "de-regionize" your DVD player to turn it into a region-free device, that's against the law under the DMCA. That's circumventing the access control mechanism itself, and that's a no-no.
And don't get all PC on me - I use backwards not as a "cultural imperialist" term, but as a relative descriptive term
Yeah, but it just kind of rubs me the wrong way when people use terms like "backwards" that imply a directionality to these sorts of things. I'm right in the middle of getting ready for a primitive camping trip-- we're leaving in the morning, and we're hoping to spend Friday through Sunday in a place far from other people, or the things of man. The only metal items I'm taking, apart from things like aluminum tent poles and such, are a handgun (just in case), a couple of good knives, my cast-iron skillet and my dutch oven. Everything else will be stone age all the way.
I do this for fun. My idea of a perfect vacation is to go out into the middle of nowhere and live off the land for as long as I can; I'll take some food with, like pancake mix and rice and potatoes and some meat, but I don't pack enough food for the whole trip. If I can, I fish or scavenge to make up the difference; hunting is usually not allowed where we go, and anything bigger than a rabbit would be wasted anyway. In the worst case, we stretch our provender out a bit to make those extra two or three days; it's not a bad way to drop a couple of pounds of flab.
My point is that I do this for fun. I do it because I like it. Calling that sort of life "backwards" implies that modern life is the acme of human experience, and I just don't buy it. I don't mind expressions like "primitive" or "advanced" to describe relative lifestyles, but calling people who live in the woods and who don't watch TV "backwards" just kinda bugs me.
But that's more about me than it is about you, so don't worry about it.
I can see how things like mass media and communication might be absent - and your local convenience store - but basic technologies which are enormously time saving, and make our modern lifestyles possible - at the very least, in the absence of petroleum products and technologies, solar power?
Solar power for what? Electrical items are, for the most part, substantially less durable than their non-electric equivalents. Compare a kerosene lantern to an electric lantern. After a year or ten, the electric lantern's bulb is going to burn out, and it'll be useless until that bulb is replaced. Ever tried to manufacture your own electric light bulb? A kerosene lantern, on the other hand, will remain useful forever as long as you keep it stocked with fuel (which can be made more easily than manufactured goods, and thus would be far more readily available) and wicks (which can be made from old rags, or from rope, or from just about any pulped and dried plant matter).
You're thinking of the people on Firefly as being deprived; don't. It's not that electric lanterns don't exist any more, or that it's impossible to get them. It's more about the fact that kerosene lanterns are a hell of a lot more useful in that environment than electric ones would be.
Who has the TIME to make this stuff? 19th century settlers did it because there simply was no alternative. The people of Firefly would almost certainly have alternatives that were much cheaper.
Well, first of all, if you need a pair of socks and you can't buy them, you find the time to make 'em. In fact, you start making them in the spring, because you know you'll need them in six months when winter comes.
Now, as to why they can't just buy 'em. Imagine you live on another planet-- say, Mars-- and yours is the only pair of socks there. Literally, I mean; you're wearing the only pair of socks on the entire planet. But they're starting to wear thin, so you decide you need a new pair.
Where are the socks? Earth, millions of miles away. On Earth, you can buy socks by the truckload for almost nothing; they're manufactured in such vast quantities that the cost is acceptable to even the desperately poor.
But you're on Mars. In order to get socks, somebody on Earth will have to put a pair of socks in a rocket, and fire that rocket off toward Mars. Not an inexpensive proposition; the cost of blasting a pair of socks into orbit is only slightly less than the cost of blasting a person into orbit, and that cost is huge. So if you want to get socks from Earth, you're going to have to pay a fortune for them.
What can you pay with? You don't have anything remotely like the money it would take to pay for the cost of shipping your socks; you have to trade somehow. What will you trade with? You're living a subsistence lifestyle as it is; you don't have the energy budget to go digging for rubies to ship back to Earth in exchange for your socks.
Long story short: you can't buy socks. There's just no way to make it practical for anybody on Earth to ship socks to you on Mars.
So what do you do? By god, you go out to the pasture and you shear a sheep and you whittle a couple of knitting needles and you make your own socks.
"the navy with aliens who speak english"
Yeah, speaking of which, my respect for the guys who make Stargate SG-1 went up a few notches when I read the FAQ they publish on their web site. One of the questions is, "Why does every group of people SG-1 encounters speak perfect English?" The answer was, basically, "Uh... they don't. Each group has their own language, but they're close enough to Earth languages to make it possible for Dr. Jackson to learn them relatively quickly. Just assume that part happens off-screen. Look, it's only an hour-long show; do you really want to spend that time watching language lessons every week?" I have a lot of respect for a group of storytellers who aren't afraid to invoke magic when it's in the best interest of the story.
This comes up in Firefly, too. How does the artificial gravity work on the ship? Magic. It actually says that, right there in the series bible. Artificial gravity works by magic; it's not relevant to the story-- and never will be-- so it's not important enough to bother explaining.
So someone accidentally pumps 'Walk this Way' into a telesurgery session and instead of a mole removal I come out with a sex change?
No, that only happens if they play "Dude Looks Like a Lady."
I gave up on the show after 2 or 3 eps, but was any of thiese expalnations you give even hinted at in the show?
You mean apart from the fact that it's all covered-- albeit in super-brief summary-- in the V/O prologue? Well, it's a TV show, you know? The purpose of the show is to tell entertaining stories. While some people get entertained by this sort of "here are the rules" exposition, most people don't. So no, you probably won't see a "here's how we colonized this particular rock in space" episode.
But, for the record, the complete backstory is included in the series bible. I don't remember enough details of it offhand to quote chapter-and-verse, but it's there, and it's plausible enough to build stories on.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." -- Mathew 10:34
I'm pretty sure you're going to hell for misspelling "Matthew."
Oh, christ. Are you sure this isn't a joke? My ZIP code brought up this doozy:
Inner Cities
Inner-City, Single Parent Families
Age group: Under 18, 18-34
Blue-Collar/Service
Household income: 16,500
1.86% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to...
Buy baby food
Buy soul/r&b/black music
Pay bills by phone
Watch pay-per-view sports
Read National Enquirer
This PRIZM Cluster lives in neighborhoods like...
Detroit, MI
Hyde Park, IL
Morningside, NY
Somebody needs to tell the PRIZM people about this little thing called the "urban renaissance." Downtown areas aren't all ghettos these days.
The computer had all the old orbital details of the original set of planets and said "6 should be about _here_"; they went "there" and found a planet (5's orbit being more elliptical, now extending out as far as 6's used to be, and they were unlucky enough to find 5 in a place that would be reasonable for 6) and didn't do any more checking.
But, like a said before, an orbit that elliptical would result in a planet being completely unable to support human life. Khan and his posse survived on Ceti Alpha 5 for decades post-explosion. It doesn't add up that way, either.
How often would they find any situation in which that would give them any surprises?
Given the number of solar systems in the known galaxy, the number of starships visiting those solar systems, and the probability that an event like this is going to occur, I'd say fairly regularly.
Let's say each starship visits about 50 unique star systems per year. And, just to pull a number out of the air, let's say there are 2,000 starships in the fleet. (The US Navy has about 400 ships; Starfleet covers not only all of Earth but also the whole Federation, so it's fair to assume that it's proportionately larger.) That comes to 100,000 visits per year. (Yeah, lots of those are dupes, but let's ignore that for the moment.)
Those calculations give us a mental picture of a galaxy-- or a part of it, anyway-- that's fairly teeming with starships, coming and going hither and yon. With all that activity, the odds that a starship is going to end up in a solar system where something interesting has happened become pretty significant.
It's unreasonable to think that a notional starship wouldn't use at least some form of dead reckoning, if for no other reason than to make sure that they're where they think they ought to be. When you zap into the outskirts of a solar system, take a quick look to make sure that it includes the right number of stars and planets, just as a sanity check.
Yes, the whole premise of a fleet of starships zipping across space is absurd all by itself. But there's no reason to make it any more absurd than it has to be. This whole thing could have been avoided simply by replacing the name "Ceti Alpha 6" with "Ceti Alpha 4" in the screenplay. What a waste.
I'm not going to get dragged into a copyright argument with you. Yes, my opinion differs from yours. Despite the fact that you have a different idea, I stubbornly persist in believing that I'm right. I am, at heart, a pragmatist, and when I hear people get all up-in-arms over fair use rights on a TV show, of all things, it brings a bit of a giggle.
Yell about your rights all you want. I prefer to choose my battles.
so... what's your point?
My point is that people read your sig, know where it came from, assume that you also know where it came from, and then reach the conclusion that you are either a complete moron, a precocious but disaffected teenager, or, more likely, both.
If that's fine with you, then by all means, go right ahead. But in the meantime I will hold on to my impression of you as a mouth-breathing fifteen-year-old who read on AOL that Crowley was a Satanist and whispered, "Kewl!"
Bedouins and Quakers live their backwards lifestyles out of religious conviction.
WHAT? Your ignorance is showing. The Bedouin are the desert-dwelling nomads of the Arabian peninsula, and the Negev and Sinai deserts. The live their "backwards" (oh, the arrogance) lifestyle out of tradition and preference, not out of religion. The Bedouin traditions go back much further than Islam; before 600 AD, the Bedouin practiced a polytheistic and animistic religion. Now they're Muslims. There's nothing in the Koran about living the life of a desert nomad; they do it because that's their tradition and that's what they choose.
You expect me to believe that a zillion people on hundreds of different worlds all suddenly agree to adopt a cult-like belief that "the simple life is best"?
Nope. The world-- and, by extension, the fictional solar system in which Firefly is set-- is a big place. Some people prefer the simple life, free from government interference but largely bereft of luxuries. Others live in big cities-- or on highly developed planets-- trading a degree of independence for comfort.
And if that's the case, how come it's not ever mentioned in the storyline?
Jesus, dude, it's right there in the prologue, for chrissakes. "Here's how it is. The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and flush with the new technologies, some not so much. The central planets, them as formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule. A few idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself."
That's it, right there. All the premise you need in about ten seconds.
I know it's really important to convey the "western" style that these people on backwater worlds are wearing handmade vintage clothing. Who is making it?
Uh... they, themselves, are? That's what "handmade" means. If you want to put socks on your kids' feet, you'd better either own a sheep or buy some wool and knit them yourself. If you get a hole in the seat of your best pair of dungarees, you get a needle (which you paid dearly for) and some thread (ditto) and you sew it up. You don't just throw them away and pick up another pair at the Try-n-Save.
Here's how I see things. Earth's used up. Big megacorps launch pre-fab factories to the other planets, and settlers come looking for work. They'll be the exploited third world labor of the future. This is the culture, clothing, and architecture you'll see in the future on these backwater worlds.
Okay, now throw in the impact of a system-wide civil war, armed revolt, and the mass exodus of the independently minded souls to the outer planets where they could live on their own terms. Somehow your premise and the show's premise end up in the same place.
If you rent a movie from Blockbuster you are allowed to show it to other people, or watch it on different televisions, before returning it.
Sure, within reason. (You can't set up a theater and charge people to watch the video you rented, for instance.) And a DRM system for VOD may include those features, too. But it probably won't. And the fact that it doesn't is no big deal at all.
The choice is simple here. Either we get a comprehensive DRM system for ephemeral media, or we don't get HDTV VOD over the Internet. As somebody who would greatly enjoy HDTV VOD-- starting, like, today-- I strongly support DRM for ephemeral media. If you want to oppose it based on principle or some other damn fool ideal, that's your prerogative. But to most people, life is a question of compromises.
the fact that it becomes illegal to circumvent the region coding
Yup. Region coding is an effective access control mechanism. Circumventing it is against the law. So don't do it. This is not a matter that warrants getting to a big snit.
Are you using a long string and two foam cups to call Australia?
Just about: AT&T.
By the way, what's "Candada?" Is that the Great White North as envisioned by Gertrude Stein?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
What's with the Crowley quote? You do know, don't you, that that guy was a drug addict, a rapist, and a con man, right? I mean, you're not exactly associating yourself with credibility here.
Then again, I kind of imagine ol' Aleister as being kind of like Groundskeeper Willy from that Halloween episode of The Simpsons. "Boo! Augh! Bleah! Uh-- oh, stop! Aw, I left ma' gun on the seat. Stop! Uh... wait here, please." (runs off)
For example if you cannot buy a movie and then sell it on to someone else after watching it, the movie is very different to other kinds of property like a house or a bicycle.
That's never even been suggested. What we're talking about here is DRM for ephemeral data, stuff that you don't buy, but merely rent. If you rent a movie from Blockbuster, are you allowed to make a copy of it? Absolutely not. Same thing.
I think that the information should be tied in to a physical token which embodies the right to use that information. For example, if you get an on-demand download of some music, your computer will spit out a small disc which gives you the right to listen to that music.
So... you're unclear on the whole idea of download-on-demand, huh? That's okay. It's not for you, I guess.
Oh, there is, by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with DVD region codes. The fact that you don't like it-- cries of "artificial" or "arbitrary" or "manipulative" or whatever-- doesn't meant that it should or will be changed or abolished. If you don't like it, don't participate in it.
P.S. Have you considered stamp collecting as a less anoying alternative?
Speak for yourself, man. Philately fucking pisses me off.
Twirlip (because too much karma is boring)
Uh... yeah. Wha?
How come nobody else has pointed out the glaring typo in the headline of this article? Cliff wrote "community" when he obviously meant "penis."
Twirlip (because too much karma is boring)
Now, my opinion of Firefly can be easily challenged being that I admitted right away I only watched the first two episodes.
That's a shame. "Our Mrs. Reynolds" is a great one, and the last episode aired, "Ariel," is a better 44 minutes of entertainment than you get out of most movies. Not only are they tightly written, but they're also really well shot and directed bits of filmed entertainment.
Besides, any show that's brave enough to establish a hard-and-fast "no sound in space" rule deserves all the chances they want.
a point of argument that is otherwise unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral in any and all possible physical implementations.
Oh, I think you need to just fuck off. Having no DRM technology at all would be a bad, bad thing; Internet broadcasting right now is essentially dead because there's no way for broadcasters to charge for their work, and if we can fix that problem, we'll see whole new worlds of entertainment and education open up. It's not going to be the advent of the printing press or anything, but it'll be cool if we can just get this piracy problem solved.
Remember when Stephen King released that e-book of his? You could download the book for a buck, or something like that. I remember reading that the publisher collected something like $100 on sales of the e-book through the web site, and that they found cracked copies all over FTP sites, web sites, peer-to-peer networks, and so on. Ever since, no cheap e-books. Great solution for those people who wanted to read e-books and were willing to pay for the privilege.
Now imagine a world in which the home theater PC, HDTV, broadband Internet, and compression technology like MPEG-4 come together. Your home theater PC is connected to your HDTV and to your broadband connection. You use your remote to go to a web site-- Blockbuster.com, maybe-- and select a movie. Say, Episode III or Return of the King or whatever. You don't watch it in real time; you don't have the bandwidth for that. Instead, you download it over several hours. Say you order the movie in the morning; you've got it to watch by that night. When you press "play," you get a pristine HDTV picture with DTS sound, compressed just to the point where it's visually indistinguishable from the HD master, and the whole thing cost you about a dollar.
Impossible without perfect DRM. Never happen.
Now, when I say "perfect DRM," I mean a system that can be used for ephemeral copies of media, stuff like video-on-demand where you merely "rent" the data instead of buying it. If you want to buy the movie, you can get it on HD-DVD or whatever; the system I'm imagining is strictly for stuff that you might call broadcast applications if you squint a little.
Perfect DRM will make it trivial for you to download and view or play media from the Internet, but practically impossible for you to save that media in an unencrypted form, or for you to play it back on anything other than the computer/device that downloaded it. Since the media is ephemeral, issues like fair use and backup copies and all that simply don't apply. And by "practically impossible" I mean so inconvenient that it's just not worth the effort.
Do I know exactly how such a system will work? No. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you; I'd tell venture capitalists and bank managers only, and then only if they let me hold on to one of their kids as a guarantee of good faith. Because whoever figures out how to do this first will be a very, very rich man.
Now, if you want to bitch about how my idea is "unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral," go right ahead. You'll probably be wrong, but I'd love to hear you give it a shot.
Way to put me in my place. I honestly did not think that you might really just not like TV at all; it seems like, if that's the case, this thread is a funny place for you to be posting.
Nevertheless, I respect the way you gave me a taste of my own medicine. The bit about scones really won me over.
If, however, you don't get a kick out of the writing on Firefly, then I have to respectfully stand by my judgment that you are-- and I say this with the utmost love-- a big, fat fuddy-duddy.
climate changes on worlds not fully studied (think Wrath of Khan)
(Hang on a sec while I wave goodbye to the topic as it recedes in the distance. Bye-bye, topic.)
See, that always pissed me off. Wrath of Khan is a movie so close to being flawless as to make no difference, but there's one glaring thing that drives me positively bat-shit every time I see it.
They put Khan on Ceti Alpha 5, right? Fifth planet out from Alpha Ceti, which is the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. (Astronomy geek.) Six months later, Ceti Alpha 6 (the next planet out) explodes. The shock shifts the orbit of Ceti Alpha 5, and that planet becomes a barely inhabitable rock.
Got the mental picture? There's Ceti Alpha 1-4, then Ceti Alpha 5 (Khan's planet), the smoking crater in space where Ceti Alpha 6 used to be, and then (just for sake of discussion) Ceti Alpha 7.
Years go by. Chekhov and whahisname come by and take a long, hard look at what they believe to be Ceti Alpha 6. They beam down, find Khan, learn about the whole Ceti Alpha 5/Ceti Alpha 6 mixup, have a good laugh, all hell breaks loose, and so on.
How the hell did they end up landing on Ceti Alpha 5, thinking it was Ceti Alpha 6? The way I figure it, it's impossible.
Let's say Chekhov and his buddies come flying in to the Ceti Alpha system and start counting planets. There's 1-4, there's 5 (better stay away from there, that's Khan's hood and we don't wear his colors), and there's 6. (Remember, 6 blowed up, so what they think is 6 is actually 7.) They beam down to Ceti Alpha 7 (which they think is 6) and find... nobody. Because Khan's gang is one planet sunward.
So they must not have counted planets. Instead, let's say they just started looking where they believe Ceti Alpha 6 should be-- based on the radius of its orbit-- and find a planet. Assuming that it's Ceti Alpha 6 (it's really 5), they beam down and get into all sorts of trouble.
But for that to have happened, Ceti Alpha 5 would have to be in a more distant orbit than it used to be. This is possible, thanks to orbital dynamics; if Ceti Alpha 6 exploded while Ceti Alpha 5 was either ahead of it or behind in orbit, the "shock wave" (yeah, I know, but nitpicking only goes so far, you know?) would give 5 a push, either speeding it up or slowing it down, which would have the net result of increasing the semimajor axis of its orbit. In other words, the orbit would become more elliptical, with its aphelion farther from the sun than it used to be. If you balance everything just right-- making the explosion the right size, and putting Ceti Alpha 5 in the right place relative to it-- Ceti Alpha 5 could be at just the right distance from its sun when Chehkov's ship arrives to pass for Ceti Alpha 6.
But what are the odds? Remember, Ceti Alpha 5's new orbit isn't circular; it's a more eccentric ellipse with a perihelion inside Ceti Alpha 5's original orbit and an aphelion near or outside Ceti Alpha 6's orbit. So the planet is only at the right distance from its sun to pass for Ceti Alpha 6 twice a year. The odds that Chehov and crew could show up at precisely the right time of year, and that they could, out of laziness or criminal misconduct or whatever, skip the part where you start at the sun and go "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, okay that's the one we want," are just too high to accept.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that an orbit sufficiently elliptical to put Ceti Alpha 5's aphelion at or near Ceti Alpha 6's original orbital radius would almost certainly render the planet completely uninhabitable, not just mostly so.
Why does this bother me so much? Simply because it would have been so easy to avoid it in the scriptwriting stages. If their target had been Ceti Alpha 4 instead of Ceti Alpha 6, no problem. Offscreen, Ceti Alpha 4 explodes, so when the white hats show up, they assume Ceti Alpha 5 is Ceti Alpha 4 (because 4 isn't there any more), and all is well with the world. Simple, easy, and with no impact whatsoever on the rest of the story.
The only reason I can think of for the writer's wanting to use Ceti Alpha 6 instead of Ceti Alpha 4 is simple euphony: Ceti Alpha 6 really rolls off the tongue, while Ceti Alpha 4 feels like you're chewing when you say it.
Okay, now that I go back and re-read this, I realize that this was a really long and essentially pointless rant about a matter of trivia so meaningless that other trivia looks at it and goes, "Pfff, whatever." Sorry about that. Can't do anything about it now, though; the backspace key on my keyboard is mysteriously broken all of a sudden.
To both you and NeuroKoan: not a typo. Bart doesn't say "Lisa," he says "Lise." Pronounced like "lease."
As to why it was moderated Informative, I will not pretend to understand.
How did these "primitives" get off of earth in the first place, if they don't have advanced technology?
This isn't a new idea in science fiction; for a point of reference, read either The Legacy of Heorot or Destiny's Road by Niven. They're both very easy reads, and they tell the story of extrasolar colonies that are basically designed on the seed-pod principle.
A plant normally needs light and nutrients to grow, but a seed is buried beneath the soil and has no roots with which to feed. So how can a seed sprout? A seed-pod contains both the embryonic plant itself and also a bit of tissue that feeds the plant while it's sprouting. As the plant sprouts, it "digests" that bit of plant-stuff to get the energy it needs to grow.
It's easy to imagine a colony that works the same way. The spacecraft-- a giant slow-boat, in this case-- is packed to the gills with lots of useful stuff: mining tools, farming tools, seeds and bulbs, livestock, pre-fab housing, a certain supply of prepared food, and so on. When the boat lands and the colonists get out, they have a great big party and start making babies willy-nilly, and then the next morning they start tearing their spaceship apart. All the stuff inside, and even the structure of the spaceship itself, gets turned into houses and mines and farms and fields and stuff to eat and build and use. This is like the seed-pod; it gives the colony enough stuff to set up a basic community, with shelter and sources of food and of minerals and all that, but that's all. After that point, the colony has to start squeezing out the pups and getting back to nature. Till the soil, milk the cows, real frontier-type stuff.
So to get the whole world off the planet, we have to postulate some of the spaceships. How many? Well, let's start by guessing that there are about 8 billion people on Earth when the shit starts to hit the fan. Due to disease and famine, say that population drops by 50% over a century: 4 billion people. Of those, half are going to get left behind, either because they're too old or too sick or too young or whatever: 2 billion.
Figure each spaceship can hold about 200 people, and the tools, equipment, and supplies they need to start a colony on a habitable world. That comes to 10 million spaceships. Ten million spaceships, each filled with stuff like goats and guns and clothes and lumber and pigs and wrought iron and seeds and medical supplies and books and ploughs and anvils and chickens, with a little room left over in the corners for the passengers.
Who could build such a vast fleet of spaceships? Oh, let's say in the West it was a joint venture of the National Geographic Society, the Gates Foundation (can't sell Windows if humanity is extinct, can you?), and Fox. (Fox got in by selling the ad rights to a yet-to-be-produced series called "When Space Colonies Go Bad." Check your local listings.)
The government of China, of course, accepted the responsibility for migrating its vast population upon its own shoulders; in 2250, Chairman Ken (China having become surprisingly Westernized in the past couple of centuries) proclaims the Great Leap Upward, and they start building Little Red Spaceships in low Earth orbit.
Improbable? Of course. Impossible? Probably. But remember that the fundamental purpose here is to establish a setting in which stories can be told. Maybe the number of people who got off the Earth is a lot smaller than 2 billion. Maybe it's more like 2 million, which would only require 10,000 spaceships, which is a hell of a lot easier to imagine. But whether you go with the high or the low figure, it's just plausible enough to make the reader, or watcher, or whatever go "Oh, okay, that's all right then, now get on with the stories."
Man, oh man. Whenever the topic of TV comes up, some asshole has to pull this same crap. "I only watch Masterpiece Theater, C-SPAN, and those delightful Taster's Choice commercials, cheerio, pip-pip!" A common variation is to throw in one inoffensive guilty pleasure to try to increase your credibility; it's always something like "The West Wing" or "CSI" or "ER," never "WWF Smackdown" or "General Hospital" or "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."
Stuff it, Lester. If you really don't watch TV, then keep your opinions to yourself and get your snobbish Thurston-Howell attitude the fuck out of this discussion. And if, as is far more likely, you're lying, quit puttin' on airs. Nobody will think any less of you if you admit that you get up early on Saturday mornings to watch reruns of "Chico and the Man" on your local Telemundo affiliate. We're all friends here.
The only thing worse than a snob is a guy who pretends to be a snob.