Yeah, using that logic, we should be able to build just about anything anywhere, as long as it can be torn down.
You forgot the part about it not damaging the environment while it is in use like a coal plant does. Any alleged damage (specifically to the tourist trade) caused by a wind farm is completely reversible.
They hauled it off in pieces and then built a lecture hall in it's place.
When they haul it off in pieces, they don't just disappear. They have to be securely stored somewhere. And even if they can return the site to a useful state, the original claim was that it was easier to do this for a wind farm, not that it was impossible to do it for a nuclear power plant.
I got something in October for 2 cents. Amazingly the trading cards have kept their value too. I guess that it is time for me to go play a crappy game!
Seriously? How exactly does this sound like "embrace, extend, extinguish"? What are they embracing? What have they extended (other than their own browser)? What could they possibly extinguish?
According to the cached document, the extensions were attributed to pinterest.com and redditenhancementsuite.com - who were also the authors of the same extensions for all the other browsers. Do you just see the name Microsoft and blinding spout out FUD even though there is not a single similarity to the old EEE scenario?
I'm too lazy to read it, but does it even MENTION nuclear power? Because any climate change plan that doesn't include nuclear as a major component of a carbon-neutral energy policy isn't worth using as toilet paper.
Why are you so sure of that? Was it mentioned in another paper that you also didn't bother to read? That's the kind of informative discussion we need around here!
> Why does your lifestyle matter more than the entire world?
Where did that question come from? Because it wasn't this discussion.
This was explained by the sentence following the one you quoted. Kohath is trying to frame this discussion to say that we don't owe a small island nation of people anything and that we should not have to change our lifestyle for just a small number of people. But the problem is that it is not only a small number of people who are impacted by climate change; it is the entire world. The nation of Kiribati is just one of the first examples of the climate change effect.
The climate change deniers have tried to tell us that global warming doesn't happen. When it is shown that it really is happening, they trot out the line that it isn't really caused by man and that it won't really be bad enough to cause any problems. Now we find out that it is causing real issues (and will result in the first of the predicted climate-change refugees) they are explained away as only being a problem of a few people and that we still should not have to be inconvenienced by having to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Every step of the way the deniers have come up with unsupported excuses and bogus conspiracy theories for why we shouldn't have to do anything about climate change. At least I will give credit for honesty when Kohath essentially says "I don't want to change my behaviour as I simply don't care about anyone but me".
the world wouldn't care if the people Kiribati lived or died
It doesn't. People have lived and died for millenia.
Well they won't any more in Kiribati if everybody has to leave!
The world would be a better place if you didn't exist. It would save us from your inane victim mentality.
How can I possibly be the victim when I am not one of the people being forced from my home? It is funny that you finished with some childish name-calling that has nothing to do with what I said when your initial line erroneously stated that what I was saying wasn't in this discussion. You simply don't like what I have to say so you have to make up bullshit about something that I haven't said.
It is not inane victim mentality to think that perhaps it would be better if we didn't stuff up the environment and cause people from another country to have to migrate from their homes. It is simply common sense and common decency.
Pathetic. You have jump straight to the "you hate the US" line simply because I dared to criticise anyone who is willing to pollute the world without a care for the people it might affect. Well here is the kicker. My country is right above yours on the table of emissions per-capita, so we are actually worse that you. But no, that doesn't mean that I hate my own country either.
what is the difference between you and me? I don't want to make the world a worse place and you do. I don't hate the US, whereas you treat the rest of the world with total contempt. It is people like you who gives your country a bad reputation. At least I care about the impact that I have on the environment, and do whatever I can to reduce my CO2 footprint. I don't just the the affect I have on the other people of the world and just say "fuck 'em!".
I thought that was the whole point of this story. Kiribati residents are owed a lifestyle regardless of the tradeoffs everyone else in the world would have to make for their lifestyle to be maintained. It leads to the still-unanswered question "why does one group matter more than another?".
If that is the way that you want to play it, perhaps you can answer the question yourself. Why does your lifestyle matter more than the entire world? After all, it is not just one single nation that is affected by climate change. If your nation is causing the globe to heat more than anyone else except one other country and yet you have only 4% of the world's population, why should you matter more than everyone else? Do you think that is fair? Do you think that you should be able to do anything you want no matter how much it hurts others?
I bet you are the kind of person who also screams about how unfair it is if there is a suggestion of raising taxes to pay for infrastructure that would benefit the entire country (or in the case of fixing global warming - benefit the world). All of a sudden, the minor inconvenience of losing a bit of money would seem terribly unjust to you. You have to admit, complaining about higher taxes seems rather petty compared to being forcibly relocated to another country as has already started happening in some of these small Pacific countries.
Or maybe it doesn't seem petty to you. If you really are as selfish and arrogant as you appear then perhaps you wouldn't notice the hypocrisy. I bet your attitude would change if your neighbors decided to burn down your house to improve their views. It would fit your philosophy of screwing the few to make life better for the many.
So my answer to your question of "why does one group matter more than another?" is this. The world wouldn't care if the people Kiribati lived or died, but the world would be a better place if you didn't exist. If you are adversely affecting the world, then you matter less than another group who is simply minding their own business and not destroying the environment. If you have no compassion for the suffering you cause to others, then you are a net drain on society. You don't matter at all.
Does the climate realize it should care about per capita emissions rather than absolute numbers? I don't think temperatures and sea levels respond to that kind of equivocation.
It's pathetic that you would dismiss the population differences between the countries in your graph when you had previously asked:
Why do thousands of Kiribati matter more than millions of Americans?
Why should the millions of US citizens be justified in causing more damage to the environment than the billions of people from the other countries? If you don't care who suffers just so you can lead the lifestyle you want, why not commit to your ideals fully? Put on a pirate hat and just invade other countries to plunder their resources!
Typically, only about 10-20% of pollution in a city is because of traffic. Most pollution is due to industries. The right solution is moving coal plants and heavy industries away from the city.
The government do know that their air pollution has more than one cause. From another article:
The government also said it would shut down a power plant in the capital that burns coal and inspect trucks at the border to make sure they comply with emissions regulations.
This is a short-term solution to fix the urgent problem. They are looking at how to deal with this in the long term, and it will not just be limited to cars.
It sounds like a "trial run"; if deemed successful, then it can be made permanent during week 3.
They have explicitly said that the restrictions would be temporary, and there is nothing to suggest that it would be otherwise. They still need to make some long term changes to fix the problem, but right now something must be done to reduce their huge, immediate pollution problem.
Not like everyone's license plate gets thoroughly checked.... heck; I see people driving with no license plate at all, all the time. I'd bet if they get caught and pulled over, they'll say they weren't aware of the scheme, blah blah blah, and weren't appropriately informed or alerted in any way, blah blah blah....
I'm pretty sure that the police will be vigilant about this considering that it is such a major event in the city. Pleading ignorance will not be an excuse in the eyes of the law. And even if some people do flout the rules, it still will not mean that the number of cars on the road will not be reduced. Just because something is not 100% successful does not mean that it is not worth trying.
You're missing the forest for the trees. People still have to get to work, so when you take away their cars you're just taxing the working class. They're going to HAVE to get to work, and this measure is NOT going to increase public transportation. As others have stated, this is a non-solution,. and an actual solution would be taxing the shit out of automobiles and spending the proceeds on public transportation. Instead, they're causing their citizenry problems (can't drive, need another car to get to work) while completely failing to address the problem (inadequate public transport.)
First of all, the phrase "you're missing the forest for the trees" makes no sense with regards to what you said. Secondly, this initiative will indeed include improving public transport. Why did you think that it would not? From the article:
To ensure that commuters are not put to hardship, Delhi Metro services will be extended and school buses will be requisitioned even as efforts to expand the existing fleet of the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) were underway.
Finally, you claim that this proposal effectively taxes the working class, and yet your solution is to directly tax them instead. So instead of the temporary inconvenience of limiting the number of cars on the road, you suggest that they permanently increase taxes. And how does "taxing the shit out of automobiles" actually reduce the amount of pollution generated since the cars on the road have already been purchased, and increasing the purchase cost will not reduce the use of the vehicle. You could be talking about fuel tax and tolls, but that is still a tax on the working class.
People get multiple cars, people hire drivers for even/odd days, people have multiple license plates, etc. This doesn't work.
This scheme is planned to run for two or three weeks. Do you really think that people are going to buy another car just to cover that short period? Do you really think that there were enough unused cars previously that could cater for a new industry of hire cars to be able to service the entire population? Do you really think that every person in Delhi has the contacts to be able to procure false license plates?
Where is your evidence that these schemes always fail miserably? Or indeed, that any scheme like this has not been able to reduce the number of cars on the road to some extent. There have been plenty of people making statements that these road reduction policies always fail, but not one of you has provided a single citation to back it up.
Sure, some residents will be able to find ways to get around the restrictions (let's face it, no system is perfect), but that doesn't mean that all 18 million people in Delhi will have the resources to game the system. They don't all have the money to buy new cars (or even the space to park them).
No for the majority of people it made no difference at all because at the first error they just jumped online and pirated the content.
No they didn't. The majority of people in the world do not pirate stuff. They do not have torrent software loaded. If they did then all forms of DRM would have died out years ago. DRM works because, as you said:
the majority of consumers do the "approved thing" with their copy
You never hear about the people who come up against the limits of DRM and simply accept it because they don't jump online to complain. If you only see the people who complain (which by definition you do) then you are seeing a skewed picture of the situation.
So I stand by my original statement that for the majority of people, the removal of DRM made little to no difference at all.
Ecept that's crap. Just about everything is freely available on the Pirate Bay. Everything is released on DVD still which while technically hsa DRM, it's so thoroughly hacked that it may as well not have.
The people who download stuff from the pirate bay are not consumers, they are pirates. The argument about DRM does not apply to them because they don't ever use DRM-encumbered media. DRM is not designed to stop the people who identify themselves as pirates; it is to prevent those people who would balk at being called that (and wouldn't dream of loading torrent software) but who see no problems with copying an album or a movie to give to a friend. Morals are not absolute. While there is no difference in downloading something from the Pirate Bay and being handed a CD from a friend to rip onto your computer, there are people who see this as two different moral levels. The former is seen as stealing, while the latter is legitimate because it's just their friend's CD.
My point has always been that people will accept DRM if it is not onerous (that is, as long as they don't have to do anything for their media to play like connecting to the Internet when there is no other reason for them to have to do this). Equally, the general public will not copy something to give to a friend if it seems onerous or if there is the vague idea that somehow there duplication might be detectable. I think that the old days of handing around physical media made casual copying much more acceptable because it felt like you were lending something physical to someone even though they got to keep the contents of that physical media.
With digital files it's a bit different, especially if you have client software like iTunes to manage it. I asked my mother-in-law (who regularly buys music from the iTunes store) whether she thought she could give a copy of an album to someone and she had no idea. The concept of ownership is blurred when the music is attached to accounts and accessed with special software. It didn't occur to her that the music had a physical form (as a file) so she has never once thought about being able to duplicate any music, despite her and my wife regularly sharing CDs with each other.
Like a lot of people, she doesn't care if her music and TV shows have DRM on them; ll she wants is to be able to play them. And that was the entire point of my original post.
Between money or more money. Not making money or losing money.
Irrelevant to this discussion.
But it made it impossible (or at least extremely inconvenient) to move away from an Apple device. The market effects were obvious and was a huge part of the iPod's success and cost the consumers millions through lack of competition. The consumer might not have really understood, but they knew it worked on Apple and didn't work anywhere else.
That is correct, but as you say the consumer didn't understand and in most cases didn't care because they simply didn't ever try to move away from the Appleverse.
They don't notice it because what millions and millions of people download have DRM removed.
No, they didn't notice the removal of DRM because they dutifully installed iTunes and never tried anything that would trigger the rights management. People were far more likely want to write their music to CD format than copy it to a non-Apple brand of player and that was still supported.
True, but you were the one claiming that publishers wouldn't publish without DRM.
No, I never claimed that. It only requires one publisher to decide not to release one song/movie in a DRM-free digital format for my statement to be true. My point has always been about the public's willingness to accept DRM that isn't onerous. If they have to connect to the Internet for the sole purpose of playing a local file then they will get annoyed. But if they package the DRM in a way that seems like a benefit to the consumer (or if it is effectively invisible like the iTunes DRM) then the consumer doesn't care. No amounts of arguments about the pros and cons (however correct they are and however much I personally agree with them) will change the my point about consumer attitudes. If the consumer can't play their media because of onerous DRM them they will be pissed off. But if we pulled all support for DRM technologies and their media files stopped working then that is also an anti-consumer practice and will piss off the very consumers that you seek to protect.
I think you confused "not economically viable" with "profit maximizing".
I'm not confusing any terms, because it is not my decision to make. It is the publishers who make that decision.
And I'm sure you noticed how the music industry imploded after iTunes gave up the DRM. Oh wait, it didn't.
I also noticed that for the majority of people, the removal of DRM made little to no difference at all. That is because they made the protection as unobtrusive as possible. Yes, the protection did prevent you from moving your digital files around, but it didn't stop playing on the Apple devices or burning the tracks to an audio CD (up to 7 times).
We could easily drop the DRM-protection, ban DRM and go back to plain old copyright infringement without the world coming to an end.
We are not talking about the world coming to an end, we are talking about whether consumers are willing to accept DRM-encumbered media. Many people here may be opposed to using any protected video and music, and I'm one of those people (I still buy my music on CD & rip them, and I still hate iTunes because it prevents you from copying non-iTunes-store music from an iPhone if you don't have access to the original computer that copied them to the phone).
But we are in the minority. The majority of people in the world either don't notice DRM or they are accepting of it.
We could easily drop the DRM-protection, ban DRM and go back to plain old copyright infringement without the world coming to an end.
And DRM could stay as it is and the world won't come to an end.
No. People want to play media. They have no desire whatsoever to have it "protected" against them.
People also would rather not pay for their media, so if they have to choose between protected content and no content at all (because the content providers think that it is not economically viable enough for them to release it DRM-free) then the consumer will choose the former option. And if the protection is implemented well so that it doesn't adversely affect the consumer then they probably wouldn't give a damn.
Adding cores is one of the main ways that modern CPUs achieve their high performance. Modern software and operating systems are written to take advantage of this by heavily making use of multiple threads. Sure you could switch off 3 of the cores to artificially get similar performance to a P4, but then you only have yourself to blame for poor performance.
So no, you don't get similar to a P4 with the new Atoms; you get the equivalent of four Pentium 4 CPUs in one chip. The single-threaded benchmark is of some importance, but fixating on it at the expense of the overall performance score ignores the fact that this is no longer the days of MS-DOS; we live with a system of numerous background processes and multi-threaded tasks.
I wouldn't expect many of those "other apps" to run terribly well on a $100 x86 PC. This is probably not something that will be a suitable gateway for all of those Windows legacy apps unless it's through running an RDP client.
Running something "not terribly well" is still better than not at all, which is the alternative if going with an ARM processor. And while many applications won't run well, many will run fine.
I do think that you may be underestimating how well this PC will run. While you wouldn't want to do highly complex stats jobs on it, it will be fine for applications that are more user-interface based (which tend to idle while waiting for user input). They will be especially fine for those legacy Windows apps that some companies have been running for years and just can't seem to shake off. At my company we have a program that started its life back on Windows 3.1. It runs like a champ on anything that you can buy today.
The truth: low performing, desk melting, battery chewing junk that I regret owning.
How long ago did you last buy an Atom-based system? While the CPUs have always been low-powered, the early units were encumbered with terrible supporting chipsets that offset the power savings. But the modern processors are not like that. My Atom notebook/tablet combo gets about 10 hours of battery life and runs very cool.
The processor used by the Kangaroo is a four-core, 2 Watt, 14 nm model. Since the term "low performing" is relative and subjective I can't address that claim, but these units will not melt the desk and will not chew your batteries. The Kangaroo gets a disappointing 4 hours of battery life, but that is probably due to using a small & cheap battery rather than the processor greedily gobbling up the power.
As I understand it, an Atom CPU roughly matches the performance of a Pentium 4 CPU clock for clock. This means an old application that runs well on a P4 will also run well on an Atom.
That is demonstrably wrong. Using the benchmark, Passmark, a 3GHz Pentium 4 has a CPU Mark of 358 while the previous -generation 1.6GHz Atom Z3795 scored 1684. The comparison site didn't have the Passmark of this newer Atom CPU, but the CPUs are similar enough.
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Wind farms: imposing the ugliness of the city on rural areas to provide power for the people of the city.
In what way is that unlike any other power source? Besides, I equate windmills with rural areas. I have yet to see any turbines in city areas.
Yeah, using that logic, we should be able to build just about anything anywhere, as long as it can be torn down.
You forgot the part about it not damaging the environment while it is in use like a coal plant does. Any alleged damage (specifically to the tourist trade) caused by a wind farm is completely reversible.
They hauled it off in pieces and then built a lecture hall in it's place.
When they haul it off in pieces, they don't just disappear. They have to be securely stored somewhere. And even if they can return the site to a useful state, the original claim was that it was easier to do this for a wind farm, not that it was impossible to do it for a nuclear power plant.
I got something in October for 2 cents. Amazingly the trading cards have kept their value too. I guess that it is time for me to go play a crappy game!
Step 1 - embrace...
Seriously? How exactly does this sound like "embrace, extend, extinguish"? What are they embracing? What have they extended (other than their own browser)? What could they possibly extinguish?
According to the cached document, the extensions were attributed to pinterest.com and redditenhancementsuite.com - who were also the authors of the same extensions for all the other browsers. Do you just see the name Microsoft and blinding spout out FUD even though there is not a single similarity to the old EEE scenario?
I'm too lazy to read it, but does it even MENTION nuclear power? Because any climate change plan that doesn't include nuclear as a major component of a carbon-neutral energy policy isn't worth using as toilet paper.
Why are you so sure of that? Was it mentioned in another paper that you also didn't bother to read? That's the kind of informative discussion we need around here!
> Why does your lifestyle matter more than the entire world?
Where did that question come from? Because it wasn't this discussion.
This was explained by the sentence following the one you quoted. Kohath is trying to frame this discussion to say that we don't owe a small island nation of people anything and that we should not have to change our lifestyle for just a small number of people. But the problem is that it is not only a small number of people who are impacted by climate change; it is the entire world. The nation of Kiribati is just one of the first examples of the climate change effect.
The climate change deniers have tried to tell us that global warming doesn't happen. When it is shown that it really is happening, they trot out the line that it isn't really caused by man and that it won't really be bad enough to cause any problems. Now we find out that it is causing real issues (and will result in the first of the predicted climate-change refugees) they are explained away as only being a problem of a few people and that we still should not have to be inconvenienced by having to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Every step of the way the deniers have come up with unsupported excuses and bogus conspiracy theories for why we shouldn't have to do anything about climate change. At least I will give credit for honesty when Kohath essentially says "I don't want to change my behaviour as I simply don't care about anyone but me".
the world wouldn't care if the people Kiribati lived or died
It doesn't. People have lived and died for millenia.
Well they won't any more in Kiribati if everybody has to leave!
The world would be a better place if you didn't exist. It would save us from your inane victim mentality.
How can I possibly be the victim when I am not one of the people being forced from my home? It is funny that you finished with some childish name-calling that has nothing to do with what I said when your initial line erroneously stated that what I was saying wasn't in this discussion. You simply don't like what I have to say so you have to make up bullshit about something that I haven't said.
It is not inane victim mentality to think that perhaps it would be better if we didn't stuff up the environment and cause people from another country to have to migrate from their homes. It is simply common sense and common decency.
Pathetic. You have jump straight to the "you hate the US" line simply because I dared to criticise anyone who is willing to pollute the world without a care for the people it might affect. Well here is the kicker. My country is right above yours on the table of emissions per-capita, so we are actually worse that you. But no, that doesn't mean that I hate my own country either.
what is the difference between you and me? I don't want to make the world a worse place and you do. I don't hate the US, whereas you treat the rest of the world with total contempt. It is people like you who gives your country a bad reputation. At least I care about the impact that I have on the environment, and do whatever I can to reduce my CO2 footprint. I don't just the the affect I have on the other people of the world and just say "fuck 'em!".
I thought that was the whole point of this story. Kiribati residents are owed a lifestyle regardless of the tradeoffs everyone else in the world would have to make for their lifestyle to be maintained. It leads to the still-unanswered question "why does one group matter more than another?".
If that is the way that you want to play it, perhaps you can answer the question yourself. Why does your lifestyle matter more than the entire world? After all, it is not just one single nation that is affected by climate change. If your nation is causing the globe to heat more than anyone else except one other country and yet you have only 4% of the world's population, why should you matter more than everyone else? Do you think that is fair? Do you think that you should be able to do anything you want no matter how much it hurts others?
I bet you are the kind of person who also screams about how unfair it is if there is a suggestion of raising taxes to pay for infrastructure that would benefit the entire country (or in the case of fixing global warming - benefit the world). All of a sudden, the minor inconvenience of losing a bit of money would seem terribly unjust to you. You have to admit, complaining about higher taxes seems rather petty compared to being forcibly relocated to another country as has already started happening in some of these small Pacific countries.
Or maybe it doesn't seem petty to you. If you really are as selfish and arrogant as you appear then perhaps you wouldn't notice the hypocrisy. I bet your attitude would change if your neighbors decided to burn down your house to improve their views. It would fit your philosophy of screwing the few to make life better for the many.
So my answer to your question of "why does one group matter more than another?" is this. The world wouldn't care if the people Kiribati lived or died, but the world would be a better place if you didn't exist. If you are adversely affecting the world, then you matter less than another group who is simply minding their own business and not destroying the environment. If you have no compassion for the suffering you cause to others, then you are a net drain on society. You don't matter at all.
There. That was simple, wasn't it.
Does the climate realize it should care about per capita emissions rather than absolute numbers? I don't think temperatures and sea levels respond to that kind of equivocation.
It's pathetic that you would dismiss the population differences between the countries in your graph when you had previously asked:
Why do thousands of Kiribati matter more than millions of Americans?
Why should the millions of US citizens be justified in causing more damage to the environment than the billions of people from the other countries? If you don't care who suffers just so you can lead the lifestyle you want, why not commit to your ideals fully? Put on a pirate hat and just invade other countries to plunder their resources!
Typically, only about 10-20% of pollution in a city is because of traffic. Most pollution is due to industries. The right solution is moving coal plants and heavy industries away from the city.
The government do know that their air pollution has more than one cause. From another article:
The government also said it would shut down a power plant in the capital that burns coal and inspect trucks at the border to make sure they comply with emissions regulations.
This is a short-term solution to fix the urgent problem. They are looking at how to deal with this in the long term, and it will not just be limited to cars.
It sounds like a "trial run"; if deemed successful, then it can be made permanent during week 3.
They have explicitly said that the restrictions would be temporary, and there is nothing to suggest that it would be otherwise. They still need to make some long term changes to fix the problem, but right now something must be done to reduce their huge, immediate pollution problem.
Not like everyone's license plate gets thoroughly checked.... heck; I see people driving with no license plate at all, all the time. I'd bet if they get caught and pulled over, they'll say they weren't aware of the scheme, blah blah blah, and weren't appropriately informed or alerted in any way, blah blah blah....
I'm pretty sure that the police will be vigilant about this considering that it is such a major event in the city. Pleading ignorance will not be an excuse in the eyes of the law. And even if some people do flout the rules, it still will not mean that the number of cars on the road will not be reduced. Just because something is not 100% successful does not mean that it is not worth trying.
You're missing the forest for the trees. People still have to get to work, so when you take away their cars you're just taxing the working class. They're going to HAVE to get to work, and this measure is NOT going to increase public transportation. As others have stated, this is a non-solution,. and an actual solution would be taxing the shit out of automobiles and spending the proceeds on public transportation. Instead, they're causing their citizenry problems (can't drive, need another car to get to work) while completely failing to address the problem (inadequate public transport.)
First of all, the phrase "you're missing the forest for the trees" makes no sense with regards to what you said. Secondly, this initiative will indeed include improving public transport. Why did you think that it would not? From the article:
To ensure that commuters are not put to hardship, Delhi Metro services will be extended and school buses will be requisitioned even as efforts to expand the existing fleet of the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) were underway.
Finally, you claim that this proposal effectively taxes the working class, and yet your solution is to directly tax them instead. So instead of the temporary inconvenience of limiting the number of cars on the road, you suggest that they permanently increase taxes. And how does "taxing the shit out of automobiles" actually reduce the amount of pollution generated since the cars on the road have already been purchased, and increasing the purchase cost will not reduce the use of the vehicle. You could be talking about fuel tax and tolls, but that is still a tax on the working class.
People get multiple cars, people hire drivers for even/odd days, people have multiple license plates, etc. This doesn't work.
This scheme is planned to run for two or three weeks. Do you really think that people are going to buy another car just to cover that short period? Do you really think that there were enough unused cars previously that could cater for a new industry of hire cars to be able to service the entire population? Do you really think that every person in Delhi has the contacts to be able to procure false license plates?
Where is your evidence that these schemes always fail miserably? Or indeed, that any scheme like this has not been able to reduce the number of cars on the road to some extent. There have been plenty of people making statements that these road reduction policies always fail, but not one of you has provided a single citation to back it up.
Sure, some residents will be able to find ways to get around the restrictions (let's face it, no system is perfect), but that doesn't mean that all 18 million people in Delhi will have the resources to game the system. They don't all have the money to buy new cars (or even the space to park them).
No for the majority of people it made no difference at all because at the first error they just jumped online and pirated the content.
No they didn't. The majority of people in the world do not pirate stuff. They do not have torrent software loaded. If they did then all forms of DRM would have died out years ago. DRM works because, as you said:
the majority of consumers do the "approved thing" with their copy
You never hear about the people who come up against the limits of DRM and simply accept it because they don't jump online to complain. If you only see the people who complain (which by definition you do) then you are seeing a skewed picture of the situation.
So I stand by my original statement that for the majority of people, the removal of DRM made little to no difference at all.
Ecept that's crap. Just about everything is freely available on the Pirate Bay. Everything is released on DVD still which while technically hsa DRM, it's so thoroughly hacked that it may as well not have.
The people who download stuff from the pirate bay are not consumers, they are pirates. The argument about DRM does not apply to them because they don't ever use DRM-encumbered media. DRM is not designed to stop the people who identify themselves as pirates; it is to prevent those people who would balk at being called that (and wouldn't dream of loading torrent software) but who see no problems with copying an album or a movie to give to a friend. Morals are not absolute. While there is no difference in downloading something from the Pirate Bay and being handed a CD from a friend to rip onto your computer, there are people who see this as two different moral levels. The former is seen as stealing, while the latter is legitimate because it's just their friend's CD.
My point has always been that people will accept DRM if it is not onerous (that is, as long as they don't have to do anything for their media to play like connecting to the Internet when there is no other reason for them to have to do this). Equally, the general public will not copy something to give to a friend if it seems onerous or if there is the vague idea that somehow there duplication might be detectable. I think that the old days of handing around physical media made casual copying much more acceptable because it felt like you were lending something physical to someone even though they got to keep the contents of that physical media.
With digital files it's a bit different, especially if you have client software like iTunes to manage it. I asked my mother-in-law (who regularly buys music from the iTunes store) whether she thought she could give a copy of an album to someone and she had no idea. The concept of ownership is blurred when the music is attached to accounts and accessed with special software. It didn't occur to her that the music had a physical form (as a file) so she has never once thought about being able to duplicate any music, despite her and my wife regularly sharing CDs with each other.
Like a lot of people, she doesn't care if her music and TV shows have DRM on them; ll she wants is to be able to play them. And that was the entire point of my original post.
Between money or more money. Not making money or losing money.
Irrelevant to this discussion.
But it made it impossible (or at least extremely inconvenient) to move away from an Apple device. The market effects were obvious and was a huge part of the iPod's success and cost the consumers millions through lack of competition. The consumer might not have really understood, but they knew it worked on Apple and didn't work anywhere else.
That is correct, but as you say the consumer didn't understand and in most cases didn't care because they simply didn't ever try to move away from the Appleverse.
They don't notice it because what millions and millions of people download have DRM removed.
No, they didn't notice the removal of DRM because they dutifully installed iTunes and never tried anything that would trigger the rights management. People were far more likely want to write their music to CD format than copy it to a non-Apple brand of player and that was still supported.
True, but you were the one claiming that publishers wouldn't publish without DRM.
No, I never claimed that. It only requires one publisher to decide not to release one song/movie in a DRM-free digital format for my statement to be true. My point has always been about the public's willingness to accept DRM that isn't onerous. If they have to connect to the Internet for the sole purpose of playing a local file then they will get annoyed. But if they package the DRM in a way that seems like a benefit to the consumer (or if it is effectively invisible like the iTunes DRM) then the consumer doesn't care. No amounts of arguments about the pros and cons (however correct they are and however much I personally agree with them) will change the my point about consumer attitudes. If the consumer can't play their media because of onerous DRM them they will be pissed off. But if we pulled all support for DRM technologies and their media files stopped working then that is also an anti-consumer practice and will piss off the very consumers that you seek to protect.
I think you confused "not economically viable" with "profit maximizing".
I'm not confusing any terms, because it is not my decision to make. It is the publishers who make that decision.
And I'm sure you noticed how the music industry imploded after iTunes gave up the DRM. Oh wait, it didn't.
I also noticed that for the majority of people, the removal of DRM made little to no difference at all. That is because they made the protection as unobtrusive as possible. Yes, the protection did prevent you from moving your digital files around, but it didn't stop playing on the Apple devices or burning the tracks to an audio CD (up to 7 times).
We could easily drop the DRM-protection, ban DRM and go back to plain old copyright infringement without the world coming to an end.
We are not talking about the world coming to an end, we are talking about whether consumers are willing to accept DRM-encumbered media. Many people here may be opposed to using any protected video and music, and I'm one of those people (I still buy my music on CD & rip them, and I still hate iTunes because it prevents you from copying non-iTunes-store music from an iPhone if you don't have access to the original computer that copied them to the phone).
But we are in the minority. The majority of people in the world either don't notice DRM or they are accepting of it.
We could easily drop the DRM-protection, ban DRM and go back to plain old copyright infringement without the world coming to an end.
And DRM could stay as it is and the world won't come to an end.
That's like walking over an unfinished bridge.
No problem. If you close your eyes the quantum bridge will be both finished and unfinished.
No. People want to play media. They have no desire whatsoever to have it "protected" against them.
People also would rather not pay for their media, so if they have to choose between protected content and no content at all (because the content providers think that it is not economically viable enough for them to release it DRM-free) then the consumer will choose the former option. And if the protection is implemented well so that it doesn't adversely affect the consumer then they probably wouldn't give a damn.
Ironic, I was watching "The Universe" on Netflix earlier, the exact episode that covered most of this. Good stuff.
No, it would be ironic if you had watched "The Universe" to find out about this topic and they explained the concept of irony to you instead!
Adding cores is one of the main ways that modern CPUs achieve their high performance. Modern software and operating systems are written to take advantage of this by heavily making use of multiple threads. Sure you could switch off 3 of the cores to artificially get similar performance to a P4, but then you only have yourself to blame for poor performance.
So no, you don't get similar to a P4 with the new Atoms; you get the equivalent of four Pentium 4 CPUs in one chip. The single-threaded benchmark is of some importance, but fixating on it at the expense of the overall performance score ignores the fact that this is no longer the days of MS-DOS; we live with a system of numerous background processes and multi-threaded tasks.
I wouldn't expect many of those "other apps" to run terribly well on a $100 x86 PC. This is probably not something that will be a suitable gateway for all of those Windows legacy apps unless it's through running an RDP client.
Running something "not terribly well" is still better than not at all, which is the alternative if going with an ARM processor. And while many applications won't run well, many will run fine.
I do think that you may be underestimating how well this PC will run. While you wouldn't want to do highly complex stats jobs on it, it will be fine for applications that are more user-interface based (which tend to idle while waiting for user input). They will be especially fine for those legacy Windows apps that some companies have been running for years and just can't seem to shake off. At my company we have a program that started its life back on Windows 3.1. It runs like a champ on anything that you can buy today.
The truth: low performing, desk melting, battery chewing junk that I regret owning.
How long ago did you last buy an Atom-based system? While the CPUs have always been low-powered, the early units were encumbered with terrible supporting chipsets that offset the power savings. But the modern processors are not like that. My Atom notebook/tablet combo gets about 10 hours of battery life and runs very cool.
The processor used by the Kangaroo is a four-core, 2 Watt, 14 nm model. Since the term "low performing" is relative and subjective I can't address that claim, but these units will not melt the desk and will not chew your batteries. The Kangaroo gets a disappointing 4 hours of battery life, but that is probably due to using a small & cheap battery rather than the processor greedily gobbling up the power.
As I understand it, an Atom CPU roughly matches the performance of a Pentium 4 CPU clock for clock. This means an old application that runs well on a P4 will also run well on an Atom.
That is demonstrably wrong. Using the benchmark, Passmark, a 3GHz Pentium 4 has a CPU Mark of 358 while the previous -generation 1.6GHz Atom Z3795 scored 1684. The comparison site didn't have the Passmark of this newer Atom CPU, but the CPUs are similar enough.