The reason in the USA, is that the telecommunications industry is essentially unregulated. Of course, there are laws, but none of them are concerned with consumer friendliness or actually encouraging good business practices. This is common in many industries in the USA. Americans are also accustomed to being treated as cattle to be milked for a revenue stream.
Seriously though, Hugh Hefner is a fascinating case study in the apparent *lack* of any ill effects of living the good life. If Hefner has done anything in his life, its indulge. In wine, women, song, and I suspect a not insignificant amount of Weed, Hash, Cocaine, LSD, Tobacco, Shrooms, Heroine, etc. Even if he were to drop dead tomorrow, you'd have a hard time convincing me it wasn't worth it. I'd take 80-odd years of living up in drugs, sex, and excess over 150+ years of abstinence and monastic clean living without even a thought.
Which brings me to another point, let's face it, we *could* all start living exactly the way doctors say we ought to, and avoid dangerous activities. We certainly might live longer. Perhaps even well over a century of good health. But would it be worth it? Is living a long, sheltered life in perfect health better than living a shorter, but much more exciting life? Nay! Fie, Fie say I! It's better to burn out than to fade away!
I think the problem is that Video is not yet, and may never be, among the kinds of productions that can be of very good quality when produced by amateurs. There are very excellent amateur productions done in webcomics, in blogs, and in Podcasts. The tools for producing those kinds of media are good enough that an amateur on a very limited budget can produce something compelling. There is admittedly a lot shit that gets produced in those media, but that's not the point. The gems do exist, and they prove the concept. There's an awful lot of shit produced by professionals in those fields too.
Video on the other hand, is very hard. It requires beautiful people for most purposes, and professional make up; not to mention the ability to act! It requires expensive camera set-ups, camera crews, lighting, and audio production. None of this is conducive to amateur production.
I could assemble an audio production studio capable of producing results as good as professional radio for just a couple grand or so(by doing it myself and not paying myself anything), a complete video production studio can easily run hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more by the time you work in the staff.
I don't think anyone argues that fossil fuels are naturally occurring. Deposition of organic matter through various climate, weather, volcanic, and other activity being an exceptionally natural process. A slightly more sensible question is whether the material is biological in origin, or geophysical.
And also, probably unlike you, I've actually seen a scholarly report (in person) on the subject by someone doing research in the area with credentials in Environmental Chemistry. I tend to suspect that fossil fuels actually are biological in origin, largely because of the immense preponderance of fossils in the matrix.
In any case, what you are missing is this difference, fossil fuels, whether biological or geophysical in nature, have been sequestered from the atmosphere for a long time, either billions (in the case of geophysical origin) or hundreds of millions (in the case of biological) of years. Biofuels, assuming that farming is modified to make use of non-petrochemical fertilizers (and don't go and say that's impossible, its not, many cultures have used various forms of marine alga as fertiziler, we could as well, if we invested in the appropriate infrastructure to cultivate the appropriate alga en mass.) have the distinct advantage of utilizing Carbon which is already in the atmosphere. Thus, Biofuels, do not result in any net increase of Carbon into the atmosphere.
A seperate issue is that it would be a good idea to also attempt to grow plants for the purpose of burying them deeply in order to sequester atmospheric carbon.
Additionally I will state this, I am much more sympathetic than others to the possibility that global warming may be caused to some degree by solar warming (by which I mean that the sun itself is increasing in temperature). The point that I think you sidestep is that regardless of cause, global warming has a number of well characterized negative impacts on the environment, from our perspective. A more sensible kind of debate is one of mitigation. What can we do to counteract this trend that we observe? Reducing Carbon emissions is one method. Are you going to argue with decades of research indicating that Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? I tend to think that the method suggested by Astrophysicist and author Gregory Benford is worthy of consideration. He suggested constructed a solar shield at the L1 Lagrange point in order to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching earth by a small percentage. Keep in mind that such a solution is fully reversible should some kind of doomsday scenario come to pass, baring anything else, you could blast the structure(s) out of the way with Nukes. Note that detonating nukes at that distance also poses no danger to earth, the L1 point being over a hundred million miles from earth, over four times as far as the moon.
"Yeah but not everyone wants to live "efficiently". Were we put on this earth to live "efficiently"? Someone might think that we were put on this Earth to maybe enjoy life and stuff, and not everyone enjoys life in a city."
Yeah, I mean, you can live out in the Country, shucking corn and fucking your sister. Why would you want to live in a city, where you could walk to hear a live Symphony Orchestra. Or an excellent theatre. Or a museum, or art gallery.
There is nothing to do in the country. You can't even find a place to buy any of the equipment required to do any of the fun stuff all that open space makes possible (paragliding, light aircraft, spelunking, hell even fishing and hunting really)
Query: Why should people have the right to make bad choices? I mean that in the broadest possible sense. From a nobody wasting their life away cooking meth in a toilet bowl, to George W. Bush pissing away what's left of American credibility, military power, and economic stability in order to line the pockets of his friends? Articulate why those choices must necessarily be available in order give meaning to say, Neils Bohr unlocking the secrets of the atom.
What exactly would you suggest is a better use of our time and effort then? Wanking around on the golf course? Playing the newest Final Fantasy? Raising some squalling brat who's going to grow up to find a world nowhere near as full of opportunity as the one your grandparents (or even you) had available? How about trying to do something that's going to have lasting meaning? And no, making a shit tonne of money is not an activity with lasting meaning. Space exploration is making sure that lasting meaning is actually possible. It is the meta-meaningful-pursuit. The pursuit of meaningful pursuit's continued existence.
I'm going to give the very uncommon answer: Yes. Definitely.
Why? If they were going to switch to x86, they waited way too long to do it. By the time the first Intel Macbooks shipped, IBM had had low power G5's available for months. These could have absolutely been user for a Powerbook G5. The desktops, of course would have been shipping POWER5 parts, what would have been the G6 (By the time these POWER6 machines made into Macs, they would have been the G7). The correct solution to many of the other problems was to pressure Nvidia to make CUDA multiplatform. This could have been Altivec^2. Apple would have had the expertise to really leverage modern GPUs as Stream Processors for Media use. This would have been amazing. What we got instead was x86, which gave us Windows legacy support. Useful, definitly, but nowhere near as exotic or sexy.
Then were was the demand for it? There were plenty of extant interconnects on the scene when HDMI arrived. What is so hard about connecting a digital coax or TOS-link cable? HDMI offers no advantages over any of the preexisting standards, and far more compatibility issues. I will say again, it is asinine to have audio and video in the same cable, because those signals should be going to different places anyway!
HDMI was not designed as a solution to an engineering problem. It was designed as an anti-consumer technology in the first place. Which is the entire problem. HDMI was designed from the ground up to be a DRM crippled interconnect. This gives rise to a number of paradoxes about the connection.
Why would you want audio and video in the same cable? Especially for expensive systems where HDMI is common now. Is anyone with a >$1000 display actually using built-in speakers? If so, what's wrong with you? Go get some decent speakers.
The Straw Man is that the Artists would actually be paid when people bought the CDs. They aren't. Especially not the ones who aren't already millionaires. The Millionaire artists are the only ones who can negotiate a contract to actually be paid.
Artists are really caught in the middle at this point. The organizations that claim to represent their interests have violated the public trust and the public interest, by extending copyright into perpetuity. They have thus destroyed the basis on which copyright is granted in the first place. The social contract is broken, and thus, natural rights take over. The natural right of free speech. This is not a case of not liking their distribution license, they have cast off the right to even bargain such points. Artists must (and many are) divorce themselves from the organization that have created this situation if they wish to regain legitimate right to copyrights. For it is now broken.
fuck no! That would destroy so much! You'd never be able to satisfy even a tiny percentage of the fans with the actor choices. Zelda's fine just the way it is.
So judging by the trends in Microsoft's development cycles, we'll see this Vista replacement somewhere around 2018 then? Pardon me while I burst into panic. By then computers might even be fast enough to give acceptable performance with Vista! I kid, I kid.
But seriously, I think this is probably the least of any Mac users worries. Generally, Bootcamp is used for backwards rather than forwards compatibility. The forward compatibility is Mac OS. Windows is for legacy apps.
Rock isn't "live" in a number of meaningful senses of the word. Also, because of the reasons you mention, Rock in particular benefits from studio processing. But Rock is not the only music in the word. Many of the people who worship a live sound, do so for Classical music, and other forms of purely acoustic performances.
Arg. There are Audiophiles and there are Audiophiles. Some of them are idiots with too much money who buy "magic" cables. Some of them are actually intelligent and realize stuff like that is bullshit. They don't buy "magic" $100/ft cable, but they don't by $0.10/ft Ratshack 22guage speaker wire either. Some realize that there is actually a way to calculate what guage of wire you need depending on run length and load impedence. It is actually possible for speaker wire to improve the quality of sound reproduction, you do this by using cable of sufficient size such that the impedence of the cable is negligible compared to the impedence of the speakers. Nothing "special", nothing "magic." Just rational application of electrical engineering.
Better is subjective. Do you deny that CDs sound different from Vinyl? As you point out, human ears are very, very sensitive, thus the noise and distortion on compact disc can be distinguished as different from the noise and distortion on Vinyl. Whether one measures better than the other is irrelevant. Some people, due to conditioning, random chance, etc find that they prefer the sound of Vinyl to the sound of Compact Disc. For them, Vinyl is "better." There are also people that prefer the sound generated by Vacuum tube amplifiers. Again, the distortion introduced by them is different and distinguishable from the distortion of solid state. The same principles apply. Leave these people alone. They like what they like.
Does anybody else think the really awesome thing about independently powered wheels would be the body style options it would open up? Really slick sci-fi looking vehicles.
The only thing holding it back is impact and safety testing (boo) which is what keeps a lot of really cool exotic vehicles from being street legal today. In my opinion the real solution to road safety is to get the damn freight trains off the road and back on railroad tracks. Semi's are a fucking disgusting abomination, and are horribly dangerous.
Anyway, all kinds of cool stuff would be opened up, truly independent suspension.
Actually, you can't do that in 'States legally. Modifying the fuel:air mix that way kills the ability of a Catalytic converter to do its job. Which obviously screws with the mandatory emissions tests and standards. Whether that means Catalytic converters are a good idea or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
I'm not literate in Swedish, but my educated guess tells me that your links are economic reports, and in that case, are pretty much par for the course in any country. Economists of any nation qualify as "dehumanizing fuckers."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says otherwise. All Governments have a responsibility to all people. Unfortunately, the current state is a consequence of the weakness of the United Nations.
As you might have noticed I have a general tendency towards being a One Worlder, but I'm bloody well picky about what that world should be. Nationalism is inherently fascist, as are almost all religions (and all extant Monotheistic religions).
By the by, it's PS2, PS/2 was a line of x86 computer by IBM from the 1980's.
One of the more rational conjectures I've heard about the 3rd party thing is that its very, very hard to compete with Nintendo. They're one of the largest concentrations of top tier talent in the industry. Hell, Miyamoto by himself is one of largest concentrations of talent in the industry, let alone all the other guys that are insanely talented. How many copies of games that Miyamoto designed have been sold? It must easily be over one hundred million, there's just nobody in the industry you can even compare with that kind of success.
How about Personal Choice Enablement? I am not a customer. I am not a "consumer." I am not a "citizen." I am a person. It is personhood that comes first. All else is predicate upon personhood, and its about damn time somebody reminded these dehumanizing fuckers about that.
Otherwise I agree completely and in a serious fashion with your premise.
Ummm, So do them at home? Why do you have to do those things in a public place (which government owned/operated roads are)? I'm all in favor of the right to privacy, more than you are from the sound of things. But demanding an absolute "right to privacy" when you're just letting it all hang out in public spaces is rediculous. Security nothing, what right do you have to bitch when you're wanting to fuck on a front porch on mainstreet? If you're going to put on a public show, you can't complain when I start taping it, and posting it on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason in the USA, is that the telecommunications industry is essentially unregulated. Of course, there are laws, but none of them are concerned with consumer friendliness or actually encouraging good business practices. This is common in many industries in the USA. Americans are also accustomed to being treated as cattle to be milked for a revenue stream.
Seriously though, Hugh Hefner is a fascinating case study in the apparent *lack* of any ill effects of living the good life. If Hefner has done anything in his life, its indulge. In wine, women, song, and I suspect a not insignificant amount of Weed, Hash, Cocaine, LSD, Tobacco, Shrooms, Heroine, etc. Even if he were to drop dead tomorrow, you'd have a hard time convincing me it wasn't worth it. I'd take 80-odd years of living up in drugs, sex, and excess over 150+ years of abstinence and monastic clean living without even a thought.
Which brings me to another point, let's face it, we *could* all start living exactly the way doctors say we ought to, and avoid dangerous activities. We certainly might live longer. Perhaps even well over a century of good health. But would it be worth it? Is living a long, sheltered life in perfect health better than living a shorter, but much more exciting life? Nay! Fie, Fie say I! It's better to burn out than to fade away!
Video on the other hand, is very hard. It requires beautiful people for most purposes, and professional make up; not to mention the ability to act! It requires expensive camera set-ups, camera crews, lighting, and audio production. None of this is conducive to amateur production.
I could assemble an audio production studio capable of producing results as good as professional radio for just a couple grand or so(by doing it myself and not paying myself anything), a complete video production studio can easily run hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more by the time you work in the staff.
And also, probably unlike you, I've actually seen a scholarly report (in person) on the subject by someone doing research in the area with credentials in Environmental Chemistry. I tend to suspect that fossil fuels actually are biological in origin, largely because of the immense preponderance of fossils in the matrix.
In any case, what you are missing is this difference, fossil fuels, whether biological or geophysical in nature, have been sequestered from the atmosphere for a long time, either billions (in the case of geophysical origin) or hundreds of millions (in the case of biological) of years. Biofuels, assuming that farming is modified to make use of non-petrochemical fertilizers (and don't go and say that's impossible, its not, many cultures have used various forms of marine alga as fertiziler, we could as well, if we invested in the appropriate infrastructure to cultivate the appropriate alga en mass.) have the distinct advantage of utilizing Carbon which is already in the atmosphere. Thus, Biofuels, do not result in any net increase of Carbon into the atmosphere.
A seperate issue is that it would be a good idea to also attempt to grow plants for the purpose of burying them deeply in order to sequester atmospheric carbon.
Additionally I will state this, I am much more sympathetic than others to the possibility that global warming may be caused to some degree by solar warming (by which I mean that the sun itself is increasing in temperature). The point that I think you sidestep is that regardless of cause, global warming has a number of well characterized negative impacts on the environment, from our perspective. A more sensible kind of debate is one of mitigation. What can we do to counteract this trend that we observe? Reducing Carbon emissions is one method. Are you going to argue with decades of research indicating that Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? I tend to think that the method suggested by Astrophysicist and author Gregory Benford is worthy of consideration. He suggested constructed a solar shield at the L1 Lagrange point in order to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching earth by a small percentage. Keep in mind that such a solution is fully reversible should some kind of doomsday scenario come to pass, baring anything else, you could blast the structure(s) out of the way with Nukes. Note that detonating nukes at that distance also poses no danger to earth, the L1 point being over a hundred million miles from earth, over four times as far as the moon.
Yeah, I mean, you can live out in the Country, shucking corn and fucking your sister. Why would you want to live in a city, where you could walk to hear a live Symphony Orchestra. Or an excellent theatre. Or a museum, or art gallery.
There is nothing to do in the country. You can't even find a place to buy any of the equipment required to do any of the fun stuff all that open space makes possible (paragliding, light aircraft, spelunking, hell even fishing and hunting really)
What exactly would you suggest is a better use of our time and effort then? Wanking around on the golf course? Playing the newest Final Fantasy? Raising some squalling brat who's going to grow up to find a world nowhere near as full of opportunity as the one your grandparents (or even you) had available? How about trying to do something that's going to have lasting meaning? And no, making a shit tonne of money is not an activity with lasting meaning. Space exploration is making sure that lasting meaning is actually possible. It is the meta-meaningful-pursuit. The pursuit of meaningful pursuit's continued existence.
They could just start dropping 2 out of ever 3 packets. That would give lots more capacity!
Why? If they were going to switch to x86, they waited way too long to do it. By the time the first Intel Macbooks shipped, IBM had had low power G5's available for months. These could have absolutely been user for a Powerbook G5. The desktops, of course would have been shipping POWER5 parts, what would have been the G6 (By the time these POWER6 machines made into Macs, they would have been the G7). The correct solution to many of the other problems was to pressure Nvidia to make CUDA multiplatform. This could have been Altivec^2. Apple would have had the expertise to really leverage modern GPUs as Stream Processors for Media use. This would have been amazing. What we got instead was x86, which gave us Windows legacy support. Useful, definitly, but nowhere near as exotic or sexy.
Then were was the demand for it? There were plenty of extant interconnects on the scene when HDMI arrived. What is so hard about connecting a digital coax or TOS-link cable? HDMI offers no advantages over any of the preexisting standards, and far more compatibility issues. I will say again, it is asinine to have audio and video in the same cable, because those signals should be going to different places anyway!
Why would you want audio and video in the same cable? Especially for expensive systems where HDMI is common now. Is anyone with a >$1000 display actually using built-in speakers? If so, what's wrong with you? Go get some decent speakers.
Artists are really caught in the middle at this point. The organizations that claim to represent their interests have violated the public trust and the public interest, by extending copyright into perpetuity. They have thus destroyed the basis on which copyright is granted in the first place. The social contract is broken, and thus, natural rights take over. The natural right of free speech. This is not a case of not liking their distribution license, they have cast off the right to even bargain such points. Artists must (and many are) divorce themselves from the organization that have created this situation if they wish to regain legitimate right to copyrights. For it is now broken.
fuck no! That would destroy so much! You'd never be able to satisfy even a tiny percentage of the fans with the actor choices. Zelda's fine just the way it is.
But seriously, I think this is probably the least of any Mac users worries. Generally, Bootcamp is used for backwards rather than forwards compatibility. The forward compatibility is Mac OS. Windows is for legacy apps.
Rock isn't "live" in a number of meaningful senses of the word. Also, because of the reasons you mention, Rock in particular benefits from studio processing. But Rock is not the only music in the word. Many of the people who worship a live sound, do so for Classical music, and other forms of purely acoustic performances.
Arg. There are Audiophiles and there are Audiophiles. Some of them are idiots with too much money who buy "magic" cables. Some of them are actually intelligent and realize stuff like that is bullshit. They don't buy "magic" $100/ft cable, but they don't by $0.10/ft Ratshack 22guage speaker wire either. Some realize that there is actually a way to calculate what guage of wire you need depending on run length and load impedence. It is actually possible for speaker wire to improve the quality of sound reproduction, you do this by using cable of sufficient size such that the impedence of the cable is negligible compared to the impedence of the speakers. Nothing "special", nothing "magic." Just rational application of electrical engineering.
Your claim that CDs are as good as live audio is just outrageous, and that's even ignoring poor mastering techniques.
Better is subjective. Do you deny that CDs sound different from Vinyl? As you point out, human ears are very, very sensitive, thus the noise and distortion on compact disc can be distinguished as different from the noise and distortion on Vinyl. Whether one measures better than the other is irrelevant. Some people, due to conditioning, random chance, etc find that they prefer the sound of Vinyl to the sound of Compact Disc. For them, Vinyl is "better." There are also people that prefer the sound generated by Vacuum tube amplifiers. Again, the distortion introduced by them is different and distinguishable from the distortion of solid state. The same principles apply. Leave these people alone. They like what they like.
The only thing holding it back is impact and safety testing (boo) which is what keeps a lot of really cool exotic vehicles from being street legal today. In my opinion the real solution to road safety is to get the damn freight trains off the road and back on railroad tracks. Semi's are a fucking disgusting abomination, and are horribly dangerous.
Anyway, all kinds of cool stuff would be opened up, truly independent suspension.
Actually, you can't do that in 'States legally. Modifying the fuel:air mix that way kills the ability of a Catalytic converter to do its job. Which obviously screws with the mandatory emissions tests and standards. Whether that means Catalytic converters are a good idea or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
I'm not literate in Swedish, but my educated guess tells me that your links are economic reports, and in that case, are pretty much par for the course in any country. Economists of any nation qualify as "dehumanizing fuckers."
As you might have noticed I have a general tendency towards being a One Worlder, but I'm bloody well picky about what that world should be. Nationalism is inherently fascist, as are almost all religions (and all extant Monotheistic religions).
One of the more rational conjectures I've heard about the 3rd party thing is that its very, very hard to compete with Nintendo. They're one of the largest concentrations of top tier talent in the industry. Hell, Miyamoto by himself is one of largest concentrations of talent in the industry, let alone all the other guys that are insanely talented. How many copies of games that Miyamoto designed have been sold? It must easily be over one hundred million, there's just nobody in the industry you can even compare with that kind of success.
Otherwise I agree completely and in a serious fashion with your premise.
Ummm, So do them at home? Why do you have to do those things in a public place (which government owned/operated roads are)? I'm all in favor of the right to privacy, more than you are from the sound of things. But demanding an absolute "right to privacy" when you're just letting it all hang out in public spaces is rediculous. Security nothing, what right do you have to bitch when you're wanting to fuck on a front porch on mainstreet? If you're going to put on a public show, you can't complain when I start taping it, and posting it on the net.