So what would be more likely is that actors and directors would take a pay cut. Special effects budgets would get cut. And movies would almost all get shot on a green screen in a sound both so that location costs (the largest expense) could be cut. So no, movies wouldn't disappear over night, but the quality would likely drop.
Will downloading movies ruin every company? Matters. If 90% of all movie watchers download movies with out paying for them, then likely yes. Either that or theator prices will shot to $30 a ticket and DVD's will cost $60. The point is, why damage them at all? Why not just pay the same rates you pay for a brick and morter rental to get the same service? $2 for a 2 day viewing window with out the hassle of returning the movie.
why, because blowing $2 on a DRM'd movie rental saves me the hassle of going to a rental store, renting a moving, and having to return it 2 days later?
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if movie producers can't make a profit selling movies, they won't continue to make movies.
And I as a customer am demanding online content delivery. I don't mind paying a fee competetive to those offered in brick and morter stores. And I don't like the idea of getting sued. DRMs are the perfect solution. They give the producers a way to limit their content's distribution, but give customers an easy way to access it.
I save money and watch the movie I want. The producers get the money to pay of the investment in making the movie, and continue making more movies. If a movie comes out that I think I will watch more then 10 times, I'll go buy the DVD, but I'm fine with rentals for the most part.
I want to be able to go online and rent any TV show season, or Movie, download it, and have it for a few days so I can watch it at my convienence.
Anti-DRM nazi be damned, I was a fast easy LEGAL way to download video content for my personal viewing pleasure. And I don't mind blowing $2 to rent a movie or season of TV. Heck, I'd even drop 5 bucks on a brand new triple-A movie.
Actually, I've had no problems with my Windows Mobile system. Everything has seemed pretty easy to find, and easy to use. Syncs up no problem. Haven't crashed it yet.
I'm afraid you are wrong. Yes, you could increase yields for a few years, 3, maybe 5. But after that, the fields would be so nutrient starved that the cost of fertilizers and soil conditioning would far outweigh any benefit of extra crops. After 10 years you would be loosing so much in yields that it would be to the point where the land is pretty much worthless to farm.
Obviously this isn't for ALL farm land, but specificly in the mid west where deep plowing and over farming is reducing yeilds. To make up for it, farmers use more fertilizers and conditioners. Both of which lead to run off which is why the mouth of the mississippi is known as a 'Dead Zone'. Things dont grow there because their is so much run off crap coming down the river.
Overfarming is the capitalist mistake. Controled farming is looking at providing sustained yields over a long period of time.
I just picked up a dell Axim x3i with Windows Mobile 2k3 and I love it. Haven't had a problem with it yet, and I'll be starting a.Net CF project for it in the next few weeks.
Paying farmers not to farm is good. It's a way of keeping farmlands fertile while not forcing farmers out of business.
It seems a little out of whack, but by not farming for a year or two, and rotating crops you will actually increase the yields and lengthen the life of the land.
My memory is a bit foggy, but I beleive most DC systems us about.45kWh per mile. AC systems I think were in the.17-.28 range. So it entirely matters on the amount of surface space, the amount of solar energy you receive, and the efficiency of the panels.
This site: http://www.solarnavigator.net/thin_film_solar_cell s.htm has a 1.5v 330mA thin film solution, that's about half a watt per cell. Over a nine hour day parked in the sun you'd be looking at 4.5Wh (.0045kWh) per cell. so you would need about 100 of them to get 1 "free" mile. At 19cm x 5 cm you would have to have one heck of a large car to hold them all. Even for the most efficient AC systems you would still need 38 to get your 1 free mile. In any case, it's not very economically feasible to count on vehicle based solar cells for power.
But if you are using a battery powered moped, and you have a fold/roll out solar array, you may be able to get enough juice while at work to power the bike for a few miles.
Don't get me wrong, I love the solar power. And I'm all for wind farms in appropriate locations. But it has to fiscally make sence. In the last week I have done numerous write ups on the break even point for gas vs electric cars. If you have a gas powered internal combustion car that gets 30 mpg, and you drive 10k miles per year, and you are looking to replace your vehicle, then $3.00/gal is the magic barrier for cost efficiency. At $3/gal and $.20/kWh you are breaking even on fuel costs (including battery pack replacement every 3 years).
The big problem with electric cars is range however. Common Batteries (The cheaper deep cycle ones) are only going to last 3-5 years, and their performance will degrade over that time. Most DC conversions (the cheapest and least efficient option) are only going to get you a 40-80 mile range in the best of conditions. Which is fine for most in-town or close to town commuters. For those of us out in the boonies, we need a better battery. And there are 2 options, Lith Ion batteries, which dramatically out perform Lead Acid batteries in many ways, but cost about 8 to 10x as much. Or fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are batteries for the most part. Just instead of storing electricity in a reactive chemical form, it is stored in the form of potential energy of hydrogen. But there is no current distribution system for hydrogen, and even if you use your excess solar power to split water, you still have to crompress it to 10k psi or cool it to a liquid to manage to get enough of it in to a vehicle storage system to be usefull.
Solar power won't solve all of our problems, but it is a big step in the right direction. And it's getting to the point where it is financially sound to invest in, IF you were going to invest in roofing anyways. Its still not economical to install solar shingles/roofing/arrays into existing structures though.
Wow! That's an awesome site! I wish I had known about it a month ago. I put together a distributed power generation term paper last month for a humanities class.
The big thing I'm thinking of is excess day power, neighborhood hydrogen generators, and nightly hydrogen fuel cell power generators. You could reduce the immediate scope of the grid to a neighborhood level and drop centralised grid power demands to a trickle.
Wisconsin is currently trying to replace to coal furnaces at the milwaukee coal processing power plant. I say trying because even though it passed budget and WI regulations, the state of Illinois (80 miles down wind) has banned to building of new coal processing plants with out gasification and extra emission controls. The states of Illinois and Michigan are sueing the state of Wisconsin to prevent the construction of the plant with out the new more environmentally friendly controls. Over 100 other new coal plants are pivoting on the outcome of this trial. If Wisconsin wins, more cheap and some what dirty factories will be created. If Illinois wins (Michigan's lawsuit is based on Mercury released in the lake) It could give other down wind states more power to fight upwind states poluting. That is also part of the polution bill that braniac bush signed. Not that I'm a fan of his, but just about any environmental concerns coming from him is a step in the right direction.
There are also other states that have significantly tighter restrictions on power plant emissions, just look at California! It's not like they ratchette down on the auto industry and leave the power industry unaccounted. Numerous other states are looking at doing the same, including Oregon, Washington, and Mass if I remember correctly.
Unfortunatly, due to some amazing social-political manuevering by capitalists in the mid 1900's, growing canibis, whether for hemp or smoke is illegal in the US.
Actually, you snotty Europeans have a lot more experience with Diesels. And thanks for the correction, I've been misspelling Diesel like a 3rd grade dislexic moron for years with out even knowing it.
I was actually considering swaping out my Fiero's 3.4l v6 gas engine for a 3.9l i4 izuzu diesel engine. The 3.9l has a redline (max rpms) of about 2800-3000 with horse power in the low 100 range. But it also has 285ft/lbs of torque at 1800 rpms. That means with a manual tranny, over drive, and highway gears, you can pull 80mph at about 2200 rpms. Vs the 3500-4000rpm I have to spin my current engine/tranny at to hit 80mph.
"Funny how that logic never seems to stop the nuclear power or ethanol industries...;^)"
Err, it did stop Nuclear power growth. The cost of dealing with Nuclear waste is so high that the US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in what, almost 20 years now? I think we have just 'restarted' construction of 3 or 4 plants that had never been completed back in the 70's though.
As for ethanol... it's a complete waste. If organic fuel is your goal, soy diesle is a much better route. Corn requires HUGE amounts of nitrogen rich fertalizer. Which means using chemical (petrolium) based fertalizers. Corn has plenty of other issues to, but I'm no agronomist. Soy on the other hand, produces its own nitrogen, is significantly more hardy, and can also be used as livestock feed after the oil has been removed. Diesle engines are also more efficient, and with current emission control standards, less polluting the their gas equivilants.
burning crushed coal with out environmental controls (ie: the same way they burnt coal 120 years ago) is worse then automobiles with modern emission controls. duh.
New processes like Gasification of coal allow it to be burnt significantly cleaner, with significantly less water consumption and a much lower amount of mecury released. Tack onto that the ease and economy of scale to impliment carbon scrubbers, filters, and new technology on a few hundred massive coal burning plants across the US as opposed to hundreds of millions of cars.
Also, environmentally sound or not, the US demands a lot of power. The US also has the largest coal reserves in the world. Currently, with the rising cost of crude oil and natural gas, coal is not going to go away. Technology continues to improve it's performance and emmissions, and running coal plants at night to generate hydrogen will allow the plants to maintain a constant load and reduce wastes (ie: worthless emissions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for green power. I would love to get building codes updated to require all new residential buildings in a class 3 or better solar area to have integrated solar roofing for power or water heating. Integrated roofing won't replace the existing power grid, but it will greatly reduce the demand for growth. I'm also a big pro-ponent of wind. Did you know that the state of Nebraska has enough wind power potential to power the entire western half of the united states? But they have crap for an infrastructure, it would cost so much to put the system in place, that there is no realistic profit margin over the forseeable future. If/When coal costs rise, Nebraska wind may become a much more viable option. Also, Nuclear power has it's advantages, but it's got an engineering problem, and it's a growing problem. We need to solve the nuclear waste problem, whether it's reprocessing, deep sea burrial, or centralised uninhabited burried storage, before we can reinvest in the nuclear solution.
Actually there is new technology in the fuel cell market that uses a significantly cheaper polimer based panels. But internal combustion is still an option.
Also, even if we are getting hydrogen by using energy created at centralized coal processing plants we are still creating less polution then everyone running gas. And with distributed power generation on the rise, people could be creating their own hydrogen by using excess power generated by solar roofing during the day.
In Wisconsin, so COLA is lower, but with an assoc (completing bach), 4 years military exp programming, 3 years consulting and coming up on my 1 year anv with my permanant position (read: pay negotiation), Numerous certs, 3.95gpa on my assoc.
I offered myself up on a silver platter to the company, $40k + benies. At the time I had an unemployed wife, a new born child, and a part time consulting gig. $40k+ gets us health insurance, our morgage and bills, and enough money to keep our vehicles running.
But luckily, renegotiations are just arround the corner, and in the last year I've cut office expences $50k by improving some software systems reducing the manpower needed, and have been the primary developer for a series of frameworks and our new portal system. So I'm in pretty good position to negotiate for a hard core raise.
Both 1 and 2 were amazing, even when they were re-written from their original 16 color graphics with type-command interface (Type: Climb Tree instead of clicking on the tree), to the 256 color prompted interface.
GPL is designed to protect free software. That means that the content management system that is GPL'd should not be elligable for a patent, but that the DRM'd content it plays is fine.
There is a simple market problem here, it costs money to create content, if no one pays for content, (many) people will stop making content.
DRMs are a valid option, and if they are created in a way that allows me to view/listen/read to all of the content I have purchased or rented on any of my systems (car, phone, iPod, computer, tv, PVR, etc) then I will have no problem with them. If they prevent me from burning multiple copies, or make those copies useless to anyone but me, that's fine by me.
Slashdot Mirror
So my sample was a bit on the extreme side.
So what would be more likely is that actors and directors would take a pay cut. Special effects budgets would get cut. And movies would almost all get shot on a green screen in a sound both so that location costs (the largest expense) could be cut. So no, movies wouldn't disappear over night, but the quality would likely drop.
Will downloading movies ruin every company? Matters. If 90% of all movie watchers download movies with out paying for them, then likely yes. Either that or theator prices will shot to $30 a ticket and DVD's will cost $60. The point is, why damage them at all? Why not just pay the same rates you pay for a brick and morter rental to get the same service? $2 for a 2 day viewing window with out the hassle of returning the movie.
-Rick
why, because blowing $2 on a DRM'd movie rental saves me the hassle of going to a rental store, renting a moving, and having to return it 2 days later?
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if movie producers can't make a profit selling movies, they won't continue to make movies.
And I as a customer am demanding online content delivery. I don't mind paying a fee competetive to those offered in brick and morter stores. And I don't like the idea of getting sued. DRMs are the perfect solution. They give the producers a way to limit their content's distribution, but give customers an easy way to access it.
I save money and watch the movie I want. The producers get the money to pay of the investment in making the movie, and continue making more movies. If a movie comes out that I think I will watch more then 10 times, I'll go buy the DVD, but I'm fine with rentals for the most part.
-Rick
I want to be able to go online and rent any TV show season, or Movie, download it, and have it for a few days so I can watch it at my convienence.
Anti-DRM nazi be damned, I was a fast easy LEGAL way to download video content for my personal viewing pleasure. And I don't mind blowing $2 to rent a movie or season of TV. Heck, I'd even drop 5 bucks on a brand new triple-A movie.
-Rick
Actually, I've had no problems with my Windows Mobile system. Everything has seemed pretty easy to find, and easy to use. Syncs up no problem. Haven't crashed it yet.
-Rick
I'm afraid you are wrong. Yes, you could increase yields for a few years, 3, maybe 5. But after that, the fields would be so nutrient starved that the cost of fertilizers and soil conditioning would far outweigh any benefit of extra crops. After 10 years you would be loosing so much in yields that it would be to the point where the land is pretty much worthless to farm.
Obviously this isn't for ALL farm land, but specificly in the mid west where deep plowing and over farming is reducing yeilds. To make up for it, farmers use more fertilizers and conditioners. Both of which lead to run off which is why the mouth of the mississippi is known as a 'Dead Zone'. Things dont grow there because their is so much run off crap coming down the river.
Overfarming is the capitalist mistake. Controled farming is looking at providing sustained yields over a long period of time.
-Rick
I just picked up a dell Axim x3i with Windows Mobile 2k3 and I love it. Haven't had a problem with it yet, and I'll be starting a .Net CF project for it in the next few weeks.
-Rick
Paying farmers not to farm is good. It's a way of keeping farmlands fertile while not forcing farmers out of business.
It seems a little out of whack, but by not farming for a year or two, and rotating crops you will actually increase the yields and lengthen the life of the land.
-Rick
My memory is a bit foggy, but I beleive most DC systems us about .45kWh per mile. AC systems I think were in the .17-.28 range. So it entirely matters on the amount of surface space, the amount of solar energy you receive, and the efficiency of the panels.
l s.htm has a 1.5v 330mA thin film solution, that's about half a watt per cell. Over a nine hour day parked in the sun you'd be looking at 4.5Wh (.0045kWh) per cell. so you would need about 100 of them to get 1 "free" mile. At 19cm x 5 cm you would have to have one heck of a large car to hold them all. Even for the most efficient AC systems you would still need 38 to get your 1 free mile. In any case, it's not very economically feasible to count on vehicle based solar cells for power.
This site: http://www.solarnavigator.net/thin_film_solar_cel
But if you are using a battery powered moped, and you have a fold/roll out solar array, you may be able to get enough juice while at work to power the bike for a few miles.
-Rick
Don't get me wrong, I love the solar power. And I'm all for wind farms in appropriate locations. But it has to fiscally make sence. In the last week I have done numerous write ups on the break even point for gas vs electric cars. If you have a gas powered internal combustion car that gets 30 mpg, and you drive 10k miles per year, and you are looking to replace your vehicle, then $3.00/gal is the magic barrier for cost efficiency. At $3/gal and $.20/kWh you are breaking even on fuel costs (including battery pack replacement every 3 years).
The big problem with electric cars is range however. Common Batteries (The cheaper deep cycle ones) are only going to last 3-5 years, and their performance will degrade over that time. Most DC conversions (the cheapest and least efficient option) are only going to get you a 40-80 mile range in the best of conditions. Which is fine for most in-town or close to town commuters. For those of us out in the boonies, we need a better battery. And there are 2 options, Lith Ion batteries, which dramatically out perform Lead Acid batteries in many ways, but cost about 8 to 10x as much. Or fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are batteries for the most part. Just instead of storing electricity in a reactive chemical form, it is stored in the form of potential energy of hydrogen. But there is no current distribution system for hydrogen, and even if you use your excess solar power to split water, you still have to crompress it to 10k psi or cool it to a liquid to manage to get enough of it in to a vehicle storage system to be usefull.
Solar power won't solve all of our problems, but it is a big step in the right direction. And it's getting to the point where it is financially sound to invest in, IF you were going to invest in roofing anyways. Its still not economical to install solar shingles/roofing/arrays into existing structures though.
-Rick
Wow! That's an awesome site! I wish I had known about it a month ago. I put together a distributed power generation term paper last month for a humanities class.
The big thing I'm thinking of is excess day power, neighborhood hydrogen generators, and nightly hydrogen fuel cell power generators. You could reduce the immediate scope of the grid to a neighborhood level and drop centralised grid power demands to a trickle.
-Rick
Wisconsin is currently trying to replace to coal furnaces at the milwaukee coal processing power plant. I say trying because even though it passed budget and WI regulations, the state of Illinois (80 miles down wind) has banned to building of new coal processing plants with out gasification and extra emission controls. The states of Illinois and Michigan are sueing the state of Wisconsin to prevent the construction of the plant with out the new more environmentally friendly controls. Over 100 other new coal plants are pivoting on the outcome of this trial. If Wisconsin wins, more cheap and some what dirty factories will be created. If Illinois wins (Michigan's lawsuit is based on Mercury released in the lake) It could give other down wind states more power to fight upwind states poluting. That is also part of the polution bill that braniac bush signed. Not that I'm a fan of his, but just about any environmental concerns coming from him is a step in the right direction.
There are also other states that have significantly tighter restrictions on power plant emissions, just look at California! It's not like they ratchette down on the auto industry and leave the power industry unaccounted. Numerous other states are looking at doing the same, including Oregon, Washington, and Mass if I remember correctly.
-Rick
Unfortunatly, due to some amazing social-political manuevering by capitalists in the mid 1900's, growing canibis, whether for hemp or smoke is illegal in the US.
-Rick
Actually, you snotty Europeans have a lot more experience with Diesels. And thanks for the correction, I've been misspelling Diesel like a 3rd grade dislexic moron for years with out even knowing it.
I was actually considering swaping out my Fiero's 3.4l v6 gas engine for a 3.9l i4 izuzu diesel engine. The 3.9l has a redline (max rpms) of about 2800-3000 with horse power in the low 100 range. But it also has 285ft/lbs of torque at 1800 rpms. That means with a manual tranny, over drive, and highway gears, you can pull 80mph at about 2200 rpms. Vs the 3500-4000rpm I have to spin my current engine/tranny at to hit 80mph.
-Rick
"Funny how that logic never seems to stop the nuclear power or ethanol industries... ;^)"
Err, it did stop Nuclear power growth. The cost of dealing with Nuclear waste is so high that the US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in what, almost 20 years now? I think we have just 'restarted' construction of 3 or 4 plants that had never been completed back in the 70's though.
As for ethanol... it's a complete waste. If organic fuel is your goal, soy diesle is a much better route. Corn requires HUGE amounts of nitrogen rich fertalizer. Which means using chemical (petrolium) based fertalizers. Corn has plenty of other issues to, but I'm no agronomist. Soy on the other hand, produces its own nitrogen, is significantly more hardy, and can also be used as livestock feed after the oil has been removed. Diesle engines are also more efficient, and with current emission control standards, less polluting the their gas equivilants.
-Rick
burning crushed coal with out environmental controls (ie: the same way they burnt coal 120 years ago) is worse then automobiles with modern emission controls. duh.
New processes like Gasification of coal allow it to be burnt significantly cleaner, with significantly less water consumption and a much lower amount of mecury released. Tack onto that the ease and economy of scale to impliment carbon scrubbers, filters, and new technology on a few hundred massive coal burning plants across the US as opposed to hundreds of millions of cars.
Also, environmentally sound or not, the US demands a lot of power. The US also has the largest coal reserves in the world. Currently, with the rising cost of crude oil and natural gas, coal is not going to go away. Technology continues to improve it's performance and emmissions, and running coal plants at night to generate hydrogen will allow the plants to maintain a constant load and reduce wastes (ie: worthless emissions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for green power. I would love to get building codes updated to require all new residential buildings in a class 3 or better solar area to have integrated solar roofing for power or water heating. Integrated roofing won't replace the existing power grid, but it will greatly reduce the demand for growth. I'm also a big pro-ponent of wind. Did you know that the state of Nebraska has enough wind power potential to power the entire western half of the united states? But they have crap for an infrastructure, it would cost so much to put the system in place, that there is no realistic profit margin over the forseeable future. If/When coal costs rise, Nebraska wind may become a much more viable option. Also, Nuclear power has it's advantages, but it's got an engineering problem, and it's a growing problem. We need to solve the nuclear waste problem, whether it's reprocessing, deep sea burrial, or centralised uninhabited burried storage, before we can reinvest in the nuclear solution.
-Rick
Actually there is new technology in the fuel cell market that uses a significantly cheaper polimer based panels. But internal combustion is still an option.
Also, even if we are getting hydrogen by using energy created at centralized coal processing plants we are still creating less polution then everyone running gas. And with distributed power generation on the rise, people could be creating their own hydrogen by using excess power generated by solar roofing during the day.
-Rick
In Wisconsin, so COLA is lower, but with an assoc (completing bach), 4 years military exp programming, 3 years consulting and coming up on my 1 year anv with my permanant position (read: pay negotiation), Numerous certs, 3.95gpa on my assoc.
I offered myself up on a silver platter to the company, $40k + benies. At the time I had an unemployed wife, a new born child, and a part time consulting gig. $40k+ gets us health insurance, our morgage and bills, and enough money to keep our vehicles running.
But luckily, renegotiations are just arround the corner, and in the last year I've cut office expences $50k by improving some software systems reducing the manpower needed, and have been the primary developer for a series of frameworks and our new portal system. So I'm in pretty good position to negotiate for a hard core raise.
-Rick
And there are some people working on QfG 6, although I haven't heard much about it lately. -Rick
Quest for Glory 1-5!!!
Both 1 and 2 were amazing, even when they were re-written from their original 16 color graphics with type-command interface (Type: Climb Tree instead of clicking on the tree), to the 256 color prompted interface.
-Rick
I type good. "IT looks like..." -Rick
I looks like we may be able to sue gun companies now. -Rick
Brazil is also in the midst of fighting off an AIDS/HIV epidemic...
-Rick
GPL is designed to protect free software. That means that the content management system that is GPL'd should not be elligable for a patent, but that the DRM'd content it plays is fine.
There is a simple market problem here, it costs money to create content, if no one pays for content, (many) people will stop making content.
DRMs are a valid option, and if they are created in a way that allows me to view/listen/read to all of the content I have purchased or rented on any of my systems (car, phone, iPod, computer, tv, PVR, etc) then I will have no problem with them. If they prevent me from burning multiple copies, or make those copies useless to anyone but me, that's fine by me.
-Rick
yeah, but with in an hour of the original post there were 3 posts from people who appeared to beleive it.
-Rick
That's the one! I love seeing that article.
Ranks right up there with my favorite horiscope. The one where Smokey the bear finaly admited it is up to me, and me alone to prevent forest fires.
-Rick