In fact, the "average" person has no problem with DRM schemes such as those that "lock" down DVDs or VHS (macrovision), nor those that iTunes had or most software has.
Are you sure that the "average" person has no problems with DRM? I heard that the main push towards DRM-free music downloads came from the stores themselves, since the DRM systems they previously used caused so much problems for their customers, and thus so many time-consuming support calls, that the profitability on those DRM-protected tracks went down the drain. How does that support your hypothesis that average Joe is indifferent to DRM?
I love the double-standard so much. Piracy is fine but GPL violations ? OH GOD STOP THE PRESSES.
You write as if Slashdot would be one single person. Do I really have to explain that there are thousands of people commenting on Slashdot, with wildly varying opinions on different subjects. It could very well be that different subsets of the Slashdot populace are attracted to the articles on piracy and GPL violations, but apparently, your simple mind cannot fathom this. Unless you get down to individuals, you cannot claim that the entire Slashdot populace has a double standard and still expect to be taken seriously.
driving over there and storming the building, or DDOSing his servers, if I have fair proof that what he did was illegal/wrong.
So you would want to commit a crime to punish him for his crime? If you'd actually do that, you wouldn't be able to take the moral high road as the innocent victim. And by the way, do you really consider "storming the building" a proportionate response to a license violation?
The other issue that you forgot is that CURRENTLY China emits more TOTAL POLLUTION (ignoring CO2), then America has COMMULATIVELY.
But who cares? Other pollution is mostly a local problem. Soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ground-level ozone do not spread significantly from the point of emission. If they want to destroy their own environment and population health, that's not my problem. I do take issue with global pollutants though, such as freons and greenhouse gasses.
I thought we were for copyright reform here... i.e. a return to reasonable copyright periods.
In politics, you'll always have to negotiate, and when you do, you'll usually not end up with the solution you find optimal, but some middle ground between your solution and your opponent's solution. If you argue for reasonable protection terms, you'll get the middle ground between reasonable and unreasonably long term lengths. Only by aiming to abolish copyright, you can pull the middle ground to where you want it, and thus get a reasonable term length after the negotiations are concluded.
How many would have bought the movie/game if you could NOT download it?
I don't pirate games, I buy them. But that also means that I'm very picky about what I buy, which means that I'll only buy such games that I'm fairly certain will be a lot of fun to me. If I would pirate games instead, this cost/benefit calculation would go out the window, and I could also download the less certain cases, i.e. games that could be fun, but just as likely could be pure crap.
There's a whole bunch of things that would suddenly be allowed that most people would object to.
Well, I strongly object to the removal of personal privacy that is going on to protect copyrights. If copyright cannot work while keeping our personal privacy, copyright isn't worth protecting and should be abolished. The only other alternative is keeping copyright but not enforcing it, but that seems pretty useless.
It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade
You were pressured to upgrade? Some mafia-style hitmen came and demanded that you upgrade?
My home desktop runs Fedora 7. Sure, it has had no updates for almost a year, but it is working well for what I use it for (video encoding). Why upgrade if you don't really feel like it? My machine is probably going to be upgraded soon, since I'd like the system not to be too old, but I hardly feel any pressure to upgrade every time. I try each release in a VM, before I decide if the real home machine will get an upgrade.
Too bad there aren't any electric train lines that cover the kinds of distances that planes and diesel trains do.
In the US maybe. In other parts of the world, there are certainly electrified train lines covering the distances that short and medium range airliners fly.
The point is not to discourage air travel altogether, but to discourage air travel where reasonable alternatives exist or are feasible to build. I cannot really see long distance air travel being replaced anytime soon, but why not start by building alternatives to short distance airline routes? The short distances are the least efficient distances for aircraft, since takeoff as well as flying on less than cruising altitude consumes large proportions of the fuel for the trip.
Unless you want to go with flammable hydrogen, which at least has the benefit of greater lifting power.
The difference in lifting power isn't great. The maximum lifting power of one cubic meter of anything is around 1.2 kg (the weight of 1 m^3 of air) at sea level and normal air pressure (101.3 kPa). To get that lifting power you need a vacuum. To get the lifting power of hydrogen and helium, subtract the weight for those two gases at the same pressure from those 1.2 kg, and you'll get around 1.12 kg for hydrogen and 1.02 kg for helium. As you can see, you can lift approximately 10% more with the same lifting volume if you use hydrogen instead of helium, which is not especially much.
I'd think that the big difference is cost and availability. At the time of the Zeppelins, the US had the only supply of helium, so the Germans couldn't use it. Thus, they had to use the only alternative, which is hydrogen. Helium may be much more available now, but I'd think that it's still much more expensive than hydrogen.
For passengers, it's more environmentally-friendly to ride a plane than a train for distances more than a few hundred miles.
Assuming the train is powered by diesel fuel, or possibly electricity generated at a coal power plant. If the electricity comes from sources such as hydro power, I have a hard time believing that planes are still more environmentally friendly.
In practice, yes. Just thew fact that airlines pay no fuel taxes anywhere effectively amounts to a worldwide subsidy of air travel compared to other modes of transportation.
I know, I have a user account at Spotify. That does not mean that I'm ready to ditch my locally stored music, far from it.
The fact that Spotify requires a network connection makes only really useful in front of your computer, or any other device with a decent network connection. Not to mention the problem of letting third parties decide what music should be available when and where. Spotify has already been forced to remove music at the whims of the music companies on at least one occasion.
So no, I'm not buying the mantra that streaming services are "the future" and that locally stored music is "on the way out". Streaming services have their place, but replacing my own library? Hardly.
net radio is an always-on source of music, so why record it?
Few stations play exactly the music you like all the time. Sometimes even my favorite station plays something that I really dislike. By recording the stream, the listener can play the tracks he likes, skipping the bad ones, in the order he likes.
No need to store that shit locally when you can enjoy all music ever made by man with the click of a button.
If that's good enough for you, fine. But I like my local music collection, and no streaming service has ever come close. I'm not convinced that streaming is "the future" and locally stored music is "the past".
Not really, giraffe's have valves in their neck arteries -- hence you don't need insane amount of blood pressure from the heart (the valves keep the blood from falling down after being pushed up).
Actually, most (all?) animals with a circulatory system have backflow prevention flaps in their veins. Having them in arteries is just a simple extension to this concept.
all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop
Oh? Last time I looked, Mac OS X was steadily approaching 10% market share.
Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
Please explain how to do this with the source available. Personally, I think open source DRM is actually impossible. If you can see and modify the code, you can strip away the restrictions. DRM can only work with the source code remaining a secret locked up in some vault.
Basically, the Linux philosophy assumes that all applications are open source, so it doesn't matter if the ABI changes with every point release of the kernel, since the distros can just recompile all their binaries when packaging. This philosophy is incompatible with the commercial software method of distributing apps as binary blobs.
If this would be true, how come I can still play my old Loki games from almost ten years ago on contemporary Linux systems? Of course, your claim is simply untrue. The ABI with regard to applications is very stable. You must be thinking of the kernel module ABI, which isn't really stable at all.
it makes sense they'd go directly to MS rather than go through a public bidding process when they want to upgrade.
Many countries have laws that require a public bidding process when any governmental organization procures some good or service. You can't just ignore that when planning to make a large procurement, because that means that tax funds could be spent on a suboptimal solution.
Of course, that may happen anyway, but a public bidding process lowers that risk somewhat.
Throwing 110MW out there isn't very helpful without more conditions.
A simple fact check shows that this measure cannot reasonable mean the requirements for one train. Current high-speed trains have a maximum power output of about 1/10th of that per trainset.
Try to do his calculation, and you'll find out he made a typo (531 instead of 351), used this erroneous result for his further calculations, as well as used Watts instead of kilowatts.
That seems ridiculously high to run a train
No train system is designed to carry just one train set. Current high-speed trains have power outputs in the 5-15 MW range. 110 MW is thus likely an estimated total power required to run an entire fleet of trains.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the "average" person has no problem with DRM schemes such as those that "lock" down DVDs or VHS (macrovision), nor those that iTunes had or most software has.
Are you sure that the "average" person has no problems with DRM? I heard that the main push towards DRM-free music downloads came from the stores themselves, since the DRM systems they previously used caused so much problems for their customers, and thus so many time-consuming support calls, that the profitability on those DRM-protected tracks went down the drain. How does that support your hypothesis that average Joe is indifferent to DRM?
I love the double-standard so much. Piracy is fine but GPL violations ? OH GOD STOP THE PRESSES.
You write as if Slashdot would be one single person. Do I really have to explain that there are thousands of people commenting on Slashdot, with wildly varying opinions on different subjects. It could very well be that different subsets of the Slashdot populace are attracted to the articles on piracy and GPL violations, but apparently, your simple mind cannot fathom this. Unless you get down to individuals, you cannot claim that the entire Slashdot populace has a double standard and still expect to be taken seriously.
driving over there and storming the building, or DDOSing his servers, if I have fair proof that what he did was illegal/wrong.
So you would want to commit a crime to punish him for his crime? If you'd actually do that, you wouldn't be able to take the moral high road as the innocent victim. And by the way, do you really consider "storming the building" a proportionate response to a license violation?
The other issue that you forgot is that CURRENTLY China emits more TOTAL POLLUTION (ignoring CO2), then America has COMMULATIVELY.
But who cares? Other pollution is mostly a local problem. Soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ground-level ozone do not spread significantly from the point of emission. If they want to destroy their own environment and population health, that's not my problem. I do take issue with global pollutants though, such as freons and greenhouse gasses.
I thought we were for copyright reform here... i.e. a return to reasonable copyright periods.
In politics, you'll always have to negotiate, and when you do, you'll usually not end up with the solution you find optimal, but some middle ground between your solution and your opponent's solution. If you argue for reasonable protection terms, you'll get the middle ground between reasonable and unreasonably long term lengths. Only by aiming to abolish copyright, you can pull the middle ground to where you want it, and thus get a reasonable term length after the negotiations are concluded.
How many would have bought the movie/game if you could NOT download it?
I don't pirate games, I buy them. But that also means that I'm very picky about what I buy, which means that I'll only buy such games that I'm fairly certain will be a lot of fun to me. If I would pirate games instead, this cost/benefit calculation would go out the window, and I could also download the less certain cases, i.e. games that could be fun, but just as likely could be pure crap.
There's a whole bunch of things that would suddenly be allowed that most people would object to.
Well, I strongly object to the removal of personal privacy that is going on to protect copyrights. If copyright cannot work while keeping our personal privacy, copyright isn't worth protecting and should be abolished. The only other alternative is keeping copyright but not enforcing it, but that seems pretty useless.
It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade
You were pressured to upgrade? Some mafia-style hitmen came and demanded that you upgrade?
My home desktop runs Fedora 7. Sure, it has had no updates for almost a year, but it is working well for what I use it for (video encoding). Why upgrade if you don't really feel like it? My machine is probably going to be upgraded soon, since I'd like the system not to be too old, but I hardly feel any pressure to upgrade every time. I try each release in a VM, before I decide if the real home machine will get an upgrade.
Too bad there aren't any electric train lines that cover the kinds of distances that planes and diesel trains do.
In the US maybe. In other parts of the world, there are certainly electrified train lines covering the distances that short and medium range airliners fly.
The point is not to discourage air travel altogether, but to discourage air travel where reasonable alternatives exist or are feasible to build. I cannot really see long distance air travel being replaced anytime soon, but why not start by building alternatives to short distance airline routes? The short distances are the least efficient distances for aircraft, since takeoff as well as flying on less than cruising altitude consumes large proportions of the fuel for the trip.
Unless you want to go with flammable hydrogen, which at least has the benefit of greater lifting power.
The difference in lifting power isn't great. The maximum lifting power of one cubic meter of anything is around 1.2 kg (the weight of 1 m^3 of air) at sea level and normal air pressure (101.3 kPa). To get that lifting power you need a vacuum. To get the lifting power of hydrogen and helium, subtract the weight for those two gases at the same pressure from those 1.2 kg, and you'll get around 1.12 kg for hydrogen and 1.02 kg for helium. As you can see, you can lift approximately 10% more with the same lifting volume if you use hydrogen instead of helium, which is not especially much.
I'd think that the big difference is cost and availability. At the time of the Zeppelins, the US had the only supply of helium, so the Germans couldn't use it. Thus, they had to use the only alternative, which is hydrogen. Helium may be much more available now, but I'd think that it's still much more expensive than hydrogen.
For passengers, it's more environmentally-friendly to ride a plane than a train for distances more than a few hundred miles.
Assuming the train is powered by diesel fuel, or possibly electricity generated at a coal power plant. If the electricity comes from sources such as hydro power, I have a hard time believing that planes are still more environmentally friendly.
Subsidies?
In practice, yes. Just thew fact that airlines pay no fuel taxes anywhere effectively amounts to a worldwide subsidy of air travel compared to other modes of transportation.
No, a right wing racist millionaire made a donation to the site several years ago.
No, he owned a company that provided colocation space and internet access to The Pirate Bay, at a reduced fee.
I know, I have a user account at Spotify. That does not mean that I'm ready to ditch my locally stored music, far from it.
The fact that Spotify requires a network connection makes only really useful in front of your computer, or any other device with a decent network connection. Not to mention the problem of letting third parties decide what music should be available when and where. Spotify has already been forced to remove music at the whims of the music companies on at least one occasion.
So no, I'm not buying the mantra that streaming services are "the future" and that locally stored music is "on the way out". Streaming services have their place, but replacing my own library? Hardly.
net radio is an always-on source of music, so why record it?
Few stations play exactly the music you like all the time. Sometimes even my favorite station plays something that I really dislike. By recording the stream, the listener can play the tracks he likes, skipping the bad ones, in the order he likes.
No need to store that shit locally when you can enjoy all music ever made by man with the click of a button.
If that's good enough for you, fine. But I like my local music collection, and no streaming service has ever come close. I'm not convinced that streaming is "the future" and locally stored music is "the past".
Not really, giraffe's have valves in their neck arteries -- hence you don't need insane amount of blood pressure from the heart (the valves keep the blood from falling down after being pushed up).
Actually, most (all?) animals with a circulatory system have backflow prevention flaps in their veins. Having them in arteries is just a simple extension to this concept.
all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop
Oh? Last time I looked, Mac OS X was steadily approaching 10% market share.
Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
Please explain how to do this with the source available. Personally, I think open source DRM is actually impossible. If you can see and modify the code, you can strip away the restrictions. DRM can only work with the source code remaining a secret locked up in some vault.
Basically, the Linux philosophy assumes that all applications are open source, so it doesn't matter if the ABI changes with every point release of the kernel, since the distros can just recompile all their binaries when packaging. This philosophy is incompatible with the commercial software method of distributing apps as binary blobs.
If this would be true, how come I can still play my old Loki games from almost ten years ago on contemporary Linux systems? Of course, your claim is simply untrue. The ABI with regard to applications is very stable. You must be thinking of the kernel module ABI, which isn't really stable at all.
it makes sense they'd go directly to MS rather than go through a public bidding process when they want to upgrade.
Many countries have laws that require a public bidding process when any governmental organization procures some good or service. You can't just ignore that when planning to make a large procurement, because that means that tax funds could be spent on a suboptimal solution.
Of course, that may happen anyway, but a public bidding process lowers that risk somewhat.
Throwing 110MW out there isn't very helpful without more conditions.
A simple fact check shows that this measure cannot reasonable mean the requirements for one train. Current high-speed trains have a maximum power output of about 1/10th of that per trainset.
The panels need to be generating 110MW whenever a train is running
No train requires 110 MW. Divide that figure by 10 and you'll get a reasonable number for a current high-speed train.
So, lets assume that 500 hp would be needed to run a train at 220 mph.
If 368 kW (500 hp) is enough to run a train at 220 mph, why does every high-speed train that runs at that speed have a power output of at least 8 MW?
far more than the optimistic 2.9 you calculated.
Try to do his calculation, and you'll find out he made a typo (531 instead of 351), used this erroneous result for his further calculations, as well as used Watts instead of kilowatts.
That seems ridiculously high to run a train
No train system is designed to carry just one train set. Current high-speed trains have power outputs in the 5-15 MW range. 110 MW is thus likely an estimated total power required to run an entire fleet of trains.
Your math is far off. 1,170,000 m^2 means 1,170,000 kW solar flux. 30% of that is 351,000 kW, which gives 1930 MWh per day.
Sweden, which is my home country.