Posts by Vladimir Plouzhnikov 3264 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2007
"That necessitates a platform neutral DRM (similar to Ultraviolet) but it should not be one which prevents users from selling, loaning, donating or even disposing their content in any way they that the law provides for physical content."
And the only way to do it is to remove DRMs altogether.
Here is how it was supposed to be announced:
QUOTE:
18/9/2012 T.V. Flash on all Dial-A-Program Services
This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on
Humanoid height."
Extract from conversation of Joe Ordinary in Local Puborama
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
They can fit twice as many in the same building site.
(they say it's alright),
Beginning with the tenants of the town of Harlow,
In the interest of humanity, they've been told they must go,
Told they must go-go-go-go."
UNQUOTE:
Somebody should buy an island in some not very hospitable waters and deport all these nutcases and their families there, so that they could demonstrate on their own example how healthy and wonderful will the lifestyle they advocate be.
Added benefit - one can make a new reality TV show. Instead of eviction there will be extinction, though.
"heavy lift (non LEO) is very inefficient and very expensive, we need to have a solution to that before space travel becomes vaguely practical"
In this I agree with you but that problem is not insurmountable and the matter is not so much cost as political will (as the solution will by necessity be nuclear).
"The only way that we'll be able to start up a colony on another celestial body is to send a huge amount of (fully automated, unmanned) resource off planet, build (or process and mine) before we get there, and that's science fiction..."
The "tools" I meant included great big machines for mining... Sending tools could well be automated but no one needs the complication of the machines having to assemble and run themselves upon arrival. It will be simpler to just send a team of engineers for that once you know that the heavy stuff have arrived successfully.
Yes, you will not fix my computer.
"imagine this magic world when we have put trillions into (say getting to Mars, and having habitats) what possible good is that compared to what the trillions could have gone into?"
And the money would have gone where exactly? You are not going to burn all those banknotes in your ion engine on the way to Mars, are you?
And to say that you will have to bring the resources from Earth is just strange. Of course, no one will buy dirt from Earth to import it to Mars, you will just take the tools with you and use the local dirt.
"What does improve with technology, is our ability to efficiently extract and use resources. Our ability to improve efficiency is not, however, infinite, as economic theory would have us think."
Agree. That's why we must eventually start exploring resources available outside this particular planet.
The energy does not have to be created by burning fossil fuels.
The higher the technology you are using the lower specific use of resources it needs to achieve the same thing.
To develop ever higher technologies you need people (young ones, as new ideas in science are mostly generated before the age of 40), who are the main asset of any country. If you reduce population in developed countries they will not be able to afford to stay developed.
In underdeveloped and developing countries the population growth is much higher than in developed ones. By turning the latter into the former you will achieve exactly the opposite of what you seem to want.
@Benjamin 4: Your proposals are as ludicrous as those of these pseudo-scientists from the original article.
Population growth is not a problem in developed countries, rather the opposite. Forced contraception or any forced medication will always create more problems then they are supposed to solve.
The artificial limits on technological development will only mean that the rest of the world will overtake you in a few months time and you will rapidly slide to being a third world country, where you won't be even able to afford your forced contraception or high technology and your "clever" population control and consumption reduction measures will result in increased pollution and resource wastage.
And authoritarian regimes are never economically competitive in the long term because they block innovation and distort markets.
This is what the new RIPA on drugs act announced yesterday will help to prevent - young would-be terrorists endangering school catering industry and the council officials' jobs. Thankfully, the MI5 will now easily track down every school food terrorist child if they try to circumvent the ban on posting pictures of their food.
The function of any TV is to be a display monitor for the tuner, DVD-player and other sources of high quality video signals with enough of the user interface to control these functions efficiently and comfortably.
Being connected to the Net is not needed for the above function (and no, the Net is not a suitable source of high quality video signals).
The internet connection is only needed if you are a content provider wishing to extend your own control over what the users can watch, when and how.
"heart-wrenching pictures of polar bears stranded on tiny icebergs"
"Stranded" doesn't come near to describing it. Look at this little wonder:
I would rather like my phone to have a Geiger counter in it.
In fact, I think that such gadgets will do much more for improving public perception of nuclear safety that any amount of reasoned explanations by specialists.
When you know you can detect and measure something mysterious and dangerous whenever you want it stops being mysterious and dangerous. When you try time and time again and all you see is the absence of danger you become reassured. When an accident happens elsewhere and you know you can check the things directly without trusting someone else telling you don't feel the need to panic. And the accident itself becomes an unfortunate event, like a fire or a landslide but which will not cause the Earth to open under your feet and the creatures of Hell to come out and the Sun to grow dark and red with a pentagram on its face and DOOM music in the background...
Just this morning on the BBC News they were dramatically "reporting" how tuna caught in California is contaminated by Fukushima fall out, with the "report" being accompanied by pictures of mutant tuna zombies swimming inexorably to poison the Pacific Coast waters and cause the end of the world as we know it.
Then, at the end of the piece, they just casually mentioned that the "contaminated" tuna is actually perfectly safe to eat...
"This ... has the fingers of non-engineers all over it."
On the opposite - it is practically covered with fingerprints of engineers eager to get their hands on a reasonably preserved engine and coming up with whatever they think is a sure tag-line to get the funding required for the restoration.
"Ultiamtely the regular consumer isn't an audiophile, they dont require "Great" or perhaps even "good" quality. They want "Acceptable" "affordable" and "portable""
And that is the industry's real problem. The consumer wants crap and crap isn't worth paying money for...
Educate the consumer to understand quality and perhaps something can still be saved.
So, a solution to the problem of phones accidentally left switched on on the plane is to keep a base-station there, which will accept connection from phones on the plane but will not make/receive any calls because it will not actually be connected to anything else (giving "network busy" response or similar)?
OK, WMP was crap, is crap and will always be unusable crap only infesting the computer with MSFT's own flavour of DRMs. First thing I do on any PC is removing any file associations with WMP for all media I am planning to regularly use.
Then, I wasn't aware that WMP ever came with MPEG2 and AC3 filters included. Maybe in Win7 it did? Or maybe they are talking about the code that processes DVD navigation such as menues, VM commands etc? As per above WMP was *always* crap at that.
"But F-35 is an all-around more capable aircraft."
I don't kno, I've already seen it brought down twice in compbat, each time by a single man jumping on top of it with little more than a hand gun. No wonder the entire JSF programme is in such a mess!
What do you mean, Die Hard IV and Avengers Assemble were not documentaries???
I fear you are comparing JSF with a wrong kind of Lightning. The Lightning you are talking about is the English Electric Lightning - a British machine. The Lightning No.1 in the US case was Lockheed P-38 Lightning - the one that was chasing the Japs over the Pacific in WWII.
Dear Herr Generalfeldmarschall, I'm a bit confused - you've spent most of your post explaining how there exist no economic incentives to invest under current status only to contradict yourself in the last sentence... Also, water utilities in England and Wales have already been privatised long ago.
I can't be bothered to look into that industry in more detail but I am confident there are no economic incentives for such investments.
I bet, the current water utilities live on subsidies, water in London is practically free for non-commercial use. To make it worthwhile the water utilities must be allowed to meter and charge the customers and the risk must be offloaded from the Government to the company.
I don't think it will happen soon but neither do I really want to as a user - very selfish of me, I know, but...
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