They have retransmission rights, apparently its the re-retransmission rights that are the problem.
You mean they are allowed to transmit Fox content live but not record it and then stream it to the user? Doesn't fair use also come into it? Users have the right to record TV content for personal use.
They dont have re-transmission rights. It costs extra obviously.
The article says they have the right to 'broadcast' Fox content, however, it also says they are doing what Aereo was doing in violation of 'an express contractual prohibition'. Do they have the right to retransmit but not to stream or 'sideload' recorded stuff to mobile devices? I don't get it, those two statements appear to be contradictory at frist glance.
Heard at the Apple Headquarters monitoring their users:
Little Johnny? XXL? Is he American?
I don't usually use earbuds except to work out, but I have a $20 pair of Sony earbuds that sound better than Apple's. It's absurd that the article doesn't mention a single thing about sound quality, and goes into how easily the cords tangle and body sensors like those are the things people care about. You need to get sound quality right before you can even think about all the other ancillary shit to try and sell more of them.
You are hard to please
It is my professional opinion that all of the audiophile bullshit is bullshit. On a low-end sound system using the cheapest components you can buy, the worst component is your ears. That's where all of your problems start, and you're trying to pay lots of money to compensate throughout the rest of the system.
If you want a pair of headphones that sound great to you, forget about brand names and fancy features. Sit down with a pair of cheap headphones, and listen to the tones in music/tv/whatever that you find most pleasing..... Next, think about features.....
I agree with that for the most part except there is a degree of difference between crapware phones and brands like Sennheiser, even in the $30 range. I know that because I went to a store and tried everything they had and stuff from Sennheiser, Bose etc. sounded noticeably better than the utter crapware. That being said the difference is not massive but there is still some difference in sound quality. I ended up sacrificing sound quality for features and got Bluetooth headphones with a built in remote. I also agree that audiophiles can be properly full of BS. A good way to get a laugh is to go to amazon.com, look up a popular set of cheap ass headphones and read some of the lengthy comments written by the audiophile crowd. You'll be tempted to think that they expected live concert quality sound from the thing.
He said "petroleum products".
The US is a net oil-product exporter: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
And I was originally talking about energy independence (oil in this case) when he started going on about the USA being a "net oil product exporter". WTF does that have to do with energy independence? Energy independence is when all of the oil consumed in your country comes from sources within your own country but perhaps definition of energy independence is different in the US from what it is over here in Europe (Nota Bene: I doubt it). A country can be a net metal products exporter and still be dependent on foreign suppliers of steel, i.e. not "metal independent".
Hydrogen doesn't just require "modifications to the gas mains", it requires a complete reconstruction, and it'd probably be a really dumb idea. Hydrogen embrittles metals. You put it in any sort of regular pipe, and your system will start springing leaks everywhere from distribution to end-user consumption. It also leaks through almost everything, but especially things not specifically designed for it. But it gets worse, because after it leaks it tends to pool in explosive mixtures under overhangs. Also, if you have multiple pipes running parallel, and there's hydrogen in the lower one but not in the upper one, part of the hydrogen leaking out of the lower pipe ends up in the upper pipe, where it can follow it to its destination and pools there. Beyond that, H2 has combustible fuel air mixtures way, way wider than of methane, 4-75% in air. And unlike methane, it can readily undergo deflagration-to-detonation transitions under STP conditions. NASA safety guidelines require any facility handling more than a dozen or so kilograms of hydrogen to have a roof designed to be blown away in an explosion. And hydrogen ignites with a tenth the ignition energy of methane. We're used to fuels that require a visible, audible spark to ignite, but hydrogen ignites with the sort of tiny static or electrics discharges that you don't even see in everyday life; ordinary electronics are not designed to be safe in an environment where a combustible hydrogen mix might leak into.
Beyond that, producing hydrogen then burning it is a ridiculously wasteful approach. Even using it in a SOFC after producing it is still ridiculously wasteful. And it's also a very expensive process. Producing methane from atmospheric CO2, however, is so bad it makes even hydrogen look efficient by comparison.
Obviously, the efficient way to store electricity is batteries. Given DC and not too fast of a charge rate, li-ions, for example, can be over 99% efficient. But obviously the price for storage would be way too high. There's various cheaper techs on the market, including some forms of flow storage, with radically cheaper ones in development, and there's talk of using used EV batteries for grid storage; we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. Also far cheaper and more efficient (~75% net) than hydrogen production is pumped hydro, with or without a river present. Compressed air storage is relatively cheap, but inefficient (~10-30%); however there's some lab-scale attempts at isothermal storage which might get that signficantly higher.
Sometimes you see claims on hydrogen or compressed air production that are higher efficiency, but that's just PR flak; they get those numbers by assuming you make use of the waste heat for some other industry that would otherwise have to burning something to produce said head. But you can say that about every system on earth, because everything has waste heat. The number that matters is how efficiently you can store your electricity.
Who's talking about replacing natural gas wit hydrogen? That is what you mean isn't it? I will admit that I'm no chemist nor an expert in the effects of hydrogen on pipe material. All I know is what I have read in the energy industry journal I subscribe to. The idea as far as I understand it is to supplement compressed natural gas (CNG) with hydrogen. That's safe with minor modifications up to a mixture of about 20%. I remember reading somewhere that this has been field tested in Holland where they found that mixtures of up to 20% hydrogen and 80% CNG (by volume) could be treated almost identically to pure CNG. Excess energy from wind and solar plants goes to waste 100%. It does not matter that the process of using that energy to create hydrogen using from that SNG is wasteful, at least the excess energy is not going completely to waste the only issue is whether or not it can be done economically. Making P2G economical is a big issue and It won't be easy but then if it was easy everybody would be doing it. And I'm not quite sure where you are going with that Battery idea, the thought here is to store thousands of gigawatt hours of energy (the current German Gas storage capacity is 200,000 GWh) and that would require one massive battery.
Also, there is now a strategic security/economical/political dimension to the energy transition for Germany much like there is for the USA concerning Oil independence that has only been reinforced by the Ukraine crisis.
Two things:
1) The USA is a net exporter of petroleum products (we import some oil, but export more refined petroleum products than the oil we import makes) these days.
That's news to me.... a net oil exporter is somebody whose domestic production exceeds domestic consumption leaving a surplus to export. According to EIA statistics about 40% of the crude oil consumed in the USA in 2012 came from foreign sources:
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b...
According to this article the USA is on it's way to become a net gas exporter, it is already a net coal exporter but unlikely to be come a net crude oil exporter.
http://business.financialpost....
2) Increasing dependence on natural gas rather than coal by Germany makes them more vulnerable to things like the Ukraine situation.
They are planning to synthesize a natural gas substitute from hydrogen and CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere or collected off of decomposing biomass. How is that increasing dependence on Russian gas? If this pans out, and P2G is currently getting massive amounts of research money, the Germans will even be able to recycle their existing natural gas infrastructure for storage of excess energy. They'd at the very least be able significantly reduce eliminate Russia's importance as a gas supplier. The best case scenario would of course be to eliminate reliance on Russian gas since it is a significant a strategic liability.
It depends. Because of the increased usage of solar and wind, the grid needs more upgrades, and part of the consumer bill goes to such investments. Also, government taxes could go up.
And there's no problem with buying low and selling high, as long as they are not using unfair business practices to block competitors from doing the same thing.
There are and always will be people who notice the most minute increase in electricity or gasoline prices but think nothing of spending a fortune on, say, cigarettes, holidays, restoring a classic car, buying a caravan or keeping a bunch of pets but the original poster nevertheless has a point. A disproportionate amount of the costs of the energy transition has been offloaded on German consumers. The argument has been that this is being done to save jobs, keep industry competitive, blah, blah, blah..... While the proportion of energy costs in the average household budget may be fairly low it is still unfair to make the consumer pay more than his/her share.
In what year is it predicted that Germany will generate fewer kWh of power from coal than it did in, say, 2005? Will we have to wait until 2050 or something for this long-promised decrease?
I don't think anybody can give you am exact date on when coal power will be phased out but the energy transition effort enjoys fairly broad support among the German public even if it is expensive so I expect it will continue. Also, there is now a strategic security/economical/political dimension to the energy transition for Germany much like there is for the USA concerning Oil independence that has only been reinforced by the Ukraine crisis. The Germans also tend to think in terms of decades rather than fiscal quarters like many Americans seem to do. Germany has gone from renewables being 6.3 percent of the national total in 2000 to about 25 percent in the first half of 2012. That's an increase of about 20% in 12 years so if we are insanely optimistic and assume a linear progression they should be at 50% renewables in c.a. 2028-30. The future of the energy transition project depends on several factors (apart from politics and economic issues of course), chief among them are things like the speed and extent of the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, how the transition to wind and solar goes and perhaps most importantly the level of progress on projects to store excess energy. The last time I checked the Germans were planning to store energy initially by producing hydrogen which will be used to supplement natural gas (which in turn requires modifications to the gas mains) and how much success they have with projects to store energy by producing methane from carbon dioxide (which a Nature article I read claimed they plan to eventually scrub from the atmosphere) and the hydrogen generated with excess solar/wind energy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...). I seem to remember there are already a couple or so industrial scale P2G methane plants on line but they are still somewhat experimental.
It's ironic for you to cite Martin Niemöller in this context. Niemöller was initially a supporter of the Nazi regime, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. His statement is truthful: he only started opposing the Nazis when they started making his life difficult, and he really only broke with Nazi ideology after having been imprisoned for years. But his apology and subsequent pacifism themselves were opportunism, and he just moved on from supporting one form of totalitarianism to another one.
In fact, it's libertarians (classical liberals) that are warning you of the dangers of what's happening in Massachusetts and the rise of paramilitary-style police, and obviously getting quite a bit of abuse for it from the political establishment.
That was kind of my point, like the OP I was referring to the subset of present-day libertarians that advocate laissez-faire capitalism and who advocate this kind of crap. I cited Niemöller quite deliberately precisely because he cheered along with the Nazis until they got around to targeting him. His lesson was not to make his mistake, get off the band wagon, pour the Kool Aid down the gutter and slash the tyres on the band wagon and choke developments like this at birth. Laissez-faire capitalists will cheer along as these privatised forces morph into corporate armies until they them selves are being targeted.
What's wrong with that? Libertarians should love this - government slashed to bare minimum (or below) and everything in private hands. And as we know, *everything* is better when privately operated. Next step should be deregulating LEC market to enable true competition.
Like Martin Niemöller pointed out, nobody cares about things like this until they are being targeted themselves. I don't expect Libertarians to be any different.
steve balmer chair throwing is still there.
Give them some time, removing all the references to Steve and chair throwing is going to keep a few dozen Indian IT people busy for months.
"You have just been erased."
How does that
The announcement comes after reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt provide Internet services to the German parliament and other official entities.
Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq maybe that country would not now be on the cusp of becoming an Islamist Caliphate and 179 British soldiers would not have died what is increasingly looking like pointless deaths. At least the Germans had the good sense to see that the CIA 'evidence' for Iraqi WMDs was a steaming pile of horse manure and the strategic foresight to realize that intervention in Iraq would highly probably become the kind of FUBAR it currently is. Could it be that Germany (and France for that matter) learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and the cold war proxy conflicts that Britain might be well advised to take to heart?
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
