DRM was never Apple's fault. DRM was the fault of the music industry who panicked as soon as the word 'internet' was branded around as the new way of distributing music. Apple had to take the tough business decision to go with them.
But most music you now download on iTunes is DRM free. And there was always the option of burning a disc in iTunes from files that were DRM protected, and then re-ripping them back into your PC. Not many people realise that.
That speech is probably the most defining moment of Steve's entire career. It even transcends what he did for Apple.
Because the message is that we are all potential Steve Jobs, all waiting to happen. Apple haven't really lost their leader,
they've simply gained and spawned a whole load of further Steves! It will be really exciting to watch all their products develop over the next few decades, as it will the offshoots of all those who have been touched by Steve Jobs' wonderful charisma.
This speech is for the entire of humanity, and it's wonderful, as there are far too many in the world who think
humanity is overrated, that there are far too many humans on the planet. I don't think there are enough! And if we
all stare death in the face (which we all will have to sooner or later), we too, all of us, could change and improve humanity
for the better.
Steve,
As a designer, a photographer and a musician, I will miss you. But let's not all get all sad now. Let's remember you for the inspiration that you were. This is a great video I just found on YouTube that for me sums up what a visionary you were.
R.I.P. Steve. 
[flash=425,344:1jrun4gr]http://www.youtube.com/v/rtT9N9L_4-w?s=1&hl=en_GB&fs=1&&[/flash:1jrun4gr]
@roger said:
He should have dedicated sprayers.
"Dedicated sprayers"? That's preposterous! To let a dishwasher clean a plate efficiently, it's advisable to scrub it in the first place. You can have "dedicated sprayers" is somewhere like the desert, but in a city where the dust is mixed usually with soot of some kind, the dust is greasy, so you need more than just some sprayer hitting the glass, and the only way around that is to get up and do the work manually. Do you really expect everyone to do this? 
@roger said:
@tfdesign said:
err...run that past me again....? "Wash his car"?
what an absurd analogy! Where's the connection?
Hmmmm. The analogy does not seem the least bit absurd to me. If the man has driven his car for years, he should have noticed the need to clean his windshield once or twice a week so he can see through the glass. Now he installs glass solar panels on the roof and is surprised by the need to rinse them. I am assuming he is an idiot. In fact, the photo of his wife climbing a ladder to hose them has me convinced. He should have dedicated sprayers.
Oh come on! You don't buy a car because you know it runs on solar power? Car's run on petrol. Some even run on electricity, but that electricity is not provided by the sun!? Why then should you be bothered to clean your car if you know perfectly well that cleaning it will do bog all to improve its performance?
@roger said:
All power is nuclear if you trace it back to its source. I just don't see the advantage of centralized power generation, when solar, wind and tidal are so abundant.
Solar is not expensive, it is just over-priced while we go through the dark ages of nuclear-based petroleum.
It's only inexpensive if you can afford it. Those on high incomes, or with lots of savings can, perhaps those who've vested in property too? Many however, can't. And only those who are loaded would be happy to invest the £12,000 or so to have the thing installed on their roof! And for what? 4kW of power at best- when it's sunny that is (not at night- and less…….)
@roger said:
Have you ever heard the argument about overcast days and it being dark at night as an argument against solar.
Yes, and it's a sound as well as valid argument. Where do you store nightime electricity? 'Eco-batteries' do exist, but in order to power hospitals and city centres, you need an awful lot of them, all which still come as a great cost to the environment. Batteries also need replacing, even if they are later recycled for less energy intensive use.
@roger said:
What is petroleum other than decayed plant material. Those plants were grown by solar energy and that energy was stored in the oil. And that solar energy came from our primary nuclear generating station which is the sun. So oil is a battery made of nuclear/solar generated biomass.
That's a very strange way of looking at it. Only someone from an alternative energy background would come up with an argument like that! This argument would be fine if your heart would beat at the speed of light and 1 year would equal one second. Then we could perhaps reap the benefits of plants and animals that have decayed over millions of years. But life, as you know doesn't travel at that pace, and we need to be realistic, and certainly not backward thinking. Personally I'd rather have a controlled nuclear reaction that will produce enough heat to power my stove to cook my morning bacon, eggs, brew my tea and heat my shower, and everybody else's breakfast and shower down the remainder of my avenue, not to mention the rest of the city!
@roger said:
In ten years we will go from 12 to 20 percent solar efficiency to near 80 percent efficiency. We have the knowledge and basic technology and the time lag is just a function of going through the phase of engineering refinement.
But scientists were saying this 40 years ago! The technology is still only about 20% efficient. Where is this 'wonder technology'? I grew up on a steady diet of Practical Electronics, Elektor and Electronics Today International. I read them religiously! Sure, when PV technology reaches 80+%, I'll be more interested, but until then, what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Freeze? Take a step back into the dark ages? No thanks!
@roger said:
The length of the lag will be moderated by the roadblocks raised by political conservatism. However, conservatism will fall harder than the Berlin wall as the floodgates of pent up energy demand and the rising price of oil collide. May not happen in my life time, but it could also happen in less than 10 years.
The price of oil hasn't risen because of the lack of oil. The price of oil is rising because of price speculation, just like the rise in the value of property, and more recently, food. Oil sits in tankers in the docks and is drip fed to us until the demand becomes so great, the price has to rise, and rise further. Another barrel is released and the price goes up again.
As for Conservatism? I consider the current shift to environmentalism 'the new conservatism'. Conservatism is about wanting to regress, not progress. If going forward means a short but serious impact on the environment, because essentially I put humanity before the environment, this would be a good thing. We've done this before. Why not do it again? Essentially conservatism doesn't really exist any more. There is only progression or regression (however you see it; making furniture from plastic bottles, or doing it properly by manufacturing products on a large scale for the use of everyone, so we don't need to 'roll our own', freeing up more time to spend with our children and families). Putting solar panels on top of one's house is not only elitist (a bit like wearing the Burqa), it's also regressive, because essentially it is just another excuse for energy companies not to invest in new technology, to build better and safer plants using technology discovered during 'the dark ages' of nuclear development, and to pass any profits, reaped from government subsidy handouts to be shared with its shareholders. Putting money before humanity is just plain wrong, and environmentalism plays right into the arms of this strategy.
This article from Spiked.org is written by Professor Colin McInnes of Strathclyde University who has written imo, a very convincing argument;
@unknownuser said:
While growing energy use and global trade have led to rapidly improving standards of living across much of the planet, some now advocate a return to localism as the means of production. For example, growing more of our own food in gardens, generating our own energy through roof-top wind turbines and crafting our own material goods are seen as the solution to a range of contemporary economic and environmental problems. Unfortunately, the result would be a socially regressive slide back towards subsistence and poverty. Subsistence, doing everything for oneself, is the very definition of poverty.
Regression to local modes of production is nothing new. During the Great Leap Forward in late-1950s China, individuals were required to produce steel in small community furnaces. The result was useless, poor-quality steel and a massive misallocation of economic resources. Even when failure was accepted by Mao himself, the scheme continued in order to raise awareness of national need.
The UK energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, harks back to such self-sufficiency when he invites us to return to localism in energy production. Big energy companies are the enemy, while home generation will apparently allow us to escape their tyranny. The idea of local energy production is superficially appealing. Like Mao’s backyard furnaces, it is widely seen as a means of raising awareness by connecting us personally to the means of production. While Huhne’s own department recognises that local energy production makes little economic sense, it notes that it can ‘empower individuals’ and be ‘used as a lever for behavioural change’. Some may well feel empowered, but the rest of us will be poorer for it.
For example, small domestic roof-mounted wind turbines at present enjoy a so-called ‘feed-in tariff’ of 34.5 pence per unit of electricity produced, guaranteed and index-linked against inflation for 25 years. However, the average spot-price for electricity production in 2009 was 3.8 pence per unit (for base load), so aspiring wind-turbine owners can in principle sell their spare energy to the rest of us for up to 10 times what it is actually worth. Even as a means of displacing carbon from energy production, this is as outrageously expensive as it is ineffective.
Read the remainder of the article here. It's a well written article, and worth reading
@roger said:
I read the report and it gets even funnier. He was afraid to remove grasshoppers and repair his inverter connection because it carried 350 volts DC.
It's not the voltage that kills you. Anyway, you should know this? A man who is so good with his engineering maths? 
err...run that past me again....? "Wash his car"? what an absurd analogy! Where's the connection?
@unknownuser said:
It was
and this video on the their blog a very optimistic one
Where are all the dead bodies? Have they hidden them? Apparently you get more carcinogens in your lungs everyday by frying sausages! (another myth perhaps?)
It's not the best of sites/blogs anyway. It's far too "too many people on the planet" malthusian nonsense for my liking. I just used their logo for my avatar.
Spiked.org is a far better, more balanced read.
@unknownuser said:
Seems your forum is a small forum by the number of members
It's not 'my' forum.
...and seeing the amount of hysteria around over nuclear (your silly scaremongering comments don't exactly help either do they? 
), what do you honestly expect?
I should point out that my avatar comes from this blog;
Nuclear Power? Yes Please Main page smiling atom free creative commons
(nuclearpoweryesplease.org)
It's a Swedish site, but is run by many nuclear physicists from around the world, and is worth a visit as a believer or not.
@unknownuser said:
Looks like someone shot tomcat
Don't worry Rich, he'll return in some shape or another...soon!
@unknownuser said:
You have a new provocative avatar
Yes, however it's no more provocative than this image below is it...?
Towards the end of the last century. my family drove around English roads and up and down motorways in our cars, with an English version of this sticker in the back window. I remember it was really cool to have this sticker- even more cool if you had the one that was in German! "Atomkraft? Nein Danke!". How provocative was that?! Britain was still very mistrusting of Germany in the 60's and 70's, and this sticker represented so much more than just being anti-nuclear. It represented moving forward. Britain united with the rest of Europe. A new age. That was my interpretation of it in those days anyway. I was only a boy.
We made such a fuss over nuclear in the 1960's and 1970's. A nuclear scientist, to the intellectual middle classes was someone to have deep mistrust in. We were fed terrible images of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all driven by a deep fear of the cold war- which was at its peak. My sister would for years have nuclear 'nightmares' and would often cry herself to sleep, because largely my parents were so prominent in the British anti-nuclear movement and would fill her head with propaganda. We actually almost had an all out nuclear war in 1979- but it wasn't a republican who was going to press that big strike button, it was sweet old democratic President Carter.
In the 1980's we demonstrated about the nuclear train. (Where did that go or end?). The nuclear train even crashed once. We're still here. There were mass demonstrations in Germany, where the green movement was strong. I was a member of the British green movement in the early 1980's. I was a young fallible 16 year old, who listened too much to others rather than making my own opinions. I became highly irritated with the green party, partially because they were doing there best to "kick out the anarchists" (but mainly because at heart, they were the vacuous upper middle-class). The greens found anarchists most distasteful, because essentially anarchists were marxists. Marxism didn't bode well with middle class green ideals. Then in about 1982/3 I was sitting outside a pub during local elections, when this guy walks up to me donning a badge of a green flower with an A in the middle of it. "I'm a green anarchist" he said. It was obvious that the greens had found kudos by posing as anarchists. And those who thought they were anarchists, but weren't and were actually middle class environmentalist posers, found a way to make themselves more acceptable to the dying left, the dregs of socialism, who were slowly watching the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a burgeoning green 'new age' growing, and those who didn't carry on with their Marxist roots (like myself), joined this new age movement. Suddenly the accolade of being labeled an "anarchist", a 'free thinker' and especially to pose as a 'green anarchist' was just too tempting, too elitist to ignore.
@unknownuser said:
When we installed the panels on our house roof I had the expectation that we could allow them to sit there without a worry or care and to generate electricity during daylight hours for the next twenty-five years when the guarantee runs out. That they ought to be exposed to unshaded sunlight was obvious, but my early discovery that in order to achieve maximum output they need also to be rinsed periodically was an early lesson in the maintenance of solar panels. I have been more recently surprised that these two points are not fully appreciated by everyone, not even some "experts."
A really interesting report from this guy in SolCal who thought PV cells on his roof was "a great idea"
@unknownuser said:
That is reasonnable?
@unknownuser said:
Onkalo, a colossal underground tomb being built in Finland, 500 metres below the earth – supposedly impervious to any event on the surface and far away from any possible earthquake danger: its purpose is to house thousands of tonnes of radioactive nuclear waste. Onkalo is the first storage site of its kind, and Madsen interviews the various technicians, scientists, legislators and commentators involved in this awe-inspiring project.
If managed correctly, yes. If it will help us power the research needed to eventually reward us with the holy grail that is nuclear fusion,as well as power our schools, homes and hospitals, then a great big resounding YES!
Everyone loves a disaster flick don't they? What makes this latest green sensationalist monstrosity any different from any other environmental disaster movie that has proceeded it? Asteroids and spacemen falling to earth? Paul Ehrlich and his merryband of merry Malthusians? Next you'll be telling us that we need better birth control, and that we should be encouraged not to have children.
None of this baloney in this video has ever come true.....
....but as soon as Orson Wells announced that aliens had arrived from mars, many fled for the hills. That's no joke.
[flash=560,349:2qppydzu]http://www.youtube.com/v/OfpSXI8_UpY?version=3[/flash:2qppydzu]
@unknownuser said:
What happen if a new big earth quake arrives in Japan?
We are dancing on the volcano
Well yes, you have a point there. But the origin of this thread wasn't about what happens after the next big one, it was about people in the west making a huge fuss about a crappy old nuclear power station- the exact same model that was also responsible for the 3 mile island accident in the USA (where again no one was killed), but more importantly, the emphasis made by hysterical liberals in the west while thousands of innocent men, women and children were either missing or dead in northern Japan.
For a nuclear power station that was only supposed to survive a wave that was only so many meters high, it fared pretty well. And the only death so far from within the power station has been one guy who apparently died from a heart attack. When you consider the ratio between this and what happened elsewhere, it wants to make me both puke and cry that we in the west can be so utterly selfish, as not really to be bothered about the real victims of this terrible catastrophe.
I think I've said far more than enough. 
Sensationalism in the working.
Listen to what they actually say at 3.48.
Then there is the blip of iodine isotope that is turning up in milk in nyc. Up goes the cnn headline at the bottom of the screen- it's official, its a crisis! God help us all! Preposterous. Have these journalists got anything better to do?
And it's our friendly well paid American Astrophysicist Michio Kaku. Looks Japanese, actually is an American. And a very good self publicist. I'm sure he wants to get in on the action, feel the love (get paid $$$ for doing the job of the people). It's all so darn cynical!
Like Kaku, I'm anti-nuclear war, but unlike Kaku I'm not anti-nuclear energy, if nuclear science is used for humanitarian purposes.
@marian said:
We offer freedom. Which should not be equated with happiness....but if people who now live in a society based on Sharia law, where women are sentenced to death or prison for the crime of being raped etc, won't be happier when they would be free then I think I may be part of another species.
Except we don't really offer 'freedom', only a western engineered version of 'democracy'. The answer lies in opening all borders right across the planet, where people can choose where they want to live or migrate to. If an Arab state wants sharia law, then fine (I too am not a fan, but some, including many women, feel that it is the way forward- for them). Those who oppose it can choose to live elsewhere.
@unknownuser said:
@tfdesign said:
After all these posts you have continued the attempt to belittle me with your fancy numbers
I'm sorry, but I'm under the distinct impression it's you that's doing the belittling. Please stop it.
You too mate. You make some inflammatory comment on this forum elsewhere about how bad Americans are. You are no better.
Please 'stop it'? Are you a moderator? Why should I stop being able to use reason in a debate? That notion is ridiculous. It also borders on the idea that the rules ("the science"?) are/is set in stone, and how dare anyone dare to challenge them/it. What sort of democracy is it we have if ideas cannot be raised as well as challenged?
