Read this article if you want more perspective.

I can understand the motivations behind such a proposal, but the end result is that the most serious offendors will remain undetected, as they will already be hiding their activities. Those on the margins, who currently get caught, will be driven into the same behaviour as the serious offendors, and their activities will also become obfuscated.

So my view is that this type of legislation will back fire, and end up reducing the ability of law enforcement to catch offendors.

The Australian government is talking about introducing an Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), in essence to try and incentivise companies to go green.  Taxes, and then handouts will in theory minimise the family impact of the ETS.

What I don’t get is why people don’t bite off a much simpler solution, and directly tackle the carbon emissions. Raise revenue from all Carbon production, and then to reduce the corporate impact, invest the proceeds from the tax in identifying the biggest CO2 emitters, and then fixing them.

So let’s look back at our Yallourn example from earlier. The owners of the Yallourn Power Plant are saying they can convert the Brown Coal power plant to Natural Gas, for a total cost of $2.5 Billion, and result in a 75% reduction in emissions. Let’s for the sake of simplicity assume Hazlewood is the same. For $5Billion dollars we can eliminate 4.5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions.

Why wouldn’t the goverment just subsidies that conversion, and bring it forward? Or why not just pay for it outright? Sure the price of electricity is going to rise, and probably by 20%. It will probably do the same under an ETS also, but with this solution we would actually make a big dent in the problem.

It seems to me that all the politicians are looking for elegant solutions, when it may well just be easier to throw money at fixing the biggest emitters.

• Movie Theatre – new release film $12
• QuickFlix or Bigpond – 2 DVD’s per month for $10
• Itunes – Buy $25, Rent $6
• Local Video Store – Rent $7-$9

I would contend that people are downloading movies illeglaly because the legitimate pricing is unacceptable.  What I don’t get is why $12 at the cinema is not the baseline? Sure you can watch it multiple times, and share it with your mates, but is it really worth $30? I wonder what  would happen to piracy rates if you could buy digital content to keep (without DRM) for $10 and rent them for $3 (with DRM obviously)?

Would people be more comfortable renting something for $3, and getting fast, safe, and legal access to a movie? Or what about an “all you can eat” plan? $50 a year for as many rentals as you want, and $200 a year for download to own? In Australia people will be limited by their download caps anyway. Maybe the movie companies could host their films, and earn payment from the internet companies for content serving? 

The Movie industry is now where the music industry was 10 years ago. They need to get the digital model right now, one that is consumer friendly, and profitable. If they don’t, they only stand to lose, as rampant piracy becomes endemic.

I am not sure why Sony didn’t make it a pre-requisite to attempt playing the minis, but there you go. A confusing error solved.

Find the MAC address for your PS3.

Create a new String value called FriendlyName

In the vlaue give it a name.

Simple

On the contrary, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you would think. To start with, I purchased a new 500gb hard drive. Connect it all up, and follow the instructions under repair.  Choose Complete System retore… but the new Hard Drive is not visible.

At this point you can close down the repair console, and go and choose to do a new install. When you do this you can partition and format a disk. Cancel the install, and go back to the repair menu, and the drive is not visible.

So you reboot, and choose repair and restore again, and this time it should work . Ok, the drive is visible, tick, and curiously the partition and format box is greyed out.  No sweat, but then the restore fails with an error and returns yo uto the repair menu.

Can’t hurt to try for a fourth time, so I choose a complete restore again, and this time the partition and format option is unticked and not greyed out. And the restore works.

Time for a new feature Microsoft, called pick a Hard Drive to restore to, and partition it, format it, and restore to it without any stress.

If you have had a similar issue let me know.

The campaign by fifth leg is called “Operation Kerplonk” .

The most original wine marketing campaign for 2009 so far.

So I am going to try it again, but with different software.

People have recommended XXCLONE, but this doesn’t work with Vista
People have recommended ACRONIS true image, but this costs money

So I kept searching, and I found the new Seagate DiscWizardedfa which is based on Acronis, but is free. So if you need to copy your entire HDD ot a new one, you should consider giving this a try.  The new HDD is up and running again. Fingers crossed it stays working.