MOST current plasma TV models would be banned from sale in Australia as early as October next year under onerous mandatory energy requirements recommended in a report commissioned by the Federal Government.The consulting firm Digital CEnergy, which prepared the report for the Government's Australian Greenhouse Office, also recommends a second tier of even tougher restrictions that would then ban almost all current LCD models from the market in April 2011.
The last quote in the article is my favourite:
Jez Ford, editor of Sound & Image magazine, attended the consultation last week. He said manufacturers were concerned there would be too little time to respond with updated products."As a consumer I should be able to choose a superior product and not have it removed from the market just because it pulls an extra light bulb's worth of power, and so it's a consumer choice issue as well as just an unrealistic deadline issue," he said.
I agree, but with one condition. The problem is that we're using too much power. Let's limit everyone to X amount of power a day. Then, if someone wants to use that power to power their massive TV instead of cooling their food, that's entirely up to them.
Of course give someone a limit and they'll sit on it.
Wipe off 5...
I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.[...]
So we have media consumption experiences with no context (desktop media players) and an incredible, endless, emergent contextual experience where media consumption is a pain in the ass, illegal, or non-existent (the Web). FIX IT. Your fans are pouring their music-loving hearts into blogs, Wikipedia, etc and what tools have you given them to work with? Not much, unfortunately.
Ten years ago (almost) the first thing I thought when music-on-the-web came to my notice was how awesome it will be to have music playing, and on the same screen see details on the song playing. Who recorded it? Where? When? Who's playing? What do the band think of the song now?
In 1999 bandwidth was such that this really wasn't possible. The quality of the audio sucked and the syncing was wonky. These days it's trivial with Flash audio players controlling HTML.
If you let them, the fans will do it all for you...
No sale.