Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Scramjet, Golden Ears, Preciousness
Everything that rises must come down under. spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "The Australian trial of a scramjet engine has fizzed. 'The experiment at the Department of Defence's Woomera Prohibited Area, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, was not successful because the [United States-supplied] rocket experienced flight anomalies prior to the scramjet experiment,' an analysis of what went wrong says. Not to worry, another test is tentatively scheduled for next week, assuming researchers can work out what went wrong with this one on the way up."
Not to be confused with this previous scramjet test, also unsuccessful.
Ah, much better, I thought you were being unreasonable there for a minute. After Jamie drew attention to it in a Slashdot piece on Saturday, SafeSurf changed their legislative proposal. In Jamie's words, "Woo!"
That's not all he said, of course: "Please note that, now, they ONLY want to fine you thousands of dollars for failing to label anything you write that is harmful to an 8-year-old. What a relief! "The penalty for a first offense of failing to label or mislabeling material harmful to minors shall be limited to a fine of under five thousand dollars."
Bennett Haselton passed on this commentary as well:
"If you go to http://www.safesurf.com/online.htm in Netscape and "View Document Info", it shows it was last modified on October 29, 2001. (This function doesn't work in IE.)The original OCPA is [at google]. SafeSurf apparently removed this paragraph from section 6:
Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.and replaced it with:Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.and then added three new paragraphs listing more exemptions from this rule."
Can you hear that pea through the mattresses? For the audio objectivists, a good update to CmdrTaco's recent MP3 v. Ogg Vorbis inquiry: E1ven writes: "Everyone is always arguing about whether Vorbis sounds better than MP3, or vice versa. Here is your chance to see who is right! ff123 is doing a set of Blind Listening tests and could use your help. The more ears the better!"
How do they define harm in things like this? Is a description of what marijuana is count as harm? How about descriptions of the biological functions of humans, such as menstruation? They teach that in school, yet some bible thumpers might consider that to be harmfull. So its up to the parents to decide. So if I am a christian mother and I feel my child was harmed by reading Islamic scripture, thus poluting their pure religious experience, I can sue under these provisions?????
I sure hate living in a police state. Do you?
whats going on with the land of the free? we're always told about the fact that in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
maybe in the economic downturn we can't afford to wait before you're guilty.
I must be missing something, because without proof of harm, the kids wouldn't even need to see it! make money via surfing the web, I guess the offers were true...
Since Ogg Vorbis got another mention, it may be worth mentioning that Croteam, creators of the surprise hit 3D shooter, Serious Sam, have announced that their upcoming sequel will have its music encoded using Ogg Vorbis, replacing MP3. Writes Alen Ladavac, "We've tried encoding all the music for SE with Oggdrop at 64kbps and the quality was perfect even at such low bitrate."
I submitted this to Slashdot two weeks ago, and it was rejected. (Hence, "Sore Loser" in the title.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Having been in school for many years, I would think many things that people would come across in school would be more harmful than a lot of the things that can be found on the net. Yes, pr0n would fall under the category of harmful (and no, its one of the few that you're not exposed to in public school). For example, my social studies teacher showed a movie about the Civil War (I want to say "Glory" was the title.), but anyway, she got yelled at by many parents because it contained graphic images of a soldier getting his head blown up.
Welcome to the real world kiddies, violence happens and there isn't ANYTHING that you can do to stop it. I don't agree with the bill, as it would allow too many oo-they-have-money-so-lets-sue-them parents to take internet sites to court. And, it is especially bad for the children. When they get out to the real world, their parents won't be there anymore to sheild their eyes from the horrors of reality. Better let them see it while you're still there to explain it, than let them get smacked upside the head with reality when they turn 18 and/or go to college.
Honestly, this falls under the category of "political correctness." IMO, the world could use more political incorrectness. Also, by making it an offense to publish "harmful" material, it would drive more and more web hosting out of the USA, such that they couldn't be punished under that bill. In this economy and the shaky tech market, the last thing we need is to drive more business away from the USA.
We have freedom of speech? Not if any laws like these go into effect.
<SARCASM> (Note: Companies may like to check into the constitution before proposing legislation) </SARCASM>
Whats to stop these publishers from directing people to other subdomains that aren't labeled? This sounds like a rather large loophole in their policy. I guess if I ran a pr0n site I could label the index page, advertise only unlabeled subdomains and be protected from lawsuits. Sounds like the geniuses at SafeSurf did it again!
Bobuhabu
That's a pretty crappy test criteria-- limiting the input to 128kbit/sec-- for those of us itnerested in achieving as-close-to-CD-as-possible performance from our compressed music.
I don't claim to have golden ears, but I can distinctly hear the difference between different playback engines (example; on a Mac, the Audion playback engine is considerable better sounding than iTunes) and different encoding engines with nearly the same settings (LAME is, by far and away, the best I have heard yet).
In any case, it would be useful to have an expanded test that includes higher bitrates for those that listen to tunes on something other than crappy computer speakers.
Ogg vs. LAME article
An excellent Ars article that only covers differences between mp3 encoders.
MP3 tech has a bunch of useful resources.
One of the best sites around, r3mix offers a wealth of technical information, some very well executed scientific and listening tests, and a section that destroys a lot of the myths surrounding mp3s.
As long as they pass the PCGA (Protection of Children from Government Act) at the same time. Here's my proposed text for the PCGA:
What do you think? Unanimous support in Congress?
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
...that being that some bright fellow here on Slashdot (sadly, I can't find the original post) observed that, should this bill pass, he'd promptly sue SafeSurf for the harm their online material (ie any blocklist they publish) had done to his daughter! A brilliant post, that... pity they (apparently) read it.
To my surprise, they responded later the same day:
OK, sounds good. I responded to Ray as follows (two days ago), but have not yet received a reply:
Make of this what you will. I still have not seen the "open and truthful" list of websites that Safesurf's software blocks.
Edith Keeler Must Die
What I want to know is whether there are any portable Ogg players out there yet? Can someone point me to one? I've got a whole music collection in MP3 that I'm ready to re-encode from CD into OGG format as soon as I can get a portable player.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
While the audio test they're doing is good for "decent" audio, which is what Vorbis excels at, it's not a good test for what most of us are interested in - high (so-called "archival") quality audio compression. To do this testing LAME's -abr 134 vs. Vorbis's 128kbps is simply laughable; the current standards for LAME encoding are usually using either the "--r3mix" command line (as defined by www.r3mix.net) or the "--dm-preset standard" command-line. These typically average around 200-250kbps for rock music, and so far are indistinguishable from CD quality in the tests that have been done.
What would be interesting is if Vorbis can achieve these same results at lower bitrates; then I would agree it's better. If it can beat mp3 at 128kbps, then that's nice, but it's pretty irrelevant to me if it still sounds like crap (just not *as* crappy).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's worth noting that Scramjets have no real civilian use.
Even the Passenger aircraft is a red herring, once you've boosted to Mach 8 why stay in the atmosphere?
Why not do a sub-orbital shot? be much quicker and easier.
Scramjets may get used for reconnaisance, but the only obvious application is super-fast cruise missiles, not bound by ballistic missile treaties.
Yes it's cool whizz-bang tech
But only in the same way an H-Bomb is.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
If SafeSurf somehow manages to get a politician's ear on this, I say that every web designer out there label ALL of their pages as obscene. This would basically nullify their software's effectiveness and have the side benefit of minimising suits against web designers under the premises of their proposal. At the very least, it'll put a gaping hole in the argument that their software should be required and isn't a form of censorship. I especially like how they are preaching voluntary labeling in their FAQ while proposing a compulsory system in that document. Truly classic...
What they seem to forget is that the existing ratings schemes (motion pictures, music, and video games) are largely voluntary and industry driven. The only penalties that are imposed on products in those markets are that some stores may not carry their product if they aren't labeled. What SafeSurf wants is a mandatory rating by law, which is just ridiculous, especially given the international nature of the net.
The Safesurf MAPS rant complains about them stealth-blocking websites that may contain important information, and people won't know they're being censored. But they've got the technology wrong: MAPS doesn't block websites - they provide tools that are normally used for blocking emails and furthermore, sites that implement MAPS tools properly normally provide bouncegrams telling people they block how and why their email was rejected, so they can fix their problems. The only way a company like Safesurf would be "censored" by a MAPS-using mailbox service would be if they sent out email to people - and since they'd find out they had a problem the first time they tried to send mail, they could put a notice on their website about it and tell people who want followup communications from them how to contact them.
Furthermore, Safesurf's web site violates Safesurf's proposed law creating (and mixing up) civil and criminal penalties and tort liability for mislabeling or failing to label web sites. Their original proposal was more aggressive than their current one, but it still doesn't require any actual harm to any actual child, as long as there are graphic images on the site (logos and decorations may not be harmful, but they're graphics, so we're covered there.) Plaintiffs can sue if the site doesn't provide appropriate ratings labels on material severe enough to be potentially harmful to children. Certainly, any proposal to throw people in jail for what they write on the net is pretty severe, and could cause harm to children who write things without labeling them if such a law were passed, and telling kids that people want to do that kind of harm to them just for what they write, even if there's no law passed, can also be pretty scary. www.safesurf.com's label says
"CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'"
which if you look it up on the explanatory web site doesn't have any indication of what the rating means. It does point to a site that tells you how to download a ".rat" file into your browser, and if you open up that file with a text editor instead of installing it, the file indicates something about "all ages", but doesn't indicate whether it's appropriate or inappropriate for all ages, so that a web browser could be set to do the appropriate thing with it, though it clearly implies that the really scary material complained about above should be appropriate for all ages....
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-services" has more PICS explanations.
Update - their web page indicates that MAPS has now unblocked them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lately I've been getting the impression that overzealous censorship like this is an adult manifestation of fear of cooties.
That's a beautiful sentence, and it needs to get some seriously wide exposure. It manages to convey the perfect sense of contempt that is the only fitting response to the "morality" brigade's attitudes.
As I recall, through a lot of these discussions, e.g., on some of the reports from town-hall meetings regarding library-censorship proposals, a lot of us have been frustrated with trying to articulate this. Not just pointing out how unworkable censorware is from a technical standpoint (true, but reducing the argument that far is granting too much). Not even just arguing for the importance of freedom (also a vitally important argument to make, of course). But attacking the fundamental immaturity of attitudes that lies behind all of their motives.
Why would they even want to do this? Even assuming it were technically possible (which it isn't), and granting that it were important enough to justify giving up so much freedom (which I don't) -- what kind of priorities does this indicate? Why, given all the really horrible things things in the world to which kids' "fragile litle minds" are exposed, not to even get started on the things that threaten them physically, would parents choose this to focus so much attention on?
I can only think that it's because the parents aren't really grown up themselves in terms of being comfortable with sexuality, and they can't even begin to contemplate it for their kids. They live in absolute dread of the day they'll have to give the "birds and bees" talk and will lash out at anything that threatens to hasten that day.
Maybe this kind of ridicule -- attributing the censors' fears to a failure to outgrow something as childish as "fear of cooties" -- could be an effective way to drive the point across in a pulic forum.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Just a general note on those scramjet tests. The guy in charge of these (Allan Paull) is my PhD supervisor, and I've been working in this area for about 4 years, though I'm not working on this project (I'm in Germany at the moment).
1. The tests were a failure in that supersonic combustion did not happen- That is, the engine operated as a ramjet rather than a scramjet. The first thought is that this was caused by the failure of the rocket turning manoeuvre, so that the air was entering the engine at a large angle from the main axis of the engine. Since the engine used has been tested up to 4 degrees of deviation, the angle was probably more than 4 degrees. The rocket needs to be turned so that it is facing downwards with the engine on the front. It should be able to do this due to the atmospheric pressure, but it turns out that it doesn't happen quickly enough. The rocket is a spin-stabilised type (Where the whole rocket spins, rather than have a separate gyroscope), and this means that the turning manoeuvre is a difficult problem in 3-D geometry.
2. Generally speaking, nobody (That I've heard of) in the scientific world is seriously looking at scramjets for a passenger plane. Amongst other thing, rockets have an unacceptable failure rate for general civilian flight.
3. The main proposal that I've heard is for a lifter of payloads in the one tonne range to near earth orbits. For that, scramjets should be cheaper than rockets. For the large payloads, rockets are still cheaper. There is a slight advantage with scramjets in that since most of the acceleration is done horizontally in the atmosphere, that a polar orbit is no more difficult to achieve than one on the equatorial plane.
4. In addition, though I'm sure there is research into scramjets for missiles (Of course it's not published in the open literature), there's not really a burning need to build faster missiles, since nobody is building faster planes or faster houses. Note also, that due to the air inlets, that a scramjet missile is inherently less stealthy than a rocket missile.
5. Somebody mentioned some tests in Russia. If these are the CIAM/NASA tests, then the papers I've read show all three flights operating primarily, in subsonic combustion mode. As ramjets.
6. One good reason for working in this field is because it is a discipline which brings together a lot of things that are also of use elsewhere. A lot of work is done on understanding the basic science, which feeds back into other areas. It's not really a field with a purely practical thrust at present, due to a continuing problem of not really understanding the aerodynamics at these speeds.
7. Thus the experiment which just failed was never really meant to be a working engine, but more a simplified example to use as a calibration for wind tunnels, and computer codes.
8. They used the terrier-orion rockets because Astrotech offered two of them for free. They have to get two tests under their belt before they can be generally licensed for testing in Australia. C/F new launch port at Christmas Island.
That's about all I can think of for the moment. The URL for the Hyshot project is:
http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/
5.0 = imperceptible (not perceptible)
4.0 = perceptible but not annoying
3.0 = slightly annoying
2.0 = annoying
1.0 = very annoying
They left out some important options. For example:
0.0 = extremely annoying, but imperceptible
-1.0 = the music is annoying
-2.0 = how do I compile the decoder again?
But it reminds me of...
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
I have a better idea. Why not consider all internet content as inappropriate for children unless otherwise indicated. Then only go after the people who say their content is safe for children but isn't.
This has always struck me as ideal. If you don't like how pornography is defined in your community, find a new one. There will always be a place for the puritans and the purient.
The Internet is great for that sort of thing. Whatever you want, you can find, from DADV to wwjd.org. Except that, lacking any boundaries at all, it's ridiculously easy to stumble into other communities, where you aren't a member, and aren't comfortable.
A great many people, (and I certainly don't think Slashdotters are immune) react to areas of the public Internet they don't like with anger, fear and loathing. I'm especially impressed by the irony of seeing these two sentiments in the same page (which is possibly the only justification for this Slashback):
- Evil people want to eliminate that which they don't understand.
- These tests are bogus! I encode things at far more than 128b/s!
I take away the feeling that on the one hand we recognize that the correct response to information for which one isn't the audience is to ignore it, but we still resent the idea that there is information for which we aren't the audience.Much as we might despise them, the MPAA solved a similar problem to this decades ago with a nifty little idea called "self-regulation." Granted the movie rating system isn't very descriptive (the US TV ratings are much more descriptive; isn't it great to see if any Adult Content:Nudity is on?)
Yes, Safeweb is going at this in an utterly braindead way. But, rating based web regulation would cope with much of the "For The Children" acts facing the US and the world at large. It seems to me that either a rating system (technically already existant) needs to be generally adopted, and browsers support it by default, even treating Unrated paged as if they were Drugs-Sex-Dismemberment-Adult-Themes, and allowing a simple browser level config. (I can see it now, as part of the Internet Setup Wizard: "How do you feel about pornography?"), or it should be included in the next batch of web standards, with the default of "horribly awful" being specified.
The pressure, then (at the cost of the collective headache of web designers everywhere) is to rate your site appropriately, because unrated sites will have a smaller audience (similar to the reasoning that leads to websites supporting IE first). But a lax rating will lead to complaints, and so on. Besides, imagine google searches by rating. It's in my interest to describe my site appropriately, since it'll bring the audience that wants my services, (At google picture: "rating:porn=MAX"). In general, I tend to see ratings not as censorship, but as a screen, because it takes away the "for the kids" argument of censors. You can say "well, it can be rated unsuitable" and demonstrate that parents can protect their children using ratings, rather than censorship.
Then they have to admit that they want to force everyone to live by their values, and that's just not in the realm of acceptability these days.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl