The trial itself was very bad, the prosecutors were ridiculous, they couldn't prove anything and they just showed they don't know anything about the technology.
Either way, this "assisting or facilitating copyright infringement" is ridiculous and if can hurt a lot of legitimate business.
For example, a music company could sue Twitter because they let people type lyrics on it or links to rapidshare files with music. Same for any other website that allows user submitted content.
If the don't win the appeal they still have the European Court Of Human Rights (http://www.echr.coe.int/echr/) to complain to, if they feel the trial and decision were not fair.
I know at least my country loses trials there and gets fined millions of euros all the time, because the judges pressured politically and some even corrupt.
In the worst case, that 1 year sentence will probably converted into probabation or something, because it's their first offense - I doubt they'd do more than 30 days in jail in the worst case.
There are two or three relatively long tubes of compressed air along the whole length of the car, under horizontal bars. The pressure of the air getting out generates electricity which turns the wheels. The tanks can be filled from a station in a couple of minutes and it costs about 1 dollar to fill the tanks. If equiped with a small air compressor the car can refill its tanks while running on the street.
Keep in mind it's just an aluminum or fiber glass box on wheels, it doesn't have any noise dampeners, exhaust pipes, stuff that regular cars have so the noise level is quite high. It will probably purr like a regular diesel car when it's all done.
Even as it is right now, the noise is not that big. Listen to a Honda motorbike revving or an Audi/Ferrari sports car accelerating and you'll find this noise quite Ok.
These air cars are much more suitable, especially as they charge in minutes and, if equipped with a small compressor, they can charge themselves while going on the street.
I don't think electric would be a good idea, although it would be better than gas.
The taxis would need recharging quite often and batteries would soon lose their performance and would need to be replaced. That's a lot of lithium and other heavy metals which can be recycled but they do cost a lot.
A better alternative would be air powered cars, especially as current gas stations could be fitted easily with pressurized air pumps, filling the car's tanks in about 5-10 minutes, at the same time they are filled with regular fuel.
See this page or go directly to this design which looks quite OK for a taxi, having both air and petrol, with up to about 1000 miles of range (using both air or regular fuel).
The 13.000 euro price (about $17k) will most likely drop a lot if they get big orders - and who knows, maybe they'd be willing to create a start-up in US, with US employees.
An ISP would never switch if it means users will pay less, especially if they're monopoly. In other countries including mine companies actually offer cheaper and better plans from time to time, because there's competition.
I personally got upgraded at no additional cost from 1/128 to 3/256 to 6/512 and now I pay a bit more for 20/2 (about $20-25 a month) but I could have chosen 10/1 for the same price).
I'm saying ISPs should be forced by laws to offer internet plans just like utilities, phone companies, and so on, and that means a very low monthly subscription that covers the equipment given to the subscriber, billing costs and so on, and then payment by GB.
In a market without monopolies, the GB price would go low very fast; in a country like US laws and regulation will have to enforce a reasonable price for people, otherwise companies would just ask for 2$ for 1GB or something like that.
If this change causes congestion, it's ISPs responsibility to solve this problem and upgrade their capacity because they'll earn more money if people will be able to do more traffic, simple as that. They'll no longer be able to give unlimited connections and then lower their costs by shaping and filtering them to hell.
This works - You don't see cellphone companies limiting the number of phone calls people can make even though a cell (an antenna) can only support a limited number of calls at the same time. They just install another cell in that area with problems, because the costs of that antenna are small compared to the earnings they bring.
For example, if we all pay for 10GB total transfer per month, and all of us decided to watch hulu at the exact point in time, the ISP would face the same problems they are complaining from now and they cannot guarantee good service to the users.
Actually, the congestion problem happens only with some types of networks and this argument is brought up constantly because monopolies don't want to invest in better networks. There's no law saying you HAVE to use the same DSL or cable connections.
They can solve the problem anytime by bringing fiber to the premises or fiber to the home. Fiber to ethernet converters are cheap nowadays: link or link
In the case of an apartment building, they can just pull fiber to the basement and inject the signal into the cable network of that apartment building. Cable modems running on DOCSIS 3 can then be used easily. Or, you can add UTP cable to each apartment.
In the case of small houses, a fiber strand can go to one house and from that house it's possible to use UTP cable (up to 100 meters) in all directions.
Both solutions would give people up to 1gbps and there won't be any congestion issues as a 1gbps fiber link is relatively cheap.
This already happens with electricity and water companies already, each day, and they manage just fine.
People wake up at 7 AM, they turn on the lights, go and have a shower, maybe warm up a quick meal, then go to work.
When they come from work, maybe they have a shower, cook a meal, children do homework or play on computer/game consoles, parents sit down and watch TV, usually around 7-10 PM.
When sun goes down, the street lights come on and there's another spike in usage.
So you see, there are spikes of usage daily and they electricity and water companies are doing it just fine.
Surprisingly, they're usually even able to have enough electricity in the summer, when people turn on the air conditioning systems.
It's way easier for an ISP to increase capacity, in comparison to electricity or water.
If electricity usage increases the local power company will "borrow" or buy electricity from places where there's less need. It's very hard to actually build another dam or another power plant due to environment damages.
In comparison, an ISP makes a tunnel in the ground, inserts a plastic pipe, and shoves a fiber cable through that pipe.
If for some reason the capacity needs to be increased, they can just pull another fiber pair through the pipe.
Some of these pipes usually can take up to 200 tubes and each tube has about 60 fiber pairs or something like that - this is how they build these days a fiber optic network in the capital of my country, Romania, and the network will be leased to ISP companies when it's done.
Just like electricity, ISP companies can go around these capacity increases by building more Internet Exchange Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point and making agreements between them so that traffic that goes through such exchange points costs very little to them.
Also, for example, if Verizon decides to charge Comcast more, Comcast could make a deal with AT&T to route the traffic through them, so in essence Comcast buys cheaper traffic from AT&T, just like an electricity company would trade electricity on the market.
Both electricity and water utilities give you unlimited electricity and water, in the sense that if you want to, you can turn all lights in the house and all the water faucets and at the end of the month you pay the bill.
If lots of people would do this, the electricity company would power up a coal power plant or order some electricity from another region of the country. The water company would probably request for more water to be taken from a dam.
Both promise you by contract unlimited usage and live up to the promise.
In contrast, the ISP companies out there promise you unlimited usage, but when you actually try to use it, they limit you. It would be like trying to turn on two lights in the house and see each bulb dim or seeing the water pressure drop when you take a shower and someone washes dishes in the kitchen.
Now, after they promised you unlimited usage, they come in and say that because more people use the Internet they have to limit you to a certain amount of transfer.
This would be the equivalent of the electricity company saying that because more people buy plasma TV's you're now allowed to use lights in the house only until 9 PM.
The other problem is that the ISP is also in business with TV and they don't have reasons to give you better internet because they'd lose the TV business.
It's like being an electricity company which is also in the business of selling natural gas/heating oil and notices more people buy electric heaters, so they start to limit the amount of electricity used in houses because "we noticed the average person uses only this amount of transfer each month"
The ISP companies have a problem in that they made contracts for unlimited usage, for a fixed payment, unlike electricity and water companies.
I don't think people would complain if the ISP companies would change the plans from something like 75$ a month for 10 mbps unmetered, to something like 25$ subscription plus 1 cent for each GB transferred.
As 10mbps unmetered is about 3300GB of data, in the worst case the customer would pay 58$ ($25 + $33 in bandwidth costs). Just like phone call minutes, companies could offer plans with an amount of GB included, first 1000 GB less expensive than the rest or the reverse and so on...
In reality the customer would probably pay much less and this is the problem of the ISP companies, they'd get less money this way.
I think the solution to this would making a law that would consider an internet connection just like water and electricity.
I can rent right now a dedicated server in a datacenter with a 10mbps internet connection for $50 or a dedicated server on a 100mbps port with 2 TB of bandwidth allowance (that would be about 8mbps constant) for the same price.
So if a datacenter can give me that I expect the ISP to also be able to give me that, and if they advertised a plan, they should keep their promise and actually deliver.
If a ISP in Romania where I am can give me 20mbps download and 2 mbps upload at any time of day for about 20$ why shouldn't it be possible in US also?
1) read again, i was talking about h264. And depending how you look at it, even MP3/AAC is the highest quality right now, from quality/bitrate point of view.
2) I don't see the Main profile so useless. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264), the difference between Main and High are Monochrome support (useless for streaming videos, 8x8 vs. 4x4 Transform Adaptivity, Quantization Scaling Matrices and Separate Cb and Cr QP control. Only the two in the middle would bring better quality but at a decreased decoding performance.
Considering you'll encode the movies with very high quality Main profile settings in the first place but at pretty low bitrate (because you're streaming the video) the benefits the High profile would bring you would be very small.
3. YES. When you're going to stream a movie you're also going to watch it, probably in Full Screen, so your computer won't do anything else. 99% of the people will just watch ONE movie so Flash might just as well use 80% of the processor.
Keep in mind the processor usage is higher in window mode because it's not able to use hardware acceleration, because if it did other objects in the Flash would not be rendered over the video properly. In Full Screen, Flash uses hardware acceleration and the processor usage decreases, probably to around 10-15%.
flash is slow in window mode because it doesn't use video acceleration. in full screen it does so cpu usage is moot.
flash supports h264 playback and mp3/aac so it supports the latest video standard, highest quality possible right now.
You can create content with a lot of software products out there and use maybe the best encoder possible for free, as it's open source.
With Silverlight you can only work with WMV or Microsoft technologies and you have to pay royalties and buy the video codec.
You're blocking yourself into a closed source standard which Microsoft may choose to drop at any time, without any real advantage (drm is not advantage because there are tools out there that strip the DRM)
Silverlight can slow your computer just as well as flash. Being a.net extension or whatever developers will be able to really abuse your system, much more easier than with Flash. You just don't see Silverlight out there because they don't care to code for it.
here's a tip for you. Open your silverlight player, run a movie. This one is decoded with hardware acceleration, with overlay mode and all the tricks possible to keep the cpu usage low. Now open another window and run another movie at the same time. That one will be decoded in software because you already use the hardware with the first movie. Now open a third movie and so on... you'll see the cpu go nuts.
I've just tested playing HD youTube movies at the same time on a Q6600 processor, all at stock. 40% with two movies, 45 with 3, 51 with 4, 65 with 5 movies and it started to stutter, maybe because i don't have enough bandwidth.
So I don't know, maybe you shouldn't build computers if you don't know how.. or something like that.
It plays just fine if you have a good video card. Another very exciting new feature in Flash Player 9 Update 3 is hardware scaling support for Flash Playerâ"which lends itself perfectly to enhancing the video playback experience of HD video in full screenâ"especially when you consider the size of HD 1080p video (1920 x 1080). The new hardware acceleration was not built solely for the new H.264 video capabilities. It also helps with larger On2 VP6 video files and the display of SWF content in general.
The lazy developers just need to use it well. Youtube has to think at the lots of Flash versions and the video quality of the videos they show sucks anyway. Just try Vimeo any time of the day with a HD movie. I've watched 720p content there with no problems on an old D805 processor.
Guam belongs to US so it's just another reason for US to sniff your traffic before it goes to Japan and Asia.
Tin foil hat aside, it's probably just easier that way and they probably can split the traffic at that location to go to US through one ocean cable and to Asian through another.
Don't worry. The government will will build the 100mbps pipes to premises but they'll sell it to companies which in turn will give you 1mbps with 10 GB monthly limit for 200 Australian dollars.
You wouldn't want them to compete with their own products now, would you...
Build a computer with a processor that has very low frequency, something like an AMD Sempron LE-1300.
It runs by default at 2300Mhz but you should be able to lower it to something like 1Ghz or maybe even lower, which will increase the compatibility with DOS (if needed and if there are any incompatibility) and it also means that the computer will run even without the fan running over the processor.
You can solve the power supply fan problems by buying a passively cooler power supply.
You could also get a SSD drive or maybe a cheap Flash to IDE/SATA adapter and use 1 or 2 GB compact Flash card for DOS.
Though you can simply create a virtual machine or even DosBox (if you don't need some complex printing functions)..
Most people here in Europe (well, at least in my country) have cellphones.
There are very cheap plans and prepaid cards and the 911 equivalent (112) works (in theory, never had the need to test) even without a plan or a SIM card in the phone, it should simply scan and use the first network for the emergency call.
At least in my country there are still problems with the 112 operators collaborating with the cellphone companies to determine very fast the location (the first is too lazy/slow to implement it and the second is too bureaucratic).
But anyways, if you're that sick or hurt to not be able to say where you are, you'll probably die in the 5-10 minutes it takes for police/firemen/ambulance to arrive:)
But back to the subject... I agree with what you say, I makes me angry to see the FBI just gathering all servers without thinking what businesses are affected by it.
And normally the police would have people hired and capable of creating images of the hard drives and returning the servers the next day, not keep them for evidence for months or years, until the trial is over. In this case, FBI didn't even research if that company still had servers in the datacenter. They just knew the company had at a certain time servers there so they took ALL the servers from the datacenter. This should be illegal and there should be a law that would allow contesting the warrant and refusing entry to the premises if it's too broad.
And they are paying more. They have a contract between the company and themselves and the company committed to giving them bandwidth. When the company made the deal with you they knew very well what they committed to offering so it's not my fault they feel they have too little profit these days. It's just corporate greediness.
They should not be allowed to change a contract so that it will be lower in capability as the current one.
How would you feel if the electricity company would give you a call tomorrow saying that most people in the neighborhood only turn the lights on between 8 pm and 11 pm so the current price you pay will be from now on enough for an average of four hours a day ?
Just like electricity, the Internet relies on the fact that not all people use the bandwidth at the same time. However, if there is demand, the electricity company will power another coal power station or buy more hydro. They won't suddenly tell you you're not allowed to have more than two lights running at the same time or stuff like that.
The ISP companies must do the same, if there is demand, just buy more bandwidth for the backend.
Sure, the analogy is not perfect because you pay a certain amount for each kW or power you use.
You have to look at it differently.
You can only consume so much electricity until the cables in your house start to burn or overheat. If you'd the maximum your fuses allow each month, let's say you'd pay 1000$.
This is just like an Internet contract, you should be able to use the maximum of 50mbps or whatever you have.
If you actually need more electricity, the electricity company will visit you and upgrade your fuse box and maybe give you some better thicker wires. This would be just like an upgrade to the internet connection.
Now from this perspective what's the difference? The difference is that for electricity you pay what you use, not that max, and for Internet you pay the max, no matter how much you use.
So if you have a 20mbps Comcast cable connection and you pay 100$ a month for it, by this reasoning you should pay 100 / ~6000 GB = $0.016 per GB. (keep in mind I don't even include the upload bandwidth) For the current Comcast 250GB limit, you'd pay 5$ each month.
The cable companies are actually making tons of money from you already so don't pity them.
I'd like to have ipv6 but UPC (Chello in NL and some parts of Europe) has no plans to support it at this time.
They did deploy new cable modems since a year ago because they planned ahead to switch to DOCSIS 3 and in a few months they will do that. Towards the end of the year they plan to go for 50 mbps down / 10mbps up.
I don't know if these cable modems do support ipv6 but if they don't they'll probably just bring fiber to the premises (the apartment building) and pull utp cable in each apartment) so this will probably be 2-4 years from now when the other ISPs in the area will offer much better speeds compared to what they'll offer.
Go rent (if you can) and watch the movie The Cheerleaders (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068364/)
It's a softcore movie about a highschool girl who joins a cheerleader team because she's the only one who's still virgin and hopes she'll find guys this way. Anyways, it's a parody, very comical.
If you're watching this movie, does this mean you're a pedophile, because you'll probably get turned on by the girls whore were all over eighteen when the movie was made but act as 14-16 year old girls?
Why a movie from 1973 can probably still be watched at home by any 18 years person but at the same time if you receive a picture from someone who may or may not be eighteen you suddenly possess child pornography?
Are you now supposed to keep track of all the girl in your school and their birth dates?
Why are you so stuck with this morality in the first place? There's no actual proof that these children are actually affected by what they've done. Maybe they're simply mature enough to understand what they do and they should be treated as adults, in which case it's not child pornography what they've done. After all, there are plenty of cases of emancipated children who are/were treated as adults even though they are/were not eighteen.
Maybe your state could actually hire some cops to stay at the traffic lights for a few days and take the drivers' license of the people doing that for something like a week, or 15 days.
After a few weeks of this, people will probably learn to wait at the red light.
The benefits of having red light cameras are far lower than the problems they cause (like people stopping suddenly at the light because they don't want to get tickets and causing crashes, the companies lowering the yellow light time to get more tickets and so on).
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They'll appeal, and they should win an appeal.
The trial itself was very bad, the prosecutors were ridiculous, they couldn't prove anything and they just showed they don't know anything about the technology.
Either way, this "assisting or facilitating copyright infringement" is ridiculous and if can hurt a lot of legitimate business.
For example, a music company could sue Twitter because they let people type lyrics on it or links to rapidshare files with music. Same for any other website that allows user submitted content.
If the don't win the appeal they still have the European Court Of Human Rights (http://www.echr.coe.int/echr/) to complain to, if they feel the trial and decision were not fair.
I know at least my country loses trials there and gets fined millions of euros all the time, because the judges pressured politically and some even corrupt.
In the worst case, that 1 year sentence will probably converted into probabation or something, because it's their first offense - I doubt they'd do more than 30 days in jail in the worst case.
There are two or three relatively long tubes of compressed air along the whole length of the car, under horizontal bars.
The pressure of the air getting out generates electricity which turns the wheels.
The tanks can be filled from a station in a couple of minutes and it costs about 1 dollar to fill the tanks.
If equiped with a small air compressor the car can refill its tanks while running on the street.
You can see how it works here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxcJ0fOrT0I
Keep in mind it's just an aluminum or fiber glass box on wheels, it doesn't have any noise dampeners, exhaust pipes, stuff that regular cars have so the noise level is quite high. It will probably purr like a regular diesel car when it's all done.
Even as it is right now, the noise is not that big. Listen to a Honda motorbike revving or an Audi/Ferrari sports car accelerating and you'll find this noise quite Ok.
These air cars are much more suitable, especially as they charge in minutes and, if equipped with a small compressor, they can charge themselves while going on the street.
I don't think electric would be a good idea, although it would be better than gas.
The taxis would need recharging quite often and batteries would soon lose their performance and would need to be replaced. That's a lot of lithium and other heavy metals which can be recycled but they do cost a lot.
A better alternative would be air powered cars, especially as current gas stations could be fitted easily with pressurized air pumps, filling the car's tanks in about 5-10 minutes, at the same time they are filled with regular fuel.
See this page or go directly to this design which looks quite OK for a taxi, having both air and petrol, with up to about 1000 miles of range (using both air or regular fuel).
The 13.000 euro price (about $17k) will most likely drop a lot if they get big orders - and who knows, maybe they'd be willing to create a start-up in US, with US employees.
An ISP would never switch if it means users will pay less, especially if they're monopoly. In other countries including mine companies actually offer cheaper and better plans from time to time, because there's competition.
I personally got upgraded at no additional cost from 1/128 to 3/256 to 6/512 and now I pay a bit more for 20/2 (about $20-25 a month) but I could have chosen 10/1 for the same price).
I'm saying ISPs should be forced by laws to offer internet plans just like utilities, phone companies, and so on, and that means a very low monthly subscription that covers the equipment given to the subscriber, billing costs and so on, and then payment by GB.
In a market without monopolies, the GB price would go low very fast; in a country like US laws and regulation will have to enforce a reasonable price for people, otherwise companies would just ask for 2$ for 1GB or something like that.
If this change causes congestion, it's ISPs responsibility to solve this problem and upgrade their capacity because they'll earn more money if people will be able to do more traffic, simple as that. They'll no longer be able to give unlimited connections and then lower their costs by shaping and filtering them to hell.
This works - You don't see cellphone companies limiting the number of phone calls people can make even though a cell (an antenna) can only support a limited number of calls at the same time. They just install another cell in that area with problems, because the costs of that antenna are small compared to the earnings they bring.
For example, if we all pay for 10GB total transfer per month, and all of us decided to watch hulu at the exact point in time, the ISP would face the same problems they are complaining from now and they cannot guarantee good service to the users.
Actually, the congestion problem happens only with some types of networks and this argument is brought up constantly because monopolies don't want to invest in better networks. There's no law saying you HAVE to use the same DSL or cable connections.
They can solve the problem anytime by bringing fiber to the premises or fiber to the home. Fiber to ethernet converters are cheap nowadays: link or link
In the case of an apartment building, they can just pull fiber to the basement and inject the signal into the cable network of that apartment building. Cable modems running on DOCSIS 3 can then be used easily. Or, you can add UTP cable to each apartment.
In the case of small houses, a fiber strand can go to one house and from that house it's possible to use UTP cable (up to 100 meters) in all directions.
Both solutions would give people up to 1gbps and there won't be any congestion issues as a 1gbps fiber link is relatively cheap.
This already happens with electricity and water companies already, each day, and they manage just fine.
People wake up at 7 AM, they turn on the lights, go and have a shower, maybe warm up a quick meal, then go to work.
When they come from work, maybe they have a shower, cook a meal, children do homework or play on computer/game consoles, parents sit down and watch TV, usually around 7-10 PM.
When sun goes down, the street lights come on and there's another spike in usage.
So you see, there are spikes of usage daily and they electricity and water companies are doing it just fine.
Surprisingly, they're usually even able to have enough electricity in the summer, when people turn on the air conditioning systems.
It's way easier for an ISP to increase capacity, in comparison to electricity or water.
If electricity usage increases the local power company will "borrow" or buy electricity from places where there's less need. It's very hard to actually build another dam or another power plant due to environment damages.
In comparison, an ISP makes a tunnel in the ground, inserts a plastic pipe, and shoves a fiber cable through that pipe.
If for some reason the capacity needs to be increased, they can just pull another fiber pair through the pipe.
Some of these pipes usually can take up to 200 tubes and each tube has about 60 fiber pairs or something like that - this is how they build these days a fiber optic network in the capital of my country, Romania, and the network will be leased to ISP companies when it's done.
Just like electricity, ISP companies can go around these capacity increases by building more Internet Exchange Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point and making agreements between them so that traffic that goes through such exchange points costs very little to them.
Also, for example, if Verizon decides to charge Comcast more, Comcast could make a deal with AT&T to route the traffic through them, so in essence Comcast buys cheaper traffic from AT&T, just like an electricity company would trade electricity on the market.
The analogies are not good.
Both electricity and water utilities give you unlimited electricity and water, in the sense that if you want to, you can turn all lights in the house and all the water faucets and at the end of the month you pay the bill.
If lots of people would do this, the electricity company would power up a coal power plant or order some electricity from another region of the country. The water company would probably request for more water to be taken from a dam.
Both promise you by contract unlimited usage and live up to the promise.
In contrast, the ISP companies out there promise you unlimited usage, but when you actually try to use it, they limit you. It would be like trying to turn on two lights in the house and see each bulb dim or seeing the water pressure drop when you take a shower and someone washes dishes in the kitchen.
Now, after they promised you unlimited usage, they come in and say that because more people use the Internet they have to limit you to a certain amount of transfer.
This would be the equivalent of the electricity company saying that because more people buy plasma TV's you're now allowed to use lights in the house only until 9 PM.
The other problem is that the ISP is also in business with TV and they don't have reasons to give you better internet because they'd lose the TV business.
It's like being an electricity company which is also in the business of selling natural gas/heating oil and notices more people buy electric heaters, so they start to limit the amount of electricity used in houses because "we noticed the average person uses only this amount of transfer each month"
The ISP companies have a problem in that they made contracts for unlimited usage, for a fixed payment, unlike electricity and water companies.
I don't think people would complain if the ISP companies would change the plans from something like 75$ a month for 10 mbps unmetered, to something like 25$ subscription plus 1 cent for each GB transferred.
As 10mbps unmetered is about 3300GB of data, in the worst case the customer would pay 58$ ($25 + $33 in bandwidth costs). Just like phone call minutes, companies could offer plans with an amount of GB included, first 1000 GB less expensive than the rest or the reverse and so on...
In reality the customer would probably pay much less and this is the problem of the ISP companies, they'd get less money this way.
I think the solution to this would making a law that would consider an internet connection just like water and electricity.
I can rent right now a dedicated server in a datacenter with a 10mbps internet connection for $50 or a dedicated server on a 100mbps port with 2 TB of bandwidth allowance (that would be about 8mbps constant) for the same price.
So if a datacenter can give me that I expect the ISP to also be able to give me that, and if they advertised a plan, they should keep their promise and actually deliver.
If a ISP in Romania where I am can give me 20mbps download and 2 mbps upload at any time of day for about 20$ why shouldn't it be possible in US also?
Here you go:
Part 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2RHBDwlH8c
Part 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsHAF39JxNs
Part 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BJu9GVU-w
Part 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JcOi6htmHM
Part 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9idglz0ANA
Part 6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWOAR6ZU0JA
9 min 10 sec each, last is 1 min 10 sec
1) read again, i was talking about h264. And depending how you look at it, even MP3/AAC is the highest quality right now, from quality/bitrate point of view.
2) I don't see the Main profile so useless. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264), the difference between Main and High are Monochrome support (useless for streaming videos, 8x8 vs. 4x4 Transform Adaptivity, Quantization Scaling Matrices and Separate Cb and Cr QP control. Only the two in the middle would bring better quality but at a decreased decoding performance.
Considering you'll encode the movies with very high quality Main profile settings in the first place but at pretty low bitrate (because you're streaming the video) the benefits the High profile would bring you would be very small.
3. YES. When you're going to stream a movie you're also going to watch it, probably in Full Screen, so your computer won't do anything else. 99% of the people will just watch ONE movie so Flash might just as well use 80% of the processor.
Keep in mind the processor usage is higher in window mode because it's not able to use hardware acceleration, because if it did other objects in the Flash would not be rendered over the video properly. In Full Screen, Flash uses hardware acceleration and the processor usage decreases, probably to around 10-15%.
flash is slow in window mode because it doesn't use video acceleration. in full screen it does so cpu usage is moot.
flash supports h264 playback and mp3/aac so it supports the latest video standard, highest quality possible right now.
You can create content with a lot of software products out there and use maybe the best encoder possible for free, as it's open source.
With Silverlight you can only work with WMV or Microsoft technologies and you have to pay royalties and buy the video codec.
You're blocking yourself into a closed source standard which Microsoft may choose to drop at any time, without any real advantage (drm is not advantage because there are tools out there that strip the DRM)
Silverlight can slow your computer just as well as flash. Being a .net extension or whatever developers will be able to really abuse your system, much more easier than with Flash. You just don't see Silverlight out there because they don't care to code for it.
here's a tip for you. Open your silverlight player, run a movie. This one is decoded with hardware acceleration, with overlay mode and all the tricks possible to keep the cpu usage low.
Now open another window and run another movie at the same time. That one will be decoded in software because you already use the hardware with the first movie.
Now open a third movie and so on... you'll see the cpu go nuts.
I've just tested playing HD youTube movies at the same time on a Q6600 processor, all at stock. 40% with two movies, 45 with 3, 51 with 4, 65 with 5 movies and it started to stutter, maybe because i don't have enough bandwidth.
So I don't know, maybe you shouldn't build computers if you don't know how.. or something like that.
It plays just fine if you have a good video card.
Another very exciting new feature in Flash Player 9 Update 3 is hardware scaling support for Flash Playerâ"which lends itself perfectly to enhancing the video playback experience of HD video in full screenâ"especially when you consider the size of HD 1080p video (1920 x 1080). The new hardware acceleration was not built solely for the new H.264 video capabilities. It also helps with larger On2 VP6 video files and the display of SWF content in general.
The lazy developers just need to use it well.
Youtube has to think at the lots of Flash versions and the video quality of the videos they show sucks anyway.
Just try Vimeo any time of the day with a HD movie.
I've watched 720p content there with no problems on an old D805 processor.
Guam belongs to US so it's just another reason for US to sniff your traffic before it goes to Japan and Asia.
Tin foil hat aside, it's probably just easier that way and they probably can split the traffic at that location to go to US through one ocean cable and to Asian through another.
Don't worry. The government will will build the 100mbps pipes to premises but they'll sell it to companies which in turn will give you 1mbps with 10 GB monthly limit for 200 Australian dollars.
You wouldn't want them to compete with their own products now, would you...
Build a computer with a processor that has very low frequency, something like an AMD Sempron LE-1300.
It runs by default at 2300Mhz but you should be able to lower it to something like 1Ghz or maybe even lower, which will increase the compatibility with DOS (if needed and if there are any incompatibility) and it also means that the computer will run even without the fan running over the processor.
You can solve the power supply fan problems by buying a passively cooler power supply.
You could also get a SSD drive or maybe a cheap Flash to IDE/SATA adapter and use 1 or 2 GB compact Flash card for DOS.
Though you can simply create a virtual machine or even DosBox (if you don't need some complex printing functions)..
It's probably just a safety measure for their anti-phishing features which block pages but it's a weird formulation anyway
Most people here in Europe (well, at least in my country) have cellphones.
There are very cheap plans and prepaid cards and the 911 equivalent (112) works (in theory, never had the need to test) even without a plan or a SIM card in the phone, it should simply scan and use the first network for the emergency call.
At least in my country there are still problems with the 112 operators collaborating with the cellphone companies to determine very fast the location (the first is too lazy/slow to implement it and the second is too bureaucratic).
But anyways, if you're that sick or hurt to not be able to say where you are, you'll probably die in the 5-10 minutes it takes for police/firemen/ambulance to arrive :)
But back to the subject... I agree with what you say, I makes me angry to see the FBI just gathering all servers without thinking what businesses are affected by it.
And normally the police would have people hired and capable of creating images of the hard drives and returning the servers the next day, not keep them for evidence for months or years, until the trial is over.
In this case, FBI didn't even research if that company still had servers in the datacenter. They just knew the company had at a certain time servers there so they took ALL the servers from the datacenter. This should be illegal and there should be a law that would allow contesting the warrant and refusing entry to the premises if it's too broad.
And they are paying more. They have a contract between the company and themselves and the company committed to giving them bandwidth. When the company made the deal with you they knew very well what they committed to offering so it's not my fault they feel they have too little profit these days. It's just corporate greediness.
They should not be allowed to change a contract so that it will be lower in capability as the current one.
How would you feel if the electricity company would give you a call tomorrow saying that most people in the neighborhood only turn the lights on between 8 pm and 11 pm so the current price you pay will be from now on enough for an average of four hours a day ?
Just like electricity, the Internet relies on the fact that not all people use the bandwidth at the same time.
However, if there is demand, the electricity company will power another coal power station or buy more hydro. They won't suddenly tell you you're not allowed to have more than two lights running at the same time or stuff like that.
The ISP companies must do the same, if there is demand, just buy more bandwidth for the backend.
Sure, the analogy is not perfect because you pay a certain amount for each kW or power you use.
You have to look at it differently.
You can only consume so much electricity until the cables in your house start to burn or overheat. If you'd the maximum your fuses allow each month, let's say you'd pay 1000$.
This is just like an Internet contract, you should be able to use the maximum of 50mbps or whatever you have.
If you actually need more electricity, the electricity company will visit you and upgrade your fuse box and maybe give you some better thicker wires. This would be just like an upgrade to the internet connection.
Now from this perspective what's the difference? The difference is that for electricity you pay what you use, not that max, and for Internet you pay the max, no matter how much you use.
So if you have a 20mbps Comcast cable connection and you pay 100$ a month for it, by this reasoning you should pay 100 / ~6000 GB = $0.016 per GB. (keep in mind I don't even include the upload bandwidth) For the current Comcast 250GB limit, you'd pay 5$ each month.
The cable companies are actually making tons of money from you already so don't pity them.
I'd like to have ipv6 but UPC (Chello in NL and some parts of Europe) has no plans to support it at this time.
They did deploy new cable modems since a year ago because they planned ahead to switch to DOCSIS 3 and in a few months they will do that. Towards the end of the year they plan to go for 50 mbps down / 10mbps up.
I don't know if these cable modems do support ipv6 but if they don't they'll probably just bring fiber to the premises (the apartment building) and pull utp cable in each apartment) so this will probably be 2-4 years from now when the other ISPs in the area will offer much better speeds compared to what they'll offer.
I thought it was going to be over 9000 :(.
Let me give you an example.
Go rent (if you can) and watch the movie The Cheerleaders (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068364/)
It's a softcore movie about a highschool girl who joins a cheerleader team because she's the only one who's still virgin and hopes she'll find guys this way. Anyways, it's a parody, very comical.
If you're watching this movie, does this mean you're a pedophile, because you'll probably get turned on by the girls whore were all over eighteen when the movie was made but act as 14-16 year old girls?
Why a movie from 1973 can probably still be watched at home by any 18 years person but at the same time if you receive a picture from someone who may or may not be eighteen you suddenly possess child pornography?
Are you now supposed to keep track of all the girl in your school and their birth dates?
Why are you so stuck with this morality in the first place? There's no actual proof that these children are actually affected by what they've done. Maybe they're simply mature enough to understand what they do and they should be treated as adults, in which case it's not child pornography what they've done.
After all, there are plenty of cases of emancipated children who are/were treated as adults even though they are/were not eighteen.
And on the other side of the medal, US is probably the largest of erotic movies, normal porn and hardcore porn.
Guess when it comes to money, the morals can be placed aside.
Maybe your state could actually hire some cops to stay at the traffic lights for a few days and take the drivers' license of the people doing that for something like a week, or 15 days.
After a few weeks of this, people will probably learn to wait at the red light.
The benefits of having red light cameras are far lower than the problems they cause (like people stopping suddenly at the light because they don't want to get tickets and causing crashes, the companies lowering the yellow light time to get more tickets and so on).