offering “goods, merchandise, property, or services of any kind whatsoever” on airport property
Only if the airport owns the street. If so, it should be immediately removed from all maps because it is not a public street and does not qualify for inclusion.
My local utility has a prohibition on using electricity for direct, resistive heating. That means no space heaters, no heating strips, and no electric stoves, dryers, or water heaters.
In most parts of the world, uttering the phrase "hair dryer ban" is considered fightin' words. I'm surprised your local utility's management haven't been lynched by a million angry teenage girls.
Your question is only valid if you honestly believe that Manning read and determined ALL of the 250,000+ documents he released to be proof of a Constitutional violation of some sort. His mass dump of documents shows his motive was less about any duty to the Constitution than it was a blatant FU to the Military & Government that entrusted him with his clearance.
You could just as easily argue that his mass dump of the documents shows that his motive was to do his duty to the constitution:
Had he gone through those 250,000 documents before releasing anything, assuming he could spend three hours per day doing it, even at one document per minute, it would have taken him almost four years. After such a long period of time, the information would no longer be timely, and many crimes would have been much harder to investigate.
Had he released those documents one at a time as he found the incriminating ones, he would have been stopped after the first one. None of the other abuses would have been revealed at all.
Therefore, short of finding a few thousand other people in the military who were all willing to similarly stick their necks out, the only way he could fulfill his perceived duty to reveal those abuses was to mass release the documents to a neutral third party (the press) with adequate resources (people and time) to review them in a timely manner.
Based on that, I would argue that the only questions that can reasonably be asked are whether he had a duty to tell the world about these abuses, and whether that duty trumped his duty to keep military secrets. All other questions are meaningless.
IMO, a major international airport's glide slope being OTS for two months is inexcusably reckless. Doubly so for this particular airport. Sure, it's more expensive to set up a second array in parallel, do the calibration during mostly inactive hours (say 2 a.m.), and then change over fully once everything is up and running, but in this case, they really should have done it that way.
Yes, properly trained pilots should have been able to land using only the PAPI and other visual indicators. The fact that we've had two undershoots in a couple of weeks means that there are some pilots flying into SFO who either did not read the NOTAM about the disabled GS or do not fly purely visual approaches often enough to not pose a significantly elevated risk of incident (or both).
To make it even more alarming, SFO and the FAA knew that the lack of a sufficient undershoot area at SFO (particularly when combined with much of the last few minutes before landing being over water) made the airport less safe than it should be, which is why they were moving the landing zone inland in the first place. By disabling safety systems (during construction) that help make up for that lack of a proper safety margin, they increased the risk of incidents.
I'd imagine the ATCs are on edge at SFO right now, trying to make sure any additional incidents are nonfatal. I wish them the best of luck in their vigilance.
I'm already using a CLEC. About the best anyone can do, given distance, attenuation, etc. is somewhere around 7 Mbps each way, IIRC. Maybe 8 if I'm really lucky. Double it for a channel-bonded connection.
If I'm not mistaken, bitrate doesn't scale linearly with resolution, which means that 4k video wouldn't require 32Mbps for equal quality.
I suspect that linear scaling comes close enough for a ballpark estimate. Nothing comes for free. If you're encoding twice as many macroblocks, or twice as many motion vectors, or whatever, then you get twice as much data on the output. If you don't get twice as much data, then either the source video wasn't really at that high a resolution (not much high frequency content) or you are generating lower-quality output. This, of course, assumes the use of the same codec for both.
HEVC is knocking on the door, and can apparently produce good quality 4k video at a 15 Mbps bitrate...
If you stick with current frame rates, perhaps. Of course, along with 4K video, there's a push to move to higher frame rates. But even if you're right, and the frame rate doesn't go up, we're still talking about on the order of 10–15 gigabytes for a typical movie; whether 4K streaming is an order of magnitude out of reach or two orders of magnitude doesn't really matter much.:-)
Now that everything is 'streaming' and 'cloud' i wonder what their intended market is.
People who want 4K video in their homes, for one. Or even decent high-def. I've watched streaming video, and the picture quality just doesn't cut it for me even on a laptop screen, much less on my widescreen TV.
At the core of the problem is the poor quality of Internet service. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the fastest Internet service available to me is 3Mbps. If I change ISPs and add channel bonding, I can push it up to the high single digits. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray-quality movie, even with the newer codecs, that means I would need to download at least 15 gigabytes of data. That translates to 11.3 hours of saturating the connection just to watch a single movie.
Move to 4K, and the download time balloons unimaginably—about a hundred gigabytes for a two-hour movie. At that rate, I could download one every few days. That's just plain insane.
The fact of the matter is that for many Americans, "the cloud" is just plain not able to keep up. Call me when every home in the U.S. has fiber. Until then, we still need optical media for content delivery.
I assume the GP was referring to abolishing the corporate income tax, not the individual income tax. The poor are already paying the corporate income tax disproportionately. It is just being hidden in the actual sticker price of the products instead of being added at the register.
Of course, the most likely outcome of eliminating that tax is that businesses would see it as a corporate windfall, and would continue selling things for the same price and enjoying their new, higher margins. If you actually want supply and demand to help hold the prices down, such a change would need to be introduced slowly, over the course of many years.
With the caveat, of course, that what we're doing does not necessarily have to result in a viable organism. That's the aspect of GM foods that is potentially dangerous. It would not be that surprising if some of these GM crops became sterile in a few generations, or otherwise mutated in a way that made them unsuitable for use as food crops. If that happened on a small scale with viruses, it would be no big deal, because they almost certainly would not supplant the viable variants (which would continue to be planted). Were it to happen on a mass-produced scale, however, the problem would be much more serious, because you would run the risk of basically losing the original, viable variants.
I redownload small files all the time. Why try to remember some (obscure) filename of a PDF of some article that takes maybe a second to download and look for it in the most unorganized directory in my entire filesystem when I can remember how I got it in the first place and redownload it?
My thoughts exactly. I keep files that I create organized into fairly complex hierarchical structures. Random downloads, however, are unimportant and do not get that level of care. If it is easier to download than to find the file (which translates "if it is less than a few tens of megabytes"), I'll just download it again. Every couple of years, I go through and toss out everything in my Downloads folder. It's easier than trying to maintain any sort of order in a background-priority work queue.
Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger.
Happens all the time between animal and bacterial species when viruses attack, and to a lesser degree with plants. A virus damages the DNA of the cell, and brings with it DNA from whatever animal or plant produced it. And there are other mechanisms that can produce similar results. See Horizontal Gene Transfer for more info.
Even attempting to use a Parking Brake during an Emergency will rarely result in anything but an unintended 'Rockford' manuever.
Correct. But if your main brakes are nonfunctional, it may be your only option, and it is a better option than continuing to drive a vehicle at ever-accelerating speeds down a hill.
By the time I disable the parking brake, my foot is no longer on the brake pedal; it's on the gas pedal, and I'm already starting to move. So at least in my case, they don't improve safety. What they do is produce a 50/50 chance of me driving a couple of miles before I realize that the reason the vehicle feels like it is lugging is that the brake is still on.
While your argument has merit, I'm going to simply stick to the strategy of buying cars that do not attach a wireless communication device to the same bus that the engine control unit sits on.
As for me, I'm going to stick to buying cars in which the brake master cylinder is physically depressed by the pedal, and in which the emergency brake lever is physically connected with a mechanical cable....
I drove a rental car the other day with an electronic emergency brake. I've never been more uncomfortable driving a vehicle. Besides having "safety" features that made it really clumsy to drive (you can't release the emergency brake unless your foot is on the brake pedal, for example, which doesn't make any real sense if the vehicle is in a flat parking space, with the transmission in Park), I just can't see myself ever trusting a car in which a computer failure could kill the emergency brake entirely, and in which there's no way to apply more force on the emergency brake in the event of an actual emergency. That design pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having an emergency brake.
I tend to agree, though preventing the most extreme abuse by big companies (e.g. sports arenas) might be worth doing through legislation, if only because that's likely to be the only means of success.
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
I build a box. I sell it to you. It is your box. If you decide to use it to ship something to your cousin Raul, that is your right. If you decide to cover it with a tablecloth and use it as a plant stand, that is your right. If you decide to use it as a toilet, that is your right. Once legitimately transferred in exchange for payment, that box becomes yours. This is the natural ownership model that goods have had for millennia.
Why should content creators have the right to dictate what the purchaser of their content does with it at all? Merely because more work went into the design and less into the manufacture? That's a fairly arbitrary distinction.
See, the problem I have with copyright reformers is that copyright is a quite well thought out piece of law (relative to most, anyway).
Not sure about Finland, but that's certainly not true in the U.S. Over here, there are so many contradictory exceptions and edge cases that it is often almost impossible to know if you are on the right side of the law.
It gives people who create things an optional tool that they don't have to use.
Again, no. Copyright is automatic in Berne signatory nations (the U.S., most of Europe, etc.). Copyright isn't optional. Unless you explicitly release something into the public domain, it is protected by copyright. And even if you do release it into the public domain, because many countries do not recognize the right of a creator to release something into the public domain, it is not possible to fully opt out of copyright if you create a work in a country where copyright is automatic, as it is in the U.S. The best you can do, legally, is provide it under a perpetual "Do whatever you want with it" license.
They feel that people who create things should have fewer options than today, less freedom to decide how their work is used, because gosh isn't it annoying and inconvenient when you want something and can't afford it?
Not at all. They feel that people who create things should get paid for actually creating new things, rather than stringing out copyright to near perpetuity and resting on their laurels while milking their works for every penny that they can possibly get. They feel that once they have paid for something, they should have the right to use it in any reasonable fashion that they desire, just as they would if they bought a box or a table. The alternative—content creators being able to dictate things like transferability, format shifting, import and export, etc.—is a highly limiting form of sale that requires some very substantial justification before we will consider it reasonable, precisely because it is so highly unusual.
The problem is if everyone does that, you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The idea that nobody who creates movies or writes software cares about money is naive and childish. People do create less when they are unable to earn an income doing so.
Not entirely accurate. They create differently. We've created a large industry that can afford to create these blockbuster films (which, incidentally, it looks like people are finally getting tired of). By contrast, an industry with fewer restrictions on copying would tend to reward smaller-scale donation-based or even patronage-based works that, although less expensive to produce, are often of similar quality. Moreover, because the money is not concentrated in a small number of businesses, the culture is enriched by having a greater number of people creating those works, with more unique voices, different points of view, and so on.
That said, nobody is asking for copyright to go away. They're asking for criminal copyright charges to go away
Everyone else on your street, along with the city, is just going to keep doing what they always been doing.
If you're a criminal, there's no reason to stop shooting people. Everyone else is just going to keep shooting people.
See the problem? Light pollution is the sum of multiple people's emissions. If you reduce yours, over time, other folks will notice and reduce theirs, but even if they don't, there's still less light pollution than there would have been had you not done so.
Put another way, light pollution levels will never improve until someone gets the process started.
I find it very hard to believe that Youtube is so massively beating out all the higher quality video providers, and can only conclude that the data is massively flawed, as TFA starts suggesting about half-way through.
Or, more likely, that people are simply no longer willing to pay money for content. With the exception of Hulu, most of those higher-quality providers charge a monthly fee. Also, most online video content, statistically, is viewed by younger people, who tend to have shorter attention spans on average, so YouTube's short clips win again. Thus, IMO, it is not at all surprising that their traffic would represent the lion's share of data delivery.
Yes, sadly, this would have the opposite of the desired effect. People would be scared to run for office, so the only people who would consider running would be people who really wanted to rule—the power-hungry—which is slightly worse than the system we have now.
What is needed is a means of somehow leveling the playing field so that people without lots of money can run for office and stand a chance of winning. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
TSA employee?
Only if the airport owns the street. If so, it should be immediately removed from all maps because it is not a public street and does not qualify for inclusion.
In most parts of the world, uttering the phrase "hair dryer ban" is considered fightin' words. I'm surprised your local utility's management haven't been lynched by a million angry teenage girls.
You could just as easily argue that his mass dump of the documents shows that his motive was to do his duty to the constitution:
Therefore, short of finding a few thousand other people in the military who were all willing to similarly stick their necks out, the only way he could fulfill his perceived duty to reveal those abuses was to mass release the documents to a neutral third party (the press) with adequate resources (people and time) to review them in a timely manner.
Based on that, I would argue that the only questions that can reasonably be asked are whether he had a duty to tell the world about these abuses, and whether that duty trumped his duty to keep military secrets. All other questions are meaningless.
IMO, a major international airport's glide slope being OTS for two months is inexcusably reckless. Doubly so for this particular airport. Sure, it's more expensive to set up a second array in parallel, do the calibration during mostly inactive hours (say 2 a.m.), and then change over fully once everything is up and running, but in this case, they really should have done it that way.
Yes, properly trained pilots should have been able to land using only the PAPI and other visual indicators. The fact that we've had two undershoots in a couple of weeks means that there are some pilots flying into SFO who either did not read the NOTAM about the disabled GS or do not fly purely visual approaches often enough to not pose a significantly elevated risk of incident (or both).
To make it even more alarming, SFO and the FAA knew that the lack of a sufficient undershoot area at SFO (particularly when combined with much of the last few minutes before landing being over water) made the airport less safe than it should be, which is why they were moving the landing zone inland in the first place. By disabling safety systems (during construction) that help make up for that lack of a proper safety margin, they increased the risk of incidents.
I'd imagine the ATCs are on edge at SFO right now, trying to make sure any additional incidents are nonfatal. I wish them the best of luck in their vigilance.
I'm already using a CLEC. About the best anyone can do, given distance, attenuation, etc. is somewhere around 7 Mbps each way, IIRC. Maybe 8 if I'm really lucky. Double it for a channel-bonded connection.
I suspect that linear scaling comes close enough for a ballpark estimate. Nothing comes for free. If you're encoding twice as many macroblocks, or twice as many motion vectors, or whatever, then you get twice as much data on the output. If you don't get twice as much data, then either the source video wasn't really at that high a resolution (not much high frequency content) or you are generating lower-quality output. This, of course, assumes the use of the same codec for both.
If you stick with current frame rates, perhaps. Of course, along with 4K video, there's a push to move to higher frame rates. But even if you're right, and the frame rate doesn't go up, we're still talking about on the order of 10–15 gigabytes for a typical movie; whether 4K streaming is an order of magnitude out of reach or two orders of magnitude doesn't really matter much. :-)
People who want 4K video in their homes, for one. Or even decent high-def. I've watched streaming video, and the picture quality just doesn't cut it for me even on a laptop screen, much less on my widescreen TV.
At the core of the problem is the poor quality of Internet service. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the fastest Internet service available to me is 3Mbps. If I change ISPs and add channel bonding, I can push it up to the high single digits. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray-quality movie, even with the newer codecs, that means I would need to download at least 15 gigabytes of data. That translates to 11.3 hours of saturating the connection just to watch a single movie.
Move to 4K, and the download time balloons unimaginably—about a hundred gigabytes for a two-hour movie. At that rate, I could download one every few days. That's just plain insane.
The fact of the matter is that for many Americans, "the cloud" is just plain not able to keep up. Call me when every home in the U.S. has fiber. Until then, we still need optical media for content delivery.
Yeah. They help you put earrings in.
Wait, what?
I assume the GP was referring to abolishing the corporate income tax, not the individual income tax. The poor are already paying the corporate income tax disproportionately. It is just being hidden in the actual sticker price of the products instead of being added at the register.
Of course, the most likely outcome of eliminating that tax is that businesses would see it as a corporate windfall, and would continue selling things for the same price and enjoying their new, higher margins. If you actually want supply and demand to help hold the prices down, such a change would need to be introduced slowly, over the course of many years.
With the caveat, of course, that what we're doing does not necessarily have to result in a viable organism. That's the aspect of GM foods that is potentially dangerous. It would not be that surprising if some of these GM crops became sterile in a few generations, or otherwise mutated in a way that made them unsuitable for use as food crops. If that happened on a small scale with viruses, it would be no big deal, because they almost certainly would not supplant the viable variants (which would continue to be planted). Were it to happen on a mass-produced scale, however, the problem would be much more serious, because you would run the risk of basically losing the original, viable variants.
My thoughts exactly. I keep files that I create organized into fairly complex hierarchical structures. Random downloads, however, are unimportant and do not get that level of care. If it is easier to download than to find the file (which translates "if it is less than a few tens of megabytes"), I'll just download it again. Every couple of years, I go through and toss out everything in my Downloads folder. It's easier than trying to maintain any sort of order in a background-priority work queue.
Happens all the time between animal and bacterial species when viruses attack, and to a lesser degree with plants. A virus damages the DNA of the cell, and brings with it DNA from whatever animal or plant produced it. And there are other mechanisms that can produce similar results. See Horizontal Gene Transfer for more info.
Correct. But if your main brakes are nonfunctional, it may be your only option, and it is a better option than continuing to drive a vehicle at ever-accelerating speeds down a hill.
By the time I disable the parking brake, my foot is no longer on the brake pedal; it's on the gas pedal, and I'm already starting to move. So at least in my case, they don't improve safety. What they do is produce a 50/50 chance of me driving a couple of miles before I realize that the reason the vehicle feels like it is lugging is that the brake is still on.
As for me, I'm going to stick to buying cars in which the brake master cylinder is physically depressed by the pedal, and in which the emergency brake lever is physically connected with a mechanical cable....
I drove a rental car the other day with an electronic emergency brake. I've never been more uncomfortable driving a vehicle. Besides having "safety" features that made it really clumsy to drive (you can't release the emergency brake unless your foot is on the brake pedal, for example, which doesn't make any real sense if the vehicle is in a flat parking space, with the transmission in Park), I just can't see myself ever trusting a car in which a computer failure could kill the emergency brake entirely, and in which there's no way to apply more force on the emergency brake in the event of an actual emergency. That design pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having an emergency brake.
Ugh.
Because if the government wants that information, it must obtain a court order. Sure, it's a small improvement, but it's an improvement nonetheless.
The USPS is an independent agency. It's just half a step away from being a government-owned corporation. Take that half step. Problem solved.
I tend to agree, though preventing the most extreme abuse by big companies (e.g. sports arenas) might be worth doing through legislation, if only because that's likely to be the only means of success.
I build a box. I sell it to you. It is your box. If you decide to use it to ship something to your cousin Raul, that is your right. If you decide to cover it with a tablecloth and use it as a plant stand, that is your right. If you decide to use it as a toilet, that is your right. Once legitimately transferred in exchange for payment, that box becomes yours. This is the natural ownership model that goods have had for millennia.
Why should content creators have the right to dictate what the purchaser of their content does with it at all? Merely because more work went into the design and less into the manufacture? That's a fairly arbitrary distinction.
Not sure about Finland, but that's certainly not true in the U.S. Over here, there are so many contradictory exceptions and edge cases that it is often almost impossible to know if you are on the right side of the law.
Again, no. Copyright is automatic in Berne signatory nations (the U.S., most of Europe, etc.). Copyright isn't optional. Unless you explicitly release something into the public domain, it is protected by copyright. And even if you do release it into the public domain, because many countries do not recognize the right of a creator to release something into the public domain, it is not possible to fully opt out of copyright if you create a work in a country where copyright is automatic, as it is in the U.S. The best you can do, legally, is provide it under a perpetual "Do whatever you want with it" license.
Not at all. They feel that people who create things should get paid for actually creating new things, rather than stringing out copyright to near perpetuity and resting on their laurels while milking their works for every penny that they can possibly get. They feel that once they have paid for something, they should have the right to use it in any reasonable fashion that they desire, just as they would if they bought a box or a table. The alternative—content creators being able to dictate things like transferability, format shifting, import and export, etc.—is a highly limiting form of sale that requires some very substantial justification before we will consider it reasonable, precisely because it is so highly unusual.
Not entirely accurate. They create differently. We've created a large industry that can afford to create these blockbuster films (which, incidentally, it looks like people are finally getting tired of). By contrast, an industry with fewer restrictions on copying would tend to reward smaller-scale donation-based or even patronage-based works that, although less expensive to produce, are often of similar quality. Moreover, because the money is not concentrated in a small number of businesses, the culture is enriched by having a greater number of people creating those works, with more unique voices, different points of view, and so on.
That said, nobody is asking for copyright to go away. They're asking for criminal copyright charges to go away
If you're a criminal, there's no reason to stop shooting people. Everyone else is just going to keep shooting people.
See the problem? Light pollution is the sum of multiple people's emissions. If you reduce yours, over time, other folks will notice and reduce theirs, but even if they don't, there's still less light pollution than there would have been had you not done so.
Put another way, light pollution levels will never improve until someone gets the process started.
Just use three lasers—a red laser, a green laser, and a blue laser. :-)
Helpful tip: They don't smell until they spray... and after they spray, it's too late.
Or, more likely, that people are simply no longer willing to pay money for content. With the exception of Hulu, most of those higher-quality providers charge a monthly fee. Also, most online video content, statistically, is viewed by younger people, who tend to have shorter attention spans on average, so YouTube's short clips win again. Thus, IMO, it is not at all surprising that their traffic would represent the lion's share of data delivery.
Yes, sadly, this would have the opposite of the desired effect. People would be scared to run for office, so the only people who would consider running would be people who really wanted to rule—the power-hungry—which is slightly worse than the system we have now.
What is needed is a means of somehow leveling the playing field so that people without lots of money can run for office and stand a chance of winning. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.