You're saying that web sites should conform to an arbitrary standard, even if no browser supports it?
Don't you think it makes more sense to write a web page in such a way that people can properly view it than it does to write it so that it conforms to an unused standard?
Warning labels don't protect those of us with two neurons to rub together Not true. Everybody does something stupid at some time, everybody lacks knowledge about things they encounter in daily life. Warning labels help protect everyone from the mistakes that any person could reasonably make about something.
Think about it for a second. How did you gain the common sense in the first place about something that is listed on a warning label? You were *warned* by someone else, sometimes in person, sometimes via a label. For some people (few in general society, but probably a much higher percentage here on slashdot), they have an education from which they can deduce certain practices to be avoided, like the warning labels on extension cords that seems to have irked so many here today. *You* might know Ohm's Law, Watt's Law, some additional elementary physics, and the implications thereof, but it's foolish to believe that it's therefore common sense. It's even more foolish to believe that just because you know something that it will follow that you will automatically apply it to every situation where it arises. Unless you somehow manage to never make a mistake that in retrospect seems obvious.
They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs to toss out ASAP. Warning labels have nothing to do with being stupid, they have to do with being ignorant, and *everyone* starts out life ignorant.
I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against the inclusion of warning labels. No matter how stupid you seem to think the people are that the labels target, it seems to me that to argue against warning those people is even more stupid. The tragedy of that stance is compounded by the fact that *every one of us* does, has, and will, benefit from such warnings from time-to-time.
Probably so that when a woman curls her bangs, she'll already be thinking about not burning her eyes.
There are already a ton of replies above about how things like this should be obvious (they are), but just because they are obvious does not mean you are going to actually *think* of them. How many times have you done something stupid that should have been obvious in retrospect?
In most cases, no big deal. You get a laugh and you learn. But something like burning your fucking eyes seems like it deserves a warning.
What you are referring to is decompression (attempting to retrieve the original data). CDs are generally *not* decompressed, but there *are* CD players which attempt to decompress the audio with 24-bit, 48kHz DACs and DSPs. A more well-known example of such decompression are upscaling DVD players. They statistically recover data that was removed from the original source.
The problem is you are thinking of compression in the limited scope of the two most common types of compression people talk about on computers: file compression (i.e., zip) and music compression (i.e., MP3). These forms of compression are useless without a complimentary decompression process. However, decompression is not necessary for compression to still occur. For example, if you only had zip, but not unzip, installed on your computer, you could still compress files with zip.
Your experience with compression is too narrow and does not cover other forms of compression. It's like not thinking 3 bean soup is a soup because you've only ever eaten soup with chicken and/or noodles.
Yes, but could one then not also state that *any* recording employs lossy compression? Yes, and that's exactly my point.
So I am not really comfortable with the term 'lossy compression' here. Why not? That's exactly what it is. By *not* calling it what it is, we end up assigning false attributes to it.
Because CD audio compression, from a format point of view, is primarily resolution and sample rate reduction, it doesn't really take into account human perception, other than trying to be slightly beyond our abilities to perceive. MP3 (and AAC and others) go further and completely remove sounds that are impossible to hear. That is to say that CDs contain significant amounts of data that is absolutely useless to the listener. In fact, compared with AAC encoding, CD audio encoding contains around 10 times the data necessary to transmit the song to the listener.
So, from a data point of view, CDs and AACs (or MP3s, etc) *lose* data from the original recording. From a perceptual point of view, a properly encoded CD and a properly encoded AAC will contain absolutely *no* degradation in quality.
Similarly, a lossless FLAC file will not sound better than a properly encoded AAC, even though FLAC can reproduce the original CD track bit-for-bit while the AAC cannot.
You're confusing compression with downsampling. No, I'm not.
CDs are not compressed. Yes, they are.
Down-sampling is a *form* of compression, and it is one of the forms CDs employ (another main form is to reduce the resolution which is completely distinct from downsampling). In fact, it's a form a lossy compression. Which is exactly what I stated.
Yet another form of compression employed on CDs is dynamic range compression, which results in significantly reduced quality (far worse than the amount of downsampling and reduced resolution employed on audio CDs, interestingly enough), but is not inherent to the format and wasn't really brought up in my post. I only bring it up now to demonstrate at least *three* ways audio CDs are compressed.
Not when CD's with no compression and much higher fidelity had already been available for two decades. CDs, strictly speaking, employ lossy compression. Unless, that is, your original audio source is 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo, or evenly divides into those numbers (which will only be true for digitally/mathematically generated sounds).
While at first, this might seem like pedantry, but I have a greater point here, which is the second half of your sentence. If you think CDs are uncompressed, and MP3s (or AACs) *are* compressed, then almost by definition MP3s will be inferior, but the fact is that both CDs and MP3s are compressed, so the question is whether the compression of one is worse than the other.
CD compression has the benefit of being fairly well matched to what we can hear. CDs have the drawback that they, in fact, tend to hold *more* sound than we can hear. This means that every audio CD contains *more* information than is necessary to reproduce a song. Better to overdo it than under do it, to be sure, but if you can remove all the imperceptible parts, you have not decreased in audio quality, but you have decreased information, and, generally, file size.
That's what MP3s and AACs and other such compression formats do (in fact, this is *exactly* what CDs do, as well, but via a less aggressive procedure). A properly encoded MP3 at *some* bit rate less than the 1.5mb/s of CD audio will be absolutely indistinguishable from the source CD. For MP3s, this is somewhere around 160-256kb/s. For AACs, this is closer to 128-160kb/s. This is with audiophile gear. In any normal situation (even with reasonably expensive gear), lower bit rates are indistinguishable from CD, probably 128kb/s for both MP3 and AAC (if you are thinking "no way!" for 128kb/s MP3, I'm referring to modern high-quality settings in LAME, not what was common in the late 90s, although even so, perhaps 160kb/s is more reasonable for MP3).
The comparison is further complicated by the source material used for CDs and MP3s. On iTunes, for example, in some cases, the music was re-encoded from a higher quality source than the corresponding CDs are mastered from. This means that it's quite likely there are AACs on iTunes that are *higher* quality than any available CD version of the same song. This has no bearing on the technical merits of MP3/AAC vs. CD, but does bring into question whether eschewing what you are calling "lossy compressed music" is going to ensure a more enjoyable musical experience.
Keep in mind, the Cole bombing killed a handful of sailors and *didn't sink the ship*. But that's not even the point...
The point is that Iran *didn't* attack our ships, yet the GOP thinks this is all but grounds for war! All without actually attacking us.
*Had* they actually attacked us in any normal sense (such as you'd expect from a foreign military), they wouldn't have made a suicide attack (like the Cole), they would have shot guns, which coincidentally enough would also be a suicide attack (and thus *highly* unlikely*), and that quite possibly *would* have started a war (it definitely would have been grounds).
You're just shamelessly using fear to promote your political agenda, and that's really one of the most despicable political tactics possible (and, ironically enough, the definition of terrorism, and the #1 tool of dictators--keep the populace afraid).
To be afraid of a few speedboats? WTF? Why is it that Republican politicians are seen as "strong" when, from what I can tell, they're the biggest bunch cowards on the planet?
The Hindenburg disaster wasn't that bad. It only killed a few dozen people. Was the second sentence meant to support the first? Because I don't really think it does.
you're going from about 700 horizontally to 1920, and 480 vertically to 1080 Actually, you're going from 480p to 1080i, which is really somewhere in between going from 480 -> 540 and 480 -> 1080 (better than the first, but not as good as the second).
HD is definitely better than SD (assuming sufficient encoding quality, which is not always the case with cable HD signals, but should be with Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies), but the difference isn't great enough to offset the increased cost and hassle most consumers would face.
Personally, I hope to sit out the Blu-ray/HD-DVD war altogether, and instead opt for non-physical media (downloads).
What's all that got to do with anything? Are you somehow comparing your local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video with community theatre?
And don't pretend instant gratification is anything new. The microwave oven, television, telephone, railroad, pony express, sail ships, chariots, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, well, my point is, wanting things faster is nothing new, nor is it anything bad.
I mean, why would you *want* to go to your local video store when you can just click download and watch immediately? Perhaps you are blessed with a quality local video store staffed with interesting people who are true movie buffs. If that's the case, more power to you. For the rest of us, or for those who aren't interested in chatting about films, or even for those who are interested in that, for those times you just want to watch the film, perhaps on a whim, how is video on demand from iTunes a bad thing?
So, you're promoting exactly what I said: you are promoting a system that actually *encourages* scams. When regulations can help curtail scams, without otherwise unreasonably affecting the market in question, why not do it?
What you're saying is that you value a completely free system (which is impossible, btw) with ruined lives than a regulated system with minimal detrimental affects and drastically reduced ruined lives. In other words, you care more about the system than the people. That strikes me as an exceptionally awful stance to take.
No, instead, you'd rather just blame the victim. Stupid old ladies, what where they thinking trying to help their grandkids, right? On the other hand, you must think the scammers are top-notch entrepreneurs. After all, what they're doing is completely legal! Please, tell me, because I really don't understand. How do you live with being such an asshole? Do you find you have to drown baby kittens every now and then to decimate your capacity for compassion whenever it starts to become a nuisance?
The movies already available on iTunes are in the 1-2GB range, similar to DVD quality (slightly lower res than progressive DVDs, but a more efficient video codec (H.264 vs MPEG-2)), and will play immediately after the download starts. So as long as your bandwidth is faster than the bitrate of the video file (limited to 1.5Mb/s for the iPod, which is only a fraction of the bandwidth of cable internet), you can start watching the movie immediately.
As for getting it to the TV, that's what the Apple TV is for. Unfortunately, the Apple TV currently doesn't support streaming movies directly from the iTunes store. This seems exactly like the sort of thing Apple would update for a rental service like this.
In other words, what we're all doing RIGHT NOW. People "all doing that RIGHT NOW" with music, but Apple has no problem selling billions of songs on iTunes. I don't think movie rentals, provided the price and DRM terms are reasonable enough (like they are with music on iTunes) will be any different.
The biggest problem will be getting the movies to where people want to watch them (ie, the TV). Fortunately, Apple has the Apple TV for just that.
The iTunes music store was easy enough, cheap enough, and the DRM was unobtrusive enough, to convince a *lot* of people already "doing that RIGHT NOW" to actually *buy* music again. Then they did the same with TV shows (until NBC/Universal decided they'd rather have people "pirate" their shows instead of buy them through Apple). There's no reason to expect the iTunes movie rentals will somehow fail to do the same thing, again granted acceptable pricing and usage terms.
I live 5 min from my video rental store. 5 minutes from the moment you decide to watch a movie to being back at home watching it? Or 5 minutes from leaving the driveway to parking the car at the video store?
Regardless, no matter *how* close your video store--even if you live *in* it, I can start watching a film from iTunes faster than you could from your live-in video store. Hell, I'd bet I can start iTunes, find a movie and start watching it before you can turn on your TV and DVD player, find and load the disc you've already rented, and start the movie (without even taking into account the FBI warning and superfluous DVD startup animations that will delay your movie no matter how fast your DVD player starts).
No one's EVER going to crack the encryption algorithms so that a temporary movie becomes permanent! It's BRILLIANT! If it's cracked (which will be *extremely* difficult--don't think that just because DVDs are so easy to decrypt that that means all DRM is futile), Apple will just update iTunes and FairPlay. At worst, there will be a window of time where rentals can be de-DRMd. You won't be able to all of the sudden "rent" a ton of movies and decrypt them, because by the time it becomes cracked, the new FairPlay (which is certainly already prepped) will be in place, so any new rentals will not be crackable via the already out-dated crack.
So, worst case for Apple and Fox, people who know and so desire, will be able to "steal" movies they've presently got rented. Since people can already decrypt DVDs, a potential, but unlikely, occasional DRM crack isn't going to be more than a blip which won't have long-term detrimental effects to this system.
I'm sorry, but people who don't read a contract that signs away the next 30 years of their cash deserve to get screwed. Jesus people, it's only gonna take you 10 minutes to read the damn loan contract. Very few people actually *can* read and understand, legally, the whole contract. For most people, they must rely heavily on the word of the people they are dealing with.
By your stance, you're essentially saying that it's OK to trick people--outright lie to them--because only the words in the contract count. Even worse, what you promote encourages contracts to be ever more cryptic, and the agents to make use of verbal lies. The more you can trick the person into signing away, the better, if it's only the signature that counts.
*Nobody* deserves to be tricked out of their life savings.
And it doesn't stop there. Even those who did fully read and understand their contract will be affected by the drain on the economy, and will also be *directly* affected by the drop in the value of their own homes due to increased foreclosures in their area. How, exactly, do you propose that *they* deserve to be screwed?
I own no land whatsoever, and *I'm* going to feel the effects of this. How is that my fault? This whole mess could have been avoided by government interfering in the market. The warning signs were all there, and all it would have taken was a quick crack-down on shady agents (basically, the things the government is talking about doing *now*, after the fact), and either through regulations, or tax-incentives, steered the market away from the cliff it was heading towards. Who would be harmed by that? The only people who would be harmed are the hucksters. On the other hand, *millions* of people would be saved from disaster, while the rest of us (hundreds of millions) will be spared the fall-out.
Life is a one-time thing, and all too short. Why do you promote a system which actively seeks to fuck over that one shot? Assholes like you are far worse than the lying hucksters who conned people out of their life savings. They, at least, have the abominable defense of, "hey, I don't make the rules, I just use them to my best advantage," but it's people like you who make their escapades possible.
Well, it is socialist theory that got all of those people into the fix they are in in the first place. These market troubles aren't due to mortgages that the banks didn't want to grant. They are due to cannibalistic hucksters who *lied* people into loans. The lies went in both directions. First they lied about the direction the market was heading (getting people into ARMs, telling them they can simply refinance to a fixed later, knowing full well that the time was fast approaching where that would fuck people over), and getting those people to lie on their applications (there's definitely some personal responsibility here on the part of the applicant, but it's hard to resist when you've got a con man sweet-talking you with all the reasons why you should do it, dangling this nice slice of the American Dream in front of you).
Socialism is not at fault here. The laws that mandate home opportunities to those who might not otherwise qualify are a manageable risk, and did not lead to this debacle. What brought us to this point was the *lack* of socialism. For the past four years I've heard from people in the real estate market warning of this impending disaster. Socialism would have enacted laws ahead of time to mitigate the problem.
Socialism has it's uses. Primarily, it's *really* good at situations where in a Capitalist market, you can see where, with everyone acting in their own best interests, the end result is going to be a disaster (like with this bubble burst). If there is a way to manipulate the market from the outside to mitigate that disaster, you should take it. It's like you're on the Titanic, headed for an iceberg, but you don't change course because it would violate the ideology of the "free ocean".
When it comes to building a good society, as far as economics go, Capitalism is a means without a goal, and Socialism is a goal without a means. Society can only truly work for both the collective good as well as the individual welfare if it utilizes *both* Socialism and Capitalism.
posting anonymously to protect my karma Yeah, I wouldn't have signed my handle to your load of shit either.
Not at all. People, as a whole, benefit when stupidity has consequences. Blaming the victim isn't going to fix the problem. "Stupidity" (i.e., being born to poor parents, being born to awful parents, being failed by the education system, being the wrong race, being tricked by unscrupulous people, etc) is never going to go away. When the government makes a rule that says, "you shall not do this", when the *only* reason to "do this" is to scam someone, or make a profit at the undue expense of another, that's a *good* *thing*.
Are you saying Americans are stupid for buying toys from China without personally verifying the lead content ahead of time? Who's going to be able to do that? Or the average American is stupid for signing a loan after the broker feeds them lies about the way the market is heading. Are they stupid?
And who gains? Society *surely doesn't* gain, as you seem to think. The only people who gain are the hucksters, and their gain is based on short-term opportunity--in other words, it doesn't last. On the other hand, the countless people who were tricked lose severely, and even the innocent bystander home-owner is going to lose out as their property value plummets due to increased foreclosures.
People like you have no clue how systems like the (falsely named) "free market" work. If you don't place limits on what people can do, they *will* exploit loopholes. Why leave those loopholes in when you know damned well they exist, and can easily be closed by a law? That's absolutely moronic. It's essentially allowing yourself to be sacrificed at the altar of that ideological falsehood known as the "free market".
And why, exactly, should I believe in social contract theory? Because it's the system that works the best. If you want to maximize the well-being of all the people of a society, some level of social responsibility is required. Libertarian-style society *encourages* treating others as means to an end, and *that* invariably leads to the stronger subjugating the less-powered. When that's the case, the powerful see to it that the ranks of the powerless are as full as possible, and without any laws except those relating *only* to the initiation of direct physical force (the primary basis of Libertarianism), there's nothing to stop that from happening. It ends up a tug of war where the stronger side gets even stronger but fewer in numbers, while the weaker side gets more numerous yet ever weaker.
Second, what happens when the government is making it possible for the "sociopathic greedheads" to do this? What's ironic in your question is that in a "free market", there's absolutely *no* mechanism to protect against what you are talking about. At least a democratic society has a workable, if imperfect, mechanism. The problem, in America, is that too many people think this mechanism is immoral, even if it actually fixes things. The media is largely to blame for this, because *their* interests are threatened by such a mechanism, so they suppress anything that might support that mechanism, which has culminated after two decades (since Reagan, who really opened these floodgates), in a President who doesn't even *believe* in using that mechanism to help the people. Can it be any surprise, for example, that a government that doesn't believe the government can help people failed so miserably provide any help in New Orleans?
From the perspective of the market? Yes, it worked out exactly as designed. The market is correcting itself. It's unfortunate that so many people will lose their homes in the process, but that's how the free market works. So, you're saying that the "free market" is more important than people? This is the problem with Libertarians (and related groups). They take a good thing (freedom) and hold it as an absolute, damn the consequences.
What's worse is the ideals they hold as absolutes, and the mechanisms they use to promote those ideals, repeatedly and inevitably bring severe harm and hardship to millions, yet in spite of that, they still hold those ideals as the highest form of morality.
I don't think you understand the current problems. They are A.) pollution B.) global warming gasses C.) renewability.
Wind and solar suffers from none of those things. You could waste 99% of the wind or solar electricity, and that won't be an issue.
Nuclear suffers from both A and C (although C doesn't seem like it would be an actual problem for the next few million years), but even so, nuclear pollution is much more containable than coal pollution, and does not contribute to global warming. So even if (again) you waste 99% of nuclear generated electricity through inefficient transmission, you're still better off than using coal.
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You're saying that web sites should conform to an arbitrary standard, even if no browser supports it?
Don't you think it makes more sense to write a web page in such a way that people can properly view it than it does to write it so that it conforms to an unused standard?
Think about it for a second. How did you gain the common sense in the first place about something that is listed on a warning label? You were *warned* by someone else, sometimes in person, sometimes via a label. For some people (few in general society, but probably a much higher percentage here on slashdot), they have an education from which they can deduce certain practices to be avoided, like the warning labels on extension cords that seems to have irked so many here today. *You* might know Ohm's Law, Watt's Law, some additional elementary physics, and the implications thereof, but it's foolish to believe that it's therefore common sense. It's even more foolish to believe that just because you know something that it will follow that you will automatically apply it to every situation where it arises. Unless you somehow manage to never make a mistake that in retrospect seems obvious. They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs to toss out ASAP. Warning labels have nothing to do with being stupid, they have to do with being ignorant, and *everyone* starts out life ignorant.
I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against the inclusion of warning labels. No matter how stupid you seem to think the people are that the labels target, it seems to me that to argue against warning those people is even more stupid. The tragedy of that stance is compounded by the fact that *every one of us* does, has, and will, benefit from such warnings from time-to-time.
Probably so that when a woman curls her bangs, she'll already be thinking about not burning her eyes.
There are already a ton of replies above about how things like this should be obvious (they are), but just because they are obvious does not mean you are going to actually *think* of them. How many times have you done something stupid that should have been obvious in retrospect?
In most cases, no big deal. You get a laugh and you learn. But something like burning your fucking eyes seems like it deserves a warning.
Easy enough: F-U-N-D-S
What you are referring to is decompression (attempting to retrieve the original data). CDs are generally *not* decompressed, but there *are* CD players which attempt to decompress the audio with 24-bit, 48kHz DACs and DSPs. A more well-known example of such decompression are upscaling DVD players. They statistically recover data that was removed from the original source.
The problem is you are thinking of compression in the limited scope of the two most common types of compression people talk about on computers: file compression (i.e., zip) and music compression (i.e., MP3). These forms of compression are useless without a complimentary decompression process. However, decompression is not necessary for compression to still occur. For example, if you only had zip, but not unzip, installed on your computer, you could still compress files with zip.
Your experience with compression is too narrow and does not cover other forms of compression. It's like not thinking 3 bean soup is a soup because you've only ever eaten soup with chicken and/or noodles.
Because CD audio compression, from a format point of view, is primarily resolution and sample rate reduction, it doesn't really take into account human perception, other than trying to be slightly beyond our abilities to perceive. MP3 (and AAC and others) go further and completely remove sounds that are impossible to hear. That is to say that CDs contain significant amounts of data that is absolutely useless to the listener. In fact, compared with AAC encoding, CD audio encoding contains around 10 times the data necessary to transmit the song to the listener.
So, from a data point of view, CDs and AACs (or MP3s, etc) *lose* data from the original recording. From a perceptual point of view, a properly encoded CD and a properly encoded AAC will contain absolutely *no* degradation in quality.
Similarly, a lossless FLAC file will not sound better than a properly encoded AAC, even though FLAC can reproduce the original CD track bit-for-bit while the AAC cannot.
Down-sampling is a *form* of compression, and it is one of the forms CDs employ (another main form is to reduce the resolution which is completely distinct from downsampling). In fact, it's a form a lossy compression. Which is exactly what I stated.
Yet another form of compression employed on CDs is dynamic range compression, which results in significantly reduced quality (far worse than the amount of downsampling and reduced resolution employed on audio CDs, interestingly enough), but is not inherent to the format and wasn't really brought up in my post. I only bring it up now to demonstrate at least *three* ways audio CDs are compressed.
While at first, this might seem like pedantry, but I have a greater point here, which is the second half of your sentence. If you think CDs are uncompressed, and MP3s (or AACs) *are* compressed, then almost by definition MP3s will be inferior, but the fact is that both CDs and MP3s are compressed, so the question is whether the compression of one is worse than the other.
CD compression has the benefit of being fairly well matched to what we can hear. CDs have the drawback that they, in fact, tend to hold *more* sound than we can hear. This means that every audio CD contains *more* information than is necessary to reproduce a song. Better to overdo it than under do it, to be sure, but if you can remove all the imperceptible parts, you have not decreased in audio quality, but you have decreased information, and, generally, file size.
That's what MP3s and AACs and other such compression formats do (in fact, this is *exactly* what CDs do, as well, but via a less aggressive procedure). A properly encoded MP3 at *some* bit rate less than the 1.5mb/s of CD audio will be absolutely indistinguishable from the source CD. For MP3s, this is somewhere around 160-256kb/s. For AACs, this is closer to 128-160kb/s. This is with audiophile gear. In any normal situation (even with reasonably expensive gear), lower bit rates are indistinguishable from CD, probably 128kb/s for both MP3 and AAC (if you are thinking "no way!" for 128kb/s MP3, I'm referring to modern high-quality settings in LAME, not what was common in the late 90s, although even so, perhaps 160kb/s is more reasonable for MP3).
The comparison is further complicated by the source material used for CDs and MP3s. On iTunes, for example, in some cases, the music was re-encoded from a higher quality source than the corresponding CDs are mastered from. This means that it's quite likely there are AACs on iTunes that are *higher* quality than any available CD version of the same song. This has no bearing on the technical merits of MP3/AAC vs. CD, but does bring into question whether eschewing what you are calling "lossy compressed music" is going to ensure a more enjoyable musical experience.
Keep in mind, the Cole bombing killed a handful of sailors and *didn't sink the ship*. But that's not even the point...
The point is that Iran *didn't* attack our ships, yet the GOP thinks this is all but grounds for war! All without actually attacking us.
*Had* they actually attacked us in any normal sense (such as you'd expect from a foreign military), they wouldn't have made a suicide attack (like the Cole), they would have shot guns, which coincidentally enough would also be a suicide attack (and thus *highly* unlikely*), and that quite possibly *would* have started a war (it definitely would have been grounds).
You're just shamelessly using fear to promote your political agenda, and that's really one of the most despicable political tactics possible (and, ironically enough, the definition of terrorism, and the #1 tool of dictators--keep the populace afraid).
To be afraid of a few speedboats? WTF? Why is it that Republican politicians are seen as "strong" when, from what I can tell, they're the biggest bunch cowards on the planet?
HD is definitely better than SD (assuming sufficient encoding quality, which is not always the case with cable HD signals, but should be with Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies), but the difference isn't great enough to offset the increased cost and hassle most consumers would face.
Personally, I hope to sit out the Blu-ray/HD-DVD war altogether, and instead opt for non-physical media (downloads).
What's all that got to do with anything? Are you somehow comparing your local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video with community theatre?
And don't pretend instant gratification is anything new. The microwave oven, television, telephone, railroad, pony express, sail ships, chariots, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, well, my point is, wanting things faster is nothing new, nor is it anything bad.
I mean, why would you *want* to go to your local video store when you can just click download and watch immediately? Perhaps you are blessed with a quality local video store staffed with interesting people who are true movie buffs. If that's the case, more power to you. For the rest of us, or for those who aren't interested in chatting about films, or even for those who are interested in that, for those times you just want to watch the film, perhaps on a whim, how is video on demand from iTunes a bad thing?
So, you're promoting exactly what I said: you are promoting a system that actually *encourages* scams. When regulations can help curtail scams, without otherwise unreasonably affecting the market in question, why not do it?
What you're saying is that you value a completely free system (which is impossible, btw) with ruined lives than a regulated system with minimal detrimental affects and drastically reduced ruined lives. In other words, you care more about the system than the people. That strikes me as an exceptionally awful stance to take.
No, instead, you'd rather just blame the victim. Stupid old ladies, what where they thinking trying to help their grandkids, right? On the other hand, you must think the scammers are top-notch entrepreneurs. After all, what they're doing is completely legal! Please, tell me, because I really don't understand. How do you live with being such an asshole? Do you find you have to drown baby kittens every now and then to decimate your capacity for compassion whenever it starts to become a nuisance?
Right, because people will be honest and "return" their rented iTunes movies on their own, without any need for DRM to enforce the rental terms.
Clue 1: Audio DRM is different from Video DRM. Clue 2:People have already fully embraced Video DRM via the DVD.
The movies already available on iTunes are in the 1-2GB range, similar to DVD quality (slightly lower res than progressive DVDs, but a more efficient video codec (H.264 vs MPEG-2)), and will play immediately after the download starts. So as long as your bandwidth is faster than the bitrate of the video file (limited to 1.5Mb/s for the iPod, which is only a fraction of the bandwidth of cable internet), you can start watching the movie immediately.
As for getting it to the TV, that's what the Apple TV is for. Unfortunately, the Apple TV currently doesn't support streaming movies directly from the iTunes store. This seems exactly like the sort of thing Apple would update for a rental service like this.
The biggest problem will be getting the movies to where people want to watch them (ie, the TV). Fortunately, Apple has the Apple TV for just that.
The iTunes music store was easy enough, cheap enough, and the DRM was unobtrusive enough, to convince a *lot* of people already "doing that RIGHT NOW" to actually *buy* music again. Then they did the same with TV shows (until NBC/Universal decided they'd rather have people "pirate" their shows instead of buy them through Apple). There's no reason to expect the iTunes movie rentals will somehow fail to do the same thing, again granted acceptable pricing and usage terms.
Regardless, no matter *how* close your video store--even if you live *in* it, I can start watching a film from iTunes faster than you could from your live-in video store. Hell, I'd bet I can start iTunes, find a movie and start watching it before you can turn on your TV and DVD player, find and load the disc you've already rented, and start the movie (without even taking into account the FBI warning and superfluous DVD startup animations that will delay your movie no matter how fast your DVD player starts).
So, worst case for Apple and Fox, people who know and so desire, will be able to "steal" movies they've presently got rented. Since people can already decrypt DVDs, a potential, but unlikely, occasional DRM crack isn't going to be more than a blip which won't have long-term detrimental effects to this system.
By your stance, you're essentially saying that it's OK to trick people--outright lie to them--because only the words in the contract count. Even worse, what you promote encourages contracts to be ever more cryptic, and the agents to make use of verbal lies. The more you can trick the person into signing away, the better, if it's only the signature that counts.
*Nobody* deserves to be tricked out of their life savings.
And it doesn't stop there. Even those who did fully read and understand their contract will be affected by the drain on the economy, and will also be *directly* affected by the drop in the value of their own homes due to increased foreclosures in their area. How, exactly, do you propose that *they* deserve to be screwed?
I own no land whatsoever, and *I'm* going to feel the effects of this. How is that my fault? This whole mess could have been avoided by government interfering in the market. The warning signs were all there, and all it would have taken was a quick crack-down on shady agents (basically, the things the government is talking about doing *now*, after the fact), and either through regulations, or tax-incentives, steered the market away from the cliff it was heading towards. Who would be harmed by that? The only people who would be harmed are the hucksters. On the other hand, *millions* of people would be saved from disaster, while the rest of us (hundreds of millions) will be spared the fall-out.
Life is a one-time thing, and all too short. Why do you promote a system which actively seeks to fuck over that one shot? Assholes like you are far worse than the lying hucksters who conned people out of their life savings. They, at least, have the abominable defense of, "hey, I don't make the rules, I just use them to my best advantage," but it's people like you who make their escapades possible.
Socialism is not at fault here. The laws that mandate home opportunities to those who might not otherwise qualify are a manageable risk, and did not lead to this debacle. What brought us to this point was the *lack* of socialism. For the past four years I've heard from people in the real estate market warning of this impending disaster. Socialism would have enacted laws ahead of time to mitigate the problem.
Socialism has it's uses. Primarily, it's *really* good at situations where in a Capitalist market, you can see where, with everyone acting in their own best interests, the end result is going to be a disaster (like with this bubble burst). If there is a way to manipulate the market from the outside to mitigate that disaster, you should take it. It's like you're on the Titanic, headed for an iceberg, but you don't change course because it would violate the ideology of the "free ocean".
When it comes to building a good society, as far as economics go, Capitalism is a means without a goal, and Socialism is a goal without a means. Society can only truly work for both the collective good as well as the individual welfare if it utilizes *both* Socialism and Capitalism. posting anonymously to protect my karma Yeah, I wouldn't have signed my handle to your load of shit either.
Are you saying Americans are stupid for buying toys from China without personally verifying the lead content ahead of time? Who's going to be able to do that? Or the average American is stupid for signing a loan after the broker feeds them lies about the way the market is heading. Are they stupid?
And who gains? Society *surely doesn't* gain, as you seem to think. The only people who gain are the hucksters, and their gain is based on short-term opportunity--in other words, it doesn't last. On the other hand, the countless people who were tricked lose severely, and even the innocent bystander home-owner is going to lose out as their property value plummets due to increased foreclosures.
People like you have no clue how systems like the (falsely named) "free market" work. If you don't place limits on what people can do, they *will* exploit loopholes. Why leave those loopholes in when you know damned well they exist, and can easily be closed by a law? That's absolutely moronic. It's essentially allowing yourself to be sacrificed at the altar of that ideological falsehood known as the "free market".
What's worse is the ideals they hold as absolutes, and the mechanisms they use to promote those ideals, repeatedly and inevitably bring severe harm and hardship to millions, yet in spite of that, they still hold those ideals as the highest form of morality.
Intuitively known, perhaps, but not mathematically. There's a universe of difference between the two.
I don't think you understand the current problems. They are A.) pollution B.) global warming gasses C.) renewability.
Wind and solar suffers from none of those things. You could waste 99% of the wind or solar electricity, and that won't be an issue.
Nuclear suffers from both A and C (although C doesn't seem like it would be an actual problem for the next few million years), but even so, nuclear pollution is much more containable than coal pollution, and does not contribute to global warming. So even if (again) you waste 99% of nuclear generated electricity through inefficient transmission, you're still better off than using coal.