You're just proving your ignorance. Look up SEER or COP (coefficient of performance). A heatpump can commonly move 3X as much heat as energy is put into it. Eg. for every 1KW of electricity, it can output 3KW equivalent of heat. It gets better if you tie geothermal into that.
I don't think Modesto, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, or pretty much the entire Central Valley is considered a 'desirable place to live'.
You're wrong. The weather in most of CA is quite nice, and there's endless easy access to all manner of recreation. The only reason the populace flocks to the ultra-huge city centers is due to concentration of jobs. If more jobs were available in Central CA, you'd see a population boom there as well. In fact it's inevitable, as witnessed by hundreds of other times jobs have spilled out from LA/SF to inland areas (typically nearer the cheaper suburbs).
And I'm not clear on how running air conditioning 24/7 throughout most of the state reduces energy consumption
That's because you're ignorant. AC is a heatpump, which is vastly more energy efficient than resistive heating. Not to mention the mild temps in CA require a much lower delta of heating/cooling than most anywhere else in the country.
nor can even the highest consumer energy consumption compare to myriad widget factories producing millions of widgets each with only 1000 employees or less.
Private residence energy consumption is about 1/4 of all electrical demands. The rest goes to companies. So, yes, having 3X as many people will do a very good job of making up for factories. And that's not to mention there more definitely are several factories in CA.
It would be far more informative if the "balloon" for each company was sized based on gross sales, or some-such. That would at least differentiate between a large company with serveral lawsuits, and a tiny company with an inordinate number.
They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth,
Actually, I think the parachute HINDERED and delayed it's return to earth, if anything. It would have been perfectly capable of returning to earth without help, as NASA scientists discovered some time ago...
CinePaint (aka. FilmGimp) most certainly DOES support 16 / 32-bit, and full color managed workflow. As for adjustment layers, there is some Script-fu to give you most of this:
Considering that Pixar started off as a software development company who wanted to do some demonstration projects to show off their tools,
Pixar's success is due to a great team. They would have been equally successful as a traditional animation firm without any "tools". The creative works are the thing of value. The tools are unimportant to a very large degree.
Ditto for all these crappy Blender films. We know open source tools can and are used for big-budget Hollywood films (eg. CinePaint), so turning out another low-budget piece of trash is not compelling, to anyone but the "converted" reading it here.
What would be a massively compelling point. is having creative individuals produce a GOOD creative work, placed under a free license, and yet still being able to turn a profit on it. That is the part that the "information wants to be free" crowd have not yet been able to show on a non-trivial scale.
Is there even a difference? Of course there is. Is it significant enough that your average web user will be browsing Sports Illustrated dot com and say "wow these images look crappy"? Hell no.
Hell yes! I don't know how you can pretend there's no noticeable difference... The solid blue background turned into blocky shit. Sure, you saved some bits, and it's still comprehensible. So what? They made a reasonable decision to optimize for better quality over tiny file-size, and the better image isn't painfully large at all...
Would it be feasible to take a current simple game like Pacman, write a driver to check it for proper functionality on an x86 CPU, spawn thousands of them in minor variations, and use a genetic algorithm to keep the smallest?
Your problem then lies in making a PERFECT "driver". If it's not perfect, you'll end up with code highly effective at tricking it, and doing NOTHING ELSE. This is what viruses are for.
Your suggestion is just like using a random number generator to write books... First, spell-check. Then, grammar check... Then, it still might be nonsensical junk, and even if not, it's not going to be War and Peace.
I can name just about any subsidizing program in existence as it stands.
But you still haven't named one... So I'd say, maybe you can't.
in Canada the bureaucracy for 'healthcare' is about 40c/dollar is spent at the administrative level.
I don't buy that for a second. What statistic did you butcher to come up with that fake number?
Let's try a real study:
In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada's national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3 percent; Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., Terry Campbell, M.H.A., and David U. Himmelstein, M.D. N Engl J Med 2003; 349:768-775 August 21, 2003
Such as the $27m/year to run 150km of rail line in northern ontario to a small town
Some reason you can't say the name of the small town, or cite your source for all this? Are you just hoping no-one will check on your ridiculous claims?
Yes, it is a bad example, an nobody would believe he has any power or authority to speak of. Yet you don't bother to provide any others. No, pundits don't count, either.
Google searches turn up rehashes of the same old stories. It's only in paranoid raving blogs (like/.) that any "threats" are suggested. Assange is trying to fuel the fire, but there's next to nothing solid out there.
Does a country have a right to use information illegally obtained by a third party to enforce laws against those implicated by that tainted information?
I think it's a pretty clear-cut YES.
Trade-secrets have been handled the same way pretty much forever. If you can keep your trade-secrets a secret, fine. But once they are exposed, even if by illegal activity (in fact, pretty much ALWAYS by illegal activity), everyone is free to use that (formerly secret) information themselves, for any purpose they choose.
In the US evidence that is obtained without legal authority to obtain it can often be thrown out of court through the "exclusionary rule," a legal doctrine often mentioned in connection with a concept of some evidenced being obtained as the "fruit of a poisonous tree."
In the US, information illegally obtained is generally only excluded from a court case if it's known (or suspected) that the person in question was a member of law enforcement, or otherwise acting as an agent of law enforcement (eg. Cop#1: "Hey Fred, go break into that house."). Otherwise, it's not a violation of the subject's constitutional rights.
You have non-productive members of society, working in society, producing nothing except being a part of the bureaucracy.
While some of their time may be wasted by the bureaucracy they work under, they're most certainly not "non-productive". Maybe they aren't as productive as the same number of people in private business, but they are still definitely productive.
There's plenty of government services you don't need, which operate and you won't die if they didn't exist as well.
Name them. Cut the BS and let's get to the meat of the matter.
I'm betting that:
A) Anything you list will be some service that, by and large, people want (or need) the government to do.
B) Constitutes only a tiny expense. and
C) Constitutes only a trivial fraction of all government jobs.
however when you have 4:1 ratios of individuals or less like in Europe where it's 2.8:1, due to bloat, you tell me what you gain except a lack of money at the end of the day, which you can in turn use to make the economy turn.
The ratio of government jobs to private jobs doesn't prove, anything. Compared to the US, all other 1st world-countries are a bit more socialistic, so ALL HEALTHCARE POSITIONS ARE GOVERNMENT JOBS. No-one is going to say healthcare is unnecessary or non-productive. And every study done has shown a single-payer system is more efficient than a private system.
So, I've just shown that having more "government" jobs can be CHEAPER and MORE EFFICIENT. There are thousands of other examples, including all public infrastructure (roads, water, electricity, communications, etc.), and security forces (police, military).
So, I've now "told you" what they are good for. Your turn to stop the blanket accusations and get to verifiable facts. NAME SOME WASTE. Since you've been wrong every time you've opened your mouth so far, we'll have to see if the examples you give can be so easily shot-down as well...
If they can print it, they, in-fact, have practically unlimited control over the currency. No magic will prevent the printing of extra currency from causing inflation. And if they stop printing more, you get deflation.
There have been plenty of instances where the citizens of a country refused to use the governments official currency
Indeed. And it's pretty much always been because that the government was abusing their (above) control over that currency. And what do they use instead? Some OTHER GOVERNMENT'S currency!
I don't think I've read a single news article about a country gaining more freedoms
That's either selective amnesia or observation bias. Laws are changing all the time. There's always someone gaining more freedom, somewhere. As a big one, Gay rights in the US marches on, in the past few days the US military has been forced by court order to re-instate an open lesbian.
And let's not forget that everyone in the history of the world that has lived long enough to become an old man has bitched and moaned about how the world is getting worse. You just call it "less freedom" and pretend that makes your complaints more legit than my old man complaining about how cars are built... Rose colored goggles in full-force.
For a long time the US had both the highest standard of living AND the lowest taxes and smallest government.
Well, if you're talking about the Regan/Bush years, the government was BIGGER, not smaller, and the economic policy undeniably drove the economy into a downward spiral, causing the highest levels of unemployment in history, which even the current recession hasn't entirely matched in all aspects. Standard of living certainly declined.
However, I wouldn't really call that "a long time". Other than that, the most recent period of low taxes I can see is the 1910s and before.
I would also like to point out that, as far back as Thomas Jefferson, and up through today, every US politician that has campaigned on "smaller government" has turned themselves into a liar almost immediately upon taking power, and grown the government. Decreases in government size have always been accidents, with unfortunate consequences.
It's actually been proven several times throughout history that higher taxes and bigger government almost always leads to lower quality of life
You may be able to selectively cite some cases where tax increases coincide with lower quality of life, but overwhelmingly, those countries with the highest tax rate do indeed have the highest quality of living.
It doesn't matter if a politician passes a law saying it's ok for person X to steal a certain amount from person Y because person Y makes more money - it's still person Y's money and no one else has the right to it.
If not for the government, person Y would be making no money at all. Otherwise, they'd just move to some failed country, start their own police force, and continue to make obscene amounts of money without being taxed... Guess what? It's the governments that create those stable economic markets person Y is (effectively) exploiting to generate their wealth.
Saying YOUR government is violating your right by taxing "your" money, is a bit like saying the casino is robbing you by not allowing you to break into the slot machine... Those trying to get out of paying taxes are merely trying to be on the most profitable end of the prisoner's dilemma...
In Canada it take 4 people to pay for the job of 1 civil servant. It's probably around 6:1 in the US
Well I would certainly hope the government doesn't have a tax-rate of 100%, which would be necessary (in most cases) for 1 person to pay the salary for 1 civil servant...
government makes no money, it creates no money, all it does it take and spend another persons.
Government isn't supposed to "make money". It's supposed to provide the services we all need to survive, and aren't efficient to provide on an individual basis. I'd sure like safety, but I can't really afford my own private police force. International trade is nice, but I can't afford a navy. In so much as providing safety and stability CREATES MONEY, most governments do exactly that, with your taxes.
This means that evidence gathered illegally is admissible!
No one has been arrested or prosecuted based on this information, nor will they be. What this information does is separate those who are evading their taxes, versus those who are not. That makes large-scale investigation vastly easier by directing you at targets. I'm willing to bet the authorities can prove tax evasion by everyone involved without actually using the leaked HSBC information in court...
It's also possible the government steps in and mandates a switch over as they did with TV
That's not actually possible... HDTV switchover was delayed for years because adoption wasn't high. The UK would have forced the switchover, against public will, if they could. With non-existent IBOC adoption, forcing switchover will amount to lots of stations broadcasting to NOBODY, which would quickly drive them out of business. You're simply not going to be able to force everyone to get a new radio. It's not remotely as essential as TV these days. Damn near everyone would just say "screw it" and never listen to broadcast radio again.
I think you would be interested in my Noise Generator cum Equalizer that can turn any good quality FM/MP3/FLAC audio into AM quality audio.
This is quite true. In the video realm, it's been extensively studied how a small amount of high-frequency noise (random) will mask many artifacts in lossy digital video codecs. No question cutting off the high frequency component of most audio will make it sound warmer, and a bit of noise thrown-in will blind you to any other harshness of it.
I can't imagine anyone paying for so minimal an improvement. If you're into AM talk radio I can see it but I don't think anyone is going to pay the iBiquity tax (every radio manufacturer has to pay for iBiquity IP to have an HD decoder) to have a radio that "sounds a little better".
This should be a surprise to NOBODY. Europe (mostly the UK) went through the exact same thing with DAB a decade before us. The audio quality improvements are overwhelmingly negated by the dramatically increased cost of receivers, and power requirements for all that extra decoding (compare a cheap FM radio with an iPod+FM radio). The whole thing is dying on the vine.
IBOC or Radio Mondiale? Who cares? I think we'll have both out there eventually with Radio's that contain decoders for either.
I, on the other hand, think penetration will stay trivial, and both will go away for the foreseeable future. Broadcasters are desperate to compete with iPods and the internet, but there's nothing that says they CAN.
The one place digital radio even sounds interesting is in the Shortwave space where audio quality is HORRIBLE thanks to fading, which DRM promises to eliminate. Still, it's looking like nobody is interested in the massive added cost there, either, and adoption is pretty much just a few experimenters, and otherwise completely stillborn.
But see my above point... If somebody was to implement DRM, iBOC, DAB(+) etc., in software on (existing) iPods with a cheap tuner add-on, this situation might finally change. Short of some major shift like that, it's not happening.
Personally, I'd rather see a truly Free solution out there, but where's the profit in that?
There are no (free or otherwise) codecs out there that can come close to matching the low-bitrate performance of HE-AAC+. I'd put Musepack above any other codec for faithful mid to high bitrate audio reproduction, but on the low-end, HE-AAC+ is quite alone.
The same is true for COFDM. Name one other modulation scheme that is as efficient and robust against interference.
(go over to the DRM project page and look at the requirements to build it
The fact that the DREAM project decided to depend several external libraries doesn't mean ANYTHING. Just about all GNU projects do the exact same thing, splitting out every tiny little feature into it's own lib, to the point that you're installing 20 libraries to install GPG (compare with the self-contained OpenSSL).
To use the bee's as a "they don't understand bees' flight thus they know nothing" falls into the "science has nothing to say unless it says everything" fallacy.
You may not realize I'm not the OP. There was no anti-scientific rhetoric in any of my comments that I can see. I replied to disagree with the statement:
"It doesn't take a lot of insight to imagine how flapping a wing can sustain slower air speeds than a fixed wing aircraft could sustain."
Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.
Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...
but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.
Okay, how's this:
"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"
It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.
"the source of extra lift remains unknown."... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"
When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"
It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".
I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.
If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:
It doesn't take a lot of insight to imagine how flapping a wing can sustain slower air speeds than a fixed wing aircraft could sustain.
That's very easy to say in hindsight. Let's keep in mind it took a good 60 years for someone to improve upon our understanding of insect flight... Until that time, nobody could explain how bees were able to sustain flight.
Considering that TFA says they are $4.3 billion debt, and trying to take their profit out of $3 phone cards, I'm not so sure I'd say they are succeeding AT ALL.
There is a big difference betweens someones private life and the actions of a government.
There certainly is, BUT Wikileaks doesn't treat them any differently. They treat leaks of private documents from small, private organizations the same as they treat big government corruption leaks.
You'll notice under their categories, they don't just have "government". They have a category specifically for non-governmental organizations. Under that, there are large and small private companies, social organizations, etc.
Care to explain how leaking the manual of female beauty for Mormons, and Alpha Chi Sigma ceremonies, and "subscriptions to Polish extreme-right newsletters" is different than leaking relevant information detailing serious criminal accusations against notable persons?
Slashdot Mirror
You're just proving your ignorance. Look up SEER or COP (coefficient of performance). A heatpump can commonly move 3X as much heat as energy is put into it. Eg. for every 1KW of electricity, it can output 3KW equivalent of heat. It gets better if you tie geothermal into that.
You're wrong. The weather in most of CA is quite nice, and there's endless easy access to all manner of recreation. The only reason the populace flocks to the ultra-huge city centers is due to concentration of jobs. If more jobs were available in Central CA, you'd see a population boom there as well. In fact it's inevitable, as witnessed by hundreds of other times jobs have spilled out from LA/SF to inland areas (typically nearer the cheaper suburbs).
That's because you're ignorant. AC is a heatpump, which is vastly more energy efficient than resistive heating. Not to mention the mild temps in CA require a much lower delta of heating/cooling than most anywhere else in the country.
Private residence energy consumption is about 1/4 of all electrical demands. The rest goes to companies. So, yes, having 3X as many people will do a very good job of making up for factories. And that's not to mention there more definitely are several factories in CA.
It would be far more informative if the "balloon" for each company was sized based on gross sales, or some-such. That would at least differentiate between a large company with serveral lawsuits, and a tiny company with an inordinate number.
Actually, I think the parachute HINDERED and delayed it's return to earth, if anything. It would have been perfectly capable of returning to earth without help, as NASA scientists discovered some time ago...
CinePaint (aka. FilmGimp) most certainly DOES support 16 / 32-bit, and full color managed workflow. As for adjustment layers, there is some Script-fu to give you most of this:
http://the-gimp.deviantart.com/art/Adjustment-Layers-1473128
and
http://registry.gimp.org/node/20340
Apparently, not enough people really cared, otherwise there'd be more contributions and improvements from others.
Additionally, Krita (http://www.koffice.org/krita/) also supports 16 / 32 bit, adjustment layers and full color managed workflow.
Pixar's success is due to a great team. They would have been equally successful as a traditional animation firm without any "tools". The creative works are the thing of value. The tools are unimportant to a very large degree.
Ditto for all these crappy Blender films. We know open source tools can and are used for big-budget Hollywood films (eg. CinePaint), so turning out another low-budget piece of trash is not compelling, to anyone but the "converted" reading it here.
What would be a massively compelling point. is having creative individuals produce a GOOD creative work, placed under a free license, and yet still being able to turn a profit on it. That is the part that the "information wants to be free" crowd have not yet been able to show on a non-trivial scale.
Hell yes! I don't know how you can pretend there's no noticeable difference... The solid blue background turned into blocky shit. Sure, you saved some bits, and it's still comprehensible. So what? They made a reasonable decision to optimize for better quality over tiny file-size, and the better image isn't painfully large at all...
Your problem then lies in making a PERFECT "driver". If it's not perfect, you'll end up with code highly effective at tricking it, and doing NOTHING ELSE. This is what viruses are for.
Your suggestion is just like using a random number generator to write books... First, spell-check. Then, grammar check... Then, it still might be nonsensical junk, and even if not, it's not going to be War and Peace.
But you still haven't named one... So I'd say, maybe you can't.
I don't buy that for a second. What statistic did you butcher to come up with that fake number?
Let's try a real study:
Some reason you can't say the name of the small town, or cite your source for all this? Are you just hoping no-one will check on your ridiculous claims?
Yes, it is a bad example, an nobody would believe he has any power or authority to speak of. Yet you don't bother to provide any others. No, pundits don't count, either.
Google searches turn up rehashes of the same old stories. It's only in paranoid raving blogs (like /.) that any "threats" are suggested. Assange is trying to fuel the fire, but there's next to nothing solid out there.
The US Government wanted to talk with him, and discourage him from posting more classified material.
Who is it you speak of who "were demanding his head"?
I think it's a pretty clear-cut YES.
Trade-secrets have been handled the same way pretty much forever. If you can keep your trade-secrets a secret, fine. But once they are exposed, even if by illegal activity (in fact, pretty much ALWAYS by illegal activity), everyone is free to use that (formerly secret) information themselves, for any purpose they choose.
In the US, information illegally obtained is generally only excluded from a court case if it's known (or suspected) that the person in question was a member of law enforcement, or otherwise acting as an agent of law enforcement (eg. Cop#1: "Hey Fred, go break into that house."). Otherwise, it's not a violation of the subject's constitutional rights.
While some of their time may be wasted by the bureaucracy they work under, they're most certainly not "non-productive". Maybe they aren't as productive as the same number of people in private business, but they are still definitely productive.
Name them. Cut the BS and let's get to the meat of the matter.
I'm betting that:
A) Anything you list will be some service that, by and large, people want (or need) the government to do.
B) Constitutes only a tiny expense. and
C) Constitutes only a trivial fraction of all government jobs.
The ratio of government jobs to private jobs doesn't prove, anything. Compared to the US, all other 1st world-countries are a bit more socialistic, so ALL HEALTHCARE POSITIONS ARE GOVERNMENT JOBS. No-one is going to say healthcare is unnecessary or non-productive. And every study done has shown a single-payer system is more efficient than a private system.
So, I've just shown that having more "government" jobs can be CHEAPER and MORE EFFICIENT. There are thousands of other examples, including all public infrastructure (roads, water, electricity, communications, etc.), and security forces (police, military).
So, I've now "told you" what they are good for. Your turn to stop the blanket accusations and get to verifiable facts. NAME SOME WASTE. Since you've been wrong every time you've opened your mouth so far, we'll have to see if the examples you give can be so easily shot-down as well...
If they can print it, they, in-fact, have practically unlimited control over the currency. No magic will prevent the printing of extra currency from causing inflation. And if they stop printing more, you get deflation.
Indeed. And it's pretty much always been because that the government was abusing their (above) control over that currency. And what do they use instead? Some OTHER GOVERNMENT'S currency!
That's either selective amnesia or observation bias. Laws are changing all the time. There's always someone gaining more freedom, somewhere. As a big one, Gay rights in the US marches on, in the past few days the US military has been forced by court order to re-instate an open lesbian.
And let's not forget that everyone in the history of the world that has lived long enough to become an old man has bitched and moaned about how the world is getting worse. You just call it "less freedom" and pretend that makes your complaints more legit than my old man complaining about how cars are built... Rose colored goggles in full-force.
Well, if you're talking about the Regan/Bush years, the government was BIGGER, not smaller, and the economic policy undeniably drove the economy into a downward spiral, causing the highest levels of unemployment in history, which even the current recession hasn't entirely matched in all aspects. Standard of living certainly declined.
However, I wouldn't really call that "a long time". Other than that, the most recent period of low taxes I can see is the 1910s and before.
I would also like to point out that, as far back as Thomas Jefferson, and up through today, every US politician that has campaigned on "smaller government" has turned themselves into a liar almost immediately upon taking power, and grown the government. Decreases in government size have always been accidents, with unfortunate consequences.
You may be able to selectively cite some cases where tax increases coincide with lower quality of life, but overwhelmingly, those countries with the highest tax rate do indeed have the highest quality of living.
If not for the government, person Y would be making no money at all. Otherwise, they'd just move to some failed country, start their own police force, and continue to make obscene amounts of money without being taxed... Guess what? It's the governments that create those stable economic markets person Y is (effectively) exploiting to generate their wealth.
Saying YOUR government is violating your right by taxing "your" money, is a bit like saying the casino is robbing you by not allowing you to break into the slot machine... Those trying to get out of paying taxes are merely trying to be on the most profitable end of the prisoner's dilemma...
Well I would certainly hope the government doesn't have a tax-rate of 100%, which would be necessary (in most cases) for 1 person to pay the salary for 1 civil servant...
Government isn't supposed to "make money". It's supposed to provide the services we all need to survive, and aren't efficient to provide on an individual basis. I'd sure like safety, but I can't really afford my own private police force. International trade is nice, but I can't afford a navy. In so much as providing safety and stability CREATES MONEY, most governments do exactly that, with your taxes.
No one has been arrested or prosecuted based on this information, nor will they be. What this information does is separate those who are evading their taxes, versus those who are not. That makes large-scale investigation vastly easier by directing you at targets. I'm willing to bet the authorities can prove tax evasion by everyone involved without actually using the leaked HSBC information in court...
That's not actually possible... HDTV switchover was delayed for years because adoption wasn't high. The UK would have forced the switchover, against public will, if they could. With non-existent IBOC adoption, forcing switchover will amount to lots of stations broadcasting to NOBODY, which would quickly drive them out of business. You're simply not going to be able to force everyone to get a new radio. It's not remotely as essential as TV these days. Damn near everyone would just say "screw it" and never listen to broadcast radio again.
This is quite true. In the video realm, it's been extensively studied how a small amount of high-frequency noise (random) will mask many artifacts in lossy digital video codecs. No question cutting off the high frequency component of most audio will make it sound warmer, and a bit of noise thrown-in will blind you to any other harshness of it.
This should be a surprise to NOBODY. Europe (mostly the UK) went through the exact same thing with DAB a decade before us. The audio quality improvements are overwhelmingly negated by the dramatically increased cost of receivers, and power requirements for all that extra decoding (compare a cheap FM radio with an iPod+FM radio). The whole thing is dying on the vine.
I, on the other hand, think penetration will stay trivial, and both will go away for the foreseeable future. Broadcasters are desperate to compete with iPods and the internet, but there's nothing that says they CAN.
The one place digital radio even sounds interesting is in the Shortwave space where audio quality is HORRIBLE thanks to fading, which DRM promises to eliminate. Still, it's looking like nobody is interested in the massive added cost there, either, and adoption is pretty much just a few experimenters, and otherwise completely stillborn.
But see my above point... If somebody was to implement DRM, iBOC, DAB(+) etc., in software on (existing) iPods with a cheap tuner add-on, this situation might finally change. Short of some major shift like that, it's not happening.
There are no (free or otherwise) codecs out there that can come close to matching the low-bitrate performance of HE-AAC+. I'd put Musepack above any other codec for faithful mid to high bitrate audio reproduction, but on the low-end, HE-AAC+ is quite alone.
The same is true for COFDM. Name one other modulation scheme that is as efficient and robust against interference.
The fact that the DREAM project decided to depend several external libraries doesn't mean ANYTHING. Just about all GNU projects do the exact same thing, splitting out every tiny little feature into it's own lib, to the point that you're installing 20 libraries to install GPG (compare with the self-contained OpenSSL).
You may not realize I'm not the OP. There was no anti-scientific rhetoric in any of my comments that I can see. I replied to disagree with the statement:
"It doesn't take a lot of insight to imagine how flapping a wing can sustain slower air speeds than a fixed wing aircraft could sustain."
Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...
Okay, how's this:
"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"
It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.
"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"
It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".
I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.
If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php
http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960
That's very easy to say in hindsight. Let's keep in mind it took a good 60 years for someone to improve upon our understanding of insect flight... Until that time, nobody could explain how bees were able to sustain flight.
Considering that TFA says they are $4.3 billion debt, and trying to take their profit out of $3 phone cards, I'm not so sure I'd say they are succeeding AT ALL.
There certainly is, BUT Wikileaks doesn't treat them any differently. They treat leaks of private documents from small, private organizations the same as they treat big government corruption leaks.
You'll notice under their categories, they don't just have "government". They have a category specifically for non-governmental organizations. Under that, there are large and small private companies, social organizations, etc.
Care to explain how leaking the manual of female beauty for Mormons, and Alpha Chi Sigma ceremonies, and "subscriptions to Polish extreme-right newsletters" is different than leaking relevant information detailing serious criminal accusations against notable persons?