On another Olympics note, does anyone else think there have been an unusually high number of errors in the technical events this year?
In women's gymnastics: No. Absolutely not. I'd say there were slightly fewer errors than previous Olympics.
If you've been watching the NBC coverage of the olympics, you've probably heard the phrase "China Syndrome" several times. China's women's gymnastics team is infamous for making huge errors come olympic competition time. I guess that's what happens when you put too much pressure on 14 year-old girls. And other than China, I'd also point out previous American gymnasts like the '96 team with Kerri Strug, who became world famous for ONLY falling down ONCE (mainly because her team-mate, Dominique Moceanu, fell down TWICE, right before her)...
In men's gymnastics: Yes. I was surprised to see competitor after competitor falling down all at the same time. I can't even guess why. The men generally have less errors than the women, not the other way around. Of course my opinion could be biased because after an hour of horrible routines and errors, it became such a depressing slog that I stopped watching entirely. The rest of the competition could have been flawless for all I know.
But when did a pre-recorded message become "speech"?
About a century after a drawing/picture became "speech".
His right to talk to me stops when he prevents himself from hearing me hanging up on him.
There's no such provision in any laws, and I doubt you could come up with anything on paper that would effectively restrict pre-recorded calls without serious collateral damage to other very important freedoms that you do (or, at least, you should) value.
NiMH used to have problems with high self discharge rates,
That has been quite a long time ago (unless you buy cheap junk ones). I still use my NiMH AAs (and AAAs) from YEARS ago, and I trust them to hold most of their charge for over a month. In fact I use NiMH batteries in most of my remotes and similar low-drain devices, and they last for at least 6 months before I get suspicious and swap them.
Mind you, I don't really have much that uses AA batteries anymore, everyone seems to have moved to embedded LiIon.
Yes indeed. I go to great lengths to stick with devices that use standard batteries. I won't accept any device where I can't instantly swap batteries, and I've found devices that use standard batteries are almost always FAR more energy efficient...
eg. My old (B&W) PDA that ran for a month on a pair of AAs, vs my even older (color) PDA that ran for 3 hours on LiION.
eg. My MP3 CD player that run for 40+ hours on a pair of AAs, vs. an iPod.
That was an issue of lacking medical technology and techniques, not a lack of regulation.
Okay. PROVE IT
I think it's safe to say some 90%+ of us have never needed medical attention, at least well into adult-hood.
Hint, you can point to herd immunity and sanition, but you still won't be able to cover the huge infant and child mortality rates. You're not completely wrong of course, as both issues contributed, but largely so by dismissing one of them.
Usually when government bans things like this, it exempts itself from the ban. For example, does this at all affect prerecorded political calls?
Speech is a very dangerous to start banning... So they only ever ban "commercial" speech, and leave non-profits and political discourse alone.
A law restricting political calls is almost guaranteed to be thrown out by the Supreme Court on the first challenge. And don't count on a constitutional amendment being passed to address everyone's minor annoyances...
I think we need better chemistry.. Lithium-ion cells are unstable, intolerant of overcharging, and energy-dense enough to be a real problem when they fail.
NiMH is extremely stable, quite tolerant of overcharging (not ridiculous so like NiCD, but infinitely better than LiION), etc., while still ALMOST as energy-dense and ALMOST as quick-charging/discharging. They aren't, however, nearly as lightweight as LiION.
About the only thing noteworthy that has happened since then is the "open source" Gray-Hoverman antenna, if you want to opt to build your own antenna with very high gain. http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/index.htm Although, at about 1.5m / 5' tall, you'll probably want to scale it down to get it to fit in a window.
if they started multicasting to me because one computer on my netowrk wanted to see the stream, my entire network would be flooded.
You're referring to multicasting on a LAN, which is quite different than an ISP using multicast. After the ISP multicast stream hits your DSL or Cable router, it can look to the local network exactly like a unicast stream.
That depends, flooding every computer on the network with information is not desirable.
With a hub, every machine on the network is already being flooded, even if the content is only unicast. Unicasting the same content to two machines on the same hub-based network segment would result in every machine on the network receiving the all the data, TWICE.
With a switch, this isn't quite the case. Though due to the limited throughput of switches, a single broadcast to all the machines might slow down your overall network less than a few simultaneous unicast streams, with the specifics depending on speed and topology.
But generally, with a switch, multicasting becomes more desirable than broadcasting, and provides the best features and benefits of both.
To answer your original question, there's little or nothing that needs to be done to set this up. Either your ethernet switch knows how to handle multicast, and therefore sends it only to subscribing ports, or it doesn't, and it broadcasts the data to all active ports, just like a hub. I imagine you were using some low-end home switch/router for your tests, which simply isn't smart enough to handle multicast properly. You can be sure, however, your ISP isn't using such low-end kit.
Also, you should check your math. Since California only accounts for just over 10% of the US economy,
13% actually, which is FAR larger than any other of the 50 states, even the geographically larger ones like TX. The CA population is #1, but not much larger than several other states.
And if CA starts to slip, the rest of the US, and in fact the world, is in very deep trouble. Most of the world's airplanes are developed, designed, built, tested, etc., in CA. The vast majority of the jet engine industry is located in CA. All the major technology companies are centrally located in CA: Intel, AMD, Google, Sun, IBM, etc. Hollywood is still turning out TV shows and movies that are shown around the world. Pretty much everything that the US has, that other countries want to buy (keeping the trade deficit from ballooning) is being developed in CA. Forget a couple measly little banks... If CA starts having economic problems, the US is in worse trouble than it has ever seen.
It's mathematically impossible for California's economy to be larger than the US economy.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
California is special though. They do something like that approximately once a week.
No, it isn't. Remember Deregulation? Enron? That was good old California doing the Republican thing, and letting power companies set their own prices. Doing the opposite now can only be a good thing.
CA has a more balanced electorate than most states, with about 45% voting Republican, often electing Republican governors (like the current Governator), and in the not-too distant past, being won by Republican presidential candidates. There are numerous Republican House Reps from CA, including good old "Duke" Cunningham (Mr. Kickbacks himself) and Jerry Lewis (Ranked #1 in Federal Government Pork).
The idea that CA is some bastion of socialism couldn't be further from the truth. With a couple more years of Mexicans streaming over the border, and it'll go even more to the right.
In the case of solar, you'll likely see the price get driven up with large scale adoption as the price of resources used to make the panels jumps due to the increased demand...
That's not at all true with solar-thermal. The latter of which is what 80%+ of solar power plants are, due to reduced installation cost, maintenance, and slightly higher efficiencies. PV really only makes sense on roof-tops and small portable power needs. Why this design uses them is beyond me.
It is true with current photovoltaics, but non-silicon based PV alternatives are in the works. Some are currently being made, just at higher costs, with the hope that prices will drop "any time now".
10GW in 10 years is well within reach, and will probably happen from commercial activity. 10GW in 2 years is unlikely, but 10GW in 5 years is probable.
I wouldn't start making aggressive predictions just yet. If oil prices start sliding downward (which is likely, to a point), prices on other fossil fuels will drop as well, and all these planned solar and wind plants won't look like as good of an investment anymore. We went through the same thing in the 70s due to OPEC's embargo, with alternative energy springing up everywhere, only to stagnate and slide backwards once the immediate and sharp price-pressure was off.
Once that happens, big government incentives have to be there, or else it's all over when the immediate commercial pressure goes away.
California is a third world country that does not know it yet.
Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.
How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?
There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.
As for Youtube, why would a Linux user want to use their flash-based player? Install latest version of clive, mplayer and xclip, and run this script after selecting or copying Youtube URL
This is the biggest problem with FLV. You need a website-specific script just to FIND the videos in question. Certainly, there are several apps that can handle YouTube, but 95% of the FLV videos I would ever care to watch are embedded on other, smaller websites like, eg. GorillaMask.
IMHO, we need some kind of SWF plug-in, but not the monsterous, slow bloated beast that is GNASH. An SWF plug-in stripped down to absolutely nothing, that runs when it encounters an embed=file.swf, then it's only task is to look for the media player strings, find the pointer to the FLV filename, and launch MPlayer with that URL (of the actual FLV file).
With a tiny fraction as much development effort as something like GNASH, and practically no system resources, every FLV video out there becomes easily accessible on Linux, FreeBSD, ReactOS, BeOS, on x86, PPC, ARM, MIPS, et al.
IMHO, Adobe screwed this up horribly... With H.264 support, they could have leap-frogged Microsoft's WMV, and become the ubiquitous format for web playback. However, they, instead, are working AGAINST 3rd parties that also included H.264/MP4, by not embedding the file directly, and forcing websites to include it, hidden behind an SWF "player" that simple obfusticates the actual file, and makes it impossible for other apps to get at, on the off chance they DON'T have the latest version of Flash installed (it'll be a few years before everyone upgrades to v9+). But instead of that, they force websites to provide TWO different web pages if they want compatibility... One for Flash, one for every other video player in the world. Unfortunately, of course, the easiest way out is to just create the Flash page, and screw everybody else over, which is what most sites do, YouTube included. Google Video was smart enough to included a download link, but they are the exceptions, and a direct link to the Flash file would be just as good.
Abstinence is the only proven method of not contracting STDs. The only way.
Ceasing to breath is the only proven method of not contracting airborne diseases. The only way.
That dirt cheap piece of rubber that is 99% effective? Yeah, don't use that... You've still got a 1% chance of catching a disease! The only way to be 100% sure is to stop breathing.
Indeed it is. As long as they have some note in the fine-print (unreadably small, and only on-screen for a couple seconds), they're in the clear.
Recently, what they're doing most often, though, is advertising their "new subscriber" price, which is very, very low, but applies only for 6 months, after which you are forever paying the full price, 4X higher.
Seriously, this country's shift towards socialism is appalling.
Unions have been around, and in force, for nearly a century now. They have actually been losing ground for the past couple decades. How does that fit into "shifting towards socalism?"
You go to Darfur or to the Sudan and tell them all your woes.
The fact that people have it worse, somewhere, doesn't mean those who have it relatively good should piss away all their rights until the point that they have it just as bad.
Patents on video and audio codecs ARE NOT SOFTWARE PATENTS. Yes, they can be implemented in software, but that's neither here nor there.
Video/Audio codec patents are valid, and enforced across the EU. Chinese DAP/MP3 players have been seized at the border by authorities in France and Germany because they didn't pay their royalties...
I had some email correspondence with a BBC tech shortly after they'd experimented with streaming ogg vorbis. He said they'd concluded that it wasn't sufficiently "scalable".
There's nothing about an audio or video codec that would make it "scalable" or not. I would imagine they're trying to say that Icecast isn't up to the task, since that's just about the only app that allows realtime streaming of Ogg. It certainly doesn't have the kinds of features that commercial media server packages from Real/M$/Apple do.
Assuming that's the case, they could squeeze Vorbis audio into a MOV container, and stream it with Apple's server. But at that point, you're paying Apple for the server, and may have to deal with patents on the container, so... why bother? They just about give away AAC, anyhow.
Still, that's just for realtime server streaming of audio, and wouldn't impact their P2P system in the slightest. Of course, quality and processing time are big issues with Theora. To a much, much lesser extent, they could be considered issues with Dirac as well.
Companies are scared to death of actually having to advertise the price they charge, so that's unlikely. They LOVE $5 fees that they don't have to advertise, so they SOUND like a good deal in the ads, and only after subscribing would you realize you've been screwed.
Anyhow, they could have done that in the first place, and bundled the boxes for $0, if not for the above. But now that it has gone to court, and is on record, expect a second anti-trust lawsuit if they try that. That's how they got Microsoft.
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In women's gymnastics: No. Absolutely not. I'd say there were slightly fewer errors than previous Olympics.
If you've been watching the NBC coverage of the olympics, you've probably heard the phrase "China Syndrome" several times. China's women's gymnastics team is infamous for making huge errors come olympic competition time. I guess that's what happens when you put too much pressure on 14 year-old girls. And other than China, I'd also point out previous American gymnasts like the '96 team with Kerri Strug, who became world famous for ONLY falling down ONCE (mainly because her team-mate, Dominique Moceanu, fell down TWICE, right before her)...
In men's gymnastics: Yes. I was surprised to see competitor after competitor falling down all at the same time. I can't even guess why. The men generally have less errors than the women, not the other way around. Of course my opinion could be biased because after an hour of horrible routines and errors, it became such a depressing slog that I stopped watching entirely. The rest of the competition could have been flawless for all I know.
You can hang-up your phone at any time, and you can opt not to pick it up while it is ringing as well.
There is no "sharing" involved in receiving a call.
About a century after a drawing/picture became "speech".
There's no such provision in any laws, and I doubt you could come up with anything on paper that would effectively restrict pre-recorded calls without serious collateral damage to other very important freedoms that you do (or, at least, you should) value.
That has been quite a long time ago (unless you buy cheap junk ones). I still use my NiMH AAs (and AAAs) from YEARS ago, and I trust them to hold most of their charge for over a month. In fact I use NiMH batteries in most of my remotes and similar low-drain devices, and they last for at least 6 months before I get suspicious and swap them.
Yes indeed. I go to great lengths to stick with devices that use standard batteries. I won't accept any device where I can't instantly swap batteries, and I've found devices that use standard batteries are almost always FAR more energy efficient...
eg. My old (B&W) PDA that ran for a month on a pair of AAs, vs my even older (color) PDA that ran for 3 hours on LiION.
eg. My MP3 CD player that run for 40+ hours on a pair of AAs, vs. an iPod.
Okay. PROVE IT
I think it's safe to say some 90%+ of us have never needed medical attention, at least well into adult-hood.
Hint, you can point to herd immunity and sanition, but you still won't be able to cover the huge infant and child mortality rates. You're not completely wrong of course, as both issues contributed, but largely so by dismissing one of them.
Speech is a very dangerous to start banning... So they only ever ban "commercial" speech, and leave non-profits and political discourse alone.
A law restricting political calls is almost guaranteed to be thrown out by the Supreme Court on the first challenge. And don't count on a constitutional amendment being passed to address everyone's minor annoyances...
NiMH is extremely stable, quite tolerant of overcharging (not ridiculous so like NiCD, but infinitely better than LiION), etc., while still ALMOST as energy-dense and ALMOST as quick-charging/discharging. They aren't, however, nearly as lightweight as LiION.
I covered this subject in my /. Journal almost a year ago.
HDTV Reception: Everything You Need to Know
http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757
About the only thing noteworthy that has happened since then is the "open source" Gray-Hoverman antenna, if you want to opt to build your own antenna with very high gain. http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/index.htm
Although, at about 1.5m / 5' tall, you'll probably want to scale it down to get it to fit in a window.
You're referring to multicasting on a LAN, which is quite different than an ISP using multicast. After the ISP multicast stream hits your DSL or Cable router, it can look to the local network exactly like a unicast stream.
With a hub, every machine on the network is already being flooded, even if the content is only unicast. Unicasting the same content to two machines on the same hub-based network segment would result in every machine on the network receiving the all the data, TWICE.
With a switch, this isn't quite the case. Though due to the limited throughput of switches, a single broadcast to all the machines might slow down your overall network less than a few simultaneous unicast streams, with the specifics depending on speed and topology.
But generally, with a switch, multicasting becomes more desirable than broadcasting, and provides the best features and benefits of both.
To answer your original question, there's little or nothing that needs to be done to set this up. Either your ethernet switch knows how to handle multicast, and therefore sends it only to subscribing ports, or it doesn't, and it broadcasts the data to all active ports, just like a hub. I imagine you were using some low-end home switch/router for your tests, which simply isn't smart enough to handle multicast properly. You can be sure, however, your ISP isn't using such low-end kit.
13% actually, which is FAR larger than any other of the 50 states, even the geographically larger ones like TX. The CA population is #1, but not much larger than several other states.
And if CA starts to slip, the rest of the US, and in fact the world, is in very deep trouble. Most of the world's airplanes are developed, designed, built, tested, etc., in CA. The vast majority of the jet engine industry is located in CA. All the major technology companies are centrally located in CA: Intel, AMD, Google, Sun, IBM, etc. Hollywood is still turning out TV shows and movies that are shown around the world. Pretty much everything that the US has, that other countries want to buy (keeping the trade deficit from ballooning) is being developed in CA. Forget a couple measly little banks... If CA starts having economic problems, the US is in worse trouble than it has ever seen.
I think you misread my comment. It's ironic that the US is one of those 8 countries with a higher GDP than California, since CA is contributing substantially to the US economy.
No, it isn't. Remember Deregulation? Enron? That was good old California doing the Republican thing, and letting power companies set their own prices. Doing the opposite now can only be a good thing.
CA has a more balanced electorate than most states, with about 45% voting Republican, often electing Republican governors (like the current Governator), and in the not-too distant past, being won by Republican presidential candidates. There are numerous Republican House Reps from CA, including good old "Duke" Cunningham (Mr. Kickbacks himself) and Jerry Lewis (Ranked #1 in Federal Government Pork).
The idea that CA is some bastion of socialism couldn't be further from the truth. With a couple more years of Mexicans streaming over the border, and it'll go even more to the right.
That's not at all true with solar-thermal. The latter of which is what 80%+ of solar power plants are, due to reduced installation cost, maintenance, and slightly higher efficiencies. PV really only makes sense on roof-tops and small portable power needs. Why this design uses them is beyond me.
It is true with current photovoltaics, but non-silicon based PV alternatives are in the works. Some are currently being made, just at higher costs, with the hope that prices will drop "any time now".
I wouldn't start making aggressive predictions just yet. If oil prices start sliding downward (which is likely, to a point), prices on other fossil fuels will drop as well, and all these planned solar and wind plants won't look like as good of an investment anymore. We went through the same thing in the 70s due to OPEC's embargo, with alternative energy springing up everywhere, only to stagnate and slide backwards once the immediate and sharp price-pressure was off.
Once that happens, big government incentives have to be there, or else it's all over when the immediate commercial pressure goes away.
Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.
How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?
There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.
This is the biggest problem with FLV. You need a website-specific script just to FIND the videos in question. Certainly, there are several apps that can handle YouTube, but 95% of the FLV videos I would ever care to watch are embedded on other, smaller websites like, eg. GorillaMask.
IMHO, we need some kind of SWF plug-in, but not the monsterous, slow bloated beast that is GNASH. An SWF plug-in stripped down to absolutely nothing, that runs when it encounters an embed=file.swf, then it's only task is to look for the media player strings, find the pointer to the FLV filename, and launch MPlayer with that URL (of the actual FLV file).
With a tiny fraction as much development effort as something like GNASH, and practically no system resources, every FLV video out there becomes easily accessible on Linux, FreeBSD, ReactOS, BeOS, on x86, PPC, ARM, MIPS, et al.
IMHO, Adobe screwed this up horribly... With H.264 support, they could have leap-frogged Microsoft's WMV, and become the ubiquitous format for web playback. However, they, instead, are working AGAINST 3rd parties that also included H.264/MP4, by not embedding the file directly, and forcing websites to include it, hidden behind an SWF "player" that simple obfusticates the actual file, and makes it impossible for other apps to get at, on the off chance they DON'T have the latest version of Flash installed (it'll be a few years before everyone upgrades to v9+). But instead of that, they force websites to provide TWO different web pages if they want compatibility... One for Flash, one for every other video player in the world. Unfortunately, of course, the easiest way out is to just create the Flash page, and screw everybody else over, which is what most sites do, YouTube included. Google Video was smart enough to included a download link, but they are the exceptions, and a direct link to the Flash file would be just as good.
Ceasing to breath is the only proven method of not contracting airborne diseases. The only way.
That dirt cheap piece of rubber that is 99% effective? Yeah, don't use that... You've still got a 1% chance of catching a disease! The only way to be 100% sure is to stop breathing.
Until rather recently, I'm sure you hadn't ever heard of digital hardware being seized for a patent violation either.
P2P isn't "realtime streaming", which is the issue here. There's no comparison with Quicktime Streaming Server.
Indeed it is. As long as they have some note in the fine-print (unreadably small, and only on-screen for a couple seconds), they're in the clear.
Recently, what they're doing most often, though, is advertising their "new subscriber" price, which is very, very low, but applies only for 6 months, after which you are forever paying the full price, 4X higher.
Unions have been around, and in force, for nearly a century now. They have actually been losing ground for the past couple decades. How does that fit into "shifting towards socalism?"
The fact that people have it worse, somewhere, doesn't mean those who have it relatively good should piss away all their rights until the point that they have it just as bad.
More info:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5312696.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/07/patent_crackdown_at_cebit/
Ignorance abounds...
Patents on video and audio codecs ARE NOT SOFTWARE PATENTS. Yes, they can be implemented in software, but that's neither here nor there.
Video/Audio codec patents are valid, and enforced across the EU. Chinese DAP/MP3 players have been seized at the border by authorities in France and Germany because they didn't pay their royalties...
There's nothing about an audio or video codec that would make it "scalable" or not. I would imagine they're trying to say that Icecast isn't up to the task, since that's just about the only app that allows realtime streaming of Ogg. It certainly doesn't have the kinds of features that commercial media server packages from Real/M$/Apple do.
Assuming that's the case, they could squeeze Vorbis audio into a MOV container, and stream it with Apple's server. But at that point, you're paying Apple for the server, and may have to deal with patents on the container, so... why bother? They just about give away AAC, anyhow.
Still, that's just for realtime server streaming of audio, and wouldn't impact their P2P system in the slightest. Of course, quality and processing time are big issues with Theora. To a much, much lesser extent, they could be considered issues with Dirac as well.
Companies are scared to death of actually having to advertise the price they charge, so that's unlikely. They LOVE $5 fees that they don't have to advertise, so they SOUND like a good deal in the ads, and only after subscribing would you realize you've been screwed.
Anyhow, they could have done that in the first place, and bundled the boxes for $0, if not for the above. But now that it has gone to court, and is on record, expect a second anti-trust lawsuit if they try that. That's how they got Microsoft.