Someone should really forbide this practice by law, for the sake of the environment.
Yes, we need to force people to make an extra trip back to the store, to return the disc. Burning gasoline for nothing so you can make the arbitrary return deadline is MUCH better for the environment.
Who cares if your nearest rental store is 10+ miles away?
When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers.
You're assuming Blockbuster and Hollywood Video would have paid just as much, and would have bought just as many copies of a movie, if they knew before-hand that they would be unable to sell it.
Presumably, the ability to resell the used disc raises the price Blockbuster/Hollywood Video is willing to pay (to the publishers) by $8... (Probably less, thanks to a large number of discs being damaged before they can be sold, but the point remains).
The creator gets no money for the product the second time.
That's a horribly unfair way to put it.
I could just as well say that half as many people would have bought the game (at the selling price) in the first place, if they knew before-hand that they couldn't ever re-sell it...
So first-sale doctrine does affect the initial sale price of games, just as much as the resale value of cars affects the sale price, and/or the number of buyers at a certain price...
Try encoding using XVID and jacking up the bitrate and you'll see what codec saturation is.
First, we're a LONG, LONG way from that point with highdef video.
Secondly, XVID has been designed with aggressive quantization, because it's primary purpose is low-bitrate encoding. Change the quantization tables, and lower the minimum frame-level quantizer, and you won't max out the codec until the video is absolutely lossless (**hand-waving away inherent rounding errors**).
at a quality level which would satisfy 99%+ of the public. Which is true.
It's not "true" in any sense. It's a completely subjective opinion, and there are NUMEROUS people just here on/. who will happily tell you they are NOT happy with a DVD-9 rip... I don't believe that remotely translates into < 1% of the populace at large.
Likewise, anything over 15MBps (average, granted) is very very very very likely to be wasted bits. At least for full HD with a HC H.264 codec.
That's simply not true in any objective sense. You might as well say going to highdef in the first place is "wasted bits".
With audio, we've been up to the limit of human hearing for decades, and have been using completely lossless formats. With video we aren't anywhere NEAR the limits of human vision, and use extremely aggressive lossy compression.
You DO realize that Taiwan is a completely separate country from China, right? China won't acknowledge it, but it's undeniable in practice, and recognized as sovereign by the rest of the world.
Japan is doing quite well to... Just because they're off the coast of China doesn't make them one in the same.
China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere.
Their EVD (IIRC) format comes to mind. It was based on incompatible use of DVD tech to give a trivial capacity boost, and the (terribly poor performing yet lower quality than MPEG-2) AVS video codec it used. Considering that JPEG is ancient and patent-free tech, and independently re-implementing inter-frame compression is so simple I could do a halfway decent job of it myself in a week, I'm stunned by how little China has achieved despite how much money they have spent. Large retailers in their own country defy the government mandate to carry them, because demand in nil, and the higher performance and non-standard decoding hardware required is far more expensive.
You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.
You can easily fit ANY resolution video, on ANY sized media, using ANY lossy codec. You can have HD video on a floppy disk using MPEG-1.
With lossy codecs, the lower the bitrate, the more visual information will be discarded (quantized) to make it fit the available bitrate. There's no magic that will wipe away the 5X increase in storage size that Blu-ray has over DVD. Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.
The article notes that this is an unconfirmed rumor, and I fully expect that it is just that, a rumor, and one with absolutely no basis in fact.
My money's on this being the result of some moron tech writer who completely misunderstood what was going on when Toshiba announced something like a new line of up-converting DVD players...
The Indie Alt-Rock group "Kiosk" did something similar with the music video for "Stratospheric". It includes CCTV video of the band on the street, edited together with video surveillance of criminals in the act.
You sound a lot like the ignorant frigtards in the recent Summit Wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mtns. of CA that were upset when a chief wouldn't send his crews up to save their homes (they had already evacuated safely)
Not trying to feed a troll or slander any firefighters, but I would have more sympathy for the chief if they would STOP telling people, at every opportunity, that they should (and later, ordering them to) all evacuate their homes and leave everything to the fire dept., rather than staying behind and trying to protect their property.
Personally, I got to watch as fire fighters sat on the bumpers of their trucks for a good 4+ hours, letting a small brush fire (that two men could have put out with shovels) burn towards homes, and horribly pollute the air for 20 miles around with thick ash. I was absolutely mystified at their utter inaction, until I heard an announcement on the radio that the fire depts. were asking for donations from all the surrounding towns... Good work men!
What's more, the area home-owners were all under mandatory evacuation orders for the entire time the dept. was extorting "donations" and other hand-outs for their crews. Additionally, because we have a fire dept., the police will stop all private citizens from approaching the area of the fire, and the possibility of a non-official fire-fighter putting the damn thing out with a garden hose...
But my biggest criticism of fire fighters is how utterly helpless they are in the face of forest fires. A fire hose may be able to put out a burning couch in 5 seconds flat, but up against a raging wild inferno, it's like spitting into a bonfire. What fire fighters really need is not water and fire retardant, but chain saws and bulldozers so they can actually make a decent fire break and stop a forest fire dead, far faster than back-burning, and no risk of loss of control. And don't bother telling me that bulldozers can't operate on an incline... Many millions have been spent to retrofit a 747 to carry fire retardant, it would be far less difficult or expensive to pivot-mount a bulldozer's engine, or even opt for an aircraft turbine (that can handle any angle) instead of pistons.
The geeks of slashdot acknowledge that P2P use strangles traffic on their LAN, and feel that some modification needs to happen to address this.
However, when service providers complain about the negative effects of millions of people using P2P on their backbones, and take action to correct this, same said slashdot geeks get their panties in a bunch and cry fowl.
There's nothing wrong with reasonable traffic shaping. ISPs, however, DON'T want to do that. They want to damn near cut-off Bittorrent traffic entirely, even though reducing it by, say, 1/4th would have the desired effect.
What's more, with network non-neutrality, what they really want, and what their QoS policies are set to enforce, is to drastically throttle all applications that COMPETE with their own... You can see this most dramatically with VoIP services, but also with P2P you can see that the ISP's own applications and services that use up bandwidth just a badly do NOT get throttled.
Those issues are why there is "moral outrage". People aren't angrily upset that their torrents were just slightly slowed down...
One particular item that they picked on as being very difficult to recycle was the Pringles can. A bizarre combination of metal, cardboard, and plastic, it is almost impossible for them to get the components apart.
It's pretty unfair to single out Pringles, when juice boxes have the exact same drawbacks. Besides, it's not like traditional potato chip bags are exactly a joy for recyclers...
Not to mention that "recyclable" isn't the be-all, end-all. If some form of packaging is effective enough, it can be counterproductive to shun it. Besides, recycling technology advances every year.
to the best of my knowledge, only the anti-pirate channels and the FCC-mandated channels (like the NASA channel) are broadcast clear.
"Wide open" doesn't mean broadcast unencrypted. "Wide open" means the NagravisionII cipher used by DishNet (and some others) has long been completely cracked, and can be trivially decoded.
However, I'm not sure all is lost for the content protectors out there.
It certainly is... DRM is an inherently untenable system.
Last time I check the P4 and greater smart cards used by directv have not been cracked despite a huge demand for it. If I'm wrong please correct me.
You're wrong about the "huge demand". Since DishNet is wide open (and they were even nice enough to use standard DVB-S protocol which any $50 tuner can receive) there isn't much reason for anyone to bother with DirecTV.
but there are also plenty of people who buy spindles of CDs and have 10-25% record failure rates on bad spindles.
That's pretty much exclusively a result of idiots buying dirt cheap, no-name CD-Rs. After a decade of buying thousands of TDK and Maxell CD-Rs, I can't recall a single defective disc.
No, the DDS4 drive wasn't cheap, but the value of the data it stores is worth millions, and is therefore quite worthwhile.
Yes, but if you spent a fraction as much on a professional CD/DVD burner (and good blank discs) you'd see MUCH, MUCH improved reliability. Right now, you're basing your CD/DVD burner experience on $40 re-branded Lite-on crap drives. Get the cheapest crap tape drive you can find, and see what kind of reliability you get there...
But what does Blu-Ray use from MO technology? Blu-Ray is a pure optical format.
RWs were the first disc type available, because Sony based Blu-ray on their pro MO disc tech. The pressed and R discs actually came later.
You only say that because you missed out on Windows NT 4.0. Far and away the best OS Microsoft has ever produced. Faster than 95, very stable (except early on, due mostly to crappy drivers), completely non-automatic, and very simple both to use and repair...
Every version of Windows, Microsoft adds another layer of abstration. Count how many steps it takes to get to the disk partitioning/management tools in 2000, XP, and Vista... In NT4 it was just Start Menu -> Programs -> Admin. Tools -> Windisk. How many services do you have starting up on 2000, XP, and Vista that you can't even identify? There were about a dozen on NT4, and I knew EXACTLY what every one did, and confidently disabled most of them for a performance boost without ill effects.
And let's get the standard complaints out of the way:
DirectX for NT was a version behind 9x, but it worked well, and most games ran fine. It reach DX6 in the end, which is plenty respectable.
USB support in the OS isn't required for USB keyboards, mice, etc. Never the less, 3rd party USB drivers were (and are) freely available for NT4. Dell still provides them for download. They even have UMASS support, which makes NT4's USB support superior to the USB support even in Win98SE. There are even USB2.0 drivers for NT4.
People complain about BSODs with NT4, but I saw them less than I do now with XP/2003 systems. It should be noted that most PC hardware was much flakier back in those days.
Written like someone whose never seen the horrors of sickle cell, hemophelia, or any number of damn near fatal diseases that can be avoided through genetic screening.
That's a real nice cop-out... Except, of course, for the fact that there are a large range of genetic disorders alive and well in my family tree, which I stand a very good chance of passing to my offspring.
After three years of constantly writing and swapping tapes, I haven't had a single DDS4 tape go bad on me. The number of CD and DVD coasters on the other hand...
There are plenty of people out there that can claim the exact OPPOSITE experience as yours...
Besides that, if you get dirt cheap crap DVD-Burners, you can expect plenty of coasters. But your DDS4 tape drive sure wasn't dirt cheap by as stretch of the imagination, now was it? Try a fair comparison. Besides that, Blu-Ray is bringing Sony's professional MO technology to the masses as well, so things are getting better, not worse.
Yes, Eugenics has a bad rap because of the way it used to be done forcibly in Nazi Germany, the US and other places.
Eugenics has a bad rap because it's been throughly disproven as complete pseudoscience.
[Prospective] parents have access to genetic testing/counseling if there's known risks like hereditary diseases, and embryos can be tested and aborted if they have severe [genetic] defects.
That's not eugenics... That's just genetic screening.
Eugenics is the process of sterilizing "lesser" peoples, such as the poor, and non-white, because of the (false) theory that their offspring were doomed to be similarly intellectually handicapped, regardless of the amount of education they received. This is basically the same (racist) argument long used to suppress negros, being applied instead to poor "white trash" classes of people.
On the (entirely separate) question of genetic screening, I would certainly discourage it. People's desires for their children, and culturally-influenced impression of what traits are "good" and "bad" are not necessarily correct. Some of the smartest people to ever have lived suffer from physical and mental defects, and it's currently impossible to know if their intelligence was in spite of, or perhaps because of that very handicap. If anything, I think modern history has proven that genetic diversity is a GOOD thing. Yet, people have proven to be irrational beings, by and large, and need to be protected from their own desire to establish a monoculture in selecting their offspring.
What happens when everyone on the planet is selecting their unborn children for intelligence, only to find out that our current established theory of what genetic traits lead to intelligence turn out to be wrong, and the world is filled with a generation of mentally handicapped children?
At any rate, at least now you admit that the radiation danger of Pu-238 is much higher than the chemical toxicity of heavy metals,
No. The above figures are for airborne Plutonium, which is much more toxic than ingestion (which I was specifically discussing).
or that the only radiation worth worrying about is gamma emmiters.
I didn't say that, either. Gamma is the only form of radiation people understand, and when they hear "radioactive" that's what they assume. Alpha radiation is infinitely less dangerous, as I was trying to explain.
Slashdot Mirror
Old news... They put TWO in every spindle of CD-R/DVD-Rs... One on the top, one on the bottom.
Yes, we need to force people to make an extra trip back to the store, to return the disc. Burning gasoline for nothing so you can make the arbitrary return deadline is MUCH better for the environment.
Who cares if your nearest rental store is 10+ miles away?
You're assuming Blockbuster and Hollywood Video would have paid just as much, and would have bought just as many copies of a movie, if they knew before-hand that they would be unable to sell it.
Presumably, the ability to resell the used disc raises the price Blockbuster/Hollywood Video is willing to pay (to the publishers) by $8... (Probably less, thanks to a large number of discs being damaged before they can be sold, but the point remains).
That's a horribly unfair way to put it.
I could just as well say that half as many people would have bought the game (at the selling price) in the first place, if they knew before-hand that they couldn't ever re-sell it...
So first-sale doctrine does affect the initial sale price of games, just as much as the resale value of cars affects the sale price, and/or the number of buyers at a certain price...
First, we're a LONG, LONG way from that point with highdef video.
Secondly, XVID has been designed with aggressive quantization, because it's primary purpose is low-bitrate encoding. Change the quantization tables, and lower the minimum frame-level quantizer, and you won't max out the codec until the video is absolutely lossless (**hand-waving away inherent rounding errors**).
It's not "true" in any sense. It's a completely subjective opinion, and there are NUMEROUS people just here on
That's simply not true in any objective sense. You might as well say going to highdef in the first place is "wasted bits".
With audio, we've been up to the limit of human hearing for decades, and have been using completely lossless formats. With video we aren't anywhere NEAR the limits of human vision, and use extremely aggressive lossy compression.
You DO realize that Taiwan is a completely separate country from China, right? China won't acknowledge it, but it's undeniable in practice, and recognized as sovereign by the rest of the world.
Japan is doing quite well to... Just because they're off the coast of China doesn't make them one in the same.
China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere.
Their EVD (IIRC) format comes to mind. It was based on incompatible use of DVD tech to give a trivial capacity boost, and the (terribly poor performing yet lower quality than MPEG-2) AVS video codec it used. Considering that JPEG is ancient and patent-free tech, and independently re-implementing inter-frame compression is so simple I could do a halfway decent job of it myself in a week, I'm stunned by how little China has achieved despite how much money they have spent. Large retailers in their own country defy the government mandate to carry them, because demand in nil, and the higher performance and non-standard decoding hardware required is far more expensive.
I guess I'd better end this rant here...
You can easily fit ANY resolution video, on ANY sized media, using ANY lossy codec. You can have HD video on a floppy disk using MPEG-1.
With lossy codecs, the lower the bitrate, the more visual information will be discarded (quantized) to make it fit the available bitrate. There's no magic that will wipe away the 5X increase in storage size that Blu-ray has over DVD. Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.
My money's on this being the result of some moron tech writer who completely misunderstood what was going on when Toshiba announced something like a new line of up-converting DVD players...
The Indie Alt-Rock group "Kiosk" did something similar with the music video for "Stratospheric". It includes CCTV video of the band on the street, edited together with video surveillance of criminals in the act.
On MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/londonkiosk
On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BBCMYO2PHQ
Free MP3 download: http://www.contactmusic.com/new/home.nsf/webpages/kioskx25x09x03
No connection to the band. In fact I think the music sucks... Still, they simply don't have as good of a PR guy working for them.
Hmm, this sound familiar.
Not trying to feed a troll or slander any firefighters, but I would have more sympathy for the chief if they would STOP telling people, at every opportunity, that they should (and later, ordering them to) all evacuate their homes and leave everything to the fire dept., rather than staying behind and trying to protect their property.
Personally, I got to watch as fire fighters sat on the bumpers of their trucks for a good 4+ hours, letting a small brush fire (that two men could have put out with shovels) burn towards homes, and horribly pollute the air for 20 miles around with thick ash. I was absolutely mystified at their utter inaction, until I heard an announcement on the radio that the fire depts. were asking for donations from all the surrounding towns... Good work men!
What's more, the area home-owners were all under mandatory evacuation orders for the entire time the dept. was extorting "donations" and other hand-outs for their crews. Additionally, because we have a fire dept., the police will stop all private citizens from approaching the area of the fire, and the possibility of a non-official fire-fighter putting the damn thing out with a garden hose...
But my biggest criticism of fire fighters is how utterly helpless they are in the face of forest fires. A fire hose may be able to put out a burning couch in 5 seconds flat, but up against a raging wild inferno, it's like spitting into a bonfire. What fire fighters really need is not water and fire retardant, but chain saws and bulldozers so they can actually make a decent fire break and stop a forest fire dead, far faster than back-burning, and no risk of loss of control. And don't bother telling me that bulldozers can't operate on an incline... Many millions have been spent to retrofit a 747 to carry fire retardant, it would be far less difficult or expensive to pivot-mount a bulldozer's engine, or even opt for an aircraft turbine (that can handle any angle) instead of pistons.
Thanks for the insight, Yoda.
There's nothing wrong with reasonable traffic shaping. ISPs, however, DON'T want to do that. They want to damn near cut-off Bittorrent traffic entirely, even though reducing it by, say, 1/4th would have the desired effect.
What's more, with network non-neutrality, what they really want, and what their QoS policies are set to enforce, is to drastically throttle all applications that COMPETE with their own... You can see this most dramatically with VoIP services, but also with P2P you can see that the ISP's own applications and services that use up bandwidth just a badly do NOT get throttled.
Those issues are why there is "moral outrage". People aren't angrily upset that their torrents were just slightly slowed down...
It's pretty unfair to single out Pringles, when juice boxes have the exact same drawbacks. Besides, it's not like traditional potato chip bags are exactly a joy for recyclers...
Not to mention that "recyclable" isn't the be-all, end-all. If some form of packaging is effective enough, it can be counterproductive to shun it. Besides, recycling technology advances every year.
"Wide open" doesn't mean broadcast unencrypted. "Wide open" means the NagravisionII cipher used by DishNet (and some others) has long been completely cracked, and can be trivially decoded.
It certainly is... DRM is an inherently untenable system.
You're wrong about the "huge demand". Since DishNet is wide open (and they were even nice enough to use standard DVB-S protocol which any $50 tuner can receive) there isn't much reason for anyone to bother with DirecTV.
That's pretty much exclusively a result of idiots buying dirt cheap, no-name CD-Rs. After a decade of buying thousands of TDK and Maxell CD-Rs, I can't recall a single defective disc.
Yes, but if you spent a fraction as much on a professional CD/DVD burner (and good blank discs) you'd see MUCH, MUCH improved reliability. Right now, you're basing your CD/DVD burner experience on $40 re-branded Lite-on crap drives. Get the cheapest crap tape drive you can find, and see what kind of reliability you get there...
RWs were the first disc type available, because Sony based Blu-ray on their pro MO disc tech. The pressed and R discs actually came later.
You only say that because you missed out on Windows NT 4.0. Far and away the best OS Microsoft has ever produced. Faster than 95, very stable (except early on, due mostly to crappy drivers), completely non-automatic, and very simple both to use and repair...
Every version of Windows, Microsoft adds another layer of abstration. Count how many steps it takes to get to the disk partitioning/management tools in 2000, XP, and Vista... In NT4 it was just Start Menu -> Programs -> Admin. Tools -> Windisk. How many services do you have starting up on 2000, XP, and Vista that you can't even identify? There were about a dozen on NT4, and I knew EXACTLY what every one did, and confidently disabled most of them for a performance boost without ill effects.
And let's get the standard complaints out of the way:
DirectX for NT was a version behind 9x, but it worked well, and most games ran fine. It reach DX6 in the end, which is plenty respectable.
USB support in the OS isn't required for USB keyboards, mice, etc. Never the less, 3rd party USB drivers were (and are) freely available for NT4. Dell still provides them for download. They even have UMASS support, which makes NT4's USB support superior to the USB support even in Win98SE. There are even USB2.0 drivers for NT4.
People complain about BSODs with NT4, but I saw them less than I do now with XP/2003 systems. It should be noted that most PC hardware was much flakier back in those days.
That's a real nice cop-out... Except, of course, for the fact that there are a large range of genetic disorders alive and well in my family tree, which I stand a very good chance of passing to my offspring.
There are plenty of people out there that can claim the exact OPPOSITE experience as yours...
Besides that, if you get dirt cheap crap DVD-Burners, you can expect plenty of coasters. But your DDS4 tape drive sure wasn't dirt cheap by as stretch of the imagination, now was it? Try a fair comparison. Besides that, Blu-Ray is bringing Sony's professional MO technology to the masses as well, so things are getting better, not worse.
Eugenics has a bad rap because it's been throughly disproven as complete pseudoscience.
That's not eugenics... That's just genetic screening.
Eugenics is the process of sterilizing "lesser" peoples, such as the poor, and non-white, because of the (false) theory that their offspring were doomed to be similarly intellectually handicapped, regardless of the amount of education they received. This is basically the same (racist) argument long used to suppress negros, being applied instead to poor "white trash" classes of people.
On the (entirely separate) question of genetic screening, I would certainly discourage it. People's desires for their children, and culturally-influenced impression of what traits are "good" and "bad" are not necessarily correct. Some of the smartest people to ever have lived suffer from physical and mental defects, and it's currently impossible to know if their intelligence was in spite of, or perhaps because of that very handicap. If anything, I think modern history has proven that genetic diversity is a GOOD thing. Yet, people have proven to be irrational beings, by and large, and need to be protected from their own desire to establish a monoculture in selecting their offspring.
What happens when everyone on the planet is selecting their unborn children for intelligence, only to find out that our current established theory of what genetic traits lead to intelligence turn out to be wrong, and the world is filled with a generation of mentally handicapped children?
So tell me, what DO they give you medals for?
Quick, stupid mistake...
No. The above figures are for airborne Plutonium, which is much more toxic than ingestion (which I was specifically discussing).
I didn't say that, either. Gamma is the only form of radiation people understand, and when they hear "radioactive" that's what they assume. Alpha radiation is infinitely less dangerous, as I was trying to explain.