"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't even found in the US Constitution
That exact phrasing isn't used. SO WHAT?
it's simply assumed as a part of the Common Law,
Absolutely wrong. The common phrasing isn't used, but the right to presumption of innocence is well laid out in several amendments to the constitution. Namely, the 5th, 6th, and 14th.
I've never actually encountered anyone who thought that fossils are fakes.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. The "rational" people need something to pin on the "non-rational" (ie. those that disagree with them about anything) people that follow some particular religion and factual accuracy doesn't count. It certainly didn't start, today, on/. and it's certainly not going to end because you've pointed out how incorrect and irrational it happens to be.
Actually I know more about the subject than you could ever DREAM there is to know.
When I use x264 to encode a VOB file at high bitrates I can get a pixel perfect reproduction of the original video at a quarter of the file size.
First off, you can't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of ANYTHING with a lossy codec. That you think it's perfect is just because your eyes aren't very good, or the display you're using is terrible. It is not a fact just because it happens to look good to you.
Also, I should point out that it's not a fair comparison. With x264, you're probably using extremely large GOP size, on the order of 20X that of the VOB you're encoding from. That will give you an advantage (though certainly not 2X) over a fair comparison. In other words, you could reencode from a VOB to MPEG-2 and get a significant bitrate reduction without practically any quality loss.
Even the x264 developers won't go out on a limb and claim a 4X improvement over MPEG-2... I say that with confidence because I know several of them.
Get yourself a very good antenna, and a preamp, and for less than the cost of 2 months of Comcast, you'll have PERFECT quality HDTV, with no future fees, and no price increases.
Yes, you get LESS channels, but cable TV is hardly worth watching anymore, anyhow. Why get the "non-stop repeats of Law & Order" channel, when you can get the "We make Law & Order" channel for free, and record as many episodes as you might ever want to want again, onto your DVR? On the rare occasion of a good cable TV show, you can get the DVD set (or perhaps Blu-ray in the near future) of the full season for the cost of one month of comcast.
H.264 or even XVID would be multiple times as efficient,
I guess you qualify for the idiotic post of the day award...
Xvid isn't multiple times as efficient as MPEG-2. At high bitrates, the difference is fairly minor, what it does well is looking acceptable at low bitrates. And those 600kbps Xvid DVD rips? They don't look nearly as good as the original, and are typically downscaled by quite a bit.
H.264, even according to it's loudest and most biased proponents, is at most 2X as efficient as MPEG-2. That's a nice improvement, and companies like DirecTV are jumping onto that bandwagon, but it's not exactly free... H.264 decoders need a LOT more horsepower than they would to decode MPEG-2. Not to mention that re-encoding is always going to produce some quality losses, so you won't be getting H.264 at half the bitrate, looking as good as the original.
and the latter is free so you don't have to deal with this crap..
Neither Xvid nor H.264 is remotely free. Xvid is MPEG-4 Part 2 (SP/ASP), and H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC). Both are licensed by the MPEG-LA (aka. "this crap"). http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4v-agreement.cfm
If you had bothered spend 60 seconds clicking-through and reading those links (MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/AVC) in the Wikipedia article you'd linked to, you'd know that.
Isn't this just great? In response to competition, comcast gives you a crappier product.
It happens. Companies sometimes decide to compete on price, and undercut the better-quality product, in hopes enough people won't know or at least care enough about the quality difference.
Imagine how coarse they must look at twice the size if a downscaling doesn't produce anything more smooth than that.
What are you talking about? The full resolution (FIOS) captures are there for side-by-side comparison, and they look GREAT.
Also, downscaling doesn't have to produce blurring. Better scalers are much smarter than that. Even with a stupid one, a simple sharping filter afterwards would reduce the blur, though it then brings out other artifacts.
You could also describe it like audio does via distorion (eg % THD).
No, you couldn't. There is NO known way to objectively rate the quality of lossy compression. There have been innumerable papers and Ph.D thesises on just how far reality (lossy video/audio perception) is from mathematical comparisons.
Perceptual coding is a non-linear thing. Lossy video may be drastically lacking in high frequencies (which might otherwise make up 33% of the video bitrate) yet look damn near perfect. Lossy audio make have the most square, disjointed, funky looking waveform, and sound great, while another codec that provides a pretty close match to the original wave can sound horrible.
For video, you most commonly have the PSNR measurement. The flaws in it are known far and wide. It's completely useless for comparing different codecs, and I'd say still mostly useless even comparing different settings of the same codec. Of course, that doesn't stop anyone: Note On2's codec comparison PDFs, where they plot the (irrelevant) PSNR score of their proprietary codecs against MPEG-standard codecs. If you'd like to believe them, you'd think Flash 8 video blows away H.264.
Not at all. If you'd read past the first sentence you'd have seen plenty of examples. The EPA is always paying out truck loads of money to municipalities to help clean up their water. States are very often paying as well, since water problems very often span municipalities. A city can charge a rate for water, and draw it from local aquifers, but when it's being drawn down and someone needs to replenish it, you can bet they don't raise their rates to astronomical levels to pay for their short-sightedness. When their local sources are overdrawn, they don't pay to build an interstate pipeline to bring in more. etc.
Utilities, especially electric, are strictly user-pay.
They absolutely are not.
Your city's water utility didn't build the dam you're drawing water from, or the aqueducts, or the flood control channels. etc., etc. When a subterranean line breaks and destroys a road, home, etc., they don't have to pay for it all.
Even wholly private companies are getting the benefits of infrastructure paid for by state and federal taxes. How many nuclear power plants are supplying you with electricity? How many dams? Your local power co didn't pay to build them from your monthly bill.
Indeed, it's much more common for the municipality that runs/owns the water utilities, to make money off the utility;
I look forward to seeing a source for that. In the mean time, I call bullshit. I'm not making things up, I'm talking about specific cases I see. You are just brushing it off as not true, because it doesn't agree with what you happen to want to believe.
I can spike to 200GB or 300GB in a month once in a while and nothing will happen. The ISP's could whine about it, but then I'd take my money elsewhere,
Sounds like ISPs where you are just haven't caught-up. In the US, companies have figured out that 2% of users make up 50% of bandwidth usage. In that light, it's in their best interest that those people switch to someone else, and be unprofitable to their competitors... Of course there is occasional collateral damage, but it's still the most profitable model.
It sounds like one CEO from a US ISP could take over an ISP where you are, and quickly make a killing, and push the rest out of business.
The cost of city water and sewer aren't the REAL costs. Many billions of dollars in subsidies are going into it, part from the local, state, and federal government. No doubt the EPA has thrown many millions in to help with cleaning up the pollution, you may be drawing water from a dam, aqueduct, etc. But, if water and sewer were thought of as non-essential luxuries, then they would be priced closer to the real costs, which would probably be more than twice as much, and higher in some areas.
Of course you could make fiber to the home as cheap as you want, just as you could make ANYTHING ELSE as cheap as you want to, provided you're willing to subsidize much of it. Cars and gasoline could be damn near free.
The question is only one of what is the least inefficient way of the necessary money being collected and allocated... The government all too often throws tons of money into bureaucratic waste, and/or unsupervised grants to private companies, and ends up getting nothing of value. Of course companies all too often charge far over cost, provide terrible service, and have little or no interest in maintaining or upgrading infrastructure. If a company is a monopoly, they do the bare minimum to provide something that resembles the service you'll need, and be forced to buy only from them. If they're not a monopoly, then they go to great lengths to "cut costs" no matter what, and end up horrendously over-subscribing, being cheap by failing to perform maintenance and infrastructure upgrades, and generally just ending up eating their own seed corn...
So, pick your poison; or invent and publish a new economic theory that doesn't have these problem.
Maybe they should schedual the first start for one of the predicted end dates ala the Mayans and Egyptans. The Hadron collider builders should also play "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by REM the day it starts.
You forgot the final season of Lexx (4.x), which made this exact topic the main plot point.
The summary is not only accurate, but basically plagiarized from TFA. The article, from the Register, is what is inaccurate. The summary is as accurate a synopsis as is possible.
The level of fragmentation on eg. ext3 filesystems stays in the low single percent. It would take an extremely strange usage pattern to exceed that, and one almost certainly not found with such large, slow disks. A far, far cry from what is seen with FAT/NTFS, and low enough that it's a pretty trivial amount of extra seeking.
Wikipedia does better, but most of the good contributions were made years ago.
And might I add that they are also being continuously undermined by hordes of editors that THINK they know what they are talking about, but in fact are introducing misinformation.
It seems like the large numbers of dedicated editors have disappeared, and the Wikipedia model is starting to break down. Mature articles get more vandalism and misinformation than good edits, but the wiki model is not geared to handle such things, and the such maintenance tasks just saps the time and energy of those knowledgeable few who remain.
This all assumes that your file system never gets fragmented. But sooner or later it will.
Not if you use a sane operating system, that DOESN'T fragment files when writing them, in the first place.
Microsoft is probably the only company out there now that is still using 1980s technology for their filesystem. Then again, even in the 1980s, most companies (selling OSes) didn't have this problem.
Updating firmware to enforce a new EULA that otherwise would not have applied?
The firmware has nothing to do with the new EULA. It's an irrelevant coincidence. They could have a nice friendly EULA that says "Happy Hacking" and still send out a firmware that disables further updates. The fact that they decided to remove a feature (the commands used for updating flash) doesn't require any kind of an agreement. You'll note that Microsoft doesn't change their EULA every time they release a security update that changes a file or removes a feature in Windows.
What's more, Meraki is in a strong position, if they have to go to court. They merely removed a feature that made it EASY to update firmware. Now, customers are just required to do it the standard way... pulling out the chips.
Ultimately, however, Google depends on quality web sites, because without it, a search engine would be pointless
Search engines were around before there were many (any?) ad-supported web sites.
Google has taken steps to build content libraries, like book search, news, e-mail, earth/maps, YouTube, etc. Caching everything ensures they'll be useful even if there's nothing else but google.
Shopping sites are more than happy to stay online without ads. Maybe instead of a lot of content (already designed to drive ads views) with a few ads on the page, we'll just have lots of product info on a site, with a few pages of a little content. No doubt if you want to make a "Coca Cola is the greatest drink ever" site, Coke would be happy to host it, even in a post-ad-apocalyptic internet.
With sites like Wikipedia, citeseer, Archive.org, government sites, universities, etc., the internet will continue to be quite useful to a great many people, even if all profit on the internet dies a horrible death (which is ludicrous).
Frankly, I think this is all bullshit. If you can't turn a profit if you're forced to fairly compete with competitors and their advertising, you're doing something wrong. Luckily, it'll only take a quick web search on Google (and a peek at the ads) to find another company that will be HAPPY to fill-in when you go away.
Full spectrum high efficiency lights would be a major boon to the pot.... I mean industrial hemp growers.
Why? When you're using an abandoned house, tapped directly into the grid, bypassing the meter, you don't care too much about electricity prices. If anything, you'd be slightly more concerned how much money you've invested, when the cops seize it.
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That exact phrasing isn't used. SO WHAT?
Absolutely wrong. The common phrasing isn't used, but the right to presumption of innocence is well laid out in several amendments to the constitution. Namely, the 5th, 6th, and 14th.
Not to worry, the Enterprise is speeding around the Sun as we speak... Space-whales told them to.
"AIM AWAY FROM FACE." ???
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. The "rational" people need something to pin on the "non-rational" (ie. those that disagree with them about anything) people that follow some particular religion and factual accuracy doesn't count. It certainly didn't start, today, on
For reference, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology
Actually I know more about the subject than you could ever DREAM there is to know.
First off, you can't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of ANYTHING with a lossy codec. That you think it's perfect is just because your eyes aren't very good, or the display you're using is terrible. It is not a fact just because it happens to look good to you.
Also, I should point out that it's not a fair comparison. With x264, you're probably using extremely large GOP size, on the order of 20X that of the VOB you're encoding from. That will give you an advantage (though certainly not 2X) over a fair comparison. In other words, you could reencode from a VOB to MPEG-2 and get a significant bitrate reduction without practically any quality loss.
Even the x264 developers won't go out on a limb and claim a 4X improvement over MPEG-2... I say that with confidence because I know several of them.
No, this is just typical idle...
Slogan: "It's not a steaming pile of crap, it's idle.slashdot.org"!
Now how the hell do I block these damn idle stories from appearing on the front page?
Get yourself a very good antenna, and a preamp, and for less than the cost of 2 months of Comcast, you'll have PERFECT quality HDTV, with no future fees, and no price increases.
http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757
Yes, you get LESS channels, but cable TV is hardly worth watching anymore, anyhow. Why get the "non-stop repeats of Law & Order" channel, when you can get the "We make Law & Order" channel for free, and record as many episodes as you might ever want to want again, onto your DVR? On the rare occasion of a good cable TV show, you can get the DVD set (or perhaps Blu-ray in the near future) of the full season for the cost of one month of comcast.
I guess you qualify for the idiotic post of the day award...
Xvid isn't multiple times as efficient as MPEG-2. At high bitrates, the difference is fairly minor, what it does well is looking acceptable at low bitrates. And those 600kbps Xvid DVD rips? They don't look nearly as good as the original, and are typically downscaled by quite a bit.
H.264, even according to it's loudest and most biased proponents, is at most 2X as efficient as MPEG-2. That's a nice improvement, and companies like DirecTV are jumping onto that bandwagon, but it's not exactly free... H.264 decoders need a LOT more horsepower than they would to decode MPEG-2. Not to mention that re-encoding is always going to produce some quality losses, so you won't be getting H.264 at half the bitrate, looking as good as the original.
Neither Xvid nor H.264 is remotely free. Xvid is MPEG-4 Part 2 (SP/ASP), and H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC). Both are licensed by the MPEG-LA (aka. "this crap"). http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4v-agreement.cfm
If you had bothered spend 60 seconds clicking-through and reading those links (MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/AVC) in the Wikipedia article you'd linked to, you'd know that.
It happens. Companies sometimes decide to compete on price, and undercut the better-quality product, in hopes enough people won't know or at least care enough about the quality difference.
What are you talking about? The full resolution (FIOS) captures are there for side-by-side comparison, and they look GREAT.
Also, downscaling doesn't have to produce blurring. Better scalers are much smarter than that. Even with a stupid one, a simple sharping filter afterwards would reduce the blur, though it then brings out other artifacts.
No, you couldn't. There is NO known way to objectively rate the quality of lossy compression. There have been innumerable papers and Ph.D thesises on just how far reality (lossy video/audio perception) is from mathematical comparisons.
Perceptual coding is a non-linear thing. Lossy video may be drastically lacking in high frequencies (which might otherwise make up 33% of the video bitrate) yet look damn near perfect. Lossy audio make have the most square, disjointed, funky looking waveform, and sound great, while another codec that provides a pretty close match to the original wave can sound horrible.
For video, you most commonly have the PSNR measurement. The flaws in it are known far and wide. It's completely useless for comparing different codecs, and I'd say still mostly useless even comparing different settings of the same codec. Of course, that doesn't stop anyone: Note On2's codec comparison PDFs, where they plot the (irrelevant) PSNR score of their proprietary codecs against MPEG-standard codecs. If you'd like to believe them, you'd think Flash 8 video blows away H.264.
Not at all. If you'd read past the first sentence you'd have seen plenty of examples. The EPA is always paying out truck loads of money to municipalities to help clean up their water. States are very often paying as well, since water problems very often span municipalities. A city can charge a rate for water, and draw it from local aquifers, but when it's being drawn down and someone needs to replenish it, you can bet they don't raise their rates to astronomical levels to pay for their short-sightedness. When their local sources are overdrawn, they don't pay to build an interstate pipeline to bring in more. etc.
They absolutely are not.
Your city's water utility didn't build the dam you're drawing water from, or the aqueducts, or the flood control channels. etc., etc. When a subterranean line breaks and destroys a road, home, etc., they don't have to pay for it all.
Even wholly private companies are getting the benefits of infrastructure paid for by state and federal taxes. How many nuclear power plants are supplying you with electricity? How many dams? Your local power co didn't pay to build them from your monthly bill.
I look forward to seeing a source for that. In the mean time, I call bullshit. I'm not making things up, I'm talking about specific cases I see. You are just brushing it off as not true, because it doesn't agree with what you happen to want to believe.
Well that's the understatement of the century...
Sounds like ISPs where you are just haven't caught-up. In the US, companies have figured out that 2% of users make up 50% of bandwidth usage. In that light, it's in their best interest that those people switch to someone else, and be unprofitable to their competitors... Of course there is occasional collateral damage, but it's still the most profitable model.
It sounds like one CEO from a US ISP could take over an ISP where you are, and quickly make a killing, and push the rest out of business.
The cost of city water and sewer aren't the REAL costs. Many billions of dollars in subsidies are going into it, part from the local, state, and federal government. No doubt the EPA has thrown many millions in to help with cleaning up the pollution, you may be drawing water from a dam, aqueduct, etc. But, if water and sewer were thought of as non-essential luxuries, then they would be priced closer to the real costs, which would probably be more than twice as much, and higher in some areas.
Of course you could make fiber to the home as cheap as you want, just as you could make ANYTHING ELSE as cheap as you want to, provided you're willing to subsidize much of it. Cars and gasoline could be damn near free.
The question is only one of what is the least inefficient way of the necessary money being collected and allocated... The government all too often throws tons of money into bureaucratic waste, and/or unsupervised grants to private companies, and ends up getting nothing of value. Of course companies all too often charge far over cost, provide terrible service, and have little or no interest in maintaining or upgrading infrastructure. If a company is a monopoly, they do the bare minimum to provide something that resembles the service you'll need, and be forced to buy only from them. If they're not a monopoly, then they go to great lengths to "cut costs" no matter what, and end up horrendously over-subscribing, being cheap by failing to perform maintenance and infrastructure upgrades, and generally just ending up eating their own seed corn...
So, pick your poison; or invent and publish a new economic theory that doesn't have these problem.
Does someone want to tell me what definition of "organic" they are using, which can be found in comets and moon geysers?
You forgot the final season of Lexx (4.x), which made this exact topic the main plot point.
The summary is not only accurate, but basically plagiarized from TFA. The article, from the Register, is what is inaccurate. The summary is as accurate a synopsis as is possible.
The level of fragmentation on eg. ext3 filesystems stays in the low single percent. It would take an extremely strange usage pattern to exceed that, and one almost certainly not found with such large, slow disks. A far, far cry from what is seen with FAT/NTFS, and low enough that it's a pretty trivial amount of extra seeking.
What you do behind closed doors is your own business...
And might I add that they are also being continuously undermined by hordes of editors that THINK they know what they are talking about, but in fact are introducing misinformation.
It seems like the large numbers of dedicated editors have disappeared, and the Wikipedia model is starting to break down. Mature articles get more vandalism and misinformation than good edits, but the wiki model is not geared to handle such things, and the such maintenance tasks just saps the time and energy of those knowledgeable few who remain.
Not if you use a sane operating system, that DOESN'T fragment files when writing them, in the first place.
Microsoft is probably the only company out there now that is still using 1980s technology for their filesystem. Then again, even in the 1980s, most companies (selling OSes) didn't have this problem.
Not at all.
The firmware has nothing to do with the new EULA. It's an irrelevant coincidence. They could have a nice friendly EULA that says "Happy Hacking" and still send out a firmware that disables further updates. The fact that they decided to remove a feature (the commands used for updating flash) doesn't require any kind of an agreement. You'll note that Microsoft doesn't change their EULA every time they release a security update that changes a file or removes a feature in Windows.
What's more, Meraki is in a strong position, if they have to go to court. They merely removed a feature that made it EASY to update firmware. Now, customers are just required to do it the standard way... pulling out the chips.
(IANAL)
Umm, we already have them... Citizens Band. Family Radio Service. Multi-Use Radio Service. General Mobile Radio Service. Ham. etc.
Not to mention the 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5GHz (et al.) unlicensed spectrum everyone is using for cordless phones and WiFi, but not for voice service.
What's so specially about 700MHz that voice service will magically take off, where the rest have failed to?
Search engines were around before there were many (any?) ad-supported web sites.
Google has taken steps to build content libraries, like book search, news, e-mail, earth/maps, YouTube, etc. Caching everything ensures they'll be useful even if there's nothing else but google.
Shopping sites are more than happy to stay online without ads. Maybe instead of a lot of content (already designed to drive ads views) with a few ads on the page, we'll just have lots of product info on a site, with a few pages of a little content. No doubt if you want to make a "Coca Cola is the greatest drink ever" site, Coke would be happy to host it, even in a post-ad-apocalyptic internet.
With sites like Wikipedia, citeseer, Archive.org, government sites, universities, etc., the internet will continue to be quite useful to a great many people, even if all profit on the internet dies a horrible death (which is ludicrous).
Frankly, I think this is all bullshit. If you can't turn a profit if you're forced to fairly compete with competitors and their advertising, you're doing something wrong. Luckily, it'll only take a quick web search on Google (and a peek at the ads) to find another company that will be HAPPY to fill-in when you go away.
Why? When you're using an abandoned house, tapped directly into the grid, bypassing the meter, you don't care too much about electricity prices. If anything, you'd be slightly more concerned how much money you've invested, when the cops seize it.