They are beholden to those who can pressure them by providing or withholding money, usually (but not always) through lobbyists.
The single gigantic hole in your theory is that the best-funded candidates LOSE as often as not.
Money matters, but the voters matter much, much more. People tend to agree with your opinion just because they've seen "their" candidates lose, or express an opinion different from theirs, and they want to blame something else, like money, and don't want to believe that their opinions are the minority, or otherwise simply mistaken.
unless you are onboard with the money-providing players, or unless you are part of a massive broad-based campaign, you will be ignored and will receive a canned response.
Even if you are sending in money, you'll still receive a canned response. It's a question of effort. It's impossible for a politician to personally respond to all mail. It's only when there is a large group of people interested, that the effort is worth it. It doesn't matter if that means voters, or campaign contributors.
Democrats want to legalize immigrants. Republicans want a "worker" program, where immigrants are indentured servants, and have no rights what-so-ever. That's a big difference between the two sides.
The rest of your points are either extremely vague, or completely factually incorrect.
vote libertarian!!
By libertarian, you mean fascist, right? No regulation at all, companies free to do whatever the hell they want... The good old days of robber-barons, and the world in a tremendous economic depression.
the current annual input of power into the atmosphere is greater than the total energy cost of human civilization, by a few orders of magnitude.
That's really not true (about wind). It's entirely conceivable that humans could use almost all available (near-ground) wind power, if we chose to make that our only power source. And long before we even get to harnessing 10% of the available wind power, you're going to see big changes, like climate shift, thanks to the reduced power of the winds.
Remember: every single watt of solar power that reaches the ground winds up in the atmosphere as heat, the foundation of wind.
That's completely, totally, laughably wrong. MOST light that hits the ground is STILL reflected outward, back into space. And a significant amount of the light that is absorbed, is STILL radiated back out into space, shortly thereafter.
The rest isn't necessarily converted into wind... You don't just need high temperatures, you need significant temperature *differentials* to generate appreciable amounts of wind.
If, and ONLY if, the solar panels were not only almost perfectly efficient, but also sucked energy from heat in the atmosphere.
Complete nonsense. You don't need near 100% efficiency, much lower efficiencies will do a perfectly good job reducing the temperature of the deserts. And you certainly don't need to absorb heat... The deserts get most of their heat from the sun hitting the ground, not from some magical source of "hot" in the atmosphere.
Sure you'll have an effect, but the tides are already affecting the moon's rotation.
Did you have a point, here, other than baselessly brushing off his concerns? "[Having] an effect" could potentially be very bad.
Your description is a bit hard to follow. If I understand you correctly, you want to encode MPEG-2 at 30fps, and encode the other 30frames/sec with VC-1/H.264, except that the VC-1/H.264 stream uses (all) the 30 MPEG-2 frames as reference/keyframes...
If that is in-fact your idea, there are innumerable technical problems, that would prevent it from working, even in theory. (I'm focusing on h.264, as I don't know VC-1 nearly as well)
Let's say that h.264 can store the same quality video in 25% of the bit-rate... That should be an approximately appropriate figure.
Before anything else, for the sake of backwards compatibility, you've already sacrificed half of that benefit, as h.264 is only storing 50% of the video, while MPEG-2 is storing the other half, so, even at this step, you're only (ideally) going to possibly be able to get a 50% lower bitrate, than using MPEG-2 on all 60frames/second.
I'd guestimate that more than 1/3rd of the bit-rate savings from using h.264 over MPEG-2 are in straight I-frame compression. So, in your scheme, h.264's size benefits over MPEG-2 have already significantly shrunk. So, maybe now you're only getting a 33% bit-rate savings by using h.264.
Another thing you lose is the ability to re-use the motion vectors from previous frames, rather than having to encode them again in-full, in each frame, as MPEG-2 doesn't have the same level of precision in motion vectors (qpel), not to mention advanced features (weighted/-patial prediction).
You largely lose the benefits of the in-loop deblocking filter as well, as the MPEG-2 video can't take advantage of it, and so the error caused by blockiness accumulates much more than it would with pure h.264 video.
Throw in the fact that one of the major bit-rate benefits of h.264 is better I-frame placement, which it really has no control over in such a scheme.
There's many more such issues, but that should be more than enough to explain why you aren't getting much benefit from h.264 anymore. I've lost track of my percentages now, but I'm pretty sure we're already past to the point that you're getting no benefits from this dual-codec scheme, and I've only just started.
So far, that's all really been just assuming ideal/lossless video encoding. The perceptual losses are even greater.
A very big benefit of h.264 over MPEG-2, is that it simply does a better job throwing away more information in the picture, that is unlikely to be perceived by human eyes. But more importantly, it simply throws away DIFFERENT information than MPEG-2. So, when it has to reference MPEG-2 frames, it's going to throw away lots of the information they contain, while it's going to be lacking lots of other information it needs, which MPEG-2 has thrown away in it's lossy processing step. If you limit h.264 to the same level and type of lossy compression as MPEG-2, to prevent this problem, you're seriously cripping h.264 yet again, removing even more of the potential bit-rate benefits.
And do you remember what I said about reducing frame-rate having diminishing returns? It's quite true, because the larger the difference (spacial and temporal) between frames, the more data that needs to be stored in each frame to represent the difference. Doubling the frame-rate of the MPEG-2 video, from 30fps to 60fps won't take 2X the bit-rate... Assuming you double the GOP size (which is only appropriate), you'll probably find that the 60fps MPEG-2 video only needs about a 1/3rd higher bit-rate than 30fps material. In your scheme, MPEG-2 can't use the h.264 frames as a reference at all, so it has to encode ALL the differences between frames, TWICE, once in the MPEG-2 video, and again to generate the h.264 "between" frames. If it could just be all MPEG-2, and depend on all 60fps being there, it can be significantly more efficient.
Of course my numbers are all ball-park figures, not thoroughly tested in anything like this scenario (as if that were really possible), but they are based on lots of experience, and
Find yourself a baren 1 acre field in the desert in Northern California that gets minor earthquakes all the time [...] you've got a 162MW generating plant
This is COMPLETE nonsense, about on-par with any kid coming up with the idea of hooking a motor up to a generator...
I can't possibly believe there's 1 acre of land, anywhere, outputting 162MWs of power in vibrations. If it was, the sand would be MELTING right now.
Reality will set in if you start trying this. Any vibrations you feel are very small. As per Carnot, theoretical efficiency is low, so you'll get almost no energy out of such small vibration. Even if that wasn't the case, and you could extract 100% of the energy cheaply and easily, you'd quickly realize that every generator you use REMOVES that energy (less vibration), so the next will have less, and the next will have even less, and the next will have less still. To actually get MWs of power from tectonic activity would require a device that actually stops the plates from moving.
It's the same reason we're never going to be able to get ALL of our energy from hydro, wind, etc. Putting up significantly more dams or windmills has diminishing returns, as would your scheme, if it were remotely POSSIBLE to begin with.
BitTorrent, as most of you know, doesn't work this way.
I, however, know that you're wrong, and that bittorrent DOES in-fact work precisely that way.
Files are selected from a server called a "tracker", and only users with that exact file size and hash will be linked with you.
Then please explain how partial files are shared with bittorrent... They won't have the exact same size and hash until they're completely downloaded, yet everyone is sharing their partially downloaded file... One of the most important parts of bittorrent.
In fact, bittorrent, like many other P2P programs, uses a 'tree' hash, which allows it to identify which chunks of a file match the original, even though the partial files is a different size, and the entire file doesn't match the hash.
Some P2P protocols allow looking up a file by a hash which does not take filename into account,
By "Some", you mean "Every Single Frickin' One Of Them", right?
nearly all existing P2P protocols will treat the new file as a completely different file,
No. Only the most brain-dead P2P protocols will. "tree" hashes are in use by several P2P protocols. Some are just old or primitive, and have a large number of old servants around that don't understand newer hashes.
Although the main stream would look like 1080i60 to a naive receiver, it would REALLY be 1080p30,
Okay, that does take care of quite a few of the problems.
Given two complete progressive frames, encoding a third progressive frame that falls between them in the source material is almost trivial, [...] There'd be no real "guessing" or AI involved at the receiving end, because the encoder would tell the decoder EXACTLY how the data it HAS should be combined to synthesize/reconstruct the intermediate frame via the "e" stream.
No, it isn't remotely trivial.
The information needed to construct a new frame is exactly that, an entire frame. You've basically reinvented bi-directional frames (B-frames), which are already used in MPEG-1/2/4 video. It's one of the oldest video compression techniques. Unfortunately, the error/difference information (the details that change between each frame) is absolutely NOT trivially small (though there certainly are diminishing returns from frame-rate reductions).
If you want to insert a b-frame between each frame *without* storing the error/difference info, then you're back to the same problem of generating frames.
It can't possibly have as much information in it as a real frame would, it would just look like blur between every other real/sharp frame. If it were really workable, everyone would start with 1fps material, and insert 59 B-frames in-between. It just doesn't work that way... Every generated frame will be more blurry and less detailed than the last.
B-frames have pros and cons, and really much more con than pro (versus using more I/P-frames instead). There are numerous explanations of B-frames online you can read up on, which will extensively explain the issues.
There are several things which can be done to reduce the bit-rate of broadcast ATSC without reducing quality, but making the video 50% B-frames certainly isn't one of them.
This discovery only reinforces the possibility of life outside our solar system;
Yeah, that's the general idea here...
we've only discovered a few extra-solar planets, and at least one among those we've seen has life.
Umm... Would you care to fill me in on the news of the extrasolar planet where lifeforms have been discovered?
If you just mistyped and mean the Earth, well, 1 positive is a horrible survey, with basically an infinite margin of error... It could be one in 100, or one in 99999999999999999999999999, until you have another example, it's impossible to guess at the odds, unless you know EXACTLY what it takes for life to form (we don't) and approximately how many planets are likely to have those exact conditions where and when they need them (we don't know that either).
How many people now think that ETs of some form do exist?
I'd go out on a limb and say: Exactly the same number that did before they heard this story.
IMHO, I'm willing to be the stand-out and betting on no life of any kind outside of this planet. And if I turn out to be wrong, I'd still bet a hell of a lot of money that any such life will be simple, and we won't find higher lifeforms anywhere... That's right, no super-beings to come along and solve all our problems for us.
"1080e60" video would be almost indistinguishable from the original 1080p60 source
I fail to see how. Aliasing artifacts are inherent in interlaced video (sampling), as the two fields are sampled 1/60th of a second apart. The information needed to counter-act that is basically an entire field... in other words, just broadcasting @60p to begin with.
Obviously, if it were even possible, everyone would save bandwidth, and broadcast at 1FPS... then double that over and over (with Faroudja's magic filters) until you get to 60fps.
anyone who's ever screwed around with TMPGENC to make XVCDs back in the old days knows you can get STUNNING results with massive size reduction as long as realtime on-the-fly compression isn't a requirement.
(2-pass) Rate-control helps, but it isn't magic. It may allow better allocation of available bits to improve quality, or reduce bitrate by perhaps 1/3rd, but that's all it does.
I've worked with extremely slow deinterlacers, and though they are able to avoid making mistakes, they can't put in new detail that wasn't there to begin with (eg. during fast motion). The only thing they do is a better job deciding whether/how much they should merge fields, or interpolate, on a frame-by-frame basis. It may be glitch-free, but it can't possibly compare with actually having all the data (2X as much) to begin with.
Most people are happy enough with TV the way it is. That's the reality.
Most people were happy enough with VHS the way it was. That was the reality.
Then DVD came along, and it was better, so they weren't happy with VHS anymore. It's difficult for people to WANT something they've never seen before. Once they see it, they decide if they want it... and they do.
So, 1080p allows them to just paint the two 1080i fields together into a progressive frame for high quality display.
Umm, what? You can't just display two interlaced fields simultaneously... You have to deinterlace, which is a very lossy operation. You lose both resolution and fluidity of motion.
Even though TFA says: "1080p combines high resolution with a high frame rate" they're simply wrong. 1080p is defined as 30fps, which isn't a high frame-rate, it's a low one. The 60fps frame-rate of 720p, however, *is* a high frame-rate. And furthermore...
Probably better then downscaling 1080i to 720p and losing information.
...at 60fps, you can natively display interlaced (30fps) material without actually deinterlacing, and can display full _vertical_ resolution of material up to 1440i (well above 1080i). Though the _horizontal_ resolution would suffer, as 720p has 1/3rd less than 1080. For motion that is 2X as smooth (than 1080p), it is likely worth that trade-off. Besides, you're losing SOME resolution in the deinterlacing process anyhow (How much is debatable).
Of course, to do that, LCD pixels would need fast enough response time to display 60fps, which is the real reason manufacturers go with 1080p@30fps.
You are not always sitting 12-15' back from the TV. 1080p maintains the quality when you do venture closer to the set.
That's nonsense. Interlacing doesn't look any worse when you get close than a progressive picture would. Interlacing artifacts don't get masked by distance any more than anything else. How you came up with that theory is beyond me.
My local broadcaster has the bandwidth divided up quite aggressively, so any scenes with fast movement quickly degrade into a mushy field of macroblocks.
Actually, that would be good reason to go with a 1080 (p/i) display, NOT a 720p display... 720 is geared towards smoother motion, while 1080i is geared towards higher resolution still/low motion video. 720p will make you miss out on much of the high-res stills, and can't do anything to make the (blocky) fast motion look any better... It can only do a better job showing you the macroblocks more clearly!
So, unless you're paying with cash, you might as well reap the benefits of the frequent shopper card. I know I will:)
Shopper cards are the prisoner's dilemma of supermarkets. If few people use them, they get the benefits, at everyone's expense. Now that EVERYONE uses them, prices have to be higher to cover the cost of running the program to begin with. Hell, the whole point of such cards is to discover what tricks work, in convincing you to buy higher-profit products.
The myth of "savings" cards have been thoroughly disproven. Those stores WITHOUT such card programs almost always have substantially lower prices than even the discounted "savings card" price.
I use NoScript not for security but because it cuts out one more way that web sites can annoy me, with their javascripted pop-up ads.
True. Even Slashdot, (which is more or less supposed to be the "good guy") has a massive onmouseover pop-up for the "Intel Opinion Center".
But it's not JUST pop-ups, though... Every javascript annoyance, like sites which "disallow" right-clicking, resize images for no good reason, reformat the page, and squeeze out the content to fit in a few more ads, etc.
Truth is, the only sites in my NoScript white-list are newegg and netflix, and the later is only necessary for a few features like ratings. I don't even white-list google, as maps are more responsive, and far less annoying (error messages/"suggestions" taking up half the page) in their non-script, HTML form.
Frankly, people are better off avaiding sites that require javascript for trivial navigation are better off. There's some major underlying problem with a site if the designer thinks a javascript requirement is a good trade-off so they can leave-out a TINY "submit" button next to drop-down menus. I hope widespread use of NoScript draws traffic away from them... Maybe then somebody will smack some sense into those idiotic web designers.
Besides, NoScript eliminates the need for Flashblock, as well as any other EMBEDed content blockers.
And once there's a demand for pirated high definition content in Asia there will be groups with significant cash resources looking for a way in.
If you've got the resources, you just do a bit-for-bit copy of the physical disk itself (encryption, bad sectors and all), and don't mind the DRM. Indistinguishable from a legit copy.
LCDs *must* have the final step of running varying voltage across the crystals to allow light through, and DLPs *must* have the final step of positioning the mirrors.
Yes, but there's nothing that says the LCD voltages need to be run across a cable from the electronics to the screen. Implant the chip on the screen itself, embed the wires deep inside it, and use smartcard-like methods to prevent tampering by anyone less skilled than perhaps the NSA.
DLP is even easier. It's already a chip. Just combine it with a decryption chip, or another type of controller, and harden the package.
For both, you use the pixel response time, or other factors, and work-up a scheme of sending 10 fake signals (that the screen won't have a chance to respond to) for every real signal. You send junk during blanking intervals, and you can also easily watermark the picture, slightly modifying a few (seemingly random) pixels.
Any excess "noise" introduced by visual obfuscation would be detectable mathematically once the raw mirror switch signals were gathered.
Easy to say, extremely difficult to actually do (without SIGNIFICANT quality losses).
Yes, some quality would be lost in the re-encode, but at the near-lossless bitrates HD content is encoded at the re-encode quality loss isn't too significant.
We're not even talking about just reencoding, we're talking about reencoding including all the noise and encoding junk they throw in when it gets to the screen, as well as whatever artifacts will be added by sending it to another screen, which does the same thing, yet again, on less than perfect data.
CRT is not dead, but the writing is on the wall. Its best days are behind it, and nobody looking towards the future sees CRTs. I wouldn't be surprised if, 10 years down the road, CRTs are depreciated, and new DRM standards come out that specifically exclude any use of CRTs.
Still, it's immensely impressive how much staying power it has had, despite the age-old death of all other forms of tubes in modern electronics.
And even with CRTs, they could at least include some simpler methods of signal obfustication (akin to Macrovision), if they chose to.
No, I'm not. Intending to be sneaky doesn't matter on bit.
The easiest example I can think of is an attourney whispering to his client in a courtroom.
Attorney client privilege is much more than a privacy law. You can be in a room with 100 people, talking to your lawyer so that they can hear you, and it still wouldn't be usable. The police could get a warrant to tap your phones, and not be allowed to use anything you say to your lawyer. It is not privacy law, and has NOTHING to do with intent.
There are similar issues with religious figures, as well as doctors.
Those exceptions to lack of privacy in public are really an entirely different class of issues, have nothing to do with privacy laws, and absolutely do not require (or care about) intent at all.
I'm aware of some educational institutions that saw their newly upgraded networks come to a complete grinding halt - simply because of P2P sharing. They had no choice but to shape their traffic so that other business could get done.
Everyone likes to believe otherwise, but there really is no magic to P2P. It is network traffic like anything else. It's just become a euphemism for the rise in the number of customers fully utilizing their alloted (unlimited) bandwidth, and that fact should be kept in mind when reading any such complaints.
If network traffic brings your network to a grinding halt, I strongly suggest you look at the underlying problems with your network. Personally, the first thing I would do is institute a speed-cap on all interfaces, to the point that the network couldn't possible be overloaded by everyone maxing out their connections. Discriminating against one protocol over another doesn't make sense at all, when the problem is not the protocol, but the bandwidth usage.
Encrypting it was just one obvious issue with this type of network management. Masquerading as HTTP, FTP, etc., would work just as well.
Personally, I'd suggest ISPs institute tiered transfer speeds, so that in-network traffic is allowed at the maximum line speed the interface can allow (varies with DSL, Cable, etc.), while (more expensive) internet traffic is limited to, say, 128K. I'd also look at encouraging development of BETTER P2P protocols, which will perhaps be slightly less taxing on networks, act acceptably when there is congestion, allow for local caching, and generally just offer some benefits to to both the users and ISPs. Programs like bittyrrant may (accidentally/incidentally) do that to a certain extent, increasing download speeds necessarily keeps more of the traffic local.
And it is that effort and intent that counts, doing something so that one has a reasonable expectation of privacy, even if some ingenious cop cirumvents it.
Your excuses to justify your opinion have NO basis in reality. There is no legal recognition of privacy, no matter how sneaky you intend to be, in a public space.
The only expectation of privacy is the recognized right of the press to not be compelled to reveal sources, and that absolutely applies just as much in public, as it does in private.
You're obviously trying to go back and justify your initial opinion, not actually form an opinion based on facts.
The current limitations of cognitive science are well known. You want to ignore them, and believe a hard-line view of functionalism. That is not accepted fact by cognitive scientists (in fact, it's exactly the opposite) that is purely your own entirely biased belief, not even tangentially supported by enough facts to even fairly call it an opinion.
Even if that wasn't the case, you seem to have no answer to the questions of at what point is an animal too intelligent to eat, or the weight that IQ should be given.
I've already pointed out that a camera (which is indeed expensive, low-quality, and easily fooled) is entirely unnecessary.
Taping an LCD and capturing it's output is still lossy, expensive, etc.
That method is just as easily fooled by different methods of (perceptual) signal obfustication.
And in addition, the analog step is very short, and the equipment could easily (but not cheaply) be hardened, to the point that it would be borderline impossible even for professionals to tap it. There's no reason LCD screens have to be as electronically simple as they currently are. That goes double for DLP.
No matter how much fancy full-pipeline encrypted hardware you build, the user still has to see it.
No. Everyone is quick to talk about pointing a video camera at a screen, but it's expensive to get HD equipment, works pretty badly in practice (eg. refresh rate, black level, etc.), and with the quality loss, you might be better off just copying the DVD version instead.
But additionally, a electronic eye sees things very differently than human eyes. There are numerous methods to make moving images look perfect to us, while seriously distorting any recordings of it. The same is true for audio. It's not in use in home equipment yet, but it's certainly possible.
Slashdot Mirror
The single gigantic hole in your theory is that the best-funded candidates LOSE as often as not.
Money matters, but the voters matter much, much more. People tend to agree with your opinion just because they've seen "their" candidates lose, or express an opinion different from theirs, and they want to blame something else, like money, and don't want to believe that their opinions are the minority, or otherwise simply mistaken.
Even if you are sending in money, you'll still receive a canned response. It's a question of effort. It's impossible for a politician to personally respond to all mail. It's only when there is a large group of people interested, that the effort is worth it. It doesn't matter if that means voters, or campaign contributors.
Democrats want to legalize immigrants.
Republicans want a "worker" program, where immigrants are indentured servants, and have no rights what-so-ever.
That's a big difference between the two sides.
The rest of your points are either extremely vague, or completely factually incorrect.
By libertarian, you mean fascist, right? No regulation at all, companies free to do whatever the hell they want... The good old days of robber-barons, and the world in a tremendous economic depression.
That's really not true (about wind). It's entirely conceivable that humans could use almost all available (near-ground) wind power, if we chose to make that our only power source. And long before we even get to harnessing 10% of the available wind power, you're going to see big changes, like climate shift, thanks to the reduced power of the winds.
That's completely, totally, laughably wrong. MOST light that hits the ground is STILL reflected outward, back into space. And a significant amount of the light that is absorbed, is STILL radiated back out into space, shortly thereafter.
The rest isn't necessarily converted into wind... You don't just need high temperatures, you need significant temperature *differentials* to generate appreciable amounts of wind.
Complete nonsense. You don't need near 100% efficiency, much lower efficiencies will do a perfectly good job reducing the temperature of the deserts. And you certainly don't need to absorb heat... The deserts get most of their heat from the sun hitting the ground, not from some magical source of "hot" in the atmosphere.
Did you have a point, here, other than baselessly brushing off his concerns? "[Having] an effect" could potentially be very bad.
If you ever want a solar-powered car, it is.
Not to mention satellites, where money is no object.
And for any other similar (portable/compact) objects as well... RVs or other camping gear... Unmanned airplanes... Ships...
Price matters a lot, but often times, surface area matters more.
Your description is a bit hard to follow. If I understand you correctly, you want to encode MPEG-2 at 30fps, and encode the other 30frames/sec with VC-1/H.264, except that the VC-1/H.264 stream uses (all) the 30 MPEG-2 frames as reference/keyframes...
If that is in-fact your idea, there are innumerable technical problems, that would prevent it from working, even in theory. (I'm focusing on h.264, as I don't know VC-1 nearly as well)
Let's say that h.264 can store the same quality video in 25% of the bit-rate... That should be an approximately appropriate figure.
Before anything else, for the sake of backwards compatibility, you've already sacrificed half of that benefit, as h.264 is only storing 50% of the video, while MPEG-2 is storing the other half, so, even at this step, you're only (ideally) going to possibly be able to get a 50% lower bitrate, than using MPEG-2 on all 60frames/second.
I'd guestimate that more than 1/3rd of the bit-rate savings from using h.264 over MPEG-2 are in straight I-frame compression. So, in your scheme, h.264's size benefits over MPEG-2 have already significantly shrunk. So, maybe now you're only getting a 33% bit-rate savings by using h.264.
Another thing you lose is the ability to re-use the motion vectors from previous frames, rather than having to encode them again in-full, in each frame, as MPEG-2 doesn't have the same level of precision in motion vectors (qpel), not to mention advanced features (weighted/-patial prediction).
You largely lose the benefits of the in-loop deblocking filter as well, as the MPEG-2 video can't take advantage of it, and so the error caused by blockiness accumulates much more than it would with pure h.264 video.
Throw in the fact that one of the major bit-rate benefits of h.264 is better I-frame placement, which it really has no control over in such a scheme.
There's many more such issues, but that should be more than enough to explain why you aren't getting much benefit from h.264 anymore. I've lost track of my percentages now, but I'm pretty sure we're already past to the point that you're getting no benefits from this dual-codec scheme, and I've only just started.
So far, that's all really been just assuming ideal/lossless video encoding. The perceptual losses are even greater.
A very big benefit of h.264 over MPEG-2, is that it simply does a better job throwing away more information in the picture, that is unlikely to be perceived by human eyes. But more importantly, it simply throws away DIFFERENT information than MPEG-2. So, when it has to reference MPEG-2 frames, it's going to throw away lots of the information they contain, while it's going to be lacking lots of other information it needs, which MPEG-2 has thrown away in it's lossy processing step. If you limit h.264 to the same level and type of lossy compression as MPEG-2, to prevent this problem, you're seriously cripping h.264 yet again, removing even more of the potential bit-rate benefits.
And do you remember what I said about reducing frame-rate having diminishing returns? It's quite true, because the larger the difference (spacial and temporal) between frames, the more data that needs to be stored in each frame to represent the difference. Doubling the frame-rate of the MPEG-2 video, from 30fps to 60fps won't take 2X the bit-rate... Assuming you double the GOP size (which is only appropriate), you'll probably find that the 60fps MPEG-2 video only needs about a 1/3rd higher bit-rate than 30fps material. In your scheme, MPEG-2 can't use the h.264 frames as a reference at all, so it has to encode ALL the differences between frames, TWICE, once in the MPEG-2 video, and again to generate the h.264 "between" frames. If it could just be all MPEG-2, and depend on all 60fps being there, it can be significantly more efficient.
Of course my numbers are all ball-park figures, not thoroughly tested in anything like this scenario (as if that were really possible), but they are based on lots of experience, and
This is COMPLETE nonsense, about on-par with any kid coming up with the idea of hooking a motor up to a generator...
I can't possibly believe there's 1 acre of land, anywhere, outputting 162MWs of power in vibrations. If it was, the sand would be MELTING right now.
Reality will set in if you start trying this. Any vibrations you feel are very small. As per Carnot, theoretical efficiency is low, so you'll get almost no energy out of such small vibration. Even if that wasn't the case, and you could extract 100% of the energy cheaply and easily, you'd quickly realize that every generator you use REMOVES that energy (less vibration), so the next will have less, and the next will have even less, and the next will have less still. To actually get MWs of power from tectonic activity would require a device that actually stops the plates from moving.
It's the same reason we're never going to be able to get ALL of our energy from hydro, wind, etc. Putting up significantly more dams or windmills has diminishing returns, as would your scheme, if it were remotely POSSIBLE to begin with.
I, however, know that you're wrong, and that bittorrent DOES in-fact work precisely that way.
Then please explain how partial files are shared with bittorrent... They won't have the exact same size and hash until they're completely downloaded, yet everyone is sharing their partially downloaded file... One of the most important parts of bittorrent.
In fact, bittorrent, like many other P2P programs, uses a 'tree' hash, which allows it to identify which chunks of a file match the original, even though the partial files is a different size, and the entire file doesn't match the hash.
By "Some", you mean "Every Single Frickin' One Of Them", right?
No. Only the most brain-dead P2P protocols will. "tree" hashes are in use by several P2P protocols. Some are just old or primitive, and have a large number of old servants around that don't understand newer hashes.
Okay, that does take care of quite a few of the problems.
No, it isn't remotely trivial.
The information needed to construct a new frame is exactly that, an entire frame. You've basically reinvented bi-directional frames (B-frames), which are already used in MPEG-1/2/4 video. It's one of the oldest video compression techniques. Unfortunately, the error/difference information (the details that change between each frame) is absolutely NOT trivially small (though there certainly are diminishing returns from frame-rate reductions).
If you want to insert a b-frame between each frame *without* storing the error/difference info, then you're back to the same problem of generating frames.
It can't possibly have as much information in it as a real frame would, it would just look like blur between every other real/sharp frame. If it were really workable, everyone would start with 1fps material, and insert 59 B-frames in-between. It just doesn't work that way... Every generated frame will be more blurry and less detailed than the last.
B-frames have pros and cons, and really much more con than pro (versus using more I/P-frames instead). There are numerous explanations of B-frames online you can read up on, which will extensively explain the issues.
There are several things which can be done to reduce the bit-rate of broadcast ATSC without reducing quality, but making the video 50% B-frames certainly isn't one of them.
Yeah, that's the general idea here...
Umm... Would you care to fill me in on the news of the extrasolar planet where lifeforms have been discovered?
If you just mistyped and mean the Earth, well, 1 positive is a horrible survey, with basically an infinite margin of error... It could be one in 100, or one in 99999999999999999999999999, until you have another example, it's impossible to guess at the odds, unless you know EXACTLY what it takes for life to form (we don't) and approximately how many planets are likely to have those exact conditions where and when they need them (we don't know that either).
I'd go out on a limb and say: Exactly the same number that did before they heard this story.
IMHO, I'm willing to be the stand-out and betting on no life of any kind outside of this planet. And if I turn out to be wrong, I'd still bet a hell of a lot of money that any such life will be simple, and we won't find higher lifeforms anywhere... That's right, no super-beings to come along and solve all our problems for us.
I fail to see how. Aliasing artifacts are inherent in interlaced video (sampling), as the two fields are sampled 1/60th of a second apart. The information needed to counter-act that is basically an entire field... in other words, just broadcasting @60p to begin with.
Obviously, if it were even possible, everyone would save bandwidth, and broadcast at 1FPS... then double that over and over (with Faroudja's magic filters) until you get to 60fps.
(2-pass) Rate-control helps, but it isn't magic. It may allow better allocation of available bits to improve quality, or reduce bitrate by perhaps 1/3rd, but that's all it does.
I've worked with extremely slow deinterlacers, and though they are able to avoid making mistakes, they can't put in new detail that wasn't there to begin with (eg. during fast motion). The only thing they do is a better job deciding whether/how much they should merge fields, or interpolate, on a frame-by-frame basis. It may be glitch-free, but it can't possibly compare with actually having all the data (2X as much) to begin with.
Yeah, the picture is the best, but the lighting is bad, the sets are rather plain, and the writers are terrible... It's just boring.
Plus, I was in the hospital for weeks after watching that mob movie...
Most people were happy enough with VHS the way it was. That was the reality.
Then DVD came along, and it was better, so they weren't happy with VHS anymore. It's difficult for people to WANT something they've never seen before. Once they see it, they decide if they want it... and they do.
Umm, what? You can't just display two interlaced fields simultaneously... You have to deinterlace, which is a very lossy operation. You lose both resolution and fluidity of motion.
Even though TFA says: "1080p combines high resolution with a high frame rate" they're simply wrong. 1080p is defined as 30fps, which isn't a high frame-rate, it's a low one. The 60fps frame-rate of 720p, however, *is* a high frame-rate. And furthermore...
Of course, to do that, LCD pixels would need fast enough response time to display 60fps, which is the real reason manufacturers go with 1080p@30fps.
That's nonsense. Interlacing doesn't look any worse when you get close than a progressive picture would. Interlacing artifacts don't get masked by distance any more than anything else. How you came up with that theory is beyond me.
Actually, that would be good reason to go with a 1080 (p/i) display, NOT a 720p display... 720 is geared towards smoother motion, while 1080i is geared towards higher resolution still/low motion video. 720p will make you miss out on much of the high-res stills, and can't do anything to make the (blocky) fast motion look any better... It can only do a better job showing you the macroblocks more clearly!
Shopper cards are the prisoner's dilemma of supermarkets. If few people use them, they get the benefits, at everyone's expense. Now that EVERYONE uses them, prices have to be higher to cover the cost of running the program to begin with. Hell, the whole point of such cards is to discover what tricks work, in convincing you to buy higher-profit products.
The myth of "savings" cards have been thoroughly disproven. Those stores WITHOUT such card programs almost always have substantially lower prices than even the discounted "savings card" price.
True. Even Slashdot, (which is more or less supposed to be the "good guy") has a massive onmouseover pop-up for the "Intel Opinion Center".
But it's not JUST pop-ups, though... Every javascript annoyance, like sites which "disallow" right-clicking, resize images for no good reason, reformat the page, and squeeze out the content to fit in a few more ads, etc.
Truth is, the only sites in my NoScript white-list are newegg and netflix, and the later is only necessary for a few features like ratings. I don't even white-list google, as maps are more responsive, and far less annoying (error messages/"suggestions" taking up half the page) in their non-script, HTML form.
Frankly, people are better off avaiding sites that require javascript for trivial navigation are better off. There's some major underlying problem with a site if the designer thinks a javascript requirement is a good trade-off so they can leave-out a TINY "submit" button next to drop-down menus. I hope widespread use of NoScript draws traffic away from them... Maybe then somebody will smack some sense into those idiotic web designers.
Besides, NoScript eliminates the need for Flashblock, as well as any other EMBEDed content blockers.
As opposed to what? Where are your uncompressed HD sources?
What you mean, BTW, is lossy. Lossless video can be significantly compressed, as can audio.
Your still wrong, though. There's nothing about lossy video or audio that inherently makes it look/sound worse than lossless video.
If you've got the resources, you just do a bit-for-bit copy of the physical disk itself (encryption, bad sectors and all), and don't mind the DRM. Indistinguishable from a legit copy.
Yes, but there's nothing that says the LCD voltages need to be run across a cable from the electronics to the screen. Implant the chip on the screen itself, embed the wires deep inside it, and use smartcard-like methods to prevent tampering by anyone less skilled than perhaps the NSA.
DLP is even easier. It's already a chip. Just combine it with a decryption chip, or another type of controller, and harden the package.
For both, you use the pixel response time, or other factors, and work-up a scheme of sending 10 fake signals (that the screen won't have a chance to respond to) for every real signal. You send junk during blanking intervals, and you can also easily watermark the picture, slightly modifying a few (seemingly random) pixels.
Easy to say, extremely difficult to actually do (without SIGNIFICANT quality losses).
We're not even talking about just reencoding, we're talking about reencoding including all the noise and encoding junk they throw in when it gets to the screen, as well as whatever artifacts will be added by sending it to another screen, which does the same thing, yet again, on less than perfect data.
CRT is not dead, but the writing is on the wall. Its best days are behind it, and nobody looking towards the future sees CRTs. I wouldn't be surprised if, 10 years down the road, CRTs are depreciated, and new DRM standards come out that specifically exclude any use of CRTs.
Still, it's immensely impressive how much staying power it has had, despite the age-old death of all other forms of tubes in modern electronics.
And even with CRTs, they could at least include some simpler methods of signal obfustication (akin to Macrovision), if they chose to.
No, I'm not. Intending to be sneaky doesn't matter on bit.
Attorney client privilege is much more than a privacy law. You can be in a room with 100 people, talking to your lawyer so that they can hear you, and it still wouldn't be usable. The police could get a warrant to tap your phones, and not be allowed to use anything you say to your lawyer. It is not privacy law, and has NOTHING to do with intent.
There are similar issues with religious figures, as well as doctors.
Those exceptions to lack of privacy in public are really an entirely different class of issues, have nothing to do with privacy laws, and absolutely do not require (or care about) intent at all.
Everyone likes to believe otherwise, but there really is no magic to P2P. It is network traffic like anything else. It's just become a euphemism for the rise in the number of customers fully utilizing their alloted (unlimited) bandwidth, and that fact should be kept in mind when reading any such complaints.
If network traffic brings your network to a grinding halt, I strongly suggest you look at the underlying problems with your network. Personally, the first thing I would do is institute a speed-cap on all interfaces, to the point that the network couldn't possible be overloaded by everyone maxing out their connections. Discriminating against one protocol over another doesn't make sense at all, when the problem is not the protocol, but the bandwidth usage.
Encrypting it was just one obvious issue with this type of network management. Masquerading as HTTP, FTP, etc., would work just as well.
Personally, I'd suggest ISPs institute tiered transfer speeds, so that in-network traffic is allowed at the maximum line speed the interface can allow (varies with DSL, Cable, etc.), while (more expensive) internet traffic is limited to, say, 128K. I'd also look at encouraging development of BETTER P2P protocols, which will perhaps be slightly less taxing on networks, act acceptably when there is congestion, allow for local caching, and generally just offer some benefits to to both the users and ISPs. Programs like bittyrrant may (accidentally/incidentally) do that to a certain extent, increasing download speeds necessarily keeps more of the traffic local.
Your excuses to justify your opinion have NO basis in reality. There is no legal recognition of privacy, no matter how sneaky you intend to be, in a public space.
The only expectation of privacy is the recognized right of the press to not be compelled to reveal sources, and that absolutely applies just as much in public, as it does in private.
You're obviously trying to go back and justify your initial opinion, not actually form an opinion based on facts.
The current limitations of cognitive science are well known. You want to ignore them, and believe a hard-line view of functionalism. That is not accepted fact by cognitive scientists (in fact, it's exactly the opposite) that is purely your own entirely biased belief, not even tangentially supported by enough facts to even fairly call it an opinion.
Even if that wasn't the case, you seem to have no answer to the questions of at what point is an animal too intelligent to eat, or the weight that IQ should be given.
Taping an LCD and capturing it's output is still lossy, expensive, etc.
That method is just as easily fooled by different methods of (perceptual) signal obfustication.
And in addition, the analog step is very short, and the equipment could easily (but not cheaply) be hardened, to the point that it would be borderline impossible even for professionals to tap it. There's no reason LCD screens have to be as electronically simple as they currently are. That goes double for DLP.
No. Everyone is quick to talk about pointing a video camera at a screen, but it's expensive to get HD equipment, works pretty badly in practice (eg. refresh rate, black level, etc.), and with the quality loss, you might be better off just copying the DVD version instead.
But additionally, a electronic eye sees things very differently than human eyes. There are numerous methods to make moving images look perfect to us, while seriously distorting any recordings of it. The same is true for audio. It's not in use in home equipment yet, but it's certainly possible.