Because it's very easy to get your hands on low-grade nuclear material,
True, despite some of the idiots replying to you...
wrap it around a conventional explosive,
You'd need a lot more than this tiny little explosive to throw any appreciable ammount of radioactive material into the atmosphere. If that was the intention, you'd certainly see something like a truck bomb. After all, they've made a big investment in radioactive materials... Leaving 90% of them harmlessly sitting on the sidewalk would be stupid.
and render the neighborhood effectively uninhabitable until it can be cleaned up.
This is nonsense. Even if the material ISN'T cleaned up, living there for DECADES will only give you a couple percentage points higher chance of EVENTUALLY getting cancer...
Living there for a few months while it's cleaned up would be pretty harmless. The only problem would be the "terror" aspect, and that is 99.99% due to the news media having hyped it to insane levels, and giving terribly misleading information without context, graphics which imply more serious results, etc.
Walmart has terrible service, cheap junk, etc. and has for many years now. Nobody is stepping in, no other companies are succeeding taking away their customers.
We in rich countries don't give laptops to every one of our kids, yet we seem to think we can tell poor countries that this is what they need.
We, in rich countries, can afford to buy books. We, in rich countries, can afford teachers. We, in rich countries, have families which can afford computers. We, in rich countries, can go to the local library and access computers and the internet trivially easily. We in rich countries have school computer labs that we have access to. etc.
there are no schools, no paper, no pencils, no books, no nuttin!
Where there is no infrastructure is THE BEST PLACE to introduce alternative infrastructure. OLPC is designed to be the school, the paper, the pencil, the book, the EVERYTHIN'!
Don't know how to read? An computer program that can read the words to you is simple, and could easily teach kids to read. Making such a computer program is a one-time cost, and that one program can be used by an unlimited number of children, for an unlimited number of years, at practically zero cost... Unlike teachers.
Don't have any books? There is plenty of freely distributable content. Of course, you either need a computer to get it for free, or you need to print it onto paper for prohibitively high costs, which don't scale like digital distribution.
They do not need: money wasted on what random first-worlders thing third worlders need.
Good, because OLPC is specifically designed for poor children, NOT for the needs of 1st worlders.
In fact YOU are the "random first-worlder" who is so arrogant that you "thing" [sic] that "third worlders need" what you had, and something else couldn't possibly be better for their situation.
the city signed a contract giving Cox exclusive rights to your town. It is illegal for another provider to string up lines and offer cable service.
It's called a natural monopoly. Look it up.
Having dozens of companies independently stringing up their own lines only ensures that NOBODY gets ANYTHING.
The only real alternatives are either wireless, where infrastructure costs are lower, or to have a single company maintain the physical lines (not providing service), then allowing any other company to provide service on those lines, at cost (not owning the lines).
I certainly think the latter would be ideal, but I've never heard of any case of that method being used.
Frankly, I'm shocked that you would think that states should be forbidden to provide services THAT THE FREE MARKET DOESN'T PROVIDE.
Don't be shocked, just look at his comment history.
Dada21 has been spewing the same libertarian philosophy, getting corrected at every turn, and summarily ignoring all the criticism he can't refute, and posting the next flamebait comment, wherever it isn't entirely off-topic.
As you state in your argument, their service will suck in pretty short order. That is when competitors step in and offer a "premium" service for a fee.
but when it's Microsoft (and we're talking about exactly the same thing here, except that they started 10 years ago)
Not at all. When Microsoft does something similar, it's to make it more closed, not open. It's to give it fewer features, not more. It's to close it off to competitors, not open it up. etc. When Microsoft buys a company, it's to suck all the marrow out of it.
Remember when Hotmail had more space, less adds, free POP service, etc.? You know, back before Microsoft bought them and made Outlook the only MUA that could access Hotmail accounts, cut down on space (until Gmail went online) made everything require javascript, munged the URLs in emails, etc. so you couldn't avoid the hordes of ads?
Everyone gives Google the benefit of the doubt, because it's earned it. EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what Microsoft has done every single time in the past.
If I'm sending international junk mail, I am actively sending to someone in the US before he can sue me.
No, you could just as well be sending to an address in your country, which just happens to be forwarded internationally, or something like that.
You can be sued for almost ANYTHING you do outside the US, if it falls outside of US laws. Of course, unless it's serious enough for extradition, the only punishment is that you can't travel to the US again, unless you're willing to face the punishment.
I don't know what would've happened had they won
I realize that. If you did know, you wouldn't be ranting and raving about it.
The OLPC has a handful of really great ideas. However, it was clear from the very beginning that it was designed specific enough that nobody else should want one.
The half-sized keyboard and bright (orange) color will keep adults from using it, even if they really need the rest of the features of the OLPC.
The small flash drive/lack of a hard drive, and limited ports, will make it of limited usefulness to kids in developed countries as well.
It has a lot of features that would be great on, otherwise normal, notebooks. But in it's current form, there are very few people who can afford it that would also want it. The price of $300 makes it impractical as well, since used notebooks can be found cheaper, and new notebooks aren't much more.
Scale it up to make a 1st world version, and you'll really have something... The OLPC guys could design it, and sell it to HP/Dell/Sony/Toshiba/etc. Using the money they earn from the manufacturer to fund the OLPC project.
Instead of largely useless $300 notebooks, just start taking $100 donations, don't limit it to people who want to buy one.
I was sued in a US court for a part of my website. I am a German.
And your website was shut down, when?
Oh, right, it wasn't. The US isn't exerting ANY sort of control over use of the internet in Germany at all...
A frivilous lawsuit in the US has nothing to do with control of the internet. You could just as easily sue someone who is sending international junk mail, and nobody is making the idiotic claim that the US controls the postal service around the world...
there are over fifty countries with freer speech than the USA.
So there are 50 countries where there are lower standards for journalists? 50 countries where journalists aren't held accountable for false, misleading, factually incorrect reports?
No, I'm not trolling, just pointing out that the numbers are all in the way you look at them. Everyone has their own definition of "freedom".
There's no strict requirement, but there's very good (technical) reason for it. Compressed audio gives a higher S/N, therefore somewhat larger broadcast area, better sound in the broadcast area and less static all around.
In perfect conditions (everyone has a strong signal), there would be no good reason for it.
if you are silent before being advised of your right to remain silent, it can be used against you
You mean before being arrested, I presume. Once you've been arrested, they immediately inform you of miranda, BECAUSE they can't use anything you say before that point.
If you invoke your right to remain silent and then later speak up, it can be used against you.
They don't gag you when you decide to remain silent. You can change your mind at any time, of course.
If you invoke your right to an attorney after being advised that you have the right and then later speak up, it can't be used against you.
No. Only if they continue to interrogate you after you ask for an attorney, can it be thrown out. If the suspect asks for an attorney, then spontaneously volunteers info, it would be usable. Conversely, after the attorney arrives, anything you say can be used (which is why lawyers repeatedly advise you not to say anything).
So if you get arrested, tell them to advise you of your rights and then immediately demand an attorney.
Generally good advice. And beforehand, you should repeatedly ask if you are being placed under arrest, and if you are free to go, otherwise they can essentially (defacto) interrogate you with no miranda restrictions, as long as they like.
"bug" commercial detection is unreliable because A) commercials for the station's own programming commonly use them. B) Networks always have them fading out, and staying off for a couple minutes in the middle of shows. This may be to foil DVRs, but it seems more likely a tactic to prevent burn-in on (old) projection TVs, plasmas, etc.
"Scene change" is interesting, because good scene-change detection is key to good, low bitrate, digital video codecs. So when you encode to something like MPEG-4, you can determine scene change just by reading the file index to locate the keyframes, rather than spending time analysing the video.
Personally, I found MythTV's commercial detection rather iffy, leaving a couple commercials here and there, skipping over 5 minutes of programming here and there, etc. Wrong much too often to be useful.
In addition, MythTV is somewhat clunky, and painfully slow to seek forward/backwards (IMHO). I found that MPlayer (no DVR, just a video player/encoder) made the perfect solution for me. Upon encoding from the TV card with mencoder, it puts keyframes in the perfect places, and seeking is sub-microsecond. At the first sign of a commercial break, I'd hit the 30+sec seek button two or three times, and be exactly at the start of the next segment of the show.
<RANT> The deal maker for me, though, was really that I didn't have to navigate sub-sub menus to get from TV shows, to files, to DVDs, etc., and learn a different interface for each. DVRs, IMHO, should be just a simple, streamlined filemanager and video player. The colorful bulbous buttons which divide your DVR into different functions don't help, they make things clunky and just serve to artificially slow you down. </RANT>
As others have pointed out, commercials tend to have much more *loudness* than your average TV show through the use of compression. For the same reasons radio sounds so much louder than a CD you have just been playing.
But TV audio IS FM radio.
It's only the non-broadcast channels that can effectively do that trick.
Truecrypt is a nice idea, except that if the interrogators find truecrypt on your harddisk, they may automatically assume you have a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume.
Then you make 12 different volumes, each having progressively more-private/sensative information.
How do you explain all of the other "noise" on the disk after the first decryption?
Simple, you fill the drive with random noise to begin with, to be completely safe.
If I decrypted a volume with a password and the result was some data and some random ones and zeros, I would probably assume that there was still encrypted data on the drive.
Filesystems don't zero-out unused harddrive space. Your hard drive is completely full of (semi)random ones and zeros right now. If you used any kind of disk encryption, those deleted portions would look completely random.
I just don't see how you can so easily claim that there is a loss. (Unless you define "loss" as "anything that changes the bitstream".
Anything that irreversibly changes it, yes (you can't resample and get exactly the same original bitstream). That is the DEFINITION of "lossless".
Changes which can't be heard are known as "transparent".
For the purpose of listening, transparency is fine (in which case analog is fine, too). But when you are talking about lossy encoding it afterwards, that will change how the output file sounds based on even the inaudible information in the bitstream.
A good example of this is repeatedly reencoding a file with a high-bitrate lossy codec. After one round, you probably won't hear any difference, but with multiple rounds, you will. Even if you have terrible ears, after about 4 rounds of lossy re-encoding, it will sound terrible. Transparent lossy encoding is more destructive than resampling (though there are some pretty bad resampling algorithms out there) but it's can have similar effects that just aren't immediatly audible.
I read the whole thread. I believe you were replying to the statement "Your ears cannot hear a difference between the two, because there technically is no difference".
Yes, the latter part of that is certainly not true. There is a very real difference, despite the AC's claims to the opposite.
I played a not-so-perfect OGG file I have of Comfortably Numb/Pink Floyd into a WAV and encoded it as an MP3 with LAME. It sounds as good as the OGG does.
Your ears (or perhaps audio equipment) suck. Not everyone else's does.
First, digital audio wasn't at the consumer level when I was in diapers.
And? I've been doing PROFESSIONAL studio work for a very long time now.
Tell me about your first experiences with digital audio. What was your first card?
Haha. Digital audio predates personal computers by several decades, thanks.
Second, you clearly don't work with SPDIF much, anyone with a multimedia PC has done these things plenty of times before.
Recording audio via SPDIF is trivially EASY. Getting a bit-perfect copy is quite a bit more difficult with PCs. You clearly fall into the first category, and are convinced anything you can't hear, can't possibly exist or matter, and that's what you keep arguing.
I'd even be willing to send you my old SoundBlaster Live for the cost of shipping plus $15 and you can see for yourself.
I've got plenty of them lying around here, and anyone who thinks Creative cards are the best available hasn't got any idea what they are talking about.
"has no defined data rate."
DATA RATE IS NOT SAMPLE RATE. GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD.
One is the samplerate of the waveform, the other is the number of bits per second. That means you can send compressed audio (AC3/DTS) just as easily as uncompressed PCM over SPDIF. But guess what, no matter the bitrate, AC3 and DTS are both ALWAYS 48KHz.
Really? Which cards? SCMS comes from DAT.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but I doubt you do as well. SCMS has nothing to do with DAT, other than the fact that DATs happened to commonly have SPDIF connections. Minidiscs, CD recorders, etc., all use SCMS. That is the SPDIF "security" you think you know about. There is no other.
But hey, you're the expert. What do I know. I'm more than done now. Have the last word if it will make you feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
True, despite some of the idiots replying to you...
You'd need a lot more than this tiny little explosive to throw any appreciable ammount of radioactive material into the atmosphere. If that was the intention, you'd certainly see something like a truck bomb. After all, they've made a big investment in radioactive materials... Leaving 90% of them harmlessly sitting on the sidewalk would be stupid.
This is nonsense. Even if the material ISN'T cleaned up, living there for DECADES will only give you a couple percentage points higher chance of EVENTUALLY getting cancer...
Living there for a few months while it's cleaned up would be pretty harmless. The only problem would be the "terror" aspect, and that is 99.99% due to the news media having hyped it to insane levels, and giving terribly misleading information without context, graphics which imply more serious results, etc.
You're not even anywhere close to the point.
Walmart has terrible service, cheap junk, etc. and has for many years now. Nobody is stepping in, no other companies are succeeding taking away their customers.
We, in rich countries, can afford to buy books. We, in rich countries, can afford teachers. We, in rich countries, have families which can afford computers. We, in rich countries, can go to the local library and access computers and the internet trivially easily. We in rich countries have school computer labs that we have access to. etc.
Where there is no infrastructure is THE BEST PLACE to introduce alternative infrastructure. OLPC is designed to be the school, the paper, the pencil, the book, the EVERYTHIN'!
Don't know how to read? An computer program that can read the words to you is simple, and could easily teach kids to read. Making such a computer program is a one-time cost, and that one program can be used by an unlimited number of children, for an unlimited number of years, at practically zero cost... Unlike teachers.
Don't have any books? There is plenty of freely distributable content. Of course, you either need a computer to get it for free, or you need to print it onto paper for prohibitively high costs, which don't scale like digital distribution.
Good, because OLPC is specifically designed for poor children, NOT for the needs of 1st worlders.
In fact YOU are the "random first-worlder" who is so arrogant that you "thing" [sic] that "third worlders need" what you had, and something else couldn't possibly be better for their situation.
Fair enough... No Wine, then.
I doubt the great majority of Unix users make use of Wine, anyhow.
It's called a natural monopoly. Look it up.
Having dozens of companies independently stringing up their own lines only ensures that NOBODY gets ANYTHING.
The only real alternatives are either wireless, where infrastructure costs are lower, or to have a single company maintain the physical lines (not providing service), then allowing any other company to provide service on those lines, at cost (not owning the lines).
I certainly think the latter would be ideal, but I've never heard of any case of that method being used.
Don't be shocked, just look at his comment history.
Dada21 has been spewing the same libertarian philosophy, getting corrected at every turn, and summarily ignoring all the criticism he can't refute, and posting the next flamebait comment, wherever it isn't entirely off-topic.
Which is why Walmart went out of business...
Not at all. When Microsoft does something similar, it's to make it more closed, not open. It's to give it fewer features, not more. It's to close it off to competitors, not open it up. etc. When Microsoft buys a company, it's to suck all the marrow out of it.
Remember when Hotmail had more space, less adds, free POP service, etc.? You know, back before Microsoft bought them and made Outlook the only MUA that could access Hotmail accounts, cut down on space (until Gmail went online) made everything require javascript, munged the URLs in emails, etc. so you couldn't avoid the hordes of ads?
Everyone gives Google the benefit of the doubt, because it's earned it. EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what Microsoft has done every single time in the past.
Name it, and stop trolling.
OpenBSD is a normal Unix system (most software compiles), supports FreeBSD and Linux binary emulation. Has Wine in ports, etc.
No, you could just as well be sending to an address in your country, which just happens to be forwarded internationally, or something like that.
You can be sued for almost ANYTHING you do outside the US, if it falls outside of US laws. Of course, unless it's serious enough for extradition, the only punishment is that you can't travel to the US again, unless you're willing to face the punishment.
I realize that. If you did know, you wouldn't be ranting and raving about it.
The OLPC has a handful of really great ideas. However, it was clear from the very beginning that it was designed specific enough that nobody else should want one.
The half-sized keyboard and bright (orange) color will keep adults from using it, even if they really need the rest of the features of the OLPC.
The small flash drive/lack of a hard drive, and limited ports, will make it of limited usefulness to kids in developed countries as well.
It has a lot of features that would be great on, otherwise normal, notebooks. But in it's current form, there are very few people who can afford it that would also want it. The price of $300 makes it impractical as well, since used notebooks can be found cheaper, and new notebooks aren't much more.
Scale it up to make a 1st world version, and you'll really have something... The OLPC guys could design it, and sell it to HP/Dell/Sony/Toshiba/etc. Using the money they earn from the manufacturer to fund the OLPC project.
Instead of largely useless $300 notebooks, just start taking $100 donations, don't limit it to people who want to buy one.
And your website was shut down, when?
Oh, right, it wasn't. The US isn't exerting ANY sort of control over use of the internet in Germany at all...
A frivilous lawsuit in the US has nothing to do with control of the internet. You could just as easily sue someone who is sending international junk mail, and nobody is making the idiotic claim that the US controls the postal service around the world...
"Manage" WHAT?
Is the US government making the tubes that carry the bits?
So there are 50 countries where there are lower standards for journalists? 50 countries where journalists aren't held accountable for false, misleading, factually incorrect reports?
No, I'm not trolling, just pointing out that the numbers are all in the way you look at them. Everyone has their own definition of "freedom".
That's just not true.
There's no strict requirement, but there's very good (technical) reason for it. Compressed audio gives a higher S/N, therefore somewhat larger broadcast area, better sound in the broadcast area and less static all around.
In perfect conditions (everyone has a strong signal), there would be no good reason for it.
You mean before being arrested, I presume. Once you've been arrested, they immediately inform you of miranda, BECAUSE they can't use anything you say before that point.
They don't gag you when you decide to remain silent. You can change your mind at any time, of course.
No. Only if they continue to interrogate you after you ask for an attorney, can it be thrown out. If the suspect asks for an attorney, then spontaneously volunteers info, it would be usable. Conversely, after the attorney arrives, anything you say can be used (which is why lawyers repeatedly advise you not to say anything).
Generally good advice. And beforehand, you should repeatedly ask if you are being placed under arrest, and if you are free to go, otherwise they can essentially (defacto) interrogate you with no miranda restrictions, as long as they like.
DeCSS and CSS-Auth are not dvd-css.
The former were illegal because they contained the illegally copied key from a piece of commercial DVD playing software.
As opposed to being clean-room reverse engineered as dvd-css was (shortly thereafter).
The article is painfully shallow...
"bugs" have been around LONG before DVRs.
"bug" commercial detection is unreliable because A) commercials for the station's own programming commonly use them. B) Networks always have them fading out, and staying off for a couple minutes in the middle of shows. This may be to foil DVRs, but it seems more likely a tactic to prevent burn-in on (old) projection TVs, plasmas, etc.
"Scene change" is interesting, because good scene-change detection is key to good, low bitrate, digital video codecs. So when you encode to something like MPEG-4, you can determine scene change just by reading the file index to locate the keyframes, rather than spending time analysing the video.
Personally, I found MythTV's commercial detection rather iffy, leaving a couple commercials here and there, skipping over 5 minutes of programming here and there, etc. Wrong much too often to be useful.
In addition, MythTV is somewhat clunky, and painfully slow to seek forward/backwards (IMHO). I found that MPlayer (no DVR, just a video player/encoder) made the perfect solution for me. Upon encoding from the TV card with mencoder, it puts keyframes in the perfect places, and seeking is sub-microsecond. At the first sign of a commercial break, I'd hit the 30+sec seek button two or three times, and be exactly at the start of the next segment of the show.
<RANT>
The deal maker for me, though, was really that I didn't have to navigate sub-sub menus to get from TV shows, to files, to DVDs, etc., and learn a different interface for each. DVRs, IMHO, should be just a simple, streamlined filemanager and video player. The colorful bulbous buttons which divide your DVR into different functions don't help, they make things clunky and just serve to artificially slow you down.
</RANT>
But TV audio IS FM radio.
It's only the non-broadcast channels that can effectively do that trick.
Then you make 12 different volumes, each having progressively more-private/sensative information.
This is the idea behind Rubber Hose: http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/
Despite the often-ranting /.ers, dvd-css is perfectly legal in the US.
Simple, you fill the drive with random noise to begin with, to be completely safe.
Filesystems don't zero-out unused harddrive space. Your hard drive is completely full of (semi)random ones and zeros right now. If you used any kind of disk encryption, those deleted portions would look completely random.
Anything that irreversibly changes it, yes (you can't resample and get exactly the same original bitstream). That is the DEFINITION of "lossless".
Changes which can't be heard are known as "transparent".
For the purpose of listening, transparency is fine (in which case analog is fine, too). But when you are talking about lossy encoding it afterwards, that will change how the output file sounds based on even the inaudible information in the bitstream.
A good example of this is repeatedly reencoding a file with a high-bitrate lossy codec. After one round, you probably won't hear any difference, but with multiple rounds, you will. Even if you have terrible ears, after about 4 rounds of lossy re-encoding, it will sound terrible. Transparent lossy encoding is more destructive than resampling (though there are some pretty bad resampling algorithms out there) but it's can have similar effects that just aren't immediatly audible.
Yes, the latter part of that is certainly not true. There is a very real difference, despite the AC's claims to the opposite.
A trivial and obvious typo. But troll away.
Your ears (or perhaps audio equipment) suck. Not everyone else's does.
And? I've been doing PROFESSIONAL studio work for a very long time now.
Haha. Digital audio predates personal computers by several decades, thanks.
Recording audio via SPDIF is trivially EASY. Getting a bit-perfect copy is quite a bit more difficult with PCs. You clearly fall into the first category, and are convinced anything you can't hear, can't possibly exist or matter, and that's what you keep arguing.
I've got plenty of them lying around here, and anyone who thinks Creative cards are the best available hasn't got any idea what they are talking about.
DATA RATE IS NOT SAMPLE RATE. GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD.
One is the samplerate of the waveform, the other is the number of bits per second. That means you can send compressed audio (AC3/DTS) just as easily as uncompressed PCM over SPDIF. But guess what, no matter the bitrate, AC3 and DTS are both ALWAYS 48KHz.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but I doubt you do as well. SCMS has nothing to do with DAT, other than the fact that DATs happened to commonly have SPDIF connections. Minidiscs, CD recorders, etc., all use SCMS. That is the SPDIF "security" you think you know about. There is no other.
But hey, you're the expert. What do I know. I'm more than done now. Have the last word if it will make you feel better.