The guy had like six days in which to do it all, of course he had to cut corners. What, do you think he's omniscient and omnipotent or something?
No, just lazy.
Day 4: God said, "Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. (Genesis 1:20-21)
After a somewhat chaotic start (creating the earth and plants before the sun was a bit of a mistake...), he gets right into the hard slog.
Day 5: God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind."... Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth." (Genesis 1:26)
Nothing radically new there - a bit of retooling (legs instead of flippers, lungs instead of gills, etc), and a straightforward copy-and-paste job on Himself.
Day 6: The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. (Genesis 2:1)
Definite signs of slackness appearing there - after doing so much in the first 4 days, and putting in at least a bit of effort on the fifth, He's just dicking around with the final design. The celestial equivalent of re-arranging your desk and making paperclip chains on a Friday afternoon.
By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. (Genesis 2:2)
He was definitely slacking off towards the end there...
Yup, good example. I read that, and it made me sick. Nice direct example of cause and effect. You want an indect example? Plenty of others have read it, and it's fed their psychopathic manipulative desires. Some even use it to form the basis of their personal philosophy - including plenty of/.'ers, I'd bet.
Imagine 100's of your politicians and captains of industry, beating off to Ayn Rand's wet dream...
Oh, you mean the rape scene? Best part of the book, if only because the "emotion" (such as it is) and behaviour there was more believeable and interesting than that in the rest of that turgid piece of crap.
The problem with modern hardware is that everyone is trying to make the highest performing components for a computer. What they aren't doing is making sure there components play nice with other components.
No, it's long been that way. You're just probably too young to remember things like Diamond video cards, early Maxtor hard drives, etc.
... and some guy does this?... If this happened in America people would be screaming about the failing quality of American educational standards.
No, people will just scream about literacy and reading comprehension...
The front-page article refers to the good Doctor as "her". So does the linked article - repeatedly. Half the comments here are about what a hottie she is.
The front-page article indicates - and the linked story explicitly says - that the academics who selected her thesis for recognition are American!
Though I doubt people will scream - if you're any indication, your whole country is just one step away from sucking your toes and going "duh?" a lot...
My favourite is the friend who stole a window. Pissed off with work in general & management incompetence / micromanagement / tightarsedness in particular, he decided the window in the internal office would be put to much better use in the new rumpus room he was building. So he grabbed a screwdriver, ripped off the timber surround and trim, and took the window.
Kharma's a bitch, though - when he went to install the window at home, he dropped it. For the $40 the new glass cost, he could have bought a second-hand window at the local building recycling depot.
A counter to this: I worked for many years in a public-sector-being-privatised company. When I started we had cleaners on-staff at each site, and toilets were cleaned daily.
By the time I left, toilets were being cleaned 3-monthly, or 6-monthly if the poor bloody subcontracted cleaners were running behind in their impossible-to-maintain schedule. And management had the hide to berate us for the fact the toilets were filthy...
When they stop killing each other, move to where the goddamned food is and settle down for a while, then maybe they can work on curing malaria and after that...
Yeah, let me know when you in the West get all that sorted out. Granted, you've got malaria sorted (more or less), but that's only one step...
How can it be argued that a replacement disc costs the same as the initial copy?
Because, in the black-magic economics of the music industry, the content costs pennies - all the cost is in production, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. At least, that's what they tell most artists.
In fact, I'd bet they could convincingly argue that a replacement disc should cost more...
You bought the physical DVD, you can do with it as you wish.
Yup, you sure can. You can stick it in a bookshelf and admire it from afar, you can hang it from your ceiling and make a pretty mobile to annoy the cat / entrance your children, you can smash it into tiny shards or make fireworks in your microwave, and you can even stick it up your bum sideways while singing the national anthem.
In fact, there are many ways to enjoy your newly purchased DVD. But the one thing you haven't purchased is the unlimited right to use the content in any way you see fit. You bought a solid piece of polycarbonate and aluminium, and a licence to watch a particular instance of a bitstream on that particular disc through a manufacturer-approved device.
No, I don't like it either. At the very least, they should stop advertising "Own it now on DVD!", because it's misleading.
At least you admit
Companies are free to copy protect until the cows come home...
because that's exactly what they're doing. If anything, DVD encryption is a result of the failure of the copyright system, and the DMCA is a ham-fisted attempt to patch it up.
... but you should be free to archive and protect your investment from damage.
And you are. All it takes is the correct licence to do this, not the limited-use "play only on approved devices" licence that comes with the DVD.
And remember, under a truly Libertarian system, companies would be free to obsolete all existing keys &/or players whenever they feel like it - when the protection is broken (HD-DVD &/or Blue-ray key revocation, anyone?), when their profits dip ("Yay! Disc sales are back up again!"), or when Cthulhu rises once again from his slumber in the mighty deep ("8 tentacles up for 'Steel Magnolias'; it reminded me that with strange aeons even death may die"). Free to require you to buy all new hardware and content each time they do this.
You, of course, have the freedom to not play that game - but you have that now...
If there's a de-HDCP package designed mainly to allow users to view discs and content that they have purchased without all kinds of authentication and hassle and crap like that...
But, as mentioned by myself and others, cracking HDCP won't make that happen. All cracking HDCP makes possible is connecting your HDMI output to a DVI input.
HDCP is encryption for the digital interconnect - the "last mile", as it were - and is nowhere near the alpha and omega of HD/Blu-ray security.
So? Cracking HDCP doesn't get you any closer to DVDDecrypter "stick disc in slot, press 'Rip' button" functionality. What you get is "now I can use my DVI-in card to rip in real-time to a 200G movie file, before recompressing in another lossy codec" functionality.
Not that it isn't a big step - all it takes is somebody with the patience to copy in real time, the disc space to do it (my 200G guesstimate above is based on a movie taking up 20G of a HD/Blu-ray disc, at 10:1 compression - the DVI/HDMI stream is uncompressed video data), and another dollop of patience to re-compress it in the lossy codec of their choice back down to 20G (or less - but that would generally mean resizing, so why not just analogue capture the component output @ 960x540 / whatever the PAL equivalent is, and bypass the HDCP-cracking step altogether?).
Sure, people will do it, and it only takes one before it hits the P2P networks - but it won't be the domain of the average P2P user. Expect fewer people doing the actual ripping, *much* less content, less seeds, and more leechers.
What you really want to be looking at is AACS &/or MMC.
Remember, DVD was first released in 1996 (Japan), 1997 (US), 1998 (Europe), & 1999 (Australia). DeCSS didn't turn up until late 1999 - 3 years after DVDs initial release, 2 years after the US release, and 1 year after the European release. And it was only the result of accident/carelessness on the part of a (software) player - a goodly part of AACS is secured in the player / drive hardware & firmware.
Remember also that the data path in the computer between drive & video card is also secured by signed & protected drivers - otherwise the drive just refuses to play the disc, or only plays at reduced analogue resolution.
What, none of this matters yet, because they're not yet using AACS / MMC / secured drivers? Wait until they've got everybody weaned off DVD and on to HD/Blue-ray, then see what happens...
As far as I can see, the **AA needs to make the decision of what they are selling.
They've made that decision already. As far as they're concerned, what they're selling is a licence to play a specific instance of a specific recording of a specific sound or video event from a specific piece of media.
Or, simply, "See that disc? Buying it gives you the right to play that disc - it doesn't give you any rights to the identical one next to it".
Of course, the law is more complicated and less exact than that - which is why they're both lobbying to change it, and advertising to change public perception.
And look around for the precursors to the next level - a licence to play a specific instance of a specific recording of a specific sound or video event from a specific piece of media on a specific device. Player-locked videogames &/or HD/Blu-Ray discs anyone?
So, in other words, they did "monitor and analyze (your) whereabouts"
Yup, and at the same time provided a practical demonstration of the mutual benefits of, shortcomings of, and consequences of breaking, a concept called "Trust".
However, the problem probably is less the encoder than the source
I'd disagree (though you're right - DV is noisy; and worse, it not even noisy in the same domain that MPEG is!). Being on a Mac, if the poster doesn't have QuickTime Pro, the MPEG encoder used by iMovie/iDVD is incredibly bad. And, even if he does buy QT Pro, I don't know if iMovie/iDVD uses the better (but still not real flash) QT Pro encoder...
Actually, in the original1995/96 spec for PAL DVD, MP2 was mandatory - anything else (e.g. AC3, PCM) was optional. It was amended in 1997 to allow for either MP2 or AC3 as the primary track.
Because of this, MP2 is considered pretty much mandatory by PAL-country replicators/distributors, although some from NTSC areas tend to ignore this in their PAL releases.
It could be encoded at 14FPS if you include the proper soft-telecine flags for that.
IIRC, the DVD spec only allows for 23.97 -> 30 telecine. I could be wrong though...
I dare say none do that.
Actually, this is exactly what they do do (depending if it's a PAL-region or an NTSC-region disc).
PAL DVDs are all 25 FPS on the disc. NTSC DVDs are either 23.97 FPS or 30 FPS on the disc, but play out at 30 FPS, regardless of the framerate of the encode (as you say, 24 FPS film is slowed down to 23.97 at encoding, which is then then telecined up to 30 FPS in the player).
On a PAL DVD, if they're from PAL source (e.g. TV), nothing's changed. If they're from film source (e.g. movies), the film is sped up to 25 FPS at encoding time - we don't dick around with telecine and other kludges. Which means, yes, their run-time is slightly shorter (by 4%), and the pitch is slightly higher (less than a quarter-tone, IIRC). If they're from NTSC source, they're either sped up from 23.97 FPS to 25 FPS, or decimated down from 30 FPS to 25 FPS (either via reverse-telecine from 30 FPS to 23.97 then sped up to 25 FPS (for telecined source, which is most of it), or via tricky decimation techniques involving frame-smoothing (for pure 30 FPS source, which is rare but likely to increase)). All that happens during the encoding process - as I said, PAL discs are all 25 FPS.
Now, when a PAL player plays an NTSC disc, it either just puts out 30 FPS - either in so-called PAL-60 (60 interlaced fields / 30 FPS) and hopes the TV can sync to the 20% difference in frame rate - or as NTSC because, unlike in the US, most TVs sold in PAL countries are now multi-standard.
As an aside, NTSC TV & DVDs tend to look really shitty to people in PAL countries - partly because the frame-doubling every 5 or 6 frames is annoyingly jerky (like 50Hz hum vs 60Hz hum - you're used to it; we're not), partly because the NTSC system is so piss-poor at keeping correct colour rendition compared to PAL (our chrominance info is resynced per-line; yours is sort of kept in check per line but only really resynced per field), and partly because those few extra lines of resolution (our 576 vs your 480) do make a noticeable difference...
That's exactly why almost no one has heard of this guy named Michael Moore.
Actually, it's exactly the reason you've only heard of Michael Moore (and, OK, a small handful of others).
Always keep a few voiciferous opponents around - it prevents the merely discontented from becoming your enemy; lets them blow off steam. People feel like they've achieved something and done their part by just listening to them, rather than doing deeper investigation themselves. Having just one (or a few) around makes them easy to marginalise as "kooks" and "nutters", or even more maliciously as "anti-American". They present an anti-objective, around which you can rally your own supporters. And, when all is said and done, it's just plain fun to laugh at them.
Really, political manipulation for most of recorded and anecdotal history has followed this exact philosophy.
Of course, the trick is to gauge their number and strength just right. Too few, and everybody will laugh at them, negating the purpose. Too many, and the small minority that just tends to agree with them sudden becomes a majority that believes them...
Slashdot Mirror
Because God likes to laugh at crazies just as much as you do. He created you in His own image, remember?
For the same reasons we have golf and target shooting ranges - practice makes perfect...
Day 4: God said, "Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. (Genesis 1:20-21)
After a somewhat chaotic start (creating the earth and plants before the sun was a bit of a mistake...), he gets right into the hard slog.
Day 5: God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind."
Nothing radically new there - a bit of retooling (legs instead of flippers, lungs instead of gills, etc), and a straightforward copy-and-paste job on Himself.
Day 6: The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. (Genesis 2:1)
Definite signs of slackness appearing there - after doing so much in the first 4 days, and putting in at least a bit of effort on the fifth, He's just dicking around with the final design. The celestial equivalent of re-arranging your desk and making paperclip chains on a Friday afternoon.
By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. (Genesis 2:2)
He was definitely slacking off towards the end there...
Imagine 100's of your politicians and captains of industry, beating off to Ayn Rand's wet dream...
Oh, you mean the rape scene? Best part of the book, if only because the "emotion" (such as it is) and behaviour there was more believeable and interesting than that in the rest of that turgid piece of crap.
- The front-page article refers to the good Doctor as "her". So does the linked article - repeatedly. Half the comments here are about what a hottie she is.
- The front-page article indicates - and the linked story explicitly says - that the academics who selected her thesis for recognition are American!
Though I doubt people will scream - if you're any indication, your whole country is just one step away from sucking your toes and going "duh?" a lot...My favourite is the friend who stole a window. Pissed off with work in general & management incompetence / micromanagement / tightarsedness in particular, he decided the window in the internal office would be put to much better use in the new rumpus room he was building. So he grabbed a screwdriver, ripped off the timber surround and trim, and took the window.
Kharma's a bitch, though - when he went to install the window at home, he dropped it. For the $40 the new glass cost, he could have bought a second-hand window at the local building recycling depot.
A counter to this: I worked for many years in a public-sector-being-privatised company. When I started we had cleaners on-staff at each site, and toilets were cleaned daily.
By the time I left, toilets were being cleaned 3-monthly, or 6-monthly if the poor bloody subcontracted cleaners were running behind in their impossible-to-maintain schedule. And management had the hide to berate us for the fact the toilets were filthy...
Despair not! I got the joke, even if no-one else did. Unfortunately, I don't have mod points today...
In fact, I'd bet they could convincingly argue that a replacement disc should cost more
In fact, there are many ways to enjoy your newly purchased DVD. But the one thing you haven't purchased is the unlimited right to use the content in any way you see fit. You bought a solid piece of polycarbonate and aluminium, and a licence to watch a particular instance of a bitstream on that particular disc through a manufacturer-approved device.
No, I don't like it either. At the very least, they should stop advertising "Own it now on DVD!", because it's misleading.
At least you admit because that's exactly what they're doing. If anything, DVD encryption is a result of the failure of the copyright system, and the DMCA is a ham-fisted attempt to patch it up.
And you are. All it takes is the correct licence to do this, not the limited-use "play only on approved devices" licence that comes with the DVD.
And remember, under a truly Libertarian system, companies would be free to obsolete all existing keys &/or players whenever they feel like it - when the protection is broken (HD-DVD &/or Blue-ray key revocation, anyone?), when their profits dip ("Yay! Disc sales are back up again!"), or when Cthulhu rises once again from his slumber in the mighty deep ("8 tentacles up for 'Steel Magnolias'; it reminded me that with strange aeons even death may die"). Free to require you to buy all new hardware and content each time they do this.
You, of course, have the freedom to not play that game - but you have that now...
HDCP is encryption for the digital interconnect - the "last mile", as it were - and is nowhere near the alpha and omega of HD/Blu-ray security.
So? Cracking HDCP doesn't get you any closer to DVDDecrypter "stick disc in slot, press 'Rip' button" functionality. What you get is "now I can use my DVI-in card to rip in real-time to a 200G movie file, before recompressing in another lossy codec" functionality.
Not that it isn't a big step - all it takes is somebody with the patience to copy in real time, the disc space to do it (my 200G guesstimate above is based on a movie taking up 20G of a HD/Blu-ray disc, at 10:1 compression - the DVI/HDMI stream is uncompressed video data), and another dollop of patience to re-compress it in the lossy codec of their choice back down to 20G (or less - but that would generally mean resizing, so why not just analogue capture the component output @ 960x540 / whatever the PAL equivalent is, and bypass the HDCP-cracking step altogether?).
Sure, people will do it, and it only takes one before it hits the P2P networks - but it won't be the domain of the average P2P user. Expect fewer people doing the actual ripping, *much* less content, less seeds, and more leechers.
What you really want to be looking at is AACS &/or MMC.
Remember, DVD was first released in 1996 (Japan), 1997 (US), 1998 (Europe), & 1999 (Australia). DeCSS didn't turn up until late 1999 - 3 years after DVDs initial release, 2 years after the US release, and 1 year after the European release. And it was only the result of accident/carelessness on the part of a (software) player - a goodly part of AACS is secured in the player / drive hardware & firmware.
Remember also that the data path in the computer between drive & video card is also secured by signed & protected drivers - otherwise the drive just refuses to play the disc, or only plays at reduced analogue resolution.
What, none of this matters yet, because they're not yet using AACS / MMC / secured drivers? Wait until they've got everybody weaned off DVD and on to HD/Blue-ray, then see what happens...
252 comments - and nobody has mentioned the iPood?
Nor, sometimes, do the English.
...?
Or was it just the Welsh, or the South Welsh, or the
Or, simply, "See that disc? Buying it gives you the right to play that disc - it doesn't give you any rights to the identical one next to it".
Of course, the law is more complicated and less exact than that - which is why they're both lobbying to change it, and advertising to change public perception.
And look around for the precursors to the next level - a licence to play a specific instance of a specific recording of a specific sound or video event from a specific piece of media on a specific device . Player-locked videogames &/or HD/Blu-Ray discs anyone?
Score: -1, Redundant.
Yup, and at the same time provided a practical demonstration of the mutual benefits of, shortcomings of, and consequences of breaking, a concept called "Trust".
24-hour-a-day GPS tracking ain't "trust"...
Actually, in the original 1995/96 spec for PAL DVD, MP2 was mandatory - anything else (e.g. AC3, PCM) was optional. It was amended in 1997 to allow for either MP2 or AC3 as the primary track.
Because of this, MP2 is considered pretty much mandatory by PAL-country replicators/distributors, although some from NTSC areas tend to ignore this in their PAL releases.
Actually, this is exactly what they do do (depending if it's a PAL-region or an NTSC-region disc).
PAL DVDs are all 25 FPS on the disc. NTSC DVDs are either 23.97 FPS or 30 FPS on the disc, but play out at 30 FPS, regardless of the framerate of the encode (as you say, 24 FPS film is slowed down to 23.97 at encoding, which is then then telecined up to 30 FPS in the player).
On a PAL DVD, if they're from PAL source (e.g. TV), nothing's changed. If they're from film source (e.g. movies), the film is sped up to 25 FPS at encoding time - we don't dick around with telecine and other kludges. Which means, yes, their run-time is slightly shorter (by 4%), and the pitch is slightly higher (less than a quarter-tone, IIRC). If they're from NTSC source, they're either sped up from 23.97 FPS to 25 FPS, or decimated down from 30 FPS to 25 FPS (either via reverse-telecine from 30 FPS to 23.97 then sped up to 25 FPS (for telecined source, which is most of it), or via tricky decimation techniques involving frame-smoothing (for pure 30 FPS source, which is rare but likely to increase)). All that happens during the encoding process - as I said, PAL discs are all 25 FPS.
Now, when a PAL player plays an NTSC disc, it either just puts out 30 FPS - either in so-called PAL-60 (60 interlaced fields / 30 FPS) and hopes the TV can sync to the 20% difference in frame rate - or as NTSC because, unlike in the US, most TVs sold in PAL countries are now multi-standard.
As an aside, NTSC TV & DVDs tend to look really shitty to people in PAL countries - partly because the frame-doubling every 5 or 6 frames is annoyingly jerky (like 50Hz hum vs 60Hz hum - you're used to it; we're not), partly because the NTSC system is so piss-poor at keeping correct colour rendition compared to PAL (our chrominance info is resynced per-line; yours is sort of kept in check per line but only really resynced per field), and partly because those few extra lines of resolution (our 576 vs your 480) do make a noticeable difference...
Always keep a few voiciferous opponents around - it prevents the merely discontented from becoming your enemy; lets them blow off steam. People feel like they've achieved something and done their part by just listening to them, rather than doing deeper investigation themselves. Having just one (or a few) around makes them easy to marginalise as "kooks" and "nutters", or even more maliciously as "anti-American". They present an anti-objective, around which you can rally your own supporters. And, when all is said and done, it's just plain fun to laugh at them.
Really, political manipulation for most of recorded and anecdotal history has followed this exact philosophy.
Of course, the trick is to gauge their number and strength just right. Too few, and everybody will laugh at them, negating the purpose. Too many, and the small minority that just tends to agree with them sudden becomes a majority that believes them...