There's a little thing called 5C or HDCP protection that flags shows as "copy once", "copy never", or "copy always". Unless the show is "copy always", the set top box will refuse to unencrypt the show for your Mac. It will only send them to an "approved" recording device like a HD-DVR that will them store them as "copy never". Think there will ever be an "approved" recording program or card for a PC/Mac? Nope. Never.
The only channels that are usually copy always are the "must carry" over the air networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc. INHD will probably be "copy once" in your area (it is in my area).
5C is similar in function to the broadcast flag. You're getting a sneak preview of what the broadcast flag will mean.
The broadcast flag is slightly different in that it involves the FCC. But the 5C racket already has the US government providing muscle with the DCMA (illegal to circumvent the encryption).
Thanks for the relevant info. That helps show where the problem lies, but it really helps support the suit, not defend it.
One problem here is that the bids in question were not tied, unless you accept Ebays twisted definition of tied as "closer than the bidding increment".
Two, defining the raising your maximum proxy bid as a new bid is contrary to any other proxy auction ever held. Even if you accept that it is a new bid of the same amount, isn't your previous bid still the oldest at that price?
IANAL, but redefining commonly accepted practices in a contract or license almost never stands up in court. For example, if the fine print in a contract says "We define "purchase" to mean we come and take it back in 3 months", a court would throw that part of the contract out because it runs counter to the commonly accepted definition of "purchase".
The last paragraph you refereneced at least tells you outright what will happen. But it's so counterintutive and counter to common proxy auction practices that I don't think it will matter in court.
There's a subtle distinction between acceleration and what most people think of as the force of gravity/acceleration.
The problem in your rocket and centrifuge analogies is that they don't actually accelerate all the parts of the system evenly. Someone accelerating due to gravity in free fall can accelerate at 1000G and feel nothing. If your rocket was individually coupled to each and every atom of the astronaut, there would also be no problem for the astronaut.
The problem is when you introduce a floor, chair, whathaveyou. Now there is a normal force due to electrostatic forces (solid object) but it only acts on the contact surface. So it pushes on your butt and in turn all the parts of your body push back against the acceleration (or inertia, depending on your mass frame) of gravity/rocket/centrifuge. So what kills you is the difference in acceleration between your body parts and the floor: delta a, or jerk.
That 1-2 Billion buys you Human advancement, however large or small, that is permanent. Permanent so long as that 80 Billion we just spent on war doesn't wipe it out.
Wonderful solultion. So if people would just stop crashing cars we could get rid of all the safety features. If nations could just get along we could save billions in military spending.
The current email system does not take into account human nature and is therefore broken beyond all hope of an easy solution. It needs to be replaced with a system designed from the ground up with accountability in mind. Period.
This is mine. Stacks nicely with other A/V equipment, a little quieter than an XBox. I put a Zalman flower heatsink in it with no fan since the case fan lines up nicely with the CPU. (uATX nForce2 board, YMMV) $140 including power supply.
Here's a review. Funny you should mention Zalman, this card comes with one of their heatpipe coolers on it. Quite a bit faster, but also nearly twice the price.
Sorry, but your Abcdef-1 password is far more secure than wkxudf1. Nobody brute forces passwords by sitting down and typing in random stuff. They use offline dictionary and brute force attacks on hashes that leak out such as in challenge response network logins.
Abcdef-1 looks like an easy pattern to you, but it's not to a cracking algorithm. A cracking program would have to use the pattern space A-Z,a-z,0-9,and at least 20 or so symbols. so 82^8 = 2 quadrillion possible combinations. wkxudf1 uses the pattern space a-z,0-9 and 7 characters, thus 36^7 = 78 billion combinations. So if it took a program 10 minutes to brute force your original password, it would take the same program 6 months to get your new one.
I agree that the scientific community has a history of being affected by groupthink and politics.
But, this is the scientific process. That community has come up with most of the innovations of the last few centuries, including the computer and networks you're reading this on. They can be and sometimes are wrong. But betting against them is not a smart bet. Especially with life as we know it on the line.
Books generally don't count since they are not filtered though peer review. The one you link to, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has the distinction of generating some peer discussion in scientific magazines. The only problem is that the discussion has been unilaterally negative. At least he did get some arguments started, so hats off to him. But if he's serious about changing scientific opinion, he should (and maybe has) submit to peer reviewed papers. They may not be published, but that's where the true battle is waged.
It sounds like your cable plant is to blame then. DTV is especially good at "snow" or low signal to noise conditions. You should see a near perfect image when a similar strength analog signal would be almost pure snow. Sounds like your local cable company is trying to cram a bajillion digital channels into whay used to be a few dozen analog channels. I hope you told them why you stopped paying them money, it will help stop this shortsighted practice.
The broadcast channels do a similarly evil thing. They are trying to skirt the law and use just enough power to satisfy the must-carry limits so they can get on local cable. Since DTV is so good at handling low signal, they can find *somewhere* at or outside the minimum broadcast distatnce where they get a good image- for a while. They figure those without cable are too poor or TV immune to buy their advertiser's products.
I'm pretty much down to sports and DVDs as well. It's sad that while the fidelity of TV is on the upswing, most of what's on is worse than snow to begin with.
I can't comment on the future predictions of pay-per-view, but remember DIVX. Consumer apathy can kill a format faster than anything else.
But regarding your old analog sets, none of your fears are founded. With a new DTV tuner, your old set will work just fine. Standard definition tuners will be about 50 bucks in a year and HD tuners about $100. They're about $100 and $300 now. They do and will output to a regular TV via RCA, S-Video, or RF-converter. The HD channels will of course be downsampled to starndard def. for your TV. Congress is even looking at fully subsidizing the cost of these tuners so it may cost you nothing.
Regarding signal, if you can see/hear anything recognizble now, the same signal strength digital signal will look nearly perfect. You'll still have to tweak with the rabbit ears if you have a weak signal. Sorry if you'll miss the snow and buzz.
Digital TV is so clearly superior in every respect that the US government felt it had to act in the public interest since the broadcast/electronics industry was dragging it's collective heels for so long. It was the film/TV industry that wanted control, but they took so long to figure out how to control the uncontrollable that the US govt. finally stepped in and forced them to quit stalling.
We failed to recognized that this treaty is in our best interest. No matter how many jobs we lose in the short term, the cost (in dollars) of coping with a damaged ecosystem will be higher.
Furthermore, this will put us technologically behind in energy generation and resource management. We're going to miss out on a big part of the next industrial revolution. Similar to what happened when US automakers fail to keep up with Japanese automakers.
Sometimes conservatism hurts business, and this is one of those times.
The fact that the RIAA and MPAA are now going after the people breaking copyright law instead of writing legislation aimed at crippling technology and suing service providers is a good thing.
Now, of course there are still some stupid hybrid technological/legal measures they're pushing like 5C encryption and the broadcast flag. But if unlawful uses of file sharing/copying/archiving diminish due to fear of individual suits, then legitimate fair use will become a significant part of what is being prevented by these measures and they'll hopefully stop or be forced to stop them. Hopefully.
Absoulutely spot on. When any of my Joe Sixpack friends come over, I show them my HDTV projector setup and they ooh and ahh a bit about the nature program or whatever is on. Then I switch to some recorded Mondy Night Football and they plop down in a chair and start to twitch. This usually gets me in trouble as their wife complains two days later that their bank account is mysteriously missing a couple thousand dollars.
Sidenote: they also seem quite smitten with HD baseball, which I can't for the life of me understand, my favorite meduim for basball is radio.
On the beer goggle front: Sometimes when we're all watching something like Sunday football in HD, I'll switch over to the regular SD channel of the same game for effect. This causes everyone to groan, boo, and yell "Turn the game back on!".
One, it's your digital cable box they're talking about having to foot the bill for (though it would be a digital off-the-air box). That's what the 1 billion is for. They want the ability to break in to "Who Wants to Marry my Million Dogs" with the emergency broadcast since that's where folks will be tuned, not the mandated emergency channel.
Two, a "high def" channel can switch to a lower resolution MPEG program stream at any time if it wants to.
Again, digital has nothing to do with HD. You can have HD analog (had it for years in Japan) and you can have standard def. digital (most digital channels still are SD).
I'm a XC racer in about the same yo-yo range and I've heard this argument many times in many forms and I've never understood the logic of it.
If you save 1 lb off your bike, now instead of yo-yoing from 170-185, you're effectively yo-yoing from 169-184. Less is more.
So you say, why not just lose an extra pound of flab? Fine. Do that too. Why does a lighter fork make you eat those steaks? (hmmm, maybe a lighter fork would let you shovel food in faster;-)
No matter how much you train, that bike weight is still going to help that much more.
For mountain biking, the bike is also semi-unsprung weight on your arms and legs, so it counts for a bit more than bulk mass. If I could take 5 pounds of my bike by putting 6 on my body I'd do it in a lactic threashold heartbeat, which by the way is why camelbacks are so great.
No. Resolution scaling is a valid metric. This can show two things:
1. (as you pointed out) The video card is not the bottleneck at lower resolutions.
2. The performance curve doesn't fall off quickly, so there is more headroom for higher resolutions/quality settings that were not tested.
So if Halo 3 comes out in a year and puts twice the number of polygons in the scene, it matters that you can expect your framerate to drop by 25% instead of 50%.
This lower falloff is most likely due to the tricks the card plays such varying the precision of calculations when it feels it can get away with it and only applying effects to visble pixels when possible.
Now we do have more to compare MS to both in the OS and monoply areas though. I think a Unix vs. Windows or a MS vs. the US Post Office thread has some merit.
The difference is that NASA is doing many things for the first time and no one has been able to do much better at any of the things they do. They may suck. There's just not enough points of reference to say so.
No argument that the Challenger disaster was caused by a stupid managment decisision.
But, as far as murder goes: high risk of death comes with being an astronaut. Safety of the crew is not the only priority, otherwise they would just make them sit at home and play video games. Safety should be the top priority, but there is no way to make this safe, and mission goals do play a role in the decision process.
IMHO, the decision to let a teacher onboard was far worse than lauching under temperature spec. I doubt she or her family were really prepared for the odds. NASA originally estimated loss of vehicle and crew at 1:100 each mission.
They found the problem before anything went wrong while checking for defects. I don't know what your definition of QA is, but that's pretty much the accepted definition.
As for horribly flawed: Compared to whom? Spaceflight is dangerous. Minor oversights that in most industries would cause a misprint in a news article tend to blow up and kill people.
Basically, until you land something off-planet, you have no room to talk. If you want to point to someone who is doing a better job of it, you pretty much have the Russians for comparison, and they have had even more problems.
Apparently in the USA, you have two choices, fascist and liberal. Forget centrist, you can't even be conservative, green, pro-business, or libertarian any more. Nope, if you're anti-fascist you're a dirty liberal, and if you're against unthinking socialism, you're a fascist. Get used to it, that's all the political subtlety the media and those force-fed by it can handle nowadays.
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You won't be able to transfer those shows.
There's a little thing called 5C or HDCP protection that flags shows as "copy once", "copy never", or "copy always". Unless the show is "copy always", the set top box will refuse to unencrypt the show for your Mac. It will only send them to an "approved" recording device like a HD-DVR that will them store them as "copy never". Think there will ever be an "approved" recording program or card for a PC/Mac? Nope. Never.
The only channels that are usually copy always are the "must carry" over the air networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc. INHD will probably be "copy once" in your area (it is in my area).
5C is similar in function to the broadcast flag. You're getting a sneak preview of what the broadcast flag will mean.
The broadcast flag is slightly different in that it involves the FCC. But the 5C racket already has the US government providing muscle with the DCMA (illegal to circumvent the encryption).
Thanks for the relevant info. That helps show where the problem lies, but it really helps support the suit, not defend it.
One problem here is that the bids in question were not tied, unless you accept Ebays twisted definition of tied as "closer than the bidding increment".
Two, defining the raising your maximum proxy bid as a new bid is contrary to any other proxy auction ever held. Even if you accept that it is a new bid of the same amount, isn't your previous bid still the oldest at that price?
IANAL, but redefining commonly accepted practices in a contract or license almost never stands up in court. For example, if the fine print in a contract says "We define "purchase" to mean we come and take it back in 3 months", a court would throw that part of the contract out because it runs counter to the commonly accepted definition of "purchase".
The last paragraph you refereneced at least tells you outright what will happen. But it's so counterintutive and counter to common proxy auction practices that I don't think it will matter in court.
There's a subtle distinction between acceleration and what most people think of as the force of gravity/acceleration.
The problem in your rocket and centrifuge analogies is that they don't actually accelerate all the parts of the system evenly. Someone accelerating due to gravity in free fall can accelerate at 1000G and feel nothing. If your rocket was individually coupled to each and every atom of the astronaut, there would also be no problem for the astronaut.
The problem is when you introduce a floor, chair, whathaveyou. Now there is a normal force due to electrostatic forces (solid object) but it only acts on the contact surface. So it pushes on your butt and in turn all the parts of your body push back against the acceleration (or inertia, depending on your mass frame) of gravity/rocket/centrifuge. So what kills you is the difference in acceleration between your body parts and the floor: delta a, or jerk.
That 1-2 Billion buys you Human advancement, however large or small, that is permanent. Permanent so long as that 80 Billion we just spent on war doesn't wipe it out.
Wonderful solultion. So if people would just stop crashing cars we could get rid of all the safety features. If nations could just get along we could save billions in military spending.
The current email system does not take into account human nature and is therefore broken beyond all hope of an easy solution. It needs to be replaced with a system designed from the ground up with accountability in mind. Period.
If you don't watch a lot of football, you're just not going to get the parent post's joke. Ever. If you do, BitwiseX, that was sublime. Kudos.
This is mine. Stacks nicely with other A/V equipment, a little quieter than an XBox. I put a Zalman flower heatsink in it with no fan since the case fan lines up nicely with the CPU. (uATX nForce2 board, YMMV) $140 including power supply.
Happy hunting!
Here's a review. Funny you should mention Zalman, this card comes with one of their heatpipe coolers on it. Quite a bit faster, but also nearly twice the price.
-Ryan
Sorry, but your Abcdef-1 password is far more secure than wkxudf1. Nobody brute forces passwords by sitting down and typing in random stuff. They use offline dictionary and brute force attacks on hashes that leak out such as in challenge response network logins.
Abcdef-1 looks like an easy pattern to you, but it's not to a cracking algorithm. A cracking program would have to use the pattern space A-Z,a-z,0-9,and at least 20 or so symbols. so 82^8 = 2 quadrillion possible combinations. wkxudf1 uses the pattern space a-z,0-9 and 7 characters, thus 36^7 = 78 billion combinations. So if it took a program 10 minutes to brute force your original password, it would take the same program 6 months to get your new one.
I agree that the scientific community has a history of being affected by groupthink and politics.
But, this is the scientific process. That community has come up with most of the innovations of the last few centuries, including the computer and networks you're reading this on. They can be and sometimes are wrong. But betting against them is not a smart bet. Especially with life as we know it on the line.
Books generally don't count since they are not filtered though peer review. The one you link to, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has the distinction of generating some peer discussion in scientific magazines. The only problem is that the discussion has been unilaterally negative. At least he did get some arguments started, so hats off to him. But if he's serious about changing scientific opinion, he should (and maybe has) submit to peer reviewed papers. They may not be published, but that's where the true battle is waged.
Does anyone credible seriously disagree that emissions from human activity are at least in part contributing factors?
No, no one credible. But the president of the United States does.
These sorts of papers are needed so that the issue can be picked up by the mainstream media and the word can filter down to Joe Sixpack.
It sounds like your cable plant is to blame then. DTV is especially good at "snow" or low signal to noise conditions. You should see a near perfect image when a similar strength analog signal would be almost pure snow. Sounds like your local cable company is trying to cram a bajillion digital channels into whay used to be a few dozen analog channels. I hope you told them why you stopped paying them money, it will help stop this shortsighted practice.
The broadcast channels do a similarly evil thing. They are trying to skirt the law and use just enough power to satisfy the must-carry limits so they can get on local cable. Since DTV is so good at handling low signal, they can find *somewhere* at or outside the minimum broadcast distatnce where they get a good image- for a while. They figure those without cable are too poor or TV immune to buy their advertiser's products.
I'm pretty much down to sports and DVDs as well. It's sad that while the fidelity of TV is on the upswing, most of what's on is worse than snow to begin with.
I can't comment on the future predictions of pay-per-view, but remember DIVX. Consumer apathy can kill a format faster than anything else.
But regarding your old analog sets, none of your fears are founded. With a new DTV tuner, your old set will work just fine. Standard definition tuners will be about 50 bucks in a year and HD tuners about $100. They're about $100 and $300 now. They do and will output to a regular TV via RCA, S-Video, or RF-converter. The HD channels will of course be downsampled to starndard def. for your TV. Congress is even looking at fully subsidizing the cost of these tuners so it may cost you nothing.
Regarding signal, if you can see/hear anything recognizble now, the same signal strength digital signal will look nearly perfect. You'll still have to tweak with the rabbit ears if you have a weak signal. Sorry if you'll miss the snow and buzz.
Digital TV is so clearly superior in every respect that the US government felt it had to act in the public interest since the broadcast/electronics industry was dragging it's collective heels for so long. It was the film/TV industry that wanted control, but they took so long to figure out how to control the uncontrollable that the US govt. finally stepped in and forced them to quit stalling.
We failed to recognized that this treaty is in our best interest. No matter how many jobs we lose in the short term, the cost (in dollars) of coping with a damaged ecosystem will be higher.
Furthermore, this will put us technologically behind in energy generation and resource management. We're going to miss out on a big part of the next industrial revolution. Similar to what happened when US automakers fail to keep up with Japanese automakers.
Sometimes conservatism hurts business, and this is one of those times.
The fact that the RIAA and MPAA are now going after the people breaking copyright law instead of writing legislation aimed at crippling technology and suing service providers is a good thing.
Now, of course there are still some stupid hybrid technological/legal measures they're pushing like 5C encryption and the broadcast flag. But if unlawful uses of file sharing/copying/archiving diminish due to fear of individual suits, then legitimate fair use will become a significant part of what is being prevented by these measures and they'll hopefully stop or be forced to stop them. Hopefully.
Absoulutely spot on. When any of my Joe Sixpack friends come over, I show them my HDTV projector setup and they ooh and ahh a bit about the nature program or whatever is on. Then I switch to some recorded Mondy Night Football and they plop down in a chair and start to twitch. This usually gets me in trouble as their wife complains two days later that their bank account is mysteriously missing a couple thousand dollars.
Sidenote: they also seem quite smitten with HD baseball, which I can't for the life of me understand, my favorite meduim for basball is radio.
On the beer goggle front: Sometimes when we're all watching something like Sunday football in HD, I'll switch over to the regular SD channel of the same game for effect. This causes everyone to groan, boo, and yell "Turn the game back on!".
Two things:
One, it's your digital cable box they're talking about having to foot the bill for (though it would be a digital off-the-air box). That's what the 1 billion is for. They want the ability to break in to "Who Wants to Marry my Million Dogs" with the emergency broadcast since that's where folks will be tuned, not the mandated emergency channel.
Two, a "high def" channel can switch to a lower resolution MPEG program stream at any time if it wants to.
Again, digital has nothing to do with HD. You can have HD analog (had it for years in Japan) and you can have standard def. digital (most digital channels still are SD).
-Ryan C.
I'm a XC racer in about the same yo-yo range and I've heard this argument many times in many forms and I've never understood the logic of it.
;-)
If you save 1 lb off your bike, now instead of yo-yoing from 170-185, you're effectively yo-yoing from 169-184. Less is more.
So you say, why not just lose an extra pound of flab? Fine. Do that too. Why does a lighter fork make you eat those steaks? (hmmm, maybe a lighter fork would let you shovel food in faster
No matter how much you train, that bike weight is still going to help that much more.
For mountain biking, the bike is also semi-unsprung weight on your arms and legs, so it counts for a bit more than bulk mass. If I could take 5 pounds of my bike by putting 6 on my body I'd do it in a lactic threashold heartbeat, which by the way is why camelbacks are so great.
Happy riding,
Ryan C.
No. Resolution scaling is a valid metric. This can show two things:
1. (as you pointed out) The video card is not the bottleneck at lower resolutions.
2. The performance curve doesn't fall off quickly, so there is more headroom for higher resolutions/quality settings that were not tested.
So if Halo 3 comes out in a year and puts twice the number of polygons in the scene, it matters that you can expect your framerate to drop by 25% instead of 50%.
This lower falloff is most likely due to the tricks the card plays such varying the precision of calculations when it feels it can get away with it and only applying effects to visble pixels when possible.
Here's a list.
This isn't really aimed at Joe Linux, but that may change when DRM starts getting imbedded in the major BIOSes.
About their coding? Yep. Mums the word.
Now we do have more to compare MS to both in the OS and monoply areas though. I think a Unix vs. Windows or a MS vs. the US Post Office thread has some merit.
The difference is that NASA is doing many things for the first time and no one has been able to do much better at any of the things they do. They may suck. There's just not enough points of reference to say so.
No argument that the Challenger disaster was caused by a stupid managment decisision.
But, as far as murder goes: high risk of death comes with being an astronaut. Safety of the crew is not the only priority, otherwise they would just make them sit at home and play video games. Safety should be the top priority, but there is no way to make this safe, and mission goals do play a role in the decision process.
IMHO, the decision to let a teacher onboard was far worse than lauching under temperature spec. I doubt she or her family were really prepared for the odds. NASA originally estimated loss of vehicle and crew at 1:100 each mission.
Apollo 1
Soyuz 1
Soyuz 11
Three fatal accidents in "simple" capsules. There aint nothin' simple about spaceflight, my friend.
They found the problem before anything went wrong while checking for defects. I don't know what your definition of QA is, but that's pretty much the accepted definition.
As for horribly flawed: Compared to whom? Spaceflight is dangerous. Minor oversights that in most industries would cause a misprint in a news article tend to blow up and kill people.
Basically, until you land something off-planet, you have no room to talk. If you want to point to someone who is doing a better job of it, you pretty much have the Russians for comparison, and they have had even more problems.
-Ryan C.
It's pretty frustrating, AntiOrganic, isn't it?
Apparently in the USA, you have two choices, fascist and liberal. Forget centrist, you can't even be conservative, green, pro-business, or libertarian any more. Nope, if you're anti-fascist you're a dirty liberal, and if you're against unthinking socialism, you're a fascist. Get used to it, that's all the political subtlety the media and those force-fed by it can handle nowadays.