In addition to all of those problems, there is this issue which is commonly heard when discussing HDTV:
"I can see the difference but I don't care. Standard def is good enough for me."
While I do not understand this viewpoint, it seems reasonably common and I can imagine that it will be at least as common in the 2d/3d discussion. Hell, I might be right there with them, I don't know yet.
"Operation Shamrock After World War I, NSA's predecessor, a civilian code-breaking agency known as the Black Chamber, working on behalf of the government, would pick up telegrams every day from the telegraph companies in violation of secrecy protections of the 1912 Radio Communications Act."
The government has a long history of doing, well, whatever it can get away with.
Even if you own your own server, you are paying someone for connectivity, and they are probably paying up the line, and so on. All of those companies are going to have policies you have to deal with. Maybe they aren't restrictive now, but in the years to come, who knows?
It isn't possible to "own" a piece of the web in the same way I own my house. Even my domain name... If BigCo decides they want it, I wouldn't be able to afford the court costs to keep it.
You can throw out the data instead of logging it, yes. But as soon as someone sues you and points out that you are throwing out data that they think can incriminate you, a court can compel you to keep it and share it.
I think Viacom's assertion that most of YouTube's popular content is pirated is probably on the mark. What gets emailed around your office... people's "baby's first steps" videos, or sketch comedy clips owned by giant companies?
This may be the beginning of a spectacular legal roller coaster that gives Google a real belly ache. I'm just hoping that it highlights how backwards copyright law has become. Some good may come of this. I hope!
A good friend of mine had his mom die when he was young in large part due to a medical error. Not surprisingly, he has been mistrustful of doctors ever since, but from his cynicism was born one fantastic bit of wisdom: "Doctors are just tech support for your body."
I haven't found the tech support yet that I wouldn't check on with my own research.
So the right to have an abortion is bullshit whereas the right to own a gun is God-given.
The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. They do not decide what is right, moral, ethical, or proper. They decide if laws are Constitutional. Hopefully, the Constitution has the moral stuff in it--of course, it fails in some places. For example, it is weak on protecting privacy and it did not address control over our own bodies, like abortion and right to die stuff.
The decision on abortion was correct, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion isn't protected in the Constitution, therefore, laws can be made restricting it. I do not like the result, but it is consistent with our system of law. The law just happens to suck.
The gun decision was made not because Americans today value guns more than abortion rights, but because the legal framework the laws were written into--the Constitution--had something to say about one, and not the other.
When you ignore the law and make decisions that "feel" right, you open the door to abuse of power. You don't like how judges act now? After a few decades of judges doing what "feels" right and pandering to part of the public, things would be worse. After all, isn't that what the President is doing?
The price we pay for living in a society of laws is that some of those laws are going to suck because the process of change is difficult. The alternative, less respect for the law in government, would make everything suck more because the powerful have more power.
If you don't take care of your body, and you become an expensive data point in your insurance system, you raise the premiums for everyone else. We all seem to generally agree on that. We disagree on what, if anything, should be done to make the system more "fair."
Likewise, if you don't raise your kid right and he becomes a murdering thug, you lower the quality of life for everyone else. Should your performance as a parent be judged, fined, taxed, regulated too? The societal impact of poor parenting is at least as great as that of too many cheeseburgers.
Personally, I will grudgingly pay for Mr. Unhealthy's insurance, and I will sadly let the person next door loose a brood of poorly socialized amoral goons on the world, because I think the alternative--trying to fix things--will end up being worse.
For that matter, do those reps think that this will make law enforcement give one whit about people stealing albums? They already have enough to deal with in terms of real crime, and they're going to utterly ignore this anyway.
From the summary: "If passed into law, the bill would establish an Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General."
So when they create a new police force exactly for pirated music, and staff it with new employees... and give them sweet tazers and body armor and all that... and dump bazillions of tax dollars in to it... Yes, that new law enforcement agency will care.
I used to think I was seeing the beginning of the end. Now I realize we're in the middle of the end.
Since it's an iPhone, you'll want a data plan as well as a voice plan...
Not all of us. I use my unlocked/hacktivated iPhone on ATT with my old SIM and no data plan. (EDGE data is disabled in the phone's config.)
I am on a family plan. I can't go legit with the iPhone without a contract extension, right? Well, that extends the contracts for all phones on the family plan. That wasn't acceptable, and I didn't really need the data plan anyway--it just wasn't worth the money to me.
(Why did I buy an iPhone? My old phone was dying, and getting a refurb iPhone cost $250, about the same as some other neat-o phone that I'd also have to unlock.)
Admittedly, I am an edge case, but still, there are reasons to use the iPhone just as a phone plus wifi device.
I just hope they don't start nuking hacked iPhones. It's a risk I am willing to take though.
10.5 has been the first Mac OS I have had any problems with.
My old G4 laptop was upgraded from 10.0 through 10.4.something. No wipes... always upgrades. It always performed perfectly. I am sure there were bugs, but I didn't encounter or notice them in my usage.
Then I upgraded to a new Intel Macbook Pro that shipped with 10.5.
Out of the box it had serious bugs in networking. It could not connect to Apple's own software update utility, and it had problems getting data from some sources through the browsers, too. Specifically, I could not download stuff from Apple... like software update DMGs.
This wasn't a network config issue, it was one of the numerous weird-ass networking bugs that plague 10.5. (If I fired up Parallels or booted into Windows, the problematic connections worked fine.)
Retrieving a troublesome file from Apple, in Mac OS X, worked fine with a command line utility like curl... but the download would always fail in the browser after about 500k had come down the pipe. Which browser? Any browser. The OS was failing to hand off the data to the app properly, somehow. And only data from some sources--Apple and also MSFT's download site were afflicted. wtf? I guess their packets taste funny.
A friend of mine works at a big iron storage company, and they get inside Apple info to better support their own customers who use Mac clients. The story he tells me is 10.5 has some new exciting network architecture that was basically pushed out before it was ready, and it is way buggy. His company officially does not support 10.5 clients connecting to their network storage product due to bugs in NFS and deeper parts of the network stack.
But in the end 10.5 is still good for me. I can work around the weird ass bug by downloading stuff from Apple/MSFT through another OS.
Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.
That IS true, but I think the GP poster was trying to say, "you can fit a surprisingly good HD movie into the space available on a DVD using a good codec." I agree.
4 GB of h.264 can look pretty good. I've never seen a BD rip crammed into the space of a double-layer DVD, but I can imagine that would look much better, and easily good enough for most people.
As good as BR/HDDVD? Well, no! I've got a bigass 1080p and I know exactly what that looks like, as well as what two CD's worth of h.264 gets you. But I'd have compromised to end the format war early, and get cheaper media prices, if it had been up to me. HD on DVD was not a bad idea as an interim measure.
Instead... after a long and bloody war, we got BR. Technically it neat-o, but in practice it's stumbled with nonsense like players that can't be upgraded to the high end of the spec.
Slashdot Mirror
My friend, I think you just spotted another pony of the apocalypse.
In this case, is a "cloud" a "company you hope doesn't go out of business?"
Think ahead, and you are clever. Think too far ahead, and you are a nut.
In addition to all of those problems, there is this issue which is commonly heard when discussing HDTV:
"I can see the difference but I don't care. Standard def is good enough for me."
While I do not understand this viewpoint, it seems reasonably common and I can imagine that it will be at least as common in the 2d/3d discussion. Hell, I might be right there with them, I don't know yet.
The Onion: China Celebrates Status As Number One Polluter
Obligatory LOL.
Cancer is a very modern disease!
Is playing some sheet music, that was legally purchased, copyright infringment by the mere act of strumming the guitar?
It is if anyone can hear you, isn't it? Don't venues have to pay fees for public performances of big-label music?
While you are complaining about useless facts, I am planning on filling up 400 GB optical disks with error-free porn.
The current telecom thing is not the first time industry has spied for the government.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/preemption/telecoms.html
"Operation Shamrock
After World War I, NSA's predecessor, a civilian code-breaking agency known as the Black Chamber, working on behalf of the government, would pick up telegrams every day from the telegraph companies in violation of secrecy protections of the 1912 Radio Communications Act."
The government has a long history of doing, well, whatever it can get away with.
Even if you own your own server, you are paying someone for connectivity, and they are probably paying up the line, and so on. All of those companies are going to have policies you have to deal with. Maybe they aren't restrictive now, but in the years to come, who knows?
It isn't possible to "own" a piece of the web in the same way I own my house. Even my domain name... If BigCo decides they want it, I wouldn't be able to afford the court costs to keep it.
It was the default from Flight 93 on... but like radioactive decay, things are fade away. No shock is so great that we cannot forget it.
If there was a hijacking ... I would not call it a guarantee that passengers would fight back, and the chances decrease with every day that passes.
You can throw out the data instead of logging it, yes. But as soon as someone sues you and points out that you are throwing out data that they think can incriminate you, a court can compel you to keep it and share it.
I think Viacom's assertion that most of YouTube's popular content is pirated is probably on the mark. What gets emailed around your office... people's "baby's first steps" videos, or sketch comedy clips owned by giant companies?
This may be the beginning of a spectacular legal roller coaster that gives Google a real belly ache. I'm just hoping that it highlights how backwards copyright law has become. Some good may come of this. I hope!
Scary stories.
A good friend of mine had his mom die when he was young in large part due to a medical error. Not surprisingly, he has been mistrustful of doctors ever since, but from his cynicism was born one fantastic bit of wisdom: "Doctors are just tech support for your body."
I haven't found the tech support yet that I wouldn't check on with my own research.
When "spleencasting" becomes the rage. There's always something new.
All this talk about RAID and no zfs link yet?
http://flux.org.uk/howto/solaris/zfs_tutorial_01
So the right to have an abortion is bullshit whereas the right to own a gun is God-given.
The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. They do not decide what is right, moral, ethical, or proper. They decide if laws are Constitutional. Hopefully, the Constitution has the moral stuff in it--of course, it fails in some places. For example, it is weak on protecting privacy and it did not address control over our own bodies, like abortion and right to die stuff.
The decision on abortion was correct, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion isn't protected in the Constitution, therefore, laws can be made restricting it. I do not like the result, but it is consistent with our system of law. The law just happens to suck.
The gun decision was made not because Americans today value guns more than abortion rights, but because the legal framework the laws were written into--the Constitution--had something to say about one, and not the other.
When you ignore the law and make decisions that "feel" right, you open the door to abuse of power. You don't like how judges act now? After a few decades of judges doing what "feels" right and pandering to part of the public, things would be worse. After all, isn't that what the President is doing?
The price we pay for living in a society of laws is that some of those laws are going to suck because the process of change is difficult. The alternative, less respect for the law in government, would make everything suck more because the powerful have more power.
If you don't take care of your body, and you become an expensive data point in your insurance system, you raise the premiums for everyone else. We all seem to generally agree on that. We disagree on what, if anything, should be done to make the system more "fair."
Likewise, if you don't raise your kid right and he becomes a murdering thug, you lower the quality of life for everyone else. Should your performance as a parent be judged, fined, taxed, regulated too? The societal impact of poor parenting is at least as great as that of too many cheeseburgers.
Personally, I will grudgingly pay for Mr. Unhealthy's insurance, and I will sadly let the person next door loose a brood of poorly socialized amoral goons on the world, because I think the alternative--trying to fix things--will end up being worse.
For that matter, do those reps think that this will make law enforcement give one whit about people stealing albums? They already have enough to deal with in terms of real crime, and they're going to utterly ignore this anyway.
From the summary: "If passed into law, the bill would establish an Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General."
So when they create a new police force exactly for pirated music, and staff it with new employees... and give them sweet tazers and body armor and all that... and dump bazillions of tax dollars in to it... Yes, that new law enforcement agency will care.
I used to think I was seeing the beginning of the end. Now I realize we're in the middle of the end.
Can you explain how to do that with Gimp, or maybe put it into some kind of a car analogy? Thanks.
Since it's an iPhone, you'll want a data plan as well as a voice plan...
Not all of us. I use my unlocked/hacktivated iPhone on ATT with my old SIM and no data plan. (EDGE data is disabled in the phone's config.)
I am on a family plan. I can't go legit with the iPhone without a contract extension, right? Well, that extends the contracts for all phones on the family plan. That wasn't acceptable, and I didn't really need the data plan anyway--it just wasn't worth the money to me.
(Why did I buy an iPhone? My old phone was dying, and getting a refurb iPhone cost $250, about the same as some other neat-o phone that I'd also have to unlock.)
Admittedly, I am an edge case, but still, there are reasons to use the iPhone just as a phone plus wifi device.
I just hope they don't start nuking hacked iPhones. It's a risk I am willing to take though.
Just sharing anecdotes:
10.5 has been the first Mac OS I have had any problems with.
My old G4 laptop was upgraded from 10.0 through 10.4.something. No wipes... always upgrades. It always performed perfectly. I am sure there were bugs, but I didn't encounter or notice them in my usage.
Then I upgraded to a new Intel Macbook Pro that shipped with 10.5.
Out of the box it had serious bugs in networking. It could not connect to Apple's own software update utility, and it had problems getting data from some sources through the browsers, too. Specifically, I could not download stuff from Apple... like software update DMGs.
This wasn't a network config issue, it was one of the numerous weird-ass networking bugs that plague 10.5. (If I fired up Parallels or booted into Windows, the problematic connections worked fine.)
Retrieving a troublesome file from Apple, in Mac OS X, worked fine with a command line utility like curl... but the download would always fail in the browser after about 500k had come down the pipe. Which browser? Any browser. The OS was failing to hand off the data to the app properly, somehow. And only data from some sources--Apple and also MSFT's download site were afflicted. wtf? I guess their packets taste funny.
A friend of mine works at a big iron storage company, and they get inside Apple info to better support their own customers who use Mac clients. The story he tells me is 10.5 has some new exciting network architecture that was basically pushed out before it was ready, and it is way buggy. His company officially does not support 10.5 clients connecting to their network storage product due to bugs in NFS and deeper parts of the network stack.
But in the end 10.5 is still good for me. I can work around the weird ass bug by downloading stuff from Apple/MSFT through another OS.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-08/release.shtml
Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.
That IS true, but I think the GP poster was trying to say, "you can fit a surprisingly good HD movie into the space available on a DVD using a good codec." I agree.
4 GB of h.264 can look pretty good. I've never seen a BD rip crammed into the space of a double-layer DVD, but I can imagine that would look much better, and easily good enough for most people.
As good as BR/HDDVD? Well, no! I've got a bigass 1080p and I know exactly what that looks like, as well as what two CD's worth of h.264 gets you. But I'd have compromised to end the format war early, and get cheaper media prices, if it had been up to me. HD on DVD was not a bad idea as an interim measure.
Instead... after a long and bloody war, we got BR. Technically it neat-o, but in practice it's stumbled with nonsense like players that can't be upgraded to the high end of the spec.
The whole affair was... regrettable.
1. Lies
2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
4. Storage products
But seeing Nichia's name in there gives me hope. (Of course, Charlie Brown had hope every time Lucy held the football for him too.)
... in a country where most people don't read if they don't have to.
That is a serious accusation. Do you have proof?
Computer runs software.
Film at 11.