There are forms of lossless compression that are especially tailored to audio data and which achieve much higher compression ratios than you can get with general-purpose compression like bz2. Checkout monkey's audio; they're the first that come to mind. They claim on the page to get around 50% compression routinely.
But what's wrong with lossy compression in general? You forget that even "raw" music data is sampled at a certain frequency and bit depth. Think about how bad 8-bit/22kHz uncompressed mono audio sounds in comparison to a 128kbit/sec joint stereo mp3 sampled at 44kHz/16bit -- well guess what, 8bit/22kHz/mono raw works out to 176kbit/sec. There's obviously a tradeoff, i.e. in order to get the best sound for a certain bitrate you want some amount of lossy compression rather than just taking the highest samplerate/depth that fits in your size limit. Now if I wanted to carry 5 hours of music around on quarter-size 500mb discs I might opt to carry around two discs and use a higher bitrate than 128k, but this prejudice against lossy compression is foolish. Good lossy compression can be very good for the sound of your audio.
don't bother arguing it, it's purely a question of semantics. The next line is, well if you're doing it to avoid having people cause trouble too, then that's out of greed too. If you're willing to say that genuinely generous unselfish acts are done out of greed (because they make you feel good inside) then there's nothing that can't be put that way, and it becomes pretty much useless to talk about people's motivations because it's all selfish in the end.
So what you're saying is, as long as you distribute your GPL software under a restrictive, closed, proprietary enough license, you don't have to release the code?... no, I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.
Re:What's the physics behind this?
on
Quark Stars
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· Score: 1
thanks, that sort of makes sense in a twisted way, like most physics
What's the physics behind this?
on
Quark Stars
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· Score: 1
I'm no professional physicist - but I thought I remembered hearing that a neutron star was held stable by the neutron degeneracy pressure counteracting the gravitational forces. Once there's enough mass so that gravity overcomes the degeneracy pressure, there are no more forces pushing particles apart so the whole thing collapses to a mathematical point (black hole.) I'm not really sure how this works either; from what I remember of quantum, degeneracy is more a law than a force - two fermions simply can't occupy the same space, so there's a limit to how dense they can become. In any case, does anyone have any further knowledge of what force might be keeping these denser-than-neutron stars from collapsing into black holes?
anyway, your argument does seem to make sense, but I don't think it makes it right for American companies to pay their foreign workers so little that their profit winds up in the thousands of percents. One problem is that what the cheaply-paid workers produce gets whisked right out of their country, sold to (relatively) rich americans, and the profits pocketed by other (relatively) rich americans. If they weren't working for Nike they'd be paid less, but their small area of the world would be better off because their full contribution would stay there. It's hard to say a country's actually industrialized if all the industry there is owned by foreigners.
Then there's debate over whether accepting these wages is such a freely-made decision as you say. I'm not talking about people being literally forced to work some particular job, but what is fairly common is government-aided crackdowns on attempts at unionization and anything else that might hike up wages and thus drive the american factories out. Labor isn't being paid peanuts cause they're earning peanuts; they're being paid peanuts because some factor or other is keeping them from demanding a more reasonable wages.
Artists? When was the last time artists caused the economy to collapse? There are many, many more parasites out there that you're not counting. Really, what do most 9-5 cube-monkeys actually contribute? Most people work because it pays the bills, not because they think their work is really necessary or useful. If you're an honest exception then good for you.
Something's backwards here. I don't have much to say abou the other four types you mention, but your comparison of sales and income taxes smells funny to me. First, you say, under sales taxes
There is no impact on individual liberties, because the tax can be mitigated by buying used goods, less goods or making it yourself (you can grow your own food, build your own house if you have wood or stone on your property, etc).
Then under income tax you say
there is no feedback loop (you have to work to eat, after all)
As far as I'm aware the government doesn't tax your work directly; it taxes, in a word, income. Removing yourself from the money economy as you suggest under the sales tax is just as effective a measure for avoiding income tax. Furthermore, why should sales taxes have any greater effect on the amount people buy than income taxes have on the amount people work? Everyone involved in the money economy has to pay for certain necessities; if a person decides to buy more (because sales taxes are low) it is necessary for them also to be making more. If they decide to spend less money (because sales taxes are high) then it makes no sense for them to work hard to make extra money if it's merely going to be stolen away by the income tax anyway. Can you clarify what makes sales tax have more of an effect on the economy than income tax? Why do you assume that people are more free to moderate what they spend than they are free to moderate what they make?
As for the privacy issue, I dislike filling out a return as much as anyone, but this is primarily a question of implementation. If sales tax required you to keep records of everything you bought throughout the year, add it up, itemize it, and pay 7%, your privacy would be much more violated than it is under the current income tax implementation. Conversely we could have an income tax implementation which simply withholds a percentage of what you make just as anonymously as sales tax; I wouldn't be such a fan because I think a flat tax is rough on the poor, but it could be done that way. In any case, unless you can clarify quite a few issues, I think your post was a heap of shameless spin. Please disillusion me.
Ninja scroll was indeed a dub that somehow (one in a million!) came out watchable. For Mononoke they at least put the Japanese track/English subs on the DVD (after a good amount of pressure and a couple delays.) Though actually I thought the Mononoke dub was more passable than most. I assume when/if they release this it'll be a dub; I just hope they make the subtitled version available eventually, to appease the literate portion of their viewership. (If you were Disney, would you put a subtitled film in theaters? hah...)
who says the brats should be entitled to reap the benefits of their genius parent any more than the general public? you want to create a freakin IP aristocracy here?
I doubt this is workable. Take your excellent example of Uncle Walt's movies: Let's say, to alleviate the problem of figuring out who created it and is therefore entitled to the copyright, that all rights to a movie were signed over by contract to the producer. Guess what those contracts, from all sides, would look like? That's right: they'd bind the producer to distribute the movie only by certain methods (i.e. not for free), profits would by contract be distributed exactly how they were before, and the only difference would be that the copyright would expire when the person did (or whatever the law says.) There are other things wrong with the corporate system (for instance, I tend to think the concept of limited liability is ridiculous, if I understand it correctly) - but what's the huge problem with group-owned copyrights?
- Divx the failed Circuit City pay-per-play disc scheme is not relevant to this conversation.
- Divx;-) (versions 3.xx) are a hacked Microsoft mpeg4 codec. Before Divx 4.xx it was the standard codec for DVD-based online copyright-infringement.
- OpenDivx (aka ProjectMayo) was an open-source project to make a video codec to replace divx3. This was never really able to compete with divx3 in its capabilities.
- Divx 4.xx came from OpenDivx code but is no longer open source. It is written by DivxNetworks and it is this that Fraunhofer is licensing. Despite not being open source it is now widely used; most say it is a better codec than divx 3.11 though it lacks one very slick tool - nandub - which some still claim is the method to use for the best encodes between the two codecs. Also, they don't use the smiley in the name as far as I know.
- XviD deserves a plug here. It's a new open-source mpeg4-compliant (though possibly not completely mpeg4-legal) codec based on opendivx which (developers promise) will be GPL'd as soon as the last few hundred lines of GPL-incompatible code are replaced. Despite being very new and "alpha," it's already competing with divx 4 in terms of quality of encodes. Source can be obtained at the above site; binaries (VfW) are here and elsewhere.
Anyway, so yeah, the submission was wrong on a few points, but we've got everything straight now, don't we?
Well, I guess I could take two strategies from here. I could either say OK, it's Socrates' right to think there's one absolute right ideology, and my right to think, well, everyone has their own ideology and no one is demonstrably better than any other - well, that's just what the relativist is trying to show. Your paradox isn't necessarily a paradox; at first it seems to accept a system wherein truth is weighed on an individual basis, and then compounds the contradictory opinions of two different people and uses that to show a contradiction - well, of couse. On the other hand, I could say OK, so your point is relativism is self-contradictory, and my point is absolutism has no basis except for relativism - you think you're right because, well, that's your opinion. We seem to be left with no possible ideology that isn't either self-contradictory or based in something self-contradictory. No ideology works out to be particularly good. Which is frankly just fine with me; but isn't that just what you were trying to avoid?
I don't get how that's supposed to be an argument against relativism. Unless you're prepared to name a source for your idea of rightness, you're just trumpeting your idea of right louder than the next guy. If you do have some source for your idea of rightness, who says it's the right source besides you? Socrates? Reason? Bullshit. Reason is almost plausible but then you have to name the core beliefs that you're starting from, and chances are they're contentious too. So admit it, an absolutist is just an arrogant relativist.
Not that this has anything to do with copyright infringement, or software piracy if you prefer.
I'd say two large and heavily armed groups of people actively trying to kill each other colliding on a beach is a pretty sure cause of some pretty extreme bloodshed, no exaggeration. Is there something you know that I'm missing?
He does have a point. I built my own computer (no OEM disc here) and it still takes only an hour, maybe two to put windows & drivers on a formatted disk. On the other hand, I tried a total of four times to install a working Linux and only this last time succeeded (and this is with Mandrake, which is kind of cheating I suppose.) Now that it's on, I like it a lot, but anyone trying to say that Linux is as easy to use as Windows is missing something. You're EXPECTED to know some Unix once you've gone through the install process, graphical or not. You're also expected to dig around for the relevant configuration tools and/or files; you can make fun of Windows for making you click the start button in order to shut down but I still have no idea what most of those damn text files in/etc/ mean.
I got the distinct impression he was telling the back story during that paragraph; that's not about today, that's about a few years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If our government treated us as the Taliban treats its citizens - if the conquering government had raised the standard of living of the world and had the most open, free society in history - if my government had vowed the destruction of the other government - I'd bunker down and hope like hell that they won. Wouldn't you?
I don't know; it's a good question. I'd tend to say so myself since you phrase it that way, but I don't think most Afghanis see it that way, for whatever reason. What's the explanation? Are you prepared to say that Afghanis in general are just wrong, stupid, deluded, or brainwashed? Maybe we can actually prove them wrong and bring them some measure of prosperity through some kind of Marshall Plan-like program; that's my best hope at this point, frankly, but I don't think this administration will be that charitable. If not, I think the most likely thing if we do eventually drive out the Taliban to our satisfaction is that we basically colonize them and become the kind of benevolent foreign dictators that have been universally hated and thrown out throughout history, usually leading to more dictatorships and atrocities afterward. For one thing, I don't particularly trust the Northern Alliance to be much better than the Taliban. Do we have evidence that they truly intend to bring more freedom and prosperity, or are they using promises of freedom and prosperity to excuse a war that for them is just an effort to kick out a rival ethnic group?
As for how we could help the Afghanis "a lot faster" -- well, if it was ONLY our intention to help the people, no one turns away no-strings-attached foreign aid. They did, after all, host UN anti-mine and hunger aid efforts. It would've had to have happened before we showed that we intended to make war on them. But as for right now, it seems we're mostly stuck. I have no more good solutions, I can only say that we were wrong to begin bombing and we're wrong to keep it up. The fact that it's all being done in the name of protecting innocent life is, as always in war, hugely ironic. ah well... I don't say you're wrong, I just think your viewpoint is too fixed. I can't see it through the eyes of a bin Laden supporter either, but I don't think you can really back up the assertion that they're wrong and we Americans are right. Might I assert that the average Muslim is no more bloodthirsty than the average American? Put the enthusiastic bin Laden followers next to that section of Americans who seriously want us to use nukes: that would certainly more than level the playing field as far as innocent death is concerned. It's all just a lot more complicated than can be decided in a quick post saying "us or them, and we're better."
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But what's wrong with lossy compression in general? You forget that even "raw" music data is sampled at a certain frequency and bit depth. Think about how bad 8-bit/22kHz uncompressed mono audio sounds in comparison to a 128kbit/sec joint stereo mp3 sampled at 44kHz/16bit -- well guess what, 8bit/22kHz/mono raw works out to 176kbit/sec. There's obviously a tradeoff, i.e. in order to get the best sound for a certain bitrate you want some amount of lossy compression rather than just taking the highest samplerate/depth that fits in your size limit. Now if I wanted to carry 5 hours of music around on quarter-size 500mb discs I might opt to carry around two discs and use a higher bitrate than 128k, but this prejudice against lossy compression is foolish. Good lossy compression can be very good for the sound of your audio.
The article mentions that patent fees don't in fact go to the patent office, but to the general government budget instead.
don't bother arguing it, it's purely a question of semantics. The next line is, well if you're doing it to avoid having people cause trouble too, then that's out of greed too. If you're willing to say that genuinely generous unselfish acts are done out of greed (because they make you feel good inside) then there's nothing that can't be put that way, and it becomes pretty much useless to talk about people's motivations because it's all selfish in the end.
So what you're saying is, as long as you distribute your GPL software under a restrictive, closed, proprietary enough license, you don't have to release the code? ... no, I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.
thanks, that sort of makes sense in a twisted way, like most physics
I'm no professional physicist - but I thought I remembered hearing that a neutron star was held stable by the neutron degeneracy pressure counteracting the gravitational forces. Once there's enough mass so that gravity overcomes the degeneracy pressure, there are no more forces pushing particles apart so the whole thing collapses to a mathematical point (black hole.) I'm not really sure how this works either; from what I remember of quantum, degeneracy is more a law than a force - two fermions simply can't occupy the same space, so there's a limit to how dense they can become. In any case, does anyone have any further knowledge of what force might be keeping these denser-than-neutron stars from collapsing into black holes?
doncha love the offtopic threads that won't die.
anyway, your argument does seem to make sense, but I don't think it makes it right for American companies to pay their foreign workers so little that their profit winds up in the thousands of percents. One problem is that what the cheaply-paid workers produce gets whisked right out of their country, sold to (relatively) rich americans, and the profits pocketed by other (relatively) rich americans. If they weren't working for Nike they'd be paid less, but their small area of the world would be better off because their full contribution would stay there. It's hard to say a country's actually industrialized if all the industry there is owned by foreigners.
Then there's debate over whether accepting these wages is such a freely-made decision as you say. I'm not talking about people being literally forced to work some particular job, but what is fairly common is government-aided crackdowns on attempts at unionization and anything else that might hike up wages and thus drive the american factories out. Labor isn't being paid peanuts cause they're earning peanuts; they're being paid peanuts because some factor or other is keeping them from demanding a more reasonable wages.
Artists? When was the last time artists caused the economy to collapse? There are many, many more parasites out there that you're not counting. Really, what do most 9-5 cube-monkeys actually contribute? Most people work because it pays the bills, not because they think their work is really necessary or useful. If you're an honest exception then good for you.
I think you read something different than what I wrote.
There is no impact on individual liberties, because the tax can be mitigated by buying used goods, less goods or making it yourself (you can grow your own food, build your own house if you have wood or stone on your property, etc).
Then under income tax you say
there is no feedback loop (you have to work to eat, after all)
As far as I'm aware the government doesn't tax your work directly; it taxes, in a word, income. Removing yourself from the money economy as you suggest under the sales tax is just as effective a measure for avoiding income tax. Furthermore, why should sales taxes have any greater effect on the amount people buy than income taxes have on the amount people work? Everyone involved in the money economy has to pay for certain necessities; if a person decides to buy more (because sales taxes are low) it is necessary for them also to be making more. If they decide to spend less money (because sales taxes are high) then it makes no sense for them to work hard to make extra money if it's merely going to be stolen away by the income tax anyway. Can you clarify what makes sales tax have more of an effect on the economy than income tax? Why do you assume that people are more free to moderate what they spend than they are free to moderate what they make?
As for the privacy issue, I dislike filling out a return as much as anyone, but this is primarily a question of implementation. If sales tax required you to keep records of everything you bought throughout the year, add it up, itemize it, and pay 7%, your privacy would be much more violated than it is under the current income tax implementation. Conversely we could have an income tax implementation which simply withholds a percentage of what you make just as anonymously as sales tax; I wouldn't be such a fan because I think a flat tax is rough on the poor, but it could be done that way. In any case, unless you can clarify quite a few issues, I think your post was a heap of shameless spin. Please disillusion me.
you mean seventy?
hmmm.... how can we enjoy the good imported anime without supporting Disney?
I know --- PIRACY! There's a perfect answer for everything.
Ninja scroll was indeed a dub that somehow (one in a million!) came out watchable. For Mononoke they at least put the Japanese track/English subs on the DVD (after a good amount of pressure and a couple delays.) Though actually I thought the Mononoke dub was more passable than most. I assume when/if they release this it'll be a dub; I just hope they make the subtitled version available eventually, to appease the literate portion of their viewership. (If you were Disney, would you put a subtitled film in theaters? hah...)
dude it's $0.005 per pageview; I think you'll probably get over your headaches.
So if you think your odds are OK, try starting an uprising and see how far you get.
who says the brats should be entitled to reap the benefits of their genius parent any more than the general public? you want to create a freakin IP aristocracy here?
I doubt this is workable. Take your excellent example of Uncle Walt's movies: Let's say, to alleviate the problem of figuring out who created it and is therefore entitled to the copyright, that all rights to a movie were signed over by contract to the producer. Guess what those contracts, from all sides, would look like? That's right: they'd bind the producer to distribute the movie only by certain methods (i.e. not for free), profits would by contract be distributed exactly how they were before, and the only difference would be that the copyright would expire when the person did (or whatever the law says.) There are other things wrong with the corporate system (for instance, I tend to think the concept of limited liability is ridiculous, if I understand it correctly) - but what's the huge problem with group-owned copyrights?
- Divx;-) (versions 3.xx) are a hacked Microsoft mpeg4 codec. Before Divx 4.xx it was the standard codec for DVD-based online copyright-infringement.
- OpenDivx (aka ProjectMayo) was an open-source project to make a video codec to replace divx3. This was never really able to compete with divx3 in its capabilities.
- Divx 4.xx came from OpenDivx code but is no longer open source. It is written by DivxNetworks and it is this that Fraunhofer is licensing. Despite not being open source it is now widely used; most say it is a better codec than divx 3.11 though it lacks one very slick tool - nandub - which some still claim is the method to use for the best encodes between the two codecs. Also, they don't use the smiley in the name as far as I know.
- XviD deserves a plug here. It's a new open-source mpeg4-compliant (though possibly not completely mpeg4-legal) codec based on opendivx which (developers promise) will be GPL'd as soon as the last few hundred lines of GPL-incompatible code are replaced. Despite being very new and "alpha," it's already competing with divx 4 in terms of quality of encodes. Source can be obtained at the above site; binaries (VfW) are here and elsewhere.
Anyway, so yeah, the submission was wrong on a few points, but we've got everything straight now, don't we?
Well, I guess I could take two strategies from here. I could either say OK, it's Socrates' right to think there's one absolute right ideology, and my right to think, well, everyone has their own ideology and no one is demonstrably better than any other - well, that's just what the relativist is trying to show. Your paradox isn't necessarily a paradox; at first it seems to accept a system wherein truth is weighed on an individual basis, and then compounds the contradictory opinions of two different people and uses that to show a contradiction - well, of couse. On the other hand, I could say OK, so your point is relativism is self-contradictory, and my point is absolutism has no basis except for relativism - you think you're right because, well, that's your opinion. We seem to be left with no possible ideology that isn't either self-contradictory or based in something self-contradictory. No ideology works out to be particularly good. Which is frankly just fine with me; but isn't that just what you were trying to avoid?
I don't get how that's supposed to be an argument against relativism. Unless you're prepared to name a source for your idea of rightness, you're just trumpeting your idea of right louder than the next guy. If you do have some source for your idea of rightness, who says it's the right source besides you? Socrates? Reason? Bullshit. Reason is almost plausible but then you have to name the core beliefs that you're starting from, and chances are they're contentious too. So admit it, an absolutist is just an arrogant relativist.
Not that this has anything to do with copyright infringement, or software piracy if you prefer.
uhhh... what the fuck?
I'd say two large and heavily armed groups of people actively trying to kill each other colliding on a beach is a pretty sure cause of some pretty extreme bloodshed, no exaggeration. Is there something you know that I'm missing?
He does have a point. I built my own computer (no OEM disc here) and it still takes only an hour, maybe two to put windows & drivers on a formatted disk. On the other hand, I tried a total of four times to install a working Linux and only this last time succeeded (and this is with Mandrake, which is kind of cheating I suppose.) Now that it's on, I like it a lot, but anyone trying to say that Linux is as easy to use as Windows is missing something. You're EXPECTED to know some Unix once you've gone through the install process, graphical or not. You're also expected to dig around for the relevant configuration tools and/or files; you can make fun of Windows for making you click the start button in order to shut down but I still have no idea what most of those damn text files in /etc/ mean.
yes, 31 billion servers is a drop in the bucket against the havoc these kids caused....
do the math
I got the distinct impression he was telling the back story during that paragraph; that's not about today, that's about a few years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know; it's a good question. I'd tend to say so myself since you phrase it that way, but I don't think most Afghanis see it that way, for whatever reason. What's the explanation? Are you prepared to say that Afghanis in general are just wrong, stupid, deluded, or brainwashed? Maybe we can actually prove them wrong and bring them some measure of prosperity through some kind of Marshall Plan-like program; that's my best hope at this point, frankly, but I don't think this administration will be that charitable. If not, I think the most likely thing if we do eventually drive out the Taliban to our satisfaction is that we basically colonize them and become the kind of benevolent foreign dictators that have been universally hated and thrown out throughout history, usually leading to more dictatorships and atrocities afterward. For one thing, I don't particularly trust the Northern Alliance to be much better than the Taliban. Do we have evidence that they truly intend to bring more freedom and prosperity, or are they using promises of freedom and prosperity to excuse a war that for them is just an effort to kick out a rival ethnic group?
As for how we could help the Afghanis "a lot faster" -- well, if it was ONLY our intention to help the people, no one turns away no-strings-attached foreign aid. They did, after all, host UN anti-mine and hunger aid efforts. It would've had to have happened before we showed that we intended to make war on them. But as for right now, it seems we're mostly stuck. I have no more good solutions, I can only say that we were wrong to begin bombing and we're wrong to keep it up. The fact that it's all being done in the name of protecting innocent life is, as always in war, hugely ironic. ah well... I don't say you're wrong, I just think your viewpoint is too fixed. I can't see it through the eyes of a bin Laden supporter either, but I don't think you can really back up the assertion that they're wrong and we Americans are right. Might I assert that the average Muslim is no more bloodthirsty than the average American? Put the enthusiastic bin Laden followers next to that section of Americans who seriously want us to use nukes: that would certainly more than level the playing field as far as innocent death is concerned. It's all just a lot more complicated than can be decided in a quick post saying "us or them, and we're better."