The codec only specifies how the encoded stream is formed and how it should be decoded. It does not specify how the encoder should transform raw video into encoded form, and much effort is devoted to finding new algorithms by which existing codecs may be made to perform better without alteration of the decoding side.
That doesn't quite work - the patents also cover useful encoding techniques, so you have to also go through your code and make sure you aren't using any mathematical concepts discovered and patented in the last twenty years.
MS did try to kill MP3 - they bundled Windows with a CD-ripping capability in windows media player that was only capable of saving to WMA format. It's a powerful tactic, but in this case it failed.
Graphics is a patent minefield - it's one of the most legally aggressive areas in computing. Both parties have a strong commercial incentive to keep their technology secret - both to stop their rival stealing ideas, and to avoid inadvertently revealing any code that infringes upon a patent they were not aware of at the time. This slows down open-source development as every change needs to be examined by legal experts, and most legal experts are very cautious in their advice.
They also told me how much I should be offering for junk components in Eve if I was still to turn a profit on reprocessing. I've not played the game for years, but spreadsheets are a pretty important tool. They also tell you which ore is most profitable to mine.
The general rule I use is to divide mbps by ten to get MBps, rather than 8. The slight over-division compensates for various overheads - headers, dropped packets, etc.
It'd be better if we weren't stuck on such tiny MTUs still, but backwards compatibility demands it: Anything over 1500 bytes is probably going to run into an ethernet segment somewhere and go wrong.
It'd have to be quite an assassin too - the president is very well-protected. He can't leave home without a security team going ahead and securing every building with a window that overlooks his route, and he only travels any significant distance in vehicles designed to withstand a small missile. The JFK days of open-topped limos are past. I'm not sure quite how it could be done without access to some serious military hardware.
It'll be easier in a few years, when drones get smaller. You couldn't get a drone in close yet, but get them down to insect-sized and you can try fitting a ricin-tipped needle on one. It'd still be difficult even with that type of technology - you'd need to smuggle it through security at an event you knew he'd be attending, and try to stay unnoticed long enough to pilot it in from your smartphone... and I expect that once that tech becomes available, every area the president enters will also be screened off behind a mosquito net precisely to prevent such an attack.
I picked that site because they have a fairly rabid comment community, but not so fringe as to be completely isolated. WND is largely responsible for the Birther conspiracy theory - they started it, they worked tirelessly to promote it. Their stories are also frequently linked to from 'mainstream' right-wing news sites like OneNewsNow. They can't just be dismissed as some nutjob circle-jerk on a blog, they are still connected into the wider right-wing political community and can syndicate some columnists with real name recognition. They even have Chuck Norris writing for them.
ONN is a lot stricter with their comments though: If you threaten to shoot police officers there, moderators are likely to pull the comment after a short time. With WND it's pretty much anything-goes, so long as you don't actually say anything positive about Obama - those comments get moderated out quickly enough.
Every one of which is just a more specific case of the general outline I gave above. I've heard them all before - they all involve some high-school science which, interpreted simplistically, seems to suggest a young earth. The carbon dating of diamonds or oil, for example. If you're only working with high-school physics, that seems a certain proof of a young earth - because at that level you only need be concerned with carbon isotopes, but back in the complexities of the real world carbon dating for very old samples cannot overcome the interference of other radioisotopes - mostly potassium-40. The SNR is just too low, so you end up with a reading at around the maximum age of your equipment sensitivity - which any operator would recognize as a sign that the sample cannot be dated.
Now, let us sample some of the comments that could be interpreted as threatening: "I dare you to come to Texas and tell Texans that you are going after their guns." "We need to undo everything he put in place while in Office. he is a lying muslim and traitor. We also need to immediately remove ALL of his appointees on day one of the next time we return to a Presidency. This muslim theocracy he works under is illegal." "Maybe while he's out of the country, we can talk our military into not letting AF One back INTO the country. Tell them to land somewhere else, not AMERICA. Keep him out, Maybe even the Secret Service will do their job of their oath of office to protect our nation from within (obama) and outside. Then he can stay in Kenya, without his protection and live it up! We'll send for AF 1 later, or even blow the damn thing up." "I hope the military and the police departments do not follow his orders when POTUS decides to grab our guns. I do not want to have to shoot a fellow American, but I have that constitutional right." "MOLON LABE! Send your storm troopers, you skunk, wannabe Adolf Hitler and you Communist wannabe Josef Stalin. See what happens when free people rise up and take back their country in a revolutionary war against tyranny. Oh did I forget also call you "King Barak the Only"?" "One if the best reasons for our 2nd Amendment is that we will be able to defend ourselves when the Obama goons come after us!!!" "omuzloid wont stop until the heart beat of america stops.....this sodomite muzloid is not fit for the office of the president and our elected servants in dc are cow towing to this loathsome peice of trash in the hopes of secureing the illegal power that he has grabbed the republicans are just as guilty as the demicrats.....we need to clean house senate and the presidency and we need to do this before omuzloid can create more havoc and strife!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" "I look for Obama to go after our guns through his illegal abuse of executive authority. We are the only ones who will stop him and that might not be pretty." "He wants a revolution, so he can martial law! I say lets give it to him! " "I want to send my sincere condolences to the families of the officers sent to try and take my GUNS.When our brave first responders follow illegal orders against there oath of office , I know they know better. Someone has to stand up and be first , and if our police and military refuse I WILL STAND ALONE. OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS."
That's just one story on one site! It's an impossible task trying to monitor all the potential threats.
Most of their arguments are variations on a very simple form. 1. I have identified an aspect of the evolutionary model which I find difficult to accept. 2. Therefore God made all life six thousand years ago.
Carbon dating is useless on fossils. Firstly because they are far too old for the ratio to be measurable, and secondly because they don't actually contain any carbon of atmospheric origin to date.
There are other forms of dating used for fossils though.
Snake taxonomy isn't really a tree. It's more of an overgrown hedge, full of thorns. This will be tidied up as the genetic comparisons are processed, but it's not a high-priority area of research.
There is indeed a mandatory prohibition on circumventing any technological means of copyright enforcement, under the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. The US implements this by the DMCA, the EU via their Copyright Directive which instructs member states to modify their own laws accordingly. The same treaty also mandates that the duration of copyright must be at least fifty years for any kind of work, though countries are able to set the term as long as they wish beyond this, and usually do.
It was a clear enough case of fair use. I could have submitted a counternotice, but I decided against doing so - I suspect I actually annoyed a real human, not just a bot, because my joke was a little offensive and they had done nothing about other people uploading the entire episode from which I took clips. They may well have escalated to an actual legal action, and I know how that turns out: I'd win, but have to spend my entire life savings on legal fees.
I had a similar experience - a video I uploaded as a demonstration of some restoration filters was flagged by content-ID. The audio in question was the original song - dating from the silent movie era, and so ancient it was public domain even in the US. There was no option to appeal, however: While you can issue a counternotice for a DMCA takedown, there is no such option for content-ID, nor any means of raising questions concerning the legitimacy of the copyright claim. Which in this case was a collections agency. I would guess they purchased the rights to a library of old silent-movie music, then submitted it in bulk without bothering to actually check the validity of the copyright.
I've also been the recipient of an actual DMCA claim - for a few clips I took from an episode of Pokemon in order to make a thirty-second comedic edit. It wasn't very funny anyway.
The whole point is that the request was absurd, and absurd in such an obvious way that for Universal (Or their contractor) to make it demonstrates a level of incompetence. If their software is so poorly-written and their checks so insufficient as to detect IMDB and even localhost as infringing, how many perfectly legal websites have they had taken down from Google due to similar but less-noticeable errors?
They almost* all expire, but the term can be increased easily - and is increased. Often. To the point that it may never run out, as the increases are past to roughly the same length as the calender advances.
*There is one non-expiring copyright: Peter Pan, within the UK. It's a special case, granted to a childrens' hospital in perpetuity as a recognition of their charitable work.
Similar business practices have been used in the past. Rockefeller is a well-known example: He was an obsessive monopolist, unable to stomach the existence of any competitor to his Standard Oil empire. Among the tricks he used was to buy up manufacturers of components used in oil drilling and refining, and then refuse to sell replacements to competitors - driving them out of business when their expensive industrial machines eventually broke down and couldn't be repaired. With the competitor driven out of business Rockefeller easily purchased what was left and incorporated it into his company. He sabotaged one company by thus denying them access to oil-carrying carts for trains - and when they switched to shipping in barrels, he purchased the one company that could make a barrel sealing compound compatible with crude oil and altered the formulation to make it chemically unsuited.
Rockefeller's business practices went down in legend - you can thank him for modern antitrust laws: The first ones in the US were passed expressly in order to target him. He was the Bill Gates of the 1800s: Built up a fortune through unethical and at times outright illegal business practices, only to eventually retire and spend the rest of his life giving it away in huge grants to charitable causes.
It would be a lot harder to pull something like that today though - there are stricter regulations and laws against such things. It could be done, but it would need a great deal of legal caution and skill to avoid liability, or at least to ensure the liability lay with a collapsing shell company.
King should be satisfied: His children have been judged on the content of their character, and faired poorly. They have spent much of their lives in legal action against each other as they fought over control of King's legacy, all seeking to exploit it either for commercial gain or in order to advance their own political goals. They strictly enforce the copyright on his famous speech too: If you want to use that quote in a movie or a documentary, expect to pay in the order of $60,000 for permission. They even charge charities for the right to quote him.
It's a court order, they have little choice. But their blocking is also trivial to circumvent. Pirate bay is blocked, yes... but not if you go via https.
Slashdot Mirror
The codec only specifies how the encoded stream is formed and how it should be decoded. It does not specify how the encoder should transform raw video into encoded form, and much effort is devoted to finding new algorithms by which existing codecs may be made to perform better without alteration of the decoding side.
You're not the first to be confused by the coincidence in terms.
That doesn't quite work - the patents also cover useful encoding techniques, so you have to also go through your code and make sure you aren't using any mathematical concepts discovered and patented in the last twenty years.
MS did try to kill MP3 - they bundled Windows with a CD-ripping capability in windows media player that was only capable of saving to WMA format. It's a powerful tactic, but in this case it failed.
But when you're designing your codec with one hand tied behind your back, it's not going to work as efficiently.
Graphics is a patent minefield - it's one of the most legally aggressive areas in computing. Both parties have a strong commercial incentive to keep their technology secret - both to stop their rival stealing ideas, and to avoid inadvertently revealing any code that infringes upon a patent they were not aware of at the time. This slows down open-source development as every change needs to be examined by legal experts, and most legal experts are very cautious in their advice.
They also told me how much I should be offering for junk components in Eve if I was still to turn a profit on reprocessing. I've not played the game for years, but spreadsheets are a pretty important tool. They also tell you which ore is most profitable to mine.
The general rule I use is to divide mbps by ten to get MBps, rather than 8. The slight over-division compensates for various overheads - headers, dropped packets, etc.
It'd be better if we weren't stuck on such tiny MTUs still, but backwards compatibility demands it: Anything over 1500 bytes is probably going to run into an ethernet segment somewhere and go wrong.
It'd have to be quite an assassin too - the president is very well-protected. He can't leave home without a security team going ahead and securing every building with a window that overlooks his route, and he only travels any significant distance in vehicles designed to withstand a small missile. The JFK days of open-topped limos are past. I'm not sure quite how it could be done without access to some serious military hardware.
It'll be easier in a few years, when drones get smaller. You couldn't get a drone in close yet, but get them down to insect-sized and you can try fitting a ricin-tipped needle on one. It'd still be difficult even with that type of technology - you'd need to smuggle it through security at an event you knew he'd be attending, and try to stay unnoticed long enough to pilot it in from your smartphone... and I expect that once that tech becomes available, every area the president enters will also be screened off behind a mosquito net precisely to prevent such an attack.
I picked that site because they have a fairly rabid comment community, but not so fringe as to be completely isolated. WND is largely responsible for the Birther conspiracy theory - they started it, they worked tirelessly to promote it. Their stories are also frequently linked to from 'mainstream' right-wing news sites like OneNewsNow. They can't just be dismissed as some nutjob circle-jerk on a blog, they are still connected into the wider right-wing political community and can syndicate some columnists with real name recognition. They even have Chuck Norris writing for them.
ONN is a lot stricter with their comments though: If you threaten to shoot police officers there, moderators are likely to pull the comment after a short time. With WND it's pretty much anything-goes, so long as you don't actually say anything positive about Obama - those comments get moderated out quickly enough.
Every one of which is just a more specific case of the general outline I gave above. I've heard them all before - they all involve some high-school science which, interpreted simplistically, seems to suggest a young earth. The carbon dating of diamonds or oil, for example. If you're only working with high-school physics, that seems a certain proof of a young earth - because at that level you only need be concerned with carbon isotopes, but back in the complexities of the real world carbon dating for very old samples cannot overcome the interference of other radioisotopes - mostly potassium-40. The SNR is just too low, so you end up with a reading at around the maximum age of your equipment sensitivity - which any operator would recognize as a sign that the sample cannot be dated.
According to a paper which failed peer review.
This is a fairly typical story on a right-wing pseudo-news site: http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/ban...
Now, let us sample some of the comments that could be interpreted as threatening:
"I dare you to come to Texas and tell Texans that you are going after their guns."
"We need to undo everything he put in place while in Office. he is a lying muslim and traitor. We also need to immediately remove ALL of his appointees on day one of the next time we return to a Presidency. This muslim theocracy he works under is illegal."
"Maybe while he's out of the country, we can talk our military into not letting AF One back INTO the country. Tell them to land somewhere else, not AMERICA. Keep him out, Maybe even the Secret Service will do their job of their oath of office to protect our nation from within (obama) and outside. Then he can stay in Kenya, without his protection and live it up! We'll send for AF 1 later, or even blow the damn thing up."
"I hope the military and the police departments do not follow his orders when POTUS decides to grab our guns. I do not want to have to shoot a fellow American, but I have that constitutional right."
"MOLON LABE! Send your storm troopers, you skunk, wannabe Adolf Hitler and you Communist wannabe Josef Stalin. See what happens when free people rise up and take back their country in a revolutionary war against tyranny. Oh did I forget also call you "King Barak the Only"?"
"One if the best reasons for our 2nd Amendment is that we will be able to defend ourselves when the Obama goons come after us!!!"
"omuzloid wont stop until the heart beat of america stops.....this sodomite muzloid is not fit for the office of the president and our elected servants in dc are cow towing to this loathsome peice of trash in the hopes of secureing the illegal power that he has grabbed the republicans are just as guilty as the demicrats.....we need to clean house senate and the presidency and we need to do this before omuzloid can create more havoc and strife!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"I look for Obama to go after our guns through his illegal abuse of executive authority. We are the only ones who will stop him and that might not be pretty."
"He wants a revolution, so he can martial law! I say lets give it to him! "
"I want to send my sincere condolences to the families of the officers sent to try and take my GUNS.When our brave first responders follow illegal orders against there oath of office , I know they know better. Someone has to stand up and be first , and if our police and military refuse I WILL STAND ALONE. OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS."
That's just one story on one site! It's an impossible task trying to monitor all the potential threats.
Most of their arguments are variations on a very simple form.
1. I have identified an aspect of the evolutionary model which I find difficult to accept.
2. Therefore God made all life six thousand years ago.
Carbon dating is useless on fossils. Firstly because they are far too old for the ratio to be measurable, and secondly because they don't actually contain any carbon of atmospheric origin to date.
There are other forms of dating used for fossils though.
Snake taxonomy isn't really a tree. It's more of an overgrown hedge, full of thorns. This will be tidied up as the genetic comparisons are processed, but it's not a high-priority area of research.
There is indeed a mandatory prohibition on circumventing any technological means of copyright enforcement, under the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. The US implements this by the DMCA, the EU via their Copyright Directive which instructs member states to modify their own laws accordingly. The same treaty also mandates that the duration of copyright must be at least fifty years for any kind of work, though countries are able to set the term as long as they wish beyond this, and usually do.
It was a clear enough case of fair use. I could have submitted a counternotice, but I decided against doing so - I suspect I actually annoyed a real human, not just a bot, because my joke was a little offensive and they had done nothing about other people uploading the entire episode from which I took clips. They may well have escalated to an actual legal action, and I know how that turns out: I'd win, but have to spend my entire life savings on legal fees.
I had a similar experience - a video I uploaded as a demonstration of some restoration filters was flagged by content-ID. The audio in question was the original song - dating from the silent movie era, and so ancient it was public domain even in the US. There was no option to appeal, however: While you can issue a counternotice for a DMCA takedown, there is no such option for content-ID, nor any means of raising questions concerning the legitimacy of the copyright claim. Which in this case was a collections agency. I would guess they purchased the rights to a library of old silent-movie music, then submitted it in bulk without bothering to actually check the validity of the copyright.
I've also been the recipient of an actual DMCA claim - for a few clips I took from an episode of Pokemon in order to make a thirty-second comedic edit. It wasn't very funny anyway.
The whole point is that the request was absurd, and absurd in such an obvious way that for Universal (Or their contractor) to make it demonstrates a level of incompetence. If their software is so poorly-written and their checks so insufficient as to detect IMDB and even localhost as infringing, how many perfectly legal websites have they had taken down from Google due to similar but less-noticeable errors?
They almost* all expire, but the term can be increased easily - and is increased. Often. To the point that it may never run out, as the increases are past to roughly the same length as the calender advances.
*There is one non-expiring copyright: Peter Pan, within the UK. It's a special case, granted to a childrens' hospital in perpetuity as a recognition of their charitable work.
Legally near-impossible, as it's required by international agreement.
Similar business practices have been used in the past. Rockefeller is a well-known example: He was an obsessive monopolist, unable to stomach the existence of any competitor to his Standard Oil empire. Among the tricks he used was to buy up manufacturers of components used in oil drilling and refining, and then refuse to sell replacements to competitors - driving them out of business when their expensive industrial machines eventually broke down and couldn't be repaired. With the competitor driven out of business Rockefeller easily purchased what was left and incorporated it into his company. He sabotaged one company by thus denying them access to oil-carrying carts for trains - and when they switched to shipping in barrels, he purchased the one company that could make a barrel sealing compound compatible with crude oil and altered the formulation to make it chemically unsuited.
Rockefeller's business practices went down in legend - you can thank him for modern antitrust laws: The first ones in the US were passed expressly in order to target him. He was the Bill Gates of the 1800s: Built up a fortune through unethical and at times outright illegal business practices, only to eventually retire and spend the rest of his life giving it away in huge grants to charitable causes.
It would be a lot harder to pull something like that today though - there are stricter regulations and laws against such things. It could be done, but it would need a great deal of legal caution and skill to avoid liability, or at least to ensure the liability lay with a collapsing shell company.
King should be satisfied: His children have been judged on the content of their character, and faired poorly. They have spent much of their lives in legal action against each other as they fought over control of King's legacy, all seeking to exploit it either for commercial gain or in order to advance their own political goals. They strictly enforce the copyright on his famous speech too: If you want to use that quote in a movie or a documentary, expect to pay in the order of $60,000 for permission. They even charge charities for the right to quote him.
It's a court order, they have little choice. But their blocking is also trivial to circumvent. Pirate bay is blocked, yes... but not if you go via https.