You underestimate just how much crappier MPEG2 is. That technology is very primative compared to modern codecs. To match the quality of h264 takes around ten times the bitrate, based on some rather unscientific estimates from my watching DVDs (mpeg2, 6GB) vs dvd rips (About the same quality, 600MB). That high a bitrate just isn't cost-effective, even today.
h264 would be ideal, if not for the patent issue. That's a real deal-breaker for many. It's why Firefox doesn't have support for h264 video - even if they applied for a license, they wouldn't then be able to sub-license to developers who want to fork the project, which is incompatible with the open-source development model.
Right now h264 is as good as you'll get, but that isn't because the standard is intrinsicly better. It's just that the encoder is much more refined than any other. It has x264, which has been under active development for many years perfecting every detail.
Easily. You just make the character into an observer.
War of the Worlds is a good example - the book, and all of the movies. The story isn't about the character - he is just the narrator, a viewpoint by which we can witness great events unfold. He doesn't save the world, or be a hero, or a villain. He is just another face in the crowd of refugees. Events unfold around him, he watches. We watch with him.
2) "Heart attack? Ah... give me thirty seconds. I'm on first-name terms with about six magic users with healing powers, have access to a space station with teleporter system and the most advanced hospital in the solar system, and half my friends could read the book on heart transplants in under a minute and perform the procedure in less. Oh, and my co-worker has a ring that can trap people in stasis. If all else fails, I'll grab the phantom zone machine from my fortress - we can worry about getting you back later, it'll keep you alive for now."
I've heard comic fans complaining that the game greatly increases the abilities of some characters and nerfs others, as otherwise Superman would be essentially invinceable and some other key battles hopelessly unbalanced.
JLU also explored the idea with a brief visit to an alternate timeline where Lexx had become such a threat to world peace that Superman had felt no option but to kill him, triggering a series of defensive power-grabs that end with the Justice League declaring martial law and ruling the world with an iron fist in order to ensure peace and order. When the conventional JL characters find this, they are most displeased... though even Batman does have to abandon attempts at argument when his alternate points out that in their timeline, with the criminal population terrified of the League, there are no more street muggers shooting parents in front of their children.
I've not seen it yet, but the Jesus-symbolism in the first movie was very ham-fisted.
The 'same age as Jesus' thing sounds dubious: None of the gospels specifies an age, nor do any other books of the bible, and there are no other surviving sources from the time mentioning Jesus at all. Which is hardly surprising - he was preaching in a backwater of the Roman empire, and didn't become the religious super-star until long after his death.
That would be the JL animated series, Superman pwns Darkseid by hammering him through multible buildings. Briefly, anyway, before Darkseid turns the fight around: Superman may be physically stronger, but he didn't prepare for the fight in advance. Darkseid came equipped for a one-on-one with Superman.
Superman has to be crippled with an unbreakable moral code just to stop him breaking the entire DC universe. Several stories have dealt with what happens when Superman gets fed up of holding back and just declares himself ruler of the world - because if those petty nationalistic factions can't be trusted not to wage war, he'll just have run things himself.
That, and if Superman didn't have a 'no killing, ever' policy, the universe would run out of villains in short order.
Batman has routinely pointed out, with some annoyance, that it is easy for Superman to be good: He can walk into a firefight of a warzone and calmly incapacitate everyone present at no risk to himself, while Batman places himself in great danger on a weekly basis by trying to use non-lethal means to take down villains that would shrug off a tank shell to the face.
Accounting anything in hollywood is hard enough that the numbers may as well be made up.
Have you noticed that the figures for movies are always gross, not net? You may sometimes see a film cited as 'grossed $x on a budget of $y,' but never an actual net profit. That is because no hollywood movie makes a profit on paper. The industry is infamous for their use of dodgy accounting to make their profits disappear, as a way to dodge taxes and reduce royalty payments to anyone new enough to accept points on net.
The main method is by internal billing. Another branch of the studio will massively overbill for promotion costs, another one for distribution, another for effects consulting, and so on. So the profit is made in lots of smaller far-flung places, often incorporated in tax havens.
I'm guessing that almost all the viewers for this film are in the 18-30 male demographic. Prime audience for piracy. The same is true of Avatar, and the Iron Man series, and the Avengers movie. If piracy could ruin the profits on any movie, it would be these.
You are out of date. True, if you have to rush to see the film as soon as possible pirates can offer only crappy cams. But they also move fast: As soon as the blu-ray is out, rips will be in production and circulating the net within a day or two. Pirates today work in 1080p. The quality is indistinguishable from a store-bought blu-ray, and better than most streaming services.
The Mother's ability to impose guilt and shame lasts long past the age of independance.
I was just using it as an example, anyway. Substitute in relative of your choice, visiting coworker, roommate, anyone else you might not wish to proclaim your porn-watching ways to.
My little project is actually quite fun. The clients authenticate each other via public key (4096-bit RSA), so there is no central authentication or identity server. The control packets are all essentially random if you don't have both the keys (sender's public and recipient's private) to decrypt them with, so even DPI couldn't identify and block the protocol. I need to get a real crypto expert to look through the design and make sure I've not missed anything obvious (Cryptography is an easy thing to do badly), but I've handled things like reply attacks (timestamp!) and bouncing to spoof source address. The protocol is even IPv6-ready.
The bit I'm writing doesn't actually do the IM. It's a distributed address lookup and authentication service. An IM program can then utilise this service to handle the troublesome matter of remaining in contact with people as they move around and their IP changes.
It's not a law, exactly. It's like the US imposition of the Hays code. The government has made it clear that there *will* be a law, unless all major ISPs block porn voluntarily. As none of them want such a law, they are all going to do as they are asked - that way the government gets what it wants, the ISPs get flexibility in their implimentation, and no-one gets the blame if it all goes wrong.
It's worse than that. During the wikipedia block incident, it was noticed that many ISPs 'block' sites by intercepting the HTTP request and returning a false 404 error.
They are so secretive that even when they block a site, they deliberately make it look like there was a technical error. They could be blocking thousands of innocent sites right now, and no-one would notice. The internet is full of 404s, a few more won't raise any attention.
It isn't the start. The start was the de-facto compulsory imposition of child porn filtering. No-one dared object to that - it was filtering child porn, after all - but it still results in every ISP operating a filter system fed by a secret blacklist produced by an organisation with no transparency, accountability or oversight.
The second step was to then broaden the definition of child porn - something politicians at the time described as 'closing a loophole' - to include not just actual child porn but also artistic depictions of children, or things that look like children in some way (a condition put in to make sure fantasy creatures were covered), in sexual situations. Again, no-one dared oppose, for the public were told that this was needed to lock up some filthy nonce scum.
The third step was the 'extreme porn' law, creating a new legal class of pornography which is illegal to possess. The 'extreme' wide enough that an exception was required for material classified by our film board, to avoid inadvertantly banning a James Bond film which meets the definition for one scene.
This is step four.
I can only speculate on step five, but if I were a moral crusader in government I would look into setting very high penalties for showing pornography to a minor, and make sure ignorance of age or best-effort age checking is no defense - that way the internet porn industry would be driven entirely offshore, because no site operator would want to run the risk of a ten year sentence and life on the sex offender register after a child sneaks onto the family computer with a browser window still open.
Other than your family. Because some day Mother is going to come round to visit, and just to test if you are being a good little boy quickly check if she can see sex.com. Then you have to endure an hour-long lecture about how the 'didn't raise you this way.'
I'd say the same applies to girlfriends, but... slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
You underestimate just how much crappier MPEG2 is. That technology is very primative compared to modern codecs. To match the quality of h264 takes around ten times the bitrate, based on some rather unscientific estimates from my watching DVDs (mpeg2, 6GB) vs dvd rips (About the same quality, 600MB). That high a bitrate just isn't cost-effective, even today.
h264 would be ideal, if not for the patent issue. That's a real deal-breaker for many. It's why Firefox doesn't have support for h264 video - even if they applied for a license, they wouldn't then be able to sub-license to developers who want to fork the project, which is incompatible with the open-source development model.
Alpha channel video would be useful in production work. Fewer files to send around when compositing effects.
Right now h264 is as good as you'll get, but that isn't because the standard is intrinsicly better. It's just that the encoder is much more refined than any other. It has x264, which has been under active development for many years perfecting every detail.
So 33, give or take a year. Not very precise.
Easily. You just make the character into an observer.
War of the Worlds is a good example - the book, and all of the movies. The story isn't about the character - he is just the narrator, a viewpoint by which we can witness great events unfold. He doesn't save the world, or be a hero, or a villain. He is just another face in the crowd of refugees. Events unfold around him, he watches. We watch with him.
2) "Heart attack? Ah... give me thirty seconds. I'm on first-name terms with about six magic users with healing powers, have access to a space station with teleporter system and the most advanced hospital in the solar system, and half my friends could read the book on heart transplants in under a minute and perform the procedure in less. Oh, and my co-worker has a ring that can trap people in stasis. If all else fails, I'll grab the phantom zone machine from my fortress - we can worry about getting you back later, it'll keep you alive for now."
I've heard comic fans complaining that the game greatly increases the abilities of some characters and nerfs others, as otherwise Superman would be essentially invinceable and some other key battles hopelessly unbalanced.
JLU also explored the idea with a brief visit to an alternate timeline where Lexx had become such a threat to world peace that Superman had felt no option but to kill him, triggering a series of defensive power-grabs that end with the Justice League declaring martial law and ruling the world with an iron fist in order to ensure peace and order. When the conventional JL characters find this, they are most displeased... though even Batman does have to abandon attempts at argument when his alternate points out that in their timeline, with the criminal population terrified of the League, there are no more street muggers shooting parents in front of their children.
I've not seen it yet, but the Jesus-symbolism in the first movie was very ham-fisted.
The 'same age as Jesus' thing sounds dubious: None of the gospels specifies an age, nor do any other books of the bible, and there are no other surviving sources from the time mentioning Jesus at all. Which is hardly surprising - he was preaching in a backwater of the Roman empire, and didn't become the religious super-star until long after his death.
That would be the JL animated series, Superman pwns Darkseid by hammering him through multible buildings. Briefly, anyway, before Darkseid turns the fight around: Superman may be physically stronger, but he didn't prepare for the fight in advance. Darkseid came equipped for a one-on-one with Superman.
Superman has to be crippled with an unbreakable moral code just to stop him breaking the entire DC universe. Several stories have dealt with what happens when Superman gets fed up of holding back and just declares himself ruler of the world - because if those petty nationalistic factions can't be trusted not to wage war, he'll just have run things himself.
That, and if Superman didn't have a 'no killing, ever' policy, the universe would run out of villains in short order.
Batman has routinely pointed out, with some annoyance, that it is easy for Superman to be good: He can walk into a firefight of a warzone and calmly incapacitate everyone present at no risk to himself, while Batman places himself in great danger on a weekly basis by trying to use non-lethal means to take down villains that would shrug off a tank shell to the face.
Accounting anything in hollywood is hard enough that the numbers may as well be made up.
Have you noticed that the figures for movies are always gross, not net? You may sometimes see a film cited as 'grossed $x on a budget of $y,' but never an actual net profit. That is because no hollywood movie makes a profit on paper. The industry is infamous for their use of dodgy accounting to make their profits disappear, as a way to dodge taxes and reduce royalty payments to anyone new enough to accept points on net.
The main method is by internal billing. Another branch of the studio will massively overbill for promotion costs, another one for distribution, another for effects consulting, and so on. So the profit is made in lots of smaller far-flung places, often incorporated in tax havens.
I'm guessing that almost all the viewers for this film are in the 18-30 male demographic. Prime audience for piracy. The same is true of Avatar, and the Iron Man series, and the Avengers movie. If piracy could ruin the profits on any movie, it would be these.
Yet they all made gigantic piles of money.
You are out of date. True, if you have to rush to see the film as soon as possible pirates can offer only crappy cams. But they also move fast: As soon as the blu-ray is out, rips will be in production and circulating the net within a day or two. Pirates today work in 1080p. The quality is indistinguishable from a store-bought blu-ray, and better than most streaming services.
The Mother's ability to impose guilt and shame lasts long past the age of independance.
I was just using it as an example, anyway. Substitute in relative of your choice, visiting coworker, roommate, anyone else you might not wish to proclaim your porn-watching ways to.
My little project is actually quite fun. The clients authenticate each other via public key (4096-bit RSA), so there is no central authentication or identity server. The control packets are all essentially random if you don't have both the keys (sender's public and recipient's private) to decrypt them with, so even DPI couldn't identify and block the protocol. I need to get a real crypto expert to look through the design and make sure I've not missed anything obvious (Cryptography is an easy thing to do badly), but I've handled things like reply attacks (timestamp!) and bouncing to spoof source address. The protocol is even IPv6-ready.
The bit I'm writing doesn't actually do the IM. It's a distributed address lookup and authentication service. An IM program can then utilise this service to handle the troublesome matter of remaining in contact with people as they move around and their IP changes.
I've been writing my own. Not because I expect it to be used, but because it's a good way to learn how these things work.
It's not a law, exactly. It's like the US imposition of the Hays code. The government has made it clear that there *will* be a law, unless all major ISPs block porn voluntarily. As none of them want such a law, they are all going to do as they are asked - that way the government gets what it wants, the ISPs get flexibility in their implimentation, and no-one gets the blame if it all goes wrong.
Stop confusing with America. This is a Brit story.
We don't have a constitution as such, but there are some EU laws that are our equivilent to the bill of rights.
It's worse than that. During the wikipedia block incident, it was noticed that many ISPs 'block' sites by intercepting the HTTP request and returning a false 404 error.
They are so secretive that even when they block a site, they deliberately make it look like there was a technical error. They could be blocking thousands of innocent sites right now, and no-one would notice. The internet is full of 404s, a few more won't raise any attention.
No, this is the UK.
We get a choice of three parties, none of which represent our opinions on most issues.
isporn = sexyness > quality.
It isn't the start.
The start was the de-facto compulsory imposition of child porn filtering. No-one dared object to that - it was filtering child porn, after all - but it still results in every ISP operating a filter system fed by a secret blacklist produced by an organisation with no transparency, accountability or oversight.
The second step was to then broaden the definition of child porn - something politicians at the time described as 'closing a loophole' - to include not just actual child porn but also artistic depictions of children, or things that look like children in some way (a condition put in to make sure fantasy creatures were covered), in sexual situations. Again, no-one dared oppose, for the public were told that this was needed to lock up some filthy nonce scum.
The third step was the 'extreme porn' law, creating a new legal class of pornography which is illegal to possess. The 'extreme' wide enough that an exception was required for material classified by our film board, to avoid inadvertantly banning a James Bond film which meets the definition for one scene.
This is step four.
I can only speculate on step five, but if I were a moral crusader in government I would look into setting very high penalties for showing pornography to a minor, and make sure ignorance of age or best-effort age checking is no defense - that way the internet porn industry would be driven entirely offshore, because no site operator would want to run the risk of a ten year sentence and life on the sex offender register after a child sneaks onto the family computer with a browser window still open.
Other than your family. Because some day Mother is going to come round to visit, and just to test if you are being a good little boy quickly check if she can see sex.com. Then you have to endure an hour-long lecture about how the 'didn't raise you this way.'
I'd say the same applies to girlfriends, but... slashdot.
Not true. The US does have one non-Christian congressman. He's a muslim, forget the name.
I know because I read far-right websites for entertainment, and they had quite the tantrum when he won.