Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) are the big ones - the sponsors of the two bills. There are lots of co-sponsors though, 61 in total between house and senate.
That's most of the point of SOPA/PROTECT-IP. The US government and the lobbyists of various copyright industries are really annoyed that companies that would be illegal in the US are doing business merely by operating in another country - they want to be able to enforce US law globally, at least where copyright is concerned. This is an effort to do that, by using a combination of internet filtering and payment embargos.
I, however, *am* encouraging outright piracy. Mostly out of spite. Unfortunatly I don't believe it'll actually harm labels or studios in any significant way. Remember that the highest grossing film of all time is still Avatar, a science-fiction film aimed at the teen-to-twentyfive mostly-male demographic that also happens to be the most inclined towards piracy. If piracy couldn't sink Fern Gully in Space, well... recruit more pirates.
You are correct. But, even if it were not, jpeg is just too established. It works. It works fairly well. It's supported by just about every image viewer and editor in current use.
WebM could probably equal h264 given time - but it's taken years of work to perfect h264 encoding. A significant head start. The biggest problem WebM has right now is just displacing an entrenched, widely-supported standard that most people are entirely happy with.
HDR isn't usually used for viewing. It's used as an intermediate step in the production of other images. They get used a lot in 3d work for skymaps, so you can express the sun as super-super-super-bright and have realistic shadows.
I think there may be some confusion over mathematically lossless verses practically lossless, as there is a DCT involved here. If you do the math, then you can prove that it is lossless. But computers don't do the math that well - they introduce rounding errors in intermediate steps. This loss of information is often overlooked, as it isn't readily apparent in a purely mathematical analysis.
Extra information that allows for very precise compensation for slight differences in how different devices display colors. For most applications it isn't needed - people won't notice if a color is just very slightly the wrong shade. It's important for things like professional print work and advertising.
Alcohol is legal because it's been established too long to ban. Like tobacco.
I debate with anti-porn crusaders a lot, and their standard approach is to convince themselves that pornography is some super-addictive drug-like poison that'll destroy a person's life with ease. If they can't find any actual mechanism of damage, they make one up. They'll even claim it is spiritually damaging, which has the nice advantage of being impossible to disprove. Take, for example, this quote from pressure group the Family Research Council:
"Pornography is a major threat to marriages, the family, and the society at large. It is not a private choice without public consequence. Pornography alters both sexual attitudes and behavior, undermining marriage, which in turn, undermines the stability of the entire community.
It goes on to list all manner of studies which prove pornography causes all manner of health problems, but I'm not even going to bother checking into the studies myself because I know the FRC has a long history of using worthless junk studies churned out by political pressure groups and distorting the findings even of legitimate studies. But that doesn't matter. It's the confirmation bias in action. If you tell an anti-porn crusader that 'scientific studies' show that, as the FRC puts it, 'Pornography viewing and sexual offense are inextricably linked' then they'll believe the claim without actually wanting to look at the studies.
There is a possibility of unintended side effects though. Not all porn sites are alike. There are respectable porn sites that advertise with caution, and there are less respectable porn sites that resort to search engine manipulation and indiscriminate spam to lure in customers. If the respectable porn sites move to xxx, that leaves.com to all the less respectable porn sites. This could easily backfire.
"Who gave ICANN the authority to require another $200 from me to register a domain name?"
That would be the US Department of Commerce, historically. ICANN has been spun off now, and officially is entirely independant of the US government. In practice it still holds considerable unofficial influence.
A problem though. All those industry ratings are rather limited in coverage. Look at films, for example. Over in the US, you get the MPAA ratings. Here in the UK, we get the BBFC ratings. Australia has it's own agency. I imagine this applies to most countries. Now try applying that to the internet, and you'd find there is too much cultural diversity. Things that go without notice in one country would be seen as incredibly offensive in others. The world still has places like Saudi Arabia - they would consider showing a woman's face to be akin to pornography. A little incident like the superbowl nipplegate was a national scandal in the US but would barely merit a mention in much of Europe, while conversely Europe would be much less tolerant of violence and some countries would slap a higher rating on a film for even depicting people owning their own guns. Germany still remains very sensitive about the nazis, and in an effort to forget it's unfortunate past still to a large extent prohibits showing swastikas on television. That is why there are so many national classification boards - because there are so many national standards of what is and isn't acceptable.
It's true. Mole rats, due to a side-effect of a mutation that gave them increased resistance to high carbon dioxide levels, are incapable of feeling pain.
"It's just that politicians are in it for the campaign contribution bribery. They're not ignorant, they're dishonest."
These options are not mutually exclusive. But fair point: It is difficult to get ahead in politics without a bit of dishonesty. All those PR consultants, media experts, TV, radio and print ads and such cost money. Politics is expensive. If you want in then you need to either have a substantial personal fortune to spend on yourself or be willing to pander to a few companies or entire industries in return for campaign contributions.
That would be difficult, given that China is a member of the WTO. Have been for ten years. A quite influencial member at that. If the WTO did set such restrictions, they would doubtless include a vague statement along the lines of 'States have a right to protect their cultural values through appropriate regulation' that could be interpreted as a licence for China to do whatever they like.
The only reason I can see to have a spare LTO drive would be restore speed - if your business is time-critical, you can't risk your drive failing just as you need to do a restore and being stranded for a day while a replacement arrives. Duplicate tapes makes some sense though - one stored onsite for quick access in the event of simutainous RAID failure, filesystem corruption or angry ex-employee and another tape stored offsite for disaster recovery.
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Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) are the big ones - the sponsors of the two bills. There are lots of co-sponsors though, 61 in total between house and senate.
That's most of the point of SOPA/PROTECT-IP. The US government and the lobbyists of various copyright industries are really annoyed that companies that would be illegal in the US are doing business merely by operating in another country - they want to be able to enforce US law globally, at least where copyright is concerned. This is an effort to do that, by using a combination of internet filtering and payment embargos.
I, however, *am* encouraging outright piracy. Mostly out of spite. Unfortunatly I don't believe it'll actually harm labels or studios in any significant way. Remember that the highest grossing film of all time is still Avatar, a science-fiction film aimed at the teen-to-twentyfive mostly-male demographic that also happens to be the most inclined towards piracy. If piracy couldn't sink Fern Gully in Space, well... recruit more pirates.
Because apps don't have access to the USB interface. At the very least you'd have to root/jailbreak the phone.
I was just pointing out that it's silly to say '30-40KB seed information for a multi-Megabyte bitmap?' without specifying what the image is.
You are correct. But, even if it were not, jpeg is just too established. It works. It works fairly well. It's supported by just about every image viewer and editor in current use.
WebM could probably equal h264 given time - but it's taken years of work to perfect h264 encoding. A significant head start. The biggest problem WebM has right now is just displacing an entrenched, widely-supported standard that most people are entirely happy with.
Might be an issue on mobile devices, but then given the cost of mobile data, I think I'd rather take the CPU wait.
HDR isn't usually used for viewing. It's used as an intermediate step in the production of other images. They get used a lot in 3d work for skymaps, so you can express the sun as super-super-super-bright and have realistic shadows.
I could encode a multi-gigabyte bitmap in under a kilobyte. The trick is that every pixel is the same color.
I think there may be some confusion over mathematically lossless verses practically lossless, as there is a DCT involved here. If you do the math, then you can prove that it is lossless. But computers don't do the math that well - they introduce rounding errors in intermediate steps. This loss of information is often overlooked, as it isn't readily apparent in a purely mathematical analysis.
To a mathematician, pi goes on forever.
Extra information that allows for very precise compensation for slight differences in how different devices display colors. For most applications it isn't needed - people won't notice if a color is just very slightly the wrong shade. It's important for things like professional print work and advertising.
Alcohol is legal because it's been established too long to ban. Like tobacco.
I debate with anti-porn crusaders a lot, and their standard approach is to convince themselves that pornography is some super-addictive drug-like poison that'll destroy a person's life with ease. If they can't find any actual mechanism of damage, they make one up. They'll even claim it is spiritually damaging, which has the nice advantage of being impossible to disprove. Take, for example, this quote from pressure group the Family Research Council:
"Pornography is a major threat to marriages, the family, and the society at large. It is not a private choice without public consequence. Pornography alters both sexual attitudes and behavior, undermining marriage, which in turn, undermines the stability of the entire community.
It goes on to list all manner of studies which prove pornography causes all manner of health problems, but I'm not even going to bother checking into the studies myself because I know the FRC has a long history of using worthless junk studies churned out by political pressure groups and distorting the findings even of legitimate studies. But that doesn't matter. It's the confirmation bias in action. If you tell an anti-porn crusader that 'scientific studies' show that, as the FRC puts it, 'Pornography viewing and sexual offense are inextricably linked' then they'll believe the claim without actually wanting to look at the studies.
No-one has yet actually backed up the statistic though.
There is a possibility of unintended side effects though. Not all porn sites are alike. There are respectable porn sites that advertise with caution, and there are less respectable porn sites that resort to search engine manipulation and indiscriminate spam to lure in customers. If the respectable porn sites move to xxx, that leaves .com to all the less respectable porn sites. This could easily backfire.
"Who gave ICANN the authority to require another $200 from me to register a domain name?"
That would be the US Department of Commerce, historically. ICANN has been spun off now, and officially is entirely independant of the US government. In practice it still holds considerable unofficial influence.
A problem though. All those industry ratings are rather limited in coverage. Look at films, for example. Over in the US, you get the MPAA ratings. Here in the UK, we get the BBFC ratings. Australia has it's own agency. I imagine this applies to most countries. Now try applying that to the internet, and you'd find there is too much cultural diversity. Things that go without notice in one country would be seen as incredibly offensive in others. The world still has places like Saudi Arabia - they would consider showing a woman's face to be akin to pornography. A little incident like the superbowl nipplegate was a national scandal in the US but would barely merit a mention in much of Europe, while conversely Europe would be much less tolerant of violence and some countries would slap a higher rating on a film for even depicting people owning their own guns. Germany still remains very sensitive about the nazis, and in an effort to forget it's unfortunate past still to a large extent prohibits showing swastikas on television. That is why there are so many national classification boards - because there are so many national standards of what is and isn't acceptable.
They don't feel pain.
It's true. Mole rats, due to a side-effect of a mutation that gave them increased resistance to high carbon dioxide levels, are incapable of feeling pain.
Blue cheeses are made with a penicillium mould. It's not the same one used to make the antibiotic, but it's a close relative.
"It's just that politicians are in it for the campaign contribution bribery. They're not ignorant, they're dishonest."
These options are not mutually exclusive. But fair point: It is difficult to get ahead in politics without a bit of dishonesty. All those PR consultants, media experts, TV, radio and print ads and such cost money. Politics is expensive. If you want in then you need to either have a substantial personal fortune to spend on yourself or be willing to pander to a few companies or entire industries in return for campaign contributions.
That would be difficult, given that China is a member of the WTO. Have been for ten years. A quite influencial member at that. If the WTO did set such restrictions, they would doubtless include a vague statement along the lines of 'States have a right to protect their cultural values through appropriate regulation' that could be interpreted as a licence for China to do whatever they like.
The only reason I can see to have a spare LTO drive would be restore speed - if your business is time-critical, you can't risk your drive failing just as you need to do a restore and being stranded for a day while a replacement arrives. Duplicate tapes makes some sense though - one stored onsite for quick access in the event of simutainous RAID failure, filesystem corruption or angry ex-employee and another tape stored offsite for disaster recovery.
Antibiotics tend to be big, complex molecules. They won't last long in the organism, and they'll last even less time in the oven.
I've used that one on creationists before. They just declare that it isn't real evolution, because it doesn't change enough.
£1000 for a drive. Could buy a lot of hard drives for that much.