The support of this format in Logic is significant as it's the first Apple software to support it. Hopefully this means will see it soon in Final Cut soon.
The problem is that you are applying a very strict, narrow definition to a word that has never been defined that way. There are myriad different social and political systems that may be seen as more or less democratic to the extent to which power is dispersed through the people as opposed to being concentrated in the center.
At the end of the day, "democracy" is probably not a very good word to use in a descriptive manner, since its meaning is so vague. It is much more useful in either a comparative or aspirational sense. For instance we can agree that the U.S. is more democratic than North Korea, for instance. We can also agree that the U.S. could certainly be considerably more democratic.
There is clearly no such thing as a perfect democracy (at least among humans.) Even in any of the direct forms of democracy that you allude to, no decision can ever perfectly reflect the collective will of the people. In any form of decision making, whether it be consensus, simple plurality voting, approval voting, etc., there will always be people who don't agree with the final decision.
In the end, I think that you can't underestimate the importance of perception. A system in which people understand and respect the decision-making process is better than one which is less transparent, even if people ultimately agree with the decisions made in the second one. Note that different systems will be appropriate in different situations (hence the ability to have a functioning military in a democratic society).
All that said, I think my main problem with people saying the US is a republic not a democracy is that it is so completely point-less. People tend to write it (and I've only even come across this line of "reasoning" on line, and only recently) as a way of dismissing a discussion about some un-democratic feature of our society. It seems to be the new post-Soviet way of telling someone to "Go to Russia if you don't like it here."
This "The US is a republic not a democracy" meme is really fucking annoying.
Now, you may be right that the US isn't particularly democratic, but that has fuck all to do with it being a republic. A republic is merely one (and probably the only practical one on a scale as large as ours) possible implementation of a democracy. There are likewise many ways of implementing a republic, some of which are more democratic than others.
Now, to the extent that the US Constitution is revered around the world, it is generally because it spells out in detail the structure of a government beholden to the people, and specifically enumerates the democratic rights of the people.
In that context, the electoral context may be an anachronism. The whole electoral system may, in this day and age, be working against the democratic ideals embodied in the constitution. In that case we have the constitutional power to change it. That's democracy.
Are you suggesting that we do away with the popular vote altogether and let the state legislatures decide? Or we vote for electors that aren't pledged to vote for a particular candidate? What exactly are you suggesting we change? Are you just suggesting we need a different style of campaigning where the candidates appeal to the electors and not the people?
All this talk of the founders' intents is evading the issue. We live in a different world now. A system as envisioned (and as imperfectly implemented in our modern age) by the US Constitution is not perceived as democratic any more. Do we want to change it to make it more so, or not? (And if you are going to take me to task for being so concerned about perceptions, please explain why the perception of fairness is not of upmost importance in a democratic society.)
My company is in a similar position, but we finally upgraded from FMP4 to version 7. Basically it addressed a lot of the really annoying things I kept hearing about and was worth the upgrade just for that. For instance, being able to make Schema changes without shutting down the database, being able to open multiple windows on the same database, importing scripts, etc.
Once we actually got it, we ended up refactoring some of our larger databases taking advantage of the new relationships that are possible in V7, and it's increased the speed and decreased the number of hard to track down bugs. Definitely worth the upgrade, in my opinion.
Three are purely speculative, one is about supposed problems with the elections that had nothing to do with the voting machines, and the last is about how the machines actually do provide a voter-verified paper-trail. While voter fraud may or may not have occurred in Venezuela (frankly, it's a little hard to trust most of the news out of Venezuela for the last few years), if it did happen it almost certainly happened the old fashioned way.
(I lived there during the second election of CAP, and I remember finding with a few friends of mine a ballot box lying in a ditch about a week after the election.)
I saw that one written up in Wired some time back. It's pretty funny, because in the name of supposedly debunking an urban legend it constructs this really long convoluted story that in fact is no more credible than the original, and uses all of the techniques he claims made the original incredible.
Pretty clever, actually. It just goes to show you people will believe anything.
Apparently there's a Japanese version as well....
on
Tor: A JAP Replacement
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Well, strictly speaking they do have NTSC resolution (it's still 720x480), but it's frame-based compression, and there is no temporal difference between the two fields of each frame (this is really a content-issue, there's no technical reason this has to be the case, but nobody would ever make a 48i DVD). It's the lack of temporal displacement that affords the increased resolution: for each temporal sample, you have 480 vertical lines of resolution instead of 240 (one field). This doesn't really give you double the perceived resolution, but it's about 50% more.
As to whether the resolution is decreased by the format, that's kind of a trick question. The luminance channel is full resolution, but the chroma is subsampled a bit more than some other formats (but in line with other consumer gear). The problem is that the amount of compression varies a great deal between different DVDs, so even though this doesn't strictly speaking affect resolution, it will affect perceived resolution once you start getting noticable compression artifacts.
It's true that it's still not HD, but it's not bad.
Just for the record the resolution of DVD is 720 x 480 interlaced
Most DVD's (at least ones that you rent) are actually encoded as 480P/24, so you actually will see a significantly better picture (with the proper DVD player) on an HDTV than on an NTSC one.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh -- it's funny but until you mentioned it I never noticed that search field in iCal! And I use iCal a lot.
Thanks!
How can we rule out that this is just a cover story for the Bush administration's initial tests of their new doomsday device?
Damn it, this time they've gone too far!!!
Broadcast Wave is actually becoming the standard audio file format for the film industry. It is used in most of the new digital field recorders (Aaton Cantar, HHB PortaDrive, Zaxcom Deva and the various Fostex field recorders.
The support of this format in Logic is significant as it's the first Apple software to support it. Hopefully this means will see it soon in Final Cut soon.
The problem is that you are applying a very strict, narrow definition to a word that has never been defined that way. There are myriad different social and political systems that may be seen as more or less democratic to the extent to which power is dispersed through the people as opposed to being concentrated in the center.
At the end of the day, "democracy" is probably not a very good word to use in a descriptive manner, since its meaning is so vague. It is much more useful in either a comparative or aspirational sense. For instance we can agree that the U.S. is more democratic than North Korea, for instance. We can also agree that the U.S. could certainly be considerably more democratic.
There is clearly no such thing as a perfect democracy (at least among humans.) Even in any of the direct forms of democracy that you allude to, no decision can ever perfectly reflect the collective will of the people. In any form of decision making, whether it be consensus, simple plurality voting, approval voting, etc., there will always be people who don't agree with the final decision.
In the end, I think that you can't underestimate the importance of perception. A system in which people understand and respect the decision-making process is better than one which is less transparent, even if people ultimately agree with the decisions made in the second one. Note that different systems will be appropriate in different situations (hence the ability to have a functioning military in a democratic society).
All that said, I think my main problem with people saying the US is a republic not a democracy is that it is so completely point-less. People tend to write it (and I've only even come across this line of "reasoning" on line, and only recently) as a way of dismissing a discussion about some un-democratic feature of our society. It seems to be the new post-Soviet way of telling someone to "Go to Russia if you don't like it here."
Now you know what a Wiki is.
This "The US is a republic not a democracy" meme is really fucking annoying.
Now, you may be right that the US isn't particularly democratic, but that has fuck all to do with it being a republic. A republic is merely one (and probably the only practical one on a scale as large as ours) possible implementation of a democracy. There are likewise many ways of implementing a republic, some of which are more democratic than others.
Now, to the extent that the US Constitution is revered around the world, it is generally because it spells out in detail the structure of a government beholden to the people, and specifically enumerates the democratic rights of the people.
In that context, the electoral context may be an anachronism. The whole electoral system may, in this day and age, be working against the democratic ideals embodied in the constitution. In that case we have the constitutional power to change it. That's democracy.
what, exactly?
Are you suggesting that we do away with the popular vote altogether and let the state legislatures decide? Or we vote for electors that aren't pledged to vote for a particular candidate? What exactly are you suggesting we change? Are you just suggesting we need a different style of campaigning where the candidates appeal to the electors and not the people?
All this talk of the founders' intents is evading the issue. We live in a different world now. A system as envisioned (and as imperfectly implemented in our modern age) by the US Constitution is not perceived as democratic any more. Do we want to change it to make it more so, or not? (And if you are going to take me to task for being so concerned about perceptions, please explain why the perception of fairness is not of upmost importance in a democratic society.)
I saw the first couple pages, but the server died before I got to the porn...
That means it works 92% of that time. That sounds pretty good to me!
I'm not sure which way the tits point on a wine glass.
Or a plate, for that matter.
This is the most un-American, absurd thing I've heard in a long time.
Anyway, if something like that does happen, hopefully a further requirement to voting is that you are actually able to spell tax payer.
My company is in a similar position, but we finally upgraded from FMP4 to version 7. Basically it addressed a lot of the really annoying things I kept hearing about and was worth the upgrade just for that. For instance, being able to make Schema changes without shutting down the database, being able to open multiple windows on the same database, importing scripts, etc.
Once we actually got it, we ended up refactoring some of our larger databases taking advantage of the new relationships that are possible in V7, and it's increased the speed and decreased the number of hard to track down bugs. Definitely worth the upgrade, in my opinion.
Three are purely speculative, one is about supposed problems with the elections that had nothing to do with the voting machines, and the last is about how the machines actually do provide a voter-verified paper-trail. While voter fraud may or may not have occurred in Venezuela (frankly, it's a little hard to trust most of the news out of Venezuela for the last few years), if it did happen it almost certainly happened the old fashioned way.
(I lived there during the second election of CAP, and I remember finding with a few friends of mine a ballot box lying in a ditch about a week after the election.)
At the same time?
Or in a row?
Heh.
I saw that one written up in Wired some time back. It's pretty funny, because in the name of supposedly debunking an urban legend it constructs this really long convoluted story that in fact is no more credible than the original, and uses all of the techniques he claims made the original incredible.
Pretty clever, actually. It just goes to show you people will believe anything.
called KRAUT.
Well, strictly speaking they do have NTSC resolution (it's still 720x480), but it's frame-based compression, and there is no temporal difference between the two fields of each frame (this is really a content-issue, there's no technical reason this has to be the case, but nobody would ever make a 48i DVD). It's the lack of temporal displacement that affords the increased resolution: for each temporal sample, you have 480 vertical lines of resolution instead of 240 (one field). This doesn't really give you double the perceived resolution, but it's about 50% more.
As to whether the resolution is decreased by the format, that's kind of a trick question. The luminance channel is full resolution, but the chroma is subsampled a bit more than some other formats (but in line with other consumer gear). The problem is that the amount of compression varies a great deal between different DVDs, so even though this doesn't strictly speaking affect resolution, it will affect perceived resolution once you start getting noticable compression artifacts.
It's true that it's still not HD, but it's not bad.
Most DVD's (at least ones that you rent) are actually encoded as 480P/24, so you actually will see a significantly better picture (with the proper DVD player) on an HDTV than on an NTSC one.
n|t
What? Why the hell isn't VirtualPC running on the PearPC?
Admit it, it's really just one person, right?
*Ducks*
was when Jimmy Carter went there to say that nothing was wrong and then came out ten feet tall and glowing. That was classic.
No I'm not!
Not anymore. They may still be the biggest customer, though.
so that they can precomputer the infinite loops.