The quality of "P2P porn" is no less than your standard DVD after being compressed to a 1 or 2 CD Divx/Xvid. Which is to say that it's quite good.
But you never know if you're getting a good rip or someone's weak analog cap thru their five year old ATI All-In-Wonder. You can choose to only download 600+ meg vids so you know you're at least getting something the SIZE of a VCD, but then your selection goes way down. For example, on Kazaa right now: out of 400+ files found for "Jenna Jameson", I see only eight VCD-sized ones, and half of those are hosted by less than three people (good luck getting those completely). The vast majority of the stuff there is sub-15meg clips of uncertain quality.
In fact, I wouldn't WANT to see HDTV-or-higher-rez porn that brings the makeup and butt pimples into focus.:)
Blech. Good point...there's too much of that already at normal resolution.
Maybe you believe the quality of "p2p porn" sucks because the last time you looked was a few years ago when tiny mpeg2 videoclips were the norm?
Oh, the quality stuff is there to be sure, but there's so much crap you have to wade through to find it. I personally pull stuff off USENET. I hate P2P because you end up at the mercy of some knob shutting down his computer 'cause his mom came into his room.
Alright. SO, you know a big part of P2P traffic is porn - porn that is almost without a doubt copyrighted, but most Porn companies don't go out of their way to track down pirates (or at least joe average light downloader). If the porno industry no longer has to expend their own money or effort to crack down on copyright violators, don't you think they'd start? Pornographic copyright violations and investigations could, as i see it, drown out all the RIAA efforts by shear volume.
The porn industry understands that the quality of P2P porn is substantially less than DVD quality, so they see it as mostly advertising. The marketing power of "free stuff" has pushed porn into more households than they'd otherwise have gotten to.
Someday, I hope to see a defense to the tune of "I was using this system before the patent" for a system like the one described in the previous paragraph, and see what happens to the patent then when the two conflicting standards both come into play at once.
That's when you see a lot of "selective enforcement" of patents. They conveniently ignore anyone whose usage predates their patent and just go after the johnny-come-lately's.
I've recorded gigs from the sound desk with a minidisc player (using automatic gain control, to cover the predetermined processing bit of the patent). That invalidates (i) and (ii). (iii) is done by every small recording studio that has a multi-cd burner. Linking the two should be obvious to any recording engineer.
Indeed. The patent practically reads like an Apple commercial "Rip. Mix. Burn." If such a process is obvious to marketing weenies, I'd say it's likely obvious to ANYONE.
if a company conducts itself in such a way that this kind of story gets out, and causes everyone who hears it to kind of nod their head and say to themselves "yeah, it sounds like them"......whose fault is that?
This is exactly what a shill from the government would say if there were UFOs there.
Heh. The problem with actual conspiracies is that lack of evidence means that the conspiracy is working. A well, designed conspiracy looks just like no conspiracy...
Bob is still around and doing physics privately. He still insists when asked that what we worked was true. Personally I beleive him. When a person comes out and says stuff like he did fully knowing that his life wil be ruined and never asks for a dime then he deverses some kind of respect or admiration?
Bob Lazar has been trying to get an movie made about his life. He mentioned it in 1993 at the "Ultimate UFO Conference". New Line Cinema was supposed to be doing it in '96, but it's apparently been seriously back-burnered. Mr. Lazar's motives are pretty suspect, if you ask me.
Just imagine, if you could get a million people (not undoable) to all turn up at once, on foot, and just blatently start walking to the base. What are they gonna do? Start shooting a million civilians of thier own country because they want to go see what thier tax dollars are paying for? Arrest a million people all at once? Pack up and move before a million people get on thier doorstep? Tear gas? Land Mines?
Might as well ask what congress and the president would do if a million people showed up to loot the Capitol and the White House. It's a dumb question because it would entirely depend upon the circumstances leading up to it. I mean, if a million people spontaneously leapt to their feet and started running towards a government base, the government could just shoot at them and drive them off and the real question would be "WTF motivated a million people to act like idiots?"
uhh... when exactly do you think DARPA started their work?
CompuServe BENEFITED because of DARPA research moron, they invented NOTHING.
the internet started in 1969 with the first connections made between the government, UC Berkley, UC san Diego, Harvard, and Yale.
Not only did you not actually read the GP poster and understand what he was saying, you're also pulling your history out of your ass. The first ARPANET node was at UCLA, with subsequent nodes starting at Stanford, U of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. Cripes, what a troll!
I have a lot of criticisms of the Military because I was in it. 8 years US Army Infantry, Light Fighter. While I was in, we transitioned from the Steel Pot to the K-Pot (helmets). The old Steel pot was better in my opinion.
Wha? Why? I was in from '87 to '91 and saw the switch too. The steel pot was good as a bucket but it wasn't very good as armor.
PS. were you with the 7th Light Infantry by chance? Sucks that they canned that division...
What I meant was that the army has a corps of engineers, and some of them are computer scientists, and they probably *could* fix a software bug if they found one.
The USACE does mostly civil engineering stuff: dams, rivers, flood control....that sort of stuff. While they may have some computer scientists on staff, that probably isn't their area of expertise.
Soviet equipment was designed to be able to use captured US/NATO supplies.
Like what? Don't say "5.56mm in the AK-74", 'cause that one's a myth. No way you can wedge a 5.56mm x 45mm round in a chamber designed for the 5.45mm x 39mm round the '74 takes.
Heh, I remember my father telling me about how the Soviets set up their rifle specification to accept bullets only marginally larger than NATO's spec -- this meant NATO bullets could be used in the Soviet rifles in a pinch, but the Soviet bullets wouldn't fit in the NATO rifles at all.
I heard that one too, when I was in the army. I asked an 7th SFG guy who was familiar with the AK series if it was possibleand he said "definitely not". The US uses 5.56x45mm ammo, while the AK-74 uses 5.45x39mm ammo. Theirs is smaller in both diameter and length, so 1) 5.56mm wouldn't fit in a '74 mag, 2) the neck of the cartridge would likely jam in the chamber even if you fed it in singly, and 3) the bolt would stop 6mm short of closing all the way.
being in the infantry you get used to everything just being heavy and ungangly. it would be a shock to most slashdotters just how cumbersome our gear is.
Apparently nothing is funnier than watching a squad of guys try to complete a night-fire exercise with loaded rucks, wearing full MOPP IV (with the old M-17 masks), old-style "shoulder pad" type kevlar vests. I wasn't laughing, but then again I was one of the guys in MOPP IV, not one of the range control guys watching...
here's something funny to illustrate. in the army we have this thing called a PLGR (Portable Lightweight GPS Reciever) or "plugger". i assure you that there is nothing portable, lightweight, or GPS about it. it's huge, like the biggest text book you've ever seen. the batteries don't last for shit, it has only an alphanumeric display (no arrows and maps), it weights a good few pounds, it is TERRIBLE at getting a GPS signal. you practically have to climb a tree or be in the middle of open desert to use it.
That thing was a load of crap. Even the SLGR which replaced it sucks. Take a look at DAGR, the unit that's supposed to get fielded Q4 this year. Finally, something that can tell you "GO THAT WAY".
pretty much anything special forces uses too gets trickled down into infantry use because our gear sucks and they've got the common sense and freedom to use what works.
You know one thing snake-eaters use all the time now that I really wished for? BDU shirts with slanted chest pockets and pockets added to the shoulders. Put on your LBE and/or a kevlar vest and all your damn pockets are covered! Used to aggravate me to no end.
That the US uses GPS guided bombs is a common misconception. The US uses GPS corrected guidance systems. The so-called "GPS guided bombs" actually use an inertial guidance system (not jammable), with a very jam resistant GPS antenna on the back-end to make minor corrections to the inertial guidance package. The accuracy difference is the difference between making the bomb land in your bathtub and land in your house. Even if you did jam the GPS effectively, you still don't want to hang around for the bomb to hit.
You are, of course, correct. JDAM is primarily INS guided. Here is a good overview of it. Pretty neat stuff.
In spite of the advantage that SA theoretically gave us, it was turned off in both Iraq Wars. First time, because not enough milspec GPS receivers were available, second time because it had been turned off years before by Clinton, and it was no longer practical to disable it.
I suspect it was left turned off this last time because the military still doesn't have decent GPS receivers. They're supposed to be fielding the DAGR Q4 of this year, but for now all they've got is those awful PLGR and SLGR units. Sometimes it seems like everyone over there brought their own Garmin GPS.
Note further that differential GPS was developed specifically to overcome the limitations imposed by SA. Most commercial-grade GPS receivers support it. Even if they didn't, it isn't so difficult a concept that it couldn't be reinvented if it were needed by a potential belligerent.
Well, DGPS is really pretty useless if you're "the enemy". It requires a stationary GPS unit transmitting constant corrections to the mobile GPS, and anything sitting on the ground bleeping RF like that is gonna be blown up real quick like.
Anyone with a GPS jammer can "regulate" GPS. Laser guided missiles are the weapons of choice for accuracy. The fact that the GPS signal is low power makes it susceptible to jamming and for that reason the military, et. al. can not rely on it at all times. They currently augment GPS with stationary ground based geo information for improved accuracy. See differential-GPS. They can use SA (selective availability) and they have, it reduces the accuracy of the GPS signal, but that's of limited use if the enemy is jamming your GPS signal anyway.
GPS jammers don't work. Iraq had six of them and they were destroyed very quickly, in some cases with GPS guided weapons. In order for such jammers to be truly effective, they have to be very powerful. Powerful radio transmitters are sitting ducks to all manner of non-GPS guided weapons. And even if they're strong enough, you have no idea if the Air Force has managed to find a way to "filter out" the spurious signals, as they did with the Russian-built jammers in Iraq.
No, the US is worried about an ICBM w/ New York City's name on it originating from North Korea and riding the Galaleo navigation system all the way even though the US saw the launch and disabled its GPS systems.
ICBM's use a pre-calculated ballistic course for guidance-- that's what the 'B' stands for. The threat the US is worried about is cruise missiles.
The satellites are NOT in a Geo-stationary orbit, so they would have to constantly be turning satellites on and off, and to top it all off, they could only command the updates while the satellites were in line of site to the ground station in US, so pretty much impossible without seriously effecting the US's use of GPS.
The satellites know exactly where they are and can be programmed to do the switching automatically. They don't need to be controlled from the ground.
Huh? That's a pretty vague answer. That's like someone asking "how did that prisoner manage to dig a tunnel that went out of his cell, past the guard towers and under the fence?" and answering "with a shovel". It lacks in specifics.
Indeed - by the time the guided unit was in range of the jammer, the accuracy of non-GPS measures (magnetic direction, speed, etc) is sufficient to hit the target accurately enough. Jammers would have to cover hundreds or thousands of km in all directions to really have value.
...and if you're pumping out enough wattage to do that, you're essentially a giant radio beacon Anything transmitting like that is a sitting duck to a modified AGM-88 HARM, or better yet a simple GBU-15.
The General Dynamics Tomahawk Cruise missile works by comparing a heightmap of binary terrain data from front and undermounted sensors with a stored representation of the target terrain. It needs no GPS system and worked fine before GPS was added as a secondary navigational fallback.
This is true. The Tomahawk pre-dates GPS by a number of years. The thing about terrain-mapping and inertial guidance systems is that you can't just buy one, pop it into a home-made cruise missile, and send it on its way. For one thing, nobody makes a generic civilian terrain following navigation system. GPS reduces what was once a difficult and expensive design task into a fifty dollar purchase and a few days work.
Will the ESA Galileo satellite navigation system be sufficiently different that you'll need all-new receivers to pick up Galileo navigation information?
That could get VERY expensive as manufacturers of satellite navigation receivers will have to accommodate both systems for airplanes, automobiles, trucks, boats, etc.
The basic GPS components are already ridiculously cheap. Most of what you're paying for with a GPS unit is the mapping/tracking software. The "GPS" portion of it is just an antenna and a few chips that spit out lat/lon/altitude data at regular intervals. Adding Galileo support will likely be a simple matter of adding a couple more chips, initially, and I predict that within a year all the major manufacturers of GPS OEM parts will have Galileo support rolled into their products.
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But you never know if you're getting a good rip or someone's weak analog cap thru their five year old ATI All-In-Wonder. You can choose to only download 600+ meg vids so you know you're at least getting something the SIZE of a VCD, but then your selection goes way down. For example, on Kazaa right now: out of 400+ files found for "Jenna Jameson", I see only eight VCD-sized ones, and half of those are hosted by less than three people (good luck getting those completely). The vast majority of the stuff there is sub-15meg clips of uncertain quality.
In fact, I wouldn't WANT to see HDTV-or-higher-rez porn that brings the makeup and butt pimples into focus. :)
Blech. Good point...there's too much of that already at normal resolution.
Maybe you believe the quality of "p2p porn" sucks because the last time you looked was a few years ago when tiny mpeg2 videoclips were the norm?
Oh, the quality stuff is there to be sure, but there's so much crap you have to wade through to find it. I personally pull stuff off USENET. I hate P2P because you end up at the mercy of some knob shutting down his computer 'cause his mom came into his room.
The porn industry understands that the quality of P2P porn is substantially less than DVD quality, so they see it as mostly advertising. The marketing power of "free stuff" has pushed porn into more households than they'd otherwise have gotten to.
That's when you see a lot of "selective enforcement" of patents. They conveniently ignore anyone whose usage predates their patent and just go after the johnny-come-lately's.
Indeed. The patent practically reads like an Apple commercial "Rip. Mix. Burn." If such a process is obvious to marketing weenies, I'd say it's likely obvious to ANYONE.
The sheep that believe everything they hear?
Heh. The problem with actual conspiracies is that lack of evidence means that the conspiracy is working. A well, designed conspiracy looks just like no conspiracy...
Bob Lazar has been trying to get an movie made about his life. He mentioned it in 1993 at the "Ultimate UFO Conference". New Line Cinema was supposed to be doing it in '96, but it's apparently been seriously back-burnered. Mr. Lazar's motives are pretty suspect, if you ask me.
Might as well ask what congress and the president would do if a million people showed up to loot the Capitol and the White House. It's a dumb question because it would entirely depend upon the circumstances leading up to it. I mean, if a million people spontaneously leapt to their feet and started running towards a government base, the government could just shoot at them and drive them off and the real question would be "WTF motivated a million people to act like idiots?"
Not only did you not actually read the GP poster and understand what he was saying, you're also pulling your history out of your ass. The first ARPANET node was at UCLA, with subsequent nodes starting at Stanford, U of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. Cripes, what a troll!
Wha? Why? I was in from '87 to '91 and saw the switch too. The steel pot was good as a bucket but it wasn't very good as armor.
PS. were you with the 7th Light Infantry by chance? Sucks that they canned that division...
The USACE does mostly civil engineering stuff: dams, rivers, flood control....that sort of stuff. While they may have some computer scientists on staff, that probably isn't their area of expertise.
Like what? Don't say "5.56mm in the AK-74", 'cause that one's a myth. No way you can wedge a 5.56mm x 45mm round in a chamber designed for the 5.45mm x 39mm round the '74 takes.
I heard that one too, when I was in the army. I asked an 7th SFG guy who was familiar with the AK series if it was possibleand he said "definitely not". The US uses 5.56x45mm ammo, while the AK-74 uses 5.45x39mm ammo. Theirs is smaller in both diameter and length, so 1) 5.56mm wouldn't fit in a '74 mag, 2) the neck of the cartridge would likely jam in the chamber even if you fed it in singly, and 3) the bolt would stop 6mm short of closing all the way.
Apparently nothing is funnier than watching a squad of guys try to complete a night-fire exercise with loaded rucks, wearing full MOPP IV (with the old M-17 masks), old-style "shoulder pad" type kevlar vests. I wasn't laughing, but then again I was one of the guys in MOPP IV, not one of the range control guys watching...
here's something funny to illustrate. in the army we have this thing called a PLGR (Portable Lightweight GPS Reciever) or "plugger". i assure you that there is nothing portable, lightweight, or GPS about it. it's huge, like the biggest text book you've ever seen. the batteries don't last for shit, it has only an alphanumeric display (no arrows and maps), it weights a good few pounds, it is TERRIBLE at getting a GPS signal. you practically have to climb a tree or be in the middle of open desert to use it.
That thing was a load of crap. Even the SLGR which replaced it sucks. Take a look at DAGR, the unit that's supposed to get fielded Q4 this year. Finally, something that can tell you "GO THAT WAY".
pretty much anything special forces uses too gets trickled down into infantry use because our gear sucks and they've got the common sense and freedom to use what works.
You know one thing snake-eaters use all the time now that I really wished for? BDU shirts with slanted chest pockets and pockets added to the shoulders. Put on your LBE and/or a kevlar vest and all your damn pockets are covered! Used to aggravate me to no end.
That's about all we had in '87 when I joined. I have heard, though, that they've expanded it to like three or four days worth in the last few years.
You are, of course, correct. JDAM is primarily INS guided. Here is a good overview of it. Pretty neat stuff.
Heh heh. Thanks(?)
I suspect it was left turned off this last time because the military still doesn't have decent GPS receivers. They're supposed to be fielding the DAGR Q4 of this year, but for now all they've got is those awful PLGR and SLGR units. Sometimes it seems like everyone over there brought their own Garmin GPS.
Note further that differential GPS was developed specifically to overcome the limitations imposed by SA. Most commercial-grade GPS receivers support it. Even if they didn't, it isn't so difficult a concept that it couldn't be reinvented if it were needed by a potential belligerent.
Well, DGPS is really pretty useless if you're "the enemy". It requires a stationary GPS unit transmitting constant corrections to the mobile GPS, and anything sitting on the ground bleeping RF like that is gonna be blown up real quick like.
GPS jammers don't work. Iraq had six of them and they were destroyed very quickly, in some cases with GPS guided weapons. In order for such jammers to be truly effective, they have to be very powerful. Powerful radio transmitters are sitting ducks to all manner of non-GPS guided weapons. And even if they're strong enough, you have no idea if the Air Force has managed to find a way to "filter out" the spurious signals, as they did with the Russian-built jammers in Iraq.
ICBM's use a pre-calculated ballistic course for guidance-- that's what the 'B' stands for. The threat the US is worried about is cruise missiles.
The satellites know exactly where they are and can be programmed to do the switching automatically. They don't need to be controlled from the ground.
By applying political pressure.
Huh? That's a pretty vague answer. That's like someone asking "how did that prisoner manage to dig a tunnel that went out of his cell, past the guard towers and under the fence?" and answering "with a shovel". It lacks in specifics.
This is true. The Tomahawk pre-dates GPS by a number of years. The thing about terrain-mapping and inertial guidance systems is that you can't just buy one, pop it into a home-made cruise missile, and send it on its way. For one thing, nobody makes a generic civilian terrain following navigation system. GPS reduces what was once a difficult and expensive design task into a fifty dollar purchase and a few days work .
The basic GPS components are already ridiculously cheap. Most of what you're paying for with a GPS unit is the mapping/tracking software. The "GPS" portion of it is just an antenna and a few chips that spit out lat/lon/altitude data at regular intervals. Adding Galileo support will likely be a simple matter of adding a couple more chips, initially, and I predict that within a year all the major manufacturers of GPS OEM parts will have Galileo support rolled into their products.