I've been shocked multiple times at 240V, and the worst I've ever felt was a bubbling sensation up my arm. It's not the voltage that generally determines pain or death. The major safety issue affected with higher voltages are the higher risks of arcing. Likewise lower voltages require much higher currents which are more likely to overload wires. Those are the tradeoffs, not "If I get shocked, one will kill me and the other will not."
Gorbachev also got the award for not being the anti-peace leader (or leaders) he followed.
I think it's hard for many Americans to understand what happened in the last eight years, and how major a catastrophe it was not just for the United States, but for the rest of the world too. Back in 1999, America was widely admired. Clinton may have had his faults on the home front, and cultural differences between the US and the rest of the world may frequently have been resented, but the United States was, for better or worse, a force for peace, democracy, and human rights.
In 2000, there was an election. In Florida a clear majority went to the ballot box intending to support one candidate for the President, but due to an unholy combination of factors, from electoral roll "washing" to a poorly designed ballot in Palm Beach, Florida's votes ended up going to the other candidate, a combination that resulted in the least popular candidate being "elected" President.
On the 11th of September, 2001, various locations in the US were attacked by terrorists, leading to over 3,000 deaths. Rather than treating this as a law enforcement issue, the US began the process of starting one war and preparing for another. The first war was against a country, Afghanistan, where the attack was arguably relevant, against a country harboring the de-facto leader of the group, and source of funds, that organized the attacks. The other was against a barely functional country, Iraq, run by a dictator who was barely holding on to power. This second war had no justification, and one of the first acts by the Bush administration was to invent a narrative, no matter how ridiculous, that would support an invasion of that country.
Meanwhile in early 2002, the US government covertly sponsored a botched coup against the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. There was no justification for this.
During 2002, the US government continued to build a case for invading Iraq. White House officials happily encouraged the view that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. A case was built, sometimes with the help of the UK government, based upon fabricated evidence. When UN inspectors were sent into Iraq to investigate the allegations the US government had made, and generally came back convinced the US (and UK) was wrong, the UN inspectors were ridiculed and discredited. Countries opposing the war were subjected to smear campaigns and boycotts.
In 2003, the US government, ignoring almost universal world wide opposition, illegally invaded Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the ensuing carnage.
In 2003, the first evidence started to come out that the US was no longer respecting basic human rights when it came to its so-called "War on terror". Initially evidence came out that the US was engaging in "Rendition" programs, where people suspected of having information useful to those investigating terrorism (some suspected terrorists, some not) were handed over to countries that didn't have laws against torture. In time, it was revealed that the US had also directly tortured those it held at Guantanamo Bay.
By 2005, the US had started releasing some of those held at Guantanamo Bay, with it becoming increasingly obvious that as many as a third of inmates had no connection whatsoever with terrorism.
I'm not even beginning to scrape the top of the iceberg.
Within four years of taking office, George W. Bush had turned the US from being a beacon of democracy, human rights, and a promoter of peace, into a symbol of war and human rights abuses.
Why was the Nobel Prize awarded to Obama? Well, it might be because whatever deficiencies he's shown in not quite ending the wars and closing Guantanamo in nearly eight months of being in office, he was successfully reversed that view of the US, and changed the course of the United States so it's no longer considered a frightening, out of control, self-interested force that doesn't stand for its own values. And in some ways, whe
It was popular in Japan, that's about it. It never caught on anywhere else
It was also popular outside of Japan. At one point I was the only Brit I knew who didn't have a Minidisc player. One of the reasons for the delay in acceptance of MP3 players in Europe was the popularity of Minidisc.
The only people I know who didn't go for Minidisc were Americans. It was immensely popular outside of the US.
You'd think that, but it does - bizarrely - appear that, for example, Blu-ray is taking off, despite being arguably the most user hostile media format released in the last forty years with the possible exception of DIVX.
It's hard to tell if Sony will actually fail here, or just not be wildly successful. Many of their technologies considered "failures" by consensus on Slashdot were often relatively successful. Minidisc, for example, was until recently very popular outside of the US as a consumer technology, and popular as a pro-audio recording system within the US, but its lack of success as a consumer format within the US means it keeps being cited as a failed Sony technology. Betamax, for all of its faults, was actually successful for a number of years, it was just supplanted by the more usable VHS.
Looking at the complaints: proprietary connectors? Well, my DS has only one non-proprietary connector. Downloaded games instead of UMD discs? That only definitely hurts existing customers. Whether it hurts future customers depends upon whether Sony recognizes it cannot price games the same way as it can for "transferable content". Until we see Sony's pricing, we can't really tell whether a download-only world is a negative, but what I can say is that anything that reduces the weight, price, and complexity (and thus "number of things that can go wrong") of the PSP is a good thing. If I were to design a portable console today I wouldn't stick a disc drive in it either.
I'm the last person to defend Sony, I think they're scum. But I think there's no reason why what Sony's doing with the PSP Go shouldn't work. The complaints are with the existing user base. The PSP Go isn't being sold to people who already have PSPs, it's being sold to people who don't have them. Treated as a "new" console rather than a rehash of an existing one, it's theoretically a good concept, as long as Sony doesn't overprice the content.
It's more of a "cost tax" than a "sin tax". The consumption of certain products (most obvious example: tobacco) has costs far beyond that of the production and selling of the item (consumer much more likely to die earlier and require expensive health treatment before he or she dies. Being coldly clinical for a moment: death has costs. People who die remove critical knowledge and skills from the economy that makes a society function. Meanwhile the health issues leading up to death are also a major problem, as we've seen discussed in the healthcare debate: people who contract expensive to treat diseases are more likely to have their paid-for insurance revoked on technicalities, and roughly 50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to insurance not covering critical healthcare treatments.
How do you deal with it while maximizing liberties? Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions. And that's where cost taxes come in.
Unlike H.264, you do not have to pay to use Theora.
Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay.
I don't trust Xiph having read their comments about what exactly they mean by "Patent free", and having seen the silence over, say, Vorbis's apparent infringement of US Patent 5,214,742. Is Theora "safer" than Vorbis? Well, it's another DCT-based codec, just like 99% of the video codecs in use since H.261, and it's essentially doing stuff where everyone else is doing stuff. The chances of it not violating some patent somewhere is minimal to non-existent, as everyone and their brother is trying to come up with ways to improve DCT based algorithms that they can patent and then submit to MPEG or VCEG for incorporation into the next MPEG or H.26* video standard.
There are really only three standards that could be considered free of patent issues, and even then it's not entirely 100% certain. H.261 dates back to the mid eighties. The ITU lists no current patents applying to MPEG-1. (It's worth pointing out that Theora's predecessor, VP3, is considered to be somewhere between H.261 and MPEG-1 in terms of quality.) And finally, the BBC did an extensive search for anything that might hit their Dirac codec and came up blank, as well as proposing (and then withdrawing once published, so they count as prior art) some patents themselves, so Dirac is in the running too.
Theora? If I was a commercial concern, I would avoid it. I'd go for the predictability of a licensable codec ahead of one that almost certainly would be a target for patent lawsuits if it ever achieves critical mass, and possibly earlier.
I might feel differently if Xiph didn't play word games with the term "Patent free", and gave a straight answer on the issues of actual patents people have found, rather than turning around and saying "Yeah, we ran it by a lawyer, and they said we're OK, but we're not going to tell you why because it's our super secret defense we'll use if we're ever sued", which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially as nobody will ever sue Xiph anyway (Xiph just writes the software, they leave the packaging, compiling, possible selling, and actual using to everyone else.)
To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.
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Reply to: Obama will not allow it
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Obama will not allow it (Score:2, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on 2009-09-18 18:57 (#29472513)
Obama initially opposed the retroactive immunity bill, but switched his stance before the vote (and received contributions from the telcos for it, just like all the flip-flopping congressmen did).
Having been bought, he won't risk buring any important bridges by biting the hand that fed him. Expect him to veto this bill (if it ever gets to his desk, which it probably won't, for the same reason given above).
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Re:Obama will not allow it (Score:?)
by squiggleslash (241428) on 2009-09-18 21:07 Homepage Journal
To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.
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To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.
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Somehow Qwest didn't see the "You have to do it if the government tells you" logic you claim AT&T and Verizon did. And they got shafted as a result.
Yes, you can refuse to obey an illegal order. The laws apply to you, the corporations, and the government, and the moment you forget that, you should expect to suffer the consequences.
You're right. While the right attempts to take away our liberties by allowing torture to be used in a law enforcement/intelligence context, by mass surveillance, and ignoring the law of the land, the left also attempts to take our liberties away by introducing universal healthcare and helping people register to vote. It's just terrible.
Instead of having to mess around with phone cards or cell phones, you bring your laptop, hook into the hotel's internet connection (many times free) and call away.
Oh that sounds way easier than using a cell phone!
I think you should have made the comparison based upon costs not ease.
This is about patent infringement rather than copyright infringement. If Microsoft had copied something, then I agree it'd seem a little unfair for Microsoft to be relieved of a fine that isn't going to damage them.
Patents don't require copying. They merely involve re-inventing the (patented) wheel that 99% of the time you didn't know had already been invented. That's why they suck.
You meant the ITU, right? IEEE is an entirely different organization.
The other thing was the context was a market where there already were a lot of non-ITU standards. V.32 came about as an effort to get modem manufacturers to unify on a common standard after virtually everyone did their own (entirely different, unrelated to any ITU effort) thing to get to 9600bps. Some modified V.29 to make it kinda full duplex, others did OFDM, others came up with even more exotic systems.
V.32 was finally released, and quickly followed by V.32bis. At this point:
- Some companies just stretched V.32 a little bit more and came up with V.32terbo. Nobody did this in anticipation of an ITU standard though, obviously, they'd have been happy if it had been supported.
- Hayes and USR, on opposite sides, came up with V.FC and 56KFlex, neither directly in anticipation of a specific ITU standard but hoping their technology would form the basis of "the next" ITU standard, whatever that was.
This is different to the pre-N (and before that pre-G) stuff. In the latter cases, the IEEE actually published a draft standard, and the manufacturers decided to go ahead and implement it. The "draft N" routers weren't proprietary technologies designed to compete with other "much better than IEEE standards" systems from rival manufacturers, they were actual implementations of a standard everyone was kinda sorta unified around but which hadn't had the official seal of approval for a variety of reasons.
So the context is very different. The ITU wasn't wearing running shoes, but it at least put its walking boots on every time the industry called. The IEEE, on the other hand, seems to be content to prance around in very uncomfortable 3" high heels.
Sounds to me like a lot of people don't know what a pardon is. A pardon isn't a statement after the fact that someone wasn't guilty, it's an admission by the government that the person who committed that crime shouldn't have been punished. The reasons may vary from "Yeah, but he's a nice guy really" to "That law was fucking stupid and should never have been on the books."
I think a "class pardon" applying to everyone victimized by an anti-homosexuality law is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for, but even if it wasn't, a pardon is especially appropriate in Turing's case. He didn't hurt anyone, he was a major cause of us winning a major world war, the man's life was, apparently, literally destroyed by his conviction - virtually every theory about his death, suicide, accident, conspiracy, is related to his conviction in some way, be it his inhibited mental state caused by anti-libido drugs, to a murder of someone deemed unreliable due to his sexuality.
Should someone who has contributed so much to society and freedom be pardoned for breaking an unjust law? Yes. Yes he should. If that's not a clear case where a pardon should be used, I don't know what is.
Nothing in the GPL forbids the use of software licensed under the GPL in commercial software. The GPL only forbids incorporation into proprietary software. Yes, the distinction does matter.
In case there are people who remain unaware of it, Fox News sued and won for the right to lie to you.
With respect, the above comment is completely fair and balanced. By which I mean it's a partisan exaggeration and/or untruth.
The company that sued for the right to fire people for refusing to lie was an owned and operated affiliate of the Fox television network (the network that has brought you such great shows as Dark Angel,
Titus,
Undeclared,
Action,
That 80's Show,
Wonderfalls,
Fastlane,
Andy Richter Controls The Universe,
Skin,
Girls Club,
Cracking Up,
The Pitts,
Firefly,
Get Real,
Freaky Links,
Wanda at Large,
Costello,
The Lone Gunman,
A Minute with Stan Hooper,
Normal, Ohio,
Pasedena,
Harsh Realm,
Keen Eddie,
The Streak,
American Embassy,
Cedric the Entertainer,
The Tick,
Louie,
and Greg the Bunny), not Fox News. Fox News, while owned by the same corporate parent as the Fox Television Network, is nonetheless a separate entity, and about the only link the two have beyond being answerable to Rupert Murdoch are that Fox News provides a show called Fox News Sunday to Fox Television.
My understanding is that Fox News doesn't need to threaten its journalists with termination for lying on air, because it doesn't have any real journalists.
I'm not sure why you think this. On2 was selling VP3 for a long time, and Theora is a tweaked version of VP3, yet no one claimed it infringed their patents. A patent troll could just as easily
When On2 was selling VP3, it was a proprietary codec and wasn't exactly used that widely. Patent owners had no serious way to know that the codec infringed on any patents of their's and if they did, a lawsuit wouldn't be likely to achieve much.
I addressed the issue about submarine patents that H.264 might infringe upon in the post you responded to. Understanding why is key to understanding why companies like Nokia and Apple describe Theora as "proprietary" and why they're expressing very real concerns when they do.
To re-cap and expand upon what I said a little: The MPEG process is "open" - companies who believe they have technologies that would be useful in the standard can submit them as long as they agree to RAND terms for any licensing. Even if the existence of the technologies and their patents is made known after the technologies are unintentionally incorporated into the MPEG standard, patent owners can register the existence of their patents with the ITU and other similar bodies, and can negotiate with groups like Via Licensing and the MPEG LA to have them collect royalties on their behalf.
In short, having a "submarine patent" in an MPEG standard is completely f--king stupid.
As the Theora process is, by necessity, patent hostile, patent owners (who want to make money on their patents) are effectively discouraged from either suggesting technologies they "own" to the Theora team, or making the existence of their patents known until the standard achieves significant market share. Anyone suing today wouldn't get much. The time to sue is when Theora has taken off so far that there's no going back.
Theora, as I said, exists in the same domain as the MPEG standards. It's essentially based upon DCT transforms and macroblock/vector entropy encoding. It's where most of the research has been done since the mid eighties when H.261 came out and MPEG committee was formed. The Theora folks are trying to do the same thing that those developing AVC are doing, and trying to solve the same problems. The chances that they haven't solved problems the same way as others working in the same field is minimal.
While a fair amount of research has been done on wavelet compression, the research is much smaller, and the BBC is better able to get a handle on what patents cover technologies in the field. Therefore, I think Dirac is probably a safer codec.
Yeah, I'd like to know where that figure comes from. According http://en.flossmanuals.net/TheoraCookbook/HTML5 which is linked to by the article, only Firefox 3.5 (which definitely doesn't have a 24% marketshare) natively supports Theora. And all the browsers that don't natively support it support it via a Java plug-in.
I assume the other 76% of browsers support Death Panels instead?
Well, the MPEG-LA is doing a good job with their plan to introduce per-download fees for people using H.264 next year. If you're still using H.264 for streaming video next year, for anything longer than a 10-minute clip, expect to be giving all of your profits away to the MPEG-LA.
Well, that's not very likely. The advantage of H.264 is that it saves bandwidth, indeed, that's what Google is seeing as the primary advantage, so the balance is going to be "What's the cost of bandwidth + free vs bandwidth - H.264 superiority + licensing fee? Assuming that H.264 genuinely is that much better than Theora, the probability is they'll continue to seriously consider H.264. It's also not entirely clear how large the fees will be, but based upon their general structure, there's a threshold below which no license fees are required and an upper limit on how much anyone can pay for using H.264 to deliver content.
So leaving moral and ethical issues aside and just considering the question of "I run a business, I expect to get $1 per viewer for ten minutes of streaming for my content in subscription fees or advertising, is it worth my while using H.264?", the question is still open, and there's a strong chance many businesses will consider it worth their while, depending on what they're trying to stream.
To be honest, I'm more interested in Dirac than Theora. VC-2 is a profile of Dirac which, like Theora, is not patent-encumbered. It's based on wavelets and is much higher quality and has a lot more industry backing than Theora (the BBC, for example, are using it for archiving already)
The other advantage of Dirac over Theora is that it probably is patent free - the BBC has conducted a fairly exhaustive search by all accounts, whereas Theora probably isn't. Theora exists in the same domain as all of the MPEG standards, which means many organizations have been developing in the same space, and the likelihood that a technology critical to Theora is encumbered by patents, the owner of which hasn't yet revealed it, is pretty high. Unlike the MPEG ISO/ITU standards, there's no incentive for companies to get it out in the open that they have patents on projects like Theora. With MPEG it's "Who wants some money? Get in line! You're going to look pretty silly and have lots of enemies if you don't get in line now!"
The disadvantage of Dirac is that right now current encoders are just not seen as high quality as H.264, and as you say, is extremely CPU intensive.
Personally I think someone should create a kick-ass MPEG-1 encoder, just to piss everyone off.
Person A buys a SquigGamester IV: They have problems, and return it under warranty. The replacement SquiGamester IV fails three weeks later with the dreaded Brown Ring of Death, as does the replacement, it's replacement, and the fifth console too. They finally get a working SquigGamester IV, and are happily playing Smug XI the morning they're killed by a falling meteor.
Person B buys a SquigGamester IV: This fails one week later with the dreaded brown ring of death. They return it, get a working one, and are happily playing Smug XII - Master Chef Cooks Up A Rabbit when a freak of particle physics causes every atom their body to mysteriously move into the black hole at the center of the universe.
Person C buys a SquigGamester IV: There are no problems with it, and they are happily playing Smug XV when Larry Niven breaks into his house and beats him to death with an unsold hardback copy of one of the later, less popular, Ringworld novels.
Person D buys a SquigGamester IV: There are no problems with it, and Person C is happily playing Smug MCIV when a probe sent by Nasa to investigate Jupiter accidentally blows it up, causing the end of the Solar System a s we know it.
Only 50% of SquigGamester users have problems with their consoles, but the console failure rate is 60%.
Interestingly, the difference here means that a significant number of people with failed consoles also must have had failed replacements. To me, that would imply a time period or geographic location where the problems occured (or else the same problems wouldn't affect the same people over and over again, while never affecting the majority.) I'd assume, therefore, that the likelihood is that Microsoft fixed the problems midway through the console's life cycle.
The cheap camcorder I bought several years ago (a basic MiniDV thing) does image stabilization, I believe it's a fairly common feature.
The major issue with this kind of thing is that you need to start with a significant overscan area otherwise the borders of the image will keep intruding on the main picture. MPEG is optimized to deal with the fact cameras shake, but that's not the same thing as saying that it unshakes the image. The edges of the picture still need to be updated.
You're absolutely right. For some reason I had it in my head that virtually all ASP's features are in AVC, despite slightly different origins. Kind of emphasizes the point though...
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I've been shocked multiple times at 240V, and the worst I've ever felt was a bubbling sensation up my arm. It's not the voltage that generally determines pain or death. The major safety issue affected with higher voltages are the higher risks of arcing. Likewise lower voltages require much higher currents which are more likely to overload wires. Those are the tradeoffs, not "If I get shocked, one will kill me and the other will not."
Oh, and they're top grounded rather than bottom grounded too. (Think: objects falling over prongs on partially sticking out plug.)
Gorbachev also got the award for not being the anti-peace leader (or leaders) he followed.
I think it's hard for many Americans to understand what happened in the last eight years, and how major a catastrophe it was not just for the United States, but for the rest of the world too. Back in 1999, America was widely admired. Clinton may have had his faults on the home front, and cultural differences between the US and the rest of the world may frequently have been resented, but the United States was, for better or worse, a force for peace, democracy, and human rights.
In 2000, there was an election. In Florida a clear majority went to the ballot box intending to support one candidate for the President, but due to an unholy combination of factors, from electoral roll "washing" to a poorly designed ballot in Palm Beach, Florida's votes ended up going to the other candidate, a combination that resulted in the least popular candidate being "elected" President.
On the 11th of September, 2001, various locations in the US were attacked by terrorists, leading to over 3,000 deaths. Rather than treating this as a law enforcement issue, the US began the process of starting one war and preparing for another. The first war was against a country, Afghanistan, where the attack was arguably relevant, against a country harboring the de-facto leader of the group, and source of funds, that organized the attacks. The other was against a barely functional country, Iraq, run by a dictator who was barely holding on to power. This second war had no justification, and one of the first acts by the Bush administration was to invent a narrative, no matter how ridiculous, that would support an invasion of that country.
Meanwhile in early 2002, the US government covertly sponsored a botched coup against the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. There was no justification for this.
During 2002, the US government continued to build a case for invading Iraq. White House officials happily encouraged the view that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. A case was built, sometimes with the help of the UK government, based upon fabricated evidence. When UN inspectors were sent into Iraq to investigate the allegations the US government had made, and generally came back convinced the US (and UK) was wrong, the UN inspectors were ridiculed and discredited. Countries opposing the war were subjected to smear campaigns and boycotts.
In 2003, the US government, ignoring almost universal world wide opposition, illegally invaded Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the ensuing carnage.
In 2003, the first evidence started to come out that the US was no longer respecting basic human rights when it came to its so-called "War on terror". Initially evidence came out that the US was engaging in "Rendition" programs, where people suspected of having information useful to those investigating terrorism (some suspected terrorists, some not) were handed over to countries that didn't have laws against torture. In time, it was revealed that the US had also directly tortured those it held at Guantanamo Bay.
By 2005, the US had started releasing some of those held at Guantanamo Bay, with it becoming increasingly obvious that as many as a third of inmates had no connection whatsoever with terrorism.
I'm not even beginning to scrape the top of the iceberg.
Within four years of taking office, George W. Bush had turned the US from being a beacon of democracy, human rights, and a promoter of peace, into a symbol of war and human rights abuses.
Why was the Nobel Prize awarded to Obama? Well, it might be because whatever deficiencies he's shown in not quite ending the wars and closing Guantanamo in nearly eight months of being in office, he was successfully reversed that view of the US, and changed the course of the United States so it's no longer considered a frightening, out of control, self-interested force that doesn't stand for its own values. And in some ways, whe
Wrong tense. I said was popular. "was until recently" to be precise.
Of course MiniDisc isn't popular today, that no more makes it a failure than Trinitron.
It was also popular outside of Japan. At one point I was the only Brit I knew who didn't have a Minidisc player. One of the reasons for the delay in acceptance of MP3 players in Europe was the popularity of Minidisc.
The only people I know who didn't go for Minidisc were Americans. It was immensely popular outside of the US.
You'd think that, but it does - bizarrely - appear that, for example, Blu-ray is taking off, despite being arguably the most user hostile media format released in the last forty years with the possible exception of DIVX.
It's hard to tell if Sony will actually fail here, or just not be wildly successful. Many of their technologies considered "failures" by consensus on Slashdot were often relatively successful. Minidisc, for example, was until recently very popular outside of the US as a consumer technology, and popular as a pro-audio recording system within the US, but its lack of success as a consumer format within the US means it keeps being cited as a failed Sony technology. Betamax, for all of its faults, was actually successful for a number of years, it was just supplanted by the more usable VHS.
Looking at the complaints: proprietary connectors? Well, my DS has only one non-proprietary connector. Downloaded games instead of UMD discs? That only definitely hurts existing customers. Whether it hurts future customers depends upon whether Sony recognizes it cannot price games the same way as it can for "transferable content". Until we see Sony's pricing, we can't really tell whether a download-only world is a negative, but what I can say is that anything that reduces the weight, price, and complexity (and thus "number of things that can go wrong") of the PSP is a good thing. If I were to design a portable console today I wouldn't stick a disc drive in it either.
I'm the last person to defend Sony, I think they're scum. But I think there's no reason why what Sony's doing with the PSP Go shouldn't work. The complaints are with the existing user base. The PSP Go isn't being sold to people who already have PSPs, it's being sold to people who don't have them. Treated as a "new" console rather than a rehash of an existing one, it's theoretically a good concept, as long as Sony doesn't overprice the content.
It's more of a "cost tax" than a "sin tax". The consumption of certain products (most obvious example: tobacco) has costs far beyond that of the production and selling of the item (consumer much more likely to die earlier and require expensive health treatment before he or she dies. Being coldly clinical for a moment: death has costs. People who die remove critical knowledge and skills from the economy that makes a society function. Meanwhile the health issues leading up to death are also a major problem, as we've seen discussed in the healthcare debate: people who contract expensive to treat diseases are more likely to have their paid-for insurance revoked on technicalities, and roughly 50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to insurance not covering critical healthcare treatments.
How do you deal with it while maximizing liberties? Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions. And that's where cost taxes come in.
Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay.
I don't trust Xiph having read their comments about what exactly they mean by "Patent free", and having seen the silence over, say, Vorbis's apparent infringement of US Patent 5,214,742. Is Theora "safer" than Vorbis? Well, it's another DCT-based codec, just like 99% of the video codecs in use since H.261, and it's essentially doing stuff where everyone else is doing stuff. The chances of it not violating some patent somewhere is minimal to non-existent, as everyone and their brother is trying to come up with ways to improve DCT based algorithms that they can patent and then submit to MPEG or VCEG for incorporation into the next MPEG or H.26* video standard.
There are really only three standards that could be considered free of patent issues, and even then it's not entirely 100% certain. H.261 dates back to the mid eighties. The ITU lists no current patents applying to MPEG-1. (It's worth pointing out that Theora's predecessor, VP3, is considered to be somewhere between H.261 and MPEG-1 in terms of quality.) And finally, the BBC did an extensive search for anything that might hit their Dirac codec and came up blank, as well as proposing (and then withdrawing once published, so they count as prior art) some patents themselves, so Dirac is in the running too.
Theora? If I was a commercial concern, I would avoid it. I'd go for the predictability of a licensable codec ahead of one that almost certainly would be a target for patent lawsuits if it ever achieves critical mass, and possibly earlier.
I might feel differently if Xiph didn't play word games with the term "Patent free", and gave a straight answer on the issues of actual patents people have found, rather than turning around and saying "Yeah, we ran it by a lawyer, and they said we're OK, but we're not going to tell you why because it's our super secret defense we'll use if we're ever sued", which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially as nobody will ever sue Xiph anyway (Xiph just writes the software, they leave the packaging, compiling, possible selling, and actual using to everyone else.)
To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.
Stories Slash Boxes Comments Slashdot Search News for nerds, stuff that matters * squiggleslash * Help & Preferences * Subscription * Firehose * Journal * Tags * Bookmarks * Logout * Customize Sections * Main * Apple * AskSlashdot * Book Reviews * Developers * Games * Hardware * IT * Index * Interviews * Linux * Mobile * Politics * Science * Technology * YRO Site Info * FAQ * Bugs * Code Stories * Old Stories * Old Polls * Hall of Fame * Submit Story Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 2 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Obama will not allow it * Obama will not allow it (Score:2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2009-09-18 18:57 (#29472513) Obama initially opposed the retroactive immunity bill, but switched his stance before the vote (and received contributions from the telcos for it, just like all the flip-flopping congressmen did). Having been bought, he won't risk buring any important bridges by biting the hand that fed him. Expect him to veto this bill (if it ever gets to his desk, which it probably won't, for the same reason given above). Reply to This Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:Obama will not allow it (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2009-09-18 21:07 Homepage Journal To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically. -- My moved journal [livejournal.com] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] URL http://squiggleslash.livejournal.com/ Subject Comment
To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.
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Somehow Qwest didn't see the "You have to do it if the government tells you" logic you claim AT&T and Verizon did. And they got shafted as a result.
Yes, you can refuse to obey an illegal order. The laws apply to you, the corporations, and the government, and the moment you forget that, you should expect to suffer the consequences.
You're right. While the right attempts to take away our liberties by allowing torture to be used in a law enforcement/intelligence context, by mass surveillance, and ignoring the law of the land, the left also attempts to take our liberties away by introducing universal healthcare and helping people register to vote. It's just terrible.
Oh that sounds way easier than using a cell phone!
I think you should have made the comparison based upon costs not ease.
This is about patent infringement rather than copyright infringement. If Microsoft had copied something, then I agree it'd seem a little unfair for Microsoft to be relieved of a fine that isn't going to damage them.
Patents don't require copying. They merely involve re-inventing the (patented) wheel that 99% of the time you didn't know had already been invented. That's why they suck.
You meant the ITU, right? IEEE is an entirely different organization.
The other thing was the context was a market where there already were a lot of non-ITU standards. V.32 came about as an effort to get modem manufacturers to unify on a common standard after virtually everyone did their own (entirely different, unrelated to any ITU effort) thing to get to 9600bps. Some modified V.29 to make it kinda full duplex, others did OFDM, others came up with even more exotic systems.
V.32 was finally released, and quickly followed by V.32bis. At this point:
- Some companies just stretched V.32 a little bit more and came up with V.32terbo. Nobody did this in anticipation of an ITU standard though, obviously, they'd have been happy if it had been supported.
- Hayes and USR, on opposite sides, came up with V.FC and 56KFlex, neither directly in anticipation of a specific ITU standard but hoping their technology would form the basis of "the next" ITU standard, whatever that was.
This is different to the pre-N (and before that pre-G) stuff. In the latter cases, the IEEE actually published a draft standard, and the manufacturers decided to go ahead and implement it. The "draft N" routers weren't proprietary technologies designed to compete with other "much better than IEEE standards" systems from rival manufacturers, they were actual implementations of a standard everyone was kinda sorta unified around but which hadn't had the official seal of approval for a variety of reasons.
So the context is very different. The ITU wasn't wearing running shoes, but it at least put its walking boots on every time the industry called. The IEEE, on the other hand, seems to be content to prance around in very uncomfortable 3" high heels.
(You were expecting a car analogy?)
Sounds to me like a lot of people don't know what a pardon is. A pardon isn't a statement after the fact that someone wasn't guilty, it's an admission by the government that the person who committed that crime shouldn't have been punished. The reasons may vary from "Yeah, but he's a nice guy really" to "That law was fucking stupid and should never have been on the books."
I think a "class pardon" applying to everyone victimized by an anti-homosexuality law is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for, but even if it wasn't, a pardon is especially appropriate in Turing's case. He didn't hurt anyone, he was a major cause of us winning a major world war, the man's life was, apparently, literally destroyed by his conviction - virtually every theory about his death, suicide, accident, conspiracy, is related to his conviction in some way, be it his inhibited mental state caused by anti-libido drugs, to a murder of someone deemed unreliable due to his sexuality.
Should someone who has contributed so much to society and freedom be pardoned for breaking an unjust law? Yes. Yes he should. If that's not a clear case where a pardon should be used, I don't know what is.
Leaflet here
Nothing in the GPL forbids the use of software licensed under the GPL in commercial software. The GPL only forbids incorporation into proprietary software. Yes, the distinction does matter.
With respect, the above comment is completely fair and balanced. By which I mean it's a partisan exaggeration and/or untruth.
The company that sued for the right to fire people for refusing to lie was an owned and operated affiliate of the Fox television network (the network that has brought you such great shows as Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Action, That 80's Show, Wonderfalls, Fastlane, Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Skin, Girls Club, Cracking Up, The Pitts, Firefly, Get Real, Freaky Links, Wanda at Large, Costello, The Lone Gunman, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Normal, Ohio, Pasedena, Harsh Realm, Keen Eddie, The Streak, American Embassy, Cedric the Entertainer, The Tick, Louie, and Greg the Bunny), not Fox News. Fox News, while owned by the same corporate parent as the Fox Television Network, is nonetheless a separate entity, and about the only link the two have beyond being answerable to Rupert Murdoch are that Fox News provides a show called Fox News Sunday to Fox Television.
My understanding is that Fox News doesn't need to threaten its journalists with termination for lying on air, because it doesn't have any real journalists.
When On2 was selling VP3, it was a proprietary codec and wasn't exactly used that widely. Patent owners had no serious way to know that the codec infringed on any patents of their's and if they did, a lawsuit wouldn't be likely to achieve much.
I addressed the issue about submarine patents that H.264 might infringe upon in the post you responded to. Understanding why is key to understanding why companies like Nokia and Apple describe Theora as "proprietary" and why they're expressing very real concerns when they do.
To re-cap and expand upon what I said a little: The MPEG process is "open" - companies who believe they have technologies that would be useful in the standard can submit them as long as they agree to RAND terms for any licensing. Even if the existence of the technologies and their patents is made known after the technologies are unintentionally incorporated into the MPEG standard, patent owners can register the existence of their patents with the ITU and other similar bodies, and can negotiate with groups like Via Licensing and the MPEG LA to have them collect royalties on their behalf.
In short, having a "submarine patent" in an MPEG standard is completely f--king stupid.
As the Theora process is, by necessity, patent hostile, patent owners (who want to make money on their patents) are effectively discouraged from either suggesting technologies they "own" to the Theora team, or making the existence of their patents known until the standard achieves significant market share. Anyone suing today wouldn't get much. The time to sue is when Theora has taken off so far that there's no going back.
Theora, as I said, exists in the same domain as the MPEG standards. It's essentially based upon DCT transforms and macroblock/vector entropy encoding. It's where most of the research has been done since the mid eighties when H.261 came out and MPEG committee was formed. The Theora folks are trying to do the same thing that those developing AVC are doing, and trying to solve the same problems. The chances that they haven't solved problems the same way as others working in the same field is minimal.
While a fair amount of research has been done on wavelet compression, the research is much smaller, and the BBC is better able to get a handle on what patents cover technologies in the field. Therefore, I think Dirac is probably a safer codec.
Yeah, I'd like to know where that figure comes from. According http://en.flossmanuals.net/TheoraCookbook/HTML5 which is linked to by the article, only Firefox 3.5 (which definitely doesn't have a 24% marketshare) natively supports Theora. And all the browsers that don't natively support it support it via a Java plug-in.
I assume the other 76% of browsers support Death Panels instead?
Well, that's not very likely. The advantage of H.264 is that it saves bandwidth, indeed, that's what Google is seeing as the primary advantage, so the balance is going to be "What's the cost of bandwidth + free vs bandwidth - H.264 superiority + licensing fee? Assuming that H.264 genuinely is that much better than Theora, the probability is they'll continue to seriously consider H.264. It's also not entirely clear how large the fees will be, but based upon their general structure, there's a threshold below which no license fees are required and an upper limit on how much anyone can pay for using H.264 to deliver content.
So leaving moral and ethical issues aside and just considering the question of "I run a business, I expect to get $1 per viewer for ten minutes of streaming for my content in subscription fees or advertising, is it worth my while using H.264?", the question is still open, and there's a strong chance many businesses will consider it worth their while, depending on what they're trying to stream.
The other advantage of Dirac over Theora is that it probably is patent free - the BBC has conducted a fairly exhaustive search by all accounts, whereas Theora probably isn't. Theora exists in the same domain as all of the MPEG standards, which means many organizations have been developing in the same space, and the likelihood that a technology critical to Theora is encumbered by patents, the owner of which hasn't yet revealed it, is pretty high. Unlike the MPEG ISO/ITU standards, there's no incentive for companies to get it out in the open that they have patents on projects like Theora. With MPEG it's "Who wants some money? Get in line! You're going to look pretty silly and have lots of enemies if you don't get in line now!"
The disadvantage of Dirac is that right now current encoders are just not seen as high quality as H.264, and as you say, is extremely CPU intensive.
Personally I think someone should create a kick-ass MPEG-1 encoder, just to piss everyone off.
Person A buys a SquigGamester IV: They have problems, and return it under warranty. The replacement SquiGamester IV fails three weeks later with the dreaded Brown Ring of Death, as does the replacement, it's replacement, and the fifth console too. They finally get a working SquigGamester IV, and are happily playing Smug XI the morning they're killed by a falling meteor.
Person B buys a SquigGamester IV: This fails one week later with the dreaded brown ring of death. They return it, get a working one, and are happily playing Smug XII - Master Chef Cooks Up A Rabbit when a freak of particle physics causes every atom their body to mysteriously move into the black hole at the center of the universe.
Person C buys a SquigGamester IV: There are no problems with it, and they are happily playing Smug XV when Larry Niven breaks into his house and beats him to death with an unsold hardback copy of one of the later, less popular, Ringworld novels.
Person D buys a SquigGamester IV: There are no problems with it, and Person C is happily playing Smug MCIV when a probe sent by Nasa to investigate Jupiter accidentally blows it up, causing the end of the Solar System a s we know it.
Only 50% of SquigGamester users have problems with their consoles, but the console failure rate is 60%.
Interestingly, the difference here means that a significant number of people with failed consoles also must have had failed replacements. To me, that would imply a time period or geographic location where the problems occured (or else the same problems wouldn't affect the same people over and over again, while never affecting the majority.) I'd assume, therefore, that the likelihood is that Microsoft fixed the problems midway through the console's life cycle.
The cheap camcorder I bought several years ago (a basic MiniDV thing) does image stabilization, I believe it's a fairly common feature.
The major issue with this kind of thing is that you need to start with a significant overscan area otherwise the borders of the image will keep intruding on the main picture. MPEG is optimized to deal with the fact cameras shake, but that's not the same thing as saying that it unshakes the image. The edges of the picture still need to be updated.
You're absolutely right. For some reason I had it in my head that virtually all ASP's features are in AVC, despite slightly different origins. Kind of emphasizes the point though...
And that Blue Man Group... total rip off the smurfs!