I suspect you're kidding, but to address that: MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 both compress similar sequencies of macroblock motion vectors such that there isn't a lot of difference between two frames at different offsets and two frames at the same offset in terms of how easily they're compressed. Camera movement certainly requires more bytes to encode, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Further, both variants of MPEG 4 (ASP and AVC - aka H.264) include Global Motion Compensation, allowing frames that are almost identical save for camera movement to be compressed almost as if there's no movement at all. I suspect most pirates use ASP and AVC.
About the only codecs I can think of for whom camera wobble would be an issue date back to the early days of compression: H.120, Amiga ANIM, or at the other end of the scale HD-MAC.
So, no, cinematographers are not shaking the camera to prevent the movies they're working on from being distributed over the Internet.
Cinematographers introduce what might be termed film artifacts (wobble, grain, that kind of thing) to build moods in the mind of viewers. Wobble in this case makes sense because they're trying to give the movie a documentary feel. Without watching it I can't tell if it's bad or not. Man on Fire made me feel physically nauseas. On the other hand, I never had a problem with the Bourne movies. You can do wobble so it doesn't hurt the audience, it depends on the skills of those making the movie.
Four to six hours for a Netbook battery isn't particularly impressive any more. As far as the "common charger" comment goes, virtually all Netbooks and laptops include a built in battery charger. You don't generally take the battery out to charge it.
The only advantage I can see of this box is that if you're really lacking an AC power source you can always pop into a store and buy some AAs. That's a nice to have, and I think it'd be great if Netbook manufacturers would make, say, an empty battery you could insert your own cells into, but I'd rather my laptops ran off the custom, compact, batteries they use today as their primary energy storage mechanism than what we see here.
I don't doubt sabre rattling will help, but I doubt Dell is anything like as interested as it used to be in exclusive contracts. Being forced to ship Windows with every PC just to get a rate of $50 per Windows box instead of $60 (you think Microsoft would charge any OEM full price, especially one with Dell's marketshare?) makes little or no sense given the current situation.
And what is the current situation? The current situation is that consumers are no longer locked to Windows. They are willing to consider alternatives. They've proven that with the Mac.
Now, if this were five years ago, then yeah, GNU/Linux wasn't ideal at that time and honestly needed either to be part of a corporate roll-out with a decent system administration group to support it, or to be sold to technically inclined users. But this is 2009. Ubuntu's GNOME is easily the second easiest to use and cleanest environment after Mac OS X, with Windows Vista a distant third, and XP coming below that, and Vista isn't even something people want.
So you can sell GNU/Linux to ordinary users. The only things keeping most people from switching are the same as for Mac OS X - proprietary lock-in. Anyone who doesn't care about that, who doesn't have some must-have app that must absolutely run on their Netbook, can switch now, and there are massive advantages in them doing so.
From Dell's point of view, if Microsoft wants to come to them and say "Well, sorry, but if you're going to stick Ubuntu on your netbooks and actually make netbooks incapable of running Windows, then we're going to jack up the license fees for the copies of Windows you do sell", then Dell can smugly laugh. "Go right ahead", they'll say. "We'll pass on the costs to our customers, or we'll pre-install more "demos" to make up the cost difference. Sure, a minority will switch to HP, but the rest are going to end up either sucking it up, or buying a netbook where we don't have to pay anyone a cent. And, guess what, Ubuntu's so much nicer than Windows, and always going to be cheaper, so we think for many of our customers, the switch will be permanent. So, Microsoft, what are you going to do? Are you really going to make us charge people more for Windows and encourage them to look at Ubuntu?"
[Cue idiots who'll miss the point and post a complaint about how Ubuntu's worse because they spent two days trying to get some obscure sound card to work or because they prefer KDE or... it doesn't matter. You're in the minority. Oh and hardware compatibility isn't going to be an issue anyway.]
If you'd said you'd switched to a specific BSD, then I could probably understand you, but *BSD? Really?
Politics in *BSD is so bad there are at least four different kernels, two (NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD) the results of massive disagreements about the direction BSD was heading in, and one (OpenBSD) the result of infighting and massive egos.
I don't think Linux or GNU are really all that bad for open source projects. The only advantage, say, FreeBSD has, is that the wars have been sufficiently bad many of the hotter heads have left already.
and anybody else who wants to use similar technology would have a rock-solid legal defense.
No, they will not. Prior Art is evidence to the USPTO when appealing the validity of a patent, not evidence to a court when defending yourself against a charge of patent infringement.
We've been down this path many, many, times before folks. The courts are only interested in whether it's a valid patent, not in whether it should be a valid patent. You want to use the technologies covered by the patent without licensing it, you, in practice, have to get the USPTO to overturn it. It sucks, but there you have it.
There's always someone who jumps the gun, ignores the careful wording of a comment (like the GP's use of the word "effectively"), and starts acting as if the parent was talking in absolutes.
But, that said, it's kind of funny when it's done by someone who's Slashdot nick is "Actually, I do RTFA"...
Good luck to the GP. I've found that there's pretty much no way to couch a generalism in words that make it clear you're not talking in absolutes.
Well, I can think of one set of circumstances where they could, conceivably, demand back that first edition and compel you to cooperate: if the first edition was stolen.
And, if I understand the story here correctly, that's not far off what's happened. Amazon "sold" digital copies of a book it didn't have a license to make those copies of. Thus the copies that were deposited on people's Kindles were there in violation of copyright law.
He probably does want to be listened to, but most artists also want to be able to spend time creating their art. Which is generally difficult if you're working 9-5 on an unrelated job and are stressed and exhausted at the end of each day.
There are a relatively small number of artists who produce high quality work of the type you want to make use of while simultaneously juggling a career in something else. Most of the people whose works you enjoy, be they authors, composers, performers, directors, whatever, have either made their art their career, or have taken breaks from their careers and been compensated financially for those breaks so they could afford to make them.
The vast majority of art that people are now demanding be free was made by people paid to do it, and probably would not have been made had the creators been forced to make it for free. That's why any attempt to define copyright in the future has to be done on the basis of asking who's going to pay for content. Do you want it pay for use (as we do today)? Do you want artists funded by charities? Should the rich commission works and the public domain be enriched only by those the rich bless? What about a broadband tax (and how would you divy that up?) Is a tip-jar system really going to be able to fund that next James Cameron epic you really want to watch? What about ubiquitous product placement?
The solutions aren't easy. At the very heart of the debate should be an appreciation for the work of the artist and a desire to encourage the artist to create.
I believe he was listing papers that were engaged in the practices he was critizing, hence The Mirror and Mail being on the list too.
The Observer, FWIW, sucks, and frequently publishes hysterical misleading stories in attempts to print papers. I'm an avid Guardian fan, but I pretty much never visit guardian.co.uk on a Sunday (when it's taken over by The Observer) because of the number of times I've found the lead stories to be bunk.
I would like to see the paper closed. It's an embarrassment that undermines the credibility of one of the best newspapers in the world.
but if he supports or disapproves of a law he is biased.
If he disapproves of a law, then arguably he could be considered biased as his refusal to believe a law is just might affect whether he enforces it or not, but it's hard to see how your judgment would be affected by the fact you happen to support the law being tried.
Judges are supposed to enforce the law, and do so fairly. If someone is accused of violating that law, they're supposed to ensure that person is fairly tried, with evidence that is pertinent to the case raised, irrelevancies struck out, and a fair judgment given if that someone is found guilty. Now, it's hard for me to determine why anyone who supports a law would act differently to someone who doesn't care specifically about a particular law but does care about the rule of law. If I support copyright law, am I going to try to make sure someone is found guilty of copyright infringement simply because I support the law and not due to their guilt or innocence? Why? Why would I do that? Why would I want someone innocent of the law I support found guilty? Would that not undermine the law I support rather than support it?
Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could to antagonize the system.
Like all RIAA defendants, she was offered the chance to settle for a few thousand. She refused and goaded the RIAA into taking her to court.
Once in court, she played games by lying about the circumstances behind her missing hard disk drive. She, nonetheless, continued to protest her innocence despite overwhelming evidence she wasn't.
She lost in court, was given a penalty that while high, was actually on the lower end of the possible outcomes. Nonetheless she could have appealed the penalty, and would probably have had a fair hearing, but decided instead to appeal the ruling that she was guilty instead on the basis of a dubious technicality which was unlikely to change the final jury verdict.
She's lost in court a second time. This time, she was caught being blatantly dishonest. The jury is almost certainly looking at this seeing someone try to mislead them, who's wasted their time with a pointless retrial over something she's clearly guilty of.
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case? Short of a jury of 12 Slashdot copyright infringement advocates advocating jury nullification, I can't see how any other result was ever possible.
It's not between 2 and 3, it's between 1 and 3. There are key version two and version three features that are missing.
Like DRM.
How important is DRM? Well, the one user of Silverlight everyone's heard of is Netflix, who use it as the engine behind their online streaming system. And guess which Silverlight feature they use to prevent people from copying their movies?
Apparently there's little chance that Microsoft will ever release a "DRM plug-in" for GNU/Linux users. Whoops.
I'm sure LTE across currently unserved areas will be better than nothing, but the "I know, this technology gives us oodles of bandwidth, let's just roll it out with as few towers as possible!" is what made a lot of networks barely usable back in the 1990s.
Funny, I read the opposite. The "Popular" view on Climate Change is what you appear to believe, that it's almost certainly all the scientists being wrong again (cue utterly moronic "They all said the world was cooling in the 1970s!" line.)
The scientists are saying one thing. Politicians trying to be populist are saying they're wrong. Talk show hosts are saying they're wrong. For the most part, Dyson excepted (and this isn't his field) the "elderly distinguished scientists" are those saying the evidence is that Global Warming is real, and that the primary cause is likely to be human activity.
Asimov wouldn't have sided with Rush Limbaugh and the Cato Institute on this one.
In the case of global warming, the majority is clearly wrong, once again, as usual. The Earth has cycled between warmer and cooler for ages
"My god, why didn't we think of that?" (*sound of thousands of foreheads being slapped*) - The Majority Of Climate Scientists.
Thank God you put them right with something they clearly would never have thought of themselves. What I'd love to know is why did you post this in Slashdot? Why not announce it at the Academy of Very Very Important Climate Scientists?
Given the comparatively low capacity/expense of SD cards, and the high bitrates required for M-JPEG, I'm not sure this is an entirely practical proposition...
Before anyone gets too excited about the idea of somehow integrating DVD playback into the Wii, there is actually a practical disadvantage that ought to make most people think twice. The Wii doesn't support 5.1 audio - well, to clarify, it supports Dolby Pro-Logic, but there's no SPDIF output and only stereo analog outputs, so the audio quality is going to be poor. I'm sure this will work for some anyway, but...
That was covered by Like all of us, he tells a white lie from time to time.
Anyway, the point is that simply by a choice of words that hints at more than's there, you can easily defame someone while technically speaking the truth.
That's Wikipedia's definition. In some jurisdictions, notably Britain's (and, it appears, MA's) libel can be truthful. What you're seeing in Wikipedia is an example of US-centricism, and the article needs to be updated.
I'm certainly no lawyer, but it seems hard to cause defamation of character if you tell the truth
Fred Bloggs cannot be trusted. He habitually lies, even to close members of his family. Dishonest to the core, he even lied to his wife on her birthday, spending time after work in secret with his curvaceous, blonde, secretary, claiming he had to work late that evening!
How can you trust Fred Bloggs?
(Reality: Fred Bloggs planned a surprise birthday party for his wife that evening, and enlisted his secretary's help. Like all of us, he tells a white lie from time to time.)
Yes, of course you can defame someone's character while telling the truth.
Some jurisdictions, notably Britain's, take it a little far. If you say "Fred Bloggs was drunk at last night's party", and you can bring in several witnesses to substantiate your claim, it's still libel. Google the phrase "tired and emotional" for more information...
Well, in fairness, when Judge Morris E. Lasker isn't presiding from the bench, he's usually browsing Slashdot, discussing the finer points of law with fellow IANALs, under his username "lasker6502 (1335014)"...
If the article claimed the Fox hates sports programs, because it scheduled Hockey, Badminton, and Fringe at times nobody would watch them, would you object to someone saying "Wait, Fringe isn't about sports!" just because you like it?
I think PJ's use of the X-Files was misleading, and that he's asserting that while it appeared to be X-files-type paranormal investigations, the show is going to try to find a scientific basis for the observed "paranormalism" in time. And is therefore Sci-fi.
I have to admit, I thought the show I saw (something about people being frozen in a bus or something) to be awful on every level, from the pseudo-science to the acting, so I haven't watched much of it since. If PJ's right, then that's a positive.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect you're kidding, but to address that: MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 both compress similar sequencies of macroblock motion vectors such that there isn't a lot of difference between two frames at different offsets and two frames at the same offset in terms of how easily they're compressed. Camera movement certainly requires more bytes to encode, but not nearly as much as you might think. Further, both variants of MPEG 4 (ASP and AVC - aka H.264) include Global Motion Compensation, allowing frames that are almost identical save for camera movement to be compressed almost as if there's no movement at all. I suspect most pirates use ASP and AVC. About the only codecs I can think of for whom camera wobble would be an issue date back to the early days of compression: H.120, Amiga ANIM, or at the other end of the scale HD-MAC. So, no, cinematographers are not shaking the camera to prevent the movies they're working on from being distributed over the Internet. Cinematographers introduce what might be termed film artifacts (wobble, grain, that kind of thing) to build moods in the mind of viewers. Wobble in this case makes sense because they're trying to give the movie a documentary feel. Without watching it I can't tell if it's bad or not. Man on Fire made me feel physically nauseas. On the other hand, I never had a problem with the Bourne movies. You can do wobble so it doesn't hurt the audience, it depends on the skills of those making the movie.
Four to six hours for a Netbook battery isn't particularly impressive any more. As far as the "common charger" comment goes, virtually all Netbooks and laptops include a built in battery charger. You don't generally take the battery out to charge it.
The only advantage I can see of this box is that if you're really lacking an AC power source you can always pop into a store and buy some AAs. That's a nice to have, and I think it'd be great if Netbook manufacturers would make, say, an empty battery you could insert your own cells into, but I'd rather my laptops ran off the custom, compact, batteries they use today as their primary energy storage mechanism than what we see here.
Because the ground's shifted.
I don't doubt sabre rattling will help, but I doubt Dell is anything like as interested as it used to be in exclusive contracts. Being forced to ship Windows with every PC just to get a rate of $50 per Windows box instead of $60 (you think Microsoft would charge any OEM full price, especially one with Dell's marketshare?) makes little or no sense given the current situation.
And what is the current situation? The current situation is that consumers are no longer locked to Windows. They are willing to consider alternatives. They've proven that with the Mac.
Now, if this were five years ago, then yeah, GNU/Linux wasn't ideal at that time and honestly needed either to be part of a corporate roll-out with a decent system administration group to support it, or to be sold to technically inclined users. But this is 2009. Ubuntu's GNOME is easily the second easiest to use and cleanest environment after Mac OS X, with Windows Vista a distant third, and XP coming below that, and Vista isn't even something people want.
So you can sell GNU/Linux to ordinary users. The only things keeping most people from switching are the same as for Mac OS X - proprietary lock-in. Anyone who doesn't care about that, who doesn't have some must-have app that must absolutely run on their Netbook, can switch now, and there are massive advantages in them doing so.
From Dell's point of view, if Microsoft wants to come to them and say "Well, sorry, but if you're going to stick Ubuntu on your netbooks and actually make netbooks incapable of running Windows, then we're going to jack up the license fees for the copies of Windows you do sell", then Dell can smugly laugh. "Go right ahead", they'll say. "We'll pass on the costs to our customers, or we'll pre-install more "demos" to make up the cost difference. Sure, a minority will switch to HP, but the rest are going to end up either sucking it up, or buying a netbook where we don't have to pay anyone a cent. And, guess what, Ubuntu's so much nicer than Windows, and always going to be cheaper, so we think for many of our customers, the switch will be permanent. So, Microsoft, what are you going to do? Are you really going to make us charge people more for Windows and encourage them to look at Ubuntu?"
[Cue idiots who'll miss the point and post a complaint about how Ubuntu's worse because they spent two days trying to get some obscure sound card to work or because they prefer KDE or... it doesn't matter. You're in the minority. Oh and hardware compatibility isn't going to be an issue anyway.]
If you'd said you'd switched to a specific BSD, then I could probably understand you, but *BSD? Really?
Politics in *BSD is so bad there are at least four different kernels, two (NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD) the results of massive disagreements about the direction BSD was heading in, and one (OpenBSD) the result of infighting and massive egos.
I don't think Linux or GNU are really all that bad for open source projects. The only advantage, say, FreeBSD has, is that the wars have been sufficiently bad many of the hotter heads have left already.
No, they will not. Prior Art is evidence to the USPTO when appealing the validity of a patent, not evidence to a court when defending yourself against a charge of patent infringement.
We've been down this path many, many, times before folks. The courts are only interested in whether it's a valid patent, not in whether it should be a valid patent. You want to use the technologies covered by the patent without licensing it, you, in practice, have to get the USPTO to overturn it. It sucks, but there you have it.
There's always someone who jumps the gun, ignores the careful wording of a comment (like the GP's use of the word "effectively"), and starts acting as if the parent was talking in absolutes.
But, that said, it's kind of funny when it's done by someone who's Slashdot nick is "Actually, I do RTFA"...
Good luck to the GP. I've found that there's pretty much no way to couch a generalism in words that make it clear you're not talking in absolutes.
It's this movie. Unfortunately there's no sound.
Well, I can think of one set of circumstances where they could, conceivably, demand back that first edition and compel you to cooperate: if the first edition was stolen.
And, if I understand the story here correctly, that's not far off what's happened. Amazon "sold" digital copies of a book it didn't have a license to make those copies of. Thus the copies that were deposited on people's Kindles were there in violation of copyright law.
He probably does want to be listened to, but most artists also want to be able to spend time creating their art. Which is generally difficult if you're working 9-5 on an unrelated job and are stressed and exhausted at the end of each day. There are a relatively small number of artists who produce high quality work of the type you want to make use of while simultaneously juggling a career in something else. Most of the people whose works you enjoy, be they authors, composers, performers, directors, whatever, have either made their art their career, or have taken breaks from their careers and been compensated financially for those breaks so they could afford to make them. The vast majority of art that people are now demanding be free was made by people paid to do it, and probably would not have been made had the creators been forced to make it for free. That's why any attempt to define copyright in the future has to be done on the basis of asking who's going to pay for content. Do you want it pay for use (as we do today)? Do you want artists funded by charities? Should the rich commission works and the public domain be enriched only by those the rich bless? What about a broadband tax (and how would you divy that up?) Is a tip-jar system really going to be able to fund that next James Cameron epic you really want to watch? What about ubiquitous product placement? The solutions aren't easy. At the very heart of the debate should be an appreciation for the work of the artist and a desire to encourage the artist to create.
I believe he was listing papers that were engaged in the practices he was critizing, hence The Mirror and Mail being on the list too.
The Observer, FWIW, sucks, and frequently publishes hysterical misleading stories in attempts to print papers. I'm an avid Guardian fan, but I pretty much never visit guardian.co.uk on a Sunday (when it's taken over by The Observer) because of the number of times I've found the lead stories to be bunk.
I would like to see the paper closed. It's an embarrassment that undermines the credibility of one of the best newspapers in the world.
If he disapproves of a law, then arguably he could be considered biased as his refusal to believe a law is just might affect whether he enforces it or not, but it's hard to see how your judgment would be affected by the fact you happen to support the law being tried.
Judges are supposed to enforce the law, and do so fairly. If someone is accused of violating that law, they're supposed to ensure that person is fairly tried, with evidence that is pertinent to the case raised, irrelevancies struck out, and a fair judgment given if that someone is found guilty. Now, it's hard for me to determine why anyone who supports a law would act differently to someone who doesn't care specifically about a particular law but does care about the rule of law. If I support copyright law, am I going to try to make sure someone is found guilty of copyright infringement simply because I support the law and not due to their guilt or innocence? Why? Why would I do that? Why would I want someone innocent of the law I support found guilty? Would that not undermine the law I support rather than support it?
Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could to antagonize the system.
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case? Short of a jury of 12 Slashdot copyright infringement advocates advocating jury nullification, I can't see how any other result was ever possible.
It's not between 2 and 3, it's between 1 and 3. There are key version two and version three features that are missing.
Like DRM.
How important is DRM? Well, the one user of Silverlight everyone's heard of is Netflix, who use it as the engine behind their online streaming system. And guess which Silverlight feature they use to prevent people from copying their movies?
Apparently there's little chance that Microsoft will ever release a "DRM plug-in" for GNU/Linux users. Whoops.
Well, he has the power. {{insert roaring noise}}
And more deadspots.
I'm sure LTE across currently unserved areas will be better than nothing, but the "I know, this technology gives us oodles of bandwidth, let's just roll it out with as few towers as possible!" is what made a lot of networks barely usable back in the 1990s.
Funny, I read the opposite. The "Popular" view on Climate Change is what you appear to believe, that it's almost certainly all the scientists being wrong again (cue utterly moronic "They all said the world was cooling in the 1970s!" line.)
The scientists are saying one thing. Politicians trying to be populist are saying they're wrong. Talk show hosts are saying they're wrong. For the most part, Dyson excepted (and this isn't his field) the "elderly distinguished scientists" are those saying the evidence is that Global Warming is real, and that the primary cause is likely to be human activity.
Asimov wouldn't have sided with Rush Limbaugh and the Cato Institute on this one.
A specific example would be Britain's blasphemy laws.
"My god, why didn't we think of that?" (*sound of thousands of foreheads being slapped*) - The Majority Of Climate Scientists.
Thank God you put them right with something they clearly would never have thought of themselves. What I'd love to know is why did you post this in Slashdot? Why not announce it at the Academy of Very Very Important Climate Scientists?
Given the comparatively low capacity/expense of SD cards, and the high bitrates required for M-JPEG, I'm not sure this is an entirely practical proposition...
Before anyone gets too excited about the idea of somehow integrating DVD playback into the Wii, there is actually a practical disadvantage that ought to make most people think twice. The Wii doesn't support 5.1 audio - well, to clarify, it supports Dolby Pro-Logic, but there's no SPDIF output and only stereo analog outputs, so the audio quality is going to be poor. I'm sure this will work for some anyway, but...
That was covered by Like all of us, he tells a white lie from time to time.
Anyway, the point is that simply by a choice of words that hints at more than's there, you can easily defame someone while technically speaking the truth.
That's Wikipedia's definition. In some jurisdictions, notably Britain's (and, it appears, MA's) libel can be truthful. What you're seeing in Wikipedia is an example of US-centricism, and the article needs to be updated.
Fred Bloggs cannot be trusted. He habitually lies, even to close members of his family. Dishonest to the core, he even lied to his wife on her birthday, spending time after work in secret with his curvaceous, blonde, secretary, claiming he had to work late that evening!
How can you trust Fred Bloggs?
(Reality: Fred Bloggs planned a surprise birthday party for his wife that evening, and enlisted his secretary's help. Like all of us, he tells a white lie from time to time.)
Yes, of course you can defame someone's character while telling the truth.
Some jurisdictions, notably Britain's, take it a little far. If you say "Fred Bloggs was drunk at last night's party", and you can bring in several witnesses to substantiate your claim, it's still libel. Google the phrase "tired and emotional" for more information...
Well, in fairness, when Judge Morris E. Lasker isn't presiding from the bench, he's usually browsing Slashdot, discussing the finer points of law with fellow IANALs, under his username "lasker6502 (1335014)"...
Ok, and?
If the article claimed the Fox hates sports programs, because it scheduled Hockey, Badminton, and Fringe at times nobody would watch them, would you object to someone saying "Wait, Fringe isn't about sports!" just because you like it?
I think PJ's use of the X-Files was misleading, and that he's asserting that while it appeared to be X-files-type paranormal investigations, the show is going to try to find a scientific basis for the observed "paranormalism" in time. And is therefore Sci-fi.
I have to admit, I thought the show I saw (something about people being frozen in a bus or something) to be awful on every level, from the pseudo-science to the acting, so I haven't watched much of it since. If PJ's right, then that's a positive.