Careful here, guys. Breaking the speed of light would be a truly wondrous, nobel-prize winning acheivment. Building transmission eqipment which boosts signal speed is really good and worthwhile, but nowhere near as important an advanced as superluminal transmission.
Please check your headlines!
Physics has always been ethically compromised
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The third example is Robert Millikan. Here we read about the experience of Gerald Holton studying Millikan's notebooks related to his famous oil droplets experiment to measure the charge e on a single electron. He found some variability in his estimate for e in difference sets of observations. Millikan gave a personal quality-of-measurment rating to each of the sets of observations in his original 1910 experiment. He then used these to obtain a weighted average of the values obtained from his sets of observation which gave him the estimate for e of 4.85*10^(-10) electrostatic units. The simple average would have given him 4.70*10^(-10) which would have been closer to the currently accepted value of 4.77*10^(-10). Holton also found that, referring to specific sets of observations, Milliken wrote: "publish this", "beauty", and "error high, will not use."
Milliken guessed or decided beforehand what he wanted the electrostatic constant to be and kept fudging his results until he got the one he wanted.
MS's security record should be a major concern to anyone who's interested in freedom to use music as they see fit as well as those who are interested in trying to take those freedoms away.
After all, WindowsXP's product activation scheme was blown out of the water before WinXP was ever relased. WindowsXP Service Pack 1 was supposed to put those restrictions back in place, but was defeated almost instantly.
A company that can't put enforcable restrictions on its own stuff is supposed to be trusted by others who want to do the same thing. I for one hope that Microsoft continues to release easily bypassed security measures. They will do more to undermine the goals of DRM than anyone else could ever hope to.
When I was reading it, I kept making the mistake of thinking... okay, this is a plot element. Surely this is going to resolve at the end. Right?
(No, I didn't know about the *real* Morris-Thorne research, but imagine including a character named 'Einstein' in a book about relativity and then *not* having that character be in some way responsible for the plot device.)
By the last fifty pages of the book, it was like watching a train wreck. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn't. I had some vague ray of hope that it would turn out well. Just like aforementioned trainwreck, there's always the hope that the train will right itself before it derails completely. In this case, the train didn't just derail, it slid off the tracks and rolled across the station.
Nah, ASCII art has been around a lot longer than that. In the same thread, they're referencing Nroff, Press, and Tex formatted images of ET and Yoda.
One of my father-in-law's favorite war stories was about his stint as a communications officer at a U.S. base in South Korea during the Veitnam war. At one point a good buddy in the U.S. sent him and his fellows a fairly high resolution black and white version of Playboy's Miss October 71... via teletype. The image had to be stapled together from multiple teletype sheets (4 feet wide and 6 feet long, I think he said) and viewed from several feet away before the print characters were recognizable as a female figure.
The most convincing portrayal of the ultimate in virtual reality with the "holodeck"
About the same time TNG started taking off, Marvel Comics X-Men's Danger Room was approaching the same levels of fictional self-realism. Due to alien technology obtained by Professor Xavier, the Danger Room became more of an immersive virtual-reality world, like the holodeck. Did the two develop independantly? Did they influence eachother. I bet neither Marvel nor Paramount will say. An interesting difference between the two is that, while the Danger Room was often a crucial setting, it was almost never the antagonist of the story like the holodeck was in so many Trek episodes.
Hmmm... CleverNickName would probably be one of the best sources to confirm this.
I would guess that most actors, after spending time on a sci-fi show, would develop a feel for the particular pseudo-science the story depended on.
I understand that after a while, at least according to interviews (CleverNickName may also have something to say about this) producers had to 'shush' the actors every time they came on stage or fired a weapon because they would make the 'whoosh' noises for the various fictional apparatus they were dealing with.
I read an article about TNG production a little while back. Rather than coming up with a exotic particle/lifeform/radition of the week to save the day, TNG scriptwriters would often just write in a placeholder to be replaced with a tech-adviser's technobabble at a later date.
Scripts would look as so:
GEORDI: Let's [technobabble] the main thrusters so that we can [technobabble] the Borg.
That said, Moz can be quite the memory hog, especially on graphically intense pages. One of the big mistakes I see that can aggrivate this is the practice of tiling single-pixel graphics over a huge area. I'm not familiar with the gecko code, but I'm guessing that rather than rendering the tiled image once and keeping a handle for the resulting bitmap, Moz renders the image over and over again as it tiles and keeps a handle for each tile.
PHPBB sites are particularly bad about this, since the 'Sub Silver' theme uses several images that are about 5 pixels wide x 30 pixels tall. 150 pixels total. If you have to cover an area that is 1000 pixels wide, you need 200 repetitions of that 5 pixel wide image. If you repeat that area 25 times, and keep seperate instances of the image for each tile, you end up keeping the image in memory 5000 times.
Anyone more familiar with Gecko willing to comment on the actual mechanism of how it handles tiled images like this?
In all other ways, Moz has completely replaced all other browsers for me. I always laugh at friends and coworkers who send me a link, but then tell me to be careful because it comes with several popup-ads.
I have to wonder what the rationale behind including a download manager with no scheduling or restart functionality is.
Oh well. I assume that this will come along eventually, just like everything else. The team has fixed both the bugs I submitted for 1.1a (table layout problems), so I will assume that they will eventually get around to this kind of functionality.
IANAA, but a professor once told me that a body that orbits another non-stellar body is a moon while a body that orbits a star is a planet or an astroid (astro- from star) depending on its size and regularity of its orbit.
Thus, the Pluto-Charon system is probably much more accurately labeled as either a pair of asteroids due to size considerations, or a dual-planetary system because their orbits are highly regular, albeit at a significant pitch compared to the other 8 planetary systems.
I've also heard that the Earth/Luna system should be considered a dual-planetary system because Luna has a much higher percentage of it's parent planet's mass than other moons... This jives with the 'Planetary Collision' theory of moon formataion, in which the moon is actualy a significant chunk of Earth, torn off early during our planet's formation.
The 'second moon', Cruithne, fits in with a large category of non-moon, non-planetary, non-asteroid bodies in the solar system. If you ever study the 'Trojans', you know that there are huge bodies of apparent moonlets that sit on a sixty-degree angle from Jupiter's, directly along Jupiter's orbit from the sun. (They are apparently held in such a strange place by the gravity of Jupiter vs. the gravity of Sol.) Rather than calling Cruithne a moon, we're probably better off adding a new 'common' cetegory to our solar classification to include it and the Trojans. AFAIC, there's no reason not to call these all Trojans and be done with it.
This is a serious mistake. You don't gain market share by eliminating applications or users. Microsoft tried this, (By trying to leverage NT4 for the desktop) and watched it backfire horribly. Apple even watched it happen once before, when they switched from 68k architecture, to PowerPC. They ended up having to include an interperater/emulator for 68k apps in later versions of Mac0S.
Yeah, most users should stay up and keep the latest and greatest of apps, compiled directly for your platform. The *rest* of the world knows that this just doesn't happen. Not all of the apps we love or *have* to use are open source or will run properly on more than one OS. If you don't beleive me, just look at all the DOS games that didn't work under Windows 2000 that were 'fixed' under WinXP. I know people who dual-boot solely so they can play Tomb Raider 1.
If Apple does not include functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, then it will hurt them.
Since I got my cable modem, I've been routinely going through about 50 CDR's every month or two -- These are mostly anime fansubs downloaded from alt.binaries.anime and alt.binaries.multimedia anime, each of which can range from 90mb to 400mb (on the high-end). Some of the fansubs you can find are higher quality than anything that's currently being offered on VHS or DVD.
I would be willing to bet that is quite a bit more than the average Egyptian can afford. I dunno, I might be wrong. Still, for rudimentary text-only web, email, and Usenet usage, say 1 hour/day it would be quite adequate.
When I try to access Microsoft's only *obvious* updating feature, I get this message: Thank you for your interest in Windows Update
Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the most out of your computer.
You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.
Download the latest version of Internet Explorer
Once Internet Explorer is installed, you can go to the Windows Update site by typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com into the address bar of Internet Explorer.
Despite CRT's downsides, there are significant reasons that an individual might prefer or even be required to use a CRT rather than an LCD display.
1. Accurate Color Matching. Sorry, you just can't do this on an LCD. I understand that Plasma is a little better, but you can't beat CRT for color matching.
2. Multi-resolution Display. LCD's have a 'Native' display resolution for which their displays are best suited. Other display resolutions, if you can get them to work, just don't look right.
3. Brightness. LCD will *never* be as bright, nor have the brightness control of CRT. CRTS are also not prone to angle-washout-syndrome like LCD monitors are. CRTS have the same brightness regardless of which direction you're looking at them from.
In many cases... most probably... an LCD display is preferrable to a CRT. In my line of work, as a graphic artist, I'd sooner lop off a pinky than part with my big, beautiful, heavy, radiation-emitting CRT.
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that their phone-bank/support-hotline/etc... is a separate division of the company, responsible for raising its own revenue.
Talk to any accountant. They'll tell you that this is the most efficient way to break down a company to save money. When you break a successful company down where customer service is it's own department, phone services appear as if they are not generating any revenue, and are therefore cut, outsourced, or otherwise done away with, usually to the detriment of the company because their customers need real help, real service, and real support, not an automated answering system that doesn't really help them.
Remember that Adobe is not fighting the DMCA. They are merely trying to bribe^h^h^h^h^hconvince a judge into saying that their actions are not a violation of the DMCA as has been alleged by other companies. This can have a couple possible outcomes. (IANALBTW)
1. Adobe is sucessful in getting a judge to declare they are not violating the DMCA. This has bad and good reprocussions. The DMCA is strengthened by case law, but what Adobe gets off for, everyone else does as well.
2. Adobe is not sucessful in getting a judge to decalre they are not violating the DMCA. This is initially bad, because the DMCA remains as strong as it was and the restrictions it imposes are stengthened by case law. In the long run, however, Adobe, one of the few non-Media oriented companies that has the most to gain from the DMCA is forced to lobby against it and fight it in court, possibly having longer lasting influence.
The lesson we should learn from all this is that if a law requires a trial just to see if it applies to any certain case, it's probably not a good law and won't be applied fairly.
I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Eventually, we're going to be at a point where we deal with electric or bio-fuel whether we like it or not. There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
The hell of it is, if we were to start *now* working on getting all the kinks and problems worked out of things like bio-fuel or solar-panels with the same energy and resources that the auto industry spends on developing new models every year, when the time comes that petroleum is so rare as to inspire strife, war, and conflict, we will be far enough ahead of the curve not to be affected.
While hybrid cars may be a step in the right direction, they're only postponing the inevitable.
Hmm... I use Mozilla's Cookie Manage to completely protect myself from cookies. I let one or two through... the cookie from my company's website, slashdot's login cookie, etc...
In Mozilla -> Tools -> Cookie Manager -> Block Cookies from this site...
Other Nigh-infinitely Rare Occurances...
on
Meteorite Hits Girl
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...Hillary Rosen or Jack Valenti mention that the mp3 format or P2P file-sharing networks may not be as evil as the dripping semen of Beelzebub....Stallman accidentally says 'Linux' in a moment of pique rather than 'Gnu/Linux'....The software or media industry creates an truly uncrackable format for copy-protecting the data on CD's...Taco posts a story to the front page of Slashdot without a single spelling error on his part....Natalie Portman does not run screaming from anything that looks remotely like a nerd....A new Slashdot reader goes six months without perma-filtering JonKatz.
Remember that even the MPEG2 format that DVD video vobs are stored in is lossy, although at such a high bitrate that, on a good DVD, it's close to impossible to tell.
DivX and other Mpeg4 codecs may be unbearably noisy at lower levels you've seen, but when you raise the bitrate up to where a 1:30:00 movie will just fit on a CD-R, it's very nearly indistinguishable from DVD video. This goes double for animation. Many of the anime fansubs that show up on IRC and Usenet are encoded in such a way that a 200mb file is more than high enough quality to tape and share with your friends.
Uhm... that's pretty stupid. It's like banning medical doctors from studying real viruses and bacteria.
If you don't know how your enemies weapons work, how can you possibly defend against them?
I, for one, hope that they *Do* institute this restriction... and then squirm and cry as they realize that they've closed themselves off to a huge section of tech development.
Slashdot Mirror
Speed Of Light Broken With Off Shelf Components
Careful here, guys. Breaking the speed of light would be a truly wondrous, nobel-prize winning acheivment. Building transmission eqipment which boosts signal speed is really good and worthwhile, but nowhere near as important an advanced as superluminal transmission.
Please check your headlines!
Taken fromn t_news/chance_news_11.02.html#item11
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/chance_news/rece
The third example is Robert Millikan. Here we read about the experience of Gerald Holton studying Millikan's notebooks related to his famous oil droplets experiment to measure the charge e on a single electron. He found some variability in his estimate for e in difference sets of observations. Millikan gave a personal quality-of-measurment rating to each of the sets of observations in his original 1910 experiment. He then used these to obtain a weighted average of the values obtained from his sets of observation which gave him the estimate for e of 4.85*10^(-10) electrostatic units. The simple average would have given him 4.70*10^(-10) which would have been closer to the currently accepted value of 4.77*10^(-10). Holton also found that, referring to specific sets of observations, Milliken wrote: "publish this", "beauty", and "error high, will not use."
Milliken guessed or decided beforehand what he wanted the electrostatic constant to be and kept fudging his results until he got the one he wanted.
Who modded the parent as redudant?
MS's security record should be a major concern to anyone who's interested in freedom to use music as they see fit as well as those who are interested in trying to take those freedoms away.
After all, WindowsXP's product activation scheme was blown out of the water before WinXP was ever relased. WindowsXP Service Pack 1 was supposed to put those restrictions back in place, but was defeated almost instantly.
A company that can't put enforcable restrictions on its own stuff is supposed to be trusted by others who want to do the same thing. I for one hope that Microsoft continues to release easily bypassed security measures. They will do more to undermine the goals of DRM than anyone else could ever hope to.
Maybe the name is Morris is so common that the situation that occured in the book is far more realistic that the one you hoped for?
Even if that's the case, it's baaaad writing...
When I was reading it, I kept making the mistake of thinking... okay, this is a plot element. Surely this is going to resolve at the end. Right?
(No, I didn't know about the *real* Morris-Thorne research, but imagine including a character named 'Einstein' in a book about relativity and then *not* having that character be in some way responsible for the plot device.)
By the last fifty pages of the book, it was like watching a train wreck. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn't. I had some vague ray of hope that it would turn out well. Just like aforementioned trainwreck, there's always the hope that the train will right itself before it derails completely. In this case, the train didn't just derail, it slid off the tracks and rolled across the station.
Nah, ASCII art has been around a lot longer than that. In the same thread, they're referencing Nroff, Press, and Tex formatted images of ET and Yoda.
One of my father-in-law's favorite war stories was about his stint as a communications officer at a U.S. base in South Korea during the Veitnam war. At one point a good buddy in the U.S. sent him and his fellows a fairly high resolution black and white version of Playboy's Miss October 71... via teletype. The image had to be stapled together from multiple teletype sheets (4 feet wide and 6 feet long, I think he said) and viewed from several feet away before the print characters were recognizable as a female figure.
The most convincing portrayal of the ultimate in virtual reality with the "holodeck"
About the same time TNG started taking off, Marvel Comics X-Men's Danger Room was approaching the same levels of fictional self-realism. Due to alien technology obtained by Professor Xavier, the Danger Room became more of an immersive virtual-reality world, like the holodeck. Did the two develop independantly? Did they influence eachother. I bet neither Marvel nor Paramount will say. An interesting difference between the two is that, while the Danger Room was often a crucial setting, it was almost never the antagonist of the story like the holodeck was in so many Trek episodes.
Hmmm... CleverNickName would probably be one of the best sources to confirm this.
I would guess that most actors, after spending time on a sci-fi show, would develop a feel for the particular pseudo-science the story depended on.
I understand that after a while, at least according to interviews (CleverNickName may also have something to say about this) producers had to 'shush' the actors every time they came on stage or fired a weapon because they would make the 'whoosh' noises for the various fictional apparatus they were dealing with.
Hmm....
Picard: Bang! I shot you!
Borg: No you didn't!
Picard: Did to!
Borg: Bang! I shot you back!
I read an article about TNG production a little while back. Rather than coming up with a exotic particle/lifeform/radition of the week to save the day, TNG scriptwriters would often just write in a placeholder to be replaced with a tech-adviser's technobabble at a later date.
Scripts would look as so:
GEORDI: Let's [technobabble] the main thrusters so that we can [technobabble] the Borg.
Etc...
I rather like the 'Pinball' skin. If you're dissatisfied with Moz's appearance, I reccomend downloading it here:
http://themes.mozdev.org/skins/pinball.html
That said, Moz can be quite the memory hog, especially on graphically intense pages. One of the big mistakes I see that can aggrivate this is the practice of tiling single-pixel graphics over a huge area. I'm not familiar with the gecko code, but I'm guessing that rather than rendering the tiled image once and keeping a handle for the resulting bitmap, Moz renders the image over and over again as it tiles and keeps a handle for each tile.
PHPBB sites are particularly bad about this, since the 'Sub Silver' theme uses several images that are about 5 pixels wide x 30 pixels tall. 150 pixels total. If you have to cover an area that is 1000 pixels wide, you need 200 repetitions of that 5 pixel wide image. If you repeat that area 25 times, and keep seperate instances of the image for each tile, you end up keeping the image in memory 5000 times.
Anyone more familiar with Gecko willing to comment on the actual mechanism of how it handles tiled images like this?
In all other ways, Moz has completely replaced all other browsers for me. I always laugh at friends and coworkers who send me a link, but then tell me to be careful because it comes with several popup-ads.
I have to wonder what the rationale behind including a download manager with no scheduling or restart functionality is.
Oh well. I assume that this will come along eventually, just like everything else. The team has fixed both the bugs I submitted for 1.1a (table layout problems), so I will assume that they will eventually get around to this kind of functionality.
IANAA, but a professor once told me that a body that orbits another non-stellar body is a moon while a body that orbits a star is a planet or an astroid (astro- from star) depending on its size and regularity of its orbit.
Thus, the Pluto-Charon system is probably much more accurately labeled as either a pair of asteroids due to size considerations, or a dual-planetary system because their orbits are highly regular, albeit at a significant pitch compared to the other 8 planetary systems.
I've also heard that the Earth/Luna system should be considered a dual-planetary system because Luna has a much higher percentage of it's parent planet's mass than other moons... This jives with the 'Planetary Collision' theory of moon formataion, in which the moon is actualy a significant chunk of Earth, torn off early during our planet's formation.
The 'second moon', Cruithne, fits in with a large category of non-moon, non-planetary, non-asteroid bodies in the solar system. If you ever study the 'Trojans', you know that there are huge bodies of apparent moonlets that sit on a sixty-degree angle from Jupiter's, directly along Jupiter's orbit from the sun. (They are apparently held in such a strange place by the gravity of Jupiter vs. the gravity of Sol.) Rather than calling Cruithne a moon, we're probably better off adding a new 'common' cetegory to our solar classification to include it and the Trojans. AFAIC, there's no reason not to call these all Trojans and be done with it.
Yeah, mod me down for bashing apple, bitches...
This is a serious mistake. You don't gain market share by eliminating applications or users. Microsoft tried this, (By trying to leverage NT4 for the desktop) and watched it backfire horribly. Apple even watched it happen once before, when they switched from 68k architecture, to PowerPC. They ended up having to include an interperater/emulator for 68k apps in later versions of Mac0S.
Yeah, most users should stay up and keep the latest and greatest of apps, compiled directly for your platform. The *rest* of the world knows that this just doesn't happen. Not all of the apps we love or *have* to use are open source or will run properly on more than one OS. If you don't beleive me, just look at all the DOS games that didn't work under Windows 2000 that were 'fixed' under WinXP. I know people who dual-boot solely so they can play Tomb Raider 1.
If Apple does not include functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, then it will hurt them.
Amen.
Since I got my cable modem, I've been routinely going through about 50 CDR's every month or two -- These are mostly anime fansubs downloaded from alt.binaries.anime and alt.binaries.multimedia anime, each of which can range from 90mb to 400mb (on the high-end). Some of the fansubs you can find are higher quality than anything that's currently being offered on VHS or DVD.
I would be willing to bet that is quite a bit more than the average Egyptian can afford. I dunno, I might be wrong. Still, for rudimentary text-only web, email, and Usenet usage, say 1 hour/day it would be quite adequate.
When I try to access Microsoft's only *obvious* updating feature, I get this message:
Thank you for your interest in Windows Update
Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the most out of your computer.
You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.
Download the latest version of Internet Explorer
Once Internet Explorer is installed, you can go to the Windows Update site by typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com into the address bar of Internet Explorer.
Despite CRT's downsides, there are significant reasons that an individual might prefer or even be required to use a CRT rather than an LCD display.
1. Accurate Color Matching. Sorry, you just can't do this on an LCD. I understand that Plasma is a little better, but you can't beat CRT for color matching.
2. Multi-resolution Display. LCD's have a 'Native' display resolution for which their displays are best suited. Other display resolutions, if you can get them to work, just don't look right.
3. Brightness. LCD will *never* be as bright, nor have the brightness control of CRT. CRTS are also not prone to angle-washout-syndrome like LCD monitors are. CRTS have the same brightness regardless of which direction you're looking at them from.
In many cases... most probably... an LCD display is preferrable to a CRT. In my line of work, as a graphic artist, I'd sooner lop off a pinky than part with my big, beautiful, heavy, radiation-emitting CRT.
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that their phone-bank/support-hotline/etc... is a separate division of the company, responsible for raising its own revenue.
Talk to any accountant. They'll tell you that this is the most efficient way to break down a company to save money. When you break a successful company down where customer service is it's own department, phone services appear as if they are not generating any revenue, and are therefore cut, outsourced, or otherwise done away with, usually to the detriment of the company because their customers need real help, real service, and real support, not an automated answering system that doesn't really help them.
Remember that Adobe is not fighting the DMCA. They are merely trying to bribe^h^h^h^h^hconvince a judge into saying that their actions are not a violation of the DMCA as has been alleged by other companies. This can have a couple possible outcomes. (IANALBTW)
1. Adobe is sucessful in getting a judge to declare they are not violating the DMCA. This has bad and good reprocussions. The DMCA is strengthened by case law, but what Adobe gets off for, everyone else does as well.
2. Adobe is not sucessful in getting a judge to decalre they are not violating the DMCA. This is initially bad, because the DMCA remains as strong as it was and the restrictions it imposes are stengthened by case law. In the long run, however, Adobe, one of the few non-Media oriented companies that has the most to gain from the DMCA is forced to lobby against it and fight it in court, possibly having longer lasting influence.
The lesson we should learn from all this is that if a law requires a trial just to see if it applies to any certain case, it's probably not a good law and won't be applied fairly.
Slashdot reamed this poor site like a drunken virgin on Prom night...
What's worse is this error message I got when I visited:
Fatal error
Type of error Database error: connect(localhost,icrontic,PASSWORD) failed.
Error message MySQL Error: ()
Please report this bug to the webmaster.
Thank you.
Is that a database password 'PASSWORD' I see before me? I think it is! This site's in for a long, long day.
I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Eventually, we're going to be at a point where we deal with electric or bio-fuel whether we like it or not. There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
The hell of it is, if we were to start *now* working on getting all the kinks and problems worked out of things like bio-fuel or solar-panels with the same energy and resources that the auto industry spends on developing new models every year, when the time comes that petroleum is so rare as to inspire strife, war, and conflict, we will be far enough ahead of the curve not to be affected.
While hybrid cars may be a step in the right direction, they're only postponing the inevitable.
Luckily, I rather like bicycling.
Hmm... I use Mozilla's Cookie Manage to completely protect myself from cookies. I let one or two through... the cookie from my company's website, slashdot's login cookie, etc...
In Mozilla -> Tools -> Cookie Manager -> Block Cookies from this site...
...Hillary Rosen or Jack Valenti mention that the mp3 format or P2P file-sharing networks may not be as evil as the dripping semen of Beelzebub. ...Stallman accidentally says 'Linux' in a moment of pique rather than 'Gnu/Linux'. ...The software or media industry creates an truly uncrackable format for copy-protecting the data on CD's ...Taco posts a story to the front page of Slashdot without a single spelling error on his part. ...Natalie Portman does not run screaming from anything that looks remotely like a nerd. ...A new Slashdot reader goes six months without perma-filtering JonKatz.
Remember that even the MPEG2 format that DVD video vobs are stored in is lossy, although at such a high bitrate that, on a good DVD, it's close to impossible to tell.
DivX and other Mpeg4 codecs may be unbearably noisy at lower levels you've seen, but when you raise the bitrate up to where a 1:30:00 movie will just fit on a CD-R, it's very nearly indistinguishable from DVD video. This goes double for animation. Many of the anime fansubs that show up on IRC and Usenet are encoded in such a way that a 200mb file is more than high enough quality to tape and share with your friends.
Uhm... that's pretty stupid. It's like banning medical doctors from studying real viruses and bacteria.
If you don't know how your enemies weapons work, how can you possibly defend against them?
I, for one, hope that they *Do* institute this restriction... and then squirm and cry as they realize that they've closed themselves off to a huge section of tech development.