Every skin cell has a complete set of human DNA, and yet, when I burn myself I am not comitting murder. An embryo, though, seemlessly transitions into an organ: there is no sudden moment, one side of which it's one thing and one side of which it's another. Yet, a kidney transplant doesn't "split a soul" either. (Right?)
The deliberate ambiguity between human-being and human-cell is a nice spin (er, rhetorical device), though. As far as I'm concerned it's the gestalt that has the sentience (or the soul), and not the zygote or embryo.
Legislation to preserve human-cells would of course be fruitless, so we have to make arbitrary distinctions about which human-cells "count" for such special protection. Unfortunately, there is a recent campaign to redefine what a human-being is (a human-cell?!), and that leads to all the current debate.
If you were sincerely interested you would learn how to use Google or the myriad search engines that exist. You wouldn't just beg, "links?"
The correlation/causality arguments over what families produce 'better' children are tired. Generally, the more committed and loving adults a child has access to the better they turn out (I don't have to link you to substantiate this), because, generally, more adults equals more time and support and unless you are a sociopath you'd agree that children do better with more adult attention and supervision.
If two available parents is sufficient, would you agree that a child is better off with access to two parents and one or more grandparents? How about two parents, one or more grandparents, and one or more aunts and uncles? How about the addition of adult cousins, committed social groups (e.g., churches) and invested mentors (e.g., teachers)?
If more adults are better-- then two daddies is better than no daddies... But...
We haven't outlawed single-parent families (following my argument, the 'worst' arrangement possible), so why would we outlaw families with even more available adults?
Every time I hear "outlaw gay marriage, for the children!", I have to ask the proponent if they also want to outlaw divorce "for the children" (and widowing, bring on the compulsory marriage/adoption). It's the only consistent position. If you take the argument to the extreme, you'd also have to desire birthrate quotas (so there are suitable, legislated ratios of parents to children in all families).
Of course, libertarians (and I thought "conservatives", too) want the fucking governments out of our lives -- and by extension, out of our familes, and by extension, out of our bedrooms and out of our marriages, etc.
Remember when interracial marriages weren't legal. Disclaimer: I have an interracial marriage.
I think he's referring to things like Makalala or Phororhacos, or other African "Terror-birds" (and not modern ostriches:-p). He's wrong though about then "even now" part; I can't think of a single example of a carnivorous, pack-hunting, man-eating, flightless bird in Africa. If you are curious about the concept though, google for "terror birds", "african cryptid" or "cryptid bird" or "cryptozoology predatory bird". By definition though these animals are rare, extinct (google Titanis walleri or Argentavis Magnificens, relatively recent -- epoch-wise -- man-killing birds), misidentified or mythical.
Man-eating/primate-eating birds are not far-fetched (they certainly existed as late as 2 million years ago, the time we're talking about in the article and whatnot). Here's the dueling wikipedia link: Terror birds are scarier than ostriches (link text for search engine fun).
Anyhow, just a drive-by comment with some assumptions as to what was being talked about. Cheers.
Let's check a Dell Inspiron 6000. Base price is 799$, comes with a 1.86GHz pentium M. Bluetooth is a 39$ option. A 7200 RPM drive is a 150$ option. Big total? 990$.
Wait... is that Dell a dual pentium M?
Does it have a built in camera? Backlit keyboard? I'm too lazy to look up Dell's site but the whole assertion just seems false on its face.
I'm not saying that's an argument for the cost of the 17" MacBook, but c'mon. Different feature sets cost different amounts. Pay what you can afford. Pay for what you want. I just don't see where (not necessarily you) people come off with this incessant 'omg, it's just sooo expensive, just buy a Dell'.
Everyone knows that if price is your only concern you shop at Dell. Dell has run just about everyone into the ground competing on price. They've won that battle.
which only bodes well for the next PowerMac ("MacDesktop Pro"? "Mac Pro"?)
I'm hoping for something more classic, like Apple Macintosh. Re-branding the PowerMac as 'pro' would be kind of an affront to everyone that uses their PowerMac at home. Maybe they'll continue the X-obsession and go with "Macintosh X" which we'll all colloqualize as "Mac-Ten".
Is the problem even that Microsoft ever had a software monopoly. I think most of the grief is that Microsoft had (or does it still have) AN OPERATING SYSTEM MONOPOLY. At the very least in the consumer/residential markets and quite possibly still does in the enterprise markets.
I don't think anyone denies that the software market is wide, wide open.
Is Windows Starter Edition sold to Americans? Talk about a red-herring. Charging what the market will bear isn't really an example of non-monopolitic behavior. Pricing is a weapon to destroy (non-free) competition with, e.g., Free MSIE while Netscape wasn't. 'Free' Windows (subsidized by Microsoft Tax) with purchase of new IBM or Compaq...
As for those complaining about the abridgement of their rights and rampant government interference I would ask you, have you or anyone you know observed or experienced serious interference in your life (lives)? I haven't, and I don't know anyone who has.
Sorry I'm not sourcing this... but as I understand it, the Framers thought the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights (particularly the First) were so fundemental and so necessary as to be self-evident. And as such they were not included in the original document. Some of the ratification hold-outs weren't convinced, knowing that men were essentially ignorant and power-hungry and demanded their enumeration.
I think you can google this up either in some of the letters of the Framers or in the documents surrounding the constitutional convention.
I would suggest that if you don't use the BPM field for storing actual BPMs that you sacrifice that field to store ratings. This is what I do, so that even when I copy sections of my library to different Macs I can easily restore my ratings (works well for backing up tracks to DVDs too). The process is pretty painless with smart playlists, just the wait for writing however many thousand ID3s.
Until iTunes has beat detection or a 'tap for BPM' feature I can garauntee that I won't be spending the effort to BPM every track in my library. In the meantime I just store BPM=5 for 5 stars, BPM=4 for 4 stars, etc. Now that it's attached to the file losing the xml that holds the extra metadata (checked or unchecked, rating, location on disk, etc) isn't a big deal.
Maybe this idea could save you some future hassle (restoring ratings from values stored in "BPM" would take you just minutes).
First, I have a tivo, as I implied at the end of my post. You don't have to explain how it works... unless it's for the other folks breathlessly following this discussion.:-D
Tivo is successful, but it's certainly not on-demand. Internet content delivery doesn't mean it will be on-demand; instead, it means viewing will be like Tivo, but with millions of "channels"- effectively, one per program per episode. It will be closer to on-demand than Tivo, because to record one specific episode you don't have to wait until some unspecified date in the future: virtually any content will be ready the day after you request it.
Of course you have to wait for some time in the future to 'get' the episode... but the episode never takes longer to 'get' than it does for it to 'play'. E.g., I can start watching something halfway 'gotten' and know that it will all be there by the time I need it. Any mechanism that 'gets' slower than real-time doesn't have this feature. Four hours to download a 45 minute show, that's crap. Further for the system to even be reasonable you have to spend less than 24 hours downloading the same amount of programming that you would watch in a day (rate limited by either bandwidth or media quality). For elite, holier than everyone geeks who only watch three shows a week (like you and me) this is no big deal. For the TV addicted families of America this is less certain.
Exhibit a) TiVO. The resolution used by TivO leads to a data rate of 1 gigabyte/"hour", or about 380 kbps. Itunes video is 128 kbps, or 1/3rd as big. If 128 were good enough for typical TV viewers, then Tivo would use it, and achieve triple the storage time on the same hardware.
This is kilobytes (an important clarification for below). Tivo uses mpeg2 (cheaper encoding, less efficient, and the 1GB/hour quality is "Basic quality" which artifacts badly for anything other than talking head shows; Tivo uses excessively more for "High" and "Best" -- the default -- quality). Itunes uses mpeg4/H.264 (and at ~0.25GB/hour looks superior on the same TV, to me anyhow, anecdotal I know; maybe there's some rigorous proof that h.264 looks better than mpeg2). Aside: I have analog cable, so I Tivo sci-fi shows in "High" or "Best" quality to preserve as much of the fast moving action, and to avoid artifacting from camera wobble in BSG. An hour (this includes commercials on disk) of "Best" quality video is some huge amount like 4 GB, meaning that "40-hour" Tivos are really only 10-hour Tivos if you use "Best". I only bring it up because Tivo has already made the quality for space trade-off. If you have a Tivo then I'm sorry for wasting your time with crap you already know (i.e., you wouldn't ever use Basic quality either). To do better, future Tivos will need (much) faster hardware encoders that use more efficient (picture quality to bitrate-wise) codecs.
me: I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.
you: There's no reason for everyone to assume internet video delivery must be on-demand.
I agree. The context of my statement there was again working on my premise that real-time or better throughputs were necessary to keep video devices stocked with content.
Exhibit b) Netflix. Delays of at least 48 hours. Exhibit c) tv torrents. Delays of at least 4 hours, sometimes much more.
Netflix enjoys the extra delays of studio production and mass manufacturing in addition to shipping. In direct reference to canceled shows this is also true if they have not yet been produced for DVD (the majority of all canceled shows). This doesn't undermine your point. I am not disputing it. I only mention this to be more realistic about the time it takes to get a TV show that was aired last night into your Netflix queue and then your doorstep. I already conceded that p2p was a gamble depending on quality.
You're query string gives me no results with the default safe search on...
Now that we both have it turned off... Do a GIS with this query string: "boobies"
Holy shit, Google is a porn search??@! Google is porn-related!!!~ You also get some birds too, damn that double meaning. I guess you could try queries like "porn" (sweet, genitals within the first 8 results!) or "tits" to avoid the pictures of actual boobies.
Either way, I made a distinction. A blog about porn (with thumbnails and links to porn apparently) is surely porn related. However... my words were (not that it matters, nobody reads slashdot): "I don't know that Bomis [that's right, the site, not Bomis Babes, the blog] can be called porn-related any more than the Internet can be called porn-related. Further, Bomis is no more a search engine for porn than ODP is a search engine for porn." (The post I was replying too wasn't referring to Bomis Babes, look at the url the Gp provided.)
Is Open Directory Project "porn-related" or "a search engine for porn"? Well yes, in the same sense that anything that can be used to search or index the web is.
I can't believe I took the time to re-iterate a self-evident post. Cheers.
"The alternative thought is that Bush is asserting a new right of "presidential supremacy". This basically means that the President can do whatever he wants so long as he claims it is pursuit of his "commander in chief" duties. Frankly, this is the more disturbing option. This is the avenue that Hitler took."
This is loosely the "Yoo Docterine" (google it). The short version is something like 'When the country is at war the Commander-in-chief has has carte blanche to do anything he believes will defend the nation."
For this to really work, i.e., cement power and undermine the state, you'd need some unending war. We have always been at war with [Mid] Eastasia! Quoth Bush: "I don't think you can win [the war on terror...] But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." You'd also need to insist, nearly all the time, in every talking point, in front of ever on-message back-drop that "Americans are safer," and "The President is doing everything he can to protect America," etc.
(oh, and Godwin's rule in like 54 minutes, not too shabby).
Q: If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally?
GONZALES: That question was asked earlier. We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.
You really think 320x240 video would do it justice? It's rather sad to see so many people pinning the hopes for internet TV delivery on iTunes video, when the 320x240 rez puts it so far below tvtorrents.net in quality.
Similar genre with a similar palette and cinematography, BSG looks good full screen on an iBook and SD television -- but that aside. I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'. Any bitrate (quality/resolution combination) that is beyond real-time on America's average broadband connection (let's call it crappy DSL 1.5 Mbit) is doomed commercially. Frankly, because it wouldn't be on demand if the bitrate was higher than available bandwidth.
Maybe, just maybe, if a movie download service can offer legal DVD rips at the precise point in time between when everyone's bandwidth is sufficient for realtime downloads and HD-DVD is a price premium they could get some traction. Otherwise, I'm pretty convinced that all of the "I'd buy shows on the internet if it was hi-res" sayers are just that -- without their money where there mouths are. (Once Bluray or HD-DVD become ubiquitous all the "I need hi-res" people -- p2p/traders whatever -- will go back to spending 8 hours on downloading a movie because it's really only about 'free as in beer' to them; remember though that this is the same set that was downloading VCDs via dial-up, not because of VCDs great quality per se, but because of the novelty of selection and the free-ness of delivery; there is a distinction between this group of people and the "I need hi-res so I buy shiny discs".) A similar case can be made for people willing to buy movies on UMD -- there isn't a value advantage (similar price, but UMDs lack the extra content of a DVD), and the resolution is reduced for viewing on the pocket screen. And yet people are doing it, enough so that now Disney is selling on UMD too. Could it be that people will pay for convenience even at the cost of fidelity? (Well obviously, because iTMS has sold like half a billion lossy songs.) Could UMD movie downloads become viable? (I'd say probably, as long as the download was considerably more convenient than locating and infringing it on p2p or driving/shipping it.) I guess it will be a non-issue if residential network bandwidth increases much faster than the fashionable media resolution/bitrate. At that point digital distribution seems like the obvious choice.
Legalities aside, I wouldn't download an hour of programming if it took more than an hour to download it... I'd just Tivo it instead.
I don't know that Bomis can be called porn-related any more than the Internet can be called porn-related. Further, Bomis is no more a search engine for porn than ODP is a search engine for porn.
Bomis.Com is an Internet ring index and portal site. We index web pages into Bomis Rings. We also offer features such as free email, weather, news, and email discussion lists.
Great commentary on the 'Gender Gap in IT' article btw. "Self-fullfilling fallacies" abound in that discussion ("everyone knows girls suck at computers!" Sheesh). Thanks for being a voice of reason. I avoided posting as much as I could because I already argued it 'til I was blue in the face on the 'Depictions of Women in Video Games' article the other day. If you want my take on it, it's in my comment history.
It's worth pointing out that in fact it is only when you have a non-statistical scientific reason for there to be causation that one can begin to say that correlation is more than correlation.
Exactly. We have a non-statistical scientific reason like physics. I think it was mentioned in the post you are responding to. It's hard to perform controlled experiments on the whole earth though, so we can't just put on our goggles, fill up the atmosphere with CO2 and then fly out to space to measure the temperature gradient (then repeat said experiment with varying amounts of CO2 and other gasses to get precise observed data). Because of this fact really smart physicists make models by observing more wieldy experiments. While these can be equations as simple as F=ma, for very complex systems, like the whole Earth, it takes very complex computer programs. I know you know all this, so here's the basics for everyone else (the kids): Increased CO2 in the atmosphere prevents heat from being lost to space. It's kind of like how glass prevents heat from being lost to the outside of a greenhouse. That's where the perky name came from. In general air is a pretty good insulator (that's why double paned windows and styrofoam are full of it). Air is even more transparent than glass (so it let's through even more light)! Light excites atoms blah blah increased kinetic energy gives off heat energy as atoms collide blah blah blah...
Anyhow, light to heat conversion and insulation is pretty basic physics. High school physics in some places. Further, both topics are covered extensively on the Internet.
Oh, my point (sorry for all that rambling!): we know the Earth is warming (we've measured it). We know why (more CO2 means better insulation given a more or less constant source of light). The only debate is how much of that carbon do we put in the atmosphere (anthropogenic forcing) by, for example, the last 200 years of burning enormous amounts of organic material that had previously been buried for tens of millions of years versus some natural process; and whether we should do anything about it.
Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir. I know practically no one is going to read this now that the story is off the main page and the RSS.
If they bundled other fixes / changes, their business customers would get really, really pissed in a major hurry. Microsoft does NOT want to piss these people off, even with the lock they have on the market. Remember that Microsoft's whole sales pitch right now is about "total cost of ownership."
Thanks for that great link to the SpeedScript manual. I never knew you could save in true ascii. Now I'm tempted to hook up my 1541 and resave all my old files in ascii so I can move them off into new media.
There's a company out of Germany (who's name escapes me right now, but Google 'catweasel') that makes a gadget (a custom ISA disk controller) that will let you read 1541 formatted floppies with "mordern" PC-compatible 5.25" drives (iirc, without the constraints that the software solutions like Disk2FDI have like requiring low-density drives or whatnot).
Slashdot Mirror
I wish you'd addressed Max's comment instead:
5 &cid=14631069
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17591
Every skin cell has a complete set of human DNA, and yet, when I burn myself I am not comitting murder. An embryo, though, seemlessly transitions into an organ: there is no sudden moment, one side of which it's one thing and one side of which it's another. Yet, a kidney transplant doesn't "split a soul" either. (Right?)
The deliberate ambiguity between human-being and human-cell is a nice spin (er, rhetorical device), though. As far as I'm concerned it's the gestalt that has the sentience (or the soul), and not the zygote or embryo.
Legislation to preserve human-cells would of course be fruitless, so we have to make arbitrary distinctions about which human-cells "count" for such special protection. Unfortunately, there is a recent campaign to redefine what a human-being is (a human-cell?!), and that leads to all the current debate.
Nah.. If there were no Apple, Microsoft would be copying Sun. (shudder)
:-D
Hilarious!
(But if Microsoft was copying CDE, Windows would still end up looking like OS X...)
If you were sincerely interested you would learn how to use Google or the myriad search engines that exist. You wouldn't just beg, "links?"
The correlation/causality arguments over what families produce 'better' children are tired. Generally, the more committed and loving adults a child has access to the better they turn out (I don't have to link you to substantiate this), because, generally, more adults equals more time and support and unless you are a sociopath you'd agree that children do better with more adult attention and supervision.
If two available parents is sufficient, would you agree that a child is better off with access to two parents and one or more grandparents? How about two parents, one or more grandparents, and one or more aunts and uncles? How about the addition of adult cousins, committed social groups (e.g., churches) and invested mentors (e.g., teachers)?
If more adults are better-- then two daddies is better than no daddies... But...
We haven't outlawed single-parent families (following my argument, the 'worst' arrangement possible), so why would we outlaw families with even more available adults?
Every time I hear "outlaw gay marriage, for the children!", I have to ask the proponent if they also want to outlaw divorce "for the children" (and widowing, bring on the compulsory marriage/adoption). It's the only consistent position. If you take the argument to the extreme, you'd also have to desire birthrate quotas (so there are suitable, legislated ratios of parents to children in all families).
Of course, libertarians (and I thought "conservatives", too) want the fucking governments out of our lives -- and by extension, out of our familes, and by extension, out of our bedrooms and out of our marriages, etc.
Remember when interracial marriages weren't legal. Disclaimer: I have an interracial marriage.
I see a lot more BMWs at the grocery store and preschool than I do slamming down PCH at thrilling speeds.
:-p Nothing personal though. I'm just quipping!
Hahaha, this is because you live in L.A. You think your sample population is typical?!
I think he's referring to things like Makalala or Phororhacos, or other African "Terror-birds" (and not modern ostriches :-p). He's wrong though about then "even now" part; I can't think of a single example of a carnivorous, pack-hunting, man-eating, flightless bird in Africa. If you are curious about the concept though, google for "terror birds", "african cryptid" or "cryptid bird" or "cryptozoology predatory bird". By definition though these animals are rare, extinct (google Titanis walleri or Argentavis Magnificens, relatively recent -- epoch-wise -- man-killing birds), misidentified or mythical.
Man-eating/primate-eating birds are not far-fetched (they certainly existed as late as 2 million years ago, the time we're talking about in the article and whatnot). Here's the dueling wikipedia link: Terror birds are scarier than ostriches (link text for search engine fun).
Anyhow, just a drive-by comment with some assumptions as to what was being talked about. Cheers.
That's why it would be so funny. :)
But while we're trading links, wikipedia is much more enjoyable than 1,000 teenagers describing what Mac-10 means to them by quoting lyrics. Cheers.
(Urbandictionary is 'cool' and all, but for an example of how vapid it can get, look up skeet. Sheesh.)
Uhhh? It's 10GB/month of bandwidth...
That's backup/sync bandwidth. That's different from hosted bandwidth.
Let's check a Dell Inspiron 6000. Base price is 799$, comes with a 1.86GHz pentium M. Bluetooth is a 39$ option. A 7200 RPM drive is a 150$ option. Big total? 990$.
Wait... is that Dell a dual pentium M?
Does it have a built in camera? Backlit keyboard? I'm too lazy to look up Dell's site but the whole assertion just seems false on its face.
I'm not saying that's an argument for the cost of the 17" MacBook, but c'mon. Different feature sets cost different amounts. Pay what you can afford. Pay for what you want. I just don't see where (not necessarily you) people come off with this incessant 'omg, it's just sooo expensive, just buy a Dell'.
Everyone knows that if price is your only concern you shop at Dell. Dell has run just about everyone into the ground competing on price. They've won that battle.
which only bodes well for the next PowerMac ("MacDesktop Pro"? "Mac Pro"?)
I'm hoping for something more classic, like Apple Macintosh. Re-branding the PowerMac as 'pro' would be kind of an affront to everyone that uses their PowerMac at home. Maybe they'll continue the X-obsession and go with "Macintosh X" which we'll all colloqualize as "Mac-Ten".
Is the problem even that Microsoft ever had a software monopoly. I think most of the grief is that Microsoft had (or does it still have) AN OPERATING SYSTEM MONOPOLY. At the very least in the consumer/residential markets and quite possibly still does in the enterprise markets.
I don't think anyone denies that the software market is wide, wide open.
Is Windows Starter Edition sold to Americans? Talk about a red-herring. Charging what the market will bear isn't really an example of non-monopolitic behavior. Pricing is a weapon to destroy (non-free) competition with, e.g., Free MSIE while Netscape wasn't. 'Free' Windows (subsidized by Microsoft Tax) with purchase of new IBM or Compaq...
As for those complaining about the abridgement of their rights and rampant government interference I would ask you, have you or anyone you know observed or experienced serious interference in your life (lives)? I haven't, and I don't know anyone who has.
You must not be brown.
Ha ha, only serious.
Sorry I'm not sourcing this ... but as I understand it, the Framers thought the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights (particularly the First) were so fundemental and so necessary as to be self-evident. And as such they were not included in the original document. Some of the ratification hold-outs weren't convinced, knowing that men were essentially ignorant and power-hungry and demanded their enumeration.
I think you can google this up either in some of the letters of the Framers or in the documents surrounding the constitutional convention.
Just a drive-by comment. Off the cuff...
Respecfully,
I would suggest that if you don't use the BPM field for storing actual BPMs that you sacrifice that field to store ratings. This is what I do, so that even when I copy sections of my library to different Macs I can easily restore my ratings (works well for backing up tracks to DVDs too). The process is pretty painless with smart playlists, just the wait for writing however many thousand ID3s.
Until iTunes has beat detection or a 'tap for BPM' feature I can garauntee that I won't be spending the effort to BPM every track in my library. In the meantime I just store BPM=5 for 5 stars, BPM=4 for 4 stars, etc. Now that it's attached to the file losing the xml that holds the extra metadata (checked or unchecked, rating, location on disk, etc) isn't a big deal.
Maybe this idea could save you some future hassle (restoring ratings from values stored in "BPM" would take you just minutes).
First, I have a tivo, as I implied at the end of my post. You don't have to explain how it works... unless it's for the other folks breathlessly following this discussion.
Tivo is successful, but it's certainly not on-demand. Internet content delivery doesn't mean it will be on-demand; instead, it means viewing will be like Tivo, but with millions of "channels"- effectively, one per program per episode. It will be closer to on-demand than Tivo, because to record one specific episode you don't have to wait until some unspecified date in the future: virtually any content will be ready the day after you request it.
Of course you have to wait for some time in the future to 'get' the episode... but the episode never takes longer to 'get' than it does for it to 'play'. E.g., I can start watching something halfway 'gotten' and know that it will all be there by the time I need it. Any mechanism that 'gets' slower than real-time doesn't have this feature. Four hours to download a 45 minute show, that's crap. Further for the system to even be reasonable you have to spend less than 24 hours downloading the same amount of programming that you would watch in a day (rate limited by either bandwidth or media quality). For elite, holier than everyone geeks who only watch three shows a week (like you and me) this is no big deal. For the TV addicted families of America this is less certain.
Exhibit a) TiVO. The resolution used by TivO leads to a data rate of 1 gigabyte/"hour", or about 380 kbps. Itunes video is 128 kbps, or 1/3rd as big. If 128 were good enough for typical TV viewers, then Tivo would use it, and achieve triple the storage time on the same hardware.
This is kilobytes (an important clarification for below). Tivo uses mpeg2 (cheaper encoding, less efficient, and the 1GB/hour quality is "Basic quality" which artifacts badly for anything other than talking head shows; Tivo uses excessively more for "High" and "Best" -- the default -- quality). Itunes uses mpeg4/H.264 (and at ~0.25GB/hour looks superior on the same TV, to me anyhow, anecdotal I know; maybe there's some rigorous proof that h.264 looks better than mpeg2). Aside: I have analog cable, so I Tivo sci-fi shows in "High" or "Best" quality to preserve as much of the fast moving action, and to avoid artifacting from camera wobble in BSG. An hour (this includes commercials on disk) of "Best" quality video is some huge amount like 4 GB, meaning that "40-hour" Tivos are really only 10-hour Tivos if you use "Best". I only bring it up because Tivo has already made the quality for space trade-off. If you have a Tivo then I'm sorry for wasting your time with crap you already know (i.e., you wouldn't ever use Basic quality either). To do better, future Tivos will need (much) faster hardware encoders that use more efficient (picture quality to bitrate-wise) codecs.
I agree. The context of my statement there was again working on my premise that real-time or better throughputs were necessary to keep video devices stocked with content.
Exhibit b) Netflix. Delays of at least 48 hours.
Exhibit c) tv torrents. Delays of at least 4 hours, sometimes much more.
Netflix enjoys the extra delays of studio production and mass manufacturing in addition to shipping. In direct reference to canceled shows this is also true if they have not yet been produced for DVD (the majority of all canceled shows). This doesn't undermine your point. I am not disputing it. I only mention this to be more realistic about the time it takes to get a TV show that was aired last night into your Netflix queue and then your doorstep. I already conceded that p2p was a gamble depending on quality.
I said, "I thin
You're query string gives me no results with the default safe search on...
... Do a GIS with this query string: "boobies"
Now that we both have it turned off
Holy shit, Google is a porn search??@! Google is porn-related!!!~ You also get some birds too, damn that double meaning. I guess you could try queries like "porn" (sweet, genitals within the first 8 results!) or "tits" to avoid the pictures of actual boobies.
Either way, I made a distinction. A blog about porn (with thumbnails and links to porn apparently) is surely porn related. However... my words were (not that it matters, nobody reads slashdot): "I don't know that Bomis [that's right, the site, not Bomis Babes, the blog] can be called porn-related any more than the Internet can be called porn-related. Further, Bomis is no more a search engine for porn than ODP is a search engine for porn." (The post I was replying too wasn't referring to Bomis Babes, look at the url the Gp provided.)
So again... if you didn't believe me: http://dmoz.org/Adult/Image_Galleries/
Is Open Directory Project "porn-related" or "a search engine for porn"? Well yes, in the same sense that anything that can be used to search or index the web is.
I can't believe I took the time to re-iterate a self-evident post. Cheers.
If anyone is interested:
"The alternative thought is that Bush is asserting a new right of "presidential supremacy". This basically means that the President can do whatever he wants so long as he claims it is pursuit of his "commander in chief" duties. Frankly, this is the more disturbing option. This is the avenue that Hitler took."
This is loosely the "Yoo Docterine" (google it). The short version is something like 'When the country is at war the Commander-in-chief has has carte blanche to do anything he believes will defend the nation."
For this to really work, i.e., cement power and undermine the state, you'd need some unending war. We have always been at war with [Mid] Eastasia! Quoth Bush: "I don't think you can win [the war on terror...] But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." You'd also need to insist, nearly all the time, in every talking point, in front of ever on-message back-drop that "Americans are safer," and "The President is doing everything he can to protect America," etc.
(oh, and Godwin's rule in like 54 minutes, not too shabby).
Q: If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed
0 051219-1.html qtd at Billmon)
something like this legally?
GONZALES: That question was asked earlier. We've had discussions with
members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not
we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was
not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get,
certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and
therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made
that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should
continue moving forward with this program.
-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/2
December 19, 2005
We didn't ask... because we knew you'd say 'no'. Best excuse ever!
Keep it up White House!
You really think 320x240 video would do it justice? It's rather sad to see so many people pinning the hopes for internet TV delivery on iTunes video, when the 320x240 rez puts it so far below tvtorrents.net in quality.
Similar genre with a similar palette and cinematography, BSG looks good full screen on an iBook and SD television -- but that aside. I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'. Any bitrate (quality/resolution combination) that is beyond real-time on America's average broadband connection (let's call it crappy DSL 1.5 Mbit) is doomed commercially. Frankly, because it wouldn't be on demand if the bitrate was higher than available bandwidth.
Maybe, just maybe, if a movie download service can offer legal DVD rips at the precise point in time between when everyone's bandwidth is sufficient for realtime downloads and HD-DVD is a price premium they could get some traction. Otherwise, I'm pretty convinced that all of the "I'd buy shows on the internet if it was hi-res" sayers are just that -- without their money where there mouths are. (Once Bluray or HD-DVD become ubiquitous all the "I need hi-res" people -- p2p/traders whatever -- will go back to spending 8 hours on downloading a movie because it's really only about 'free as in beer' to them; remember though that this is the same set that was downloading VCDs via dial-up, not because of VCDs great quality per se, but because of the novelty of selection and the free-ness of delivery; there is a distinction between this group of people and the "I need hi-res so I buy shiny discs".) A similar case can be made for people willing to buy movies on UMD -- there isn't a value advantage (similar price, but UMDs lack the extra content of a DVD), and the resolution is reduced for viewing on the pocket screen. And yet people are doing it, enough so that now Disney is selling on UMD too. Could it be that people will pay for convenience even at the cost of fidelity? (Well obviously, because iTMS has sold like half a billion lossy songs.) Could UMD movie downloads become viable? (I'd say probably, as long as the download was considerably more convenient than locating and infringing it on p2p or driving/shipping it.) I guess it will be a non-issue if residential network bandwidth increases much faster than the fashionable media resolution/bitrate. At that point digital distribution seems like the obvious choice.
Legalities aside, I wouldn't download an hour of programming if it took more than an hour to download it... I'd just Tivo it instead.
I don't know that Bomis can be called porn-related any more than the Internet can be called porn-related. Further, Bomis is no more a search engine for porn than ODP is a search engine for porn.
http://www.bomis.com/about/bomis_faq.html
What is Bomis.Com?
Bomis.Com is an Internet ring index and portal site. We index web pages into Bomis Rings. We also offer features such as free email, weather, news, and email discussion lists.
Great commentary on the 'Gender Gap in IT' article btw. "Self-fullfilling fallacies" abound in that discussion ("everyone knows girls suck at computers!" Sheesh). Thanks for being a voice of reason. I avoided posting as much as I could because I already argued it 'til I was blue in the face on the 'Depictions of Women in Video Games' article the other day. If you want my take on it, it's in my comment history.
It's worth pointing out that in fact it is only when you have a non-statistical scientific reason for there to be causation that one can begin to say that correlation is more than correlation.
Exactly. We have a non-statistical scientific reason like physics. I think it was mentioned in the post you are responding to. It's hard to perform controlled experiments on the whole earth though, so we can't just put on our goggles, fill up the atmosphere with CO2 and then fly out to space to measure the temperature gradient (then repeat said experiment with varying amounts of CO2 and other gasses to get precise observed data). Because of this fact really smart physicists make models by observing more wieldy experiments. While these can be equations as simple as F=ma, for very complex systems, like the whole Earth, it takes very complex computer programs. I know you know all this, so here's the basics for everyone else (the kids): Increased CO2 in the atmosphere prevents heat from being lost to space. It's kind of like how glass prevents heat from being lost to the outside of a greenhouse. That's where the perky name came from. In general air is a pretty good insulator (that's why double paned windows and styrofoam are full of it). Air is even more transparent than glass (so it let's through even more light)! Light excites atoms blah blah increased kinetic energy gives off heat energy as atoms collide blah blah blah...
Anyhow, light to heat conversion and insulation is pretty basic physics. High school physics in some places. Further, both topics are covered extensively on the Internet.
Oh, my point (sorry for all that rambling!): we know the Earth is warming (we've measured it). We know why (more CO2 means better insulation given a more or less constant source of light). The only debate is how much of that carbon do we put in the atmosphere (anthropogenic forcing) by, for example, the last 200 years of burning enormous amounts of organic material that had previously been buried for tens of millions of years versus some natural process; and whether we should do anything about it.
Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir. I know practically no one is going to read this now that the story is off the main page and the RSS.
Oh crap ... I meant to post that anonymous. Apologies to everyone ;-)
If they bundled other fixes / changes, their business customers would get really, really pissed in a major hurry. Microsoft does NOT want to piss these people off, even with the lock they have on the market. Remember that Microsoft's whole sales pitch right now is about "total cost of ownership."
:-D
I can't believe I'm compelled to say this...
Don't you mean total cost of 0wnership
Thanks for that great link to the SpeedScript manual. I never knew you could save in true ascii. Now I'm tempted to hook up my 1541 and resave all my old files in ascii so I can move them off into new media.
There's a company out of Germany (who's name escapes me right now, but Google 'catweasel') that makes a gadget (a custom ISA disk controller) that will let you read 1541 formatted floppies with "mordern" PC-compatible 5.25" drives (iirc, without the constraints that the software solutions like Disk2FDI have like requiring low-density drives or whatnot).
I had a 1200 bps Volksmodem myself. Haha.
Anyhow, thanks again on that link.
You must admit that black market money is used by terrorists. A good source of untraceable cash is illegal drug sales.
d ing_impact.asp (This is the definition of propaganda.)
Another good source is oil sales.
*ducks*
Anyhow, the state badly wants you to believe that drug money funds terrorism (afterall, President Bush said so!): http://www.theantidrug.com/drugs_terror/understan