the privacy in the cyberpunk world is completely in the hands of the individual. Basically, if you care enough about anonymity and have sufficient skills, you will make yourself anonymous.
Privacy and anonymity are two different things. You can have both, neither, or either without the other.
Your medical records are not anonymous, but they are private.
A/. posting by an AC is anonymous, but not private. In this case, the lack of privacy is voluntary (and desired).
Spam-mail is one example of your privacy being invaded by someone who doesn't know (and doesn't even care) who you are.
Your personal privacy can even be violated publically by someone else while retaining your anonymity intact. An example of this is the growing trade in hidden-camera and upskirt videos. See, for example, this article in Salon Magazine.
Relying on anonymity is a poor second-best to having your privacy respected.
The only ones who will win by this conversion to digital TV in the us is the major Japanese TV equipment manufacturers...
There are other winners in the DTV conversion.
The broadcast stations win because they only have to use 20% of their bandwidth for "free TV". They'll be able to sell the other 80% as subscription TV or non-TV services such as datacasting.
The networks win because they think they are the ones who're going to get to use all of that extra bandwidth. Most of the networks are looking at transmitting multiple program channels (e.g. ABC + Disney + ESPN + ESPN-2) in a single broadcast channel. CBS had only one channel and was the big pusher for High Definition TV, but since they recently were bought out by Viacom I'm expecting a change in that attitude.
The government wins because they've already booked the projected income from selling off the TV channels that will be vacated when current NTSC stations shut down. Unfortunately for them, they booked it for the year 2006 and nobody really believes that it's going to happen by then.
The film industry, represented by the MPAA, are tickled pink that they can make their movies unrecordable. The 5C (DTCP) copy-protection standard even has the ability for the MPAA to send a "death penalty" to any box that they suspect of being used for "piracy".
Lots of winners, each expecting to make big bucks. I wonder whose pocket those bucks are coming from?
Generally pretty good scoop. However, the Wired article got way too freaked out about the non-issue of interlacing. Also, from the comment above:
Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")!
This is pretty much a non-issue as well. The ATSC Table 3 standard basically calls for 5 different resolution/aspect ratio combinations:
1920x1080 @ 16:9 (HDTV)
1280x720 @ 16:9 (HDTV)
704x480 @ 16:9 (wide-screen Standard Definition)
704x480 @ 4:3 (Standard Definition)
640x480 @ 4:3 (VGA compatible)
My SVGA graphics adapter and monitor have to deal with that many settings. Ain't no strain.
The other variation is the frame rate. This is not a receiver issue. The receiver has no need to know the frame rate. It simply receives the data and jams it in the frame buffer.
It's the MPEG encoder which cares, because it must dynamically adjust the precision of the data stream to keep the average frame rate of the encoded data stream exactly equal to the frame rate of the source (24 fps for film, 30 fps for video, etc.).
Although both the MPEG encoder and the receiver need to be aware if the data are being presented in interlaced scan lines, interlacing of the data is unrelated to whether the display is interlaced.
Looking over the comments here, I guess most Slashdotters figure that if you aren't coding Open Source projects, you aren't a programmer.
A clue, folks. This was a poll, which means that it measures quantity.
Corporate America employs programmers in truly astounding quantities. These folks are known in the trade as Applications Programmers. They crank out huge amounts of code following the formal specifications provided by the company's Applications Analysts.
These days, the language of choice for Applications programming is VB. It used to be COBOL. (Anyone remember COBOL?)
Applications Programmers are, by and large, a breed apart from Slashdotters. That doesn't mean that they don't exist.
The use of the logistic model is widely established in many fields of modeling and forecasting. It has a controversial history in population ecology, a point to which we return near the end of this article. One of a family of density-dependent functions, the logistic law of growth assumes simply that systems grow exponentially under the constraints of an upper limit producing a typical S-shaped curve.
The reason why the logistics work well with most animal populations is that the niches that encase the populations are of constant size. When the animals can invent new technologies, such as when bacteria produce a new enzyme to dismantle a sleepy component of their broth, then we face a problem. New logistics suddenly pop up, either growing from the limit of the prior one or, if the invention came early, in the course of the first logistic.
An added (non-trivial) point about companies wanting someone that they can blame...
It also gives them someone they can sue.
One might think that companies are in the business of [whatever the company ostensibly does]. In fact, as Otto said, companies are in the business of making money. If a problem with a supplier's product interferes with their ability to make money doing whatever it is they do, they gladly will substitute compensation obtained from the supplier.
(Although, as Otto noted, they'd rather not have to wait.)
In the USofA: The "official" term "HDTV" (High-Definition, as opposed to the more generic Digital TV) covers four cases:
1280x720 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
1280x720 @ 60 frames/second non-interlaced
1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
1920x1080 @ 60 fields/second interlaced 2:1 to 30 frames/second
Only one of the four, the one generally referred to as "1080i", is interlaced. When transmitting 24 fps material (movies and other film-based content), no interlacing is used at any resolution.
The sad fact is there will still be competing broadcast standards which make the NTSC/PAL/SECAM fight seem silly.
Actually, the American DTV technical standards are pretty well settled in at this point. The only half-way outstanding question is which copy-protection scheme will be used for the box-to-box connection (cable to TV, etc), and at this point 5C seems to have it sewn up. Thomson and Zenith seem to have lost their battle to keep home video recorders a viable product.
Many questions remain, however, in the non-technical areas. A huge battle lies ahead in determining who's going to make all the money from the "extra" bandwidth that the stations have. The stations would like to sell it themselves, but the networks have other plans.
In that vein, CBS had been the big champion of using the extra bandwidth for HDTV, since they had only the one program stream. With the recent sale to Viacom, they might well change their tune to preferring non-HDTV multicasting of all of Viacom's programming.
The other battle is between the broadcasters and the cable operators. The cable operators see DTV as added competition and don't see how DTV makes them any money, so they're not enthusiastic about it.
The company today announced it was forming a 'patent pool' with key FireWire licensees Compaq, Sony, Matsushita/Panasonic, Philips and Toshiba. Together, the six companies will develop and implement a collective licensing programme.
In effect, the move takes Apple's FireWire intellectual property and shares it out among the six companies...
I realize that Slashdotters are computer-centric, but try to remember that FireWire's current focus is on Digital TV. The American standard interconnection for digital video (between cable boxes or digital camcorders and DTV sets, for example) is OpenCable HDNI, which uses FireWire as the hardware layer. With the US being forced over to DTV over the next decade, that adds up to a lot of FireWire ports.
The $1 per port fee was never going to fly with the home electronics market, which is objecting strenuously to a "mere" 5 cent (US) per device fee for licensing the 5C copy protection system which is also part of OpenCable HDNI.
I'm not clear on how Rambus is supposed to be "the next step in the chip-set food chain".
Intel has (IIRC) said that Rambus won't be used on Celerons, won't be used on 100-MHz FSB P-III's, won't be used on Xeons, won't be used on Itania (no I won't say Itaniums), and won't be used on systems with more than two CPUs.
So here we have a memory technology which is limited to 1- and 2-processor 133-MHzFSB Pentium III's. Those systems don't need Rambus, since they can work with PC-133.
Rambus claims to be faster than PC-133, but over and over again the benchmarks refuse to confirm that.
I've seen Eifel and it's a nice programing language. Well I've never written code for it because it's proprietery and it isn't cheap.
For a GPL'ed Eiffel implementation, go here. Precompiled versions are available for Windows, Mac (PowerMac & 68K), HP-UX, Amiga, OpenStep, and oh yes, Linux (RPM and glibc2).
While much of the blame for crummy software can be placed on management priorities, there is plenty of blame to go around. Programmers bear responsibility on at least two counts:
First, for not having the guts to say "no". But it does seem rather pointless giving up one's job, knowing that there's always some fresh-faced kid straight out of college who'll agree to do whatever the boss says.
Something that we can control, though, is that we programmers (in general) hate doing quality-oriented stuff. Analysis, design, documentation, coding with clear (long) routine names and variable names, putting in all of the right error checks, etc. The important thing to us is minimal keystrokes and maximal cool. Perl poetry and C++ hackery are exalted, while quality-oriented languages like Eiffel are snubbed because they're not kewl to code in.
My credentials: I ain't a Health Physicist, and I ain't a Nuclear Engineer, but I did work for five years at a U.S. liquid-process nuclear fuel fabrication facility. #1: This is an industrial accident, not a public health issue. Something went wrong and some workers were injured. Unfortunately, it appears that at least a couple of them will not survive. The plant will have a giant mess to clean up, and probably will be shut down for months. Hazard to the populace consists entirely of the effects of panic reactions by unknowledgable officials, by the fourth estate, and by the public themselves. #2: I can almost guarantee that there isn't one "cause". As with airline accidents, these things happen because a combination of many separate mistakes, omissions, oversights, equipment failures, etc., all come together at once. Presuming that the Japanese nuclear regulatory people are as thorough as our NRC, it will take them quite a while to ferret out all of the causes, and then it will be a big effort for the plant to have to correct all of them. My heart goes out to those injured in the accident.
The appeals court agreed with Microsoft that this is a contract dispute. Consequently, the damages, if any, are strictly monetary.
The questions then become: will Sun be driven out of business before the settlement is issued (seems pretty unlikely), or would Microsoft find itself unable to pay the amount of the judgment (ROFL!).
So, the appellate court judge is simply saying that both parties can wait until the final determination, and then Microsoft probably will have to pay some chunk of money to Sun.
For those who would like to find out how trademarks really work, may I suggest dropping by nolo.com.
If y'all take the time, you'll learn that trademarks don't need to be registered, and in fact cannot be registered until they've been in use and established. Actually, only a fraction of trademarks are registered. An ordinary, unregistered trademark is indicated by the little "TM" symbol, while a registered trademark is indicated by the "R in a circle".
There has been a huge boom in the demand for additional phone lines. In addition to the frenzy of area-code splitting, there's the problem that our cities weren't wired with that many copper pairs.
A common solution is (as EvilGoat noted in a response to a prior comment in this thread) putting in Digital Line Concentrators (aka PairGain and other trademarks). Unfortunately, modems don't work well over a DLC... I usually get 26.4 over mine, and V.90 is out of the question.
Ironically, those extra phone lines usually were ordered specifically to be used with a modem.
DSL also doesn't work well over DLC (more irony: one of the big DSL equipment manufacturers is PairGain, which also is a big name in DLC).
The problem with DSL over DLC, as I understand it, is not technical... it's that there's no room inside the DLC huts to stick the DSL electronics.
I'd love to see their business plans. I imagine that like most start-ups they're planning to lose money for a few years. But just about the time they expect to turn the corner, Digital TV is going to begin slowly grinding them into the mud.
As Tivo notes:
[IEEE-1394 (FireWire)] is an evolving standard for storage and connectivity expansion...
The part that is still in flux is what the "content protection" system for digital television will be. Whatever it turns out to be, it's a safe bet that recording DTV signals, whether off the air, off of cable, or off of DVD, will be out of the question. You'll have to use a DTV-to-NTSC converter and then record the analog signal.
Analog TV has a few more years left in it, but does it have enough for these companies to turn a profit?
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy and anonymity are two different things. You can have both, neither, or either without the other.
Your medical records are not anonymous, but they are private.
A /. posting by an AC is anonymous, but not private. In this case, the lack of privacy is voluntary (and desired).
Spam-mail is one example of your privacy being invaded by someone who doesn't know (and doesn't even care) who you are.
Your personal privacy can even be violated publically by someone else while retaining your anonymity intact. An example of this is the growing trade in hidden-camera and upskirt videos. See, for example, this article in Salon Magazine.
Relying on anonymity is a poor second-best to having your privacy respected.
There are other winners in the DTV conversion.
The broadcast stations win because they only have to use 20% of their bandwidth for "free TV". They'll be able to sell the other 80% as subscription TV or non-TV services such as datacasting.
The networks win because they think they are the ones who're going to get to use all of that extra bandwidth. Most of the networks are looking at transmitting multiple program channels (e.g. ABC + Disney + ESPN + ESPN-2) in a single broadcast channel. CBS had only one channel and was the big pusher for High Definition TV, but since they recently were bought out by Viacom I'm expecting a change in that attitude.
The government wins because they've already booked the projected income from selling off the TV channels that will be vacated when current NTSC stations shut down. Unfortunately for them, they booked it for the year 2006 and nobody really believes that it's going to happen by then.
The film industry, represented by the MPAA, are tickled pink that they can make their movies unrecordable. The 5C (DTCP) copy-protection standard even has the ability for the MPAA to send a "death penalty" to any box that they suspect of being used for "piracy".
Lots of winners, each expecting to make big bucks. I wonder whose pocket those bucks are coming from?
Generally pretty good scoop. However, the Wired article got way too freaked out about the non-issue of interlacing. Also, from the comment above:
This is pretty much a non-issue as well. The ATSC Table 3 standard basically calls for 5 different resolution/aspect ratio combinations:
- 1920x1080 @ 16:9 (HDTV)
- 1280x720 @ 16:9 (HDTV)
- 704x480 @ 16:9 (wide-screen Standard Definition)
- 704x480 @ 4:3 (Standard Definition)
- 640x480 @ 4:3 (VGA compatible)
My SVGA graphics adapter and monitor have to deal with that many settings. Ain't no strain.The other variation is the frame rate. This is not a receiver issue. The receiver has no need to know the frame rate. It simply receives the data and jams it in the frame buffer.
It's the MPEG encoder which cares, because it must dynamically adjust the precision of the data stream to keep the average frame rate of the encoded data stream exactly equal to the frame rate of the source (24 fps for film, 30 fps for video, etc.).
Although both the MPEG encoder and the receiver need to be aware if the data are being presented in interlaced scan lines, interlacing of the data is unrelated to whether the display is interlaced.
A nice link: Digital Television: The Site(tm) (digitaltelevision.com).
A clue, folks. This was a poll, which means that it measures quantity.
Corporate America employs programmers in truly astounding quantities. These folks are known in the trade as Applications Programmers. They crank out huge amounts of code following the formal specifications provided by the company's Applications Analysts.
These days, the language of choice for Applications programming is VB. It used to be COBOL. (Anyone remember COBOL?)
Applications Programmers are, by and large, a breed apart from Slashdotters. That doesn't mean that they don't exist.
An exponential function? Not hardly.
It's closer to a logistic function, although even that doesn't fit well.
For a real look at forecasting of human populations, check out "Human Population Dynamics Revisited with the Logistic Model: How Much Can Be Modeled and Predicted?"
A couple of extracts:
It also gives them someone they can sue.
One might think that companies are in the business of [whatever the company ostensibly does]. In fact, as Otto said, companies are in the business of making money. If a problem with a supplier's product interferes with their ability to make money doing whatever it is they do, they gladly will substitute compensation obtained from the supplier.
(Although, as Otto noted, they'd rather not have to wait.)
Imagine trying to play Unreal if your computer monitor refresh was sync'ed up to the frame rate. Yuck!
Not that anyone really cares...
In the USofA: The "official" term "HDTV" (High-Definition, as opposed to the more generic Digital TV) covers four cases:
- 1280x720 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
- 1280x720 @ 60 frames/second non-interlaced
- 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
- 1920x1080 @ 60 fields/second interlaced 2:1 to 30 frames/second
Only one of the four, the one generally referred to as "1080i", is interlaced. When transmitting 24 fps material (movies and other film-based content), no interlacing is used at any resolution.Actually, the American DTV technical standards are pretty well settled in at this point. The only half-way outstanding question is which copy-protection scheme will be used for the box-to-box connection (cable to TV, etc), and at this point 5C seems to have it sewn up. Thomson and Zenith seem to have lost their battle to keep home video recorders a viable product.
A six-month-old overview of the standards situation can be found online at Communications Engineering & Design magazine.
Many questions remain, however, in the non-technical areas. A huge battle lies ahead in determining who's going to make all the money from the "extra" bandwidth that the stations have. The stations would like to sell it themselves, but the networks have other plans.
In that vein, CBS had been the big champion of using the extra bandwidth for HDTV, since they had only the one program stream. With the recent sale to Viacom, they might well change their tune to preferring non-HDTV multicasting of all of Viacom's programming.
The other battle is between the broadcasters and the cable operators. The cable operators see DTV as added competition and don't see how DTV makes them any money, so they're not enthusiastic about it.
The answer is "depends on who you are". See "Apple caves in over FireWire licensing" in The Register.
I realize that Slashdotters are computer-centric, but try to remember that FireWire's current focus is on Digital TV. The American standard interconnection for digital video (between cable boxes or digital camcorders and DTV sets, for example) is OpenCable HDNI, which uses FireWire as the hardware layer. With the US being forced over to DTV over the next decade, that adds up to a lot of FireWire ports.
The $1 per port fee was never going to fly with the home electronics market, which is objecting strenuously to a "mere" 5 cent (US) per device fee for licensing the 5C copy protection system which is also part of OpenCable HDNI.
Intel has (IIRC) said that Rambus won't be used on Celerons, won't be used on 100-MHz FSB P-III's, won't be used on Xeons, won't be used on Itania (no I won't say Itaniums), and won't be used on systems with more than two CPUs.
So here we have a memory technology which is limited to 1- and 2-processor 133-MHzFSB Pentium III's. Those systems don't need Rambus, since they can work with PC-133.
Rambus claims to be faster than PC-133, but over and over again the benchmarks refuse to confirm that.
Where's the future in Rambus?
For a GPL'ed Eiffel implementation, go here. Precompiled versions are available for Windows, Mac (PowerMac & 68K), HP-UX, Amiga, OpenStep, and oh yes, Linux (RPM and glibc2).
First, for not having the guts to say "no". But it does seem rather pointless giving up one's job, knowing that there's always some fresh-faced kid straight out of college who'll agree to do whatever the boss says.
Something that we can control, though, is that we programmers (in general) hate doing quality-oriented stuff. Analysis, design, documentation, coding with clear (long) routine names and variable names, putting in all of the right error checks, etc. The important thing to us is minimal keystrokes and maximal cool. Perl poetry and C++ hackery are exalted, while quality-oriented languages like Eiffel are snubbed because they're not kewl to code in.
Perhaps we should clean our own houses first?
My credentials: I ain't a Health Physicist, and I ain't a Nuclear Engineer, but I did work for five years at a U.S. liquid-process nuclear fuel fabrication facility. #1: This is an industrial accident, not a public health issue. Something went wrong and some workers were injured. Unfortunately, it appears that at least a couple of them will not survive. The plant will have a giant mess to clean up, and probably will be shut down for months. Hazard to the populace consists entirely of the effects of panic reactions by unknowledgable officials, by the fourth estate, and by the public themselves. #2: I can almost guarantee that there isn't one "cause". As with airline accidents, these things happen because a combination of many separate mistakes, omissions, oversights, equipment failures, etc., all come together at once. Presuming that the Japanese nuclear regulatory people are as thorough as our NRC, it will take them quite a while to ferret out all of the causes, and then it will be a big effort for the plant to have to correct all of them. My heart goes out to those injured in the accident.
There won't be much to consider unless XCA manages to topple 5C.
The appeals court agreed with Microsoft that this is a contract dispute. Consequently, the damages, if any, are strictly monetary.
The questions then become: will Sun be driven out of business before the settlement is issued (seems pretty unlikely), or would Microsoft find itself unable to pay the amount of the judgment (ROFL!).
So, the appellate court judge is simply saying that both parties can wait until the final determination, and then Microsoft probably will have to pay some chunk of money to Sun.
If y'all take the time, you'll learn that trademarks don't need to be registered, and in fact cannot be registered until they've been in use and established. Actually, only a fraction of trademarks are registered. An ordinary, unregistered trademark is indicated by the little "TM" symbol, while a registered trademark is indicated by the "R in a circle".
IANAL, thank Heavens.
A common solution is (as EvilGoat noted in a response to a prior comment in this thread) putting in Digital Line Concentrators (aka PairGain and other trademarks). Unfortunately, modems don't work well over a DLC... I usually get 26.4 over mine, and V.90 is out of the question.
Ironically, those extra phone lines usually were ordered specifically to be used with a modem.
DSL also doesn't work well over DLC (more irony: one of the big DSL equipment manufacturers is PairGain, which also is a big name in DLC).
The problem with DSL over DLC, as I understand it, is not technical... it's that there's no room inside the DLC huts to stick the DSL electronics.
As Tivo notes:
The part that is still in flux is what the "content protection" system for digital television will be. Whatever it turns out to be, it's a safe bet that recording DTV signals, whether off the air, off of cable, or off of DVD, will be out of the question. You'll have to use a DTV-to-NTSC converter and then record the analog signal.Analog TV has a few more years left in it, but does it have enough for these companies to turn a profit?