For long-form material, the expectation of professional mixers is to keep the anchor element (usually speech, but could be music in an all-music program) at constant loudness. Short-form material is generally analyzed as a whole.
I have wondered why we don't just use massive helium balloons to carry rockets much closer to space
Check out JP Aerospace who have been working on the "Airship to Orbit" concept.
Atmospheric airships using both buoyancy and lift go from ground to 140K feet. There they dock with "Dark Sky Stations" where cargo is transferred to the massive airship-to-orbit craft that can only exist at this altitude and will use buoyancy to rise to 200K feet, then uses electric propulsion to speed up over several days to orbital velocity.
Indeed there is plenty of public television produced with government funds (mostly indirectly through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sometimes directly through federal government agencies or from state governments through state public broadcasters) where the funding is based on limited broadcast by public broadcasters, but other rights (broadcast by private entities, Internet distribution, DVD distribution) is held by the content creator.
Most television productions are a complex mix containing a broad array of elements (recorded and original music, still images, stock footage, animations, archival footage, talent) and the rights for each element can be controlled by different parties. In order to make content accessible after the broadcast rights expire, all the permissions must be renewed.
PBS maintains a warehouse filled with 150,000+ videotapes going back more than 40 years. Rights to these materials are sometimes only partially known, and often the rights owner may not even exist any more.
"Channel switching speed: It keeps getting worse. "
That's because the GOP size keeps rising. With MPEG-2 coding, because the forward and inverse transforms were slightly non-inverses of each other, you could only have an intraframe every 15 pictures or so. Any longer and errors would accumulate.
With H.264, we now can have GOPs of size 128 pictures or more, because the forward and inverse transforms are integer valued math and precise inverses.
So now when you tune to a new channel, you may have to wait for 128 pictures to grab an intraframe to start viewing the video.
"Why do those foreign companies have wage and regulation advantages?"
The wage advantage is a short-term issue to to massive supply of labor at a time China (and to a lesser extent India) opened themselves to the free global market.
Chinese urban factory wages have doubled since 2005. The urban parts of China are nearing the "Lewis turning point", when surplus labor evaporates, pushing up pay, inflation and consumption. This previously happened in South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s with rapid losses of competitiveness of their "sweatshop industries".
Many US companies (such as Coach and Caterpillar) are beginning to move some manufacturing out of China due to rising wages.
Chinese wages will rise, and their workers will have to get access to capital equipment to enable their productivity to rise as well to maintain a balance.
"The government wants to address public concern over the safety of nuclear development," Li Yongjiang, vice president of the China Nuclear Energy Association, said in an interview in Hong Kong, where he is attending an industry conference. "Capacity will fall somewhere between 60 and 70 gigawatts, as some planned projects have to be scaled back or canceled."
Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories.
American factories produce far more today than they did 20 years ago. With less workers, and more automation. The factories are being filled with machines.
I wonder how much of this is due to contamination from the Great Leap Forward. Modern factories are located more central to urban areas, but during the GLF there were inefficient & not well controlled backyard smelters in almost every country village in China.
"They started the interview by informing me that I would be "the oldest person in the group" (I was 39 at the time)."
Too bad you weren't over 40, you could have then said: "Of course I'm sure that won't be held against me due to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act..."
When you are hiring, you never should mention anything regarding age, marriage status, race, veteran status, etc.
"True but with those other loans they not being garanteed by the federal government and not therefore being backed by your fellow citizens tax dollars"
Right, when you take a government-backed or government provided loan, you have been SOCIALIZED and are now the PROPERTY OF THE STATE. That is the theory of the big-government folks.
"The student loan on the other hand is entirely based on your promise to pay. Its unsecured."
It is unsecured in the traditional sense, but most are backed by the government, so the lender has no incentive to make sure you personally can pay back the loan, as long as the government can.
Student loans are not dischargable in bankruptcy because the government doesn't want to pay for everyone's government-backed student loans either.
Today, total compensation (defined as the total costs spent on an employee) is often twice the actual salary of the employee. Compensation includes required elements such as employer part of Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers comp insurance, as well as non-taxable standard benefits such as health insurance and life insurance.
I don't know about Federal government compensation, but here in California, they had a state prison nurse earning three times her regular pay due to massive overtime because it was far cheaper than hiring two more nurses (and putting away for their generous future pensions, etc.)
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "
"What product or service does Goldman Sachs provide?"
Mergers and acquisitions advice, underwriting services, asset management, prime brokerage, putting together private equity deals, underwriting IPOs (they did for Microsoft in 1986 and Yahoo! in 1998) as well as buying assets that people want to buy and selling assets to people who want to buy them (proprietary trading).
Certainly a lot of people wanted to buy high-yield junk mortgage-backed securities from them during the bubble.
But indeed, it appears they may have screwed up a bit themselves (though less than other similar firms), and the non-libertarian Democrat and Republican federal government gave them a $10 billion load directly, and something like $782 billion in Fed loans (Primary Dealer Credit Facility & Term Securities Lending Facility), all of which they have paid back though.
"Well, while they can't FORCE me to purchase their products, they can certainly throw their weight around and "encourage" my congressmen to hold secret meetings with other global leaders to pass unpopular "agreements"
OK, so we agree that corporations have little ability to exert force through market forces, only through crony capitalism/regulatory capture through government power. So cut government power. Vote libertarian.
"something like clear channel controls what percent of radio broadcasts now?"
Oh noes, Clear Channel is making me listen to Randi Rhodes & Rush Limbaugh on AM instead of my satellite radio / podcast. Not.
"I can't go into a grocery store without hearing their music over the speaker, "
Oh noes! You are oppressed! I guess you've never heard of earplugs. You may also want to consider shopping on-line on this new-fangled Interwebzor thing.
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "
"there are only so many seats in a classroom and only so many classrooms on a campus."
I had several great classes in college with a 300:1 student/faculty ratio.
On the other hand, this video class is way better than the electromagnetics class I had in college that had only 30 students, because the professor is excellent.
So why do you have to physically be in a college, when they same thing can be achieved through videoconferencing/video lectures?
We also need to deal with the question about how much college is actual education versus signaling that you can spend four years of your life getting drunk and hooking up while being able to still get A's.
"Could we discuss what works and doesn't work elsewhere?"
The UK has just trebled university fees (to about $14,000/yr). Students can pay the fees with a student loan to be repaid when they are earning more than $33,500.
"For-profit colleges are basically a big scam meant to prey off the poor and the naive, including our nation's veterans. Ron Paul doesn't want to talk about that because that would be acknowledging that the free-market isn't an instant panacea for everything."
It isn't a free market if the government is backing loans (loans that have the special characteristic of not being discharged in bankruptcy - all unsecured loans should have the same policy rather than government picking a winner).
Ron Paul is arguing that instead of government backing bad education bubble loans, that it should be left to the private sector to determine which students and majors are actually likely to repay their loan - to avoid the same thing that happened when the GSEs backed bubble mortgages.
I think one can comprehend that private companies can feed off bad government policy (Solyndra, etc.)
"We need to have a threshold to limit access to student loans for those who have a chance of succeeding."
Indeed, and this determination should be left to the private lending market, and if the private lenders screw up, they should not be bailed out by taxpayer dollars - which, if believably stated, might make them actually careful about who they are loaning to.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds good, but how do you define "volume?" Peak decibels? RMS power of the signal? Average volume?
The CALM Act references ATSC A/85 which uses loudness measurement using the ITU-R BS.1770 recommendation.
For long-form material, the expectation of professional mixers is to keep the anchor element (usually speech, but could be music in an all-music program) at constant loudness. Short-form material is generally analyzed as a whole.
By the way, both the CALM Act (Public Law 111-311) and the FCC Report and Order refer to ATSC A/85 "Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television".
Here is a link to the FCC website for the actual text of the Report and Order regarding implementation of the CALM Act.
I have wondered why we don't just use massive helium balloons to carry rockets much closer to space
Check out JP Aerospace who have been working on the "Airship to Orbit" concept.
Atmospheric airships using both buoyancy and lift go from ground to 140K feet. There they dock with "Dark Sky Stations" where cargo is transferred to the massive airship-to-orbit craft that can only exist at this altitude and will use buoyancy to rise to 200K feet, then uses electric propulsion to speed up over several days to orbital velocity.
Indeed there is plenty of public television produced with government funds (mostly indirectly through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sometimes directly through federal government agencies or from state governments through state public broadcasters) where the funding is based on limited broadcast by public broadcasters, but other rights (broadcast by private entities, Internet distribution, DVD distribution) is held by the content creator.
Most television productions are a complex mix containing a broad array of elements (recorded and original music, still images, stock footage, animations, archival footage, talent) and the rights for each element can be controlled by different parties. In order to make content accessible after the broadcast rights expire, all the permissions must be renewed.
PBS maintains a warehouse filled with 150,000+ videotapes going back more than 40 years. Rights to these materials are sometimes only partially known, and often the rights owner may not even exist any more.
For more info see Intellectual Property and Copyright Issues Relating to the Preservation and Future Accessibility of Digital Public Television Programs.
"Channel switching speed: It keeps getting worse. "
That's because the GOP size keeps rising. With MPEG-2 coding, because the forward and inverse transforms were slightly non-inverses of each other, you could only have an intraframe every 15 pictures or so. Any longer and errors would accumulate.
With H.264, we now can have GOPs of size 128 pictures or more, because the forward and inverse transforms are integer valued math and precise inverses.
So now when you tune to a new channel, you may have to wait for 128 pictures to grab an intraframe to start viewing the video.
"Why do those foreign companies have wage and regulation advantages?"
The wage advantage is a short-term issue to to massive supply of labor at a time China (and to a lesser extent India) opened themselves to the free global market.
Chinese urban factory wages have doubled since 2005. The urban parts of China are nearing the "Lewis turning point", when surplus labor evaporates, pushing up pay, inflation and consumption. This previously happened in South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s with rapid losses of competitiveness of their "sweatshop industries".
Many US companies (such as Coach and Caterpillar) are beginning to move some manufacturing out of China due to rising wages.
Chinese wages will rise, and their workers will have to get access to capital equipment to enable their productivity to rise as well to maintain a balance.
Unfortunately China is backing away from Nuclear:
"The government wants to address public concern over the safety of nuclear development," Li Yongjiang, vice president of the China Nuclear Energy Association, said in an interview in Hong Kong, where he is attending an industry conference. "Capacity will fall somewhere between 60 and 70 gigawatts, as some planned projects have to be scaled back or canceled."
Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories.
American factories produce far more today than they did 20 years ago. With less workers, and more automation. The factories are being filled with machines.
I wonder how much of this is due to contamination from the Great Leap Forward. Modern factories are located more central to urban areas, but during the GLF there were inefficient & not well controlled backyard smelters in almost every country village in China.
"They started the interview by informing me that I would be "the oldest person in the group" (I was 39 at the time)."
Too bad you weren't over 40, you could have then said: "Of course I'm sure that won't be held against me due to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act..."
When you are hiring, you never should mention anything regarding age, marriage status, race, veteran status, etc.
"True but with those other loans they not being garanteed by the federal government and not therefore being backed by your fellow citizens tax dollars"
Right, when you take a government-backed or government provided loan, you have been SOCIALIZED and are now the PROPERTY OF THE STATE. That is the theory of the big-government folks.
"The student loan on the other hand is entirely based on your promise to pay. Its unsecured."
It is unsecured in the traditional sense, but most are backed by the government, so the lender has no incentive to make sure you personally can pay back the loan, as long as the government can.
Student loans are not dischargable in bankruptcy because the government doesn't want to pay for everyone's government-backed student loans either.
Today, total compensation (defined as the total costs spent on an employee) is often twice the actual salary of the employee. Compensation includes required elements such as employer part of Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers comp insurance, as well as non-taxable standard benefits such as health insurance and life insurance.
I don't know about Federal government compensation, but here in California, they had a state prison nurse earning three times her regular pay due to massive overtime because it was far cheaper than hiring two more nurses (and putting away for their generous future pensions, etc.)
Forget Bill Gates, in the words of Steve Jobs:
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "
"Can Monsanto control you into wanting to eat food?"
I'd like to see them stop me from buying organic...
"What product or service does Goldman Sachs provide?"
Mergers and acquisitions advice, underwriting services, asset management, prime brokerage, putting together private equity deals, underwriting IPOs (they did for Microsoft in 1986 and Yahoo! in 1998) as well as buying assets that people want to buy and selling assets to people who want to buy them (proprietary trading).
Certainly a lot of people wanted to buy high-yield junk mortgage-backed securities from them during the bubble.
But indeed, it appears they may have screwed up a bit themselves (though less than other similar firms), and the non-libertarian Democrat and Republican federal government gave them a $10 billion load directly, and something like $782 billion in Fed loans (Primary Dealer Credit Facility & Term Securities Lending Facility), all of which they have paid back though.
"Well, while they can't FORCE me to purchase their products, they can certainly throw their weight around and "encourage" my congressmen to hold secret meetings with other global leaders to pass unpopular "agreements"
OK, so we agree that corporations have little ability to exert force through market forces, only through crony capitalism/regulatory capture through government power. So cut government power. Vote libertarian.
"something like clear channel controls what percent of radio broadcasts now?"
Oh noes, Clear Channel is making me listen to Randi Rhodes & Rush Limbaugh on AM instead of my satellite radio / podcast. Not.
"I can't go into a grocery store without hearing their music over the speaker, "
Oh noes! You are oppressed! I guess you've never heard of earplugs. You may also want to consider shopping on-line on this new-fangled Interwebzor thing.
"Public sector (government employee) Unions are an abomination."
And in the words of Steve Jobs:
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "
"same price for a much needed engineering degree and an unneeded philosophy degree? WTF?"
Actually now some colleges are charging different prices for different degrees.
"there are only so many seats in a classroom and only so many classrooms on a campus."
I had several great classes in college with a 300:1 student/faculty ratio.
On the other hand, this video class is way better than the electromagnetics class I had in college that had only 30 students, because the professor is excellent.
So why do you have to physically be in a college, when they same thing can be achieved through videoconferencing/video lectures?
We also need to deal with the question about how much college is actual education versus signaling that you can spend four years of your life getting drunk and hooking up while being able to still get A's.
"Support for Ron Paul by the young and sometimes geeky has intrigued me for some time. Is it a result of reading Ayn Rand?"
Maybe they are inspired by the austerity plan of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin in the 1990's when Canada reduced federal spending by 20%, fired 23% of public sector workers, slashed defense expenditures 15%, cut certain subsidies by 40-60%, and eliminated some ministries entirely (thus cutting Canadian sovereign debt and regaining an AAA rating on it).
"Could we discuss what works and doesn't work elsewhere?"
The UK has just trebled university fees (to about $14,000/yr). Students can pay the fees with a student loan to be repaid when they are earning more than $33,500.
"For-profit colleges are basically a big scam meant to prey off the poor and the naive, including our nation's veterans. Ron Paul doesn't want to talk about that because that would be acknowledging that the free-market isn't an instant panacea for everything."
It isn't a free market if the government is backing loans (loans that have the special characteristic of not being discharged in bankruptcy - all unsecured loans should have the same policy rather than government picking a winner).
Ron Paul is arguing that instead of government backing bad education bubble loans, that it should be left to the private sector to determine which students and majors are actually likely to repay their loan - to avoid the same thing that happened when the GSEs backed bubble mortgages.
I think one can comprehend that private companies can feed off bad government policy (Solyndra, etc.)
"We need to have a threshold to limit access to student loans for those who have a chance of succeeding."
Indeed, and this determination should be left to the private lending market, and if the private lenders screw up, they should not be bailed out by taxpayer dollars - which, if believably stated, might make them actually careful about who they are loaning to.