"The Administration" may also include cabinet members who are Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General. Who knows how much email these people and their staff get!
So in absolute terms, "loudness", as in a measure of pressure
Hate to burst your bubble, but loudness is "a subjective measure, is often confused with objective measures of sound pressure such as decibels or sound intensity".
The networks don't necessarily boost the volume, but you're correct in the sense that they don't do anything to stop commercial developers from boosting the audio
I can assure you that "networks" have had loudness specifications for commercial material based on Leq(A) or more recently ITU-R BS.1770 for several years.
On the other hand, your local affiliate/member station or your local cable system may or may not be quite as effective at monitoring this. I'm not exactly sure how cable providers can splice in ads into various channels while matching that channel's content loudness, as they tend to splice in the compressed domain.
You don't need a license to operate over a private cable/fiber network. Only if you're using the public spectrum do you need a license to broadcast.
While that is true, cable and satellite systems still come under some the control of the FCC, although generally not for content requirements. It should be noted that H. R. 6209 applied to "any video programming that is broadcast or that is distributed by any multichannel video programming distributor," the latter being shorthand for cable or satellite TV provider.
I think the original idea of "commercials cannot be louder than the program's average volume" is a pretty simple alternative to guidelines written by the industry.
No, the original idea is not simpler because there is no technical definition for "loudness". It is the equivalent of saying "commercials can't be prettier than the program's average prettiness".
The best thing we have for approximating human loudness perception is the ITU-R BS.1170 loudness measure, which actually is a fairly recent development, and has proven to be more accurate than the previously used measure, Leq(A). Plus we need to keep in mind the complexity of the Dolby AC-3 audio system, which is legislatively required for US Digital Television use, which itself has dialogue loudness normalization metadata and several dynamic range limiting elements.
Television sound distribution is very complex. Sound is captured uncompressed, then mixed, encoded in AC-3 for terrestrial DTV distribution or AAC for some satellite distribution, and the DTV distribution may then be re-encoded for local cable or local-into-local satellite TV. The cable systems use transport stream splicers to switch between compressed streams that may have different dialog normalization levels.
The problem is that perceived loudness is not simply sound pressure level, but it is weighted spectrally, and often has temporal qualities (a loud noise in the middle of quiet may be perceived as louder than a continuous high loudness) as well as semantic qualities (a loud gunshot is not perceived as loud as equivalently "loud" talking).
ITU-R BS.1770 is the best non-temporal/non-semantic measure we have for use right now.
In 2008, Hollywood foreign box office was also around $10 billion, with Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony Pictures and Disney collecting more than $1 billion outside the US.
TV is also highly internationalized. A show like "House" that may have 10 million viewers in the US has over 70 million viewers outside the US.
So if anyone tells you "the US doesn't export anything these days", take them to see "Avatar":)
Overly officious US border agents, the "Guantanamo halo effect" (ie. there is no rule of law)and the general unfriendliness at the border have caused me to cease visiting the US.
Heck, I'm form the US, and I hate coming back through our immigration and customs! It tends to be disorganized, the officers are nasty, yelling, questioning disbelievingly.
I just spent over an hour in immigration/customs at LAX coming back from outside the US. Meanwhile, if I land in the Netherlands, they look at my passport for 30 seconds and wave me through!
I have personally seen threats of anti-competitive lawsuits used to limit competition.
Several companies come together to try to set a file standard for interoperation. A vendor to some of these companies threatens an anti-competitive lawsuit, after all they are meeting in a room discussing how to work together. The vendor was trying to maintain lock-in to its proprietary file format for its customers. The standard is stuck in limbo for years until the companies working on the standard can form a corporation with enough legal support to fend off a potential lawsuit.
If you think patents reduce innovation by creating IP mine fields, anti-competitive laws are just like that.
Is there some wicked cool technology that's going to work on my existing (brand new) TV without glasses?
This is under development, but the challenge is that non-glasses based 3D systems need to code a large number of views - you may need to be able to generate 100 views so that everyone in the room can view 3D properly. Rather than code and transmit ~50 views, it is likely that you will have to code and transmit 3D model (think: Quake model) and render the views at the display device.
The different views can be steered in different directions using lenticular arrays, a matrix of small mirrors or other beam steering devices on the display surface, or computer-generated holograms (aka electronically controlled diffraction-grating matrix).
I've seen some 12-view lenticular displays based on a quad-HD resolution 2D LCD panel that begins to be acceptable - but I've also seen a small ~200-view, 360-degree display based on a single spinning mirror that was awesome, but wouldn't scale to a 50" screen.
Already, MPEG-4 AVC encoding (and MPEG-2 before it) predict the current frame from past and future frames, thus only coding the difference in the frames, generally motion.
MPEG-4 Multiview Coding (MVC) allows a right eye frame to be predicted from past, current, and future left eye frames as well.
Unfortunately, there is a big difference between "motion prediction" which generally offsets of just a few pixels between frames that can be well coded as linear block movement, and "stereoscopic disparity prediction", which involves longer offsets and block affine transforms due to parallax. Since MVC only has linear block motion prediction, it turns out that MVC doesn't give as much compression as you may think over just coding left and right eye separately, but MVC is simple and does save some bits, but someday we may see even better stereoscopic compression.
Cable must-carry laws have traditionally respected radio frequency propagation of the over-the-air television station (the "Grade B service contour" for analog, the "noise limited service contour" of for DTV)
It only takes an hour to download a 720p movie if you happen to have access to about 7mb+ broadband.
The question is what you mean by "720p movie". I can tell you that most broadcast engineers would only be happy with 1280x720@60p at 15 Mbps MPEG-2 or 10 Mbps H.264.
At the same time, I have watched movies on the incredibly crappy Netflix instant streaming (must be less than 1 Mbps), and fully enjoyed them as long as I could turn the part of my brain off that does video quality analysis.
This is the kind of thing we should be looking to build instead of asking governments to protect our right to free information.
Indeed, the Internet exists as the incredibly free exchange of political, commercial, technical, and pornographic information because of a lack of government regulation at the inception of the private expansion of the Internet (believe me, I was there, and there were plenty of government censorship threats). The nature of government is to control information.
Face it, you are a nation of consumers with no real manufacturing left. You all demand cheap goods, and if that comes with the price of outsourcing to foreign sweatshops, you accept it by turning a blind eye... if all your manufacturing was done inside the US, none of you could afford to buy anything.
The USA remains by far the largest manufacturer in the world, producing $1.8 trillion in manufactured products in 2006.
If the US refused to import manufactured goods from outside the country, few jobs would be added, since most work would be done by automated machines - they would be cheaper than US human labor.
The Netherlands is my favorite "socialist" country because they actually have very high levels of economic freedom, except for having a lot of monetary redistribution. In many ways (such as government control of schools, drug tolerance, and trade freedom) the Netherlands is more free than the US. Plus their customs people don't yell at me at the airport.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to believe that the former Bush Administration edited 22 million emails.
The Executive Office of the President has about 2000 employees, and the Office of the Vice President has another 200. Over a year period, that is just ~30 per day per person. I wish I only got 30 emails per day at work!
"The Administration" may also include cabinet members who are Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General. Who knows how much email these people and their staff get!
So in absolute terms, "loudness", as in a measure of pressure
Hate to burst your bubble, but loudness is "a subjective measure, is often confused with objective measures of sound pressure such as decibels or sound intensity".
The networks don't necessarily boost the volume, but you're correct in the sense that they don't do anything to stop commercial developers from boosting the audio
I can assure you that "networks" have had loudness specifications for commercial material based on Leq(A) or more recently ITU-R BS.1770 for several years.
On the other hand, your local affiliate/member station or your local cable system may or may not be quite as effective at monitoring this. I'm not exactly sure how cable providers can splice in ads into various channels while matching that channel's content loudness, as they tend to splice in the compressed domain.
You don't need a license to operate over a private cable/fiber network. Only if you're using the public spectrum do you need a license to broadcast.
While that is true, cable and satellite systems still come under some the control of the FCC, although generally not for content requirements. It should be noted that H. R. 6209 applied to "any video programming that is broadcast or that is distributed by any multichannel video programming distributor," the latter being shorthand for cable or satellite TV provider.
I think the original idea of "commercials cannot be louder than the program's average volume" is a pretty simple alternative to guidelines written by the industry.
No, the original idea is not simpler because there is no technical definition for "loudness". It is the equivalent of saying "commercials can't be prettier than the program's average prettiness".
The best thing we have for approximating human loudness perception is the ITU-R BS.1170 loudness measure, which actually is a fairly recent development, and has proven to be more accurate than the previously used measure, Leq(A). Plus we need to keep in mind the complexity of the Dolby AC-3 audio system, which is legislatively required for US Digital Television use, which itself has dialogue loudness normalization metadata and several dynamic range limiting elements.
Television sound distribution is very complex. Sound is captured uncompressed, then mixed, encoded in AC-3 for terrestrial DTV distribution or AAC for some satellite distribution, and the DTV distribution may then be re-encoded for local cable or local-into-local satellite TV. The cable systems use transport stream splicers to switch between compressed streams that may have different dialog normalization levels.
There should be 2 volumes you can set on the TV.
1. Existing TV volume
2. Decibel limit
The problem is that perceived loudness is not simply sound pressure level, but it is weighted spectrally, and often has temporal qualities (a loud noise in the middle of quiet may be perceived as louder than a continuous high loudness) as well as semantic qualities (a loud gunshot is not perceived as loud as equivalently "loud" talking).
ITU-R BS.1770 is the best non-temporal/non-semantic measure we have for use right now.
In 2008, Hollywood foreign box office was also around $10 billion, with Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony Pictures and Disney collecting more than $1 billion outside the US.
TV is also highly internationalized. A show like "House" that may have 10 million viewers in the US has over 70 million viewers outside the US.
So if anyone tells you "the US doesn't export anything these days", take them to see "Avatar" :)
Overly officious US border agents, the "Guantanamo halo effect" (ie. there is no rule of law)and the general unfriendliness at the border have caused me to cease visiting the US.
Heck, I'm form the US, and I hate coming back through our immigration and customs! It tends to be disorganized, the officers are nasty, yelling, questioning disbelievingly.
I just spent over an hour in immigration/customs at LAX coming back from outside the US. Meanwhile, if I land in the Netherlands, they look at my passport for 30 seconds and wave me through!
I have personally seen threats of anti-competitive lawsuits used to limit competition.
Several companies come together to try to set a file standard for interoperation. A vendor to some of these companies threatens an anti-competitive lawsuit, after all they are meeting in a room discussing how to work together. The vendor was trying to maintain lock-in to its proprietary file format for its customers. The standard is stuck in limbo for years until the companies working on the standard can form a corporation with enough legal support to fend off a potential lawsuit.
If you think patents reduce innovation by creating IP mine fields, anti-competitive laws are just like that.
The better way to handle this is to drop the stupid ineffective fines and threaten that their products wont be allowed to sell in the USA.
Or maybe another company should have started up and underpriced them.
That way he can get his spine fixed and I can get my $7.50 back.
Not so fast, in the future, government controls medicine...
(the future is about 2 years away)
How do these shutter glasses synchronize with the video playback?
An infrared emitter attaches to the display device, and the glasses sync to the IR signal.
If you allow the manufacturers to pervert stereo views into "3D", what will you call actual 3D when it becomes available?
The "SMPTE Task Force on 3D to the Home" suggested the term "non-glasses-based 3D displays (NG3D)".
Holovizio is 3D with different perspective based on viewpoint, but you CANNOT walk behind the monitor and see the backside of the image
This display allows you to walk 360 degrees around it and see 3D.
Is there some wicked cool technology that's going to work on my existing (brand new) TV without glasses?
This is under development, but the challenge is that non-glasses based 3D systems need to code a large number of views - you may need to be able to generate 100 views so that everyone in the room can view 3D properly. Rather than code and transmit ~50 views, it is likely that you will have to code and transmit 3D model (think: Quake model) and render the views at the display device.
The different views can be steered in different directions using lenticular arrays, a matrix of small mirrors or other beam steering devices on the display surface, or computer-generated holograms (aka electronically controlled diffraction-grating matrix).
I've seen some 12-view lenticular displays based on a quad-HD resolution 2D LCD panel that begins to be acceptable - but I've also seen a small ~200-view, 360-degree display based on a single spinning mirror that was awesome, but wouldn't scale to a 50" screen.
How does multiview work?
Already, MPEG-4 AVC encoding (and MPEG-2 before it) predict the current frame from past and future frames, thus only coding the difference in the frames, generally motion.
MPEG-4 Multiview Coding (MVC) allows a right eye frame to be predicted from past, current, and future left eye frames as well.
Unfortunately, there is a big difference between "motion prediction" which generally offsets of just a few pixels between frames that can be well coded as linear block movement, and "stereoscopic disparity prediction", which involves longer offsets and block affine transforms due to parallax. Since MVC only has linear block motion prediction, it turns out that MVC doesn't give as much compression as you may think over just coding left and right eye separately, but MVC is simple and does save some bits, but someday we may see even better stereoscopic compression.
Wouldn't carbon-14 measurement of the methane tell us whether there is live involved or not?
A big problem is how they define markets.
Cable must-carry laws have traditionally respected radio frequency propagation of the over-the-air television station (the "Grade B service contour" for analog, the "noise limited service contour" of for DTV)
the mouthpiece of an extremely powerful corporate entity says they want to change it in order to skim more money off of both us and other companies,
It is an actual problem when they actually do it. Until then, it is a potential problem.
It only takes an hour to download a 720p movie if you happen to have access to about 7mb+ broadband.
The question is what you mean by "720p movie". I can tell you that most broadcast engineers would only be happy with 1280x720@60p at 15 Mbps MPEG-2 or 10 Mbps H.264.
At the same time, I have watched movies on the incredibly crappy Netflix instant streaming (must be less than 1 Mbps), and fully enjoyed them as long as I could turn the part of my brain off that does video quality analysis.
This is the kind of thing we should be looking to build instead of asking governments to protect our right to free information.
Indeed, the Internet exists as the incredibly free exchange of political, commercial, technical, and pornographic information because of a lack of government regulation at the inception of the private expansion of the Internet (believe me, I was there, and there were plenty of government censorship threats). The nature of government is to control information.
No one has yet shown me an ACTUAL EXISTING PROBLEM that would be solved by Net Neutrality, I only hear about these theoretical, potential problems.
Please reply with an actual, existing problem.
Face it, you are a nation of consumers with no real manufacturing left. You all demand cheap goods, and if that comes with the price of outsourcing to foreign sweatshops, you accept it by turning a blind eye ... if all your manufacturing was done inside the US, none of you could afford to buy anything.
The USA remains by far the largest manufacturer in the world, producing $1.8 trillion in manufactured products in 2006.
If the US refused to import manufactured goods from outside the country, few jobs would be added, since most work would be done by automated machines - they would be cheaper than US human labor.
I have no problem legalizing illegal immigrants provided they teach their children English and assimilate into our culture.
I have never met a child born in the US who did not learn English - they pick it up from TV and their friends even if their parents don't speak it.
Thanks for the info!
The Netherlands is my favorite "socialist" country because they actually have very high levels of economic freedom, except for having a lot of monetary redistribution. In many ways (such as government control of schools, drug tolerance, and trade freedom) the Netherlands is more free than the US. Plus their customs people don't yell at me at the airport.