AMPAS recently had a report called "The Digital Dilemma", which the NY Times wrote about:
If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years...
What are film archives doing? Where possible, studios are making long-lasting, non-fade B&W pan separation YCM polyester negative film backups, even when the film is mostly or totally "born digital". Then you put it under a mountain somewhere.
Government video archives worldwide are moving to LTO tape, typically using JPEG 2000 video encoding, with the recognition that every few years they will have to migrate their tapes up a generation of LTO. I suspect there may be a move from lossy JPEG 2000 to lossless JPEG 2000 and eventually uncompressed video as tape speeds and capacities ramp up.
I can't understand why we're not massively building wind farms in the great plane states of the US.
We are! Drive US Route 40 across the country, and look at those huge things in Texas and Oklahoma. No idea how much transmission loss there must be to get this electricity back to civilization.
Besides the plane states, the largest wind installations are in mountain passes of the high deserts of California, see the San Gorgonio pass with 4,000 windmills that barely produce the electricity at peak wind that a single nuclear power plant does.
"Large scale deployment" is in the eye of the observer.
Denmark has 13 GWe of electrical production capability, with wind at 3 GWe (peaking), about 2 nuclear power plants worth of wind (well, not really a fair comparison because nuclear is stable base power).
Compare with the US at 932 GWe total electrical production capability.
"commondreams.org" is not a reliable source, sorry. Nor is "kicktheoilabit.org" Your mms.gov links do not support your spurious allegations in any way, shape, or form. Are you just trolling or are you deranged enough to think those links are actually relevant?
Perhaps you'd prefer the Congressional Research Service report titled "Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies: Current Status and Analysis" which describes the tax breaks due to amortization and domestic manufacturing tax deduction (IRC section 199).
The mms.gov link states "Two federal sales of offshore oil and natural gas leases in the Eastern and Central Gulf of Mexico attracted more than $3.7 billion in high bids" which is exactly what I said. Are you on drugs?
Here are the actual "subsidies" that US oil companies get:
Domestic manufacturing tax deduction: business engaged in a qualifying production activity are eligible to take a tax deduction of 6% of net income in 2007. The "loophole" is that domestic oil and gas production was made qualifying in 2004. Obviously plenty of other companies take this mildly trade protectionist deduction as well.
Five-year amortization of geological and geophysical expenditures: This amortization period was made available starting in 2006 only to "major oil companies" that have daily worldwide production of over 500,000 barrels. Evidently there is talk of making this a seven-year amortization period.
Royalties "not paid" for drilling on public land: It is a bit unclear, but there is some evidence that the federal government is not always properly collecting royalties for gas and oil production on public land. (FYI, for offshore extraction, the royalty rate varies between 12%-16%, and total government royalty revenue is ~$11 billion/yr.)
Fact is the oil industry is getting from 20-55 Billion dollars in incentives by way of tax discounts and others,
It should be kept in mind that half of US oil company "tax discounts" are also being used by manufacturing companies in the US.
It should also be kept in mind that given the limited demand elasticity, it is likely that 60% to 70% of any increase in US oil company taxes will be passed on to the consumer. So when you talk about "hands in your pocket", consider what would happen when you eradicate these tax breaks.
The problem with peak oil predictions is that it never takes into account for more efficient production advances. You can reverse the peak trends with technology and innovation.
The other thing is that "peak oil" assumes that producers are willing to produce more. If major producers intentionally produce less, peak oil might be a "rosy scenario"
I am certain that Saudia Aramco and PDSVA are capable of producing much more oil today at current prices, but are either intentionally not doing so to maximize their total return on their oil supplies (well, it is their oil...), and as state-run organizations they have significant problems being very efficient.
"They still would have a population greater than our own and the `fight` in them would be far greater as we would have attacked and wiped out 600,000,000+ citizens."
On the other hand, if we closed down the port of Long Beach, China would be bankrupt in a few months.
Well, I suppose we'd also have to refuse to pay back US Treasury Securities owned by the Chinese government.
Hmmm, then we'd probably be bankrupt as well as the world would refuse to purchase any more of our government debt.
HD goes up to about 1.485 GHz, so Vn = 46 uV. 1 of 30 bits (assumping 1V peak) is 0.9 nV. So I suspect the cleanest analog component video will top out at about 19 bits at room temperature due to thermal noise.
Keep in mind that DCI gamut is 12-bit (4:4:4 XYZ though, not RGB). HD-SDI is 10-bit (4:2:2 YUV, not RGB either), and is that is the biggest bit-depth you will see on digital television.
To date, I have not seen any LCD or Plasma monitor that can perform as well as certain projection D-ILAs in terms of the combination of luminance ranges, good black levels, contrast ratios, gamma accuracy, viewing angle, and coverage of the Rec. 709 gamut. But don't take my word for it, here the Plasma Display coalition admits they can only cover 80% of Rec. 709 with their best displays, with many more falling in the 75% department.
From a digital television perspective I am much more interested in monitor gamut effectively covering the Rec. 709 color space, because that is all I can put on TV. Sure, it's OK to have extended gamut outside Rec. 709, but if you can't actually cover all of Rec. 709 gamut I don't care if you cover color outside that space. Similarly, I'm sure digital cinema people want the DCI gamut covered well first before having coverage outside that gamut.
On the LCD side, the production lines are changing so rapidly that two versions of the same type of panel from different months will have different results. I have seen a $300 Dell LCD computer monitor perform better than some professional television LCD displays that are priced 10 times as much.
My suggestion is to measure displays yourself, and ignore marketing literature. Of course, you need a good broadcast engineering lab to do that, not all networks have such a thing...
I guess we got lucky with the Internet in a way. It was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists and engineers in a peer-reviewed academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
You wouldn't have any Internet connectivity if it stayed that way. The Internet originally just connected a bunch of universities and government sites.
The early Internet Service Providers to ordinary people were entrepreneurial folks who set up hundreds of dial-in modems in their basements, access servers, risked purchasing expensive T1 line service to upstream networks, and depended on profits to expand to the incredible broadband world we live in today. Because of them, "normal people" got email accounts and later access to the World Wide Web.
On the other hand, cable and telephone companies are government-regulated monopolies...
You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.
It depends which definition of "HD" and "DVD" you mean...
Today's Blu-ray's are encoded with H.264 around 25 Mbps yielding 28 GB for a 2.5 hour movie. I personally think this might be a bit of overkill, the broadcast world feels pretty happy about 12 to 15 Mbps H.264 for HD.
To fit onto a single-sided, double-layer 8.5 GB DVD, your bitrate would need to be around 7.5 Mbps, which is what I call "pretty crappy" HD.
A double-sided, double-layer 15 GB DVD would get you to the 15 Mbps department for a 2.5 hour movie, acceptable to broadcasters, but below what the cinema-oriented people want for H.264 optical media.
If the Democrats are willing to cut the entitlements and reform the citizenship laws (i.e. only children of citizens are citizens at birth) then us free trade Republicans are willing to let more people have a shot at coming to the United States.
Those of us who actually believe in free markets suggest that you Republicans and Democrats should just unilaterally end your socialism and allow for the free movement of people as well as goods.
When my great-grandmother came to the USA, you got citizenship after two years of residency. Let's go back to that (the "conservative thing to do"...)
I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.
Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.
So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...
Mr. Rogers came on PBS and said that these are aweful times, but please limit what small children are being exposed to - it could be very scary and detrimental.
I should mention that on the morning of 9/11, PBS made an active decision to stay in children's programming, to be a safe harbor for children. Granted, PBS is a distributor and not a television network, and they had no control over what local public television stations actually put on the air, but it is my impression that most of public television decided to go along with the PBS decision.
Of course, it isn't like PBS was well set-up to do a 24x7 wall-to-wall news operation anyway. Maybe they could have pulled on every commentator they could find and tried to do something from the NewsHour set at WETA in Washington, but it probably would have been a real shoe-string operation. The commercial networks have pretty serious live-news-capable operations they can call on at a moment's notice.
When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value
Actually the US makes plenty of stuff. Over the last 10 years, US manufacturing production output is up 26%, and is at an all-time-high. US manufacturing jobs are down though (3.6 million fewer over 10 year), but this is because US manufacturing is becoming more efficient, so people are moving into other sectors.
Our value in the value chain is going to diminish.
That is like saying that New York's value chain is going to diminish because of some start-ups in San Jose. Yes, there will be great ideas and great companies coming out of China and India, while there will still be great ideas and great companies coming out of the US. Everywhere where there is economic freedom will flourish. We'll do fine...as long as we don't damage our economic freedom with unneeded regulation.
The redistribution control descriptor ("RC Descriptor","Broadcast Flag") is contained in ATSC Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP).
According to ATSC A/65, the RC descriptor is mandatory in the PMT and EIT tables for broadcast, and if ATSC is carried over cable, it needs to be in the PMT and EIT as well (if there is an EIT).
The question is "how were you watching the show, and how did it get to you"?
If you were watching analog terrestrial broadcast television or on your cable analog tier, there is no ATSC stream to have the broadcast flag.
If you were watching on digital cable or satellite, the question is whether the original ATSC PMT and/or EIT were appropriately carried to you. Many cable and DBS providers re-compress the original ATSC signal, and in the process of doing so they may or may not properly carry the PSIP tables to the end user. It is also possible that your cable MSO has a direct fiber video connection to the television station, in which case the PSIP tables are not effectively sent to the cable MSO in the first place.
If you are using an analog output (composite, component, or S-Video) of a digital cable or satellite decoder box to go into your recording device, there is no broadcast flag present at the recording device.
If the broadcast flag in the PSIP tables doesn't reach your recording device, obviously even compliant devices won't know not to record.
Theoretically, any ATSC digital television decoder that has an HDMI output should only be willing to send broadcast flagged video to HDCP encryption compliant devices. Some DVI output devices will adhere to this as well if they support HDCP.
"My Name is Earl" is produced by 20th Century Fox Television which is in the FOX Filmed Entertainment (FFE) group of FOX. This show is broadcast on the NBC television network. Similarly, 20th also produces "How I Met Your Mother" which is broadcast on the CBS television network.
FOX Broadcasting Company (FBC) is what most people know as the FOX television network. Recently, the FOX network aired "Sarah Connor Chronicles" which was produced by Warner Bros. Television.
Slashdot Mirror
AMPAS recently had a report called "The Digital Dilemma", which the NY Times wrote about:
If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years...
What are film archives doing? Where possible, studios are making long-lasting, non-fade B&W pan separation YCM polyester negative film backups, even when the film is mostly or totally "born digital". Then you put it under a mountain somewhere.
Government video archives worldwide are moving to LTO tape, typically using JPEG 2000 video encoding, with the recognition that every few years they will have to migrate their tapes up a generation of LTO. I suspect there may be a move from lossy JPEG 2000 to lossless JPEG 2000 and eventually uncompressed video as tape speeds and capacities ramp up.
Sign up for 15 Gmail accounts
I suggest a "Redundant Array of Online Storage Providers (ROASP)".
I hope that NASA's budget is minuscule in the big scheme of things; we spend much more on things like professional sports
"much more" is a bit questionable...
NASA FY2007 actual outlays: $15.8 billion
MLB and NFL 2007 sales: $6 billion each
How do we know it is frozen H2O and not frozen CO2?
I can't understand why we're not massively building wind farms in the great plane states of the US.
We are! Drive US Route 40 across the country, and look at those huge things in Texas and Oklahoma. No idea how much transmission loss there must be to get this electricity back to civilization.
Besides the plane states, the largest wind installations are in mountain passes of the high deserts of California, see the San Gorgonio pass with 4,000 windmills that barely produce the electricity at peak wind that a single nuclear power plant does.
"Large scale deployment" is in the eye of the observer.
Denmark has 13 GWe of electrical production capability, with wind at 3 GWe (peaking), about 2 nuclear power plants worth of wind (well, not really a fair comparison because nuclear is stable base power).
Compare with the US at 932 GWe total electrical production capability.
(soure)
I suggest a robotic head that follows you down the hall while showering you with compliments. It will help to boost the self-esteem of the CS majors.
Or animatronic fish crying out in pain. It will remind the CS majors that some people do have it worse than them.
Or a disembodied robotic hand that points at you and accuses you of crimes against humanity. OK, this is just weird.
"commondreams.org" is not a reliable source, sorry. Nor is "kicktheoilabit.org" Your mms.gov links do not support your spurious allegations in any way, shape, or form. Are you just trolling or are you deranged enough to think those links are actually relevant?
Perhaps you'd prefer the Congressional Research Service report titled "Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies: Current Status and Analysis" which describes the tax breaks due to amortization and domestic manufacturing tax deduction (IRC section 199).
The mms.gov link states "Two federal sales of offshore oil and natural gas leases in the Eastern and Central Gulf of Mexico attracted more than $3.7 billion in high bids" which is exactly what I said. Are you on drugs?
Here are the actual "subsidies" that US oil companies get:
Domestic manufacturing tax deduction: business engaged in a qualifying
production activity are eligible to take a tax deduction of 6% of net
income in 2007. The "loophole" is that domestic oil and gas production
was made qualifying in 2004. Obviously plenty of other companies take
this mildly trade protectionist deduction as well.
Five-year amortization of geological and geophysical expenditures:
This amortization period was made available starting in 2006 only to
"major oil companies" that have daily worldwide production of over
500,000 barrels. Evidently there is talk of making this a seven-year
amortization period.
(source)
Royalties "not paid" for drilling on public land: It is a bit
unclear, but there is some evidence that the federal government is not
always properly collecting royalties for gas and oil production on
public land. (FYI, for offshore extraction, the royalty rate varies
between 12%-16%, and total government royalty revenue is ~$11
billion/yr.)
source 1
source 2
source 3
Of course, the Feds just made $3.7 billion on new offshore leases.
Fact is the oil industry is getting from 20-55 Billion dollars in incentives by way of tax discounts and others,
It should be kept in mind that half of US oil company "tax discounts" are also being used by manufacturing companies in the US.
It should also be kept in mind that given the limited demand elasticity, it is likely that 60% to 70% of any increase in US oil company taxes will be passed on to the consumer. So when you talk about "hands in your pocket", consider what would happen when you eradicate these tax breaks.
The problem with peak oil predictions is that it never takes into account for more efficient production advances. You can reverse the peak trends with technology and innovation.
The other thing is that "peak oil" assumes that producers are willing to produce more. If major producers intentionally produce less, peak oil might be a "rosy scenario"
I am certain that Saudia Aramco and PDSVA are capable of producing much more oil today at current prices, but are either intentionally not doing so to maximize their total return on their oil supplies (well, it is their oil...), and as state-run organizations they have significant problems being very efficient.
"They still would have a population greater than our own and the `fight` in them would be far greater as we would have attacked and wiped out 600,000,000+ citizens."
On the other hand, if we closed down the port of Long Beach, China would be bankrupt in a few months.
Well, I suppose we'd also have to refuse to pay back US Treasury Securities owned by the Chinese government.
Hmmm, then we'd probably be bankrupt as well as the world would refuse to purchase any more of our government debt.
Prices at Wal-Mart would double as well.
I hope we can all "just get along!"
what OS / software combo actually supports 30 bit colour displays?
No idea, but you can carry 48-bit color over dual-link DVI-D. Analog component is another option, but let's see...
Thermal noise, Vn=sqrt(4*1.38x10-23 J/K * 300K * 75 Ohms) = 1.1 nV * sqrt(Hz)
HD goes up to about 1.485 GHz, so Vn = 46 uV. 1 of 30 bits (assumping 1V peak) is 0.9 nV. So I suspect the cleanest analog component video will top out at about 19 bits at room temperature due to thermal noise.
Keep in mind that DCI gamut is 12-bit (4:4:4 XYZ though, not RGB). HD-SDI is 10-bit (4:2:2 YUV, not RGB either), and is that is the biggest bit-depth you will see on digital television.
To date, I have not seen any LCD or Plasma monitor that can perform as well as certain projection D-ILAs in terms of the combination of luminance ranges, good black levels, contrast ratios, gamma accuracy, viewing angle, and coverage of the Rec. 709 gamut. But don't take my word for it, here the Plasma Display coalition admits they can only cover 80% of Rec. 709 with their best displays, with many more falling in the 75% department.
From a digital television perspective I am much more interested in monitor gamut effectively covering the Rec. 709 color space, because that is all I can put on TV. Sure, it's OK to have extended gamut outside Rec. 709, but if you can't actually cover all of Rec. 709 gamut I don't care if you cover color outside that space. Similarly, I'm sure digital cinema people want the DCI gamut covered well first before having coverage outside that gamut.
On the LCD side, the production lines are changing so rapidly that two versions of the same type of panel from different months will have different results. I have seen a $300 Dell LCD computer monitor perform better than some professional television LCD displays that are priced 10 times as much.
My suggestion is to measure displays yourself, and ignore marketing literature. Of course, you need a good broadcast engineering lab to do that, not all networks have such a thing...
If you want to know what you need in a good monitor, see the EBU User requirements for Video Monitors. SMPTE is working on a set of recommendations as well.
I'm hoping that OLED displays will come to the rescue, but it will take a while for them to come up to needed sizes and maturity.
I guess we got lucky with the Internet in a way. It was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists and engineers in a peer-reviewed academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
You wouldn't have any Internet connectivity if it stayed that way. The Internet originally just connected a bunch of universities and government sites.
The early Internet Service Providers to ordinary people were entrepreneurial folks who set up hundreds of dial-in modems in their basements, access servers, risked purchasing expensive T1 line service to upstream networks, and depended on profits to expand to the incredible broadband world we live in today. Because of them, "normal people" got email accounts and later access to the World Wide Web.
On the other hand, cable and telephone companies are government-regulated monopolies...
shoot on this video will NOT get you in the big festivals.
This may be changing...using a RED One 4K Camera, Joshua Weigel took Best Film for "Stained" at the 168 Film Festival.
Also now Joe Carnahan is shooting "Killing Pablo" on a RED as well.
These aren't cheap DV or HDV cameras, but video nonetheless.
Digex has befallen a much stranger fate: It's been purchased, sold, rebranded, and repackaged 73,652.2 times!
Isn't it Verizon Business now?
BTW, working for Doug was a very cool experience, both in boom and bust times.
You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.
It depends which definition of "HD" and "DVD" you mean...
Today's Blu-ray's are encoded with H.264 around 25 Mbps yielding 28 GB for a 2.5 hour movie. I personally think this might be a bit of overkill, the broadcast world feels pretty happy about 12 to 15 Mbps H.264 for HD.
To fit onto a single-sided, double-layer 8.5 GB DVD, your bitrate would need to be around 7.5 Mbps, which is what I call "pretty crappy" HD.
A double-sided, double-layer 15 GB DVD would get you to the 15 Mbps department for a 2.5 hour movie, acceptable to broadcasters, but below what the cinema-oriented people want for H.264 optical media.
If the Democrats are willing to cut the entitlements and reform the citizenship laws (i.e. only children of citizens are citizens at birth) then us free trade Republicans are willing to let more people have a shot at coming to the United States.
Those of us who actually believe in free markets suggest that you Republicans and Democrats should just unilaterally end your socialism and allow for the free movement of people as well as goods.
When my great-grandmother came to the USA, you got citizenship after two years of residency. Let's go back to that (the "conservative thing to do"...)
I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.
Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.
So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...
Mr. Rogers came on PBS and said that these are aweful times, but please limit what small children are being exposed to - it could be very scary and detrimental.
I should mention that on the morning of 9/11, PBS made an active decision to stay in children's programming, to be a safe harbor for children. Granted, PBS is a distributor and not a television network, and they had no control over what local public television stations actually put on the air, but it is my impression that most of public television decided to go along with the PBS decision.
Of course, it isn't like PBS was well set-up to do a 24x7 wall-to-wall news operation anyway. Maybe they could have pulled on every commentator they could find and tried to do something from the NewsHour set at WETA in Washington, but it probably would have been a real shoe-string operation. The commercial networks have pretty serious live-news-capable operations they can call on at a moment's notice.
When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value
Actually the US makes plenty of stuff. Over the last 10 years, US manufacturing production output is up 26%, and is at an all-time-high. US manufacturing jobs are down though (3.6 million fewer over 10 year), but this is because US manufacturing is becoming more efficient, so people are moving into other sectors.
Our value in the value chain is going to diminish.
That is like saying that New York's value chain is going to diminish because of some start-ups in San Jose. Yes, there will be great ideas and great companies coming out of China and India, while there will still be great ideas and great companies coming out of the US. Everywhere where there is economic freedom will flourish. We'll do fine...as long as we don't damage our economic freedom with unneeded regulation.
Oh yeah, I replicated thousands of strands of DNA today, just in the tip of my little finger!
The redistribution control descriptor ("RC Descriptor","Broadcast Flag") is contained in ATSC Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP).
According to ATSC A/65, the RC descriptor is mandatory in the PMT and EIT tables for broadcast, and if ATSC is carried over cable, it needs to be in the PMT and EIT as well (if there is an EIT).
The question is "how were you watching the show, and how did it get to you"?
If you were watching analog terrestrial broadcast television or on your cable analog tier, there is no ATSC stream to have the broadcast flag.
If you were watching on digital cable or satellite, the question is whether the original ATSC PMT and/or EIT were appropriately carried to you. Many cable and DBS providers re-compress the original ATSC signal, and in the process of doing so they may or may not properly carry the PSIP tables to the end user. It is also possible that your cable MSO has a direct fiber video connection to the television station, in which case the PSIP tables are not effectively sent to the cable MSO in the first place.
If you are using an analog output (composite, component, or S-Video) of a digital cable or satellite decoder box to go into your recording device, there is no broadcast flag present at the recording device.
If the broadcast flag in the PSIP tables doesn't reach your recording device, obviously even compliant devices won't know not to record.
Theoretically, any ATSC digital television decoder that has an HDMI output should only be willing to send broadcast flagged video to HDCP encryption compliant devices. Some DVI output devices will adhere to this as well if they support HDCP.
Producers and networks are often not related.
"My Name is Earl" is produced by 20th Century Fox Television which is in the FOX Filmed Entertainment (FFE) group of FOX. This show is broadcast on the NBC television network. Similarly, 20th also produces "How I Met Your Mother" which is broadcast on the CBS television network.
FOX Broadcasting Company (FBC) is what most people know as the FOX television network. Recently, the FOX network aired "Sarah Connor Chronicles" which was produced by Warner Bros. Television.