Stabilizing population is necessary but not sufficient. The current global economy is structured in a way that absolutely depends on exponential growth of production and consumption, and hence exponential growth of the population. We have major recessions when GDP growth drops to a lower-but-still-positive rate. If we went straight to a zero population growth rate tomorrow, very soon there would be a catastrophic economic meltdown.
This is a big problem I have with singularity-ists: what they see as an exponential hockey-stick graph is actually just the first half of a sigmoid where resource constraints start to kick in. There are no productivity advancements on the horizon that can maintain the current economic system long-term with a stable population. Humanity is in for a world of hurt in the next few decades; the only variable is how many of us will come out the other end, which will be largely determined by how we address this obvious problem now.
I used to get bug reports for FLAC caused by this very same problem.
FLAC has a verify mode when encoding which, in parallel, decodes the encoded output and compares it against the original input to make sure they're identical. Every once in a while I'd get a report that there were verification failures, implying FLAC had a bug.
If it were actually a FLAC bug, the error would be repeatable* (same error in the same place) because the algorithm is deterministic, but upon rerunning the exact same command the users would get no error, or (rarely) an error in a different place. Then they'd run some other hardware checker and find the real problem.
Turns out FLAC encoding is also a nice little hardware stressor.
(* Pedants: yes, there could be some pseudo-random memory corruption, etc but that never turned out to be the case. PS I love valgrind.)
It's not just corporate greed; consumer greed fuels the race to the bottom of the price curve. Users apparently have no problem "paying" for a service with their and others' privacy or other intangibles as long as the service is free-as-in-beer. The whole vendor-customer structure has been inverted; Facebook's and Google's etc. users who might have been paying customers in a sane economy pay nothing so are now the product. Now half the "innovation" that happens in the valley is just new ways to get people's attention and sell them out to advertisers, and the more obvious a patent is, the more it's worth.
I wonder if there could ever be a sane market again where you paid what a phone costs and got secure communication without being tracked, or paid for email with built in PGP and avoided getting spammed and having your email property of and stored by your provider forever, paid for a social networking service without having your life exposed or your face secretly scanned and sold to the government. I think those times are gone.
What the hell does capitalism have to do with it? I hate to break it to you but capitalism is not the only economic system that allows some to sell something to someone else. I suppose you think it is also capitalism's fault that Chinese companies sell weapons to Sudan?
Here's an idea to clear up this mess nicely: get rid of all sales taxes. They're extremely regressive and complicate and impede commerce. Increase income, property, and capital gains taxes to compensate.
Sales tax is only 'regressive' if you measure the expenditure as a percentage of income, which is totally arbitrary. That phony definition plays on people's classism to sway them one way or the other. Sales tax when measured against the actual tax base is not regressive and in the US is actually more 'progressive' in that some goods you need to survive have no sales tax.
Note that FLAC was not designed to sound better than MP3s. (It can, if the MP3 encoding wasn't done correctly.) It was designed primarily as an archival format, the master copy from which you could encode to whatever format was practical for listening.
It didn't take long to realize that FLAC was easy to implement on devices, and memory keeps getting cheaper, so why not skip the transcoding step entirely? Not for quality reasons, for practicality. So now pretty much all software (except iTunes) supports it and many very good devices (except iPod) do too.
Isn't the fact that it's "good, free, and open" the exact reasons the publishers wouldn't use it? It kinda flies in the face of them being tyrannical mongrels controlling the media distribution if customers can actually meaningfully use it.
From the publisher's point of view, MP3 is as free and open as FLAC is. That's why a lot of them do sell FLAC. Like the Beatles (before they were even in the Apple store), the Rolling Stones and even Metallica.
Citation needed. What are you talking about here? I'm sorry, but you can't look for hidden weapons in peoples' cars with today's technology just by driving by them in a van. X-rays don't penetrate steel unless they're extremely high power, and at that power, you'd kill the people inside the car.
It's part of a greater "war on curiosity" that's a fear-based initiative to stamp out any and all behaviors that even slightly deviate from a prescribed norm.
It's deeper than that; I think there's a large contingent of the population here that would agree with Tertullian:
"Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well... His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor." -- Tertullian, Ad Nationes II:4
The problem is not the card, it's the data and what's done with it. Somehow I doubt Congressmen have their personal and biometric data in some crappy insecure system, easily accessed, shared with any agency or corporation willy-nilly, sold to marketers, etc. like what is going to happen if this proposal goes through.
maybe as a distributor you care about ipod market share. and yet the fact remains: no one is selling alac, only flac.
as a consumer, the market share of players makes no difference. what matters is choice. how many portables do you have to choose from if you want alac? ipod. how many players if you want flac? dozens, probably hundreds now.
anyway lossless makes the least sense in portables. lossless makes the most sense in distribution because encoding to some other format incurs no generation loss.
your advantages/disadvantages just don't match with the reality.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as.wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp.
there are a couple of benefits (besides the free space): 1) flac is easier to tag in a way that is seen by all players; 2) if your wavs get corrupt, you might not know until you listen to them (maybe getting full-scale noise screaming out of your speakers), and the damage (rarely) could mess up the remainder of the file. with flac, each frame has a checksum and you can verify the whole thing. any errors damage only the frame, and can be detected and muted.
The biggest problem against FLAC is simple: relatively few portable media players support FLAC "out of the box." In fact, you almost would be better off with selling Apple Lossless encoded music, since just about every iPod classic, nano and touch model since 2004 and all iPhone models support Apple Lossless natively.
a lot more portables (by choice, not market share) support flac (dozens) than apple lossless (ipod)[1]. and pretty much everyone selling lossless is selling flac. as far as I know, nobody is selling apple lossless and the one outfit selling wma lossless (musicgiants) went bankrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a big problem I have with singularity-ists: what they see as an exponential hockey-stick graph is actually just the first half of a sigmoid where resource constraints start to kick in. There are no productivity advancements on the horizon that can maintain the current economic system long-term with a stable population. Humanity is in for a world of hurt in the next few decades; the only variable is how many of us will come out the other end, which will be largely determined by how we address this obvious problem now.
Exactly; a person expects to been seen in public, not to be stalked.
Using GPLv3 will all but ensure no corporate/enterprise support, thus leaving the older, less useful formats in place.
Not necessarily. If the format is free and well-defined, there can be other implementations. This happened with FLAC, which started out LGPL.
Nobody but nobody cares whether or not you have a facebook account.
The method they use remind me though of FLAC.
FLAC is actually in the first episode for a few seconds; it was the baseline they were comparing against.
adjective.
FLAC has a verify mode when encoding which, in parallel, decodes the encoded output and compares it against the original input to make sure they're identical. Every once in a while I'd get a report that there were verification failures, implying FLAC had a bug.
If it were actually a FLAC bug, the error would be repeatable* (same error in the same place) because the algorithm is deterministic, but upon rerunning the exact same command the users would get no error, or (rarely) an error in a different place. Then they'd run some other hardware checker and find the real problem.
Turns out FLAC encoding is also a nice little hardware stressor.
(* Pedants: yes, there could be some pseudo-random memory corruption, etc but that never turned out to be the case. PS I love valgrind.)
Easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
It's not just corporate greed; consumer greed fuels the race to the bottom of the price curve. Users apparently have no problem "paying" for a service with their and others' privacy or other intangibles as long as the service is free-as-in-beer. The whole vendor-customer structure has been inverted; Facebook's and Google's etc. users who might have been paying customers in a sane economy pay nothing so are now the product. Now half the "innovation" that happens in the valley is just new ways to get people's attention and sell them out to advertisers, and the more obvious a patent is, the more it's worth.
I wonder if there could ever be a sane market again where you paid what a phone costs and got secure communication without being tracked, or paid for email with built in PGP and avoided getting spammed and having your email property of and stored by your provider forever, paid for a social networking service without having your life exposed or your face secretly scanned and sold to the government. I think those times are gone.
What the hell does capitalism have to do with it? I hate to break it to you but capitalism is not the only economic system that allows some to sell something to someone else. I suppose you think it is also capitalism's fault that Chinese companies sell weapons to Sudan?
Here's an idea to clear up this mess nicely: get rid of all sales taxes. They're extremely regressive and complicate and impede commerce. Increase income, property, and capital gains taxes to compensate.
Sales tax is only 'regressive' if you measure the expenditure as a percentage of income, which is totally arbitrary. That phony definition plays on people's classism to sway them one way or the other. Sales tax when measured against the actual tax base is not regressive and in the US is actually more 'progressive' in that some goods you need to survive have no sales tax.
Note that FLAC was not designed to sound better than MP3s. (It can, if the MP3 encoding wasn't done correctly.) It was designed primarily as an archival format, the master copy from which you could encode to whatever format was practical for listening.
It didn't take long to realize that FLAC was easy to implement on devices, and memory keeps getting cheaper, so why not skip the transcoding step entirely? Not for quality reasons, for practicality. So now pretty much all software (except iTunes) supports it and many very good devices (except iPod) do too.
Isn't the fact that it's "good, free, and open" the exact reasons the publishers wouldn't use it? It kinda flies in the face of them being tyrannical mongrels controlling the media distribution if customers can actually meaningfully use it.
From the publisher's point of view, MP3 is as free and open as FLAC is. That's why a lot of them do sell FLAC. Like the Beatles (before they were even in the Apple store), the Rolling Stones and even Metallica.
TSA is another colossal failure of Obama's administration, and another reason to not re-elect him.
P.S. the TSA was created by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and signed into law by President Bush. I'll save you the one-word search:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration
Citation needed. What are you talking about here? I'm sorry, but you can't look for hidden weapons in peoples' cars with today's technology just by driving by them in a van. X-rays don't penetrate steel unless they're extremely high power, and at that power, you'd kill the people inside the car.
did you even look? http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/.
hell, even https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=x-ray+van would do it.
"citation needed" does not mean "I'm too lazy to type 2 words into a search box"
Hopefully it turned out better for them than this.
It's part of a greater "war on curiosity" that's a fear-based initiative to stamp out any and all behaviors that even slightly deviate from a prescribed norm.
It's deeper than that; I think there's a large contingent of the population here that would agree with Tertullian:
"Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well... His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor." -- Tertullian, Ad Nationes II:4
The problem is not the card, it's the data and what's done with it. Somehow I doubt Congressmen have their personal and biometric data in some crappy insecure system, easily accessed, shared with any agency or corporation willy-nilly, sold to marketers, etc. like what is going to happen if this proposal goes through.
Fine, congressmen should get the cards first. If they still like the idea after 6 years, let them try and foist it on the rest of us.
bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Just a month ago Greenbaum wrote an article and tweeted about hoaxes in the media. What motivates people to do them, etc.
...
Now, it sounds like all the details come straight from Greenbaum.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/leaving_a_vulgar_comment_online_might_cost_you_your_job.php#comment-169438 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/leaving_a_vulgar_comment_online_might_cost_you_your_job.php#comment-169602
as a consumer, the market share of players makes no difference. what matters is choice. how many portables do you have to choose from if you want alac? ipod. how many players if you want flac? dozens, probably hundreds now.
anyway lossless makes the least sense in portables. lossless makes the most sense in distribution because encoding to some other format incurs no generation loss.
your advantages/disadvantages just don't match with the reality.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp.
there are a couple of benefits (besides the free space): 1) flac is easier to tag in a way that is seen by all players; 2) if your wavs get corrupt, you might not know until you listen to them (maybe getting full-scale noise screaming out of your speakers), and the damage (rarely) could mess up the remainder of the file. with flac, each frame has a checksum and you can verify the whole thing. any errors damage only the frame, and can be detected and muted.
The biggest problem against FLAC is simple: relatively few portable media players support FLAC "out of the box." In fact, you almost would be better off with selling Apple Lossless encoded music, since just about every iPod classic, nano and touch model since 2004 and all iPhone models support Apple Lossless natively.
a lot more portables (by choice, not market share) support flac (dozens) than apple lossless (ipod)[1]. and pretty much everyone selling lossless is selling flac. as far as I know, nobody is selling apple lossless and the one outfit selling wma lossless (musicgiants) went bankrupt.
[1] http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html (stale and missing a lot of new players and stores from this year)