Edmonds, who is Turkish-American, is a 10-year U.S. citizen who has passed a
polygraph examination conducted by FBI investigators. She speaks fluent
Farsi, Arabic and Turkish and worked part-time for the FBI, making $32 an
hour for six months, beginning Sept. 20, 2001. She was assigned to the FBI's
investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other counterterrorism and
counterintelligence cases, where she translated reams of documents seized by
agents who, for the previous year, had been rounding up suspected
terrorists.
She says those tapes, often connected to terrorism, money laundering or
other criminal activity, provide evidence that should have made apparent
that an al- Qaida plot was in the works. Edmonds cannot talk in detail about
the tapes publicly because she's been under a Justice Department gag order
since 2002.
In other words, THE TRANSLATED DOCUMENTS ARE THE DOCUMENTS SHE IS REFERRING TO. Do you think a newly hired, part-time translator is given access to high level intelligence summary documents? She has no idea what the president knew or didn't know.
The original Salon article requires a subscription. Wait a minute? That's an American news outlet! Why haven't they been shot for publishing this story yet? After all this is fascist America right?
Because Ms. Edmonds didn't say the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks before the happened. And if she did, she is a liar.
She was brought in AFTER 9/11 to clear a backlog of untranslated documents (wiretaps, intercepts, ect) and claims that she uncovered information suggesting an attack which was obtained before 9/11. But these were UNTRANSLATED DOCUMENTS, so nobody knew what information they contained.
The reason for the gag order is because she is telling anyone who would listen about these documents and compromising national security in the process. I think the CIA/NSA/FBI frowns on translators revealing information they were hired to process from covert sources, don't you? She has testified before the commission investigating intelligence failures before 9/11, in private. But that wasn't good enough for her, so she went to the UK media.
Don't you see, that is the entire point of moving to a longer pipeline: to inflate the MHZ.
Intel don't care if a Prescott 4.0GHZ is twice as fast as a Pentium 4 2.0 GHZ. Just as a P4 2.0GHZ is not twice as fast as a PIII 1.0GHZ. They just want to get to 4.0GHZ.
Intel doesn't care if AMD's 4000+ is actually faster than their 4000MHZ part, they just want to have a 4000MHZ part to market before AMD.
The reason they wanted you to reboot was most likely to get you off the phone.
I worked phone support for a few months and the #1 concern (by far) of the support provider (especially when the are contracted third parties, which most are) is talk times. Most supervisors would rather have an incompetent, fast tech who NEVER FIXES ANYTHING than a slower tech who fixes the problem and makes the customer happy. They would PREFER a customer call back 5+ times with 5 minute calls, half of which do nothing or repeat what the last tech did, then have one 10 minute call that fixes the problem. 5 minute calls make the average call time come down (which is usually rewarded in the contract), and increase call volume (more call volume means bigger contracts for third party support providers).
Call centers do have quality control in place, but they are done randomly. Even if a call was monitored for quality, the tech can do NOTHING to fix the problem and still get a good score. In order to make QA less subjective many of the points received are for following the script:
Did the tech use the right intro and goodbye? Did the tech verify the callers info correctly? Did the tech document the call correctly? Did the tech give the caller a reference number? Did the tech mention the support site web address?
Fixing the problem has zero, or very little impact on the tech's score. Besides, the tech may have a 5% or less chance of a call being monitored for quality assurance, but they have a 100% chance that the length of the call will be recorded and combined into their daily/monthly average.
If this were a still image compression test I would agree that using a lossy format for presentation would be completely unacceptable. But, as Doom9 stated several times in the review, the real judgment comes from watching these codecs in motion. As such the screen-caps are merely aids which, while useful in demonstrating differences, are not meant to be used solely to determine the quality of the codec. Unfortunately, offering clips to be downloaded is out of the question for practical and legal reasons.
It would be nice to use a lossless format, but as it is the codec reviews take up a large amount of the sites bandwidth (even without slashdot's help). In addition to hosting the codec comparisons, many guides (in 9 languages), and an active forum, Doom9 also hosts a large library of video backup software. All of this is done without commercial sponsors, advertisements or fees.
It's not against the law to use a copyrighted work if the copyright holder allows it. Copyright law requires the holder to actively defend the copyright. All the author is asking is for the companies that hold these rights asks themselves if the value of defending the copyright is greater than the benefit of allowing the infringement.
A perfect case of ill advised copyright defense was when NBC systematically destroyed the online fan base of "Late Night with Conan O'Brian" by sending Cease and Desist letters to many fan sites. Sure, they were within there legal rights to force the removal of NBC copyrighted material, mostly pictures and logos, but the bad will they generated far out weighed the value of the material defended.
When I was going to college in the Boston area I lived in the only county where RCN and Time/Warner overlapped in coverage. It was great. Every summer salesmen would go door to door offering great deals to switch. RCN had the best packages with phone/cable/cable modem, but it was great to play them against each other.
My last year we got phone and cable for $19.95 each, with the first 3 months cable free. Meanwhile, in the next county it was $35 just for cable. It shows you what a free market can do.
It's odd how I hear all these fanboys saying that 90% of the reviews are positive, or the critics hate/don't get Star Wars movies. Let's take a look at the early results:
As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.
If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.
If it was tape->dvd (from camcorder or screener tape) then there would be no need for DeCSS, because CSS encrypting would never be applied.
If the source was a CSS encrypted DVD there is still a chance that it was under the 4.7GB limit of DVD-Rs and therefor a bit-to-bit duplicate could be made, with out decrypting the files. Your DVD player would unlock the files just as with the original DVD.
The only case that needs DeCSS is for CSS encrypted DVDs that are larger than 4.7GB (ie. double layer). To place these on a DVD-R you need to re-encode the video to a lower bitrate so it fits under the 4.7GB limit. This requires the video to be decrypted, hence the need for DeCSS.
Fast forward three years into the future. CBDTPA-compliant hardware says: "Watermark detected. Recording denied." And your pre-CBDTPA hardware has worn out after years of use. Now what do you do?
Take a trip to Canada, and pick up some Cuban cigars while I'm at it.
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Google group post of article
The original Salon article requires a subscription. Wait a minute? That's an American news outlet! Why haven't they been shot for publishing this story yet? After all this is fascist America right?
The reason for the gag order is because she is telling anyone who would listen about these documents and compromising national security in the process. I think the CIA/NSA/FBI frowns on translators revealing information they were hired to process from covert sources, don't you? She has testified before the commission investigating intelligence failures before 9/11, in private. But that wasn't good enough for her, so she went to the UK media.
Don't you see, that is the entire point of moving to a longer pipeline: to inflate the MHZ.
Intel don't care if a Prescott 4.0GHZ is twice as fast as a Pentium 4 2.0 GHZ. Just as a P4 2.0GHZ is not twice as fast as a PIII 1.0GHZ. They just want to get to 4.0GHZ.
Intel doesn't care if AMD's 4000+ is actually faster than their 4000MHZ part, they just want to have a 4000MHZ part to market before AMD.
The reason they wanted you to reboot was most likely to get you off the phone.
I worked phone support for a few months and the #1 concern (by far) of the support provider (especially when the are contracted third parties, which most are) is talk times. Most supervisors would rather have an incompetent, fast tech who NEVER FIXES ANYTHING than a slower tech who fixes the problem and makes the customer happy. They would PREFER a customer call back 5+ times with 5 minute calls, half of which do nothing or repeat what the last tech did, then have one 10 minute call that fixes the problem. 5 minute calls make the average call time come down (which is usually rewarded in the contract), and increase call volume (more call volume means bigger contracts for third party support providers).
Call centers do have quality control in place, but they are done randomly. Even if a call was monitored for quality, the tech can do NOTHING to fix the problem and still get a good score. In order to make QA less subjective many of the points received are for following the script:
Did the tech use the right intro and goodbye? Did the tech verify the callers info correctly? Did the tech document the call correctly? Did the tech give the caller a reference number? Did the tech mention the support site web address?
Fixing the problem has zero, or very little impact on the tech's score. Besides, the tech may have a 5% or less chance of a call being monitored for quality assurance, but they have a 100% chance that the length of the call will be recorded and combined into their daily/monthly average.
If this were a still image compression test I would agree that using a lossy format for presentation would be completely unacceptable. But, as Doom9 stated several times in the review, the real judgment comes from watching these codecs in motion. As such the screen-caps are merely aids which, while useful in demonstrating differences, are not meant to be used solely to determine the quality of the codec. Unfortunately, offering clips to be downloaded is out of the question for practical and legal reasons.
It would be nice to use a lossless format, but as it is the codec reviews take up a large amount of the sites bandwidth (even without slashdot's help). In addition to hosting the codec comparisons, many guides (in 9 languages), and an active forum, Doom9 also hosts a large library of video backup software. All of this is done without commercial sponsors, advertisements or fees.
So by your logic DVD is useless too?
It's not against the law to use a copyrighted work if the copyright holder allows it. Copyright law requires the holder to actively defend the copyright. All the author is asking is for the companies that hold these rights asks themselves if the value of defending the copyright is greater than the benefit of allowing the infringement.
A perfect case of ill advised copyright defense was when NBC systematically destroyed the online fan base of "Late Night with Conan O'Brian" by sending Cease and Desist letters to many fan sites. Sure, they were within there legal rights to force the removal of NBC copyrighted material, mostly pictures and logos, but the bad will they generated far out weighed the value of the material defended.
When I was going to college in the Boston area I lived in the only county where RCN and Time/Warner overlapped in coverage. It was great. Every summer salesmen would go door to door offering great deals to switch. RCN had the best packages with phone/cable/cable modem, but it was great to play them against each other. My last year we got phone and cable for $19.95 each, with the first 3 months cable free. Meanwhile, in the next county it was $35 just for cable. It shows you what a free market can do.
At this point Clones has 58%.
As a comparison, TPM as a 58% positive review rating. Compared to Star Wars at 97%, Empires at 97%, and Jedi at 79%.
If we look at the cream of the crop section (AKA the real film critics), TPM has a miserable 33% positive, but still beats Clone's current rating of 25%.
Doesn't seem so stupid now!
If the source was a CSS encrypted DVD there is still a chance that it was under the 4.7GB limit of DVD-Rs and therefor a bit-to-bit duplicate could be made, with out decrypting the files. Your DVD player would unlock the files just as with the original DVD.
The only case that needs DeCSS is for CSS encrypted DVDs that are larger than 4.7GB (ie. double layer). To place these on a DVD-R you need to re-encode the video to a lower bitrate so it fits under the 4.7GB limit. This requires the video to be decrypted, hence the need for DeCSS.
Take a trip to Canada, and pick up some Cuban cigars while I'm at it.