Honestly, why the hell not? Would the original moon landing have been any less epic with a coca-cola symbol on the side of the lander?
Nearly all of the early explorers to the "new world" were trying to turn a profit. Profit makes the world go round. For the people who disagree, how many of you are doing your job for free today?
Agreed. This map claims I get Time Warner service 10 mbps-25 mbps. I can get cable, but no internet service is offered (believe me, I call them every month). They're just comparing zip codes or some bull.
Sometimes I think that what people object to with Fox news is less the bias than the fact that they ignore previous societal norms about bias.
Fox News wears its bias on its sleeve. They are bold and direct and obvious in their agenda and their manipulation.
If you think the other networks don't have bias, you've never read one of their reports on gun control. But it's coached in much more collegiate terms - they observe the forms of unbiased reporting and the old-school, "respectable" image of the impartial journalist.
Not that the old classics of journalism were so impartial - they have almost always projected what they considered a centrist viewpoint - but again, it's a journalism-school-educated, upper-middle-class-living-in-New-York view of "centrist." Which has its own set of assumptions and agenda.
As an analogy, Fox News is the crass, new rich and the other media are the old guard. Their culture is very different, but their kids are all still going to Yale.
The most important thing to remember about every government power is that once it exists, it *will* eventually be given to people with whom you think are wrong, stupid, and/or evil.
It all depends on who is president when this is passed. If it's Obama those same people will happily march against the socialist and totalitarian invasion of our freedoms. It's only if the next republican president does it that it's necessary.
No offense to you, personally, but is anyone else sick of the "penis waving" metaphors? I'm sorry, but if I said a given argument was just because the women were all on their period, I'd be packing out my office within a day. It's crass, it's sexist, and it's offensively downplaying an argument without presenting any facts.
I don't really care if people want to be offensive, but the double standard of how common and acceptable that phrase is kind of ticks me off.
Yes, and enjoy the complete collapse of almost every major consumer industry in the US.
Things aren't shipped by truck because transporting them on a truck is cheaper. They're shipped by truck because it's cheaper than having a giant warehouse of inventory on the end of the distribution line.
Read about lean manufacturing. In the days before the interstate you had to keep massive inventory locally. The efficiencies allowed by getting your new delivery of just what you need by truck overnight instead of scheduling on the next major train line have been huge. Allowing, among other things, the nice selection of fresh produce in every cheap-ass walmart in the country.
People don't realize how much logistics affect everything.
People buy whatever luxuries they can afford and fit into their lifestyle. It's what drives nearly every advance in the world, the idea that if you make more money you can get shit you like.
When I was in Europe, it seemed like the size of cars was driven much less by gas prices and much more by the fact that you couldn't drive a Cayenne down most of their streets, let alone find parking for it.
The problem is less about pay and more about pensions. Most public pensions are not sustainable. The unions prevent a restructuring of that deal.
Also, being a union shop, there is absolutely *zero* incentive for good teachers. Pay is based on education obtained and seniority, not how good of a teacher you are, despite the fact that studies have shown that the best teachers can teach 2-3 times as much in a school year as the worst. There are a million different ways to get fired as a teacher - almost none of them have to do with poor performance.
Unfortunately, the attempts to combat this issue have generally focussed more on absolute test scores school-wide. This ignores the massive effect that home environment has on the children compared to the school itself, and has mostly resulted in the suburban schools getting nice grades and pats on the back while the urban school get shat on.
My mom is a teacher in an urban school district. I thought she described it very well, that for the system to be fixed, they need to blow the whole thing up and allow vouchers and performance incentives and competition. But it would be terrible, personally, for her, if that ever happened, because it would mean the pension she's worked for (which is a large part of why you put up with the awful pay), as well as her seniority, would disappear.
The system needs to be restructured so that the incentives for better teaching and better results are not so incredibly averse to the individual incentives of the teachers.
Also, consider, for those who consider teachers under-paid - how many other jobs give you three months of paid leave every year? I know plenty of younger teachers, at least, who have time for an entire second job during the summer.
We need to pay the best teachers the way we pay the best performers at other jobs, and kick the worst out of the building. The union is vilified because it stands in the way of that.
The social contract of Union and employer works very well when the Union provides assurance of quality labor. Once it represents the worst just as well as the best, it's become counter-productive, scrabbling for a larger piece of a smaller pie instead of trying to make a bigger and better pie.
It's more akin to traction control, anti-lock brakes, power steering, and air bags.
How long until people are speeding along on their cell phone, unworried because "the computer will beep at me if there's something I need to pay attention to."
Of course, then they borrow their friend's car without these features and wrap their car around a tree.
Studies have shown that we adjust our behavior to a set level of perceived risk. Safety features encourage riskier behavior.
That doesn't mean we should just give up, but it *does* mean that safety gains are likely to be more limited than expected.
I'd honestly say the most useful advance in safety has actually been crumple zones, because they are largely unnoticed or thought about by drivers (many of whom still swear by the safety of older, heavier cars), but still provide a much better chance of survival in a crash than you used to have.
I find this interesting, considering that, at least according to the first couple sites I found on a google search, the median salary for computer science graduates is higher than that for finance. Now, there are a few higher paying jobs in finance - but they aren't exactly easy to get. *Most* people with that degree aren't working at a major position on wall street, just like most people with a CS degree aren't founding google.
The *only* reason anyone on the content delivery side of things has cared about HTML5 video is because Apple booted flash off of iOS.
As nice as it for everyone (and honestly, I'm a huge fan of open source and linux) the money market is not there for people to serve a third, completely separate version up to linux and max firefox users who have decided not to install flash.
Seriously, most practical linux users end up installing flash and something that will play x264 anyway, because that's the world we live in. Yes, it would be nice if they didn't have to worry about the fact that they might be violating patent laws... but they're still doing it.
So MS adding firefox support for HTML5 h.264 just means that pretty much anyone and everyone that advertisers care about are going to be getting things in h.264, or in a flash wrapper... there's just no incentive for anyone who isn't specifically a distributor of open source software.
Yeah. Right now mail service is a shitty job that pays decently well. While it probably makes more business sense to make it a mediocre job that pays poorly, that's not what anyone who is working there wants to hear.
If you ever want to hear a beautiful example of an employer and a union doing their best to screw each other over, listen to a post office employee for a while. Horribly management of the things they can change combined with union opposition to any change that could be more efficient (and therefore mean less workers).
The big question mark in reducing deliveries is whether it bumps the weekly workload for mailmen below 40 hours a week, at which point it becomes a very different kind of job.
You are opening up your home machine to corporate exposure.
You are now completely responsible for any an all data loss or theft due to hardware failure or viruses.
You are essentially renting them time on an asset that you paid money for, for free.
And that doesn't even touch on what kind of a messy situation you could run into if you were fired, or the company comes under investigation for something, or has an audit, or you end up suing them yourself.
Just don't do it. Infrastructure is cheap compared to the brain you're paying to sit in front of the computer. Make them buy you a new system or live with your reduced productivity.
I understand why open source has a problem with H.264 becoming the standard. I am saying that from the perspective of anyone *outside* of open source, it is a very open and friendly standard.
Open source isn't the entire software world. In fact, for most people it is a very small part of it.
Not to mention that patents are still compatible with some open source licenses. The x264 group could pay the roytalties to distribute an encoder. Any group that took their open source and then modified it would have to pay those royalties as well, but that's how it goes. It's only the stubborn refusal by some open source groups to compromise at all on any issue that prevents this (well, and a lack of corporate funding, but hey nothing else in the world is free).
Look, *I'm* not saying that H.264 supported by is a better option than WebM. I'm saying it's a viable option for most businesses, with different problems than WebM, that is still massively better than the current alternatives (which currently seems to be patent-encumbered H.264 in a patent-encumbered, proprietary, non-standard wrapper of flash).
It's an analogy. I assumed most non video-heads wouldn't be familiar with Sorenson, Wm7-9, and whatever other crappy proprietary codecs were most commonly used in those containers.
Also, I was under the impression that the tag would specify the container format as well?
The point still stands. WebM is not an industry-defined standard. It is an open source, patent-free standard being pushed by one company. It may overall be better for the web from a control standpoint, but provided that the licensing terms do not change, it is open in all the ways that everyone who is *not* distributing open source software and wants to use it cares about.
And most of the rhetoric only mentions one, and open means too many things.
There is standard versus nonstandard (.doc vs appleworks). There is open versus proprietary (C++ versus Java). There is open source versus closed source (x264 versus apple's H.264 coder) There is unencumbered versus encumbered by patents and license fees.
We have formats across all forms that are varying degrees of all of these. The thing that the h.264 people are saying is look - h.264 is the better half in almost all of those cases! It is a standard that was agreed upon by a standards board, not by a single company. The spec is out there and available for everyone to implement, not controlled by a single company. It is free to license for most uses! And it is supported by everyone and everything.
From all business perspectives outside of the open source mindset, it is a *great* standard. You don't have to worry about Apple, Microsoft, or Adobe changing it, or wait on them to make their decoder not suck. It is attached to so many different businesses that there is a huge incentive to keep licensing fees from becoming ridiculous. And it works everywhere.
Do people remember.mov and.wmv files? Do you remember real media's proprietary standards? From a *use* standpoint and a consumer standpoint, h.264 is a great and "open" standard.
The problem is when you run up against the open source concerns about infrastructure. It *is* controlled by somebody. It does have patents, so if you don't have money you can't make a business out of it. It is not "free" - either as beer or speech.
I think the argument the article makes is that perfect is the enemy of good. H.264 is *vastly* more open, consumer, and business friendly than that which it replaces - proprietary, nonstandard, closed video players from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Real. Going to it as a web standard would be a huge boon for consumers and businesses, and it already has real momentum to do that.
WebM would be better, from a "free" perspective... but, argues the author, it's much less likely to succeed, as it isn't a standard, and it isn't ubiquitous. And so we should go with something that is already a huge improvement over the status quo instead of hoping for some "perfect" free solution. Getting to an open standard is already a major victory for nearly everyone involved. Or is installing a plugin to add h.264 support so much more odious than already installing one for flash? At least you can have your choice of which h.264 implementation you want to use.
The issue is not one of cameras. The issue is of pervasiveness and data management.
There being a camera on every street corner isn't that big of a privacy issue if every one of those feeds into a separate tape deck for a convenience store that gets reused every two weeks when they don't get robbed. No one looks at that video. If something interesting happens on the corner, someone might think to get a warrant for it and search through it for something interesting, but that's about it.
But network them, put them all where some data center can crunch through facial recognition, or where a guy can sit in front of a computer and track you around the entire city, and that's a whole different privacy issue, because now a small organization can monitor an entire city.
Just because you're in plain sight doesn't mean someone isn't invading your privacy by stalking you.
But really, this isn't about you and me. Privacy rights are a nice luxury for normal people - we don't like people messing with our personal lives, but most people don't care.
They're a much bigger issue for the journalist working on a big leak about the current administration, who can now have a drone tracing him all day to find out who he's talking to and if he has any habits that can be used to blackmail him out of doing his job. Or for the people's rights advocate lawyer or political candidate going against the incumbent. For those sorts of people, the functioning of a democratic system *requires* that they have privacy rights against the government.
The fifth estate is every person who writes letters to the editor or hands out poorly typed pamphlets or sends out tweets. It is the dissemination of viewpoints and information, not the editorial control of a select group. That is why "freedom of the press" applies as much to this slashdot comment as it does to the New York Times.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, why the hell not? Would the original moon landing have been any less epic with a coca-cola symbol on the side of the lander?
Nearly all of the early explorers to the "new world" were trying to turn a profit. Profit makes the world go round. For the people who disagree, how many of you are doing your job for free today?
Agreed. This map claims I get Time Warner service 10 mbps-25 mbps. I can get cable, but no internet service is offered (believe me, I call them every month). They're just comparing zip codes or some bull.
The real fun question is whether the brain is a turing machine, or more specifically, whether it is *only* a turing machine.
Sometimes I think that what people object to with Fox news is less the bias than the fact that they ignore previous societal norms about bias.
Fox News wears its bias on its sleeve. They are bold and direct and obvious in their agenda and their manipulation.
If you think the other networks don't have bias, you've never read one of their reports on gun control. But it's coached in much more collegiate terms - they observe the forms of unbiased reporting and the old-school, "respectable" image of the impartial journalist.
Not that the old classics of journalism were so impartial - they have almost always projected what they considered a centrist viewpoint - but again, it's a journalism-school-educated, upper-middle-class-living-in-New-York view of "centrist." Which has its own set of assumptions and agenda.
As an analogy, Fox News is the crass, new rich and the other media are the old guard. Their culture is very different, but their kids are all still going to Yale.
The most important thing to remember about every government power is that once it exists, it *will* eventually be given to people with whom you think are wrong, stupid, and/or evil.
It all depends on who is president when this is passed. If it's Obama those same people will happily march against the socialist and totalitarian invasion of our freedoms. It's only if the next republican president does it that it's necessary.
A little harder when it's a mobile antenna on the back of a pickup truck in the mountains.
Also, unless they also make antennas illegal as part of this legislation, your neighbor just thinks it's another satellite dish.
No offense to you, personally, but is anyone else sick of the "penis waving" metaphors? I'm sorry, but if I said a given argument was just because the women were all on their period, I'd be packing out my office within a day. It's crass, it's sexist, and it's offensively downplaying an argument without presenting any facts.
I don't really care if people want to be offensive, but the double standard of how common and acceptable that phrase is kind of ticks me off.
Yes, and enjoy the complete collapse of almost every major consumer industry in the US.
Things aren't shipped by truck because transporting them on a truck is cheaper. They're shipped by truck because it's cheaper than having a giant warehouse of inventory on the end of the distribution line.
Read about lean manufacturing. In the days before the interstate you had to keep massive inventory locally. The efficiencies allowed by getting your new delivery of just what you need by truck overnight instead of scheduling on the next major train line have been huge. Allowing, among other things, the nice selection of fresh produce in every cheap-ass walmart in the country.
People don't realize how much logistics affect everything.
People buy whatever luxuries they can afford and fit into their lifestyle. It's what drives nearly every advance in the world, the idea that if you make more money you can get shit you like.
When I was in Europe, it seemed like the size of cars was driven much less by gas prices and much more by the fact that you couldn't drive a Cayenne down most of their streets, let alone find parking for it.
The problem is less about pay and more about pensions. Most public pensions are not sustainable. The unions prevent a restructuring of that deal.
Also, being a union shop, there is absolutely *zero* incentive for good teachers. Pay is based on education obtained and seniority, not how good of a teacher you are, despite the fact that studies have shown that the best teachers can teach 2-3 times as much in a school year as the worst. There are a million different ways to get fired as a teacher - almost none of them have to do with poor performance.
Unfortunately, the attempts to combat this issue have generally focussed more on absolute test scores school-wide. This ignores the massive effect that home environment has on the children compared to the school itself, and has mostly resulted in the suburban schools getting nice grades and pats on the back while the urban school get shat on.
My mom is a teacher in an urban school district. I thought she described it very well, that for the system to be fixed, they need to blow the whole thing up and allow vouchers and performance incentives and competition. But it would be terrible, personally, for her, if that ever happened, because it would mean the pension she's worked for (which is a large part of why you put up with the awful pay), as well as her seniority, would disappear.
The system needs to be restructured so that the incentives for better teaching and better results are not so incredibly averse to the individual incentives of the teachers.
Also, consider, for those who consider teachers under-paid - how many other jobs give you three months of paid leave every year? I know plenty of younger teachers, at least, who have time for an entire second job during the summer.
We need to pay the best teachers the way we pay the best performers at other jobs, and kick the worst out of the building. The union is vilified because it stands in the way of that.
The social contract of Union and employer works very well when the Union provides assurance of quality labor. Once it represents the worst just as well as the best, it's become counter-productive, scrabbling for a larger piece of a smaller pie instead of trying to make a bigger and better pie.
It's more akin to traction control, anti-lock brakes, power steering, and air bags.
How long until people are speeding along on their cell phone, unworried because "the computer will beep at me if there's something I need to pay attention to."
Of course, then they borrow their friend's car without these features and wrap their car around a tree.
Studies have shown that we adjust our behavior to a set level of perceived risk. Safety features encourage riskier behavior.
That doesn't mean we should just give up, but it *does* mean that safety gains are likely to be more limited than expected.
I'd honestly say the most useful advance in safety has actually been crumple zones, because they are largely unnoticed or thought about by drivers (many of whom still swear by the safety of older, heavier cars), but still provide a much better chance of survival in a crash than you used to have.
I find this interesting, considering that, at least according to the first couple sites I found on a google search, the median salary for computer science graduates is higher than that for finance. Now, there are a few higher paying jobs in finance - but they aren't exactly easy to get. *Most* people with that degree aren't working at a major position on wall street, just like most people with a CS degree aren't founding google.
No, it's not.
The *only* reason anyone on the content delivery side of things has cared about HTML5 video is because Apple booted flash off of iOS.
As nice as it for everyone (and honestly, I'm a huge fan of open source and linux) the money market is not there for people to serve a third, completely separate version up to linux and max firefox users who have decided not to install flash.
Seriously, most practical linux users end up installing flash and something that will play x264 anyway, because that's the world we live in. Yes, it would be nice if they didn't have to worry about the fact that they might be violating patent laws... but they're still doing it.
So MS adding firefox support for HTML5 h.264 just means that pretty much anyone and everyone that advertisers care about are going to be getting things in h.264, or in a flash wrapper... there's just no incentive for anyone who isn't specifically a distributor of open source software.
Yeah. Right now mail service is a shitty job that pays decently well. While it probably makes more business sense to make it a mediocre job that pays poorly, that's not what anyone who is working there wants to hear.
If you ever want to hear a beautiful example of an employer and a union doing their best to screw each other over, listen to a post office employee for a while. Horribly management of the things they can change combined with union opposition to any change that could be more efficient (and therefore mean less workers).
The big question mark in reducing deliveries is whether it bumps the weekly workload for mailmen below 40 hours a week, at which point it becomes a very different kind of job.
That can anticipate a deer jumping into the road, or handle a patch of black ice.
Hell, I don't even trust cruise control if there is limited visibility or bad weather.
You are opening up your home machine to corporate exposure.
You are now completely responsible for any an all data loss or theft due to hardware failure or viruses.
You are essentially renting them time on an asset that you paid money for, for free.
And that doesn't even touch on what kind of a messy situation you could run into if you were fired, or the company comes under investigation for something, or has an audit, or you end up suing them yourself.
Just don't do it. Infrastructure is cheap compared to the brain you're paying to sit in front of the computer. Make them buy you a new system or live with your reduced productivity.
I understand why open source has a problem with H.264 becoming the standard. I am saying that from the perspective of anyone *outside* of open source, it is a very open and friendly standard.
Open source isn't the entire software world. In fact, for most people it is a very small part of it.
Not to mention that patents are still compatible with some open source licenses. The x264 group could pay the roytalties to distribute an encoder. Any group that took their open source and then modified it would have to pay those royalties as well, but that's how it goes. It's only the stubborn refusal by some open source groups to compromise at all on any issue that prevents this (well, and a lack of corporate funding, but hey nothing else in the world is free).
Look, *I'm* not saying that H.264 supported by is a better option than WebM. I'm saying it's a viable option for most businesses, with different problems than WebM, that is still massively better than the current alternatives (which currently seems to be patent-encumbered H.264 in a patent-encumbered, proprietary, non-standard wrapper of flash).
It's an analogy. I assumed most non video-heads wouldn't be familiar with Sorenson, Wm7-9, and whatever other crappy proprietary codecs were most commonly used in those containers.
Also, I was under the impression that the tag would specify the container format as well?
The point still stands. WebM is not an industry-defined standard. It is an open source, patent-free standard being pushed by one company. It may overall be better for the web from a control standpoint, but provided that the licensing terms do not change, it is open in all the ways that everyone who is *not* distributing open source software and wants to use it cares about.
And most of the rhetoric only mentions one, and open means too many things.
There is standard versus nonstandard (.doc vs appleworks).
There is open versus proprietary (C++ versus Java).
There is open source versus closed source (x264 versus apple's H.264 coder)
There is unencumbered versus encumbered by patents and license fees.
We have formats across all forms that are varying degrees of all of these. The thing that the h.264 people are saying is look - h.264 is the better half in almost all of those cases! It is a standard that was agreed upon by a standards board, not by a single company. The spec is out there and available for everyone to implement, not controlled by a single company. It is free to license for most uses! And it is supported by everyone and everything.
From all business perspectives outside of the open source mindset, it is a *great* standard. You don't have to worry about Apple, Microsoft, or Adobe changing it, or wait on them to make their decoder not suck. It is attached to so many different businesses that there is a huge incentive to keep licensing fees from becoming ridiculous. And it works everywhere.
Do people remember .mov and .wmv files? Do you remember real media's proprietary standards? From a *use* standpoint and a consumer standpoint, h.264 is a great and "open" standard.
The problem is when you run up against the open source concerns about infrastructure. It *is* controlled by somebody. It does have patents, so if you don't have money you can't make a business out of it. It is not "free" - either as beer or speech.
I think the argument the article makes is that perfect is the enemy of good. H.264 is *vastly* more open, consumer, and business friendly than that which it replaces - proprietary, nonstandard, closed video players from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Real. Going to it as a web standard would be a huge boon for consumers and businesses, and it already has real momentum to do that.
WebM would be better, from a "free" perspective... but, argues the author, it's much less likely to succeed, as it isn't a standard, and it isn't ubiquitous. And so we should go with something that is already a huge improvement over the status quo instead of hoping for some "perfect" free solution. Getting to an open standard is already a major victory for nearly everyone involved. Or is installing a plugin to add h.264 support so much more odious than already installing one for flash? At least you can have your choice of which h.264 implementation you want to use.
Yes, and I'm pretty sure they started the British installation with one camera, as well.
The issue is not one of cameras. The issue is of pervasiveness and data management.
There being a camera on every street corner isn't that big of a privacy issue if every one of those feeds into a separate tape deck for a convenience store that gets reused every two weeks when they don't get robbed. No one looks at that video. If something interesting happens on the corner, someone might think to get a warrant for it and search through it for something interesting, but that's about it.
But network them, put them all where some data center can crunch through facial recognition, or where a guy can sit in front of a computer and track you around the entire city, and that's a whole different privacy issue, because now a small organization can monitor an entire city.
Just because you're in plain sight doesn't mean someone isn't invading your privacy by stalking you.
But really, this isn't about you and me. Privacy rights are a nice luxury for normal people - we don't like people messing with our personal lives, but most people don't care.
They're a much bigger issue for the journalist working on a big leak about the current administration, who can now have a drone tracing him all day to find out who he's talking to and if he has any habits that can be used to blackmail him out of doing his job. Or for the people's rights advocate lawyer or political candidate going against the incumbent. For those sorts of people, the functioning of a democratic system *requires* that they have privacy rights against the government.
And then those people will be arrested and sent to prison for wiretapping the police. It is happening.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras
The fifth estate is every person who writes letters to the editor or hands out poorly typed pamphlets or sends out tweets. It is the dissemination of viewpoints and information, not the editorial control of a select group. That is why "freedom of the press" applies as much to this slashdot comment as it does to the New York Times.