A high quality rip is barely distinguishable to someone with consumer quality playback equipment.
And a high quality rip is just as good on hi-fi playback equiptment. The r3mix website (now defunct & cybersquatted) had details on a test conducted by a German Hi-Fi magazine, where they encoded various mp3 files, then burnt them back to audio CD.
The blind listening test consisted (IIRC) of around 1000 Hi-Fi fans, who listened to the various material on some pretty hi-end gear. They concluded that a well encoded mp3 file was indistingishable for the vast majority of listeners.
They came up with a VBR setting that seemed to satisfy everyone. Most decent encoders have it as "-r3mix". I've since went back and re-encoded any of my CDs that were ripped at less than 192 kbit/s with it, and the results are pretty impressive.
The weak link is generally the sound card, especially if it's on-board sound. Buy a decent card, and you'll notice a difference. My whole system (low to mid-range hi-fi) is based of my mp3 library, and I'm more than happy with the audio quality
It's not a solution, just an observation. You'll find it hard to get a customer that is willing to pay for something that used to be free, in any industry.
Ever seen the destruction to lives caused by those few grams of pot? No... I didn't think so.
Well, just about everyone I know (a lot of folk) smoke pot at least once a week, at parties etc. For most of us, we have been doing it for at least 10 years.
Where are these problems you speak of? Even my mate, the drugs councillor who works with 18 year-old heroin addicts, can't understand what "destruction" you refer to.
Which considering the murder rates in both countries, surely the case could be made that GTA and its ilk be compulsory due to it's undoubted pacifying effects?
What do you mean? The gun murder rate in the USA is the world largest. The gun murder rate in the UK is one of the worlds smallest.
Pretty much everything in the first ten years. Which are in many ways the most important years. Remember, humans learn by imitation, so although it may not seem like your parents are teaching you things, you are absorbing just about everything you see at home.
parents are amazingly irrelevant to their children's character. One long twin study showed approximately 50% coming from genes, 45% from unknown sources but presumably peer influence, and 5% from parents.
Perhaps because parents are spending less than 5% of time with their kids nowadays? Now, shut up children, ER is on TV now.
Going from legalizing and regulation of drugs to socializing the distribution is a big jump
Not really, it's a common harm reduction technique. You treat addiction to hard drugs as an illness, not a crime. Encourage, but don't force people off it. Another advantage is that the users potentially lose touch with the dealers, making successfully staying clean more likely.
Not only does it allow you to disable/filter the service, announcing it in such a public way starts a race between the distro's to get the patches out first.
Not at all, why rob a drug store when you can get your hard-drug fix for free at a doctors? Drug crime is inherently linked to their illegality.
And, yes, I support legalising prostitution as well. It's not something I really approve of, however it's going to go on regardless of it's legal status. Where is the benefit in criminalising those involved? I can't see any, other than appeasing the moral sensitivities of the minority, however the problems associated with the illegality, such as violence, drug addiction, exposure of such things to children in the street, turf wars, pimps etc are all linked again to the illegality of it all. There are no such problems in Holland, where it is legal and they even have a trade union.
I'd happilly subscribe to a service that charged around 1 or $1 per album, and offered a wide catalogue of music at as-fast-as-you-can-get-it download speeds. Most folk would find that preferable to piracy, and in many ways it would be more convienient than the p2p queues. At the moment, p2p is easier than the alternatives, going to a store or ordering a hard-copy online.
It's very much clear that DVD Rips of movies that aren't available on DVD yet. Jeez, have of them have copyright and "property of..." overlays.
On the otherhand, any telescreener is clearly someone who knows a friendly cinema manager who will let them do captures after-hours. Films captured during public screenings are rare and understandably so. I haven't seen someone standup or talk in one of these since I saw a friends copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over a year before it's UK theatrical release!
I remember reading (on Usenet, so pinch of salt) many years ago that airplanes would get your analogue phone barred from the network. Before digital, analogue phones could be easilly "cloned". You could sit at a highway service station and pick out the id's of drivers using their phone. Your phone would then become a copy of theirs, getting you free calls.
To combat this, the telcos had software written that would bar a cellphone if it appeared unrealistically in several cell stations at once. That would indicate that there were two copies of the phone. However, turn a phone on at 30,000 feet, you get line-of-sight with a lot of towers, confusing this system.
Weren't folks on that plane using cellphones with no apparent problem?
Well, IIRC they never actually said it was the rebelion that directly led to the plane crashing. The wording has always been done very carefully.
Alternate possibilities might be that the cellphones crashed the plane, or it was intentionally shot down. Given the time of day, the general feeling in the whitehouse, and the fact that the plane was headed to Washington, and the large area that wreckage was found over, I'd say the latter was most likely.
To be honest, I reckon that fly-by-wire will be safest ultimately, once it's fully mature. Mechanical components generally die before solid-state ones. Of course, there are the actuators to think of!
My biggest question thing is whether the virgin thing is actually believed by anyone, except paranoid christians. Sounds like religious FUD to me. Next they'll be telling us they eat babies.
Well, I rememeber watching MTV 10 years ago, and isn't wasn't like that. It was MTV Europe, and it played mostly non-commercial stuff (except during charts etc), as well as lots of short-films and arty stuff.
I caught MTV UK recently, didn't even realise I had it on my cable package. Utter garbage.
If you can find a full length DVD ripped movie for 500 Mbs the quality is going to suck balls.
Using DivX, you can get good quality for a 2 hour film in one CD, 650 meg. Adding the AC3 soundtrack and reducing compression by approx 50% takes 2 CDs, and you are damn near DVD quality. Rememeber, DivX is a more advanced codec (essentially mpeg4), and therefore has smaller file sizes than mpeg2 (DVD)
The quality is pretty damn good, and there a millions of people downloading movies right now. The other posts are right, the MPAA isn't that far behind the RIAA.
The main differences are:
Sheer size of data
Awareness (most folk don't know you can do this)
Playability, you need a PC, special DVD player, or a hacked XBox to play the movies.
Crack those problems, the RIAA is in the same boat. The saviour will be the packaging, bonuses, multiple languages, subtitles etc. They are the only things that really would allow DVDs to compete with downloads. The audio industry has nothing like this to compete with.
Show me where you can get a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean or The Hulk in good quality and around that size.
Very bad examples. Neither film is out on DVD yet, so any copy is going to be some crappy camcorder in the cinema, so the source material is already dreadful. Get on sharereactor.com and be amazed at the wealth of high quality media available.
Having your media on mp3 (or similar, "mp3" seems to be the new "hoover") has the following advantages:
You can create playlists, like a jukebox
You can access your whole library on any PC on your home network
You can rsync off-site backups, no fire or theft risk to your collection
You can (broadband permitting) stream your music to any PC on the planet.
Get a car and portable player, you can zap new albums onto SD-cards or CDrs in minutes
You can search for files/directories in seconds and navigate through a massive collection in seconds
You don't need to worry about theft/damage/not-using-jewel-cases to your CDs at a party, a common problem for my friends
Forget buying CDs, I haven't even used an audio CD at home in at least a year, and that was to rip it. I don't even know where my CD collection is, I think it's in a box in my parents attic somewhere.
CDs? Aren't they used for burning DivX movies to now?;-)
Those votes don't mean shit, the whole thing was set up to pass.
It was a highly emotive time. Who in the right mind would vote against "The Patriot Act", post-9/11? Those who were publicly against it were said "to be with the terrorists".
Bush's "your either with us or against us" speach was possibly the most worrying speach I've heard in a long time.
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And a high quality rip is just as good on hi-fi playback equiptment. The r3mix website (now defunct & cybersquatted) had details on a test conducted by a German Hi-Fi magazine, where they encoded various mp3 files, then burnt them back to audio CD.
The blind listening test consisted (IIRC) of around 1000 Hi-Fi fans, who listened to the various material on some pretty hi-end gear. They concluded that a well encoded mp3 file was indistingishable for the vast majority of listeners.
They came up with a VBR setting that seemed to satisfy everyone. Most decent encoders have it as "-r3mix". I've since went back and re-encoded any of my CDs that were ripped at less than 192 kbit/s with it, and the results are pretty impressive.
The weak link is generally the sound card, especially if it's on-board sound. Buy a decent card, and you'll notice a difference. My whole system (low to mid-range hi-fi) is based of my mp3 library, and I'm more than happy with the audio quality
It's not a solution, just an observation. You'll find it hard to get a customer that is willing to pay for something that used to be free, in any industry.
Because he can get it for free?
Well, just about everyone I know (a lot of folk) smoke pot at least once a week, at parties etc. For most of us, we have been doing it for at least 10 years.
Where are these problems you speak of? Even my mate, the drugs councillor who works with 18 year-old heroin addicts, can't understand what "destruction" you refer to.
What do you mean? The gun murder rate in the USA is the world largest. The gun murder rate in the UK is one of the worlds smallest.
Pretty much everything in the first ten years. Which are in many ways the most important years. Remember, humans learn by imitation, so although it may not seem like your parents are teaching you things, you are absorbing just about everything you see at home.
Perhaps because parents are spending less than 5% of time with their kids nowadays? Now, shut up children, ER is on TV now.
Other things that will have the same problem:
Banning the offending object isn't the way ahead. Increasing awareness of the problem is much better.
Not really, it's a common harm reduction technique. You treat addiction to hard drugs as an illness, not a crime. Encourage, but don't force people off it. Another advantage is that the users potentially lose touch with the dealers, making successfully staying clean more likely.
Light years ahead of the current system.
Not only does it allow you to disable/filter the service, announcing it in such a public way starts a race between the distro's to get the patches out first.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
The first updates the package database, the second does the package download & install.
I'm not entirely sure why it's not cron'ed by default. Does anyone know why, or is there any reason why you shouldn't do it?
And, yes, I support legalising prostitution as well. It's not something I really approve of, however it's going to go on regardless of it's legal status. Where is the benefit in criminalising those involved? I can't see any, other than appeasing the moral sensitivities of the minority, however the problems associated with the illegality, such as violence, drug addiction, exposure of such things to children in the street, turf wars, pimps etc are all linked again to the illegality of it all. There are no such problems in Holland, where it is legal and they even have a trade union.
Not if they sold 20 times more copies than they currently are selling, which they certainally would at those prices.
I'd happilly subscribe to a service that charged around 1 or $1 per album, and offered a wide catalogue of music at as-fast-as-you-can-get-it download speeds. Most folk would find that preferable to piracy, and in many ways it would be more convienient than the p2p queues. At the moment, p2p is easier than the alternatives, going to a store or ordering a hard-copy online.
It's very much clear that DVD Rips of movies that aren't available on DVD yet. Jeez, have of them have copyright and "property of ..." overlays.
On the otherhand, any telescreener is clearly someone who knows a friendly cinema manager who will let them do captures after-hours. Films captured during public screenings are rare and understandably so. I haven't seen someone standup or talk in one of these since I saw a friends copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over a year before it's UK theatrical release!
To combat this, the telcos had software written that would bar a cellphone if it appeared unrealistically in several cell stations at once. That would indicate that there were two copies of the phone. However, turn a phone on at 30,000 feet, you get line-of-sight with a lot of towers, confusing this system.
Well, IIRC they never actually said it was the rebelion that directly led to the plane crashing. The wording has always been done very carefully.
Alternate possibilities might be that the cellphones crashed the plane, or it was intentionally shot down. Given the time of day, the general feeling in the whitehouse, and the fact that the plane was headed to Washington, and the large area that wreckage was found over, I'd say the latter was most likely.
It's a cost & weight issue. Shieding is expensive, and adds weight that costs you everytime the plane takes to the air.
Retrofitting existing aircraft with shielding would be very difficult. I'd be very surprised if new planes didn't have much better shielding though.
To be honest, I reckon that fly-by-wire will be safest ultimately, once it's fully mature. Mechanical components generally die before solid-state ones. Of course, there are the actuators to think of!
My biggest question thing is whether the virgin thing is actually believed by anyone, except paranoid christians. Sounds like religious FUD to me. Next they'll be telling us they eat babies.
I caught MTV UK recently, didn't even realise I had it on my cable package. Utter garbage.
Using DivX, you can get good quality for a 2 hour film in one CD, 650 meg. Adding the AC3 soundtrack and reducing compression by approx 50% takes 2 CDs, and you are damn near DVD quality. Rememeber, DivX is a more advanced codec (essentially mpeg4), and therefore has smaller file sizes than mpeg2 (DVD)
The quality is pretty damn good, and there a millions of people downloading movies right now. The other posts are right, the MPAA isn't that far behind the RIAA.
The main differences are:
Crack those problems, the RIAA is in the same boat. The saviour will be the packaging, bonuses, multiple languages, subtitles etc. They are the only things that really would allow DVDs to compete with downloads. The audio industry has nothing like this to compete with.
Show me where you can get a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean or The Hulk in good quality and around that size.
Very bad examples. Neither film is out on DVD yet, so any copy is going to be some crappy camcorder in the cinema, so the source material is already dreadful. Get on sharereactor.com and be amazed at the wealth of high quality media available.
Having your media on mp3 (or similar, "mp3" seems to be the new "hoover") has the following advantages:
Forget buying CDs, I haven't even used an audio CD at home in at least a year, and that was to rip it. I don't even know where my CD collection is, I think it's in a box in my parents attic somewhere.
CDs? Aren't they used for burning DivX movies to now? ;-)
It was a highly emotive time. Who in the right mind would vote against "The Patriot Act", post-9/11? Those who were publicly against it were said "to be with the terrorists".
Bush's "your either with us or against us" speach was possibly the most worrying speach I've heard in a long time.
Well, as proven in the Dilbert vids, the most important part of a project is the name. Get the right name, it'll be easier to sell.