And I've been telling people for years that the "weakest link" concept in audio reproduction is an oversimplification and therefore wrong.
There are orthagonal distortion components introduced by various devices. An MP3's digital distortion (sizzle sounds, to borrow from another article somebody linked to) would be IN ADDITION TO poor frequency response and mechanical distortion. It isn't "masked" by it. And it doesn't take significantly more bitrate to go from "crappy" to "great." 128kbps CBR MP3 is pretty crappy, but 160kbps VBR MP3 is indistinguishable from the source "even on great systems." I don't intend to argue what bitrate you consider "sufficient," just that "Listen to a low bitrate because you have crappy speaker" implies that crappy speakers mask MP3 compression artifacts.
If I were to go out on a limb, I'd say its possible for crappy speakers to distort even more with overcompressed MP3s than good speakers do.
As far as I'm aware from reading in context, bricking usually means "failure due to a firmware replacement that also prevents the firmware from being further replaced."
Like, you update your firmware on the PS3, then it decides to completely fail to boot or anything... and you can't update the firmware because you need working firmware in place to do that. BRICKED.
I don't consider mechanical failure to be "bricked" though an argument could be made for that. Obviously, "it momentarily doesn't work until I hit the restore button" is definitely not bricked.
Eh... while the Atari, PS2, and Wii examples are accurate, I don't think the NES/SNES/PSX examples are correct.
NES and SMS were very very close in capability. The SMS might have been superior in some nitpicky sense, but if you play games on both systems it isn't apparent that SMS outpaces NES. I'll give you credit that NES won despite not having any obvious technical superiority (since it didn't.)
At SNES vs Genesis: Genesis was noticably inferior. Genesis was NOT 32 bit capable, as it used a 68000 on a 16 bit bus. Its cpu was measurably faster, however its graphics and sound hardware were noticeably behind SNES. If you play SNES and then play Genesis, especially games that were on both systems, the SNES version nearly always had better graphics and sound. Due to the censorship issue, I wouldn't compare Mortal Kombat 1 on Genesis to SNES, but if you go to MK2, the SNES version is a lot closer to the arcade version than the Genesis version was. Having a slightly faster processor doesn't outweigh the greatly superior dedicated sound and graphics chips of the SNES. Genesis can only put 64 colors on screen out of a palette of 4096... SNES can put 256 colors on screen out of a palette of 32768. Not to mention FM synthesis in the Genesis vs 8 channel PCM mixing in SNES.
As far as Playstation vs N64... the Playstation won because its storage system was technically superior to N64. Game developers didn't want to be limited to expensive ROM, so developers switched in droves to PSX. The 3d rendering capabilities of N64 were limited by the small amount of data each game could hold, not to mention a tiny texture cache that limited the detail in games. Granted, the main CPU in N64 was superior to the main CPU in PSX, but this isn't the only "technical" detail of the system. Playstation won due to technical superiority: In 1996, CDs were technically superior to rom cartridges.
Beyond 24" or so, increasing the screen size increases the distance you have to sit from the monitor to avoid motion sickness. If you had a 103" screen as your computer monitor, the idea is you sit 15 feet or so away and enjoy the fact that you don't have to use your near vision to focus on the monitor. Keep in mind this article is from like 2005 and the "high end" 50" plasma at the time was 1366x768, not 1080p.
If this was a product Panasonic was seriously marketing today, they could probably stand to inrease the resolution to, say, 3840x2160 to make the experience similiar to running four 50" plasmas with no bezels in the way. But the fact that the pixels are "physically large" is irrelevant - if you're sitting an appropriate distance away, the pixels will occupy the same angular portion of your field of view.
He probably meant 62" CRT rear projection. The definitely don't have bulbs in the sense of light bulbs, but it does have the tubes themselves that create the image. This is probably what died.
Heh, this comment is supposed to be a joke obviously, but I'll point out in case anyone is worried: They can't actually increase the punishment after it has been decided, as that would be against due process.
IANAL but if I recall correctly, punitive damages are typically considered unconstitutional if they exceed 10 times actual damages. Feel free to correct me on that one.
This is patently false. Whats really happening is that SUSTAINED WRITE PERFORMANCE decreases by about 20% on a full drive as compared to a fresh drive. You might say 20% is too much, and I'd probably agree with you, except that ONLY sustained write performance is being affected.
Your read speed will not decrease. Your read latency will not increase. Unless you're using your SSDs as the temp drive for a high definition video operation (And why the hell would you for that? Platter drives are far better suited to that task between sequential write speed and total storage space) then you have nothing to worry about.
This happens on all drives, as the article title correctly states. The solution is a new write command that pre-erases blocks as you use them, so the odds that you have to erase-then-write as you go along are decreased. Win7 knows how to do this.
Nonetheless, it is totally overblown and your SSD will perform better than any platter based drive even when totally full.
Air Force One is the callsign for whatever plane the president is currently flying on (which is usually one of the two specialized 747s.) If the president was flying on the back up, it would be "Air Force One" as well, and if it was flying without the president, it would have a different callsign altogether.
And I was learning BASIC on an Apple IIe in elementary school... in 1994! Just because more people were probably using C64s/Apple IIs/ Spectrum 128Ks as their main computer in the 80s than there were in the 90s doesn't mean you can't go back to the old computer just for the sake of learning. I mean yeah, in 1994 I had a then-modern PC but our elementary school had all Apple IIs.
Eh, isn't the point of the iphone that its mp3 player quality is on par with the ipod itself? I've never used one for music playback, but ASSUMING (and i may be wrong) that its headphone out is of the same quality as an ipod, then with not-terribly-expensive headphones it shouldn't be hard to tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps.
A commonly stated fallacy, even among relatively well informed audio gurus, is that limitations in one part of a signal chain can obscure limitations in other parts of the signal chain. This isn't necessarily true. It depends on what exact kind of distortion is added. I first noticed that 128kbps mp3s weren't really CD quality while listening to a CD I burned (obviously from 128 kbps MP3s) in my dad's loudass 1973 BMW 2002 BEFORE he installed all the sound damping stuff. Just because the dynamic range was obviously obscured by the cabin noise, doesn't mean the distortion in the high end caused by 128 kbps mp3s was also obscured. Going back to the CDs to rip higher bitrate MP3s improved the situation considerably.
Nonetheless, I'm not an anti-MP3 bigot either. I've heard people try to argue that 320kbps isn't even "CD quality." Aside from the fact that its technically lossy, I doubt anyone would reliably be able to distinguish 320kbps mp3 from the CD source in a blind test. I suspect you agree that 192kbps is a pretty reasonable "threshold" for avoiding audible artifacts in MP3s... seems like most music sounds good at that bitrate.
But finally and most importantly: People shouldn't complain about the quality of a one time $3 fee to access a whole bands discography regardless of who that band is.
You said "a few thousand kilobits per second" of telemetry data, and then "a few million bits per second" of h.264 video. Thousand kilobits = megabit. Million bits = megabit.
I assume you meant to say a smaller number for the amount of telemetry data the Apollo stuff had to deal with.
I knew somebody would make some gross misstatement like "The human eye only sees at 25 fps anyway"
And for that, here is the obligatory link to 100fps.com
In short, the shortest flash a human eye can see depends on a lot of things. These factors are explained thoroughly on that web site. The tl;dr version is this: The human eye can discern A LOT MORE than 25 fps.
The SCPH-1001 original PSX model usually wouldn't play games UNLESS it was vertical. Of course... I wouldn't reorient it WHILE playing. Also strangely, while I attributed the "Needing to turn it on its side" to something with the laser assembly wearing out, it turned out that my "early" playstation games still played consistently with the system oriented horizontally. I think FF8 was the first I had that required the system to be vertical, and that confuses the hell out of me. If I went back and hooked my PSX up right now, I bet Return Fire would play fine horizontally but Gran Turismo 2 would refuse to play in any orientation but vertically. (Old game vs newer).
Yeah, this is why its just not practical to ID everybody either. Theres only one practical solution, and I think the state of NY already figured it out:
1. Make it so you have to be over 18 to actually buy cigarettes. 2. Make it so you have to ID anybody that looks under 25. The high threshold isn't stated so you can impose penalties on people who sell cigarettes to 24 year olds without IDing them, its just to clarify that you should ID everybody unless they're "really old." 3. If you want to actually go trolling for people who might potentially sell to minors, send in the youngest looking 18 year old possible.
When Stewarts sends their 25+ year old employees in to do these internal stings, all they're proving is that I don't ID EVERYONE that looks old. Imagine you're a new employee and theres a customer that comes in 5 days a week to buy cigarettes, he's not "obviously over 30" so you ask for his ID. Congratulations: You've just opened the flood gates. That customer will not leave without his pack of cigarettes and you will get an earful about how he's in there so often and nobody ever IDs him so he left his ID at home. These people do not take "I'M JUST FOLLOWING STORE POLICY" for an answer. And there are many of these people in the world. The soccer moms who just ran in to buy a gallon of milk on the way home with their kids doesn't want to listen wait in line while you explain to the regular customer that you can't sell them cigarettes without an ID. If you repeated this a few times a day, you'd have the line wrapped around the entire store in no time, and employees have other things to do besides ring customers.
Ok yeah, this is way off topic, but after all this is Slashdot, so oh well. Haha.
This is the problem/reason I quit my job at the gas station. The company I worked for would send their employees to do tobacco stings. The company policy was "ID everybody who looks under 30" but this is impractical for reasons anybody who has worked at a gas station would understand. Nonetheless, you only have to be 18 to buy cigarettes and NYS law is that you're supposed to ID anybody that "looks under 25."
Well, while I have no problem looking at a 19 year old and thinking "he's not over 25, I'll ask for ID." But once you set the threshold too high, everybody just blurs together. 28? 35? How am I supposed to tell the difference? Maybe Stewarts policy should just be to ID everybody, if they really care about not selling tobacco to minors. Or maybe they should just stop selling cigarettes because they're a filthy addiction anyway? Obviously their only real concern is losing their tobacco licence for selling to minors, but they are in no such danger of that if I fail to ID somebody over the age of 25. On a side note: when the state actually runs a sting, they send the youngest looking clean shaven just-turned-18 year olds possible. They don't really care if you fail to ID "some" people over 18, what they're really testing is if you'd sell to a minor, and the best way of testing that without actually getting a minor to buy cigarettes is to send the youngest looking person possible. Because if you don't ID a young looking 18 year old for cigarettes... you're not doing your job. If you don't ID an old looking 27 year old... who the hell cares?
The last straw was when they sent in somebody who I KNEW worked for the company and I KNEW was 27 years old. I didn't ID her because she was in our store buying stuff all the time and I knew how old she was. I wasn't fired, but I was suspended for a week and didn't go back to work afterwards.
Eventually you have to hit a limit. It gets hard bordering on possible to judge people because as they always say, "its not the age, its the miles" and heavy smokers tend to look way older than they actually are anyway. I realize this isn't related to child pornography, but the basic idea of "how do you prove how old somebody APPEARS to be" is something that has no real answer.
Oh yes: 1080p will look considerably better than 720p or 480p on a 25" TV from 2' away. Its just that at that screen size/distance you're getting into an area where even higher resolution video would be better.
What I'd have to wonder is if you're really 2' away or if the screen is really 25". Thats a distance-size ratio of LESS THAN 1 (.96 to be exact). The vast majority of people would start feeling the effects of motion sickness observing a moving image that takes up that much of their field of vision. No doubt though, 1080p will be easily recognizable over 480p at that distance.
And in other news: 82% of people CAN tell the difference between SD and HD.
www.cowclops.net/resolutionchart1.png
You want your optimal viewing distance to be on the line for whichever format you watch the most of, which is about where you'd notice the quality difference between that and the next worst format. If you have a TV smaller than 42" or so or you're sitting very far away for whatever screen size you have, you won't be able to tell the difference.
And yes, I'm going too post this on every "Stupid people can't tell SD from HD" story until people stop asserting that HD isn't that much of an improvement over SD. I use a 720p projector on a 65" screen that I sit 10 feet away from and Transformers on HD-DVD looks CONSIDERABLY better than Transformers on DVD.
Actually, the point of VBR is to keep quality close to constant, as some audio frames are more easily compressed than others. Constant bitrate actually gives you variable quality. Variable bitrate gives you near constant quality. If you "hear" the quality changing in a VBR recording, theres something wrong with the encoder.
Well they won't keep making recreations of NES era games when nobody remembers NES anymore. They'll make recreations of newer games that people still remember playing as a kid.
The government can not copyright material. All material produced by government is owned by the people collectively. But I'm not entirely sure what you're specifically referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
And I've been telling people for years that the "weakest link" concept in audio reproduction is an oversimplification and therefore wrong.
There are orthagonal distortion components introduced by various devices. An MP3's digital distortion (sizzle sounds, to borrow from another article somebody linked to) would be IN ADDITION TO poor frequency response and mechanical distortion. It isn't "masked" by it. And it doesn't take significantly more bitrate to go from "crappy" to "great." 128kbps CBR MP3 is pretty crappy, but 160kbps VBR MP3 is indistinguishable from the source "even on great systems." I don't intend to argue what bitrate you consider "sufficient," just that "Listen to a low bitrate because you have crappy speaker" implies that crappy speakers mask MP3 compression artifacts.
If I were to go out on a limb, I'd say its possible for crappy speakers to distort even more with overcompressed MP3s than good speakers do.
As far as I'm aware from reading in context, bricking usually means "failure due to a firmware replacement that also prevents the firmware from being further replaced."
Like, you update your firmware on the PS3, then it decides to completely fail to boot or anything... and you can't update the firmware because you need working firmware in place to do that. BRICKED.
I don't consider mechanical failure to be "bricked" though an argument could be made for that. Obviously, "it momentarily doesn't work until I hit the restore button" is definitely not bricked.
They didn't rescan the film to do that release, they simply used the betacam SP tapes originally used to make the laserdisc.
Eh... while the Atari, PS2, and Wii examples are accurate, I don't think the NES/SNES/PSX examples are correct.
NES and SMS were very very close in capability. The SMS might have been superior in some nitpicky sense, but if you play games on both systems it isn't apparent that SMS outpaces NES. I'll give you credit that NES won despite not having any obvious technical superiority (since it didn't.)
At SNES vs Genesis: Genesis was noticably inferior. Genesis was NOT 32 bit capable, as it used a 68000 on a 16 bit bus. Its cpu was measurably faster, however its graphics and sound hardware were noticeably behind SNES. If you play SNES and then play Genesis, especially games that were on both systems, the SNES version nearly always had better graphics and sound. Due to the censorship issue, I wouldn't compare Mortal Kombat 1 on Genesis to SNES, but if you go to MK2, the SNES version is a lot closer to the arcade version than the Genesis version was. Having a slightly faster processor doesn't outweigh the greatly superior dedicated sound and graphics chips of the SNES. Genesis can only put 64 colors on screen out of a palette of 4096... SNES can put 256 colors on screen out of a palette of 32768. Not to mention FM synthesis in the Genesis vs 8 channel PCM mixing in SNES.
As far as Playstation vs N64... the Playstation won because its storage system was technically superior to N64. Game developers didn't want to be limited to expensive ROM, so developers switched in droves to PSX. The 3d rendering capabilities of N64 were limited by the small amount of data each game could hold, not to mention a tiny texture cache that limited the detail in games. Granted, the main CPU in N64 was superior to the main CPU in PSX, but this isn't the only "technical" detail of the system. Playstation won due to technical superiority: In 1996, CDs were technically superior to rom cartridges.
Beyond 24" or so, increasing the screen size increases the distance you have to sit from the monitor to avoid motion sickness. If you had a 103" screen as your computer monitor, the idea is you sit 15 feet or so away and enjoy the fact that you don't have to use your near vision to focus on the monitor. Keep in mind this article is from like 2005 and the "high end" 50" plasma at the time was 1366x768, not 1080p.
If this was a product Panasonic was seriously marketing today, they could probably stand to inrease the resolution to, say, 3840x2160 to make the experience similiar to running four 50" plasmas with no bezels in the way. But the fact that the pixels are "physically large" is irrelevant - if you're sitting an appropriate distance away, the pixels will occupy the same angular portion of your field of view.
He probably meant 62" CRT rear projection. The definitely don't have bulbs in the sense of light bulbs, but it does have the tubes themselves that create the image. This is probably what died.
Heh, this comment is supposed to be a joke obviously, but I'll point out in case anyone is worried: They can't actually increase the punishment after it has been decided, as that would be against due process.
IANAL but if I recall correctly, punitive damages are typically considered unconstitutional if they exceed 10 times actual damages. Feel free to correct me on that one.
"Drastically effected its performance"
This is patently false. Whats really happening is that SUSTAINED WRITE PERFORMANCE decreases by about 20% on a full drive as compared to a fresh drive. You might say 20% is too much, and I'd probably agree with you, except that ONLY sustained write performance is being affected.
Your read speed will not decrease. Your read latency will not increase. Unless you're using your SSDs as the temp drive for a high definition video operation (And why the hell would you for that? Platter drives are far better suited to that task between sequential write speed and total storage space) then you have nothing to worry about.
This happens on all drives, as the article title correctly states. The solution is a new write command that pre-erases blocks as you use them, so the odds that you have to erase-then-write as you go along are decreased. Win7 knows how to do this.
Nonetheless, it is totally overblown and your SSD will perform better than any platter based drive even when totally full.
Air Force One is the callsign for whatever plane the president is currently flying on (which is usually one of the two specialized 747s.) If the president was flying on the back up, it would be "Air Force One" as well, and if it was flying without the president, it would have a different callsign altogether.
And I was learning BASIC on an Apple IIe in elementary school... in 1994! Just because more people were probably using C64s/Apple IIs/ Spectrum 128Ks as their main computer in the 80s than there were in the 90s doesn't mean you can't go back to the old computer just for the sake of learning. I mean yeah, in 1994 I had a then-modern PC but our elementary school had all Apple IIs.
I thought the Supreme Court of India was coming down on burgers... because Hindu people worship cows and therefore don't eat hamburgers.
Eh, isn't the point of the iphone that its mp3 player quality is on par with the ipod itself? I've never used one for music playback, but ASSUMING (and i may be wrong) that its headphone out is of the same quality as an ipod, then with not-terribly-expensive headphones it shouldn't be hard to tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps.
A commonly stated fallacy, even among relatively well informed audio gurus, is that limitations in one part of a signal chain can obscure limitations in other parts of the signal chain. This isn't necessarily true. It depends on what exact kind of distortion is added. I first noticed that 128kbps mp3s weren't really CD quality while listening to a CD I burned (obviously from 128 kbps MP3s) in my dad's loudass 1973 BMW 2002 BEFORE he installed all the sound damping stuff. Just because the dynamic range was obviously obscured by the cabin noise, doesn't mean the distortion in the high end caused by 128 kbps mp3s was also obscured. Going back to the CDs to rip higher bitrate MP3s improved the situation considerably.
Nonetheless, I'm not an anti-MP3 bigot either. I've heard people try to argue that 320kbps isn't even "CD quality." Aside from the fact that its technically lossy, I doubt anyone would reliably be able to distinguish 320kbps mp3 from the CD source in a blind test. I suspect you agree that 192kbps is a pretty reasonable "threshold" for avoiding audible artifacts in MP3s... seems like most music sounds good at that bitrate.
But finally and most importantly: People shouldn't complain about the quality of a one time $3 fee to access a whole bands discography regardless of who that band is.
You said "a few thousand kilobits per second" of telemetry data, and then "a few million bits per second" of h.264 video. Thousand kilobits = megabit. Million bits = megabit.
I assume you meant to say a smaller number for the amount of telemetry data the Apollo stuff had to deal with.
I knew somebody would make some gross misstatement like "The human eye only sees at 25 fps anyway"
And for that, here is the obligatory link to 100fps.com
In short, the shortest flash a human eye can see depends on a lot of things. These factors are explained thoroughly on that web site. The tl;dr version is this: The human eye can discern A LOT MORE than 25 fps.
What computer had 4MB of ram but only a 20MB hard drive? By the time I had 4MB of ram, I had a 340MB hard drive to go with it.
(But your point still stands, lol)
Eh, I still think FF6 was the best game in the series. FF7 isn't crap, but FF8 and 9 are. Can't speak for the ones after 9.
The SCPH-1001 original PSX model usually wouldn't play games UNLESS it was vertical. Of course... I wouldn't reorient it WHILE playing. Also strangely, while I attributed the "Needing to turn it on its side" to something with the laser assembly wearing out, it turned out that my "early" playstation games still played consistently with the system oriented horizontally. I think FF8 was the first I had that required the system to be vertical, and that confuses the hell out of me. If I went back and hooked my PSX up right now, I bet Return Fire would play fine horizontally but Gran Turismo 2 would refuse to play in any orientation but vertically. (Old game vs newer).
Yeah, this is why its just not practical to ID everybody either. Theres only one practical solution, and I think the state of NY already figured it out:
1. Make it so you have to be over 18 to actually buy cigarettes.
2. Make it so you have to ID anybody that looks under 25. The high threshold isn't stated so you can impose penalties on people who sell cigarettes to 24 year olds without IDing them, its just to clarify that you should ID everybody unless they're "really old."
3. If you want to actually go trolling for people who might potentially sell to minors, send in the youngest looking 18 year old possible.
When Stewarts sends their 25+ year old employees in to do these internal stings, all they're proving is that I don't ID EVERYONE that looks old. Imagine you're a new employee and theres a customer that comes in 5 days a week to buy cigarettes, he's not "obviously over 30" so you ask for his ID. Congratulations: You've just opened the flood gates. That customer will not leave without his pack of cigarettes and you will get an earful about how he's in there so often and nobody ever IDs him so he left his ID at home. These people do not take "I'M JUST FOLLOWING STORE POLICY" for an answer. And there are many of these people in the world. The soccer moms who just ran in to buy a gallon of milk on the way home with their kids doesn't want to listen wait in line while you explain to the regular customer that you can't sell them cigarettes without an ID. If you repeated this a few times a day, you'd have the line wrapped around the entire store in no time, and employees have other things to do besides ring customers.
Ok yeah, this is way off topic, but after all this is Slashdot, so oh well. Haha.
This is the problem/reason I quit my job at the gas station. The company I worked for would send their employees to do tobacco stings. The company policy was "ID everybody who looks under 30" but this is impractical for reasons anybody who has worked at a gas station would understand. Nonetheless, you only have to be 18 to buy cigarettes and NYS law is that you're supposed to ID anybody that "looks under 25."
Well, while I have no problem looking at a 19 year old and thinking "he's not over 25, I'll ask for ID." But once you set the threshold too high, everybody just blurs together. 28? 35? How am I supposed to tell the difference? Maybe Stewarts policy should just be to ID everybody, if they really care about not selling tobacco to minors. Or maybe they should just stop selling cigarettes because they're a filthy addiction anyway? Obviously their only real concern is losing their tobacco licence for selling to minors, but they are in no such danger of that if I fail to ID somebody over the age of 25. On a side note: when the state actually runs a sting, they send the youngest looking clean shaven just-turned-18 year olds possible. They don't really care if you fail to ID "some" people over 18, what they're really testing is if you'd sell to a minor, and the best way of testing that without actually getting a minor to buy cigarettes is to send the youngest looking person possible. Because if you don't ID a young looking 18 year old for cigarettes... you're not doing your job. If you don't ID an old looking 27 year old... who the hell cares?
The last straw was when they sent in somebody who I KNEW worked for the company and I KNEW was 27 years old. I didn't ID her because she was in our store buying stuff all the time and I knew how old she was. I wasn't fired, but I was suspended for a week and didn't go back to work afterwards.
Eventually you have to hit a limit. It gets hard bordering on possible to judge people because as they always say, "its not the age, its the miles" and heavy smokers tend to look way older than they actually are anyway. I realize this isn't related to child pornography, but the basic idea of "how do you prove how old somebody APPEARS to be" is something that has no real answer.
Oh yes: 1080p will look considerably better than 720p or 480p on a 25" TV from 2' away. Its just that at that screen size/distance you're getting into an area where even higher resolution video would be better.
What I'd have to wonder is if you're really 2' away or if the screen is really 25". Thats a distance-size ratio of LESS THAN 1 (.96 to be exact). The vast majority of people would start feeling the effects of motion sickness observing a moving image that takes up that much of their field of vision. No doubt though, 1080p will be easily recognizable over 480p at that distance.
And in other news: 82% of people CAN tell the difference between SD and HD.
www.cowclops.net/resolutionchart1.png
You want your optimal viewing distance to be on the line for whichever format you watch the most of, which is about where you'd notice the quality difference between that and the next worst format. If you have a TV smaller than 42" or so or you're sitting very far away for whatever screen size you have, you won't be able to tell the difference.
And yes, I'm going too post this on every "Stupid people can't tell SD from HD" story until people stop asserting that HD isn't that much of an improvement over SD. I use a 720p projector on a 65" screen that I sit 10 feet away from and Transformers on HD-DVD looks CONSIDERABLY better than Transformers on DVD.
Actually, the point of VBR is to keep quality close to constant, as some audio frames are more easily compressed than others. Constant bitrate actually gives you variable quality. Variable bitrate gives you near constant quality. If you "hear" the quality changing in a VBR recording, theres something wrong with the encoder.
Well they won't keep making recreations of NES era games when nobody remembers NES anymore. They'll make recreations of newer games that people still remember playing as a kid.
The government can not copyright material. All material produced by government is owned by the people collectively. But I'm not entirely sure what you're specifically referring to.