People are violent. That has never changed and shows no signs of doing so. On the other hand, those that are disposed to violence are typically those that will pick targets that they can likely "win" against. That's why you rarely get jumped by one guy, and these are gangs of youths doing these crimes. If the playing field is leveled, then there's less violent crime.
There's more crime per capita in your "principled" civilization in Great Britian according to NationMaster, as well as double the number of assaults per capita. You can't just compare raw numbers because Great Britain is tiny compared to the USA. You really have no concept of how small your country is. You're sitting at around 62 million people. The USA has 308 million. Really, all you show is a major disconnect from facts but you have a very strong "feeling" that you're right.
Hell, they just need to have saner self-defense laws. It's almost illegal to protect yourself in Britain, and it's almost universally illegal to protect your property. Note how it's just finally becoming explicitly protected to do so: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13957587
Mad Moxxi lets me store my extra guns so I can collect more... it's not a complete waste;) Well... maybe in terms of it should have been in the base game, but...
What is sitting in a bank and preventing it from being able to do business but a denial of service?
Re:HD formats are a kind of DOS attack
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
Ehh... I call shenanigans on DVD. Yes, you compress that further, but you generally compress it using a much superior codec to the MPEG2 that DVD uses natively. An MPEG2 stream of the same quality of the same content in H.264 is typically twice the bitrate. So encoding a 4GB DVD down to 2GB loses almost none of the quality while still taking up much less disk space.
Re-encoding a Blu-Ray, yes, you do lose some quality. But it's not a linear loss of quality.
Re:How Good is "Good Enough?"
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
You still can't see the full definition of 1080p until you get to about 8', even if you can tell the 1080p is better than the 720p, jackass. That's the point. You're still not going to want to sit much closer than 10' to a 60" display, and most people have a much smaller 40" or so display necessitating sitting much closer. 5-7', which means no laying down and watching TV. Another resolution jump over 1080p is going to have almost NO benefit for the vast majority of consumers, TVs or content.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Monitors and computer/text use are a different ball of wax. For the video use most people make of their TVs, 1080p is almost overkill as it stands. I don't watch TV with my face 50" from a 32" screen. As for my 61" screen, I need to sit 95" away to not miss any detail. That's 8'. You crank that up to 2K resolution and you need to sit 6.8' from a 61" screen to be able to perceive all the detail. And that's if you have perfect 20/20 vision. 4K resolution you're looking at sitting less than 4 feet from a 61" screen to be able to visually determine at a single pixel. That's just not reasonable. If it were a computer monitor, it would be.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't uses for higher pixel densities. I'm just saying there aren't uses for them with a living-room television.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A monitor has a different use case. I'm not watching movies on my monitor terribly often, but I may do video editing. I also have 3 monitors hooked up to my PC. But I only have one big TV for watching movies/TV/console games (media center PC for the video).
My point is that 1080p is more than enough for most people. As the OP said, many people are running their HDTVs at sub-HD resolutions and don't even realize it. I have a pretty large screen and 1080 vertical lines is about the limit of usefulness on it. Most people won't have a TV that large, or a place to put it. So higher-resolution video wins 99% of people absolutely nothing. It'll get a few people with thousands of dollars to throw away bragging rights, and that's about it. We're just reaching the limit of returns for improvements in resolution as far as the physical realities of people's eyes and their lifestyles are concerned. Just like SACD is a lot better technically than a CD, but... there's just no compelling reason for it for the vast majority of consumers.
So... what exactly are the publishers losing to those digital packrats? The ones that wouldn't have it if it wasn't free?
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Yeah. I have a 61" 1080p TV, and I'm not sure I could make out any higher resolution on it sitting at normal viewing distances. Higher resolution might be nice for theatres and archiving, but not for the general user. Hell, I rip all my Blu-Rays to hard drive so I can watch them more easily and if it's nothing that is special-effects heavy I encode it at 720p to save disk space. What good would higher resolution do?
Reminds me of that quite attributed to Niemöller. People won't care until it affects them directly. They don't have any empathy for their fellow humans, or the ability to think of consequences further out than next week.
Hehe. So naive. You didn't think the laws applied to the cops, did you? They look out for each other unless it's something they can't hide. And even then they often try.
No, not all departments or officers are like that. But enough are that it's scary as hell.
MADD doesn't need any more power. They're already a neo-prohibitionist organization. Even the founder quit because they started becoming nuts. The "war" against drunk driving has effectively been "won". Only the highly stupid do it, and they're typically punished fairly strongly.
Pretty sure George Carlin talked about having all safety devices removed and replaced with a huge metal spike in the middle of the steering wheel pointed right at the driver;)
I can use my phone safely while driving. But it is a mindset thing. The first thing you need to do is realize that driving is your first priority, period. A lot of people forget that because they're having a fight with someone on the phone, bored, distracted, thinking about what they want to do when they get to where they're going, anything but the driving itself.
Then, use the handy things about the technology. I dictate texts all the time with Google's voice recognition on my phone. Much safer, and actually faster than typing it IMO. If I do have to type, I wait for a stoplight or pull over. As for why I think I'm safe, I've had a number of opportunities to be in accidents that wouldn't have been my fault and I still avoided them, as well as not being in an accident ever (15 years and counting) except for people rear-ending me while I was stopped at a stoplight.
I like to think that the main issue is that people don't know and don't have respect for physics, and don't realize how much energy they're handling and maneuvering, stopping and starting. They have no respect for the vehicle or the danger, so it's easier to ignore it.
Should have. But common sense and hindsight are 20/20. Most terrorists just wanted a ride to Cuba before 9/11, so there was no need to escalate the situation. When 9/11 turned the planes themselves into weapons, the attitudes of the passengers and the pilots changed. That is all that it took. We don't need anything else.
How about the FBI and CIA keeping doing their jobs, and catching the terrorists when they're planning and building up? I mean, we pay them for something, right? The TSA is a boondoggle, a handout to the various companies that supply the machinery to the TSA. There's no increase in security, as evidenced by the number of times that the TSA has let terrorists and weapons through their "checkpoints" while simultaneously harassing little old ladies and sexually assaulting children.
This shit does not make us safer. It makes us more complacent, more willing to give up our freedoms just to hear the government say "there are no monsters in your closet".
Vultures actually have a better sense of smell than dogs. There's scientific merit to the idea. It's just turning out that the vulture's brain isn't wired to be trained properly.
It's amazing how little silver it takes to actually be conductive. Just like Goldschlager can have flakes of real gold in it and not really be expensive, so can these pens.
You need to make better friends. Mine give me beer and make me dinner when I help them, and understand that they're imposing. And when I need help from them, they gladly do it. Our daycare provider will periodically call me with computer questions, and in return she works with me when my schedule changes and I have to leave the kids there a little longer than normal.
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People are violent. That has never changed and shows no signs of doing so. On the other hand, those that are disposed to violence are typically those that will pick targets that they can likely "win" against. That's why you rarely get jumped by one guy, and these are gangs of youths doing these crimes. If the playing field is leveled, then there's less violent crime.
More reading: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4706
There's more crime per capita in your "principled" civilization in Great Britian according to NationMaster, as well as double the number of assaults per capita. You can't just compare raw numbers because Great Britain is tiny compared to the USA. You really have no concept of how small your country is. You're sitting at around 62 million people. The USA has 308 million. Really, all you show is a major disconnect from facts but you have a very strong "feeling" that you're right.
Hell, they just need to have saner self-defense laws. It's almost illegal to protect yourself in Britain, and it's almost universally illegal to protect your property. Note how it's just finally becoming explicitly protected to do so: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13957587
Mad Moxxi lets me store my extra guns so I can collect more... it's not a complete waste ;) Well... maybe in terms of it should have been in the base game, but...
What is sitting in a bank and preventing it from being able to do business but a denial of service?
Ehh... I call shenanigans on DVD. Yes, you compress that further, but you generally compress it using a much superior codec to the MPEG2 that DVD uses natively. An MPEG2 stream of the same quality of the same content in H.264 is typically twice the bitrate. So encoding a 4GB DVD down to 2GB loses almost none of the quality while still taking up much less disk space.
Re-encoding a Blu-Ray, yes, you do lose some quality. But it's not a linear loss of quality.
You still can't see the full definition of 1080p until you get to about 8', even if you can tell the 1080p is better than the 720p, jackass. That's the point. You're still not going to want to sit much closer than 10' to a 60" display, and most people have a much smaller 40" or so display necessitating sitting much closer. 5-7', which means no laying down and watching TV. Another resolution jump over 1080p is going to have almost NO benefit for the vast majority of consumers, TVs or content.
Not at TV viewing distances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_HDTV_viewing_distance#Human_visual_system_limitation
Monitors and computer/text use are a different ball of wax. For the video use most people make of their TVs, 1080p is almost overkill as it stands. I don't watch TV with my face 50" from a 32" screen. As for my 61" screen, I need to sit 95" away to not miss any detail. That's 8'. You crank that up to 2K resolution and you need to sit 6.8' from a 61" screen to be able to perceive all the detail. And that's if you have perfect 20/20 vision. 4K resolution you're looking at sitting less than 4 feet from a 61" screen to be able to visually determine at a single pixel. That's just not reasonable. If it were a computer monitor, it would be.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't uses for higher pixel densities. I'm just saying there aren't uses for them with a living-room television.
A monitor has a different use case. I'm not watching movies on my monitor terribly often, but I may do video editing. I also have 3 monitors hooked up to my PC. But I only have one big TV for watching movies/TV/console games (media center PC for the video).
My point is that 1080p is more than enough for most people. As the OP said, many people are running their HDTVs at sub-HD resolutions and don't even realize it. I have a pretty large screen and 1080 vertical lines is about the limit of usefulness on it. Most people won't have a TV that large, or a place to put it. So higher-resolution video wins 99% of people absolutely nothing. It'll get a few people with thousands of dollars to throw away bragging rights, and that's about it. We're just reaching the limit of returns for improvements in resolution as far as the physical realities of people's eyes and their lifestyles are concerned. Just like SACD is a lot better technically than a CD, but... there's just no compelling reason for it for the vast majority of consumers.
So... what exactly are the publishers losing to those digital packrats? The ones that wouldn't have it if it wasn't free?
Yeah. I have a 61" 1080p TV, and I'm not sure I could make out any higher resolution on it sitting at normal viewing distances. Higher resolution might be nice for theatres and archiving, but not for the general user. Hell, I rip all my Blu-Rays to hard drive so I can watch them more easily and if it's nothing that is special-effects heavy I encode it at 720p to save disk space. What good would higher resolution do?
Besides, how many Wi-Fi capable devices are out there that have a GPS function but no GPS?
Almost every laptop in existence?
That's already happening: http://www.kimbawlion.com/rant2.htm
Reminds me of that quite attributed to Niemöller. People won't care until it affects them directly. They don't have any empathy for their fellow humans, or the ability to think of consequences further out than next week.
Hehe. So naive. You didn't think the laws applied to the cops, did you? They look out for each other unless it's something they can't hide. And even then they often try.
No, not all departments or officers are like that. But enough are that it's scary as hell.
MADD doesn't need any more power. They're already a neo-prohibitionist organization. Even the founder quit because they started becoming nuts. The "war" against drunk driving has effectively been "won". Only the highly stupid do it, and they're typically punished fairly strongly.
Pretty sure George Carlin talked about having all safety devices removed and replaced with a huge metal spike in the middle of the steering wheel pointed right at the driver ;)
I can use my phone safely while driving. But it is a mindset thing. The first thing you need to do is realize that driving is your first priority, period. A lot of people forget that because they're having a fight with someone on the phone, bored, distracted, thinking about what they want to do when they get to where they're going, anything but the driving itself.
Then, use the handy things about the technology. I dictate texts all the time with Google's voice recognition on my phone. Much safer, and actually faster than typing it IMO. If I do have to type, I wait for a stoplight or pull over. As for why I think I'm safe, I've had a number of opportunities to be in accidents that wouldn't have been my fault and I still avoided them, as well as not being in an accident ever (15 years and counting) except for people rear-ending me while I was stopped at a stoplight.
I like to think that the main issue is that people don't know and don't have respect for physics, and don't realize how much energy they're handling and maneuvering, stopping and starting. They have no respect for the vehicle or the danger, so it's easier to ignore it.
But they aren't preventing people from making the discs. That's the issue here.
Wish I had mod points for you, kid ;)
Should have. But common sense and hindsight are 20/20. Most terrorists just wanted a ride to Cuba before 9/11, so there was no need to escalate the situation. When 9/11 turned the planes themselves into weapons, the attitudes of the passengers and the pilots changed. That is all that it took. We don't need anything else.
How about the FBI and CIA keeping doing their jobs, and catching the terrorists when they're planning and building up? I mean, we pay them for something, right? The TSA is a boondoggle, a handout to the various companies that supply the machinery to the TSA. There's no increase in security, as evidenced by the number of times that the TSA has let terrorists and weapons through their "checkpoints" while simultaneously harassing little old ladies and sexually assaulting children.
This shit does not make us safer. It makes us more complacent, more willing to give up our freedoms just to hear the government say "there are no monsters in your closet".
Not sure how that's NSFW, but whatever. What's sad is that many of the parodies are significantly better than the original photoshop
Vultures actually have a better sense of smell than dogs. There's scientific merit to the idea. It's just turning out that the vulture's brain isn't wired to be trained properly.
It's amazing how little silver it takes to actually be conductive. Just like Goldschlager can have flakes of real gold in it and not really be expensive, so can these pens.
You need to make better friends. Mine give me beer and make me dinner when I help them, and understand that they're imposing. And when I need help from them, they gladly do it. Our daycare provider will periodically call me with computer questions, and in return she works with me when my schedule changes and I have to leave the kids there a little longer than normal.