"What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?"
Technically, yes. As I understand it, NASA footage is generally in the public domain, but if you pay to telecine that footage from film to tape and then clean it up, you have copyright over that specific copy of the footage; there's no legal responsibility to give NASA a copy.
It may sound silly, but that's copyright law for you.
"There is likely little "enhancement" done for this film to reach "HD standards.""
As another poster mentioned below, there's probably been a substantial amount of grading and cleanup done to footage that was shot in far from ideal conditions and probably hasn't been stored terribly well.
"Can anyone explain why we saw colour pictures in some fidelity, yet the sound was worse than CB quality?"
Because the pictures were mostly shot on 16mm film or better, while the sound was typically recorded on analogue tape after transmission over a low-bandwidth radio link from space to ground?
Pretty much; if they stop supporting old bugs, a lot of old software will break. I'm sure I found an old Windows 3.1 bug in XP some time back, but I can't remember what it was (something to do with driver installation, I think).
Linux, in comparison, provides a fair amount of backwards compatibility, but doesn't have to overly worry because most software comes in source form and can be fixed when a kernel or library change breaks it. Windows doesn't have that option.
"Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API."
I think you missed the point. For the sake of backwards compatibility, Microsoft supports applications which do all these things, and drags all the associated crap into future versions of Windows so they still run.
For that matter, so do hardware developers: back when I was writing drivers for Windows I had to deliberately put bugs in our code to support applications which only worked because of bugs in the Microsoft versions of the drivers and would crash if we didn't replicate those bugs ourselves. We also spent weeks working around abuse of the API by a certain big computer company that can't program PCs worth a damn (or even, apparently, read API documentation).
"The problem is you had a maxtor... No wonder it failed."
I've had over a dozen Maxtors in the last decade and none have failed. Of course I replace them every 3-4 years because by then they've got too damn small.
The only drive I've had that did fail was an IBM, and even then I had plenty of advance warning so I could replace it before it was unusable.
From what I remember, the Google study showed that temperature made far less difference than had previously been believed (of course my memory may be past its MTBF).
When I bought a laptop a few months ago, even the sales people were telling me how much Vista sucks (despite the fact that some of the stores didn't even sell XP laptops anymore so they were sure to lose a sale). When the people selling PCs are actively discouraging customers from buying newer systems with newer operating systems, Microsoft clearly have a problem... so I'm not surprised they want to hide their dirty laundry rather than have it exposed in the press.
"I live in continental Europe and I have an ID card. I know that exactly the same style of ID cards exists in at least Belgium and Germany. Why is it a problem?"
Ask the Jews... well, the ones the German government didn't murder, anyway.
The innocent have nothing to hide, until the day the government turn them into criminals (making merely being alive a capital offence in the case of German Jews); then they suddenly realise why bloated government databases and ID cards were a really bad idea.
"I've built a very good number of machines for people lately with Abit micro-ATX boards, with built-in graphics (d-sub and DVI). Throw in a 2.4 GHz X2 and 4 gigs of memory, a hard drive, and a burner, and the hardware comes to something like $300. Good, fast, and CHEAP."
Yeah, I'm getting a similar machine because it seems much easier to run Linux cheap on AMD hardware than Intel right now. However, while the low end may be where the money is, it's not where the profit margins are; Intel probably make more profit on one high-end CPU than AMD do on a dozen low-end CPUs.
"I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading."
Indeed. My current office is full of Linux machines. In my previous job pretty much everyone in the company had two or more Linux machines on their desk and we were aiming to sell tens of millions of them (which the company may well still do: of course Joe Sixpack won't realise that their MP3 player, car navigation system, or the surveillance camera watching them in their local mall is actually running Linux). In my previous job before that, again most of the work was done on Linux.
Linux is everywhere, and it's quite possible that there are more linux machines in the world than Windows machines when you include all the servers and embedded systems it's installed on. The only place it's comparatively rare is on the desktop for non-techies, and the only reason people think Linux _isn't_ spreading is because the non-techie desktop is the most visible part of the computing world.
Seriously, you made some good points, but biometrics have nothing to do with real security. Imagine if people were issued random passwords at birth, could never change them, had them tattooed over their bodies, using ink which would leave traces of some of their passwords on anything they touched, and had to give them to a wide variety of companies for 'security'; you'd write that off as crazy... but that's biometrics.
"Simply share the onetime pad between the computer and access point over a wired connection"
If you have a wired connection, you don't need wireless.
Ah, but, you say, you just download a big enough file that you won't need to update it.
But my wireless connection is around 5 megabytes per second, so to support that much traffic with a one-time pad, you'd need every pad to be 900 megabytes. For every three minutes you're using the network.
Which is a metric fuck-load of data to have to carry around just in case you might want to connect to one particular network for one specific three minute period. I'll let you work out how big it would be if you had to be able to connect at any time during a period of several days.
Exactly how was Orion's Bloat 'quickly and quietly solved'? Last I heard they'd had to switch from land landing to water landing because it was already too heavy to launch with no prospect for future weight growth, and then discovered the slight problem of not being able to land if they had to abort early in the launch.
And, even then, it was still too heavy.
The simple fact is that they're building far too big a capsule, and every other problem stems from that. That's led to the removal of safety features because they're too heavy to launch, and the switch from the shuttle's four-segment SRB to a five-segment SRB, which is the root cause of the latest problems.
All they have to do is accept reality and cut back the size of the capsule, and rest should at least vaguely work. Of course then they'll be left with the MLV Saturn 1b design (solid rocket first stage, J-2 powered second stage) from the late 60s.
I believe you'll find it's another made-up statistic to justify NASA based on 'spin offs'; most of those arguments turn out to be bogus when you actually look for proof.
In addition, if you want CCDs, you'd be better off spending the money to develop them and skipping over the entire mult-billion dollar HST thing. Now, I think the HST is a good thing, but it has to stand on its own merits, not on the basis of some possible 'spin offs'.
""I hope no one was so ill-informed as to believe that we would be able to develop a system to replace the shuttle without facing any challenges in doing so," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press."
Well, duh, the whole point of the 'shuttle-derived' Stick design was that it was supposed to be safe to fly and fast and cheap to develop because the shuttle technology would avoid these kind of 'challenges'.
But instead of building a capsule that could fly on the shuttle-derived launcher they've expanded it into an orbital RV which requires major changes to the launcher design to have any chance of reaching orbit.
'Voluntary' in the sense that the government threatened to impose restrictions if the game industry didn't censor itself; they've just proven why self-censorship is always a bad idea, because game censorship laws would have been thrown out by now, whereas the ESRB is so entrenched it's almost impossible to get rid of.
Either way, without threats from the government the ESRB ratings would not exist. That's hardly 'voluntary' by any standard I'm aware of.
"In the real watermarking scheme, every single byte is changed. Basically the entire thing is covered with a huge watermark that is noise, with randomly and sparsely distributed blocks of the actual watermark. So finding identical bytes does not work."
Then you're screwing up the music with noise and the people buying it would be better off just to download a copy ripped from CD. You're also loading up your servers with a huge amount of processing required to produce a different version of the entire file for each customer.
In the very worst case, a pirate just has to decompress the audio from a few different copies of the same file and find the bits that differ. Zero or interpolate those bits and recompress... of course, again, you'd be better off just downloading a copy ripped direct from CD.
"If they haven't figured out a way to actually encrypt the watermarks, they're more stupid than I thought."
Like, duh. For watermarks to work they have to be different between different copies of the same file; that's the whole point of a watermark. And that design requirement guarantees they can be trivially found by a simple byte compare, whether or not they're encrypted.
It's no wonder you're not concerned when you don't even understand the issues.
"But watermarking? Eh. I don't care. You're supposed to not be sharing music you bought, and unless someone actually breaks in and steals it, there's really no legitimate reason to find music that you bought out on the net somewhere."
Watermarks provide very little security, since you can find them just by comparing a few copies of the same file. Watermarks tied to users offer the RIAA an easy way to frame anyone, since they can create a watermarked copy of any file with your details and release it on the Internet.
I take it none of your CDs are more than 5 years old?
Several of my older CDs have deteriorated substantially, in one case with a sizable hole right through the metal layer in the audio tracks, in other cases with oxidation eating into the metal layer from the edges. Fortunately, thanks to error correction, they're still all playable so far... but they won't be forever.
"it's funny that i can't get a legit movie in a microsoft format to play in a microsoft media player on a microsoft OS."
Not really: it was one of the first examples of Microsoft DRM, and refused to play anywhere outside Region-1. If I remember correctly it required access to a license server, which no longer exists.
So your 'high-def' movie is now just a coaster. That's what DRM does for you.
"The speed quoted for a mechanical hard drive is a burst speed, accurate for reading only one track, and doesn't include the time it takes for a conventional rotating hard drive to change tracks. Isn't that correct?"
Depends. My IDE drives seem to sustain 60-ish MB/second on a large contiguous file even across multiple tracks... but suck if the file is heavily fragmented.
Slashdot Mirror
"What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?"
Technically, yes. As I understand it, NASA footage is generally in the public domain, but if you pay to telecine that footage from film to tape and then clean it up, you have copyright over that specific copy of the footage; there's no legal responsibility to give NASA a copy.
It may sound silly, but that's copyright law for you.
"There is likely little "enhancement" done for this film to reach "HD standards.""
As another poster mentioned below, there's probably been a substantial amount of grading and cleanup done to footage that was shot in far from ideal conditions and probably hasn't been stored terribly well.
"Can anyone explain why we saw colour pictures in some fidelity, yet the sound was worse than CB quality?"
Because the pictures were mostly shot on 16mm film or better, while the sound was typically recorded on analogue tape after transmission over a low-bandwidth radio link from space to ground?
Pretty much; if they stop supporting old bugs, a lot of old software will break. I'm sure I found an old Windows 3.1 bug in XP some time back, but I can't remember what it was (something to do with driver installation, I think).
Linux, in comparison, provides a fair amount of backwards compatibility, but doesn't have to overly worry because most software comes in source form and can be fixed when a kernel or library change breaks it. Windows doesn't have that option.
"Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API."
I think you missed the point. For the sake of backwards compatibility, Microsoft supports applications which do all these things, and drags all the associated crap into future versions of Windows so they still run.
For that matter, so do hardware developers: back when I was writing drivers for Windows I had to deliberately put bugs in our code to support applications which only worked because of bugs in the Microsoft versions of the drivers and would crash if we didn't replicate those bugs ourselves. We also spent weeks working around abuse of the API by a certain big computer company that can't program PCs worth a damn (or even, apparently, read API documentation).
This is Britain they're talking about. If you live in Britain today and you're not paranoid, you're crazy.
"The problem is you had a maxtor... No wonder it failed."
I've had over a dozen Maxtors in the last decade and none have failed. Of course I replace them every 3-4 years because by then they've got too damn small.
The only drive I've had that did fail was an IBM, and even then I had plenty of advance warning so I could replace it before it was unusable.
From what I remember, the Google study showed that temperature made far less difference than had previously been believed (of course my memory may be past its MTBF).
When I bought a laptop a few months ago, even the sales people were telling me how much Vista sucks (despite the fact that some of the stores didn't even sell XP laptops anymore so they were sure to lose a sale). When the people selling PCs are actively discouraging customers from buying newer systems with newer operating systems, Microsoft clearly have a problem... so I'm not surprised they want to hide their dirty laundry rather than have it exposed in the press.
"I live in continental Europe and I have an ID card. I know that exactly the same style of ID cards exists in at least Belgium and Germany. Why is it a problem?"
Ask the Jews... well, the ones the German government didn't murder, anyway.
The innocent have nothing to hide, until the day the government turn them into criminals (making merely being alive a capital offence in the case of German Jews); then they suddenly realise why bloated government databases and ID cards were a really bad idea.
"I've built a very good number of machines for people lately with Abit micro-ATX boards, with built-in graphics (d-sub and DVI). Throw in a 2.4 GHz X2 and 4 gigs of memory, a hard drive, and a burner, and the hardware comes to something like $300. Good, fast, and CHEAP."
Yeah, I'm getting a similar machine because it seems much easier to run Linux cheap on AMD hardware than Intel right now. However, while the low end may be where the money is, it's not where the profit margins are; Intel probably make more profit on one high-end CPU than AMD do on a dozen low-end CPUs.
"I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading."
Indeed. My current office is full of Linux machines. In my previous job pretty much everyone in the company had two or more Linux machines on their desk and we were aiming to sell tens of millions of them (which the company may well still do: of course Joe Sixpack won't realise that their MP3 player, car navigation system, or the surveillance camera watching them in their local mall is actually running Linux). In my previous job before that, again most of the work was done on Linux.
Linux is everywhere, and it's quite possible that there are more linux machines in the world than Windows machines when you include all the servers and embedded systems it's installed on. The only place it's comparatively rare is on the desktop for non-techies, and the only reason people think Linux _isn't_ spreading is because the non-techie desktop is the most visible part of the computing world.
"using HIS login credentials ( via biometrics )."
Ha-ha! He said 'biometrics'!
Seriously, you made some good points, but biometrics have nothing to do with real security. Imagine if people were issued random passwords at birth, could never change them, had them tattooed over their bodies, using ink which would leave traces of some of their passwords on anything they touched, and had to give them to a wide variety of companies for 'security'; you'd write that off as crazy... but that's biometrics.
"Simply share the onetime pad between the computer and access point over a wired connection"
If you have a wired connection, you don't need wireless.
Ah, but, you say, you just download a big enough file that you won't need to update it.
But my wireless connection is around 5 megabytes per second, so to support that much traffic with a one-time pad, you'd need every pad to be 900 megabytes. For every three minutes you're using the network.
Which is a metric fuck-load of data to have to carry around just in case you might want to connect to one particular network for one specific three minute period. I'll let you work out how big it would be if you had to be able to connect at any time during a period of several days.
It's not as though people who actually considered the overall impact haven't been pointing this out for years.
"That was quickly and quietly solved"
Exactly how was Orion's Bloat 'quickly and quietly solved'? Last I heard they'd had to switch from land landing to water landing because it was already too heavy to launch with no prospect for future weight growth, and then discovered the slight problem of not being able to land if they had to abort early in the launch.
And, even then, it was still too heavy.
The simple fact is that they're building far too big a capsule, and every other problem stems from that. That's led to the removal of safety features because they're too heavy to launch, and the switch from the shuttle's four-segment SRB to a five-segment SRB, which is the root cause of the latest problems.
All they have to do is accept reality and cut back the size of the capsule, and rest should at least vaguely work. Of course then they'll be left with the MLV Saturn 1b design (solid rocket first stage, J-2 powered second stage) from the late 60s.
"Link?"
I believe you'll find it's another made-up statistic to justify NASA based on 'spin offs'; most of those arguments turn out to be bogus when you actually look for proof.
In addition, if you want CCDs, you'd be better off spending the money to develop them and skipping over the entire mult-billion dollar HST thing. Now, I think the HST is a good thing, but it has to stand on its own merits, not on the basis of some possible 'spin offs'.
""I hope no one was so ill-informed as to believe that we would be able to develop a system to replace the shuttle without facing any challenges in doing so," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press."
Well, duh, the whole point of the 'shuttle-derived' Stick design was that it was supposed to be safe to fly and fast and cheap to develop because the shuttle technology would avoid these kind of 'challenges'.
But instead of building a capsule that could fly on the shuttle-derived launcher they've expanded it into an orbital RV which requires major changes to the launcher design to have any chance of reaching orbit.
"The game ratings set by the ESRB are voluntary."
'Voluntary' in the sense that the government threatened to impose restrictions if the game industry didn't censor itself; they've just proven why self-censorship is always a bad idea, because game censorship laws would have been thrown out by now, whereas the ESRB is so entrenched it's almost impossible to get rid of.
Either way, without threats from the government the ESRB ratings would not exist. That's hardly 'voluntary' by any standard I'm aware of.
"In the real watermarking scheme, every single byte is changed. Basically the entire thing is covered with a huge watermark that is noise, with randomly and sparsely distributed blocks of the actual watermark. So finding identical bytes does not work."
Then you're screwing up the music with noise and the people buying it would be better off just to download a copy ripped from CD. You're also loading up your servers with a huge amount of processing required to produce a different version of the entire file for each customer.
In the very worst case, a pirate just has to decompress the audio from a few different copies of the same file and find the bits that differ. Zero or interpolate those bits and recompress... of course, again, you'd be better off just downloading a copy ripped direct from CD.
"If they haven't figured out a way to actually encrypt the watermarks, they're more stupid than I thought."
Like, duh. For watermarks to work they have to be different between different copies of the same file; that's the whole point of a watermark. And that design requirement guarantees they can be trivially found by a simple byte compare, whether or not they're encrypted.
It's no wonder you're not concerned when you don't even understand the issues.
"But watermarking? Eh. I don't care. You're supposed to not be sharing music you bought, and unless someone actually breaks in and steals it, there's really no legitimate reason to find music that you bought out on the net somewhere."
Watermarks provide very little security, since you can find them just by comparing a few copies of the same file. Watermarks tied to users offer the RIAA an easy way to frame anyone, since they can create a watermarked copy of any file with your details and release it on the Internet.
So they're both useless and harmful.
"These days, CDs don't wear out"
I take it none of your CDs are more than 5 years old?
Several of my older CDs have deteriorated substantially, in one case with a sizable hole right through the metal layer in the audio tracks, in other cases with oxidation eating into the metal layer from the edges. Fortunately, thanks to error correction, they're still all playable so far... but they won't be forever.
"it's funny that i can't get a legit movie in a microsoft format to play in a microsoft media player on a microsoft OS."
Not really: it was one of the first examples of Microsoft DRM, and refused to play anywhere outside Region-1. If I remember correctly it required access to a license server, which no longer exists.
So your 'high-def' movie is now just a coaster. That's what DRM does for you.
"The speed quoted for a mechanical hard drive is a burst speed, accurate for reading only one track, and doesn't include the time it takes for a conventional rotating hard drive to change tracks. Isn't that correct?"
Depends. My IDE drives seem to sustain 60-ish MB/second on a large contiguous file even across multiple tracks... but suck if the file is heavily fragmented.