I feel that free speech is partly a spawn of relativism. Your truth is as good as mine. If we look at the law of any civilized nation, we will find passages on freedom. We will also find passages that -restrict- your freedom as to prevent you from harming other people. Hateful statements cause emotional distress and can thus be said to harm people. You are free to swing your arm around, but if you hit someones face...
I would say that the core difference is that hate speech is considered to be immoral by the vast majority of people. Just like murder. Or stealing.
Isn't this a perfect example of how this law is good? You really have to say something outrageous to even be touched by this law. There was recently an article by Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World, alluding that the Jews weren't as innocent as made out to be. Yes! He received a lot of criticism for it. No! He did not get arrested for hate speech.
Let me say that I personally feel that neo-Nazism is idiotic. However, neo-Nazi or not, anyone making such outrageous statements as above is an idiot. If these Nazis had any wit, they would wrap their point of view in much better packaging. Just look at The Progress Party. They cleverly exploit the public's fear of foreigners, plus other grassroots attitudes, in order to gain popularity. They don't explicitly say "Stop letting bad black people into our country!" but they're pretty damn close.
To try to sum it up: The law against hate speech does not silence controversial statements, nor does it prevent them spreading (several news outlets quoted the statements above). It merely punishes irresponsible idiots.
Hasn't most of Western Europe got free speech? In Norway, there are a couple of exceptions. One is quite archaic: it's illegal to insult His Majesty the King. Also, I think hate speech may be illegal. This would generally apply to the rest of Scandinavia too. When Americans speak of the rest of the world and how unfortunate they are, it touches a nerve in me...
Don't signed repositories have a private key and a public key? Could GPLv3 somehow cause difficulties here? Stallman has specifically talked about encryption keys needed to make the software work, though I guess you could make your own unsigned packages, or make your own private keys.
Music software on Linux will benefit from this. For software monitoring/synthesizers, extremely small sound buffers are used (128 to 512 samples). These buffers need to be refilled so often that a simple repaint of the screen or a burst of HD activity can cause clicks.
It *might* be that the somewhat restricted usage patterns computer geeks limit themselves to (few or no games, no crappy included software from Dell or HP Compaq, etc) means that they rarely expose themselves to the kind of problems that home users do. I'm sure there's more crappy Happy Magic Photo Print software out there than there are crappy Java IDEs. Sometimes I simply can't fix a problem with a user because I can't quite conceive how on earth they managed to create the problem in the first place, and I end up simply doing a reinstall, telling the user to be more careful the next time. It is somewhat hard though to summarize precisely what criteria an expert user have for picking non-dubious software. Personally, I just kind of "smell" it...
How on earth can it be that I'm sitting here on a Windows XP SP2 machine and it's in the DMZ of my router (i.e. not really protected at all). I have no anti-virus, no anti-spyware, no nothing. Just a machine with proper security patches and Mozilla Firefox installed. It boots quickly, no viruses detected with online virus scans, no nothing. I don't think software can help you keep your computer clean. I think brains do.
Why in my day we didn't even HAVE modems. We would use our crank phones and WHISTLE the data carrier up hill both ways against the wind. Darn whippersnappers! *shakes walking stick*
Music snobs always say Phil Collins is bad. Then Pandora offered me some songs. I dig them! There's an art to creating a polished 80's rock sound too, you know... I'm actually a musician myself and I like trying to mimic those sounds. All this pop snobbism makes you forget one thing: music should sound beautiful. So what if it's embarrassing?!
Reel-to-reel? Do you happen to be about 50? My father bought music on reel-to-reel when he was in his 20s. I was born just early enough to have operated tape machines at the local radio. I think they may have been Tascams. A friend of mine, about 10 years older, taught me how to make a smooth tape splice. I'm basically fine with tapes. I can't really hear the difference between a new casette and a new CD. If casettes didn't wear out and it wasn't so time consuming to find tracks on them (even with those decks that find tracks for you it's a bit of a hassle), I think it would've been very hard to have people make the switch to CD. Just look at how few people (including me) are interested in the new DVD-Audio and SACD formats. Most of the digital artifacts of the CD format already lie outside of the human hearing range. I do however prefer DAT. I can tell 48 kHz from 44.1kHz on the smoother treble of the former.
I grew up with CDs and always hear people talk affectionately about vinyl. I must say, after being given the job of digitizing some old records of my aunts, I don't think I like vinyl. The RIAA filter causes bass fidelity to go bad quick as the record wears down, and treble doesn't go softer from wear. It just starts to distort and shriek instead. The pops and clicks sound neat, until you hear the same recording on a CD, and your ears can start to relax again. I admit that these records were old (about 30 years) but if that's how my music is going to sound in 30 years...
When it comes to the perceived problems of MP3, I attribute that to a few things:
1. Use of fixed bitrate. With increasing harmonic complexity, a fixed number of DCT values need to cover a wider and wider frequency area. Upper midtone and treble are quantized or removed.
2. Use of low bitrate. Cutoff filter is lowered to give encoder less to encode (this reduces ringing at the cost of treble). For instance, LAME will cut off above 15 kHz at 128 kbps. DCT values around the removal/quantization thresholds causes unnatural jumps in harmonic amplitude. This causes the notorious MP3 ringing effect. OGG masks away this effect with a synthesized noise floor. This is a form of mild distortion and gives OGG a more in-your-face sound. This also explains why OGG files never seem to start ringing, they just get more "angry" at lower bitrates.
3. Use of joint stereo instead of true stereo. Joint Stereo uses a Middle-Side matrix to convert the original signal into a new representation where one channel has a mono mix (Left + Right) and the other has the stereo information (Left - Right). The mono signal is given most of the bandwidth. The side signal is bit-reduced heavily and is only included if there's a "perceivable" stereo image in the frame that is being encoded. This heavy compression reduces the stereo image to a shadow of itself.
If you want to see what MP3 really can do, try this with LAME:
1. Enable VBR at quality 0 (best): -V 0 2. Enable true stereo: -m s 3. Kill the low pass filter: -k 4. Enable high quality encoding: -h
Using this method, I usually can't tell the difference between the CD and the MP3. Of course, the file size is rather unmodest, but that's the price you have to pay. If you wish to save a little space, you let LAME filter for you. The default behaviour for those settings is 20 kHz.
Re:How about the free software aspect?
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
True. My site is for uploading and displaying artwork. The crowd that hangs there are your average crowd of teenage websurfers from Europe and USA. Here are my stats so far:
April 2006 Windows - 97.9% | Mac - 0.9% | Linux - 0% MSIE - 66.5% | Firefox - 30.5%
May 2006 Windows - 98.1% | Mac - 1.3% | Linux - 0.2% MSIE - 63.8% | Firefox - 33.4%
June 2006 Windows - 97.3% | Mac - 1.6% | Linux - 0% MSIE - 60.1% | Firefox - 34.5%
July 2006 Windows - 97.1% | Mac - 1.9% | Linux - 0.2% MSIE - 63.1% | Firefox - 31.5%
August 2006 Windows - 96.9% | Mac - 1.4% | Linux - 0.1% MSIE - 59% | Firefox - 35.1%
Re:How about the free software aspect?
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
I think Firefox' market share depends on the age group. I run a site with a few thousand users, most of them are teenagers, and my statistics consistantly show that 35% of my users are on Firefox. I'm curious as to which numbers the rest of you have measured?
As I understand this patent, they have rail with magnets on it, and a magnetic shield (drawn as a bracket) that moves along the rail in a manner that requires very little effort. Apparently, the magnets serve to balance each other in some way. It looks like could work but are magnetic shields possible? Wouldn't a magnetic shield have to absorb the magnetic field, i.e. somehow being exerted resistance upon by that field?
You must've seen subsidized phones in Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have those. Basically the phone is locked to one provider for a year after buying it, after which you can get an unlock code from them, in return for paying almost nothing for the phone. There's the option of buying the phone without the lock but then you pay full price for it.
No, actually, from the way you commented on it, I made the assumption that you hadn't the slightest idea about there being a non-WoW version. I didn't critisize WoW-fans for making it at all.
Goes to show how WoW-centered some people are. It's actually a song from a Broadway show. The people singing are various muppets (or lookalikes). I've been trying to find that video I saw of it for ages but all I can find is that dumb WoW video which isn't half as funny.
I have several friends who've disappeared into WoW to never return. If I didn't like that game before, I hate it now. One of my friends play it because her boyfriend is addicted, and thus the bad spiral continues...
I run Adsense on my art site, which had 1,148,325 hits, 274,550 pageviews, 23,095 visits or 5,577 visitors in July. I had 139,992 ad impressions and 114 clicks. This gives an impression-to-click-ratio of 1228:1, a ridiculously tiny fraction.
I think these clicks are accidents that earned me a few dollars. Ignoring people who own huge sites like MySpace.com who earn wads of cash from millions of accidental clicks, I don't think anyone's making real money on banner ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, according to a mid-20th century account, human tastes like veal.
I feel that free speech is partly a spawn of relativism. Your truth is as good as mine. If we look at the law of any civilized nation, we will find passages on freedom. We will also find passages that -restrict- your freedom as to prevent you from harming other people. Hateful statements cause emotional distress and can thus be said to harm people. You are free to swing your arm around, but if you hit someones face...
I would say that the core difference is that hate speech is considered to be immoral by the vast majority of people. Just like murder. Or stealing.
Isn't this a perfect example of how this law is good? You really have to say something outrageous to even be touched by this law. There was recently an article by Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World, alluding that the Jews weren't as innocent as made out to be. Yes! He received a lot of criticism for it. No! He did not get arrested for hate speech.
Let me say that I personally feel that neo-Nazism is idiotic. However, neo-Nazi or not, anyone making such outrageous statements as above is an idiot. If these Nazis had any wit, they would wrap their point of view in much better packaging. Just look at The Progress Party. They cleverly exploit the public's fear of foreigners, plus other grassroots attitudes, in order to gain popularity. They don't explicitly say "Stop letting bad black people into our country!" but they're pretty damn close.
To try to sum it up: The law against hate speech does not silence controversial statements, nor does it prevent them spreading (several news outlets quoted the statements above). It merely punishes irresponsible idiots.
Hasn't most of Western Europe got free speech? In Norway, there are a couple of exceptions. One is quite archaic: it's illegal to insult His Majesty the King. Also, I think hate speech may be illegal. This would generally apply to the rest of Scandinavia too. When Americans speak of the rest of the world and how unfortunate they are, it touches a nerve in me...
So where are you moving? Just wondering, since I'm Norwegian.
Don't signed repositories have a private key and a public key? Could GPLv3 somehow cause difficulties here? Stallman has specifically talked about encryption keys needed to make the software work, though I guess you could make your own unsigned packages, or make your own private keys.
Music software on Linux will benefit from this. For software monitoring/synthesizers, extremely small sound buffers are used (128 to 512 samples). These buffers need to be refilled so often that a simple repaint of the screen or a burst of HD activity can cause clicks.
YCbCr has a much greater gamut than RGB. It has been proposed to use the greater chroma range that YCbCr has for better color representation.
I can personally attest to this as well. It is a known filed bug in GAIM but they can't fix it since it's server side.
It *might* be that the somewhat restricted usage patterns computer geeks limit themselves to (few or no games, no crappy included software from Dell or HP Compaq, etc) means that they rarely expose themselves to the kind of problems that home users do. I'm sure there's more crappy Happy Magic Photo Print software out there than there are crappy Java IDEs. Sometimes I simply can't fix a problem with a user because I can't quite conceive how on earth they managed to create the problem in the first place, and I end up simply doing a reinstall, telling the user to be more careful the next time. It is somewhat hard though to summarize precisely what criteria an expert user have for picking non-dubious software. Personally, I just kind of "smell" it...
How on earth can it be that I'm sitting here on a Windows XP SP2 machine and it's in the DMZ of my router (i.e. not really protected at all). I have no anti-virus, no anti-spyware, no nothing. Just a machine with proper security patches and Mozilla Firefox installed. It boots quickly, no viruses detected with online virus scans, no nothing. I don't think software can help you keep your computer clean. I think brains do.
Why in my day we didn't even HAVE modems. We would use our crank phones and WHISTLE the data carrier up hill both ways against the wind. Darn whippersnappers! *shakes walking stick*
Music snobs always say Phil Collins is bad. Then Pandora offered me some songs. I dig them! There's an art to creating a polished 80's rock sound too, you know... I'm actually a musician myself and I like trying to mimic those sounds. All this pop snobbism makes you forget one thing: music should sound beautiful. So what if it's embarrassing?!
Reel-to-reel? Do you happen to be about 50? My father bought music on reel-to-reel when he was in his 20s. I was born just early enough to have operated tape machines at the local radio. I think they may have been Tascams. A friend of mine, about 10 years older, taught me how to make a smooth tape splice. I'm basically fine with tapes. I can't really hear the difference between a new casette and a new CD. If casettes didn't wear out and it wasn't so time consuming to find tracks on them (even with those decks that find tracks for you it's a bit of a hassle), I think it would've been very hard to have people make the switch to CD. Just look at how few people (including me) are interested in the new DVD-Audio and SACD formats. Most of the digital artifacts of the CD format already lie outside of the human hearing range. I do however prefer DAT. I can tell 48 kHz from 44.1kHz on the smoother treble of the former.
I grew up with CDs and always hear people talk affectionately about vinyl. I must say, after being given the job of digitizing some old records of my aunts, I don't think I like vinyl. The RIAA filter causes bass fidelity to go bad quick as the record wears down, and treble doesn't go softer from wear. It just starts to distort and shriek instead. The pops and clicks sound neat, until you hear the same recording on a CD, and your ears can start to relax again. I admit that these records were old (about 30 years) but if that's how my music is going to sound in 30 years...
When it comes to the perceived problems of MP3, I attribute that to a few things:
1. Use of fixed bitrate. With increasing harmonic complexity, a fixed number of DCT values need to cover a wider and wider frequency area. Upper midtone and treble are quantized or removed.
2. Use of low bitrate. Cutoff filter is lowered to give encoder less to encode (this reduces ringing at the cost of treble). For instance, LAME will cut off above 15 kHz at 128 kbps. DCT values around the removal/quantization thresholds causes unnatural jumps in harmonic amplitude. This causes the notorious MP3 ringing effect. OGG masks away this effect with a synthesized noise floor. This is a form of mild distortion and gives OGG a more in-your-face sound. This also explains why OGG files never seem to start ringing, they just get more "angry" at lower bitrates.
3. Use of joint stereo instead of true stereo. Joint Stereo uses a Middle-Side matrix to convert the original signal into a new representation where one channel has a mono mix (Left + Right) and the other has the stereo information (Left - Right). The mono signal is given most of the bandwidth. The side signal is bit-reduced heavily and is only included if there's a "perceivable" stereo image in the frame that is being encoded. This heavy compression reduces the stereo image to a shadow of itself.
If you want to see what MP3 really can do, try this with LAME:
1. Enable VBR at quality 0 (best): -V 0
2. Enable true stereo: -m s
3. Kill the low pass filter: -k
4. Enable high quality encoding: -h
Using this method, I usually can't tell the difference between the CD and the MP3. Of course, the file size is rather unmodest, but that's the price you have to pay. If you wish to save a little space, you let LAME filter for you. The default behaviour for those settings is 20 kHz.
True. My site is for uploading and displaying artwork. The crowd that hangs there are your average crowd of teenage websurfers from Europe and USA. Here are my stats so far:
April 2006
Windows - 97.9% | Mac - 0.9% | Linux - 0%
MSIE - 66.5% | Firefox - 30.5%
May 2006
Windows - 98.1% | Mac - 1.3% | Linux - 0.2%
MSIE - 63.8% | Firefox - 33.4%
June 2006
Windows - 97.3% | Mac - 1.6% | Linux - 0%
MSIE - 60.1% | Firefox - 34.5%
July 2006
Windows - 97.1% | Mac - 1.9% | Linux - 0.2%
MSIE - 63.1% | Firefox - 31.5%
August 2006
Windows - 96.9% | Mac - 1.4% | Linux - 0.1%
MSIE - 59% | Firefox - 35.1%
I think Firefox' market share depends on the age group. I run a site with a few thousand users, most of them are teenagers, and my statistics consistantly show that 35% of my users are on Firefox. I'm curious as to which numbers the rest of you have measured?
One of their patents rely on a "magnetic shield" for its work:0 06035419&F=0&QPN=WO2006035419
http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO2
As I understand this patent, they have rail with magnets on it, and a magnetic shield (drawn as a bracket) that moves along the rail in a manner that requires very little effort. Apparently, the magnets serve to balance each other in some way. It looks like could work but are magnetic shields possible? Wouldn't a magnetic shield have to absorb the magnetic field, i.e. somehow being exerted resistance upon by that field?
You must've seen subsidized phones in Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have those. Basically the phone is locked to one provider for a year after buying it, after which you can get an unlock code from them, in return for paying almost nothing for the phone. There's the option of buying the phone without the lock but then you pay full price for it.
Like most of Slashdot, he's probably a male in his 20s.
Tagged this a dupe. How do tags work anyway? If N people assign tag X, it becomes visible?
No, actually, from the way you commented on it, I made the assumption that you hadn't the slightest idea about there being a non-WoW version. I didn't critisize WoW-fans for making it at all.
Goes to show how WoW-centered some people are. It's actually a song from a Broadway show. The people singing are various muppets (or lookalikes). I've been trying to find that video I saw of it for ages but all I can find is that dumb WoW video which isn't half as funny. I have several friends who've disappeared into WoW to never return. If I didn't like that game before, I hate it now. One of my friends play it because her boyfriend is addicted, and thus the bad spiral continues...
I run Adsense on my art site, which had 1,148,325 hits, 274,550 pageviews, 23,095 visits or 5,577 visitors in July. I had 139,992 ad impressions and 114 clicks. This gives an impression-to-click-ratio of 1228:1, a ridiculously tiny fraction.
I think these clicks are accidents that earned me a few dollars. Ignoring people who own huge sites like MySpace.com who earn wads of cash from millions of accidental clicks, I don't think anyone's making real money on banner ads.
This reminds me of when my 50 year old uncle got MSN Messenger. I actually had respect for that guy until I saw him type... *gets a brain tumor*