Just as exploits in the image processing components of web browsers will hopefully educate people to surf in Lynx? Or exploits in their HTML rendering will hopefully educate people to surf by piping wget through less?
This was not because of Javascript, nor is Javascript going away because of this.
It's so nice to know that YOU are being open minded and willing to let others have their own views about things.
They have the right to their view.
And I have the right to, having considered it thoroughly, disregard it without much of a second thought. I usually don't, because I have the time, but I'm not surprised real scientists are too busy with real science to waste their time educating you.
Talk about disrespectful and delusional hubris.
Which is more disrespectful or delusional:
Disregarding a concept which has been proven false at least as many times and as conclusively as the idea that the Earth is flat, in favor of an idea which, in reluctant humility, places no greater value on ourselves than on any other creature? To accept that not only does the sun not revolve around the earth, but the animal kingdom does not revolve around us?
- or -
Believing that the vast majority of the scientific community, filled with people much smarter than you or I, have somehow collectively failed to grasp something you (or the con artists who lead the "Intelligent Design" movement) see so clearly? Or if you're honest with yourself for a moment, imposing a strange Bronze-Age belief system on a cosmos so much larger and more profound than anything Yehoshua ben Yosef ever dreamed?
That's right, profound. You are missing on something so much more amazing, something truly awe-inspriing, something so much grander than any religion's wildest dreams, all because you'd rather believe something comforting than know the truth.
If you really want to start that discussion, bring some evidence or GTFO.
Re:That was actually kind of awesome
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Carl Sagan Sings
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· Score: 1
You're not the first to think of Carl Smith. (Or Agent Sagan, if you prefer.)
Hahaha! That worked really well for cigarette smokers, right?
Cigarrettes are physically addictive. So is caffeine, but to a much lesser degree, and if that's the problem, switch from Coke to coffee.
What's more, if the taxes actually go towards healthcare, and if smoke-free areas continue to increase, it solves the larger problem of me having to care. At the moment, I care mostly because my tax dollars inevitably go to medical care for these people -- but if they're pulling in tax from the cause of those medical bills (cigarettes, soda, etc), problem solved.
how will this help those of us who are already in good shape?
Well, by not having to pay higher taxes for things like Medicare and Medicaid.
I guess we'll have to resign ourselves to drinking water and snacking on carrots and broccoli
That'd be a terrible diet, and if you're in any decent kind of shape, you should know that.
But I'd be more curious how you're drinking enough soda that this is an issue, yet you're "in good shape"... I guess "round" is a shape. But yeah, if you're drinking one a week, or every few days, does it really matter whether it's $1 or $2?
the average problem solving skill level of the population has dropped.
Citation needed.
After all, the program would make less money if they successfully taught customers how to maintain their weight by themselves.
You'd think that all it would take is one program that worked to break that oligarchy. But then, you're right about the marketing.
Much more sensible to just require soda sellers to display calorie counts for each soda in the available sizes.
Except that counting calories isn't all there is to good nutrition, which is needed if you want that weight loss to be at all permanent.
It's not a bad idea, but I think focusing on any one statistic like that is missing the point, and is also likely to lead to even more artificial garbage. Remember Olestra? Yeah, the solution isn't to make "diet" versions of everything, the solution is to make saner "regular" versions, and stop consuming stuff you don't need. Diet may be better than regular, but I'd argue one regular a week is better than two diets a day.
You both have the arrogance to think you can force better decisions on other people,
I'm not trying to force anything. I'm trying to convince people to make better decisions. If I can't do that, I'm trying to at least ensure that they're the ones paying for those poor decisions, not me.
social cruelty and sin taxes are equally wrong ways to pursue that goal.
I just haven't seen that many flaws in recent versions of OpenSSH.
But you apparently didn't read this part:
You can argue that such flaws are inevitable, but I'd argue that this is an argument about human fallibility, not about the theoretical limitations of a software system.
And if you're able to express your requirements in a formal language, you've already written something that's more like a program than like pseudocode.
This is actually the idea behind Behavior-Driven Design -- develop your spec in something that looks like English, but is actually high-level executable stubs. Fill in the stubs to make a test suite. This test suite is now the official spec, describing in both prose and code what your program is supposed to do.
Yes, maybe you can implement mathematically perfect encryption... thus forcing an attacker to torture you until you give up your key.
At which point, there are purely technological means to discourage this. One of them, famously implemented in Truecrypt, is to store an encrypted image inside the free space left behind by a filesystem -- thus, your first layer of security is that they don't necessarily even suspect an encrypted filesystem to begin with, and your second layer of security is that no matter how much they torture you, they can never be absolutely sure they've found all of the encrypted data on the disk.
So, it doesn't save you from being tortured, but it makes it an ultimately futile exercise.
There are also much lower-tech ways to avoid this -- for example, a cyanide pill, or the technological equivalent, a system configured to wipe its keys after a sufficient number of failures (or after a specific (but wrong) password is entered). Or thermite on the drive.
"But they have your wife and kids!" Yes, that's a form of torture. If you've already tripped the anti-torture scheme, I suppose it's sad, but the data is safe.
it simply cannot be "perfect". Ever.
So find the flaw in what I just described.
I'll grant you this one:
You are falling for the age-old trap of thinking of security in purely technological terms
I believe it's still possible to have perfect security, even accounting for the human element, if you're talking about data. If you're talking about something else, like trying to keep your family safe and happy, then you're right, there is no perfect security.
How is this less important?
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Carl Sagan Sings
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· Score: 4, Interesting
He inspired a generation to be interested in science. How many actual scientists today can trace their choice of career back to Cosmos?
The one problem is that Coke and Pepsi pretty much have the restaurants covered. That is, any given restaurant is going to have Coke or Pepsi -- there really isn't a third party there.
So, probably a market failure. Not enough of one to care -- alternatives probably aren't farther than your local gas station -- but a failure nonetheless.
And people do enjoy what I think they should enjoy -- in particular, I don't think I've met anyone who wouldn't prefer imported Coke, from countries where they use real sugar instead of corn syrup. What they don't enjoy is paying $3 for maybe a 16oz bottle -- but I'd call that a market failure, that there isn't a real competitor who offers a cola flavored with actual sugar...
No, I think the real point is here:
freaking soda?
It's just hard to actually care about this. Worst case, the competition does exist, and a can or bottle is portable enough that I can bring it into a restaurant with me -- or wherever I need to go.
You make an interesting point, but I'm not sure it would've helped me. I recently lost around 50 lbs, still more to go. Being called "fat" didn't motivate me. Realizing that I could build muscle, and that muscles are fun to have, was a much stronger motivation.
we need to go back to ridiculing them like we did in the 1950s and before.
I have to wonder, did ridiculing them work in the 1950s? I don't think so. Look around -- things are different now than then. Among other things ("supersize", anyone?), the fat and sugar content of the same foods has gone up quite a lot since then.
most fat people today are fat because they make stupid diet and exercise decisions.
And calling them fat and stupid doesn't motivate them to do anything other than cry.
Some sissies may think ridicule is mean, but it's just a form of positive peer pressure.
"Positive" in what way?
When I was growing up in the 50s, I used to like chocolates and sweets too much. They made me fat, and then people around me started ridiculing me. Even as a child, I knew that it was my diet that was to blame, and so I admitted I was at fault, and changed my ways.
Were you really so stupid you needed to have people around you ridicule you in order to realize it?
Actually, "stupid" is the term I'd bring back. For example, creationists do not have another point of view that should be respected, they have a stupid delusion that should not be given the time of day.
That, and people who are stupid in that way often don't realize they're stupid. Fat people would have to be pretty absurdly stupid to not realize they're fat.
We don't need soda taxes.
But they wouldn't hurt.
We just need to tell these fat fucks that they're fat and that they need to lose weight. Either they'll disregard us and face more and more ridicule, or they'll change their ways for the better.
And if they disregard us and continue to face more and more ridicule, what then?
No, I think a soda tax is much more practical. At some point, you stop caring about the ridicule, or even internalize it -- the fattest people I know often say things like "I'm so fat!" Maybe there are ways we could pressure them socially, but really, we need to hit them where it hurts -- in the wallet. If nothing else, we'll at least stop subsidizing them in our healthcare.
The issue with H.264 is the license and the fees (for large hosts) starting 2011.
These licenses only work because of patents. Without patents, no one would care -- we'd all just use x264 and ffmpeg and be done with it.
The alleged issue with Theora are third-party patents it might some day be accused of violating.
In other words, the issue with Theora is that it might someday have patent problems, whereas h2.64 already has patent problems.
The kneejerk reaction here seems to be because Theora isn't managed by a corporate entity -- but it was, and it was indeed patented. Those patents were released to the public domain.
Apple and Google got Theora dumped as HTML5's required codec with that argument.
Wrong. Apple used that argument. Chrome does natively support Theora.
It's just that Chrome also natively supports h.264, and Google refuses to use Theora for YouTube, as long as h.264 has better quality per bit.
As there is no way around Firefox's market share, Mozilla's decision keeps Theora in the game, hopefully long enough for Theora to improve until it's usable for HD streaming.
I hope not, actually. There are only a few possible outcomes:
Theora eventually beats h.264. Nobody thinks this is likely, but let's pretend. In this case, we still have to convince Google that it's worth re-encoding all of YouTube yet again. And as you mention, there's all that existing content -- and that's going to be a generational loss for anyone who doesn't save all the original files.
People agree to use Theora, even though it's worse. YouTube sticks to Flash, to save bandwidth. HTML5 Video fails before it even begins.
The h.264 patents expire. Everyone adopts h.264, except Firefox, because Firefox committed itself to a non-pluggable architecture.
It looks to me that the sane solution would be for Firefox to support whatever native video codecs are available on a platform -- that means DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QuickTime on OS X. If they want to install a codec for Theora out of the box, that's fine, but it makes sense to support h.264 if they can.
Or, to put it another way, mplayer would be significantly less useful to me without all the proprietary formats it supports. Firefox would be significantly less useful to me if I could watch YouTube without Flash in Chrome, but not in Firefox.
Even if the standards were to specify that you must use a certain codec, and even if it was a better codec... My cell phone -- a pretty standard, free-with-the-contract Motorola -- can record short videos. I can retrieve them via Bluetooth. They're tiny, and crappy, and I certainly don't want to make them worse with re-encoding.
They appear to be in a Quicktime (or maybe mp4) container, with divx video and some sort of Quicktime audio. They're also tiny, which means they're already decently web-sized.
So, it would be nice if I could just wrap these in a video tag, rather than having to re-encode them to Theora. That's why a pluggable, multi-multi-codec Firefox makes much more sense in the long run.
In the short term, as much as I dislike a defacto standard of h.264, I much prefer it to a defacto standard of Flash or Silverlight.
What chrome frame has also demonstrated beyond a doubt is that microsoft could have shipped a solution that preserved IE6 compatibility and upgraded web standards at the same time. They didn't because they didn't want to.
I'm not entirely sure about that. Microsoft did try roughly this strategy -- there was a plan to make IE7 (I think?) default to IE6 rendering, unless you sent some header to tell IE to render in "standards-compliant mode".
This is effectively the same thing -- it turns IE6 into a browser that's still IE6 until you do whatever you have to do to enable Chrome Frame, which is roughly like "standards-compliant mode".
The difference is, this isn't meant to be any kind of solution. IETab in Firefox is a solution. Adding an "IE6 Frame" to IE8 would be a solution, but I don't think IE8's "compatibility mode" is quite compatible, or people wouldn't still be using IE6 in these corporate environments.
So, this is more a hack to force the issue than a real solution.
I think the difference is that Microsoft was trying to sell this hack as the next version of IE, while Google isn't trying to sell this as anything other than cleaning up after Microsoft's mistakes.
I don't entirely disagree, though:
Microsoft is going to keep delaying the web's advance as long as possible.
Ever wonder why IE doesn't support the video tag? Or canvas?
Hopefully I'm wrong, and IE will eventually catch up -- at which point, of course, everyone else will have moved on to things like WebGL -- but it seems to me that improving the web in this way would slowly but surely make Silverlight (and Flash) obsolete.
I have news for you: the average reader doesn't give a flying shit about grammar. They only care that what is written is understandable and reasonably fluid.
Which very basic grammar rules help with.
Content is king.
Presentation counts, if you want people to pay attention to your content.
Even someone who doesn't care about decent grammar at all, who'll happily ignore spelling mistakes (and make plenty of them) -- would they be comfortable seeing a doctor who talks like a lolcat?
Then again, there's not really anyone who will prefer bad grammar when they're looking for something to read. I'm sure there are mistakes in what I've written here, but it doesn't really take me any effort to write this way, and there are advantages (people who appreciate good grammar will appreciate it), but no disadvantages (no one else gives a flying shit).
Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate [merriam-webster.com]", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)"
If you really want to play that game, you should've looked up appropriate:
1 : to take exclusive possession of
This is the definition you'd like to apply, and quite possibly the one that was meant. But look here:
3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
Which says nothing about exclusive possession, or depriving the others of said use. It seems to me that this is exactly what's happening here.
So I suppose the answer is "very yes".
Fair enough. But it's also only something which can be done at the individual level, or, very carefully, with open source. If I use h.264 for something, and a commercial entity wants to make use of that something -- be it source material or software -- they're going to have to pay some sort of fee, or risk lawsuits.
Which also means they'll be legitimizing software patents in the process.
If I instead use Theora, a commercial entity can just pick it up and run with it, to the extent that my licence allows -- that's my license, not mine plus h.264.
I don't think that choosing Theora for that reason puts me in the lunatic fringe of frothing-at-the-mouth FSF "free as in freedom" people.
Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.
I wouldn't agree with that, either. Let's try again, with something more relevant: Would most people agree Crysis' graphics engine is better than Valve's Source Engine? From the games I've seen, the Source engine is much better at scaling up and down -- I don't know of any CryEngine-based games that will run on 256 megs of RAM and a DirectX 6 graphics card.
Or consider price -- if I'm wanting to build a free mod, what's the best engine? The Source engine may give me a free SDK, as will several other commercial engines. On the other hand, if I start with Nexuiz or Quake 3, I get source code. Depending on the game I'm trying to build, being able to modify the engine -- not to mention deliver a stand-alone executable -- may trump whatever technical features Source has over those engines.
Add to that the fact that Nexuiz and Quake 3 are both incredibly scalable, and Quake 3 almost certainly supports much older systems than Source, and you can see why one graphics engine is not necessarily "best", unless one presupposes (as you do) that the only criteria worth considering for making an engine "good" is "makes the most realistic graphics".
I understand what your analogy is trying to do, but no matter how you reword it, it's still not valid -- even when you get it down to "what's the best sorting algorithm?", the answer isn't always Quicksort.
except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.
Depends what you mean by "tiny". While I'm often surprised at the number of game studios who pay for MP3 support in their games, rather than just using vorbis, that is a valid concern for just about anyone who wants to include a video clip in their game. Or in any other software, for that matter.
That may still fit your definition of "tiny", though, I'm not sure.
your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote.
I also said "likely to be" -- but I suppose you have a point.
refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a single feature poorly.
Or make it possible for the developers of any browser to impleme
All security, no matter what type it is or how it is implemented, is basically designed to slow down anybody who might try to break it.
I think you're confusing real security with poor security. Granted, often real security is difficult or impossible...
It is possible to create a system which is actually impossible to crack, short of social engineering or unprecedented changes in technology. Example: SSH keypairs. The last major vulnerability in this was due to a stupid, stupid flaw in the implementation. You can argue that such flaws are inevitable, but I'd argue that this is an argument about human fallibility, not about the theoretical limitations of a software system. Depending how much you're willing to invest, it's possible to write a program in such a way that you can mathematically prove it to be correct.
The only other way SSH keypairs are likely to be defeated is when quantum computers become feasible.
That said, I think it's unlikely they've created a truly invincible system with all the software they mentioned. There's likely to be a bug somewhere in Win7, CS4, Office, or Tunes.
However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen"
Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.
Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way
Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing?
I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.
a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware.
It's come down to a semantic argument, but this seems pretty blatantly wrong to me. It's "better" even if it's impossible? In that case, might I suggest a codec that assumes we've solved the halting problem?
Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong
BIG GIANT KEY FUCKING WORD there. Try it again like this:
Most people would agree that Crysis is better than Pong
I think many people would agree with you, still, but it becomes a lot less clear-cut -- for some people, Pong really is a better game. Here, let me make it even simpler:
Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than World of Warcraft. Most, not all.
How many people would agree that Crysis is automatically a better game?
Do you get it yet? "Better" is by definition subjective, and only has meaning relative to other concerns. There is no such thing as a "best" video codec, at least not yet. I'll give you another consideration: not only price of an encoder or decoder, but the ability to produce a file which anyone can develop a decoder for, for free.
The fact that you don't consider a concern to be important doesn't make the concern go away, because like it or not, Virak on Slashdot is not the arbitrator of What's Best for Everyone.
I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do.
To abuse the rhetoric even more, I'm surprised you thought I was doing that. I was merely interpreting what you said. Specifically:
I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.
I was pointing out that commercial usage is significant to users of video codecs -- therefore, focusing on users and ignoring commercial usage is distorting the picture, even if you only care from a user's perspective.
The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents.
These open source tools are illegal in the US, as I understand it -- that's why, for example, Audacity requires you to install an mp3 plugin, after clicking through something.
This significantly hampers distribution of these tools -- for example, Dell can't distribute open source implementations of codecs, or even of DVD playback, with their Linux boxes. Instead, they license from Fluendo.
Or maybe an example you'd care about: Firefox cannot legally distribute any non-free codecs. They basically have these options:
Mozilla could license the needed codecs. Aside from the amount of cash required, this would mean that anyone wanting to fork Firefox would have to pay the fee again. If you think forks aren't important, remember that Firefox began life as a fork.
Mozilla could say "fuck patents" and include the codecs. They could probably get away with it, in places where US software patents aren't enforced. But they'd likely get sued here, as would anyone trying to include Firefox in their product.
Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care.
Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way.
You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".
I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression.
Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?
And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.
anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents.
I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant, especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as exploits in the image processing components of web browsers will hopefully educate people to surf in Lynx? Or exploits in their HTML rendering will hopefully educate people to surf by piping wget through less?
This was not because of Javascript, nor is Javascript going away because of this.
It's so nice to know that YOU are being open minded and willing to let others have their own views about things.
They have the right to their view.
And I have the right to, having considered it thoroughly, disregard it without much of a second thought. I usually don't, because I have the time, but I'm not surprised real scientists are too busy with real science to waste their time educating you.
Talk about disrespectful and delusional hubris.
Which is more disrespectful or delusional:
Disregarding a concept which has been proven false at least as many times and as conclusively as the idea that the Earth is flat, in favor of an idea which, in reluctant humility, places no greater value on ourselves than on any other creature? To accept that not only does the sun not revolve around the earth, but the animal kingdom does not revolve around us?
- or -
Believing that the vast majority of the scientific community, filled with people much smarter than you or I, have somehow collectively failed to grasp something you (or the con artists who lead the "Intelligent Design" movement) see so clearly? Or if you're honest with yourself for a moment, imposing a strange Bronze-Age belief system on a cosmos so much larger and more profound than anything Yehoshua ben Yosef ever dreamed?
That's right, profound. You are missing on something so much more amazing, something truly awe-inspriing, something so much grander than any religion's wildest dreams, all because you'd rather believe something comforting than know the truth.
If you really want to start that discussion, bring some evidence or GTFO.
You're not the first to think of Carl Smith. (Or Agent Sagan, if you prefer.)
Meh. I'm also an arrogant man, and also quite harsh on Star trek. I'll watch it, but I'll argue with it in the process...
I think he would've liked Firefly.
Evolutuion knows what to do with cane sugar
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Hahaha! That worked really well for cigarette smokers, right?
Cigarrettes are physically addictive. So is caffeine, but to a much lesser degree, and if that's the problem, switch from Coke to coffee.
What's more, if the taxes actually go towards healthcare, and if smoke-free areas continue to increase, it solves the larger problem of me having to care. At the moment, I care mostly because my tax dollars inevitably go to medical care for these people -- but if they're pulling in tax from the cause of those medical bills (cigarettes, soda, etc), problem solved.
how will this help those of us who are already in good shape?
Well, by not having to pay higher taxes for things like Medicare and Medicaid.
I guess we'll have to resign ourselves to drinking water and snacking on carrots and broccoli
That'd be a terrible diet, and if you're in any decent kind of shape, you should know that.
But I'd be more curious how you're drinking enough soda that this is an issue, yet you're "in good shape"... I guess "round" is a shape. But yeah, if you're drinking one a week, or every few days, does it really matter whether it's $1 or $2?
the average problem solving skill level of the population has dropped.
Citation needed.
After all, the program would make less money if they successfully taught customers how to maintain their weight by themselves.
You'd think that all it would take is one program that worked to break that oligarchy. But then, you're right about the marketing.
Much more sensible to just require soda sellers to display calorie counts for each soda in the available sizes.
Except that counting calories isn't all there is to good nutrition, which is needed if you want that weight loss to be at all permanent.
It's not a bad idea, but I think focusing on any one statistic like that is missing the point, and is also likely to lead to even more artificial garbage. Remember Olestra? Yeah, the solution isn't to make "diet" versions of everything, the solution is to make saner "regular" versions, and stop consuming stuff you don't need. Diet may be better than regular, but I'd argue one regular a week is better than two diets a day.
You both have the arrogance to think you can force better decisions on other people,
I'm not trying to force anything. I'm trying to convince people to make better decisions. If I can't do that, I'm trying to at least ensure that they're the ones paying for those poor decisions, not me.
social cruelty and sin taxes are equally wrong ways to pursue that goal.
What is the right way to pursue that goal, then?
I just haven't seen that many flaws in recent versions of OpenSSH.
But you apparently didn't read this part:
You can argue that such flaws are inevitable, but I'd argue that this is an argument about human fallibility, not about the theoretical limitations of a software system.
And if you're able to express your requirements in a formal language, you've already written something that's more like a program than like pseudocode.
This is actually the idea behind Behavior-Driven Design -- develop your spec in something that looks like English, but is actually high-level executable stubs. Fill in the stubs to make a test suite. This test suite is now the official spec, describing in both prose and code what your program is supposed to do.
Yes, maybe you can implement mathematically perfect encryption... thus forcing an attacker to torture you until you give up your key.
At which point, there are purely technological means to discourage this. One of them, famously implemented in Truecrypt, is to store an encrypted image inside the free space left behind by a filesystem -- thus, your first layer of security is that they don't necessarily even suspect an encrypted filesystem to begin with, and your second layer of security is that no matter how much they torture you, they can never be absolutely sure they've found all of the encrypted data on the disk.
So, it doesn't save you from being tortured, but it makes it an ultimately futile exercise.
There are also much lower-tech ways to avoid this -- for example, a cyanide pill, or the technological equivalent, a system configured to wipe its keys after a sufficient number of failures (or after a specific (but wrong) password is entered). Or thermite on the drive.
"But they have your wife and kids!" Yes, that's a form of torture. If you've already tripped the anti-torture scheme, I suppose it's sad, but the data is safe.
it simply cannot be "perfect". Ever.
So find the flaw in what I just described.
I'll grant you this one:
You are falling for the age-old trap of thinking of security in purely technological terms
I believe it's still possible to have perfect security, even accounting for the human element, if you're talking about data. If you're talking about something else, like trying to keep your family safe and happy, then you're right, there is no perfect security.
He inspired a generation to be interested in science. How many actual scientists today can trace their choice of career back to Cosmos?
Oh, and read Demon-Haunted World.
They seem to be objecting to artificial voices and a lack of originality...
I wonder where that music in the background came from? Synthesizer? Or sampled from someone else?
If you don't like how autotune sounds, fine. But that video was pretty hypocritical.
It was worth watching.
Move.
Which you'd have to do anyway if you're changing jobs or divorcing your wife.
Oh, and you can also vote.
The one problem is that Coke and Pepsi pretty much have the restaurants covered. That is, any given restaurant is going to have Coke or Pepsi -- there really isn't a third party there.
So, probably a market failure. Not enough of one to care -- alternatives probably aren't farther than your local gas station -- but a failure nonetheless.
And people do enjoy what I think they should enjoy -- in particular, I don't think I've met anyone who wouldn't prefer imported Coke, from countries where they use real sugar instead of corn syrup. What they don't enjoy is paying $3 for maybe a 16oz bottle -- but I'd call that a market failure, that there isn't a real competitor who offers a cola flavored with actual sugar...
No, I think the real point is here:
freaking soda?
It's just hard to actually care about this. Worst case, the competition does exist, and a can or bottle is portable enough that I can bring it into a restaurant with me -- or wherever I need to go.
And I'd buy coffee. Or tea.
But we did just prove the point -- that $50 is effectively a ban, with all of the same results, including an underground market.
I'm not sure "obese" was ever a feel-good term.
You make an interesting point, but I'm not sure it would've helped me. I recently lost around 50 lbs, still more to go. Being called "fat" didn't motivate me. Realizing that I could build muscle, and that muscles are fun to have, was a much stronger motivation.
we need to go back to ridiculing them like we did in the 1950s and before.
I have to wonder, did ridiculing them work in the 1950s? I don't think so. Look around -- things are different now than then. Among other things ("supersize", anyone?), the fat and sugar content of the same foods has gone up quite a lot since then.
most fat people today are fat because they make stupid diet and exercise decisions.
And calling them fat and stupid doesn't motivate them to do anything other than cry.
Some sissies may think ridicule is mean, but it's just a form of positive peer pressure.
"Positive" in what way?
When I was growing up in the 50s, I used to like chocolates and sweets too much. They made me fat, and then people around me started ridiculing me. Even as a child, I knew that it was my diet that was to blame, and so I admitted I was at fault, and changed my ways.
Were you really so stupid you needed to have people around you ridicule you in order to realize it?
Actually, "stupid" is the term I'd bring back. For example, creationists do not have another point of view that should be respected, they have a stupid delusion that should not be given the time of day.
That, and people who are stupid in that way often don't realize they're stupid. Fat people would have to be pretty absurdly stupid to not realize they're fat.
We don't need soda taxes.
But they wouldn't hurt.
We just need to tell these fat fucks that they're fat and that they need to lose weight. Either they'll disregard us and face more and more ridicule, or they'll change their ways for the better.
And if they disregard us and continue to face more and more ridicule, what then?
No, I think a soda tax is much more practical. At some point, you stop caring about the ridicule, or even internalize it -- the fattest people I know often say things like "I'm so fat!" Maybe there are ways we could pressure them socially, but really, we need to hit them where it hurts -- in the wallet. If nothing else, we'll at least stop subsidizing them in our healthcare.
You're confusing patents with licenses.
I don't think it changes my main point.
The issue with H.264 is the license and the fees (for large hosts) starting 2011.
These licenses only work because of patents. Without patents, no one would care -- we'd all just use x264 and ffmpeg and be done with it.
The alleged issue with Theora are third-party patents it might some day be accused of violating.
In other words, the issue with Theora is that it might someday have patent problems, whereas h2.64 already has patent problems.
The kneejerk reaction here seems to be because Theora isn't managed by a corporate entity -- but it was, and it was indeed patented. Those patents were released to the public domain.
Apple and Google got Theora dumped as HTML5's required codec with that argument.
Wrong. Apple used that argument. Chrome does natively support Theora.
It's just that Chrome also natively supports h.264, and Google refuses to use Theora for YouTube, as long as h.264 has better quality per bit.
As there is no way around Firefox's market share, Mozilla's decision keeps Theora in the game, hopefully long enough for Theora to improve until it's usable for HD streaming.
I hope not, actually. There are only a few possible outcomes:
It looks to me that the sane solution would be for Firefox to support whatever native video codecs are available on a platform -- that means DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QuickTime on OS X. If they want to install a codec for Theora out of the box, that's fine, but it makes sense to support h.264 if they can.
Or, to put it another way, mplayer would be significantly less useful to me without all the proprietary formats it supports. Firefox would be significantly less useful to me if I could watch YouTube without Flash in Chrome, but not in Firefox.
Even if the standards were to specify that you must use a certain codec, and even if it was a better codec... My cell phone -- a pretty standard, free-with-the-contract Motorola -- can record short videos. I can retrieve them via Bluetooth. They're tiny, and crappy, and I certainly don't want to make them worse with re-encoding.
They appear to be in a Quicktime (or maybe mp4) container, with divx video and some sort of Quicktime audio. They're also tiny, which means they're already decently web-sized.
So, it would be nice if I could just wrap these in a video tag, rather than having to re-encode them to Theora. That's why a pluggable, multi-multi-codec Firefox makes much more sense in the long run.
In the short term, as much as I dislike a defacto standard of h.264, I much prefer it to a defacto standard of Flash or Silverlight.
What chrome frame has also demonstrated beyond a doubt is that microsoft could have shipped a solution that preserved IE6 compatibility and upgraded web standards at the same time. They didn't because they didn't want to.
I'm not entirely sure about that. Microsoft did try roughly this strategy -- there was a plan to make IE7 (I think?) default to IE6 rendering, unless you sent some header to tell IE to render in "standards-compliant mode".
This is effectively the same thing -- it turns IE6 into a browser that's still IE6 until you do whatever you have to do to enable Chrome Frame, which is roughly like "standards-compliant mode".
The difference is, this isn't meant to be any kind of solution. IETab in Firefox is a solution. Adding an "IE6 Frame" to IE8 would be a solution, but I don't think IE8's "compatibility mode" is quite compatible, or people wouldn't still be using IE6 in these corporate environments.
So, this is more a hack to force the issue than a real solution.
I think the difference is that Microsoft was trying to sell this hack as the next version of IE, while Google isn't trying to sell this as anything other than cleaning up after Microsoft's mistakes.
I don't entirely disagree, though:
Microsoft is going to keep delaying the web's advance as long as possible.
Ever wonder why IE doesn't support the video tag? Or canvas?
Hopefully I'm wrong, and IE will eventually catch up -- at which point, of course, everyone else will have moved on to things like WebGL -- but it seems to me that improving the web in this way would slowly but surely make Silverlight (and Flash) obsolete.
I have news for you: the average reader doesn't give a flying shit about grammar. They only care that what is written is understandable and reasonably fluid.
Which very basic grammar rules help with.
Content is king.
Presentation counts, if you want people to pay attention to your content.
Even someone who doesn't care about decent grammar at all, who'll happily ignore spelling mistakes (and make plenty of them) -- would they be comfortable seeing a doctor who talks like a lolcat?
Then again, there's not really anyone who will prefer bad grammar when they're looking for something to read. I'm sure there are mistakes in what I've written here, but it doesn't really take me any effort to write this way, and there are advantages (people who appreciate good grammar will appreciate it), but no disadvantages (no one else gives a flying shit).
Let us look up the definition of "misappropriate [merriam-webster.com]", shall we? "to appropriate wrongly (as by theft or embezzlement)"
If you really want to play that game, you should've looked up appropriate:
1 : to take exclusive possession of
This is the definition you'd like to apply, and quite possibly the one that was meant. But look here:
3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
Which says nothing about exclusive possession, or depriving the others of said use. It seems to me that this is exactly what's happening here.
So I suppose the answer is "very yes".
Fair enough. But it's also only something which can be done at the individual level, or, very carefully, with open source. If I use h.264 for something, and a commercial entity wants to make use of that something -- be it source material or software -- they're going to have to pay some sort of fee, or risk lawsuits.
Which also means they'll be legitimizing software patents in the process.
If I instead use Theora, a commercial entity can just pick it up and run with it, to the extent that my licence allows -- that's my license, not mine plus h.264.
I don't think that choosing Theora for that reason puts me in the lunatic fringe of frothing-at-the-mouth FSF "free as in freedom" people.
Let me reword it in a way that more unambiguously represents the intent of my analogy: Most people would agree that Crysis's graphics engine is better than Pong's.
I wouldn't agree with that, either. Let's try again, with something more relevant: Would most people agree Crysis' graphics engine is better than Valve's Source Engine? From the games I've seen, the Source engine is much better at scaling up and down -- I don't know of any CryEngine-based games that will run on 256 megs of RAM and a DirectX 6 graphics card.
Or consider price -- if I'm wanting to build a free mod, what's the best engine? The Source engine may give me a free SDK, as will several other commercial engines. On the other hand, if I start with Nexuiz or Quake 3, I get source code. Depending on the game I'm trying to build, being able to modify the engine -- not to mention deliver a stand-alone executable -- may trump whatever technical features Source has over those engines.
Add to that the fact that Nexuiz and Quake 3 are both incredibly scalable, and Quake 3 almost certainly supports much older systems than Source, and you can see why one graphics engine is not necessarily "best", unless one presupposes (as you do) that the only criteria worth considering for making an engine "good" is "makes the most realistic graphics".
I understand what your analogy is trying to do, but no matter how you reword it, it's still not valid -- even when you get it down to "what's the best sorting algorithm?", the answer isn't always Quicksort.
except for a specific, tiny minority, most people would agree with me that "more quality per bit" is, in fact, what makes one compression method "better" than another.
Depends what you mean by "tiny". While I'm often surprised at the number of game studios who pay for MP3 support in their games, rather than just using vorbis, that is a valid concern for just about anyone who wants to include a video clip in their game. Or in any other software, for that matter.
That may still fit your definition of "tiny", though, I'm not sure.
your wording was "anywhere other than the pirate community", and that's an exact quote.
I also said "likely to be" -- but I suppose you have a point.
refuse to make it easier for the developers of a specific program to implement a single feature poorly.
Or make it possible for the developers of any browser to impleme
All security, no matter what type it is or how it is implemented, is basically designed to slow down anybody who might try to break it.
I think you're confusing real security with poor security. Granted, often real security is difficult or impossible...
It is possible to create a system which is actually impossible to crack, short of social engineering or unprecedented changes in technology. Example: SSH keypairs. The last major vulnerability in this was due to a stupid, stupid flaw in the implementation. You can argue that such flaws are inevitable, but I'd argue that this is an argument about human fallibility, not about the theoretical limitations of a software system. Depending how much you're willing to invest, it's possible to write a program in such a way that you can mathematically prove it to be correct.
The only other way SSH keypairs are likely to be defeated is when quantum computers become feasible.
That said, I think it's unlikely they've created a truly invincible system with all the software they mentioned. There's likely to be a bug somewhere in Win7, CS4, Office, or Tunes.
However, "misappropriated unpaid-for format" is about a hair's width away from "stolen"
Which, like it or not, is still not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what's going on here. You could say "illegal unlicensed format", if you like, but I don't think it changes the tone significantly.
Unless you can provide evidence of widespread usage of "misappropriated" in anything but a negative way
Are you going to argue that patent infringement is a positive thing?
I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but let's be clear, because it sounds like that's what you're advocating.
a better codec is better even if it's impractical or even impossible to use it given current hardware.
It's come down to a semantic argument, but this seems pretty blatantly wrong to me. It's "better" even if it's impossible? In that case, might I suggest a codec that assumes we've solved the halting problem?
Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than Pong
BIG GIANT KEY FUCKING WORD there. Try it again like this:
Most people would agree that Crysis is better than Pong
I think many people would agree with you, still, but it becomes a lot less clear-cut -- for some people, Pong really is a better game. Here, let me make it even simpler:
Most people would agree that Crysis has better graphics than World of Warcraft. Most, not all.
How many people would agree that Crysis is automatically a better game?
Do you get it yet? "Better" is by definition subjective, and only has meaning relative to other concerns. There is no such thing as a "best" video codec, at least not yet. I'll give you another consideration: not only price of an encoder or decoder, but the ability to produce a file which anyone can develop a decoder for, for free.
The fact that you don't consider a concern to be important doesn't make the concern go away, because like it or not, Virak on Slashdot is not the arbitrator of What's Best for Everyone.
I'm surprised you consider shoving words in my mouth a reasonable thing to do.
To abuse the rhetoric even more, I'm surprised you thought I was doing that. I was merely interpreting what you said. Specifically:
I was objecting to you greatly exaggerating how important patents are to users of video codecs. I never said anything about commerical usage being significant or not significant.
I was pointing out that commercial usage is significant to users of video codecs -- therefore, focusing on users and ignoring commercial usage is distorting the picture, even if you only care from a user's perspective.
The most popular ripping tools are open source and use open source codecs and nobody gets paid a cent over patents.
These open source tools are illegal in the US, as I understand it -- that's why, for example, Audacity requires you to install an mp3 plugin, after clicking through something.
This significantly hampers distribution of these tools -- for example, Dell can't distribute open source implementations of codecs, or even of DVD playback, with their Linux boxes. Instead, they license from Fluendo.
Or maybe an example you'd care about: Firefox cannot legally distribute any non-free codecs. They basically have these options:
Phrasing it as them using "a misappropriated unpaid-for format" is not saying they merely don't care.
Oh? I don't think so, but I'm not the one who phrased it that way.
You really have to read that line very loosely and optimistically to interpret it in a way
that doesn't make it seem like the author was thinking "damn filthy fucking pirates" when he wrote it.
You have to read it with quite a lot of prejudice to come up with "damn filthy fucking pirates".
I don't see how "in terms of quality per bit" changes anything, as that's the regular definition of "better" when it comes to lossy compression.
Really? You wouldn't at least consider performance?
And I do think patents are a valid consideration here -- that is, price.
anywhere other than commercial uses nobody cares about patents.
I'm surprised you don't consider "commercial uses" to be significant, especially when "ripping for personal use" often involves some sort of commercial software which had to pay that fee.