Egads, I'm not even an oldster, they're too young! I had to follow the link to remember a mention of LORD. And 14.4 modems were the 3rd or 4th upgrade for me, after having the wonderful experience of an new 300 baud modem. That would be after coding my first game, in assembly, on an Atari 800. We played things like Zork, Wizardry, Hack, and, heck, there was some star based game on DECs we used to play, although the name escapes me now. For that matter, there were an entire sequence of very popular Infocom games (I admit I still have them in a box upstairs) that I played, and the original D&D games in amazing 2 bit color (ok, perhaps only my graphics card was monochrome, I don't recall) But I do recall FIDONET as a new wondrous thing (hey, if we're mentioning BBS's, might as well mention the first networked system) OK, nostalgia satisfied, time to go back to my VCR and reel to reel.
Health insurance applies to everyone, since it's difficult to live without some kind of health.
Hmm..so, how did people ever survive before the concept of health insurance came into being?
Many didn't, if they needed care. People's life expectancy in the US didn't just miraculously universally increase more than the world average in the past 100+ years. It was partly from near universal vaccinations, and partly from effective universal health care, even if we don't call it that. Arriving at an ER with life threatening conditions did not first require you to provide proof of financial responsibility, you were helped.
Actually...best thing to do, is make people more responsible for their own care. Make it easier to set up HSA (Health Savings Accounts) which are not use it or lose it, like FSA's are....and let people sock away money pre-tax, to be used on routine care, and meds.
This combined with what used to be called "major medical" insurance, something to cover the emergencies (heart attack,car wreck)...would take care of things. With a reasonably high deductible, like $1200...premiums are very reasonable.
These would be modern tools, that would allow people to have health care, and not be a burden on everyone else.
You have to set aside money for food, shelter, etc....why should you not also have to set aside some for your health care? It is YOUR health, why should you not be somewhat responsible for it? It isn't the governments constitutionally mandated responsibility.
So essentially you're advocating another form of the current scenario - where people still choose to be self insured, without addressing the issue of emergency response which is at the core of the current health problems. So, you have a heart attack, an ambulance is called and whisks you away in seconds to treatment at an ER with emergency surgery that saves your life. Had they checked for insurance or ability to pay upon arriving, you'd be dead whether you had insurance or not. Had they checked at the ER before treating you, same outcome. Only after 50+K of treatment was rendered could they take enough time to start the verification process, and it can take a while, like not until you've recovered, at an additional cost of $8-20K a day, depending upon where you are. None of this is addressed by your proposal. People using ER's for regular health care is a different issue and not the overwhelming cost issue that some try to make it out to be. 1 heart attack victim runs anywhere on average between 2-250K, escalating on ambulance, ER, OR, and complications/days in hospital to recover as needed to treat the heart attack. Those that don't need anything other than the ambulance to arrive and evaluate the victim are cheapest, with costs rapidly rising afterwards. (And yes, I have seen bills for emergency hospital surgery, although thankfully not my own. They are an eye opening experience, especially when you compare the "billed" cost to the actual "payment" if you have insurance)
Your proposal is a potential option for providing yourself health care, but that's all it is. It does not address the larger problem. I'll be happy to entertain anything you'd like to present as a solution for society.
BTW I think the Supreme Court's questions about what ELSE Congress could mandate, like purchasing solar panels on roofs, or hybrid cars, or Bluray players (to support the music business & discourage piracy), and on and on..... indicate they are against the idea.
But the people in general already pay for such services if they use them, thus your point there is flawed. This is more like requiring drivers to have driver's insurance, if you don't drive, you don't have to have it. Health insurance applies to everyone, since it's difficult to live without some kind of health.
21,000 people have pre-existing condition insurance as a result of the bill, Obama said it would be 375,000 in the first year alone. When the creator of the bill was off by more than an order of magnitude, do you really want the rest of the bill to go into effect?
At least it was an order of magnitude less which makes the impact less than some feared. This would be a "good" thing. If the number was an order of magnitude more, you might have a point about the impact on insurers being understated, but that would probably be countered by "look, more people are being helped". I'd also like to know whether those with pre-existing condition insurance are paying the same rates as others or if price is affecting the total number being helped.
The saddest thing is that the entire law was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong problem would have been repealing that law that says the ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, then everyone will be lining up for insurance or dying in a ditch. The right problem is why the fuck I need insurance to not go bankrupt if I break my arm. And no, the answer to that one isn't tort reform (seriously, read the article if you think it is.) I don't know what it is, but nobody on either side of the aisle is even bothering to look.
Actually, that is the root point: do you let people die on an ER's doorstep? What if they were in a bad accident, and their insurance papers couldn't be found, say they were in a wallet crammed in a glovebox in a burning car? Who pays then? (If you're going to decide that people aren't helped when they should be, then someone will be liable for that decision.) And therein lies the crux of the matter. Since we can't reliably determine who should be helped, and almost no one says that they shouldn't have been helped after being helped, we wind up with only a single logical conclusion: everyone must pay into the insurance fund because the current system of some pay some don't but everyone gets helped has already been proven unsustainable.
My biggest problem with streaming services are the artifacts resulting from dropped packets or buffering issues. If neither of those were a major issue, then streaming would be fine for DVD quality at the very least.
That argument wouldn't have flown because the court already agreed that "finite time with infinite potential for future retro-active extensions" was "effectively unlimited" in a much more real sense that merely exceeding the author's life span, but that because it wasn't literally unlimited at any given time it wasn't unconstitutional.
Interesting. Isn't the majority supposed to be conservative on the court? Last time I checked, that meant they had strict interpretations of the Constitution. This sounds like either blind literalism in clear opposition to the intent of the Constitution or clear leave of all rational thought.
Either state does not bode well for us "mere" citizens.
We had the same thing in Belgium, where pupils have never been allowed to wear hats, caps, etc. in class. So to treat everyone equally, neither can Muslims. Which then, according to them, infringes on their right of religious freedom. Which is ridiculous, of course.
How is it ridiculous? If a tenet of their religion requires them to cover a certain part of their body and the law requires them to bare that body part in certain places, their freedom to follow their religion is most certainly being infringed upon--their religion demands they do one thing and the law demands another...
It's ridiculous because in no way does it infringe upon their right to religious freedom. One is free to choose any religion one wants. It merely infringes on them practicing portions of their religion in public. Which is an entirely different thing, much like the sacrifice of animals or willing humans, or mutilation of minors, which are also prohibited, for example.
All current disk based DRM has been broken. As I understand it, unless an entirely new DRM comes out, there's nothing that can be done to stop "piracy". This Cinavia approach does nothing to end piracy since it only works on "licensed" players, none of which will be used to play back the ripped, oops, "pirated" media.
Streaming media still has too many artifacts for me. It's fine for sub DVD quality playback, but anything higher just has too many issues, regardless of DRM involved.
On the other hand, you could get MakeMKV and rip your disks to your computer, just like DVDs, and bypass all that startup DRM nonsense, along with forced ads, etc. (Note to manufacturers - when I pay for a disk, I DO NOT want to be forced to watch your previews etc. Just the movie please) I've got over 100 HD DVDs ripped to disk (yes, when they dropped to less than $3 a disk after the format war was lost, I decided to pick up an entire collection on the chance that the DRM would soon be broken and easily ripped, to protect my "investment". After all - can't buy a new player when mine dies, and I own the disks and the right to play them, no?
That's a nice assertion there. How do you figure? The "master" is already in HD, and these days almost always digital to begin with. So the process is the same, with the only difference being the resulting output, since both formats need to be rendered from the original master to work with their intended media, along with the addition of the standard directory and other wrappers/additions.
The media production itself might be more expensive, but that difference should be minor on a 10K unit or more run.
I find it interesting that the argument wasn't made that it was effectively unlimited if it exceeded a normal lifespan, or that such an argument, if made, failed.
The entire concept of revenue loss is a red herring. The music industry had a golden age of revenue after the CD came into being as everyone eventually bought CDs to replace their aging or crappy sounding LPs, since the latter tend to self-destruct over time. So the industry saw a really nice revenue wave of the expected sales of new music plus the additional sales of replacement CDs, coupled with a refusal to sell anything but full albums (singles were pretty much dropped for a long time)
This process had a natural bell curve, as people migrated to the new tech and discovered that yes, it did sound better, and replaced their favorite old LPs with CDs. The music industry, however, wants everyone to believe that the growth and level should have continued indefinitely, an obvious delusional fantasy for anyone that is even remotely logical/rational.
I'd like to see a full revenue graph from the 70s onward, with notes on CD introduction, CD mass acceptance, and a few other notations included such as the first Gold CD - Boston Third Stage, and the first Platinum CD, the dropping of 45s/singles, as well as a relationship to CD player sales and CD ownership percentages, and the beginning of iTunes sales, which returned the ability to buy singles. I think you'll see some interesting relationships, of which one result will be that the music industry was already peaked by 1999, and Napster, while potentially increasing the effect, was certainly not responsible for any part of the trend.
A last piece I'd like to see would be the number of new records and artists and their major categories released each year, which would be interesting for other reasons. My personal impression is that new artists/records in a large segment of categories have dwindled to very small numbers over the past 10 years.
I would actually have to agree that might be a decent improvement in Windows 7. It sounds like they copied QuickSilver. Can't run OSX without it.:) OK, OK, you could, but QuickSilver makes launching apps trivial, and you never have to leave the keyboard.
Rereading it and my response - I did goof on the MP3 bit rates (too late I guess) Thanks for catching that. Besides making statements about 192kHz / 24 bit vs 44.1 kHz/ 16 bit sampling rates / depth, I also made a statement about comparisons to MP3s and slipped on kbps. (damn the lack of an edit feature, even though it wouldn't have helped in this case.)
Given appropriate equipment and a person with a reasonable ear (mine aren't even that great and they suffice) and you can definitely tell the difference between 92KHz and 192Khz,
So you didn't read the fine article, I gather.
Did you run your ABX testing? No? Thought not.
You apparently didn't read my post nor the one I responded to. Nope, not a word.
So perhaps I should have correctly stated that "they migrate in large groups without apparently considering the consequences and sometimes dying en masse", but it's much easier to just say "cliff".
My "hefty" investment was only a few hundred dollars, because of dropping costs and, sadly, I can't really tell the difference anymore in higher level equipment. This is probably no more than your investment, unless you're listening to $50 commodity junk. The real problem with compression is the dropping of harmonics and other effects that add depth, including wave shapes that are not possible to replicate during compression modes, at least at those low resolutions.
Truth be told, the cost for amplifiers is THD at a certain output level, the lower the THD at the higher the level, across a broader spectrum, the higher the cost. In plain english, this means less distortion of the originating signal as it is amplified. And yes, this is something almost anyone can hear.
There are lots of double blind tests. Most that mean anything are between CD quality and above.
No difference found after a year plus of testing.
If you want to hear some differences in what's left out when items are compressedA refutation of the validity of double-blind audio tests
The main point would be that a well mastered CD is better than a poorly mastered 192kHz/24 bit recording, and the same goes for a poorly mastered CD vs a 192 encoded well mastered piece. However, when the original quality material is of like quality, many can tell the differences until they get to CD quality. After that, a smaller segment can tell. What's been destroying music is the large group of folks who've never heard anything that wasn't put through a pipe filled with a wet sponge first. If that's all you've been exposed to, even the clear trill of a bird might sound unpleasantly harsh in its clarity.
I would fall into this group. My hearing is not good enough at this resolution, and the 16bit/44.1kHz rate was chosen because it allowed accurate enough replication of all frequencies within the 99 plus hearing percentile that it was deemed good enough.
The 192kHz/24bit applies to multi-channel sound, where it can make a difference, but I can't speak to the specifics why that is as that's not my area of expertise. I'd guess it's because effectively you'll drop below those key values and it becomes noticeable. Hearing is notoriously sensitive to direction, so the diffraction patterns have to make sense to your ears, or so I hear, at least when I was configuring the surround sound on my receiver.
192 encoded samples are definitely poor audio representations of actual music. Listen to them on appropriate equipment and get back to us.
I listened to 256 encoded music in my car, and it was so bad I went lossless for what I listen to in the car. At home even 320 MP3s were hollow. Granted, it does depend upon the music you select, some are not as negatively affected, but only the most trivial music does not lose something going down to 192.
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I don't recall Compuserve in 83. I was, however, on the nascent network soon to be known as "the internet". I do recall it around 87 or so.
Egads, I'm not even an oldster, they're too young! I had to follow the link to remember a mention of LORD. And 14.4 modems were the 3rd or 4th upgrade for me, after having the wonderful experience of an new 300 baud modem. That would be after coding my first game, in assembly, on an Atari 800. We played things like Zork, Wizardry, Hack, and, heck, there was some star based game on DECs we used to play, although the name escapes me now. For that matter, there were an entire sequence of very popular Infocom games (I admit I still have them in a box upstairs) that I played, and the original D&D games in amazing 2 bit color (ok, perhaps only my graphics card was monochrome, I don't recall) But I do recall FIDONET as a new wondrous thing (hey, if we're mentioning BBS's, might as well mention the first networked system) OK, nostalgia satisfied, time to go back to my VCR and reel to reel.
Hmm..so, how did people ever survive before the concept of health insurance came into being?
Many didn't, if they needed care. People's life expectancy in the US didn't just miraculously universally increase more than the world average in the past 100+ years. It was partly from near universal vaccinations, and partly from effective universal health care, even if we don't call it that. Arriving at an ER with life threatening conditions did not first require you to provide proof of financial responsibility, you were helped.
Actually...best thing to do, is make people more responsible for their own care. Make it easier to set up HSA (Health Savings Accounts) which are not use it or lose it, like FSA's are....and let people sock away money pre-tax, to be used on routine care, and meds.
This combined with what used to be called "major medical" insurance, something to cover the emergencies (heart attack ,car wreck)...would take care of things. With a reasonably high deductible, like $1200...premiums are very reasonable.
These would be modern tools, that would allow people to have health care, and not be a burden on everyone else.
You have to set aside money for food, shelter, etc....why should you not also have to set aside some for your health care? It is YOUR health, why should you not be somewhat responsible for it? It isn't the governments constitutionally mandated responsibility.
So essentially you're advocating another form of the current scenario - where people still choose to be self insured, without addressing the issue of emergency response which is at the core of the current health problems. So, you have a heart attack, an ambulance is called and whisks you away in seconds to treatment at an ER with emergency surgery that saves your life. Had they checked for insurance or ability to pay upon arriving, you'd be dead whether you had insurance or not. Had they checked at the ER before treating you, same outcome. Only after 50+K of treatment was rendered could they take enough time to start the verification process, and it can take a while, like not until you've recovered, at an additional cost of $8-20K a day, depending upon where you are. None of this is addressed by your proposal. People using ER's for regular health care is a different issue and not the overwhelming cost issue that some try to make it out to be. 1 heart attack victim runs anywhere on average between 2-250K, escalating on ambulance, ER, OR, and complications/days in hospital to recover as needed to treat the heart attack. Those that don't need anything other than the ambulance to arrive and evaluate the victim are cheapest, with costs rapidly rising afterwards. (And yes, I have seen bills for emergency hospital surgery, although thankfully not my own. They are an eye opening experience, especially when you compare the "billed" cost to the actual "payment" if you have insurance)
Your proposal is a potential option for providing yourself health care, but that's all it is. It does not address the larger problem. I'll be happy to entertain anything you'd like to present as a solution for society.
BTW I think the Supreme Court's questions about what ELSE Congress could mandate, like purchasing solar panels on roofs, or hybrid cars, or Bluray players (to support the music business & discourage piracy), and on and on..... indicate they are against the idea.
But the people in general already pay for such services if they use them, thus your point there is flawed. This is more like requiring drivers to have driver's insurance, if you don't drive, you don't have to have it. Health insurance applies to everyone, since it's difficult to live without some kind of health.
21,000 people have pre-existing condition insurance as a result of the bill, Obama said it would be 375,000 in the first year alone. When the creator of the bill was off by more than an order of magnitude, do you really want the rest of the bill to go into effect?
At least it was an order of magnitude less which makes the impact less than some feared. This would be a "good" thing. If the number was an order of magnitude more, you might have a point about the impact on insurers being understated, but that would probably be countered by "look, more people are being helped". I'd also like to know whether those with pre-existing condition insurance are paying the same rates as others or if price is affecting the total number being helped.
FYI: Obama was not the creator of the bill.
The saddest thing is that the entire law was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong problem would have been repealing that law that says the ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, then everyone will be lining up for insurance or dying in a ditch. The right problem is why the fuck I need insurance to not go bankrupt if I break my arm. And no, the answer to that one isn't tort reform (seriously, read the article if you think it is.) I don't know what it is, but nobody on either side of the aisle is even bothering to look.
Actually, that is the root point: do you let people die on an ER's doorstep? What if they were in a bad accident, and their insurance papers couldn't be found, say they were in a wallet crammed in a glovebox in a burning car? Who pays then? (If you're going to decide that people aren't helped when they should be, then someone will be liable for that decision.) And therein lies the crux of the matter. Since we can't reliably determine who should be helped, and almost no one says that they shouldn't have been helped after being helped, we wind up with only a single logical conclusion: everyone must pay into the insurance fund because the current system of some pay some don't but everyone gets helped has already been proven unsustainable.
Ron Paul has not addressed this point at all.
I'll check it out - thanks.
My biggest problem with streaming services are the artifacts resulting from dropped packets or buffering issues. If neither of those were a major issue, then streaming would be fine for DVD quality at the very least.
That argument wouldn't have flown because the court already agreed that "finite time with infinite potential for future retro-active extensions" was "effectively unlimited" in a much more real sense that merely exceeding the author's life span, but that because it wasn't literally unlimited at any given time it wasn't unconstitutional.
Interesting. Isn't the majority supposed to be conservative on the court? Last time I checked, that meant they had strict interpretations of the Constitution. This sounds like either blind literalism in clear opposition to the intent of the Constitution or clear leave of all rational thought.
Either state does not bode well for us "mere" citizens.
How is it ridiculous? If a tenet of their religion requires them to cover a certain part of their body and the law requires them to bare that body part in certain places, their freedom to follow their religion is most certainly being infringed upon--their religion demands they do one thing and the law demands another...
It's ridiculous because in no way does it infringe upon their right to religious freedom. One is free to choose any religion one wants. It merely infringes on them practicing portions of their religion in public. Which is an entirely different thing, much like the sacrifice of animals or willing humans, or mutilation of minors, which are also prohibited, for example.
All current disk based DRM has been broken. As I understand it, unless an entirely new DRM comes out, there's nothing that can be done to stop "piracy". This Cinavia approach does nothing to end piracy since it only works on "licensed" players, none of which will be used to play back the ripped, oops, "pirated" media.
Streaming media still has too many artifacts for me. It's fine for sub DVD quality playback, but anything higher just has too many issues, regardless of DRM involved.
On the other hand, you could get MakeMKV and rip your disks to your computer, just like DVDs, and bypass all that startup DRM nonsense, along with forced ads, etc. (Note to manufacturers - when I pay for a disk, I DO NOT want to be forced to watch your previews etc. Just the movie please) I've got over 100 HD DVDs ripped to disk (yes, when they dropped to less than $3 a disk after the format war was lost, I decided to pick up an entire collection on the chance that the DRM would soon be broken and easily ripped, to protect my "investment". After all - can't buy a new player when mine dies, and I own the disks and the right to play them, no?
That's a nice assertion there. How do you figure? The "master" is already in HD, and these days almost always digital to begin with. So the process is the same, with the only difference being the resulting output, since both formats need to be rendered from the original master to work with their intended media, along with the addition of the standard directory and other wrappers/additions.
The media production itself might be more expensive, but that difference should be minor on a 10K unit or more run.
I find it interesting that the argument wasn't made that it was effectively unlimited if it exceeded a normal lifespan, or that such an argument, if made, failed.
The entire concept of revenue loss is a red herring. The music industry had a golden age of revenue after the CD came into being as everyone eventually bought CDs to replace their aging or crappy sounding LPs, since the latter tend to self-destruct over time. So the industry saw a really nice revenue wave of the expected sales of new music plus the additional sales of replacement CDs, coupled with a refusal to sell anything but full albums (singles were pretty much dropped for a long time)
This process had a natural bell curve, as people migrated to the new tech and discovered that yes, it did sound better, and replaced their favorite old LPs with CDs. The music industry, however, wants everyone to believe that the growth and level should have continued indefinitely, an obvious delusional fantasy for anyone that is even remotely logical/rational.
I'd like to see a full revenue graph from the 70s onward, with notes on CD introduction, CD mass acceptance, and a few other notations included such as the first Gold CD - Boston Third Stage, and the first Platinum CD, the dropping of 45s/singles, as well as a relationship to CD player sales and CD ownership percentages, and the beginning of iTunes sales, which returned the ability to buy singles. I think you'll see some interesting relationships, of which one result will be that the music industry was already peaked by 1999, and Napster, while potentially increasing the effect, was certainly not responsible for any part of the trend.
A last piece I'd like to see would be the number of new records and artists and their major categories released each year, which would be interesting for other reasons. My personal impression is that new artists/records in a large segment of categories have dwindled to very small numbers over the past 10 years.
I would actually have to agree that might be a decent improvement in Windows 7. It sounds like they copied QuickSilver. Can't run OSX without it. :) OK, OK, you could, but QuickSilver makes launching apps trivial, and you never have to leave the keyboard.
Rereading it and my response - I did goof on the MP3 bit rates (too late I guess) Thanks for catching that. Besides making statements about 192kHz / 24 bit vs 44.1 kHz/ 16 bit sampling rates / depth, I also made a statement about comparisons to MP3s and slipped on kbps. (damn the lack of an edit feature, even though it wouldn't have helped in this case.)
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=2 ttl=240 time=31.804 ms
and apparently the lower latency doesn't help me post faster. :)
Given appropriate equipment and a person with a reasonable ear (mine aren't even that great and they suffice) and you can definitely tell the difference between 92KHz and 192Khz,
So you didn't read the fine article, I gather.
Did you run your ABX testing? No? Thought not.
You apparently didn't read my post nor the one I responded to. Nope, not a word.
So perhaps I should have correctly stated that "they migrate in large groups without apparently considering the consequences and sometimes dying en masse", but it's much easier to just say "cliff".
My "hefty" investment was only a few hundred dollars, because of dropping costs and, sadly, I can't really tell the difference anymore in higher level equipment. This is probably no more than your investment, unless you're listening to $50 commodity junk. The real problem with compression is the dropping of harmonics and other effects that add depth, including wave shapes that are not possible to replicate during compression modes, at least at those low resolutions.
Truth be told, the cost for amplifiers is THD at a certain output level, the lower the THD at the higher the level, across a broader spectrum, the higher the cost. In plain english, this means less distortion of the originating signal as it is amplified. And yes, this is something almost anyone can hear.
There are lots of double blind tests. Most that mean anything are between CD quality and above. No difference found after a year plus of testing. If you want to hear some differences in what's left out when items are compressed A refutation of the validity of double-blind audio tests The main point would be that a well mastered CD is better than a poorly mastered 192kHz/24 bit recording, and the same goes for a poorly mastered CD vs a 192 encoded well mastered piece. However, when the original quality material is of like quality, many can tell the differences until they get to CD quality. After that, a smaller segment can tell. What's been destroying music is the large group of folks who've never heard anything that wasn't put through a pipe filled with a wet sponge first. If that's all you've been exposed to, even the clear trill of a bird might sound unpleasantly harsh in its clarity.
Lemmings reliably prefer a cliff. Does that make it right or a sound choice?
I would fall into this group. My hearing is not good enough at this resolution, and the 16bit/44.1kHz rate was chosen because it allowed accurate enough replication of all frequencies within the 99 plus hearing percentile that it was deemed good enough.
The 192kHz/24bit applies to multi-channel sound, where it can make a difference, but I can't speak to the specifics why that is as that's not my area of expertise. I'd guess it's because effectively you'll drop below those key values and it becomes noticeable. Hearing is notoriously sensitive to direction, so the diffraction patterns have to make sense to your ears, or so I hear, at least when I was configuring the surround sound on my receiver.
You are out of your mind, or partially deaf.
192 encoded samples are definitely poor audio representations of actual music. Listen to them on appropriate equipment and get back to us.
I listened to 256 encoded music in my car, and it was so bad I went lossless for what I listen to in the car. At home even 320 MP3s were hollow. Granted, it does depend upon the music you select, some are not as negatively affected, but only the most trivial music does not lose something going down to 192.