I don't know what you mean by the term "the wireless standards", but both the 802.11 WLAN standards and H.264 et al. are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.
Of course there are other factors. But regulation of gun ownership is one of them, and regulation of gun types allowed for private use is another.
Most countries with high gun ownership rates and low murder rates tend to have hunting rifles, not assault weapons. They also have extensive systems that work to prevent guns from coming into the wrong hands.
This whole clichéd genre of "X is also potentially deadly, too, therefore weapons are unfairly singled out!" is absolutely free of any rationality. Guns make murder happen faster than other potentially deadly things. That's why people who want to be able to kill buy guns rather than propane tanks, as any cursory look at standard military equipment would indicate.
It's a matter of efficiency and scale. A spree shooter gets a lot more people before the police can disable him if he uses a gun. As it were: Duh.
The problem with your analogy is that lugging a propane tank into a classroom is probably going to get you some questions people would insist you answered. And you'd be hard pressed to stop them because you're busy lugging a propane tank.
My first thought is: Good luck syncing audio to that!
Second: Good luck doing meaningful digital compression!
In professional broadcasting - _unlike_ the camcorder a mortal can afford - rolling-shutter is under control, as is a lot of other Bad and Wrong stuff that consumer cameras do. (Here's one you can easily check at home: Point a TV remote at it, and press buttons. Do you see the remote LED lighting up? That means it doesn't filter IR, and that wreaks havoc on colour fidelity!)
That's funny. When you see lip-flap in dubbed commercials here in Norway, it's almost always a painfully tacky German ad. Probably for shampoo, or a domestic cleaning product.
That xkcd misunderstands an important point: Resolution should be measured in arc-seconds at typical viewing distance. You have a phone right up against your face. You have a television at one meter distance, at least.
Film cameras need time to advance to the next frame, and to expose the viewfinder. Usually the shutter speed is effectively around 1/50s - in motion pictures the term used is always "shutter angle", never "shutter speed".
That isn't because high-framerate content is bad, though, that's because consumer televisions do a terrible job of motion compensation (which is a HARD problem).
In Norway, the public broadcaster broadcasts 720p50 simply because people watch TV on flat panels, which means that if we sent 1080i50 the TV would deinterlace internally - and deinterlacing is nearly impossible to get right. 720p50 from a hefty box full of ASICs gives much, much higher effective quality than a home user would get from 1080i50, which is the normal HD format until 1080p50 infrastructure becomes adequate.
1080p25 is not something you want. It's really only useful for film material shot at 25fps (as most made-for-TV film stuff is). Frame rates that low incur several restrictions that you cannot process your way out of, like the "safe panning speed".
In cinema, exposure time is a function of frame rate and "shutter angle". The shutter rotates over the film, and by varying the angle you can get higher shutter speeds. IIRC, my Arriflex (made for TV, thus geared for 25fps) maxes out at 180 degrees, meaning 1/52s.
Digital cinema cameras do not have high-speed shutters (unless you set them that way, just like with film). Indeed, since there is no mechanical requirement to blank away the film while the claw advances, you can actually have smaller shutter angles/greater speed.
Why would you want to rotate that monitor 90 degrees? Rotating a 16:9 24" monitor already yields a display height which causes me to have to tilt my neck to read the text at the top.
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar. The modern bright LED screens do so much better in such places.
You're likely comparing these to CRT rear-projection TVs, which were indeed dark - but that's apples and oranges. A DLP rear-projection TV is very bright even in normal lighting. It's essentially a high-quality DLP video projector with a built-in reflector and projection target.
In fact, the greatest damage moderates and left-wing could do to the right wing extremists is to invite them to freely speak their minds. The resulting spew of homophobic, sexist, and racist non-sequiturs would likely shift most people just a bit to the left.
In my experience that's a fallacy. If you say that spewing hate-filled bullshit is "okay" and "harmless", it will catch on.
Dismissing dangerous political ideas as somehow "inherently self-destructing" flies in the face of all experience with human history, which includes a lot of dangerous political ideologies - like Communism and Nazism.
The reason preposterous or dangerous ideologies tend not to catch on in developed societies is because people react to them. If people stop reacting to them, they catch on.
Another approach would be to add an abstraction layer between the hardware and software very much like what is done with virtualization, Java, ZFS, LVM, DirectX, Crossbow et al. That would make the software more independent of the underlying hardware...
The problem is that both parties given the change will do the same to the extreme.
Nope. Sorry. There's no comparison. And trying to say that both parties are equally bad isn't merely incorrect, it represents a cowardly cop-out which is far too common, built on the illusion that saying that both parties to a conflict are "just as bad" serves to "raise you from the fray". It does not. It serves to remove you from any useful discourse, and to remove the disincentive to the Republicans for any disingenuous behaviour (thus stimulating it, since the incentives are many).
I'm sorry to be an annoying outsider here as a non-American, but my pet peeve about political discussions in the United States is this absurd belief that all correlation implies total causation - "Say what you want about the Yugo, but when I drove a Yugo the economy went really well". It's a great way to remove all meaning from a discussion.
Discuss the facts of the matter - the concrete decisions made, the changes in culture - and the direct and indirect outcomes of those. That's how you get closer to a good answer. And the clear and obvious reality is that the Republican party has - to a far greater extent than the Democratic party - made the strategic choice to put the popularity of the party above the general welfare of the nation, by eagerly jumping at a chance to obstruct the political system to hinder its work in a manner which - to the casual observer - seem to make the Democrats look bad by impeding their agenda.
This is possible because the press will not criticise the Republicans for fear of being branded partisan. Commercial censorship at its best. This is not a partisan statement even if it is primarily a criticism of a single political party. Objectivity is not the belief that both parties are always equally poor.
It almost certainly could not. It could scan a framebuffer with that resolution, but there are a numbers of quite good low-pass filters in the CRT which limit the dot pitch.
Corporations have the same incentive as government for efficiency, albeit enforced by different mechanisms.
It's just that in some cases, in some parts of the economy, the mechanisms that regulate a private company are better. Most of all, this applies to sectors of the economy where the rules of the business can change rapidly, where you have multiple competitors in a situation where the customers are equipped to make a truly well-informed decision, and where the benefit of cooperation does not exceed the positive outcomes of competition. To me, the best example of this is the computing industry, and a comparison between the US and Soviet computer industries are profoundly striking.
Now, that does not apply for all things, just a large amount of them. And one rather extreme counter-example is a weather service, where you're basically dealing with - first, basic research, which never makes fiscal sense to MBAs and so long-run R&D departments tend to get cut quite severely when parent organizations are privatized. Secondly, it's data processing based on the maximum number of data collection points. It's called a "natural monopoly"; Essentially, you want a monopoly rather than three or four organizations competing with a third or a fourth of the sensor coverage, so the task is best executed by a monopoly.
Besides, the US Weather Service is really pretty excellent. Their ability to constantly improve their quality of output is striking, and they are masters of prediction.
Private companies are quite robust because they always have a bottom line they can steer by. If you're in the black, you're doing fine. Government institutions can really only steer by the expectations of the voters, and by constantly lowering them that inherently causes the government efficiency to drop - so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Expecting efficiency from the public sector really does work.
I'm a big fan of the private market, but the extent to which a lot of people oversimplify its strengths and ignore weaknesses is counterproductive. The world is full of nuances.
Yep. Tekst-TV is the generic name of the service in Norway, the analog of "teletext", I suppose. NRK used to run Tekst-TV on VAX and later Alpha OpenVMS systems. Now we run it off a doubly redundant Linux box with a bit of custom software.
It's really all a fun and kludgey affair, but quite stable - the box outputs analog composite video with the Huffmann-coded data - which is then run into a really old MPEG-2 encoder (which is the only box around that will actually import teletext) - which then turns it into a transport stream over ASI, which then runs into the modern multiplexer. The external data used to arrive by a varied set of different means but it's all XML over HTTP now, which is munged into Teletext by way of a templating system written in Object Pascal, of all things.
Tekst-TV is still one of our most popular services, and we get immediate feedback if there is any error in the content - some of the feedback displaying a truly admirable attention to accuracy from the users! Bathing temperatures, ski information, airport arrivals/departures, stock exchange - people tend to remember the page numbers, and so it's really only between four and six key strokes to get the information in an instant. The typography isn't beautiful, but I don't check bathing temperatures for the typography.:)
The system is very well integrated with our other content infrastructure. The subtitles are integrated with our DVB subtitling system, for instance, and the news delivery with our web CMS. This enables us to keep the system chugging along very cost-efficiently.
Well, because the market mechanism doesn't work as well as the public mechanism here
Well, you'll need to give an example then. It looks to me like market works better for this sort of thing.
The Apollo space program. All other space exploration too. The Internet. Transistors, fiber optics, radar (and all the high-frequency electronics that come with it). I could go on.
For the price of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars you could do the Apollo project between 10 and 40 times over, depending on which estimate you trust, never mind the human cost.
And what would you have gotten for that money? At least with the wars, the US knocked over a dictatorship and set back some enemies that were looking to make a habit of bombing stuff on US soil.
You also knocked over what conservative estimates place at more than 110 000 innocent civilians in Iraq and 20 000 in Afghanistan. And you can't document those claims.
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I don't know what you mean by the term "the wireless standards", but both the 802.11 WLAN standards and H.264 et al. are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.
People need to understand that life does not have infinite value. If it did (...) slavery would still be practiced everywhere.
*blink*
Of course there are other factors. But regulation of gun ownership is one of them, and regulation of gun types allowed for private use is another.
Most countries with high gun ownership rates and low murder rates tend to have hunting rifles, not assault weapons. They also have extensive systems that work to prevent guns from coming into the wrong hands.
This whole clichéd genre of "X is also potentially deadly, too, therefore weapons are unfairly singled out!" is absolutely free of any rationality. Guns make murder happen faster than other potentially deadly things. That's why people who want to be able to kill buy guns rather than propane tanks, as any cursory look at standard military equipment would indicate.
It's a matter of efficiency and scale. A spree shooter gets a lot more people before the police can disable him if he uses a gun. As it were: Duh.
The problem with your analogy is that lugging a propane tank into a classroom is probably going to get you some questions people would insist you answered. And you'd be hard pressed to stop them because you're busy lugging a propane tank.
My first thought is: Good luck syncing audio to that!
Second: Good luck doing meaningful digital compression!
In professional broadcasting - _unlike_ the camcorder a mortal can afford - rolling-shutter is under control, as is a lot of other Bad and Wrong stuff that consumer cameras do. (Here's one you can easily check at home: Point a TV remote at it, and press buttons. Do you see the remote LED lighting up? That means it doesn't filter IR, and that wreaks havoc on colour fidelity!)
That's funny. When you see lip-flap in dubbed commercials here in Norway, it's almost always a painfully tacky German ad. Probably for shampoo, or a domestic cleaning product.
That xkcd misunderstands an important point: Resolution should be measured in arc-seconds at typical viewing distance. You have a phone right up against your face. You have a television at one meter distance, at least.
Film cameras need time to advance to the next frame, and to expose the viewfinder. Usually the shutter speed is effectively around 1/50s - in motion pictures the term used is always "shutter angle", never "shutter speed".
That isn't because high-framerate content is bad, though, that's because consumer televisions do a terrible job of motion compensation (which is a HARD problem).
Digital interpolation is not really all that lossy nowadays, if you use the right equipment.
I would prefer the home release to be 720p50, myself, but I expect it'll either be 1080p24 - or maybe 1080i50?
In Norway, the public broadcaster broadcasts 720p50 simply because people watch TV on flat panels, which means that if we sent 1080i50 the TV would deinterlace internally - and deinterlacing is nearly impossible to get right. 720p50 from a hefty box full of ASICs gives much, much higher effective quality than a home user would get from 1080i50, which is the normal HD format until 1080p50 infrastructure becomes adequate.
1080p25 is not something you want. It's really only useful for film material shot at 25fps (as most made-for-TV film stuff is). Frame rates that low incur several restrictions that you cannot process your way out of, like the "safe panning speed".
Some errata:
In cinema, exposure time is a function of frame rate and "shutter angle". The shutter rotates over the film, and by varying the angle you can get higher shutter speeds. IIRC, my Arriflex (made for TV, thus geared for 25fps) maxes out at 180 degrees, meaning 1/52s.
Digital cinema cameras do not have high-speed shutters (unless you set them that way, just like with film). Indeed, since there is no mechanical requirement to blank away the film while the claw advances, you can actually have smaller shutter angles/greater speed.
Why would you want to rotate that monitor 90 degrees? Rotating a 16:9 24" monitor already yields a display height which causes me to have to tilt my neck to read the text at the top.
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar. The modern bright LED screens do so much better in such places.
You're likely comparing these to CRT rear-projection TVs, which were indeed dark - but that's apples and oranges. A DLP rear-projection TV is very bright even in normal lighting. It's essentially a high-quality DLP video projector with a built-in reflector and projection target.
In fact, the greatest damage moderates and left-wing could do to the right wing extremists is to invite them to freely speak their minds. The resulting spew of homophobic, sexist, and racist non-sequiturs would likely shift most people just a bit to the left.
In my experience that's a fallacy. If you say that spewing hate-filled bullshit is "okay" and "harmless", it will catch on.
Dismissing dangerous political ideas as somehow "inherently self-destructing" flies in the face of all experience with human history, which includes a lot of dangerous political ideologies - like Communism and Nazism.
The reason preposterous or dangerous ideologies tend not to catch on in developed societies is because people react to them. If people stop reacting to them, they catch on.
Just as the AlphaServer had desktop equivalents, so did the Itanium, which were discontinued.
Another approach would be to add an abstraction layer between the hardware and software very much like what is done with virtualization, Java, ZFS, LVM, DirectX, Crossbow et al. That would make the software more independent of the underlying hardware...
Isn't that basically how CISC works nowadays?
The problem is that both parties given the change will do the same to the extreme.
Nope. Sorry. There's no comparison. And trying to say that both parties are equally bad isn't merely incorrect, it represents a cowardly cop-out which is far too common, built on the illusion that saying that both parties to a conflict are "just as bad" serves to "raise you from the fray". It does not. It serves to remove you from any useful discourse, and to remove the disincentive to the Republicans for any disingenuous behaviour (thus stimulating it, since the incentives are many).
I'm sorry to be an annoying outsider here as a non-American, but my pet peeve about political discussions in the United States is this absurd belief that all correlation implies total causation - "Say what you want about the Yugo, but when I drove a Yugo the economy went really well". It's a great way to remove all meaning from a discussion.
Discuss the facts of the matter - the concrete decisions made, the changes in culture - and the direct and indirect outcomes of those. That's how you get closer to a good answer. And the clear and obvious reality is that the Republican party has - to a far greater extent than the Democratic party - made the strategic choice to put the popularity of the party above the general welfare of the nation, by eagerly jumping at a chance to obstruct the political system to hinder its work in a manner which - to the casual observer - seem to make the Democrats look bad by impeding their agenda.
This is possible because the press will not criticise the Republicans for fear of being branded partisan. Commercial censorship at its best. This is not a partisan statement even if it is primarily a criticism of a single political party. Objectivity is not the belief that both parties are always equally poor.
It almost certainly could not. It could scan a framebuffer with that resolution, but there are a numbers of quite good low-pass filters in the CRT which limit the dot pitch.
Ugh. That's the cheeziest way I've ever seen anyone tell his friend to lighten up.
Corporations have the same incentive as government for efficiency, albeit enforced by different mechanisms.
It's just that in some cases, in some parts of the economy, the mechanisms that regulate a private company are better. Most of all, this applies to sectors of the economy where the rules of the business can change rapidly, where you have multiple competitors in a situation where the customers are equipped to make a truly well-informed decision, and where the benefit of cooperation does not exceed the positive outcomes of competition. To me, the best example of this is the computing industry, and a comparison between the US and Soviet computer industries are profoundly striking.
Now, that does not apply for all things, just a large amount of them. And one rather extreme counter-example is a weather service, where you're basically dealing with - first, basic research, which never makes fiscal sense to MBAs and so long-run R&D departments tend to get cut quite severely when parent organizations are privatized. Secondly, it's data processing based on the maximum number of data collection points. It's called a "natural monopoly"; Essentially, you want a monopoly rather than three or four organizations competing with a third or a fourth of the sensor coverage, so the task is best executed by a monopoly.
Besides, the US Weather Service is really pretty excellent. Their ability to constantly improve their quality of output is striking, and they are masters of prediction.
Private companies are quite robust because they always have a bottom line they can steer by. If you're in the black, you're doing fine. Government institutions can really only steer by the expectations of the voters, and by constantly lowering them that inherently causes the government efficiency to drop - so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Expecting efficiency from the public sector really does work.
I'm a big fan of the private market, but the extent to which a lot of people oversimplify its strengths and ignore weaknesses is counterproductive. The world is full of nuances.
Yep. Tekst-TV is the generic name of the service in Norway, the analog of "teletext", I suppose. NRK used to run Tekst-TV on VAX and later Alpha OpenVMS systems. Now we run it off a doubly redundant Linux box with a bit of custom software.
It's really all a fun and kludgey affair, but quite stable - the box outputs analog composite video with the Huffmann-coded data - which is then run into a really old MPEG-2 encoder (which is the only box around that will actually import teletext) - which then turns it into a transport stream over ASI, which then runs into the modern multiplexer. The external data used to arrive by a varied set of different means but it's all XML over HTTP now, which is munged into Teletext by way of a templating system written in Object Pascal, of all things.
Tekst-TV is still one of our most popular services, and we get immediate feedback if there is any error in the content - some of the feedback displaying a truly admirable attention to accuracy from the users! Bathing temperatures, ski information, airport arrivals/departures, stock exchange - people tend to remember the page numbers, and so it's really only between four and six key strokes to get the information in an instant. The typography isn't beautiful, but I don't check bathing temperatures for the typography. :)
The system is very well integrated with our other content infrastructure. The subtitles are integrated with our DVB subtitling system, for instance, and the news delivery with our web CMS. This enables us to keep the system chugging along very cost-efficiently.
No, would be like saying eBay sucks because most sellers rip you off.
Well, because the market mechanism doesn't work as well as the public mechanism here
Well, you'll need to give an example then. It looks to me like market works better for this sort of thing.
The Apollo space program. All other space exploration too. The Internet. Transistors, fiber optics, radar (and all the high-frequency electronics that come with it). I could go on.
For the price of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars you could do the Apollo project between 10 and 40 times over, depending on which estimate you trust, never mind the human cost.
And what would you have gotten for that money? At least with the wars, the US knocked over a dictatorship and set back some enemies that were looking to make a habit of bombing stuff on US soil.
You also knocked over what conservative estimates place at more than 110 000 innocent civilians in Iraq and 20 000 in Afghanistan. And you can't document those claims.