CDs hand-carved by tibetan monks and charge three billion dollars each. [...] An FTP server would do the job for at least three orders of magnitude less money
Umm, would you like to buy an FTP server from me? IT can be yours for the low price of $3 Million.
The 9/11 hijackers were anything but dumb (evil, suicidal, crazy, whatever else you feel like saying) having trained as pilots for very complex aircraft
Actually, they were pretty dumb for not showing any interest in learning how to take off or land. But fortunately for them, we were dumber for not being suspicious of this.
using the right equipment you can record from a CD onto a high quality casette, then if you use the right recording deck... after 5 generations you would start gettiing the higher frequencies flattened
Yes, with the "right equipment" (by which I assume you mean not the typical equipment that everybody and his brother had back in the day) you could get 4 generations out without hearing noticible degradation. How about run-o-the-mill walkman-to-walkman copying? An mp3 in an email message can be forwarded 4 billion times with zero (not negligable, zero) degradation. And we're still ignoring the time it takes to make a tape copy, and the cost of the tape. So, it's understandable that the industry would be more concerned about mp3s than about casettes. the degradation of casettes is nowhere near your suggested levels.
Um, WHAT suggested levels? I made no attempt in my previous message to quantify the amount of degradation incurred per generation, nor to estimate the number of useful generations that could be made. I made the fairly trivial observation that two generations experience twice as much degradation as one, but that's all.
Yes, but MP3s are stil digital, and don't suffer from generational degradation. If you copy a minicasette and give a copy to a friend, and he makes a copy of that and gives the 2nd copy to his friend, the second copy is degraded twice as much. With an mp3, the degradation is limited (barely discernible) and happens only once. After that, all copies of the mp3 file are identical.
Since when has any addiction ever been healthy? It seems to me that the relevant question is not whether it's healthy, but rather, how unhealthy is it?
Well, there are obviously lunatics on each side of the aisle. I hadn't heard about the illegal immigrants voting idea. I had heard about giving them driver's licenses, which is almost as nutty.
African-American Republicans were 50 times more likely to have their ballot thrown out in 2000 Florida election
Fifty times more likely than whom? Neither you nor the article say. Fifty times more likely than Black Democrats? Unlikely. Fifty times more likely than White Republicans? Probably, and irrelevant. Even if the former is true, that can work out to the Republican's advantage, given large discrepancies in set size. Let's say 1% of Black Democrat votes are discarded, and 50% of Black Republican votes are discarded, giving the "50 times more likely" factor you quoted. Now lets say there are a million Black Democrats. You just tossed 10,000 Democrat votes. Now, let's say there are, oh, 10,000 Black Republicans in Florida, and you toss half their votes. You just tossed 5,000 Republican votes. Net gain to the Republican party? 5,000 votes.
Felons can't vote, and yet the fabric of society is not unravelling because of it.
On the contrary, I think it already has. Thousands of Black voters were illegally and intentionally disenfranchised in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, and the illegality of felons voting was the means by which they carried it out and made it look like an accident. As a result, the candidate who would have won, lost. I submit that any adverse impact of allowing felons to vote would be dwarfed by the damage caused by the illegal purging of legal voters from the registration rolls on the grounds of preventing felon-voting.
In the future I bet almost all devices, maybe even ALL soda cans, will contain miniature computers with wireless capabilities
*** Error: The electronic opener in this can has detected an overpressure condition inside and needs to shut down. The most recent temperature and acceleration data has been recorded in the logfile. By sending this information to CocaCola, you will enable us to help diagnose this condition. What would you like to do? [Send Now]....[Don't Send]...[Just open the damn can before I pull out my Swiss Army Knife]
This is not at all paranoia. A camera-phone is a camera. There are secure buildings, or buildings with secure rooms (like where I work), where you have to have a secret or top-secret clearance to get in. Bringing a camera in there is forbidden and a security violation. Anybody who works in such an environment, who is too stupid to realize what a no-no this would be, does not belong working there.
Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" or in degraded form: through analog outputs or digital outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels or less--less than 1/4 of HDTV's capability.
There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only.
I don't think they're lying. I think you are just parsing it wrong. If they left out the word "output" after "analog", there would be implied parentheses around "analog or digital", and you'd be correct. Rather, they are saying that there are two kinds of "degraded form": (1) analog outputs (which is inherently degraded), and (2) digital outputs with reduced resolution.
I know I'll get modded down for being a grammar nazi, but if you're going to be publishing research, you really should know the differenve between "sited" and "cited".
Slashdot Mirror
CDs hand-carved by tibetan monks and charge three billion dollars each. [...] An FTP server would do the job for at least three orders of magnitude less money
Umm, would you like to buy an FTP server from me? IT can be yours for the low price of $3 Million.
The 9/11 hijackers were anything but dumb (evil, suicidal, crazy, whatever else you feel like saying) having trained as pilots for very complex aircraft
Actually, they were pretty dumb for not showing any interest in learning how to take off or land. But fortunately for them, we were dumber for not being suspicious of this.
Also, this prompts the question, what is the EU doing to examine Longhorn?"
Thank you for not abusing the phrase "begging the question".
The long standing arguement against banning guns is it means only the criminals will have them.
Yes, it's true that only criminals will have them. But it's not true that all the criminals that would otherwise have had them, would still have them.
using the right equipment you can record from a CD onto a high quality casette, then if you use the right recording deck
Yes, with the "right equipment" (by which I assume you mean not the typical equipment that everybody and his brother had back in the day) you could get 4 generations out without hearing noticible degradation. How about run-o-the-mill walkman-to-walkman copying? An mp3 in an email message can be forwarded 4 billion times with zero (not negligable, zero) degradation. And we're still ignoring the time it takes to make a tape copy, and the cost of the tape. So, it's understandable that the industry would be more concerned about mp3s than about casettes.
the degradation of casettes is nowhere near your suggested levels.
Um, WHAT suggested levels? I made no attempt in my previous message to quantify the amount of degradation incurred per generation, nor to estimate the number of useful generations that could be made. I made the fairly trivial observation that two generations experience twice as much degradation as one, but that's all.
Yes, but MP3s are stil digital, and don't suffer from generational degradation. If you copy a minicasette and give a copy to a friend, and he makes a copy of that and gives the 2nd copy to his friend, the second copy is degraded twice as much. With an mp3, the degradation is limited (barely discernible) and happens only once. After that, all copies of the mp3 file are identical.
Doesn't one billion PCs sound a little high considering that the vast majority of the world's population doesn't have access to a telephone?
A little high? No more so than the fact that McDonalds has served a hundred times as many people who have ever lived.
Why should they adjust for that? After all, they're getting paid for both licenses.
Since when has any addiction ever been healthy? It seems to me that the relevant question is not whether it's healthy, but rather, how unhealthy is it?
"I wouldn't call him stupid; let's just say he doesn't have a good relationship with his brain..."
Nah, George Bush and Karl Rove are getting along just fine.
This "end of the universe" joke comes from comedian Lewis Black's stand up routine.
"hey that was disgusting, put a tape in quick and record 5 minutes ago"
I think we need a "(+1, Duh)" moderation.
no one is going to examine your snotty nose are they :-)
No, but they might ask why you spend so much time sniffing top-secret documents.
Well, there are obviously lunatics on each side of the aisle. I hadn't heard about the illegal immigrants voting idea. I had heard about giving them driver's licenses, which is almost as nutty.
African-American Republicans were 50 times more likely to have their ballot thrown out in 2000 Florida election
Fifty times more likely than whom? Neither you nor the article say. Fifty times more likely than Black Democrats? Unlikely. Fifty times more likely than White Republicans? Probably, and irrelevant. Even if the former is true, that can work out to the Republican's advantage, given large discrepancies in set size. Let's say 1% of Black Democrat votes are discarded, and 50% of Black Republican votes are discarded, giving the "50 times more likely" factor you quoted. Now lets say there are a million Black Democrats. You just tossed 10,000 Democrat votes. Now, let's say there are, oh, 10,000 Black Republicans in Florida, and you toss half their votes. You just tossed 5,000 Republican votes. Net gain to the Republican party? 5,000 votes.
That would be funny if it were true. Which democrats count convicted felons as one of their constituencies?
Felons can't vote, and yet the fabric of society is not unravelling because of it.
On the contrary, I think it already has. Thousands of Black voters were illegally and intentionally disenfranchised in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, and the illegality of felons voting was the means by which they carried it out and made it look like an accident. As a result, the candidate who would have won, lost. I submit that any adverse impact of allowing felons to vote would be dwarfed by the damage caused by the illegal purging of legal voters from the registration rolls on the grounds of preventing felon-voting.
In the future I bet almost all devices, maybe even ALL soda cans, will contain
miniature computers with wireless capabilities
*** Error: The electronic opener in this can has detected an overpressure condition inside and needs to shut down. The most recent temperature and acceleration data has been recorded in the logfile. By sending this information to CocaCola, you will enable us to help diagnose this condition. What would you like to do?
[Send Now]....[Don't Send]...[Just open the damn can before I pull out my Swiss Army Knife]
This is not at all paranoia. A camera-phone is a camera. There are secure buildings, or buildings with secure rooms (like where I work), where you have to have a secret or top-secret clearance to get in. Bringing a camera in there is forbidden and a security violation. Anybody who works in such an environment, who is too stupid to realize what a no-no this would be, does not belong working there.
There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only.
I don't think they're lying. I think you are just parsing it wrong. If they left out the word "output" after "analog", there would be implied parentheses around "analog or digital", and you'd be correct. Rather, they are saying that there are two kinds of "degraded form": (1) analog outputs (which is inherently degraded), and (2) digital outputs with reduced resolution.
She's rewarding behavior that could have got the boy killed. I hereby dub her "The Anti-Darwin".
Didn't they teach you that the Halting Problem was unsolvable?
I think a cooler name for a super-hero would be "Knight Goggles".
A great way for geeks to get into shape without having to go outside.
Are they going to come out with a version that uses the buttons on the game controller, rather than youre feet?
slide actually sited the Slashdot-mentioned story
I know I'll get modded down for being a grammar nazi, but if you're going to be publishing research, you really should know the differenve between "sited" and "cited".