What does "relying on heavy reuse from the existing H.264 codebase" actually mean?
It means that the code uses the same mathematical principals of video encoding/decoding that H264 does. Unfortunately, the USPTO being what it is today, these mathematical principals have been patented and are owned by various private entities. All this despite the fact that mathematics is not supposed to be patentable. Not that the USPTO actually cares about what is patentable and what is not anymore.
Basically, H264 largely boils down to using Fourier series, motion estimation, colour subsampling,(bi-)linear interpolation, and bitstream compression. But then again, all video compression basically boils down to these steps. If you patent,not the methods or implementation, but the very idea of using these methods--"on a computer" to be sure--you've basically patented the idea of video compression itself. In fact, according to proponents of "intellectual property", you in fact own the idea of video compression; And based on the consensus view, MPEG-LA and others are seen as doing just that.
Welcome to the future, where mathematical (and probably physical) laws of the universe are the sole and lawful property of hairless apes in business suits.
The fundamental issue here is that the needs of private industry are fundamentally opposed to family life. People are left choosing one over the other time and again; women simply get the worst of it. The simple truth is that employers hate children, and would much prefer their employees to remain single their entire lives. Unfortunately, if the workaholic culture and demographic wilting of Japan is any indication, employers can and probably will get that wish, and entire nations will atrophy in the long term for the sake of supposed gains in efficiency.
Right now, as things stand, working men and especially working women are being punished for having children, raising children and even being with their children. I wouldn't classify myself as a child person and especially not as a "family values" proponent, but I can still see why this system is wrong and why change is needed. And simply extending parental leave, paid or otherwise, is not the solution. Businesses need to be persuaded or forced to stop seeing employees with children as liabilities. The question is how this can be done.
Why should we be giving up on privacy for the benefit of marketing companies?
Wrong question. You don't have a say in this. The right question is:"Why should private companies give up the chance to make extra money for the benefit of your privacy?".
As someone who wrote a 20 page term paper on this case for an International Intellectual Property class in law school,
You mean as someone who was trained and educated in modern legal copyright dogma, as promoted and financed by the industries which benefit from it--including the legal industry itself. Your paper and the conclusions of your post are little more than obsequious toadying to those promoting the outrageous concept of "intellectual property". The sad thing is, this nonsense has become so accepted by the legal system that people are now being recognised as having ownership over works in the public domain via "squatters rights" gained by the production of derivative works, especially movies. Lawyers and judges have both forgotten that a "copyright" does not confer ownership of any kind and is merely a writ of monopoly granted at the pleasure of the government--temporarily.
I see it all the time, Westerners are shocked that their culture of "it's OK to make mistakes and it's a positive thing to admit when you are wrong" doesn't apply everywhere.
Surprising really, because such thinking doesn't actually apply in the Western world either. If you make mistakes in the West--even minor ones--you will hounded out of your position by a feral media. Unless you're in a position of considerable corporate power obviously.
I think you'll agree that the full text befits his reputation as Britain's visionary saviour, whereas the person who first sought to sully his reputation by offering up into popular currency the truncated misrepresentation of his view deserves shame.
But they got a +5 Informative score. Mudslinging works. It works because the people who accept it want it to work.
Similarly voting system work, or not, because the public desire it. Ultimately all voting systems are just ways of distilling the will of the people. And most of the time, the people get the leaders they deserve.
I think it would be better to use this term sound like an idiot, than use "mainstream media" and look like a fool for giving the modern media such a lofty term of respect.
Ignorance and stupidity prevents science from advancing proper.
It's not ignorance or stupidity. It's morality and ethics. And before you roll your eyes, please try to remember what happens when the medical profession tries to set these aside in the name of progress(ironically more often done by self proclaimed "moral societies", but I digress). The field does not have a good track record, and that's just on the research side. The commercial side is arguably worse.
None of this would be happening if working with stem cells and bioengineering proper was legalized at large.
You have even less evidence of that than the doctors in this case who thought their treatment would work. The reality is the question of "if something works" and "if something should be done" are two very, very different things. And progress does not happen when you ignore either one.
You go on and on about capitalism and the free market but the basic fact of the matter is that there are so few people demanding these devices and so few companies selling them that the rules theorised for grain and bullion markets simply do not apply. There is enormous price gouring and manipulation going on by companies who have cornered these so called "markets", which are in reality simply landlord/tenant relationships without the corresponding protections.
These devices cost less to make than a DVD player, yet are being sold for a thousand times the price. No matter how much you twist and bend them, your free market theories will never be able to explain this, and neither will your complaints about government interference. Only the iron laws of monopoly and market manipulation have a hope of explaining these kinds of margins.
So a Slashdotter claims that part of his workload involves being "acutely aware" of all the various kinds of porn out there, and that trolling coworkers files for instances of such constitutes a "valid part" of his job, and you say we're done here?
Come on! This warrants at least one +5 Funny comment.
You really have to wonder though, if that market can be oversaturated. After all, porn changes the least over time so if there's already 100GB+ or 1TB+ of whatever fetish rocks your boat on the market, how much room is there for yet another standard flick with quite "standard" girls - for porn anyways?
You can apply virtually the same arguments to books, films and music. The point here is that as the world and culture changes, the products in that culture must also change in order to stay accepted and contemporary. In other words, most people nowadays probably wouldn't find 80's porn stars so much arousing as amusing.
Very few works break this trend, though some can. Mathematical texts for example are usually quite timeless, with works like Euclid's elements surviving untouched to the present day. The same goes for religious texts like the Bible.
And so I nominate my own post on Pornography, Mathematical and the Bible in the "Most unlikely argument" category in next Slashdotted awards.
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.
Re:H1b visas and the job market
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What do we learn from this? That using cheap labor is short-termism at the expense of our development.
To most people, "development" does not mean scientific advances. Far from it. Development means bigger economies and more profits. That's the metric we use to judge ourselves and our societies. Scientific research is generally an atomic "loss" and is thus regarded as at worst as a useless or regressive pursuit, and at best simply a tool used to promote profit.
Nowadays astronomers are expected to justify "commerical" applications of their work. Astronomers. The one field that has consistently advanced humanities' knowledge, understanding and technologies and astronomers now have to show that they are "useful to business"; because anyone who isn't is in effect useless. The "science gap" is one in our culture; our way of thinking about human activity is currently literally centred almost completely on business. Even religion is placed into this mould.
This is the age we live in. The age of commercialism. As distinct from even capitalism, where at least the capitalists of prior ages did see merit in other pursuits. Everything we do nowadays must be justified from the point of view of profit and loss, balance sheets, stock counts, portfolios, economic impacts, money and how it can make some for people who matter. Science does not and has never fit into this mould, with very few scientists engaged in research primarily for profit.
I'll finish off by saying if you think the sciences have it bad, you should see what has happened to the humanities.
But that's ok... only ethically bad people use pornography, right? Right?
According to quite a few people, yes. Pornography exploits women by treating them as objects or "pieces of meat" for sinful men. There are many who hold such opinions and who argument and lobby strongly for pornography to be heavily censored or more preferable banned in order to protect women and especially children.
Funnily enough, most of these same people beleive a woman's place is in the home, subservient to her husband, and largely removed from the democratic process. So something tells me they're not in it for the women they're supposedly fighting for.
OK Mr Wise Geek, let's assume you're right and Australians do figure out that they need encryption to secure their communications. What then? What technologies are available which can offer them secure access to their usual internet services without compromising on features?
What about web browsing? Http. How can they browse securely? Https? Only available on a per website basis, and besides the security crowd are so pedantic they've convinced Firefox and who knows how many else that self signed certs are worse than unencrypted traffic. No real movement on that front then. Tor? I think the atrocious hit in speed precludes that route. Proxies? I suppose they'll work for about five minutes before succumbing to congestion. Let's just conclude this section by stating that encrypted/secure web browsing isn't going to be a viable option for most.
The situation for most other web protocols isn't much better. The simple fact of the matter is that the current infrastructure of the net was never built with mass government censorship in mind and is wide open to surveillance. On top of this, virtually no-one is interested in developing the technologies neccessary to make a secure web a reality, and those that are are too concerned with 50 year old theoretical problems than in making a system that everyone can use. We're not getting a secure web unless you count esoterica like Freenet.
It has nothing to do with figuring out you need to "encrypt everything". It's about needing the two to three decades of research and development required to build an Internet capable of end to end encryption; development that simply has not been done.
People should understand that the Academic publishers would never have dared try a 400% rise without a strong bargaining position. The sad reality is that publishing in a journal like Nature is a huge feather in the cap/CV of any academic, earning them big kudos, faster tenure track and generally more money overall. Publishers are well aware of this and are effectively trying to call UCLAs bluff here. They're very powerful groups with many "prestigious" journals, and the monopolization of the industry probably means that NPG controls a sizable percentage of overall journals; journals all the other academics NOT at UCLA now have less to compete against when publishing in.
This however is all a bit weird coming from a company whose online publishing director print journals will disappear in the next 10 years. Having said that, considering the power of DRM, perhaps that's exactly what publishers want.
It may be smart, it may be the way of the world, but it is definitely NOT something that is compatible with American ideals.
Yes. Definitely not coarse, ignorant or self important enough for the typical American stereotype. The driver should also have been wearing a cowboy hat, blowing cigar smoke in the officers face, and hollering about "taxes!" and "unconstitutional!".
A patent troll is a patent troll. It doesn't matter who they are or who they are suing. The carriers are doing something with this technology and simply inventing it does not entitle CSIRO to an automatic right to be paid money, or worse to deny its use for the benefit of everyone.
Simply having an idea is not enough justification for being given an absolute worldwide monopoly on it. Ideas have no intrinsic value. If you want to protect your ideas then you must do something with them. Only then will they be protected. CSIRO did not do anything with their ideas. The US carriers did. In my mind, that makes the carriers the more legitimate "owners" of these ideas--as distasteful I find supporting large corporations.
Of course not. Anyone with half a brain knows that private companies are utterly amoral entities beholden to no law or regulation beyond those they set themselves; Not even the profit motive--though this is most often their creed.
If you look at the problems seen in this spill, the financial crisis and elsewhere, you see that each and every single person involved in the poor and negligent decisions that were made acted in their own interests to the exclusion of all else. It's obvious why they did so; no-one was accountable for anything. And what happens when people can do whatever they want with no consequences?
Forget fines. Fines on large companies count as paperwork to them. No-one cares. Who's going to jail over this. Who will have to personally pay fines? That is the only type of punishment that people, human beings will understand. If the supervisors and managers of Deepwater Horizon knew that their jobs, pensions and freedom was on the line if anything happened at that plant, you can be certain that all measures would have been taken to ensure safety. Instead, punitive measures are passed on to the company in the form of (minor) bureaucratic fines, all while bonuses are paid out to employees for illegal/dangerous behaviour. Deepwater Horizon was one disaster amid millions waiting to happen under our current corporate system.
The problem is the corporate system, and the unnecessary and dangerous insulation it gives to individuals. Corporations and their actions are ultimately a result of the decisions and actions of individuals and those must be the people who are held to account, not some abstract entity. The science fiction cliché of mega-corporations who commit all kinds of outrageous crimes is not a fantasy so much as it is a logical extrapolation of what the corporate system will ultimately allow to happen; indeed, that is has allowed to happen.
This is of course the whole point of corporations. There whole purpose is to shield their owners and managers from liability, financial and otherwise, while enabling them to maximise profit. The net result is incompetent oil drilling safety measures with no contingencies in the Gulf, and bankers getting paid bonuses for every dollar of other people's money they shovel out the door. The only people who are surprised when things finally go belly up are those under some kind of ridiculous delusion that the people who run corporations are "good, reasonable, upstanding businessmen". The notion of the corporate suit as anything other than a pantomime villain is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
It means that the code uses the same mathematical principals of video encoding/decoding that H264 does. Unfortunately, the USPTO being what it is today, these mathematical principals have been patented and are owned by various private entities. All this despite the fact that mathematics is not supposed to be patentable. Not that the USPTO actually cares about what is patentable and what is not anymore.
Basically, H264 largely boils down to using Fourier series, motion estimation, colour subsampling,(bi-)linear interpolation, and bitstream compression. But then again, all video compression basically boils down to these steps. If you patent,not the methods or implementation, but the very idea of using these methods--"on a computer" to be sure--you've basically patented the idea of video compression itself. In fact, according to proponents of "intellectual property", you in fact own the idea of video compression; And based on the consensus view, MPEG-LA and others are seen as doing just that.
Welcome to the future, where mathematical (and probably physical) laws of the universe are the sole and lawful property of hairless apes in business suits.
The fundamental issue here is that the needs of private industry are fundamentally opposed to family life. People are left choosing one over the other time and again; women simply get the worst of it. The simple truth is that employers hate children, and would much prefer their employees to remain single their entire lives. Unfortunately, if the workaholic culture and demographic wilting of Japan is any indication, employers can and probably will get that wish, and entire nations will atrophy in the long term for the sake of supposed gains in efficiency.
Right now, as things stand, working men and especially working women are being punished for having children, raising children and even being with their children. I wouldn't classify myself as a child person and especially not as a "family values" proponent, but I can still see why this system is wrong and why change is needed. And simply extending parental leave, paid or otherwise, is not the solution. Businesses need to be persuaded or forced to stop seeing employees with children as liabilities. The question is how this can be done.
Wrong question. You don't have a say in this. The right question is :"Why should private companies give up the chance to make extra money for the benefit of your privacy?".
The only real answer is: "Regulation."
You mean as someone who was trained and educated in modern legal copyright dogma, as promoted and financed by the industries which benefit from it--including the legal industry itself. Your paper and the conclusions of your post are little more than obsequious toadying to those promoting the outrageous concept of "intellectual property". The sad thing is, this nonsense has become so accepted by the legal system that people are now being recognised as having ownership over works in the public domain via "squatters rights" gained by the production of derivative works, especially movies. Lawyers and judges have both forgotten that a "copyright" does not confer ownership of any kind and is merely a writ of monopoly granted at the pleasure of the government--temporarily.
Surprising really, because such thinking doesn't actually apply in the Western world either. If you make mistakes in the West--even minor ones--you will hounded out of your position by a feral media. Unless you're in a position of considerable corporate power obviously.
But they got a +5 Informative score. Mudslinging works. It works because the people who accept it want it to work.
Similarly voting system work, or not, because the public desire it. Ultimately all voting systems are just ways of distilling the will of the people. And most of the time, the people get the leaders they deserve.
I think it would be better to use this term sound like an idiot, than use "mainstream media" and look like a fool for giving the modern media such a lofty term of respect.
It's not ignorance or stupidity. It's morality and ethics. And before you roll your eyes, please try to remember what happens when the medical profession tries to set these aside in the name of progress(ironically more often done by self proclaimed "moral societies", but I digress). The field does not have a good track record, and that's just on the research side. The commercial side is arguably worse.
You have even less evidence of that than the doctors in this case who thought their treatment would work. The reality is the question of "if something works" and "if something should be done" are two very, very different things. And progress does not happen when you ignore either one.
You go on and on about capitalism and the free market but the basic fact of the matter is that there are so few people demanding these devices and so few companies selling them that the rules theorised for grain and bullion markets simply do not apply. There is enormous price gouring and manipulation going on by companies who have cornered these so called "markets", which are in reality simply landlord/tenant relationships without the corresponding protections.
These devices cost less to make than a DVD player, yet are being sold for a thousand times the price. No matter how much you twist and bend them, your free market theories will never be able to explain this, and neither will your complaints about government interference. Only the iron laws of monopoly and market manipulation have a hope of explaining these kinds of margins.
So a Slashdotter claims that part of his workload involves being "acutely aware" of all the various kinds of porn out there, and that trolling coworkers files for instances of such constitutes a "valid part" of his job, and you say we're done here?
Come on! This warrants at least one +5 Funny comment.
You can apply virtually the same arguments to books, films and music. The point here is that as the world and culture changes, the products in that culture must also change in order to stay accepted and contemporary. In other words, most people nowadays probably wouldn't find 80's porn stars so much arousing as amusing.
Very few works break this trend, though some can. Mathematical texts for example are usually quite timeless, with works like Euclid's elements surviving untouched to the present day. The same goes for religious texts like the Bible.
And so I nominate my own post on Pornography, Mathematical and the Bible in the "Most unlikely argument" category in next Slashdotted awards.
Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.
To most people, "development" does not mean scientific advances. Far from it. Development means bigger economies and more profits. That's the metric we use to judge ourselves and our societies. Scientific research is generally an atomic "loss" and is thus regarded as at worst as a useless or regressive pursuit, and at best simply a tool used to promote profit.
Nowadays astronomers are expected to justify "commerical" applications of their work. Astronomers. The one field that has consistently advanced humanities' knowledge, understanding and technologies and astronomers now have to show that they are "useful to business"; because anyone who isn't is in effect useless. The "science gap" is one in our culture; our way of thinking about human activity is currently literally centred almost completely on business. Even religion is placed into this mould.
This is the age we live in. The age of commercialism. As distinct from even capitalism, where at least the capitalists of prior ages did see merit in other pursuits. Everything we do nowadays must be justified from the point of view of profit and loss, balance sheets, stock counts, portfolios, economic impacts, money and how it can make some for people who matter. Science does not and has never fit into this mould, with very few scientists engaged in research primarily for profit.
I'll finish off by saying if you think the sciences have it bad, you should see what has happened to the humanities.
According to quite a few people, yes. Pornography exploits women by treating them as objects or "pieces of meat" for sinful men. There are many who hold such opinions and who argument and lobby strongly for pornography to be heavily censored or more preferable banned in order to protect women and especially children.
Funnily enough, most of these same people beleive a woman's place is in the home, subservient to her husband, and largely removed from the democratic process. So something tells me they're not in it for the women they're supposedly fighting for.
OK Mr Wise Geek, let's assume you're right and Australians do figure out that they need encryption to secure their communications. What then? What technologies are available which can offer them secure access to their usual internet services without compromising on features?
What about web browsing? Http. How can they browse securely? Https? Only available on a per website basis, and besides the security crowd are so pedantic they've convinced Firefox and who knows how many else that self signed certs are worse than unencrypted traffic. No real movement on that front then. Tor? I think the atrocious hit in speed precludes that route. Proxies? I suppose they'll work for about five minutes before succumbing to congestion. Let's just conclude this section by stating that encrypted/secure web browsing isn't going to be a viable option for most.
The situation for most other web protocols isn't much better. The simple fact of the matter is that the current infrastructure of the net was never built with mass government censorship in mind and is wide open to surveillance. On top of this, virtually no-one is interested in developing the technologies neccessary to make a secure web a reality, and those that are are too concerned with 50 year old theoretical problems than in making a system that everyone can use. We're not getting a secure web unless you count esoterica like Freenet.
It has nothing to do with figuring out you need to "encrypt everything". It's about needing the two to three decades of research and development required to build an Internet capable of end to end encryption; development that simply has not been done.
....Or are the UCLA academics cutting theirs?
People should understand that the Academic publishers would never have dared try a 400% rise without a strong bargaining position. The sad reality is that publishing in a journal like Nature is a huge feather in the cap/CV of any academic, earning them big kudos, faster tenure track and generally more money overall. Publishers are well aware of this and are effectively trying to call UCLAs bluff here. They're very powerful groups with many "prestigious" journals, and the monopolization of the industry probably means that NPG controls a sizable percentage of overall journals; journals all the other academics NOT at UCLA now have less to compete against when publishing in.
This however is all a bit weird coming from a company whose online publishing director print journals will disappear in the next 10 years. Having said that, considering the power of DRM, perhaps that's exactly what publishers want.
But they can't find it.
And the US doesn't have jurisdiction over him. Case closed it would seem.
Wrong. It's simply becoming more extremist; though instability is one of the side effects of this.
Yes. Definitely not coarse, ignorant or self important enough for the typical American stereotype. The driver should also have been wearing a cowboy hat, blowing cigar smoke in the officers face, and hollering about "taxes!" and "unconstitutional!".
A vitamin rich sludge to help their skin maintain its healthy slime. But what does that have to do with beer?
A patent troll is a patent troll. It doesn't matter who they are or who they are suing. The carriers are doing something with this technology and simply inventing it does not entitle CSIRO to an automatic right to be paid money, or worse to deny its use for the benefit of everyone.
Simply having an idea is not enough justification for being given an absolute worldwide monopoly on it. Ideas have no intrinsic value. If you want to protect your ideas then you must do something with them. Only then will they be protected. CSIRO did not do anything with their ideas. The US carriers did. In my mind, that makes the carriers the more legitimate "owners" of these ideas--as distasteful I find supporting large corporations.
It's Juicy.
Of course not. Anyone with half a brain knows that private companies are utterly amoral entities beholden to no law or regulation beyond those they set themselves; Not even the profit motive--though this is most often their creed.
If you look at the problems seen in this spill, the financial crisis and elsewhere, you see that each and every single person involved in the poor and negligent decisions that were made acted in their own interests to the exclusion of all else. It's obvious why they did so; no-one was accountable for anything. And what happens when people can do whatever they want with no consequences?
Forget fines. Fines on large companies count as paperwork to them. No-one cares. Who's going to jail over this. Who will have to personally pay fines? That is the only type of punishment that people, human beings will understand. If the supervisors and managers of Deepwater Horizon knew that their jobs, pensions and freedom was on the line if anything happened at that plant, you can be certain that all measures would have been taken to ensure safety. Instead, punitive measures are passed on to the company in the form of (minor) bureaucratic fines, all while bonuses are paid out to employees for illegal/dangerous behaviour. Deepwater Horizon was one disaster amid millions waiting to happen under our current corporate system.
The problem is the corporate system, and the unnecessary and dangerous insulation it gives to individuals. Corporations and their actions are ultimately a result of the decisions and actions of individuals and those must be the people who are held to account, not some abstract entity. The science fiction cliché of mega-corporations who commit all kinds of outrageous crimes is not a fantasy so much as it is a logical extrapolation of what the corporate system will ultimately allow to happen; indeed, that is has allowed to happen.
This is of course the whole point of corporations. There whole purpose is to shield their owners and managers from liability, financial and otherwise, while enabling them to maximise profit. The net result is incompetent oil drilling safety measures with no contingencies in the Gulf, and bankers getting paid bonuses for every dollar of other people's money they shovel out the door. The only people who are surprised when things finally go belly up are those under some kind of ridiculous delusion that the people who run corporations are "good, reasonable, upstanding businessmen". The notion of the corporate suit as anything other than a pantomime villain is rapidly becoming obsolete.