High end LCDs are almost as good as decent CRTs, mostly because LCDs significantly change color with viewing angle.
When you really get down to it, the black point can still be an issue, too. For anyone who doesn't already know what I'm talking about: there's a different in how CRTs and LCDs produce the color "black".
With a CRT, colors are produced by shooting a set amount of light to a particular place in the screen, which lights the screen up from behind. "Black" is produced by not shooting light at the screen. In LCD screens, on the other hand, there is a constant backlight throughout the entire screen, and "black" is created by having part of the screen turn opaque. The problem with this method is that the screen doesn't turn *completely* opaque, and some amount of light leaks through, so your "black" isn't completely black. This effect can throw of your other colors a bit, too, and not just black.
Newer and better LCDs have gotten better at turning opaque, and so a lot less light leaks through than it did with early LCD screens. However, the issue isn't completely gone (at least not on any LCD I've used), and that's part of the reason some people still prefer CRT monitors for professional color matching.
I dealing with the other component of the the complaint-- I'm not sure Bethesda won't do a good job here. Oblivion had a few problems, but IMO it showed at least a technical competence to make a good Fallout game. The writing and voice acting in Oblivion need to be improved, and I can definitely see lots of things that could be refined. I also hope that, in Fallout, they don't level enemies throughout the game.
In case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, in Oblivion, enemies everywhere become more difficult as you level up. That means you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything early in the game, but there is less payoff for leveling up. The old Fallout games took a different approach, making enemies harder in certain areas, those areas being places that you shouldn't really get to until later in the game.
But with Oblivion, Bethesda has succeeded in making a big and open world that feels relatively organic. You can find lots of little side-quests and explore on your own, and your choices make at least a little bit of a difference in what happens. Plus, you can really specialize your character, and what kind of character you build has a substantial effect on how you can approach problems, as well as how people react to you. Take all that and mix in a little Fallout style, and you have a game that I'll play. It might not be everything that I've always imagined Fallout 3 might be, but it should be interesting.
It's not that they think they are invincible (tho there probably is some of that too), it's just that they don't care. They realize (for the most part) that these actions will hurt them in some way. They just don't care about it.
Yeah, that might be what they say. "I don't care!" Of course, what it really means it, "I don't think it'll really happen to me, or else it will happen when I'm so old that it won't matter!" Because, of course, young people tend to think old people should just hurry up and die, partially out of a level of disbelief at how quickly they'll become that "old person".
It may sound crazy, but I've seen it happen-- not with hearing specifically, but with other things. It's all "I don't care!" until it happens to them younger than they thought it would, and then suddenly it's "how could this have happened to me?"
Don't believe me? Take a 20-something who "doesn't care" about his hearing, and threaten to poke out his eardrums so he'll be deaf for the rest of his life. He'll care.
Well regardless of the specifics, I would expect lots of people had the same sort of experience that I did. I downloaded it, installed it, and tried it out for a while. It was pretty good, and I had no serious problems, but it didn't take long for me to think, "meh, whatever" and go back to what I was using.
To be completely honest, I tend to use the default pre-installed browser on my OS, because I really don't care much about the browser as long as it's doing its job. The only exception is that I use Firefox on Windows, because I don't really think of IE as "doing its job" well enough. Ad-blocking is nice, but as long as the ads aren't too intrusive, I don't tend to think too much about it.
Not necessarily. If they're using a different version of word, don't have the same fonts, or are using a different view in word, things could look very different.
I can understand why people would be annoyed that things like Cancer and AIDS aren't cured yet money is being spent on things that don't matter for survival.
Sure, I can understand that too, but I don't think they're entirely correct to be annoyed. Quality of life is an important issue. Living longer isn't everything. How you live-- being able to live well and happily-- is important too.
Just because I doubt other people will be afraid/unwilling to present the "shallow" point of view: What's wrong with wanting to look attractive? It's easy to condemn people for being superficial when you're looking pretty good, but not everyone is so lucky.
Forgetting the health ramifications, just try getting a job when you've lost some of your front teeth. Try going on a date after losing an ear in an accident. There are people who have skin conditions, body odors, and various other problems that you could describe as "superficial" because they aren't "serious health issues". Part of the problem is that a lot of the rest of the world is superficial, and you will be judged by how you look. Beyond that, it's can be emotionally crushing just to look in the mirror.
Now, of course there are people who go too far. People develop eating disorders or have excessive plastic surgery in misguided attempts to look good. Also, losing your hair isn't exactly on the same level as losing an ear. But really, problems like hair loss or acne can cause a big hit to the ego, and being able to solve those problems can be a surpassing improvement in quality of life. I could change how people treat you and respond to you, and even improve how you see yourself. It may be shallow, but it's not trivial.
It's either intelligence or it's not. The issue of varying degrees of intelligence should not concern AI developers at this time. They'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it
I don't agree-- I think they should definitely be thinking about the degrees of intelligence. Part of the problem with attempts to make AI, it seems to me, is that people have wasted a certain amount of time by getting ahead of themselves. You can't go from nothing to human-level intelligence through programming alone. People have rightly (IMO) realized that, if you ever want to develop real AI, you'll have to start simple, like trying to develop insect-level intelligence, and you have to look at how biological systems work as a model.
Personally, I think that you'll never see a real AI until someone can figure out how to give a machine desires/drives resembling those of biological organisms (e.g. hunger, sex, survival).
If you really want to solve the issue it is quite simple.
Put out a convenient product, instead of a DRM-ladened one, and people will but it.
There's a problem with your logic: who said the media companies want to solve the issue?
First of all, the purpose of DRM is not only to prevent piracy, but also to prevent fair-use format shifting. Why let me buy one copy of a song that I can use in my car, on my phone, in my stereo, and on my computer, when then sell me separate copies of every peace of content wherever I want to listen to it?
Second, they don't want online distribution to work. Yes, people are willing to buy music online, and selling DRM-free music online can be profitable. But you have to remember that the record companies make up an entire industry that fulfills three basic purposes:
They front the capital and resources to produce albums (record, master, etc).
They front the capital and resources to cut media and distribute that media.
They act as marketing firms to market and advertise the product.
Ok, so now look at what technology is doing to their industry: Due to computers, it's becoming cheaper and easier to produce albums. To do a really good job still requires a fair bit of expertise, but the equipment necessary to record a professional sounding album is a fraction of what it was 30 years ago. Insofar as people are doing electronic distribution over the Internet, the stores incur the distribution costs so there's no need for anyone to front any money.
Many people in the industry fear that their companies will become nothing but marketing firms, but with culture moving online and things becoming "viral" (no, I'm not very fond of the term), they've lost some of their ability market things effectively and predictably. It was much easier when they could just control TV and radio, but they're having greater trouble controlling the Internet.
All in all, things don't look too great for them. I'm not predicting their immanent demise or anything, but suddenly powerful executives who were accustomed to being on top of the world have had to justify their own existence. They're going to stonewall and prevent progress in distribution methods as long as they're able to.
To me, the free market doesn't necessarily mean that I have any particular number of competitors to choose from (though admittedly, it's hard to call it a "free market" when there's only one business in the market). Instead, I would say that it has to do with how free I am to choose between those competitors, and just as importantly, how possible it is for a new competitor to enter the market.
To my mind, you could have 5 or 50 businesses competing in the market, but if it's difficult or impossible for a startup company to enter into the market and compete based on their competency rather than connections/influence, then it's not really a free market. Sometimes this means that you need government "interference" (i.e. regulation) to ensure that a market remains free, which I admit is a bit of a counter-intuitive idea.
In the case of the Internet, however, the market is already not-free. Often there is government control (at some level of government) over who can dig ditches to lay cable. There's government control over who can use which radio frequencies to transmit data over the air. These government controls help reenforce the current big competitors and increase the barrier to enter the market, making it less free to begin with.
I'm not in favor of excessive regulation, but I think it's a horrible idea for government to interfere with a market without regulating the results. They should not give subsidies and special consideration to certain specific companies, giving those companies undo advantages, and then not regulate the effect it has on those companies respective markets.
Their stances on net neutrality are vague for a reason, so they can change their minds at a moments notice.
I think even more likely is that their stances are vague because they don't understand the issues very thoroughly. Hell, I worked in IT for over a decade, and I don't feel confident that I could talk about net neutrality in any depth without saying something stupid.
At this point in the campaign, both candidates are trying not to say anything stupid, while hoping that their opponents do.
Now how do you determine whether the person in front of you is "average" for their school?
I agree that it's not completely meaningless. If all I know about two people is that one graduated from Harvard and the other from some random community college, I'm going to assume that the Harvard candidate has something more working in his favor. I won't necessarily know what he has in his favor-- whether it's that he's smart, he knows how to cheat, or he has a rich daddy who pulls strings. But it's a pretty good guess that something got him in and something got him through.
Yeah, having a completely up-to-date restore disk for the OS is helpful, but as you said, you can always re-download the patches. A visit to Windows update, running Software Update, or running apt-get aren't difficult, won't take too long, and there will be no data lost. It's often not worth trying to get a daily snapshot turned into a bootable rescue disk every day. Once every few months is probably more than adequate.
Documents, on the other hand, are something that I want backed up as frequently as is feasible. How often it is "feasible" depends on the backup methods being used, but I treat backups of my own files very differently than my OS restore image. Not only do I do them more often, but I worry much more about losing them or having them exposed to outside parties. (obviously)
That's fine. I'm not saying you're not allowed to buy CDs or DVDs, but none of that addresses the issue of backups. Unless you're just ripping it to your computer anyway, and your purchased media is the backup. In that case, if I burn my stuff to DVD as a backup, then we're pretty much in the same boat.
We're getting a bit off-topic here, but I personally think the better strategy there is to create two different backups: one of your OS/applications, and another of your profile.
For most systems, you aren't going to change your OS and applications very often, so it's kind of pointless to back them up frequently. It's nice to have an image with any customizations you might want, so that you can restore quickly, but backing up the entire OS with every backup is usually wasting space on you backup media, as well as wasting time. If you do have to restore the whole thing, it's not much more difficult to restore the OS/apps, and then afterward restore the user profiles.
Also, as a side note, making those sorts of full-machine restore disks in OSX is pretty easy. It's a bit harder to make a bootable DVD or something, so it's better to use some sort of USB drive. But you can easily install a full version of OSX onto a USB drive that will boot on almost any Mac, and then make a full disk image that can be copied to any Mac, made bootable, and you're done. You can even do a differential update to your backup image to make the whole process faster. Some of this, I'm sure, is made easier by their control over hardware. Still, I think other OS developers should be trying to match the ease with which OSX can be imaged.
If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.
What if we added in an extra $700 billion? Because I've heard that if you throw in an additional $150 in pork projects, Congress will pass anything.
They're talking about the possibility of Bluray disks with 4 layers rather than 2, which means that media companies should be able to pack more data onto each disk. Or am I missing something?
Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.
And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.
Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.
...it'll make sure that broadcasts are tagged up with useful metadata about the contents, if nothing else; which I'm sure will be good for everyone
Yes, it's good for everyone. For the parents who want to filter what their children see, it will provide them an easy method to determine the contents of a specific show without watching it. On the other hand, if you tag broadcasts with metadata that tells us which shows have nudity and graphic sex scenes, it will allow children a more effective method to search for the porn they're so desperate to see.
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.
Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.
Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.
I suspect that expectations were just really low. For one thing, it's Iron Man. I know Iron Man has some hardcore fans, but he's really not one of the major heroes. (I'm sure some Iron Man fan will flip out at hearing this and tell me all about how he has played a major role in some terribly important events in the Marvel universe.) Also, a big project of that sort, with a relatively unproven director, and I think people imagined all sorts of ways that this thing could turn bad. These sorts of movies generally turn into special effects suck-fests.
But the movie didn't fall down in any of the ways that people were expecting to. That, paired with some decent performances from actors who you would expect to give decent performances, lead to the whole project exceeding expectations. In movies, just as in politics, sometimes exceeding some seriously low expectations ends up getting counted as a major victory.
You're right, I over-generalized philosophers at large; specifically I meant to highlight the most extreme case, which I could only attribute to philosophers.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, but I've studied a fair bit of philosophers, and so it just struck me funny to be saying, "Philsophers think that all evidence is suspect." It's sort of like saying, "Scientists study the genetics of fruit flies." Yes, it may be true that some scientists study the genetics of fruit flies. The fact that you're studying the genetics of fruit flies might indicate that you're some kind of scientist. On the other hand, scientists study lots of things, and generally the only scientists studying the genetics of fruit flies are those biologists who study the genetics of fruit flies.
Some people don't realize it, but philosophers can be very practical. Pragmatists, for example. Even many of those who seem way out there are usually (if they're any good) trying to get at truth in a way that has practical implications. In fact, I would claim that with pretty much any viewpoint you want to talk about, however original or folksy it seems, ancient philosophers were already talking about it a couple thousand years ago.
Not that you don't know all that, but we've gotten this far in the conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
High end LCDs are almost as good as decent CRTs, mostly because LCDs significantly change color with viewing angle.
When you really get down to it, the black point can still be an issue, too. For anyone who doesn't already know what I'm talking about: there's a different in how CRTs and LCDs produce the color "black".
With a CRT, colors are produced by shooting a set amount of light to a particular place in the screen, which lights the screen up from behind. "Black" is produced by not shooting light at the screen. In LCD screens, on the other hand, there is a constant backlight throughout the entire screen, and "black" is created by having part of the screen turn opaque. The problem with this method is that the screen doesn't turn *completely* opaque, and some amount of light leaks through, so your "black" isn't completely black. This effect can throw of your other colors a bit, too, and not just black.
Newer and better LCDs have gotten better at turning opaque, and so a lot less light leaks through than it did with early LCD screens. However, the issue isn't completely gone (at least not on any LCD I've used), and that's part of the reason some people still prefer CRT monitors for professional color matching.
Because speech != beer?
...and yet for me at parties, beer = speech.
We have quite a mathematical conundrum on our hands.
I dealing with the other component of the the complaint-- I'm not sure Bethesda won't do a good job here. Oblivion had a few problems, but IMO it showed at least a technical competence to make a good Fallout game. The writing and voice acting in Oblivion need to be improved, and I can definitely see lots of things that could be refined. I also hope that, in Fallout, they don't level enemies throughout the game.
In case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, in Oblivion, enemies everywhere become more difficult as you level up. That means you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything early in the game, but there is less payoff for leveling up. The old Fallout games took a different approach, making enemies harder in certain areas, those areas being places that you shouldn't really get to until later in the game.
But with Oblivion, Bethesda has succeeded in making a big and open world that feels relatively organic. You can find lots of little side-quests and explore on your own, and your choices make at least a little bit of a difference in what happens. Plus, you can really specialize your character, and what kind of character you build has a substantial effect on how you can approach problems, as well as how people react to you. Take all that and mix in a little Fallout style, and you have a game that I'll play. It might not be everything that I've always imagined Fallout 3 might be, but it should be interesting.
I wonder what the FALLOUT from this leak will be.
(ha ha, snort, we're funny!)
It's not that they think they are invincible (tho there probably is some of that too), it's just that they don't care. They realize (for the most part) that these actions will hurt them in some way. They just don't care about it.
Yeah, that might be what they say. "I don't care!" Of course, what it really means it, "I don't think it'll really happen to me, or else it will happen when I'm so old that it won't matter!" Because, of course, young people tend to think old people should just hurry up and die, partially out of a level of disbelief at how quickly they'll become that "old person".
It may sound crazy, but I've seen it happen-- not with hearing specifically, but with other things. It's all "I don't care!" until it happens to them younger than they thought it would, and then suddenly it's "how could this have happened to me?"
Don't believe me? Take a 20-something who "doesn't care" about his hearing, and threaten to poke out his eardrums so he'll be deaf for the rest of his life. He'll care.
Well regardless of the specifics, I would expect lots of people had the same sort of experience that I did. I downloaded it, installed it, and tried it out for a while. It was pretty good, and I had no serious problems, but it didn't take long for me to think, "meh, whatever" and go back to what I was using.
To be completely honest, I tend to use the default pre-installed browser on my OS, because I really don't care much about the browser as long as it's doing its job. The only exception is that I use Firefox on Windows, because I don't really think of IE as "doing its job" well enough. Ad-blocking is nice, but as long as the ads aren't too intrusive, I don't tend to think too much about it.
Young people think they're invincible and fail to realize that actions they take now can hurt themselves for the rest of their lives-- News at 11.
Not necessarily. If they're using a different version of word, don't have the same fonts, or are using a different view in word, things could look very different.
I can understand why people would be annoyed that things like Cancer and AIDS aren't cured yet money is being spent on things that don't matter for survival.
Sure, I can understand that too, but I don't think they're entirely correct to be annoyed. Quality of life is an important issue. Living longer isn't everything. How you live-- being able to live well and happily-- is important too.
Just because I doubt other people will be afraid/unwilling to present the "shallow" point of view: What's wrong with wanting to look attractive? It's easy to condemn people for being superficial when you're looking pretty good, but not everyone is so lucky.
Forgetting the health ramifications, just try getting a job when you've lost some of your front teeth. Try going on a date after losing an ear in an accident. There are people who have skin conditions, body odors, and various other problems that you could describe as "superficial" because they aren't "serious health issues". Part of the problem is that a lot of the rest of the world is superficial, and you will be judged by how you look. Beyond that, it's can be emotionally crushing just to look in the mirror.
Now, of course there are people who go too far. People develop eating disorders or have excessive plastic surgery in misguided attempts to look good. Also, losing your hair isn't exactly on the same level as losing an ear. But really, problems like hair loss or acne can cause a big hit to the ego, and being able to solve those problems can be a surpassing improvement in quality of life. I could change how people treat you and respond to you, and even improve how you see yourself. It may be shallow, but it's not trivial.
It's either intelligence or it's not. The issue of varying degrees of intelligence should not concern AI developers at this time. They'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it
I don't agree-- I think they should definitely be thinking about the degrees of intelligence. Part of the problem with attempts to make AI, it seems to me, is that people have wasted a certain amount of time by getting ahead of themselves. You can't go from nothing to human-level intelligence through programming alone. People have rightly (IMO) realized that, if you ever want to develop real AI, you'll have to start simple, like trying to develop insect-level intelligence, and you have to look at how biological systems work as a model.
Personally, I think that you'll never see a real AI until someone can figure out how to give a machine desires/drives resembling those of biological organisms (e.g. hunger, sex, survival).
If you really want to solve the issue it is quite simple.
Put out a convenient product, instead of a DRM-ladened one, and people will but it.
There's a problem with your logic: who said the media companies want to solve the issue?
First of all, the purpose of DRM is not only to prevent piracy, but also to prevent fair-use format shifting. Why let me buy one copy of a song that I can use in my car, on my phone, in my stereo, and on my computer, when then sell me separate copies of every peace of content wherever I want to listen to it?
Second, they don't want online distribution to work. Yes, people are willing to buy music online, and selling DRM-free music online can be profitable. But you have to remember that the record companies make up an entire industry that fulfills three basic purposes:
Ok, so now look at what technology is doing to their industry: Due to computers, it's becoming cheaper and easier to produce albums. To do a really good job still requires a fair bit of expertise, but the equipment necessary to record a professional sounding album is a fraction of what it was 30 years ago. Insofar as people are doing electronic distribution over the Internet, the stores incur the distribution costs so there's no need for anyone to front any money.
Many people in the industry fear that their companies will become nothing but marketing firms, but with culture moving online and things becoming "viral" (no, I'm not very fond of the term), they've lost some of their ability market things effectively and predictably. It was much easier when they could just control TV and radio, but they're having greater trouble controlling the Internet.
All in all, things don't look too great for them. I'm not predicting their immanent demise or anything, but suddenly powerful executives who were accustomed to being on top of the world have had to justify their own existence. They're going to stonewall and prevent progress in distribution methods as long as they're able to.
To me, the free market doesn't necessarily mean that I have any particular number of competitors to choose from (though admittedly, it's hard to call it a "free market" when there's only one business in the market). Instead, I would say that it has to do with how free I am to choose between those competitors, and just as importantly, how possible it is for a new competitor to enter the market.
To my mind, you could have 5 or 50 businesses competing in the market, but if it's difficult or impossible for a startup company to enter into the market and compete based on their competency rather than connections/influence, then it's not really a free market. Sometimes this means that you need government "interference" (i.e. regulation) to ensure that a market remains free, which I admit is a bit of a counter-intuitive idea.
In the case of the Internet, however, the market is already not-free. Often there is government control (at some level of government) over who can dig ditches to lay cable. There's government control over who can use which radio frequencies to transmit data over the air. These government controls help reenforce the current big competitors and increase the barrier to enter the market, making it less free to begin with.
I'm not in favor of excessive regulation, but I think it's a horrible idea for government to interfere with a market without regulating the results. They should not give subsidies and special consideration to certain specific companies, giving those companies undo advantages, and then not regulate the effect it has on those companies respective markets.
Their stances on net neutrality are vague for a reason, so they can change their minds at a moments notice.
I think even more likely is that their stances are vague because they don't understand the issues very thoroughly. Hell, I worked in IT for over a decade, and I don't feel confident that I could talk about net neutrality in any depth without saying something stupid.
At this point in the campaign, both candidates are trying not to say anything stupid, while hoping that their opponents do.
Now how do you determine whether the person in front of you is "average" for their school?
I agree that it's not completely meaningless. If all I know about two people is that one graduated from Harvard and the other from some random community college, I'm going to assume that the Harvard candidate has something more working in his favor. I won't necessarily know what he has in his favor-- whether it's that he's smart, he knows how to cheat, or he has a rich daddy who pulls strings. But it's a pretty good guess that something got him in and something got him through.
Yeah, having a completely up-to-date restore disk for the OS is helpful, but as you said, you can always re-download the patches. A visit to Windows update, running Software Update, or running apt-get aren't difficult, won't take too long, and there will be no data lost. It's often not worth trying to get a daily snapshot turned into a bootable rescue disk every day. Once every few months is probably more than adequate.
Documents, on the other hand, are something that I want backed up as frequently as is feasible. How often it is "feasible" depends on the backup methods being used, but I treat backups of my own files very differently than my OS restore image. Not only do I do them more often, but I worry much more about losing them or having them exposed to outside parties. (obviously)
That's fine. I'm not saying you're not allowed to buy CDs or DVDs, but none of that addresses the issue of backups. Unless you're just ripping it to your computer anyway, and your purchased media is the backup. In that case, if I burn my stuff to DVD as a backup, then we're pretty much in the same boat.
We're getting a bit off-topic here, but I personally think the better strategy there is to create two different backups: one of your OS/applications, and another of your profile.
For most systems, you aren't going to change your OS and applications very often, so it's kind of pointless to back them up frequently. It's nice to have an image with any customizations you might want, so that you can restore quickly, but backing up the entire OS with every backup is usually wasting space on you backup media, as well as wasting time. If you do have to restore the whole thing, it's not much more difficult to restore the OS/apps, and then afterward restore the user profiles.
Also, as a side note, making those sorts of full-machine restore disks in OSX is pretty easy. It's a bit harder to make a bootable DVD or something, so it's better to use some sort of USB drive. But you can easily install a full version of OSX onto a USB drive that will boot on almost any Mac, and then make a full disk image that can be copied to any Mac, made bootable, and you're done. You can even do a differential update to your backup image to make the whole process faster. Some of this, I'm sure, is made easier by their control over hardware. Still, I think other OS developers should be trying to match the ease with which OSX can be imaged.
If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.
What if we added in an extra $700 billion? Because I've heard that if you throw in an additional $150 in pork projects, Congress will pass anything.
They're talking about the possibility of Bluray disks with 4 layers rather than 2, which means that media companies should be able to pack more data onto each disk. Or am I missing something?
Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.
And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.
Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.
...it'll make sure that broadcasts are tagged up with useful metadata about the contents, if nothing else; which I'm sure will be good for everyone
Yes, it's good for everyone. For the parents who want to filter what their children see, it will provide them an easy method to determine the contents of a specific show without watching it. On the other hand, if you tag broadcasts with metadata that tells us which shows have nudity and graphic sex scenes, it will allow children a more effective method to search for the porn they're so desperate to see.
See? It's win/win.
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.
Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.
Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.
BTW - What is the BFD about this movie?
I suspect that expectations were just really low. For one thing, it's Iron Man. I know Iron Man has some hardcore fans, but he's really not one of the major heroes. (I'm sure some Iron Man fan will flip out at hearing this and tell me all about how he has played a major role in some terribly important events in the Marvel universe.) Also, a big project of that sort, with a relatively unproven director, and I think people imagined all sorts of ways that this thing could turn bad. These sorts of movies generally turn into special effects suck-fests.
But the movie didn't fall down in any of the ways that people were expecting to. That, paired with some decent performances from actors who you would expect to give decent performances, lead to the whole project exceeding expectations. In movies, just as in politics, sometimes exceeding some seriously low expectations ends up getting counted as a major victory.
Still, I'd say it was a pretty solid movie.
You're right, I over-generalized philosophers at large; specifically I meant to highlight the most extreme case, which I could only attribute to philosophers.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, but I've studied a fair bit of philosophers, and so it just struck me funny to be saying, "Philsophers think that all evidence is suspect." It's sort of like saying, "Scientists study the genetics of fruit flies." Yes, it may be true that some scientists study the genetics of fruit flies. The fact that you're studying the genetics of fruit flies might indicate that you're some kind of scientist. On the other hand, scientists study lots of things, and generally the only scientists studying the genetics of fruit flies are those biologists who study the genetics of fruit flies.
Some people don't realize it, but philosophers can be very practical. Pragmatists, for example. Even many of those who seem way out there are usually (if they're any good) trying to get at truth in a way that has practical implications. In fact, I would claim that with pretty much any viewpoint you want to talk about, however original or folksy it seems, ancient philosophers were already talking about it a couple thousand years ago.
Not that you don't know all that, but we've gotten this far in the conversation.