These stupid fucks, will never learn. Torrents are just the new way of doing P2P. You can not block P2P. It's impossible.
Yes, blocking at the backbone level can be defeated. With freedom.
Face it, Bittorrent is P2P but TPB is not. It's fundamentally a single domain name bound to an IP addy, it's a brand; TPB only works because people know they can reliably type "thepiratebay.se" or some similar easy-to-remember name and it'll get referred. TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.
Voyager, also known as "Subatomic Particle of the Week Theater." Occasionally interspersed with "Brannon Braga's Transhumanist/Alien/Hybrid Evolution Storyline Retold with Different Characters."
If you insist upon Star Trek, I'd start with TNG because Gene Roddenberry purposely made each episode a stand-alone story. According to his wife Majel he thought continuing stories alienated the viewers (because they would be lost).
A lot of people watch shows with continuing story lines now: Lost, True Blood, Breaking Bad, The Wire I think have proven this point. I recently started going through Deep Space 9 for again on Netflix, and it's incredible! I think it's now my favorite of the modern TV Treks. A broad story arc with several different conflicts, very interesting characters and extremely interesting villains -- someone could probably write a doctoral dissertation on Gul Dukat or Garak. It also features complicated political problems and intrigues, and occasionally Starfleet officers do evil things, without being possessed by a lizard alien. It's exactly the kind of show Roddenberry would never have allowed to be made.
My issue with starting someone on TNG is that season three is great, but it gets soap-opera'y by season 7, with evil twin brothers, love triangles, and all the actors are so chummy it feels like a community theater show. Also several of the later episodes fall into particle-of-the-week-ism and repeat premises from earlier in the series.
Is the fear of getting shot by the police what keeps you from jaywalking? Is it what makes you pay your taxes? Is it what makes you buy health insurance?
The fact is, the US government cannot and does not credibly threaten violence to compel these behaviors -- it simply doesn't have enough guns, no strong nation-state on Earth has the facilities necessary to violently compel more than the most simple behavior, and the more they resort to the guns, the more disordered and disunited their government is. People obey the law out of the expectation that it's a norm, or that someone will catch them (government or civilian), or they tell themselves it's fair, or in their enlightened self-interest: there are many ready-made and self-inventable rationales for playing by the rules, and most of them don't involve the fear of death.
If fear of violence was the thing compelling obedience in the US, the entire country would collapse, people wouldn't stand for it. The difference between you and me is that I believe this, and you don't. You seem to find it convenient that people are sheep in a slaughterhouse, too stupid to understand the powers around them and cowering in fear lest they stray off some line.
Unfortunately, Weber's postulated idea has been been converted by reinterpretation into am intellectually-bankrupt high school level theory of government, which was then mixed with libertarian theory at some point, and the adherents use it as a kind of salve to help rationalize why individuals don't behave according to their individualistic theoretical model. "They're afraid of getting shot! That's why people don't jaywalk! That's why they pay their taxes! That's why they do anything that's in conflict with (my standard of) rational self-interest and (my standard of) free thought!"
George W Bush who famously said, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."
George W. Bush, for all his faults, at least recognized (and only in a pinch) that the legitimacy of any American government rests on its ability to deliver prosperity and the promise of a better life in the future, and that any first world government that dedicates itself to merely "making it possible" is doomed.
Even if charities and business can't or won't address a problem, will the cure of putting a government gun to people's head to force them into involuntary servitude of fixing the problem
I find this characterization of public works to be inflammatory and deeply offensive. When was the last time the United States government "put a gun to people's heads" to work an economic policy? A policy of any kind? Even if they throw you in jail they're not going to point a gun at you. I know you're being sarcastic but it's a comically inaccurate depiction of how government power works... it's only become fashionable to talk about "legitimate violence" that way in the last 50-75 years, and only because so much 20th-century poll sci scholarship was focused on explaining totalitarianism. I assure you John Locke, the Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Robert Taft would have found your quoted sentence above as non-sensical as I do.
Your conception of government action, relying on a so-called "monopoly of violence," and standing in opposition to "liberty," is facile and doesn't take into account cultural hegemony or a state's power to lead concerted action without duress.
What value do we place on liberty today?
I cannot interpret this statement as anything other than passing judgment on modern Americans for the terrible crime of having different cultural values from 200-year-old slave-owning gentlemen farmers. Every time someone wonders if the Founders would approve of government policy, God kills a kitten.
You can sorta argue all kinds of different "motivations" for rights, I don't believe in most natural rights interpretation but a lot of people do. The OR is an exclusive OR here.
The thing that makes something a "right" is that, in the general case, it requires more force to prevent its exercise than the reward someone gets from preventing it, be that someone a government, or a corporation, or anyone else. You can't force people to stop talking, and the more successful you are, the more it has to rely on violence instead of authority or common cause and the less powerful the government becomes (I use Arendt's definitions of these terms).
Firstly, governments, wether they be state, federal, county, whatever, don't have "rights." They have powers. It's a big difference -- human beings have rights because of natural law, or social acceptance, or convention; they aren't contingent and cannot be revoked. Government power is always contingent, even if they put guns to everyone's heads -- which is actually an indicator of a very weak government, not a powerful one.
Therefore Corporations can be given far more rights than the government.
Well said, loyal consumer! For your grassroots advocacy, you have earned an extra allotment of scrip to spend at the company store!
The Win8 version at $1k would still be competitive.
At $999 you're in Macbook Air/Samsung Series 9 territory -- in tablet mode the Surface has to have double the battery life of either of those to match an iPad, and in laptop mode it'll have to boot, wake, and launch apps as fast as an Air, and keep 20 IE tabs open with Flash video on all of them as snappily as a Samsung. It's a tough balancing act for one thing that "does both," given the expectations at that price point.
At $999 you're selling a netbook and charging a premium for a multitouch-screen interface, or selling an ultrabook for ultrabook prices with a flimsy keyboard and ultrabook battery life. Apple's pricing strategy was to sell at the netbook price-point, not in premium to it, betting losing the keyboard and the full OS but adding the multitouch and the slate form factor and was an even trade.
No, not that far; the critical point is that they can always add blur in post, but they can never take it away, and most footage is shot at maximal blurriness, because it gives the most favorable exposure and is more forgiving when the camera's in motion.
Wether something at 48 looks strobe-y at 24 is gonna depend on how they process it, and when they do downcoverts like this the usually go through them shot-by-shot to make sure they look right. They don't just send the 48 frame master to the theater and let a dumb algorithm in the projector do it for them.
Film has long, slow pans *because* directors are used to working within the limitations of film... Not because it is necessarily better.
That's bullshit, film cameras don't judder and DPs are able to minimize blur with higher shutter speeds, often adjustable during the shot. It's not a frame rate issue at all, it's the fact that people get dizzy when their eyes have to quickly track an object moving across a 50 foot screen -- and that's why its not an issue on TV. The ASC Manual has several tables of an empirical survey they did in the 60s on just that issue... Frame rate isn't as much of a controlling factor as screen size, observer distance and shutter speed.
Theaters mostly lease their 3D gear on a show-by-show basis; companies like RealD offer the system as a kit that goes on the front of the digital projector in a few minutes, and they handle all the glasses, etc. Theaters rarely even pay for the rental itself, it has been standard practice (until recently) for the studios to subsidize the rental of the gear on a time basis, and the theater keeps the per-seat surcharge.
The difference here is you can't lease a 48fps projector on a show-by-show basis, it requires capital investment, something the studios have been adamant they wouldn't subsidize.
At 120fps, a wide-open shutter would be not much better than 1/240 second, which means they'd have to have to open up about 1 and a third f/stops to get the same exposure, losing depth-of-field, or you'll have to double your lighting budget (and the time to set it up, and the crew...).
You're also going to start losing natural blur at that speed, and if your movie is at 120, that means you have to start renting extremely expensive cameras in order to shoot slow-motion footage, which will have to be over 1000fps to achieve the equivalent effect of shooting 120fps on a 24fps shoot.
And then there's the issue of having to rent 3 times the amount of RAID space to work with the dailies, and all the follow-on expense of the VFX people, colorists etc. having to work at that res. Let alone the expenses involved in putting it in a theater.
Strobe-ness isn't a function of frame rate, it's a function of shutter speed. The amount of blur in the images is decided on set, by a knob on the camera.
I know you guys are joking, but you can neither shoot nor show a 3D movie on film with modern processes, so the whole motor argument is sorta kaput. The 3D version of the film with be digital only.
For the record, several 30/45/48 frame film processes have been around for the last 70 years, like Todd-AO, Showscan. Most 70mm projectors that were manufactured have 2 or 3 different speed settings to accommodate different standards.
It depends -- blending frames will have the effect of doubling the effective shutter speed of the camera, making the images blurrier than they were photographed, or about as blurry as if they were shot with a 1/48 shutter. This is completely acceptable if the filmmaker is trying to achieve a normal look, but it would screw up shots that were taken at 1/500 or 1/1000, which DPs do all the time in action scenes -- viz. Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator.
Making the 24 frame version of a 48 frame film isn't just a press-the-button-and-go process, every shot has to be examined and the process has to be tweaked for every cut, just like the color grading.
Add to this the complication that most movies now that shoot on 35mm actually shoot "3-perf", three perfs per frame instead of four. This allows them to shoot 25% more footage for the same cost (film costs and lab fees are always per-foot), and exposes a negative image of about 1.78:1; this is then kept for HDTV, or cropped for a 1.85 or 2.35 theatrical.
Back when they were actually using film, what allowed wide-screen in the first place was rotating the film 90 degrees as it passed through the camera... each frame could have an essentially arbitrary aspect ratio either way by increasing or decreasing the amount of film that was exposed with each frame, and by having it go sideways through the camera instead of vertically allowed it to have a wider aspect ratio like we see today.
The system you describe is called "VistaVision", where a horizontal frame, 8 perfs long, was exposed and then matted and printed into a 35mm projection print. VistaVision was only used as a primary photographic process in the 1950s; the cameras were still used for special effects work on films like Star Wars and up through the first Spider-Man in 2001 -- the process gave more negative area and higher resolution.
The other process in the 1950s was CinemaScope, which exposed a roughly square area of the film, through a 2:1 anamorphic lens, to create a 2.35-ish aspect ratio frame on the camera negative. We still use this process on film release prints, which nowadays are either "flat" (a square, matted 1.85 image through a spherical lens) or "'scope" (a squeezed 2.4-ish frame through an anamorphic lens).
However, anamorphic lenses are almost never used for photography, just for the theatrical prints. Most films shot today on film, if they are shot on film, will shoot in "Super 35", which exposes the entire negative area (including holdout space for the sound track) with a broad, 1.33 frame, and either a 2.35 or 1.85 frame is cropped from the negative -- the film nowadays is so sharp that the crop and blowup doesn't significantly hurt the image. The camera viewfinder has a "frame" to show the cameraman what part of the frame will be kept, but the DP or the lab can always nudge the frame around to pick slightly different areas of the image to keep, in case the boom dipped into the shot, or the decide to reframe the film for different media -- standard def TV versions are made off the Super 35 negatives simply by cropping the frame, larger, smaller, or with a common top line.
the aspect ratio is fixed to what the capturing CCD is capable of,
As long as the CCD is bigger than the deliverable, they can and do crop. And since theatrical deliverables are 2k-4k, a 4k-8k sensor gives the filmmakers broad latitude to reframe shots.
surely 3rd time lucky will give us the phone OS that will take mobile computing a huge step forward this time?
They aren't looking for the step forward, they're just looking for the thing that Works and takes them off of Google's update schedule and in a better position to compete strategically with the iOS ecosystem. It's also quite possible they just want to have a loaded gun pointed at Google, ready to fire if they ever got the whiff that Google was using Android on Motorola to attack their handset business.
90% of bringing a viable mobile ecosystem to market is having a Facebook and Twitter app, a way to buy songs and a way to stream Netflix, a mapping system and some sandbox you can run HTML5 apps in. That's not hard to deliver, webOS was just that and had a great reputation -- the toughest part is picking your networks and partners and making sure you get the good end of the deal.
At least exporting information at gunpoint instead of drugs has positive side-effects for free speech on the Internet.
You're not talking about free speech on the Internet. You're talking about American speech on the Internet. At gunpoint, no less. Is that what we're going to be killing foreigners over next? You give far too much ground in the comparison with the drug war.
While I don't see China going to war over Youtube, I definitely see them conducting all kinds of chicaneries to keep Falun Gong or Tienamen off their Internet, and I don't see the US picking a fight over that -- the corporations that launch the satellites would rather be making money than participate in some internal political conflict. Google and Yahoo know how to play ball, so does everyone else. In the end, we only come to blows over the money, not over the right to free expression as such; and in the end, the US shouldn't be expending its resources paternalistically fighting for the rights of Chinese people in China. We've fought for the rights of other people on their own soil before, it never goes well.
You start using satellites like that and countries are going to start shooting them down. And all of the sudden the United States will find itself in a shooting war over Hughes Aerospace's "right" to operate a Ku-band transponder, and Viacom's "right" to transmit The Real World to flats in Shenzen.
The problem with a "right" to international communication is that it's little more than a thin veil to justify corporations using state military power to protect their access to markets. Behold mercantilism 2.0.
That simply addresses the wiretapping provisions, I don't see how this prevents states from assessing tolls on inbound communications, particularly when most nation-states are net data recipients.
The exact quote was "The pope? How many divisions does he have?" and most sources attribute the quote to Josef Stalin, though he almost certainly was quoting the other guy.
What are they going to do if we ignore their invoices? Hold their breath?
The short answer is, if Russia, China and the EU agree on a system, all they have to do is prevent our packets from passing through AS's on their sovereign territory. The UN is just the place where they come to the agreement, it's not the UN's idea and it's not up to the UN to enforce it.
The US can always withdraw from the ITU, but if these policies genuinely reflect the interests and will of other nation-states, and they remain united, I don't see how the US gets out from under them.
As I understand it, inflation is when the government prints more money than the value of goods and services produced.
Inflation is an increase in the average price level. It can be caused by an increase in the quantity of money, or a decrease in the velocity of money, or a decrease in goods and services in the economy.
This is a hidden tax on money. It devalues savings, and encourages people to spend and invest rather than save.
It's an explicit tax on risk-free saving. It's particularly damaging in the current US situation, because banks just take your savings and plow it back into government bonds. Saving in the currency of the state is the number one way of enabling the state's borrowing, unless you stick the dollars under your mattress. Risk-free saving is really just an form of rent; it's getting something, safety, for nothing. TANSTAAFL.
Currency is for short-term liquidity, it's a public service and using it for hoarding is an abuse of a public service.
It occurs to me that bitcoins can't be abused in this way.
Why bother inflating Bitcoins, when you can abuse and defraud the users, delay their redemptions, indefinitely detain their savings, and avoid any kind of institutional accountability, and after all that, they keep coming back?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, blocking at the backbone level can be defeated. With freedom.
Face it, Bittorrent is P2P but TPB is not. It's fundamentally a single domain name bound to an IP addy, it's a brand; TPB only works because people know they can reliably type "thepiratebay.se" or some similar easy-to-remember name and it'll get referred. TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.
Voyager, also known as "Subatomic Particle of the Week Theater." Occasionally interspersed with "Brannon Braga's Transhumanist/Alien/Hybrid Evolution Storyline Retold with Different Characters."
A lot of people watch shows with continuing story lines now: Lost, True Blood, Breaking Bad, The Wire I think have proven this point. I recently started going through Deep Space 9 for again on Netflix, and it's incredible! I think it's now my favorite of the modern TV Treks. A broad story arc with several different conflicts, very interesting characters and extremely interesting villains -- someone could probably write a doctoral dissertation on Gul Dukat or Garak. It also features complicated political problems and intrigues, and occasionally Starfleet officers do evil things, without being possessed by a lizard alien. It's exactly the kind of show Roddenberry would never have allowed to be made.
There are also amazing gems like Little Green Men and Trials and Tribblations.
My issue with starting someone on TNG is that season three is great, but it gets soap-opera'y by season 7, with evil twin brothers, love triangles, and all the actors are so chummy it feels like a community theater show. Also several of the later episodes fall into particle-of-the-week-ism and repeat premises from earlier in the series.
Is the fear of getting shot by the police what keeps you from jaywalking? Is it what makes you pay your taxes? Is it what makes you buy health insurance?
The fact is, the US government cannot and does not credibly threaten violence to compel these behaviors -- it simply doesn't have enough guns, no strong nation-state on Earth has the facilities necessary to violently compel more than the most simple behavior, and the more they resort to the guns, the more disordered and disunited their government is. People obey the law out of the expectation that it's a norm, or that someone will catch them (government or civilian), or they tell themselves it's fair, or in their enlightened self-interest: there are many ready-made and self-inventable rationales for playing by the rules, and most of them don't involve the fear of death.
If fear of violence was the thing compelling obedience in the US, the entire country would collapse, people wouldn't stand for it. The difference between you and me is that I believe this, and you don't. You seem to find it convenient that people are sheep in a slaughterhouse, too stupid to understand the powers around them and cowering in fear lest they stray off some line.
Unfortunately, Weber's postulated idea has been been converted by reinterpretation into am intellectually-bankrupt high school level theory of government, which was then mixed with libertarian theory at some point, and the adherents use it as a kind of salve to help rationalize why individuals don't behave according to their individualistic theoretical model. "They're afraid of getting shot! That's why people don't jaywalk! That's why they pay their taxes! That's why they do anything that's in conflict with (my standard of) rational self-interest and (my standard of) free thought!"
George W. Bush, for all his faults, at least recognized (and only in a pinch) that the legitimacy of any American government rests on its ability to deliver prosperity and the promise of a better life in the future, and that any first world government that dedicates itself to merely "making it possible" is doomed.
I find this characterization of public works to be inflammatory and deeply offensive. When was the last time the United States government "put a gun to people's heads" to work an economic policy? A policy of any kind? Even if they throw you in jail they're not going to point a gun at you. I know you're being sarcastic but it's a comically inaccurate depiction of how government power works... it's only become fashionable to talk about "legitimate violence" that way in the last 50-75 years, and only because so much 20th-century poll sci scholarship was focused on explaining totalitarianism. I assure you John Locke, the Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Robert Taft would have found your quoted sentence above as non-sensical as I do.
Your conception of government action, relying on a so-called "monopoly of violence," and standing in opposition to "liberty," is facile and doesn't take into account cultural hegemony or a state's power to lead concerted action without duress.
I cannot interpret this statement as anything other than passing judgment on modern Americans for the terrible crime of having different cultural values from 200-year-old slave-owning gentlemen farmers. Every time someone wonders if the Founders would approve of government policy, God kills a kitten.
You can sorta argue all kinds of different "motivations" for rights, I don't believe in most natural rights interpretation but a lot of people do. The OR is an exclusive OR here.
The thing that makes something a "right" is that, in the general case, it requires more force to prevent its exercise than the reward someone gets from preventing it, be that someone a government, or a corporation, or anyone else. You can't force people to stop talking, and the more successful you are, the more it has to rely on violence instead of authority or common cause and the less powerful the government becomes (I use Arendt's definitions of these terms).
Firstly, governments, wether they be state, federal, county, whatever, don't have "rights." They have powers. It's a big difference -- human beings have rights because of natural law, or social acceptance, or convention; they aren't contingent and cannot be revoked. Government power is always contingent, even if they put guns to everyone's heads -- which is actually an indicator of a very weak government, not a powerful one.
Well said, loyal consumer! For your grassroots advocacy, you have earned an extra allotment of scrip to spend at the company store!
At $999 you're in Macbook Air/Samsung Series 9 territory -- in tablet mode the Surface has to have double the battery life of either of those to match an iPad, and in laptop mode it'll have to boot, wake, and launch apps as fast as an Air, and keep 20 IE tabs open with Flash video on all of them as snappily as a Samsung. It's a tough balancing act for one thing that "does both," given the expectations at that price point.
At $999 you're selling a netbook and charging a premium for a multitouch-screen interface, or selling an ultrabook for ultrabook prices with a flimsy keyboard and ultrabook battery life. Apple's pricing strategy was to sell at the netbook price-point, not in premium to it, betting losing the keyboard and the full OS but adding the multitouch and the slate form factor and was an even trade.
But Microsoft will never release it. That's called "startegery".
No, not that far; the critical point is that they can always add blur in post, but they can never take it away, and most footage is shot at maximal blurriness, because it gives the most favorable exposure and is more forgiving when the camera's in motion.
Wether something at 48 looks strobe-y at 24 is gonna depend on how they process it, and when they do downcoverts like this the usually go through them shot-by-shot to make sure they look right. They don't just send the 48 frame master to the theater and let a dumb algorithm in the projector do it for them.
Home movies are 29.97 frames per second, 59.94 fields per second, full stop.
However, VHS only captures about half the line resolution of NTSC, that's how they traded quality for economy.
That's bullshit, film cameras don't judder and DPs are able to minimize blur with higher shutter speeds, often adjustable during the shot. It's not a frame rate issue at all, it's the fact that people get dizzy when their eyes have to quickly track an object moving across a 50 foot screen -- and that's why its not an issue on TV. The ASC Manual has several tables of an empirical survey they did in the 60s on just that issue... Frame rate isn't as much of a controlling factor as screen size, observer distance and shutter speed.
Theaters mostly lease their 3D gear on a show-by-show basis; companies like RealD offer the system as a kit that goes on the front of the digital projector in a few minutes, and they handle all the glasses, etc. Theaters rarely even pay for the rental itself, it has been standard practice (until recently) for the studios to subsidize the rental of the gear on a time basis, and the theater keeps the per-seat surcharge.
The difference here is you can't lease a 48fps projector on a show-by-show basis, it requires capital investment, something the studios have been adamant they wouldn't subsidize.
At 120fps, a wide-open shutter would be not much better than 1/240 second, which means they'd have to have to open up about 1 and a third f/stops to get the same exposure, losing depth-of-field, or you'll have to double your lighting budget (and the time to set it up, and the crew...).
You're also going to start losing natural blur at that speed, and if your movie is at 120, that means you have to start renting extremely expensive cameras in order to shoot slow-motion footage, which will have to be over 1000fps to achieve the equivalent effect of shooting 120fps on a 24fps shoot.
And then there's the issue of having to rent 3 times the amount of RAID space to work with the dailies, and all the follow-on expense of the VFX people, colorists etc. having to work at that res. Let alone the expenses involved in putting it in a theater.
Strobe-ness isn't a function of frame rate, it's a function of shutter speed. The amount of blur in the images is decided on set, by a knob on the camera.
I know you guys are joking, but you can neither shoot nor show a 3D movie on film with modern processes, so the whole motor argument is sorta kaput. The 3D version of the film with be digital only.
For the record, several 30/45/48 frame film processes have been around for the last 70 years, like Todd-AO, Showscan. Most 70mm projectors that were manufactured have 2 or 3 different speed settings to accommodate different standards.
It depends -- blending frames will have the effect of doubling the effective shutter speed of the camera, making the images blurrier than they were photographed, or about as blurry as if they were shot with a 1/48 shutter. This is completely acceptable if the filmmaker is trying to achieve a normal look, but it would screw up shots that were taken at 1/500 or 1/1000, which DPs do all the time in action scenes -- viz. Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator.
Making the 24 frame version of a 48 frame film isn't just a press-the-button-and-go process, every shot has to be examined and the process has to be tweaked for every cut, just like the color grading.
Add to this the complication that most movies now that shoot on 35mm actually shoot "3-perf", three perfs per frame instead of four. This allows them to shoot 25% more footage for the same cost (film costs and lab fees are always per-foot), and exposes a negative image of about 1.78:1; this is then kept for HDTV, or cropped for a 1.85 or 2.35 theatrical.
The system you describe is called "VistaVision", where a horizontal frame, 8 perfs long, was exposed and then matted and printed into a 35mm projection print. VistaVision was only used as a primary photographic process in the 1950s; the cameras were still used for special effects work on films like Star Wars and up through the first Spider-Man in 2001 -- the process gave more negative area and higher resolution.
The other process in the 1950s was CinemaScope, which exposed a roughly square area of the film, through a 2:1 anamorphic lens, to create a 2.35-ish aspect ratio frame on the camera negative. We still use this process on film release prints, which nowadays are either "flat" (a square, matted 1.85 image through a spherical lens) or "'scope" (a squeezed 2.4-ish frame through an anamorphic lens).
However, anamorphic lenses are almost never used for photography, just for the theatrical prints. Most films shot today on film, if they are shot on film, will shoot in "Super 35", which exposes the entire negative area (including holdout space for the sound track) with a broad, 1.33 frame, and either a 2.35 or 1.85 frame is cropped from the negative -- the film nowadays is so sharp that the crop and blowup doesn't significantly hurt the image. The camera viewfinder has a "frame" to show the cameraman what part of the frame will be kept, but the DP or the lab can always nudge the frame around to pick slightly different areas of the image to keep, in case the boom dipped into the shot, or the decide to reframe the film for different media -- standard def TV versions are made off the Super 35 negatives simply by cropping the frame, larger, smaller, or with a common top line.
As long as the CCD is bigger than the deliverable, they can and do crop. And since theatrical deliverables are 2k-4k, a 4k-8k sensor gives the filmmakers broad latitude to reframe shots.
They aren't looking for the step forward, they're just looking for the thing that Works and takes them off of Google's update schedule and in a better position to compete strategically with the iOS ecosystem. It's also quite possible they just want to have a loaded gun pointed at Google, ready to fire if they ever got the whiff that Google was using Android on Motorola to attack their handset business.
90% of bringing a viable mobile ecosystem to market is having a Facebook and Twitter app, a way to buy songs and a way to stream Netflix, a mapping system and some sandbox you can run HTML5 apps in. That's not hard to deliver, webOS was just that and had a great reputation -- the toughest part is picking your networks and partners and making sure you get the good end of the deal.
You're not talking about free speech on the Internet. You're talking about American speech on the Internet. At gunpoint, no less. Is that what we're going to be killing foreigners over next? You give far too much ground in the comparison with the drug war.
While I don't see China going to war over Youtube, I definitely see them conducting all kinds of chicaneries to keep Falun Gong or Tienamen off their Internet, and I don't see the US picking a fight over that -- the corporations that launch the satellites would rather be making money than participate in some internal political conflict. Google and Yahoo know how to play ball, so does everyone else. In the end, we only come to blows over the money, not over the right to free expression as such; and in the end, the US shouldn't be expending its resources paternalistically fighting for the rights of Chinese people in China. We've fought for the rights of other people on their own soil before, it never goes well.
You start using satellites like that and countries are going to start shooting them down. And all of the sudden the United States will find itself in a shooting war over Hughes Aerospace's "right" to operate a Ku-band transponder, and Viacom's "right" to transmit The Real World to flats in Shenzen.
The problem with a "right" to international communication is that it's little more than a thin veil to justify corporations using state military power to protect their access to markets. Behold mercantilism 2.0.
That simply addresses the wiretapping provisions, I don't see how this prevents states from assessing tolls on inbound communications, particularly when most nation-states are net data recipients.
The exact quote was "The pope? How many divisions does he have?" and most sources attribute the quote to Josef Stalin, though he almost certainly was quoting the other guy.
The short answer is, if Russia, China and the EU agree on a system, all they have to do is prevent our packets from passing through AS's on their sovereign territory. The UN is just the place where they come to the agreement, it's not the UN's idea and it's not up to the UN to enforce it.
The US can always withdraw from the ITU, but if these policies genuinely reflect the interests and will of other nation-states, and they remain united, I don't see how the US gets out from under them.
Inflation is an increase in the average price level. It can be caused by an increase in the quantity of money, or a decrease in the velocity of money, or a decrease in goods and services in the economy.
It's an explicit tax on risk-free saving. It's particularly damaging in the current US situation, because banks just take your savings and plow it back into government bonds. Saving in the currency of the state is the number one way of enabling the state's borrowing, unless you stick the dollars under your mattress. Risk-free saving is really just an form of rent; it's getting something, safety, for nothing. TANSTAAFL.
Currency is for short-term liquidity, it's a public service and using it for hoarding is an abuse of a public service.
Why bother inflating Bitcoins, when you can abuse and defraud the users, delay their redemptions, indefinitely detain their savings, and avoid any kind of institutional accountability, and after all that, they keep coming back?