I disagree. The reason is that any modern bulb is going to be xenon which last at least 10,000 hours, and probably more like 20,000. At even 4 hours a day 365 days per year, that's at least 6 years before a bulb change is necessary, and more than likely at least twice that.
Even more modern bulbs, like the LEDs on high-end audis are rated for 20K-50K of usage.
So, it really doesn't mean much that a part that need only be changed once a decade is difficult to change. Now, if you had an example of a car where you couldn't change the oil without special equipment, then you would have a point.
You probably don't realize this, but "altering the lowest order bits" is precisely what is meant by hiding something in the background noise, be it bits representing audio or bits representing video.
Its simply naive to think that it didn't in some way support Bin Ladins organization. Ignoring the difference between pakalolo and poppies for the moment, I'd have to say it is extremely naive to think that the policies of the US government and the DEA which amount to taxpayer-funded price-supports on heroin have not significantly contributed to bin Laden's organization.
Obviously if they modify the background noise then no amount of ECCs could recover anything from it since they're modifying all of the ECCs too Who says that the people with secrets will even try to encode them in the background noise?
Maybe they will use the foreground noise -- for example, they could alter the pitch of the speaking voice to precisely fall into certain discrete frequency ranges, and then they occasionally bump a couple of samples into an 'unused' range and use those as a simple binary encoding of the secret data.
If they use enough discrete frequency ranges, the general tone of the speaker's vioce won't be noticeably different and the occasional minor shifts in frequency for the encoded data will hardly stand out.
That is just one example that I literally thought up in 30 seconds. I'm sure someone who was really concentrating could come up with much better ways to defeat the described countermeasures.
Here's a hint. How about they compress it with something less obscenely wasteful than MPEG-2? H.264 or even XVID would be multiple times as efficient Yeah.... I don't think so.
MPEG4 AVC aka h.264 is roughly 25% more efficient than MPEG2 at high bandwidth. In other words, a 10mbps h.264 encoding will have roughly identical picture quality via qpsnr measurements as a 12.5mbps mpeg2 encoding.
For lower bitrate and lower resolution, you can expect to see 2-3x better performance from h.264 as from mpeg2 because h.264 was designed for low-bitrate performance. But, as resolution and bitrate increase, the difference between codecs shrinks and so does the h.264's performance lead.
Sure, a 25% improvement can be a huge deal, but it isn't anywhere near 'multiples' faster.
Not welding the engine shut works because you can't just copy-paste the engine and put your own label on it. Hello? McFly? Even if you could copy-n-paste an engine, that still wouldn't change anything about how serviceable the engine is.
In fact, they're already experimenting with this now. Some newer cars have most of the stuff under the bonnet covered by plastic/metal plates, Those plates are easily removed - they are there to make the engine compartment look 'pretty,' nothing more.
You can't even replace a headlight bulb without a well-equipped garage. Taking your car to a 'well equipped' garage can only happen when the guts are easily accessible. Otherwise you could only take the car to a manufacturer-licensed garage.
it is a basic expectation that anyone should be able to open up their car and work on their engine -- even if 99% of car owners never do and just let a mechanic take care of things in the beginning every driver was also a technician, then the roles started to separate and finally they are completely independent of each other.
Just a sidenote: copyright is important for GFDL and GPL as well. Without copyright law, GPL'd code becomes essentially BSD-licensed one, if not public domain. Your point gets made a lot around here. But it doesn't take into account the bigger picture.
Stallman's goal is that the market for software will eventually get to a point a lot like where the automotive market is today. Software without source code is like a car with the engine compartment welded shut. No one would buy a car like that because it is a basic expectation that anyone should be able to open up their car and work on their engine -- even if 99% of car owners never do and just let a mechanic take care of things, the expectation is still there.
Similarly with Stallman's goals for the software marketplace - even though the vast majority of buyers will never take a peek at the source, the ability to do so will become a baseline assumption. In a market like that, there is no need for copyright laws to enforce software Freedom, no one will be able to make a living selling non-Free software.
it's a flash based web player. there's no drm. same deal with all the new video from mtv networks. flash players, no windows stuff, etc. So, if there is no DRM, does that mean the various video downloaders can save a copy in the clear to the user's hard disk?
If these drones become wide-spread, I predict that any sophisticated "bad guys" - i.e. drug runners and coyotes - will quickly get their own drones.
Maybe they won't be equipped with cameras, they'll probably be just run of the mill R/C helicopters. But they will be sufficient to take out any drones within visible range - just crash the R/C helicopter into the police drone to take it out of commission. If you miss, you just come back for another pass. Worst case, you keep the drone busy dodging the R/C helicopter instead of watching the goings on and best case you get a firey explosion in the sky. It will only take a few $500 R/C helicopter versus $50,000+ drone encounters before the police run out of drones.
And you quit being ignorant... just because you can google a few outspoken muslims who are sensible, Did you even LOOK at the links? There are literally thousands of condemnations from all levels of muslim society - even fatwas on bin Laden himself from imams all across the middle-east.
it doesn't mean the vast majority don't get pleasure every time an American or Dane is killed Oh grow the fuck up. What is now very clear is that you get pleasure out of demonizing your fellow humans. You fucking sick fuck.
So where is the 95% condemning suicide bombings? -- No where So where is the 95% condemning the killing of innocents? -- No where So where it the 95% condemning all the crap that happened after the publication of cartoons? -- No where Quit watching faux news and do a little research for yourself. Is it really that hard to google for "muslims condemn terrorism?"
Seriously, who would you rather discuss politics with? The Digg crowd? The people that leave comments on Youtube? Seriously, answer that question and go there. Then come back and tell us what you find. Try BigThink.
I personally think they are doomed to failure because they are too general, but their goal at least is to be the place to go when you want informed discussion about "big" issues.
because we have these rare pieces of real estate called sidewalks, and people who actually use them for walking. Which is often counter-productive because they kill situational awareness. Sure the people walking on the sidewalk can see the ground right in front of them just fine, but what they can't see is 3 feet off to the left or the right where a mugger is standing just beyond the edge of the light waiting for them.
I'd rather they spent the money on better quality sidewalks and let our eyes do what they were made to do - adjust to the light.
the quality is not getting that degraded because it is using a different, probably more efficient codec. In the case of HD-rips that is generally not true. Both HD formats include h264 (aka MPEG4 AVC) and VC1 as well as MPEG2. For AVC and VC1, x264 is generally no more efficient (it is, after all, a reimplementation of AVC to begin with). For the movies that were originally MPEG2, you can shave off about 25% of the bitrate with x264 and maintain almost equal quality. Part of the problem is that AVC was designed for low-bitrate applications which doesn't include 9GB encodings, so much of the benefit of AVC vs MPEG2 is lost once you start pushing past the 7-8mbps rate.
One of the reasons that these 9GB re-encodes do look so good is because the competition sucks. Broadcast HDTV rarely lives up to its potential - the satellite guys have been screwing with the quality for years, preferring quantity over quality. So much so that the term "hd-lite" was invented to describe the bit-starved HDTV encoding from Dish and DirecTV.
But, regular over-the-air networks haven't done so well either. CBS is the only OTA broadcaster that seems to give a damn about quality - they generally run their bitrates at the max and try to do a good encoding job. But all the other networks - NBC, ABC, Fox, CW, and most PBS stations, do a really crappy job. Wasting bandwidth on channel multiplexing or just letting the bandwidth go unused - for example, most East Coast Fox affiliates broadcast their primetime at bitrates under 10mbps while the standard allows for up to about 18.5mbps. They just "null-pad" the video with empty packets.
When regular HDTV is so sub-par, it is no wonder that these reduced quality re-encodes are perceived as the bees-knees, they generally look so much better than regular HDTV that people are more than satisified with the quality.
The secure server uses an independent cookie with the secure flag set, which cannot be transmitted except over https. Hijacking the unsecured session cookie won't get you much more than recommendations tailored to someone else's account. However, that mechanism does not protect the user from Amazon, et al. A prefetch to amazon typically includes the referrer, thus letting amazon know that you - as identified by your regular cookie - were looking at page so and so, and if it is a search result, Amazon will probably also get your search query.
Do you trust that Amazon is not collecting and correlating that information today? If you do, do you think they won't start as soon as they figure out how mining that data can increase revenues in one way or another? Do you think that once that data has been collected, someone will figure out other uses for it?
Too bad CFL's look like shit. Been to a mall recently? Or any other large venue? I guarantee you that all major sources of artificial lighting there were CFL.
I watch 24 with a very critical eye, and FWIW, I've noticed that almost every use of straight-out torture backfires against Jack.
Usually the tortured character gives out false, or misdirecting information - like when Jack tortured his own brother who then told him a "little secret" instead of the "big secret." Consequently, Jack burnt precious hours (of script) going after the wrong bad guys.
The one case I clearly remember where torture 'worked' for Jack without any major complications was when he used some av-geek trickery to fool the tortured person into believing that his family was being executed, one by one at Jack's command. A more forgiving eye might not even consider that to be torture, just smart interrogation tactics.
Of course, plenty of people don't watch 24 with a critical eye and may easily come away with a latent reinforcement of the belief that torture is OK for good guys and is totally reliable, etc. But I really can't argue for even further dumbing-down of television for the lowest common denominator crowd - just like I don't support the anti-sex and the anti-violence people's attempts to dumb-down shows either.
As a counterpoint, I do think we could use a few good "conspiracy" shows where the bad guys are regularly the ones who claim to be the good guys and regularly abuse the power of government to do their dirty deeds. Since 9/11, I think the furthest that TV has gone is the occasional one-liners about how some clearly-innocent suspects have no rights now under the new patriot act. Some films have started to address these issues, but often tangentially like "Man of the Year's" use of diebold's problems or too preachy like "Rendition."
"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!"
- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now "I love the sound of obscenties in the morning! Sounds like victory!"
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I disagree. The reason is that any modern bulb is going to be xenon which last at least 10,000 hours, and probably more like 20,000. At even 4 hours a day 365 days per year, that's at least 6 years before a bulb change is necessary, and more than likely at least twice that.
Even more modern bulbs, like the LEDs on high-end audis are rated for 20K-50K of usage.
So, it really doesn't mean much that a part that need only be changed once a decade is difficult to change. Now, if you had an example of a car where you couldn't change the oil without special equipment, then you would have a point.
You probably don't realize this, but "altering the lowest order bits" is precisely what is meant by hiding something in the background noise, be it bits representing audio or bits representing video.
Maybe they will use the foreground noise -- for example, they could alter the pitch of the speaking voice to precisely fall into certain discrete frequency ranges, and then they occasionally bump a couple of samples into an 'unused' range and use those as a simple binary encoding of the secret data.
If they use enough discrete frequency ranges, the general tone of the speaker's vioce won't be noticeably different and the occasional minor shifts in frequency for the encoded data will hardly stand out.
That is just one example that I literally thought up in 30 seconds. I'm sure someone who was really concentrating could come up with much better ways to defeat the described countermeasures.
MPEG4 AVC aka h.264 is roughly 25% more efficient than MPEG2 at high bandwidth. In other words, a 10mbps h.264 encoding will have roughly identical picture quality via qpsnr measurements as a 12.5mbps mpeg2 encoding.
For lower bitrate and lower resolution, you can expect to see 2-3x better performance from h.264 as from mpeg2 because h.264 was designed for low-bitrate performance. But, as resolution and bitrate increase, the difference between codecs shrinks and so does the h.264's performance lead.
Sure, a 25% improvement can be a huge deal, but it isn't anywhere near 'multiples' faster.
Even if you could copy-n-paste an engine, that still wouldn't change anything about how serviceable the engine is.
Your point is irrelevant.
Stallman's goal is that the market for software will eventually get to a point a lot like where the automotive market is today. Software without source code is like a car with the engine compartment welded shut. No one would buy a car like that because it is a basic expectation that anyone should be able to open up their car and work on their engine -- even if 99% of car owners never do and just let a mechanic take care of things, the expectation is still there.
Similarly with Stallman's goals for the software marketplace - even though the vast majority of buyers will never take a peek at the source, the ability to do so will become a baseline assumption. In a market like that, there is no need for copyright laws to enforce software Freedom, no one will be able to make a living selling non-Free software.
Plenty more in google where that came from.
The only real competition that the government cares about is who can shove the most 'campaign funds' into each politician's pockets.
I am going to wait for the porn version of this experiment.
The DVD will be called:
Large Hardon Experiment Goes Interracial!
Creates black holes and fills them with loads of quarks!
If the WTO wants American politicians to listen them, then they need to pony up with the 'campaign funding' like everyone else.
If these drones become wide-spread, I predict that any sophisticated "bad guys" - i.e. drug runners and coyotes - will quickly get their own drones.
Maybe they won't be equipped with cameras, they'll probably be just run of the mill R/C helicopters. But they will be sufficient to take out any drones within visible range - just crash the R/C helicopter into the police drone to take it out of commission. If you miss, you just come back for another pass. Worst case, you keep the drone busy dodging the R/C helicopter instead of watching the goings on and best case you get a firey explosion in the sky. It will only take a few $500 R/C helicopter versus $50,000+ drone encounters before the police run out of drones.
So where is the 95% condemning the killing of innocents? -- No where
So where it the 95% condemning all the crap that happened after the publication of cartoons? -- No where Quit watching faux news and do a little research for yourself. Is it really that hard to google for "muslims condemn terrorism?"
http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php
http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/friedman-wrong-about-muslims-again-and.html
http://www.americanmuslimwoman.com/id14.html
http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/terror.htm
I personally think they are doomed to failure because they are too general,
but their goal at least is to be the place to go when you want informed
discussion about "big" issues.
I'd rather they spent the money on better quality sidewalks and let our eyes do what they were made to do - adjust to the light.
One of the reasons that these 9GB re-encodes do look so good is because the competition sucks. Broadcast HDTV rarely lives up to its potential - the satellite guys have been screwing with the quality for years, preferring quantity over quality. So much so that the term "hd-lite" was invented to describe the bit-starved HDTV encoding from Dish and DirecTV.
But, regular over-the-air networks haven't done so well either. CBS is the only OTA broadcaster that seems to give a damn about quality - they generally run their bitrates at the max and try to do a good encoding job. But all the other networks - NBC, ABC, Fox, CW, and most PBS stations, do a really crappy job. Wasting bandwidth on channel multiplexing or just letting the bandwidth go unused - for example, most East Coast Fox affiliates broadcast their primetime at bitrates under 10mbps while the standard allows for up to about 18.5mbps. They just "null-pad" the video with empty packets.
When regular HDTV is so sub-par, it is no wonder that these reduced quality re-encodes are perceived as the bees-knees, they generally look so much better than regular HDTV that people are more than satisified with the quality.
Do you trust that Amazon is not collecting and correlating that information today?
If you do, do you think they won't start as soon as they figure out how mining that data can increase revenues in one way or another?
Do you think that once that data has been collected, someone will figure out other uses for it?
I guarantee you that all major sources of artificial lighting there were CFL.
CFLs haven't looked like shit for years.
I watch 24 with a very critical eye, and FWIW, I've noticed that almost every use of straight-out torture backfires against Jack.
Usually the tortured character gives out false, or misdirecting information - like when Jack tortured his own brother who then told him a "little secret" instead of the "big secret." Consequently, Jack burnt precious hours (of script) going after the wrong bad guys.
The one case I clearly remember where torture 'worked' for Jack without any major complications was when he used some av-geek trickery to fool the tortured person into believing that his family was being executed, one by one at Jack's command. A more forgiving eye might not even consider that to be torture, just smart interrogation tactics.
Of course, plenty of people don't watch 24 with a critical eye and may easily come away with a latent reinforcement of the belief that torture is OK for good guys and is totally reliable, etc. But I really can't argue for even further dumbing-down of television for the lowest common denominator crowd - just like I don't support the anti-sex and the anti-violence people's attempts to dumb-down shows either.
As a counterpoint, I do think we could use a few good "conspiracy" shows where the bad guys are regularly the ones who claim to be the good guys and regularly abuse the power of government to do their dirty deeds. Since 9/11, I think the furthest that TV has gone is the occasional one-liners about how some clearly-innocent suspects have no rights now under the new patriot act. Some films have started to address these issues, but often tangentially like "Man of the Year's" use of diebold's problems or too preachy like "Rendition."
- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now "I love the sound of obscenties in the morning! Sounds like victory!"