But what? You have nothing to back up your argument, but you like the idea anyway? A person in the US can read every book on that list if they want.
Funny you bring up DeCSS -- some people in the US have it on t-shirts. Do you think a person in Cuba could get away with wearing an anti-Castro slogan on a shirt?
Trouble is, the analog output quality of video hardware varies greatly. Older nVidia graphics cards with VGA ports are a good example. They have exremely poor output quality compared witih most cards. There was a trick you could do to solder an extra bit of electronics onto the board and improve things (nVidia was using cheap parts), but how many people are willing to do that?
Other than that I agree with you for the most part.
bunch of old movies that won't be significantly better in quality than the SD DVD version anyway
WTF? Those movies are all less than 10-15 years old (unless they are talking about the original Planet of the Apes). They certainly will look better in HD. Even if they were 50 years old, they still would show improvement in HD. There is a tremendous amount of image detail in movies going back decades that is simply not visible in traditional home video formats, not even DVD. All it takes is a fresh high resolution scan to get at it.
Hell, a lot standard def DVDs out there today are already sourced from hi-def scans. In those cases, they don't even need to rescan, just reencode.
When I left Microsoft, the going base rate for new hires averaged $85K.
That's great, but were you an H1-B? Was the H1-B base rate the same as it was for everyone else? That's the crux of the issue, you know, and you totally failed to address it. Not hard to believe you worked for MS.
Almost every newsagent and bookshop has a photocopier. Yet people don't commonly "pirate" books and newspapers. Why? Well, because it's cheaper to buy than to pirate.
Good lord, what a horrible comparison. The reason it's "cheaper to buy than pirate" for books is because of the effort involved. You cannot just drop a book into a photocopier and get another book out of it. You have to copy it ONE PAGE AT A TIME and then find a way bind it yourself.
You can, however, get a cheap computer with two optical drives, and create a perfect copy of a CD in one step. Two steps if you only have one optical drive. The effort required to copy CDs is so low, pre-recorded music CDs would have to cost less than a blank CD in order for it to be truly cheaper to buy than pirate. Considering blank CDs are basically free, I doubt that will ever happen.
Oh, and here's another thing: Despite the effort involved, people in Japan use cameraphones to pirate magazines (taking pictures of each page and uploading them to the net, right from the newstand). This is for something that is incredibly cheap. If it weren't for shrinkwrap, people would be ripping CDs and DVDs right in the store too, no matter how cheap they are.
I've found that while the cheap compact fluorescents have to warm up for a bit to reach full brightness, the name brand ones (like GE) snap on immediately. I put a GE one in the basement stairway so that everyone could get immediate bright light, and it was really nice. You could barely tell the difference between that and a real incandescent.
Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's ownpastpress releases contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
I suggest that you get your drivers into the tree, where other people can review them for bugs
You mean where people who don't understand them can make "suggestions". See all those rants by Hans. Whatever else you think of him, he's got a point when it comes to that.
Ever been to sub-Saharan Africa? I have. I've seen Massai living in mud-and-cowshit huts out in the middle of the savanna. Everywhere you go, poor kids beg you for pens. Yes, pens, as in Bic. Having simple supplies for writing is a big deal to many people in the world. Maybe his attitude is "Colonial", but it appears to me at least to be based somewhat in reality.
If the USA economy goes in the toilet, so will those of a lot more countries than just Canada. China for example will feel the pain too, since the US is a very large consumer of their goods. If the US can no longer afford to buy its products, there goes their double-digit growth rate.
1) Stock pump scams. When one starts making the rounds (Cana Petrolium today judging by my mail), find out who made purchases of the stock in the previous week. Freeze their accounts until the individuals responsible can be dragged into an FBI office. If the FBI/SEC can't locate the individuals then it just means that the laws regulating the stock trade are jokes.
If they truly want to stop stock pump scams, they should start by shutting down all the financial new channels. Then they could bust all the fly by night CEOs. Spam is the least of the problems.
kinda laughed me off as some sort of conspiracy wackjob
Isn't it amazing how well-trained everyone is to react that way these days? Any questions regarding authority are immediately recognized as "conspiracy theory", which everyone knows is a synonym for "wrong". It's an almost Pavlovian response.
A soft drink sweetened with cane sugar would be just as bad.
No, it would not be "just as bad", because cane sugar and HFCS affect the body very differently. Go read some of the links in this thread and you'll see. They are not equivalent. That is the whole point. The "hysteria" you point to is actually quite justified. HFCS is a dangerous ingredient, regardless of people's eating habits.
If this were to be combined with 2X HD resolution 60P motion video (about 4,000 pixels across) it would kick serious ass as the next 'Imax' lifelike motion picture display.
It could also breath new life into older motion pictures. A lot of movies shot during the 20th century look quite feeble on home video with today's display tech, but would look inredible if scanned and stored in a format that preserved the full dynamic range of the image. There is a tremendous amount of HDR info locked in Hollywood's valuts already. It would be wonderful for people to have a way to view it at home. An HDR home video format would probably be much more successful than the failing HD formats.
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But what? You have nothing to back up your argument, but you like the idea anyway? A person in the US can read every book on that list if they want.
Funny you bring up DeCSS -- some people in the US have it on t-shirts. Do you think a person in Cuba could get away with wearing an anti-Castro slogan on a shirt?
Other than that I agree with you for the most part.
WTF? Those movies are all less than 10-15 years old (unless they are talking about the original Planet of the Apes). They certainly will look better in HD. Even if they were 50 years old, they still would show improvement in HD. There is a tremendous amount of image detail in movies going back decades that is simply not visible in traditional home video formats, not even DVD. All it takes is a fresh high resolution scan to get at it.
Hell, a lot standard def DVDs out there today are already sourced from hi-def scans. In those cases, they don't even need to rescan, just reencode.
That's great, but were you an H1-B? Was the H1-B base rate the same as it was for everyone else? That's the crux of the issue, you know, and you totally failed to address it. Not hard to believe you worked for MS.
Good lord, what a horrible comparison. The reason it's "cheaper to buy than pirate" for books is because of the effort involved. You cannot just drop a book into a photocopier and get another book out of it. You have to copy it ONE PAGE AT A TIME and then find a way bind it yourself.
You can, however, get a cheap computer with two optical drives, and create a perfect copy of a CD in one step. Two steps if you only have one optical drive. The effort required to copy CDs is so low, pre-recorded music CDs would have to cost less than a blank CD in order for it to be truly cheaper to buy than pirate. Considering blank CDs are basically free, I doubt that will ever happen.
Oh, and here's another thing: Despite the effort involved, people in Japan use cameraphones to pirate magazines (taking pictures of each page and uploading them to the net, right from the newstand). This is for something that is incredibly cheap. If it weren't for shrinkwrap, people would be ripping CDs and DVDs right in the store too, no matter how cheap they are.
I've found that while the cheap compact fluorescents have to warm up for a bit to reach full brightness, the name brand ones (like GE) snap on immediately. I put a GE one in the basement stairway so that everyone could get immediate bright light, and it was really nice. You could barely tell the difference between that and a real incandescent.
Son, that's what we call backpedallin'
You needed wikipedia to teach you that?
- Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's own past press releases contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
- Claim that the majority of work is done by a group of people who actually don't really contribute that much.
I'm sure there's more.What, those people aren't geeks?
You mean where people who don't understand them can make "suggestions". See all those rants by Hans. Whatever else you think of him, he's got a point when it comes to that.
Ever been to sub-Saharan Africa? I have. I've seen Massai living in mud-and-cowshit huts out in the middle of the savanna. Everywhere you go, poor kids beg you for pens. Yes, pens, as in Bic. Having simple supplies for writing is a big deal to many people in the world. Maybe his attitude is "Colonial", but it appears to me at least to be based somewhat in reality.
The mac mini has an external power brick. Can you do that test with something that has an internal power supply, like an iMac?
What city is that? Also, are they using the de-facto standard high pressure sodium vapour lamps, or something else?
If the USA economy goes in the toilet, so will those of a lot more countries than just Canada. China for example will feel the pain too, since the US is a very large consumer of their goods. If the US can no longer afford to buy its products, there goes their double-digit growth rate.
Drive Stun can still harm or even kill.
If they truly want to stop stock pump scams, they should start by shutting down all the financial new channels. Then they could bust all the fly by night CEOs. Spam is the least of the problems.
Isn't it amazing how well-trained everyone is to react that way these days? Any questions regarding authority are immediately recognized as "conspiracy theory", which everyone knows is a synonym for "wrong". It's an almost Pavlovian response.
If he wants something done, he'll just sit back and wonder if it should be done. He doesn't need to be on the board for that.
He doesn't need to throw his weight around. All he has to do is "wonder" if something ought to happen and ... poof! It does. Like magic!
here
No, it would not be "just as bad", because cane sugar and HFCS affect the body very differently. Go read some of the links in this thread and you'll see. They are not equivalent. That is the whole point. The "hysteria" you point to is actually quite justified. HFCS is a dangerous ingredient, regardless of people's eating habits.
It could also breath new life into older motion pictures. A lot of movies shot during the 20th century look quite feeble on home video with today's display tech, but would look inredible if scanned and stored in a format that preserved the full dynamic range of the image. There is a tremendous amount of HDR info locked in Hollywood's valuts already. It would be wonderful for people to have a way to view it at home. An HDR home video format would probably be much more successful than the failing HD formats.
A company that gives away their shit for free is one that "gets it"?
Maynor fired the first shot with his cigarette-stab quote. Without that, this would have been a non-story. Now it's a giant clusterfuck.