The reason that many in the US Armed Forces don't like Seymour Hersch
Apart from the fact that he routinely fabricates important parts of his stories, you mean? Conspiracy theories about 30-year-old grudges are all well and good, but the whole "lies a lot" bit is kind of a show-stopper, don't you think?
That story marked a seminal moment in US journalism, demonstrating the power of the media by uncovering the truth and the lies of the Viet Nam conflict.
Actually, what it did was demonstrate the power of the press to shine a really bright light on a really small spot. Was what happened at My Lai a big deal? Absolutely. It was tragic and inhuman. But was it representative of the conduct of war? Absolutely not. It was an aberration. But thanks to the news media, an entire generation of Americas --possibly including yourself, I gather from reading between the lines --grew up with the idea that My Lai was typical.
The media frenzy of My Lai, and, later, Abu Ghraib, was a case of well-intentioned people spinning completely out of control and failing to put the news in perspective. Ultimately, a great disservice was done in both cases.
Now tell me that Tommy Franks and others don't have an axe to grind.
Whether anybody has an ax to grind or not seems, to me, to kind of be beside the point. Hersch has been caught, repeatedly, reporting things that just aren't so. The most egregious example I know about was the one I cited before, where he completely made up a story about a military engagement in Afghanistan. Ironically, if he'd been less zealous, he might have gotten away with it. As it is, anybody who reads the story who actually knows how many AC-130s existed at that time will know that Hersch was just plain lying.
What somebody thinks about Hersch is, in my opinion, pretty much irrelevant. He went on record with a story that couldn't possibly have been true. He lied. It's nothing personal; that's just how it is.
My biggest regret these days is that there's no new generation of independant reporters with the skills and determination that Hersch is still showing.
My biggest regret is that there is, in fact, an entire generation of young, idealistic reporters out there who went into journalism because they wanted to change the world. It's an old saw that journalism is the first draft of history. It's a terrible disservice when somebody -- Seymour Hersch or Ted Rall, or more recently Dan Rather and Mary Mapes --sacrifices truth on the altar of their political agenda.
Someone makes wild-assed claims, backs it with weak evidence from a tainted source, and call it fact.
We're talking about Seymour Hersch again, right? He is, after all, the one who consistently goes on record with wild-assed claims that are in contradiction of documented fact, supposedly supported by "sources" that nobody else can find.
Boy, did you ever get that wrong. Seymour Hersch is personally responsible for blowing the Abu Ghraib story completely out of proportion.
My favorite Seymour Hersch anecdote comes from Tommy Franks' autobiography, American Soldier. He diplomatically refrains from mentioning Hersch by name, but he refers to an author who fabricated an absurd story during the fighting in Afghanistan. The dead giveaway was the fact that the author -- Hersch --said that the military used X AC-130 Spectre gunships during a certain event, where X was a figure that was larger than the total number of AC-130s that existed in the world at the time.
Pretty funny story. He's not quite in the Robert Fisk or Jayson Blair class for self-described journalists who just make up their stories, but he's awfully close. What a huge waste of The New Yorker's money.
The purpose of the Gnu Public License is to perpetuate itself. That is, it's to require people who create derivative works to license those works under the Gnu Public License. If you create a derivative work, you have zero choice about whether to release it into the public domain or not. You aren't even given the option. You are required to release it under the Gnu Public License.
Let's say I decide I want to write some software. Say I want my software to perform some function --it doesn't matter what, for purposes of discussion. Let's say that somebody's already written a module that performs that function, and rather than taking the time to write it myself, I decide I want to just incorporate that module into my program.
I then decide that I want to be altruistic and put my program in the public domain for anybody to use. Oh, wait! I can't! Because the module I used -- which, I was assured, was freely available for my use at no cost to me --was released under the Gnu Public License, I am prohibited from releasing my work into the public domain. My only choice is to perpetuate the Gnu license, possibly trapping some other poor sucker at some future date in the process. Well, okay, that's not technically the only option. I guess I could just rip out all the stuff I got under the Gnu license and re-write it from scratch...or could I? I've already seen the Gnu code. Any implementation that I create that uses the same basic algorithms or ideas would also, necessarily, be covered under the Gnu license. So that means I'm forced to clean-room the whole module, finding somebody who's never seen the Gnu code to write it for me from scratch!
Or, of course, I could do what any reasonable person would do under those circumstances: Scrap the whole project, write off the wasted time and count myself wiser for having learned my lesson.
I have to say, your use of language is frankly frightening. You refer to "stealing community work." How can it be stolen? It's community property, available to all. That's the purpose of the public domain. Everybody has equal property rights over works that are in the public domain. By definition, they can't be stolen.
But you use language in order to create an "us versus them" mentality. Your position is extremely antagonistic. Why is that? Do you really see the world in terms of "us and them" or does framing it in those terms just suit you for other reasons?
Friend, "us versus them" is a fallacy. It's a big lie perpetrated on you by people who seek to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do. There is no "us and them." There's only us. We're all in this together.
To put it bluntly, if Sony doesn't make it, it's kind of a non-starter. There have always been high-resolution, high-dynamic-range cameras available, but they have had essentially no commercial use. They're used mainly by industry and government. This camera, no doubt, is in the same class.
Imagine, for example, if somebody came to you and said that there's a new still camera available, but it doesn't take any existing lenses, and that it outputs a data format that none of your software can work with via an interface that nobody supports. Interesting? Sure, as a proof-of-concept. But it wouldn't have any real commercial impact on the industry.
Feature filmmaking is moving to 1080/24p. That's going to be the standard. The 1.85:1 aperture format may hang around as slightly matted 1080/24p, or we may see a shift to HD's native 1.78:1 ratio. For widescreen productions, in the neighborhood of 2.35:1, we're either going to see matting like what Lucas used to shoot Star Wars Episode II, or the use of new anamorphic lenses that squeeze the picture slightly. While that technique has been used for years, it's been used to squeeze a 2.35:1 frame into a 1.33:1 35 mm frame. The same process will work with HD, but we have to grind new lenses to suit the different aspect ratio of the HD frame.
I've seen 4K projected in screening rooms plenty of times, in the form of a print made directly off of an effects negative. You know what? You can't see the difference between the practically-4K first-generation print and the fourth-generation print you see in the movie theater. By the time the picture makes it through the lens, through the air to the screen, off the reflective surface of the screen into your eyeballs, those extra pixels just don't count any more. You can push as much resolution through the projection booth as you want; it just doesn't matter.
What does matter, though, is dynamic range. More dynamic range is better, but dynamic range requires more storage. So the next big leap is going to be the development of either optical or magnetic media that are capable of holding an entire feature in a small space. "Small" is up for interpretation, of course, but the goal is to have a distribution medium that's cheaper to ship than film canisters. Right now we can ship a couple dozen 400 GB hard drives across the country, but they have to be so well packed that the end result is more expensive to ship than film. We need to fix that.
(Incidentally, Episode I was not shot digitally. It was shot on film, finished digitally, printed to film, then transferred back to the digital format for projection in a few theaters around the country. That means the digital transfer had just as much jitter and grain as the film prints. The only thing it didn't have were reel-change judders. Now, Episode II, on the other hand, was an all-digital production from lens to screen, if you were lucky enough to see it in a digital cinema. That was a hell of a thing.)
That was very funny the way you made your joke about pink dancing elephants. It did not, however, contribute in any meaningful way to a grown-up discussion of the issues. Maybe next time you could take a stab at being both funny and relevant at the same time, huh?
Yes, BSD, as you put it, "allows taking." That's part of a really bizarre and counter-intuitive system that we call "freedom." It's a neat idea. Maybe you could google it or something to familiarize yourself with the basic premise. The GPL, on the other hand, takes the normal property rights that people would enjoy from creating new works based on old ones. It preemptively abolishes those rights...or rather it tries to. If such a thing were ever to go before a court of law, it would be immediately struck down. Strangely, though, nobody's yet tested it. Probably because people who choose to be monomaniacal dicks and require anybody who looks at their work to agree in advance to a massive and summary abdication of their unalienable rights are best left to their own devices anyway. Who needs 'em.
Gifts? No. The GPL is not a gift; it's an allegedly binding contract that drastically abbreviates the rights of all recipients.
The BSD "license" is a gift. The GPL is not.
Of course, even the BSD "license" is patently unnecessary. It's just silliness designed to make people feel good about themselves. The correct term for what people usually refer to as the "BSD license" is "public domain."
Very few people (that I know of, anyway) are actually in favor of abolishing all intellectual property. Rather, most seem to advocate more moderate limits.
Let's drop this statement on the floor and see if the cat sniffs at it. Change "intellectual property" to "privacy" and see if it holds together.
Very few people (that I know of, anyway) are actually in favor of abolishing all privacy. Rather, most seem to advocate more moderate limits.
Oops. That doesn't sound right at all, does it?
Rights are rights. You can't pick and choose which ones you think are worth protecting.
Nonsense. He did no such thing. All he did was blow chaff and head for the next topic. Comparing copy protection mechanisms to totalitarianism? That's just a Chewbacca defense, plain and simple.
People like Stallman are uncomfortable with comparisons between their philosophies and communism not because they're inapt but because they're apt! Stallman stands for the abolition of private property rights, and seeks to achieve that goal by poisoning the body of work with the utterly unnecessary and deeply harmful Gnu Public License and its many variants. He wants to make it so that the protection of private property is, in fact, legally impossible; that's what motivated his little practical joke of a license agreement.
The depressing thing about Stallman isn't that he, himself, is such a loon. It's that he's managed to convince so many other people that he's sane.
From your very brief self-description, it sounds like your views are neither left nor right. They are utopian, which means they lie completely outside the political spectrum.
Example: The belief in a universal, government-run, non-disastrous health-care system is tantamount to wishing that birds played frisbee or that tap water tasted like tapioca. It's wishing for the impossible. That takes the whole idea outside the realm of politics altogether and puts it in the realm of fantasy.
Likewise, since we're on the subject, the idea of a communist society that's not based on mass theft of property. It's just not possible, no more than it would be possible to have a society made up entirely of left-handed people. Can't be done. So those kinds of ideas don't belong in a discussion of politics. They belong in a fairy tale.
Being able to distinguish valid ideas that aren't compatible with your own from nonsense ideas spouted by people who aren't interested in discussing reality is a very important skill.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a utopian, mind you. Those people just aren't very interesting to talk to.
I have to confess to being a little confused. In your first paragraph, you make explicit reference to the fact that iTunes songs can be burned to audio CD. In point of fact, Apple not only permits this, it strongly encourages this in all the Music Store instructions and whatnot.
Then, in your second paragraph, you advance a silly straw-man argument about how you might be unable to play your songs if (1) your computer crashes and (2) you are somehow mysteriously unable to reauthorize it.
I'm a little new around here, so please tell me how this works, exactly? Were you just hoping that you didn't flatly refute your second point with your first point?
It wasn't a mouse. It was an iPod mini. The patent you refer to is for the click-wheel introduced on the iPod mini and later added to the iPod. Somebody misread the patent and assumed it was a mouse, when in fact it was just an "input device."
I was so sorry to learn that you're having problems with your eyes. I know this must be a difficult time for you, but remember that we're living in an age of medical miracles. There's no doubt in my mind that the doctors will find a cure for your affliction soon.
You know, I wrote this late last night, and I really shouldn't have. I left out some important stuff.
The OpenEXR format does include support for the 32-bit float pixel type, but it's not commonly used for color. Much more common is the "half" pixel type for color: 16-bit floats. The 32-bit float format is used for other types of image data, but rarely for color.
See, if you use the "half" format, you get about 30 f-stops of dynamic range, compared to about 7 f-stops in an 8-bit integer image. (You can squeeze that to 10 or 11 stops in 10-bit integer, but that's hardly much of an improvement.) That's plenty, and you can store your images in half the space. When you're looking at more than 36 MB per 2K frame for uncompressed 32-bit float, cutting that in half is a very big deal. (Lossless wavelet and ZIP compression can give you something on the order of another 1/3rd to 1/2 of your disk space back.)
What that means is that you can apply pretty extensive color correction to an OpenEXR "half" file without introducing artifacts or getting an unacceptable level of graininess. So "half" is good enough for color work. The 32-bit float format is available when you need even more precision. Typically that's for things like alpha channels and depth mattes.
The other important thing about OpenEXR's "half" is that it's bit-for-bit compatible with the "half" data type in the Cg language, which means that OpenEXR image data in "half" format can be passed to GPUs without conversion for processing in hardware. That's important.
All of this technology is available from ILM under a BSD license, which is how Apple was able to build it in to Mac OS X Tiger. I should have made that more clear, too. "Half," or 16-bit floating-point, is a native pixel format in Tiger, and OpenEXR is a native file format, and CoreImage supports downloading files in OpenEXR format straight to the GPU along with pixel algorithms or convolution kernels for transforming them. Amazingly fast. It's basically Photoshop with 10 times the color precision implemented entirely in hardware.
Anyway, I should have made all that clear last night. Blame it on the sleepy.
Practically nothing is being done at 48-bit. Never really was. Thirty-six bit was common for a while (what people in the biz call "12-bit integer"), but it's basically gone the way of the dodo now.
Virtually all film and d-cinema work is being done in OpenEXR format now, which uses 32-bit floating-point pixels. Video work, of course, is all done in 10-bit integer. Well, not all. A surprising amount of it is still being done in 8-bit integer. But the pro stuff is practically all 10-bit.
While it's true that neither CRT nor LCD monitors can handle the complete dynamic range of 32-bit floating-point, LCD is quite a bit closer. DLP comes closest, of course, which is why it's being used in new movie theaters.
Interestingly, OpenEXR support is native in Mac OS X Tiger. That's the power of the BSD license, right there.
This is basically no longer true. As of this year's NAB, Sony will be discontinuing their PVM monitor line and is replacing it with LCD displays. For many applications, LCD is now capable of taking the place of CRT.
The BVM line, of course, is still based on CRTs, but only the rarest and most perfect CRTs are used to make BVMs. Which explains why they cost upwards of $30,000. (The BVMF24U display, a 24" model used for d-cinema applications, sells for $36,000.)
What I will not grant is that any plane has ever been grounded as a result of such an action, much less crashed. Please find a counter-example.
What? What are you talking about? Nobody has ever alleged that. But that's not the point. The point is that any reasonable person can see that shining a bright light into the cockpit of a plane in mid-flight is a bad idea. That's the legal standard at play here.
This should be treated as a case of battery against the cabin crew
If the plane were on the ground, sure. ("Battery?" No. Assault.) But it wasn't. It was in mid-flight, making it attempted murder in the second degree. ("Depraved indifference to human life" in my jurisdiction.)
I'm just saying that this isn't a case of terrorism, and should not be approached in that way.
Nobody said it was. Well, except for the idiot journalists and editors who wrote things like "charged under the Patriot Act," a characterization that not only isn't true, but that couldn't possibly be true. (We don't charge people under Acts in this country. We charge them under provisions of the United States Code and of the laws of the several states. But apparently many Americans slept through government class.)
It is not a crime which compares to the sort for which people spend 25 years in prison.
Calmly and patiently carrying out an act which any reasonable person could foresee would have the potential consequence of bringing down an airplane isn't a crime for which people spend 25 years in prison?
Sounds an awful lot like attempted murder in the second degree to me.
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The reason that many in the US Armed Forces don't like Seymour Hersch
Apart from the fact that he routinely fabricates important parts of his stories, you mean? Conspiracy theories about 30-year-old grudges are all well and good, but the whole "lies a lot" bit is kind of a show-stopper, don't you think?
That story marked a seminal moment in US journalism, demonstrating the power of the media by uncovering the truth and the lies of the Viet Nam conflict.
Actually, what it did was demonstrate the power of the press to shine a really bright light on a really small spot. Was what happened at My Lai a big deal? Absolutely. It was tragic and inhuman. But was it representative of the conduct of war? Absolutely not. It was an aberration. But thanks to the news media, an entire generation of Americas --possibly including yourself, I gather from reading between the lines --grew up with the idea that My Lai was typical.
The media frenzy of My Lai, and, later, Abu Ghraib, was a case of well-intentioned people spinning completely out of control and failing to put the news in perspective. Ultimately, a great disservice was done in both cases.
Now tell me that Tommy Franks and others don't have an axe to grind.
Whether anybody has an ax to grind or not seems, to me, to kind of be beside the point. Hersch has been caught, repeatedly, reporting things that just aren't so. The most egregious example I know about was the one I cited before, where he completely made up a story about a military engagement in Afghanistan. Ironically, if he'd been less zealous, he might have gotten away with it. As it is, anybody who reads the story who actually knows how many AC-130s existed at that time will know that Hersch was just plain lying.
What somebody thinks about Hersch is, in my opinion, pretty much irrelevant. He went on record with a story that couldn't possibly have been true. He lied. It's nothing personal; that's just how it is.
My biggest regret these days is that there's no new generation of independant reporters with the skills and determination that Hersch is still showing.
My biggest regret is that there is, in fact, an entire generation of young, idealistic reporters out there who went into journalism because they wanted to change the world. It's an old saw that journalism is the first draft of history. It's a terrible disservice when somebody -- Seymour Hersch or Ted Rall, or more recently Dan Rather and Mary Mapes --sacrifices truth on the altar of their political agenda.
Someone makes wild-assed claims, backs it with weak evidence from a tainted source, and call it fact.
We're talking about Seymour Hersch again, right? He is, after all, the one who consistently goes on record with wild-assed claims that are in contradiction of documented fact, supposedly supported by "sources" that nobody else can find.
Neither is Indymedia.
Boy, did you ever get that wrong. Seymour Hersch is personally responsible for blowing the Abu Ghraib story completely out of proportion.
My favorite Seymour Hersch anecdote comes from Tommy Franks' autobiography, American Soldier. He diplomatically refrains from mentioning Hersch by name, but he refers to an author who fabricated an absurd story during the fighting in Afghanistan. The dead giveaway was the fact that the author -- Hersch --said that the military used X AC-130 Spectre gunships during a certain event, where X was a figure that was larger than the total number of AC-130s that existed in the world at the time.
Pretty funny story. He's not quite in the Robert Fisk or Jayson Blair class for self-described journalists who just make up their stories, but he's awfully close. What a huge waste of The New Yorker's money.
The betrayers went into the frozen lake. They were buried in ice proportionate to their crime.
I think you're thinking of the evil counselors, who had their own bolgia on the 8th tier.
The purpose of the Gnu Public License is to perpetuate itself. That is, it's to require people who create derivative works to license those works under the Gnu Public License. If you create a derivative work, you have zero choice about whether to release it into the public domain or not. You aren't even given the option. You are required to release it under the Gnu Public License.
...or could I? I've already seen the Gnu code. Any implementation that I create that uses the same basic algorithms or ideas would also, necessarily, be covered under the Gnu license. So that means I'm forced to clean-room the whole module, finding somebody who's never seen the Gnu code to write it for me from scratch!
Let's say I decide I want to write some software. Say I want my software to perform some function --it doesn't matter what, for purposes of discussion. Let's say that somebody's already written a module that performs that function, and rather than taking the time to write it myself, I decide I want to just incorporate that module into my program.
I then decide that I want to be altruistic and put my program in the public domain for anybody to use. Oh, wait! I can't! Because the module I used -- which, I was assured, was freely available for my use at no cost to me --was released under the Gnu Public License, I am prohibited from releasing my work into the public domain. My only choice is to perpetuate the Gnu license, possibly trapping some other poor sucker at some future date in the process. Well, okay, that's not technically the only option. I guess I could just rip out all the stuff I got under the Gnu license and re-write it from scratch
Or, of course, I could do what any reasonable person would do under those circumstances: Scrap the whole project, write off the wasted time and count myself wiser for having learned my lesson.
I have to say, your use of language is frankly frightening. You refer to "stealing community work." How can it be stolen? It's community property, available to all. That's the purpose of the public domain. Everybody has equal property rights over works that are in the public domain. By definition, they can't be stolen.
But you use language in order to create an "us versus them" mentality. Your position is extremely antagonistic. Why is that? Do you really see the world in terms of "us and them" or does framing it in those terms just suit you for other reasons?
Friend, "us versus them" is a fallacy. It's a big lie perpetrated on you by people who seek to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do. There is no "us and them." There's only us. We're all in this together.
I wish more people understood that.
To put it bluntly, if Sony doesn't make it, it's kind of a non-starter. There have always been high-resolution, high-dynamic-range cameras available, but they have had essentially no commercial use. They're used mainly by industry and government. This camera, no doubt, is in the same class.
Imagine, for example, if somebody came to you and said that there's a new still camera available, but it doesn't take any existing lenses, and that it outputs a data format that none of your software can work with via an interface that nobody supports. Interesting? Sure, as a proof-of-concept. But it wouldn't have any real commercial impact on the industry.
Feature filmmaking is moving to 1080/24p. That's going to be the standard. The 1.85:1 aperture format may hang around as slightly matted 1080/24p, or we may see a shift to HD's native 1.78:1 ratio. For widescreen productions, in the neighborhood of 2.35:1, we're either going to see matting like what Lucas used to shoot Star Wars Episode II, or the use of new anamorphic lenses that squeeze the picture slightly. While that technique has been used for years, it's been used to squeeze a 2.35:1 frame into a 1.33:1 35 mm frame. The same process will work with HD, but we have to grind new lenses to suit the different aspect ratio of the HD frame.
I've seen 4K projected in screening rooms plenty of times, in the form of a print made directly off of an effects negative. You know what? You can't see the difference between the practically-4K first-generation print and the fourth-generation print you see in the movie theater. By the time the picture makes it through the lens, through the air to the screen, off the reflective surface of the screen into your eyeballs, those extra pixels just don't count any more. You can push as much resolution through the projection booth as you want; it just doesn't matter.
What does matter, though, is dynamic range. More dynamic range is better, but dynamic range requires more storage. So the next big leap is going to be the development of either optical or magnetic media that are capable of holding an entire feature in a small space. "Small" is up for interpretation, of course, but the goal is to have a distribution medium that's cheaper to ship than film canisters. Right now we can ship a couple dozen 400 GB hard drives across the country, but they have to be so well packed that the end result is more expensive to ship than film. We need to fix that.
(Incidentally, Episode I was not shot digitally. It was shot on film, finished digitally, printed to film, then transferred back to the digital format for projection in a few theaters around the country. That means the digital transfer had just as much jitter and grain as the film prints. The only thing it didn't have were reel-change judders. Now, Episode II, on the other hand, was an all-digital production from lens to screen, if you were lucky enough to see it in a digital cinema. That was a hell of a thing.)
That was very funny the way you made your joke about pink dancing elephants. It did not, however, contribute in any meaningful way to a grown-up discussion of the issues. Maybe next time you could take a stab at being both funny and relevant at the same time, huh?
...or rather it tries to. If such a thing were ever to go before a court of law, it would be immediately struck down. Strangely, though, nobody's yet tested it. Probably because people who choose to be monomaniacal dicks and require anybody who looks at their work to agree in advance to a massive and summary abdication of their unalienable rights are best left to their own devices anyway. Who needs 'em.
Yes, BSD, as you put it, "allows taking." That's part of a really bizarre and counter-intuitive system that we call "freedom." It's a neat idea. Maybe you could google it or something to familiarize yourself with the basic premise. The GPL, on the other hand, takes the normal property rights that people would enjoy from creating new works based on old ones. It preemptively abolishes those rights
"Mostly" giving? Sorry, friend, but the seizure of private property for redistribution by the state is wrong whether it's a little or a lot.
Gifts? No. The GPL is not a gift; it's an allegedly binding contract that drastically abbreviates the rights of all recipients.
The BSD "license" is a gift. The GPL is not.
Of course, even the BSD "license" is patently unnecessary. It's just silliness designed to make people feel good about themselves. The correct term for what people usually refer to as the "BSD license" is "public domain."
Very few people (that I know of, anyway) are actually in favor of abolishing all intellectual property. Rather, most seem to advocate more moderate limits.
Let's drop this statement on the floor and see if the cat sniffs at it. Change "intellectual property" to "privacy" and see if it holds together.
Very few people (that I know of, anyway) are actually in favor of abolishing all privacy. Rather, most seem to advocate more moderate limits.
Oops. That doesn't sound right at all, does it?
Rights are rights. You can't pick and choose which ones you think are worth protecting.
Nonsense. He did no such thing. All he did was blow chaff and head for the next topic. Comparing copy protection mechanisms to totalitarianism? That's just a Chewbacca defense, plain and simple.
People like Stallman are uncomfortable with comparisons between their philosophies and communism not because they're inapt but because they're apt! Stallman stands for the abolition of private property rights, and seeks to achieve that goal by poisoning the body of work with the utterly unnecessary and deeply harmful Gnu Public License and its many variants. He wants to make it so that the protection of private property is, in fact, legally impossible; that's what motivated his little practical joke of a license agreement.
The depressing thing about Stallman isn't that he, himself, is such a loon. It's that he's managed to convince so many other people that he's sane.
I'm baffled, positively baffled, by the number of people posting here who don't know the difference between giving and taking.
Sharing: giving.
Communism: taking.
See? It's fine to give something that you have to someone else. But it's not okay to take something from someone else. Therein lies the distinction.
BSD license: giving.
GPL license: taking.
See the difference?
From your very brief self-description, it sounds like your views are neither left nor right. They are utopian, which means they lie completely outside the political spectrum.
Example: The belief in a universal, government-run, non-disastrous health-care system is tantamount to wishing that birds played frisbee or that tap water tasted like tapioca. It's wishing for the impossible. That takes the whole idea outside the realm of politics altogether and puts it in the realm of fantasy.
Likewise, since we're on the subject, the idea of a communist society that's not based on mass theft of property. It's just not possible, no more than it would be possible to have a society made up entirely of left-handed people. Can't be done. So those kinds of ideas don't belong in a discussion of politics. They belong in a fairy tale.
Being able to distinguish valid ideas that aren't compatible with your own from nonsense ideas spouted by people who aren't interested in discussing reality is a very important skill.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a utopian, mind you. Those people just aren't very interesting to talk to.
Actually, the problem with communism is that it's predicated on the idea of forcefully taking people's property from them.
I don't really care very much what your motives are; that's not okay.
As opposed ...to tens of millions ...of necessary deaths?
You must live in an interesting world.
I have to confess to being a little confused. In your first paragraph, you make explicit reference to the fact that iTunes songs can be burned to audio CD. In point of fact, Apple not only permits this, it strongly encourages this in all the Music Store instructions and whatnot.
Then, in your second paragraph, you advance a silly straw-man argument about how you might be unable to play your songs if (1) your computer crashes and (2) you are somehow mysteriously unable to reauthorize it.
I'm a little new around here, so please tell me how this works, exactly? Were you just hoping that you didn't flatly refute your second point with your first point?
Are you kidding? Have you read the complaint? It was written in crayon on the back of a Bob's Big Boy children's menu.
The idea that anybody has been forced to buy one of the most successful pieces of consumer electronics ever doesn't pass the laugh test.
It wasn't a mouse. It was an iPod mini. The patent you refer to is for the click-wheel introduced on the iPod mini and later added to the iPod. Somebody misread the patent and assumed it was a mouse, when in fact it was just an "input device."
Dear Mr. "Coward,"
I was so sorry to learn that you're having problems with your eyes. I know this must be a difficult time for you, but remember that we're living in an age of medical miracles. There's no doubt in my mind that the doctors will find a cure for your affliction soon.
You're in my prayers!
Signed,
Leo
You know, I wrote this late last night, and I really shouldn't have. I left out some important stuff.
The OpenEXR format does include support for the 32-bit float pixel type, but it's not commonly used for color. Much more common is the "half" pixel type for color: 16-bit floats. The 32-bit float format is used for other types of image data, but rarely for color.
See, if you use the "half" format, you get about 30 f-stops of dynamic range, compared to about 7 f-stops in an 8-bit integer image. (You can squeeze that to 10 or 11 stops in 10-bit integer, but that's hardly much of an improvement.) That's plenty, and you can store your images in half the space. When you're looking at more than 36 MB per 2K frame for uncompressed 32-bit float, cutting that in half is a very big deal. (Lossless wavelet and ZIP compression can give you something on the order of another 1/3rd to 1/2 of your disk space back.)
What that means is that you can apply pretty extensive color correction to an OpenEXR "half" file without introducing artifacts or getting an unacceptable level of graininess. So "half" is good enough for color work. The 32-bit float format is available when you need even more precision. Typically that's for things like alpha channels and depth mattes.
The other important thing about OpenEXR's "half" is that it's bit-for-bit compatible with the "half" data type in the Cg language, which means that OpenEXR image data in "half" format can be passed to GPUs without conversion for processing in hardware. That's important.
All of this technology is available from ILM under a BSD license, which is how Apple was able to build it in to Mac OS X Tiger. I should have made that more clear, too. "Half," or 16-bit floating-point, is a native pixel format in Tiger, and OpenEXR is a native file format, and CoreImage supports downloading files in OpenEXR format straight to the GPU along with pixel algorithms or convolution kernels for transforming them. Amazingly fast. It's basically Photoshop with 10 times the color precision implemented entirely in hardware.
Anyway, I should have made all that clear last night. Blame it on the sleepy.
Practically nothing is being done at 48-bit. Never really was. Thirty-six bit was common for a while (what people in the biz call "12-bit integer"), but it's basically gone the way of the dodo now.
Virtually all film and d-cinema work is being done in OpenEXR format now, which uses 32-bit floating-point pixels. Video work, of course, is all done in 10-bit integer. Well, not all. A surprising amount of it is still being done in 8-bit integer. But the pro stuff is practically all 10-bit.
While it's true that neither CRT nor LCD monitors can handle the complete dynamic range of 32-bit floating-point, LCD is quite a bit closer. DLP comes closest, of course, which is why it's being used in new movie theaters.
Interestingly, OpenEXR support is native in Mac OS X Tiger. That's the power of the BSD license, right there.
This is basically no longer true. As of this year's NAB, Sony will be discontinuing their PVM monitor line and is replacing it with LCD displays. For many applications, LCD is now capable of taking the place of CRT.
The BVM line, of course, is still based on CRTs, but only the rarest and most perfect CRTs are used to make BVMs. Which explains why they cost upwards of $30,000. (The BVMF24U display, a 24" model used for d-cinema applications, sells for $36,000.)
What I will not grant is that any plane has ever been grounded as a result of such an action, much less crashed. Please find a counter-example.
What? What are you talking about? Nobody has ever alleged that. But that's not the point. The point is that any reasonable person can see that shining a bright light into the cockpit of a plane in mid-flight is a bad idea. That's the legal standard at play here.
This should be treated as a case of battery against the cabin crew
If the plane were on the ground, sure. ("Battery?" No. Assault.) But it wasn't. It was in mid-flight, making it attempted murder in the second degree. ("Depraved indifference to human life" in my jurisdiction.)
I'm just saying that this isn't a case of terrorism, and should not be approached in that way.
Nobody said it was. Well, except for the idiot journalists and editors who wrote things like "charged under the Patriot Act," a characterization that not only isn't true, but that couldn't possibly be true. (We don't charge people under Acts in this country. We charge them under provisions of the United States Code and of the laws of the several states. But apparently many Americans slept through government class.)
It is not a crime which compares to the sort for which people spend 25 years in prison.
Calmly and patiently carrying out an act which any reasonable person could foresee would have the potential consequence of bringing down an airplane isn't a crime for which people spend 25 years in prison?
Sounds an awful lot like attempted murder in the second degree to me.
Hear hear.
Best comment I've seen since I started reading this site.