TL;DR version of the below - There isn't a bad or good thing. It's a question of are the governments of this planet ready to spend the required money to get us ready for a planet with global warming? The answer is "no". Therefore, I question if global warming is truly something we actually want.
I question why is that a bad thing?
You shouldn't question things as bad or good. What you should ask is "are the consequences ones we as a species wish to deal with down the road?" Ultimately, global warming includes things that will make some things that we currently value more expensive or require more effort to continue to have them. Coffee is my usual go to answer. As the climate in the coffee belt continues to change, the ability for coffee to adapt to the change becomes less and less, since coffee requires a pretty stable environment to grow at the yields we currently enjoy. Because the environment is changing it becomes less favorable for coffee and more favorable for different plant species, some that we can use as a food stuff, but many that we cannot. But the point remains, we will have less coffee which in turn will drive the price up. So while we may currently enjoy a can of coffee at $9.99 today, we may be in a world in thirty years where that price has increased dramatically. That does not mean that we have zero coffee, but it does mean we as a species will be drinking a lot less coffee. There are those who say, oh well we can just grow it further north/south from the equator. And the problem with that is a lot of plants have specific sunlight requirements. The further you move away from the equator, the fewer hours of sunlight you get. So even if Canada had the temperature and rainfall to support coffee, it would never have the sunlight requirement to grow it at any yield close to what can be grown at the equator. And so we'd still have coffee, just a lot less of it. Again, is that something we're ready to pay for? And that's just a simple example.
Use of fossil fuels lets developing countries develop much faster so that by the time say Bangladesh needs flood defenses of the type Netherlands has , it can afford them
And that's not untrue, the question to ask is that ultimately what do you want to spend your money on? We could put up a flood wall around the entire coastal border of the US and not have to worry about Florida, the question is, is that what we want to spend our money on? Would it be cheaper to go some other route? Would we get more bang for our buck not having to erect flood protection for thousands of miles of the US and perhaps spend it on something else? Would it just be cheaper to move everyone inland? Lot's of if and no one really has good answers to any of them. More importantly, no one is even preparing for any of them. We do know what will happen, but pretty much a lot of folks have just taken a "meh" approach to prepare for those things we know will happen. I mean, if we know that Florida is going to be underwater, why are people still moving there and building massive buildings that will become major losses?
Not to mention a warmer world means more rains, a greener Sahara, less drought prone India and a greened Australian desert.
Sort of. A greener Sahara doesn't mean a more useful Sahara. Plants don't adapt very quickly without a lot of intervention via GMO or selective breeding and there isn't a whole lot of plants well suited for the conditions that a green Sahara would bring. Perhaps we might be able to engineer a few after spending billions of dollars on researching that, but then that goes back to the question of, "Is that something we want to spend money on?" We might be able to grow things in a greener Sahara within the confines of a greenhouse, but again that begs the question, "Is that something we want to spend money on?" And again, more importantly, if that's something we're totally okay with, then why aren't we devoting resourc
I have to assume it's because everyone working on the HTML5 stuff is too young to have learned anything from the first time around
Wow that's incredibly naive. The people who wrote HTML 5 spec are keenly aware of the first time around. Pretty much anything Web is made for commercialization. If people solely wanted information distribution, we would have implemented a copyleft version of something like Gopher. While Tim Berners-Lee may have originally made the web in the pursuit of wide distribution of information, those who have been entrusted to steer the W3 since mid 1990s have had a single goal in mind. How do we write a commercial friendly spec?
Case in point, notifications. The spec and API for notifications once upon a time was called as such from JS.
Now just go look at the Notifications spec here. If you look at how it goes, you'll see pretty much the Notification API in the HTML spec is just the Webkit Notification API with "webkit" removed as the prefix for each method. That's not a mistake, Google pretty much wrote the HTML spec for Notifications. I mean shit, if you roll down to the bottom there in the "Acknowledgements" most of the names there are Google engineers. And you'll see that a lot on a lot of HTML5's different technical specs. HTML 5 was written to make Google and Apple better at what they want to serve to you. Shit, just look up what internally happened in W3 when XHTML 2 was being tossed around. You don't write a spec that no one will use and no one will use a spec if money is not to be found there or the legacy isn't completely entrenched.
The people steering the W3 now are writing a sepc that's specifically tailored to the services that they want to serve. So yeah, they looked back at how once upon a time annoying notifications were shoved into people's faces and learned how to create a spec that makes it difficult to filter out trash from notifications all the while attempting to prevent client options for wide scale ignoring notifications and remaining in spec. That's the key here, Firefox is free to implement whatever the fuck they want to combat notification spam, but that is constrained by the fact they'd like to keep a "standards compliant" browser.
Standards committees aren't altruistic entities, they're there to create a standard that will be used first. With fair to all somewhere long after the other goals. If the majority of folks implementing a spec are doing so for a profit or to drive a service that will net them profit, then the spec becomes profit driven. That's how every standards committee since formal standards outside the world of academia (and even then that doesn't make it immune, see the U and Gopher protocol) works. The web and the standards committee driving it are doing so at the behest of those who want to use a standards compliant client to drive profit. Hells bells, some of the voting members just let the private companies write the spec and then they just go vote yes for whatever they were handed. Thinking the web or W3 or anyone else is doing something different is ignoring reality for idealism. It is time for those who think the web is for something outside the world of profit to finally accept that the web exists only for profit and all other perceived functions are merely riding the coattails here or said person is conflating the terms Internet and Web.
On a macintosh or a linux machine, I can type gcc my_program.c -o my_program and I'm done
I myself being a person who favors Unix can definitely attest to how much I like how easy simple things can be done on these systems. That said, if compiling a single C file is what you're attempting to do, Visual Studio is absolutely not the correct tool for you. Microsoft's Visual Studio is a tool that is refined to develop Microsoft style development on Microsoft stacks. It works okay for other styles and stack, but this IDE is finely crafted, honed, and a juggernaut in sheer power for development in Microsoft land. If Microsoft isn't your bread and butter, yeah, you'll find better tools out there by the dozens. But if your shop is eyebrows deep in Mircosoft, there's few things that compare to this IDE.
Get the right tool for what you need always. VS is tool that shines best for a select number of use cases that all in one way or another favor Microsoft's thinking for development and their stack of development/deployment. Don't fool yourself into thinking that there is any one single tool that rules them all and does everything the absolutely best way possible.
it's a reminder that the machine is still a *lot* dumber than a human
Depends on the classification of dumb. We've all seen massively paradoxical things being done by drivers who were confused by the lane markings. Hell, rubbernecking leads to more crashes as attention is drawn off the road and onto the accident meaning the drive may not see the car in front of them slamming on the brakes. So really depending on how one defines "fooling the driver" one could easily say humans are just as easily fooled by things. The massive difference here is that while evolution of our brain's capacity happens on large time scales, a computer's function can increase drastically within the span of twenty-four months. Additionally, once one system is taught how not to be fooled, all systems learn in immediate fashion how also not to be fooled. Humans, however, have been told to not rubberneck time and time again and yet here we are.
Because it's part of a wider and very worrying trend of tech companies deciding to expunge people from the record
Oh buddy do I have news for you. None of this is new. Like not even this century new. Companies just vanishing you from all code is pretty par at least since I've been programming (~ late 70s).
wrongthink
Have you read some of his tweets? I mean it's not really important, but have you read some of his tweets? I could maybe understand if he's apologetic about some of them, but nah, he seems totally fine with some choice racial slurs. That being said, he's totally free to say what he wants but Microsoft is free to do whatever they want with the code they bought from him for ~$1B. Do remember he sold his company lock, stock, and barrel to Microsoft so, I think that kind of entitles them to vanish his ass if they so wish it. I think they were leaving it in just to be nice, but ya know, push come to shove. Either way, dude got his money and ran. Now he's on Twitter whining about "injustice". Maybe he's making a pitch to be noticed again? Maybe not. I won't pretend to know what his motives are or if he's truly lost his ever loving mind from all the money (because he does bring up the fact that he's a billionaire quite often on Twitter). It's Microsoft's code, Notch can kick rocks and go say whatever he wants to say. Microsoft still gets to do whatever they want with their code. That's what it means when you completely sell out.
I only wanted to correct the mistaken statement that additional action is required by an author to get copyright protection for a work that is eligible for protection.
To which I am happy to have been corrected, might I add.
Your correction is incorrect, at least in the United States
You are correct on this. That is Trademark that requires legal defense and Copyright requires overt act to release to public domain.
That said, in the United States, I believe the majority of what I said still applies. Modern APIs are more explicit about the licensing requirements for the API and GPL et al convey an open agreement for the APIs. Additionally, Copyright in the US permits fair use as well. While I wouldn't want to attempt playing within that domain, new projects convey fair derivative use of APIs be it in explicit terms for non-standard licenses or in some of the more commons ones we've come to know. Additionally, I think people are more aware of APIs usage today than they once were.
Again, the biggest problem I see with copyrighted APIs is prior projects that implemented "fuzzy" in legal terms APIs. So that being said, I don't see copyrighted APIs as a hindrance for future open source projects. However, I will reaffirm that my preference here is APIs not being a copyrighted thing.
they don't like the government telling them what to do
I think the generic response to that is then to figure out how one by the rule of the law changes the government that is attempting to force something down their throat. There's several things I don't agree with the government's position. That said, that does not grant me unilateral power to just simply ignore what the law says in the meantime.
More specifically the anti-vaccination argument really fails here as it is a matter of public safety. The government ought o be able to enforce things that attempt to prevent needless pain/suffering/death. Seeing the argument as simply, "the government is simply telling you what to do" ignores all of the public safety concerns.
Typically when folks bring up that argument though there's the inevitable "well who gets to decide that?" argument that comes up to which see my first point there. If the government mandates that I have to start drinking soda, well then I'm pretty sure that people can rise up to that and push back to enact change in that or elect people who's platform would undo such regulations. And people will rise up to debate the case should the persuasion to logically do so is there. And that rings back to my second point. While there is definitely those who would persuade to a world of non-regulated vaccination, their arguments typically fail on some massive point. I would say then, that if you can address the massive public safety concern of having massive groups of unvaccinated children successfully, then you might have something to further that agenda, until then the argument's persuasion will fall deaf on enough people to continue to have an enforced vaccination schedule.
f your answer to any of those is no, then why should the government be able to force you to put anything into your body, including vaccinations?
I hope you understand how this generalization is a logical fallacy. The details of those things cannot be successfully debated on the single point provided as the items listed have more complexities that need to be enumerated in order for a meaningful debate to actually happen.
Just let people do what they want and stop being so controlling
Again, you should watch out your generalizations here. There's lots of people who'd like to murder without impunity. Such a statement includes them.
Minor correction, can be copyrighted. Not every API that comes into existence automatically becomes copyrighted unless the author says so and even then if they only enforce it.
I don't agree with the idea that APIs can be copyrighted, but, what I do and don't agree to means nothing in the legal system. That said, I don't see this as something that kills open source software. Not giving something a legal definition leaves it in murky waters. With APIs being something that can be copyrighted, it's easy for projects to require the APIs be copyleft/GPL/BSD/etc. Copyrighted APIs become an issue for people who've done projects with APIs with less than clear legal language, which was the case since APIs were pretty much just assumed to public domain/just how things work. And trust me I would love to see APIs having that legal distinction, but they don't and you work with the reality your handed.
A lot of the modern APIs in major use today are already open sourced and apply either a copyleft/GPL/BSD requirement to the licensing of the API. Hell, even Java today is GPL API via the OpenJDK. And OpenJDK's special exception that was irrevocably granted by Sun before they gave up Java, is how Google to this day keeps Android alive. Google was once upon a time not down with going GPL and wanted to use Apache License. Which you cannot convert simply relicense a GPL project to Apache License project, which was the entire argument that Oracle made in court against Google.
I don't like the notion of copyrighted APIs anymore than the next person, but I do see that APIs being copyrighted isn't the death knell for future projects. But I totally see it as a submarine issue for projects from the past. Much like how patent submarines were once used before a change in the patent law.
Democrats blew the best opportunity we've ever had to get constructive NN passed.
Let me just stop you right there and let you know that there's a lot of Republicans who are fine with letting NN die a horrible death if that means their person gets another term to "protect the babies". I live in the deep south and on a list of top 50 things folks are concerned about, NN ranks about 246,789,122nd place. The moment people became so focused on single topic issues, was the moment voting records started to mean nothing. So literally Republicans are zero percent phased by this going on the record because their voters don't care. To them there are way more important topics to focus on. You either have to convince people that NN actually matters (good luck) or you need to get them unstuck from voting for a party for a single particular reason (yeah, better odds with the lotto).
Democrats blew the best opportunity we've ever had to get constructive NN passed.
Oh sweetheart, it's been a concerted effort on both sides. Democrats understand that a clean rewrite would suck resources their staffer can't provide and lobbyist won't pay for. Republicans ensured that independent consultation won't happen this lifetime. And do you think the FCC is willing to testify in commitee on this topic honestly? So unless come 2020 we elect bona fide IT folk into Congress (and I highly don't recommend that), a clean rewrite won't happen.
New legislation doesn't happen on timescales of less than a decade without some sort of outside of Congress input that's paid to specialize within the topic's domain. So we sure can do it the committee way and have something fresh and new to replace dated Title II, oh by 2028-ish. However, critters in Congress have reelections that happen on shorter than that timescales. So, I guess we're stuck for the time being with shit Title II or nothing. But let's not forget that Congress has acted in a unified matter to increase the level of nothingness they do on a daily basis.
But it's true, I'd rather crash as a consequence of my own fuckup
Well at least you see that, but it is important that a death can happen as a consequence of someone else's fuck up. The thing to remember is this...
than as a consequence of some programmer making an off-by-one error
When the error the programmer made is fixed, everyone learns it. When you fix something that you're fucking up, only you learn it. The nature of information transmission in humans is incredibly slow, error prone, and wildly inefficient/inconsistently efficient. You can learn something and try to teach someone else not to make the same fuck up, only to have that person plow into you at an intersection. Only after the fact might they get where they fucked up and see the light in your words of wisdom. The nature of information transmission in machines is such, a machine might have an off-by-one error and kill someone, but every machine thereafter irrevocably learns the lesson and integrates it in almost immediate fashion.
As long as you understand the difference in evolution and information transmission in humans versus machines, what your "feels" are for not wanting to be in a fully automated vehicle are totally and validly yours to have. However, it is important to remember that, that opinion is one based in emotion. That's mostly what I'm trying to get at here and it seems you've picked up on that.
It doesn't matter how safe they are if we have no control over them
Yes it does matter, that's the entire point of risk-cost analysis.
You are trusting your life, no matter how safe, to a black box you have no idea how it works
That doesn't even make sense. If a black box is 98% safe versus human counterpart that is 83%. The black box is still mathematically safer. You having control over it or not doesn't change that percentage. It just gives you a personal satisfaction which means nothing if the rate is still only 83%. And that's the entire point here. People are arguing the "you don't have control over it" because they're thinking, "Oh I'll be safer" but the reality is they are arguing "I'll feel better." So it's important to not confuse "I'll be safer" with "I'll feel better."
It doesn't matter if they would theoretically be safer, we don't want to give up control for that safety
Correction, you don't. And that's fine, but it does matter if something is safer, especially in the longer run here. Eventually all the people who currently have hesitations about it will in the long term be dead and those who grow up in a world knowing nothing but an automated world will think nothing of it. So long term, this point here is a nothing burger. Society doesn't make long term bets on how any one group "feels", they base it on numbers and facts. So "Reals over feels" brother.
Do you really want to subject yourself to that possibility? Do you want to subject your FAMILY to that possibilty?
Yeah, because the odds of that happening are minimal. Like if an airplane is falling out of the sky, there's nothing I can do about it. However, the odds of a plane falling out of the air is slim. The big argument I've heard so far about why "no" to automated cars is pretty much, "Because on the rare chance that you do get into a wreck, there's nothing you can do." Which I can say just the same for air travel, vaccines, and anything else where there is a incredibly small chance that everything could go horrifically wrong, but the odds of that happening are incredibly long.
there won't be 'fewer deaths'
Which is outright incorrect because of the advances we've already made to assisted driving/anti-lock brakes/airbags/etc, driving is statistically safer than what it once was with none of those. Same thing with air travel. The automation that has happened in air travel has made air travel more safer than when it lack all of those things. It stands to reason that as we automate things, they become more safer. There's lots of data points that point in that direction. It's not media or industry hype, it's actual numbers you can point at.
Again, you're attempting to appeal on an emotional level to justify a position, but that's exactly the same kind of stuff that anti-vaxxers use. Appeal to emotion rather than numbers and logic. Simply put, I'm not getting into a debate that's not based on fact.
Nearly all of the advances that could improve automated also apply to assisted driving
Not so, but depends on where your line is here. Level 1 and level 2 automated driving I would say, yeah, you've got a point. But Level 3 and 4 however, I would argue that it would be hard to add things from level 4 and some things from level 3 and still call it assisted driving, but things like assisted driving is just a not so well defined label, I guess I could just simply say, depends...
Fully automated will always be less safe.
That literally makes no sense. A level 5 vehicle which requires zero people inside of it, crashing and only destroying itself is technically 100% more safer than anything else because it literally has zero people involved. So apply that to a simple drive I can cite that recently happened in my neck of the woods. Person wanted to go to Kroger to pick up a few things. Picks up a few things, gets a phone call, while reaching for phone forgets about round-about, car crashes and bursts into flames. Driver only suffered minor injuries and of course property damage. Compare that to, Kroger finally starts their fully automated delivery service, instead person just pulls out their phone, orders it, and a few minutes later Kroger's automated vehicle crashes into the round-about. There's literally no one to suffer minor injuries in that all things considered the same. So technically, that's not a true statement. All things the same for anything you can think up, a "fully automated" system is always going to be safer, because a "fully automated" system doesn't require people to be involved in the first place.
But fewer people will die of it, that's the point. Fewer.
Has to be equivalent to a human mind. No compromises
How about no. I'm tired of humans rubber necking and rear ending into cars making things worse. I hardly need a machine to do all of that.
False equivalency.
I don't see it as such. Anti-vaxxers literally focus down on the dozen of deaths from vaccines as reason to not have them in spite of the millions of people who literally have zero happen to them other than they become inoculated to a fully preventable disease, which anti-vaxxers additionally use the argument that you can never be "fully" inoculated, that there will always be some 1% or 0.01% chance that you can get the disease, etc... Self driving cars wouldn't make deaths in cars 0%, there will always be some non-zero number of deaths, but those deaths would be less than a non automated environment. So I don't see it as a false equivalency when you focus down on what would be a small number and ignore that automated cars would prevent things like distracted driving. Perhaps that's just me.
Cost cutting that has cost hundreds of lives in less than a year
Yeah, but you're still focusing down on these two events that killed 347 people. All the while millions of people fly with no problem. That's what I'm getting at here and you just proved my point by doubling down on it as some argument. In 2017 around 4 billion people on this planet flew in a plane and here you are talking about cutting corners that killed 347 people. On average, without cutting corners required, human driven cars here in the US killed that many between when I left work on Friday to when I jump into rush hour traffic on Monday morning. You have to understand when you come with...
Cost cutting that has cost hundreds of lives in less than a year
That's the same as those anti-vaxxers who sit there and cite that allergic reactions to vaccines killed however many dozens it might have killed last year. They're focusing on the dozens who died versus the millions who've literally had zero happen to them. It's not about autism, it's about focusing on one number to spite the other, even though the other clearly shows that these one off events that might have been caused by cutting corners are rare.
and could have cost hundreds more if the planes hadn't been grounded around the workd, forcing Boeing to start addressing the problem
First, could of, would of, should of. Please don't attempt to make an argument by attempting to extrapolate on things that clearly didn't happen. Planes got grounded, "it could have been worse" is a really shitty thing to attempt in reasonable debate. Yes, everything could have been worse, thank you for understanding existence. Second, the maker is being held accountable. When's the last time you could hold Samsung accountable because someone rear ended you while they were on Instagram? I rest my case.
That said, fact remains that Boeing makes planes that fly millions of miles without a crash. I thought here on Slashdot we were trying to rise above the media hype?
because people can think "I don't drive drunk, but it looks like the AI could, I want my manual car back"
Yeah and people think that vaccines are bad. There's always going to be that group of people who look at one event and use that as evidence that something is bad in spite of the volumes of evidence otherwise. Who knew we lived in such a world?!
Since we trust software so much
Software not so much, but there is a profit motive to ensure that say an automated Semi deliver it's load correctly. Online voting might hurt the public at large if hacked, but wouldn't exactly hurt any particular companies' bottom line, heck look at Equifax hack as an example of that. I trust that the profit motive in getting automated vehicles right is vastly higher than getting an online voting system right.
I shudder to think how many people are going to have to die in utter terror before everyone else understands this
The thing to remember isn't that the goal is zero deaths. The goal is less than what we currently have deaths. You will never have a zero death anything on "open" anything, full stop. So the number of people who die in fully automated cars is always going to be a non-zero number, thinking that it will ever be anything other than that is just not accepting reality. However, in a fully automated environment, we will have a number of deaths that is less than the non-automated environment.
Perhaps, it can demonstrate that compromise and practicality are sometimes necessary in a functioning society
RMS is the extreme end in FOSS and pretty much you can always attribute anything, and from the eight or so times I've been to one of his talks,/everything he says as being the furthest end of the spectrum.
Rigidity to an ideology can often be more destructive and counter-productive over the long run
RMS is definitely one of those folks you take in small doses. He's got a good point in general that is worth thinking about. The cross section between everyday life and computers is pretty big and gets bigger by the day. For example, cars are becoming more and more computerized. Imagine how liberating it would be if the firmware of your car was open source? You'd have a lot less people getting on Slashdot being cantankerous about these fancy-pants cars they can't repair... However, I get that we're always going to have some close and that it's one of those "struggle for the ages" kind of thing where we're just always going to have to work towards "full libre" systems for life. But of course, that gets lost listening to RMS who's pretty much, "It won't happen till we burn every close system to the ground."
Progress comes from change not stasis
Yeah. And the majority of us understand that. I think we ought to continue to strive to completely open systems, but I get that we're not getting there overnight.
You can also capture the data stream straight from the video buffer
Okay I'm going to ignore a lot of things here. One, TPM. Two, actual quality of playback. Three, that we're skipping capture cards (besides there isn't a 4K capture card at the moment). Okay so that said, reading memory is not a zero time operation. It requires some non-zero value of time to read memory. So that said, you are going to be reading a buffer that's always refilling with new data. That's going to give you timing issues that, unless you've got control of the flow into the buffer, is going to give you artifacts within your copy. Now if you do have control of flow going into the buffer, then just decrypt the original file and be done. There's no need to go through extra hoops here.
Every frame has to pass a video card or be converted pixel-perfect onto an LCD/LED array
No, that's not how it works. This is a digital interface, there are two protocols that are spoken on the wire between your video card and the actual output device. TMDS and DDC. Within TMDS there are three packet types VDP, DIP, and VC, DDC which actually has the data that you're wanting is usually within a TMDS/VDP packet. A DDC packet can contain sRGB or some other agreed upon color space between the card and the output device. However, those packets aren't guaranteed to be in scanline ordering. It's whatever the video card and output device agree upon, which means that you need to be able to follow along with all of the commands that are sent in between all of the actual video data. Thinking of modern video as being passed as "frame-by-frame" is a pretty dated concept that's still done in older video cards and monitors granted, but pretty much every 4K output device is a simplified networked computer talking in a peer-to-peer network, of which there are only two peers; your video card and the output device itself.
If the underlying data is HDCP encrypted, the DDC payload is literally HDCP encrypted color space values. Those values are stored in the output device's memory encrypted. The decryption happens within the main processor, the actual pixel-by-pixel data is then sent to a output staging area within the processor, the staging area will then adjust the actual values with values that are appropriate for the substance that your output device is made of, plus will toss in things like smoothing, contrast fixes, if the underlying substance has issues with changing from color-A to color-B quickly a smearing of the two colors between frames, and so on. There's a lot of actual processing on the pixel-by-pixel data within the processor before it ever emerges from the chip onto the actual substance that makes up your display. Not only that, the processor has a specific way it will signal to the underlying substance and all of that can be super subtle, you can have a go-red/go-blue current that differs by maybe a microamp, but only does that when the last refresh had go-higreen there as the green element's charge might not have completely dissipated. It's really tricky and if you aren't in the know about the absolute specifics of the underlying substance, you can easily spend years trying to reverse engineer it. And even then, you aren't getting a pixel-by-pixel read of the data, you're just getting a read of the data as it was interpreted by the processor within the output device.
With the right electronics and a cheap ASIC you could do a perfect digital capture
I'm going to assume you meant FPGA, because there isn't an ASIC that does capture at 4K currently, and if/when it does come out, it sure won't be cheap at first. I've built a lot of thing using TTL chips and the number one hardest thing I've ever built with off shelf chips is a VGA (not even SVGA) video output and even then it was driving data from an EEPROM. Doing video is difficult because there's a lot of timing that goes behind it and shy of just d
Of course, somewhere, at some point, it must be decrypted for transport to the actual pixel device
That's done within the central processor of the display. If you ever look at the memory within a 4K display, they are exactly the DDC packets as transmitted be it HDCP encrypted or not. By the time the data leaves the processor, it's already in a format that only makes sense to the display array. Actual color space data like YCBCR is never transmitted on the traces and is always handled within the chip. That actual representation, pixel by pixel, never sees life outside the display's processor, unless it was originally transmitted that way.
Technically, you could sit there and read the grid array signal and work backwards from there to attempt to understand the timing and what not, but I do want to mention that the data sent to the actual pixels are not a pixel by pixel read of the data, but instead a rough interpretation of that pixel-by-pixel data based on what the processor thinks the actual substance that makes up the display can handle. If the stuff your display is made out of can't handle a pixel going from color A to color B in a reasonable amount of time, the processor just glosses over that by sending a somewhat color A first, somewhat color B next, but somewhat mixture of the two for both frames. So even then you aren't getting a pixel-by-pixel read, just what the processor thinks the underlying substance can handle.
The law these days has become nothing but an automatically guilty upon accusation without due process cliche.
Well this speaks volumes about how little most law makers understand technology and how a lot of law has on purpose become obtuse so that the courts may refine it at a later time, which for technology this is the intended consequence since, well see first point. Since the turn of 20th century, lawmakers have become increasingly less incline to produce focused law and rather make law that applies broadly and allow courts to refine as need be. We clearly aren't going to be leaving a legislative process that's almost 100 years old.
That said, better educated within the domain at hand topic lawmakers typically produce bills that are less likely to produce law that ends in litigation for refinement. We need to have lawmakers that are keenly aware of the topic to which they are crafting bills for. There are three schools of thought for this (more, but generally speaking in the US these three are the more predominate).
One, have the lawmaker elected on the knowledge they've acquired before entering into the law making process. IE, have someone who understands technology actually write law for technology.
Two, have a department that advises law makers on a non-partisan level of technology (or whatever the topic is) and have those people on government payroll to prevent bias. IE, CBO like departments.
Three, have independent commercial contractors who come in and advise the lawmakers. IE, lobbyist.
Now each one has pros and cons, and I would argue that we need a healthy mix of all three (though we could split hairs on where that healthy mix is). However, around the end of the 1800s we started gearing into a system mostly ran by the final third option and a general public who feel that we should hyper-shift into the first of the three options. That's kind of resulted in this system we've got now where lawmakers grandstand on issues to appear knowledgeable, but mostly are reiterating what a lobbyist is telling them. They want to appeal to the base as understanding their woes but have no freaking clue what the series of words they're blithering on about mean.
Slashdot Mirror
TL;DR version of the below - There isn't a bad or good thing. It's a question of are the governments of this planet ready to spend the required money to get us ready for a planet with global warming? The answer is "no". Therefore, I question if global warming is truly something we actually want.
I question why is that a bad thing?
You shouldn't question things as bad or good. What you should ask is "are the consequences ones we as a species wish to deal with down the road?" Ultimately, global warming includes things that will make some things that we currently value more expensive or require more effort to continue to have them. Coffee is my usual go to answer. As the climate in the coffee belt continues to change, the ability for coffee to adapt to the change becomes less and less, since coffee requires a pretty stable environment to grow at the yields we currently enjoy. Because the environment is changing it becomes less favorable for coffee and more favorable for different plant species, some that we can use as a food stuff, but many that we cannot. But the point remains, we will have less coffee which in turn will drive the price up. So while we may currently enjoy a can of coffee at $9.99 today, we may be in a world in thirty years where that price has increased dramatically. That does not mean that we have zero coffee, but it does mean we as a species will be drinking a lot less coffee. There are those who say, oh well we can just grow it further north/south from the equator. And the problem with that is a lot of plants have specific sunlight requirements. The further you move away from the equator, the fewer hours of sunlight you get. So even if Canada had the temperature and rainfall to support coffee, it would never have the sunlight requirement to grow it at any yield close to what can be grown at the equator. And so we'd still have coffee, just a lot less of it. Again, is that something we're ready to pay for? And that's just a simple example.
Use of fossil fuels lets developing countries develop much faster so that by the time say Bangladesh needs flood defenses of the type Netherlands has , it can afford them
And that's not untrue, the question to ask is that ultimately what do you want to spend your money on? We could put up a flood wall around the entire coastal border of the US and not have to worry about Florida, the question is, is that what we want to spend our money on? Would it be cheaper to go some other route? Would we get more bang for our buck not having to erect flood protection for thousands of miles of the US and perhaps spend it on something else? Would it just be cheaper to move everyone inland? Lot's of if and no one really has good answers to any of them. More importantly, no one is even preparing for any of them. We do know what will happen, but pretty much a lot of folks have just taken a "meh" approach to prepare for those things we know will happen. I mean, if we know that Florida is going to be underwater, why are people still moving there and building massive buildings that will become major losses?
Not to mention a warmer world means more rains, a greener Sahara, less drought prone India and a greened Australian desert.
Sort of. A greener Sahara doesn't mean a more useful Sahara. Plants don't adapt very quickly without a lot of intervention via GMO or selective breeding and there isn't a whole lot of plants well suited for the conditions that a green Sahara would bring. Perhaps we might be able to engineer a few after spending billions of dollars on researching that, but then that goes back to the question of, "Is that something we want to spend money on?" We might be able to grow things in a greener Sahara within the confines of a greenhouse, but again that begs the question, "Is that something we want to spend money on?" And again, more importantly, if that's something we're totally okay with, then why aren't we devoting resourc
I have to assume it's because everyone working on the HTML5 stuff is too young to have learned anything from the first time around
Wow that's incredibly naive. The people who wrote HTML 5 spec are keenly aware of the first time around. Pretty much anything Web is made for commercialization. If people solely wanted information distribution, we would have implemented a copyleft version of something like Gopher. While Tim Berners-Lee may have originally made the web in the pursuit of wide distribution of information, those who have been entrusted to steer the W3 since mid 1990s have had a single goal in mind. How do we write a commercial friendly spec?
Case in point, notifications. The spec and API for notifications once upon a time was called as such from JS.
{ window.webkitNotifications.createNotification('icon.png', 'Notification Title', 'Notification content...'); } else { window.webkitNotifications.requestPermission(); } } //dot dot dot
Now just go look at the Notifications spec here. If you look at how it goes, you'll see pretty much the Notification API in the HTML spec is just the Webkit Notification API with "webkit" removed as the prefix for each method. That's not a mistake, Google pretty much wrote the HTML spec for Notifications. I mean shit, if you roll down to the bottom there in the "Acknowledgements" most of the names there are Google engineers. And you'll see that a lot on a lot of HTML5's different technical specs. HTML 5 was written to make Google and Apple better at what they want to serve to you. Shit, just look up what internally happened in W3 when XHTML 2 was being tossed around. You don't write a spec that no one will use and no one will use a spec if money is not to be found there or the legacy isn't completely entrenched.
The people steering the W3 now are writing a sepc that's specifically tailored to the services that they want to serve. So yeah, they looked back at how once upon a time annoying notifications were shoved into people's faces and learned how to create a spec that makes it difficult to filter out trash from notifications all the while attempting to prevent client options for wide scale ignoring notifications and remaining in spec. That's the key here, Firefox is free to implement whatever the fuck they want to combat notification spam, but that is constrained by the fact they'd like to keep a "standards compliant" browser.
Standards committees aren't altruistic entities, they're there to create a standard that will be used first. With fair to all somewhere long after the other goals. If the majority of folks implementing a spec are doing so for a profit or to drive a service that will net them profit, then the spec becomes profit driven. That's how every standards committee since formal standards outside the world of academia (and even then that doesn't make it immune, see the U and Gopher protocol) works. The web and the standards committee driving it are doing so at the behest of those who want to use a standards compliant client to drive profit. Hells bells, some of the voting members just let the private companies write the spec and then they just go vote yes for whatever they were handed. Thinking the web or W3 or anyone else is doing something different is ignoring reality for idealism. It is time for those who think the web is for something outside the world of profit to finally accept that the web exists only for profit and all other perceived functions are merely riding the coattails here or said person is conflating the terms Internet and Web.
On a macintosh or a linux machine, I can type gcc my_program.c -o my_program and I'm done
I myself being a person who favors Unix can definitely attest to how much I like how easy simple things can be done on these systems. That said, if compiling a single C file is what you're attempting to do, Visual Studio is absolutely not the correct tool for you. Microsoft's Visual Studio is a tool that is refined to develop Microsoft style development on Microsoft stacks. It works okay for other styles and stack, but this IDE is finely crafted, honed, and a juggernaut in sheer power for development in Microsoft land. If Microsoft isn't your bread and butter, yeah, you'll find better tools out there by the dozens. But if your shop is eyebrows deep in Mircosoft, there's few things that compare to this IDE.
Get the right tool for what you need always. VS is tool that shines best for a select number of use cases that all in one way or another favor Microsoft's thinking for development and their stack of development/deployment. Don't fool yourself into thinking that there is any one single tool that rules them all and does everything the absolutely best way possible.
it's a reminder that the machine is still a *lot* dumber than a human
Depends on the classification of dumb. We've all seen massively paradoxical things being done by drivers who were confused by the lane markings. Hell, rubbernecking leads to more crashes as attention is drawn off the road and onto the accident meaning the drive may not see the car in front of them slamming on the brakes. So really depending on how one defines "fooling the driver" one could easily say humans are just as easily fooled by things. The massive difference here is that while evolution of our brain's capacity happens on large time scales, a computer's function can increase drastically within the span of twenty-four months. Additionally, once one system is taught how not to be fooled, all systems learn in immediate fashion how also not to be fooled. Humans, however, have been told to not rubberneck time and time again and yet here we are.
Because it's part of a wider and very worrying trend of tech companies deciding to expunge people from the record
Oh buddy do I have news for you. None of this is new. Like not even this century new. Companies just vanishing you from all code is pretty par at least since I've been programming (~ late 70s).
wrongthink
Have you read some of his tweets? I mean it's not really important, but have you read some of his tweets? I could maybe understand if he's apologetic about some of them, but nah, he seems totally fine with some choice racial slurs. That being said, he's totally free to say what he wants but Microsoft is free to do whatever they want with the code they bought from him for ~$1B. Do remember he sold his company lock, stock, and barrel to Microsoft so, I think that kind of entitles them to vanish his ass if they so wish it. I think they were leaving it in just to be nice, but ya know, push come to shove. Either way, dude got his money and ran. Now he's on Twitter whining about "injustice". Maybe he's making a pitch to be noticed again? Maybe not. I won't pretend to know what his motives are or if he's truly lost his ever loving mind from all the money (because he does bring up the fact that he's a billionaire quite often on Twitter). It's Microsoft's code, Notch can kick rocks and go say whatever he wants to say. Microsoft still gets to do whatever they want with their code. That's what it means when you completely sell out.
I only wanted to correct the mistaken statement that additional action is required by an author to get copyright protection for a work that is eligible for protection.
To which I am happy to have been corrected, might I add.
Your correction is incorrect, at least in the United States
You are correct on this. That is Trademark that requires legal defense and Copyright requires overt act to release to public domain.
That said, in the United States, I believe the majority of what I said still applies. Modern APIs are more explicit about the licensing requirements for the API and GPL et al convey an open agreement for the APIs. Additionally, Copyright in the US permits fair use as well. While I wouldn't want to attempt playing within that domain, new projects convey fair derivative use of APIs be it in explicit terms for non-standard licenses or in some of the more commons ones we've come to know. Additionally, I think people are more aware of APIs usage today than they once were.
Again, the biggest problem I see with copyrighted APIs is prior projects that implemented "fuzzy" in legal terms APIs. So that being said, I don't see copyrighted APIs as a hindrance for future open source projects. However, I will reaffirm that my preference here is APIs not being a copyrighted thing.
they don't like the government telling them what to do
I think the generic response to that is then to figure out how one by the rule of the law changes the government that is attempting to force something down their throat. There's several things I don't agree with the government's position. That said, that does not grant me unilateral power to just simply ignore what the law says in the meantime.
More specifically the anti-vaccination argument really fails here as it is a matter of public safety. The government ought o be able to enforce things that attempt to prevent needless pain/suffering/death. Seeing the argument as simply, "the government is simply telling you what to do" ignores all of the public safety concerns.
Typically when folks bring up that argument though there's the inevitable "well who gets to decide that?" argument that comes up to which see my first point there. If the government mandates that I have to start drinking soda, well then I'm pretty sure that people can rise up to that and push back to enact change in that or elect people who's platform would undo such regulations. And people will rise up to debate the case should the persuasion to logically do so is there. And that rings back to my second point. While there is definitely those who would persuade to a world of non-regulated vaccination, their arguments typically fail on some massive point. I would say then, that if you can address the massive public safety concern of having massive groups of unvaccinated children successfully, then you might have something to further that agenda, until then the argument's persuasion will fall deaf on enough people to continue to have an enforced vaccination schedule.
f your answer to any of those is no, then why should the government be able to force you to put anything into your body, including vaccinations?
I hope you understand how this generalization is a logical fallacy. The details of those things cannot be successfully debated on the single point provided as the items listed have more complexities that need to be enumerated in order for a meaningful debate to actually happen.
Just let people do what they want and stop being so controlling
Again, you should watch out your generalizations here. There's lots of people who'd like to murder without impunity. Such a statement includes them.
With the new standard tht APIs are copyrighted
Minor correction, can be copyrighted. Not every API that comes into existence automatically becomes copyrighted unless the author says so and even then if they only enforce it.
I don't agree with the idea that APIs can be copyrighted, but, what I do and don't agree to means nothing in the legal system. That said, I don't see this as something that kills open source software. Not giving something a legal definition leaves it in murky waters. With APIs being something that can be copyrighted, it's easy for projects to require the APIs be copyleft/GPL/BSD/etc. Copyrighted APIs become an issue for people who've done projects with APIs with less than clear legal language, which was the case since APIs were pretty much just assumed to public domain/just how things work. And trust me I would love to see APIs having that legal distinction, but they don't and you work with the reality your handed.
A lot of the modern APIs in major use today are already open sourced and apply either a copyleft/GPL/BSD requirement to the licensing of the API. Hell, even Java today is GPL API via the OpenJDK. And OpenJDK's special exception that was irrevocably granted by Sun before they gave up Java, is how Google to this day keeps Android alive. Google was once upon a time not down with going GPL and wanted to use Apache License. Which you cannot convert simply relicense a GPL project to Apache License project, which was the entire argument that Oracle made in court against Google.
I don't like the notion of copyrighted APIs anymore than the next person, but I do see that APIs being copyrighted isn't the death knell for future projects. But I totally see it as a submarine issue for projects from the past. Much like how patent submarines were once used before a change in the patent law.
Democrats blew the best opportunity we've ever had to get constructive NN passed.
Let me just stop you right there and let you know that there's a lot of Republicans who are fine with letting NN die a horrible death if that means their person gets another term to "protect the babies". I live in the deep south and on a list of top 50 things folks are concerned about, NN ranks about 246,789,122nd place. The moment people became so focused on single topic issues, was the moment voting records started to mean nothing. So literally Republicans are zero percent phased by this going on the record because their voters don't care. To them there are way more important topics to focus on. You either have to convince people that NN actually matters (good luck) or you need to get them unstuck from voting for a party for a single particular reason (yeah, better odds with the lotto).
Democrats blew the best opportunity we've ever had to get constructive NN passed.
Oh sweetheart, it's been a concerted effort on both sides. Democrats understand that a clean rewrite would suck resources their staffer can't provide and lobbyist won't pay for. Republicans ensured that independent consultation won't happen this lifetime. And do you think the FCC is willing to testify in commitee on this topic honestly? So unless come 2020 we elect bona fide IT folk into Congress (and I highly don't recommend that), a clean rewrite won't happen.
New legislation doesn't happen on timescales of less than a decade without some sort of outside of Congress input that's paid to specialize within the topic's domain. So we sure can do it the committee way and have something fresh and new to replace dated Title II, oh by 2028-ish. However, critters in Congress have reelections that happen on shorter than that timescales. So, I guess we're stuck for the time being with shit Title II or nothing. But let's not forget that Congress has acted in a unified matter to increase the level of nothingness they do on a daily basis.
But it's true, I'd rather crash as a consequence of my own fuckup
Well at least you see that, but it is important that a death can happen as a consequence of someone else's fuck up. The thing to remember is this...
than as a consequence of some programmer making an off-by-one error
When the error the programmer made is fixed, everyone learns it. When you fix something that you're fucking up, only you learn it. The nature of information transmission in humans is incredibly slow, error prone, and wildly inefficient/inconsistently efficient. You can learn something and try to teach someone else not to make the same fuck up, only to have that person plow into you at an intersection. Only after the fact might they get where they fucked up and see the light in your words of wisdom. The nature of information transmission in machines is such, a machine might have an off-by-one error and kill someone, but every machine thereafter irrevocably learns the lesson and integrates it in almost immediate fashion.
As long as you understand the difference in evolution and information transmission in humans versus machines, what your "feels" are for not wanting to be in a fully automated vehicle are totally and validly yours to have. However, it is important to remember that, that opinion is one based in emotion. That's mostly what I'm trying to get at here and it seems you've picked up on that.
It doesn't matter how safe they are if we have no control over them
Yes it does matter, that's the entire point of risk-cost analysis.
You are trusting your life, no matter how safe, to a black box you have no idea how it works
That doesn't even make sense. If a black box is 98% safe versus human counterpart that is 83%. The black box is still mathematically safer. You having control over it or not doesn't change that percentage. It just gives you a personal satisfaction which means nothing if the rate is still only 83%. And that's the entire point here. People are arguing the "you don't have control over it" because they're thinking, "Oh I'll be safer" but the reality is they are arguing "I'll feel better." So it's important to not confuse "I'll be safer" with "I'll feel better."
It doesn't matter if they would theoretically be safer, we don't want to give up control for that safety
Correction, you don't. And that's fine, but it does matter if something is safer, especially in the longer run here. Eventually all the people who currently have hesitations about it will in the long term be dead and those who grow up in a world knowing nothing but an automated world will think nothing of it. So long term, this point here is a nothing burger. Society doesn't make long term bets on how any one group "feels", they base it on numbers and facts. So "Reals over feels" brother.
Most people when presented with it will NOT get in a car they can't actually control
So taxis aren't a thing... Got it.
Do you really want to subject yourself to that possibility? Do you want to subject your FAMILY to that possibilty?
Yeah, because the odds of that happening are minimal. Like if an airplane is falling out of the sky, there's nothing I can do about it. However, the odds of a plane falling out of the air is slim. The big argument I've heard so far about why "no" to automated cars is pretty much, "Because on the rare chance that you do get into a wreck, there's nothing you can do." Which I can say just the same for air travel, vaccines, and anything else where there is a incredibly small chance that everything could go horrifically wrong, but the odds of that happening are incredibly long.
there won't be 'fewer deaths'
Which is outright incorrect because of the advances we've already made to assisted driving/anti-lock brakes/airbags/etc, driving is statistically safer than what it once was with none of those. Same thing with air travel. The automation that has happened in air travel has made air travel more safer than when it lack all of those things. It stands to reason that as we automate things, they become more safer. There's lots of data points that point in that direction. It's not media or industry hype, it's actual numbers you can point at.
Again, you're attempting to appeal on an emotional level to justify a position, but that's exactly the same kind of stuff that anti-vaxxers use. Appeal to emotion rather than numbers and logic. Simply put, I'm not getting into a debate that's not based on fact.
Nearly all of the advances that could improve automated also apply to assisted driving
Not so, but depends on where your line is here. Level 1 and level 2 automated driving I would say, yeah, you've got a point. But Level 3 and 4 however, I would argue that it would be hard to add things from level 4 and some things from level 3 and still call it assisted driving, but things like assisted driving is just a not so well defined label, I guess I could just simply say, depends...
Fully automated will always be less safe.
That literally makes no sense. A level 5 vehicle which requires zero people inside of it, crashing and only destroying itself is technically 100% more safer than anything else because it literally has zero people involved. So apply that to a simple drive I can cite that recently happened in my neck of the woods. Person wanted to go to Kroger to pick up a few things. Picks up a few things, gets a phone call, while reaching for phone forgets about round-about, car crashes and bursts into flames. Driver only suffered minor injuries and of course property damage. Compare that to, Kroger finally starts their fully automated delivery service, instead person just pulls out their phone, orders it, and a few minutes later Kroger's automated vehicle crashes into the round-about. There's literally no one to suffer minor injuries in that all things considered the same. So technically, that's not a true statement. All things the same for anything you can think up, a "fully automated" system is always going to be safer, because a "fully automated" system doesn't require people to be involved in the first place.
and people will die needlessly because of it
But fewer people will die of it, that's the point. Fewer.
Has to be equivalent to a human mind. No compromises
How about no. I'm tired of humans rubber necking and rear ending into cars making things worse. I hardly need a machine to do all of that.
False equivalency.
I don't see it as such. Anti-vaxxers literally focus down on the dozen of deaths from vaccines as reason to not have them in spite of the millions of people who literally have zero happen to them other than they become inoculated to a fully preventable disease, which anti-vaxxers additionally use the argument that you can never be "fully" inoculated, that there will always be some 1% or 0.01% chance that you can get the disease, etc... Self driving cars wouldn't make deaths in cars 0%, there will always be some non-zero number of deaths, but those deaths would be less than a non automated environment. So I don't see it as a false equivalency when you focus down on what would be a small number and ignore that automated cars would prevent things like distracted driving. Perhaps that's just me.
Cost cutting that has cost hundreds of lives in less than a year
Yeah, but you're still focusing down on these two events that killed 347 people. All the while millions of people fly with no problem. That's what I'm getting at here and you just proved my point by doubling down on it as some argument. In 2017 around 4 billion people on this planet flew in a plane and here you are talking about cutting corners that killed 347 people. On average, without cutting corners required, human driven cars here in the US killed that many between when I left work on Friday to when I jump into rush hour traffic on Monday morning. You have to understand when you come with...
Cost cutting that has cost hundreds of lives in less than a year
That's the same as those anti-vaxxers who sit there and cite that allergic reactions to vaccines killed however many dozens it might have killed last year. They're focusing on the dozens who died versus the millions who've literally had zero happen to them. It's not about autism, it's about focusing on one number to spite the other, even though the other clearly shows that these one off events that might have been caused by cutting corners are rare.
and could have cost hundreds more if the planes hadn't been grounded around the workd, forcing Boeing to start addressing the problem
First, could of, would of, should of. Please don't attempt to make an argument by attempting to extrapolate on things that clearly didn't happen. Planes got grounded, "it could have been worse" is a really shitty thing to attempt in reasonable debate. Yes, everything could have been worse, thank you for understanding existence. Second, the maker is being held accountable. When's the last time you could hold Samsung accountable because someone rear ended you while they were on Instagram? I rest my case.
Just look at Boeing and MCAS
That said, fact remains that Boeing makes planes that fly millions of miles without a crash. I thought here on Slashdot we were trying to rise above the media hype?
because people can think "I don't drive drunk, but it looks like the AI could, I want my manual car back"
Yeah and people think that vaccines are bad. There's always going to be that group of people who look at one event and use that as evidence that something is bad in spite of the volumes of evidence otherwise. Who knew we lived in such a world?!
Since we trust software so much
Software not so much, but there is a profit motive to ensure that say an automated Semi deliver it's load correctly. Online voting might hurt the public at large if hacked, but wouldn't exactly hurt any particular companies' bottom line, heck look at Equifax hack as an example of that. I trust that the profit motive in getting automated vehicles right is vastly higher than getting an online voting system right.
I shudder to think how many people are going to have to die in utter terror before everyone else understands this
The thing to remember isn't that the goal is zero deaths. The goal is less than what we currently have deaths. You will never have a zero death anything on "open" anything, full stop. So the number of people who die in fully automated cars is always going to be a non-zero number, thinking that it will ever be anything other than that is just not accepting reality. However, in a fully automated environment, we will have a number of deaths that is less than the non-automated environment.
Perhaps, it can demonstrate that compromise and practicality are sometimes necessary in a functioning society
RMS is the extreme end in FOSS and pretty much you can always attribute anything, and from the eight or so times I've been to one of his talks, /everything he says as being the furthest end of the spectrum.
Rigidity to an ideology can often be more destructive and counter-productive over the long run
RMS is definitely one of those folks you take in small doses. He's got a good point in general that is worth thinking about. The cross section between everyday life and computers is pretty big and gets bigger by the day. For example, cars are becoming more and more computerized. Imagine how liberating it would be if the firmware of your car was open source? You'd have a lot less people getting on Slashdot being cantankerous about these fancy-pants cars they can't repair... However, I get that we're always going to have some close and that it's one of those "struggle for the ages" kind of thing where we're just always going to have to work towards "full libre" systems for life. But of course, that gets lost listening to RMS who's pretty much, "It won't happen till we burn every close system to the ground."
Progress comes from change not stasis
Yeah. And the majority of us understand that. I think we ought to continue to strive to completely open systems, but I get that we're not getting there overnight.
Couple of points here.
You can also capture the data stream straight from the video buffer
Okay I'm going to ignore a lot of things here. One, TPM. Two, actual quality of playback. Three, that we're skipping capture cards (besides there isn't a 4K capture card at the moment). Okay so that said, reading memory is not a zero time operation. It requires some non-zero value of time to read memory. So that said, you are going to be reading a buffer that's always refilling with new data. That's going to give you timing issues that, unless you've got control of the flow into the buffer, is going to give you artifacts within your copy. Now if you do have control of flow going into the buffer, then just decrypt the original file and be done. There's no need to go through extra hoops here.
Every frame has to pass a video card or be converted pixel-perfect onto an LCD/LED array
No, that's not how it works. This is a digital interface, there are two protocols that are spoken on the wire between your video card and the actual output device. TMDS and DDC. Within TMDS there are three packet types VDP, DIP, and VC, DDC which actually has the data that you're wanting is usually within a TMDS/VDP packet. A DDC packet can contain sRGB or some other agreed upon color space between the card and the output device. However, those packets aren't guaranteed to be in scanline ordering. It's whatever the video card and output device agree upon, which means that you need to be able to follow along with all of the commands that are sent in between all of the actual video data. Thinking of modern video as being passed as "frame-by-frame" is a pretty dated concept that's still done in older video cards and monitors granted, but pretty much every 4K output device is a simplified networked computer talking in a peer-to-peer network, of which there are only two peers; your video card and the output device itself.
If the underlying data is HDCP encrypted, the DDC payload is literally HDCP encrypted color space values. Those values are stored in the output device's memory encrypted. The decryption happens within the main processor, the actual pixel-by-pixel data is then sent to a output staging area within the processor, the staging area will then adjust the actual values with values that are appropriate for the substance that your output device is made of, plus will toss in things like smoothing, contrast fixes, if the underlying substance has issues with changing from color-A to color-B quickly a smearing of the two colors between frames, and so on. There's a lot of actual processing on the pixel-by-pixel data within the processor before it ever emerges from the chip onto the actual substance that makes up your display. Not only that, the processor has a specific way it will signal to the underlying substance and all of that can be super subtle, you can have a go-red/go-blue current that differs by maybe a microamp, but only does that when the last refresh had go-higreen there as the green element's charge might not have completely dissipated. It's really tricky and if you aren't in the know about the absolute specifics of the underlying substance, you can easily spend years trying to reverse engineer it. And even then, you aren't getting a pixel-by-pixel read of the data, you're just getting a read of the data as it was interpreted by the processor within the output device.
With the right electronics and a cheap ASIC you could do a perfect digital capture
I'm going to assume you meant FPGA, because there isn't an ASIC that does capture at 4K currently, and if/when it does come out, it sure won't be cheap at first. I've built a lot of thing using TTL chips and the number one hardest thing I've ever built with off shelf chips is a VGA (not even SVGA) video output and even then it was driving data from an EEPROM. Doing video is difficult because there's a lot of timing that goes behind it and shy of just d
Of course, somewhere, at some point, it must be decrypted for transport to the actual pixel device
That's done within the central processor of the display. If you ever look at the memory within a 4K display, they are exactly the DDC packets as transmitted be it HDCP encrypted or not. By the time the data leaves the processor, it's already in a format that only makes sense to the display array. Actual color space data like YCBCR is never transmitted on the traces and is always handled within the chip. That actual representation, pixel by pixel, never sees life outside the display's processor, unless it was originally transmitted that way.
Technically, you could sit there and read the grid array signal and work backwards from there to attempt to understand the timing and what not, but I do want to mention that the data sent to the actual pixels are not a pixel by pixel read of the data, but instead a rough interpretation of that pixel-by-pixel data based on what the processor thinks the actual substance that makes up the display can handle. If the stuff your display is made out of can't handle a pixel going from color A to color B in a reasonable amount of time, the processor just glosses over that by sending a somewhat color A first, somewhat color B next, but somewhat mixture of the two for both frames. So even then you aren't getting a pixel-by-pixel read, just what the processor thinks the underlying substance can handle.
The law these days has become nothing but an automatically guilty upon accusation without due process cliche.
Well this speaks volumes about how little most law makers understand technology and how a lot of law has on purpose become obtuse so that the courts may refine it at a later time, which for technology this is the intended consequence since, well see first point. Since the turn of 20th century, lawmakers have become increasingly less incline to produce focused law and rather make law that applies broadly and allow courts to refine as need be. We clearly aren't going to be leaving a legislative process that's almost 100 years old.
That said, better educated within the domain at hand topic lawmakers typically produce bills that are less likely to produce law that ends in litigation for refinement. We need to have lawmakers that are keenly aware of the topic to which they are crafting bills for. There are three schools of thought for this (more, but generally speaking in the US these three are the more predominate).
One, have the lawmaker elected on the knowledge they've acquired before entering into the law making process. IE, have someone who understands technology actually write law for technology.
Two, have a department that advises law makers on a non-partisan level of technology (or whatever the topic is) and have those people on government payroll to prevent bias. IE, CBO like departments.
Three, have independent commercial contractors who come in and advise the lawmakers. IE, lobbyist.
Now each one has pros and cons, and I would argue that we need a healthy mix of all three (though we could split hairs on where that healthy mix is). However, around the end of the 1800s we started gearing into a system mostly ran by the final third option and a general public who feel that we should hyper-shift into the first of the three options. That's kind of resulted in this system we've got now where lawmakers grandstand on issues to appear knowledgeable, but mostly are reiterating what a lobbyist is telling them. They want to appeal to the base as understanding their woes but have no freaking clue what the series of words they're blithering on about mean.
Yes, this is the server end code. You can find the clients here.