The 8th Amendment only protects against cruel & unusual **punishment**, and punishment requires a criminal context. It is not implicated here. This is a civil damages award, governed by the loosey-goosey so-called "standards" of the due process clause.
See the Supreme Court's decision in BMW v. Gore, for example. (No, not *that* Gore.)
As constitutional doctrines go, it's really an odd duck. Substantive due process was brought into its own by the liberals of the Warren court, but extended to protect against exorbitant damages awards principally in the hands of conservative members of the bar. Which goes to show that law is mostly a matter of opportunism, not principle.
Interesting. One possible solution in your case might be to rate movies that you (a) have seen but not rented from Netflix, or (b) that you have not seen and would not see (i.e., Not Interested).
As for (a), I wonder if it is possible from the provided data for the algorithm to treat differently the ratings for movies rented through Netflix, and the ratings entered without an accompanying rental?
Might be that the second category of ratings should count for more. Of course, you can argue that they should count for less, too.
Squeezebox indeed can readily handle tens of thousands or more tracks. It can take a while to scan, but you only need to initiate a scan when you add or change music files on the server. That process can be manually initiated or on a regular schedule. For example, it's easy enough to initiate a rescan every day at a reasonable hour, say noon, when all good slashdotters are asleep, not listening to their tunes...
There's better - real, live on-line Diplomacy, with sophisticated maps in PDF form. Google wouldn't add anything. See http://www.diplom.org/ and check out the DPPD server.
As Manus would say: Stab you soon!
That's like saying you can make JPEG look better than the uncompressed image.
I see nothing wrong with the statement that technology *can* do that, at least in theory.
Any CD has limited dynamic range, suffers losses through digitization, and loses some dynamics by virtue of being a two-channel recording. My idea of ideal sound is to reproduce the original performance, not (merely) the recording engineer's result. Many CDs (any number of old jazz masters, 1970s albums by the Who, etc., but not limited to older recordings) simply do not ideally capture the original performance. In other words, *every* CD reflects, in some way, a compromise.
Thus, re-processing of a compressed MP3 can aim at something different than merely reproducing the original CD audio as accurately as possible. To the extent it can reproduce the original recording as accurately as possible, it is possible to exceed the quality - i.e., "sound better than" - the original CD.
To use your JPEG analogy, it is not so hard to imagine hardware or software that improves the image beyond its original quality. For example, the technology in question might intelligently look for artifacts like red-eye or improper contrast and adjust for them - thus making the rendering of the JPEG "better" than the original uncompressed image.
A better analogy is found in video, where processing requirements are more intensive and compression is more a fact of life. A DVD contains video at 480i resolution. There is no doubt that hardware that upscales the video (to 480p or 1080i or whatever) improves the image as rendered on a modern HDTV *beyond* what is found on the original DVD. A lot of this has to do with compensating for deficiencies - or taking advantages of benefits - in modern display technology.
Is it so hard to believe that Creative can achieve something similar with respect to sound - however many MIPS their card may have?
God, this makes me miss *lisp and my CM-2.
With supercomputing being taken over by Big Blue and the like, there seems little room anymore for the smaller, more flexible players like Thinking Machines.
Cory Doctorow's recent novel Eastern Standard Tribe (see http://www.craphound.com/est/) talks about similar-sounding peer-to-peer networks among automobiles, where among other things cars on the system can share or request local traffic information among one another. One of the interesting background ideas in the story is the development of toll system for peer-to-peer music sharing along the highways.
Is anyone aware of any other books or short stories that included or discussed applying this or other sorts of technology to optimize utilization of transportation systems?
I've been interested in this idea for a long time, and especially now since I find myself fighting DC traffic every day on the way from Virginia to Capitol Hill....
Slashdot Mirror
The 8th Amendment only protects against cruel & unusual **punishment**, and punishment requires a criminal context. It is not implicated here. This is a civil damages award, governed by the loosey-goosey so-called "standards" of the due process clause.
See the Supreme Court's decision in BMW v. Gore, for example. (No, not *that* Gore.)
As constitutional doctrines go, it's really an odd duck. Substantive due process was brought into its own by the liberals of the Warren court, but extended to protect against exorbitant damages awards principally in the hands of conservative members of the bar. Which goes to show that law is mostly a matter of opportunism, not principle.
Interesting. One possible solution in your case might be to rate movies that you (a) have seen but not rented from Netflix, or (b) that you have not seen and would not see (i.e., Not Interested). As for (a), I wonder if it is possible from the provided data for the algorithm to treat differently the ratings for movies rented through Netflix, and the ratings entered without an accompanying rental? Might be that the second category of ratings should count for more. Of course, you can argue that they should count for less, too.
I submitted this to /. with a link, but apparently wasn't the first.
mudderp(b0r1s) ?
Squeezebox indeed can readily handle tens of thousands or more tracks. It can take a while to scan, but you only need to initiate a scan when you add or change music files on the server. That process can be manually initiated or on a regular schedule. For example, it's easy enough to initiate a rescan every day at a reasonable hour, say noon, when all good slashdotters are asleep, not listening to their tunes...
There's better - real, live on-line Diplomacy, with sophisticated maps in PDF form. Google wouldn't add anything. See http://www.diplom.org/ and check out the DPPD server. As Manus would say: Stab you soon!
I see nothing wrong with the statement that technology *can* do that, at least in theory.
Any CD has limited dynamic range, suffers losses through digitization, and loses some dynamics by virtue of being a two-channel recording. My idea of ideal sound is to reproduce the original performance, not (merely) the recording engineer's result. Many CDs (any number of old jazz masters, 1970s albums by the Who, etc., but not limited to older recordings) simply do not ideally capture the original performance. In other words, *every* CD reflects, in some way, a compromise.
Thus, re-processing of a compressed MP3 can aim at something different than merely reproducing the original CD audio as accurately as possible. To the extent it can reproduce the original recording as accurately as possible, it is possible to exceed the quality - i.e., "sound better than" - the original CD.
To use your JPEG analogy, it is not so hard to imagine hardware or software that improves the image beyond its original quality. For example, the technology in question might intelligently look for artifacts like red-eye or improper contrast and adjust for them - thus making the rendering of the JPEG "better" than the original uncompressed image.
A better analogy is found in video, where processing requirements are more intensive and compression is more a fact of life. A DVD contains video at 480i resolution. There is no doubt that hardware that upscales the video (to 480p or 1080i or whatever) improves the image as rendered on a modern HDTV *beyond* what is found on the original DVD. A lot of this has to do with compensating for deficiencies - or taking advantages of benefits - in modern display technology.
Is it so hard to believe that Creative can achieve something similar with respect to sound - however many MIPS their card may have?
God, this makes me miss *lisp and my CM-2. With supercomputing being taken over by Big Blue and the like, there seems little room anymore for the smaller, more flexible players like Thinking Machines.
Cory Doctorow's recent novel Eastern Standard Tribe (see http://www.craphound.com/est/) talks about similar-sounding peer-to-peer networks among automobiles, where among other things cars on the system can share or request local traffic information among one another. One of the interesting background ideas in the story is the development of toll system for peer-to-peer music sharing along the highways.
Is anyone aware of any other books or short stories that included or discussed applying this or other sorts of technology to optimize utilization of transportation systems?
I've been interested in this idea for a long time, and especially now since I find myself fighting DC traffic every day on the way from Virginia to Capitol Hill....