It's scary that one of the three judges was willing to basically let the movie industry control the ISP industry in the movie industry's interests.
But overall it seems like a good decision; even if they did bend over a little for the movie industry, they did set out some expectations about what is and what isn't the right way to go about sending notices of infringement.
Unfortunately if you work in libraries you realise that it's the e-book (and other database) vendors that are applying the old world methodologies to their business models and libraries have no choice.
If libraries had their way all the world's published knowledge would be free and open to everyone.
> I would be surprised if many people could differentiate 16-bit from 24-bit except via the increased dynamic range
That increase in dynamic range is nothing but theoretical, so no they won't hear anything. You won't get any actual increase in dynamic range on any equipment you can buy because 16-bit has more than anyone can use.
> The reason why you have to constantly adjust the volume of your DVD when watching at home? Too much dynamic range.
I'm not sure you quite understand what's being discussed. You are talking about the dynamic range of the material, not of the medium. It's true that classical and jazz typically does need more dynamic range in the medium, because the material has a lot of range. This is why CDs have a massive 16 bits, way more than enough.
This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time.
16 bits per channel gives you a whopping 96dB or so of dynamic range.
All popular and contemporary music has crap compressed out of the dynamic range so you'd be lucky if you could get a discernable 20dB of range. Classical music needs a lot more, but not 96dB. Maybe 60 or 70dB.
You would need as quiet a listening environment as an empty concert hall, and a very high powered amp turned up loud, to even hear as much dynamic range as is represented by 16 bits.
And they think adding more even dynamic range than that is a good idea?!
If they wanted to make a difference to sound quality, they should increase the sample rate to 48kHz, or hey go why not crazy and go to 96kHz. It will still not sound any different to the average person, but at least the difference can actually be detected and measured with the right equipment.
Another good suggestion, but still doesn't add up. If it were a panic over morals, why only ban it after 10pm? Surely if they believe playing games is immoral then they would be just as immoral in the afternoon.
Or is playing games at night immoral?
Banning alcohol after 2am is a known tactic to try and reduce alcohol related crime, drink driving, etc which all have rather obvious negative effects on society and 2am to 6am are the peak periods for this kind of trouble. Whether this is an effective strategy or not (and I'd suggest it is indeed effective at reducing crime, even though it has the undesirable quality of reducing freedom and liberty for the law-abiding citizens), at least it's clear why it's being put in place.
But do video games lead to late night street violence?
More than anything, I'm having a rant about how neither the summary nor either of the linked articles even bother to mention WHY this is being done, and it's not clear to me. I'm not after a GOOD, logical reason why they did this, I'm just after THEIR reason, even if the logic is messed up.
I've waded through both of the linked articles but I still can't seem to find out what "issue" this is trying to solve. It seems that banning online games is the answer to some problem, but since I don't live in Vietnam and haven't followed the issue I have no idea what said problem is.
At first I thought it was putting strain on the country's third-rate internet infrastructure, but linking the second article seems to imply it's some sort of social problem, but it's just quoting statistics and not really saying what that problem is. If kids are in gaming shops they're not out doing drugs, or are they? It doesn't say. And the piece about kids going to gaming halls after school seems to have no relation to banning video games for adults after 10pm.
Therefore don't feel as if I have enough information to judge this as a senseless abuse of people's freedom by a tyrannical government.
A recipient's email server will see the "To" and "Cc" recipient lists on any email it receives. It is never actually given the "Bcc" recipient list by the sending server so no matter how the mail server works it won't see the Bcc recipient list. The only way your mail server could even know if someone was Bcc'd is if the other Bcc recipient(s) use the same mail server, because it would also receive the emails going to the other people. And properly functioning mail servers don't let person A know what mail is in person B's mailbox (if they did, the server admin is not doing his/her job).
No. If you receive an email, you see all the "To" and "Cc" recipients regardless of whether you were Bcc'd. You just don't see the Bcc recipients (ie, yourself).
So if you "reply all" it still goes back to everyone in the "To" and "Cc" recipient list.
1. Different companies fund game development than fund movies. They have different business models. A movie company is going to be more worried about getting people into the theatre, where under 18s make up most of theatre-going audience. That's just the model they're used to.
2. Successful computer games don't automatically translate into successful movies, even if the movie was good or the fans of the game loved it. The same is true for adaptations from books - unless the movie had a dirt cheap budget, if it only reaches fans of the original it's not going to be successful - it has to reach new audiences meaning it has to gain the interest of people who've never played/read or maybe heard of the original.
3. Making the movie would involve hiring big-name talent and actually shooting underwater, neither of which are needed for game development.
That summary is terrible. It launches straight into: "Switzerland and Australia already feel that violent video games are an issue".
What sort of issue? Where are you getting this? I see no mention of Switzerland or Australia in TFA, and how does a country as a whole have an opinion about something? Are you talking about a specific branch of the government?
In Australia, one possible issue which you could say is related to violent video games is that there is no R rating for video games so games that might otherwise get an R rating are refused classification in Australia. Often this results in the game being modified, sometimes in a way that impacts enjoyment, so that it's suitable for an MA rating. Sometimes it might result in the game not being released in Australia.
Now, I'm guessing this isn't the "issue" that is alluded to in the vague summary. But I have no way of knowing.
If the "issue" is in fact about nutcases blaming video games for violence, well we've already discussed that topic to death on Slashdot - basically sometimes people just need somewhere to point the finger, and it helps if it's something that a lot of people don't understand - video games.
This summary is drawn from an opinion piece which was originally inspired by a presentation by Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli in January called "Who the bloody hell cares about Debian".
Original presentation makes a solid case for why Debian is more important now than ever.
Being not from the US, I was under the impression that social security numbers are almost public knowledge there - that you're required to hand them over when signing up for all sorts of things right down to signing up in a video store, etc. What's more, they are simply a guessable 9 digit number - not linked to a biometric, a PIN, a photo or anything. So, if they cannot be used as an authenticator, and a number of people/companies know it or have access to it, what is the problem if one is stolen?
it is still including OpenOffice.org 3.2.1. I wonder when they'll get LibreOffice
Debian's OpenOffice uses patches from Go-OO (now merging with LibreOffice) anyway, so in some ways it is already more similar to LibreOffice than to stock OpenOffice.org. It opens.docx documents very well, for example.
This is also true of Ubuntu's, and generally other distros' OpenOffice packages.
LibreOffice itself came into existence too late for an actual LibreOffice version to make it into Debian 6.0.
I expect it will be a smooth and uncontroversial transition from Debian 6.0's Go-OO enhanced OpenOffice to Debian 7.0's LibreOffice. I'm guessing they'll no longer use the OpenOffice.org branding for that particular variation of it though.
it seems that MS is tracking which google (and I assume any other search engine, including Bing) search results people are clicking, and then trying to promote these in their results.
Not quite - the problem is that MS are also adding them as new results where but don't already exist in Bing. Which is how Google's fake data got copied into Bing's database.
LucasArts developed a 100% faithful remake of the original Monkey Island in 2009.
The new graphics and audio are superb but scene-for-scene, and dialogue-for-dialogue, it is 100% faithful to the original. It even has a classic mode where you can substitute the original graphics and music for the reworked stuff - it's 100% synchronised. Clearly a fine tribute to the original and aimed at people who appreciated it at the time.
Sneaking the word "Open" into this specification was a really dirty trick by Microsoft because
- it implies that this standard is somewhat "open", and the word "open" has positive connotations - it (seemingly deliberately) creates confusion with "Open Office" ie the product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were taken in by this, thinking that by making the decision to support OOXML they were somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open government and/or open source.
H.264 is closed only in the sense that patents cover it and the patent owners require royalties.
In other respects, H.264 is very much open. The spec is available to anyone. An open source implementation of the encoder AND decoder is available to anyone. If you ignore the patents or you're in a country where they don't apply (and don't intend to export to one where they do), the H.264 spec and existing open source implementation is fully open.
Rather than blaming H.264 we should point the finger at software patents. They don't aid innovation in the way that patents were originally supposed to, and that's especially true in software. They're broken.
Hmmm, I guess some of the following might help with this:
1. Better coverage of backports (and the concept of installing newer packages from backports) in various Debian documentation.
2. Offering backports (along with volatile) as pre-selectable options for software sources by placing them in sources.list (perhaps commented out initially) in a typical install. Maybe better integrating them into "Software Sources" GUI app too.
It's important not to throw backports at people by default I think, as there is a great benefit in Stable being Debian's primary product, but I agree with you that backports does not get nearly enough attention.
Slashdot Mirror
It's scary that one of the three judges was willing to basically let the movie industry control the ISP industry in the movie industry's interests.
But overall it seems like a good decision; even if they did bend over a little for the movie industry, they did set out some expectations about what is and what isn't the right way to go about sending notices of infringement.
Drupal has all the "everything is be a module and go in a box in some column" limitations of a 1990s CMS and all the complexity of a modern MMORPG.
Unfortunately if you work in libraries you realise that it's the e-book (and other database) vendors that are applying the old world methodologies to their business models and libraries have no choice.
If libraries had their way all the world's published knowledge would be free and open to everyone.
> I would be surprised if many people could differentiate 16-bit from 24-bit except via the increased dynamic range
That increase in dynamic range is nothing but theoretical, so no they won't hear anything. You won't get any actual increase in dynamic range on any equipment you can buy because 16-bit has more than anyone can use.
> The reason why you have to constantly adjust the volume of your DVD when watching at home? Too much dynamic range.
I'm not sure you quite understand what's being discussed. You are talking about the dynamic range of the material, not of the medium. It's true that classical and jazz typically does need more dynamic range in the medium, because the material has a lot of range. This is why CDs have a massive 16 bits, way more than enough.
This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time.
16 bits per channel gives you a whopping 96dB or so of dynamic range.
All popular and contemporary music has crap compressed out of the dynamic range so you'd be lucky if you could get a discernable 20dB of range. Classical music needs a lot more, but not 96dB. Maybe 60 or 70dB.
You would need as quiet a listening environment as an empty concert hall, and a very high powered amp turned up loud, to even hear as much dynamic range as is represented by 16 bits.
And they think adding more even dynamic range than that is a good idea?!
If they wanted to make a difference to sound quality, they should increase the sample rate to 48kHz, or hey go why not crazy and go to 96kHz. It will still not sound any different to the average person, but at least the difference can actually be detected and measured with the right equipment.
Another good suggestion, but still doesn't add up. If it were a panic over morals, why only ban it after 10pm? Surely if they believe playing games is immoral then they would be just as immoral in the afternoon.
Or is playing games at night immoral?
Banning alcohol after 2am is a known tactic to try and reduce alcohol related crime, drink driving, etc which all have rather obvious negative effects on society and 2am to 6am are the peak periods for this kind of trouble. Whether this is an effective strategy or not (and I'd suggest it is indeed effective at reducing crime, even though it has the undesirable quality of reducing freedom and liberty for the law-abiding citizens), at least it's clear why it's being put in place.
But do video games lead to late night street violence?
More than anything, I'm having a rant about how neither the summary nor either of the linked articles even bother to mention WHY this is being done, and it's not clear to me. I'm not after a GOOD, logical reason why they did this, I'm just after THEIR reason, even if the logic is messed up.
Is it just me?
I've waded through both of the linked articles but I still can't seem to find out what "issue" this is trying to solve. It seems that banning online games is the answer to some problem, but since I don't live in Vietnam and haven't followed the issue I have no idea what said problem is.
At first I thought it was putting strain on the country's third-rate internet infrastructure, but linking the second article seems to imply it's some sort of social problem, but it's just quoting statistics and not really saying what that problem is. If kids are in gaming shops they're not out doing drugs, or are they? It doesn't say. And the piece about kids going to gaming halls after school seems to have no relation to banning video games for adults after 10pm.
Therefore don't feel as if I have enough information to judge this as a senseless abuse of people's freedom by a tyrannical government.
No, it doesn't depend on the email provider.
A recipient's email server will see the "To" and "Cc" recipient lists on any email it receives. It is never actually given the "Bcc" recipient list by the sending server so no matter how the mail server works it won't see the Bcc recipient list. The only way your mail server could even know if someone was Bcc'd is if the other Bcc recipient(s) use the same mail server, because it would also receive the emails going to the other people. And properly functioning mail servers don't let person A know what mail is in person B's mailbox (if they did, the server admin is not doing his/her job).
No. If you receive an email, you see all the "To" and "Cc" recipients regardless of whether you were Bcc'd. You just don't see the Bcc recipients (ie, yourself).
So if you "reply all" it still goes back to everyone in the "To" and "Cc" recipient list.
1. Different companies fund game development than fund movies. They have different business models. A movie company is going to be more worried about getting people into the theatre, where under 18s make up most of theatre-going audience. That's just the model they're used to.
2. Successful computer games don't automatically translate into successful movies, even if the movie was good or the fans of the game loved it. The same is true for adaptations from books - unless the movie had a dirt cheap budget, if it only reaches fans of the original it's not going to be successful - it has to reach new audiences meaning it has to gain the interest of people who've never played/read or maybe heard of the original.
3. Making the movie would involve hiring big-name talent and actually shooting underwater, neither of which are needed for game development.
More like a thousand problems, if sed goes wrong.
I'm actually rather impressed that this site still works in Lynx, what with all its new-fangled ajax hoohaa.
Lemme just email this to all my friends with the subject line "If you know someone like this pass it on LOL"
That summary is terrible. It launches straight into: "Switzerland and Australia already feel that violent video games are an issue".
What sort of issue? Where are you getting this? I see no mention of Switzerland or Australia in TFA, and how does a country as a whole have an opinion about something? Are you talking about a specific branch of the government?
In Australia, one possible issue which you could say is related to violent video games is that there is no R rating for video games so games that might otherwise get an R rating are refused classification in Australia. Often this results in the game being modified, sometimes in a way that impacts enjoyment, so that it's suitable for an MA rating. Sometimes it might result in the game not being released in Australia.
Now, I'm guessing this isn't the "issue" that is alluded to in the vague summary. But I have no way of knowing.
If the "issue" is in fact about nutcases blaming video games for violence, well we've already discussed that topic to death on Slashdot - basically sometimes people just need somewhere to point the finger, and it helps if it's something that a lot of people don't understand - video games.
... then they'll be narrowed down to just 100 star candidates.
This summary is drawn from an opinion piece which was originally inspired by a presentation by Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli in January called "Who the bloody hell cares about Debian".
Original presentation makes a solid case for why Debian is more important now than ever.
Stefano's blog post discussing the story behind the presentation is here. There is a link to the slides there and apparently video will be available soon.
Being not from the US, I was under the impression that social security numbers are almost public knowledge there - that you're required to hand them over when signing up for all sorts of things right down to signing up in a video store, etc. What's more, they are simply a guessable 9 digit number - not linked to a biometric, a PIN, a photo or anything. So, if they cannot be used as an authenticator, and a number of people/companies know it or have access to it, what is the problem if one is stolen?
Debian's OpenOffice uses patches from Go-OO (now merging with LibreOffice) anyway, so in some ways it is already more similar to LibreOffice than to stock OpenOffice.org. It opens .docx documents very well, for example.
This is also true of Ubuntu's, and generally other distros' OpenOffice packages.
LibreOffice itself came into existence too late for an actual LibreOffice version to make it into Debian 6.0.
I expect it will be a smooth and uncontroversial transition from Debian 6.0's Go-OO enhanced OpenOffice to Debian 7.0's LibreOffice. I'm guessing they'll no longer use the OpenOffice.org branding for that particular variation of it though.
Not quite - the problem is that MS are also adding them as new results where but don't already exist in Bing. Which is how Google's fake data got copied into Bing's database.
I skimmed that first line and thought this was about changing typefaces.
I can.
LucasArts developed a 100% faithful remake of the original Monkey Island in 2009.
The new graphics and audio are superb but scene-for-scene, and dialogue-for-dialogue, it is 100% faithful to the original. It even has a classic mode where you can substitute the original graphics and music for the reworked stuff - it's 100% synchronised. Clearly a fine tribute to the original and aimed at people who appreciated it at the time.
Screenshots available at this site I found.
Sneaking the word "Open" into this specification was a really dirty trick by Microsoft because
- it implies that this standard is somewhat "open", and the word "open" has positive connotations
- it (seemingly deliberately) creates confusion with "Open Office" ie the product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were taken in by this, thinking that by making the decision to support OOXML they were somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open government and/or open source.
H.264 is closed only in the sense that patents cover it and the patent owners require royalties.
In other respects, H.264 is very much open. The spec is available to anyone. An open source implementation of the encoder AND decoder is available to anyone. If you ignore the patents or you're in a country where they don't apply (and don't intend to export to one where they do), the H.264 spec and existing open source implementation is fully open.
Rather than blaming H.264 we should point the finger at software patents. They don't aid innovation in the way that patents were originally supposed to, and that's especially true in software. They're broken.
Hmmm, I guess some of the following might help with this:
1. Better coverage of backports (and the concept of installing newer packages from backports) in various Debian documentation.
2. Offering backports (along with volatile) as pre-selectable options for software sources by placing them in sources.list (perhaps commented out initially) in a typical install. Maybe better integrating them into "Software Sources" GUI app too.
It's important not to throw backports at people by default I think, as there is a great benefit in Stable being Debian's primary product, but I agree with you that backports does not get nearly enough attention.