Do these devices decompress the MPEG-2 stream before they upscale? Because to me that seems the wrong approach: MPEG data is mostly vector in character so should conceivably work at any scale; only the keyframes would suffer a bit of blurriness due to upscaling. Or am I missing something obvious?
you can't make a law that is impossible to enforce. well, you can, legislative bodies do it every day. but it simply doesn't mean anything, it's hollow, it's a joke. Unfortunately, that's not quite true; these kinds of laws are very useful to authoritarian regimes, because they now have a reason to victimize anyone they don't like. We *may* be lucky enough not to live in that kind of state quite yet, but let's not let them have this kind of ammunition. If a law's unenforceable, let's have it off the statute books.
+1 fuckin' insightful!
Corporations are not people, and we badly need a way to dismantle through a legal process any organization which has outgrown it social usefulness (whilst helping its former members to find a more positive place in the world).
I think you overstate the case that people break laws because they don't understand them. It's interesting that you bring up speed restrictions as an example, because - being a simple law - by your reasoning it ought to get broken only rarely. I don't know what country you're in, but here in the UK speeding is rife. It's not because we have complex rules, or not enough road signs.
I think there are two main factors which influence whether people break a law: how likely they think it is that they'll get caught and whether they agree with the *aim* of the law. (Or, as you put it yourself: "Laws either require consensus of the population or insane checking to be upheld".)
People who speed probably think the restrictions are there for other, less competent drivers (and the first factor is the reason we have those awful cameras - stupidity itself because now, if there isn't a camera around, you *know* you won't be caught).
Or take drug use: what actually is the point of making it illegal to take certain drugs - cannabis, say? What social good does it do? I simply have no idea, and I doubt users do either. So, although I don't use illegal drugs myself, I have utter contempt for that law, and - while I know there are some ambiguities in how much you're allowed to be found carrying etc - wouldn't let it stop me if I decided to start using.
With copyright, both factors are heavily in play: as well as the infinitesimal chance of being caught, people overwhelmingly disagree with the law. The complexity is on the enforcement side, and you're right, as with the speeding law, the kneejerk response is not better public education, repeal or reform of the laws, but state snooping - which we must oppose at every turn.
Does anyone else think they both look shit? Using a slanty font throws up aliasing issues all over the place, which is no doubt why both tools offer further enhancements. It would be a more useful test to switch on the best enhancement each tool offers (though, as you say, Photoshop has many, which are more or less appropriate to different situations).
Have you ever stopped to consider that IE might be a part of your problem as well? Must be. I have been using the Google toolbar for Firefox since its first incarnation, and find it stable and - you may be surprised to learn - incredibly useful.
Of course you can install each bit of its functionality - Site Search, I'm Feeling Lucky, Groups, Images, Google Maps, etc - as separate search plugins, but you still have to choose one from the dropdown. With the toolbar it's just a matter of hitting the right button. The 'Up One Level' button is useful too, as are the little buttons that zoom to an individual search term on the page.
Plus, with my Google needs taken care of, I can set Wikipedia as my default search engine.
Thanks for this - it's actually reassuring. The last discussion I saw about this *was* on Slashdot, but I don't remember seeing this important factoid - it was all about spreading the wear (which, I presume now, is no longer necessary?)
My concern about these drives is that they will die a very premature death under Windows where, as someone pointed out somewhere higher up the page, even with enough RAM to run all your apps, some paging (or swapping) is always occurring. (And don't tell me you can disable Virtual Memory: yes you can but the OS will very soon start to complain, and eventually turn it on again itself.)
My laptop has a little green light beside the keyboard which flashes when the disk is being accessed, there's even a small red LED on the back of my Archos 605 for the same purpose, in fact - gosh darn it - I think every device I've ever owned that includes a hard disk has had a disk activity light. It's one of the steps when you build a PC: heatsink on top of processor - check; graphics card in its slot - check; and, oh, don't forget to connect the little dangly lead coming from the disk activity light to the correct pins on the motherboard.
You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?
I used to see something like this a lot. I put it down to a bug in the Littlefox theme I was using. Are you using the default theme? I am mainly using Flock these days, so perhaps the trouble lies in the chrome, which is different in Flock I believe?
What can justify that you may lose +/- 5% of your audience (and potential sells) I would have thought most marketing departments would be glad of an opportunity to lose -5% of their audience
As a Brit, I envy the differences in policies you're likely to be offered if Obama wins the nomination: on healthcare alone he offers a clear break with the past. Here, nobody with any chance of gaining power ever suggests such a dramatic change, it's always incremental - usually for the worse. This is how we were able to have a report into copyright which essentially said: "everything's fine, but we need tougher penalties for filesharers."
I wonder how many little sites built by IE-centric coders are going to need a lot of work in order to function well with IE8. Depends if they already fixed them to work in IE7. If they did, all they have to do is add a meta tag to the head and IE8 will render in IE7-mode.
... whereas now we know precisely what will happen. I mean, what could possibly happen in 7.6 billion years to alter the behaviour of objects in our solar system, or our understanding of them?
NoScript doesn't help if a site already on your whitelist gets compromised. While it's literally true that if a site on my whitelist (netvibes.com, for instance) has its server compromised and a bad script is introduced there, my browser will get hit, as I understand it this is not generally how such script-based attacks happen.
Usually a bad script from some other domain is introduced onto a page, eg through a widget, a badly-screened comment form, an ad script, etc. Without NoScript, these scripts are treated with the same level of trust as those hosted on the site's domain. But NoScript blocks such scripts by default (unless they happen to come from another trusted domain).
So, while NoScript is not a perfect protection, it does seem pretty good defence against the current wave of malware.
The 'do not reverse engineer' clause has always seemed to me the most unreasonable restriction. If I buy something mechanical - a clock, say - I am free to take it apart, reassemble it, use the parts in artworks, etc. The software vendor have already given me instructions on precisely how the software works, in machine-readable form. Why may I not also understand how it works, tinker with it, improve it? They are taking advantage of the fact that most desktop software currently happens to be compiled to binary form. If it is written in an interpreted language - Python, say - it already happens to be in human-readable form, too and there's no reverse engineering necessary.
But then, I don't see how they could ever enforce it - if I don't post it anywhere, how would they know? This is how knowledge advances - "intellectual property" be damned!
Slashdot Mirror
Do these devices decompress the MPEG-2 stream before they upscale? Because to me that seems the wrong approach: MPEG data is mostly vector in character so should conceivably work at any scale; only the keyframes would suffer a bit of blurriness due to upscaling. Or am I missing something obvious?
+1 fuckin' insightful! Corporations are not people, and we badly need a way to dismantle through a legal process any organization which has outgrown it social usefulness (whilst helping its former members to find a more positive place in the world).
I think you overstate the case that people break laws because they don't understand them. It's interesting that you bring up speed restrictions as an example, because - being a simple law - by your reasoning it ought to get broken only rarely. I don't know what country you're in, but here in the UK speeding is rife. It's not because we have complex rules, or not enough road signs.
I think there are two main factors which influence whether people break a law: how likely they think it is that they'll get caught and whether they agree with the *aim* of the law. (Or, as you put it yourself: "Laws either require consensus of the population or insane checking to be upheld".)
People who speed probably think the restrictions are there for other, less competent drivers (and the first factor is the reason we have those awful cameras - stupidity itself because now, if there isn't a camera around, you *know* you won't be caught).
Or take drug use: what actually is the point of making it illegal to take certain drugs - cannabis, say? What social good does it do? I simply have no idea, and I doubt users do either. So, although I don't use illegal drugs myself, I have utter contempt for that law, and - while I know there are some ambiguities in how much you're allowed to be found carrying etc - wouldn't let it stop me if I decided to start using.
With copyright, both factors are heavily in play: as well as the infinitesimal chance of being caught, people overwhelmingly disagree with the law. The complexity is on the enforcement side, and you're right, as with the speeding law, the kneejerk response is not better public education, repeal or reform of the laws, but state snooping - which we must oppose at every turn.
I've always pronounced it Krah-ken, but they didn't even mention that possibility :-(
Is it pronounced "kray-ken" or "krakk-'n"?
Seconded, though I use Sunbelt Kerio rather than ZoneAlarm. I do also browse with NoScript, which also does wonders in keeping ads off my screen.
Does anyone else think they both look shit? Using a slanty font throws up aliasing issues all over the place, which is no doubt why both tools offer further enhancements. It would be a more useful test to switch on the best enhancement each tool offers (though, as you say, Photoshop has many, which are more or less appropriate to different situations).
Of course you can install each bit of its functionality - Site Search, I'm Feeling Lucky, Groups, Images, Google Maps, etc - as separate search plugins, but you still have to choose one from the dropdown. With the toolbar it's just a matter of hitting the right button. The 'Up One Level' button is useful too, as are the little buttons that zoom to an individual search term on the page.
Plus, with my Google needs taken care of, I can set Wikipedia as my default search engine.
Uggh...pointers...BAD BAd bAD......no....not...the pointers again....[trembles]
I can deal with about anything, except pointers. Thanks for bringing the nightmares back again....
:-P
As they point, do they say "Ni"?Thanks for this - it's actually reassuring. The last discussion I saw about this *was* on Slashdot, but I don't remember seeing this important factoid - it was all about spreading the wear (which, I presume now, is no longer necessary?)
My concern about these drives is that they will die a very premature death under Windows where, as someone pointed out somewhere higher up the page, even with enough RAM to run all your apps, some paging (or swapping) is always occurring. (And don't tell me you can disable Virtual Memory: yes you can but the OS will very soon start to complain, and eventually turn it on again itself.)
My laptop has a little green light beside the keyboard which flashes when the disk is being accessed, there's even a small red LED on the back of my Archos 605 for the same purpose, in fact - gosh darn it - I think every device I've ever owned that includes a hard disk has had a disk activity light. It's one of the steps when you build a PC: heatsink on top of processor - check; graphics card in its slot - check; and, oh, don't forget to connect the little dangly lead coming from the disk activity light to the correct pins on the motherboard.
You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?
I'm with the GP. Surely I'm not the only one who reacts strongly the other way when someone tells me what to think?
I used to see something like this a lot. I put it down to a bug in the Littlefox theme I was using. Are you using the default theme? I am mainly using Flock these days, so perhaps the trouble lies in the chrome, which is different in Flock I believe?
As a Brit, I envy the differences in policies you're likely to be offered if Obama wins the nomination: on healthcare alone he offers a clear break with the past. Here, nobody with any chance of gaining power ever suggests such a dramatic change, it's always incremental - usually for the worse. This is how we were able to have a report into copyright which essentially said: "everything's fine, but we need tougher penalties for filesharers."
... whereas now we know precisely what will happen. I mean, what could possibly happen in 7.6 billion years to alter the behaviour of objects in our solar system, or our understanding of them?
Anyway, that's how it happened in Doctor Who, so everything that goes on in the meantime is irrelevant.
Actually, eating a placenta is probably a lot better for you than installing Vista.
Usually a bad script from some other domain is introduced onto a page, eg through a widget, a badly-screened comment form, an ad script, etc. Without NoScript, these scripts are treated with the same level of trust as those hosted on the site's domain. But NoScript blocks such scripts by default (unless they happen to come from another trusted domain).
So, while NoScript is not a perfect protection, it does seem pretty good defence against the current wave of malware.
The 'do not reverse engineer' clause has always seemed to me the most unreasonable restriction. If I buy something mechanical - a clock, say - I am free to take it apart, reassemble it, use the parts in artworks, etc. The software vendor have already given me instructions on precisely how the software works, in machine-readable form. Why may I not also understand how it works, tinker with it, improve it? They are taking advantage of the fact that most desktop software currently happens to be compiled to binary form. If it is written in an interpreted language - Python, say - it already happens to be in human-readable form, too and there's no reverse engineering necessary.
But then, I don't see how they could ever enforce it - if I don't post it anywhere, how would they know? This is how knowledge advances - "intellectual property" be damned!