So why are the BBC listing online in their license fee expenditure?

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/c...

Stop making shit up.

The problem is you're focussing on one or two fringe cases and letting that dictate policy rather than considering the bigger picture.

You're effectively arguing that someone so blatantly craving for attention and power should be given the power to dictate the outcome of an entire issue with his mindgames.

That doesn't sound an awful lot like punishment, it sounds an awful lot like you're giving this individual you're referring too power beyond his wildest dreams, power to individually bend an entire wide ranging political issue based simply on his individual actions.

Politics should be bigger than one person, if you're using these one or two fringe cases to dictate policy then you've let them win, you've let them manipulate a system far bigger than they are. You've fallen hook, line, and sinker in giving them the very attention and power they've been craving all this time. They've been caught, they don't care if they're going to be executed or not, all they care is that people are paying attention to them, and if they can twist entire political debates with their individual words? they're in heaven.

If punishment is what you're after and aren't interested in rehabilitation, then a better solution would be to tell them to shut up, stick them in solitary, and not let their voice be heard ever again. Now THAT would really kill them.

"Unfortunately, I can't find the Nyquist paper online anywhere (I originally read it off microfilm a couple decades back) so the Wikipedia article (not the one you quoted, the other one I linked) is the best I can do for references."

What you really mean is: "My attempt to try and argue myself out of this massive hole I've dug by using a combination of Google and Wikipedia rather than actually understanding of the topic has failed, but I'm still too insecure to admit I was wrong explicitly.". You can't argue your way out of this hole by simply quoting the names of papers and algorithms you've found on Google and Wikipedia in a desperate attempt to try and sound smart all the whilst showing a complete lack of clue about what any of it actually means in practice.

"I have to ask you though, why is it okay for you to insist that "sharp" has different definitions between digital imaging and photography"

It's not about difference in defintion, it's about difference in factors that can cause loss of sharpness. In photography loss of focus is the key thing that causes loss of detail, but in computer graphics there are other things - pixelation by reduced resolution for example.

If you think having read the defintion of blur that it backs up your position, then you're still just desperately clutching at straws to avoid just admitting you were wrong. Have a look at an aliased vs. an anti-aliased screenshot, zoom in to see what anti-aliasing does. The definition of anti-aliasing you linked states:

"make or become unclear or less distinct."

This is EXACTLY what anti-aliasing does, the whole point in it is to make strikingly pixelated areas look less pixelated, this is why I provided you the simple nVidia link, because it shows with a basic example the effects of anti-aliasing - it reduces jagged pixelated edges by blurring them into surrounding edges - it reduces the distinct pixelation by making it less distinct so that to the human eye in intended viewing conditions the edge looks more like a sharp diagonal line than a jagged pixelated mess.

Oh, and by the way, the way you make multiple posts in reply to me and yourself? It's like a desperation meter, the more desperate your argument gets the more desperately you flood the discussion. It's quite amusing.

Oh fuck me, I was wrong, you really are just too dumb to cope with any of this. You're now trying to say that whether something is a blurring effect is defined entirely on whether an article on an AA algorithm explicitly uses the word "blur".

You really didn't think before making even more of a tit of yourself it might be prudent to actually understand what a blur is? You realise the no matter what dictionary you check the term blur and it's synonyms describe the effect of AA exactly?

I can't believe you've reached the point where you're trying to argue a blurring effect isn't in a desperate attempt to save face. You really are a lost cause, a perfect example of someone who just wants to be right even when they're oh so wrong and will jump to extraordinary extremes like arguing that something that is the very definition of a blur isn't. You always know that someone is hopeless when they drop to the point of trying to redefine the dictionary to suit their argument and that's exactly where you're at. It's pathetic.

There's no point in going any further, I can't help you, I've explained multiple times, I've given you everything you need, but you're just beyond it, you're just far too retarded to be able to rationally take part in this topic.

Yeah it's still a crime, that's not in dispute, but we do have the concepts of extenuating circumstances and public interest in British law.

I can't see what the public interest would be if it turns out there are no charges to answer, it's not like anyone and everyone can just get an embassy to put them up in order to skip bail, even Ecuador very nearly didn't take him. It's not like people are going to start running to embassies left and right under the assumption they'll get given protection- Assange was an extreme exception because of the politics of his case.

Yeah I'm interested to see how that plays out. If Sweden drops it's extradition request, there's every possibility that the British courts may deem that that adds weight to his argument that there was no case to answer, that it was political, and that he shouldn't have had to be on bail in the first place making his fleeing of that effectively irrelevant.

But then if there is a political dimension, it may be that they'll be happy to get him on whatever they can, and they do indeed punish him for skipping bail.

It'd be interesting to see how that plays out, but it really depends what happens after the questioning that is finally going ahead.

It's interesting that Ny cites the impending statute of limitations date as the reason for the change of heart. There have been two other key events in the last 6 months that I suspect were more relevant:

1) Assange's petition to the Swedish courts to have the case dropped failed, but in the ruling the Swedish judiciary was clear that it could not understand why Ny hadn't just questioned him over here, that it was incredibly odd that she hadn't and that she must do this ASAP.

2) There has been growing political pressure to stop guarding the embassy. When £10million has been spent on guarding the embassy whilst police forces have been cut MPs have faced increasing pressure from the public and even policing unions to stop wasting time on it. Recent cuts have meant that some crimes such as car crime have become defacto decriminalised because the police no longer have the resources to pursue them. In that context it's rather galling for the police and public alike to hear we're spending millions just to have officers stood around doing nothing.

So I imagine the weight of these two events have been the key reasons for this shift rather than expiry of statute of limitations for the most minor allegations. If Ny defied the Swedish courts a further appeal to have the case dropped would likely succeed due to Ny refusing to do her job and actually pursue a prosecution. Similarly, the Ecuadorian embassy might stop being watched and Assange could flee anyway.

She's really been left little choice. At least the case is finally moving, and Ny has been forced to do her job properly rather than simply persisting with long discredited excuses not to do it (the most amusing of which is that the Swedish justice system doesn't allow overseas questioning - what a laughing stock the folks that persisted in pushing that myth have now become).

Saying you want to learn when all question posed have clearly been answered multiple times shows a clear disconnect between what you're saying you want to do, and what you actually want to do.

You're still displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about most things here. You're trying to explain MSAA and using that as an obscure argument that in some cases an estimated pixel is blurring, and in others it's not. This makes no sense - blurring occurs when you have an approximation of a set of pixels, rather than the actual pixels. An approximation of 4 pixels downscaled to 1, is still an approximation, as is 1 pixel upscaled into 4 approximated pixels. Have a look at the font example here:

http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats...

What do you think those intermediate pixels between the black and the white when anti-aliased are if not a literal blurring of the lines to make a jagged edge look smoother?

You're reaching for a single very specific algorithm, and using very arbitrary (and hypocritical) definitions to try and argue your point. This tells me that you've already decided what's what, which again shows what a farce your claim to want to learn is- if you've already decided you know best (whilst admitting you're wholly unqualified on the subject) then why are you pretending you care? why are you even discussing? don't say you're doing so because you want to learn whilst simultaneously proving that you do not.

You're arguing as someone whose taken their knowledge from a "my graphics card is better than your graphics card" type website or forum discussion with maybe a bit of Googling thrown in to try and mask the most embarrassing elements of your lack of knowledge. What you're not showing is an understanding of the visual impact these algorithms and techniques have on a finalised scene and it's that that makes it clear that you're out of your depth.

If you want to lecture on discussion etiquette whilst complaining about not getting detailed answers - consider this, don't enter a discussion posting in a manner where it's clear you're looking for a fight, continue on with "I've no idea about any of this but here's a logical fallacy" and then persist with "I want to learn but I can't be arsed to think so you're wrong". I don't owe you anything, much less am I willing to put any effort into providing more detailed an in depth explanations with examples when you act like an ass from the very outset and persist through the duration.

You strike me as someone that could actually get into this in a bit more detail and could, if you wanted to, learn to write your own rendering engine. But before you do that you need to sort your attitude out and actually want to learn rather than pretend to want to learn but actually just be looking for a fight. You're so nearly there, you recognise that learning is important, and that wanting to learn is important, but you've not quite crossed the line yet where you're willing to put self-pride aside to actually do it.

If you're not going to do that and finally cross that line you may want to consider that there's a reason you're the sort of person that ended up working in a fast food joint as you mentioned in another post. It's your choice, but I think you probably do have the potential to actually get into this stuff properly and actually do it, rather than skirt about on the edges with half-arsed third hand knowledge learnt from the second hand knowledge of some bottom of the rung gaming website faux-journalist.

If you want to do that I can tell you exactly what you need to do to get going, and how to avoid or deal with the inevitable roadblocks that learning this stuff creates because whilst being a game developer is easy, being a graphics developer isn't - anyone can chuck something together with Unity, Unreal Engine and so forth, but far fewer people can write those engines in the first place. Don't look upto game developers as rockstars, they're not. The days where every development house is building it's own engine and has it's own engine development team are long gone. Most are little more than glorified mod teams nowadays using pre-built engines- if you want to be a game developer you can be one. If you want to be an engine developer? that's going to take a lot more work, but either way you sound like your worship the profession and what it does, and if so then why aren't you aspiring to it? it's within your reach.

Ultimately it depends how much you really care. But don't pretend you want to learn if you actually just want to always be right, even when you're not. I'm not asking you to listen to me, if you're still skeptical of the idea that an upscale can still create a sharper scene than a lower resolution non-upscaled scene, that blurring is sometimes a good thing and so on and so forth then that's your prerogative, but rather than telling me I haven't explained something when I have and just assuming I'm wrong, or bad at teaching just accept that maybe you've got a bit more learning to do first and go learn or experiment, or figure it out yourself from another source.

"The upshot is that enforcement is now in the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, rather than the civil system."

No it's not. License fee evasion is still dealt with entirely in the civil justice system. I doubt the BBC would even want it reclassified because it'd require a higher standard of evidence for a criminal trial than for a civil trial and that'd massively increase the cost to them of enforcement. Right now they can win trials by knocking up shoddy, and frankly unacceptably poor standards of evidence, if it went criminal they'd probably never win a case again.

"by abolishing the TV Licence and reintroducing it as an all-households tax (call it an "Air tax"?), so you have to pay it whether you have a TV or not, to also remove the requirement and burden of proof that a TV is in fact present."

Right but that actually makes an awful lot of sense. The license fee doesn't just pay for the BBC, it helps fund ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. It pays for all our broadcast infrastructure including for both TV and radio. It pays for iPlayer and the BBC website.

I doubt there's a person in the UK that can't honestly say they haven't consumed a service at least in part paid for by the license fee. If you've ever read an article on the BBC website, or using their numerous apps you've done it. If you've watched iPlayer you've done it, if you've watched any of the hundred odd Terrestrial freeview channels you've done it, if you've ever listened to the radio you've done it.

The license fee isn't even close to fit for purpose anymore, because the range of things it covers is necessarily expanding as technology improves and habits change. It makes sense to keep our tax system uptodate to represent reality, rather than have it outdated and nonsensical.

Why should people who own TVs subsidise everyone else? It makes far more sense to spread the cost and have everyone pay for something that everyone uses. We can finally get rid of free TV licenses for elderly millionaires and other such idiocy at the same time.

Yeah, we'd never have held onto the Falklands if it weren't for old Attenborough telling those Argies all about their parrots.

And yet the UK technology industry still manages to piss it all away and be an also-ran.

Seriously. How the fuck do we do it?

Er, just realised my tablet changed shotguns to just Guns for some reason. First sentence should be:

Yes we are. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.

"The problem is that it's so damn difficult to get an easy suicide: Guns, sure.. In the UK, we're not allowed them"

Yes we are. Guns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.

What you can't have is something like a submachine gun, an assault rifle or a hand gun unless you can get an exemption from the Home Secretary because you have a need for one (for example, if you're part of a foreign dignitary's personal security detail like those Obama and the Pope can't leave home without).

When you talk about sharpness in photography as opposed to bluriness, you're talking about a picture that more accurately represents the scene as you see it. When you defocus, you lose detail, the scene is not as you expect, and you call it less sharp.

In computer graphics it's not as straightforward, there is no real scene to capture directly, instead we try and make up something that looks like a real scene with a variety of algorithms.

Your view seems to be that a computer image is more sharp if there is always greater contrast between pixels, and that all upscaling algorithms create a decrease in contrast by using estimates of additional pixels on upscale.

These assumptions are incorrect, because they neither represent how modern upscaling algorithms used in games work, nor do they take into account that greater contrast is sometimes detrimental in creating a more realistic picture. Your view would imply that a non-anti-aliased scene is better than an anti-aliased scene for say, an FPS where you're looking down a straight road. This is nonsense, because without that blur you're actually going to end up with a scene that looks less real - it fits your definition of sharper. Similarly increased pixelation makes a scene less real, even though you seem to be suggesting a more pixelated scene is a sharper scene.

So you've got this differentiation with the computer graphics world where there are additional criteria that reduce the accuracy of a scene to what you might hope it to be that go beyond simple focus. You're using a definition of sharpness that suggests that a less realistic looking scene (i.e. more pixelated, and with nonsense distance rendering) is sharper. You're saying that if we had a simple game like Minecraft running at a low incredibly pixelated resolution, that the image is somehow sharper than that same scene upscaled with an algorithm that can recognise the typically well defined edges in Minecraft's relatively simple graphics and grow them to a resolution that loses visible pixelation whilst not losing any actual practical detail. Fundamentally you're equating sharpness to increased pixelation, and increased contrast between neighbouring pixels. Neither of which are actually really desirable in many parts of scenes in games gunning for photorealism.

Just like being out of focus can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene with a camera, higher pixelation and lack of decent blending can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene in computer graphics. You can't make a scene sharper by simply increasing contrast, and increasing pixelation all you're doing is creating a digital kind of blur that messes up the scene as much as being out of focus with an analog camera would.

Of course there are other factors, if you can have more polygons at 720p upscaled to 1080p than you can afford if you just go for native 1080p then you can make curves look more like curves, rather than a bunch of triangles desperately trying to represent curves. Or you can simply make the scene look more real in general by having more realistic clutter in it like litter on the ground, rather than a pristine swept street in the middle of a ghetto that makes zero sense and gives zero immersion.

Upscaling is done for a reason - when used with specific intention in a planned manner like this it creates a better, more realistic image than not upscaling. Again yes, if you can afford to render the scene natively at 1080p with full AA and so forth it's bound to look better because there's no guesswork going on, but that guesswork is typically good enough that upscaled to 1080p is going to look way sharper than native 720p because the curves are better defined, distance rendering can be more accurately done and so on and so forth.

Saying you want to learn is meaningless, you have to actually want to learn and be willing to learn. Refusing to read what's in front of you and arguing about something you openly admit you don't have a clue about guarantees you a life of ignorance. This is the last time I'm going to try to explain it to you because beyond this it simply means that you don't want to learn, that you're intentionally ignorant- that you're ignorant by choice.

Um no, I replied to you because you replied to me asking a question which I answered. I've no idea who "the game developer" is but even then what do you mean by game developer? are we talking about an expert in rendering technology? I don't think many if any of those post here anymore, people like Carmack left a long time ago and mostly when people rave on about being a game developer on Slashdot what they really mean is they're a bottom of the rung lacky that implements a few game mechanics- that's a far cry from being one of the handful of developers who actually deal with rendering tech in the industry - there's a reason why most companies just reuse existing engines like Frostbite, Unreal, or id Tech.

You seem to be upset that you asked a question and got an answer you didn't want and are now pushing a classic appeal to authority fallacy. I'm happy to answer questions as I have done, but if you just want to argue for the sake of it by throwing in logical fallacies whilst admitting that you don't really know enough to provide an actual counter-point or correction then I've got better things to do.

If your knowledge of computer graphics and upscaling is limited to resize in paint programs you really are too dumb to be having this conversation.

Even if we stick to your photography oriented view of out of focus blur which is really what you're talking about when you say sharpness when talking about loss of explicit per-pixel detail it's not as if upscaling algorithms are so dumb that a similar blur is a given. Worse, some blurring is even desirable, that's the whole point of spatial anti-aliasing after all.

Of course yes, having AA on a 1080p precisely rendered scene is always going to look best, but an upscaled 720p image to 1080p is always going to look better than a precisely rendered 720p image with modern upscaling algorithms and also nearly always look better than a 1080p precisely rendered scene without AA even.