Coward! Windows Movie Maker actually interprets(some) standard formats, and has an interface that feels like having a pro editing studio at your back compared to the horrors of Sony Movieshaker!(Even better, Movieshaker is exciting and mandatory if you were... questionably sensible... enough to purchase one of Sony's pricey 'MicroMV' cameras, which were vaguely DV-like, except totally incompatible.)

With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.

Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.

Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.

If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.

Or sell a generator to a legitimate client, and see if they can draw a continuous 1MW from it over a long period of time. I'll lay good money on the claim that this "customer" is a pal of Rossi.

you might be right, but it won't come soon enough to help this generation.

You're both just ranting unless you ask the people she supposedly helped, most of whom are presumably now dead. If they were happy then she did a good job. If they were unhappy then she did a bad job. There is no other metric which is meaningful but happiness per dollar or whatever other number you're measuring effectiveness by. (Man-hour? It pretty much always boils down to dollars or hours, and hours can be converted into dollars.)

If you're going to come over all logical, I have to ask, where is the grain coming from? I mean, you're not proposing that they print bread from PLA, are you? Just because you can theoretically eat it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I got my first webpage at 15. And there wasn't a lot of content around at the time.

Suffice to say, if I ever entertained notions of running for political office, they were long since dashed.

This is much of why I feel so free to share my feelings here. My attitude is already well-known and a matter of public record. (Although since the internet archive operates based on the current robots.txt, our once-significant site is not available to the public...)

Those numbers aren't truly random and cryptanalysis can be applied to them. Especially if the attacker knows you're using the Yellow Pages (security through obscurity).

There are two kinds of noise in the car which are insulated for, the road noise and the engine noise. If you run any kind of fancy rubber for performance reasons, road noise will be considerable at high speeds. Of course, most EVs and hybrids run LRR tires which produce less friction and thus less noise... but in a luxury performance vehicle, you want some decent rubber. You really need it if you want to actually use the car.

"a Tesla" will soon include a $30k model and, hopefully, will later include a lower-cost model. If a family can't afford to buy a $30k car on credit, then there are deeper problems afoot in the nation which you simply cannot pin on Tesla, and which are not adequately explained by the Government granting them a loan which has now been paid back.

How amusing. Solyndra is what you're asking for, and Tesla is what you're complaining about, but we've been paid back for Tesla, and not for Solyndra. You really have no clue what you're on about, or even what you're saying, have you?

Sounds like a metaphor for something kinky...

It wasn't until the auto companies bought up and shut down profitable public transportation systems nationwide (including both local and long-range transport — streetcars, buses, and trains) and shut them down to increase demand for their product. When coupled with the development of the interstate highway system which was allegedly intended to promote national defense but which was actually unnecessary for that purpose (expanding a rail network provides for the same function, but delivers more transportation efficiency) this forced citizens to buy automobiles if they wanted to remain relevant members of society. I grew up in Santa Cruz as the child of a single mother who refused to buy a car. Some of our buses ran every fifteen minutes but that still resulted in adding hours to my day every day because of the dominance of cars and the ineffectuality of the bus system — again, a situation which was deliberately created by auto companies nationwide.

You're looking at history through typically rose-colored glasses. The fact is that it wasn't the price coming down that drove acceptance of the automobile; that was a result of acceptance of the automobile that was forced upon the populace, due to the deliberate removal of the systems which had naturally evolved to fill actual consumer need.

That's a massive change. That's several of the most failure-prone systems removed and replaced with something less failure-prone than anything that's currently on the vehicle. It basically reduces the vehicle to body, suspension, and electrical work, because statistically nobody is actually going to work on the motor or controller (which will be replaced as a unit) and many of these vehicles don't even have a transmission. Vehicles with regenerative braking also reduce the wear on the brake system, extending even such a trivial service. The fact is that EVs built to the same standards will require significantly less maintenance hours than vehicles with ICEs in them. Dealers are already hurting (primarily "big 3" dealers) due to the loss of service revenues which came with American automakers finally electing to compete on quality and not simply based on being made in the USA, which is mostly a lie anyway since so many major parts (including castings!) have been coming from China since the 1980s.

Public transport, then? Not a viable alternative in many cases, like if you have to move a lot of stuff. On my current commute, going by car offers a better travel time during rush hour, even in NL with its dense and efficient public transport network.

I have better hopes for self-driving cars. It'll be a while before a completely autonomous vehicle becomes an everyday reality, but parts of that self-driving stuff is viable today and some of it will already be present in upcoming Volvo / BMW models IIRC. It won't be long until we'll have many cars that can reliably keep to a lane and maintain a safe distance to the guy in front. If there are enough of these... imagine opening up a special diamond lane for these cars, and letting them go 150km/h bumper to bumper there. That's first class, door-to-door "public transport" that lets you go your own way when you need to.

You offered a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "a new car for $10K and $1K in gas fees every year for 20 years" and whatever, because of the massive externalities from gasoline-powered vehicles. As long as people are driving them, we all suffer and we suffer by loss of environment and due to health impact. Petro-fueled cars have a cost in lives. Those who drive them are murderers, myself included. Hyperbole? Bullshit. We're killers for nothing more than convenience.

EVs have the same problem, but not inherently. Of course, we could run even our gassers on biofuels (i.e. Butanol, a direct 1:1 replacement) if not for legal malfeasance designed to keep us from producing and burning them, thanks to Butamax, a shell company owned by BP and DuPont. They are leveraging patents produced at public universities, partly with our tax money to prevent production of Butanol as a motor fuel, which would make the world a better place.

An open statement, not to be misconstrued as any accusation against the parent poster: If you work for BP or DuPont, fuck you. I hope you die in a fire.