Wow! It's been a while since I've seen an FDIV joke.

I don't know how you could call that 'arrogance'. Thinking you know what is best for the majority is a prerequisite for setting sane defaults.

Speaking as a social democrat living in Norway, a country which (like most socialized health care systems) beats the hell out of the US and most privatized health care systems, I have to say that granting everyone "the exact same level of care, regardless of ability to pay" - is a goddamned feature, not a bug.

Believing in market forces does not mean having to abandon belief in human dignity, for goodness' sake.

Comprehensive health care should be just as much a fundamental human right as the comprehensive justice care afforded by the legal system.

I don't know what you mean by the term "the wireless standards", but both the 802.11 WLAN standards and H.264 et al. are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.

*blink*

Of course there are other factors. But regulation of gun ownership is one of them, and regulation of gun types allowed for private use is another.

Most countries with high gun ownership rates and low murder rates tend to have hunting rifles, not assault weapons. They also have extensive systems that work to prevent guns from coming into the wrong hands.

This whole clichéd genre of "X is also potentially deadly, too, therefore weapons are unfairly singled out!" is absolutely free of any rationality. Guns make murder happen faster than other potentially deadly things. That's why people who want to be able to kill buy guns rather than propane tanks, as any cursory look at standard military equipment would indicate.

It's a matter of efficiency and scale. A spree shooter gets a lot more people before the police can disable him if he uses a gun. As it were: Duh.

The problem with your analogy is that lugging a propane tank into a classroom is probably going to get you some questions people would insist you answered. And you'd be hard pressed to stop them because you're busy lugging a propane tank.

My first thought is: Good luck syncing audio to that!

Second: Good luck doing meaningful digital compression!

In professional broadcasting - _unlike_ the camcorder a mortal can afford - rolling-shutter is under control, as is a lot of other Bad and Wrong stuff that consumer cameras do. (Here's one you can easily check at home: Point a TV remote at it, and press buttons. Do you see the remote LED lighting up? That means it doesn't filter IR, and that wreaks havoc on colour fidelity!)

That's funny. When you see lip-flap in dubbed commercials here in Norway, it's almost always a painfully tacky German ad. Probably for shampoo, or a domestic cleaning product.

That xkcd misunderstands an important point: Resolution should be measured in arc-seconds at typical viewing distance. You have a phone right up against your face. You have a television at one meter distance, at least.

Film cameras need time to advance to the next frame, and to expose the viewfinder. Usually the shutter speed is effectively around 1/50s - in motion pictures the term used is always "shutter angle", never "shutter speed".

That isn't because high-framerate content is bad, though, that's because consumer televisions do a terrible job of motion compensation (which is a HARD problem).

Digital interpolation is not really all that lossy nowadays, if you use the right equipment.

I would prefer the home release to be 720p50, myself, but I expect it'll either be 1080p24 - or maybe 1080i50?

In Norway, the public broadcaster broadcasts 720p50 simply because people watch TV on flat panels, which means that if we sent 1080i50 the TV would deinterlace internally - and deinterlacing is nearly impossible to get right. 720p50 from a hefty box full of ASICs gives much, much higher effective quality than a home user would get from 1080i50, which is the normal HD format until 1080p50 infrastructure becomes adequate.

1080p25 is not something you want. It's really only useful for film material shot at 25fps (as most made-for-TV film stuff is). Frame rates that low incur several restrictions that you cannot process your way out of, like the "safe panning speed".

Some errata:

In cinema, exposure time is a function of frame rate and "shutter angle". The shutter rotates over the film, and by varying the angle you can get higher shutter speeds. IIRC, my Arriflex (made for TV, thus geared for 25fps) maxes out at 180 degrees, meaning 1/52s.

Digital cinema cameras do not have high-speed shutters (unless you set them that way, just like with film). Indeed, since there is no mechanical requirement to blank away the film while the claw advances, you can actually have smaller shutter angles/greater speed.