Or Microsoft uses them as a flotation device for WinPhone until it starts to gain some traction, then encourages other hardware makers in a race to the bottom on hardware price and downgrades Nokia while they sit back and rake in the money on software fees. There is a fundamental disconnect between the aspirations and needs of the two companies, and the use and abuse by MS of other partners like HP is not a promising precendent. Very suspect too that a guy moves from MS WinMo to Nokia and then moves Nokia to what is effectively a subsidiary position under Microsoft, which Microsoft controlling the crown jewels (the OS), and Nokia left as just another hardware partner. The strength of Nokia used to be in a great synthesis between software and hardware (some time ago, before they got lost in the smartphone quagmire), and this deal will leave them as simply yet another hardware manufacturer which leases their software from MS. I imagine WinPhone will do OK (mediocre or not), but the hardware partners will not, as they will be squeezed for cash like other MS hardware partners. So the fundamental problem here is that Nokia needs MS, but MS doesn't need Nokia.
Partnering with Microsoft was an incredibly stupid move from Nokia, and the beginning of the end for their company - unlike someone like IBM, they don't have other major streams of revenue that will insulate them from this partnership when it goes bad.
Terrorizers would come out of the woodwork with ample targets at any point along the tracks to sabotage the infrastructure requiring us to absorb billion dollar costs to pay some military industrial complex behemoth to secure the infrastructure and I would still need my nutsack groped and inspected to get on a train that moves at half the speed of a plane.
Terrorists could attack megachurches, they could attack busy shopping centres, they could attack cinemas, schools, busy highways etc etc. Trains are just one of many targets. In an open society, terrorism is not something you can eliminate, so realise that it kills far fewer people a year than the roads, alcoholism, or guns, and get on with your life WITHOUT BEING TERRORISED into a trembling fear of change. Your politicians cannot admit this as admitting they can do very little would be political suicide - people don't want to hear it.
The US will never build high speed rail, but mainly because the government is prey to corporate lobbyists and politicians hostile to social intervention who would make sure this never got off the ground. In fact it would make a lot of sense in a country so widely distributed, with huge amounts of spare land and large urban centres.
Roads are actually very expensive too, but somehow that's just seen as a necessary government expenditure - up to $3,000,000 per mile.
Sometimes it's better not to back devils - the US is not obliged to send huge amounts of military aid to Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, Uzbekistan etc etc. and probably a lot of covert funding for guerrilla groups that we don't know about (see numerous examples from past decades). Maybe that seemed like a good idea at some point, but we've reached the point where the US is currently bankrolling the majority of the world's oppressive regimes - that's got to stop.
As to this story, the concept of the US actually imposing the internet on dictatorships is absurd. Given their recent backing of the torturer Suleiman as the new 'strong man of Egypt', they're more likely to help impose a media blackout in the name of continuity and stability than undermine any dictators. Unless, of course, those dictators decide they don't want to play along with the US in the region. Then perhaps they might have 'freedom' imposed on them.
How about the west cancel immediately their HUGE military and financial aid for this dictator (whom they have backed for the last 30 years without more than lip-service to freedom, democracy, and all those things they claim to hold dear), unequivocally call for him to step down, and then stay out of the way? Leaving egypt to the egyptians would make a nice change.
As long as there have been empires there have been excuses for interfering in other countries, in the name of justice, civilisation, stability etc etc. Now people are claiming we need to intervene because otherwise there will be danger to the Suez, or an Islamist takeover, or a military coup. These are old lies, and we should know better than be taken in by the likes of Blair (the 'peace envoy' who thinks Mubarak should definitely stay), or Clinton talking of the need for stability and western interference.
Should the US government intervene on behalf of a political faction in Egypt,
Couldn't agree more.
That's why the US should stop supporting the dictator Mubarak in the name of stability, and immediately stop supplying huge amounts of military and other aid to the Egyptian government. That would be a truly neutral position to take, and far more in line with the ostensible ideals of the US than propping up an ageing dictator after he has his security forces shoot down people in the streets with live ammunition, much of which has been supplied by the US.
Same goes for all the other dictators past and present that the US and other western states have propped up in the name of expediency. It would save the US a lot of money too, though perhaps the US armaments industry wouldn't be too happy.
I'm trying to go more cash as it is...keep CC spending down...and really, one good hack on this thing, or a stolen phone...how much money could you potentially lose if this thing acts like a debit card and takes it straight out of your checking???
Typically these schemes require the user to actively transfer money to a contact-less payment card, either manually or by direct debit, so they are a true equivalent to cash and do not threaten your main bank balance. See for example how the Oyster travel card scheme works in London. So it would just be like withdrawing 20 credits from a bank machine with your debit card, then using it to buy something. If they allowed access to all the funds in your account (or even a set amount per day), that would be insane and a huge invitation to fraud.
As to turning it off, I imagine Apple will have a switch in settings to do so, and you'd have to set up the account in the first place with your details and load it with money (probably a small amount).
The US funds Israel to the tune of 3 BILLION a year for military use. That's an insane amount of money PER YEAR, and if you removed it I suspect the 'huge defence industry' of Israel would collapse overnight. The US could at least stop being part of the problem here.
It's time the US took responsability for meddling so comprehensively in the region, and started winding down military aid to all players, including Saudi, Israel, Iraq, and anywhere else which is a possible future tinderbox.Imagine if all that military aid was transformed into building hospitals, schools and in both Israel and Palestine.
Finally, can the US even afford to spend that much money on a foreign country every year, given their ballooning deficit? Avoiding foreign entanglements has never sounded such a good idea.
The person who leaked this managed the cayman island accounts for at least a few years, had a high up position in the bank and had access to the data on the accounts. As the purpose of hidden and offshore accounts is often explicitly tax evasion he most likely has a very, very, good idea of whether they cheated on their taxes and declared all their income.
Would love to see this come back - I too was happy with the feature they introduced to downvote results.
There should be some way for users to down-vote these scammer parasites like efreedom.com which just serve content from other sites with adverts. Just as we collectively downvote spam, which ensures most people never see it, we should be able to do the same with search results.
Regarding RAW: My wife is a professional photographer, and from her perspective the main advantage of RAW over jpeg is if you're going to do anything with the color.
If you're a professional, and you know what you're doing, I agree RAW has its uses, but its usefulness is limited for non-professional work unless you do a lot of post-processing (and even in post-processing, its usefulness is exaggerated), and as an archival format it's terrible due to the fact it is not one format, but hundreds of different ones. If you don't adjust your images much, it's definitely not worth the space, as you say.
Low quality jpegs are awful - among the worst files I've had to work on, but high quality ones do not typically have significant artefacts/colour shifts. All images supplied by agencies are stored and supplied as jpg files, the reason being that jpg on maximum quality is actually close to lossless, and the quality/space tradeoff is definitely worth it. The compression you choose to use makes far more difference to file size than the pixel density of the image, so they keep the images as hires as possible and use jpg.
I know this because I spend a lot of time adjusting images and looking at the differences close up for work. Sometimes, on edge cases, RAW helps save a badly exposed picture, but often it won't make any difference, particularly if it is well exposed in the first place. I've been shooting in RAW the last few years and am considering just switching back to jpg unless it's for paid work.
Having done quite a lot of post-processing on photographs (mine and others), I'd say RAW has become a bit of a fetish, particularly in the prosumer market - it's another one of those things people do to try to get the perfect picture, even if they never actually adjust their images and use the facilities it offers, and the downsides are massive space requirements and constantly changing, poorly documented formats.
What they call coalition government we call bipartisanship, right?
No, it's a coalition government - rule by more than one party in the same cabinet/government. Quite common in Europe, unheard of in the states (though you do have cohabitation between a president and a congress or senate hostile to them quite often).
A true coalition in the States would have (for example) Obama appointing Dick Cheney or Ron Paul as his vice-president, and working with him day to day and appointing advisers from other parties, but the systems are so different that it's hard to compare. Typically a coalition is made up of one large party and one or more small ones to make up the numbers, so in the strongly bipartisan system of the states, it's unlikely to happen.
They're most likely storing them as RAW if one holiday leads to 16GB of images.
If saved in jpg (with maximum quality/minimum compression) rather than RAW, you'd cut the collection down to a much smaller size without having to adjust resolution at all (which definitely does lose information). RAW does not give you so much that it is worth storing stuff in it, unless you're a professional photographer and do a lot of image correction yourself, but many amateurs also like to use it as it sounds technical, and in theory gives you more control, even though it balloons the size of an image collection and does not in fact offer a huge amount more control. RAW also varies with the camera, unless you're savvy enough to convert it all to Adobe's version, so it's a terrible choice for archiving photos, as all these different raw formats will be forgotten quicker than jpg (for example) and may become hard to open.
Typically images end up saved as jpg anyway when sold, distributed, or printed in any way so there's not much gain in storing them as raw, particularly if you're not intending to sell them at a later date.
I can't agree that resizing to 1024 or 800 is in any way a good idea, as you'd lose an awful lot of information, and it's just not necessary if you use a file format with compression. The loss in quality would be huge if you do anything other than look at the images on your ipad or something - even a laptop screen is easily larger than the resolutions you quote, and forget about printing up to A4 size. Depends on the uses you put your images to I guess - if you're just taking holiday snaps and only want small printouts/web images, resizing to a smaller size is quite acceptable, but for most people it's not a necessary trade-off as there are other ways to get smaller files.
Outing honest people whose only so-called "crime" is wanting to avoid the theft of their hard and presumably legitimately-earned dollars is completely and totally wrong, and negates much if not all of the good Wikileaks has done in exposing actual government and corporate wrongdoing. It also makes Wikileaks, directly or indirectly, an accomplice to the very real crimes of the state that it has spent so much of its time trying to expose.
What if they are not honest people, but are in fact (for example) dictators stealing money from Tunisia or some other African country? Should they still act with impunity and should their actions still be hidden if they are exposed to wikileaks?
Tax evasion is also a crime in most countries, and rightly so. If that's what they are exposing here they would also be doing good in my opinion (that's tax evasion not avoidance). Finally, I'm not aware that the death sentence is imposed for evading tax, so perhaps tone down the rhetoric a bit?
However no-one knows yet what this information is exactly, and who it is on, so it is really far too early to judge this whistleblower and wikileaks. The guy is ruining his life to do leak this and will probably go to jail for it, so I imagine he has some pretty strong reasons to release the information, possibly because he feels morally obliged to...
It's not actually a plugin in the narrow sense of the word - they're using standard extensibility points for codecs in both IE and Safari. Read the "Update" part in the original article [techcrunch.com].
It is a plugin in the sense of the word that users of browsers use - you have to download a binary and install it to view the content. The distinction they're trying to make in that article is meaningless to end users.
The problem with it is that you have to download yet another browser plugin to view that content. So someone has to have made a plugin, and if there isn't one for your platform (iPhone or iPad say), you're out of luck.
I have backed Google many times in the past, said that basically they were a good company at heart. I still think they are but for the setback they have caused in forcing us all into a new dark age of flash players for video across the web - for that, I have dropped Chrome, and switched all my default search engines to Bing *shudder*. I think Google has somehow totally lost focus on what is good for the industry or the consumer, and are going totally now for what is good for Google and no-one else.
This is not some secret move to support Flash - they're pushing a standard which is intended to supplant Flash for all video playing. The move is very similar to that Apple made in pushing to drop flash and replace it with their chosen video standard - h.264. Apple look in a more favourable position at the moment, but really the moves are essentially similar - they are a political attempt to push web users away from Flash and toward an open standard that they have more control over. Neither side wants Adobe to take over the web with Flash and AIR, or Microsoft with Silverlight, or for the other to get a strangle-hold on internet video and each side is jostling for advantage, and frankly don't much care about the effects on their users.
Apple has sacrificed the ability of their users of iDevices to play Flash in this battle (there's still loads of Flash on the web), and it looks like going forward will do the same for all their computers too. They don't care that this inconveniences less technical users or annoys them when they can't play the BBC news web clips (for example), they just want to eliminate Flash (the reasons for which I completely understand).
And Google has decided to play hardball and if they push WebM hard enough may cause trouble for users without access to a plugin, since MS and Apple aren't going to cooperate, and devices like iPad will be left high and dry if YouTube switches, with no Flash and no WebM (because Apple will refuse to incorporate it).
Frankly, neither side is anything to cheer about, and it's quite clear both sides view user inconvenience as collateral damage in the war for control of internet video. This is all about money, not about being good or bad.
As to the problems caused for the video tag, it supports multiple video encodings, and life would be relatively simple for web developers if they only have to encode videos twice - once for WebM, and once for h.264 - job done for all modern browsers. That's no reason to use Flash instead of the video tag, so this whole 'this pushes people to use Flash' argument is bogus. This doesn't kill the video tag, it just splits the users into two camps which need to be catered to. Saying that it pushes people to Flash is completely ignoring all the devices out there which don't support Flash well - iPods, iPads, iPhones, many Android phones, and soon, all new Macs. A strange contortion for an Apple fan to ignore all that, but ideologically necessary it seems, in order to continue to view Apple as on the side of right at all times.
If they cared about their users, Google would support both formats, as would Apple, and there would be no problem - let the best format win. If you've abandoned all Google use over this, I suggest you step back and look at your priorities again, as Apple is just as evil in their own way. Apple is not always on the side of the light, and Google suddenly evil; they are both corporations, jostling for advantage, and neither of them cares about you as a user in any way, so long as you keep buying their stuff/viewing their ads. The different shades of evil mostly come down to that dichotomy in how they earn their money.
Actually they did contain a gag order, one which twitter was only allowed ta talk about ( and inform the targets of ) after they had overturned.
Given the statements by Biden and others classing him as a 'terrorist' it's probable that they're building a case against Assange as well. Given the abuse of law and process at guantanamo bay, I'd say it's only sensible that Assange is concerned over an attempt at prosecution by a gov which does not respect international law, or even their own laws.
Perhaps you should stop indulging your fantasies about what 'the left' and 'liberals' think and engage your brain in grappling with the questions raised. While you are wrestling with straw men of your one creation ( che Guevara supporting, Chavez hugging Mugabe supporter), other people live their life under socialism quite happily.
Just FYI democratic socialism is practised in many European countries, it is not some evil dictatorship of the proletariat's representatives, it is merely a recognition that capitalism works best when tempered with humanity. You appear to have mixed it up with extreme forms of communism, though I'm sure you can find some crazy political grouping with socialist in it's name (e.g. National socialists), it is not a synonym of communism.
The world is not black and white and you are doing yourself and others a disservice by painting it in lurid caricatures, particularly so as the post you responded to attempted to find common ground, which you rejected with an irrelevant rant. Please deal with your real opponents and the arguments they present, and you'll find they're not so different from you and not as rabid as your imaginings.
Or just browse without Java. I've had Java turned off for years, and don't miss it.
Disabling Javascript leads to degraded performance and a degraded UI on some sites (note I said degraded, not non-functional, just not as nice), so it's not something most people would want to do. Javascript is pretty well sandboxed now in any case, and many exploits are through image file handling or things like that, which you'd still be vulnerable to.
Your recommendation of another browser for Java would unfortunately leave users just as vulnerable, as they can be exploited just as easily through the other browser's Java.
PS Splitting a sentence between the post title and body is annoying, please use the title for an actual title.
Bad ideas get torn apart by other users with great haste, exuberance, and detail.
Or not, as the case may be; good ideas may equally be torn apart because they don't agree with the preconceptions and assumptions of the particular users on the forum. Your argument assumes that large collections of people will produce the best solution, or even a usable solution, by consensus. That's not often the case in my experience.
Democracy is the least bad political system because it limits the power of those in charge and forces them to be held to account, not because it produces efficient or desirable results. To apply it to realms other than the political is not always useful.
You can't have it both ways. Either Wikileaks and Assange are responsible for what happens when they release information, or they aren't. You can't say that they're heroes when a leak promotes democracy, but that when a leak sets it back, they're off the hook. If Wikileaks wants the credit when good things happen, then they also get the blame when bad stuff happens.
Wikileaks are responsible for releasing this information about Tsangvirai's contacts with the US into the wild.
Mugabe is responsible for the collapse of Zimbabwe, and the persecution of Tsangvirai, probably the murder of his family, and for manipulating him into a power-sharing arrangement in which he and the MDC are very vulnerable.
Tsangvirai is responsible for his agreement with Mugabe to jointly hold power, his contacts with Western powers, and any other agreements he may have made, whether secret or not.
The summary tries to conflate the Mugabe's actions with wikileaks and somehow make them co-conspirators, which is stupid. Mugabe doesn't need wikileaks to perform extra-judicial murder or steal elections, it just serves his purposes to include a little bit of truth in his rants about Western interference - that truth could come from any source. As to whether wikileaks set democracy back by releasing information on Tsangvirai, Tsangvirai does not represent democracy, but yet another compromised politian who has co-habited with Mugabe for years without concrete results. His contribution to democracy in Zimbabwe is debatable at best.
The Zimbabwean people should know about the actions of all these actors and make up their own minds, and the best weapon in their fight is the truth, something which is in very short supply. I'd say it's not clear whether wikileaks has helped democracy or not here, and certainly not something to come to a snap judgement about or use as an argument for the evil of wikileaks.
Re:Don't Feel Comfortable Helping
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Cablegate, the Game
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So reading New York Times = learning the truth, right?
Wrong. Evidently, I'm not claiming the NYT has always and will forever print exclusively the truth, only that it did, along with wikileaks, and now Slashdot, reproduce the particular truths the grandparent is complaining about being exposed to (things that were said by American diplomats in cables). In those particular instances the NYT was reproducing the truth about the USG and its diplomats' views of the world - that was what I meant by 'learning the truth about your government'.
I hope that puts your mind at rest as to whether I believe the NYT is eternally and universally true!
Slashdot Mirror
Or Microsoft uses them as a flotation device for WinPhone until it starts to gain some traction, then encourages other hardware makers in a race to the bottom on hardware price and downgrades Nokia while they sit back and rake in the money on software fees. There is a fundamental disconnect between the aspirations and needs of the two companies, and the use and abuse by MS of other partners like HP is not a promising precendent. Very suspect too that a guy moves from MS WinMo to Nokia and then moves Nokia to what is effectively a subsidiary position under Microsoft, which Microsoft controlling the crown jewels (the OS), and Nokia left as just another hardware partner. The strength of Nokia used to be in a great synthesis between software and hardware (some time ago, before they got lost in the smartphone quagmire), and this deal will leave them as simply yet another hardware manufacturer which leases their software from MS. I imagine WinPhone will do OK (mediocre or not), but the hardware partners will not, as they will be squeezed for cash like other MS hardware partners. So the fundamental problem here is that Nokia needs MS, but MS doesn't need Nokia.
Partnering with Microsoft was an incredibly stupid move from Nokia, and the beginning of the end for their company - unlike someone like IBM, they don't have other major streams of revenue that will insulate them from this partnership when it goes bad.
Terrorizers would come out of the woodwork with ample targets at any point along the tracks to sabotage the infrastructure requiring us to absorb billion dollar costs to pay some military industrial complex behemoth to secure the infrastructure and I would still need my nutsack groped and inspected to get on a train that moves at half the speed of a plane.
Terrorists could attack megachurches, they could attack busy shopping centres, they could attack cinemas, schools, busy highways etc etc. Trains are just one of many targets. In an open society, terrorism is not something you can eliminate, so realise that it kills far fewer people a year than the roads, alcoholism, or guns, and get on with your life WITHOUT BEING TERRORISED into a trembling fear of change. Your politicians cannot admit this as admitting they can do very little would be political suicide - people don't want to hear it.
The US will never build high speed rail, but mainly because the government is prey to corporate lobbyists and politicians hostile to social intervention who would make sure this never got off the ground. In fact it would make a lot of sense in a country so widely distributed, with huge amounts of spare land and large urban centres.
Roads are actually very expensive too, but somehow that's just seen as a necessary government expenditure - up to $3,000,000 per mile.
That worked so well with Iran and the overthrow of the Shah. Sometimes it's better to stick with the devil you know.
The Shah was yet another dictator installed by the US and UK after deposing a democratic government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'état
Sometimes it's better not to back devils - the US is not obliged to send huge amounts of military aid to Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, Uzbekistan etc etc. and probably a lot of covert funding for guerrilla groups that we don't know about (see numerous examples from past decades). Maybe that seemed like a good idea at some point, but we've reached the point where the US is currently bankrolling the majority of the world's oppressive regimes - that's got to stop.
http://www.alternet.org/world/149805/it_ain't_just_mubarak_--_7_of_the_worst_dictators_the_u.s._is_backing_to_the_hilt/
As to this story, the concept of the US actually imposing the internet on dictatorships is absurd. Given their recent backing of the torturer Suleiman as the new 'strong man of Egypt', they're more likely to help impose a media blackout in the name of continuity and stability than undermine any dictators. Unless, of course, those dictators decide they don't want to play along with the US in the region. Then perhaps they might have 'freedom' imposed on them.
The UN should be let in
How about the west cancel immediately their HUGE military and financial aid for this dictator (whom they have backed for the last 30 years without more than lip-service to freedom, democracy, and all those things they claim to hold dear), unequivocally call for him to step down, and then stay out of the way? Leaving egypt to the egyptians would make a nice change.
As long as there have been empires there have been excuses for interfering in other countries, in the name of justice, civilisation, stability etc etc. Now people are claiming we need to intervene because otherwise there will be danger to the Suez, or an Islamist takeover, or a military coup. These are old lies, and we should know better than be taken in by the likes of Blair (the 'peace envoy' who thinks Mubarak should definitely stay), or Clinton talking of the need for stability and western interference.
Should the US government intervene on behalf of a political faction in Egypt,
Couldn't agree more.
That's why the US should stop supporting the dictator Mubarak in the name of stability, and immediately stop supplying huge amounts of military and other aid to the Egyptian government. That would be a truly neutral position to take, and far more in line with the ostensible ideals of the US than propping up an ageing dictator after he has his security forces shoot down people in the streets with live ammunition, much of which has been supplied by the US.
Same goes for all the other dictators past and present that the US and other western states have propped up in the name of expediency. It would save the US a lot of money too, though perhaps the US armaments industry wouldn't be too happy.
I'm trying to go more cash as it is...keep CC spending down...and really, one good hack on this thing, or a stolen phone...how much money could you potentially lose if this thing acts like a debit card and takes it straight out of your checking???
Typically these schemes require the user to actively transfer money to a contact-less payment card, either manually or by direct debit, so they are a true equivalent to cash and do not threaten your main bank balance. See for example how the Oyster travel card scheme works in London. So it would just be like withdrawing 20 credits from a bank machine with your debit card, then using it to buy something. If they allowed access to all the funds in your account (or even a set amount per day), that would be insane and a huge invitation to fraud.
As to turning it off, I imagine Apple will have a switch in settings to do so, and you'd have to set up the account in the first place with your details and load it with money (probably a small amount).
The US funds Israel to the tune of 3 BILLION a year for military use. That's an insane amount of money PER YEAR, and if you removed it I suspect the 'huge defence industry' of Israel would collapse overnight. The US could at least stop being part of the problem here.
It's time the US took responsability for meddling so comprehensively in the region, and started winding down military aid to all players, including Saudi, Israel, Iraq, and anywhere else which is a possible future tinderbox.Imagine if all that military aid was transformed into building hospitals, schools and in both Israel and Palestine.
Finally, can the US even afford to spend that much money on a foreign country every year, given their ballooning deficit? Avoiding foreign entanglements has never sounded such a good idea.
The person who leaked this managed the cayman island accounts for at least a few years, had a high up position in the bank and had access to the data on the accounts. As the purpose of hidden and offshore accounts is often explicitly tax evasion he most likely has a very, very, good idea of whether they cheated on their taxes and declared all their income.
He doesn't need a trial to know that.
Would love to see this come back - I too was happy with the feature they introduced to downvote results.
There should be some way for users to down-vote these scammer parasites like efreedom.com which just serve content from other sites with adverts. Just as we collectively downvote spam, which ensures most people never see it, we should be able to do the same with search results.
the person who leaked this has no idea if these people actually cheated on their taxes.
What makes you think that?
Regarding RAW: My wife is a professional photographer, and from her perspective the main advantage of RAW over jpeg is if you're going to do anything with the color.
If you're a professional, and you know what you're doing, I agree RAW has its uses, but its usefulness is limited for non-professional work unless you do a lot of post-processing (and even in post-processing, its usefulness is exaggerated), and as an archival format it's terrible due to the fact it is not one format, but hundreds of different ones. If you don't adjust your images much, it's definitely not worth the space, as you say.
Low quality jpegs are awful - among the worst files I've had to work on, but high quality ones do not typically have significant artefacts/colour shifts. All images supplied by agencies are stored and supplied as jpg files, the reason being that jpg on maximum quality is actually close to lossless, and the quality/space tradeoff is definitely worth it. The compression you choose to use makes far more difference to file size than the pixel density of the image, so they keep the images as hires as possible and use jpg.
I know this because I spend a lot of time adjusting images and looking at the differences close up for work. Sometimes, on edge cases, RAW helps save a badly exposed picture, but often it won't make any difference, particularly if it is well exposed in the first place. I've been shooting in RAW the last few years and am considering just switching back to jpg unless it's for paid work.
Having done quite a lot of post-processing on photographs (mine and others), I'd say RAW has become a bit of a fetish, particularly in the prosumer market - it's another one of those things people do to try to get the perfect picture, even if they never actually adjust their images and use the facilities it offers, and the downsides are massive space requirements and constantly changing, poorly documented formats.
sorry, for bipartisan in that last sentence, read bipartate...
What they call coalition government we call bipartisanship, right?
No, it's a coalition government - rule by more than one party in the same cabinet/government. Quite common in Europe, unheard of in the states (though you do have cohabitation between a president and a congress or senate hostile to them quite often).
A true coalition in the States would have (for example) Obama appointing Dick Cheney or Ron Paul as his vice-president, and working with him day to day and appointing advisers from other parties, but the systems are so different that it's hard to compare. Typically a coalition is made up of one large party and one or more small ones to make up the numbers, so in the strongly bipartisan system of the states, it's unlikely to happen.
They're most likely storing them as RAW if one holiday leads to 16GB of images.
If saved in jpg (with maximum quality/minimum compression) rather than RAW, you'd cut the collection down to a much smaller size without having to adjust resolution at all (which definitely does lose information). RAW does not give you so much that it is worth storing stuff in it, unless you're a professional photographer and do a lot of image correction yourself, but many amateurs also like to use it as it sounds technical, and in theory gives you more control, even though it balloons the size of an image collection and does not in fact offer a huge amount more control. RAW also varies with the camera, unless you're savvy enough to convert it all to Adobe's version, so it's a terrible choice for archiving photos, as all these different raw formats will be forgotten quicker than jpg (for example) and may become hard to open.
Typically images end up saved as jpg anyway when sold, distributed, or printed in any way so there's not much gain in storing them as raw, particularly if you're not intending to sell them at a later date.
I can't agree that resizing to 1024 or 800 is in any way a good idea, as you'd lose an awful lot of information, and it's just not necessary if you use a file format with compression. The loss in quality would be huge if you do anything other than look at the images on your ipad or something - even a laptop screen is easily larger than the resolutions you quote, and forget about printing up to A4 size. Depends on the uses you put your images to I guess - if you're just taking holiday snaps and only want small printouts/web images, resizing to a smaller size is quite acceptable, but for most people it's not a necessary trade-off as there are other ways to get smaller files.
Outing honest people whose only so-called "crime" is wanting to avoid the theft of their hard and presumably legitimately-earned dollars is completely and totally wrong, and negates much if not all of the good Wikileaks has done in exposing actual government and corporate wrongdoing. It also makes Wikileaks, directly or indirectly, an accomplice to the very real crimes of the state that it has spent so much of its time trying to expose.
What if they are not honest people, but are in fact (for example) dictators stealing money from Tunisia or some other African country? Should they still act with impunity and should their actions still be hidden if they are exposed to wikileaks?
Tax evasion is also a crime in most countries, and rightly so. If that's what they are exposing here they would also be doing good in my opinion (that's tax evasion not avoidance). Finally, I'm not aware that the death sentence is imposed for evading tax, so perhaps tone down the rhetoric a bit?
However no-one knows yet what this information is exactly, and who it is on, so it is really far too early to judge this whistleblower and wikileaks. The guy is ruining his life to do leak this and will probably go to jail for it, so I imagine he has some pretty strong reasons to release the information, possibly because he feels morally obliged to...
It's not actually a plugin in the narrow sense of the word - they're using standard extensibility points for codecs in both IE and Safari. Read the "Update" part in the original article [techcrunch.com].
It is a plugin in the sense of the word that users of browsers use - you have to download a binary and install it to view the content. The distinction they're trying to make in that article is meaningless to end users.
The problem with it is that you have to download yet another browser plugin to view that content. So someone has to have made a plugin, and if there isn't one for your platform (iPhone or iPad say), you're out of luck.
I have backed Google many times in the past, said that basically they were a good company at heart. I still think they are but for the setback they have caused in forcing us all into a new dark age of flash players for video across the web - for that, I have dropped Chrome, and switched all my default search engines to Bing *shudder*. I think Google has somehow totally lost focus on what is good for the industry or the consumer, and are going totally now for what is good for Google and no-one else.
This is not some secret move to support Flash - they're pushing a standard which is intended to supplant Flash for all video playing. The move is very similar to that Apple made in pushing to drop flash and replace it with their chosen video standard - h.264. Apple look in a more favourable position at the moment, but really the moves are essentially similar - they are a political attempt to push web users away from Flash and toward an open standard that they have more control over. Neither side wants Adobe to take over the web with Flash and AIR, or Microsoft with Silverlight, or for the other to get a strangle-hold on internet video and each side is jostling for advantage, and frankly don't much care about the effects on their users.
Apple has sacrificed the ability of their users of iDevices to play Flash in this battle (there's still loads of Flash on the web), and it looks like going forward will do the same for all their computers too. They don't care that this inconveniences less technical users or annoys them when they can't play the BBC news web clips (for example), they just want to eliminate Flash (the reasons for which I completely understand).
And Google has decided to play hardball and if they push WebM hard enough may cause trouble for users without access to a plugin, since MS and Apple aren't going to cooperate, and devices like iPad will be left high and dry if YouTube switches, with no Flash and no WebM (because Apple will refuse to incorporate it).
Frankly, neither side is anything to cheer about, and it's quite clear both sides view user inconvenience as collateral damage in the war for control of internet video. This is all about money, not about being good or bad.
As to the problems caused for the video tag, it supports multiple video encodings, and life would be relatively simple for web developers if they only have to encode videos twice - once for WebM, and once for h.264 - job done for all modern browsers. That's no reason to use Flash instead of the video tag, so this whole 'this pushes people to use Flash' argument is bogus. This doesn't kill the video tag, it just splits the users into two camps which need to be catered to. Saying that it pushes people to Flash is completely ignoring all the devices out there which don't support Flash well - iPods, iPads, iPhones, many Android phones, and soon, all new Macs. A strange contortion for an Apple fan to ignore all that, but ideologically necessary it seems, in order to continue to view Apple as on the side of right at all times.
If they cared about their users, Google would support both formats, as would Apple, and there would be no problem - let the best format win. If you've abandoned all Google use over this, I suggest you step back and look at your priorities again, as Apple is just as evil in their own way. Apple is not always on the side of the light, and Google suddenly evil; they are both corporations, jostling for advantage, and neither of them cares about you as a user in any way, so long as you keep buying their stuff/viewing their ads. The different shades of evil mostly come down to that dichotomy in how they earn their money.
Actually they did contain a gag order, one which twitter was only allowed ta talk about ( and inform the targets of ) after they had overturned.
Given the statements by Biden and others classing him as a 'terrorist' it's probable that they're building a case against Assange as well. Given the abuse of law and process at guantanamo bay, I'd say it's only sensible that Assange is concerned over an attempt at prosecution by a gov which does not respect international law, or even their own laws.
Perhaps you should stop indulging your fantasies about what 'the left' and 'liberals' think and engage your brain in grappling with the questions raised. While you are wrestling with straw men of your one creation ( che Guevara supporting, Chavez hugging Mugabe supporter), other people live their life under socialism quite happily.
Just FYI democratic socialism is practised in many European countries, it is not some evil dictatorship of the proletariat's representatives, it is merely a recognition that capitalism works best when tempered with humanity. You appear to have mixed it up with extreme forms of communism, though I'm sure you can find some crazy political grouping with socialist in it's name (e.g. National socialists), it is not a synonym of communism.
The world is not black and white and you are doing yourself and others a disservice by painting it in lurid caricatures, particularly so as the post you responded to attempted to find common ground, which you rejected with an irrelevant rant. Please deal with your real opponents and the arguments they present, and you'll find they're not so different from you and not as rabid as your imaginings.
BoA
Browse without Javascript, Java, or plugins.
Or just browse without Java. I've had Java turned off for years, and don't miss it.
Disabling Javascript leads to degraded performance and a degraded UI on some sites (note I said degraded, not non-functional, just not as nice), so it's not something most people would want to do. Javascript is pretty well sandboxed now in any case, and many exploits are through image file handling or things like that, which you'd still be vulnerable to.
Your recommendation of another browser for Java would unfortunately leave users just as vulnerable, as they can be exploited just as easily through the other browser's Java.
PS Splitting a sentence between the post title and body is annoying, please use the title for an actual title.
Not really. You're using up the lifespan of the semiconductors faster.
And if your equipment is cheaper to replace than paying for air-conditioning, it's still worth running them hot.
Bad ideas get torn apart by other users with great haste, exuberance, and detail.
Or not, as the case may be; good ideas may equally be torn apart because they don't agree with the preconceptions and assumptions of the particular users on the forum. Your argument assumes that large collections of people will produce the best solution, or even a usable solution, by consensus. That's not often the case in my experience.
Democracy is the least bad political system because it limits the power of those in charge and forces them to be held to account, not because it produces efficient or desirable results. To apply it to realms other than the political is not always useful.
You can't have it both ways. Either Wikileaks and Assange are responsible for what happens when they release information, or they aren't. You can't say that they're heroes when a leak promotes democracy, but that when a leak sets it back, they're off the hook. If Wikileaks wants the credit when good things happen, then they also get the blame when bad stuff happens.
Wikileaks are responsible for releasing this information about Tsangvirai's contacts with the US into the wild.
Mugabe is responsible for the collapse of Zimbabwe, and the persecution of Tsangvirai, probably the murder of his family, and for manipulating him into a power-sharing arrangement in which he and the MDC are very vulnerable.
Tsangvirai is responsible for his agreement with Mugabe to jointly hold power, his contacts with Western powers, and any other agreements he may have made, whether secret or not.
The summary tries to conflate the Mugabe's actions with wikileaks and somehow make them co-conspirators, which is stupid. Mugabe doesn't need wikileaks to perform extra-judicial murder or steal elections, it just serves his purposes to include a little bit of truth in his rants about Western interference - that truth could come from any source. As to whether wikileaks set democracy back by releasing information on Tsangvirai, Tsangvirai does not represent democracy, but yet another compromised politian who has co-habited with Mugabe for years without concrete results. His contribution to democracy in Zimbabwe is debatable at best.
The Zimbabwean people should know about the actions of all these actors and make up their own minds, and the best weapon in their fight is the truth, something which is in very short supply. I'd say it's not clear whether wikileaks has helped democracy or not here, and certainly not something to come to a snap judgement about or use as an argument for the evil of wikileaks.
So reading New York Times = learning the truth, right?
Wrong. Evidently, I'm not claiming the NYT has always and will forever print exclusively the truth, only that it did, along with wikileaks, and now Slashdot, reproduce the particular truths the grandparent is complaining about being exposed to (things that were said by American diplomats in cables). In those particular instances the NYT was reproducing the truth about the USG and its diplomats' views of the world - that was what I meant by 'learning the truth about your government'.
I hope that puts your mind at rest as to whether I believe the NYT is eternally and universally true!