Serious subject. Culturally significant. Perhaps the most realistic "hacking" in Hollywood history. All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing. Dated today, but holds up very well.
One of the problems Xiph has in my opinion is that they want to do everything. They have a bunch of good codecs (mainly audio) like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex and CELT, but then they develop their own container and subtitle formats instead of just using or adapting the ones that are all ready out there and better than what Xiph has to offer
While true and annoying, I don't believe that has any relation to how horribly long Xiph takes to do... ANYTHING.
It's not as if Ogg is a well thought-out format that is being actively developed by a large team, around the clock. It's a one-off mess that everyone despieses, and which is extremely limited to begin with. While that wastes some time, it can't possibly account for much.
What they completely waste their time on is all the marketing fluff. Deciding what file name extension should be used. Extending the VP3 bitstream to add the possibility of using many different features that nobody will even stand a snow-ball's chance in hell of utilizing.
Snow, with just a single developer working on it for a few months, quickly developed into something quite usable and easily out-performing all other existing codecs. There could hardly be a bigger contrast between how good codec developers work, and Xiph.org developers do things...
You better believe I'll tell people that they reserve the right to spy on people based on who they call, then decide to sue people who tell anybody.
As opposed to "The Phone Company" who never makes any mention of spying on their customers in EULAs or otherwise, but happily does so just as much as they damn-well please...
they have had the thing up to 43 mph, which is faster than I can go unless I draft a car,
...or get dragged by one. Either is good.
I did actually calculate out the CO2 output equivalency of riding a bike is actually about 90 MPG for the average American on the average diet.
That's certainly interesting to know, but I'm sure you'll find the cost of that food energy is quite a bit higher than gasoline at it's worst...
I'd be more interested in a practical vehicle that got 100 mpg.
I'd be more interested in an electric car. Internal combustion engines just aren't ever going to get the kind of efficiency we need to progress much. 100 mpg is certainly minimally doable, with a light car, and poor acceleration (and I might well buy one) but much more than that, and even in theory, the efficiency just isn't there. Even small turbines can't do any better...
The only way to get petrochemical fuels to notably exceed what we're getting now is fuel cells which operate on unleaded gasoline, and the like. The D.O.E.'s website has some details on these, and they approach 70% of the maximum energy conversion efficiency for the fuel, compared to 30% for the best ICEs.
Batteries, OTOH, can manage 70% efficiency pretty inexpensively, and can do better with a bit of work. Inverters/controllers and electric motors also exceed 90% efficiency. And what's more, they do so with less weight than a conventional vehicle requires (engine, transmission, axle, mounts, firewall, etc.)
I certainly couldn't agree more. It's idiocy like that which made me give up on WP almost entirely. You can also oee Fractal Antennas for an on-going conflict with biased editors given every benefit, and Digital Audio Broadcasting for the single most horribly twisted (one-man POV) article in all of WP.
I believe nuclear energy can be safe in theory but in practice it's the people who inject the danger to the process.
You do us all a disservice when you limit it to nuclear power companies. The only reason they are dangerous is because, by necessity, they handle radioactive material. Why doesn't equal concern, and equal regulation fall on hospitals, and any other industry that needs large quantities of the stuff? In fact that later is probably making more money off the radioactive materials than the former.
It's simple, really. It's easy to be afraid of nuclear when there's little else on the line, but the decision is much more balanced when it's your broken rib, or your mother's cancer metastasizing.
Except they're not encoding videos so that they only decode on high-end CPUs.
Yes, yes they are. It's clear you have no idea what you're talking about...
Remember that Theora is a much simpler codec that's rather faster to decode than h264 anyway...
H.264 baseline is VERY SIMPLE. Simpler than Theora. And that's what YouTube has opted to use, much more speed, at the expense of being much lower quality than a good H.264 video, or about the same as a Theora video at max settings.
That a free codec like Theora exists is good, and it is estimated that Theora can be competitive with or even a bit better than XviD (MPEG4 ASP) when it is more developed and adaptive quantization (in version 1.2) and other psy optimizations are implemented
Not true at all. Every credible codec developer has come down on Theora like a ton of bricks. I used to believe in a lighter touch, but with the hard-core propaganda coming out of Xiph, Wikipedia, and Stallman/FSF, I'm not inclined to be so polite... Everyone who knows anything about video codecs calls it out as a piece of junk. The claims that H.261 is just as good were panned as biased, but aren't far off the evaluations given from every other technical source.
Let's try x264 developer Dark Shikari, who first said Theora might be able to compete with MPEG-4 ASP, but then looked into the details, and came back trashing the technical capabilities of the codec:
Dark Shikari8th May 2009, 20:38 Actually, it's worse than I thought. xiphmont just told me Theora has no MV prediction.
NONE.
Every MV is coded as either 6-bit X and 6-bit Y, or with a global static huffman table. This is worse than MPEG-1.
I retract my statement that Theora can ever get near MPEG-4 ASP. Removing MV prediction from x264, by the way, reduces PSNR by 1db at 500kbps on BlackPearl.
but currently the encoder has some problems that need to be addressed.
The problems with the VP3 format are fundamental and can't be optimized out. The lousy deblocker that makes things worse, the lack of B-frames, etc, etc. (no time to get into much detail here...) Let's give Mike Melanson the last word here:
What I would like to get across here is that Theora is rather different than most video codecs, in just about every way you can name (no, wait: the base quantization matrix for golden frames is the same as the quantization matrix found in JPEG). As for the idea that most DCT-based codecs are all fundamentally the same, ironically, you can't even count on that with Theora- its DCT is different than the one found in MPEG-1/2/4, H.263, and JPEG (which all use the same DCT). http://multimedia.cx/eggs/dct-pr/
[...] which is unfortunate considering how long the format has been in development.
That's...an incredible under-statement on your part!
Theora can't match H.264 for every application, but it is demonstratively up to par with what Youtube considers to be good enough.
If Youtube wanted videos that were only decode-able with high-end CPUs, they would use H.264 settings which did that. Since they don't, encoding Theora videos with such limitations is NOT a reasonable comparison.
LTSP isn't some X11 extension. It's a distro that sets up a server, and supports a large number of diskless thin clients, with lots of features like running apps locally, accessing local disks, etc., etc.
Running X11 apps over SSH has NO RELATION TO WHAT LTSP DOES.
seems like the logical path would be to upgrade to IE8 first, fix everything that broke, and then upgrade to Win7.
Except then you're fixing the same problems, twice... Once for those that broke with IE8 on XP, then again for those that broke with IE8 on Win 7. It sounds stupid, I know, but the real world is often anti-ideal...
Once you've been in the business a few years, and seen problems like a theme that changes one pixel of the window border completely destroying an application, you begin to understand why testing is done in big steps, rather than small.
In this case, there's a good chance you'll find bugs in IE8 on XP that you wouldn't see in IE8 on Win7, and so will just waste extra time. Additionally, there may be some additional problem in IE8 on Win7 that ruins one part of an application, necessitating the need to replace the whole thing, and invalidating all the time you spent fixing all the OTHER bugs you found in IE8 on XP...
Again, I know how horrendous this line of thought sounds, but in the real world, worse things happen, every day, and IT gets paid well for having a brain so twisted as to catch the possibility of such crazy things happening... because they certainly do...
Attack with deadly force on civilian targets for a political motive.
By that definition, EVERYONE who has been pissed off by some law or another, and killed someone afterwords, is a terrorist. At that point, the word becomes meaningless...
House foreclosed on? Rob a liquor store and you're a terrorist. Divorce didn't go well? Terrorist! etc.
This guy got angry and decided to go kill some people at an organization he was (to an irrational degree) upset with... It's a rather straight-forward crime.
Re:Good luck getting it repealed now
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
After all, excessive TAX was the REASON for the revolt - or at least the one put forward in school books.
Nowhere in The Declaration of Independence, nor history books about it, will you find "excessive taxes". The phrase is "taxation without representation" and it has no relation to whether taxes are "excessive" or not.
However if you look at history, (excessive) taxation in times of ludicrous government excesses (or failure to address the problems in the economy) is usually what sets the stage for revolt.
And random idiots claiming every single trivial law or tax code they don't like is going to spring up a popular revolt, is as equally long of a tradition.
Hint: Taxes in the US have been vastly higher than they are now. Taxes in many countries around the world are vastly higher than they are in the US... Note that none of the above resulted in government overthrow.
Don't underestimate the impact of Windows 95/98. It still runs on old hardware, is compatible-enough it can still run most applications businesses need, etc. IE6 is the newest browser available.
If anyone has any suggestion for a full-featured browser that still runs on Windows 98, I could probably reduce the count of IE6 users by a few thousand. Don't bother mentioning Firefox. Mozilla.org gave-up Windows 9x compatibility with v3, so you're still left with an unsupported browser. That "EX"-something-or-other (to run XP apps on 9x) sounds clever, but is an overwhelming no-go in a business.
And suggesting hardware upgrades for everyone, when their needs are absolutely trivial, and already met, will similarly get met with extreme resistance in the "more frugal" (read: cheap as hell) organizations, such as mine.
Considering than Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia alternate between begging for money, and slapping around those same people with idiotic rules and many layers of bureaucracy that make improving WP impossible, I have to wonder if he isn't just setting himself up for his 4th failure. The largest and longest by-far.
I would be quite ironic if WP failed, while citizendium.org prospers.*
*CZ, for those who don't know, is the WP-like project of Larry Sanger, the WP co-founder you dare not talk about, because if you got paid any money, your employer gets to take not just the proceeds of your work, but 100% credit and mind-share for everything you accomplished... right Jimmy?
These things average about 15 mph and top out at 30. I have better performance than that on my bike (at least when I'm in shape) I would be willing to bet I could very easily out accelerate this thing on my bike as well.
This has a 3HP engine. Humans manage about 0.25HP on a bike, with the exceptions of world-class athletes, who can maybe double that. So...
* Stick this engine on a bike, and it'll accelerate 12X faster, and have 12X the top speed you could possibly manage.
* You're going to be spending a LOT more money on food if you're riding 3,000 miles on a bike.
* It's rather cold when I go to work, and sometimes raining. I haven't seen many bikes with enclosed cockpits.
* If you DO find an enclosed bike, I can guarantee you won't get a fraction the speed of this thing, even in the best shape.
* This is an extreme example. Why does everyone complain that some concept car isn't EXACTLY what they would want? I'm ecstatic to see people working on what is clearly going to be the real future of automobiles, rather than squandering many hundreds of millions of dollars on idiocy like hydrogen/ethanol subsidies. i.e. Making equivalent-performing cars at half or 1/4th the weight is reasonably achievable, and about the only reasonable way forward in a world of energy shortages.
The secret to CoreAVC's speed is that it cheats... If you compare the frames output, with any other codec, you'll see that the results are not the same. People have commented on how CoreAVC looks different, sometimes "fuzzy". Again, it's going for lower-precision in exchange for speed. This is particularly galling in the case of H.264/AVC, since it has lossless modes, which are supposed to be bit-exact, not "close enough".
Honestly, if you want slightly faster + blurry video, why don't you just grab a lower-resolution copy of the same video, and save yourself the disk space, and money on the software license.
The parent stated "the developed world". The link you posted is GLOBAL figures, with NO indication of in which countries those ill health effects apply. They could all be in 3rd world countries for all we know.
The only specifics they provided were saying that in the US, air pollution CONTRIBUTES to a few serious diseases.
Slightly increasing your risk of getting cancer in old age (by an unspecified amount) isn't a compelling argument. And what's more, everyone conveniently ignores the fact that increaded energy prices directly contribute to numerous deaths every year. Honestly stating your suggesting the we should stop killing people with air pollution, and start killing them with high prices, isn't going to get many people on your side.
"The Chronicles of Riddick" was a great action movie with a dark Sci-Fi/Fantasy background
Agreed. However, it bears pointing-out that the THEATRICAL version was quite good, while I found the "DIRECTORS CUT" to be a steaming pile of crap, with all kinds of silliness and clumsy additional scenes. And Netflix ONLY stocks the latter... d'oh!
Also, I have to mark it down some for the absolutely stupid names chosen. eg. "Fury-ons". Ditto for a few ridiculous and heavy-handed plot-points.
Personally I thoroughly enjoyed both movies in different ways, although this might be because I first saw "The Chronicles of Riddick" and then went looking for "Pitch Black" instead of the other way around
Not the case for me at all. I saw both when they came out, and still liked both, the sequel more than the original.
Mozilla, for good reasons (IMHO), is not willing to support H.264
Mozilla not only refuses to support H.264, but refuses to allow it to be supported by 3rd party plug-ins as well. Their reasons for this are most certainly NOT "good", and is all about PR.
Theora isn't going to take over the world. The quality is terrible, and I can provide quotes from 10 of the top Open Source codec developers stating that even in theory, it can't possibly even compete with OLD codecs. Not to mention how horrendously it is to code for.
If Mozilla wanted video in HTML5, they would have already included MJPEG with PCM audio, H.261, MPEG-1 video/Layer-2 audio, musepack, flac, speex, etc, etc. But those weren't developed by infallible ideologues, so that's no good. What the Mozilla team really wants is a victory for their preferred dogma.
That's not to say the H.264 side of this isn't filled with schills of a similarly contentious and irrational nature, but let's try not to bend the truth here.
You've failed to point out any flaws in my logic, or my facts. Asserting that there MUST BE some, somewhere, lends no credibility to your assertions...
You've only established the potential for criminality there.
The previous argument was that many of us COULD do what he did, but we don't because we're not "criminals". If we're using the literal definition you're using here, then that statement is banal and meaningless. I think it's clear, however, that the statement meant to imply that there are some people who are willing to committing crimes, and those who are not, which I've illustrated is not the case.
Even if a recession increases the overall probability of crime, that does not lessen individual responsibility.
I was not attempting to claim anything of the sort... Simply that sufficient motivation could turn any of us into criminals. The facts of crime versus economy is simply proof that it's a sliding scale of risk and reward, that plenty of people aren't far from the edge of as-is.
IMHO, the idea that there is a class of people who will always commit crimes, and a class of people who would NEVER do so, is a far more depressing thought, in part because such is even more easily believed, as evidenced by most of history...
Slashdot Mirror
"War Games"
Serious subject.
Culturally significant.
Perhaps the most realistic "hacking" in Hollywood history.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Dated today, but holds up very well.
While true and annoying, I don't believe that has any relation to how horribly long Xiph takes to do... ANYTHING.
It's not as if Ogg is a well thought-out format that is being actively developed by a large team, around the clock. It's a one-off mess that everyone despieses, and which is extremely limited to begin with. While that wastes some time, it can't possibly account for much.
What they completely waste their time on is all the marketing fluff. Deciding what file name extension should be used. Extending the VP3 bitstream to add the possibility of using many different features that nobody will even stand a snow-ball's chance in hell of utilizing.
Snow, with just a single developer working on it for a few months, quickly developed into something quite usable and easily out-performing all other existing codecs. There could hardly be a bigger contrast between how good codec developers work, and Xiph.org developers do things...
As opposed to "The Phone Company" who never makes any mention of spying on their customers in EULAs or otherwise, but happily does so just as much as they damn-well please...
That's certainly interesting to know, but I'm sure you'll find the cost of that food energy is quite a bit higher than gasoline at it's worst...
I'd be more interested in an electric car. Internal combustion engines just aren't ever going to get the kind of efficiency we need to progress much. 100 mpg is certainly minimally doable, with a light car, and poor acceleration (and I might well buy one) but much more than that, and even in theory, the efficiency just isn't there. Even small turbines can't do any better...
The only way to get petrochemical fuels to notably exceed what we're getting now is fuel cells which operate on unleaded gasoline, and the like. The D.O.E.'s website has some details on these, and they approach 70% of the maximum energy conversion efficiency for the fuel, compared to 30% for the best ICEs.
Batteries, OTOH, can manage 70% efficiency pretty inexpensively, and can do better with a bit of work. Inverters/controllers and electric motors also exceed 90% efficiency. And what's more, they do so with less weight than a conventional vehicle requires (engine, transmission, axle, mounts, firewall, etc.)
I certainly couldn't agree more. It's idiocy like that which made me give up on WP almost entirely. You can also oee Fractal Antennas for an on-going conflict with biased editors given every benefit, and Digital Audio Broadcasting for the single most horribly twisted (one-man POV) article in all of WP.
You do us all a disservice when you limit it to nuclear power companies. The only reason they are dangerous is because, by necessity, they handle radioactive material. Why doesn't equal concern, and equal regulation fall on hospitals, and any other industry that needs large quantities of the stuff? In fact that later is probably making more money off the radioactive materials than the former.
It's simple, really. It's easy to be afraid of nuclear when there's little else on the line, but the decision is much more balanced when it's your broken rib, or your mother's cancer metastasizing.
Yes, yes they are.
It's clear you have no idea what you're talking about...
H.264 baseline is VERY SIMPLE. Simpler than Theora. And that's what YouTube has opted to use, much more speed, at the expense of being much lower quality than a good H.264 video, or about the same as a Theora video at max settings.
Not true at all. Every credible codec developer has come down on Theora like a ton of bricks. I used to believe in a lighter touch, but with the hard-core propaganda coming out of Xiph, Wikipedia, and Stallman/FSF, I'm not inclined to be so polite... Everyone who knows anything about video codecs calls it out as a piece of junk. The claims that H.261 is just as good were panned as biased, but aren't far off the evaluations given from every other technical source.
Let's try x264 developer Dark Shikari, who first said Theora might be able to compete with MPEG-4 ASP, but then looked into the details, and came back trashing the technical capabilities of the codec:
The problems with the VP3 format are fundamental and can't be optimized out. The lousy deblocker that makes things worse, the lack of B-frames, etc, etc. (no time to get into much detail here...) Let's give Mike Melanson the last word here:
That's...an incredible under-statement on your part!
If Youtube wanted videos that were only decode-able with high-end CPUs, they would use H.264 settings which did that. Since they don't, encoding Theora videos with such limitations is NOT a reasonable comparison.
LTSP isn't some X11 extension. It's a distro that sets up a server, and supports a large number of diskless thin clients, with lots of features like running apps locally, accessing local disks, etc., etc.
Running X11 apps over SSH has NO RELATION TO WHAT LTSP DOES.
John Wayne... George Patton... Same thing, really...
Except then you're fixing the same problems, twice... Once for those that broke with IE8 on XP, then again for those that broke with IE8 on Win 7. It sounds stupid, I know, but the real world is often anti-ideal...
Once you've been in the business a few years, and seen problems like a theme that changes one pixel of the window border completely destroying an application, you begin to understand why testing is done in big steps, rather than small.
In this case, there's a good chance you'll find bugs in IE8 on XP that you wouldn't see in IE8 on Win7, and so will just waste extra time. Additionally, there may be some additional problem in IE8 on Win7 that ruins one part of an application, necessitating the need to replace the whole thing, and invalidating all the time you spent fixing all the OTHER bugs you found in IE8 on XP...
Again, I know how horrendous this line of thought sounds, but in the real world, worse things happen, every day, and IT gets paid well for having a brain so twisted as to catch the possibility of such crazy things happening... because they certainly do...
By that definition, EVERYONE who has been pissed off by some law or another, and killed someone afterwords, is a terrorist. At that point, the word becomes meaningless...
House foreclosed on? Rob a liquor store and you're a terrorist. Divorce didn't go well? Terrorist! etc.
This guy got angry and decided to go kill some people at an organization he was (to an irrational degree) upset with... It's a rather straight-forward crime.
Nowhere in The Declaration of Independence, nor history books about it, will you find "excessive taxes". The phrase is "taxation without representation" and it has no relation to whether taxes are "excessive" or not.
And random idiots claiming every single trivial law or tax code they don't like is going to spring up a popular revolt, is as equally long of a tradition.
Hint: Taxes in the US have been vastly higher than they are now. Taxes in many countries around the world are vastly higher than they are in the US... Note that none of the above resulted in government overthrow.
Except for flexible/ultra-thin, all those traits apply as well, if not more-so, to DLP tech.
Don't underestimate the impact of Windows 95/98. It still runs on old hardware, is compatible-enough it can still run most applications businesses need, etc. IE6 is the newest browser available.
If anyone has any suggestion for a full-featured browser that still runs on Windows 98, I could probably reduce the count of IE6 users by a few thousand. Don't bother mentioning Firefox. Mozilla.org gave-up Windows 9x compatibility with v3, so you're still left with an unsupported browser. That "EX"-something-or-other (to run XP apps on 9x) sounds clever, but is an overwhelming no-go in a business.
And suggesting hardware upgrades for everyone, when their needs are absolutely trivial, and already met, will similarly get met with extreme resistance in the "more frugal" (read: cheap as hell) organizations, such as mine.
Considering than Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia alternate between begging for money, and slapping around those same people with idiotic rules and many layers of bureaucracy that make improving WP impossible, I have to wonder if he isn't just setting himself up for his 4th failure. The largest and longest by-far.
I would be quite ironic if WP failed, while citizendium.org prospers.*
*CZ, for those who don't know, is the WP-like project of Larry Sanger, the WP co-founder you dare not talk about, because if you got paid any money, your employer gets to take not just the proceeds of your work, but 100% credit and mind-share for everything you accomplished... right Jimmy?
This has a 3HP engine. Humans manage about 0.25HP on a bike, with the exceptions of world-class athletes, who can maybe double that. So...
* Stick this engine on a bike, and it'll accelerate 12X faster, and have 12X the top speed you could possibly manage.
* You're going to be spending a LOT more money on food if you're riding 3,000 miles on a bike.
* It's rather cold when I go to work, and sometimes raining. I haven't seen many bikes with enclosed cockpits.
* If you DO find an enclosed bike, I can guarantee you won't get a fraction the speed of this thing, even in the best shape.
* This is an extreme example. Why does everyone complain that some concept car isn't EXACTLY what they would want? I'm ecstatic to see people working on what is clearly going to be the real future of automobiles, rather than squandering many hundreds of millions of dollars on idiocy like hydrogen/ethanol subsidies. i.e. Making equivalent-performing cars at half or 1/4th the weight is reasonably achievable, and about the only reasonable way forward in a world of energy shortages.
The secret to CoreAVC's speed is that it cheats... If you compare the frames output, with any other codec, you'll see that the results are not the same. People have commented on how CoreAVC looks different, sometimes "fuzzy". Again, it's going for lower-precision in exchange for speed. This is particularly galling in the case of H.264/AVC, since it has lossless modes, which are supposed to be bit-exact, not "close enough".
Honestly, if you want slightly faster + blurry video, why don't you just grab a lower-resolution copy of the same video, and save yourself the disk space, and money on the software license.
The parent stated "the developed world". The link you posted is GLOBAL figures, with NO indication of in which countries those ill health effects apply. They could all be in 3rd world countries for all we know.
The only specifics they provided were saying that in the US, air pollution CONTRIBUTES to a few serious diseases.
Slightly increasing your risk of getting cancer in old age (by an unspecified amount) isn't a compelling argument. And what's more, everyone conveniently ignores the fact that increaded energy prices directly contribute to numerous deaths every year. Honestly stating your suggesting the we should stop killing people with air pollution, and start killing them with high prices, isn't going to get many people on your side.
Agreed. However, it bears pointing-out that the THEATRICAL version was quite good, while I found the "DIRECTORS CUT" to be a steaming pile of crap, with all kinds of silliness and clumsy additional scenes. And Netflix ONLY stocks the latter... d'oh!
Also, I have to mark it down some for the absolutely stupid names chosen. eg. "Fury-ons". Ditto for a few ridiculous and heavy-handed plot-points.
Not the case for me at all. I saw both when they came out, and still liked both, the sequel more than the original.
http://www.flashvideodownloader.org/supported-sites/
Mozilla not only refuses to support H.264, but refuses to allow it to be supported by 3rd party plug-ins as well. Their reasons for this are most certainly NOT "good", and is all about PR.
Theora isn't going to take over the world. The quality is terrible, and I can provide quotes from 10 of the top Open Source codec developers stating that even in theory, it can't possibly even compete with OLD codecs. Not to mention how horrendously it is to code for.
If Mozilla wanted video in HTML5, they would have already included MJPEG with PCM audio, H.261, MPEG-1 video/Layer-2 audio, musepack, flac, speex, etc, etc. But those weren't developed by infallible ideologues, so that's no good. What the Mozilla team really wants is a victory for their preferred dogma.
That's not to say the H.264 side of this isn't filled with schills of a similarly contentious and irrational nature, but let's try not to bend the truth here.
You've failed to point out any flaws in my logic, or my facts. Asserting that there MUST BE some, somewhere, lends no credibility to your assertions...
The previous argument was that many of us COULD do what he did, but we don't because we're not "criminals". If we're using the literal definition you're using here, then that statement is banal and meaningless. I think it's clear, however, that the statement meant to imply that there are some people who are willing to committing crimes, and those who are not, which I've illustrated is not the case.
I was not attempting to claim anything of the sort... Simply that sufficient motivation could turn any of us into criminals. The facts of crime versus economy is simply proof that it's a sliding scale of risk and reward, that plenty of people aren't far from the edge of as-is.
IMHO, the idea that there is a class of people who will always commit crimes, and a class of people who would NEVER do so, is a far more depressing thought, in part because such is even more easily believed, as evidenced by most of history...