"Shortens lives" is not good enough. The whole point of this thread is that pollution will either kill someone immediately, or will otherwise ONLY shorten lives by a few years. You're the one jumping in and saying my statement was wrong (when you took it out of context) and now you're continuing to assert that I was wrong, while refusing to even talk specifics about the topic.
"kill innocents/soldiers instead of using the money to help feed the poor"
That's a false dichotomy, and false in absolute terms as well. There is practically no one starving to death in the US. People may complain about social mobility, standard of living, and whatnot, but nobody would say the poor in the US are not being fed.
voting gives my tacit approval of things I do not approve of
Politicians are concerned with their percentages, not absolute numbers. Nobody cares if 1,000 more or less people voted for a politician. And not voting doesn't help your cause in any way.
Working within a morally corrupt system in order to reduce it's corruptness is hypocritical and ineffective, as we've seen.
The system isn't morally corrupt in any way. And there's absolutely NO QUESTION that politics has gotten less and less corrupt over the decades and centuries, because voters keep voting for less-corrupt officials. Things like Teapot Dome are absolutely unthinkable today, and our "scandals" of today are quite trivial by comparison. The level of accepted corruption in the past was huge, but trivial today.
if it was children, where you cut their lifespan from 55 (this is china we are talking about), to 12, that counts as murder.
Maybe it should, IF cancer worked that way, but it almost NEVER does. It's astronomically rare for someone under 40 to exhibit signs of cancer, let alone to DIE of the disease.
Other illnesses don't tend to result in multi-year affliction before death. With other kinds of poisoning, you generally either die quickly, or completely recover, with few lingering symptoms. There's always some space in-between, like just the right amount of toxicity to cause some organ failure, but that, too, is quite rare.
as long as you agree that I would think twice AFTER I was executed. WTF???
I'm not the one saying nonsensical crap here.
Your first reply confused recidivism with deterrence, so your statement was literally that we should KILL EVERYBODY, BEFORE they commit a crime, just to be safe. That's the "WTF" here.
it ended up languishing for half a decade with an "alpha" label after it was actually done
It was bitstream stable (which would have been very nice to know at the time, rather than years later), but the software wasn't done. The alphas performed horribly, and turned out video that looked like crap. This may have simply been a few features turned off in #IFDEFs for development, but either way, the public couldn't have used the alphas for real work, even if they wanted to.
The civilised punishment for poisoning the water drunk by thousands of people is a slap on the wrist and a fine that looks large to newpaper readers but causes no material harm to the perpetrator....
Right, because life in prison is too lenient, and there's nothing in-between a slap on the wrist and the death-penalty.
If you dump toxic waste into the drinking water and dozens get sick and die of cancer-- how is that any different from murder.
We don't recognize it as murder if the affected person lives more than 1 year after the incident.
And the difference between increased cancer risk and MURDER is pretty damn obvious. One *might* take a few years off the end of your life, while the other ends your life immediately.
If somebody dumped arsenic in the river, okay, that would be murder or at least manslaughter. But slightly increased chance of cancer? Death penalty for that? Give me a break.
VP3 was great when it was released in 2000. It was still damn impressive when On2 open sourced it in 2001. Nothing else out there did in-loop deblocking like VP3, which made it perform incredibly well for low-bitrate encoding. Numerous companies like AOL, Adobe/Macromedia licensed it.
But a DECADE LATER, when Xiph finally released a stable version of Theora, quality was really NO BETTER, and now it had to compete with much better, and entrenched players like H.264, which obviously took off, while VP3 and Theora never did.
At the rate Xiph.org moves, you can just sit around and WAIT for patents to expire.
If Xiph.org had just ported VP3 over to Linux, and integrated it into MPlayer, ffmpeg, and anything else around at the time, I fully expect it would have easily overtaken Divx, and H.264 wouldn't have had a chance. There wouldn't have been any debate over using the codec with the video tag, or WebRTC.
I've been saying this for years. Low and behold, Google did exactly what Xiph should have done, when releasing VP8. Sadly, they dropped the ball pretty early, and didn't follow through on their promises to reencode all of YouTube, and removing H.264 from Chrome. But they did a hell of a lot better, and only a short while after Theora finally struggled into the world.
in summary... because that's where the cool kids want to hang out. and you want to hire the cool kids.
I'm one of the "cool kids", and I want to stay the hell away from the city. There's plenty of "kids" like me, too.
And even for those who like the city, cost of living that's half as expensive can be VERY compelling, even with a much lower salary (in no small part because of the progressive nature of income tax).
You're not going to be able to pay employees in cities an order of magnitude more money, yet that's approximately the difference in cost of land and housing in the city, versus an hour+ drive away.
I know companies that have successfully moved away from the city, too, slashing salaries in the process, and yet have people lined-up outside their doors, hoping for a job closer to home.
Or you could have to drive, only to find that some idiot cut off some other idiot and caused a massive accident that has the expressway backed up for miles, and you have to wait around for hours until they clear the accident.
There are always alternate routes when roads are closed. You might have to put up with the occasional 1-hr delay of employees coming in, but if you're reasonably well situated, that'll only be a fraction of them, as they all come in from different directions.
He's been very successfully working on freely usable audio and video codecs for well over a decade now, starting at a time when many people didn't believe that a non-encumbered audio or video codec was even possible.
Monty and Xiph have done pretty well with audio codecs, but they need to stay the HELL away from video codecs.
Theora/VP3 was a nightmarish debacle that we're still suffering from. Thank god Google took the reins by releasing VP8, and developing it themselves, rather than handing it over to Xiph to die on the vine, and make a depressing reappearance a decade later...
Originally, the blocks used in the JPEG image coder was put there to make sure that you could stream-encode images using reasonably cheap silicon back in the eighties.
Your idea is nonsense. Whatever the reason for blocks in JPEG, video codecs NEED blocks. Full stop. Motion prediction/estimation/compensation/vectors works on the block level. The frame level isn't granular enough, and pixel-level has far too much overhead.
H.120 was the first standard video codec, and it didn't use blocks. It was not at all practical, mostly because of that decision. The next codec built on that, corrected that mistake, and became the first practical codec: H.261, which MPEG-1 was later based on.
I also don't see how JPEG could benefit from elimination of macroblocks... The DPCM encoding of one block to the next reduces size significantly.
Using the same algorithm as JPEG but removing the blocks gives a serious quality boost.
You'll need a source for that... I can tell you that block-based codecs with in-loop deblocking (like H.264 I-frames) outperform non-block based codecs such as JPEG2000:
This codec will never run on hardware that can't handle more than 16 x 16 pixels at once
Except modern video codecs benefit from going THE OTHER WAY. H.264 introduced 8x8 and 4x4 macroblocks, in addition to the standard 16x16 macroblock, because the motion vectors on smaller blocks allows it to eliminate more temporal redundancy. VP9 is adopting larger macroblock sizes as well, but that really only helps on a small amount of HD content.
How is a keyboard and mouse any different than me putting in a purchase order for a new chair, or fan, or whatever else I need?
Mainly because IT isn't going to get called when the fan breaks. IT isn't going to get called to install install the new keyboard driver. That other stuff isn't going to get sent back to IT when you don't need it any more, and have them sorting out the inventory that doesn't add-up. And there's no chance your fancy new chair can potentially cause problems with the "floor" it's hooked up to.
Either way, it devolves to whoever spends the most money and is the loudest to convince others of their vote is the one that has the biggest/most votes to cast in this so-called democracy
Fortunately, that's not true at all. Money makes a difference when it's close, but actual issues make more of a difference than any amount of money can.
The Republican party is expected to not be a viable national party in the coming years, because the demographics they've alienated are becoming the majority.
Don't stoop to their level by "voting".
In fact each side goes to great lengths to try and keep supporters of the other side from voting. All the "voter ID" laws Republican state congressmen and governors tried to pass were a nice throwback to Jim Crow days, but were luckily struck down by the courts before game day.
If you don't vote, you're helping someone, just as if you did vote, and probably the opposite of who you want to support.
Anything is acceptable. burning witches, executing gays, xraying muslims, rocketing israelis, raping kids, car bombing protestants. its all good as long as god agrees....
It's not religious zealotry, just self-interest.
People weren't murdering "witches" because God said to do so... They were doing it because they were convinced the witch next door was hurting someone.
McCarthyism didn't happen just because god said to do it.
The LAPD doesn't beat people because God told them to.
People will justify whatever they want to do. And if you're surrounded by devout believers, you want to find justification in a religious text, because that's all they'll potentially be interested in.
These days, you can find plenty of atrocities committed are justified by hiding behind the law, rather than the torah/bible/quaran/etc.
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Yes, it is a false dichotomy, because there's nothing to prevent doing both, and skipping one will NOT help the other.
More importantly, where are these starving/dying people?
"Shortens lives" is not good enough. The whole point of this thread is that pollution will either kill someone immediately, or will otherwise ONLY shorten lives by a few years. You're the one jumping in and saying my statement was wrong (when you took it out of context) and now you're continuing to assert that I was wrong, while refusing to even talk specifics about the topic.
Quit making a fool out of yourself.
"kill innocents/soldiers instead of using the money to help feed the poor"
That's a false dichotomy, and false in absolute terms as well. There is practically no one starving to death in the US. People may complain about social mobility, standard of living, and whatnot, but nobody would say the poor in the US are not being fed.
Please point to any one of those that's likely to kill a 12 year old child, several years after exposure.
You're the one cheapening the discussion, taking statements wildly out of obvious context.
Politicians are concerned with their percentages, not absolute numbers. Nobody cares if 1,000 more or less people voted for a politician. And not voting doesn't help your cause in any way.
The system isn't morally corrupt in any way. And there's absolutely NO QUESTION that politics has gotten less and less corrupt over the decades and centuries, because voters keep voting for less-corrupt officials. Things like Teapot Dome are absolutely unthinkable today, and our "scandals" of today are quite trivial by comparison. The level of accepted corruption in the past was huge, but trivial today.
Maybe it should, IF cancer worked that way, but it almost NEVER does. It's astronomically rare for someone under 40 to exhibit signs of cancer, let alone to DIE of the disease.
http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/publications/ppaper789.pdf
Other illnesses don't tend to result in multi-year affliction before death. With other kinds of poisoning, you generally either die quickly, or completely recover, with few lingering symptoms. There's always some space in-between, like just the right amount of toxicity to cause some organ failure, but that, too, is quite rare.
I'm not the one saying nonsensical crap here.
Your first reply confused recidivism with deterrence, so your statement was literally that we should KILL EVERYBODY, BEFORE they commit a crime, just to be safe. That's the "WTF" here.
It was bitstream stable (which would have been very nice to know at the time, rather than years later), but the software wasn't done. The alphas performed horribly, and turned out video that looked like crap. This may have simply been a few features turned off in #IFDEFs for development, but either way, the public couldn't have used the alphas for real work, even if they wanted to.
Right, because life in prison is too lenient, and there's nothing in-between a slap on the wrist and the death-penalty.
That's not deterrence, that's recidivism. Different words, for different issues.
We don't recognize it as murder if the affected person lives more than 1 year after the incident.
And the difference between increased cancer risk and MURDER is pretty damn obvious. One *might* take a few years off the end of your life, while the other ends your life immediately.
If somebody dumped arsenic in the river, okay, that would be murder or at least manslaughter. But slightly increased chance of cancer? Death penalty for that? Give me a break.
This is China. If you do something big, that completely embarrasses the state, you're going up against the wall.
Dump a few tonnes of coal sludge in the river? No big deal.
Then the press picks up the story, and people are outraged? Firing squad...
Nope, there's nothing to worry about, because the death penalty is not a deterrent:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/the-death-penalty-and-deterrence
VP3 was great when it was released in 2000. It was still damn impressive when On2 open sourced it in 2001. Nothing else out there did in-loop deblocking like VP3, which made it perform incredibly well for low-bitrate encoding. Numerous companies like AOL, Adobe/Macromedia licensed it.
But a DECADE LATER, when Xiph finally released a stable version of Theora, quality was really NO BETTER, and now it had to compete with much better, and entrenched players like H.264, which obviously took off, while VP3 and Theora never did.
At the rate Xiph.org moves, you can just sit around and WAIT for patents to expire.
If Xiph.org had just ported VP3 over to Linux, and integrated it into MPlayer, ffmpeg, and anything else around at the time, I fully expect it would have easily overtaken Divx, and H.264 wouldn't have had a chance. There wouldn't have been any debate over using the codec with the video tag, or WebRTC.
I've been saying this for years. Low and behold, Google did exactly what Xiph should have done, when releasing VP8. Sadly, they dropped the ball pretty early, and didn't follow through on their promises to reencode all of YouTube, and removing H.264 from Chrome. But they did a hell of a lot better, and only a short while after Theora finally struggled into the world.
I'm one of the "cool kids", and I want to stay the hell away from the city. There's plenty of "kids" like me, too.
And even for those who like the city, cost of living that's half as expensive can be VERY compelling, even with a much lower salary (in no small part because of the progressive nature of income tax).
You're not going to be able to pay employees in cities an order of magnitude more money, yet that's approximately the difference in cost of land and housing in the city, versus an hour+ drive away.
I know companies that have successfully moved away from the city, too, slashing salaries in the process, and yet have people lined-up outside their doors, hoping for a job closer to home.
There are always alternate routes when roads are closed. You might have to put up with the occasional 1-hr delay of employees coming in, but if you're reasonably well situated, that'll only be a fraction of them, as they all come in from different directions.
Monty and Xiph have done pretty well with audio codecs, but they need to stay the HELL away from video codecs.
Theora/VP3 was a nightmarish debacle that we're still suffering from. Thank god Google took the reins by releasing VP8, and developing it themselves, rather than handing it over to Xiph to die on the vine, and make a depressing reappearance a decade later...
Your idea is nonsense. Whatever the reason for blocks in JPEG, video codecs NEED blocks. Full stop. Motion prediction/estimation/compensation/vectors works on the block level. The frame level isn't granular enough, and pixel-level has far too much overhead.
H.120 was the first standard video codec, and it didn't use blocks. It was not at all practical, mostly because of that decision. The next codec built on that, corrected that mistake, and became the first practical codec: H.261, which MPEG-1 was later based on.
I also don't see how JPEG could benefit from elimination of macroblocks... The DPCM encoding of one block to the next reduces size significantly.
You'll need a source for that... I can tell you that block-based codecs with in-loop deblocking (like H.264 I-frames) outperform non-block based codecs such as JPEG2000:
http://etill.net/papers/jvt-d039.pdf
Except modern video codecs benefit from going THE OTHER WAY. H.264 introduced 8x8 and 4x4 macroblocks, in addition to the standard 16x16 macroblock, because the motion vectors on smaller blocks allows it to eliminate more temporal redundancy. VP9 is adopting larger macroblock sizes as well, but that really only helps on a small amount of HD content.
Mainly because IT isn't going to get called when the fan breaks. IT isn't going to get called to install install the new keyboard driver. That other stuff isn't going to get sent back to IT when you don't need it any more, and have them sorting out the inventory that doesn't add-up. And there's no chance your fancy new chair can potentially cause problems with the "floor" it's hooked up to.
Fortunately, that's not true at all. Money makes a difference when it's close, but actual issues make more of a difference than any amount of money can.
The Republican party is expected to not be a viable national party in the coming years, because the demographics they've alienated are becoming the majority.
In fact each side goes to great lengths to try and keep supporters of the other side from voting. All the "voter ID" laws Republican state congressmen and governors tried to pass were a nice throwback to Jim Crow days, but were luckily struck down by the courts before game day.
If you don't vote, you're helping someone, just as if you did vote, and probably the opposite of who you want to support.
Hate groups, like, say, far-right religious Zionists?
It's not religious zealotry, just self-interest.
People weren't murdering "witches" because God said to do so... They were doing it because they were convinced the witch next door was hurting someone.
Lynch mobs weren't running around, reciting biblical verses.
McCarthyism didn't happen just because god said to do it.
The LAPD doesn't beat people because God told them to.
People will justify whatever they want to do. And if you're surrounded by devout believers, you want to find justification in a religious text, because that's all they'll potentially be interested in.
These days, you can find plenty of atrocities committed are justified by hiding behind the law, rather than the torah/bible/quaran/etc.
How is that ironic? Nazis used to SHOOT Jews, too. And now Jews carry guns. And?
Actually, I liked this passage the most:
You've got to be a special kind of insane for the KKK to immediately rat you out to the FBI.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, I was moderately terrorized once....