Whenever anybody says a sentence of the form, "The government should do X," I replace "the government" with "Joe Smith." If what's being proposed would be morally or ethically wrong for a person-- Joe Smith-- then it's wrong for the govrnment.
You may believe this, but I doubt it. "The government decided John Doe did something bad so they locked him up." versus "Joe Smith decided John Doe did something bad so he locked him up." Maybe you're into anarchy, but AFAIK the prevailing view is that the point of the government is to be a representative of (roughly) the will of the general population, and therefore is supposed to exercise more power than individuals. Determining how much power you think they should use is up to your political philosophy.
As for the distinction you make in your last paragraph, it doesn't work out. First, what makes you think the government is providing you with services in exchange for your income tax but not inheritance tax? (Aside from silly jokes about how dead people don't get government services.) Second, is it actually OK with you for Joe Smith to demand money in return for services you didn't ask for? If you ask me, Joe Smith is an excellent rhetorial device and a poor device for actual politics.
What you're saying is irrelevant to what the parent post said. Saddam could stop the death or we could; both choose not to. Now, multiple-choice: a) Saddam is an evil child-killer and "we"* are not. b) We are evil childkillers and Saddam is not. c) Saddam is not an evil childkiller nor are we. d) We are evil childkillers as is Saddam.
* we = the sanction policy, the countries responsible for it, etc.
bubble in your answer, sign your paper and hand it to the proctor...
yeah, that article actually says the most likely figure is between 100,000 and 350,000 excess deaths due to sanctions. The author likes to rag on the 'loony left' (Zinn, Chomsky, Said et al) but if you read the last four paragraphs, he seems to be agreeing that the sanctions are stupid, barbaric, and counterproductive, just like those damn soft-on-terrorism lefties have been saying.
As for the _blame_, it's pretty pointless to assign - whether or not Saddam could prevent the ongoing starvation by giving in to UN demands, the UN also has the choice of lifting the sanctions in favor of some more effective strategy. And by "a more effective strategy" I mean "pretty much any other strategy."
That is an invalid logical inference. A fault of reasoning. An incorrect deduction. An unscientific conclusion.
Given enough evidence, that type of inference is actually fairly scientific. It's not how deductive logic works, but it is how science works: you drop enough things and you deduce that things fall when you drop them. Not to say that the evidence for gravity isn't much much stronger than the evidence against Communism, but the method is sound. Problem with social science is you still have to take statistical and systematic error into account, which gets pretty impossibly complicated compared to nice easy stuff like physics.
aaaand.... what's the difference between you and Stalin, evil-wise? He's bloodthirsty, you're bloodthirsty - it's people that kill people, not ideologies.
No. What you've been saying in the five-so-far posts you've made on this article has been simply the most dangerous misunderstanding of the principles the country's founded on. There hasn't been a society where the majority gets to do what they want since the rise of tribalism, and for good reason. Everyone is out of line with the majority at some point. The majority of Americans realize that they all have some area in which they are minorities, and that it's in their best interest to protect minorities because of that. Take an inventory of your own personal beliefs and features and figure out for yourself whether you really want the type of unrestrained rule of the majority you're talking about. The distinction between democracy and republic that you've got such a hangup on actually cuts exactly the opposite way from what you've been talking. It's designed not to be an absolute democracy exactly because of the possibility of majorities unfairly oppressing minorities.
Hoover and McCarthy are examples of people who got around the protections, not examples of how the system is supposed to work.
Actually I should correct myself. With a good installer (and there are many - see rootrider's post for links) it's perfectly possible to get it working nicely with minimal interference. It's once you start trying to theme it yourself - which you probably will - that it takes some work to get to know.
Litestep is what I use when I boot into Windows; if it didn't exist I probably would've moved to Linux much earlier. It requires that you play around with rc files and spend a few months getting to know modules and their quirks before it works really well, but really there are no limits once you get it going. My question wouldn't have been about alternate shells for windows, my question would've been whether there are any unix desktop environments that come at all close to comparing to Litestep. I'm probably being a little unfair to the multitude of other shells out there but really once I got the hang of Litestep I found it had so many possibilities that I didn't feel inclined to try any others.
sure it can, just not complete. people keep trying to bend Godel to say that mathematical systems are inconsistent - it's still very possible to have a consistent theory, it just will never be able prove the truth or falsehood of every statement that can be expressed in the language of that theory.
Personally I could go on all day about how the recording co's would make more money if they sold CD's cheaper, promoted better artists, allowed sharing, etc etc. But every article which comes to this conclusion seems to be suggesting that there's some reason why the record co's want to crack down on sharing whether or not it actually gains them money in the long run. But why is that? If the studies that the RIAA funds are biased towards a crackdown on piracy, what are they thinking? They should want to know more than anyone what costs and gains them money, and they should be in favor of anything that does. It's not necessarily the responsibility of those who put out studies to say why the RIAA is so anti-file sharing if file sharing increases their revenue, but some hint of a reason would make their report that much more convincing in my opinion.
but also have a short portion at the top using simplified terms
If lawyers can take simply worded licenses and twist them to make loopholes, lawyers can also take pedantically worded licenses and phrase them in simple language which sounds much less restrictive than the pedantic language actually specifies and leaves out many of the sticky details. Agreeing to a license on the basis of such a "summary" is as bad as agreeing to a license without reading it (not that this isn't done all the time.)
Please refrain from spreading misinformation when your brain power is extremely low.
heh, I like that.
Anyway, I could be mistaken about the right-button problem being fixed, but middle mouse works very nicely (once you disable the default behavior under unix of automatically trying to open as an URL whatever happens to be on the clipboard at the moment...)
If the gestures are less intuitive, then ain't it nice you can change them? And if detection is poor then I haven't noticed... maybe I'm just a precise gesturer or something.
Like I say, not trying to discredit opera at all, just saying Mozilla has a very usable gesture package of its own, so don't go getting defensive. silly AC
Opera is pretty nice, true. But in mozilla if you happen to have a middle button you can set things up so's you can middle-click a link and open in the background (nicer for me than down-up gesturing since I do a lot of this, and yes I did start out with opera gestures.) Further, you can get gestures in mozilla easily using optimoz. Up till recently they wouldn't work right with the right button but now they seem to, and in any case middle button works fine. There's also a few installation issues with linux (have to install as root and chmod a+rx manually...) but once they're set up they're as good as opera's. You can also edit the gestures in some.js file or another.
You're right about a few of those features you mentioned in the first paragraph. Saving your current set of pages to be reopened on startup in case of a crash would be nice, as would easier user-agent modification. But if it's gestures that's worth a grand to you, mozilla's already got them.
Not to mention that Fontographer is evidently made by Macromedia which is probably a bigger company than Agfa Monotype (judging by the fact that I hadn't heard of the latter) and would win in a lawsuit probably even if it weren't complete crap.
I got the install to work, I just don't think it's very out-of-the-box friendly to the typical linux operating mode. First it tries to install in your home folder, so I suppose you can have a copy for each user, or only use it for one user. I installed it into/usr/lib/OpenOffice which went fine, but then trying to run it as a non-root user is a real pain. Keeps crashing, not sure what you're supposed to do to get it to work. (I'd try reading some docs but the website...)
What you say makes sense, I just have never seen it happen. As a Windows user I used to run lots of cracked shareware, update the shareware, update the crack, repeat, toss in a nice gutted Photoshop 5 with some leet group's ifo file in it... never once got a virus (all those cpu cycles wasted running Norton!) I would think that running random cracks and keygens all the time would be a pretty good way to get a virus but I never heard of it happening to anyone.
Re:Thank God for the police...
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 1
Huh? If that's "behaving completely properly" I'd hate to think what it'd be like otherwise.
Cops are all the time outside talking to BB and not even bothering to listen to my story.
In comes on of the cops, cuffs me (God that hurts) and then tells me that I was cuffed so that I wouldnt hurt anyone.
Cops took me on a joy ride for half an hour and it was a damn uncomfortable one.
MAYBE it's policy to cuff and detain someone on say-so even in cases like this where it's a low-urgency (nonviolent) type of complaint, but it sure is shitty policy if so.
yes, what you said about 8/22 was exactly what I was saying: you get much more for your bits from lossy compression than from raw samples.
I'd bet if you applied some lossy compression to a 24/96 stream, let's say just enough to fit 80 minutes in 700mb, it'd make 16/44.1 sound "abysmal and unlistenable." Makes sense, doesn't it? Say you have some pristine piece of high-quality thousand-bit-billion-hertz audio and you want to fit it into a stream of a certain bitrate. Will you get a better sound from arbitrarily cutting off all frequencies beyond (say) 22kHz in order to accomplish this, or from applying some tuned psychoacoustic model? Surprise, the tuned lossy compression probably sounds better than the arbitrarily cut-off raw sampling.
# FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardare.
There are portables all over the place using perceptual codecs namely mp3. FLAC claims to be faster than "most perceptual codecs"; so unless you know something I don't, I'd imagine it's faster than mp3 to decode. Eh?
Wouldn't it be better if they used a higher samplerate/depth and some lossy compression? If you think not, try downsampling a track from some CD until it's the same size as an mp3 of the same track, and compare their quality. You have a point when it comes to 128kbit mp3s - they're just not devoting enough bits to making it sound good. But the mere fact that it's using lossy compression is not the problem here.
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Whenever anybody says a sentence of the form, "The government should do X," I replace "the government" with "Joe Smith." If what's being proposed would be morally or ethically wrong for a person-- Joe Smith-- then it's wrong for the govrnment.
You may believe this, but I doubt it. "The government decided John Doe did something bad so they locked him up." versus "Joe Smith decided John Doe did something bad so he locked him up." Maybe you're into anarchy, but AFAIK the prevailing view is that the point of the government is to be a representative of (roughly) the will of the general population, and therefore is supposed to exercise more power than individuals. Determining how much power you think they should use is up to your political philosophy.
As for the distinction you make in your last paragraph, it doesn't work out. First, what makes you think the government is providing you with services in exchange for your income tax but not inheritance tax? (Aside from silly jokes about how dead people don't get government services.) Second, is it actually OK with you for Joe Smith to demand money in return for services you didn't ask for? If you ask me, Joe Smith is an excellent rhetorial device and a poor device for actual politics.
What you're saying is irrelevant to what the parent post said. Saddam could stop the death or we could; both choose not to. Now, multiple-choice:
a) Saddam is an evil child-killer and "we"* are not.
b) We are evil childkillers and Saddam is not.
c) Saddam is not an evil childkiller nor are we.
d) We are evil childkillers as is Saddam.
* we = the sanction policy, the countries responsible for it, etc.
bubble in your answer, sign your paper and hand it to the proctor...
yeah, that article actually says the most likely figure is between 100,000 and 350,000 excess deaths due to sanctions. The author likes to rag on the 'loony left' (Zinn, Chomsky, Said et al) but if you read the last four paragraphs, he seems to be agreeing that the sanctions are stupid, barbaric, and counterproductive, just like those damn soft-on-terrorism lefties have been saying.
As for the _blame_, it's pretty pointless to assign - whether or not Saddam could prevent the ongoing starvation by giving in to UN demands, the UN also has the choice of lifting the sanctions in favor of some more effective strategy. And by "a more effective strategy" I mean "pretty much any other strategy."
He wasn't advocating Communism, he was saying to take a middle ground. But we'd better open a file on him anyway.
That is an invalid logical inference. A fault of reasoning. An incorrect deduction. An unscientific conclusion.
Given enough evidence, that type of inference is actually fairly scientific. It's not how deductive logic works, but it is how science works: you drop enough things and you deduce that things fall when you drop them. Not to say that the evidence for gravity isn't much much stronger than the evidence against Communism, but the method is sound. Problem with social science is you still have to take statistical and systematic error into account, which gets pretty impossibly complicated compared to nice easy stuff like physics.
The only good communist is a dead one!
aaaand.... what's the difference between you and Stalin, evil-wise? He's bloodthirsty, you're bloodthirsty - it's people that kill people, not ideologies.
No. What you've been saying in the five-so-far posts you've made on this article has been simply the most dangerous misunderstanding of the principles the country's founded on. There hasn't been a society where the majority gets to do what they want since the rise of tribalism, and for good reason. Everyone is out of line with the majority at some point. The majority of Americans realize that they all have some area in which they are minorities, and that it's in their best interest to protect minorities because of that. Take an inventory of your own personal beliefs and features and figure out for yourself whether you really want the type of unrestrained rule of the majority you're talking about. The distinction between democracy and republic that you've got such a hangup on actually cuts exactly the opposite way from what you've been talking. It's designed not to be an absolute democracy exactly because of the possibility of majorities unfairly oppressing minorities.
Hoover and McCarthy are examples of people who got around the protections, not examples of how the system is supposed to work.
Actually I should correct myself. With a good installer (and there are many - see rootrider's post for links) it's perfectly possible to get it working nicely with minimal interference. It's once you start trying to theme it yourself - which you probably will - that it takes some work to get to know.
Litestep is what I use when I boot into Windows; if it didn't exist I probably would've moved to Linux much earlier. It requires that you play around with rc files and spend a few months getting to know modules and their quirks before it works really well, but really there are no limits once you get it going. My question wouldn't have been about alternate shells for windows, my question would've been whether there are any unix desktop environments that come at all close to comparing to Litestep. I'm probably being a little unfair to the multitude of other shells out there but really once I got the hang of Litestep I found it had so many possibilities that I didn't feel inclined to try any others.
sure it can, just not complete. people keep trying to bend Godel to say that mathematical systems are inconsistent - it's still very possible to have a consistent theory, it just will never be able prove the truth or falsehood of every statement that can be expressed in the language of that theory.
Hmm, so you'd tell the RIAA guys that you've bought fewer CDs since napster was invented? I'd think the error would go the other way.
Personally I could go on all day about how the recording co's would make more money if they sold CD's cheaper, promoted better artists, allowed sharing, etc etc. But every article which comes to this conclusion seems to be suggesting that there's some reason why the record co's want to crack down on sharing whether or not it actually gains them money in the long run. But why is that? If the studies that the RIAA funds are biased towards a crackdown on piracy, what are they thinking? They should want to know more than anyone what costs and gains them money, and they should be in favor of anything that does. It's not necessarily the responsibility of those who put out studies to say why the RIAA is so anti-file sharing if file sharing increases their revenue, but some hint of a reason would make their report that much more convincing in my opinion.
If lawyers can take simply worded licenses and twist them to make loopholes, lawyers can also take pedantically worded licenses and phrase them in simple language which sounds much less restrictive than the pedantic language actually specifies and leaves out many of the sticky details. Agreeing to a license on the basis of such a "summary" is as bad as agreeing to a license without reading it (not that this isn't done all the time.)
heh, I like that.
Anyway, I could be mistaken about the right-button problem being fixed, but middle mouse works very nicely (once you disable the default behavior under unix of automatically trying to open as an URL whatever happens to be on the clipboard at the moment...) If the gestures are less intuitive, then ain't it nice you can change them? And if detection is poor then I haven't noticed... maybe I'm just a precise gesturer or something.
Like I say, not trying to discredit opera at all, just saying Mozilla has a very usable gesture package of its own, so don't go getting defensive. silly AC
You're right about a few of those features you mentioned in the first paragraph. Saving your current set of pages to be reopened on startup in case of a crash would be nice, as would easier user-agent modification. But if it's gestures that's worth a grand to you, mozilla's already got them.
Not to mention that Fontographer is evidently made by Macromedia which is probably a bigger company than Agfa Monotype (judging by the fact that I hadn't heard of the latter) and would win in a lawsuit probably even if it weren't complete crap.
barratry,
3 : the persistent incitement of litigation
I got the install to work, I just don't think it's very out-of-the-box friendly to the typical linux operating mode. First it tries to install in your home folder, so I suppose you can have a copy for each user, or only use it for one user. I installed it into /usr/lib/OpenOffice which went fine, but then trying to run it as a non-root user is a real pain. Keeps crashing, not sure what you're supposed to do to get it to work. (I'd try reading some docs but the website...)
What you say makes sense, I just have never seen it happen. As a Windows user I used to run lots of cracked shareware, update the shareware, update the crack, repeat, toss in a nice gutted Photoshop 5 with some leet group's ifo file in it... never once got a virus (all those cpu cycles wasted running Norton!) I would think that running random cracks and keygens all the time would be a pretty good way to get a virus but I never heard of it happening to anyone.
Cops are all the time outside talking to BB and not even bothering to listen to my story. In comes on of the cops, cuffs me (God that hurts) and then tells me that I was cuffed so that I wouldnt hurt anyone.
Cops took me on a joy ride for half an hour and it was a damn uncomfortable one.
MAYBE it's policy to cuff and detain someone on say-so even in cases like this where it's a low-urgency (nonviolent) type of complaint, but it sure is shitty policy if so.
apparently that's not necessarily always true.
yes, what you said about 8/22 was exactly what I was saying: you get much more for your bits from lossy compression than from raw samples.
I'd bet if you applied some lossy compression to a 24/96 stream, let's say just enough to fit 80 minutes in 700mb, it'd make 16/44.1 sound "abysmal and unlistenable." Makes sense, doesn't it? Say you have some pristine piece of high-quality thousand-bit-billion-hertz audio and you want to fit it into a stream of a certain bitrate. Will you get a better sound from arbitrarily cutting off all frequencies beyond (say) 22kHz in order to accomplish this, or from applying some tuned psychoacoustic model? Surprise, the tuned lossy compression probably sounds better than the arbitrarily cut-off raw sampling.
get the source, get the jdk, compile it yourself, and gee whiz, a no-spyware limewire, free for the taking.
From the Free Lossless Audio Codec features page:
# FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardare.
There are portables all over the place using perceptual codecs namely mp3. FLAC claims to be faster than "most perceptual codecs"; so unless you know something I don't, I'd imagine it's faster than mp3 to decode. Eh?
Wouldn't it be better if they used a higher samplerate/depth and some lossy compression? If you think not, try downsampling a track from some CD until it's the same size as an mp3 of the same track, and compare their quality. You have a point when it comes to 128kbit mp3s - they're just not devoting enough bits to making it sound good. But the mere fact that it's using lossy compression is not the problem here.