Just FYI. That "test" with the burning Athlon was because he used a cheap motherboard. The mothboard didn't detect changes in temperature when it was overheating too fast (such as fan failiure) so the Athlon CPU didn't get correct temperature data and thus didn't shut off.
The point is that GSM describes a mobile phone system, everything from how audio is encoded to how it is sent over the air. CDMA is really just a way to send stuff over the air. CDMAone and CDMA2000 are both other examples of mobile phone systems.
Furthermore, GSM uses TDMA the radio system to send data. But it can also use FDMA, SDMA or CDMA. CDMA is used in a variant known as Wide-CDMA with GSM audio coding etc in the 3G system found in Europe.
Finally, TDMA (the mobile phone system, yes that exists too) is what was used in the US before and became known as shitty.
When you are refering to TDMA, CDMA as mobile phone systems you are confusing the matter. As far as the radio systems are concerned they don't have any voice quality since that's not even defined by the technologies. (They are only concerned with how to send data over radio.) However there are systems which describe audio coding with the same names as the radio system, which is why it gets confusing.
Furthermore claiming that CDMA has much better coverage than GSM is just stupid. That would be depending on how many tramsission towers you are willing to build, not the technology. And as can be seen in Europe where 3G is being rolled out W-CDMA requires a lot more transmission towers than the old GSM system to provide the same coverage.
There was an article the other day about Japan and mobile phones. In that it was commented quite a lot on different mobile phone technologies. Among other points it was brought up that the old system in the US (CDMAone) has significantly lower quality than GSM or for that matter CDMA2000 or other 3G systems.
So yes, it really is that bad. (I have no personal experience with it though, when I was in the US a couple of years back noone had mobile phones.)
True, but they have nowhere the market penetration of Java. Unless you consider Unix systems you'll only find Python and Perl on the machine of a programmer. Java is found on almost all machines with a web browser in it.
It seems from other posts that the big confusion is that CDMA is both a phone standard and a radio transmission system.
CDMA the transmission system is better than that which is used in old GSM systems. However newer GSM systems use CDMA for transmission (this is 3G). CDMA the phone system is inferior to GSM the phone system (less features and lower voice quality).
Even though I'm actually kind of in the mobile industry I still find all these standards confusing.
Wikipedia to the rescue, start off at the CDMA description and you can browse around among the different standards there. Quite informative really, pity it's a bit hard to find pages with "the hole picture" though.
It's common that countries that lose a war are forbidden by treaties to build and army for a certain time. I would assume this goes for Japan after WW2 as well.
So it wasn't really that they depended on a US army to protect them but that they were not allowed to have one. After they had been doing this for a few decades and become one of the leading countries in the process I assmume they discovered that it was quite a lot better to have a lot of research and tech instead of a military so why stop doing it?
You also have Peter Jackson who improvised his own steady-cam for the recording of Bad Taste. In that commentary (I saw it on VHS with behind the scenes extras, not sure if it matches the DVD releases.) he tells that he used a standard desktop lamp (those with an arm with an "elbow" on it, balanced with springs). By changing the lamp to a camera, adding a counter weightand altering the tension of the springs he got a steady cam.
This is quite interesting. At first I dismissed Charles Fort as yet another anti-science "researcher" with too much time on his hands. Apparently this is pretty much true too, since he spend a large time of his life researching paranormal events living off of a hieritage. I did some quick googling though and found a couple of intresting articles about him. After skimming some of these I become quite interested in actually reading his works. Not so much for "becoming open-minded" but since it seems it's quite humourous. I'll provide some citations from the articles I found. Note that these are quite skeptical, although Wikipedia is quite balanced in tone. It's not from one of his fansites since none of those seemed worth reading. (A page with a graphic background and random images does little to inspire credibility with me.)
BTW if anyone is interested in reading the books there are links at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry [2].
Now these are some quotes from the article in the sceptics dictionary [1]:
In these works, he does not seem interested in questioning the reliability of his sources, which is odd, given that he had worked as a news reporter for a number of years before embarking on his quest to collect stories of the weird and bizarre. He does reject one story about a talking dog who disappeared into a puff of green smoke. He expresses his doubt that the dog really went up in green smoke, though he doesn't question its ability to speak.
That passage makes it seem like the books share a lot with the magazines with "Unbelieveable stories" and such. Could be entertaining however. And as I pointed out before, you can get them electronically.
This tendency to believe almost anything is also mentioned in the other articles.
Fort did not seem particularly interested in making any sense out of his collection of weird stories. He seemed particularly uninterested in scientific testing, yet some of his devotees consider him to be the founding father of modern paranormal studies. His main interest in scientific hypotheses was to criticize and ridicule the very process of theorizing. [...] Since he did not generally concern himself with the reliability or accuracy of his data, this borderland also blurs the distinction between open-mindedness and gullibility.
The article in Wikipedia [2] mentions that his works are on the borderline between comedy and seriousness because of this tendency. I guess that's another reason to read them though.
Fort was skeptical about scientific explanations because scientists sometimes argue "according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence" and they suppress or ignore inconvenient data. He seems to have understood that scientific theories are models, not pictures, of reality, but he considered them to be little more than superstitions and myths. He seems to have had a profound misunderstanding of the nature of scientific theories. For, he criticized them for not being able to accommodate anomalies and for requiring data to fit. [...] Fort seems to have been opposed to science as it really is: fallible, human and tentative, after probabilities rather than absolute certainties. He seems to have thought that since science is not infallible, any theory is as good as any other. This is the same kind of misunderstanding of science that we find with so-called "scientific creationists" and many other pseudoscientists.
No, I'm not going to go on quoting stuff from other places anymore. The passages above was from [1], it's quite interesting (and not very long) so I'd encourage people to read it.
As a counter to all this anti-science I'd yet again recommend reading the works of sceptics in science. Carl Sagan is a good start IMHO. I don't mind that people are sceptical about science and the scientific process, that's in a way part of science. However, I find that it's hard to find a person which is
What do you expect, a "fair and balanced" reporter's statement that no scientists have presented replicatable explanations -- but they could if they really wanted to?
Well he's a reporter, perhaps he should ask some of the science people around what they think of it? That is his job after all. A lot of people (including you perhaps) have a limited understanding of the scientific principle and how the methodology works. Because every time a "scientist" can't explain everything right away all the crack-pots start gathering and all of a sudden their "explainations" are good as gold. The scientist have typically already gone over a lot of hypothesises, but unlike the crack-pots they need to be able to verify their ideas before they can accept them.
If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there.
"Citations"? When was the last time you read a scientific article by reputable scientists saying, effectively, "Here's something a lot of people have witnessed and it beats the shit out of us what's happening"?
Yes, because as I pointed out before it's important for people to understand how critical thinking actually works. Scientist aren't born with all knowledge in the world, they are simply trained to think about problems and solve them in a methodical way.
And why should it be less interesting to hear what the scientist have to say than that the mayor doesn't know what's going on. Or the priest who's convinced that it's the devil who has possessed the electrical appliences. (Which brings up an interesting theological question regarding if mobile phones have souls.)
Certainly, the news that 1/6 of the world's population have become scientists and are visiting this tiny village should be covered in something like Demographics Journal. But even if that article were accepted for publication, the delays mean we won't be able to read about it for another year or two. Thank Sagan we can read authoritative, unrefereed Web sites to get the real story that the news media are afraid to print!
Jesus Christ, did you write this article or something? You seem to take my critisism way too personal.
Yes the scientific process is slow. That's part of why it actually produces useable work. And I don't claim that the site I linked has the solution. I do however claim that the people there actually have some understanding of how problems like this are solved. It's not like with the X-Files where you know that they soon will have the answer since it's only 10 minutes left on the show. I just think it's really sad that journalist tend to skip the "boring details" and go straight to the stuff that sell papers. The article even claims that is is the first time it has ever happened in the world, but that's apparently not true.
I can understand that it's not easy for a journalist to get all the facts but they should be expected to look things up before they print it. Well, that's just the reason why I never trust news articles with statistics or science in them any more. The journalists are way to gullible to provide a decent filter to what they are writing.
What these people do is a good way to sell more papers.
What more scientific way of refuting data than by impuning the methods of the reporters? I mean, aside from the Sokal and Lomborg affairs, we all know that scientists publish for the purist of motives, right?
WHAT DATA? There isn't a single interesting fact in that article. They don't even attempt to explain correlation between the incidents or mention that the incidents have occured when no electrical appliaces were around. My entire point is that the article is completely devoid of any facts besides that a village on Siccily has a problem with fires and the name of the mayor of said village.
Well true, but I would say that project such as Lnux has already demonstrated that false. While there is certain hardware that you can't use on Linux you can enjoy the same functionality if you just ensure to buy brands that are supported. Similarly any software from Microsoft that you run on Windows is available in some alternative for other OSes. The biggest limitation (for pure functionality) in these applications tend to be that everyone else uses propriatary Microsoft formats to save their files.
Well, I wasn't suggesting that you should only use the controllers. It seems like only one player should be pressing the GI combo when the GI sound is played though. Naturally this would assume that you know which controller is hooked to which life-bar.
That may still not be quite sufficient. I haven't played SC2 quite that much... Yet.
Agreed. But I have a hard time finding examples of cases were "supernatural" reasons are claimed and then there has been any back-up on those ideas. Making up hypothesises to explain a phenomena is ok, but unless you can start backing your claims with facts or at least logic then it's not that much use IMHO.
Anyone who would claim to have all the answers is, likewise, an idiot....
You know, I believe that the uncertainty principle is very much a concept of science. Without a lot of scientific research in the area of quantum physics the idea wouldn't even exist in the first place.
And while you can never predict this phenomena you can attempt to explain it. We're not there yet, but unless you have a degree in QM-physics I'm just not going to trust your opinion that much.
In many ways the same goes for ultiverse theories. Part of the work of a scientist is to try to find ways to prove their theories right. Unless you can do this it's doomed to remain a "cute idea". (People of the paranormal persuasion seem content with remaining in this area though, I guess it's less work that way.) BTW I believe they are attempting to test the multiverse theory with graviton experiments in particle accellerators, so there's still hope.
That said, there are a lot of things which science can't explain. Using the scientific method on human behaviour eg is pretty much doomed to fail. (Although you can have a lot of fun annoying people while you try.)
My objection is first off mainly because while the word may not have a bad meaning in itself it is typically used in conjunction with ghosts, aliens etc. That's not really a problem with the word per se though.
The biggest gripe is that supernatural is often used as an "explaination" when it is none of the sort. If you classify something as supernatural then you have not really accomplished anything. When you can define that supernatural and explain it then you have somthing we can use. However, media and crackpots like to say "it's supernatural, end of story" as if that gave us any new information. If it was proved that the devil could possess my mobile phone than that would be a scientific breakthrough. However the evidence seem to have been quite lacking for quite a few thousands of years by now.
And I think you'll find that "scientists" (scientist is really a bad term, it's about as informative as "white male" in these situations) are typically the first to admit we don't know everything about the world. Contrast that with religions which typically claim to have all the answers.
Actually I would say that it's a good example of media presenting it as something science can't explain. If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there. They do provide a lot of quotes from people who think it's related to electrical appliances possessed by the devil.
For a more scientific approach to the problem you should check the site The Fires of Canneto di Caronia which at least attempt to provide an explaination.
And furthermore, you may complain that scientist are sceptical to new ideas. This is natural because in science there is a clear distintion between an idea (hypothesis) and something which is "tried and true" (theory, law). What these enthusiasts are doing is to invent meaningless stuff about the "causes" and claiming that it's as good as a scientific idea. Now naturally if you can't use the hypothesis to actually predict anything then it's at best cute. Most likely it's a big fat waste of time.
The scientific method is a systematic way of getting more and better knowledge. What these people do is a good way to sell more papers. I just feel that it's so extremely sad when I read about "science" or statistics in a paper that I want to go to that journal and smack him on the nose with a rolled up paper (perhaps a scientific journal would help) and say "Bad irresponsible crackpot journalist! Bad irresponsible crackpot journalist! Look at what you did!"
BTW I recommend that you read eg "The deamon haunted world" by Carl Sagan. It's a pretty good introduction to critical thinking in a world of disinformation.
It may be "magical" but it isn't "supernatural" or "paranormal". That is, just because you don't understand something should your first assumption be that "this can only be explained by rejecting all previous knowledge and making something up".
And I find the lack of citations from any of the alleged scientist disturbing. The press is in a sad state indeed.
It's newsworthy because the guy added it to a game which doesn't have it from the beginning. Furthermore he did it by processing the video stream from the console. It has nothing to do with console vs PC.
It's kind of like the people who analysed the data stream for Everquest in order to make a map of the area around the character. (Although it's quite a lot harder to successfully analyse a video stream than a network stream.)
Just a friendly advice for the future. While I'm sure that you are quite correct as far as using iPods are concerrned you should try giving advice a bit nicer in the future. You do come off as a total prick with a truckload of sand up your vagina (as Cartman would have put it) in this thread.
Furthermore, you don't seem to even attempt to understand why the original poster doesn't want to use ID3 tags. You only conclude that he must be a moron for not using it and then go off on a big rant about that.
While I agree that the original poster should consider using a tagging program to tag his files there may be other issues with it. (Such as Unicode since many programs fuck that up.)
Your advice are sound but the presentation needs a lot of work. I mean, your posts pissed me off and I don't even have an iPod.;-)
I think another big thing about Ogg is the possibility of bit-shaving. That way you can dynamically lower the bitrate of a file without reencoding it. If you use portable players (think USB thumb drives) that can be a big thing. Unfortunately no portable players I know of support Ogg, so it's kind of moot. And AFAIK bit-shaving is still not quite there, although the latest release had more support for it.
Still, if you add something like that then the point of Ogg might just become apparent to "the rest of the world". Though that doesn't really matter to me. As long as it's more useful for me then that's enough.
The most obvious arguments against Microsoft as a free actor on the market is that they cause vendor lock-in. Eg how Office documents can be hard to open on non-Windows systems (you can typically get it to work, but no thanks to Microsoft for that). Similar issues exist on almost all levels with integrating Windows with with a other OSs. For some reason it's always the other actors that have to adapt to Microsoft and how they tend to change protocols to make interoperability harder. (Often also breaking compatability with their own "out dated" products.)
Besides the fact that the ships are grossly off scale in that scene it is interesting. IIRC the ships cover a good portion of the sky seen from the planet. Considering that the bugs fire non-homing weapons the ships would have to be large like a country or small continent to be hit. It's like trying to hit a small bird at 10,0000" with a rifle from the ground.
But it is nice when big ships collide. Same thing goes for those (super) star destroyers in RotJ.
I think the best space fights I've seen has been in games like Wing Commander.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI. That "test" with the burning Athlon was because he used a cheap motherboard. The mothboard didn't detect changes in temperature when it was overheating too fast (such as fan failiure) so the Athlon CPU didn't get correct temperature data and thus didn't shut off.
The point is that GSM describes a mobile phone system, everything from how audio is encoded to how it is sent over the air. CDMA is really just a way to send stuff over the air. CDMAone and CDMA2000 are both other examples of mobile phone systems.
Furthermore, GSM uses TDMA the radio system to send data. But it can also use FDMA, SDMA or CDMA. CDMA is used in a variant known as Wide-CDMA with GSM audio coding etc in the 3G system found in Europe.
Finally, TDMA (the mobile phone system, yes that exists too) is what was used in the US before and became known as shitty.
When you are refering to TDMA, CDMA as mobile phone systems you are confusing the matter. As far as the radio systems are concerned they don't have any voice quality since that's not even defined by the technologies. (They are only concerned with how to send data over radio.) However there are systems which describe audio coding with the same names as the radio system, which is why it gets confusing.
Furthermore claiming that CDMA has much better coverage than GSM is just stupid. That would be depending on how many tramsission towers you are willing to build, not the technology. And as can be seen in Europe where 3G is being rolled out W-CDMA requires a lot more transmission towers than the old GSM system to provide the same coverage.
There was an article the other day about Japan and mobile phones. In that it was commented quite a lot on different mobile phone technologies. Among other points it was brought up that the old system in the US (CDMAone) has significantly lower quality than GSM or for that matter CDMA2000 or other 3G systems.
So yes, it really is that bad. (I have no personal experience with it though, when I was in the US a couple of years back noone had mobile phones.)
True, but they have nowhere the market penetration of Java. Unless you consider Unix systems you'll only find Python and Perl on the machine of a programmer. Java is found on almost all machines with a web browser in it.
The reason you don't want to do this (and similar P2P wireless phone ideas) is that it drains the batteries something crazy.
Besides, the complexity of a dynamic networks would make it hard to make it work in a reliable way. (Roaming and similar issues for instance.)
Somebody needs to read more Asimov.
It seems from other posts that the big confusion is that CDMA is both a phone standard and a radio transmission system.
CDMA the transmission system is better than that which is used in old GSM systems. However newer GSM systems use CDMA for transmission (this is 3G). CDMA the phone system is inferior to GSM the phone system (less features and lower voice quality).
Even though I'm actually kind of in the mobile industry I still find all these standards confusing.
Wikipedia to the rescue, start off at the CDMA description and you can browse around among the different standards there. Quite informative really, pity it's a bit hard to find pages with "the hole picture" though.
It's common that countries that lose a war are forbidden by treaties to build and army for a certain time. I would assume this goes for Japan after WW2 as well.
So it wasn't really that they depended on a US army to protect them but that they were not allowed to have one. After they had been doing this for a few decades and become one of the leading countries in the process I assmume they discovered that it was quite a lot better to have a lot of research and tech instead of a military so why stop doing it?
You also have Peter Jackson who improvised his own steady-cam for the recording of Bad Taste. In that commentary (I saw it on VHS with behind the scenes extras, not sure if it matches the DVD releases.) he tells that he used a standard desktop lamp (those with an arm with an "elbow" on it, balanced with springs). By changing the lamp to a camera, adding a counter weightand altering the tension of the springs he got a steady cam.
BTW if anyone is interested in reading the books there are links at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry [2].
Now these are some quotes from the article in the sceptics dictionary [1]:
That passage makes it seem like the books share a lot with the magazines with "Unbelieveable stories" and such. Could be entertaining however. And as I pointed out before, you can get them electronically.
This tendency to believe almost anything is also mentioned in the other articles.
The article in Wikipedia [2] mentions that his works are on the borderline between comedy and seriousness because of this tendency. I guess that's another reason to read them though.
No, I'm not going to go on quoting stuff from other places anymore. The passages above was from [1], it's quite interesting (and not very long) so I'd encourage people to read it.
As a counter to all this anti-science I'd yet again recommend reading the works of sceptics in science. Carl Sagan is a good start IMHO. I don't mind that people are sceptical about science and the scientific process, that's in a way part of science. However, I find that it's hard to find a person which is
Well he's a reporter, perhaps he should ask some of the science people around what they think of it? That is his job after all. A lot of people (including you perhaps) have a
limited understanding of the scientific principle and how the methodology works. Because every time a "scientist" can't explain everything right away all the crack-pots start gathering and all of a sudden their "explainations" are good as gold. The scientist have typically already gone over a lot of hypothesises, but unlike the crack-pots they need to be able to verify their ideas before they can accept them.
Yes, because as I pointed out before it's important for people to understand how critical thinking actually works. Scientist aren't born with all knowledge in the world, they are simply trained to think about problems and solve them in a methodical way.
And why should it be less interesting to hear what the scientist have to say than that the mayor doesn't know what's going on. Or the priest who's convinced that it's the devil who has possessed the electrical appliences. (Which brings up an interesting theological question regarding if mobile phones have souls.)
Jesus Christ, did you write this article or something? You seem to take my critisism way too personal.
Yes the scientific process is slow. That's part of why it actually produces useable work. And I don't claim that the site I linked has the solution. I do however claim that the people there actually have some understanding of how problems like this are solved. It's not like with the X-Files where you know that they soon will have the answer since it's only 10 minutes left on the show. I just think it's really sad that journalist tend to skip the "boring details" and go straight to the stuff that sell papers. The article even claims that is is the first time it has ever happened in the world, but that's apparently not true.
I can understand that it's not easy for a journalist to get all the facts but they should be expected to look things up before they print it. Well, that's just the reason why I never trust news articles with statistics or science in them any more. The journalists are way to gullible to provide a decent filter to what they are writing.
WHAT DATA? There isn't a single interesting fact in that article. They don't even attempt to explain correlation between the incidents or mention that the incidents have occured when no electrical appliaces were around. My entire point is that the article is completely devoid of any facts besides that a village on Siccily has a problem with fires and the name of the mayor of said village.
I'm not claiming this hasn't happened. I am
Well true, but I would say that project such as Lnux has already demonstrated that false. While there is certain hardware that you can't use on Linux you can enjoy the same functionality if you just ensure to buy brands that are supported. Similarly any software from Microsoft that you run on Windows is available in some alternative for other OSes. The biggest limitation (for pure functionality) in these applications tend to be that everyone else uses propriatary Microsoft formats to save their files.
Well, I wasn't suggesting that you should only use the controllers. It seems like only one player should be pressing the GI combo when the GI sound is played though. Naturally this would assume that you know which controller is hooked to which life-bar.
That may still not be quite sufficient. I haven't played SC2 quite that much... Yet.
No argument there. Well, not from me at any rate.
You know, I believe that the uncertainty principle is very much a concept of science. Without a lot of scientific research in the area of quantum physics the idea wouldn't even exist in the first place.
And while you can never predict this phenomena you can attempt to explain it. We're not there yet, but unless you have a degree in QM-physics I'm just not going to trust your opinion that much.
In many ways the same goes for ultiverse theories. Part of the work of a scientist is to try to find ways to prove their theories right. Unless you can do this it's doomed to remain a "cute idea". (People of the paranormal persuasion seem content with remaining in this area though, I guess it's less work that way.) BTW I believe they are attempting to test the multiverse theory with graviton experiments in particle accellerators, so there's still hope.
That said, there are a lot of things which science can't explain. Using the scientific method on human behaviour eg is pretty much doomed to fail. (Although you can have a lot of fun annoying people while you try.)
My objection is first off mainly because while the word may not have a bad meaning in itself it is typically used in conjunction with ghosts, aliens etc. That's not really a problem with the word per se though.
The biggest gripe is that supernatural is often used as an "explaination" when it is none of the sort. If you classify something as supernatural then you have not really accomplished anything. When you can define that supernatural and explain it then you have somthing we can use. However, media and crackpots like to say "it's supernatural, end of story" as if that gave us any new information. If it was proved that the devil could possess my mobile phone than that would be a scientific breakthrough. However the evidence seem to have been quite lacking for quite a few thousands of years by now.
And I think you'll find that "scientists" (scientist is really a bad term, it's about as informative as "white male" in these situations) are typically the first to admit we don't know everything about the world. Contrast that with religions which typically claim to have all the answers.
Actually I would say that it's a good example of media presenting it as something science can't explain. If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there. They do provide a lot of quotes from people who think it's related to electrical appliances possessed by the devil.
For a more scientific approach to the problem you should check the site The Fires of Canneto di Caronia which at least attempt to provide an explaination.
And furthermore, you may complain that scientist are sceptical to new ideas. This is natural because in science there is a clear distintion between an idea (hypothesis) and something which is "tried and true" (theory, law). What these enthusiasts are doing is to invent meaningless stuff about the "causes" and claiming that it's as good as a scientific idea. Now naturally if you can't use the hypothesis to actually predict anything then it's at best cute. Most likely it's a big fat waste of time.
The scientific method is a systematic way of getting more and better knowledge. What these people do is a good way to sell more papers. I just feel that it's so extremely sad when I read about "science" or statistics in a paper that I want to go to that journal and smack him on the nose with a rolled up paper (perhaps a scientific journal would help) and say "Bad irresponsible crackpot journalist! Bad irresponsible crackpot journalist! Look at what you did!"
BTW I recommend that you read eg "The deamon haunted world" by Carl Sagan. It's a pretty good introduction to critical thinking in a world of disinformation.
It may be "magical" but it isn't "supernatural" or "paranormal". That is, just because you don't understand something should your first assumption be that "this can only be explained by rejecting all previous knowledge and making something up".
And I find the lack of citations from any of the alleged scientist disturbing. The press is in a sad state indeed.
One way would be to read the controllers as well. That would require some more hardware for analysing though.
It's newsworthy because the guy added it to a game which doesn't have it from the beginning. Furthermore he did it by processing the video stream from the console. It has nothing to do with console vs PC.
It's kind of like the people who analysed the data stream for Everquest in order to make a map of the area around the character. (Although it's quite a lot harder to successfully analyse a video stream than a network stream.)
Just a friendly advice for the future. While I'm sure that you are quite correct as far as using iPods are concerrned you should try giving advice a bit nicer in the future. You do come off as a total prick with a truckload of sand up your vagina (as Cartman would have put it) in this thread.
;-)
Furthermore, you don't seem to even attempt to understand why the original poster doesn't want to use ID3 tags. You only conclude that he must be a moron for not using it and then go off on a big rant about that.
While I agree that the original poster should consider using a tagging program to tag his files there may be other issues with it. (Such as Unicode since many programs fuck that up.)
Your advice are sound but the presentation needs a lot of work. I mean, your posts pissed me off and I don't even have an iPod.
I think another big thing about Ogg is the possibility of bit-shaving. That way you can dynamically lower the bitrate of a file without reencoding it. If you use portable players (think USB thumb drives) that can be a big thing. Unfortunately no portable players I know of support Ogg, so it's kind of moot. And AFAIK bit-shaving is still not quite there, although the latest release had more support for it.
Still, if you add something like that then the point of Ogg might just become apparent to "the rest of the world". Though that doesn't really matter to me. As long as it's more useful for me then that's enough.
The most obvious arguments against Microsoft as a free actor on the market is that they cause vendor lock-in. Eg how Office documents can be hard to open on non-Windows systems (you can typically get it to work, but no thanks to Microsoft for that). Similar issues exist on almost all levels with integrating Windows with with a other OSs. For some reason it's always the other actors that have to adapt to Microsoft and how they tend to change protocols to make interoperability harder. (Often also breaking compatability with their own "out dated" products.)
Besides the fact that the ships are grossly off scale in that scene it is interesting. IIRC the ships cover a good portion of the sky seen from the planet. Considering that the bugs fire non-homing weapons the ships would have to be large like a country or small continent to be hit. It's like trying to hit a small bird at 10,0000" with a rifle from the ground.
But it is nice when big ships collide. Same thing goes for those (super) star destroyers in RotJ.
I think the best space fights I've seen has been in games like Wing Commander.
Those episodes are named "Year of Hell" BTW.