If the underlying system has a general media decoding system, and if the browser uses that, then the browser will support any kind of media supported by that underlying system.
Oh, my understanding is the Mozilla chose not to use any such system. They directly implement Ogg/Theora support (via libtheora) - and so they support nothing else. Chromium uses FFMpeg, which has a wide range of support for video formats.
The Mozilla move to me does not make sense. I gather they're doing it because they want to promote an unencumbered codec over H.264. However, it seems to me this just completely hobbles the prospects of HTML5 video being adopted over flash. By tying together the embedding and codec questions, it seems to me they damage the prospects of *either* dimension going free. If you can "free" the embedding technology and wrest the web away from Flash, then you have *much* greater scope for next trying to do something about the codec situation.
Hitching problems together often makes them much harder to solve. Divide and conquer - splitting problems in more manageable, independent chunks - often is a better strategy.
That is to say, HTML5 is a way to embed video into web pages, along with controls. HTML5 doesn't say anything about the video codec that should be used, similar to how the IMG tag doesn't say what kinds of image formats are supported. Further, the videos that are loaded will almost certainly be in some container format, like Ogg, MP4, AVI, etc.. - not in raw codec data form.
If the underlying system has a general media decoding system, and if the browser uses that, then the browser will support any kind of media supported by that underlying system.
HTML5 is open
It's an openly specified W3 standard. As a means to embed video into webpages, HTML5 video is much better than using the object tag to suck in a proprietary blob to then suck in the video.
The H.264 codec is openly specified.
H.264 is openly specified in standards drawn up by the MPEG and published by ISO. There are free software implementations of H.264. H.264 rather is encumbered by patents, the licensing for many of which is administered by the MPEG-LA. The patent situation is what things difficult for distributors/users, there is no lack of standards.
Note that flash players often use H.263 and H.264 codec videos, and so have all the same patent issues for free software implementations (in addition to the problem of Flash not being fully documented, and not having any complete free implementations).
The reason for the "more or less" is that dycke, dyke and dyk (others?) have all been accepted spellings in dutch prior to the various overhauls and regularisation of spelling in nl_NL. Dutch readers will (should) be able to recognise such old spellings, no?:) Even modern dutch texts will sometimes fall back to old dutch, if trying to give a historic flavour.
Yes, it's not the modern spelling in nl_NL. However, as we're talking about variants of languages, the net seems to suggest "dyk" is still common idiom in Afrikaans (nl_za). Also, didn't nl_BE stick with y-grec for quite a while??
I'm guessing you're not dutch, and hence you don't realise that dutch spelling (well, NL dutch) has gone through some changes over the last couple of hundred years. E.g. have a look at the NL wikipedia page on the lange ei. Even if you can't speak dutch, the picture might be informative.
The linked to article, from which the submitter (who may well not be USAsian) and hence presumably the editor took the spelling is from a *dutch* publisher. Further, the dutch were primarily taught GB english in the past, though younger generations of dutch seem to tend toward US english.
This isn't about which variant of english should be used though. This is simply about the lack of *awareness* of the existence of other variants by USAsians.
Finally,/. draws from news internationally and has an international readership, as should be self-evident from this article.
The/. editors have since gone and revised the text of the leader.
using 3.14159 is just silly because you can only be sure of 3 digits anyway from your measurement of the radius.
That depends entirely on the accuracy of your tools. With highly accurate tools you might have accuracy to far greater precision than 3 digits. Basically, you seem to be missing the concept of accuracy from your understanding. I'm surprised you say this would be at science degree level (that's what you mean by "major" right?), in the countries I'm aware of (Ireland, UK, NL) accuracy and error gets drilled into pupils in late primary / early secondary maths/science classes (ie. somewhere around age 10 to 13).
Where are you getting this from? I'm slightly scared you got modded 5 for saying this.
As other posters have noted the validity of the relation of "# votes >= 2/3" is determinable without any need for cutting off 2/3 to some arbitrary decimal precision.
Try Andrews & Arnold. They've said they won't do IWF filtering. They've also recently issued a statement on the DE Act to say they'll follow it to its technical letter, but so far as possible they'll work around its intention and keep customers online.
Really must go support them with my money - soon as I can take the time hit of switching ISPs.
Haughey was openly corrupt. He lived an amazingly grand life-style for a professional politician, replete with a country house set in a large estate and his own, private island. I was a bit young to be politically aware myself in the early 80s, but I know my parent's despised him for his corruptness, for such reasons.
Not all of them. In my memory it's pretty much just been the Haughey-ite, Fianna Fail taoiseachs who have been massively corrupt. I.e. Haughey and his protege Bertie. Reynolds seemed reasonably decent for a Fianna Fail'er. I can't work out if Cowen is principled but utterly misguided, or corrupted - but he was at least not a Haughey-ite.
On the other side, the Fianna Gael taoiseachs have been decent enough, i.e. Fitzgerald and Bruton. The big problem is that the Irish electorate seem to delight in electing blatantly corrupt FF politicians over and over again.:(
Read my sig. I use "friend"/"foe" + mod-point modifiers as a karma system, to help *me* get more from my time when reading/..
I have the right to be disgusted by those who apologise away the slaying of civilians in clearly inexcusable circumstances (i.e. the people who came to help - there is 0 evidence for them being insurgents, Baghdad is a densely populated city!). I have the right to mark down such people so that *I* don't have to read them as often.
Next, for you to try equate my doing so with the actions of a helicopter crew blowing chunks out of civilians is just bizarre. Please rethink that.
The gunner most definitely is disturbed. If you think that a normal mind could be *begging* for the opportunity to kill a clearly badly wounded man then I submit there is something wrong with you too. Indeed, maybe you are suffering from the same problems as this gunner?
I agree with you there may be reasons why this crew acted the way they did. They may have lost friends. They may have watched fellow soldiers die, turned into twisted chunks of meat by enemy fire, just as the subjects of the film were. Perhaps you have too, if you were a soldier over there too.
However, while this *explains* why they became the kinds of people who could do what they did, and while it acts as a mitigating factor in assessing what consequences would be appropriate for them, it does **not** _excuse_ them. That is, the act of slaughtering civilians who are trying to assist a badly wounded man is wrong - full stop. It does not matter what state of mind the crew were in, or what they were thinking, the act remains wrong and must be condemned.
I never said anyone's actions were politically motivated, and my comment is utterly non-political beside the "King W" remark (which is an aside, and not at all relevant to the point - so you're right, I shouldn't have put that in). Rather I said that *your* actions, in commenting here, perhaps are motivated by a sense of wanting to justify what you have (as you say) taken part in in the past (i.e. in very general terms of having participated in Iraq that is).
I don't know what you've gone through. I agree with you that many soldiers can see the most awful things, so awful they often will try avoid to talk about them ever again (least, I've known WWII and heard of Vietnam vets like that). Perhaps you have too. I sympathise with you for that.
However, I simply can not sympathise with you when you try excuse a clear war-crime, by the US military's own standards. I can not sympathise with when you talk about this as if it's just a "tragic mistake" whose greatest lesson is that soldiers need more PID training.
If you think soldiers have it tough in occupying a land, think what's it like for the civilians. The soldiers may see awful things, but so do the civilians. Indeed, while the soldiers may be traumatised by human viscera, it's often the civilians who have to *clean up* and mourn those remains.
Next, the soldiers get to go back to their barracks/base at nights and get fed. They get to go home after a tour. The civilians are stuck there, often with little or no food. They *HAVE TO* continue their life despite the battles outside. They MUST go out to find food - which requires money or goods to barter, which often means taking on high-risk work. They have NO CHOICE but to do this if they want to live, even more so if they have children to feed.
No doubt you have suffered if you served anywhere near combat. However that does not excuse your attitude towards civilians, who have almost certainly suffered just as greatly, if not far more, and who the US military were supposed to be aiding and protecting - both by strategic mission and by all the rules of war (international and the US military's own). I sympathise very much with what you may have gone through, but you should not expect people to be glad to hear you excuse the killing of civilians.
(FWIW, my background is that I grew up listening to tales from my grandmother about the trials of having to look after a new-born son in Nazi occupied Europe. Nowhere near as hard as Baghdad, I suspect - but still they had to endure a famine. My wife has tales of life under Japanese occupation from her grandmother).
That post is bit confusing. The 2nd paragraph largely is talking about how typing would work if it depended only the existence of a member element - which is the level of safety you get with macros, and which you seem to be talking about. However, I believe C++ templates are type checked.
I see what you mean now about C#, it has "dynamic" typing. My comments from the 2nd paragraph on type safety would apply to it.
FWIW, you could sort of achieve the same with Java introspection, but you'd need a lot more scaffolding.
Thanks for your reply. I have to admit I can't tell if I'm talking to someone whose understanding is way below my own or way above:). Still, I suspect you're missing something. Apologies in advance if I'm the one being an idiot.;)
I think I understand how the typing in C++ templates work. And yes, templates are not macros - they're a closed subset that can't be abused as macros can, and they're type-checked (I thought). And yes, if you write your programme according to a convention that says "method names must be globally unique, according to their function" it will work so long as you don't make a mistake. If that convention doesn't hold, e.g. because you're trying to use code from multiple independent sources (like using a library, whatever), or because you simply made a mistake, then it no longer works. It's a very very weak typing system, as the compiler can't help you with it much, beyond checking for the existence of a method.
The Java generics stuff is heavily influenced by CS type theory. It's not perfect per se, but it can provide quite strong guarantees. Further, I believe the C++ templates are NOT as you describe - they also require well-formed and compatible types. I did not think it was sufficient with C++ to pass any class that had whatever method names were used.
Can you give an example of the C# thing you're talking about? Cause, from what I can tell C# generics also do type-checking, as Java does.
Just as a data-point: An RPG-7 is 95cm long. Fair bit longer still with a projectile loaded. Whatever that man is holding, it seems a good bit shorter than an RPG-7.
It's possible one man has an AK-47, but it's extremely hard to tell.
How is it justified to blow up people for collecting bodies, regardless of whether the bodies are of insurgents or photographers? I don't see where the ROE (also on wikileaks) allow for that.
Never mind that though, we *know* the crew knew the man was not dead.
I'm somewhat disgusted by your comments here, defending the indefensible.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean to give any impression that HTML5 did not support object and/or flash. Thanks for clarifying.
If the underlying system has a general media decoding system, and if the browser uses that, then the browser will support any kind of media supported by that underlying system.
Oh, my understanding is the Mozilla chose not to use any such system. They directly implement Ogg/Theora support (via libtheora) - and so they support nothing else. Chromium uses FFMpeg, which has a wide range of support for video formats.
The Mozilla move to me does not make sense. I gather they're doing it because they want to promote an unencumbered codec over H.264. However, it seems to me this just completely hobbles the prospects of HTML5 video being adopted over flash. By tying together the embedding and codec questions, it seems to me they damage the prospects of *either* dimension going free. If you can "free" the embedding technology and wrest the web away from Flash, then you have *much* greater scope for next trying to do something about the codec situation.
Hitching problems together often makes them much harder to solve. Divide and conquer - splitting problems in more manageable, independent chunks - often is a better strategy.
Still need to see what Google does with VP8..
That is to say, HTML5 is a way to embed video into web pages, along with controls. HTML5 doesn't say anything about the video codec that should be used, similar to how the IMG tag doesn't say what kinds of image formats are supported. Further, the videos that are loaded will almost certainly be in some container format, like Ogg, MP4, AVI, etc.. - not in raw codec data form.
If the underlying system has a general media decoding system, and if the browser uses that, then the browser will support any kind of media supported by that underlying system.
It's an openly specified W3 standard. As a means to embed video into webpages, HTML5 video is much better than using the object tag to suck in a proprietary blob to then suck in the video.
H.264 is openly specified in standards drawn up by the MPEG and published by ISO. There are free software implementations of H.264. H.264 rather is encumbered by patents, the licensing for many of which is administered by the MPEG-LA. The patent situation is what things difficult for distributors/users, there is no lack of standards.
Note that flash players often use H.263 and H.264 codec videos, and so have all the same patent issues for free software implementations (in addition to the problem of Flash not being fully documented, and not having any complete free implementations).
Actually, I would argue for tolerance towards spelling variations. See my other comments.
The reason for the "more or less" is that dycke, dyke and dyk (others?) have all been accepted spellings in dutch prior to the various overhauls and regularisation of spelling in nl_NL. Dutch readers will (should) be able to recognise such old spellings, no? :) Even modern dutch texts will sometimes fall back to old dutch, if trying to give a historic flavour.
Yes, it's not the modern spelling in nl_NL. However, as we're talking about variants of languages, the net seems to suggest "dyk" is still common idiom in Afrikaans (nl_za). Also, didn't nl_BE stick with y-grec for quite a while??
En ik ook.
I'm guessing you're not dutch, and hence you don't realise that dutch spelling (well, NL dutch) has gone through some changes over the last couple of hundred years. E.g. have a look at the NL wikipedia page on the lange ei. Even if you can't speak dutch, the picture might be informative.
You're full of fail.
The linked to article, from which the submitter (who may well not be USAsian) and hence presumably the editor took the spelling is from a *dutch* publisher. Further, the dutch were primarily taught GB english in the past, though younger generations of dutch seem to tend toward US english.
This isn't about which variant of english should be used though. This is simply about the lack of *awareness* of the existence of other variants by USAsians.
Finally, /. draws from news internationally and has an international readership, as should be self-evident from this article.
The /. editors have since gone and revised the text of the leader.
Are you really unaware that there are variants of english out there other than US english?
The word is dyke in dutch (well, more or less) and in its closest english speaking neighbour.
Try learn about the rest of the world before making yourself sound like an myopic, "World Series" looking idiot.
using 3.14159 is just silly because you can only be sure of 3 digits anyway from your measurement of the radius.
That depends entirely on the accuracy of your tools. With highly accurate tools you might have accuracy to far greater precision than 3 digits. Basically, you seem to be missing the concept of accuracy from your understanding. I'm surprised you say this would be at science degree level (that's what you mean by "major" right?), in the countries I'm aware of (Ireland, UK, NL) accuracy and error gets drilled into pupils in late primary / early secondary maths/science classes (ie. somewhere around age 10 to 13).
MUST be taken to at least 3 digits
Where are you getting this from? I'm slightly scared you got modded 5 for saying this.
As other posters have noted the validity of the relation of "# votes >= 2/3" is determinable without any need for cutting off 2/3 to some arbitrary decimal precision.
They had a MIPS port before Alpha, it's the reason why Alpha ARCSBIOS had MIPS style device names.
Incorrect, the UK has de facto goverment-mandated net-censorship, via the IWF.
Try Andrews & Arnold. They've said they won't do IWF filtering. They've also recently issued a statement on the DE Act to say they'll follow it to its technical letter, but so far as possible they'll work around its intention and keep customers online.
Really must go support them with my money - soon as I can take the time hit of switching ISPs.
Haughey was openly corrupt. He lived an amazingly grand life-style for a professional politician, replete with a country house set in a large estate and his own, private island. I was a bit young to be politically aware myself in the early 80s, but I know my parent's despised him for his corruptness, for such reasons.
Not all of them. In my memory it's pretty much just been the Haughey-ite, Fianna Fail taoiseachs who have been massively corrupt. I.e. Haughey and his protege Bertie. Reynolds seemed reasonably decent for a Fianna Fail'er. I can't work out if Cowen is principled but utterly misguided, or corrupted - but he was at least not a Haughey-ite.
On the other side, the Fianna Gael taoiseachs have been decent enough, i.e. Fitzgerald and Bruton. The big problem is that the Irish electorate seem to delight in electing blatantly corrupt FF politicians over and over again. :(
Read my sig. I use "friend"/"foe" + mod-point modifiers as a karma system, to help *me* get more from my time when reading /..
I have the right to be disgusted by those who apologise away the slaying of civilians in clearly inexcusable circumstances (i.e. the people who came to help - there is 0 evidence for them being insurgents, Baghdad is a densely populated city!). I have the right to mark down such people so that *I* don't have to read them as often.
Next, for you to try equate my doing so with the actions of a helicopter crew blowing chunks out of civilians is just bizarre. Please rethink that.
The gunner most definitely is disturbed. If you think that a normal mind could be *begging* for the opportunity to kill a clearly badly wounded man then I submit there is something wrong with you too. Indeed, maybe you are suffering from the same problems as this gunner?
I agree with you there may be reasons why this crew acted the way they did. They may have lost friends. They may have watched fellow soldiers die, turned into twisted chunks of meat by enemy fire, just as the subjects of the film were. Perhaps you have too, if you were a soldier over there too.
However, while this *explains* why they became the kinds of people who could do what they did, and while it acts as a mitigating factor in assessing what consequences would be appropriate for them, it does **not** _excuse_ them. That is, the act of slaughtering civilians who are trying to assist a badly wounded man is wrong - full stop. It does not matter what state of mind the crew were in, or what they were thinking, the act remains wrong and must be condemned.
I never said anyone's actions were politically motivated, and my comment is utterly non-political beside the "King W" remark (which is an aside, and not at all relevant to the point - so you're right, I shouldn't have put that in). Rather I said that *your* actions, in commenting here, perhaps are motivated by a sense of wanting to justify what you have (as you say) taken part in in the past (i.e. in very general terms of having participated in Iraq that is).
I don't know what you've gone through. I agree with you that many soldiers can see the most awful things, so awful they often will try avoid to talk about them ever again (least, I've known WWII and heard of Vietnam vets like that). Perhaps you have too. I sympathise with you for that.
However, I simply can not sympathise with you when you try excuse a clear war-crime, by the US military's own standards. I can not sympathise with when you talk about this as if it's just a "tragic mistake" whose greatest lesson is that soldiers need more PID training.
If you think soldiers have it tough in occupying a land, think what's it like for the civilians. The soldiers may see awful things, but so do the civilians. Indeed, while the soldiers may be traumatised by human viscera, it's often the civilians who have to *clean up* and mourn those remains.
Next, the soldiers get to go back to their barracks/base at nights and get fed. They get to go home after a tour. The civilians are stuck there, often with little or no food. They *HAVE TO* continue their life despite the battles outside. They MUST go out to find food - which requires money or goods to barter, which often means taking on high-risk work. They have NO CHOICE but to do this if they want to live, even more so if they have children to feed.
No doubt you have suffered if you served anywhere near combat. However that does not excuse your attitude towards civilians, who have almost certainly suffered just as greatly, if not far more, and who the US military were supposed to be aiding and protecting - both by strategic mission and by all the rules of war (international and the US military's own). I sympathise very much with what you may have gone through, but you should not expect people to be glad to hear you excuse the killing of civilians.
(FWIW, my background is that I grew up listening to tales from my grandmother about the trials of having to look after a new-born son in Nazi occupied Europe. Nowhere near as hard as Baghdad, I suspect - but still they had to endure a famine. My wife has tales of life under Japanese occupation from her grandmother).
That post is bit confusing. The 2nd paragraph largely is talking about how typing would work if it depended only the existence of a member element - which is the level of safety you get with macros, and which you seem to be talking about. However, I believe C++ templates are type checked.
I see what you mean now about C#, it has "dynamic" typing. My comments from the 2nd paragraph on type safety would apply to it.
FWIW, you could sort of achieve the same with Java introspection, but you'd need a lot more scaffolding.
Thanks for your reply. I have to admit I can't tell if I'm talking to someone whose understanding is way below my own or way above :). Still, I suspect you're missing something. Apologies in advance if I'm the one being an idiot. ;)
I think I understand how the typing in C++ templates work. And yes, templates are not macros - they're a closed subset that can't be abused as macros can, and they're type-checked (I thought). And yes, if you write your programme according to a convention that says "method names must be globally unique, according to their function" it will work so long as you don't make a mistake. If that convention doesn't hold, e.g. because you're trying to use code from multiple independent sources (like using a library, whatever), or because you simply made a mistake, then it no longer works. It's a very very weak typing system, as the compiler can't help you with it much, beyond checking for the existence of a method.
The Java generics stuff is heavily influenced by CS type theory. It's not perfect per se, but it can provide quite strong guarantees. Further, I believe the C++ templates are NOT as you describe - they also require well-formed and compatible types. I did not think it was sufficient with C++ to pass any class that had whatever method names were used.
Can you give an example of the C# thing you're talking about? Cause, from what I can tell C# generics also do type-checking, as Java does.
As far as the gunship crew knew
We know what the crew knew because they describe what they're seeing "picking up the wounded" and "they're taking him".
Just as a data-point: An RPG-7 is 95cm long. Fair bit longer still with a projectile loaded. Whatever that man is holding, it seems a good bit shorter than an RPG-7.
It's possible one man has an AK-47, but it's extremely hard to tell.
Yes. The US invaded Iraq because Iraqis were beheading tens of thousands of Americans.
ArsonSmith? You should be Winston Smith...
You sure about that? The transcript seems to suggest the fire from that area came later - when they flatten the place with Hellfires.
I.e. got a cite?
How is it justified to blow up people for collecting bodies, regardless of whether the bodies are of insurgents or photographers? I don't see where the ROE (also on wikileaks) allow for that.
Never mind that though, we *know* the crew knew the man was not dead.
I'm somewhat disgusted by your comments here, defending the indefensible.