I guess I'm missing a problem here, but for every transmitter this guy has there will be (hopefully) more than one person that will be subscribed to it.
If more than one person can access the transmitter, then those multiple clients could just as easily talk to each other, should they take the time to work out a private wireless network for everyone to work on.
If the company had a forum where users could post their area codes, it would be a great way to meet and then privately organise a self-contained network.
I will, think about that, while, dividing my time, between, thinking about, the cost of, periodic DVD burner upgrades, and, excessive, use, of, commas, in, slashdot, posts.
Remember the biggest problem with current thermoelectric materials - the woeful efficiency - means for every say 3 Watts of electrical power supplied, you end up with only around 1W of cooling power and 2W of heat! One would do better with a keg *made of* a huge peltier junction which means the inside lining would be the cold plate and the outside lining would be essentially one big heatsink, but that would be quite a bit harder to design.
Much more energy-efficient would be a similar keg sleeve with a portable heat pump providing keg-isolated coolant and heat exhaustion. Heat pumps are much more efficient at this, despite being less convenient.
If you want to argue, you'll need to base your argument on whether what was recorded in the New Testaments books were facts, lies or exaggerations. But in order to do so, you'll have to carefully check other "external" historical texts from the time period that either support or discredit those included in the Bible. If you have so much energy for it, I'll leave that exercise up to you.
Luckily that has been done for us, by Thomas Paine, in The Age Of Reason, a comprehensive debunking and exposition of how hopelessly flawed the OT and NT are.
Rebuttals? Refutals? None have been published. His work stands, and only a fraction of what he pointed out as faults in the Bible have ever been explained away by mistranslations in his source material.
But you won't bother to read it, of course, that would require questioning something you hold dear and possibly engaging your logical and critical thinking skills towards your religion. I know most religious people all too quickly attack the logical progressions of scientific studies, but are deathly afraid of examining their own faith with the same degree of effort.
Well, yeah, that's the scientific method in action. Scientists don't go around spouting certainties, they spout reasonable expectations based on past observervations.
Scientists admit when they're wrong and refine theories.
Religionists cannot admit that their religion could possibly be wrong, and resort to attacks and apologists in order to continue their circular logic.
I actually think it's more to do with a greater awareness of logical deduction and critical thinking.
Christianity relies on the accuracy of the Bible. If you start doubting certain passages and disregarding others, the entire deck of cards comes crashing down. How can the word of God be inaccurate? If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?
This is what drove Thomas Paine to write The Age of Reason, a thorough debunking of this have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach to religion.
The only religious positions that have *any* solid philosophical or logical foundations are deism, atheism and agnosticism. Everything else has as much credulity as me saying "last night while I was watching TV an angel appeared and told me the word of God!!!!!!! Check out my rough draft of what it said on my AOL homepage!! Praise Ungdor who died for us while orbiting the moon bathed in the blood of his enemies!!"
Why are you going to such great lengths to explain how the world could have flooded? Don't you think God could just make more water appear out of nowhere? He willed the entire universe into existence apparently.
Personally, I think it would have been easier to make the water appear and then make it disappear, than to re-shape the entire surface area of the planet. And if you think the Rocky mountains could have been formed by 40 days or 40,000 years of continuous rain erosion, I question the value of this conversation.
Because a sentient being cannot exist without a universe to contain it?
This is a tired argument - you're placing something 'before' time began, in this case God, but for mysterious reasons you don't need anything to create God.
"The universe appeared out of nothing? Ridiculous! God appeared out of nothing? Why of course!!" Do you not realise that's what you're saying?
Scientists accept the fact that some facts are unknowable, due simply to our physical limitations. We will never know *anything* for sure, and that scares the hell out of a great many people, often leading them to believe in an invisible being that runs everything. For scientists, who recognise that the ability to doubt is the root of all intelligence, this is not an unbearable situation at all.
But the cricinfo.org page has exactly the same thing - just look at Mark Waugh's statistics search log, or scan backwards for records of every professional cricket player (back to Charles Bannerman anyway, who was born in 1851), with scores/fielding/bowling results from every career game including meaningful statistics (also searchable) and game result sheets. There are already ball-by-ball listings for every professional game played available.
The fact is, once the raw numbers are recorded you can create as many arcane statistics as you like, and many of the same would hold for baseball and cricket. All I know is that in both games, they record who delivered the ball, what the batsmen did to it, where it went and what happened when it got there. Once you have that information, the rest is up to researchers and SQL queries.
I hate to say it, but H.264 is not all that. And yes, I know, since I've worked on programming MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video compression libraries, and know quite a bit about the new spec.
Firstly, your comparison is between two vastly mismatched encoders - one is using a wide range of tools to near-maximum potential (H.264), the other is using a vastly smaller range of tools quite poorly (MS MPEG-4 distribution). The post-processing used by MS is much worse than the stock H.264 in-loop post-processing, the motion search is far worse, the quantization is "dumb" (i.e. trellis quantization would achieve much better quality), and it's not even using advanced MPEG-4 coding tools like QPel or B-frames. It's also missing subjective improvements like noise randomization, DCT-domain in-loop deblocking or masking based on luminance and temporal position (such as those you'd find in a good MPEG-2 encoder).
Also, the reason you're better off using MPEG-2 at high bitrates is because of better encoder tweaks, not some deficiency of MPEG-4 itself. The MPEG-4 bitstream is more efficient at storing the same data than MPEG-2 in almost all cases, and encoders will eventually mature to reflect this.
But I'm still excited about H.264. The quality diminishes rapidly when you disable the brute-force searches that make it so efficient, so don't expect miracles from high-speed encoders. Hardware implementations should be quite impressive though.
If you're still playing with it, ffmpeg recently added a native H.264 decoder which should be a good portion faster than the one you were using.
I recently stumbled upon some Graphite foam with high thermal conductivity which seems to be a great replacement for Aluminum or Copper CPU heatsinks (it weighs a fifth of Al but can cool better, as this paper demonstrates).
Although it was developed by tax dollars, it is patented by ORNL and licensed to only a few manufacturers. Prices still hover between $10 and $20 per cubic inch, which rules it out for any weekend experimentation. A real pity that, considering its tremendous potential for cooler and smaller heatsinks, radiators and padding of all types.
What's wrong with the kerning? Just look at "the" in the 20 pt Adobe Gill Sans line, comparing "th" to "he". There are problems like that throughout the 1st screenshot.
The 2nd shot featuring Konqueror is similarly disappointing. Just in the first paragraph - "Konquerer" and "filesystem" are all over the place.
Sure the antialiasing is pretty, but it's just tinsel on a withering christmas tree from the looks of things.
I'd suggest listening to Triple J's webcast. Triple J is a government-sponsored Australian radio station (ala the BBC in the UK) which runs no ads and almost completely avoids anything that would be on the "top 40" list of the day. I'm sure there are many other Australian artists you'd be interested in.
The DivX 3.11 "format" is just a hack of Microsoft's old MSMPEG4V3 codec - it is similar to MPEG-4, but the bitstream format is different (more limited, missing many features, different huffman codes).
I am working on a tool that can losslessly convert a DivX 3.11 AVI into an MPEG-4 stream. The resulting MPEG-4 stream will be larger than the original, since the codebooks aren't optimal anymore, but the conversion will be quick and visually identical. This is possible due to the fact that motion vector resolution, block sizes, quantizers, etc. are identical between the formats, they're just written differently.
Support for full GMC is quite complex (and potentially *extremely* computationally expensive), and I'm guessing that's why support isn't included. QPel is quite simple, it's just a different interpolation filter.
DivX 5.x doesn't encode with the full range of options that GMC allows however (only uses 1 warping point), and is therefore quite simple to decode. I suppose they could have included that quite easily, but decided to pass on it since it would only be implementing "half a feature."
That is a limitation of the AVI format, which people continue to stuff MPEG-4 video into for reasons unknown. It requires that you write "FourCC" identification codes, and those codes are what determines which codec is required to decompress it.
XviD will decode AVI files with the FourCC IDs XVID, DIVX or DX50, whereas DivX only decodes its own DIVX/DX50. FFvfw (a VFW port of libavcodec) will decode XVID, XVIX, DIVX, DX50, FVFW and a number of other FourCC codes which all identify video that is purely MPEG-4.
The MPEG-4 systems format (i.e. *.mp4, just as *.mpg is for MPEG-1/2) is what MPEG-4 video is supposed to reside in, and once you mux an XviD/DivX/ffmpeg MPEG-4 stream into it, the FourCC mess is left behind, and any spec-compliant MPEG-4 decoder (say, Envivio) will be able to decode it.
What are you talking about? DivX, XviD and ffmpeg are all creating MPEG-4 spec-compliant video streams. As far as the decoder can see, streams created by any of them were created by the same encoder.
If you don't like the work the XviD team is doing (i.e. a free, open-source implementation of the MPEG-4 video spec), don't use it.
Move along. It's akin to complaining about taxation levels at a dinner party. You may have a good point, but the empowered audience is far out of earshot.
(2) which of the two types above are you?
I think most people are open-minded deep down, and can be reached by the right argument. There are some battles that aren't worth fighting though. Thus I alternate between whiner-bashing and flag-waving every couple weeks.
If you know the rules, write code that does what you desire in the first place. Everyone knows that parts of C suck, and most of what was added to make C++ is completely worthless, but people who realise such know that the right solutions and alternatives exist to get the job done.
If the lack of intelligent type promotion has made your job hard (thought I can't fathom how this is the case), campaign to use Pascal or FORTRAN or x86 assembly instead, whatever lets you get the job done faster than you could in C.
Eternally bitching and whining about something that will never change will only annoy people. Unless that's the aim of course.
If I offered you 1/2 million dollars what would you expect to get 0 dollars or $500,000 ?
If the smallest form of currency available is a $1,000,000 bill, I'd expect nothing. Duh.
If you can't deal with the very useful (speaking as a video compression and filtering developer) behaviour of integer math in C, don't use it. Others will use it in the meantime to get real work done.
Here's an alternative theory that fits in with all the scientific data....maybe God had something to do with putting those molecules in just the right order to create life. We are merely human and limited in our ability; God is the infinite, omnipotent intelligent designer of our universe...and not only can He assemble those molecules in just the right order but He can make them chiral too!
What scientific data do you have access to which points explicitly to God's involvement? Why not Buddha? Or Allah? Or the Gods of Olympus?
Placing a God figure in charge of the universe's development simply replaces one paradox with another one. Until there is a credible, testable theory concerning the "God problem", I have little choice but to stay agnostic.
I'm sorry, but blind faith has no place in my logic, nor do "whoops, we can't comprehend the situation so we'll stick God in there somewhere" explanations for any given situation.
>Talking about killing isn't bad depending on what way you describe the action. ie: Saying "killing is wrong" is talking about killing, but isn't bad. Saying "Kill everyone" in the context of not quoting someone is talking about killing and is bad.
Following that logic, I guess someone saying "Beat everyone" is talking about beating people and is bad, and should also be investigated. Also, wouldn't "I'm so angry I could explode!" imply that you're about to go on a murderous rampage? I guess that since we're really watching out for our safety, a postal worker mumbling "what a bitch of a day" is extremely likely to pull out an AK-47 and mow down his coworkers.
Obviously in this scenario, anyone venting frustration, regardless of how their linguistic history and teaching forms their words, they're a danger to society and should be locked up. Sound about right?
>My opinions, like Katz's, are my own and don't have to be 100% rational (like, as many people continue to point out, Katz's). Maybe all the pieces don't add up and fit together. That happens to be because I have better things to do than think about death threats.
Rationality has a surprisingly positive effect on the weight of one's argument. As has been said millions of times before, "saying something is right doesn't make it so." If someone blasts a logical hole in your argument, you have a couple choices: cover your ears and shout "lalalalallalaal I'm not listening!", or entertain the idea that perhaps your opinions aren't founded so much in logic, but rather sentiment, hear-say or dogma.
>That means, the minute that "boy" is off the property, it isn't the school's job to deal with him. Being in court is probably a good drive, never mind a walk, away from the school, and therefore isn't the school's jurisdiction (IMHO).
So the fact that the exchange (and reporting of the exchange) occurred on school property, at a time when the school -was- responsible for the student's welfare, is completely irrelevant?
>I just don't find turning men (again, I don't consider these people mentally kids at this age) into informers is anti-democratic.
The whole idea of such snitch lines is to protect the public at large. While I'm all for the greater good of society, there are methods which obviously -don't- work or are -not-, when analysed, good for much of anything. I can't think of a great example at the moment, but here's one for starters:
Give police the power to stop and search anyone they please, without prior permission or statement of intent. Sure, a whole bunch of people will be searched for no reason, embarassed in front of their peers, annoyed with and distrustful of the police force, and specific minorities and classes will be discriminated against, but think of all the crimes which would be prevented! That's what matters right? Right?
It's a slippery slide towards totalitarianism, and a very scary one at that.
>In Ontario, Canada, for example, children under 12 can commit no crimes.
I know this is off-topic, but to me this is the height of ridiculous legislation. If a child commits a crime a day before his 12th birthday, he gets off scot-free? How an individual is viewed by the state should depend solely on a psychological profile, not a baseless number of days they've been on the planet. Contrary to many people's thinking, I haven't heard of many kids suddenly gaining wisdom, insight and the ability to have criminal intentions when they wake up to their 12th birthday.
To tie this in with the topic somewhat, I also believe that the witness in this snitch issue should have to prove their ability to accurately discern a legitimate threat from juvenile frustration - anything else will only add up to a pointless and frequently-abused system.
>I might not be an American, but I know the Bill of Rights doesn't cover death threats in many states.... You missed a few words: "I", "want" and "to". I want to means just that, premeditation to do something.
I believe this was touched on elsewhere - does this mean we no longer have the right to speak figuratively? I don't know how many times I've heard friend's girlfriends mutter "I could just kill that bastard!". Amazingly, I haven't witnessed a single case where the female in question acted on her obviously murderous intentions. Does this mean speech is, let's see, sometimes *not* supposed or meant to be taken literally? I should hope so!
>He commited the crime. The law says so and I'll go by what the judge said, not you or Katz.
Do you honestly live by that motto?! "If someone in authority said something, who am I to question it?" Good god man! As citizens in a democracy, it is our duty to question leadership and authority! To do otherwise is to eliminate the whole point of democracy.
>>If you call crimestoppers and say "I heard this dude say he wants to kill" they won't and can't do anything.
>That because in that case it is hear-say. I heard someone say that they heard some one say xyz. This is not such a case. This is a direct witness of a statement.
You've misread his argument - what he's talking about is the same as the school snitch case. Anyway, try it yourself - ring up Crimestoppers (we've got them here in Australia too) and say "this 15 year-old guy I know had a bitch of a day and said he would kill someone!" - you'd probably get laughed off the line. The point is, the police have normally required facts, evidence and proof of intent before they can do anything, not the testimony of a single, untrained adolescent. There's a reason for that - the ability to abuse the system is simply too great to do otherwise.
>Opinions are like Assholes, everybody's got one. My asshole says that my opinions is such that snitch lines are great. I voted twice for a long time supporter of snitch lines, Mike Harris, our current Premier (eq. Govenor). Sorry, but from where I stand, public opinion has you beat.
So because the majority thinks something is "right", it therefore must be "right"? There's something called tyranny of the masses, and it's a very dangerous thing. The majority of americans believed racism was right - indeed, a duty - for a hundred or so years. Did that make racism "right"? Most Russians believed communism was "right" - did that make our fondness of democracy "wrong"?
Snitch lines revolve around the politics of fear, just like mandatory sentencing, drug enforcement laws, military spending and internet censorship. Until someone can convince me that snitch lines do more good than harm, I can see no reason to alter my views.
Sorry for the vitriolic tone of this post, I get carried away rather easily.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought you meant anagram as in MSSAP ~> SPASM.
I guess I'm missing a problem here, but for every transmitter this guy has there will be (hopefully) more than one person that will be subscribed to it.
If more than one person can access the transmitter, then those multiple clients could just as easily talk to each other, should they take the time to work out a private wireless network for everyone to work on.
If the company had a forum where users could post their area codes, it would be a great way to meet and then privately organise a self-contained network.
Remember the biggest problem with current thermoelectric materials - the woeful efficiency - means for every say 3 Watts of electrical power supplied, you end up with only around 1W of cooling power and 2W of heat! One would do better with a keg *made of* a huge peltier junction which means the inside lining would be the cold plate and the outside lining would be essentially one big heatsink, but that would be quite a bit harder to design.
Much more energy-efficient would be a similar keg sleeve with a portable heat pump providing keg-isolated coolant and heat exhaustion. Heat pumps are much more efficient at this, despite being less convenient.
If you're serious about quiet (or preferably, silent) computing, the most valuable site I know of is Silent PC Review.
Luckily that has been done for us, by Thomas Paine, in The Age Of Reason, a comprehensive debunking and exposition of how hopelessly flawed the OT and NT are.
Rebuttals? Refutals? None have been published. His work stands, and only a fraction of what he pointed out as faults in the Bible have ever been explained away by mistranslations in his source material.
But you won't bother to read it, of course, that would require questioning something you hold dear and possibly engaging your logical and critical thinking skills towards your religion. I know most religious people all too quickly attack the logical progressions of scientific studies, but are deathly afraid of examining their own faith with the same degree of effort.
Well, yeah, that's the scientific method in action. Scientists don't go around spouting certainties, they spout reasonable expectations based on past observervations.
Scientists admit when they're wrong and refine theories.
Religionists cannot admit that their religion could possibly be wrong, and resort to attacks and apologists in order to continue their circular logic.
Christianity relies on the accuracy of the Bible. If you start doubting certain passages and disregarding others, the entire deck of cards comes crashing down. How can the word of God be inaccurate? If you can ignore certain parts, why not all of it?
This is what drove Thomas Paine to write The Age of Reason, a thorough debunking of this have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach to religion.
The only religious positions that have *any* solid philosophical or logical foundations are deism, atheism and agnosticism. Everything else has as much credulity as me saying "last night while I was watching TV an angel appeared and told me the word of God!!!!!!! Check out my rough draft of what it said on my AOL homepage!! Praise Ungdor who died for us while orbiting the moon bathed in the blood of his enemies!!"
Why are you going to such great lengths to explain how the world could have flooded? Don't you think God could just make more water appear out of nowhere? He willed the entire universe into existence apparently.
Personally, I think it would have been easier to make the water appear and then make it disappear, than to re-shape the entire surface area of the planet. And if you think the Rocky mountains could have been formed by 40 days or 40,000 years of continuous rain erosion, I question the value of this conversation.
Because a sentient being cannot exist without a universe to contain it?
This is a tired argument - you're placing something 'before' time began, in this case God, but for mysterious reasons you don't need anything to create God.
"The universe appeared out of nothing? Ridiculous! God appeared out of nothing? Why of course!!" Do you not realise that's what you're saying?
Scientists accept the fact that some facts are unknowable, due simply to our physical limitations. We will never know *anything* for sure, and that scares the hell out of a great many people, often leading them to believe in an invisible being that runs everything. For scientists, who recognise that the ability to doubt is the root of all intelligence, this is not an unbearable situation at all.
The fact is, once the raw numbers are recorded you can create as many arcane statistics as you like, and many of the same would hold for baseball and cricket. All I know is that in both games, they record who delivered the ball, what the batsmen did to it, where it went and what happened when it got there. Once you have that information, the rest is up to researchers and SQL queries.
I personally think Rusty's In-desk PC is the slickest I've seen. Optimised for silence too.
I hate to say it, but H.264 is not all that. And yes, I know, since I've worked on programming MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video compression libraries, and know quite a bit about the new spec.
Firstly, your comparison is between two vastly mismatched encoders - one is using a wide range of tools to near-maximum potential (H.264), the other is using a vastly smaller range of tools quite poorly (MS MPEG-4 distribution). The post-processing used by MS is much worse than the stock H.264 in-loop post-processing, the motion search is far worse, the quantization is "dumb" (i.e. trellis quantization would achieve much better quality), and it's not even using advanced MPEG-4 coding tools like QPel or B-frames. It's also missing subjective improvements like noise randomization, DCT-domain in-loop deblocking or masking based on luminance and temporal position (such as those you'd find in a good MPEG-2 encoder).
Also, the reason you're better off using MPEG-2 at high bitrates is because of better encoder tweaks, not some deficiency of MPEG-4 itself. The MPEG-4 bitstream is more efficient at storing the same data than MPEG-2 in almost all cases, and encoders will eventually mature to reflect this.
But I'm still excited about H.264. The quality diminishes rapidly when you disable the brute-force searches that make it so efficient, so don't expect miracles from high-speed encoders. Hardware implementations should be quite impressive though.
If you're still playing with it, ffmpeg recently added a native H.264 decoder which should be a good portion faster than the one you were using.
There's probably nothing stopping them.
I recently stumbled upon some Graphite foam with high thermal conductivity which seems to be a great replacement for Aluminum or Copper CPU heatsinks (it weighs a fifth of Al but can cool better, as this paper demonstrates).
Although it was developed by tax dollars, it is patented by ORNL and licensed to only a few manufacturers. Prices still hover between $10 and $20 per cubic inch, which rules it out for any weekend experimentation. A real pity that, considering its tremendous potential for cooler and smaller heatsinks, radiators and padding of all types.
What's wrong with the kerning? Just look at "the" in the 20 pt Adobe Gill Sans line, comparing "th" to "he". There are problems like that throughout the 1st screenshot.
The 2nd shot featuring Konqueror is similarly disappointing. Just in the first paragraph - "Konquerer" and "filesystem" are all over the place.
Sure the antialiasing is pretty, but it's just tinsel on a withering christmas tree from the looks of things.
I'd suggest listening to Triple J's webcast. Triple J is a government-sponsored Australian radio station (ala the BBC in the UK) which runs no ads and almost completely avoids anything that would be on the "top 40" list of the day. I'm sure there are many other Australian artists you'd be interested in.
http://triplej.abc.net.au/listen/
The DivX 3.11 "format" is just a hack of Microsoft's old MSMPEG4V3 codec - it is similar to MPEG-4, but the bitstream format is different (more limited, missing many features, different huffman codes).
I am working on a tool that can losslessly convert a DivX 3.11 AVI into an MPEG-4 stream. The resulting MPEG-4 stream will be larger than the original, since the codebooks aren't optimal anymore, but the conversion will be quick and visually identical. This is possible due to the fact that motion vector resolution, block sizes, quantizers, etc. are identical between the formats, they're just written differently.
Support for full GMC is quite complex (and potentially *extremely* computationally expensive), and I'm guessing that's why support isn't included. QPel is quite simple, it's just a different interpolation filter.
DivX 5.x doesn't encode with the full range of options that GMC allows however (only uses 1 warping point), and is therefore quite simple to decode. I suppose they could have included that quite easily, but decided to pass on it since it would only be implementing "half a feature."
That is a limitation of the AVI format, which people continue to stuff MPEG-4 video into for reasons unknown. It requires that you write "FourCC" identification codes, and those codes are what determines which codec is required to decompress it.
XviD will decode AVI files with the FourCC IDs XVID, DIVX or DX50, whereas DivX only decodes its own DIVX/DX50. FFvfw (a VFW port of libavcodec) will decode XVID, XVIX, DIVX, DX50, FVFW and a number of other FourCC codes which all identify video that is purely MPEG-4.
The MPEG-4 systems format (i.e. *.mp4, just as *.mpg is for MPEG-1/2) is what MPEG-4 video is supposed to reside in, and once you mux an XviD/DivX/ffmpeg MPEG-4 stream into it, the FourCC mess is left behind, and any spec-compliant MPEG-4 decoder (say, Envivio) will be able to decode it.
What are you talking about? DivX, XviD and ffmpeg are all creating MPEG-4 spec-compliant video streams. As far as the decoder can see, streams created by any of them were created by the same encoder.
If you don't like the work the XviD team is doing (i.e. a free, open-source implementation of the MPEG-4 video spec), don't use it.
Move along. It's akin to complaining about taxation levels at a dinner party. You may have a good point, but the empowered audience is far out of earshot.
(2) which of the two types above are you?
I think most people are open-minded deep down, and can be reached by the right argument. There are some battles that aren't worth fighting though. Thus I alternate between whiner-bashing and flag-waving every couple weeks.
If you know the rules, write code that does what you desire in the first place. Everyone knows that parts of C suck, and most of what was added to make C++ is completely worthless, but people who realise such know that the right solutions and alternatives exist to get the job done.
If the lack of intelligent type promotion has made your job hard (thought I can't fathom how this is the case), campaign to use Pascal or FORTRAN or x86 assembly instead, whatever lets you get the job done faster than you could in C.
Eternally bitching and whining about something that will never change will only annoy people. Unless that's the aim of course.
If the smallest form of currency available is a $1,000,000 bill, I'd expect nothing. Duh.
If you can't deal with the very useful (speaking as a video compression and filtering developer) behaviour of integer math in C, don't use it. Others will use it in the meantime to get real work done.
-h
What scientific data do you have access to which points explicitly to God's involvement? Why not Buddha? Or Allah? Or the Gods of Olympus?
Placing a God figure in charge of the universe's development simply replaces one paradox with another one. Until there is a credible, testable theory concerning the "God problem", I have little choice but to stay agnostic.
I'm sorry, but blind faith has no place in my logic, nor do "whoops, we can't comprehend the situation so we'll stick God in there somewhere" explanations for any given situation.
>Talking about killing isn't bad depending on what way you describe the action. ie: Saying "killing is wrong" is talking about killing, but isn't bad. Saying "Kill everyone" in the context of not quoting someone is talking about killing and is bad.
Following that logic, I guess someone saying "Beat everyone" is talking about beating people and is bad, and should also be investigated. Also, wouldn't "I'm so angry I could explode!" imply that you're about to go on a murderous rampage? I guess that since we're really watching out for our safety, a postal worker mumbling "what a bitch of a day" is extremely likely to pull out an AK-47 and mow down his coworkers.
Obviously in this scenario, anyone venting frustration, regardless of how their linguistic history and teaching forms their words, they're a danger to society and should be locked up. Sound about right?
>My opinions, like Katz's, are my own and don't have to be 100% rational (like, as many people continue to point out, Katz's). Maybe all the pieces don't add up and fit together. That happens to be because I have better things to do than think about death threats.
Rationality has a surprisingly positive effect on the weight of one's argument. As has been said millions of times before, "saying something is right doesn't make it so." If someone blasts a logical hole in your argument, you have a couple choices: cover your ears and shout "lalalalallalaal I'm not listening!", or entertain the idea that perhaps your opinions aren't founded so much in logic, but rather sentiment, hear-say or dogma.
>That means, the minute that "boy" is off the property, it isn't the school's job to deal with him. Being in court is probably a good drive, never mind a walk, away from the school, and therefore isn't the school's jurisdiction (IMHO).
So the fact that the exchange (and reporting of the exchange) occurred on school property, at a time when the school -was- responsible for the student's welfare, is completely irrelevant?
>I just don't find turning men (again, I don't consider these people mentally kids at this age) into informers is anti-democratic.
The whole idea of such snitch lines is to protect the public at large. While I'm all for the greater good of society, there are methods which obviously -don't- work or are -not-, when analysed, good for much of anything. I can't think of a great example at the moment, but here's one for starters:
Give police the power to stop and search anyone they please, without prior permission or statement of intent. Sure, a whole bunch of people will be searched for no reason, embarassed in front of their peers, annoyed with and distrustful of the police force, and specific minorities and classes will be discriminated against, but think of all the crimes which would be prevented! That's what matters right? Right?
It's a slippery slide towards totalitarianism, and a very scary one at that.
>In Ontario, Canada, for example, children under 12 can commit no crimes.
I know this is off-topic, but to me this is the height of ridiculous legislation. If a child commits a crime a day before his 12th birthday, he gets off scot-free? How an individual is viewed by the state should depend solely on a psychological profile, not a baseless number of days they've been on the planet. Contrary to many people's thinking, I haven't heard of many kids suddenly gaining wisdom, insight and the ability to have criminal intentions when they wake up to their 12th birthday.
To tie this in with the topic somewhat, I also believe that the witness in this snitch issue should have to prove their ability to accurately discern a legitimate threat from juvenile frustration - anything else will only add up to a pointless and frequently-abused system.
>I might not be an American, but I know the Bill of Rights doesn't cover death threats in many states. ... You missed a few words: "I", "want" and "to". I want to means just that, premeditation to do something.
I believe this was touched on elsewhere - does this mean we no longer have the right to speak figuratively? I don't know how many times I've heard friend's girlfriends mutter "I could just kill that bastard!". Amazingly, I haven't witnessed a single case where the female in question acted on her obviously murderous intentions. Does this mean speech is, let's see, sometimes *not* supposed or meant to be taken literally? I should hope so!
>He commited the crime. The law says so and I'll go by what the judge said, not you or Katz.
Do you honestly live by that motto?! "If someone in authority said something, who am I to question it?" Good god man! As citizens in a democracy, it is our duty to question leadership and authority! To do otherwise is to eliminate the whole point of democracy.
>>If you call crimestoppers and say "I heard this dude say he wants to kill" they won't and can't do anything.
>That because in that case it is hear-say. I heard someone say that they heard some one say xyz. This is not such a case. This is a direct witness of a statement.
You've misread his argument - what he's talking about is the same as the school snitch case. Anyway, try it yourself - ring up Crimestoppers (we've got them here in Australia too) and say "this 15 year-old guy I know had a bitch of a day and said he would kill someone!" - you'd probably get laughed off the line. The point is, the police have normally required facts, evidence and proof of intent before they can do anything, not the testimony of a single, untrained adolescent. There's a reason for that - the ability to abuse the system is simply too great to do otherwise.
>Opinions are like Assholes, everybody's got one. My asshole says that my opinions is such that snitch lines are great. I voted twice for a long time supporter of snitch lines, Mike Harris, our current Premier (eq. Govenor). Sorry, but from where I stand, public opinion has you beat.
So because the majority thinks something is "right", it therefore must be "right"? There's something called tyranny of the masses, and it's a very dangerous thing. The majority of americans believed racism was right - indeed, a duty - for a hundred or so years. Did that make racism "right"? Most Russians believed communism was "right" - did that make our fondness of democracy "wrong"? Snitch lines revolve around the politics of fear, just like mandatory sentencing, drug enforcement laws, military spending and internet censorship. Until someone can convince me that snitch lines do more good than harm, I can see no reason to alter my views.
Sorry for the vitriolic tone of this post, I get carried away rather easily.