It is the interpretation of the facts of science by people and the interpretation of what is actually written in the Bible by other people, that the contradictions arise.
So your argument is, as far as I can tell, that the contradiction happens in the head of people that read the texts - sort of like a bible/science analogy of the schrÃdinger's cat experiment? That is, no contradiction exists until someone "interprets" the bible/science?
It is an interesting example of sophistry, but no more convincing as an argument than Clinton arguing about what the meaning of "is" is.
ALL assumptions (beliefs, educated guesses) may or may not be correct, but they will ALWAYS be assumptions until someone actually measures or observes otherwise.
That is really a subject for a textbook on philosophy, not for basic level science.
To some level or another, everything we "know" (or rather think to know) is built on assumptions. Taken to the extreme, how do we know we're not plugged into the Matrix? The question then is where to draw the line.
Diet creationism being taught alongside evolution, despite being unscientific, doesn't abridge any privileges or immunities of citizens, though it may annoy or misguide them.
Check the history of creationism and ID. The ID movement is little more than a search/replace of "God" to "some intelligent designer".
This happened after the 1987 Edwards case, which ruled that teaching creationism in school was unconstitutional, because [it] was specifically intended to advance a particular religion. While ID doesn't name the "intelligent designer", it is quite obvious what the ID proponents' motive for getting ID taught in science class is.
Not to mention that what is taught in science class should be science. If the standard is lowered enough to allow ID access, then why shouldn't the pastafarianism creation story be told too?
Either God really did create the earth and everything in it or it came into existence in some other way.
You are arguing from the point of biblical literalism. Far from all Christian share that view. There are also passages in the Bible that can be read to mean that the earth is the centre of our solar system ("the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved"), and there is no shortage of similar examples. However, there are very few Christians that take that passage literally and they don't consider teaching school children that the earth revolves around the sun as promotion of atheism.;-)
The idea that the Bible is open to interpretation is very old.
Evolution is mute on the question of abiogenesis / "the origin of life". It is also mute with regards to what happened before, like what caused the big bang. As such, it is not in conflict with the view that some sort of intelligent agent set the wheels in motion some time in the distant past.
In the more general sense, science tries to find the answer to "how" while religion is concerned with "why".
The theory of evolution only "promotes atheism" if you happen to be in the YEC / genesis literalism camp. In that case, it isn't really evolution that "promotes atheism" but rather that the world around us does not behave as described in a particular book ("the world has an evolution bias!"). Then again, if you would rather believe in a literal interpretation of an old book rather than to trust what we can see around us I would suggest that you get some professional help.
Evolution has been singled out for special ire by Discovery, as it provides an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes.
There's two claims here-- 1. Evolution is singled out. 2. It is singled out because it offers an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes.
On the first:
William Paley predated Darwin. And, certainly Creationists have not in the interim ceased 'preaching' the same message which has gone forth since before either of them.
They have certainly modified the message over time. You are familiar with the "God of the gaps" argument, I presume? Whenever science comes up with a decent explanation of something that the creationists claimed "god did it", they change their message. See dover trial and the flagellum argument for one example, or their find/replace of "God did it" with "some intelligent designer did it" when they changed their name from creationism to ID.
Does evolution really offer an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes? If you really believe that, then ask yourself two questions. 1 - Where did the original matter making up the primordial soup (or the infinitesimally small mass before the big bang) come from? and 2 - What about these natural laws that seem to govern the universe which make natural processes possible?
That is a moving the goalposts argument.
And, even if evolution did offer this explanation, it is solely a conjecture that rebuffing evolution is ID theorists' sole motive in advancing their theory.
It is quite clear that the ID movement was born after the creationists' failed attempts to get creationism into the school curriculum. If rebuffing the theory of evolution isn't their goal then what is?
Why should I continue any further? [..] Why should I waste any more time on this?
I ask myself the same question. (1) "Creationists not changing their message" and (2) "ID is not an attempt to rebuff evolution". I typically stop rebuffing/. comments after the first few errant statements, but in this case, two are enough.
Why would these Creationists feel so threatened by something that doesn't threaten their belief system?!? I'm confused.
So am I. Why are the ID proponents so eager to push their stuff into our schools if evolution doesn't threaten their belief system? Might it have something to do with it conflicting with a literal reading of genesis?
Atheism is more like denouncing the existence of stamps, and as such it isn't really neutral to the question of the "great stamp in the sky". In that respect, state atheism would be a violation of church and state just as state <insert religion of choice here> would be.
Then again, I don't agree with glitch's assertion that evolution promotes atheism and by extension I don't agree with his assertion that teaching evolution is school is a violation of the 1st. amdmt.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
It is generally interpreted to say that government should not prefer one religion to another, and by extension to keep church and state separate. Which is not surprising, considering that many of those that left the old world for the new did so because they were persecuted for their beliefs by the governments in the old world.
Besides, the notion of that "ID" science is somehow the promotion of some religion, is absurd.
It does two things. It reveals the scientific data discovered, which exposes evolution as the hoax that it is.
Sure, whatever. Mind coughing up some supporting evidence or are we just going to throw unsupported absolutist statements at each other?
Evolutionary scientists are the ones whom have, numerous times, morphologically evolved their theory to accommodate the new, damning, empirical data.
"Damning empirical data?" There you go again. Sources please.
Besides, it is actually the nature of science not to take our current theories as unchanging truth but to constantly test them and alter the theories if they are not consistent with observed behaviour. That might seem anathema if you base your world view on a single unchanging book, but to use that as an argument to denounce science is bunkum.
Also, ID science reveals the often times found in nature, extremely improbable, if not impossible. Particularly configured existence of many things, if intelligent design were absent.
Again, sources please. Flagellum and the immune system is not as slam dunk as you seem to think they are.
from the fact that its the reason why Dawkins went on a religion intolerance, hating rampage.
Sources?
Thus, evo would gain indirect, pseudo validation.
Really? If A is shown to be invalid, it does not follow that B is true. Simple logic.
What they are really saying is that after the flood, "micro-evolution" took place. Thus, it was not necessary for Noah to take a Black bear, a brown one and a Polar bear also. But rather, just one type of bear.
How long ago was this supposed flood?
You do know that we are now capable of sequencing DNA? That makes it possible to compare the DNA of different organisms and estimate how long ago their common ancestor walked the earth.
There is also the issue of the fossil record. If this flood happened fairly recently, it should be fairly easy to check this theory of yours.
Makes non intelligent processes of "random chance" the already mathematically calculated, to be an implausible hypothesis.
Are you speaking of the Drake equation? Depending on what estimates you use, the value ranges from something like 500 to close to zero concurrent extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
If you are not thinking of Drake, mind sharing what "already mathematically calculated" thing you are referring to? And besides, such a calculation would probably only come up with the chance for our particular form of life. Even on earth, there are organisms that thrive in conditions that we would consider completely unsuitable for life - like around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. There is also nothing that says that DNA is the only option, so an attempt to "mathematically calculate" to any kind of certainty the chance of life being out there is rather futile due to the huge uncertainties in the values you would plug into this equation.
DNA contains so much ordered, sequenced information, that the probability of the spontaneous generation of life has been "conservatively" calculated.
The DNA in modern organisms is not a product of chance alone; it is under selective pressure. To calculate the chance of a human spontaneously self-assembling from dead matter would be silly.
If you are talking about the assembly of the very first self-reproducing molecule/molecules or cells I would be very interested to know exactly which molecules you are speaking of. Self-replicating ribozymes, perhaps?
To have the odds of X:1, X being a number so large that its more than the amount of particles that scientists have calculated to exist in the universe. "Particles"! Those are sub-atomic.
Citation needed. Mind sharing what magic equation these scientists used?
Something, or whatever, is not capable of causing the existence of a universe that is so fine-tuned to the very existence of life without being intelligent.
I were with you up until this point. The above makes no sense to me, I see no requirement for intelligence in the conditions that caused the big bang. Your argument is equivalent to "The position of the earth is so fine-tuned to the very existence of life, so it must have been placed at this exact point in the solar system by some intelligence".
With all the solar systems in the universe, isn't random chance a sufficient explanation and that our particular planet got lucky? The same with the big bang, how do we know that this universe is the only universe? We might just happen to be a winner in the great lottery of the multiverse, no intelligent creator required.
No scientist has ever observed a spontaneous appearance of a new species from another.
Sure we haven't. Well, it depends a bit on what one defines as separate species but it has certainly been observed and also created in labs for at least some definitions of the word.
whereas, we actually see all varieties of viruses, monera, protista, fungi, plants, invertebrates and vertebrates show up in the fossil record all at the same time, at the beginning of the Pre-Cambrian era.
Maybe they'll even teach something like "Evolution is mostly popular because many atheists think it can discount the first two pages of the bible, thereby disproving god forever"
Oh my, we've been found out! Yes the theory of evolution is obviously an ebil conspiracy by the crazed atheists that have nothing better to do with their short time on this planet than to rob you of your faith in god.
Or that, chemically and mathematically, life on Earth only has a 1:1,200,000,000,000,000,000 chance
Cute big number. Mind sharing how you came up with it?
happening the way evolutionists predict?
The theory of evolution makes many testable predictions. Please mention at least one lab experiment or anything in the fossil record that is incompatible with the predictions of evolution. (Adaptation, Genetic drift, Gene flow, Mutation, Natural selection, Speciation).
That it's six trillion times more likely that life started with an asteroid colliding with earth containing life.
You seem to confuse evolution and abiogenesis. Evolution only deals with how life evolves, it is not a theory of how life started.
Is that what they'll want to teach? That science doesn't have all the answers yet
Yes, that's exactly what we should teach. Science is the effort to discover, and increase human understanding of how the physical world works. We should teach our current best understanding ("theories"), be it gravity or evolution, and also teach the scientific method so that they have the tools needed to test the current theories and come up with better ones if the tests show that our current theories are deficient.
They start teaching that, the truth, instead of separate theories and stories AS truth, and kids might actually be interested in science again.
Is gravity true or not? It certainly is close to what we would call a fact, and at least in lower grades children are taught Newton's law of gravity as a fairly good approximation.
What would you rather that we should teach about gravity? That it is a plot by atheists trying to hide the fact that the sun revolves around the earth?
The first thing would probably be to look for strings / constants in the binary. It won't show up anything if the copier has changed those, but then again how many do? I highly doubt that it would be sufficient as evidence in court, but it is a quick "smell test" to see if there's anything suspicious going on.
Then you could do things like compare how the original and the suspect behaves on identical input (f.ex. if it is a TCP/IP stack, compare fingerprints or isn plots). If you know of a particular bug or weird behaviour in the original, see if the suspect behaves the same.
Then you might disassemble / analyse the binaries. Compare call graphs. Compare particular pieces of code (say, if you used a unusual hash function or hand-coded an inner loop in assembler).
Mpeg-2 is afaik $2.50 each for encode and decode per unit.
Add $0.25 per unit above 50'000 for Mpeg-4 SP/ASP.
For H.264 (a.k.a Mpeg-4 AVC) it is as far as I can figure:
0-100'000 units: free 100'000 - 5 mill: $0.20 per unit 5 mill+ : $0.10 per unit
You want fries (erm, VC-1) with that? Similar licensing cost as with AVC.
All said and done it doesn't look like it should add more than a few $ at retail. Probably the same price as now, actually, because somewhere in the value chain someone is already paying the license fee if the card comes with accelerated windows drivers.
I assume the sticking point is that if VIA was to release open source accelerated drivers, mpeg-la might come asking for money for every single chip VIA makes.
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
So why not remove the stupid EULA restriction?
Hatta already made the point, but it is worth repeating. This is really the same issue that Lessig's Change Congress movement is about - it doesn't matter whether cash contributions skews the political process or not, the mere existence of contributions is sufficient to cast doubt on the neutrality of the political process in the mind of the populace.
It does not matter whether the EULA restriction is used only to stop stupid benchmarks, the mere existence of the restriction creates the impression that vmware has something to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the interpretation of the facts of science by people and the interpretation of what is actually written in the Bible by other people, that the contradictions arise.
So your argument is, as far as I can tell, that the contradiction happens in the head of people that read the texts - sort of like a bible/science analogy of the schrÃdinger's cat experiment? That is, no contradiction exists until someone "interprets" the bible/science?
It is an interesting example of sophistry, but no more convincing as an argument than Clinton arguing about what the meaning of "is" is.
ALL assumptions (beliefs, educated guesses) may or may not be correct, but they will ALWAYS be assumptions until someone actually measures or observes otherwise.
That is really a subject for a textbook on philosophy, not for basic level science.
To some level or another, everything we "know" (or rather think to know) is built on assumptions. Taken to the extreme, how do we know we're not plugged into the Matrix? The question then is where to draw the line.
Teaching the doctrines of the religion of secular humanism in public schools appears to be perfectly OK as long as it is labeled science.
Huh? That makes absolutely no sense to me. How is science the same as secular humanism?
Diet creationism being taught alongside evolution, despite being unscientific, doesn't abridge any privileges or immunities of citizens, though it may annoy or misguide them.
Check the history of creationism and ID. The ID movement is little more than a search/replace of "God" to "some intelligent designer".
This happened after the 1987 Edwards case, which ruled that teaching creationism in school was unconstitutional, because [it] was specifically intended to advance a particular religion. While ID doesn't name the "intelligent designer", it is quite obvious what the ID proponents' motive for getting ID taught in science class is.
Not to mention that what is taught in science class should be science. If the standard is lowered enough to allow ID access, then why shouldn't the pastafarianism creation story be told too?
Either God really did create the earth and everything in it or it came into existence in some other way.
You are arguing from the point of biblical literalism. Far from all Christian share that view. There are also passages in the Bible that can be read to mean that the earth is the centre of our solar system ("the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved"), and there is no shortage of similar examples. However, there are very few Christians that take that passage literally and they don't consider teaching school children that the earth revolves around the sun as promotion of atheism. ;-)
The idea that the Bible is open to interpretation is very old.
Teaching evolution promotes atheism
How?
Evolution is mute on the question of abiogenesis / "the origin of life". It is also mute with regards to what happened before, like what caused the big bang. As such, it is not in conflict with the view that some sort of intelligent agent set the wheels in motion some time in the distant past.
In the more general sense, science tries to find the answer to "how" while religion is concerned with "why".
The theory of evolution only "promotes atheism" if you happen to be in the YEC / genesis literalism camp. In that case, it isn't really evolution that "promotes atheism" but rather that the world around us does not behave as described in a particular book ("the world has an evolution bias!"). Then again, if you would rather believe in a literal interpretation of an old book rather than to trust what we can see around us I would suggest that you get some professional help.
Evolution has been singled out for special ire by Discovery, as it provides an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes.
There's two claims here-- 1. Evolution is singled out. 2. It is singled out because it offers an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes.
On the first:
William Paley predated Darwin. And, certainly Creationists have not in the interim ceased 'preaching' the same message which has gone forth since before either of them.
They have certainly modified the message over time. You are familiar with the "God of the gaps" argument, I presume? Whenever science comes up with a decent explanation of something that the creationists claimed "god did it", they change their message. See dover trial and the flagellum argument for one example, or their find/replace of "God did it" with "some intelligent designer did it" when they changed their name from creationism to ID.
Does evolution really offer an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes? If you really believe that, then ask yourself two questions. 1 - Where did the original matter making up the primordial soup (or the infinitesimally small mass before the big bang) come from? and 2 - What about these natural laws that seem to govern the universe which make natural processes possible?
That is a moving the goalposts argument.
And, even if evolution did offer this explanation, it is solely a conjecture that rebuffing evolution is ID theorists' sole motive in advancing their theory.
Conjecture, my hindquarters..
"The concept of intelligent design (hereinafter âoeIDâ), in its current form, came into existence after the Edwards case was decided in 1987. For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child."
It is quite clear that the ID movement was born after the creationists' failed attempts to get creationism into the school curriculum. If rebuffing the theory of evolution isn't their goal then what is?
Why should I continue any further? [..] Why should I waste any more time on this?
I ask myself the same question. (1) "Creationists not changing their message" and (2) "ID is not an attempt to rebuff evolution". I typically stop rebuffing /. comments after the first few errant statements, but in this case, two are enough.
Why would these Creationists feel so threatened by something that doesn't threaten their belief system?!? I'm confused.
So am I. Why are the ID proponents so eager to push their stuff into our schools if evolution doesn't threaten their belief system? Might it have something to do with it conflicting with a literal reading of genesis?
Atheism is more like denouncing the existence of stamps, and as such it isn't really neutral to the question of the "great stamp in the sky". In that respect, state atheism would be a violation of church and state just as state <insert religion of choice here> would be.
Then again, I don't agree with glitch's assertion that evolution promotes atheism and by extension I don't agree with his assertion that teaching evolution is school is a violation of the 1st. amdmt.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
It is generally interpreted to say that government should not prefer one religion to another, and by extension to keep church and state separate. Which is not surprising, considering that many of those that left the old world for the new did so because they were persecuted for their beliefs by the governments in the old world.
Besides, the notion of that "ID" science is somehow the promotion of some religion, is absurd.
Oh really? There is quite a paper trail showing that ID was developed by a group of United States creationists who reformulated their argument in the creation-evolution controversy to circumvent court rulings that prohibit the teaching of creationism as science. "The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID's 'official position' does not acknowledge that the designer is God."
It does two things. It reveals the scientific data discovered, which exposes evolution as the hoax that it is.
Sure, whatever. Mind coughing up some supporting evidence or are we just going to throw unsupported absolutist statements at each other?
Evolutionary scientists are the ones whom have, numerous times, morphologically evolved their theory to accommodate the new, damning, empirical data.
"Damning empirical data?" There you go again. Sources please.
Besides, it is actually the nature of science not to take our current theories as unchanging truth but to constantly test them and alter the theories if they are not consistent with observed behaviour. That might seem anathema if you base your world view on a single unchanging book, but to use that as an argument to denounce science is bunkum.
Also, ID science reveals the often times found in nature, extremely improbable, if not impossible. Particularly configured existence of many things, if intelligent design were absent.
Again, sources please. Flagellum and the immune system is not as slam dunk as you seem to think they are.
from the fact that its the reason why Dawkins went on a religion intolerance, hating rampage.
Sources?
Thus, evo would gain indirect, pseudo validation.
Really? If A is shown to be invalid, it does not follow that B is true. Simple logic.
They simply demonstrate that the world and universe contain much evidence of the presence of "design".
Mind sharing with us what this evidence is?
And please don't bring up that old Behe flagellum unless you want to bring some facts to the table.
What they are really saying is that after the flood, "micro-evolution" took place. Thus, it was not necessary for Noah to take a Black bear, a brown one and a Polar bear also. But rather, just one type of bear.
How long ago was this supposed flood?
You do know that we are now capable of sequencing DNA? That makes it possible to compare the DNA of different organisms and estimate how long ago their common ancestor walked the earth.
There is also the issue of the fossil record. If this flood happened fairly recently, it should be fairly easy to check this theory of yours.
Makes non intelligent processes of "random chance" the already mathematically calculated, to be an implausible hypothesis.
Are you speaking of the Drake equation? Depending on what estimates you use, the value ranges from something like 500 to close to zero concurrent extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.
If you are not thinking of Drake, mind sharing what "already mathematically calculated" thing you are referring to? And besides, such a calculation would probably only come up with the chance for our particular form of life. Even on earth, there are organisms that thrive in conditions that we would consider completely unsuitable for life - like around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. There is also nothing that says that DNA is the only option, so an attempt to "mathematically calculate" to any kind of certainty the chance of life being out there is rather futile due to the huge uncertainties in the values you would plug into this equation.
DNA contains so much ordered, sequenced information, that the probability of the spontaneous generation of life has been "conservatively" calculated.
The DNA in modern organisms is not a product of chance alone; it is under selective pressure. To calculate the chance of a human spontaneously self-assembling from dead matter would be silly.
If you are talking about the assembly of the very first self-reproducing molecule/molecules or cells I would be very interested to know exactly which molecules you are speaking of. Self-replicating ribozymes, perhaps?
To have the odds of X:1, X being a number so large that its more than the amount of particles that scientists have calculated to exist in the universe. "Particles"! Those are sub-atomic.
Citation needed. Mind sharing what magic equation these scientists used?
I think you just proved his point.
Something, or whatever, is not capable of causing the existence of a universe that is so fine-tuned to the very existence of life without being intelligent.
I were with you up until this point. The above makes no sense to me, I see no requirement for intelligence in the conditions that caused the big bang. Your argument is equivalent to "The position of the earth is so fine-tuned to the very existence of life, so it must have been placed at this exact point in the solar system by some intelligence".
With all the solar systems in the universe, isn't random chance a sufficient explanation and that our particular planet got lucky? The same with the big bang, how do we know that this universe is the only universe? We might just happen to be a winner in the great lottery of the multiverse, no intelligent creator required.
No scientist has ever observed a spontaneous appearance of a new species from another.
Sure we haven't. Well, it depends a bit on what one defines as separate species but it has certainly been observed and also created in labs for at least some definitions of the word.
whereas, we actually see all varieties of viruses, monera, protista, fungi, plants, invertebrates and vertebrates show up in the fossil record all at the same time, at the beginning of the Pre-Cambrian era.
If by "same time" you mean 70-80 million years.
Maybe they'll even teach something like "Evolution is mostly popular because many atheists think it can discount the first two pages of the bible, thereby disproving god forever"
Oh my, we've been found out! Yes the theory of evolution is obviously an ebil conspiracy by the crazed atheists that have nothing better to do with their short time on this planet than to rob you of your faith in god.
Or that, chemically and mathematically, life on Earth only has a 1:1,200,000,000,000,000,000 chance
Cute big number. Mind sharing how you came up with it?
happening the way evolutionists predict?
The theory of evolution makes many testable predictions. Please mention at least one lab experiment or anything in the fossil record that is incompatible with the predictions of evolution. (Adaptation, Genetic drift, Gene flow, Mutation, Natural selection, Speciation).
That it's six trillion times more likely that life started with an asteroid colliding with earth containing life.
You seem to confuse evolution and abiogenesis. Evolution only deals with how life evolves, it is not a theory of how life started.
Is that what they'll want to teach? That science doesn't have all the answers yet
Yes, that's exactly what we should teach. Science is the effort to discover, and increase human understanding of how the physical world works. We should teach our current best understanding ("theories"), be it gravity or evolution, and also teach the scientific method so that they have the tools needed to test the current theories and come up with better ones if the tests show that our current theories are deficient.
They start teaching that, the truth, instead of separate theories and stories AS truth, and kids might actually be interested in science again.
Is gravity true or not? It certainly is close to what we would call a fact, and at least in lower grades children are taught Newton's law of gravity as a fairly good approximation.
What would you rather that we should teach about gravity? That it is a plot by atheists trying to hide the fact that the sun revolves around the earth?
lp0 on fire (Unix)
I personally prefer "You don't exist, go away".
ms is more experienced in doing dirty footwork than ibm
+1 funny
Look up the origins of the expression "FUD" to understand why.
Meh, I checkmate your checkmate and this was my 2nd Slashdot account!
Yeah, happened to me too. *sigh*
How to win an Internet argument, lesson 101:
(1) Issue some absolute statement that you know people with disagree with. Example - "Windows came with my PC for free".
(2) When people call you on it, come up with an arbitrary definition of "free" that makes your statement technically correct.
Your home assignment for this week is to read the next chapter in the book, titled "How to avoid being an obvious troll".
Been there, done that.
But how to kill in rss feed? thxinadvance.
The first thing would probably be to look for strings / constants in the binary. It won't show up anything if the copier has changed those, but then again how many do? I highly doubt that it would be sufficient as evidence in court, but it is a quick "smell test" to see if there's anything suspicious going on.
Then you could do things like compare how the original and the suspect behaves on identical input (f.ex. if it is a TCP/IP stack, compare fingerprints or isn plots). If you know of a particular bug or weird behaviour in the original, see if the suspect behaves the same.
Then you might disassemble / analyse the binaries. Compare call graphs. Compare particular pieces of code (say, if you used a unusual hash function or hand-coded an inner loop in assembler).
Mpeg-2 is afaik $2.50 each for encode and decode per unit.
Add $0.25 per unit above 50'000 for Mpeg-4 SP/ASP.
For H.264 (a.k.a Mpeg-4 AVC) it is as far as I can figure:
0-100'000 units: free
100'000 - 5 mill: $0.20 per unit
5 mill+ : $0.10 per unit
You want fries (erm, VC-1) with that? Similar licensing cost as with AVC.
All said and done it doesn't look like it should add more than a few $ at retail. Probably the same price as now, actually, because somewhere in the value chain someone is already paying the license fee if the card comes with accelerated windows drivers.
I assume the sticking point is that if VIA was to release open source accelerated drivers, mpeg-la might come asking for money for every single chip VIA makes.
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
So why not remove the stupid EULA restriction?
Hatta already made the point, but it is worth repeating. This is really the same issue that Lessig's Change Congress movement is about - it doesn't matter whether cash contributions skews the political process or not, the mere existence of contributions is sufficient to cast doubt on the neutrality of the political process in the mind of the populace.
It does not matter whether the EULA restriction is used only to stop stupid benchmarks, the mere existence of the restriction creates the impression that vmware has something to hide.
Just curious. When's the last time anyone saw a (signed) post from a Sun VP on /.?
It is very rare, but happens.
This is however the first time I've seen an AC complain about astroturfing.