Series protagonist Marcus Fenix doesn't wield a gun-sword, like some other videogame heroes. No, his gun has a chainsaw right there on the end. That level of subtlety should convey something, and really says all you need to know about the world Marcus lives in.(emphasis mine)
the first thing that came to mind was William Shatner on Saturday Night Live: "GET A LIFE, will you people?"
Look at the comments here for more information about the 25 year old Publication Project Supervisor in the Health Education and Training Department, and some of the nonsense he is spouting as facts.
That's in theory, in practice in doesn't result in an identical quality. As for your attempt to make an analogy between buying a CD and ripping it, and buying an iTunes track and recompressing it, it is flawed. Buying an iTunes track implies that you have already made the compromise between loss of quality and (slightly) lower price. Losing any more quality just for the purpose of moving the track around, at the same size, and for your own use, is not acceptable.
Even AAC -> WAV will result in a loss of quality - it's not a mechanical process, and the WAV player in most cases will make the same file sound worse thant the AAC player...
Uncompressing to a WAV can be no better than the MP3's audio data, so it's not as good as the original WAV.
Since you cannot restore the lost pieces, you are not "uncompressing" from MP3 to WAV, you are converting an MP3 to WAV. You are right that theoretically the WAV can be no better than the MP3, but in reality it will be worse than the MP3, because MP3 decoders (players) know that certain things are missing and can compensate for some of them. The WAV decoder (player) doesn't compensate in any way, so what you hear will be worse than the MP3 version.
If you want to take that $.99 track into something other than iTunes/iPod, you can, with no further loss of quality (you retain all of the quality you paid for). Just burn a CD, then use uncompressed or lossless on the other device. It's a choice.
You are wrong. The moment you convert the original AAC file to something else, you lose the quality you paid for. The conversion AAC -> WAV -> MP3 is of significantly lower quality than the original AAC.
iTunes gives users the opportunity (by making a CD) to get full quality non-DRM copies of the music they purchase.
What you buy via iTunes is an AAC encoded song. AAC (just like MP3, OGG, etc) is a lossy compression format. "Lossy" means that you are throwing away information from the original in order to shrink the size of the song. When you make a CD, iTunes cannot recreate the original full quality song, because it cannot recreate the thrown away pieces. The result is a WAV file of significantly lower quality than the original song. When you then compress the crappy WAV file into an MP3 (and therefore throw away other pieces, different from the ones used in the AAC compression), you get loss of quality which is much worse than the original AAC song.
Second, there is no technical way to have an electronic voting system which both preserves the secret ballot and the public vote count. If the ballots are secret, then there's no verifiability, meaning no public count. If the system is verifiable, then there's no secret ballot. You can have one or the other, but not both.
Can someone expand on that? Why can't an electronic voting machine with a paper trail satisfy the private voting/public counting principle?
Don't kid yourself. I know exactly what I'm talking about by the way.[snip] In fact if you knew what you were talking about you would know about the special prosecutor and how that works. I remember when the Dem's put that in place so they could get Republicans. It was right after Nixon. Ironically they were upset when it was used against Clinton. Got bit by their own dog as it were. Anyhow you have a special prosecutor first, then if he finds stuff you would have hearings just like they did with Clinton... remember?
Little knowledge is a dangerous thing - in this case it makes you look like a fool. What was you are referring to as "special prosecutor" was the Office of Independent Counsel, and that was what Ken Starr was. Congress let the law establishing the office of the independent counsel lapse in 1999, and didn't reauthorize it. Therefore, you cannot have the same type of investigation like you had of Clinton - of unlimitted legth, and unlimitted budget, and not appointed by Congress or the Department of Justice, but by a court. Here is the Wikipedia link.
What is now known as a special prosecutor, is someone appointed by the department of Justice or Congress. Here is another Wikipedia link. So you have to get Congress to have hearings - official hearings, which the Conyers "hearings" are not - organized by the majority party, in order to get a special prosecutor appointed. This has not happened, and the congressional Republican leadership continues to do nothing. Conyers cannot appoint one on his own.
The point about Truman and Rousevelt is that the Republicans in Congress are not investigating allegations of illegal activities (in many cases claiming national security reasons, war time, etc.), while Truman lead an investigation into a Democratic administration, during the time of war.
So do you have something? Do tell. So far I just get hot air when I ask this question to people like you. Of course this is probably a very unfair thing to ask you since I'm sure you don't have a legal background.
I don't have a legal background, but these guys do. Frome the report:
[T]he American Bar Association urges the Congress to conduct a thorough, comprehensive investigation to determine: (a) the nature and extent of electronic surveillance of U.S. persons conducted by any U.S. government agency for foreign intelligence purposes that does not comply with FISA; (b) what basis or bases were advanced (at the time it was initiated and subsequently) for the legality of such surveillance; (c) whether the Congress was properly informed of and consulted as to the surveillance; (d) the nature of the information obtained as a result of the surveillance and whether it was retained or shared with other agencies; and (e) whether this information was used in legal proceedings against any U.S. citizen.
Once again, Congress has not conducted such an investigation.
The rest of you points are just as uninformed - you are sadly mistaken about a whole lot of things. Here is why the war in Iraq was unnecessary - it diverted the attention from the war on terorism, to a campaign whose alleged goal was to address a "real and present danger", according to Colin Powell:
The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world. Let me now turn to those deadly weapons programs and describe why they are real and present dangers to the region and to the world.
. The reality was that Saddam was already scared to death, and had allowed the weapons inspectors the full access they had asked for in the past 12 years. From the
If Bush does something that really is illegal (not what propaganda says is illegal), he will be impeached. If you know of something, tell Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan). You don't really know what you are talking about. Congress has investigative powers, they can subpoena anything and everything, but that power is only available to the majority party in the House. Even if John Conyers had evedience he can't hold a hearing in Congress, and make it official.
Simply lying in federal court - a felony isn't good enough (actually it is, however not in that case). Clinton was impeached for lying, and several democrats voted for the impeachment, so the title "Republican Hypocrisy" is very appropriate. If Republicans had any sense of decency, they at least would have done an investiation to determine if anything illegal is going on, based on the information in the press - like Harry Truman did during the Roosevelt administration, during WWII, and uncovered several cases of war profiteering.
As for the "ills" of the country, what are you talking about? Starting from the fact that the administration seems to think that laws don't apply to them, going through war profiteering, unprecedented rise of the national debt, dismantling of the environmental proctections (which for example leads to more mercury related poisoning accross the US), disregard for science and education, skyrocketting healthcare costs, and yet one of the worst child-birth mortality rates among the industrialized nations, and end with >2,500 unecessary deaths of young men and women, and tens of thousands injured (and that is just the US casualties) - I would say these are some significant ills.
I am running Mandriva 2006, kernel 2.6.16.1 (from the SoS RPM repository), xorg 6.9, fglrx driver from the PLF RPM repository - the version before 8.26.18, I think (I don't have my laptop with me). The ATI linux driver release notes have some more info on existing issues with TV-out, and I have never tried to use it.
I think the biggest difference is that you are using a suspend2 kernel. I don't have suspend2, and suspend to memory works just fine (suspend to disk I can't try because I didn't set up my swap partition large enough).
Hope this helps, I will verify the exact version of the ATI driver once I get home...
I have a Dell Latitude D610, with the ATI R300 chipset. While the older drivers worked, the latest one, together with kernel 2.6.16.x, does provide good performance for a laptop. The frame rate reported by glxgears jumped from less than 200 to about 1000, 3d screensavers look very nice, and hooking up external monitors or projectors is a breeze.
I don't know what the support is for desktop cards, but for laptops ATI is now a viable option to consider.
A lot of the negativity in previous comments seem to be based on past experiences - try the latest driver if you have a chance, you may be pleasantly surprised...
What part of "Binary drivers are not yet compatible with X.Org 7.1." did you not understand? Nether nVidia, nor ATI drivers work yet, so this is not a fair asssessment of ATI's driver support. Here is the Gentoo X.org update information.
How about a sitting senator that considers naming everything in West Virginia after himself to be his top priority? That, and having his friends in the road business pave it over with your tax dollars.
BS Re:I think Slashdot is trying to cheat us here
on
PHP Hacks
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Slashdot provides a place for reviews of technical books. They get to specify the URL and get referrer credit for it. The reson it is BN is because of the Amazon "One-click" patent, for which they sued BN - so using Barnes and Nobble both supports Slashdot, and provides a small way to fight obvious SW patents...
On the other hand, looks like the parent put their own referrer link to Amazon - now that's what I call cheating!
Your "anarcho-capitalist" views are bunk, plane and simple:-). Name me a place where there is competition and a choice over who provides your electricity, gas or water to your home, If there is no competition or choice, then it is a monopoly. So my water utility, the electric company, and the gas company, who provide these services to my home are monopolies.
Slashdot Mirror
the first thing that came to mind was William Shatner on Saturday Night Live: "GET A LIFE, will you people?"
n/t
Look at the comments here for more information about the 25 year old Publication Project Supervisor in the Health Education and Training Department, and some of the nonsense he is spouting as facts.
See also here (the Kaiser summary) for a more balanced view of the issue.
The moment you said "central DB" you lost any healthcare customers in the US
Not the GSM vendors (Cingular and T-Mobil) - any unlocked phone with the appropriate SIM card will work on their networks.
Right, keep dreaming. Even countries like Bulgaria have HSDPA (sometimes called G3.5). Note the date - Sept. 2005.
Yes, you read that right - there only one HSDPA-capable phone available in the US (from Cingular).
That's in theory, in practice in doesn't result in an identical quality. As for your attempt to make an analogy between buying a CD and ripping it, and buying an iTunes track and recompressing it, it is flawed. Buying an iTunes track implies that you have already made the compromise between loss of quality and (slightly) lower price. Losing any more quality just for the purpose of moving the track around, at the same size, and for your own use, is not acceptable.
Even AAC -> WAV will result in a loss of quality - it's not a mechanical process, and the WAV player in most cases will make the same file sound worse thant the AAC player...
Since you cannot restore the lost pieces, you are not "uncompressing" from MP3 to WAV, you are converting an MP3 to WAV. You are right that theoretically the WAV can be no better than the MP3, but in reality it will be worse than the MP3, because MP3 decoders (players) know that certain things are missing and can compensate for some of them. The WAV decoder (player) doesn't compensate in any way, so what you hear will be worse than the MP3 version.
You are wrong. The moment you convert the original AAC file to something else, you lose the quality you paid for. The conversion AAC -> WAV -> MP3 is of significantly lower quality than the original AAC.
What you buy via iTunes is an AAC encoded song. AAC (just like MP3, OGG, etc) is a lossy compression format. "Lossy" means that you are throwing away information from the original in order to shrink the size of the song. When you make a CD, iTunes cannot recreate the original full quality song, because it cannot recreate the thrown away pieces. The result is a WAV file of significantly lower quality than the original song. When you then compress the crappy WAV file into an MP3 (and therefore throw away other pieces, different from the ones used in the AAC compression), you get loss of quality which is much worse than the original AAC song.
My first impression of the wiki-textbook on XML was not not that great - it seemed to be closer to lecture notes, than to a textbook.
Can someone expand on that? Why can't an electronic voting machine with a paper trail satisfy the private voting/public counting principle?
Is that what they call that these days?
Cell carriers do distribute phones with mini- and micro-SD card slots, and the ability to load your mp3 files without a problem. Here is an example.
Not true - a Google search shows plenty of results (even in Spanish), including the direct link to the download...
Little knowledge is a dangerous thing - in this case it makes you look like a fool. What was you are referring to as "special prosecutor" was the Office of Independent Counsel, and that was what Ken Starr was. Congress let the law establishing the office of the independent counsel lapse in 1999, and didn't reauthorize it. Therefore, you cannot have the same type of investigation like you had of Clinton - of unlimitted legth, and unlimitted budget, and not appointed by Congress or the Department of Justice, but by a court. Here is the Wikipedia link.
What is now known as a special prosecutor, is someone appointed by the department of Justice or Congress. Here is another Wikipedia link. So you have to get Congress to have hearings - official hearings, which the Conyers "hearings" are not - organized by the majority party, in order to get a special prosecutor appointed. This has not happened, and the congressional Republican leadership continues to do nothing. Conyers cannot appoint one on his own.
The point about Truman and Rousevelt is that the Republicans in Congress are not investigating allegations of illegal activities (in many cases claiming national security reasons, war time, etc.), while Truman lead an investigation into a Democratic administration, during the time of war.
So do you have something? Do tell. So far I just get hot air when I ask this question to people like you. Of course this is probably a very unfair thing to ask you since I'm sure you don't have a legal background.
I don't have a legal background, but these guys do. Frome the report:
Once again, Congress has not conducted such an investigation.
The rest of you points are just as uninformed - you are sadly mistaken about a whole lot of things. Here is why the war in Iraq was unnecessary - it diverted the attention from the war on terorism, to a campaign whose alleged goal was to address a "real and present danger", according to Colin Powell:
.
The reality was that Saddam was already scared to death, and had allowed the weapons inspectors the full access they had asked for in the past 12 years. From the
If Bush does something that really is illegal (not what propaganda says is illegal), he will be impeached. If you know of something, tell Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan).
You don't really know what you are talking about. Congress has investigative powers, they can subpoena anything and everything, but that power is only available to the majority party in the House. Even if John Conyers had evedience he can't hold a hearing in Congress, and make it official.
Simply lying in federal court - a felony isn't good enough (actually it is, however not in that case).
Clinton was impeached for lying, and several democrats voted for the impeachment, so the title "Republican Hypocrisy" is very appropriate. If Republicans had any sense of decency, they at least would have done an investiation to determine if anything illegal is going on, based on the information in the press - like Harry Truman did during the Roosevelt administration, during WWII, and uncovered several cases of war profiteering.
As for the "ills" of the country, what are you talking about?
Starting from the fact that the administration seems to think that laws don't apply to them, going through war profiteering, unprecedented rise of the national debt, dismantling of the environmental proctections (which for example leads to more mercury related poisoning accross the US), disregard for science and education, skyrocketting healthcare costs, and yet one of the worst child-birth mortality rates among the industrialized nations, and end with >2,500 unecessary deaths of young men and women, and tens of thousands injured (and that is just the US casualties) - I would say these are some significant ills.
I am running Mandriva 2006, kernel 2.6.16.1 (from the SoS RPM repository), xorg 6.9, fglrx driver from the PLF RPM repository - the version before 8.26.18, I think (I don't have my laptop with me). The ATI linux driver release notes have some more info on existing issues with TV-out, and I have never tried to use it.
I think the biggest difference is that you are using a suspend2 kernel. I don't have suspend2, and suspend to memory works just fine (suspend to disk I can't try because I didn't set up my swap partition large enough).
Hope this helps, I will verify the exact version of the ATI driver once I get home...
I have a Dell Latitude D610, with the ATI R300 chipset. While the older drivers worked, the latest one, together with kernel 2.6.16.x, does provide good performance for a laptop. The frame rate reported by glxgears jumped from less than 200 to about 1000, 3d screensavers look very nice, and hooking up external monitors or projectors is a breeze.
I don't know what the support is for desktop cards, but for laptops ATI is now a viable option to consider.
A lot of the negativity in previous comments seem to be based on past experiences - try the latest driver if you have a chance, you may be pleasantly surprised...
What part of "Binary drivers are not yet compatible with X.Org 7.1." did you not understand? Nether nVidia, nor ATI drivers work yet, so this is not a fair asssessment of ATI's driver support. Here is the Gentoo X.org update information.
How about a sitting senator that considers naming everything in West Virginia after himself to be his top priority? That, and having his friends in the road business pave it over with your tax dollars.
Ted Stevens is from Alaska.
Slashdot provides a place for reviews of technical books. They get to specify the URL and get referrer credit for it. The reson it is BN is because of the Amazon "One-click" patent, for which they sued BN - so using Barnes and Nobble both supports Slashdot, and provides a small way to fight obvious SW patents...
On the other hand, looks like the parent put their own referrer link to Amazon - now that's what I call cheating!
Your "anarcho-capitalist" views are bunk, plane and simple :-). Name me a place where there is competition and a choice over who provides your electricity, gas or water to your home, If there is no competition or choice, then it is a monopoly. So my water utility, the electric company, and the gas company, who provide these services to my home are monopolies.