The point I'm trying to make is that fuck-ups happen. No matter how many safeguards you put in place, the risk is just too great when you are dealing with nuclear material.
BULLSHIT.
50,000 people die every damn year in automobile accidents in the USA alone. That's 1,000,000 people in the past 20 years.
ZERO people have died in "fuck-ups" that happened in the past 20 years in nuclear power in the USA or Canada.
HOW THE FUCK could you possibly say "the risk is just too great".
No, clearly the risk is not too great. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined couldn't kill as many people as automobiles have in the past 20 years. The risk is completely fucking acceptable.
Now the economics, that's a whole different ballgame. I'm down with "reverse hydro power storage", wind generation, and dumping tons of money into fuel cells and flywheels (although the thought of a flywheel in my car scares the fuck out of me, I think I'd have to see a number of demonstrations of catostrophic failure being contained before I ever bought a flywheel powered car).
. YES, I've noticed those same things. One other thing I've noticed is that if you put the player in it's armband thingie - you can no longer press the buttons, it's buried under too many layers of heavy material. They should re-arrange where the velcro is and make thinner material where the buttons are. Maybe even put on "fake button" targets.
I can press any of the buttons reliably through my jeans, shell jacket, and my fall jacket. Probably something to do with the two middle buttons being smaller yet taller than the two outer buttons, thus quickly recognizable.
The "bit of pressure" thing is probably good in terms of preventing accidental presses, but it is noticable when ffwding. Luckily I rarely ffwd. I'll probably hunt down some kind of software to make it easy to chop up the large "full cd" mp3's I have. I don't have many of those either, so it doesn't bother me much at all.
Yes, those headphones suck, I can't stand that type (around the ear big-things). I love a *good* pair of earbuds, ones that are $15-$25 (lately certain Sony's).
One bad thing with earbuds is that it's hard to run with them, they tend to "pop out". I usually buy extra sets of the little foamies (can be found at any dollar store) and put a 2nd set of them on to make them a "tigher fit". I've also found that earbuds that don't come with foamies fit nicer if I put foamies on them.
Would you believe that the best pair of earbuds I've *ever* found were a pair I bought in 1991, KOSS, $15 Canadian Tire. After something like 7 years of use, the wires finally parted and I had to go HUNTING *so-hard* to find anything even comparable. Took me ages to find something acceptable in comparison.
Of course I wouldn't touch *anything* KOSS these days. Ruining their reputation selling the cheap-ass $4 super-huge non-neodymium earbuds all over the place...
LOVE the fact that SD memory is so cheap. Would love to find out if this player is compatible with a 512 MB SD card... I've gotta get around to upgrading the firmware and/or asking on a newsgroup/forum.
Doesn't mp3 allow you to just "start somewhere" and begin playing? It's a streaming media protocol... They don't need to *process* 60 minutes of mp3, they just need to stop processing the mp3 while you're holding down the Fast ForWard (FFW) button, AND do a slow rise in the rate that the "time counter" is increasing....
My Lyra 64 MB SD mp3 player also has this problem, it only fast forwards at a fixed rate of about 10:1, which is entirely unacceptable for a "whole albumn" mp3. For "large files" they need to rise to 50:1 after 5 seconds, and 200:1 after another 10 seconds. Maybe leave it at 10:1 and 30:1 for files less than 10 minutes... heck scale the rise in rate with the size in file...
And my Lyra isn't processing the file either like this reviewed device is, I don't hear any clipped chatter.
Look at the picture in the MSNBC article. His bike is printing HUGE block letters a foot and a half high with 4 inch wide chalk lines.
I noticed a 2x2 foot "chalk" advertisement on the sidewalk here at Yonge and Eglington in Toronto, it takes a couple weeks to wear away and is immedicately "refreshed" every 2 weeks. It's ugly and garish, and that's not what I paid my taxes for the frickin sidewalks to be, someone else's damn advertising billboards. Unless they're paying the city for the advertising space I think it should be a crime or something.
How we split hairs so that "artists" and individuals can do small time expressive/etc things... yeah, we've got our work cut out for us. But it still seems pretty damn clear to me. He wasn't putting the chalk on himself, he was using an automated system instead of hands/hand-tools, and the messages were not his own. Even without money changing hands, it's semi-commercial and/or not "individual".
No, I don't want some bugger cycling around putting 10 fricking kilometers of 1.5 foot high lettering all over my god damn city. (Wait till the script kiddies get ahold of his API and begin cranking out crap.)
> You really only have 4 viable final solutions: > 1) The Israelis are "driven into the sea" as you say, leaving an Arab state > 2) The Palestinians are neutralized, leaving only Jews living in the Israeli state > 3) The land is split into two soveriegn countries - one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians. > 4) The two groups live as equals in one country. > > Which solution do you advocate? Which one is the US advocating?
I'd be happy with #3 or #4.
Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad have repeatedly stated that they will continue with terrorism until #1 is accomplished, no matter what.
The Government of the United States of America IS IN FACT being guided by the principles of #4. I've seen this very mission statement quoted within the past month, it was actually pretty interesting to read. It was along the lines of "The USA will be guided by the principles of supporting democracy, independent of historical claims to the land".
The only problems are:
Israel won't let the Palestinians vote
The Palestinians aren't ever going to allow a real Democracy.
The Islamic radicals are never going to stop with the terrorism.
The thing that really tilts the US State Department towards Israel is that they are already a democracy. The US State Department doesn't look at Israel and think about all the Jewish voters, they look at the only western style Democracy surrounded by totalitarian states and being assailed by Terrorists from a land that will never allow democracy to be established.
I believe it was to allow them to more quickly identify relatives of people on the planes as well as more positively and quickly confirm that person A *was* on the flight while person B did not board.
Back in the day there was a long long torturous window where they just weren't sure who was on the plane and who not, and until person B popped up and said "hello, here I am", their family was some distressed. And of course they couldn't say for quite some time to family A that YES, we know for sure your loved one was on the plane.
Man, educated opinions are rarer and rarer here on Slashdot, and the admins are picking more "tempests in a teapot" and "dupes" and "mis-analyzed story preces" than ever, and now I even have to go 2/3 of the way down the comments to find someone with a clue whose been moderated up.
but what really bothers me is how slow the mozilla opera and firefox load times are
A certain website I frequent necessitates regular logins in order to re-authenticate what IP address you are using, so that this other application can continue to use the services from an IP that's been linked to your web-account. (For all of us on dynamic IP blocks).
Therefore everyone uses a simple html page that does an auto-reload every 1800 seconds of the login to update their servers with your current IP.
Bonus Side Effect - Firefox is NEVER EVER swapped out of memory, and is ALWAYS instantly accessible.
PS: OMG I love how FireFox now asks you before you close a window with mutliple tabs still open - I used to accidentally do that all too often. And they've like read my mind and integrated in all sorts of other improvements too.
The per-student cost of public education went up significantly a couple decades ago due to a single cause. When you find out what that cause is you'll understand why Republicans don't like to talk about it when they're bashing public education.
I'm an expert googler, but there's too many possible matches for me to determine what you are talking about, although I'm very very interesting in knowning.
So what was the cause of the increase in cost per student decades ago that you speak of?
21. At the foregoing meeting, UCI also advised NAC that it needed more space. NAC was not in a position to provide space sufficient to meet all UCI's anticipated needs. During the meeting, Mr. Rubenstein, the Chief Operating Officer of NAC, stated in words or substance to Silverglate and Barna, "When are you going to shut the f*** up already, sell your business to us (NAC) and come work for me?" Upon information and belief, the comment reflected NAC's goal to acquire UCI, instead of servicing plaintiff company as part of a customer/provider relationship in the future.
Ummm, if you've just had a "severe accident" in the middle of a dark theatre with 300 people around you, I think it's acceptable to stand up and scream "help help I need some help!!!".
Seriously, if you're calling 911 on your cell phone in the middle of a dark theatre, what do you expect to happen 4 minutes latter when emergency services arrive?
You're like my idiot friend that thinks the Mafia runs *everything* in Canada, and the ENTIRE federal government is on the take, and ALL the city cops under the age of 35 do nothing but hunt for traffic violators, and ALL the cops over 35 are on the take and sitting on their ass putting protection money into fat accounts for their retirement.
This despite the fact that we *all* know tons of friends and family that work in the federal and provincial governments whose personal reputations are spotless and the first people in the world that we would expect to be raising hell in the name of justice, and friends and family who work in law enforcement who are fine outstanding citizens and diligent in their jobs. This despite all of us working in a variety of industries, have never once come across a case of corporate corruption. Incompetence maybe, corruption, no.
But oohhh no, according to some people, the Mafia runs everything and everyone not in the Mafia is on the take.
Maybe this was true 150 years ago (descriptions of city corruption from that era are like reading books about another world). But we've done a damn good job ridding our world of the types of corruption which infest non-western nations like Russia and the far-east. And almost any time a bad-apple comes into view, we smite them.
> The Department of Energy report I referred to included oil shales and sands in the proven reserve totals
I don't see any mention of shale in that webpage, and the reserve numbers quoted are nearly two orders of magnitude lower than the total oil locked up in shale. I've looked hard through that webpage for a link to the DOE report you are referring to, but I can't see anything.
AFAIK nobody includes Oil Shale in reserve numbers, because at this time it is considered uneconomical to recover.
> Perhaps the best bet for oil shales would be Thermal Depolymerization
It's gotta be a real neat challenge to be an Engineer, and not only trying to discover new ways of doing something so complicated, but doing it *economically*. I've read some simple descriptions of what they do for Oil Sands, and it's pretty cool stuff.
> One final thing -- more research does not necessarily lead to more economical production... > there is quite a difference between what's on the whiteboard or benchtop and a full scale plant.
Very true. I did an MSc in optoelectronics, and huge amounts of what happens in research turns out to be not of real use, let alone of economical use.
I'd really love to see more Wind power combined with energy storage using water. Build some big turbine plants out near a hydrolectric dam whose reservoir isn't used to capacity. (Of course that's going to suck out a lot of the efficiency, with losses from pumping up and re-generating...)
From what I hear there is actually a seasonal surge in hydro power availability, what with the spring thatws providing so much more water for the hydro dams in BC, then latter on in the summer/fall they start worrying about how much longer their water supply will carry them.
I'm still waiting for all that research into Solar Cells to pay off. It's probably being held back by the economies of scale. I saw a program last year which showed the assembly of a solar panel array here in Ontario (the types used by HomePower people), and it was *so* small scale, the panels and everything being soldered and assembled by hand.
In early 2004, Canada added 200 BBL to it's reserves numbers due to the fact that Oil Sands recovery costs have gone from 20-30 dollars per barrel to 8 dollars per barrel. This makes Canada nearly the 2nd largest reserve of oil in the world, right behind Saudia Arabia. Global Reserves in 2001 was 1100 BBL, in 2003 it was 1000 BBL, after Canada added it's update this year it's 1200 BBL. Canada's Oil sands actually contain 1500 BBL, of which they currently think 300 BBL are recoverable economically. (Reserves are not "all known oil" but "oil known to be economically recoverable right now".)
Last month, Saudia Arabia supprised everyone by tripling their reserve numbers, and Russia is doubling and tripling it's numbers as it's new corporate market begins to announce their discoveries in Russia.
At the start of 2005 I expect global reserves to stand at 1700 BBL. 70% more than last year.
Note that the USA has 2000 BBL of oil shale, which in the 1980's cost 60 dollars per barrel to recover. Many people are drooling at the prospect of trying to apply Canadian oil sands recovery technology on oil shale.
But there's no rush:)
PS: I vote left wing, and love green power. I'm all for increased efficiency and preventing waste. However, as oil prices eventually rise (whether it happens in 20 years or 100) there will be TONS of incentive and money for solar and wind development. There will not be any "impenentrable wall of death" that will doom us all. And not rushing things is important, because the longer researchers have to develop things, the more economical it will be to do whatever we need to in the end.
As someone else on slashdot pointed out to me, wouldn't we feel stupid if we cut our GDP in half for 80 years trying our hardest to prevent "the end of the world", only to have a disruptive technology appear and make all our sacrifices pointless.
If we needed to revolutionize the world inside 10 years, we could do it. So I'm in no extreme hurry to prevent something that's still 100 years away.
Yes I've read that section. It says "struggle" in the title because of the Japanese governments disfunctional nature and near-complete subservience to the military command.
> A) Were a significant percentage of the Japanese government already prepared to accept *unconditional* surrender? (Answer: Yes)
Japan was not a democracy, and those who wanted to surrender would not force the issue nor did they have the influence to force the military to surrender.
> B) Did the ones that didn't accept that surrender in general was proper? (Answer: Yes; they just had a few mitigating conditions)
Such as? Please, I've read a lot more about this than you, and I know what types of things the Japanese Military wanted as "mitigating conditions", and all the western powers agreed that they were UNACCEPTABLE.
Here's probably the real difference between people like you and people like me.
You would have been willing to accept those "mitigating conditions" to end the war early.
The rest of us were not, and history has proven us right. If Allied troops were not placed on Japanese soil, if Japan wasn't changed in the way that it was after the war, Japan would not be a democracy today and more wars and death would have resulted. MUCH MUCH more than the few hundred thousand that died in the bombs.
> C) Was the emperor working behind the scenes to "secure peace at any price"? (Answer:Yes)
Why did he need to work "behind the scenes"? Why was he unwilling to tell the military to end the war? Why did it take them years and years after they realized that the war was unwinnable.
After the deaths of 10,000,000 people, you are splitting hairs, AND you are doing it using intimate knowledge that was NOT available to the Western wartime leaders.
Japan was "working behind the scenes" and had "a few ineffectual non-military leaders" who wanted to surrender, and made "polite discrete inquiries" with the Russians.
They did not get on the airwaves and say "let's have a ceasefire and talk about conditions". They did not say "lets save some Japanese civilian lives and talk". They kept up their military rhetoric until the very last day. Hence the civilian shock at hearing their emporor tell them that they were going to surrender.
> D) Was the negotiator sent to Moscow instructed to achieve that? (Answer: Yes)
No he did not. I'm looking at the original text at the Truman Library, and all I see are references such as "to ask Russia to intercede with the United States in order to stop the war". That's not surrender. That's a polite "let's negotiate, and let's have you try and get us more favourable terms".
Unacceptable.
> E) Was the date "November 1st" a date for "in all probability" they would have surrendered by? (Answer: Yes) > F) Was the date "December 1st" a date for Japan to "certainly" have surrendered by (Answer: Yes) > G) How long was the length of time from September 2nd to November 1st (hint: It's not 5-6 months).
The BOMBING SURVEY theorizes that they would have surrendered by Dec 1st IF THE non-NUCLEAR BOMBING HAD CONTINUED. AND THE NON-NUCLEAR BOMBING KILLS WAY WAY WAY MORE CIVILIANS PER WEEK THAN THE TWO NUKES.
Please repeat after me - the bombing survey does not suggest that the Japanese would have surrendered if conventional bombing had stopped, and conventional bombing killed MILLIONS of Japanese, not hundreds of thousands.
Furthermore there is no guarantte that the bombing survey would have been right. Any failure to continue to pursue the war aggressively could have easily played right into the military leaders plans who wanted nothing less than self-genocide on the allied speartips, and who would have accepted nothing less than "surrender with no foreign troops and no change in government".
Finally, the bombing survey is using the same facts that you and I have access to, which war-time leaders DID NOT.
> While I can't agree with anyone sending you a hate mail, I do think > you are being excessively inflammatory, trollish, and otherwise offensive
Oh wait, you're objecting to him coming back to flame the guy who sent him e-mail direct. Not objecting (at least not completely) to his original post.
Uhhh, yeah, I can kind of see your point. But at the same time we don't know exactly what the Mormon sent to him in e-mail, perhaps it was a bit abusive. Perhaps he felt his privacy and time were invaded. Personally I'd be willing to do this to them just to make up for my time that they waste and annoy when they show up on my doorstep, just like I hate telemarketers.
> I don't know why it is that you feel it necessary to bash any > particular religion, especially one that you don't seem to like.
I do. A lot of us do. They want to convert us, and we want to convert them and prevent conversions to idiotic belief systems that we think are steaming piles of shit.
Not only that, but I thought his post was VERY entertaining. It was ENJOYABLE to read.
We live in a free country. So they get to do what they do, and we get to do what we do.
If you don't like it go to Russia.*
> The goal of proselyting is not to _force_ an idea on anyone, > but to allow others to hear your view and hopefully off > them information that they did not previously have.
Oh wait, it seems you do understand what I'm talking about after all!!!
:-)
(*) Damn it, Russia's a free country now, isn't it. But it still sounds so right, so I'm going to continue using it. God bless the Simpsons.
Because paying someone a $2 million dollar bonus for staying around just isn't sane, rational, or within the capabilities of almost any company?????
You can bet that he wasn't allowed to tell anyone what his wage or signing bonus with Microsoft was, so it's not like the people at Borland can just counter the offer. And until Microsoft has paid $1 million dollar signing bonuses to 35 of your BEST key people, you don't have a case against them.
I don't think you're head is connected to reality. Your logic and reasoning skills are direly lacking.
Note I'm not saying ANYTHING at all about Borland as a company or their managers, and of course they did it "of their own free will". You show up and offer me $2 million dollar signing bonus to me I'll leave the company I'm currently VERY happy at. But what insane person would offer me $2 million dollars for "no reason what-so-ever", and how the FUCK could you hold not "matching that" against the company I currently work for? It's idiotic.
CLEARLY and without question Microsoft was using it's market domination and deep pockets to destroy a competitor using non-competitive practices.
Which we as a society have deemed "not good for all" and legislated as "illegal". Hence the lawsuit.
> Read the Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted after the war, which determined exactly the > same thing that Bard suggested.... ttp://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm
It says no such thing. And I quote:
"We underestimated the ability of our air attack on Japan's home islands, coupled as it was with blockade and previous military defeats, to achieve unconditional surrender without invasion. By July 1945, the weight of our air attack had as yet reached only a fraction of its planned proportion, Japan's industrial potential had been fatally reduced, her civilian population had lost its confidence in victory and was approaching the limit of its endurance, and her leaders, convinced of the inevitability of defeat, were preparing to accept surrender. The only remaining problem was the timing and terms of that surrender."
Note that the above paragraph implicitly implies that getting them to surrender was going to involve "our air attack had as yet reached only a fraction of its planned proportion". Guess how many Japanese would have died if we had continued with the conventional bombing instead of the two nukes? It would be a gross distortion of the facts to look at the above paragraph and claim that if we had unilaterally stopped killing Japanese and simply gone with a blockade that they would have eventually surrendered. The above paragraph does not provide any support to that type of argument AT ALL.
And almost everyone will object to the above statement saying "preparing to surrender", as clearly the only ones whose "willingness to surrender" mattered were the Japanese military, and they were WELL PREPARED to fight forever and/or grind the population into the earth in an attempt to get us to reduce our requirements for "the only remaining problem", aka "the terms of surrender".
Again I quote:
"The cabinet could perpetuate itself only so long as it was able to absorb or modify the views of the Army and Navy ministers, who, until the end, were strongly influenced by the fanaticism of the Army officers and many of the younger Navy officers."
"while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained"
And in support of my contention that it wasn't "no bombing" vs "atomic bombs", the report you quote is comparing "conventional bombing for 5-6 more months" versus "atomic bombs":
"Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
This DOES NOT imply fewer Japanese casualties. It is merely a dry analyitic military analysis of the capabilities of US Conventional Air Power to force the Japanese to surrender with another 5-6 months of unrestricted air warfare.
Hence the title of the report - "United States Strategic Bombing Survey".
It is not titled "Analysis of whether or not we could have gotten the Japanese to surrender with fewer civilian deaths using any other means".
> And they had already tried to surrender via the USSR
BULLSHIT. They wanted to negotiate, so they sent a polite quiet diplomatic query to Russia through their ambassador. To call that "trying to surrender" is a gross distortion of the facts.
Their military would only have agreed to end the war at that point if it involved not having any foreign troops on their soil and no regieme change what-so-ever. Which was of course utterly unacceptable, the Allies would (and properly should) only accept unconditional surrender.
If you look through all of Scaled Composites' aircraft, you'll see that they've got a LOT of aircraft for which they only built a couple flying prototypes which never went anywhere commercially.
Hmmm, seems you are right. Sorry about the semi-snide comment, but my initial search didn't show anything that would indicate that lavc was nothing more than a wrapper around a bunch of codecs, and nothing indicated that the "mpeg4" in its list of dozens of codecs was in fact an original implementation.
From what little I've found, it seems that everyone agrees that lavc and xvid easily beat DivX5, but people have differing opinions about lavc and xvid quality, although many believe lavc is faster in the encode.
Here's one quote - "It seems that libavc gives a (very) little more detailed image. On the other hand, XviD has an excellent processing at high bitrate and shows less 'blocks'."
Is lavc available on Windows for encoding? Sounds like it would be interesting to try, especially wrt it's encode speed for a home PVR solution.
I've followed this thread with interest, but now that I've gone looking for this libavcodec, all I've found is that libavcodec wraps ffmpeg which supports a large number of actual video codecs (http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC 19), which includes "FFmpeg Video 1".
So my question to you is, what actual video encoding codec did you have libavcodec/ffmpeg using? Was it in fact "ffmpeg video 1"? Or was it another? There are a lot of different video codecs in the above reference that ffmpeg/libavcodec can encode with.., and ffmpeg video 1 is noted as being "lossless", which doesn't sound like something that could compete against any type of mpeg4 at the same bitrate...
I seriously don't think you actually know what codec you happened to be using, just that it was wrapped up in the libavcodec library being used by mplayer.
Ok, I read your reference, and I come to the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion as you do wrt militia.
> 1. An army composed of ordinary citizens...
Check, the National Guard is ordinary citizens who have day jobs and are not currently professional soldiers. Yes they perhaps *were* professional soldiers some time ago, but when they are in the National Guard, they are no longer holding down full time jobs in the army. They are civilians.
> 2. A military force that is not part of a regular army and is subject to call for service in an emergency.
Check, the National Guard is not part of the regular army, and is subject to call for service in emergencies. #2 matches the National Guard perfectly.
> 3. The whole body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service.
That's the only one that doesn't fit in the US National Guard system. But that's simply because not all US Citizens are required to do military service, like say Israelis.
However note that most "references" and dictionaly definitions are not "AND"'d , they are "OR"'d.
Slashdot Mirror
What should we have done had there been a Nazi resistance movement in Germany?
.
Oh man, it's been too long, I don't remember my right hand rules for that stuff....
*but*, wouldn't it be possible to orient it so that when turning a corner it would actually hold your card down!??
Bah - I'm sure someone's been thinking of this kind of stuff..
The point I'm trying to make is that fuck-ups happen. No matter how many safeguards you put in place, the risk is just too great when you are dealing with nuclear material.
BULLSHIT.
50,000 people die every damn year in automobile accidents in the USA alone. That's 1,000,000 people in the past 20 years.
ZERO people have died in "fuck-ups" that happened in the past 20 years in nuclear power in the USA or Canada.
HOW THE FUCK could you possibly say "the risk is just too great".
No, clearly the risk is not too great. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined couldn't kill as many people as automobiles have in the past 20 years. The risk is completely fucking acceptable.
Now the economics, that's a whole different ballgame. I'm down with "reverse hydro power storage", wind generation, and dumping tons of money into fuel cells and flywheels (although the thought of a flywheel in my car scares the fuck out of me, I think I'd have to see a number of demonstrations of catostrophic failure being contained before I ever bought a flywheel powered car).
.
YES, I've noticed those same things. One other thing I've noticed is that if you put the player in it's armband thingie - you can no longer press the buttons, it's buried under too many layers of heavy material. They should re-arrange where the velcro is and make thinner material where the buttons are. Maybe even put on "fake button" targets.
I can press any of the buttons reliably through my jeans, shell jacket, and my fall jacket. Probably something to do with the two middle buttons being smaller yet taller than the two outer buttons, thus quickly recognizable.
The "bit of pressure" thing is probably good in terms of preventing accidental presses, but it is noticable when ffwding. Luckily I rarely ffwd. I'll probably hunt down some kind of software to make it easy to chop up the large "full cd" mp3's I have. I don't have many of those either, so it doesn't bother me much at all.
Yes, those headphones suck, I can't stand that type (around the ear big-things). I love a *good* pair of earbuds, ones that are $15-$25 (lately certain Sony's).
One bad thing with earbuds is that it's hard to run with them, they tend to "pop out". I usually buy extra sets of the little foamies (can be found at any dollar store) and put a 2nd set of them on to make them a "tigher fit". I've also found that earbuds that don't come with foamies fit nicer if I put foamies on them.
Would you believe that the best pair of earbuds I've *ever* found were a pair I bought in 1991, KOSS, $15 Canadian Tire. After something like 7 years of use, the wires finally parted and I had to go HUNTING *so-hard* to find anything even comparable. Took me ages to find something acceptable in comparison.
Of course I wouldn't touch *anything* KOSS these days. Ruining their reputation selling the cheap-ass $4 super-huge non-neodymium earbuds all over the place...
LOVE the fact that SD memory is so cheap. Would love to find out if this player is compatible with a 512 MB SD card... I've gotta get around to upgrading the firmware and/or asking on a newsgroup/forum.
Doesn't mp3 allow you to just "start somewhere" and begin playing? It's a streaming media protocol... They don't need to *process* 60 minutes of mp3, they just need to stop processing the mp3 while you're holding down the Fast ForWard (FFW) button, AND do a slow rise in the rate that the "time counter" is increasing....
My Lyra 64 MB SD mp3 player also has this problem, it only fast forwards at a fixed rate of about 10:1, which is entirely unacceptable for a "whole albumn" mp3. For "large files" they need to rise to 50:1 after 5 seconds, and 200:1 after another 10 seconds. Maybe leave it at 10:1 and 30:1 for files less than 10 minutes... heck scale the rise in rate with the size in file...
And my Lyra isn't processing the file either like this reviewed device is, I don't hear any clipped chatter.
Look at the picture in the MSNBC article. His bike is printing HUGE block letters a foot and a half high with 4 inch wide chalk lines.
I noticed a 2x2 foot "chalk" advertisement on the sidewalk here at Yonge and Eglington in Toronto, it takes a couple weeks to wear away and is immedicately "refreshed" every 2 weeks. It's ugly and garish, and that's not what I paid my taxes for the frickin sidewalks to be, someone else's damn advertising billboards. Unless they're paying the city for the advertising space I think it should be a crime or something.
How we split hairs so that "artists" and individuals can do small time expressive/etc things... yeah, we've got our work cut out for us. But it still seems pretty damn clear to me. He wasn't putting the chalk on himself, he was using an automated system instead of hands/hand-tools, and the messages were not his own. Even without money changing hands, it's semi-commercial and/or not "individual".
No, I don't want some bugger cycling around putting 10 fricking kilometers of 1.5 foot high lettering all over my god damn city. (Wait till the script kiddies get ahold of his API and begin cranking out crap.)
Let him rot for 48 hours.
> You really only have 4 viable final solutions:
> 1) The Israelis are "driven into the sea" as you say, leaving an Arab state
> 2) The Palestinians are neutralized, leaving only Jews living in the Israeli state
> 3) The land is split into two soveriegn countries - one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians.
> 4) The two groups live as equals in one country.
>
> Which solution do you advocate? Which one is the US advocating?
I'd be happy with #3 or #4.
Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad have repeatedly stated that they will continue with terrorism until #1 is accomplished, no matter what.
The Government of the United States of America IS IN FACT being guided by the principles of #4. I've seen this very mission statement quoted within the past month, it was actually pretty interesting to read. It was along the lines of "The USA will be guided by the principles of supporting democracy, independent of historical claims to the land".
The only problems are:
Israel won't let the Palestinians vote
The Palestinians aren't ever going to allow a real Democracy.
The Islamic radicals are never going to stop with the terrorism.
The thing that really tilts the US State Department towards Israel is that they are already a democracy. The US State Department doesn't look at Israel and think about all the Jewish voters, they look at the only western style Democracy surrounded by totalitarian states and being assailed by Terrorists from a land that will never allow democracy to be established.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
I believe it was to allow them to more quickly identify relatives of people on the planes as well as more positively and quickly confirm that person A *was* on the flight while person B did not board.
Back in the day there was a long long torturous window where they just weren't sure who was on the plane and who not, and until person B popped up and said "hello, here I am", their family was some distressed. And of course they couldn't say for quite some time to family A that YES, we know for sure your loved one was on the plane.
Man, educated opinions are rarer and rarer here on Slashdot, and the admins are picking more "tempests in a teapot" and "dupes" and "mis-analyzed story preces" than ever, and now I even have to go 2/3 of the way down the comments to find someone with a clue whose been moderated up.
Mayhaps it's time to quit reading this site.
but what really bothers me is how slow the mozilla opera and firefox load times are
A certain website I frequent necessitates regular logins in order to re-authenticate what IP address you are using, so that this other application can continue to use the services from an IP that's been linked to your web-account. (For all of us on dynamic IP blocks).
Therefore everyone uses a simple html page that does an auto-reload every 1800 seconds of the login to update their servers with your current IP.
Bonus Side Effect - Firefox is NEVER EVER swapped out of memory, and is ALWAYS instantly accessible.
PS: OMG I love how FireFox now asks you before you close a window with mutliple tabs still open - I used to accidentally do that all too often. And they've like read my mind and integrated in all sorts of other improvements too.
The per-student cost of public education went up significantly a couple decades ago due to a single cause. When you find out what that cause is you'll understand why Republicans don't like to talk about it when they're bashing public education.
I'm an expert googler, but there's too many possible matches for me to determine what you are talking about, although I'm very very interesting in knowning.
So what was the cause of the increase in cost per student decades ago that you speak of?
There's something deeper going on here. Check out #24 on Page 11 of the restraining order (http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case/restraining- order.pdf)
And I quote:
21. At the foregoing meeting, UCI also advised NAC that it needed more space. NAC was not in a position to provide space sufficient to meet all UCI's anticipated needs. During the meeting, Mr. Rubenstein, the Chief Operating Officer of NAC, stated in words or substance to Silverglate and Barna, "When are you going to shut the f*** up already, sell your business to us (NAC) and come work for me?" Upon information and belief, the comment reflected NAC's goal to acquire UCI, instead of servicing plaintiff company as part of a customer/provider relationship in the future.
Bold mine, spelling mistakes probably mine.
Ummm, if you've just had a "severe accident" in the middle of a dark theatre with 300 people around you, I think it's acceptable to stand up and scream "help help I need some help!!!".
Seriously, if you're calling 911 on your cell phone in the middle of a dark theatre, what do you expect to happen 4 minutes latter when emergency services arrive?
You're like my idiot friend that thinks the Mafia runs *everything* in Canada, and the ENTIRE federal government is on the take, and ALL the city cops under the age of 35 do nothing but hunt for traffic violators, and ALL the cops over 35 are on the take and sitting on their ass putting protection money into fat accounts for their retirement.
This despite the fact that we *all* know tons of friends and family that work in the federal and provincial governments whose personal reputations are spotless and the first people in the world that we would expect to be raising hell in the name of justice, and friends and family who work in law enforcement who are fine outstanding citizens and diligent in their jobs. This despite all of us working in a variety of industries, have never once come across a case of corporate corruption. Incompetence maybe, corruption, no.
But oohhh no, according to some people, the Mafia runs everything and everyone not in the Mafia is on the take.
Maybe this was true 150 years ago (descriptions of city corruption from that era are like reading books about another world). But we've done a damn good job ridding our world of the types of corruption which infest non-western nations like Russia and the far-east. And almost any time a bad-apple comes into view, we smite them.
> The Department of Energy report I referred to included oil shales and sands in the proven reserve totals
..
I don't see any mention of shale in that webpage, and the reserve numbers quoted are nearly two orders of magnitude lower than the total oil locked up in shale. I've looked hard through that webpage for a link to the DOE report you are referring to, but I can't see anything.
AFAIK nobody includes Oil Shale in reserve numbers, because at this time it is considered uneconomical to recover.
> Perhaps the best bet for oil shales would be Thermal Depolymerization
It's gotta be a real neat challenge to be an Engineer, and not only trying to discover new ways of doing something so complicated, but doing it *economically*. I've read some simple descriptions of what they do for Oil Sands, and it's pretty cool stuff.
> One final thing -- more research does not necessarily lead to more economical production.
> there is quite a difference between what's on the whiteboard or benchtop and a full scale plant.
Very true. I did an MSc in optoelectronics, and huge amounts of what happens in research turns out to be not of real use, let alone of economical use.
I'd really love to see more Wind power combined with energy storage using water. Build some big turbine plants out near a hydrolectric dam whose reservoir isn't used to capacity. (Of course that's going to suck out a lot of the efficiency, with losses from pumping up and re-generating...)
From what I hear there is actually a seasonal surge in hydro power availability, what with the spring thatws providing so much more water for the hydro dams in BC, then latter on in the summer/fall they start worrying about how much longer their water supply will carry them.
I'm still waiting for all that research into Solar Cells to pay off. It's probably being held back by the economies of scale. I saw a program last year which showed the assembly of a solar panel array here in Ontario (the types used by HomePower people), and it was *so* small scale, the panels and everything being soldered and assembled by hand.
.
:)
You were right.
Emphasis on *were*.
In early 2004, Canada added 200 BBL to it's reserves numbers due to the fact that Oil Sands recovery costs have gone from 20-30 dollars per barrel to 8 dollars per barrel. This makes Canada nearly the 2nd largest reserve of oil in the world, right behind Saudia Arabia. Global Reserves in 2001 was 1100 BBL, in 2003 it was 1000 BBL, after Canada added it's update this year it's 1200 BBL. Canada's Oil sands actually contain 1500 BBL, of which they currently think 300 BBL are recoverable economically. (Reserves are not "all known oil" but "oil known to be economically recoverable right now".)
Last month, Saudia Arabia supprised everyone by tripling their reserve numbers, and Russia is doubling and tripling it's numbers as it's new corporate market begins to announce their discoveries in Russia.
At the start of 2005 I expect global reserves to stand at 1700 BBL. 70% more than last year.
Note that the USA has 2000 BBL of oil shale, which in the 1980's cost 60 dollars per barrel to recover. Many people are drooling at the prospect of trying to apply Canadian oil sands recovery technology on oil shale.
But there's no rush
PS: I vote left wing, and love green power. I'm all for increased efficiency and preventing waste. However, as oil prices eventually rise (whether it happens in 20 years or 100) there will be TONS of incentive and money for solar and wind development. There will not be any "impenentrable wall of death" that will doom us all. And not rushing things is important, because the longer researchers have to develop things, the more economical it will be to do whatever we need to in the end.
As someone else on slashdot pointed out to me, wouldn't we feel stupid if we cut our GDP in half for 80 years trying our hardest to prevent "the end of the world", only to have a disruptive technology appear and make all our sacrifices pointless.
If we needed to revolutionize the world inside 10 years, we could do it. So I'm in no extreme hurry to prevent something that's still 100 years away.
Yes I've read that section. It says "struggle" in the title because of the Japanese governments disfunctional nature and near-complete subservience to the military command.
> A) Were a significant percentage of the Japanese government already prepared to accept *unconditional* surrender? (Answer: Yes)
Japan was not a democracy, and those who wanted to surrender would not force the issue nor did they have the influence to force the military to surrender.
> B) Did the ones that didn't accept that surrender in general was proper? (Answer: Yes; they just had a few mitigating conditions)
Such as? Please, I've read a lot more about this than you, and I know what types of things the Japanese Military wanted as "mitigating conditions", and all the western powers agreed that they were UNACCEPTABLE.
Here's probably the real difference between people like you and people like me.
You would have been willing to accept those "mitigating conditions" to end the war early.
The rest of us were not, and history has proven us right. If Allied troops were not placed on Japanese soil, if Japan wasn't changed in the way that it was after the war, Japan would not be a democracy today and more wars and death would have resulted. MUCH MUCH more than the few hundred thousand that died in the bombs.
> C) Was the emperor working behind the scenes to "secure peace at any price"? (Answer:Yes)
Why did he need to work "behind the scenes"? Why was he unwilling to tell the military to end the war? Why did it take them years and years after they realized that the war was unwinnable.
After the deaths of 10,000,000 people, you are splitting hairs, AND you are doing it using intimate knowledge that was NOT available to the Western wartime leaders.
Japan was "working behind the scenes" and had "a few ineffectual non-military leaders" who wanted to surrender, and made "polite discrete inquiries" with the Russians.
They did not get on the airwaves and say "let's have a ceasefire and talk about conditions". They did not say "lets save some Japanese civilian lives and talk". They kept up their military rhetoric until the very last day. Hence the civilian shock at hearing their emporor tell them that they were going to surrender.
> D) Was the negotiator sent to Moscow instructed to achieve that? (Answer: Yes)
No he did not. I'm looking at the original text at the Truman Library, and all I see are references such as "to ask Russia to intercede with the United States in order to stop the war". That's not surrender. That's a polite "let's negotiate, and let's have you try and get us more favourable terms".
Unacceptable.
> E) Was the date "November 1st" a date for "in all probability" they would have surrendered by? (Answer: Yes)
> F) Was the date "December 1st" a date for Japan to "certainly" have surrendered by (Answer: Yes)
> G) How long was the length of time from September 2nd to November 1st (hint: It's not 5-6 months).
The BOMBING SURVEY theorizes that they would have surrendered by Dec 1st IF THE non-NUCLEAR BOMBING HAD CONTINUED. AND THE NON-NUCLEAR BOMBING KILLS WAY WAY WAY MORE CIVILIANS PER WEEK THAN THE TWO NUKES.
Please repeat after me - the bombing survey does not suggest that the Japanese would have surrendered if conventional bombing had stopped, and conventional bombing killed MILLIONS of Japanese, not hundreds of thousands.
Furthermore there is no guarantte that the bombing survey would have been right. Any failure to continue to pursue the war aggressively could have easily played right into the military leaders plans who wanted nothing less than self-genocide on the allied speartips, and who would have accepted nothing less than "surrender with no foreign troops and no change in government".
Finally, the bombing survey is using the same facts that you and I have access to, which war-time leaders DID NOT.
Hence any criticism of
> While I can't agree with anyone sending you a hate mail, I do think
> you are being excessively inflammatory, trollish, and otherwise offensive
Oh wait, you're objecting to him coming back to flame the guy who sent him e-mail direct. Not objecting (at least not completely) to his original post.
Uhhh, yeah, I can kind of see your point. But at the same time we don't know exactly what the Mormon sent to him in e-mail, perhaps it was a bit abusive. Perhaps he felt his privacy and time were invaded. Personally I'd be willing to do this to them just to make up for my time that they waste and annoy when they show up on my doorstep, just like I hate telemarketers.
> I don't know why it is that you feel it necessary to bash any
:-)
> particular religion, especially one that you don't seem to like.
I do. A lot of us do. They want to convert us, and we want to convert them and prevent conversions to idiotic belief systems that we think are steaming piles of shit.
Not only that, but I thought his post was VERY entertaining. It was ENJOYABLE to read.
We live in a free country. So they get to do what they do, and we get to do what we do.
If you don't like it go to Russia.*
> The goal of proselyting is not to _force_ an idea on anyone,
> but to allow others to hear your view and hopefully off
> them information that they did not previously have.
Oh wait, it seems you do understand what I'm talking about after all!!!
(*) Damn it, Russia's a free country now, isn't it. But it still sounds so right, so I'm going to continue using it. God bless the Simpsons.
> AND - why didn't Borland do anything ???
Because paying someone a $2 million dollar bonus for staying around just isn't sane, rational, or within the capabilities of almost any company?????
You can bet that he wasn't allowed to tell anyone what his wage or signing bonus with Microsoft was, so it's not like the people at Borland can just counter the offer. And until Microsoft has paid $1 million dollar signing bonuses to 35 of your BEST key people, you don't have a case against them.
I don't think you're head is connected to reality. Your logic and reasoning skills are direly lacking.
Note I'm not saying ANYTHING at all about Borland as a company or their managers, and of course they did it "of their own free will". You show up and offer me $2 million dollar signing bonus to me I'll leave the company I'm currently VERY happy at. But what insane person would offer me $2 million dollars for "no reason what-so-ever", and how the FUCK could you hold not "matching that" against the company I currently work for? It's idiotic.
CLEARLY and without question Microsoft was using it's market domination and deep pockets to destroy a competitor using non-competitive practices.
Which we as a society have deemed "not good for all" and legislated as "illegal". Hence the lawsuit.
> Read the Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted after the war, which determined exactly the ... ttp://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm
> same thing that Bard suggested.
It says no such thing. And I quote:
"We underestimated the ability of our air attack on Japan's home islands, coupled as it was with blockade and previous military defeats, to achieve unconditional surrender without invasion. By July 1945, the weight of our air attack had as yet reached only a fraction of its planned proportion, Japan's industrial potential had been fatally reduced, her civilian population had lost its confidence in victory and was approaching the limit of its endurance, and her leaders, convinced of the inevitability of defeat, were preparing to accept surrender. The only remaining problem was the timing and terms of that surrender."
Note that the above paragraph implicitly implies that getting them to surrender was going to involve "our air attack had as yet reached only a fraction of its planned proportion". Guess how many Japanese would have died if we had continued with the conventional bombing instead of the two nukes? It would be a gross distortion of the facts to look at the above paragraph and claim that if we had unilaterally stopped killing Japanese and simply gone with a blockade that they would have eventually surrendered. The above paragraph does not provide any support to that type of argument AT ALL.
And almost everyone will object to the above statement saying "preparing to surrender", as clearly the only ones whose "willingness to surrender" mattered were the Japanese military, and they were WELL PREPARED to fight forever and/or grind the population into the earth in an attempt to get us to reduce our requirements for "the only remaining problem", aka "the terms of surrender".
Again I quote:
"The cabinet could perpetuate itself only so long as it was able to absorb or modify the views of the Army and Navy ministers, who, until the end, were strongly influenced by the fanaticism of the Army officers and many of the younger Navy officers."
"while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained"
And in support of my contention that it wasn't "no bombing" vs "atomic bombs", the report you quote is comparing "conventional bombing for 5-6 more months" versus "atomic bombs":
"Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
This DOES NOT imply fewer Japanese casualties. It is merely a dry analyitic military analysis of the capabilities of US Conventional Air Power to force the Japanese to surrender with another 5-6 months of unrestricted air warfare.
Hence the title of the report - "United States Strategic Bombing Survey".
It is not titled "Analysis of whether or not we could have gotten the Japanese to surrender with fewer civilian deaths using any other means".
> And they had already tried to surrender via the USSR
BULLSHIT. They wanted to negotiate, so they sent a polite quiet diplomatic query to Russia through their ambassador. To call that "trying to surrender" is a gross distortion of the facts.
Their military would only have agreed to end the war at that point if it involved not having any foreign troops on their soil and no regieme change what-so-ever. Which was of course utterly unacceptable, the Allies would (and properly should) only accept unconditional surrender.
Where the fuck do you numb-nuts get this shit.
If you look through all of Scaled Composites' aircraft, you'll see that they've got a LOT of aircraft for which they only built a couple flying prototypes which never went anywhere commercially.
[goes away to dig further]
:)
Hmmm, seems you are right. Sorry about the semi-snide comment, but my initial search didn't show anything that would indicate that lavc was nothing more than a wrapper around a bunch of codecs, and nothing indicated that the "mpeg4" in its list of dozens of codecs was in fact an original implementation.
From what little I've found, it seems that everyone agrees that lavc and xvid easily beat DivX5, but people have differing opinions about lavc and xvid quality, although many believe lavc is faster in the encode.
Here's one quote - "It seems that libavc gives a (very) little more detailed image. On the other hand, XviD has an excellent processing at high bitrate and shows less 'blocks'."
Is lavc available on Windows for encoding? Sounds like it would be interesting to try, especially wrt it's encode speed for a home PVR solution.
Oh wait, think I answered my own question - ffvfw (http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/ffvfw.html). Oddly enough, doom9 shows ffvfw encoding *way* slower than xvid, and in reading through their test scenes and comparisons, I think xvid comes out pretty well ahead of ffvfw in terms of quality. http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-203-5.htm
Of course if I was using Linux, I bet that would make choosing libavcodec a lot easier
I've followed this thread with interest, but now that I've gone looking for this libavcodec, all I've found is that libavcodec wraps ffmpeg which supports a large number of actual video codecs (http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC 19), which includes "FFmpeg Video 1".
So my question to you is, what actual video encoding codec did you have libavcodec/ffmpeg using? Was it in fact "ffmpeg video 1"? Or was it another? There are a lot of different video codecs in the above reference that ffmpeg/libavcodec can encode with.., and ffmpeg video 1 is noted as being "lossless", which doesn't sound like something that could compete against any type of mpeg4 at the same bitrate...
I seriously don't think you actually know what codec you happened to be using, just that it was wrapped up in the libavcodec library being used by mplayer.
Ok, I read your reference, and I come to the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion as you do wrt militia.
> 1. An army composed of ordinary citizens...
Check, the National Guard is ordinary citizens who have day jobs and are not currently professional soldiers. Yes they perhaps *were*
professional soldiers some time ago, but when they are in the National Guard, they are no longer holding down full time jobs in the army. They are civilians.
> 2. A military force that is not part of a regular army and is subject to call for service in an emergency.
Check, the National Guard is not part of the regular army, and is subject to call for service in emergencies. #2 matches the National Guard perfectly.
> 3. The whole body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service.
That's the only one that doesn't fit in the US National Guard system. But that's simply because not all US Citizens are required to do military service, like say Israelis.
However note that most "references" and dictionaly definitions are not "AND"'d , they are "OR"'d.
1 and/or 2 and/or 3