I think there's more to measuring a human (and society) than risk reduction. For example, the degree to which a human is mentally prepared to confront risk, and the skill that a human has to navigate risks.
I train parkour. That training has certainly influenced the way that I measure mankind (as you can see above), but I've also found in it a fantastic tool for identifying and pushing my physical and mental boundaries, which I'd definitely call advancement.
Playgrounds, as it happens, provide some of the highest-density areas for finding body-and-mind challenges. Overly safe playgrounds, however, severely limit the number and degree of challenges, and as such make it a lot harder to push oneself in a progressive fashion. (In my case: sure, it's possible to train in a gymnasium or around the city, but the former tends to be too safe -- there aren't many gymnasiums out there designed for parkour -- and the latter tends to be too risky for those who haven't worked themselves up to that level.)
Zero risk is an interesting concept, but I don't think we'll ever achieve that (just an axiom in my mental model of the world), so one must be prepared to confront it. Eliminating that risk from playgrounds, in my opinion, weakens one of the best tools we have to build up those skills.
I'm not an advocate of exposing children to murderers, thieves, and rapists to "toughen them up"; that's just silly. I'm more interested in expanding human ability (specifically, my own) to deal with the universe. Risk reduction is one way to do it; having the physical and mental training to overcome that risk is another. I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
Obviously, you can't always determine a person's country of origin by their name.
The map at http://code.google.com/soc-map.html seems to be a pretty good indicator of where SoC students are. While incomplete -- and, judging from the traffic on the SoC mailing lists, maybe even wrong in some ways -- it still provides a better way to judge student locations than inferring on names, IMHO.
I'll assume that by "free" you really mean "free speech", not just "free beer". If you really meant to limit yourself to the latter, then the programs I'm about to list are also applicable, but it may be best to clarify your intention next time (considering what the general mindset of most people reading this website are).
You can find a large collection of AVISynth filters at http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/. I don't do much filtering in VirtualDubMod (I use it mostly for viewing AVISynth output, writing AVISynth scripts, performing compression, and muxing), but you can find a good starting list of VirtualDub filters at http://neuron2.net.
I don't care for people to stop using some other browser than IE.
I do care, however, that we don't get ourselves into a "FIREFOX 4EVAR" mood. Increasing market share for Firefox is nice to see, but I believe that maintaining healthy competition and _choice_ is much more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Just some musings:
I think there's more to measuring a human (and society) than risk reduction. For example, the degree to which a human is mentally prepared to confront risk, and the skill that a human has to navigate risks.
I train parkour. That training has certainly influenced the way that I measure mankind (as you can see above), but I've also found in it a fantastic tool for identifying and pushing my physical and mental boundaries, which I'd definitely call advancement.
Playgrounds, as it happens, provide some of the highest-density areas for finding body-and-mind challenges. Overly safe playgrounds, however, severely limit the number and degree of challenges, and as such make it a lot harder to push oneself in a progressive fashion. (In my case: sure, it's possible to train in a gymnasium or around the city, but the former tends to be too safe -- there aren't many gymnasiums out there designed for parkour -- and the latter tends to be too risky for those who haven't worked themselves up to that level.)
Zero risk is an interesting concept, but I don't think we'll ever achieve that (just an axiom in my mental model of the world), so one must be prepared to confront it. Eliminating that risk from playgrounds, in my opinion, weakens one of the best tools we have to build up those skills.
I'm not an advocate of exposing children to murderers, thieves, and rapists to "toughen them up"; that's just silly. I'm more interested in expanding human ability (specifically, my own) to deal with the universe. Risk reduction is one way to do it; having the physical and mental training to overcome that risk is another. I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
For those who don't want to use Flash, a PDF copy can be obtained here:
http://www.eg8forum.com/ebook/data/document.pdf
No idea why that's not linked from http://www.eg8forum.com/en/.
OpenID has made this possible for quite some time now.
Key escrow.
Well, WE won't be doing that. Governments will try to push it.
Obviously, you can't always determine a person's country of origin by their name.
The map at http://code.google.com/soc-map.html seems to be a pretty good indicator of where SoC students are. While incomplete -- and, judging from the traffic on the SoC mailing lists, maybe even wrong in some ways -- it still provides a better way to judge student locations than inferring on names, IMHO.
- David, USian SoC student
I use VirtualDubMod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net) and AVISynth (http://www.avisynth.org) extensively for video processing. They're the two big reasons why I keep a Windows XP partition on my computer.
You can find a large collection of AVISynth filters at http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/. I don't do much filtering in VirtualDubMod (I use it mostly for viewing AVISynth output, writing AVISynth scripts, performing compression, and muxing), but you can find a good starting list of VirtualDub filters at http://neuron2.net.
The doom9 forums for AVISynth development are also a good place to look for software and hints.
I don't care for people to stop using some other browser than IE.
I do care, however, that we don't get ourselves into a "FIREFOX 4EVAR" mood. Increasing market share for Firefox is nice to see, but I believe that maintaining healthy competition and _choice_ is much more important.
Who the fuck modded this informative? Didn't you read my refutation of my own post?
Er, wait a minute, now I can. I forgot to click the "fradulent e-mail" button. Whoops.
I'm also using Firefox 1.0, and I also can't reproduce the behavior that they say that I should see. Interesting.