the thread started off talking about using another player instead of their own internal player, so how specifically thier own player fails for live tv I'm not sure
Their issue was that mythtv didn't really handle external video well. I agreed and wished that external video was handled seamlessly as if it were just a regular TV show (ie it showed up in the regular program list and didn't need a separate plugin with a separate interface).
Are you trying to transcode it inside of or outside of myth?
Outside.
If you are talking about limited transcoding ability of myth's built in transcoders, I'll definitely agree with you there.
Yup - that would be why I'm using an external transcoder.
The nice thing, however, is that you can let any program do the transcoding.
Yup - as long as you don't mind the video not actually playing back correctly, which brings me back to my complaint.:)
If you can supply a working command line that will transcode MPEG-2 with an AC3 audio stream down to 720x480 or thereabouts while keeping the 5.1 AC3 audio track intact such that it can play back as a regular TV program and work with commercial detection, I'm all ears. I can transcode the files and play them with mplayer just fine (including with mythvideo calling mplayer). I just can't play them in the program guide, which means I can't use commercial flagging and I lose all those wonderful features myth has for organizing my shows and displaying metadata from the program guide.
Trust me - I didn't start using mythtv last week. The whole reason I want to downsample the HD (besides saving space) is that my EPIA M10000-based diskless frontend can't playback hi-def video, but it handles the 5.1 AC3 audio just fine via SPDIF. I could care less about the high-def output (and I'd already be more at DVD-quality than off-the-air quality even with the downsampling), but I do appreciate true 5.1 sound.
Again, I'm not exactly volunteering to rewrite all of mythtv and I've contributed all of one patch to the mythtv source, so I don't expect all the devs to cater to my every wish. However, that doesn't mean that I can't see the room for improvement either. If the devs don't have the same itch as I do, fine - they can work on what suits them - I'm getting far more than I paid for, right?:)
Knowing how well voice recognition actually works, I can see this robot giving chase to an astronaut desperately trying to evade being "grappled" shouting commands to halt as the helpful robot reaches out for the air hose.
I'm talking about better codec support for live TV.:)
Don't get me wrong - I think MythTV is wonderful, which is why I use it. But there are areas where it could use improvement. I won't be overly critical, since I'm not exactly volunteering to rewrite the whole thing.
I agree that a seektable probably wouldn't hurt with stuff like cutlists. So, implement the seektable for foreign media - you import a foreign media file into myth and it builds a seektable. That isn't a reason not to support foreign media - just one more thing to implement when you do support it.
As far as HD video formats - couldn't agree more with what you said, but I'm not sure how it is relevant. My HD card records the ATSC MPEG-2 stream off the air - often with AC3 5.1 audio. I'd like to turn that into an mpeg-2 or mpeg-4 lower-resolution video stream with the AC3 5.1 audio remaining intact. That is very hit-and-miss in my experience. Myth is very fussy with the video format (particular with keybrame spacing). It also doesn't help that most of the transcoding tools don't handle the AC3 well either - you can run into problems with re-interleaving the audio into the container.
Again, mythtv is wonderful. However, just a few tweaks would make it better. If nothing else the smaller change of indexing frame numbers rather than keyframe numbers in the seektable would probably help (the devs have discussed this very change - the change is very simple but the pain would be for those upgrading their databases as you'd need to update all the frame numbers). I completely sympathize that these changes aren't easy to make.
Ok, the post I replied to pointed out that mythtv didn't handle TV shows obtained from sources other than off-the-air well. I agreed.
Sure, you can play them via mythvideo - but this is a kludgy interface. Fast-forward/rewind don't work well. Cutlists and commercial skip don't work at all. The shows aren't organized in the main program list, there is no autoexpire, etc. Basically mythvideo is just a browser and then it can spawn an external player (or use its more limited internal player).
What I'd like is for a media file off the internet to look just like a show I recorded an hour ago. If I have a media file with commercials in it, I'd like to be able to flag them. I'd like to do that even if myth didn't record that media file.
Try sticking a random avi in your mythtv video directory. There are tools to try to put it into the regular program list, but the file probably won't seek correctly. I can't tell you how much trouble I've had just trying to transcode myth-recorded shows without using mythtranscode (in my case I want to transcode hi-def to standard-def while preserving the AC3 audio stream).
How do you use an external player for watching TV (with commerical skip, etc)? Everybody here is talking about mythvideo - I was talking about the main interface used for TV.
I'd lke to be able to watch a TV show as if it were recorded by myth, even thought it wasn't recorded by myth. I don't want some plugin that doesn't support 90% of the mythtv feature set. Sure, I use mythtvideo because I have to - not because I want to...:)
MythVideo - which is a mythtv plugin - is a frontend to mplayer for external files.
You can't integrate external video files into mythtv proper (the interface where you can easily fast-forward, rewind (not skip), and do editing/cutlists/commercial-flagging/etc). That is the component that could be improved by allowing the use of external video.
I was talking about using an external player WITHOUT using mythvideo.
The whole point is that external video files aren't handled well by mythtv. At best you can use mythvideo which is very stripped down compared to the interface used to play recorded TV shows. For example, you can't set up a cutlist or remove commercials using mythvideo.
Can you demonstrate that there can be any other kind of universe at all?:)
We can't even explain why physical constants are what they are - so how could we know if it is even possible for them to be different? Sure, there is always complete fantasy - but that isn't science.
Science isn't any proposed explanation that doesn't use terms often associated with theology. Science is proposing a hypothesis and then testing it. If you can't even propose a way to test a hypothesis then it isn't science. Test proposals that are fantastic in nature also don't count.
"Well, maybe one day we'll figure out how to travel to other universes and observe them." Sure, maybe we will. But then again, maybe one day we'll figure out how to travel to heaven and back and observe a supreme being - does that make theology a science? Speculation doesn't become science by virtue of sounding scientific. Nor does it become science just because the proponent doesn't claim absolute certainty - one could make an essentially religious statement without professing to be certain about it.
But what about Joe Sixpack seeing the menu item called VIM and assuming that anything that goes wrong is a problem with vi/vim? Or Mysql, or mythtv, or any of 3000 other projects.
Pretty soon you'd log into a linux system (err, make that a "catfish" system) and you wouldn't even be able to use it - every executable and menu item on the system would have some cryptic codename to avoid infringing trademark. Or maybe you'd have 47 codenames with "word processor" next to them.
Agreed - it would be nice if foreign media could be seamlessly integrated into the MythTV interface. Mythvideo is very primitive by comparison (the interface used for random avi/ogg/mpg files/etc).
One issue is that mythtv implemented their own media player, which means that only a few codecs are supported and there are very strict limitations on the video stream. For example, if keyframes aren't spaced completely uniformly the seektable breaks and any attempt to seek causes all kinds of problems. I think a better approach would be to use some other media player as the actual playback method and have myth focus on the value-adds like indexing the content, maintaining cutlists, GUI, etc. Mythtv would basically be a front-end to something like xine/mplayer. Why re-invent the wheel?
Case in point - I knew a guy pursing a PhD in the physical sciences who decided to take some courses on the side from the university's prestigious business school (tuition was waived but he couldn't get an actual degree). In his first week of class the professor said that in their program they would be doing serious math and that calculus would be used regularly. It turns out that this meant calculating derivatives of polynomials - which apparently had half the business majors turning white. Suffice it to say my friend was amused.
I'm sure there are individuals with exceptional math skills in the business-oriented professions, but in my experience what rates as "complicated math" in those fields amounts to anything more than the first 8 weeks of a primary school Algebra I course.
Additionally, IR pulses aimed at various parts of the screen could encode information such as the theater, room number, and date/timestamp. That would aid stopping the practice greatly.
I don't have a major problem with banning the use of recording devices in theaters (not the mere possession of cellphones/etc). However, this should really be subject to a fine - not a prison and a felony conviction. The intent should be to prevent wanton distibution of copyrighted works - not to make examples out of people whose clear intent was something innocuous.
Not entirely. I'll be the first to go on the record to say that strong conventional armies won't stop terrorist attacks. Now, it will deter nations from heavily funding terrorist activities - at least on an official level, lest they be blamed for the actions of a group they sponsor as happened in Afganistan.
Tanks won't help much in the war on terror - but that isn't the only kind of war the US faces. Tanks will be of tremendous help in a conventional war. Now, the US certainly doesn't face much threat there - but that is only because we have all those tanks/jets/ships/etc.
This is kind of like the old dilema faced by IT admins - if everything is working nobody notices. Why do we need to pay for all this backup hardware - we've never lost data! Well, perhaps the reason the company has never lost data is because of all that backup hardware.
Sure, the US could afford to save some money on the military, but the easiest way to start doing that is to stop deploying it 365 days a year on everybody else's soil.
"When you have the perfect army then nobody messes with you in the first place..." Umm, really? We're fighting several wars at the moment with our perfect army, and losing them....
I don't think any of those people really messed with the US in the first place - so the big army worked. And yes - if you overextend your perfect army you are going to not do so well, and when you intentionally start wars you can't win you're going to suffer defeat. This will in fact embolden others to challenge you on the world stage, which defeats the whole point of having a big army.
"That doesn't mean that we should go around picking fights.." Except that that's been our entire foreign policy for the last 8 years...
When did I say that it wasn't? My post was intended as a critique of US policy as much as a support for certain aspects of it.
"..but it is not in the interests of the US to fall behind either" Fall behind who? We currently have the most powerful military in the world. There is no threat to us, so we make one up, and then use the Air Force to kill Pakistani wedding guests. No one is a threat to us on our own soil, so we are planting missiles next to Russia to try and start up the Cold War again.
Again, I'm not a fan of getting entangled in foreign wars unless seriously provoked. That doesn't mean that the army can only use following an actual military attack against US interests, but it also doesn't mean that we should be continuously engaged in some battle somewhere. As far as missile defense goes - it isn't a bad concept. Putin is just saber-rattling - a few ABM sites in Eastern Europe isn't really going to do anything to stop a full-scale Russian nuclear attack - but hey, if it makes for popular TV back home why not rally the voters? Kind of like claiming a country is harboring chemical weapons and has a nuclear program and then invading it.
Your kind make me sick.
Oh good, ad hominims. You disagree with a post I wrote (when it seems like I actually hold several of your views, not that you bothered to find out), and now you've figured out what "kind" of person I am? Try talking to people who don't completely agree with you once in a while - who knows, maybe a few of them will turn out to be human beings...
As bad as 9/11 was - it pales in terms of the imapct of a true conventional military attack. The reason people are so focused on bombs on busses is because we don't have to deal with bombs falling from planes. Just a few large bomb impacts in NYC would wipe out half the skyline and make 9/11 look like a walk in the park.
Every peaceful nation on earth maintains a military of some kind, or close alliances with others who do. It is wrong to use a military to bully other nations, but maintaining a military capable of deterring aggression is fine in my book.
Something I don't support at all - look at my last sentence. Not agreeing with aggressive foreign intervention by the US isn't the same as supporting dismantling of the submarine force.
Hey - I'm all for finding clever ways to avoid killing whales with sonar and all that. However, if it can't be done the banning of sonar isn't necessarily the right solution.
Hey - I'm all for protecting the enviornment. However, it certainly isn't the ONLY consideration in a case like this. I don't think that anything could be worse for the enviornment than hundreds of nuclear ballistic missles, and yet I certainly sleep better knowing that they're present as a deterrant against a nuclear attack.
Yes, we ought to care for the planet we live on, and that includes its ecosystems. It is in our own interest, and it also is generally the right thing to do. However, when the interests of humans collide with the interests of animals, you need to be realistic. A navy that is inadequate for the task of defending US interests encourages an attack upon those interests. Some have implied that submarines are unnecessary in the modern world - nothing could be further from the truth. However, a perfect army is one that never needs to fight a battle. When you have the perfect army then nobody messes with you in the first place. That doesn't mean that we should go around picking fights - but it is not in the interests of the US to fall behind either.
A good idea for general use. However, it won't help you if your server goes down unexpectedly and you need it to boot up quickly - obviously it will have to do a full reboot in that case (with extra delay due to fsck/etc).
Yes and no. Companies shield their owners against economic failure, but they should not be curtains that block owners from prosecution for crime.
We're not talking about locking up anybody who had stock in Samsung. We're talking about locking up the people responsible for the decision to break the law.
Companies serve useful purposes in society. Some guy who invests in some start-up shouldn't have to worry about whether some employee is doing something fishy. However, when leadership at the executive level is breaking the law, people need to pay sufficiently that others are deterred from following in their ways.
Agreed - I grew up as a lego nut. However, when I happen to look at lego sets in the store today I get the impression that they just design some molded plastic toy that could be made as one piece, and then chop it into 10 pieces for somebody to assemble, using the lego tab and slot mechanism.
What's the point? I'm all for having lots of interesting parts beyond just blocks, but let's keep the pieces small and interchangable.
Fair enough - if you're of the opinion that congress should be limited to precisely the roles spelled out in Article I, then I suppose murder ought not to be against federal law (along with kidnapping and about 95% of the other laws on the books). You could argue that any use of federal or state money to fund abortions could fall under the jurisdiction of the 5th ammendment (a deprivation of life/liberty/property). I don't believe the 5th ammendment on its own would otherwise give grounds to make murder illegal at the federal level.
However, to be consistent you really need to accept one or the other. If federal government makes it illegal to murder somebody, then they need to define what murder is, and if the definition uses words like "person" then you need to define what a person is. The problem is that with modern medicine and biology we're stretching common words like that all the time. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before we have apes walking around with human brains, and the first time one gets hit by a car you have a question of how to charge the driver.
Keep in mind the dispute over abortion comes down to whether unborn children are considered humans with civil rights. A libertarian opposed to abortion isn't really any more inconsistent than a libertarian opposed to lynchings. Libertarians aren't anarchists - they do believe that it is the proper purpose of government to establish and enforce criminal law. Murder clearly ought to be illegal, so the question becomes whether stuff like abortion, euthenasia, assisted-suicide, etc is murder.
At least if they had used Microsoft Windows internally, they would have been free of any political considerations for license compliance.
Yeah - go ahead and try to distribute thousands of voting machines containing Windows without a license and see what happens.
If you want to distribute software, you need a license. You might pay money for it, or you might barter in some other way (such as providing source for all modifications to the software).
If anything the GPL grants far more freedom to distribute software than the Windows license does. Under the windows license you can't distribute the software at all without making all kinds of deals with Microsoft (for a pretty penny I'm sure) - the best you could do without cutting a deal is to buy a ton of retail licenses and install them on each machine. You can't even mass-duplicate paid-for windows installs without going through some hoops (OEM agreement, volume license, etc).
A good whiff of concentrated ammonia will knock you over - or at least it will wake you up!:)
Ammonia is a gas. Household ammonia is a fairly dilute solution of ammonium hydroxide in water - maybe a few percent at most. You can get ammonia up to a concentration of 35% or so before it hits the solubility limit. The tank most likely contains pure ammonia gas.
If a tank of ammonia gas leaks you're going to notice it from quite a distance - it smells just like the stuff under your sink but about 1000X stronger. If you get a whiff and get away from it you'll probably be fine. If it just bursts and releases a big cloud near somebody they could be in trouble.
Then again, assuming that 40 pound hypothetical piece even contained some ammonia all the way to earth it isn't going to hold that much unless it was liquified under pressure - and even then it would disperse pretty quickly in the air. A really unlucky soul might get blinded or something, but I wouldn't think that it would be likely to kill somebody.
I have some expereince with dealing with huge bills. In my case the insurance has been very reasonable to deal with (they must have paid close to $100k at this point for a family member), but doctors and hospitals have been horrible.
There should be a simple law that states that hospitals:
1. Must offer one price quoted in advance for a procedure (taking into account possible complications). 2. Must have a catalog of prices for any ad-hoc needs - given to patients in advance whether they ask for it or not. 3. Must clearly discuss cost in advance of any non-emergency service. 4. Must be considered the single point of contact for all financial transactions associated with a service. They can choose to consider doctors independant contractors, but that is a subcontracting arrangement that the patient is not a party to.
#4 is the reeal big one. A hospital is either covered or not. None of this "The hospital is covered, but the nurse who checks you in submits their own bill, as does each of the 14 people in the OR and the guy who cleans the floor after you leave." That amounts to undisclosed charges after the fact.
I hate the idea of socialized medicine, but I consider sending a check to the DNC everytime I have to deconvolute a hospital bill.
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the thread started off talking about using another player instead of their own internal player, so how specifically thier own player fails for live tv I'm not sure
The thread started off with this.
Their issue was that mythtv didn't really handle external video well. I agreed and wished that external video was handled seamlessly as if it were just a regular TV show (ie it showed up in the regular program list and didn't need a separate plugin with a separate interface).
Are you trying to transcode it inside of or outside of myth?
Outside.
If you are talking about limited transcoding ability of myth's built in transcoders, I'll definitely agree with you there.
Yup - that would be why I'm using an external transcoder.
The nice thing, however, is that you can let any program do the transcoding.
Yup - as long as you don't mind the video not actually playing back correctly, which brings me back to my complaint. :)
If you can supply a working command line that will transcode MPEG-2 with an AC3 audio stream down to 720x480 or thereabouts while keeping the 5.1 AC3 audio track intact such that it can play back as a regular TV program and work with commercial detection, I'm all ears. I can transcode the files and play them with mplayer just fine (including with mythvideo calling mplayer). I just can't play them in the program guide, which means I can't use commercial flagging and I lose all those wonderful features myth has for organizing my shows and displaying metadata from the program guide.
Trust me - I didn't start using mythtv last week. The whole reason I want to downsample the HD (besides saving space) is that my EPIA M10000-based diskless frontend can't playback hi-def video, but it handles the 5.1 AC3 audio just fine via SPDIF. I could care less about the high-def output (and I'd already be more at DVD-quality than off-the-air quality even with the downsampling), but I do appreciate true 5.1 sound.
Again, I'm not exactly volunteering to rewrite all of mythtv and I've contributed all of one patch to the mythtv source, so I don't expect all the devs to cater to my every wish. However, that doesn't mean that I can't see the room for improvement either. If the devs don't have the same itch as I do, fine - they can work on what suits them - I'm getting far more than I paid for, right? :)
Knowing how well voice recognition actually works, I can see this robot giving chase to an astronaut desperately trying to evade being "grappled" shouting commands to halt as the helpful robot reaches out for the air hose.
I'm talking about better codec support for live TV. :)
Don't get me wrong - I think MythTV is wonderful, which is why I use it. But there are areas where it could use improvement. I won't be overly critical, since I'm not exactly volunteering to rewrite the whole thing.
I agree that a seektable probably wouldn't hurt with stuff like cutlists. So, implement the seektable for foreign media - you import a foreign media file into myth and it builds a seektable. That isn't a reason not to support foreign media - just one more thing to implement when you do support it.
As far as HD video formats - couldn't agree more with what you said, but I'm not sure how it is relevant. My HD card records the ATSC MPEG-2 stream off the air - often with AC3 5.1 audio. I'd like to turn that into an mpeg-2 or mpeg-4 lower-resolution video stream with the AC3 5.1 audio remaining intact. That is very hit-and-miss in my experience. Myth is very fussy with the video format (particular with keybrame spacing). It also doesn't help that most of the transcoding tools don't handle the AC3 well either - you can run into problems with re-interleaving the audio into the container.
Again, mythtv is wonderful. However, just a few tweaks would make it better. If nothing else the smaller change of indexing frame numbers rather than keyframe numbers in the seektable would probably help (the devs have discussed this very change - the change is very simple but the pain would be for those upgrading their databases as you'd need to update all the frame numbers). I completely sympathize that these changes aren't easy to make.
Ok, the post I replied to pointed out that mythtv didn't handle TV shows obtained from sources other than off-the-air well. I agreed.
Sure, you can play them via mythvideo - but this is a kludgy interface. Fast-forward/rewind don't work well. Cutlists and commercial skip don't work at all. The shows aren't organized in the main program list, there is no autoexpire, etc. Basically mythvideo is just a browser and then it can spawn an external player (or use its more limited internal player).
What I'd like is for a media file off the internet to look just like a show I recorded an hour ago. If I have a media file with commercials in it, I'd like to be able to flag them. I'd like to do that even if myth didn't record that media file.
Try sticking a random avi in your mythtv video directory. There are tools to try to put it into the regular program list, but the file probably won't seek correctly. I can't tell you how much trouble I've had just trying to transcode myth-recorded shows without using mythtranscode (in my case I want to transcode hi-def to standard-def while preserving the AC3 audio stream).
How do you use an external player for watching TV (with commerical skip, etc)? Everybody here is talking about mythvideo - I was talking about the main interface used for TV.
I'd lke to be able to watch a TV show as if it were recorded by myth, even thought it wasn't recorded by myth. I don't want some plugin that doesn't support 90% of the mythtv feature set. Sure, I use mythtvideo because I have to - not because I want to... :)
No it isn't.
MythVideo - which is a mythtv plugin - is a frontend to mplayer for external files.
You can't integrate external video files into mythtv proper (the interface where you can easily fast-forward, rewind (not skip), and do editing/cutlists/commercial-flagging/etc). That is the component that could be improved by allowing the use of external video.
I was talking about using an external player WITHOUT using mythvideo.
The whole point is that external video files aren't handled well by mythtv. At best you can use mythvideo which is very stripped down compared to the interface used to play recorded TV shows. For example, you can't set up a cutlist or remove commercials using mythvideo.
Can you demonstrate that there can be any other kind of universe at all? :)
We can't even explain why physical constants are what they are - so how could we know if it is even possible for them to be different? Sure, there is always complete fantasy - but that isn't science.
Science isn't any proposed explanation that doesn't use terms often associated with theology. Science is proposing a hypothesis and then testing it. If you can't even propose a way to test a hypothesis then it isn't science. Test proposals that are fantastic in nature also don't count.
"Well, maybe one day we'll figure out how to travel to other universes and observe them." Sure, maybe we will. But then again, maybe one day we'll figure out how to travel to heaven and back and observe a supreme being - does that make theology a science? Speculation doesn't become science by virtue of sounding scientific. Nor does it become science just because the proponent doesn't claim absolute certainty - one could make an essentially religious statement without professing to be certain about it.
But what about Joe Sixpack seeing the menu item called VIM and assuming that anything that goes wrong is a problem with vi/vim? Or Mysql, or mythtv, or any of 3000 other projects.
Pretty soon you'd log into a linux system (err, make that a "catfish" system) and you wouldn't even be able to use it - every executable and menu item on the system would have some cryptic codename to avoid infringing trademark. Or maybe you'd have 47 codenames with "word processor" next to them.
Agreed - it would be nice if foreign media could be seamlessly integrated into the MythTV interface. Mythvideo is very primitive by comparison (the interface used for random avi/ogg/mpg files/etc).
One issue is that mythtv implemented their own media player, which means that only a few codecs are supported and there are very strict limitations on the video stream. For example, if keyframes aren't spaced completely uniformly the seektable breaks and any attempt to seek causes all kinds of problems. I think a better approach would be to use some other media player as the actual playback method and have myth focus on the value-adds like indexing the content, maintaining cutlists, GUI, etc. Mythtv would basically be a front-end to something like xine/mplayer. Why re-invent the wheel?
Case in point - I knew a guy pursing a PhD in the physical sciences who decided to take some courses on the side from the university's prestigious business school (tuition was waived but he couldn't get an actual degree). In his first week of class the professor said that in their program they would be doing serious math and that calculus would be used regularly. It turns out that this meant calculating derivatives of polynomials - which apparently had half the business majors turning white. Suffice it to say my friend was amused.
I'm sure there are individuals with exceptional math skills in the business-oriented professions, but in my experience what rates as "complicated math" in those fields amounts to anything more than the first 8 weeks of a primary school Algebra I course.
Additionally, IR pulses aimed at various parts of the screen could encode information such as the theater, room number, and date/timestamp. That would aid stopping the practice greatly.
I don't have a major problem with banning the use of recording devices in theaters (not the mere possession of cellphones/etc). However, this should really be subject to a fine - not a prison and a felony conviction. The intent should be to prevent wanton distibution of copyrighted works - not to make examples out of people whose clear intent was something innocuous.
Not entirely. I'll be the first to go on the record to say that strong conventional armies won't stop terrorist attacks. Now, it will deter nations from heavily funding terrorist activities - at least on an official level, lest they be blamed for the actions of a group they sponsor as happened in Afganistan.
Tanks won't help much in the war on terror - but that isn't the only kind of war the US faces. Tanks will be of tremendous help in a conventional war. Now, the US certainly doesn't face much threat there - but that is only because we have all those tanks/jets/ships/etc.
This is kind of like the old dilema faced by IT admins - if everything is working nobody notices. Why do we need to pay for all this backup hardware - we've never lost data! Well, perhaps the reason the company has never lost data is because of all that backup hardware.
Sure, the US could afford to save some money on the military, but the easiest way to start doing that is to stop deploying it 365 days a year on everybody else's soil.
"When you have the perfect army then nobody messes with you in the first place..." Umm, really? We're fighting several wars at the moment with our perfect army, and losing them....
I don't think any of those people really messed with the US in the first place - so the big army worked. And yes - if you overextend your perfect army you are going to not do so well, and when you intentionally start wars you can't win you're going to suffer defeat. This will in fact embolden others to challenge you on the world stage, which defeats the whole point of having a big army.
"That doesn't mean that we should go around picking fights.." Except that that's been our entire foreign policy for the last 8 years...
When did I say that it wasn't? My post was intended as a critique of US policy as much as a support for certain aspects of it.
"..but it is not in the interests of the US to fall behind either" Fall behind who? We currently have the most powerful military in the world. There is no threat to us, so we make one up, and then use the Air Force to kill Pakistani wedding guests. No one is a threat to us on our own soil, so we are planting missiles next to Russia to try and start up the Cold War again.
Again, I'm not a fan of getting entangled in foreign wars unless seriously provoked. That doesn't mean that the army can only use following an actual military attack against US interests, but it also doesn't mean that we should be continuously engaged in some battle somewhere. As far as missile defense goes - it isn't a bad concept. Putin is just saber-rattling - a few ABM sites in Eastern Europe isn't really going to do anything to stop a full-scale Russian nuclear attack - but hey, if it makes for popular TV back home why not rally the voters? Kind of like claiming a country is harboring chemical weapons and has a nuclear program and then invading it.
Your kind make me sick.
Oh good, ad hominims. You disagree with a post I wrote (when it seems like I actually hold several of your views, not that you bothered to find out), and now you've figured out what "kind" of person I am? Try talking to people who don't completely agree with you once in a while - who knows, maybe a few of them will turn out to be human beings...
As bad as 9/11 was - it pales in terms of the imapct of a true conventional military attack. The reason people are so focused on bombs on busses is because we don't have to deal with bombs falling from planes. Just a few large bomb impacts in NYC would wipe out half the skyline and make 9/11 look like a walk in the park.
Every peaceful nation on earth maintains a military of some kind, or close alliances with others who do. It is wrong to use a military to bully other nations, but maintaining a military capable of deterring aggression is fine in my book.
Something I don't support at all - look at my last sentence. Not agreeing with aggressive foreign intervention by the US isn't the same as supporting dismantling of the submarine force.
Hey - I'm all for finding clever ways to avoid killing whales with sonar and all that. However, if it can't be done the banning of sonar isn't necessarily the right solution.
Hey - I'm all for protecting the enviornment. However, it certainly isn't the ONLY consideration in a case like this. I don't think that anything could be worse for the enviornment than hundreds of nuclear ballistic missles, and yet I certainly sleep better knowing that they're present as a deterrant against a nuclear attack.
Yes, we ought to care for the planet we live on, and that includes its ecosystems. It is in our own interest, and it also is generally the right thing to do. However, when the interests of humans collide with the interests of animals, you need to be realistic. A navy that is inadequate for the task of defending US interests encourages an attack upon those interests. Some have implied that submarines are unnecessary in the modern world - nothing could be further from the truth. However, a perfect army is one that never needs to fight a battle. When you have the perfect army then nobody messes with you in the first place. That doesn't mean that we should go around picking fights - but it is not in the interests of the US to fall behind either.
A good idea for general use. However, it won't help you if your server goes down unexpectedly and you need it to boot up quickly - obviously it will have to do a full reboot in that case (with extra delay due to fsck/etc).
Yes and no. Companies shield their owners against economic failure, but they should not be curtains that block owners from prosecution for crime.
We're not talking about locking up anybody who had stock in Samsung. We're talking about locking up the people responsible for the decision to break the law.
Companies serve useful purposes in society. Some guy who invests in some start-up shouldn't have to worry about whether some employee is doing something fishy. However, when leadership at the executive level is breaking the law, people need to pay sufficiently that others are deterred from following in their ways.
Agreed - I grew up as a lego nut. However, when I happen to look at lego sets in the store today I get the impression that they just design some molded plastic toy that could be made as one piece, and then chop it into 10 pieces for somebody to assemble, using the lego tab and slot mechanism.
What's the point? I'm all for having lots of interesting parts beyond just blocks, but let's keep the pieces small and interchangable.
Fair enough - if you're of the opinion that congress should be limited to precisely the roles spelled out in Article I, then I suppose murder ought not to be against federal law (along with kidnapping and about 95% of the other laws on the books). You could argue that any use of federal or state money to fund abortions could fall under the jurisdiction of the 5th ammendment (a deprivation of life/liberty/property). I don't believe the 5th ammendment on its own would otherwise give grounds to make murder illegal at the federal level.
However, to be consistent you really need to accept one or the other. If federal government makes it illegal to murder somebody, then they need to define what murder is, and if the definition uses words like "person" then you need to define what a person is. The problem is that with modern medicine and biology we're stretching common words like that all the time. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before we have apes walking around with human brains, and the first time one gets hit by a car you have a question of how to charge the driver.
Keep in mind the dispute over abortion comes down to whether unborn children are considered humans with civil rights. A libertarian opposed to abortion isn't really any more inconsistent than a libertarian opposed to lynchings. Libertarians aren't anarchists - they do believe that it is the proper purpose of government to establish and enforce criminal law. Murder clearly ought to be illegal, so the question becomes whether stuff like abortion, euthenasia, assisted-suicide, etc is murder.
At least if they had used Microsoft Windows internally, they would have been free of any political considerations for license compliance.
Yeah - go ahead and try to distribute thousands of voting machines containing Windows without a license and see what happens.
If you want to distribute software, you need a license. You might pay money for it, or you might barter in some other way (such as providing source for all modifications to the software).
If anything the GPL grants far more freedom to distribute software than the Windows license does. Under the windows license you can't distribute the software at all without making all kinds of deals with Microsoft (for a pretty penny I'm sure) - the best you could do without cutting a deal is to buy a ton of retail licenses and install them on each machine. You can't even mass-duplicate paid-for windows installs without going through some hoops (OEM agreement, volume license, etc).
A good whiff of concentrated ammonia will knock you over - or at least it will wake you up! :)
Ammonia is a gas. Household ammonia is a fairly dilute solution of ammonium hydroxide in water - maybe a few percent at most. You can get ammonia up to a concentration of 35% or so before it hits the solubility limit. The tank most likely contains pure ammonia gas.
If a tank of ammonia gas leaks you're going to notice it from quite a distance - it smells just like the stuff under your sink but about 1000X stronger. If you get a whiff and get away from it you'll probably be fine. If it just bursts and releases a big cloud near somebody they could be in trouble.
Then again, assuming that 40 pound hypothetical piece even contained some ammonia all the way to earth it isn't going to hold that much unless it was liquified under pressure - and even then it would disperse pretty quickly in the air. A really unlucky soul might get blinded or something, but I wouldn't think that it would be likely to kill somebody.
I have some expereince with dealing with huge bills. In my case the insurance has been very reasonable to deal with (they must have paid close to $100k at this point for a family member), but doctors and hospitals have been horrible.
There should be a simple law that states that hospitals:
1. Must offer one price quoted in advance for a procedure (taking into account possible complications).
2. Must have a catalog of prices for any ad-hoc needs - given to patients in advance whether they ask for it or not.
3. Must clearly discuss cost in advance of any non-emergency service.
4. Must be considered the single point of contact for all financial transactions associated with a service. They can choose to consider doctors independant contractors, but that is a subcontracting arrangement that the patient is not a party to.
#4 is the reeal big one. A hospital is either covered or not. None of this "The hospital is covered, but the nurse who checks you in submits their own bill, as does each of the 14 people in the OR and the guy who cleans the floor after you leave." That amounts to undisclosed charges after the fact.
I hate the idea of socialized medicine, but I consider sending a check to the DNC everytime I have to deconvolute a hospital bill.