That's not much of a parallel unless Joe and Jane Consumer somehow gain the ability to easily and inexpensively manufacture their own duplicate game cards using technology readily available on any PC. Which they don't, so your analogy fails.
...as vegtables (sic) are far lower in energy than meat and meat can be farmed in a much smaller area.
Yeah, maybe if you don't feed it. Using crops such as corn and soy for cattle feedstocks results in considerably less energy density and vastly less resource efficiency than either feeding those same stocks to humans directly (where applicable) or using the land to plant other human-edible crops.
That's not even considering the land required for the cattle themselves, or the other environmental impacts of cattle ranching (methane production, deforestation, etc.).
I'm sorry, do you have a hard time parsing pronouns in general, or only in the context of threaded discussions? He was responding to a claim that "the Democratic one is just as bad," which itself was a reply to a criticism of the Republican voter survey. How is asking for a link to the allegedly just-as-bad Democratic survey a "strawman argument"?
...Especially when you consider the generally excellent history of security and reliability — and, of course, auditability — in their ATM product line. When they so choose, they seem to be capable of producing robust hardware and software to meet a broadly similar set of design goals. So why should we believe that their history of problems producing accurate and dependable voting machines is the result of mere incompetence?
Shall we talk about "bullshit"? Let's start with your comment, a charming blend of distortion and fabrication.
Issuing IOUs to state employees during budget crises is not standard procedure in California nor, to my knowledge, any other state. The last time IOUs were issued to state workers in California was when Pete Wilson (another Republican governor) attempted it in 1992, when the state ran out of cash during protracted budget negotiations — something controller Chiang assures us will not happen until at least the end of September.
Banks refused to accept the IOUs, and public employees were finally driven to take legal action. The state was ultimately forced to come to a settlement with workers in 1996, after a 1995 ruling by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. found that the state's IOUs were not "cash or its equivalent" and violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. California has never since issued IOUs as pay.
They have released the open source code in Darwin and kept releasing it with every new release of OS X. They have added their own open source components, to the point where the majority of the traditional userland in OS X, as well as many major new components like launchd, are open source.
Of course, the vast majority of those incompatibilities are due to inconsistencies in implementation of the DOM — which the book under review explicitly chooses not to address. Take the DOM out of the picture, and the core JavaScript language is fairly consistent across all modern browser implementations. In the context of the language as covered in this book, a single browser is probably a pretty safe requirement.
You're assuming, as it seems does Wikipedia, that mergers and "synthesis" should be the end goals of any useful repository of information. I'm not so sure I always want "the wisdom of the crowd" to do that for me. Given a contentious subject (or, for that matter, a disagreement between a recognized authority and an opinionated amateur) I'd rather have multiple viewpoints fully represented than a homogenized "neutral" synthesis in which it's difficult to determine where one point of view ends and another begins, or who derived the synthesis. Given conflicting sources of information, I'm more than capable of performing my own synthesis — and at least I know where my own biases lie.
My apologies — I hadn't come across IE's "dynsrc" extension to the IMG tag before (or perhaps had merely forgotten it), but you're correct that it adds support for inline embedded video files. (In IE. If the user enables it in Internet Options.)
I'm afraid the rest of your argument remains fairly confusing/ambiguous, however, so I hope you'll forgive me if I mistook its point to be the exact opposite of the one you'd intended. Perhaps you can clarify for me: are you not claiming that the existence of IE's proprietary IMG tag extension (little-used, to my knowledge, nor ever imitated in another browser) obviates the need for a standardized media tag? And what do codecs have to do with anything? I'd say there's plenty of room for multiple codecs, proprietary or otherwise, in the online video arena; it's the proliferation of competing container formats and associated media players that makes such a mess of things. Also, what does it mean, in this context, to give the W3C "a pass"? What are you giving them a pass on? Their failure to define a media tag earlier? Their failure to resolve much of anything important with the HTML5 media tag? Something else?
What, exactly, does XMLHTTPRequest have to do with MSIE? It's implemented entirely on the server side. Full credit to Microsoft for inventing this, but the fact that they did has exactly nothing to do with Internet Explorer.
Sorry, but you're only demonstrating your complete ignorance of both HTML and digital video.
<Img> tags have never displayed video, and never will — for that, you need an <object> or <embed> tag in order to embed a media player, which in turn is responsible for displaying the video itself. Of course, the media player needs to be downloaded and/or installed separately from the browser.
But which media player? Depends on the container format of the video file. The only pretty much universally-supported container is the now-ancient MPG file format, but nobody in their right mind wants to distribute video as MPG anymore, as the files are huge and of poor visual quality. The big two container formats are MOV and AVI/WMV, each of which is best supported by its own respective media player, QuickTime or Windows Media Player (although savvy users of either can find third-party extensions to enable support for the rival format). DivX is nice enough, but requires its own player plugin to enable streaming. Other options are similarly encumbered. End result: no matter what format you choose, you effectively lock out something like 30%-60% of your potential audience.
Or, you can avoid the whole mess, encode as FLV, and have multi-platform, multi-browser support — anywhere Flash 6 or higher is installed; in the neighborhood of 98% penetration, if you believe Adobe's statistics. (I can personally confirm numbers in the neighborhood of 96% on the commercial site I maintain.)
HTML5's <media> tag doesn't resolve this situation, either, AFAIK — it just eliminates the <object>/<embed> issue and makes the whole mess accessible via the DOM (both welcome features in their own right).
..."A few thousand K?" As in a few thousand kilobytes — AKA, a few megabytes? Is "a few" more or less than five?:P
In any case, while dialup makes getting botted orders of magnitude more painful for the affected party, their effectiveness as a bot is practically nil compared to the havoc a bot can wreak on a broadband connection. I think the GP's general point still stands.
Close, but Edison actually championed a low-voltage DC system. The series of stunts you mention, in which he used AC current to electrocute elephants, was part of a campaign to discredit Tesla and Westinghouse's AC distribution system by playing up the lethal potential (heh) of high-voltage AC.
...What, you though Microsoft invented FUD? (Too bad Edison didn't think to patent it.)
...I know I'm going to regret this. But I have to ask, given that you insist so adamantly upon your correctness.
You wrote, "It's also the people who are guilty of stealing who are the loudest to laud DRM's pratfalls."
What exactly did you mean by that? My initial (and more charitable) speculation was that you intended to suggest that those who habitually engage in the theft and piracy of DRM-restricted works are naturally the most vocal when it comes to pointing out the negative consequences of DRM — a reasonable claim, I think — and that you simply chose the wrong words to convey your meaning.
I say "speculation", of course, because the actual words you employed mean almost exactly the opposite — to paraphrase, substituting their definitions: that those who steal are the loudest to praise DRM when it fails clumsily. That's such a patently silly claim that I can only assume you must have meant to say something else, and struggle to guess what it might have been.
And yet, you insist that you spoke correctly, to the point of quoting back the definitions of your words (without replacing them in context, of course) and claiming that they were exactly what you meant.
So please, tell me, which is it? Did you merely make a verbal gaffe, or an outright laughable assertion? I am honestly curious as to your original intent.
Slashdot Mirror
A game which features, among other occult references and plot devices, the Spear of Destiny doesn't strike you as "mystical"?
Maybe you're confusing Wolfenstein with Battlefield 1942.
That's not much of a parallel unless Joe and Jane Consumer somehow gain the ability to easily and inexpensively manufacture their own duplicate game cards using technology readily available on any PC. Which they don't, so your analogy fails.
Educated, moral, armed: pick two.
...as vegtables (sic) are far lower in energy than meat and meat can be farmed in a much smaller area.
Yeah, maybe if you don't feed it. Using crops such as corn and soy for cattle feedstocks results in considerably less energy density and vastly less resource efficiency than either feeding those same stocks to humans directly (where applicable) or using the land to plant other human-edible crops.
That's not even considering the land required for the cattle themselves, or the other environmental impacts of cattle ranching (methane production, deforestation, etc.).
(Granted, I'd be curious to see a link to the Republican survey, too, but the absence of one hardly invalidates the question.)
It's almost as if someone wanted to help me prove my point... Thanks, anonymous benefactor!
I'm sorry, do you have a hard time parsing pronouns in general, or only in the context of threaded discussions? He was responding to a claim that "the Democratic one is just as bad," which itself was a reply to a criticism of the Republican voter survey. How is asking for a link to the allegedly just-as-bad Democratic survey a "strawman argument"?
...Especially when you consider the generally excellent history of security and reliability — and, of course, auditability — in their ATM product line. When they so choose, they seem to be capable of producing robust hardware and software to meet a broadly similar set of design goals. So why should we believe that their history of problems producing accurate and dependable voting machines is the result of mere incompetence?
Wow, the Republican TrollMods are out in force today.
Shall we talk about "bullshit"? Let's start with your comment, a charming blend of distortion and fabrication.
Issuing IOUs to state employees during budget crises is not standard procedure in California nor, to my knowledge, any other state. The last time IOUs were issued to state workers in California was when Pete Wilson (another Republican governor) attempted it in 1992, when the state ran out of cash during protracted budget negotiations — something controller Chiang assures us will not happen until at least the end of September.
Banks refused to accept the IOUs, and public employees were finally driven to take legal action. The state was ultimately forced to come to a settlement with workers in 1996, after a 1995 ruling by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. found that the state's IOUs were not "cash or its equivalent" and violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. California has never since issued IOUs as pay.
DIVs have no intrinsic semantic meaning, true.
They do support this nifty ID attribute, though, which allows you to assign them whatever semantic meaning you please.
And then style them accordingly.
Right. That strong commitment to open source no doubt accounts for OpenDarwin's continued existence.
"God is dead."
-3D Realms, with apologies to Nietszche
Of course, the vast majority of those incompatibilities are due to inconsistencies in implementation of the DOM — which the book under review explicitly chooses not to address. Take the DOM out of the picture, and the core JavaScript language is fairly consistent across all modern browser implementations. In the context of the language as covered in this book, a single browser is probably a pretty safe requirement.
You're assuming, as it seems does Wikipedia, that mergers and "synthesis" should be the end goals of any useful repository of information. I'm not so sure I always want "the wisdom of the crowd" to do that for me. Given a contentious subject (or, for that matter, a disagreement between a recognized authority and an opinionated amateur) I'd rather have multiple viewpoints fully represented than a homogenized "neutral" synthesis in which it's difficult to determine where one point of view ends and another begins, or who derived the synthesis. Given conflicting sources of information, I'm more than capable of performing my own synthesis — and at least I know where my own biases lie.
Wait, you're seriously setting up CNN as a counter-example to Fox's conservative bias?
My apologies — I hadn't come across IE's "dynsrc" extension to the IMG tag before (or perhaps had merely forgotten it), but you're correct that it adds support for inline embedded video files. (In IE. If the user enables it in Internet Options.)
I'm afraid the rest of your argument remains fairly confusing/ambiguous, however, so I hope you'll forgive me if I mistook its point to be the exact opposite of the one you'd intended. Perhaps you can clarify for me: are you not claiming that the existence of IE's proprietary IMG tag extension (little-used, to my knowledge, nor ever imitated in another browser) obviates the need for a standardized media tag? And what do codecs have to do with anything? I'd say there's plenty of room for multiple codecs, proprietary or otherwise, in the online video arena; it's the proliferation of competing container formats and associated media players that makes such a mess of things. Also, what does it mean, in this context, to give the W3C "a pass"? What are you giving them a pass on? Their failure to define a media tag earlier? Their failure to resolve much of anything important with the HTML5 media tag? Something else?
What the hell are you talking about?
Sorry, but you're only demonstrating your complete ignorance of both HTML and digital video.
<Img> tags have never displayed video, and never will — for that, you need an <object> or <embed> tag in order to embed a media player, which in turn is responsible for displaying the video itself. Of course, the media player needs to be downloaded and/or installed separately from the browser.
But which media player? Depends on the container format of the video file. The only pretty much universally-supported container is the now-ancient MPG file format, but nobody in their right mind wants to distribute video as MPG anymore, as the files are huge and of poor visual quality. The big two container formats are MOV and AVI/WMV, each of which is best supported by its own respective media player, QuickTime or Windows Media Player (although savvy users of either can find third-party extensions to enable support for the rival format). DivX is nice enough, but requires its own player plugin to enable streaming. Other options are similarly encumbered. End result: no matter what format you choose, you effectively lock out something like 30%-60% of your potential audience.
Or, you can avoid the whole mess, encode as FLV, and have multi-platform, multi-browser support — anywhere Flash 6 or higher is installed; in the neighborhood of 98% penetration, if you believe Adobe's statistics. (I can personally confirm numbers in the neighborhood of 96% on the commercial site I maintain.)
HTML5's <media> tag doesn't resolve this situation, either, AFAIK — it just eliminates the <object>/<embed> issue and makes the whole mess accessible via the DOM (both welcome features in their own right).
..."A few thousand K?" As in a few thousand kilobytes — AKA, a few megabytes? Is "a few" more or less than five? :P
In any case, while dialup makes getting botted orders of magnitude more painful for the affected party, their effectiveness as a bot is practically nil compared to the havoc a bot can wreak on a broadband connection. I think the GP's general point still stands.
Close, but Edison actually championed a low-voltage DC system. The series of stunts you mention, in which he used AC current to electrocute elephants, was part of a campaign to discredit Tesla and Westinghouse's AC distribution system by playing up the lethal potential (heh) of high-voltage AC.
...What, you though Microsoft invented FUD? (Too bad Edison didn't think to patent it.)
Indeed. I have a Swedish co-worker, so I have been privy to similar exchanges.
You may be giving us Americans a little too much credit for geographical savvy.
More likely scenario: "Wait, what? What does wiretapping have to do with yodeling or chocolate?"
...I know I'm going to regret this. But I have to ask, given that you insist so adamantly upon your correctness.
You wrote, "It's also the people who are guilty of stealing who are the loudest to laud DRM's pratfalls."
What exactly did you mean by that? My initial (and more charitable) speculation was that you intended to suggest that those who habitually engage in the theft and piracy of DRM-restricted works are naturally the most vocal when it comes to pointing out the negative consequences of DRM — a reasonable claim, I think — and that you simply chose the wrong words to convey your meaning.
I say "speculation", of course, because the actual words you employed mean almost exactly the opposite — to paraphrase, substituting their definitions: that those who steal are the loudest to praise DRM when it fails clumsily. That's such a patently silly claim that I can only assume you must have meant to say something else, and struggle to guess what it might have been.
And yet, you insist that you spoke correctly, to the point of quoting back the definitions of your words (without replacing them in context, of course) and claiming that they were exactly what you meant.
So please, tell me, which is it? Did you merely make a verbal gaffe, or an outright laughable assertion? I am honestly curious as to your original intent.
Sweet. I seem to have acquired my very own personal troll mod.
Lots of luck whittling down 5+ years of "Excellent" karma, fella. See you in meta-moderation.