And, here is the contradiction: if gun advocates really think that a well armed populace can hold off the US military, then they also should think we ought to get out of Iraq NOW.
Well, I believe both things.
So no contradiction here.
We'll never be able to subdue a well armed insurgency, right?
I don't think we'll be successful, no, but other people may have a different view. I don't agree with their assessment of the situation in Iraq, I think it's rather delusional, but I don't think that disqualifies them from believing in gun ownership rights.
The notion that a gun advocate thinks that a government can never defeat an armed populace is ridiculous, a pure strawman. The point is you have to fight, and if you fight you may win, or you may lose. And even if your side wins, you may die in the process! But the whole point is that you have to fight, and if you lack the means to fight then you've lost before you've begun.
Personally I think that in the case of an American revolution, we'd be able to acquire those "means" even if guns were banned. But having the large amount of legal weapons in the country today certainly gives us a huge leg up, just like the fact that every household in Iraq has at least one AK-47 helped the insurgency there.
It's not religious, it's based on the facts that the ONLY people pushing for war with Iraq were the neo-cons, and Gore isn't one and doesn't listen to them. Were it not for Cheney's, Rumsfeld's, and Wolfowitz's positions in the administration, Iraq would have never happened. Everyone who wasn't a neocon in the administration was surprised when they started talking about it.
You want me to trust you? You want to prove that your views aren't useless? You want me to think "maybe they are right", "they" meaning "you" in this case? Okay then, tell me WHO in a Gore Presidency was going to push for an invasion of Iraq. It's wouldn't be the director of the CIA, it wouldn't be the National Security Council. WHO was going to stump for it? You have no idea at all, do you?
Lots of people know more than me, I know it, and I listen to them and thus become more knowledgeable. That's how you do it.
But morons who think anybody but the neo-cons would have invaded Iraq after Afghanistan, or who think invading Iraq wasn't a retarded idea to begin with, aren't among them. It's YOU who needs to open your ears and start listening to what knowledgeable people who know far more than you think. You could do worse than to start with Richard Clarke.
'our Office recently [in 2001] concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.
I thought the whole constitution had no application to the whole government?
After all, isn't it just a scrap of paper?
Yeah well that seems to be the basic theory they're working under, and unfortunately as long as the executive branch can manage to keep itself out of the court room that theory will be untested.
Though fortunately should this theory of the 4th Amendment not applying even come before a court, it would get shit-canned faster than you can say "judicial review".
See, here's the basic problem: Bush can talk however he wants about how he's the "decider", but ultimately he can only do what Congress approves. There'd be no DHS, there'd be no Iraq war, hell there'd be no Secret Service or FBI without the approval of Congress in the form of the law that created and funded those organizations. And each of those bodies can only do the things within their purview, and that purview is again decided by Congress. The President only decides the "how" within those guidelines. Thus, any use of the military as a domestic police force would require the approval of Congress in the form of a law. And the 4th Amendment certainly applies to Congress! So any law they passed which authorized the military to arrest people without respecting their 4th Amendment rights would be Unconstitutional, and thus the authority under which the military made the arrests invalid.
This would shake out in about 5 minutes after the Court heard the arguments from both sides. In general, Bush's retarded Constitutional theories haven't held up very well when they've actually been aired in court. For example those kangaroo court military tribunals they come up with first, one of the detainees managed to get a day in a real court and by the end of the day the tribunals were ruled illegal. They could only continue once they met the judge's demands, and Bush made the necessary changes to provide the accused with more rights. Basically, when push comes to shove, Bush knows he's full of shit and has to bow to the power of law. Unfortunately, getting that day in court can be tough. See for example the case of domestic wiretaps, which would clearly be found Unconstitutional and in violation of existing laws, but nobody has been able to sue the government over it and thus get a judicial ruling on the matter because nobody knows that they were spied on, so nobody has standing to sue the government.
Regime change was the official policy of the Clinton Administration.
And ya might want to read this. Gore's statements about Iraq in the wake of 9/11. The money shot: "As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table".
Oh please. And stopping genocide in Darfur, and wherever it occurs, is the official policy of the U.N. There's a big difference between an official policy of "regime change" and devoting a huge portion of your military to invading. Bush has said the nuclear option is "on the table for" Iran. Is he doing it any time soon? Some money shot, there's no action.
The only people who were seriously talking about invading Iraq were the high-up neocons, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. Everyone else in the government apparatus had no reason to invade. Those guys though were talking about invading immediately after 9/11, as if it was the only pretense they needed. Before 9/11, even the Bush administration was giving speeches about how harmless and contained Iraq was. And don't tell me that the intelligence changed, or that other countries agreed they were a threat, because all the key intel to support the war was from before 2001, and the only intel the other countries had to judge was what we showed them, which was only the stuff that sounded good and not what made it sound sketchy. Ask Colin Powell.
If Gore was president, we would almost certainly be in Afghanistan, but it would never have even occurred to him to randomly change course to fight a secular dictator who was a counterbalance to a certain Islamic Republic in the area you may have heard of and/or wanted to invade, at the expense of our operation to eliminate the ones responsible for 9/11. Who was going to suggest it to him? George Tenet? Richard Clark? Assume nobody from PNAC counts, whose was going to push for Iraq II?
But as soon Bush started talking about "Axis of Evil", I knew exactly who they were going to invade. Or more like who not -- the ones that were actually dangerous.
The Iraqis have an opportunity to join modern nations with a functioning democracy - they are moving closer to being a modern democracy like Turkey every day. Still a long way away, but clearly a better situation that having Saddam or one of his psychopathic sons in charge, likely for the next half-century.
But I guess all you care about is your own green grass.
What grass do you care about, huh? Have you even been paying attention to this grass? I don't know if you keep up on current events, but two of Iraq's political parties were just at war with each other. They describe a normal day in the city of Basra, after the cease fire was called, as being only sporadic automatic weapons and rocket fire. All these political parties? They're religiously motivated and armed militias. In many of the militia-dominated sections of the country -- which by the way, includes both entire cities and suburbs of Baghdad which by themselves include millions of people, and only exist because the government backed by our troops is not strong enough to assert itself there. In the milita-dominated sections of the country, many of them are enforcing Islamic law, female dress codes. In any case many civilians are dying in the conflicts. You think this is somehow going to magically turn into a nice stable secular democracy like Turkey? Well this "opportunity" you're so happy to give them has yet to appear.
We gave that same opportunity to the people of Afghanistan, and it has yet to appear there either, and it's been two years longer. Shouldn't we have at least waited until after we proved we could deliver this opportunity before we tried to repeat the process? But no, because we decided to get involved in an even bigger project, Afghanistan was neglected and the Taliban allowed to regroup. Allowed to retake territory, which we have to fight to retake, and they are able to retake again the next year. With, still, the civilians caught
You've got a good grip on the situation, so I have to fix one factual error:
They didn't even need a warrant, as even under the older FISA law, warrants were not needed for calls that comes into the US from outside it.
Yes they were. FISA explicitly spells out when a warrant is not required, and it is only when it is believed that no "U.S. Person" is a party to the call. A "U.S. person" basically means a U.S. citizen no matter where they are, or a non-citizen who is legally within the U.S. So that means any call with one end in the U.S. (where it isn't known the party in the u.s. is here illegally), or even a call that takes place entirely in a foreign country that includes a U.S. citizen, requires a warrant.
However that said, the argument that they needed a new law is BS because here is what they could have done perfectly legally: Tap the call in question immediately, and then any time within the next three days showed up before the FISA court to ask for a retro-active warrant. And as FISA's record clearly shows, if they had any reason at all to believe the call was suspect, FISA would have granted the warrant.
In other words, and this is important because it applies to all the recent surveilance too: The only reason not to get a warrant is if they had no reason at all to believe that the call is of any interest, not one tiny scrap of hearsay to suggest that it's a terrorist call. It means that as far as they knew, it was no different than the billions of other calls made daily.
So remember, whenever they say they need a new law to let them listen in on certain phone calls, that law would ONLY allow them the new power to listen to calls that are, as far as they could possibly tell, COMPLETELY INNOCENT.
Its simply naive to think that it didn't in some way support Bin Ladins organization.
Of course, though the whole reason you got the response is you were replying to a post that only mention MJ -- and MJ has been specifically target as somehow funding terrorism -- with what was essentially a non sequitor about opium.
But since we're on the subject, there's two funny parts about this opium in Afghanistan thing: 1) While they were actively trying to stomp it out while in power, now that they're trying to fund an insurgency, the Taliban is absolutely A-Ok with growing and selling opium. 2) The Northern Alliance et. al., aka the warlords we pretend are the "good guys" in Afghanistan, funded their operations from opium sales both while the Taliban was in power, but especially now that the country is in chaos and they're the "good guys" so there's a lot less pressure to stop.
So actually, if you buy opium, you have at least a 50% chance of supporting our side in Afghanistan. Delicious irony.
Which Congress passed the law? Which President was burning his political capital for too many other things to risk a fight with Congress by using his veto?
Not that I'm saying he didn't support it, I'm saying you do have to look at who passed the law *first* because the veto is not an option most Presidents just wield willy-nilly. Yes, Bush signed USAPATRIOT, but I mostly blame Congress who passed the law without even reading, much less debating, the fucking thing.
This is why my sister always asks me for a copy of Photoshop for her birthday. She has no idea how to get it for free online. SHHH!!!! Don't tell her I have been secretly slipping her copies of the GIMP all these years....
I have a hard time believing she wouldn't know the difference; even a computer retard can tell that you don't spell Photoshop "GIMP". But if that's true, that's pure hilarity. It's pretty funny just for the idea.:)
In order for the Army MWR to verify that this was in fact a legitimate security operation, they had to visit a website and enter their personal information...
Fortunately there are large companies who dedicate resources to managing which code they do and don't want in their kernel.
It might be too hard for your average roll-your-own-kernel type, but for most users who are using a kernel provided by their distribution, these kinds of shenanigans shouldn't affect them much because Red Hat is going to do the hard work of stripping the offending code out.
I don't know how you can label the Leftist view of letting the government run everything (healthcare, housing, food) as a bottom-up approach. That sounds like a top-down approach to me (where the top mandates how citizens are supposed to live).
He was talking about the bottom of society, as in the poor. As opposed to the top of society, which is the large business owners and corporate executives.
I know it was confusing, since those are usually engineering terms about how the structure is built, not what its purpose is. Even if you support states rights, our system is "top down" in the sense that the Constitution of our federal goverment is primary, even to the extent that it abdicates power to the states. But that's not what he meant.
Whether or not that actually applies in any meaningful way to a given "left" or "right" politician is a different matter. Frankly I think it rarely does. But it should be obvious that government-run healthcare is an attempt to help those who can't afford healthcare, as opposed to the rich who can buy their own.
They say stegosaurus was the sneakiest of the dinosaurs, and could hide in plain sight.
Re:Basically, what they just did
on
ISO Approves OOXML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
explain to me why such a pragmatic decision should come as a surprise to anyone. or, to put the question another way, how many industrial standards simply rationalize practices of long standing?
Ah, that's very common. There will be various competing versions of something, and they vie in the marketplace as much as before standards boards, and eventually one is chosen as the standard. Including using dirty tricks to influence the process, to gain the advantage of it being your version which all your products already use that becomes standard.
Here's what's different:
At the end of the day, after the politics ended, the intent and result of these proceedings was to standardize and thus increase interoperability. The standards themselves enabled that, allowing multiple implementations of the standard that would work together. Even if one company gains an advantage in the near term, that doesn't last long and then things just start working better together, and choice and opportunity are increased.
This is the exact opposite. The intent and result of this process is to damage interoperability by creating a standard that nobody can duplicate, that not even Microsoft themselves have implemented. It's only purpose is to derail acceptance of a true open standard like ODF. There will be no market around OOXML tools and products, because the only one that will ever use it is MS Office, and they aren't even obligated to follow the standard they created. That doesn't matter. All they want to be able to do is shout "We're an ISO standard!" when the government rep starts talking about how they require "open" documents. That's all.
My point is that colours which are not pure red, green or blue can only be produced by combinations of subpixels, as a tristimulus display can only produce shades of these three colours. We are in agreement about this.
No, we're not. Because colors which are not red, green, or blue are necessarily produced by a combination of the primary colors, a tristimulus display can produce any color that is a combination of those primary shades, for any reasonable definition of the word "produce".
But since you changed definitions of produce mid-sentence from a reasonable one to a ludicrous one (because it would mean that NOTHING can "produce" any color but red green or blue), we don't agree.
Anyway, change your statement to "a tristimulus display produces non-RGB colors through a combination of subpixels" and let's move on.
Finally, since dithering between subpixels is a necessary artifact of colour reproduction, arguing about whether one method of dithering is "right" and produces "true 16 million colours" and another is "wrong" and produces "only 200 thousand colours" is pointless.
No, it's NOT. If your method of dithering requires using multiple pixels, then your effective resolution is lower and thus claiming full resolution and the ability to produce that many colors is a LIE. You CANNOT do both; you can do one or the other. You can -either- have full resolution with a lower color count, OR you can display more colors at the expense of image data. Just as it would be a lie to claim the total number of subpixels as your resolution, then claim 16 million colors at that resolution. That's blatantly wrong. If it takes 20 subpixels to produce the range of color you're claiming, then your stated resolution must be defined in terms of groups of 20 subpixels.
That's what resolution and color depth mean. It means that you have X many uniquely addressable color points, and you can assign any one of the available colors to that point.
If you have a 6-bit 1600x1200 display, can you give each of those 1.92 million pixels a unique color? NO! So claiming that you can is a LIE.
I did not say Nikon are lying about their resolution, I was pointing out that the rgb-triplet method is not the only valid way of dithering to produce more than the very limited range of colours which n-bit RGB can produce or capture.
If this method of dithering requires using additional pixels so as to produce the additional colors, but they advertise the full compliment of pixels, then yes they are lying. I don't know the specifics of the product you're talking about, but I do know that I don't take your statement that they aren't lying to mean anything.
In conclusion: dithering between arbitrary subpixels is a valid method of colour reproduction, and it is not false advertising to state full resolution when an arbitrary block of subpixels is required to produce an arbitrary colour.
If that "arbitrary block of subpixels" is larger than one pixel, but you claim your resolution is equivalent to the number of pixels, then yes that is false advertising.
It's like this: Apple is claiming 16 million colors, and claiming a resolution based on the "arbitrary" grouping of an RGB triplet as a pixel. However that "arbitrary" grouping is not the same as the "arbitrary" grouping that can produce 16 million colors. Thus they are lying. It couldn't be any more plain.
She has a point. I still wonder how the most powerful and advanced military the world has ever known could "accidentally" target a hospital, or an embassy, when both are clearly marked on maps, and everyone who actually lives in the city knows where they are...
I'm not saying she's wrong, but here's something to consider: All those images from Gulf War 1 of laser guided bombs dropping down chimneys making nice tidy explosions? That was a form of propaganda, intended to convince Americans that these weapons were the majority that were used, and that we were the good guys because we could precisely target the enemy's installations in the middle of a city full of civilians and not hurt any innocents. With the side effect of convincing everyone else that if we hit a target, it must be because we meant to.
In reality, the vast majority (as in like 99%) of ordinance dropped in that war was completely standard bombs not substantially better than those dropped in WWII where they could carpet-bomb a city day and night and still not hit the factory they were aiming for.
So it's not impossible that the bomb that hit the hospital was unguided and thus prone to wildly missing its target, and it could very much be an accident.
As to why they'd be dropping unguided bombs in a city so that they could accidentally hit hospitals, well, unguided bombs are much cheaper, and they definitely don't care as much about eliminating civilian deaths as they talk like they do.
No, I'm arguing that RGB are in fact the only colours produced by a tristimulus-based display. The eye combines the separate wavelengths with a weighted response to produce something that we in our own perceptually encumbered heads call "cyan".
Which is the same as arguing that RGB are the only colors that exist outside our "perceptually encumbered heads". It is impossible to "produce" cyan without combining components. So like I said, either you're arguing that RGB are the only colors that exist, or you acknowledge that cyan is in fact a color and therefore an RGB display can produce cyan for any meaningful definition of the term.
The statement that the LCD can only display the colors RGB is only true for a useless and limited definition of color.
The distinction of where one pixel ends and another begins is arbitrary
As long as they consist of adjacent red, green, and blue sub-pixels, yes, only not really, because the screen has an edge. A red subpixel orphaned on the side is not a pixel. So in reality there is exactly one valid definition of pixel in an LCD arranged as above.
so to claim that an 8-bit display is capable of displaying 16 million colors at its native resolution is wrong because the native resolution is not 1920x1080 pixels, but 5760x1080 subpixels, and it is irrelevant which source subpixels make up a single visual entity which we call "cyan".
It's not wrong at all. Regardless of how you define pixel boundaries, there are 1920x1080 of them, and each one is capable of displaying one of 16 million colors. If you were to adjust the pixel boundaries and keep the subpixels the same (and lets say it's a cylindrical or spherical display to avoid the edge issue), then there would still be 1920x1080 pixels, they'd still be capable of displaying 16 million colors each, and you'd just say the color of the new pixels was different but still producing the same image. And if all those pixels were set to 0x00ffff, it'd be cyan as sure as salmon is pink, bees are yellow, and Labradors are brown.
Then sue Nikon for using Bayer patterns and stating full (interpolated) resolution.
If they're lying about their resolution and color depth, then they should be sued. I don't own a Nikon (or a Mac for that matter), so I wouldn't have standing. But I agree that all cases of false advertising should be. What was your point?
I did not say that three 8-bit subpixels produce 766 permutations - clearly there are ~16 million. I said there are 766 colours, and that it is the combination of multiple subpixels to produce the illusion of more than that.
What is a color, if not a permutation of components? Our own eyes work by combining the components red, green, and blue. When you combine green and blue light, you get cyan. There is no other way to get cyan, there is no frequency for cyan. So either you're arguing that cyan is not a color and in fact RGB are the ONLY colors, or you accept that a color is necessarily a combination of components. A pixel with its green subpixel fully on, its blue subpixel fully on, and its red pixel fully off is displaying cyan for any meaningful definition of the term. And therefore an 8-bit display is capable of displaying 16 million colors at its native resolution.
Dithering is simply the process of producing more colours using more than three subpixels.
And thus necessarily throwing away visual information, since in the frame buffer every pixel is specified. And also necessarily looking much worse than supporting the full color depth, since while sub-pixels are indistinguishable without having your nose on the glass, individual pixels are much easier to see at normal viewing distances. Any LCD that claimed to support millions of colors, but is only 6-bit and thus must use dithering, should also commensurately advertise with a lower resolution based on the number of pixels needed to display an arbitrary color. To both claim 16million colors and full resolution is a blatant lie. Your attempt to support this lie is ill-conceived and a failure.
Ad hominem. Attack the argument, not the person.
First, you don't have to point out that I'm insulting you personally. I'm aware.
Second, ad hominem is used in reference to a fallacious argument. "I overestimated your intelligence" is not an argument, it is a conclusion.
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And, here is the contradiction: if gun advocates really think that a well armed populace can hold off the US military, then they also should think we ought to get out of Iraq NOW.
Well, I believe both things.
So no contradiction here.
We'll never be able to subdue a well armed insurgency, right?
I don't think we'll be successful, no, but other people may have a different view. I don't agree with their assessment of the situation in Iraq, I think it's rather delusional, but I don't think that disqualifies them from believing in gun ownership rights.
The notion that a gun advocate thinks that a government can never defeat an armed populace is ridiculous, a pure strawman. The point is you have to fight, and if you fight you may win, or you may lose. And even if your side wins, you may die in the process! But the whole point is that you have to fight, and if you lack the means to fight then you've lost before you've begun.
Personally I think that in the case of an American revolution, we'd be able to acquire those "means" even if guns were banned. But having the large amount of legal weapons in the country today certainly gives us a huge leg up, just like the fact that every household in Iraq has at least one AK-47 helped the insurgency there.
It's not religious, it's based on the facts that the ONLY people pushing for war with Iraq were the neo-cons, and Gore isn't one and doesn't listen to them. Were it not for Cheney's, Rumsfeld's, and Wolfowitz's positions in the administration, Iraq would have never happened. Everyone who wasn't a neocon in the administration was surprised when they started talking about it.
You want me to trust you? You want to prove that your views aren't useless? You want me to think "maybe they are right", "they" meaning "you" in this case? Okay then, tell me WHO in a Gore Presidency was going to push for an invasion of Iraq. It's wouldn't be the director of the CIA, it wouldn't be the National Security Council. WHO was going to stump for it? You have no idea at all, do you?
Lots of people know more than me, I know it, and I listen to them and thus become more knowledgeable. That's how you do it.
But morons who think anybody but the neo-cons would have invaded Iraq after Afghanistan, or who think invading Iraq wasn't a retarded idea to begin with, aren't among them. It's YOU who needs to open your ears and start listening to what knowledgeable people who know far more than you think. You could do worse than to start with Richard Clarke.
Neo in the 2D Matrix: "I know Kung-Fu!"
'our Office recently [in 2001] concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.
I thought the whole constitution had no application to the whole government?
After all, isn't it just a scrap of paper?
Yeah well that seems to be the basic theory they're working under, and unfortunately as long as the executive branch can manage to keep itself out of the court room that theory will be untested.
Though fortunately should this theory of the 4th Amendment not applying even come before a court, it would get shit-canned faster than you can say "judicial review".
See, here's the basic problem: Bush can talk however he wants about how he's the "decider", but ultimately he can only do what Congress approves. There'd be no DHS, there'd be no Iraq war, hell there'd be no Secret Service or FBI without the approval of Congress in the form of the law that created and funded those organizations. And each of those bodies can only do the things within their purview, and that purview is again decided by Congress. The President only decides the "how" within those guidelines. Thus, any use of the military as a domestic police force would require the approval of Congress in the form of a law. And the 4th Amendment certainly applies to Congress! So any law they passed which authorized the military to arrest people without respecting their 4th Amendment rights would be Unconstitutional, and thus the authority under which the military made the arrests invalid.
This would shake out in about 5 minutes after the Court heard the arguments from both sides. In general, Bush's retarded Constitutional theories haven't held up very well when they've actually been aired in court. For example those kangaroo court military tribunals they come up with first, one of the detainees managed to get a day in a real court and by the end of the day the tribunals were ruled illegal. They could only continue once they met the judge's demands, and Bush made the necessary changes to provide the accused with more rights. Basically, when push comes to shove, Bush knows he's full of shit and has to bow to the power of law. Unfortunately, getting that day in court can be tough. See for example the case of domestic wiretaps, which would clearly be found Unconstitutional and in violation of existing laws, but nobody has been able to sue the government over it and thus get a judicial ruling on the matter because nobody knows that they were spied on, so nobody has standing to sue the government.
Regime change was the official policy of the Clinton Administration.
And ya might want to read this. Gore's statements about Iraq in the wake of 9/11. The money shot: "As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table".
Oh please. And stopping genocide in Darfur, and wherever it occurs, is the official policy of the U.N. There's a big difference between an official policy of "regime change" and devoting a huge portion of your military to invading. Bush has said the nuclear option is "on the table for" Iran. Is he doing it any time soon? Some money shot, there's no action.
The only people who were seriously talking about invading Iraq were the high-up neocons, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. Everyone else in the government apparatus had no reason to invade. Those guys though were talking about invading immediately after 9/11, as if it was the only pretense they needed. Before 9/11, even the Bush administration was giving speeches about how harmless and contained Iraq was. And don't tell me that the intelligence changed, or that other countries agreed they were a threat, because all the key intel to support the war was from before 2001, and the only intel the other countries had to judge was what we showed them, which was only the stuff that sounded good and not what made it sound sketchy. Ask Colin Powell.
If Gore was president, we would almost certainly be in Afghanistan, but it would never have even occurred to him to randomly change course to fight a secular dictator who was a counterbalance to a certain Islamic Republic in the area you may have heard of and/or wanted to invade, at the expense of our operation to eliminate the ones responsible for 9/11. Who was going to suggest it to him? George Tenet? Richard Clark? Assume nobody from PNAC counts, whose was going to push for Iraq II?
But as soon Bush started talking about "Axis of Evil", I knew exactly who they were going to invade. Or more like who not -- the ones that were actually dangerous.
The Iraqis have an opportunity to join modern nations with a functioning democracy - they are moving closer to being a modern democracy like Turkey every day. Still a long way away, but clearly a better situation that having Saddam or one of his psychopathic sons in charge, likely for the next half-century.
But I guess all you care about is your own green grass.
What grass do you care about, huh? Have you even been paying attention to this grass? I don't know if you keep up on current events, but two of Iraq's political parties were just at war with each other. They describe a normal day in the city of Basra, after the cease fire was called, as being only sporadic automatic weapons and rocket fire. All these political parties? They're religiously motivated and armed militias. In many of the militia-dominated sections of the country -- which by the way, includes both entire cities and suburbs of Baghdad which by themselves include millions of people, and only exist because the government backed by our troops is not strong enough to assert itself there. In the milita-dominated sections of the country, many of them are enforcing Islamic law, female dress codes. In any case many civilians are dying in the conflicts. You think this is somehow going to magically turn into a nice stable secular democracy like Turkey? Well this "opportunity" you're so happy to give them has yet to appear.
We gave that same opportunity to the people of Afghanistan, and it has yet to appear there either, and it's been two years longer. Shouldn't we have at least waited until after we proved we could deliver this opportunity before we tried to repeat the process? But no, because we decided to get involved in an even bigger project, Afghanistan was neglected and the Taliban allowed to regroup. Allowed to retake territory, which we have to fight to retake, and they are able to retake again the next year. With, still, the civilians caught
You've got a good grip on the situation, so I have to fix one factual error:
They didn't even need a warrant, as even under the older FISA law, warrants were not needed for calls that comes into the US from outside it.
Yes they were. FISA explicitly spells out when a warrant is not required, and it is only when it is believed that no "U.S. Person" is a party to the call. A "U.S. person" basically means a U.S. citizen no matter where they are, or a non-citizen who is legally within the U.S. So that means any call with one end in the U.S. (where it isn't known the party in the u.s. is here illegally), or even a call that takes place entirely in a foreign country that includes a U.S. citizen, requires a warrant.
However that said, the argument that they needed a new law is BS because here is what they could have done perfectly legally: Tap the call in question immediately, and then any time within the next three days showed up before the FISA court to ask for a retro-active warrant. And as FISA's record clearly shows, if they had any reason at all to believe the call was suspect, FISA would have granted the warrant.
In other words, and this is important because it applies to all the recent surveilance too: The only reason not to get a warrant is if they had no reason at all to believe that the call is of any interest, not one tiny scrap of hearsay to suggest that it's a terrorist call. It means that as far as they knew, it was no different than the billions of other calls made daily.
So remember, whenever they say they need a new law to let them listen in on certain phone calls, that law would ONLY allow them the new power to listen to calls that are, as far as they could possibly tell, COMPLETELY INNOCENT.
Its simply naive to think that it didn't in some way support Bin Ladins organization.
Of course, though the whole reason you got the response is you were replying to a post that only mention MJ -- and MJ has been specifically target as somehow funding terrorism -- with what was essentially a non sequitor about opium.
But since we're on the subject, there's two funny parts about this opium in Afghanistan thing:
1) While they were actively trying to stomp it out while in power, now that they're trying to fund an insurgency, the Taliban is absolutely A-Ok with growing and selling opium.
2) The Northern Alliance et. al., aka the warlords we pretend are the "good guys" in Afghanistan, funded their operations from opium sales both while the Taliban was in power, but especially now that the country is in chaos and they're the "good guys" so there's a lot less pressure to stop.
So actually, if you buy opium, you have at least a 50% chance of supporting our side in Afghanistan. Delicious irony.
They just forgot to find a way to somewhat also cram the "child pornography" keyword together with "terrorist" and "pirate".
Fellow Americans, we must pass this law swiftly so that law enforcement has the tools it needs to protect us from Terrorist Pornography Child Pirates!
If Gore was president, we wouldn't be in Iraq. That "grass" is real, and it's fucking green enough for me.
Which president signed the DMCA into law?
Which Congress passed the law? Which President was burning his political capital for too many other things to risk a fight with Congress by using his veto?
Not that I'm saying he didn't support it, I'm saying you do have to look at who passed the law *first* because the veto is not an option most Presidents just wield willy-nilly. Yes, Bush signed USAPATRIOT, but I mostly blame Congress who passed the law without even reading, much less debating, the fucking thing.
Would it be more correct to say this is a measurement of the event horizon?
Yes that's what astronomers mean when they say how "big" a black hole is.
This is why my sister always asks me for a copy of Photoshop for her birthday. She has no idea how to get it for free online. ...
:)
SHHH!!!! Don't tell her I have been secretly slipping her copies of the GIMP all these years.
I have a hard time believing she wouldn't know the difference; even a computer retard can tell that you don't spell Photoshop "GIMP". But if that's true, that's pure hilarity. It's pretty funny just for the idea.
In order for the Army MWR to verify that this was in fact a legitimate security operation, they had to visit a website and enter their personal information...
Fortunately there are large companies who dedicate resources to managing which code they do and don't want in their kernel.
It might be too hard for your average roll-your-own-kernel type, but for most users who are using a kernel provided by their distribution, these kinds of shenanigans shouldn't affect them much because Red Hat is going to do the hard work of stripping the offending code out.
I don't know how you can label the Leftist view of letting the government run everything (healthcare, housing, food) as a bottom-up approach. That sounds like a top-down approach to me (where the top mandates how citizens are supposed to live).
He was talking about the bottom of society, as in the poor. As opposed to the top of society, which is the large business owners and corporate executives.
I know it was confusing, since those are usually engineering terms about how the structure is built, not what its purpose is. Even if you support states rights, our system is "top down" in the sense that the Constitution of our federal goverment is primary, even to the extent that it abdicates power to the states. But that's not what he meant.
Whether or not that actually applies in any meaningful way to a given "left" or "right" politician is a different matter. Frankly I think it rarely does. But it should be obvious that government-run healthcare is an attempt to help those who can't afford healthcare, as opposed to the rich who can buy their own.
These arguments are starting to sound like a "who's the alien shape shifter?" speech by the guy who's lost it in your average bad sci-fi show.
Yeah, and it's usually the first guy to ask that question who turns out to be the alien... waitaminute...
OMG, eldavojohn is submitting Windows code to the Linux kernel! Burn him!
They say stegosaurus was the sneakiest of the dinosaurs, and could hide in plain sight.
explain to me why such a pragmatic decision should come as a surprise to anyone. or, to put the question another way, how many industrial standards simply rationalize practices of long standing?
Ah, that's very common. There will be various competing versions of something, and they vie in the marketplace as much as before standards boards, and eventually one is chosen as the standard. Including using dirty tricks to influence the process, to gain the advantage of it being your version which all your products already use that becomes standard.
Here's what's different:
At the end of the day, after the politics ended, the intent and result of these proceedings was to standardize and thus increase interoperability. The standards themselves enabled that, allowing multiple implementations of the standard that would work together. Even if one company gains an advantage in the near term, that doesn't last long and then things just start working better together, and choice and opportunity are increased.
This is the exact opposite. The intent and result of this process is to damage interoperability by creating a standard that nobody can duplicate, that not even Microsoft themselves have implemented. It's only purpose is to derail acceptance of a true open standard like ODF. There will be no market around OOXML tools and products, because the only one that will ever use it is MS Office, and they aren't even obligated to follow the standard they created. That doesn't matter. All they want to be able to do is shout "We're an ISO standard!" when the government rep starts talking about how they require "open" documents. That's all.
Not enough coffee...
:)
I thought that was the default until your hand was shaking so much you couldn't hold the mug, then that's "enough"
No, it was correct to the number of significant digits he gave: 0.015625 =~ 0.016.
My point is that colours which are not pure red, green or blue can only be produced by combinations of subpixels, as a tristimulus display can only produce shades of these three colours. We are in agreement about this.
No, we're not. Because colors which are not red, green, or blue are necessarily produced by a combination of the primary colors, a tristimulus display can produce any color that is a combination of those primary shades, for any reasonable definition of the word "produce".
But since you changed definitions of produce mid-sentence from a reasonable one to a ludicrous one (because it would mean that NOTHING can "produce" any color but red green or blue), we don't agree.
Anyway, change your statement to "a tristimulus display produces non-RGB colors through a combination of subpixels" and let's move on.
Finally, since dithering between subpixels is a necessary artifact of colour reproduction, arguing about whether one method of dithering is "right" and produces "true 16 million colours" and another is "wrong" and produces "only 200 thousand colours" is pointless.
No, it's NOT. If your method of dithering requires using multiple pixels, then your effective resolution is lower and thus claiming full resolution and the ability to produce that many colors is a LIE. You CANNOT do both; you can do one or the other. You can -either- have full resolution with a lower color count, OR you can display more colors at the expense of image data. Just as it would be a lie to claim the total number of subpixels as your resolution, then claim 16 million colors at that resolution. That's blatantly wrong. If it takes 20 subpixels to produce the range of color you're claiming, then your stated resolution must be defined in terms of groups of 20 subpixels.
That's what resolution and color depth mean. It means that you have X many uniquely addressable color points, and you can assign any one of the available colors to that point.
If you have a 6-bit 1600x1200 display, can you give each of those 1.92 million pixels a unique color? NO! So claiming that you can is a LIE.
I did not say Nikon are lying about their resolution, I was pointing out that the rgb-triplet method is not the only valid way of dithering to produce more than the very limited range of colours which n-bit RGB can produce or capture.
If this method of dithering requires using additional pixels so as to produce the additional colors, but they advertise the full compliment of pixels, then yes they are lying. I don't know the specifics of the product you're talking about, but I do know that I don't take your statement that they aren't lying to mean anything.
In conclusion: dithering between arbitrary subpixels is a valid method of colour reproduction, and it is not false advertising to state full resolution when an arbitrary block of subpixels is required to produce an arbitrary colour.
If that "arbitrary block of subpixels" is larger than one pixel, but you claim your resolution is equivalent to the number of pixels, then yes that is false advertising.
It's like this: Apple is claiming 16 million colors, and claiming a resolution based on the "arbitrary" grouping of an RGB triplet as a pixel. However that "arbitrary" grouping is not the same as the "arbitrary" grouping that can produce 16 million colors. Thus they are lying. It couldn't be any more plain.
She has a point. I still wonder how the most powerful and advanced military the world has ever known could "accidentally" target a hospital, or an embassy, when both are clearly marked on maps, and everyone who actually lives in the city knows where they are...
I'm not saying she's wrong, but here's something to consider: All those images from Gulf War 1 of laser guided bombs dropping down chimneys making nice tidy explosions? That was a form of propaganda, intended to convince Americans that these weapons were the majority that were used, and that we were the good guys because we could precisely target the enemy's installations in the middle of a city full of civilians and not hurt any innocents. With the side effect of convincing everyone else that if we hit a target, it must be because we meant to.
In reality, the vast majority (as in like 99%) of ordinance dropped in that war was completely standard bombs not substantially better than those dropped in WWII where they could carpet-bomb a city day and night and still not hit the factory they were aiming for.
So it's not impossible that the bomb that hit the hospital was unguided and thus prone to wildly missing its target, and it could very much be an accident.
As to why they'd be dropping unguided bombs in a city so that they could accidentally hit hospitals, well, unguided bombs are much cheaper, and they definitely don't care as much about eliminating civilian deaths as they talk like they do.
No, I'm arguing that RGB are in fact the only colours produced by a tristimulus-based display. The eye combines the separate wavelengths with a weighted response to produce something that we in our own perceptually encumbered heads call "cyan".
Which is the same as arguing that RGB are the only colors that exist outside our "perceptually encumbered heads". It is impossible to "produce" cyan without combining components. So like I said, either you're arguing that RGB are the only colors that exist, or you acknowledge that cyan is in fact a color and therefore an RGB display can produce cyan for any meaningful definition of the term.
The statement that the LCD can only display the colors RGB is only true for a useless and limited definition of color.
The distinction of where one pixel ends and another begins is arbitrary
As long as they consist of adjacent red, green, and blue sub-pixels, yes, only not really, because the screen has an edge. A red subpixel orphaned on the side is not a pixel. So in reality there is exactly one valid definition of pixel in an LCD arranged as above.
so to claim that an 8-bit display is capable of displaying 16 million colors at its native resolution is wrong because the native resolution is not 1920x1080 pixels, but 5760x1080 subpixels, and it is irrelevant which source subpixels make up a single visual entity which we call "cyan".
It's not wrong at all. Regardless of how you define pixel boundaries, there are 1920x1080 of them, and each one is capable of displaying one of 16 million colors. If you were to adjust the pixel boundaries and keep the subpixels the same (and lets say it's a cylindrical or spherical display to avoid the edge issue), then there would still be 1920x1080 pixels, they'd still be capable of displaying 16 million colors each, and you'd just say the color of the new pixels was different but still producing the same image. And if all those pixels were set to 0x00ffff, it'd be cyan as sure as salmon is pink, bees are yellow, and Labradors are brown.
Then sue Nikon for using Bayer patterns and stating full (interpolated) resolution.
If they're lying about their resolution and color depth, then they should be sued. I don't own a Nikon (or a Mac for that matter), so I wouldn't have standing. But I agree that all cases of false advertising should be. What was your point?
then we can extrapolate that most of what we lost was pr0n
Wow, I've never been more personally saddened by the loss of the Library of Alexandria until I read your post.
I did not say that three 8-bit subpixels produce 766 permutations - clearly there are ~16 million. I said there are 766 colours, and that it is the combination of multiple subpixels to produce the illusion of more than that.
What is a color, if not a permutation of components? Our own eyes work by combining the components red, green, and blue. When you combine green and blue light, you get cyan. There is no other way to get cyan, there is no frequency for cyan. So either you're arguing that cyan is not a color and in fact RGB are the ONLY colors, or you accept that a color is necessarily a combination of components. A pixel with its green subpixel fully on, its blue subpixel fully on, and its red pixel fully off is displaying cyan for any meaningful definition of the term. And therefore an 8-bit display is capable of displaying 16 million colors at its native resolution.
Dithering is simply the process of producing more colours using more than three subpixels.
And thus necessarily throwing away visual information, since in the frame buffer every pixel is specified. And also necessarily looking much worse than supporting the full color depth, since while sub-pixels are indistinguishable without having your nose on the glass, individual pixels are much easier to see at normal viewing distances. Any LCD that claimed to support millions of colors, but is only 6-bit and thus must use dithering, should also commensurately advertise with a lower resolution based on the number of pixels needed to display an arbitrary color. To both claim 16million colors and full resolution is a blatant lie. Your attempt to support this lie is ill-conceived and a failure.
Ad hominem. Attack the argument, not the person.
First, you don't have to point out that I'm insulting you personally. I'm aware.
Second, ad hominem is used in reference to a fallacious argument. "I overestimated your intelligence" is not an argument, it is a conclusion.