People still use xine directly? Both major desktops have good multimedia apps now. For KDE there is KMplayer and for GNOME there is Totem. Both are standard, run-of-the-mill apps.
Here is where you are wrong. I'd rather that a guy like this spends his time improving himself and his skills, so he can be even more productive when the economy does improve, than that he waste his time flipping burgers at Macdonalds.
"As a rule, no major studio will rely on a tool without access to the source code... That insurance can be expensive, and the relationship with vendors is sometimes strained."
I think its made quite clear that the studios pay (often dearly) for access to the source code of these proprietory programs.
I saw a BSOD in WinXP in the last two months. I don't take great care of my XP partition, but hell, I don't take great care of my Linux partition either. I used to be a very careful Windows user, and as a result, even Win9x was stable for me. But Linux doesn't need me to be so careful (beta software, devel kernels, the works) and I just don't have the time to babysit my OS anymore.
To argue that virtue, ethics and morality -- our notions of justice and right and wrong -- are culture-based is to begin down the path of accepting any belief as valid and equivalent to any other, and, thereby, deny the validity of your own. >>>>>>>>>> Yep. That sounds about right. I don't believe my beliefs are innately more valid that someone else's. Now, if there is some other reasoning involved, that isn't based on a culture-specific idea of morality, then that's different, but hard-facts are few and far between in most arguments about this sort of thing.
I don't care if that is culture-based or not, but I hold that it is repugnant, inhuman, and uncivilized behavior that should be eliminated. >>>>>>>>>>>> I agree. But who are we to make this decision for others? Eventually, these cultures will come out of the stone-age. Enlightenment (and liberalism!) will take hold and they will ask the rest of us for help and we can help them then. Until then, we have no mandate to do anything about the situation. Not only would it be incredibly arrogant of us to meddle in the problems of others, when we have so many of our own to worry about, but it would be futile. This sort of thing does not occur, any longer, in urbanized areas, but in the backwater rural regions of the world. Even if the US went in and decreed that such behavior should stop, and sent its army in to enforce the decree, nothing would change. The only thing that can change culture is time.
Are we to excuse such murderers simply by accepting that their behavior is based on a cultural belief? Nonsense. If I do that, I am morally culpable in their crimes. >>>>>>>>> Your only morally culpable if you are under the impression that you are somehow morally responsible for the actions of others. I thought that this foolish idea had been exterminated with Puritanism.
If enough people die from taking drugs for a condition where the drug hurts rather than helps, people will stop buying that drug, right? >>>>>>>> That's a lot of needless deaths, don't you think. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) Most people don't research anything they buy. I'm not condoning their behavior (I think they're sheep), but I don't want them to die because of it!
2) Its not going to be control over advertising that allows the government to impinge on our freedoms. The people behind these sorts of controls are just bureaucrats at regulatory organizations like the FCC. If anybody at the FCC manages to pull off a coup-d'etat through abuse of their powers, I'd be amused more than anything else:)
Its not about having to watch the ads, or what should be the law about infomercials. There is a law on the books about truth in infomercials. If you don't like it (I don't either) then work to get it repealed. But its there for the time being. What this measure is about is closing a possible loophole (through product-placement) in the laws about infomercials.
There's no virtue in sitting on the fence and giving equal moral wieght to opposing beliefs. >>>>>>>>> According to whose definition of virtue? You'd think by know that we would figure out that "virtue" is an intensely culture-specific idea, and not some sort of universal truth. We can't even be sure of truths in science (and stuff like Godel's work indicates that there may not even be such a Truth to search for) so what makes you arrogant enough to believe that you have such a truth for social behavior?
Regardless of the feelings of their population. People don't have the right to vote away their freedoms, because that action enslaves their children and future generations. >>>>>>>>>> If a time comes where future generations do not hold the same beliefs as their ancestors, then the antiquated forms of government will come down. Europe managed to get itself out from under the rule of absolute monarchy, and many places got out from under Calvinism, all without outside intervention. There is no reason to believe others won't.
To argue that I am compelled to give equal weight to theocracy or monarchy is equivalent to arguing that I am compelled not to act on my belief in democracy. >>>>>>>>>>> In *our* democracy, you're perfectly free to act on your beliefs about democracy. But what your not free to do under *our* system, is act in a way that deprives others of the right to act on *their* beliefs. This is why evangelical democracy is such an abomination. Its not because it violates some universal law, because it violates the laws that *we* have set down to govern ourselves.
*You* and I may think they are wrong, but who are we to argue? You seem to believe that we have found some sort of absolute truth in democracy. I would caution you that in believing this, you are no different from those who believe in the absolute power of the clergy or the absolute power of the king.
Then its time for an American Jihad to "free" all the oppressed peoples of the world, isn't it. For such a bible-loving country, why do we ignore the parts that tell you to MYOB?
Well, shit. If democratic governments are all we'd had, we'd be living in the stone ages. Take Napoleon, for example. Turned France from a back-water, rural country into a world power. Without the unifying rule of a dictator, France would still have its provinces bickering with one-another. Also, your view of government is steeped in your own world view, where the power of the individual is supreme. A lot of people don't share that view. Take Iran, for example. We look at it as a conservative, undemocratic theocracy. That is what it is. But it is that way not because some crazy dictator came to rule over the people, but the people themselves (the student revolution) chose to place that form of governmen there. To them, the traditional form of government (what they believe will save their souls) is more important than individual freedom. We can criticize all we want, but we have to remember that we were no different 500 years ago, and there is nothing to say that, 500 years from now, we won't have moved on to a different form of government.
Us enlightened liberals expect more from the United States than we do from Iraq (or China for that matter). If we really are the greatest country in the world, let's act like it. If we didn't hold such a high opinion of the US and its history, we'd just not fucking bother and move somewhere else...
Thanks for the link. I never saw the Biefeld-Brown effect explained in detail. I knew it had something to do with ion-wind. Reading the literature, I have to say the two effects look pretty similar, except in the Biefeld-Brown lifter, the thrust is amplified by the movement of the fluid. Are there more substantial differences between the two effects?
I think the way it works is that the top coil ionizes the air around it, while the bottom coil attracts the ionized air molecules. So the reason the lifter doesn't work in a vacuum is not that the mechanism doesn't work, but because there is no fuel to ionize.
Also, thrust (force) isn't the same as acceleration. Say you're getting 11 m/s^2 of acceleration in an upwards direction. For a 3 gram lifter, this equates to a thrust of only 0.033 newtons of force. That's only 0.0074 pounds of thrust, or about 1/7 the thrust of this ion drive.
Check out this page for some nifty things you can build that may work on ion-propulsion. I thought it was a hoax at first, but my friend convinced me to build it in high-school, and the thing really did work. Of course, the efficiency was terrible. We were using an old monitor as a 20,000 volt power source, so power dissipation was probably pretty high. That was enough to lift the 2 gram device and 1 gram of payload.
The practical memory limited for a consumer 32-bit machine is not 4GB but 2GB. The OSs needs some of the virtual address space (you can cut it down, but that decreases peformance because you have to jump through hoops to map the whole buffer cache) and hardware needs some as well. All told, up to a gig of your virtual address space is gone before you even talk about memory. Since 3GB is an odd amount of memory for a machine, 2GB is the limit you usually see in motherboards. 2GB is a pretty close limit. Soon as my new SO-DIMMS get here, my *laptop* will have a gig of memory. My next system will probably be 2 gig, and that leaves me no more room to expand. So the 32-bit limit is getting close.
The problem is that your reencoding them. Since a lot of the data has already been thrown away in the first encoding, you probably get much better compression when you get to the mpeg2 step.
If you believe something 100%, then you are blind to all the evidence contradicting that belief. I'm not saying that you shouldn't believe in things, but if you're *sure* about it, then you are probably not seeing the whole situation.
There might be a fine line between purple and lavander, but there isn't between red and green. The president himself said that there is no connection between Iraq and 9/11. We didn't even have so much as unfounded-speculation that there was an imminent threat. All we knew is that they *might* have weapons. So we attacked them because they *might* have had weapons. My neighbor has a gun. Should I preemptively murder him because he might get me first?
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People still use xine directly? Both major desktops have good multimedia apps now. For KDE there is KMplayer and for GNOME there is Totem. Both are standard, run-of-the-mill apps.
Here is where you are wrong. I'd rather that a guy like this spends his time improving himself and his skills, so he can be even more productive when the economy does improve, than that he waste his time flipping burgers at Macdonalds.
From the article:
"As a rule, no major studio will rely on a tool without access to the source code... That insurance can be expensive, and the relationship with vendors is sometimes strained."
I think its made quite clear that the studios pay (often dearly) for access to the source code of these proprietory programs.
I saw a BSOD in WinXP in the last two months. I don't take great care of my XP partition, but hell, I don't take great care of my Linux partition either. I used to be a very careful Windows user, and as a result, even Win9x was stable for me. But Linux doesn't need me to be so careful (beta software, devel kernels, the works) and I just don't have the time to babysit my OS anymore.
To argue that virtue, ethics and morality -- our notions of justice and right and wrong -- are culture-based is to begin down the path of accepting any belief as valid and equivalent to any other, and, thereby, deny the validity of your own.
>>>>>>>>>>
Yep. That sounds about right. I don't believe my beliefs are innately more valid that someone else's. Now, if there is some other reasoning involved, that isn't based on a culture-specific idea of morality, then that's different, but hard-facts are few and far between in most arguments about this sort of thing.
I don't care if that is culture-based or not, but I hold that it is repugnant, inhuman, and uncivilized behavior that should be eliminated.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
I agree. But who are we to make this decision for others? Eventually, these cultures will come out of the stone-age. Enlightenment (and liberalism!) will take hold and they will ask the rest of us for help and we can help them then. Until then, we have no mandate to do anything about the situation. Not only would it be incredibly arrogant of us to meddle in the problems of others, when we have so many of our own to worry about, but it would be futile. This sort of thing does not occur, any longer, in urbanized areas, but in the backwater rural regions of the world. Even if the US went in and decreed that such behavior should stop, and sent its army in to enforce the decree, nothing would change. The only thing that can change culture is time.
Are we to excuse such murderers simply by accepting that their behavior is based on a cultural belief? Nonsense. If I do that, I am morally culpable in their crimes.
>>>>>>>>>
Your only morally culpable if you are under the impression that you are somehow morally responsible for the actions of others. I thought that this foolish idea had been exterminated with Puritanism.
-1: Not good enough at BS to hide the fact that he didn't read the article.
Huh? Since when? In Asia (maybe excepting Japan), at least, they mostly get British stuff, not American stuff.
If enough people die from taking drugs for a condition where the drug hurts rather than helps, people will stop buying that drug, right?
:)
>>>>>>>>
That's a lot of needless deaths, don't you think. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) Most people don't research anything they buy. I'm not condoning their behavior (I think they're sheep), but I don't want them to die because of it!
2) Its not going to be control over advertising that allows the government to impinge on our freedoms. The people behind these sorts of controls are just bureaucrats at regulatory organizations like the FCC. If anybody at the FCC manages to pull off a coup-d'etat through abuse of their powers, I'd be amused more than anything else
Its not about having to watch the ads, or what should be the law about infomercials. There is a law on the books about truth in infomercials. If you don't like it (I don't either) then work to get it repealed. But its there for the time being. What this measure is about is closing a possible loophole (through product-placement) in the laws about infomercials.
There's no virtue in sitting on the fence and giving equal moral wieght to opposing beliefs.
>>>>>>>>>
According to whose definition of virtue? You'd think by know that we would figure out that "virtue" is an intensely culture-specific idea, and not some sort of universal truth. We can't even be sure of truths in science (and stuff like Godel's work indicates that there may not even be such a Truth to search for) so what makes you arrogant enough to believe that you have such a truth for social behavior?
Regardless of the feelings of their population. People don't have the right to vote away their freedoms, because that action enslaves their children and future generations.
>>>>>>>>>>
If a time comes where future generations do not hold the same beliefs as their ancestors, then the antiquated forms of government will come down. Europe managed to get itself out from under the rule of absolute monarchy, and many places got out from under Calvinism, all without outside intervention. There is no reason to believe others won't.
To argue that I am compelled to give equal weight to theocracy or monarchy is equivalent to arguing that I am compelled not to act on my belief in democracy.
>>>>>>>>>>>
In *our* democracy, you're perfectly free to act on your beliefs about democracy. But what your not free to do under *our* system, is act in a way that deprives others of the right to act on *their* beliefs. This is why evangelical democracy is such an abomination. Its not because it violates some universal law, because it violates the laws that *we* have set down to govern ourselves.
I'd love that tickit. Clark is a good moderate candidate --- he gets things done, but he's also a very smart guy.
*You* and I may think they are wrong, but who are we to argue? You seem to believe that we have found some sort of absolute truth in democracy. I would caution you that in believing this, you are no different from those who believe in the absolute power of the clergy or the absolute power of the king.
Then its time for an American Jihad to "free" all the oppressed peoples of the world, isn't it. For such a bible-loving country, why do we ignore the parts that tell you to MYOB?
Well, shit. If democratic governments are all we'd had, we'd be living in the stone ages. Take Napoleon, for example. Turned France from a back-water, rural country into a world power. Without the unifying rule of a dictator, France would still have its provinces bickering with one-another. Also, your view of government is steeped in your own world view, where the power of the individual is supreme. A lot of people don't share that view. Take Iran, for example. We look at it as a conservative, undemocratic theocracy. That is what it is. But it is that way not because some crazy dictator came to rule over the people, but the people themselves (the student revolution) chose to place that form of governmen there. To them, the traditional form of government (what they believe will save their souls) is more important than individual freedom. We can criticize all we want, but we have to remember that we were no different 500 years ago, and there is nothing to say that, 500 years from now, we won't have moved on to a different form of government.
Us enlightened liberals expect more from the United States than we do from Iraq (or China for that matter). If we really are the greatest country in the world, let's act like it. If we didn't hold such a high opinion of the US and its history, we'd just not fucking bother and move somewhere else...
Nope. WinXP boots tons of sevices in the background as well, like RPC servies, etc. Its just that WinXP is pretty optimized in the bootup department.
Thanks for the link. I never saw the Biefeld-Brown effect explained in detail. I knew it had something to do with ion-wind. Reading the literature, I have to say the two effects look pretty similar, except in the Biefeld-Brown lifter, the thrust is amplified by the movement of the fluid. Are there more substantial differences between the two effects?
Jesus. This reminds me of that SNL skit with Christopher Walkin, where he kills a guy as a "practical joke."
The NT kernel itself isn't crap. Microsoft just needs to check the sources for NT 3.5 out of CVS and start from there again :)
I think the way it works is that the top coil ionizes the air around it, while the bottom coil attracts the ionized air molecules. So the reason the lifter doesn't work in a vacuum is not that the mechanism doesn't work, but because there is no fuel to ionize.
Also, thrust (force) isn't the same as acceleration. Say you're getting 11 m/s^2 of acceleration in an upwards direction. For a 3 gram lifter, this equates to a thrust of only 0.033 newtons of force. That's only 0.0074 pounds of thrust, or about 1/7 the thrust of this ion drive.
Check out this page for some nifty things you can build that may work on ion-propulsion. I thought it was a hoax at first, but my friend convinced me to build it in high-school, and the thing really did work. Of course, the efficiency was terrible. We were using an old monitor as a 20,000 volt power source, so power dissipation was probably pretty high. That was enough to lift the 2 gram device and 1 gram of payload.
The practical memory limited for a consumer 32-bit machine is not 4GB but 2GB. The OSs needs some of the virtual address space (you can cut it down, but that decreases peformance because you have to jump through hoops to map the whole buffer cache) and hardware needs some as well. All told, up to a gig of your virtual address space is gone before you even talk about memory. Since 3GB is an odd amount of memory for a machine, 2GB is the limit you usually see in motherboards. 2GB is a pretty close limit. Soon as my new SO-DIMMS get here, my *laptop* will have a gig of memory. My next system will probably be 2 gig, and that leaves me no more room to expand. So the 32-bit limit is getting close.
The problem is that your reencoding them. Since a lot of the data has already been thrown away in the first encoding, you probably get much better compression when you get to the mpeg2 step.
If you believe something 100%, then you are blind to all the evidence contradicting that belief. I'm not saying that you shouldn't believe in things, but if you're *sure* about it, then you are probably not seeing the whole situation.
There might be a fine line between purple and lavander, but there isn't between red and green. The president himself said that there is no connection between Iraq and 9/11. We didn't even have so much as unfounded-speculation that there was an imminent threat. All we knew is that they *might* have weapons. So we attacked them because they *might* have had weapons. My neighbor has a gun. Should I preemptively murder him because he might get me first?