I suggest we copy a virus into a removable media. Nop, not a small pendrive, I am thinking of a 4GB Quantum Bigfoot. Then, we stick it up this "scientist's" ass. Wait 2 days. Then we plug it back in into a computer. For science.
Slashdot is US centric, that is true. But above anything, it's Geek-centric. This is news for nerds. We are man of science. And we all use metric.
It doesn't truly matter what most people in your country uses. You used units of measure made for monkeys. If that's all you are, I recommend you head over to Fark.
So many words and letter combinations to hide 'bad words'... and all the bad words I can think of are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits!
Want the proof? Take a look at ink and printer prices in various countries.
They are not charging what the ink is worth, they are charging as much as people is willing to pay. Example:
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in the US for u$s 21.99 HP's C8721 cartridge retails in Argentina for u$s 20.55
Mostly the same.
Except that price of ~20 dollars in Argentina includes 21% VAT, import taxes (~20%), and ~3.5% other taxes. That's ~45%. But they manage to sell it at the same price they sell in the US, where taxes for this product are much lower. Explain that.
Also, I buy my own Ink (I live in Argentina). A motherfucking LITER of Epson black Ink retails at $30. 1/2 a liter of HP black ink retails for $16.
Now, explain how a few milliliters of ink can cost as much as a fucking 1L bottle full of it? If the bottle was priced like the ink in the cartridge, the bottle would cost somewhere near $10.000. 10k for a bottle of ink? No way!.
Now, I know the ink on the bottles isn't the same a the ink on the cartridges, but it's close enough. A little difference in quality and a different dilution can't account for a 1000x price difference.
So, now matter how you look at it, they are ripping us off, and setting the price of Ink to "as much as we can get away with". There is no correlation between production costs and retail price.
First, they didn't invent anything. Digital video is an invention. Digital video compression is an invention. A particular codec for digital video compression among the thousands that exist shouldn't be patentable. This guys hold patents on ridiculous things like b-frames!
So, basically, if your codec does inter-frame compression, you are infringing on their patents. That doesn't sound fair to me.
Also, they don't actually develop anything, they are just a patent pool. They gather patents from many guys, with the explicit intention of suing the fuck out of anyone not in the group.
On the other hand, they are acting exactly like a patent troll. If you hold an honest patent (if there is such a thing), and you want to protect your invention, you immediately identify infringing parties and notify them first, sue them if you have to. This guys are just holding onto the patents, not directly suing, mostly just threatening. They spread FUD. They've said that ANY video codec ever will infringe their patents. Yes, they've actually said that.
Now STFU and educate yourself before defending this stupid trolls.
And I fully agree with you. Except it's one of those temporary permanent solutions. Mention one place where charity has done a good thing. Mention one place that was once on charity and managed to make it on its own. Not a single one. On the other hand, you have places like Europe, that were devastated after World War 2, and where helped by no one. They got no humanitarian help of any kind. Germany, for instance, is now one of the most powerful nations in the world, and they made it on their own. Take Nigeria, on the other hand...
Take Cube and Haiti. They have the same background. Cube was isolated, and on their own they managed to get a pretty decent social situation. Haiti, that has received help for almost a century, on the other hand...
I do agree that we should lend a hand to people to help them back on their feet. But it must be done in a nondiscriminatory way, not tied to any other kind of interests. Political/Religious/Corporate clientelism is one of the worst faces of the system.
Charity is a bad thing. The lower classes, always somebody's tool. The Government uses them to get votes, the religions win them easily with some charity and false promises, and the corporations get their cheap labor from them.
Governments, Religions and corporations want to keep the poor down there. They need poor people. Charity is the tool they use to keep them there. It will keep them alive, but it won't let them go anywhere.
People need jobs, hospitals, and equal opportunities. We are already creating the means to create that equal opportunity for everyone through taxes. Except politicians steal the money, and give some to corporations and religions. Then, together, they can use that money to bribe the poor. I'll give you food, but you'll turn into a catholic. I'll give you food, but you'll vote for me. I'll pay you minimal wage, but you'll work 16 hours a day. Same plan, different perpetrators.
Now, you were talking about positive things coming out of religions?
Well, the GPL version 3 does address this issue, and other limitations (like hypervisors that prevent you from installing unsigned code).
But the problem is not a license issue, since we don't have the resources to legally battle all companies that violate Free Software licenses.
It's about people understanding the importance of GPLed software, and the philosophy behind it. It's about building an ethical understanding of the issue in the population.
But the reason why people violate the GPL is obvious: Copyright isn't natural. Stealing is immoral, and also breaks the law. Copyright infringement only breaks the law, but it's not immoral. It's not a crime. And it'll never be. Copyright is an invention, and unnatural limitation. Therefore, people disregard it, just like many other things that aren't immoral, but are illegal. Illegal, but very convenient, will get you a lot of infractions. That's why we have a lot more traffic violations than murders.
So, you are a huge organization with lots of political power, and you have a history of murder and torture and censorship, you are responsible for the overpopulation and aids problem we have right now since you told people that using condoms was bad, and you accomplished all of that with money stolen from people both directly and through government support across 2000 years, mostly by telling them an schizophrenic story about a jewish carpenter that was his own father. But you don't censor science that much anymore, so, you are suddenly GOOD?
That's what I call low standards.
All religions are shit. They attempt to create yet another division across humans so that we can continue killing each other over trivial shit, and then they profit from it. Nothing good ever came out of them, and never will. The sooner we get rid of them, the better. And that kind of religious apology you are doing is dangerous, to say the least. Just because the evil empire doesn't target your particular group anymore doesn't mean it's not an evil empire.
Then, they laugh at you. Then they win. Then you die. 500 years later, they remove your bones, use you to do a PR stunt, then they bath you with their bullshit water, and pretend nothing happened.
Well, Bill Joy will go to editors hell, since we all know vi is the editor of the beast. Richard will be rewritten in Lisp and released in Emacs 35 as the replacement of Dr. Emacs.
The issue here is not the quality of H.264. It's the fact that H.264 is owned by a congregation of patent trolls. We don't care if H.264 can compress a 2 hour movie in 720x576 to a 50KB file in a loss-less manner. We don't care if it bends space-time to deliver video FTL. Even if it did, I'd rather use MJPEG which is patent-free and supported by all browsers out of the box.
They do not believe in 99.9999% of the gods out there, except for one god, the one in their own religion. So, by your definition, catholics are skeptics, because they do not believe in buddha, reincarnation, aliens, xenu, and mohammad?
He had his own set of irrational believes, and disregarded other people's irrational believes as stupid. Just like the rest of theists. Get yourself an alchemist, a catholic priest, a jew, and a spoon-bender and they'll all tell you that they don't believe in a lot of stuff. That doesn't make them skeptics or rational humans. They are just defending their own believes, and disregarding others.
Same thing for this guy.
In order to be a rational human being you must NOT believe in ANYTHING. You can have a reasonable confidence in something due to experimentation and analysis on the subject. If you have faith in something, without any facts that support that idea, and a lot of facts against it, then you are not a rational human being, even if you happen to disregard a lot of other ideas. You can't believe in everything, that doesn't make you an skeptic.
He's one of those persons I just can't respect. He was essentially a crackpot. He was outspoken against pseudoscience, and then ran around talking about god. He was essentially weak. He didn't really believe in god, everything he believed was proof that there is no god. And he still insisted on believing in god, and tried hard to keep his stupid faith.
He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god, and therefore it's reasonable to believe in a god.
And those thoughts, specially coming from such a respected scientist, hurt the Atheist cause more than anything.
Let me think... integrated e-mail, search engine and online office suite. I'm sure I've seen that before. Now it comes to bing and hotmail, but I'm sure I've seen it in some other search engine that also has an e-mail service. I can't seem to remember the name right now.
Anyway, Congratulations microsoft! Definitely original and innovative new product, as usual.
In the end, the project was cancelled before we got a chance to get to test 3G coverage. But we did get to think about it. Our customer was a fleet of cargo ships, going through a fixed path on the Rio de la Plata (River Plate). Basically, we were going to install our CCTV system in there, and have it push images and other information to our servers whenever it had signal. We wanted to know approximately in what areas of the river we would have signal. We were going to base our system on the Vodafone mobile connect driver. It's a set of Python scripts. Of course, it communicates with the modem using simple AT commands. It's released under the GPL. It is capable of measuring signal, sending and receiving text messages, and other nice stuff (like, well, actually dialing and calling PPP to stablish the connection). We had it working with several Huawei devices, but I know it works with other brands too.
Our idea was to modify this scripts so that they would try to maintain a connection, auto-dial every time it disconnected, and log the signal at certain intervals to a MySQL DB. We were also going to run download tests all the time automatically. Since there was no chance we would go on the ships with the devices (the ships were cargo ships that transported and extracted sand, and there weren't very comfortable, not to mention their average trip was at least ~72 hs.), so we wanted to do all of this automatically. The devices would also inform their IP to a web service every time their IP changed, so we could SSH in the machine running this tests in case we needed to change something.
We were going to add a GPS to this system, that would also log its position at certain intervals, so that we could then generate a color-coded signal map.
I hope this helps. It's really fairly simple. I would be happy to provide you with source code, but we didn't get that far into the project as to produce actual source code, since the customer changed his mind due to budget restrictions real early. Feel free to contact me if you have other questions {almafuerte (at) gmail (dot) com}
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I couldn't help but read that in George's voice.
I miss that magnificent bastard so fucking much.
I suggest we copy a virus into a removable media. Nop, not a small pendrive, I am thinking of a 4GB Quantum Bigfoot. Then, we stick it up this "scientist's" ass. Wait 2 days. Then we plug it back in into a computer. For science.
Oh, you mean read-only?
Slashdot is US centric, that is true. But above anything, it's Geek-centric. This is news for nerds. We are man of science. And we all use metric.
It doesn't truly matter what most people in your country uses. You used units of measure made for monkeys. If that's all you are, I recommend you head over to Fark.
So many words and letter combinations to hide 'bad words' ... and all the bad words I can think of are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits!
Please, learn metric and post again.
I don't understand your archaic, unscientific units.
I thought it was called Mosaic. //I just watched SE01E21 ... FF, we are going to miss you.
Want the proof? Take a look at ink and printer prices in various countries.
They are not charging what the ink is worth, they are charging as much as people is willing to pay. Example:
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in the US for u$s 21.99
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in Argentina for u$s 20.55
Mostly the same.
Except that price of ~20 dollars in Argentina includes 21% VAT, import taxes (~20%), and ~3.5% other taxes. That's ~45%. But they manage to sell it at the same price they sell in the US, where taxes for this product are much lower. Explain that.
Also, I buy my own Ink (I live in Argentina). A motherfucking LITER of Epson black Ink retails at $30. 1/2 a liter of HP black ink retails for $16.
Now, explain how a few milliliters of ink can cost as much as a fucking 1L bottle full of it? If the bottle was priced like the ink in the cartridge, the bottle would cost somewhere near $10.000. 10k for a bottle of ink? No way!.
Now, I know the ink on the bottles isn't the same a the ink on the cartridges, but it's close enough. A little difference in quality and a different dilution can't account for a 1000x price difference.
So, now matter how you look at it, they are ripping us off, and setting the price of Ink to "as much as we can get away with". There is no correlation between production costs and retail price.
Bullshit.
First, they didn't invent anything. Digital video is an invention. Digital video compression is an invention. A particular codec for digital video compression among the thousands that exist shouldn't be patentable. This guys hold patents on ridiculous things like b-frames!
So, basically, if your codec does inter-frame compression, you are infringing on their patents. That doesn't sound fair to me.
Also, they don't actually develop anything, they are just a patent pool. They gather patents from many guys, with the explicit intention of suing the fuck out of anyone not in the group.
On the other hand, they are acting exactly like a patent troll. If you hold an honest patent (if there is such a thing), and you want to protect your invention, you immediately identify infringing parties and notify them first, sue them if you have to. This guys are just holding onto the patents, not directly suing, mostly just threatening. They spread FUD. They've said that ANY video codec ever will infringe their patents. Yes, they've actually said that.
Now STFU and educate yourself before defending this stupid trolls.
And I fully agree with you. Except it's one of those temporary permanent solutions. Mention one place where charity has done a good thing. Mention one place that was once on charity and managed to make it on its own. Not a single one. On the other hand, you have places like Europe, that were devastated after World War 2, and where helped by no one. They got no humanitarian help of any kind. Germany, for instance, is now one of the most powerful nations in the world, and they made it on their own. Take Nigeria, on the other hand ...
Take Cube and Haiti. They have the same background. Cube was isolated, and on their own they managed to get a pretty decent social situation. Haiti, that has received help for almost a century, on the other hand ...
I do agree that we should lend a hand to people to help them back on their feet. But it must be done in a nondiscriminatory way, not tied to any other kind of interests. Political/Religious/Corporate clientelism is one of the worst faces of the system.
Charity is a bad thing. The lower classes, always somebody's tool. The Government uses them to get votes, the religions win them easily with some charity and false promises, and the corporations get their cheap labor from them.
Governments, Religions and corporations want to keep the poor down there. They need poor people. Charity is the tool they use to keep them there. It will keep them alive, but it won't let them go anywhere.
People need jobs, hospitals, and equal opportunities. We are already creating the means to create that equal opportunity for everyone through taxes. Except politicians steal the money, and give some to corporations and religions. Then, together, they can use that money to bribe the poor. I'll give you food, but you'll turn into a catholic. I'll give you food, but you'll vote for me. I'll pay you minimal wage, but you'll work 16 hours a day. Same plan, different perpetrators.
Now, you were talking about positive things coming out of religions?
Well, the GPL version 3 does address this issue, and other limitations (like hypervisors that prevent you from installing unsigned code).
But the problem is not a license issue, since we don't have the resources to legally battle all companies that violate Free Software licenses.
It's about people understanding the importance of GPLed software, and the philosophy behind it. It's about building an ethical understanding of the issue in the population.
But the reason why people violate the GPL is obvious: Copyright isn't natural. Stealing is immoral, and also breaks the law. Copyright infringement only breaks the law, but it's not immoral. It's not a crime. And it'll never be. Copyright is an invention, and unnatural limitation. Therefore, people disregard it, just like many other things that aren't immoral, but are illegal. Illegal, but very convenient, will get you a lot of infractions. That's why we have a lot more traffic violations than murders.
Benign?
So, you are a huge organization with lots of political power, and you have a history of murder and torture and censorship, you are responsible for the overpopulation and aids problem we have right now since you told people that using condoms was bad, and you accomplished all of that with money stolen from people both directly and through government support across 2000 years, mostly by telling them an schizophrenic story about a jewish carpenter that was his own father. But you don't censor science that much anymore, so, you are suddenly GOOD?
That's what I call low standards.
All religions are shit. They attempt to create yet another division across humans so that we can continue killing each other over trivial shit, and then they profit from it. Nothing good ever came out of them, and never will. The sooner we get rid of them, the better. And that kind of religious apology you are doing is dangerous, to say the least. Just because the evil empire doesn't target your particular group anymore doesn't mean it's not an evil empire.
Then, they laugh at you. Then they win. Then you die. 500 years later, they remove your bones, use you to do a PR stunt, then they bath you with their bullshit water, and pretend nothing happened.
Oh, I hate theists a little bit more every day.
Well, Bill Joy will go to editors hell, since we all know vi is the editor of the beast. Richard will be rewritten in Lisp and released in Emacs 35 as the replacement of Dr. Emacs.
Exactly, with an arbitrary palette. That is lossy.
Exactly. I'm damn sure he picked up b-frames from the VP8 stream, and full key frames from the H.264 video.
Then he encoded them in GIF, and renamed the files to JPEG. This guy is biased. The article is worthless.
Are you stupid? GIF is by definition a lossy format, just like JPEG.
If you are going to do a comparison like this one, TIFF is the least we can expect.
The issue here is not the quality of H.264. It's the fact that H.264 is owned by a congregation of patent trolls.
We don't care if H.264 can compress a 2 hour movie in 720x576 to a 50KB file in a loss-less manner. We don't care if it bends space-time to deliver video FTL. Even if it did, I'd rather use MJPEG which is patent-free and supported by all browsers out of the box.
Well, that's what Theists do!
They do not believe in 99.9999% of the gods out there, except for one god, the one in their own religion. So, by your definition, catholics are skeptics, because they do not believe in buddha, reincarnation, aliens, xenu, and mohammad?
He had his own set of irrational believes, and disregarded other people's irrational believes as stupid. Just like the rest of theists. Get yourself an alchemist, a catholic priest, a jew, and a spoon-bender and they'll all tell you that they don't believe in a lot of stuff. That doesn't make them skeptics or rational humans. They are just defending their own believes, and disregarding others.
Same thing for this guy.
In order to be a rational human being you must NOT believe in ANYTHING. You can have a reasonable confidence in something due to experimentation and analysis on the subject. If you have faith in something, without any facts that support that idea, and a lot of facts against it, then you are not a rational human being, even if you happen to disregard a lot of other ideas. You can't believe in everything, that doesn't make you an skeptic.
He's one of those persons I just can't respect. He was essentially a crackpot. He was outspoken against pseudoscience, and then ran around talking about god. He was essentially weak. He didn't really believe in god, everything he believed was proof that there is no god. And he still insisted on believing in god, and tried hard to keep his stupid faith.
He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god, and therefore it's reasonable to believe in a god.
And those thoughts, specially coming from such a respected scientist, hurt the Atheist cause more than anything.
Doug Stanhope supports this post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlWi5NvGLpE
But a quick GIS revealed she's fucking hot. That's all you need to know.
Let me think ... integrated e-mail, search engine and online office suite. I'm sure I've seen that before. Now it comes to bing and hotmail, but I'm sure I've seen it in some other search engine that also has an e-mail service. I can't seem to remember the name right now.
Anyway, Congratulations microsoft! Definitely original and innovative new product, as usual.
In the end, the project was cancelled before we got a chance to get to test 3G coverage. But we did get to think about it. Our customer was a fleet of cargo ships, going through a fixed path on the Rio de la Plata (River Plate). Basically, we were going to install our CCTV system in there, and have it push images and other information to our servers whenever it had signal. We wanted to know approximately in what areas of the river we would have signal. We were going to base our system on the Vodafone mobile connect driver. It's a set of Python scripts. Of course, it communicates with the modem using simple AT commands. It's released under the GPL. It is capable of measuring signal, sending and receiving text messages, and other nice stuff (like, well, actually dialing and calling PPP to stablish the connection). We had it working with several Huawei devices, but I know it works with other brands too.
Our idea was to modify this scripts so that they would try to maintain a connection, auto-dial every time it disconnected, and log the signal at certain intervals to a MySQL DB. We were also going to run download tests all the time automatically. Since there was no chance we would go on the ships with the devices (the ships were cargo ships that transported and extracted sand, and there weren't very comfortable, not to mention their average trip was at least ~72 hs.), so we wanted to do all of this automatically. The devices would also inform their IP to a web service every time their IP changed, so we could SSH in the machine running this tests in case we needed to change something.
We were going to add a GPS to this system, that would also log its position at certain intervals, so that we could then generate a color-coded signal map.
I hope this helps. It's really fairly simple. I would be happy to provide you with source code, but we didn't get that far into the project as to produce actual source code, since the customer changed his mind due to budget restrictions real early. Feel free to contact me if you have other questions {almafuerte (at) gmail (dot) com}