What the game industry uses to encode music in games has no influence whatsoever on the habits of the general public in that area. Your post is pretty much orthogonal to the point of the GP, which is that Vorbis doesn't have the popularity required to make it a good choice to encode your music collection, unless you choose your mp3 player before you encode. From a limited set of choices, which may not have the looks you like, the features you want or the price you're willing to pay. And be ready to do the same thing in a few years, when you need to replace your music player.
When a subordinate screws up, it is also a failure of your own for not giving an adequate supervision of his work, giving vague instructions which could have been subject to interpretation, etc. You don't have to take all the blame, but you do carry a part of it. I'm not saying this is the case every single time, but it is probably not appropriate to waste too much time pinning blame very precisely before moving on and fixing the situation.
I agree with you as far as to think that this is a stupid idea, but I don't see the reason for Democrats bashing. One of the three proponents of the measure is Republican. Besides, the Republicans ran the two branches of the government long enough in recent years for everyone to see they don't know how to administrate the treasury any better.
I'm with you on that. I tried making an album from all the greatest Beatles songs with lyrics of my own inspiration, but Apple Records came sent its lawyers after me, so I'm not allowed to sell it.
Re:Truecrypt? why not dm-crypt instead?
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
Yes, there was always a deb package available, but after any kernel update, you had to wait for them to make a new package or compile it on your own. Maybe this situation has changed, I don't know. I'm just saying how it was last time I used it, which is a year or two ago maybe.
Truecrypt? why not dm-crypt instead?
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
I don't know if the situation has changed, but I have found using truecrypt on ubuntu to be extremely frustrating. Nothing wrong with Truecrypt per se, but it had to be recompiled every single time there was an update to the kernel. I need to access encrypted drives all the time, and having to wait a few hours for truecrypt to be compiled, keep track of where it has been installed, and delete it every couple of weeks to replace it with a another version was a major pain. Long story short, I now use dm-crypt. It can be mounted on Windows with FreeOTFE, and doesn't need to be recompiled all the time.
Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents
I cannot fathom how could anybody think that the conclusion to draw from this report is to develop AI to take ethical decisions. I dare say that no one who knows anything about AI research would hazard a guess about when such an elaborate project could come to fruition. What is needed is some sensitivity training for soldiers sent overseas... What do the people who answered this survey think would happen to their wives and daughters if an invading army came in the US with the same ideas about the dignity and respect of noncombatants?
Replace the women's rights pamphlet with a (non-explicit) circular defending paedophilia. Do you think our society would still protect your freedom of speech if you began circulating that? How long before they beat a confession out of you? Who's going to defend you?
I don't think I'd get 20 years in jail for doing that. And if I get beaten up, it won't be with the government's approval. As for the confession, a confession to what? Where will they find evidence of me committing paedophilia? Will it be in a secret trial, like the trial for this Afghan student? Western society is far better in this regard than what you try to make it look like it is.
Vista is not awful, but it's worst than XP in many ways (For instance, where is the button to go to the parent directory in windows explorer? How come I have to click through half a dozen dialogs to change file permissions?). It feels slower, which is annoying, and it simply doesn't have any compelling feature to make me want to switch. As you said, YMMV, but the consensus so far is that it was a long wait for nothing, which, from my personal experience, I tend to agree with.
Maybe all your friends are computer savvy, but such is not the case for me. I use Skype mostly to call my parents. The only internet access they can get is 28.8 kbps through a phone line. So guess what, they're not always online. Therefore, if I wanted them to use Skype, I would have to
1) Get them to download it, which would take hours; 2) Install it; 3) Purchase a microphone; 4) Configure the microphone; 5) Call them and warn them to get on the internet so I can call them; 6) Talk to them.
They're not computer savvy, so I would probably have to go see them to do the configuration, hoping it will remain functional for the one call per month I make. Or I can just call them from Skype to phone.
I'm not saying snooping on my calls is a good thing. However, I don't think free software is the answer here. I make calls from my computer to a land line, how can I prevent my provider, Skype or not, from eavesdropping on my conversations? You don't expect me to convince all my contacts to start using their computer to receive calls, do you?
I can't speak for the piston aircraft engine cooling part, but the advantages of sodium weren't sufficient to keep using it in submarines. Basically, if the reactor had to be shut down, it was impossible to restart, since the coolant would have by that time frozen solid. Not so desirable in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, as far as I know, cooling with liquid sodium is not used in any currently running nuclear submarine. Anyways, I am quite skeptical of the bold claims made in this press release. We see the usual patent pending technology, which has broken some unknown thus far barrier to the widespread use of this technology in the PC cooling area, putting the company ahead of the competition. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, it looks like a potentially very effective venture capital sink for clueless investors with money to burn.
I am a customer of Sympatico Bell, and I can assure you that, unlike what the interviewee would make you believe, traffic is throttled all day, every day. I don't use bittorrent too often, but whenever I start a download, it goes from ~500 KiB/s to ~30 KiB/s within the span of two minutes. The speed stays the same overnight. Not exactly a peak period... Sad thing is, I'm using Cogeco for the summer, and they're even worst, uploads are pretty much completely blocked.:(
Your reply completely fails to address the points I raised. Semantics aside, the article you refer to interprets a study and from it makes dubious claims which I doubt the original researchers would stand behind, such as
Conventional farming, on the other hand, restores mineral balances through fertilization. It also goes on to add it's own chosen set of "facts" which were obviously not part of the study
Without this artificially produced fertilizer, farmers would simply not be able to grow the crops necessary to feed the world's population. True or not, the author clearly has an agenda, and uses the "facts and math" to present his own, favorable view of industrial agriculture. Do you disagree with this statement, and why?
As for my sources, I agree that I did not choose the most unbiased website to link to. But, setting aside your long and pointless rant against women, hippies and treehuggers, how do you address the statement I quoted earlier:
A 2002 study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that, using our current system, three calories of energy were needed to create one calorie of edible food. And that was on average. Some foods take far more, for instance grain-fed beef, which requires thirty-five calories for every calorie of beef produced. x WhatÃ(TM)s more, the John Hopkins study didnÃ(TM)t include the energy used in processing and transporting food. Sure, the webpage it comes from is biased, but it mentions a valid study, and is factual. I use it to support the idea that industrial agriculture is not a sustainable practice. Do you disagree with this statement, and if so why?
Finally, can you explain to me how can organic farming cause a food crisis, given that its total land usage in the years 2005-2006 was 0.51% of all agricultural land in the US? The source for this statement is the United States Department of Agriculture.
If you want to attempt to make a rational argument leave the emotionally charged words and demonization out of it. Maybe you should try to apply that statement yourself. I can't find "treehugger" in the dictionary yet. And your whole answer to my post is nothing but a huge ad hominem against certain groups of people and against myself. Not much facts, science or math there. Or anything worth reading, for that matter.
Why is this modded insightful? According to this chart, 0.51% of all the land in the US is certified organic. How can such a small percentage of all the farmland be responsible for the current food crisis? Or perhaps you are saying the organic farmland in Africa is the root of the problem? I will not question your claim about organic farming's sustainability, but I consider the implied notion that industrial farming is "sustainable" to be completely laughable. Here is another article which, unlike yours, does not look like a press release from Monsanto, with a juicy tidbit of my picking:
A 2002 study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that, using our current system, three calories of energy were needed to create one calorie of edible food. And that was on average. Some foods take far more, for instance grain-fed beef, which requires thirty-five calories for every calorie of beef produced. x Whatâ(TM)s more, the John Hopkins study didnâ(TM)t include the energy used in processing and transporting food. If you are interested on the topic, I suggest you read the book Fast Food Nation. They mention, among other things, that the heavy use of pesticides and the need of machinery has had for consequence the current situation, where for every dollar spent to grow crops by a farmer, an equal amount is given by the US government in subsidies.
If what you want is realism in a FPS, then don't play DOOM, because that's not what the game is about. Is a game more realistic because my character will be limping for 10 seconds after being shot in the knee? Not really. Honestly, I find it quite ridiculous that you show so much contempt for players who have different tastes than yours. Not all shooters have to be remakes of Counter-Strike or Ghost Recon, you know.
How the hell was this moderated up? Wake up, the US is not any safer now against terrorism than it was before attacking Iraq. As far as I am concerned, this war is little more than a generous gift from a corrupt politician elected in a dubious manner to his friends in the military industrial complex. Besides, I'm sure a very good argument could be made that investing in high speed trains would make the US citizens safer, since there would be less planes around to hijack and throw into skyscrapers. Geez, are you going to stop building anything for fear someone may blow it up?
So now that they have tapped into them, they'll just bring them back on line? Those cables would be the easiest point for any hostile power to secure, since all they would have to do to make any tap irrelevant is to encrypt all the communications which go through the cables. Hopefully, the US intelligence is more competent than that and will use some other means, such as rooting one of the endpoints, to gather data.
FTA: "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."
What the interviewee is conveniently omitting to mention is that putting a loudspeaker to blare all day in the street would be obviously illegal, so nobody is being "spared", we're just being forced to listen to advertising which is so invading that it would be illegal in normal circumstances.
I think a better example of something that causes lost sovereignty is some of the trade agreements such as NAFTA. One example I think of specifically is the dispute between Ethyl Corporation and Canada, in which Canada was basically forced to remove a ban on a fuel additive despite evidence of it being harmful to humans, and to pay to Ethyl corporation 13 million dollars in legal fees and lost profits. (I am aware that the link I gave is quite biased, but I just wanted to point out the result of the legal battle I am speaking of). Further down, the article reads "... Canada remains one of the few countries in the world where MMT is blended into automotive fuel.". If that is not an example of lost sovereignty, I don't know what is.
The reason that comercially-architected pop groups succeed is simple - more people like them and are willing to pay for their music than that of the "truly talented artists".
With that kind of logic, McDonalds must be the best restaurant in the world. Seriously. The reason more people listen to pop groups is not that they like them more - it's simply because most people don't really have any musical taste. Or the movies they watch. They just listen to the movies and the music their friends listen to. Most people don't care about music or movies, they care about those around them and how these people perceive them. Ask these people to talk about their preferred artists or movies, and see how long the discussion will go. Some of the artists you praise would be completely replaceable by another person without anyone noticing, if it's wasn't for the huge clout from millions of dollars poured into advertising their image and making them known.
Slashdot recently covered the fact that the first new applications in 30 years for nuclear power plants were recently made in New Jersey. I expect to see more articles written whose purpose is to minimize the risks associated with nuclear power generation and to emphasize its benefits. Anyways, that my little conspiracy theory:>.
Slashdot Mirror
What the game industry uses to encode music in games has no influence whatsoever on the habits of the general public in that area. Your post is pretty much orthogonal to the point of the GP, which is that Vorbis doesn't have the popularity required to make it a good choice to encode your music collection, unless you choose your mp3 player before you encode. From a limited set of choices, which may not have the looks you like, the features you want or the price you're willing to pay. And be ready to do the same thing in a few years, when you need to replace your music player.
When a subordinate screws up, it is also a failure of your own for not giving an adequate supervision of his work, giving vague instructions which could have been subject to interpretation, etc. You don't have to take all the blame, but you do carry a part of it. I'm not saying this is the case every single time, but it is probably not appropriate to waste too much time pinning blame very precisely before moving on and fixing the situation.
I agree with you as far as to think that this is a stupid idea, but I don't see the reason for Democrats bashing. One of the three proponents of the measure is Republican. Besides, the Republicans ran the two branches of the government long enough in recent years for everyone to see they don't know how to administrate the treasury any better.
I'm with you on that. I tried making an album from all the greatest Beatles songs with lyrics of my own inspiration, but Apple Records came sent its lawyers after me, so I'm not allowed to sell it.
Yes, there was always a deb package available, but after any kernel update, you had to wait for them to make a new package or compile it on your own. Maybe this situation has changed, I don't know. I'm just saying how it was last time I used it, which is a year or two ago maybe.
I don't know if the situation has changed, but I have found using truecrypt on ubuntu to be extremely frustrating. Nothing wrong with Truecrypt per se, but it had to be recompiled every single time there was an update to the kernel. I need to access encrypted drives all the time, and having to wait a few hours for truecrypt to be compiled, keep track of where it has been installed, and delete it every couple of weeks to replace it with a another version was a major pain. Long story short, I now use dm-crypt. It can be mounted on Windows with FreeOTFE, and doesn't need to be recompiled all the time.
Now let's hope Symantec is not going to sue them... :)
Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents
I cannot fathom how could anybody think that the conclusion to draw from this report is to develop AI to take ethical decisions. I dare say that no one who knows anything about AI research would hazard a guess about when such an elaborate project could come to fruition. What is needed is some sensitivity training for soldiers sent overseas... What do the people who answered this survey think would happen to their wives and daughters if an invading army came in the US with the same ideas about the dignity and respect of noncombatants?
Media Transparency documents that between 1986 and 2005 CMPA received 55 grants totaling $2,960,916 (unadjusted for inflation)...The data reveals that the overwhelming proportion of CMPA's funding comes from conservative foundations.
Replace the women's rights pamphlet with a (non-explicit) circular defending paedophilia. Do you think our society would still protect your freedom of speech if you began circulating that? How long before they beat a confession out of you? Who's going to defend you?
I don't think I'd get 20 years in jail for doing that. And if I get beaten up, it won't be with the government's approval. As for the confession, a confession to what? Where will they find evidence of me committing paedophilia? Will it be in a secret trial, like the trial for this Afghan student? Western society is far better in this regard than what you try to make it look like it is.
Vista is not awful, but it's worst than XP in many ways (For instance, where is the button to go to the parent directory in windows explorer? How come I have to click through half a dozen dialogs to change file permissions?). It feels slower, which is annoying, and it simply doesn't have any compelling feature to make me want to switch. As you said, YMMV, but the consensus so far is that it was a long wait for nothing, which, from my personal experience, I tend to agree with.
Not good enough.
Maybe all your friends are computer savvy, but such is not the case for me. I use Skype mostly to call my parents. The only internet access they can get is 28.8 kbps through a phone line. So guess what, they're not always online. Therefore, if I wanted them to use Skype, I would have to
1) Get them to download it, which would take hours;
2) Install it;
3) Purchase a microphone;
4) Configure the microphone;
5) Call them and warn them to get on the internet so I can call them;
6) Talk to them.
They're not computer savvy, so I would probably have to go see them to do the configuration, hoping it will remain functional for the one call per month I make. Or I can just call them from Skype to phone.
I'm not saying snooping on my calls is a good thing. However, I don't think free software is the answer here. I make calls from my computer to a land line, how can I prevent my provider, Skype or not, from eavesdropping on my conversations? You don't expect me to convince all my contacts to start using their computer to receive calls, do you?
I can't speak for the piston aircraft engine cooling part, but the advantages of sodium weren't sufficient to keep using it in submarines. Basically, if the reactor had to be shut down, it was impossible to restart, since the coolant would have by that time frozen solid. Not so desirable in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, as far as I know, cooling with liquid sodium is not used in any currently running nuclear submarine. Anyways, I am quite skeptical of the bold claims made in this press release. We see the usual patent pending technology, which has broken some unknown thus far barrier to the widespread use of this technology in the PC cooling area, putting the company ahead of the competition. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, it looks like a potentially very effective venture capital sink for clueless investors with money to burn.
How about giving baseball bats to all the passengers boarding a plane instead?
(Not my idea, someone was suggesting it in a video I can't find a link to a few years back)
I am a customer of Sympatico Bell, and I can assure you that, unlike what the interviewee would make you believe, traffic is throttled all day, every day. I don't use bittorrent too often, but whenever I start a download, it goes from ~500 KiB/s to ~30 KiB/s within the span of two minutes. The speed stays the same overnight. Not exactly a peak period... Sad thing is, I'm using Cogeco for the summer, and they're even worst, uploads are pretty much completely blocked. :(
As for my sources, I agree that I did not choose the most unbiased website to link to. But, setting aside your long and pointless rant against women, hippies and treehuggers, how do you address the statement I quoted earlier: A 2002 study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that, using our current system, three calories of energy were needed to create one calorie of edible food. And that was on average. Some foods take far more, for instance grain-fed beef, which requires thirty-five calories for every calorie of beef produced. x WhatÃ(TM)s more, the John Hopkins study didnÃ(TM)t include the energy used in processing and transporting food. Sure, the webpage it comes from is biased, but it mentions a valid study, and is factual. I use it to support the idea that industrial agriculture is not a sustainable practice. Do you disagree with this statement, and if so why?
Finally, can you explain to me how can organic farming cause a food crisis, given that its total land usage in the years 2005-2006 was 0.51% of all agricultural land in the US? The source for this statement is the United States Department of Agriculture. If you want to attempt to make a rational argument leave the emotionally charged words and demonization out of it. Maybe you should try to apply that statement yourself. I can't find "treehugger" in the dictionary yet. And your whole answer to my post is nothing but a huge ad hominem against certain groups of people and against myself. Not much facts, science or math there. Or anything worth reading, for that matter.
If what you want is realism in a FPS, then don't play DOOM, because that's not what the game is about. Is a game more realistic because my character will be limping for 10 seconds after being shot in the knee? Not really. Honestly, I find it quite ridiculous that you show so much contempt for players who have different tastes than yours. Not all shooters have to be remakes of Counter-Strike or Ghost Recon, you know.
How the hell was this moderated up? Wake up, the US is not any safer now against terrorism than it was before attacking Iraq. As far as I am concerned, this war is little more than a generous gift from a corrupt politician elected in a dubious manner to his friends in the military industrial complex. Besides, I'm sure a very good argument could be made that investing in high speed trains would make the US citizens safer, since there would be less planes around to hijack and throw into skyscrapers. Geez, are you going to stop building anything for fear someone may blow it up?
So now that they have tapped into them, they'll just bring them back on line? Those cables would be the easiest point for any hostile power to secure, since all they would have to do to make any tap irrelevant is to encrypt all the communications which go through the cables. Hopefully, the US intelligence is more competent than that and will use some other means, such as rooting one of the endpoints, to gather data.
FTA: "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."
What the interviewee is conveniently omitting to mention is that putting a loudspeaker to blare all day in the street would be obviously illegal, so nobody is being "spared", we're just being forced to listen to advertising which is so invading that it would be illegal in normal circumstances.
I think a better example of something that causes lost sovereignty is some of the trade agreements such as NAFTA. One example I think of specifically is the dispute between Ethyl Corporation and Canada, in which Canada was basically forced to remove a ban on a fuel additive despite evidence of it being harmful to humans, and to pay to Ethyl corporation 13 million dollars in legal fees and lost profits. (I am aware that the link I gave is quite biased, but I just wanted to point out the result of the legal battle I am speaking of). Further down, the article reads "... Canada remains one of the few countries in the world where MMT is blended into automotive fuel.". If that is not an example of lost sovereignty, I don't know what is.
With that kind of logic, McDonalds must be the best restaurant in the world. Seriously. The reason more people listen to pop groups is not that they like them more - it's simply because most people don't really have any musical taste. Or the movies they watch. They just listen to the movies and the music their friends listen to. Most people don't care about music or movies, they care about those around them and how these people perceive them. Ask these people to talk about their preferred artists or movies, and see how long the discussion will go. Some of the artists you praise would be completely replaceable by another person without anyone noticing, if it's wasn't for the huge clout from millions of dollars poured into advertising their image and making them known.
Slashdot recently covered the fact that the first new applications in 30 years for nuclear power plants were recently made in New Jersey. I expect to see more articles written whose purpose is to minimize the risks associated with nuclear power generation and to emphasize its benefits. Anyways, that my little conspiracy theory :>.
Disclaimer: I am in favor of nuclear power.