Telecommuting is a good idea, but "well-intentioned" half-baked policy measures which try to advance a good idea without any thought about the unintended real-world consequences are much of what got us into this mess in the first place.
Your proposed policy would have disastrous economic effects without having much in the way of positive environmental effects. Under your system, industries that need onsite labor are unfairly crippled, industries where nearly everyone could telecommute have no incentive to have more than 50% of their people telecommute, and those who aren't telecommuting have no incentive to shorten their commute or use more efficient transportation. In fact, with reduced congestion and no increase in their incentives to be efficient, those who were still commuting would spread out more and use more inefficient transportation, offsetting much of the gains of increased telecommuting.
Having employees onsite is not the problem; emissions and congestion are the problems. Telecommuting is just one possible helpful idea. Policy measures need to be directed at the problems and leave people free to find their own ideas and choices about how to adjust.
If you raise the gas taxes sufficiently, people will design communities and metropolitan areas around the idea that people should live close to where they work, go to school, shop, etc- within range of walking, cycling, or simple public transit. When the social costs of transit show up directly in individuals' transportation costs, people have incentives to be as efficient as they can be. Those who can telecommute will do so. Those who have sufficiently strong motivations to commute or even to have long commutes would not be prevented from doing so, they'd simply pay more of the social cost of their actions. This outcome is more equitable and just, better for the economy, and better for the environment than what you propose.
1. Realize safety is one goal among many and that we have to deal with tradeoffs. Over the past 30 years it's been "the engineer giveth and the safety inspector taketh away" as overblown concerns about collision readiness have turned into absurd safety regulations and a curb weight arms race.
2. Raise the gas tax to reflect the real costs of driving- the tremendous spending on road construction and maintenance, the externalities associated with road congestion and pollution, etc. Everyone who's willing to be honest about the impact of different policies, from Greg Mankiw (former chairman of the CEA and an adviser to Romney) to Steven Chu (Obama's energy secretary), knows that this is the only realistic way forward.
Higher gas taxes would be much much less distortionary and harmful to the economy than simply mandating higher fuel standards. The gas tax is also a better way to raise revenue than most other taxes; a revenue-neutral bill raising the gas tax while lowering the taxes on labor and productivity (payroll, corporate, income, etc) would be a huge boon to the economy.
Of course, I don't expect either of these two things to happen, since political bickering and accusations ("you want to see more Americans dying on the highways! you want to put the pain on us every time we go to the pump!") will probably trump any kind of attempt to bring our policies back in contact with reality.
aacplus was just the early CT-proprietary version of HE-AAC. They did test against the two best publicly available HE-AAC encoders, which have improved quite a bit since the aacplus days. Opus was better, by a statistically significant margin.
Opus has band folding, which is in some ways similar to SBR but considerably superior. Halfway down Monty's two-year-old CELT demo page there's some explanation and a visual of what this looks like on a spectrogram in low-bitrate situations. (Opus used technology from CELT but is considerably improved.)
If you really think HE-AAC type codecs sound like CD at 32kbps and so forth you are extremely insensitive to coding artifacts. Unless you meant mono for all of those.
"Shine" is a really funny word for what HE-AAC sounds like at 16-24kbps. You can't polish a turd.
As far as AMR-WB/NB, you have to get down to 8kbps before AMR-WB sounds measurably better, and you have to get down to 6kbps before AMR-NB sounds better. Opus is tied with AMR-WB at 12kbps and better at 16kbps, and it's tied with AMR-NB at 8kbps and significantly better at 12 or above. Look at the studies linked from the comparison page if you want more details, keeping in mind that the Opus encoder has continued to improve in the year since those studies were done.
No. You're confusing transmission latency with algorithmic latency. If you're encoding music to store on an mp3 player, the format can use larger transform windows (usually MDCT) and other methods which mean the encoder looks at a larger number of samples before sending any output and the decoder has to read a larger amount of data before outputting any audio.
For codecs like mp3, AAC, etc, even if you had an infinitely fast computer and infinitely fast transmission, adding an encoder and decoder between the recording and the playback adds ~200ms of latency. That's fine for storing files on an mp3 player but totally unacceptable for real-time communication. Opus, by default, has 20ms of algorithmic latency, and it can be configured to go as low as 2.5ms.
Testing that things work has been done for all kinds of bitrates (512kbps per stream * multiple streams in a surround encoding). It's just that Opus is transparent to most listeners on most samples before you hit 128kbps for stereo. It's extremely hard to do a worthwhile listening test when only a few listeners can tell even a few of the samples from the original.
Some people at hydrogenaudio.org have reported problem samples which they were able to ABX from the original at up to 160kbps. I haven't personally found any stereo samples I can reliably ABX from the original at above 80kbps.
It can support up to 255 channels. The two-channel maximum is per stream. Multiple streams can be packed into single frames, but for >2 channels the mapping and coupling has to be signaled at the container level.
The standard tools available at opus-codec.org use Ogg as a container for "at-rest files," and Firefox, foobar2000, and gstreamer-supporting apps (like Opera on Linux) all play Opus-in-Ogg files. VLC and Rockbox will soon release versions with playback support for these too. Though RTP etc is a primary focus, the "at-rest file" support is ahead of the interactive support at this stage of the game.
A Matroska mapping is still in progress. Most likely, for the time being, Opus files will be predominantly Ogg, while the Matroska mapping will be more important for using Opus with video streams (esp. vp8, improving on the webm vp8+vorbis+matroska combination).
It's true that Opus does better than AAC and Vorbis at CD-quality bitrates and thus would be an improvement for music players etc.
But the improvements there are fairly small- in fact, Opus wasn't originally targeted at that kind of use at all, and the authors were quite surprised that it outdid those kinds of high-latency codecs. Opus is a very low-latency codec, and it combines Skype's speech compression technology and more music-oriented technologies (those introduced in CELT) to allow interactive speech and music over the Web.
Gaining marketshare in the high-bitrate stored music market against dominant formats like MP3 and AAC is hard, even when you outperform them substantially. But there's not really any established players in low-latency Internet audio. Opus blows all the other low-latency and/or low-bitrate codecs out of the water when competing in those other codecs' bitrate-latency "sweet spots", is the only codec which can compete across that kind of a range, is now a standard, is royalty-free, and is already implemented in Firefox.
Those who are saying "meh, only audiophiles will care" or "this won't get marketshare against AAC" are missing the point. This codec will change the face of the Web.
Higher *enforced* speed limits are much better than lower but commonly disregarded ones.
A highway where everyone is traveling at 85mph is safe under normal driving conditions. It's much more hazardous to have a highway where a third of traffic is staying within a few mph of a 65mph speed limit, half of traffic is going the usual 10mph over the limit or thereabouts, and the last sixth is split between those trying to go considerably over 80 and a handful of people going less than 60.
Even beyond the safety considerations, having any laws that people expect to almost always get away with flagrantly violating is bad for society. Speed limits should be high but *tightly-enforced*. If people would be outraged if a speed limit were tightly enforced, either the limit needs to be raised or (much harder) societal expectations have to be fundamentally changed.
I know everybody complains about traffic enforcement cameras, but traffic violations are too frequent and too hard to catch to have effective enforcement without them; instead of complaining about the law actually being enforced, change the law.
When you're only enforcing the law a tiny fraction of the time, that's not only ineffective but also unfair and arbitrary. Making people pay an exorbitant fine the 0.01% of the time they get caught is not an effective deterrent; such fines may raise revenue for some municipalities but they're awful public policy.
You are totally full of crap. You didn't "point out that there is a low latency niche that this codec COULD fill," you had to have two different posters bash you over the head with that fact before you acknowledged it. I didn't claim Opus "would end up on every PMP and other consumer device" either; I talked about HTML5 use and real-time communications. Try reading and understanding before you start spouting bull.
Apple had very little to do with the rise of H.264; its very large technical superiority over DIVX and other previous codecs, its early-to-market advantage over VC-1, Theora, and VP8, its use on Blu-ray, and the appearance of a best-of-breed free encoder (x.264) all contributed a heck of a lot more than Apple. Apple has been a big factor in AAC adoption due to iTunes, but that doesn't mean they have that kind of power with any other market niche. Steve Jobs' comment about Flash didn't make any change in the Flash vs HTML5 war at all, and the impact of Apple's stance regarding Flash on iDevices has only been to slightly accelerate an existing trend.
You rant and rave about how Apple is God and then you accuse everybody else of having drunk the Koolaid? Go get your head examined.
No codec rules the market forever. You might as well have been saying "dude, mp2 rules both audio and video, give it up" fifteen years ago, or "dude, audio is MP3 and video is DIVX and that is that" nine years ago.
The MPEG cartel doesn't believe you either; they've been rushing to get new codecs together (USAC/Extended HE-AAC, H.265).
This time they were beat to the punch. Opus significantly outperforms MP3 and AAC even at their strong points, and MP3 and AAC are very poor for low-bandwidth use and zero use for low-latency communications. USAC is late to the party, high-latency, and doesn't match Opus's quality.
Opus may not totally displace MP3 and AAC for music player use, but it will gain a place there, just as AAC did, and in many of the markets it competes in- especially low-latency Internet audio- there is no well-established competitor.
You're perfectly welcome to continue using Lynx on your PDP-10 then. Many of the rest of us are interested in listening to audio over the internet without having to use Flash, and in having conversations over the Internet without having to use Skype etc.
A fair question. I think the term "Creationist" has primarily been used by both the young-earthers and the militant atheists to try to conflate the issues and create a false dichotomy.
Young-earthers often abuse the word "Creationist" to either try to claim broader support for their absurd position than they really have (by lumping theistic evolutionists in with their position) or to attack theistic evolution (by lumping it in with atheism).
Militant atheists abuse the word "Creationist" to lump all believers in God in with the young-earthers. The straw-man theism they thus set up is a lot easier to attack.
The word "Creationist" would most naturally provide us with a common term for all--Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Sikh, deist, or whatever else-- who believe in any form of divine creation, whether evolutionary, seven-days, instantaneously ex nihilo, or whatever else. But in the current rhetorical climate the term has become worse than useless, and I suppose I'd advocate avoiding the term and being more specific.
(If we were using the term in its most natural sense, "Creationist Christian" would either be redundant or rule out only those who do not believe in a Creator but nevertheless term themselves Christian-- a handful of liberal theologians and some Unitarians, I suppose.)
It's not simply false- an allegory isn't meant to be understood that literally and narrowly. And that God created the world, that there's a purpose to its existence as well as ours, is not some kind of "last scrap." The exact amount of time from the beginning of the world to the appearance of man had little bearing on the lives of a bunch of ancient Hebrews and continues to have little bearing on mine today. Knowing that Creation and life are loving gifts we should cherish and are stewardships we should manage prudently has a tremendous impact.
Agreed. Just about every serious economist out there will tell you that US gas taxes are much lower than would be socially optimal. For instance, Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the CEA and an adviser to Romney, listed a few key reasons for phasing in an extra $1/gal tax in an article for the WSJ. Steven Chu, Obama's energy secretary, had a broadly similar proposal.
The costs of road use and pollution need to be linked to the price of using the roads and the price of polluting. If we want people to use less gas, we should tax it more. Demand for gas is relatively inelastic, so gas tax revenues would greatly increase, and we could use that to either help with the deficit or reduce taxes on things we want people to do more of (like income/payroll taxes, which tax productivity).
The only trouble is that even though this is a no-brainer, it's a third rail which no mainstream politicians will touch.
In a sense, yes, they are fixing problems that weren't their fault. 3rd-party add-ons have been the cause of the most significant FF memory problems for many users, and FF 15 contains changes which should keep even badly written add-ons from leaking anywhere near as much memory as they used to.
The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.
Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.
I defy you to come up with any meaningful metric by which He did an awful job. I look at the earth around us and at the fossil record and am constrained to say, as does the scripture, that His Creation was all very good.
Some people claim that the amount of time or energy it took to reach the point of having sentient creatures was excessive and inefficient. Why would God care about either of those metrics? Why would one who is eternal care how long it took? Why would one who created the stars care how much energy it took?
There are young-earth creationists who make those sorts of claims- "He wouldn't have created it that way, that's too slow and inefficient." To those people I'm inclined to answer "Who are you to try to tell God what to do and how to do it?"
Wrong. Somehow expecting "divine fingerprints" to show up as "let's just suspend all the laws of nature here" type stuff, and then saying "we can definitively rule out any divine intervention because we don't have any evidence of instantaneous ex nihilo creations of vastly different species" is absurd.
For any given one of the billions upon billions of mutations which helped determine the course of evolution on earth, if you say "that mutation wasn't divinely caused- it had to be random!" you're making an entirely unscientific claim, a claim at least as unfounded as any theist's, and one which is based wholly upon a mistaken interpretation of randomness.
No, the headline isn't a good summary. However, if it had read "Young-Earth Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children" it would have been just fine.
The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process. From Asa Gray- said by Darwin to be Darwin's best advocate- to the present day, hundreds of millions of people, including a good number of evolutionary biologists, have held both of these beliefs.
Evolution is, however, inconsistent with an overly literal and naive reading of the first chapter of Genesis. Those misguided individuals who promote the idea that Genesis was a scientific account and try to force schools to ignore the mountains of evidence for evolution and/or to "teach the controversy" are a threat to basic science education. As a science educator Nye has an interest in helping combat that threat. But he is not trying to pick a fight with all theists here.
Even when tiered plans exist, they are not proportionately cheaper. If somebody else uses 200 GB and I use 50MB my service is not 1/4000 the price. So low-bandwidth users are still subsidizing the high-bandwidth ones.
Also, there's no way to price Unlimited plans in such a way that proportionately reflects their usage compared to tiered plans - how much should they be, infinity dollars?
Sure, if the users actually use infinite bandwidth:) People should be charged for what they use. Your claim that this is impossible is baffling; I suppose you think every time people go to the supermarket they all just pay the same price to get in (or maybe a lowere 'tiered' price if they promise they'll be using the Under 20 Items Express Checkout) and then make off with whatever goods they can.
Offering unlimited data plans is kinda absurd. It's a terrible way to allocate a limited resource. It means that the majority of customers, who use rather little bandwidth, pay a ton extra to subsidize the few people who cause most of the burden on the network. Prices should be related to the cost of the services/goods provided, and when the connection between the two is severed, you end up with everything from dropped calls in NYC to Soviet bread queues.
I look forward to the day when there's a simple per-GB rate that applies to all data, whether that data happens to be smartphone internet use, tethered internet use, voice, or text. (The per-GB rate would also naturally change with the time of day to reflect network demand/pressure.) In that glorious day, the phone providers, forced to compete with one another based on that rate rather than on absurd plans and subsidized phones, will provide better and less expensive service.
But given the current oligopoly, the messed-up regulatory situation, and the incestuous relationships between cell manufacturers and the carriers, I don't know that that day is any closer than the day we'll all be driving fusion-powered flying cars:(
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Telecommuting is a good idea, but "well-intentioned" half-baked policy measures which try to advance a good idea without any thought about the unintended real-world consequences are much of what got us into this mess in the first place.
Your proposed policy would have disastrous economic effects without having much in the way of positive environmental effects. Under your system, industries that need onsite labor are unfairly crippled, industries where nearly everyone could telecommute have no incentive to have more than 50% of their people telecommute, and those who aren't telecommuting have no incentive to shorten their commute or use more efficient transportation. In fact, with reduced congestion and no increase in their incentives to be efficient, those who were still commuting would spread out more and use more inefficient transportation, offsetting much of the gains of increased telecommuting.
Having employees onsite is not the problem; emissions and congestion are the problems. Telecommuting is just one possible helpful idea. Policy measures need to be directed at the problems and leave people free to find their own ideas and choices about how to adjust.
If you raise the gas taxes sufficiently, people will design communities and metropolitan areas around the idea that people should live close to where they work, go to school, shop, etc- within range of walking, cycling, or simple public transit. When the social costs of transit show up directly in individuals' transportation costs, people have incentives to be as efficient as they can be. Those who can telecommute will do so. Those who have sufficiently strong motivations to commute or even to have long commutes would not be prevented from doing so, they'd simply pay more of the social cost of their actions. This outcome is more equitable and just, better for the economy, and better for the environment than what you propose.
1. Realize safety is one goal among many and that we have to deal with tradeoffs. Over the past 30 years it's been "the engineer giveth and the safety inspector taketh away" as overblown concerns about collision readiness have turned into absurd safety regulations and a curb weight arms race.
2. Raise the gas tax to reflect the real costs of driving- the tremendous spending on road construction and maintenance, the externalities associated with road congestion and pollution, etc. Everyone who's willing to be honest about the impact of different policies, from Greg Mankiw (former chairman of the CEA and an adviser to Romney) to Steven Chu (Obama's energy secretary), knows that this is the only realistic way forward.
Higher gas taxes would be much much less distortionary and harmful to the economy than simply mandating higher fuel standards. The gas tax is also a better way to raise revenue than most other taxes; a revenue-neutral bill raising the gas tax while lowering the taxes on labor and productivity (payroll, corporate, income, etc) would be a huge boon to the economy.
Of course, I don't expect either of these two things to happen, since political bickering and accusations ("you want to see more Americans dying on the highways! you want to put the pain on us every time we go to the pump!") will probably trump any kind of attempt to bring our policies back in contact with reality.
aacplus was just the early CT-proprietary version of HE-AAC. They did test against the two best publicly available HE-AAC encoders, which have improved quite a bit since the aacplus days. Opus was better, by a statistically significant margin.
Opus has band folding, which is in some ways similar to SBR but considerably superior. Halfway down Monty's two-year-old CELT demo page there's some explanation and a visual of what this looks like on a spectrogram in low-bitrate situations. (Opus used technology from CELT but is considerably improved.)
If you really think HE-AAC type codecs sound like CD at 32kbps and so forth you are extremely insensitive to coding artifacts. Unless you meant mono for all of those.
Gack, should have previewed. Of course the link is supposed to be "you'll get generation loss."
"Shine" is a really funny word for what HE-AAC sounds like at 16-24kbps. You can't polish a turd.
As far as AMR-WB/NB, you have to get down to 8kbps before AMR-WB sounds measurably better, and you have to get down to 6kbps before AMR-NB sounds better. Opus is tied with AMR-WB at 12kbps and better at 16kbps, and it's tied with AMR-NB at 8kbps and significantly better at 12 or above. Look at the studies linked from the comparison page if you want more details, keeping in mind that the Opus encoder has continued to improve in the year since those studies were done.
No. You're confusing transmission latency with algorithmic latency. If you're encoding music to store on an mp3 player, the format can use larger transform windows (usually MDCT) and other methods which mean the encoder looks at a larger number of samples before sending any output and the decoder has to read a larger amount of data before outputting any audio.
For codecs like mp3, AAC, etc, even if you had an infinitely fast computer and infinitely fast transmission, adding an encoder and decoder between the recording and the playback adds ~200ms of latency. That's fine for storing files on an mp3 player but totally unacceptable for real-time communication. Opus, by default, has 20ms of algorithmic latency, and it can be configured to go as low as 2.5ms.
Testing that things work has been done for all kinds of bitrates (512kbps per stream * multiple streams in a surround encoding). It's just that Opus is transparent to most listeners on most samples before you hit 128kbps for stereo. It's extremely hard to do a worthwhile listening test when only a few listeners can tell even a few of the samples from the original.
Some people at hydrogenaudio.org have reported problem samples which they were able to ABX from the original at up to 160kbps. I haven't personally found any stereo samples I can reliably ABX from the original at above 80kbps.
Of course lossless has its place. You don't want to be doing a lot of decoding lossy files, editing them, and then re-encoding, since you'll get . For similar reasons, rather than transcoding from one lossy format to another it makes sense to keep a lossless master and encode to lossy formats from that. But for listening purposes, Opus is quite capable of being perceptually transparent.
It can support up to 255 channels. The two-channel maximum is per stream. Multiple streams can be packed into single frames, but for >2 channels the mapping and coupling has to be signaled at the container level.
The standard tools available at opus-codec.org use Ogg as a container for "at-rest files," and Firefox, foobar2000, and gstreamer-supporting apps (like Opera on Linux) all play Opus-in-Ogg files. VLC and Rockbox will soon release versions with playback support for these too. Though RTP etc is a primary focus, the "at-rest file" support is ahead of the interactive support at this stage of the game.
A Matroska mapping is still in progress. Most likely, for the time being, Opus files will be predominantly Ogg, while the Matroska mapping will be more important for using Opus with video streams (esp. vp8, improving on the webm vp8+vorbis+matroska combination).
It's true that Opus does better than AAC and Vorbis at CD-quality bitrates and thus would be an improvement for music players etc.
But the improvements there are fairly small- in fact, Opus wasn't originally targeted at that kind of use at all, and the authors were quite surprised that it outdid those kinds of high-latency codecs. Opus is a very low-latency codec, and it combines Skype's speech compression technology and more music-oriented technologies (those introduced in CELT) to allow interactive speech and music over the Web.
Gaining marketshare in the high-bitrate stored music market against dominant formats like MP3 and AAC is hard, even when you outperform them substantially. But there's not really any established players in low-latency Internet audio. Opus blows all the other low-latency and/or low-bitrate codecs out of the water when competing in those other codecs' bitrate-latency "sweet spots", is the only codec which can compete across that kind of a range, is now a standard, is royalty-free, and is already implemented in Firefox.
Those who are saying "meh, only audiophiles will care" or "this won't get marketshare against AAC" are missing the point. This codec will change the face of the Web.
Higher *enforced* speed limits are much better than lower but commonly disregarded ones.
A highway where everyone is traveling at 85mph is safe under normal driving conditions. It's much more hazardous to have a highway where a third of traffic is staying within a few mph of a 65mph speed limit, half of traffic is going the usual 10mph over the limit or thereabouts, and the last sixth is split between those trying to go considerably over 80 and a handful of people going less than 60.
Even beyond the safety considerations, having any laws that people expect to almost always get away with flagrantly violating is bad for society. Speed limits should be high but *tightly-enforced*. If people would be outraged if a speed limit were tightly enforced, either the limit needs to be raised or (much harder) societal expectations have to be fundamentally changed.
I know everybody complains about traffic enforcement cameras, but traffic violations are too frequent and too hard to catch to have effective enforcement without them; instead of complaining about the law actually being enforced, change the law.
When you're only enforcing the law a tiny fraction of the time, that's not only ineffective but also unfair and arbitrary. Making people pay an exorbitant fine the 0.01% of the time they get caught is not an effective deterrent; such fines may raise revenue for some municipalities but they're awful public policy.
You are totally full of crap. You didn't "point out that there is a low latency niche that this codec COULD fill," you had to have two different posters bash you over the head with that fact before you acknowledged it. I didn't claim Opus "would end up on every PMP and other consumer device" either; I talked about HTML5 use and real-time communications. Try reading and understanding before you start spouting bull.
Apple had very little to do with the rise of H.264; its very large technical superiority over DIVX and other previous codecs, its early-to-market advantage over VC-1, Theora, and VP8, its use on Blu-ray, and the appearance of a best-of-breed free encoder (x.264) all contributed a heck of a lot more than Apple. Apple has been a big factor in AAC adoption due to iTunes, but that doesn't mean they have that kind of power with any other market niche. Steve Jobs' comment about Flash didn't make any change in the Flash vs HTML5 war at all, and the impact of Apple's stance regarding Flash on iDevices has only been to slightly accelerate an existing trend.
You rant and rave about how Apple is God and then you accuse everybody else of having drunk the Koolaid? Go get your head examined.
No codec rules the market forever. You might as well have been saying "dude, mp2 rules both audio and video, give it up" fifteen years ago, or "dude, audio is MP3 and video is DIVX and that is that" nine years ago.
The MPEG cartel doesn't believe you either; they've been rushing to get new codecs together (USAC/Extended HE-AAC, H.265).
This time they were beat to the punch. Opus significantly outperforms MP3 and AAC even at their strong points, and MP3 and AAC are very poor for low-bandwidth use and zero use for low-latency communications. USAC is late to the party, high-latency, and doesn't match Opus's quality.
Opus may not totally displace MP3 and AAC for music player use, but it will gain a place there, just as AAC did, and in many of the markets it competes in- especially low-latency Internet audio- there is no well-established competitor.
You're perfectly welcome to continue using Lynx on your PDP-10 then. Many of the rest of us are interested in listening to audio over the internet without having to use Flash, and in having conversations over the Internet without having to use Skype etc.
A fair question. I think the term "Creationist" has primarily been used by both the young-earthers and the militant atheists to try to conflate the issues and create a false dichotomy.
Young-earthers often abuse the word "Creationist" to either try to claim broader support for their absurd position than they really have (by lumping theistic evolutionists in with their position) or to attack theistic evolution (by lumping it in with atheism).
Militant atheists abuse the word "Creationist" to lump all believers in God in with the young-earthers. The straw-man theism they thus set up is a lot easier to attack.
The word "Creationist" would most naturally provide us with a common term for all--Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Sikh, deist, or whatever else-- who believe in any form of divine creation, whether evolutionary, seven-days, instantaneously ex nihilo, or whatever else. But in the current rhetorical climate the term has become worse than useless, and I suppose I'd advocate avoiding the term and being more specific.
(If we were using the term in its most natural sense, "Creationist Christian" would either be redundant or rule out only those who do not believe in a Creator but nevertheless term themselves Christian-- a handful of liberal theologians and some Unitarians, I suppose.)
It's not simply false- an allegory isn't meant to be understood that literally and narrowly. And that God created the world, that there's a purpose to its existence as well as ours, is not some kind of "last scrap." The exact amount of time from the beginning of the world to the appearance of man had little bearing on the lives of a bunch of ancient Hebrews and continues to have little bearing on mine today. Knowing that Creation and life are loving gifts we should cherish and are stewardships we should manage prudently has a tremendous impact.
Agreed. Just about every serious economist out there will tell you that US gas taxes are much lower than would be socially optimal. For instance, Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the CEA and an adviser to Romney, listed a few key reasons for phasing in an extra $1/gal tax in an article for the WSJ. Steven Chu, Obama's energy secretary, had a broadly similar proposal.
The costs of road use and pollution need to be linked to the price of using the roads and the price of polluting. If we want people to use less gas, we should tax it more. Demand for gas is relatively inelastic, so gas tax revenues would greatly increase, and we could use that to either help with the deficit or reduce taxes on things we want people to do more of (like income/payroll taxes, which tax productivity).
The only trouble is that even though this is a no-brainer, it's a third rail which no mainstream politicians will touch.
(Here's a Washington Post article with more details.)
In a sense, yes, they are fixing problems that weren't their fault. 3rd-party add-ons have been the cause of the most significant FF memory problems for many users, and FF 15 contains changes which should keep even badly written add-ons from leaking anywhere near as much memory as they used to.
The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.
Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.
Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)
I defy you to come up with any meaningful metric by which He did an awful job. I look at the earth around us and at the fossil record and am constrained to say, as does the scripture, that His Creation was all very good.
Some people claim that the amount of time or energy it took to reach the point of having sentient creatures was excessive and inefficient. Why would God care about either of those metrics? Why would one who is eternal care how long it took? Why would one who created the stars care how much energy it took?
There are young-earth creationists who make those sorts of claims- "He wouldn't have created it that way, that's too slow and inefficient." To those people I'm inclined to answer "Who are you to try to tell God what to do and how to do it?"
Wrong. Somehow expecting "divine fingerprints" to show up as "let's just suspend all the laws of nature here" type stuff, and then saying "we can definitively rule out any divine intervention because we don't have any evidence of instantaneous ex nihilo creations of vastly different species" is absurd.
The particular course evolution has taken depends on countless numbers of "random" mutations, as well as upon a tremendous number of environmental factors in the survival and reproduction of organisms carrying those mutations. Saying those mutations were random is basically admitting that there is no way we could have predicted those particular mutations given our knowledge of the previously obtaining conditions.
For any given one of the billions upon billions of mutations which helped determine the course of evolution on earth, if you say "that mutation wasn't divinely caused- it had to be random!" you're making an entirely unscientific claim, a claim at least as unfounded as any theist's, and one which is based wholly upon a mistaken interpretation of randomness.
No, the headline isn't a good summary. However, if it had read "Young-Earth Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children" it would have been just fine.
The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process. From Asa Gray- said by Darwin to be Darwin's best advocate- to the present day, hundreds of millions of people, including a good number of evolutionary biologists, have held both of these beliefs.
Evolution is, however, inconsistent with an overly literal and naive reading of the first chapter of Genesis. Those misguided individuals who promote the idea that Genesis was a scientific account and try to force schools to ignore the mountains of evidence for evolution and/or to "teach the controversy" are a threat to basic science education. As a science educator Nye has an interest in helping combat that threat. But he is not trying to pick a fight with all theists here.
I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Interview
(from one of the best games ever made)
Even when tiered plans exist, they are not proportionately cheaper. If somebody else uses 200 GB and I use 50MB my service is not 1/4000 the price. So low-bandwidth users are still subsidizing the high-bandwidth ones.
Sure, if the users actually use infinite bandwidth :) People should be charged for what they use. Your claim that this is impossible is baffling; I suppose you think every time people go to the supermarket they all just pay the same price to get in (or maybe a lowere 'tiered' price if they promise they'll be using the Under 20 Items Express Checkout) and then make off with whatever goods they can.
Offering unlimited data plans is kinda absurd. It's a terrible way to allocate a limited resource. It means that the majority of customers, who use rather little bandwidth, pay a ton extra to subsidize the few people who cause most of the burden on the network. Prices should be related to the cost of the services/goods provided, and when the connection between the two is severed, you end up with everything from dropped calls in NYC to Soviet bread queues.
I look forward to the day when there's a simple per-GB rate that applies to all data, whether that data happens to be smartphone internet use, tethered internet use, voice, or text. (The per-GB rate would also naturally change with the time of day to reflect network demand/pressure.) In that glorious day, the phone providers, forced to compete with one another based on that rate rather than on absurd plans and subsidized phones, will provide better and less expensive service.
But given the current oligopoly, the messed-up regulatory situation, and the incestuous relationships between cell manufacturers and the carriers, I don't know that that day is any closer than the day we'll all be driving fusion-powered flying cars :(
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun."
(Excellent.)