"Always faithful" includes not spilling even when its been spilled.
"Always faithful" means not betraying a secret yourself, and has nothing to do with discussing common knowledge.
Even though your wife is unfaithful, you stay faithful.
Maybe. You might also get a divorce, or simply decide to make it an "open marriage".
Even if the "facility" were declassified, you don't freely discuss it.
Declassifying something means that your higher-ups have told you its okay to freely discuss it. Discussing it is, therefore, okay.
There are things you don't even tell family years after.
The day I put loyalty to any country above my family is the day I stop deserving one.
Even when its declassified the honorable ones take it to the grave.
Honour or the lack of it has nothing to do with the decision to discuss or not discuss a declassified thing.
The only they he has to say, whether 17 or 97 is "I am a Marine" and that is enough to earn respect. You've lost the respect.
I'm sure he'll lose a lot of sleep over that.
If indeed you are telling the truth, then you are scum. If not, you are still scum. There are no ex-Marines, but I think you qualify, if you ever were one.
Scum for discussing something he's specifically been allowed to discuss? LOL WUT?
If I were unlucky to know you in person and see you in a bar, I'd pour my drink out and walk out.
I'm sure the bar patrons wouldn't beg you to stay, either.
When he discovered that his presumptions were incorrect, he wrote a book whining about how the Japanese do everything "the wrong way" and wept like the little bitch he is because nobody fawned all over him for being a westener who could speak some Japanese.
I see. He was critical of Japan, so clearly he must be a loser and can thus be ignored.
If you don't like the Japanese way, if it's "not as good as your way", you have two options: shuttup and live with the "fact", or fuck off back to your own country.
Actually, you have a third option: laugh at the funny slanty-eyed infidel midgets getting their panties in a bunch over someone daring to suggest that they just might be wrong. Or better yet, someone else getting his panties in a bunch over it and make Japanese seem morons while defending them.
Note: I'm a 6'5" westerner with a Japanese wife (met and married her outside Japan, had two kids), and have lived and worked in Japan for a couple of years (as just another corporate drone), and understand that 99.999% of Japanese would be happy to see me and all other foreigners leave Japan forever, mostly because 99.9% of gaijin fall into motivational categories 1-4.
And yet they still allow foreigners into their country, and even marry and employ them. Clearly, this is not a sign of utter stupidity, but simply the "Japanese way", which is just as good as my way despite making its practitioner miserable; to suggest otherwise would make me a failed English teacher, which I'm not, so it can't be true.
But then again, I'm only 6'1", so disregard that, it's just my gaijin bitterness speaking:(.
Sure, feel free to speculate. But have you ever been to San Francisco? It's commonplace here. Most of the Chinese-operated massage parlors are semi-tolerated brothels. Law enforcement has ongoing concerns about human trafficking, but it's hard to prove when the proprietors and the sex workers all deny it. (And why wouldn't they?)
So, the presumed victims deny being victims but you just know they are?
The fact that so many "enlightened, sex-positive people" are so willing to wish this kind of stuff into the cornfield is precisely what makes the sex trade so insidious. But if you come to my city -- or any city -- walk its streets and really get to know it, you'll understand that the realities of prostitution for most of the participants are not nearly as pretty as the "independent sex worker entrepreneur" crowd will tell you.
Prostitution is legal where I live. To the best of my ability to tell, the people doing it treat it just as another job. It's not "insidious", it's not "pretty"; it's just a job. The same seems to be true of any other country with legal prostitution.
I'm willing to bet that the ability to post ads on Craigslist really does cut down on some of the danger and crime associated with prostitution for some women. That still doesn't make me comfortable with it.
No one's asking you to be comfortable with other people's business, just to get your nose out of it.
This is quite precisely my point. Belief in miracles isn't consistent with an evidence based approach to understanding the world.
Belief in miracles isn't consistent with naturalistic approach to understanding the world. It's quite compatible to evidence-based approach; in fact the whole point of miracles and why they keep on getting mentioned is that they serve as evidence of the existence of supernatural (whether you consider there to be enough evidence to support the believe that they actually happened is another matter).
Besides, the naturalistic assumption itself - the assumption that there is nothing supernatural - isn't really inherent or necessary for science. All you have to assume to conduct an experiment is that nothing is interfering with that particular experiment. That's all. Fields like mathematics or logic aren't at all affected by even that weak form of naturalistic assumption.
Unless you've experienced a direct, personal revelation (and most Christians I've met don't claim to have), the only reason you have to believe Mary was a virgin is either that you read it in a book, or that all your friends and family believe it. These are not good reasons for believing something.
I would like to point out that peer pressure and appeals to authority ("reading it in a book") are the main reasons people believe anything, including scientific theories. This is only natural, since it is simply impossible to personally verify all or even any significant fraction of your knowledge.
Your original comment was a combination of ad hominem and circular reasoning - there is no supernatural, therefore reports of supernatural activity shouldn't be believed, therefore there is no evidence of supernatural, therefore there is no supernatural. Couldn't the discussion inspired by these articles on Slashdot even once not degenerate into name-calling and logical errors galore?
If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas
If your application is limited by the CPU, you'll need to parallelize it to take advantage of multicore CPUs. C is probably the worst possible choice there, with the possible exception of assembly.
Furthermore, while low-level languages allow for all kinds of tricks in the hands of a master, the chances are that you are close to an average coder, which means that you won't likely see much if any speed advantage. Assembly also has the problem of not being readily portable.
If there are just a few people, or if the developers work more or less independent of each other, I'd recommend Python.
Python's main problem, as I see it, is that objects have a type that's defined by the methods they support, yet the language pretends that they are typeless. Consequently there is no type checking at program launch, yet you can still get a type mismatch error at runtime. It's bloody annoying.
Accelerating charge radiates. Merely moving isn't sufficient (or otherwise there would either be a special universal rest frame, one which each charge's motion approaches as it loses energy, or each charge would carry infinite energy from which to radiate without slowing down, or charges would not be subject to the first law of thermodynamics).
Take a nice fast space shuttle, and bring it to 0 ground speed. Not fly up to a stable geosynchronous orbit. If you go UP, you're going the wrong way to come DOWN. As it falls and the air thickens, it'll slow down.
If you have enough engine capacity to stop at orbit relative to ground (which I presume you meant), you have enough engine capacity to simply do a powered landing. Simply turn the engines down where they just barely keep you afloat, and then turn them a bit further down, so you'll descend in a gentle and controlled way. Of course it would take a nuclear rocket, at the very least, to do that.
The shuttle wasn't exactly made for it, which is why I said the other parts.
The shuttle was made for a lot rougher landing. That part is not a problem.
It's not exactly a practical plan, but it could have been used as a contingency plan.
No, it isn't a practical plan, and it can't be used as a contingency plan for that exact reason.
You've seen a shuttle prior to launch, right? Ever notice that huge cylinder which the shuttle is attached to, which in fact dwarfs the shuttle itself? That's the fuel tank for the main engine, needed to bring the shuttle up to orbital speed. It's not quite enough either, but requires the help of two boosters. In order to stop from orbital speed would require just as much fuel (minus the amount used to fight air resistance and gravity at the beginning of the flight). The shuttle simply doesn't have it. In order to have it, the initial launch vehicle would need to carry all that fuel to the orbit too. We do not have the ability to send that much mass to space at a price we could afford.
Now their contingency plan is to launch another shuttle which at the odds will likely have a fault too.
Well, the alternative your proposing would require them to magically generate a tankerful of fuel and a tank to hold it from nothing.
I wish they'd have Garret again but make him more powerful. Sure, you can still have sneaking as an option - except for boss fights, of course - but there really should be a lot more action. Sometimes there could be reaction test, like when a guard draws a deep breath and a button blinks on the screen for a split-second, and if you push it on time Garret will throw a knife into the guards throat before he can scream.
What gets voted to power is a good indication of what is right?
No, what gets voted to power is likely to be something most people can live with. It would be ideal, of course, to base laws on what is right; unfortunately, people will disagree on what that might be, exactly speaking. And while it is obvious to me that whoever disagrees with me is either evil or stupid, I acknowledge that they likely feel the same way about me, so we either come up with something we both can live with, or fight for power for our entire lives - and that carries the risk that I lose. Voting is a way of conducting this fight in a non-destructive way, and with added checks to keep the loser - which could be me - from screwed up too badly.
"It's freedom for the few rich owners, and serfdom for everyone else"? No. Eventually, either everybody has liberty or nobody has liberty.
Liberty is not the same as freedom. Liberty is a prerequisite for freedom, but it is not alone sufficient. Liberty means that no one will use outright force or violence to dominate you; freedom means that you are free from all forms of compulsion, be them violent, economical, social or any other.
Anything else is unstable, and will eventually move towards no-liberty.
Every human society has a natural tendency to move towards hierarchical power structures. It's in our nature to seek dominance over one another. That's one of the reasons why I believe Libertarian ideal world would soon degenerate into feudalism, even if the people actually were equal when it got started (which they wouldn't be, were it started now on any existing society).
I have a truly marvellous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Power-hungry people use the power they have to gain more, therefore subjugating the rest.
The economy is a much larger and more complicated version of that sort of mutual back-scratching machine. And whenever you add more people you're adding the potential for more of those relationships.
Unfortunately, there is a problem: since neither of you produced the raw materials for the dinner, you had to buy them from outside. Money left your economy. Add more people, and there might be more back-scratching opportunities, but you also have to buy more food, driving you to bankruptcy that much sooner.
Now, if some of you worked the fields and the mill - but that's not the case in the US nowadays. Manufacturing has been outsourced to third world countries, and the country consumes more than it manufactures, so it's heading towards inevitable bankruptcy. Add more people to the economy, and it gets even worse, since the new people have to eat too.
Basically, in a "service economy", the more people you add, the faster it falls apart.
Umm... No! Corporations are a danger to liberty only if they control politicians and get laws changed against liberty.
Corporations are a danger to liberty because they concentrate money and power into fewer hands.
What happened in TF1 is just not an example of that!
Actually, since the e-mail in question was sent to TF1 from a politician, it is reasonable to assume that there's a connection between them, and that TF1 has at least some influence over said politician.
"Also if this precedent is allowed to stand..." My god! What about the liberty of TF1? Do you think only low-level employees should have liberty? If I ran a hospital, I would certainly get rid of all my anti-abortion employees - as this belief would affect their performance in the job I expect them to do.
And this is why Libertarians won't ever get voted into power: a Libertarian state is one where you must always keep your head down and express no opinions least you offend your feudal lord, who'll cast you to the streets where you'll starve due to the lack of any social security nets. It's freedom for the few rich owners, and serfdom for everyone else.
the modern treatment of "illegal enemy combatant" by the US has been immoral. But, it allows for the summary execution of saboteurs, spies, etc. during times of war.
Is there any added value in summary execution as opposed to imprisonment, or even execution after a proper trial? If a bomber pilot who destroys a bridge but is shot down is not executed but merely imprisoned, why should a saboteur who dynamites that same bridge be treated any differently? Sure, he is being sneaky about it rather than painting a huge bullseye on himself, but it could be argued that saboteurs are actually a more humane way to fight a war than bombers, because they are more accurate and usually only strike at military targets rather than carpet bombing a whole city.
There really doesn't seem to be much point in summary executions, besides petty vengeance.
This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC. Superior in a lot of qualities but largely ignored by the majority
There are two important differences between these situations.
Firstly, MP3 already packs good quality sound to such a small size that the additional size reduction of OGG is unnoticeable in modern - or even older - devices. With videos, however, the we're talking about huge files. Not only are these large enough to matter even with modern hard drives, but they also affect streaming video producers a lot. A few percent reduction translates to lots of dollars when we're talking about terabytes per month.
Secondly, MP3 is a de facto standard. It's synonymous with packed sound in people's minds. When you download sound, people expect it to be in MP3 format. This is very different from the world of video codecs, where no format truly dominates and people are used to installing a dozen codecs to watch the videos. One more for Theora won't make a difference, especially since most popular codec packages already have or will include it, and it's a very small download. Once it's installed, Theora videos will play on whatever media player the user uses.
Based on this, I'd say that if Theora is truly technically as good as - and especially if it's better than - H264 (or any other codec for that matter), it has pretty good chances of gaining marketshare. There's simply too much incentive to use the best codec, and no good reason not to use Theora.
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States
of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Surely the Pirate Bay isn't bound by laws of a country it doesn't reside in?
Anyway, from now on, in every election, I'll be voting for the Pirate Party. Not just because of the copyright issue, but also because their anti-surveillance stance. It's ironic when people using a grinning skull and crossbones as their symbol are our best hope for peace, freedom and justice, but that's how it seems to be.
The sad reality is that it only takes one government to exploit a new technology negatively, and if it gives them the edge to do so, you can bet the US will follow suit, no matter how good are original intentions are.
It won't give them an edge. Every tyranny in history has been a hellhole balancing at the edge of bankruptcy. Wasting resources lording it over your citizens deals you a double whammy of wasted resources and passive population. Just look at the former Soviet Union, it's satellite states or North Korea. Even China is only growing its economy because it's leeching the technological innovations and capital from the rest of the world; eventually it'll reach the limits of slave labour, at which point it changes or gets outcompeted.
Looking at the way nuclear weapons have effected us over the last half century, I think I'm being pretty level headed in fearing new arms races and their effect on humanity: There is already so much historical precedent for that happening.
So, we can look up to huge investments in R&D, powerful new energy sources, lack of major wars and a manned mission to Mars?
Ummm, EVEN IF you could create a sentient AI that operates "faster than real time" (you mean faster than the human brain?), what makes you think they will continue to operate in servitude of our desires? If somehow an ant created you, would you work on their hill or would you go do human stuff?
If an ant created me, wouldn't it also get to decide what's "human stuff", that is, what I find desirable or fun - perhaps even working on the anthill? And if I created an AI, couldn't I make it's silicon heart's desire to serve me?
But the statment we can create a sentient AI smarter than us any time in the near future is already hugely suspect...
Of course, but even a dumb but adaptive AI would be massively useful.
Not to mention, if it takes simulating an entire body to replicate a human digitally, so be it.
Actually, there's the tiny little problem that a perfect or reasonably accurate simulation would behave like the original, including ageing, virtual heart attacks, etc. In order to make this thing useful, you'd really need to figure out how to map the mind from a dying body to a new healthy one, at which point you could probably just abstract away most details.
For example, instead of creating a universe, you could create a virtual universe.
You know, this reminds me of a suggestion by some scientists to create an actual new universe by manipulating the quantum state of vacuum - basically, if you create a bubble of false vacuum, it will experience inflation and simultaneously collapse due to Hawking radiation, resulting in a new separate universe being created.
Translation: "They haven't gored any of my oxen, at least not yet."
They have, several in fact. But the alternative is losing the whole herd to the first guy bigger than me that happens by, or as soon as a smaller guy can sneak behind me, or as soon as I need some shut-eye, whichever happens first.
Not that I'm a fan of having tax-like fees slammed on people with pathetic justifications. It's deceitful to disguise a tax as something else, and what's worse, a flat fee is not progressive, thus hitting poor people the hardest. However, claiming that you are not part of the society as an excuse to not pay - especially on the Internet, which wouldn't even exist if the society didn't - is idiotic and will actually end up hurting any efforts to have this fee cancelled by making its opponents seem like retards throwing a temper tantrum.
But as long as you live in a land with society, you either follow its laws and pay taxes because said laws so demand, or refuse to be part of it and pay whatever it asks because it's bigger than you and the laws of the jungle don't care about anything else.
What makes you think we want even the remotest association with SCOm? Our river otters are fine, pure and noble beasts, not scum-sucking bottom feeders, as they would be inferred to be by the use of that domain in such a manner.
Scum-sucking bottom feeders perform a valuable service to the biosphere: they keep the bottom clean and return nutrients to circulation. They are nature's equivalent to a combined garbage collector and recycling center. SCO, on the other hand, did nothing useful, and caused plenty of harm, making them pure parasites. Please do not insult scum-sucking bottom feeders by comparing them to Darl McBride again.
Haha, I don't remember signing any "social contract."
Well, then you're clearly not part of it. Sorry for the mistake.
Valid contracts are entered into voluntarily, and contain terms of offer, acceptance, and consideration.
These requirements are part of the laws enforced by the Social Contract. Since you haven't signed the Social Contract, these niceties don't apply to you.
If sticking a gun in my face and demanding money because I own a computer is what you call the "social contract," then you and Tommy Hobbes can leave me out of it.
Nah, sticking a gun in your face and demanding money because I can is what I call the cost of being outside the Social Contract. You refuse to be part of the society and play by its rules - which is what refusing to sign the Social Contract means - so don't expect to be protected by them either.
Welcome to the Jungle. I doubt you'll like it's laws any better, but it's your choice.
When a program isn't storing landscape data, character models, textures, etc. in memory, and using at least some processor time in keeping track of them, it means you can have much more complex AI/more instances of the AI, larger areas in memory at one time, and a wide range of ongoing effects all at once.
At least Nethack, and presumably other roguelike games too, doesn't have any AI. The critters don't plan, they just react. It's all reflexes, about equivalent to insects.
I really wish people would stop calling "for object in visible_objects() if player(object) shoot(object);" AI. It isn't, by any stretch of imagination. Roguelike games simply add more commands (such as picking up and drinking potions) to write reflexes with, but the basic lack of anything resembling intelligence remains.
Slashdot Mirror
"Always faithful" means not betraying a secret yourself, and has nothing to do with discussing common knowledge.
Maybe. You might also get a divorce, or simply decide to make it an "open marriage".
Declassifying something means that your higher-ups have told you its okay to freely discuss it. Discussing it is, therefore, okay.
The day I put loyalty to any country above my family is the day I stop deserving one.
Honour or the lack of it has nothing to do with the decision to discuss or not discuss a declassified thing.
I'm sure he'll lose a lot of sleep over that.
Scum for discussing something he's specifically been allowed to discuss? LOL WUT?
I'm sure the bar patrons wouldn't beg you to stay, either.
I see. He was critical of Japan, so clearly he must be a loser and can thus be ignored.
Actually, you have a third option: laugh at the funny slanty-eyed infidel midgets getting their panties in a bunch over someone daring to suggest that they just might be wrong. Or better yet, someone else getting his panties in a bunch over it and make Japanese seem morons while defending them.
And yet they still allow foreigners into their country, and even marry and employ them. Clearly, this is not a sign of utter stupidity, but simply the "Japanese way", which is just as good as my way despite making its practitioner miserable; to suggest otherwise would make me a failed English teacher, which I'm not, so it can't be true.
But then again, I'm only 6'1", so disregard that, it's just my gaijin bitterness speaking :(.
Well obviously if you're an asshat dictator or plan on being one. Everything depends on your point of view, you know ;).
So, the presumed victims deny being victims but you just know they are?
Prostitution is legal where I live. To the best of my ability to tell, the people doing it treat it just as another job. It's not "insidious", it's not "pretty"; it's just a job. The same seems to be true of any other country with legal prostitution.
No one's asking you to be comfortable with other people's business, just to get your nose out of it.
It isn't, of course. It does, however, have the power of taxation, so why should prostitution be exempt? Other services aren't.
Belief in miracles isn't consistent with naturalistic approach to understanding the world. It's quite compatible to evidence-based approach; in fact the whole point of miracles and why they keep on getting mentioned is that they serve as evidence of the existence of supernatural (whether you consider there to be enough evidence to support the believe that they actually happened is another matter).
Besides, the naturalistic assumption itself - the assumption that there is nothing supernatural - isn't really inherent or necessary for science. All you have to assume to conduct an experiment is that nothing is interfering with that particular experiment. That's all. Fields like mathematics or logic aren't at all affected by even that weak form of naturalistic assumption.
I would like to point out that peer pressure and appeals to authority ("reading it in a book") are the main reasons people believe anything, including scientific theories. This is only natural, since it is simply impossible to personally verify all or even any significant fraction of your knowledge.
Your original comment was a combination of ad hominem and circular reasoning - there is no supernatural, therefore reports of supernatural activity shouldn't be believed, therefore there is no evidence of supernatural, therefore there is no supernatural. Couldn't the discussion inspired by these articles on Slashdot even once not degenerate into name-calling and logical errors galore?
If your application is limited by the CPU, you'll need to parallelize it to take advantage of multicore CPUs. C is probably the worst possible choice there, with the possible exception of assembly.
Furthermore, while low-level languages allow for all kinds of tricks in the hands of a master, the chances are that you are close to an average coder, which means that you won't likely see much if any speed advantage. Assembly also has the problem of not being readily portable.
Python's main problem, as I see it, is that objects have a type that's defined by the methods they support, yet the language pretends that they are typeless. Consequently there is no type checking at program launch, yet you can still get a type mismatch error at runtime. It's bloody annoying.
Accelerating charge radiates. Merely moving isn't sufficient (or otherwise there would either be a special universal rest frame, one which each charge's motion approaches as it loses energy, or each charge would carry infinite energy from which to radiate without slowing down, or charges would not be subject to the first law of thermodynamics).
If you have enough engine capacity to stop at orbit relative to ground (which I presume you meant), you have enough engine capacity to simply do a powered landing. Simply turn the engines down where they just barely keep you afloat, and then turn them a bit further down, so you'll descend in a gentle and controlled way. Of course it would take a nuclear rocket, at the very least, to do that.
The shuttle was made for a lot rougher landing. That part is not a problem.
No, it isn't a practical plan, and it can't be used as a contingency plan for that exact reason.
You've seen a shuttle prior to launch, right? Ever notice that huge cylinder which the shuttle is attached to, which in fact dwarfs the shuttle itself? That's the fuel tank for the main engine, needed to bring the shuttle up to orbital speed. It's not quite enough either, but requires the help of two boosters. In order to stop from orbital speed would require just as much fuel (minus the amount used to fight air resistance and gravity at the beginning of the flight). The shuttle simply doesn't have it. In order to have it, the initial launch vehicle would need to carry all that fuel to the orbit too. We do not have the ability to send that much mass to space at a price we could afford.
Well, the alternative your proposing would require them to magically generate a tankerful of fuel and a tank to hold it from nothing.
I wish they'd have Garret again but make him more powerful. Sure, you can still have sneaking as an option - except for boss fights, of course - but there really should be a lot more action. Sometimes there could be reaction test, like when a guard draws a deep breath and a button blinks on the screen for a split-second, and if you push it on time Garret will throw a knife into the guards throat before he can scream.
No, what gets voted to power is likely to be something most people can live with. It would be ideal, of course, to base laws on what is right; unfortunately, people will disagree on what that might be, exactly speaking. And while it is obvious to me that whoever disagrees with me is either evil or stupid, I acknowledge that they likely feel the same way about me, so we either come up with something we both can live with, or fight for power for our entire lives - and that carries the risk that I lose. Voting is a way of conducting this fight in a non-destructive way, and with added checks to keep the loser - which could be me - from screwed up too badly.
Liberty is not the same as freedom. Liberty is a prerequisite for freedom, but it is not alone sufficient. Liberty means that no one will use outright force or violence to dominate you; freedom means that you are free from all forms of compulsion, be them violent, economical, social or any other.
Every human society has a natural tendency to move towards hierarchical power structures. It's in our nature to seek dominance over one another. That's one of the reasons why I believe Libertarian ideal world would soon degenerate into feudalism, even if the people actually were equal when it got started (which they wouldn't be, were it started now on any existing society).
Power-hungry people use the power they have to gain more, therefore subjugating the rest.
I guess the margin was wide enough after all ;).
Unfortunately, there is a problem: since neither of you produced the raw materials for the dinner, you had to buy them from outside. Money left your economy. Add more people, and there might be more back-scratching opportunities, but you also have to buy more food, driving you to bankruptcy that much sooner.
Now, if some of you worked the fields and the mill - but that's not the case in the US nowadays. Manufacturing has been outsourced to third world countries, and the country consumes more than it manufactures, so it's heading towards inevitable bankruptcy. Add more people to the economy, and it gets even worse, since the new people have to eat too.
Basically, in a "service economy", the more people you add, the faster it falls apart.
Corporations are a danger to liberty because they concentrate money and power into fewer hands.
Actually, since the e-mail in question was sent to TF1 from a politician, it is reasonable to assume that there's a connection between them, and that TF1 has at least some influence over said politician.
And this is why Libertarians won't ever get voted into power: a Libertarian state is one where you must always keep your head down and express no opinions least you offend your feudal lord, who'll cast you to the streets where you'll starve due to the lack of any social security nets. It's freedom for the few rich owners, and serfdom for everyone else.
Is there any added value in summary execution as opposed to imprisonment, or even execution after a proper trial? If a bomber pilot who destroys a bridge but is shot down is not executed but merely imprisoned, why should a saboteur who dynamites that same bridge be treated any differently? Sure, he is being sneaky about it rather than painting a huge bullseye on himself, but it could be argued that saboteurs are actually a more humane way to fight a war than bombers, because they are more accurate and usually only strike at military targets rather than carpet bombing a whole city.
There really doesn't seem to be much point in summary executions, besides petty vengeance.
There are two important differences between these situations.
Firstly, MP3 already packs good quality sound to such a small size that the additional size reduction of OGG is unnoticeable in modern - or even older - devices. With videos, however, the we're talking about huge files. Not only are these large enough to matter even with modern hard drives, but they also affect streaming video producers a lot. A few percent reduction translates to lots of dollars when we're talking about terabytes per month.
Secondly, MP3 is a de facto standard. It's synonymous with packed sound in people's minds. When you download sound, people expect it to be in MP3 format. This is very different from the world of video codecs, where no format truly dominates and people are used to installing a dozen codecs to watch the videos. One more for Theora won't make a difference, especially since most popular codec packages already have or will include it, and it's a very small download. Once it's installed, Theora videos will play on whatever media player the user uses.
Based on this, I'd say that if Theora is truly technically as good as - and especially if it's better than - H264 (or any other codec for that matter), it has pretty good chances of gaining marketshare. There's simply too much incentive to use the best codec, and no good reason not to use Theora.
From http://static.thepiratebay.org/dreamworks_response.txt, as a response to a DMCA takedown request:
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Surely the Pirate Bay isn't bound by laws of a country it doesn't reside in?
Anyway, from now on, in every election, I'll be voting for the Pirate Party. Not just because of the copyright issue, but also because their anti-surveillance stance. It's ironic when people using a grinning skull and crossbones as their symbol are our best hope for peace, freedom and justice, but that's how it seems to be.
It won't give them an edge. Every tyranny in history has been a hellhole balancing at the edge of bankruptcy. Wasting resources lording it over your citizens deals you a double whammy of wasted resources and passive population. Just look at the former Soviet Union, it's satellite states or North Korea. Even China is only growing its economy because it's leeching the technological innovations and capital from the rest of the world; eventually it'll reach the limits of slave labour, at which point it changes or gets outcompeted.
So, we can look up to huge investments in R&D, powerful new energy sources, lack of major wars and a manned mission to Mars?
If an ant created me, wouldn't it also get to decide what's "human stuff", that is, what I find desirable or fun - perhaps even working on the anthill? And if I created an AI, couldn't I make it's silicon heart's desire to serve me?
Of course, but even a dumb but adaptive AI would be massively useful.
Actually, there's the tiny little problem that a perfect or reasonably accurate simulation would behave like the original, including ageing, virtual heart attacks, etc. In order to make this thing useful, you'd really need to figure out how to map the mind from a dying body to a new healthy one, at which point you could probably just abstract away most details.
You know, this reminds me of a suggestion by some scientists to create an actual new universe by manipulating the quantum state of vacuum - basically, if you create a bubble of false vacuum, it will experience inflation and simultaneously collapse due to Hawking radiation, resulting in a new separate universe being created.
They have, several in fact. But the alternative is losing the whole herd to the first guy bigger than me that happens by, or as soon as a smaller guy can sneak behind me, or as soon as I need some shut-eye, whichever happens first.
Not that I'm a fan of having tax-like fees slammed on people with pathetic justifications. It's deceitful to disguise a tax as something else, and what's worse, a flat fee is not progressive, thus hitting poor people the hardest. However, claiming that you are not part of the society as an excuse to not pay - especially on the Internet, which wouldn't even exist if the society didn't - is idiotic and will actually end up hurting any efforts to have this fee cancelled by making its opponents seem like retards throwing a temper tantrum.
But as long as you live in a land with society, you either follow its laws and pay taxes because said laws so demand, or refuse to be part of it and pay whatever it asks because it's bigger than you and the laws of the jungle don't care about anything else.
Scum-sucking bottom feeders perform a valuable service to the biosphere: they keep the bottom clean and return nutrients to circulation. They are nature's equivalent to a combined garbage collector and recycling center. SCO, on the other hand, did nothing useful, and caused plenty of harm, making them pure parasites. Please do not insult scum-sucking bottom feeders by comparing them to Darl McBride again.
O RLY?
And just in case someone didn't figure it out from the context, the link is not safe for work.
Well, then you're clearly not part of it. Sorry for the mistake.
These requirements are part of the laws enforced by the Social Contract. Since you haven't signed the Social Contract, these niceties don't apply to you.
Nah, sticking a gun in your face and demanding money because I can is what I call the cost of being outside the Social Contract. You refuse to be part of the society and play by its rules - which is what refusing to sign the Social Contract means - so don't expect to be protected by them either.
Welcome to the Jungle. I doubt you'll like it's laws any better, but it's your choice.
At least Nethack, and presumably other roguelike games too, doesn't have any AI. The critters don't plan, they just react. It's all reflexes, about equivalent to insects.
I really wish people would stop calling "for object in visible_objects() if player(object) shoot(object);" AI. It isn't, by any stretch of imagination. Roguelike games simply add more commands (such as picking up and drinking potions) to write reflexes with, but the basic lack of anything resembling intelligence remains.