As at least one other poster has pointed out, if Eisner's CBITPIDIBADIBADO copyright-facism bill gets passed, linux will become illegal. Having one hand at disney not knowing what the other hand is doing in this case is great. The more the megalocorps adopt free-software, for *whatever* reason, the more their interests become aligned with those of the free-sofware community -- whether they want to or not. Thus, given a chance, the megalocorps will have to stop pushing for draconian laws or face the possibly dire and immediate consquences to their own self-interest.
In other words, if you can't beat them, trick them into joining you.
Not only that, but debit cards cost merchants more to handle than credit cards, even when they are from the same network. Most merchants are required to accept debit cards are part of their contract for accepting credit cards. But, there is an ongoing lawsuit by a trade organization against the credit card issuers like Visa and Mastercard to break that contract based on monopoloy abuse of power by the issuers. Here's to hoping that the trade org wins, making it that much less desirable to use a debit card.
FWIW, the only people who should use debit cards are those who really, really, really suck at handling debt and have probably already destroyed their credit rating so that they are unable to get a true credit card anyway and debit cards are their only option. Anyone else is just shooting themselves in the financial foot by using a debit card over a credit card - at the very least you are losing out on the interest on the float that a credit card user gets.
Ya think we might, one day, get a non-inflammatory response to the ADTI paper? This latest one is as bad as all the others - filled with deprecating comments written as if the audience was part of the "in-crowd." If you really care about the accuracy of the debate, why waste your time writing a rebuttal article for the linux audience? The ADTI article was not aimed at the linux audience but rather at the suits who don't know the details of the either the politics or the tecnology. A rebuttal written for that target audience is worth more to the forward progress of linux than a hundred of these "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rebuttals that can only sound like the squabbling of an infant to an outside party.
What other industry can you get a job in Alaska or Hawaii doing the same thing? You might even end up inventing the next Mosaic out in the cornfields. Gotta love them pork-barrel politics!
That's an interresting approach to the campaign-fundraising problem. The recently passed laws that attempt to cap it will only be effective for a short period of time until the corporate lawyers have found the loopholes in the law.
It is amazing how cheap our legislators really are, $10K here and $10K there and pretty soon you've got your own highly favorable federal law on the books. So I propose a new method of dealing with campaign finance reform that will actually produce the desired results by going along with human nature rather than trying to fight it:
Instead of capping campaign donations we set a legally enforced minimum corporate donation. This would force our cheap-ass legislators to get bribes that are really in proportional to the damage they do to our society. If your a corporation and you want to make a donation to a congress-droid's campaign there would be standardized fee schedule with expensive minimums that vary depending on the desired legislative outcome, here's an example:
1) Cripple EPA for a specific pollution case - $500M 2) Require the use of commercial software for all government functions - $10B 3) Reduce FAA safety inspection requirements for commercial passenger aircraft - $5B 4) Increase visa quotas to flood the market with low-cost employees in a specific job sector - $1B/yr 5) etc
This kind of minimum donation would assure that only very few bribes would be made because most companies couldn't afford it.
On the otherhand, he is right about how the market has changed. Take a look at any of the classic rock type sections at the local music store, they are filled with remastered editions of 10+ year old albums - Genesis, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath even Abba - the whole spectrum of a prior generation of music is being remastered and re-released - mainly, I suspect, because current major label stuff is just too sucktastic to really sell to anyone but hypnotized teenyboppers. It is actually quite ironic because the king of high-quality remasters, Mobile Fidelty with their gold Ultradisc releases, went bankrupt and had to close down shop right before this trend started.
Wal-Mart shoppers are already used to buying things like kola, chokolat, jeens, meet and asspren. I'm sure Lindows will fit right in with all the other misleading named products there. So I don't think this turn of events will do much to help the Lindows/Windows trademark suite.
jonr - do you understand the definition of an oligopoly? Do you understand the effect of an oligopoly on pricing in the market that the oligopoly dominates? Pricing in an oligpoloistic market is set pretty much at whatever the sellers feel like setting it at. The copyright industry is pretty an oligopoly.
but if I'm going to spend $4.00 to rent a movie, why not spend $6.00 more to own it?
Blockbuster's default on Harry Potsmoker is rent for $4 then spend another $10 to own a used copy, not another $6. So, total price $16 for a used copy versus $10 for a new copy.
Not only that, but Blockbuster chose Harry Potter as the one title, in all of their inventory, that they would price match any local competitor on. CompUSA has been selling limited quantities (really limited, as in sold out in the first hour limited) of Harry Potter for $9.95 brand new. So, all you gotta do is take the print ad for CompUSA showing the $9.95 price over to Blockbuster and then you can buy a new copy for $10 and not have to worry about ever renting it.
The thing is that Radeon's still have objectively better video overlay quality than Nvidia parts. This may be due to drivers rather than hardware - perhaps the Nvidia drivers don't (or can't) use the 10-bits of precision in the overlay (the windows drivers have no gamma adjustment for the overlay, only for the regular desktop) or that the iDCT acceleration on the GF4 is only 8-bit while the Radeon has 10 bits, but whatever the case, so far the quality of video on the Radeon visibly outclasses that of the the GF4.
If you poke around on avsforum.com you'll see plenty of people who are happy with the GF4, but for the ones who have done head-to-head comparisons between the cards on CRT (analog) projectors, the Radeon is the clear favorite. On digital projectors the difference is not so obvious because most digital projectors only have 8-bit ADCs anyway.
You are right. The 10-bits of precision refer to the ability to modify the overlay output, like fiddle with the gamma and such, without clipping as easily as you would on the nvidia part.
The Nvidia still lacks 10-bit precision in the video overlay which is probably very important for broadcast video work. The ATI 8500 (and 7500) and the new Matrox all support at least that level of precision.
That was me. Or rather my posting a lie to slashdot with some good buzzwords in it to see what would happen. Incredibly, it got modded up to +5 (from 0 since I posted it anonmously). Even after posting a follow-up, non-anonymous message explaining how and why I made that bogus posting and how it was clearly bogus to anyone who knew anything about wma and psycho-acoustics, no new moderators ever reduced the score. Go back and poke around and I am sure you will find the message, still with a +5.
So, no wma does not just do boost the volume in certain frequencies, it was all made up.
It is called reed-solomon error correction and it works just great. I own plenty of CDs that have been scratched to varying degrees over the years and even a couple that have been physically cracked. They all play fine.
which are unfortunately beyond the range of consumer-level HDTV equipment
Yes and no. You can pick up a nice *used* CRT front-projection system that will support 1080p for about what a nice new RPTV costs - ~$6K. So many places are making the transition from CRT to digital that the market for high-quality used CRT projectors is approaching saturation. I myself have an electrohome marquee unit with refurbished 9" tubes that originally cost in excess of $30K about 5 years ago and has ended up costing me about $5-6K when all is said and done. This system is capable of fully resolving 1920x1080p and looks simply marvelous.
Also, we are on the cusp of new digital projectors that will do 1280x1024 or 1340x1024 for the same price range and require less hassle to operate 1024 is close enough to 1080p to be indistinguishable. I expect by x-mas or so these new units will be all over the market. Even on the RPTV side, Viewsonic (of all brands!) just announced a 4MegaPixel RPTV in the 40" range for around $4K using similar technology.
Now, if the MPAA would just self-implode on their own rhetoric so that we could get lots of hi-rez content at good prices, we would be set.
Experimentation by people posting on www.avsforum.com shows that MP4 encoding of hi-def sources yields excellent results, even at bitrates on the order of 4-5MB/s, at the full 8-9MB/s that DVDs are capable of you get picture quality that is practically indistinguishble from the original MP2 encoding.
All this with consumer level MP4 encoders that are transcoding from MP2 compressed data. I imagine that working with commercial-grade encoders and using the original uncompressed video data, this MP4 on DVD format will be very sucesfull from a performance and technology perspective. As for the politics of it, I expect the MPAA to kill it just to show that they can.
Try more like $1500 for a "low-end" set that is still head and shoulders above any standard-definition set. And its getting cheaper every day, Apex king of low-priced DVD is moving into the market with plenty of cheap digital TVs too.
First, obsolecence is a very different argument than superstition.
Not when the point is that making it a "law" does not confer any greater validity to a belief.
Your argument boils down to the idea that, because we have made cow production as hazardous as pig production, pig production is now okay.
Feed lots are no more a required part of hog farming than they are a required part of cattle farming. It is just that in the USA packing animals in tight places and treating the side-effects of that, namely disease, with anti-biotics and hormones appears to be more efficient because the full cost is not born by the farmers, we all pay for the resulting pollution.
But there is nothing inherent about pig farming that means they have to be raised in such terrible conditions. There are free-range hog farms just as there are free-range cattle and chicken farms.
Furthermore, hogs are vastly more efficient at turning grain into meat than cattle or any other form of livestock besides fowl. In this way, they have less of an impact on the environment per kilo of protein produced than cattle, goats or lamb.
Additionally, pigs are able to subsist on a wider variety of diet than cattle or just about any kind of livestock, including fowl. In nature, the output of one process is always the input for another - light/dark cycle in plants, herbivores producing fertilizattion for for more plants and meat on for carnivores, etc, etc. In that sense hogs both compete less for resources with humans than other kinds of livestock because they are more efficient and and are able to better live alongside humans by consuming some of the waste products that humans produce - mostly the by-products of food preparation.
If you want a modern responce to food animals, there is one, Vegetariainism. It also happens to place you solidly within the traditions of cleanliness.
Again with the traditions. How about the modern world? Vegatarianism has "unclean" effects on the environment too. The most severe one that comes to mind is global warming. If you accept that carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for increasing the rate of global warming, then you are likely aware of the fact that cow flatulance is the #1 source of such emissions. But, you are probably not aware that the #2 source of such emissions, which is a very close second at that, is rice paddies. With so many people, vegatarian or not, eating rice they are having almost as large an impact on our environment as the cattle industry, While pig flatulance is such a small contributor that you'd be hard pressed to even find it on anyone's list of contributors to global warming.
I appreciate your responses in this debate, and they are certainly head and shoulders above the knee-jerk rationalizations of my wife and her siblings. But, just like their responses, it is clear that yours come from a set of basic assumptions, based on an ingrained belief or faith. It really is impossible to argue with faith because, by its very definition faith means accepting some ideas as inarguable, and usually unprovable (or disprovable) truth.
In their never-ending quest to turn back the clock, the RIAA has announced their latest tool to fight music piracy on the high seas and in your home - vacuum tube based soundcards. Not happy with preventing digital SACD and DVD-Audio playback on consumer stereo equipment much less consumer PCs, the RIAA is now forcing all motherboard manufacturers to support only the oldest functioning technology for audio playback known to man.
Hillary Rosen was quoted as saying this hardware program will finally end the Napster menace once and for all.
First, avoiding pork is not a superstition; It is a law. It is analagous to not driving drunk. You can get away with doing it sometimes, but as a general rule, "It is unacceptable." Societies create rules to protect the society.
Call it a law, I know the sharia does, but that doesn't make it any less groundless in a modern country. There have been plenty of laws, both western and eastern that were based purely on superstitious beliefs, with even less grounding in reality than the ban on pork, yet indeed they too were laws.
The only reason pork is popular, is that modern people do not think that they live with the pigs. However, they do: http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspills.a sp
Sorry, but that is just a more sophisticated form of rationalization. Your link talks about all types of feedlots, not just hogs. In fact, there is only one reference to pigs in the entire article. Having been around cattle feedlots myself I can tell you that they are just as environmentally damaging as the hog feedlots and chickens aren't that much further behind.
As for Shrimp You are confusing Halal and Kashrut. Shrimp is not Kosher. Shrimp/is/ Halal. See: http://www.islamonline.net/fatwaapplication/ englis h/display.asp?hFatwaID=8519
That link really doesn't agree with what you are saying, it leaves it pretty ambiguous, meanwhile this link, and my father-in-law, both agree explicitly that shrimp and lobster, or any other animal from the sea without scales, are haram:
Funny all the AC's who freaked out, trying to call me racist and what not - if any of you spas ACs are muslim, then judging from your responses I know more about being a muslim than you do.
First off - no one mentioned trichinosis - the worm that often lives in pig meat and is fatal to humans. If you eat pork with trichina worm that has not been well cooked, you can get infected yourself. That is the reason both Jews and Muslims have a superstition about avoiding pork - because 2000 years ago, give or take, it was real hard to cook pork well enough to kill the worm without making the meat into charcoal in the process. That no longer applies in a 1st or 2nd world country where we have ovens, yet the superstition persists and you get to hear all kinds of rationalization for it about pigs being dirty and what not, even in the face of contradictory evidence - which is a prime characteristic of a superstition.
Second - both pork and lobster, and even shrimp for that matter, are all haram. The only kind of sea food that is halal is that with scales on it, i.e. fish. If you don't have a learned person to ask directly, just whip out google and do a search, it should take you about 30 seconds. There is no halal method of slaughter for any of these animals to prepare them "properly."
Third - pigs are not naturally dirty animals. They seem to tolerate crap pretty well, but they certainly don't go out of their way to live in feces. It is humans, for the most part, that force them to live that way. Wild pigs certainly do not live that way at all - I grew up in an area with enough feral pigs to know that first hand.
Slashdot Mirror
As at least one other poster has pointed out, if Eisner's CBITPIDIBADIBADO copyright-facism bill gets passed, linux will become illegal. Having one hand at disney not knowing what the other hand is doing in this case is great. The more the megalocorps adopt free-software, for *whatever* reason, the more their interests become aligned with those of the free-sofware community -- whether they want to or not. Thus, given a chance, the megalocorps will have to stop pushing for draconian laws or face the possibly dire and immediate consquences to their own self-interest.
In other words, if you can't beat them, trick them into joining you.
Not only that, but debit cards cost merchants more to handle than credit cards, even when they are from the same network. Most merchants are required to accept debit cards are part of their contract for accepting credit cards. But, there is an ongoing lawsuit by a trade organization against the credit card issuers like Visa and Mastercard to break that contract based on monopoloy abuse of power by the issuers. Here's to hoping that the trade org wins, making it that much less desirable to use a debit card.
FWIW, the only people who should use debit cards are those who really, really, really suck at handling debt and have probably already destroyed their credit rating so that they are unable to get a true credit card anyway and debit cards are their only option. Anyone else is just shooting themselves in the financial foot by using a debit card over a credit card - at the very least you are losing out on the interest on the float that a credit card user gets.
Ya think we might, one day, get a non-inflammatory response to the ADTI paper? This latest one is as bad as all the others - filled with deprecating comments written as if the audience was part of the "in-crowd." If you really care about the accuracy of the debate, why waste your time writing a rebuttal article for the linux audience? The ADTI article was not aimed at the linux audience but rather at the suits who don't know the details of the either the politics or the tecnology. A rebuttal written for that target audience is worth more to the forward progress of linux than a hundred of these "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rebuttals that can only sound like the squabbling of an infant to an outside party.
What other industry can you get a job in Alaska or Hawaii doing the same thing? You might even end up inventing the next Mosaic out in the cornfields. Gotta love them pork-barrel politics!
I think you have .org confused with .good or .notevil.
That's an interresting approach to the campaign-fundraising problem. The recently passed laws that attempt to cap it will only be effective for a short period of time until the corporate lawyers have found the loopholes in the law.
It is amazing how cheap our legislators really are, $10K here and $10K there and pretty soon you've got your own highly favorable federal law on the books. So I propose a new method of dealing with campaign finance reform that will actually produce the desired results by going along with human nature rather than trying to fight it:
Instead of capping campaign donations we set a legally enforced minimum corporate donation. This would force our cheap-ass legislators to get bribes that are really in proportional to the damage they do to our society. If your a corporation and you want to make a donation to a congress-droid's campaign there would be standardized fee schedule with expensive minimums that vary depending on the desired legislative outcome, here's an example:
1) Cripple EPA for a specific pollution case - $500M
2) Require the use of commercial software for all government functions - $10B
3) Reduce FAA safety inspection requirements for commercial passenger aircraft - $5B
4) Increase visa quotas to flood the market with low-cost employees in a specific job sector - $1B/yr
5) etc
This kind of minimum donation would assure that only very few bribes would be made because most companies couldn't afford it.
On the otherhand, he is right about how the market has changed. Take a look at any of the classic rock type sections at the local music store, they are filled with remastered editions of 10+ year old albums - Genesis, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath even Abba - the whole spectrum of a prior generation of music is being remastered and re-released - mainly, I suspect, because current major label stuff is just too sucktastic to really sell to anyone but hypnotized teenyboppers. It is actually quite ironic because the king of high-quality remasters, Mobile Fidelty with their gold Ultradisc releases, went bankrupt and had to close down shop right before this trend started.
Wal-Mart shoppers are already used to buying things like kola, chokolat, jeens, meet and asspren. I'm sure Lindows will fit right in with all the other misleading named products there. So I don't think this turn of events will do much to help the Lindows/Windows trademark suite.
jonr - do you understand the definition of an oligopoly? Do you understand the effect of an oligopoly on pricing in the market that the oligopoly dominates? Pricing in an oligpoloistic market is set pretty much at whatever the sellers feel like setting it at. The copyright industry is pretty an oligopoly.
but if I'm going to spend $4.00 to rent a movie, why not spend $6.00 more to own it?
Blockbuster's default on Harry Potsmoker is rent for $4 then spend another $10 to own a used copy, not another $6. So, total price $16 for a used copy versus $10 for a new copy.
Not only that, but Blockbuster chose Harry Potter as the one title, in all of their inventory, that they would price match any local competitor on. CompUSA has been selling limited quantities (really limited, as in sold out in the first hour limited) of Harry Potter for $9.95 brand new. So, all you gotta do is take the print ad for CompUSA showing the $9.95 price over to Blockbuster and then you can buy a new copy for $10 and not have to worry about ever renting it.
The thing is that Radeon's still have objectively better video overlay quality than Nvidia parts. This may be due to drivers rather than hardware - perhaps the Nvidia drivers don't (or can't) use the 10-bits of precision in the overlay (the windows drivers have no gamma adjustment for the overlay, only for the regular desktop) or that the iDCT acceleration on the GF4 is only 8-bit while the Radeon has 10 bits, but whatever the case, so far the quality of video on the Radeon visibly outclasses that of the the GF4.
If you poke around on avsforum.com you'll see plenty of people who are happy with the GF4, but for the ones who have done head-to-head comparisons between the cards on CRT (analog) projectors, the Radeon is the clear favorite. On digital projectors the difference is not so obvious because most digital projectors only have 8-bit ADCs anyway.
You are right. The 10-bits of precision refer to the ability to modify the overlay output, like fiddle with the gamma and such, without clipping as easily as you would on the nvidia part.
The Nvidia still lacks 10-bit precision in the video overlay which is probably very important for broadcast video work. The ATI 8500 (and 7500) and the new Matrox all support at least that level of precision.
That was me. Or rather my posting a lie to slashdot with some good buzzwords in it to see what would happen. Incredibly, it got modded up to +5 (from 0 since I posted it anonmously). Even after posting a follow-up, non-anonymous message explaining how and why I made that bogus posting and how it was clearly bogus to anyone who knew anything about wma and psycho-acoustics, no new moderators ever reduced the score. Go back and poke around and I am sure you will find the message, still with a +5.
So, no wma does not just do boost the volume in certain frequencies, it was all made up.
Remember some of the causes of WWW 1!
I think we can hold Tim Berners-Lee completely responsible for that.
It is called reed-solomon error correction and it works just great. I own plenty of CDs that have been scratched to varying degrees over the years and even a couple that have been physically cracked. They all play fine.
Sounds like you haven't watched Ally McBeal, plenty of white judges on there.
which are unfortunately beyond the range of consumer-level HDTV equipment
Yes and no. You can pick up a nice *used* CRT front-projection system that will support 1080p for about what a nice new RPTV costs - ~$6K. So many places are making the transition from CRT to digital that the market for high-quality used CRT projectors is approaching saturation. I myself have an electrohome marquee unit with refurbished 9" tubes that originally cost in excess of $30K about 5 years ago and has ended up costing me about $5-6K when all is said and done. This system is capable of fully resolving 1920x1080p and looks simply marvelous.
Also, we are on the cusp of new digital projectors that will do 1280x1024 or 1340x1024 for the same price range and require less hassle to operate 1024 is close enough to 1080p to be indistinguishable. I expect by x-mas or so these new units will be all over the market. Even on the RPTV side, Viewsonic (of all brands!) just announced a 4MegaPixel RPTV in the 40" range for around $4K using similar technology.
Now, if the MPAA would just self-implode on their own rhetoric so that we could get lots of hi-rez content at good prices, we would be set.
Experimentation by people posting on www.avsforum.com shows that MP4 encoding of hi-def sources yields excellent results, even at bitrates on the order of 4-5MB/s, at the full 8-9MB/s that DVDs are capable of you get picture quality that is practically indistinguishble from the original MP2 encoding.
All this with consumer level MP4 encoders that are transcoding from MP2 compressed data. I imagine that working with commercial-grade encoders and using the original uncompressed video data, this MP4 on DVD format will be very sucesfull from a performance and technology perspective. As for the politics of it, I expect the MPAA to kill it just to show that they can.
Try more like $1500 for a "low-end" set that is still head and shoulders above any standard-definition set. And its getting cheaper every day, Apex king of low-priced DVD is moving into the market with plenty of cheap digital TVs too.
n s/ DigitalTVs.asp?b=0&m=1&cat=24&scat=1470&sort=4
http://www.bestbuy.com/HomeAudioVideo/Televisio
First, obsolecence is a very different argument than superstition.
Not when the point is that making it a "law" does not confer any greater validity to a belief.
Your argument boils down to the idea that, because we have made cow production as hazardous as pig production, pig production is now okay.
Feed lots are no more a required part of hog farming than they are a required part of cattle farming. It is just that in the USA packing animals in tight places and treating the side-effects of that, namely disease, with anti-biotics and hormones appears to be more efficient because the full cost is not born by the farmers, we all pay for the resulting pollution.
But there is nothing inherent about pig farming that means they have to be raised in such terrible conditions. There are free-range hog farms just as there are free-range cattle and chicken farms.
Furthermore, hogs are vastly more efficient at turning grain into meat than cattle or any other form of livestock besides fowl. In this way, they have less of an impact on the environment per kilo of protein produced than cattle, goats or lamb.
Additionally, pigs are able to subsist on a wider variety of diet than cattle or just about any kind of livestock, including fowl. In nature, the output of one process is always the input for another - light/dark cycle in plants, herbivores producing fertilizattion for for more plants and meat on for carnivores, etc, etc. In that sense hogs both compete less for resources with humans than other kinds of livestock because they are more efficient and and are able to better live alongside humans by consuming some of the waste products that humans produce - mostly the by-products of food preparation.
If you want a modern responce to food animals, there is one, Vegetariainism. It also happens to place you solidly within the traditions of cleanliness.
Again with the traditions. How about the modern world? Vegatarianism has "unclean" effects on the environment too. The most severe one that comes to mind is global warming. If you accept that carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for increasing the rate of global warming, then you are likely aware of the fact that cow flatulance is the #1 source of such emissions. But, you are probably not aware that the #2 source of such emissions, which is a very close second at that, is rice paddies. With so many people, vegatarian or not, eating rice they are having almost as large an impact on our environment as the cattle industry, While pig flatulance is such a small contributor that you'd be hard pressed to even find it on anyone's list of contributors to global warming.
I appreciate your responses in this debate, and they are certainly head and shoulders above the knee-jerk rationalizations of my wife and her siblings. But, just like their responses, it is clear that yours come from a set of basic assumptions, based on an ingrained belief or faith. It really is impossible to argue with faith because, by its very definition faith means accepting some ideas as inarguable, and usually unprovable (or disprovable) truth.
In their never-ending quest to turn back the clock, the RIAA has announced their latest tool to fight music piracy on the high seas and in your home - vacuum tube based soundcards. Not happy with preventing digital SACD and DVD-Audio playback on consumer stereo equipment much less consumer PCs, the RIAA is now forcing all motherboard manufacturers to support only the oldest functioning technology for audio playback known to man.
Hillary Rosen was quoted as saying this hardware program will finally end the Napster menace once and for all.
First, avoiding pork is not a superstition; It is a law. It is analagous to not driving drunk. You can get away with doing it sometimes, but as a general rule, "It is unacceptable." Societies create rules to protect the society.
a sp
/is/ Halal. See:/ englis h/display.asp?hFatwaID=8519
o rk / sg00236.html
Call it a law, I know the sharia does, but that doesn't make it any less groundless in a modern country. There have been plenty of laws, both western and eastern that were based purely on superstitious beliefs, with even less grounding in reality than the ban on pork, yet indeed they too were laws.
The only reason pork is popular, is that modern people do not think that they live with the pigs. However, they do:
http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspills.
Sorry, but that is just a more sophisticated form of rationalization. Your link talks about all types of feedlots, not just hogs. In fact, there is only one reference to pigs in the entire article. Having been around cattle feedlots myself I can tell you that they are just as environmentally damaging as the hog feedlots and chickens aren't that much further behind.
As for Shrimp You are confusing Halal and Kashrut. Shrimp is not Kosher. Shrimp
http://www.islamonline.net/fatwaapplication
That link really doesn't agree with what you are saying, it leaves it pretty ambiguous, meanwhile this link, and my father-in-law, both agree explicitly that shrimp and lobster, or any other animal from the sea without scales, are haram:
http://www.al-islam.org/organizations/AalimNetw
Funny all the AC's who freaked out, trying to call me racist and what not - if any of you spas ACs are muslim, then judging from your responses I know more about being a muslim than you do.
First off - no one mentioned trichinosis - the worm that often lives in pig meat and is fatal to humans. If you eat pork with trichina worm that has not been well cooked, you can get infected yourself. That is the reason both Jews and Muslims have a superstition about avoiding pork - because 2000 years ago, give or take, it was real hard to cook pork well enough to kill the worm without making the meat into charcoal in the process. That no longer applies in a 1st or 2nd world country where we have ovens, yet the superstition persists and you get to hear all kinds of rationalization for it about pigs being dirty and what not, even in the face of contradictory evidence - which is a prime characteristic of a superstition.
Second - both pork and lobster, and even shrimp for that matter, are all haram. The only kind of sea food that is halal is that with scales on it, i.e. fish. If you don't have a learned person to ask directly, just whip out google and do a search, it should take you about 30 seconds. There is no halal method of slaughter for any of these animals to prepare them "properly."
Third - pigs are not naturally dirty animals. They seem to tolerate crap pretty well, but they certainly don't go out of their way to live in feces. It is humans, for the most part, that force them to live that way. Wild pigs certainly do not live that way at all - I grew up in an area with enough feral pigs to know that first hand.