Most schools do permit students not to say the pledge if it violates their beliefs.
You can still "permit" while simultaneously ostracizing which is what automatically happens in a situation where there is an expectation of the group to recite the pledge.
Most french schools, as I understand it, do not allow you to wear your religious symbols if not doing so violates your religious belifies. That's a significant difference.
That sentence is hard to parse, so I will explain the way the new law in France works - whether or not you believe headscarves are mandated by your religion, you can not wear one.
So, the difference is that with the pledge there is no official coercion, but the "society" within the school coerces anyway. In france, the coercion is an official rule. In the end, there is little difference between the two, either way the state is supporting religious based coercion.
And may I say it, the moment of silence debate is stupid. Let a moment of silence be a moment of silence.
If that's all it were, then fine. But the common case with the "moment of silence" is that students are explicitly told that they "can" use the moment for prayer. If they limited what was officially said about the mandatory moment of silence to just "reflection" then they'd probably be ok. But that is not what usually happens.
In other words, theoretically on Windows *any* media player could play *any* content, and users could pick their favorite combination.
That is demonstrably false.
There are different levels of "security" which can be set when DRM'ing windows-media content. Different levels of security require different levels of player authorization (not just *user* but the actual player). At least one of those levels requires that MS sign off on the source code and sign the resultant binary each and every time there is a source change and they charge $10K a pop for that "service."
Recently, MS changed the default security level that their DRM tools use to require exactly such a level of player authorization, and a number of DRM'd products were released with this default level of restriction. None of these newly released titles will play on third party DRM-enabled players like TheaterTek or Zoom Player because they can't afford the $10K per patch or release that MS charges.
Meanwhile, the rest of your post completely misses the point of what it means to be convicted of abusing a monopoly position in a market.
Here I thought this was going to be about the "caller mute" button, bloviating and the other ways he deals with callers who get the conversational upper hand. Wrong O'Reilly I guess.
By putting a price on it all you are doing is validating their bundling of the product because it just furthers the fact they're just attempting to give the consumer more value.
No, by putting a price on it you are validating their conviction of abuse of monopoly power.
The reason MS does not put a price on it is because they can leverage the shedloads of cash they make on their monopoly OS business to dump software in the video and audio player market in order to obtain a monopoly position there too. That is illegal, that's what MS has been convicted of.
It isn't like mediaplayer just spontaneously formed - it costs MS lots of money to develop and support it. It is far from free (or Free for that matter).
Of course no one wants the stripped down version because it costs the same as the full-blown version.
This isn't vindication for MS - it is just proof of the stupidity of the EU bureaucrats who did a half-assed job of imposing the punishment on MS. If they weren't so incompetent, they would have mandated that not only must MS make a stripped down version, they also gotta sell it for proportionally less too where "lots" is equal to some value of proportional...
Re:Gach! More amateur website baloney
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
The guys who know their stuff tend to be busy earning money by using that knowledge. But you can try reading the forums at doom9.org. At least those guys know when to call a spade a spade.
Re:Recommend your alternatives here
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Can the mods not mod up comments that make mistakes such as confusing a media player with a video codec?
VLC is both a player and a codec - mulitple codecs in fact. It can definitely encode to mpeg and mpeg4. I would not be surprised if the next release or two end up with full encode/decode support for all that divx6 implements.
. The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'?
No. No you should not. It is really stupid.
Re:Decoding DivX
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Are you kidding? All my attempts to use alpha version of ffdshow on windows have resulted in all kinds of weirdness
You just have to get a stable build. I use a build from october of 2004 or so (don't have it right in front of me) and it is significantly faster than either the divx or xvid decoders. It is rock-stable solid.
Plus the other ffdshow filters like scaling, noise removal, deblocking, logo-killer, etc can make a HUGE improvement in the final quality of the rendered image - especially for low-rez sources like most divx encodes. Might not make so much of a difference on a 17" monitor but on a 100" front projector the difference is night and day.
Gach! More amateur website baloney
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How can anyone take the Tom's Hardware article when he starts out with rubbish like this:
Historically, DivX 5 format videos were best shared over the Internet by first wrapping them in ZIP files for better compression. In my tests with the new DivX Encoder--a tool scheduled to replace the company's Dr. DivX--I could re-encode DivX 5 files as DivX 6, with the resulting file size not much larger than the ZIP-compressed DivX 5 file.
If he's getting more than a percent or so additional compression by zipping up the divx encoded file, he's doing something wrong during the divx encode to begin with - and what little amount he might get it is going to de due to compressability of the container format, not the encoded video.
This implies a compression scheme that is just about as capable as the most aggressive Lempel-Ziv algorithms available.
LZ is a lossless alogorithm and no matter how "aggressive" LZ is, it can't come anywhere near the compression ratio of a properly configured divx encoding because the divx encoding is lossy - it throws out data.
If LZ somehow were "just about as capable" then everyone would be using LZ in the first place and all these preceptual lossy compressors would have died off long ago.
Heck, I can write a "compressor" that produces a file of the exact same size as the original and that LZ will make bigger rather than smaller. All you have to do is make the encoding random enough (like something along the lines of xoring it with pi).
So many of these "hobbiest" websites like Anandtech and Tom's are just the blind leading the blind with gross misrepresentations that end up being taken as gospel by those who don't know any better.
There ought to be a disclaimer before each "article" on sites like those with a warning that - "author is just another schmoe with no real expertise and is prone to make stuff up if it sounds good."
In fact, he seems to refer to it in terms of open-sourcing the codebase within the company, rather than open-sourcing to everyone. I have read somewhere around here that the same kind of thing goes on at Google.
My first job out of college was at a small unix computer manufacturer and all of their source code - os, tools and apps - were easily accessible to anyone in the company with a workstation.
Then I went to work for HP and could not believe that the support guys had zero access to the source code - only the engineers in the development labs did. It sure made my job harder so I quit. Since then I've learned that HP was the norm and my first job (and all the Free software I worked on during college, we didn't have no stinkin' "open source" back then) was the aberration.
It is good to see the industry starting to finally get sensible. Now all they have to do is diving in completely and make the source available to anyone, not just inside IBM.
I think you are more likely to see the following variations:
1) Linux emulation on OSX - the ability to run native x86 linux binaries on OSX for intel. Some BSD's already have this functionality and being a micro-kernel, OSX is just screaming for someone to write a linux emulator for it although there are other ways to do it too.
2) OSX in a box - using the new virtualization enhancements from Intel (VT) and AMD (Pacifica) we'll see a low-to-no overhead version of VMware or similar that can boot just about any operating system, including OSX.
The size thing is to make it easier to target head-scarves, which is even worse than being a blanket ban. It is a ban with such narrow "general" characteristics that make it not so general in practice. It is still all about banning personal religious expression which is nothing less than government enforced secularization.
I find it highly disturbing that the more liberal groups continue their attempts to strip the rights of states to have their own laws, especially in a representative government.
Yeah, those nutjob liberals are all trying to destroy states' rights to legalize euthanasia and pot! The nerve!
Freedom from religion is what is going on in France, and it directly impacts freedom of religion. For instance, you have laws prohibiting muslims from wearing head-scarfs, jews wearing yamulkas, and Christians wearing large crosses in public schools.
What's going on in France is not freedom from religion, it is forced secularization, there is no liberty about it.
The state is dictating dress code to students based on religion. If they were governed by the US constitution it would be a blatant violation of "make no law respecting religion" - respect does not always mean "deference" it also means giving particular attention to, which the no-headscarves thing is all about. Just because they tried to make it applicable to all religions does not make it any less about religion.
Under the law, Internet providers in Utah must provide their customers with a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges."
I suggest that all Utah ISP's implement this with feature with a link from their home page "Click here to disable access to pornographic web sites" that leads directly to the ISP's account termination page.
Blogs and opinion columns do not exactly make for reliable sources, especially when you're trying to support insinuations of the rather serious charge of electon fraud.
The Indonesian information minister's statement is ridiculous: But you sure as hell can be forced to do things legally.
Seem to have missed the part where it is the information minister aka government official. If they don't like how MS uses the law against them, they will just change the law.
So yeah, you are right, MS can force them to do things legally, they'll just redefine the law to say what they have been doing is legal.
I'm actually surprised Google let others leech on their bandwidth like this without paying them or anything.
Google is flush with IPO cash. Bandwidth is cheap, but ideas are expensive.
By letting others "leech on their bandwidth" google fosters creativity. Creativity that has google at its foundation. If the result is even just a couple of good and new marketable uses of google's product, then the investment in bandwidth will have paid for itself a hundred-fold.
Think of it as a cooperative model of development and progress - kind of like academia, instead of the hording model that most Western business is so focused on.
I'd view it more as "seed stock" so that they can meet the immediate demand until get enough Indians trained in other European languages. Lose money in the short term, make money in the long run.
The clearly the way to combat this trend is to get as many Indian outsourcers listed on US stock exchanges. Once wall-street takes over, all long-term thinking will cease and the jobs will return "home" to the USA!
Slashdot Mirror
Then it'd fit in nicely with all the other **AA groups that we can collectively hate for stifling our freedoms.
Collectively known as the "Ass.'s of America."
Most schools do permit students not to say the pledge if it violates their beliefs.
You can still "permit" while simultaneously ostracizing which is what automatically happens in a situation where there is an expectation of the group to recite the pledge.
Most french schools, as I understand it, do not allow you to wear your religious symbols if not doing so violates your religious belifies. That's a significant difference.
That sentence is hard to parse, so I will explain the way the new law in France works - whether or not you believe headscarves are mandated by your religion, you can not wear one.
So, the difference is that with the pledge there is no official coercion, but the "society" within the school coerces anyway. In france, the coercion is an official rule. In the end, there is little difference between the two, either way the state is supporting religious based coercion.
And may I say it, the moment of silence debate is stupid. Let a moment of silence be a moment of silence.
If that's all it were, then fine. But the common case with the "moment of silence" is that students are explicitly told that they "can" use the moment for prayer. If they limited what was officially said about the mandatory moment of silence to just "reflection" then they'd probably be ok. But that is not what usually happens.
In other words, theoretically on Windows *any* media player could play *any* content, and users could pick their favorite combination.
That is demonstrably false.
There are different levels of "security" which can be set when DRM'ing windows-media content. Different levels of security require different levels of player authorization (not just *user* but the actual player). At least one of those levels requires that MS sign off on the source code and sign the resultant binary each and every time there is a source change and they charge $10K a pop for that "service."
Recently, MS changed the default security level that their DRM tools use to require exactly such a level of player authorization, and a number of DRM'd products were released with this default level of restriction. None of these newly released titles will play on third party DRM-enabled players like TheaterTek or Zoom Player because they can't afford the $10K per patch or release that MS charges.
Meanwhile, the rest of your post completely misses the point of what it means to be convicted of abusing a monopoly position in a market.
O'Reilly Revisits Online Countermeasures
Here I thought this was going to be about the "caller mute" button, bloviating and the other ways he deals with callers who get the conversational upper hand. Wrong O'Reilly I guess.
Talk about failing to get the point...
By putting a price on it all you are doing is validating their bundling of the product because it just furthers the fact they're just attempting to give the consumer more value.
No, by putting a price on it you are validating their conviction of abuse of monopoly power.
The reason MS does not put a price on it is because they can leverage the shedloads of cash they make on their monopoly OS business to dump software in the video and audio player market in order to obtain a monopoly position there too. That is illegal, that's what MS has been convicted of.
It isn't like mediaplayer just spontaneously formed - it costs MS lots of money to develop and support it. It is far from free (or Free for that matter).
Of course no one wants the stripped down version because it costs the same as the full-blown version .
This isn't vindication for MS - it is just proof of the stupidity of the EU bureaucrats who did a half-assed job of imposing the punishment on MS. If they weren't so incompetent, they would have mandated that not only must MS make a stripped down version, they also gotta sell it for proportionally less too where "lots" is equal to some value of proportional...
reference: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22283
The guys who know their stuff tend to be busy earning money by using that knowledge. But you can try reading the forums at doom9.org. At least those guys know when to call a spade a spade.
Can the mods not mod up comments that make mistakes such as confusing a media player with a video codec?
VLC is both a player and a codec - mulitple codecs in fact. It can definitely encode to mpeg and mpeg4. I would not be surprised if the next release or two end up with full encode/decode support for all that divx6 implements.
Didn't you hear? "Mars is the new France".
Well, we can fix that!
I'm on hold right now for the Rush Limbaugh show, I am going to have him rename Mars to "The Freedom Planet!"
Are you kidding? All my attempts to use alpha version of ffdshow on windows have resulted in all kinds of weirdness
You just have to get a stable build. I use a build from october of 2004 or so (don't have it right in front of me) and it is significantly faster than either the divx or xvid decoders. It is rock-stable solid.
Plus the other ffdshow filters like scaling, noise removal, deblocking, logo-killer, etc can make a HUGE improvement in the final quality of the rendered image - especially for low-rez sources like most divx encodes. Might not make so much of a difference on a 17" monitor but on a 100" front projector the difference is night and day.
LZ is a lossless alogorithm and no matter how "aggressive" LZ is, it can't come anywhere near the compression ratio of a properly configured divx encoding because the divx encoding is lossy - it throws out data.
If LZ somehow were "just about as capable" then everyone would be using LZ in the first place and all these preceptual lossy compressors would have died off long ago.
Heck, I can write a "compressor" that produces a file of the exact same size as the original and that LZ will make bigger rather than smaller. All you have to do is make the encoding random enough (like something along the lines of xoring it with pi).
So many of these "hobbiest" websites like Anandtech and Tom's are just the blind leading the blind with gross misrepresentations that end up being taken as gospel by those who don't know any better.
There ought to be a disclaimer before each "article" on sites like those with a warning that - "author is just another schmoe with no real expertise and is prone to make stuff up if it sounds good."
In fact, he seems to refer to it in terms of open-sourcing the codebase within the company, rather than open-sourcing to everyone. I have read somewhere around here that the same kind of thing goes on at Google.
My first job out of college was at a small unix computer manufacturer and all of their source code - os, tools and apps - were easily accessible to anyone in the company with a workstation.
Then I went to work for HP and could not believe that the support guys had zero access to the source code - only the engineers in the development labs did. It sure made my job harder so I quit. Since then I've learned that HP was the norm and my first job (and all the Free software I worked on during college, we didn't have no stinkin' "open source" back then) was the aberration.
It is good to see the industry starting to finally get sensible. Now all they have to do is diving in completely and make the source available to anyone, not just inside IBM.
It's not quite forced secularization. One could still go to a religious school.
So, only those can who afford freedom deserve it, while the poor are not allowed religous freedom?
It's sad and an example for the United States of what not to do.
It is just as restrictive as forcing students to "observe a moment of silence" or to pledge allegiance to one country under God.
Telling people what they can not do is the same thing as telling them what they must do.
I think you are more likely to see the following variations:
1) Linux emulation on OSX - the ability to run native x86 linux binaries on OSX for intel. Some BSD's already have this functionality and being a micro-kernel, OSX is just screaming for someone to write a linux emulator for it although there are other ways to do it too.
2) OSX in a box - using the new virtualization enhancements from Intel (VT) and AMD (Pacifica) we'll see a low-to-no overhead version of VMware or similar that can boot just about any operating system, including OSX.
The size thing is to make it easier to target head-scarves, which is even worse than being a blanket ban. It is a ban with such narrow "general" characteristics that make it not so general in practice. It is still all about banning personal religious expression which is nothing less than government enforced secularization.
I find it highly disturbing that the more liberal groups continue their attempts to strip the rights of states to have their own laws, especially in a representative government.
Yeah, those nutjob liberals are all trying to destroy states' rights to legalize euthanasia and pot! The nerve!
Freedom from religion is what is going on in France, and it directly impacts freedom of religion. For instance, you have laws prohibiting muslims from wearing head-scarfs, jews wearing yamulkas, and Christians wearing large crosses in public schools.
What's going on in France is not freedom from religion, it is forced secularization, there is no liberty about it.
The state is dictating dress code to students based on religion. If they were governed by the US constitution it would be a blatant violation of "make no law respecting religion" - respect does not always mean "deference" it also means giving particular attention to, which the no-headscarves thing is all about. Just because they tried to make it applicable to all religions does not make it any less about religion.
Under the law, Internet providers in Utah must provide their customers with a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges."
I suggest that all Utah ISP's implement this with feature with a link from their home page "Click here to disable access to pornographic web sites" that leads directly to the ISP's account termination page.
Blogs and opinion columns do not exactly make for reliable sources, especially when you're trying to support insinuations of the rather serious charge of electon fraud.
i ve.htm
Ok, how about Diebold themselves?
http://www.diebold.com/whatsnews/inthenews/execut
Of course it is full of spin, but that they even feel the need to spin it should be cause for very close scrutiny.
The Indonesian information minister's statement is ridiculous:
But you sure as hell can be forced to do things legally.
Seem to have missed the part where it is the information minister aka government official.
If they don't like how MS uses the law against them, they will just change the law.
So yeah, you are right, MS can force them to do things legally, they'll just redefine the law to say what they have been doing is legal.
I'm actually surprised Google let others leech on their bandwidth like this without paying them or anything.
Google is flush with IPO cash.
Bandwidth is cheap, but ideas are expensive.
By letting others "leech on their bandwidth" google fosters creativity. Creativity that has google at its foundation. If the result is even just a couple of good and new marketable uses of google's product, then the investment in bandwidth will have paid for itself a hundred-fold.
Think of it as a cooperative model of development and progress - kind of like academia, instead of the hording model that most Western business is so focused on.
What can 'Windows developers' do? Use a mouse?
They could not figure out how to log in.
Every time they pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL to get to the login box,
the linux machines would run "shutdown" instead.
my in-depth knowledge of Bollywood is lacking but I'm always open to new ideas.
You had better learn to love musicals. If there ain't dancing and singing, it didn't come from Bollywood.
I'd view it more as "seed stock" so that they can meet the immediate demand until get enough Indians trained in other European languages. Lose money in the short term, make money in the long run.
The clearly the way to combat this trend is to get as many Indian outsourcers listed on US stock exchanges. Once wall-street takes over, all long-term thinking will cease and the jobs will return "home" to the USA!