You should really try acutally using VLC for a while, then you'd know that it does, in fact, do exactly that. Try shift, alt or ctrl plus an arrow key for a small, medium or large jump, respectively.
The fact is that VLC can do so much more useful stuff than any other video player that you're crazy not to use it. One obvious feature that you can't live without is that you can modify the syncing between the audio and video on the fly with the j/k keys. So if your video is out of sync, you can easily fix that. Another thing is that it can crop the video on the fly, so if you have a 16:9 video on a 16:10 screen, you can just crop it to the right aspect ratio so you don't get any black bars. And it can do so, so much more.
Really, it's insanity to use anything else.
The organization that did this study is an organization that assits kids in need, primarily by giving out a phone-number that they can call (so, like, if their parents are mistreating them, they can call this number and get help). If kids are actually calling in and asking for help because their father's porn habit are becoming so bad that they actually suffer from it, then yeah, porn is a problem.
As someone with some experience with journalism, I can assure every one that this is correct. 95% of all publications that publish reviews never ask a reviewer to alter his score for the sake of journalism. It's something that is extremely rare, and disturbing when it happens. I was a big fan of Gerstmann (from the excellent GameSpot podcast, The HotSpot), but I don't think I can ever trust one of their reviews again. Management really needs to speak out about what happened here.
You're actually not too far off target. People who serve alcohol to visibly intoxicated people that later causes accidents are liable for those accidents. These laws are called Dram Shop laws and are perfectly constitutional.
Forgive my ignorance, but has anyone actually used Token Ring since, like, the mid-90s? I thought it was a completely outdated technology, replaced with ethernet?
I haven't been around to long either, but mostly it's because way back every third article that came through was from his blog and it was usually the same editor who posted them (can't remember which one). Often, the link was to his blog instead of the original article, i.e. it was him linking to something else in the way that most blogs work. This gave him a stellar google rank and people was accusing him of spamming slashdot to get more revenue to his site (and there was even some accusations that the slashdot editor actually was him).
I see it like this: if it's a good story, why complain. If it's a terrible story, complain about that instead.
Oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong it's not even funny. In my immediate family, there are three journalists, my parents and my sister (my parents are actually editors, but they started out as journalists and see themselves that way). In my extended family there are a few more. Every night at dinner time something concerning journalism was discussed. Most of their friends which I met where regularly where journalists. I can assure you, there are few professions in the entire world that values integrity as high as journalists do. I mean, look at Judith Miller. Whatever you think of her as a person or a journalist, she went to jail for months because she refused to divulge a source! And the source was Scooter Libby! And this isn't something that is rare, this is what most journalists would do, they wouldn't name a source to save their life.
See, people who want to do serious journalism want to do so because they are idealists. They want to be the people that airs dirty laundry and keep people honest. They aren't the people that get the most column space, that's for the gossips, but they are the people that affect change and report fairly. Pick up any serious newspaper and browse through it and you'll see pages written by people who has every bit of integrity as Murrow. You have an overly romantic view of the past and a an overly cynical view of the present.
The reason you don't get much real news is that you read crap. You certainly didn't read the New York Times on December 16, 2005. The only reason you know about it is because of the media. You have two choices here: either you get disclosure of one of the most egregious civil rights violations in modern history along with much heated debate, or it is kept secret and no one knows about it. I know which one I'd pick.
If you're so troubled by the Britney's and the Lindsey's of the world, stop buying tabloids and start buying a real newspaper.
I just wrote pretty much the same response to another poster (I even included the same link to Yellow journalism on wikipedia). Thank you for not making me write it again:)
I don't really understand the rosy picture that you all paint of the history of journalism: do you think that media conglomerates are a new thing? Have you ever heard of William Randolph Hearst? Rupert Murdoch is a spit-ball in a rainstorm compared to Hearst. And what about Murrow? He was part of a huge media network too, it was called the Columbia Broadcasting System. Murrow wasn't the first one to go after McCarthy, public opinion had already started to turn. There's no doubt that he played a big role in that affair, but it's also a complete miracle that William Paley didn't can his ass. He certainly would have if Murrow had started 6 months earlier.
There will always be be media giants that control a huge chunk of the market, it has been that was since newspapers started publishing. So, yeah, FOX is pretty biased. But you know what, there are three other networks that has a government mandate to report the news. Not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Posts, Salon, Slate, Comedy Central, PBS, NPR and all the other ones.
You talk about the sensationalist journalism, and how it is all about the money. That kind of journalism actually has a name, it's called Yellow Journalism. This was invented by William Randolph Hearst! Honestly, it's stunning to hear someone argue that we are in worse shape now than in the fifties. It was the fifties! Blacklists, segregation, HUAC, sexism, homophobia, communist paranoia and the Cold War. Honest journalists like Murrow did their best to make things better (and in sometimes they succeeded), but free speech and freedom of the press where a pittance in comparison to what they are today.
Is the state of American journalism perfect? No, of course not. But it does represent by far the biggest insurance of a free society we have.
Wow... this... this is pretty much the most absurd thing I've read all week. The media is a "religion" and a news-anchor is our "priest" and they are "feral beasts" and I don't know what else. Lighten up on the rhetoric, you sound like a crazy-person.
First off all, do you think this a new thing? Do you think it was only recently that newspapers became biased, that people didn't try to use the media to push their POV fifty years ago? It was even worse then, because now we have so many options that we can actually form an idea of what is going on!
Listen, ass-hole reporters are the price you pay for a free media. You get the datelines, the people that infiltrate conventions and try to vilify innocent people. But you also get Nellie Bly, who infiltrated a mental hospital and reported on the horrible conditions. Sure, you get partisan hacks that try to scare you into agreeing with them, but you also get Thomas Nast, fighting an enormously corrupt regime with a few drawings, and winning. And lest you think all of these examples are are ancient ones that don't apply today, let me ask you something: if the media had been "reigned in", how would you know about NSA wiretapping program? How would know about Abu Ghraib? How would you know about any of the masses of republican scandals? The answer: you wouldn't.
It's these things that go if you start curtailing the media. If you start demanding stricter control over media, it's not going to be Bill O'Reilly who loses a job, it's going to be two young reporters in the seventies working for the Washington Post called Bernstein and Woodward.
"The cons outweigh the pros"? "More of an enemy to democracy than an ally"? What the hell are you smoking? Listen, in these days of the Bush administration, the ONLY thing that stands between him and autocracy is the media. The ONLY thing. You would sacrifice that because some dude in the media isn't playing nice? Congress may be democratic (and who can we thank for that?), but it's weak. The Supreme Court is just to the left of Joseph McCarthy. What do we have? We have the New York Times. We have 60 Minutes. We have The Daily Show. And yes, we have Slashdot.
There is a reason the media is the only industry specifically protected by the Bill of Rights.
As some other posters said, this is absolutely not true and it hasn't been true since asymmetric cryptography and secure key exchanges where discovered.
However, if the hacker was able to set himself up as a proxy between the computer and the network (by using ARP spoofing, for instance), he could substitute his own certificate for Google's, decrypt the traffic, read it, and then forward it to Gmail (that is, a man-in-the-middle attack). This takes way more work, and there will be a popup that says "This certificate has not been signed by a trusted authority, someone might be trying to sniff you out". No one with a tiny bit of computer security knowledge would fall for this, but a clueless user who clicks "Allow" on everything probably would be. Still, WAY more work.
Even more important to a functioning democracy is a free press. Just because FOX employs idiots it doesn't give you license to question journalism itself.
There is actually something about that in the Geneva Conventions. Quoting:
Henceforth, signatories shall respect human dignity in all its citizens and prisoners of war. They shall not be subjected to degrading treatment, such as torture, sleep deprivation, excessive interrogation, bad puns or Mmm-bop by the Hanson Brothers, et cetera. Violation of this shall be considered the grossest of atrocities and justify international sanctions. Especially the last one. Seriously.
If I might jump in here, I think I can clarify some things about Deus Ex Machinas. As I said, the term comes from the ancient Greek plays, primarily from the writer Euripides, one of the three great Greek tragedians (the other two being Sophocles and Aeschylus). Lets use his play Medea as an example:
The story is this: the great hero Jason has returned from a quest to find something called the Golden Fleece. This marks him as one of the greatest heroes in history. With him he also brought a wife, Medea, from the eastern lands, who gave up everything and even betrayed her own family to follow him. They settle down in a city called Corinth and have three children. After a while, Jason falls in love with the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. As men are want to do, he leaves trades in his wife for a younger model. Medea is understandably upset. She decides to get revenge. This being a Greek tragedy, this means blood. She poisons and kills Jason's new love and her father Creon, killing them in an instant. That's not enough, however, so in what is certainly one of the most horrific plot twists in the history of drama, she also kills her own children.
So now she's stuck in Corinth with Jason and the entire armed forces after her (she having killed the king and all). There is no escape, she cannot survive. So what happens? Out of nowhere, Helios, the sun God, descends on a carriage, scoops her up, and takes her to Athens (where King Aegeus has promised her refuge). This is a Deus Ex Machina. In the amphitheatres, they had this huge crane which they lowered down the carriage with the actor playing Helios in it. Literally, "A God in a Machine".
This is considered bad writing, because suddenly having a God appear and save the day is cheating. It doesn't follow the rules. It's a miracle that completely breaks the reality of the play, a plot device introduced to magically solve everything because the writer has painted himself into a corner and couldn't come up with anything better. That is precisely what JK Rowling does in Goblet of Fire (at least I think so). Voldemort is pointing his wand straight at Harry. For four books Rowling had pounded in that the killing curse is absolute and unblockable, if someone does it, you're a goner. Suddenly, she introduces a completely new plot device that we've never heard of (not the specific effect) that magically saves Harry skin, for very obscure and strange reasons. It's cheating.
See, any time you read a book, watch a play or see a movie, there is a contract between the writer and the viewer. We accept that impossible things can happen so long as the story maintains a certain internal logic. This is how we can see a Die Hard movie and not complain that McClane should die after five minutes or read a book about magicians. The name for this is suspension of disbelief. When the writer breaks that contract (by violating the internal logic) we say "Oh, come on! That doesn't make any sense!" This breaks the suspension of disbelief and diminishes the work. This is why you should avoid Deus Ex Machinas like the plauge.
I should add that I don't necessarily think this is so bad, I really like the Potter books. Deus Ex Machina's are lazy ways to get out of tricky plot points, but they don't necessarily drag a book down. I mean, the expression comes from classic tragic plays like Medea, and that play is probably one of the most brilliant works of literature in history. I'm just saying, Rowling likes them too:)
Priori Incantatem was first mentioned in book 4, at the Q******* (I can't spell that:) World Cup, and the extremely obscure effect that happened when Harry and Voldemort crossed wands had never been mentioned. For four books the idea that you couldn't stop a killing curse had been pounded in, that's what made Harry so special. So then, suddenly, as if by magic (pardon the pun) a plot device is introduced so that suddenly Harry doesn't die by Voldemort's hand? It's like the definition of a Deus Ex Machina.
I figure since the hat and the sword are the only two remaining relics of Gryffindor that they are connected somehow. Since the hat is concious I bet he can summon it at will. It's kind of a deus ex machina, but hey, Harry Potter is filled with those (can you say book 4, Priori Incantatem? Or book 2, with the phoenix?)
That doesn't make any sense. A placebo is a medicine that doesn't really fix a problem but works anyway because the person taking it thinks it does. If AV software doesn't fix a problem, it doesn't fix the problem, no matter how much you wish it did.
Slashdot Mirror
You should really try acutally using VLC for a while, then you'd know that it does, in fact, do exactly that. Try shift, alt or ctrl plus an arrow key for a small, medium or large jump, respectively. The fact is that VLC can do so much more useful stuff than any other video player that you're crazy not to use it. One obvious feature that you can't live without is that you can modify the syncing between the audio and video on the fly with the j/k keys. So if your video is out of sync, you can easily fix that. Another thing is that it can crop the video on the fly, so if you have a 16:9 video on a 16:10 screen, you can just crop it to the right aspect ratio so you don't get any black bars. And it can do so, so much more. Really, it's insanity to use anything else.
News at 10!
The organization that did this study is an organization that assits kids in need, primarily by giving out a phone-number that they can call (so, like, if their parents are mistreating them, they can call this number and get help). If kids are actually calling in and asking for help because their father's porn habit are becoming so bad that they actually suffer from it, then yeah, porn is a problem.
As someone with some experience with journalism, I can assure every one that this is correct. 95% of all publications that publish reviews never ask a reviewer to alter his score for the sake of journalism. It's something that is extremely rare, and disturbing when it happens. I was a big fan of Gerstmann (from the excellent GameSpot podcast, The HotSpot), but I don't think I can ever trust one of their reviews again. Management really needs to speak out about what happened here.
One should also mention the Nebula, which is the other major sci-fi-award. Winning both the Hugo and the Nebula is the grand slam of sci fi, and the list of those who did it is an austere one. Some novels go even further and wins the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K Dick Award. That's sci-fi royalty, that is.
The keys are like all next to each other!
You're actually not too far off target. People who serve alcohol to visibly intoxicated people that later causes accidents are liable for those accidents. These laws are called Dram Shop laws and are perfectly constitutional.
Huh. Well, there you go. Learn something every day.
Forgive my ignorance, but has anyone actually used Token Ring since, like, the mid-90s? I thought it was a completely outdated technology, replaced with ethernet?
I haven't been around to long either, but mostly it's because way back every third article that came through was from his blog and it was usually the same editor who posted them (can't remember which one). Often, the link was to his blog instead of the original article, i.e. it was him linking to something else in the way that most blogs work. This gave him a stellar google rank and people was accusing him of spamming slashdot to get more revenue to his site (and there was even some accusations that the slashdot editor actually was him).
I see it like this: if it's a good story, why complain. If it's a terrible story, complain about that instead.
Oh, the pain! My god it hurts! Thank you for that mental image.
Oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong it's not even funny. In my immediate family, there are three journalists, my parents and my sister (my parents are actually editors, but they started out as journalists and see themselves that way). In my extended family there are a few more. Every night at dinner time something concerning journalism was discussed. Most of their friends which I met where regularly where journalists. I can assure you, there are few professions in the entire world that values integrity as high as journalists do. I mean, look at Judith Miller. Whatever you think of her as a person or a journalist, she went to jail for months because she refused to divulge a source! And the source was Scooter Libby! And this isn't something that is rare, this is what most journalists would do, they wouldn't name a source to save their life.
See, people who want to do serious journalism want to do so because they are idealists. They want to be the people that airs dirty laundry and keep people honest. They aren't the people that get the most column space, that's for the gossips, but they are the people that affect change and report fairly. Pick up any serious newspaper and browse through it and you'll see pages written by people who has every bit of integrity as Murrow. You have an overly romantic view of the past and a an overly cynical view of the present.
And by the way, what's wrong with Brian Williams?
The reason you don't get much real news is that you read crap. You certainly didn't read the New York Times on December 16, 2005. The only reason you know about it is because of the media. You have two choices here: either you get disclosure of one of the most egregious civil rights violations in modern history along with much heated debate, or it is kept secret and no one knows about it. I know which one I'd pick.
If you're so troubled by the Britney's and the Lindsey's of the world, stop buying tabloids and start buying a real newspaper.
I just wrote pretty much the same response to another poster (I even included the same link to Yellow journalism on wikipedia). Thank you for not making me write it again :)
I don't really understand the rosy picture that you all paint of the history of journalism: do you think that media conglomerates are a new thing? Have you ever heard of William Randolph Hearst? Rupert Murdoch is a spit-ball in a rainstorm compared to Hearst. And what about Murrow? He was part of a huge media network too, it was called the Columbia Broadcasting System. Murrow wasn't the first one to go after McCarthy, public opinion had already started to turn. There's no doubt that he played a big role in that affair, but it's also a complete miracle that William Paley didn't can his ass. He certainly would have if Murrow had started 6 months earlier.
There will always be be media giants that control a huge chunk of the market, it has been that was since newspapers started publishing. So, yeah, FOX is pretty biased. But you know what, there are three other networks that has a government mandate to report the news. Not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Posts, Salon, Slate, Comedy Central, PBS, NPR and all the other ones.
You talk about the sensationalist journalism, and how it is all about the money. That kind of journalism actually has a name, it's called Yellow Journalism. This was invented by William Randolph Hearst! Honestly, it's stunning to hear someone argue that we are in worse shape now than in the fifties. It was the fifties! Blacklists, segregation, HUAC, sexism, homophobia, communist paranoia and the Cold War. Honest journalists like Murrow did their best to make things better (and in sometimes they succeeded), but free speech and freedom of the press where a pittance in comparison to what they are today.
Is the state of American journalism perfect? No, of course not. But it does represent by far the biggest insurance of a free society we have.
Wow... this... this is pretty much the most absurd thing I've read all week. The media is a "religion" and a news-anchor is our "priest" and they are "feral beasts" and I don't know what else. Lighten up on the rhetoric, you sound like a crazy-person.
First off all, do you think this a new thing? Do you think it was only recently that newspapers became biased, that people didn't try to use the media to push their POV fifty years ago? It was even worse then, because now we have so many options that we can actually form an idea of what is going on!
Listen, ass-hole reporters are the price you pay for a free media. You get the datelines, the people that infiltrate conventions and try to vilify innocent people. But you also get Nellie Bly, who infiltrated a mental hospital and reported on the horrible conditions. Sure, you get partisan hacks that try to scare you into agreeing with them, but you also get Thomas Nast, fighting an enormously corrupt regime with a few drawings, and winning. And lest you think all of these examples are are ancient ones that don't apply today, let me ask you something: if the media had been "reigned in", how would you know about NSA wiretapping program? How would know about Abu Ghraib? How would you know about any of the masses of republican scandals? The answer: you wouldn't.
It's these things that go if you start curtailing the media. If you start demanding stricter control over media, it's not going to be Bill O'Reilly who loses a job, it's going to be two young reporters in the seventies working for the Washington Post called Bernstein and Woodward.
"The cons outweigh the pros"? "More of an enemy to democracy than an ally"? What the hell are you smoking? Listen, in these days of the Bush administration, the ONLY thing that stands between him and autocracy is the media. The ONLY thing. You would sacrifice that because some dude in the media isn't playing nice? Congress may be democratic (and who can we thank for that?), but it's weak. The Supreme Court is just to the left of Joseph McCarthy. What do we have? We have the New York Times. We have 60 Minutes. We have The Daily Show. And yes, we have Slashdot.
There is a reason the media is the only industry specifically protected by the Bill of Rights.
As some other posters said, this is absolutely not true and it hasn't been true since asymmetric cryptography and secure key exchanges where discovered.
However, if the hacker was able to set himself up as a proxy between the computer and the network (by using ARP spoofing, for instance), he could substitute his own certificate for Google's, decrypt the traffic, read it, and then forward it to Gmail (that is, a man-in-the-middle attack). This takes way more work, and there will be a popup that says "This certificate has not been signed by a trusted authority, someone might be trying to sniff you out". No one with a tiny bit of computer security knowledge would fall for this, but a clueless user who clicks "Allow" on everything probably would be. Still, WAY more work.
Even more important to a functioning democracy is a free press. Just because FOX employs idiots it doesn't give you license to question journalism itself.
There is actually something about that in the Geneva Conventions. Quoting:
If I might jump in here, I think I can clarify some things about Deus Ex Machinas. As I said, the term comes from the ancient Greek plays, primarily from the writer Euripides, one of the three great Greek tragedians (the other two being Sophocles and Aeschylus). Lets use his play Medea as an example:
The story is this: the great hero Jason has returned from a quest to find something called the Golden Fleece. This marks him as one of the greatest heroes in history. With him he also brought a wife, Medea, from the eastern lands, who gave up everything and even betrayed her own family to follow him. They settle down in a city called Corinth and have three children. After a while, Jason falls in love with the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. As men are want to do, he leaves trades in his wife for a younger model. Medea is understandably upset. She decides to get revenge. This being a Greek tragedy, this means blood. She poisons and kills Jason's new love and her father Creon, killing them in an instant. That's not enough, however, so in what is certainly one of the most horrific plot twists in the history of drama, she also kills her own children.
So now she's stuck in Corinth with Jason and the entire armed forces after her (she having killed the king and all). There is no escape, she cannot survive. So what happens? Out of nowhere, Helios, the sun God, descends on a carriage, scoops her up, and takes her to Athens (where King Aegeus has promised her refuge). This is a Deus Ex Machina. In the amphitheatres, they had this huge crane which they lowered down the carriage with the actor playing Helios in it. Literally, "A God in a Machine".
This is considered bad writing, because suddenly having a God appear and save the day is cheating. It doesn't follow the rules. It's a miracle that completely breaks the reality of the play, a plot device introduced to magically solve everything because the writer has painted himself into a corner and couldn't come up with anything better. That is precisely what JK Rowling does in Goblet of Fire (at least I think so). Voldemort is pointing his wand straight at Harry. For four books Rowling had pounded in that the killing curse is absolute and unblockable, if someone does it, you're a goner. Suddenly, she introduces a completely new plot device that we've never heard of (not the specific effect) that magically saves Harry skin, for very obscure and strange reasons. It's cheating.
See, any time you read a book, watch a play or see a movie, there is a contract between the writer and the viewer. We accept that impossible things can happen so long as the story maintains a certain internal logic. This is how we can see a Die Hard movie and not complain that McClane should die after five minutes or read a book about magicians. The name for this is suspension of disbelief. When the writer breaks that contract (by violating the internal logic) we say "Oh, come on! That doesn't make any sense!" This breaks the suspension of disbelief and diminishes the work. This is why you should avoid Deus Ex Machinas like the plauge.
I hope that makes it a little bit clearer :)
I should add that I don't necessarily think this is so bad, I really like the Potter books. Deus Ex Machina's are lazy ways to get out of tricky plot points, but they don't necessarily drag a book down. I mean, the expression comes from classic tragic plays like Medea, and that play is probably one of the most brilliant works of literature in history. I'm just saying, Rowling likes them too :)
Priori Incantatem was first mentioned in book 4, at the Q******* (I can't spell that :) World Cup, and the extremely obscure effect that happened when Harry and Voldemort crossed wands had never been mentioned. For four books the idea that you couldn't stop a killing curse had been pounded in, that's what made Harry so special. So then, suddenly, as if by magic (pardon the pun) a plot device is introduced so that suddenly Harry doesn't die by Voldemort's hand? It's like the definition of a Deus Ex Machina.
I figure since the hat and the sword are the only two remaining relics of Gryffindor that they are connected somehow. Since the hat is concious I bet he can summon it at will. It's kind of a deus ex machina, but hey, Harry Potter is filled with those (can you say book 4, Priori Incantatem? Or book 2, with the phoenix?)
That doesn't make any sense. A placebo is a medicine that doesn't really fix a problem but works anyway because the person taking it thinks it does. If AV software doesn't fix a problem, it doesn't fix the problem, no matter how much you wish it did.
A big one you didn't mention is rape. That is (horrifically) a major problem.