Maybe if you read the post in a grossly implausibly optimistic manner. But luckily the OP himself has seen fit to kindly elaborate on his views. It's rather difficult to interpret "Our descendants will likely become concubines, whores, and slaves to the descendants of the invaders" as anything but claiming society is thoroughly fucked (and also that the OP is a fucking lunatic).
A functioning society which due to purely internal factors lead to a change in it which, according to you and the OP, will ultimately lead to its downfall. Yeah, that sounds real fucking functional.
The fact that half of our society got pissed off and demanded equal rights makes it plainly obvious that they don't work. "Works" does not mean "pumps out as many babies as fast as possible at any cost".
So the evil liberals and their oppressive egalitarian agenda are leading to the downfall of society and the invasion of Muslim barbarians? Did you forget to take your medicine today?
After reading your post I am forced to conclude that men are actually far stupider than women. At least, I certainly feel stupider after reading that nonsense.
Well I'm glad you're here to finally save the day and free all those big businesses relying heavily on Linux on their servers with no problems from their OS that apparently drops data like a quadriplegic juggler. Thanks, anonymous FreeBSD fanboy, the world would be a worse place without you.
I'm glad to see the global warming skeptics are such reasonable and well-meaning people who seek to open our eyes to the plans of climatologists to try to take over Europe and kill all the Jews. The world is a better place thanks to your insight.
She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed."
So then they just lie to the children and say the police will get the bad guys and completely prevent all copying of the images and videos. Just like they're doing now. What, did you think they can really track down every copy in the world and destroy them and arrest the people who made those copies? As the saying goes, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Even censorship of things you think ought to be censored. Any effort to completely remove information there is any demand for from the Internet is doomed to failure.
at the Scientific level the CRU clowns have been CAUGHT in illegality, denying valid FOI requests, for which their University, UEA, will have to answer in both British and European Courts.
When they're taken to court and convicted you can claim they've been CAUGHT in illegality.
Read the e-mails, they are disgusting
I've read plenty and the only disgusting thing I found was how denialists consistently took stuff out of context and misinterpreted it to fit their preconceived viewpoints.
and Prof. "Phil" Jones has already been forced to step down.
That's a rather funny way of saying "he chose to temporarily step down during an internal investigation regarding the leaked emails and data".
At least they have hidden/fabricated/falsified data and used it for fraudulent ends.
I haven't seen anything to indicate that, and apparently neither has Nature. Or is the most prominent scientific journal in the world in on the conspiracy too?
At the Political level the AGW agenda is DEAD.
No, not really. The far-right lunatics will trumpet the death of AGW, sure, but that won't make it so.
Since Global temperatures are FALLING there is no urgency, and there is no chance of re-vitalising this scam.
No they aren't. Have a look at, for example, the GISTEMP data yourself. It's quite clear there's no giant downward trend like the denialists like to claim.
No, I don't think you appreciate how insignificant the problem is. Nobody gives a fuck except the far right (and you can't argue they aren't far-right websites you go to if Slashdot looks 'mostly liberal' to you). The world has not stopped believing "ANY temperature data any more". You only see it as the end of the world for AGW because you have a horribly distorted view of the world from hanging out at websites full of people who seek to discredit good science because it conflicts with their ideology.
Also, pretty much all debate on global warming has already ended--the scientific debate, anyway. The theory of AGW has broad scientific consensus, and most debate is about whether we're very very fucked or very very very fucked if we don't take drastic measures now. The only debate this leak affects is the political debate, which carries about as much weight in science as the political debate over evolution does.
Holy fuck man, anime on fucking Blu-ray! You just blew my fucking mind!
I'm quite familiar with anime Blu-ray releases, but apparently you are not. There's nowhere near as many releases on Blu-ray in English as there are in Japanese, and plenty of people just watch fansubs, in which case the restrictions of the original media are of no concern to the viewer. My original assertion, that "for most people it is a tiny, tiny issue", still stands, and you are still a whiny, ignorant asshat.
Well first, your suggestion is utterly asinine. If you break their OS division into a bunch of companies and have them each develop their own fork of Windows, you won't get a bunch of new OSes magically, you'll get a bunch of slightly different forks of Windows. And then they probably find some way to work together to avoid pointless duplication of effort. Everyone's software will still work on all the new Windows forks, so there'll be no reason for developers to make their applications portable. And still nobody will be able to develop their own Windows, so it really won't offer any real competition. Basically, it won't fix the market and you could never pull it off anyway.
Personally, if I could choose any way to deal with it, I'd force the source of Windows (and perhaps some other products) open, put it under GPLv3 or something like that, and split the company up a bunch, with no more than one major product to each resulting part. Realistically, there's no way you could get away with open-sourcing software by force, so I'd settle for just breaking it up. This isn't "implicitly acknowledging" anything like you said, it's just that doing stupid things like splitting the same product division into multiple companies isn't going to help anything. At least keeping them all apart would prevent them from abusively leveraging their power in one market to assist them in another, or providing special capabilities to some of their applications but not those developed by others.
Really, if you wanted to deal with an abusive monopoly in a situation like Microsoft, the only way to deal with it quickly and easily is to prevent them from becoming an abusive monopoly at all. Sort of like what the EU is trying to do here. But they didn't and now it's too late. Now the best they can do (besides things that will never happen like what I suggested) is split it up and keep a very close eye on the resulting pieces. But doing that sort of thing would be difficult in the land of Freedom and Dangerously Unregulated Business that is America, so I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
I'm talking about the "The DoJ looks at where there is harm to consumers" part of the quote. He's saying the EU is "completely different" from the DoJ and the DoJ would never do this (being concerned about keeping the market full of lots of small competitors), thus implying that he thinks that a lack of competition is not harmful to consumers. Or perhaps he was just very bad with words and meant to say that the DoJ only deals with stuff it thinks harms consumers (not that objectively harms consumers), and thus is hilariously incompetent and overlooks concerns like this.
I don't really have any experience myself with setting any Linux distro up as an HTPC. As for the average person who wants to watch anime, they're not going to be setting up a fancy HTPC setup like you are, so the situations aren't really comparable. And I think you're underestimating them a bit. I know quite a few who are into anime and have switched to Linux (or at least dual-boot it), generally with few problems, and often willing to work through the problems they have.
Technical competence in general seems to be a lot higher in the anime community. Another poster was spot on when he linked to this. It's not rare for me to have lengthy and in-depth conversations about theoretical physics or the finer points of operating system design in channels ostensibly about discussing anime.
Then I never have to worry about deciding on a GUI
You already decided on one, namely MPC-HC.
worrying about certain combinations of container and subtitle format not playing together
I'm curious as to exactly what combinations do this, and with which player. I've got a bunch of stuff in all the common formats (Matroska/{H.264,MPEG-4 ASP}/{Vorbis,AAC,MP3}/ASS, AVI/MPEG-4 ASP/MP3, raw DVDs), and some stuff in some less common formats (OGM/SRT, anyone?), and mplayer plays anything I throw at it without a problem, even incomplete or broken files.
and any sound issues at all.
And I'm also curious about these sound issues. I hear people complaining about general sound under Linux all the time (though it's Just Worked for me since forever), but I've never heard of sound issues with mplayer specifically.
With Windows I can sit down and enjoy a game or film without needing to worry about 'preparing' them beforehand.
For video, there's always piracy: cheaper and you get a better product for your (lack of money) too! Or you could always take over the big media companies and get them to stop producing evil formats that hate your freedom and want to take it away. Though if being able to play Blu-ray videos without a bit of extra effort to get around the shit they lock it up in is by itself important enough to you to switch OSes, then I guess there's nothing I can really do for you.
As for the games, you brought up Touhou and VNs; all the Touhous work fine (as noted), and out of the box, with no 'preparing' anything in any way. With VNs, generally what you see is what you get. If it crashes horribly and vomits out some cryptic error when you try to run it under Wine, probably even the darkest of dark magics won't get it running, so 'preparing' is futile. Though with their low resource usage and lack of using things like fancy 3D graphics, you can usually get them running flawlessly under a VM (I suggest VirtualBox if you're willing to consider this).
VLC gets it's SSA/ASS subtitle rendering support from the mplayer project. So except for being a step behind MPlayer's they are using the same code. Implementation, however, may be making a difference.
I just went and downloaded a more recent VLC version and played something with it and surprisingly it wasn't hilariously broken. It's like I'm really using a player developed in the 21st century. I suppose I must tentatively (only tentatively because I didn't do a thorough test of its capabilities) retract my jab at VLC's subtitle support, but maintain my vague assertions about its general quality as a video player and the frequency with which it kicks defenseless little puppies.
Now see, here's your problem: You're an arrogant asshole. I have TONS of video clips that mplayer won't play; vlc plays them all. From where I'm sitting, mplayer is the crap software.
Now see, here's your problem: You're an arrogant asshole. I have TONS of video clips that vlc won't play; mplayer plays them all. From where I'm sitting, vlc is the crap software.
It's getting to be a bigger issue. People who watch on their PC would often like to take advantage of the additional resolution, so it's not just HDTV owners -- nevertheless a growing segment.
Please note the story and the OP's post. This is in the context of anime, not in general.
That quote is rather bizarre. It seems to be implying that having a market utterly dominated by a few large companies instead of being composed of many smaller, less individually influential ones isn't harmful to consumers.
I generally prefer Zoomplayer and MPC-HC to stuff like VLC
See, here's your problem. You're comparing competent players to an incompetent player. One that in particular has terrible support for ASS, by far the most popular subtitle format for fansubs. Try mplayer (or a GUI frontend if that's your thing) sometime.
but a big issue is the lack of Blu Ray playing capability under Linux.
For you, maybe. For most people it is a tiny, tiny issue though. And anyways, that's certainly not the case anyway.
There's also gaming, with the exception of Onscript based games, very few visual novels play well with Linux
Plenty of them run well with Wine, but the amount that manage to make something as simple as a VN not work at all under Wine is certainly impressive.
and most Tohou/doujin shooters are Windows only.
The Touhou games all work fine under Wine, minus the occasional minor graphical glitch.
That line bears only the most vague resemblance to his post. This is not the patent system. Credit is not due just because someone else came up with a similar idea before you.
Well, I suppose it's my own fault for trusting The Register. After reading the first article, I got curious and went on to check out the technical details of the exploit. What The Register phrases as "it's Twitter's API's fault" is actually "holy fuck you can POST the whole HTTP message to arbitrary locations (hosted on the same server, anyway)", which is a tad bit worse. While the Internet still isn't going to go down in flames, this does open up potential for some sites to get some nasty burns, and in a way they almost surely won't already be protected against, even if the developers aren't idiots.
He did it by injecting text that instructed Twitter's application protocol interface to dump the contents of the web request into a Twitter message after they had been decrypted.
The only reason it was exploitable was because of Twitter's API. Understandably, I'm not too worried about the rest of the Internet going down in flames any time soon.
They don't need to open source the code for that. Mono is already behind and always will be. The.NET Micro Framework is a stripped-down version of.NET for use on embedded devices and such. It only has a small subset of the whole.NET library, and the VM itself is much simpler. Opening up the code gives away none of the interesting stuff, and probably nets them greater market share. There's absolutely no downside for them. There's also really no downside for the free software community, but they don't gain anything from it either.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if you read the post in a grossly implausibly optimistic manner. But luckily the OP himself has seen fit to kindly elaborate on his views. It's rather difficult to interpret "Our descendants will likely become concubines, whores, and slaves to the descendants of the invaders" as anything but claiming society is thoroughly fucked (and also that the OP is a fucking lunatic).
A functioning society which due to purely internal factors lead to a change in it which, according to you and the OP, will ultimately lead to its downfall. Yeah, that sounds real fucking functional.
The fact that half of our society got pissed off and demanded equal rights makes it plainly obvious that they don't work. "Works" does not mean "pumps out as many babies as fast as possible at any cost".
So the evil liberals and their oppressive egalitarian agenda are leading to the downfall of society and the invasion of Muslim barbarians? Did you forget to take your medicine today?
After reading your post I am forced to conclude that men are actually far stupider than women. At least, I certainly feel stupider after reading that nonsense.
Well I'm glad you're here to finally save the day and free all those big businesses relying heavily on Linux on their servers with no problems from their OS that apparently drops data like a quadriplegic juggler. Thanks, anonymous FreeBSD fanboy, the world would be a worse place without you.
I'm glad to see the global warming skeptics are such reasonable and well-meaning people who seek to open our eyes to the plans of climatologists to try to take over Europe and kill all the Jews. The world is a better place thanks to your insight.
So then they just lie to the children and say the police will get the bad guys and completely prevent all copying of the images and videos. Just like they're doing now. What, did you think they can really track down every copy in the world and destroy them and arrest the people who made those copies? As the saying goes, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Even censorship of things you think ought to be censored. Any effort to completely remove information there is any demand for from the Internet is doomed to failure.
When they're taken to court and convicted you can claim they've been CAUGHT in illegality.
I've read plenty and the only disgusting thing I found was how denialists consistently took stuff out of context and misinterpreted it to fit their preconceived viewpoints.
That's a rather funny way of saying "he chose to temporarily step down during an internal investigation regarding the leaked emails and data".
I haven't seen anything to indicate that, and apparently neither has Nature. Or is the most prominent scientific journal in the world in on the conspiracy too?
No, not really. The far-right lunatics will trumpet the death of AGW, sure, but that won't make it so.
No they aren't. Have a look at, for example, the GISTEMP data yourself. It's quite clear there's no giant downward trend like the denialists like to claim.
No, I don't think you appreciate how insignificant the problem is. Nobody gives a fuck except the far right (and you can't argue they aren't far-right websites you go to if Slashdot looks 'mostly liberal' to you). The world has not stopped believing "ANY temperature data any more". You only see it as the end of the world for AGW because you have a horribly distorted view of the world from hanging out at websites full of people who seek to discredit good science because it conflicts with their ideology.
Also, pretty much all debate on global warming has already ended--the scientific debate, anyway. The theory of AGW has broad scientific consensus, and most debate is about whether we're very very fucked or very very very fucked if we don't take drastic measures now. The only debate this leak affects is the political debate, which carries about as much weight in science as the political debate over evolution does.
Holy fuck man, anime on fucking Blu-ray! You just blew my fucking mind!
I'm quite familiar with anime Blu-ray releases, but apparently you are not. There's nowhere near as many releases on Blu-ray in English as there are in Japanese, and plenty of people just watch fansubs, in which case the restrictions of the original media are of no concern to the viewer. My original assertion, that "for most people it is a tiny, tiny issue", still stands, and you are still a whiny, ignorant asshat.
Well first, your suggestion is utterly asinine. If you break their OS division into a bunch of companies and have them each develop their own fork of Windows, you won't get a bunch of new OSes magically, you'll get a bunch of slightly different forks of Windows. And then they probably find some way to work together to avoid pointless duplication of effort. Everyone's software will still work on all the new Windows forks, so there'll be no reason for developers to make their applications portable. And still nobody will be able to develop their own Windows, so it really won't offer any real competition. Basically, it won't fix the market and you could never pull it off anyway.
Personally, if I could choose any way to deal with it, I'd force the source of Windows (and perhaps some other products) open, put it under GPLv3 or something like that, and split the company up a bunch, with no more than one major product to each resulting part. Realistically, there's no way you could get away with open-sourcing software by force, so I'd settle for just breaking it up. This isn't "implicitly acknowledging" anything like you said, it's just that doing stupid things like splitting the same product division into multiple companies isn't going to help anything. At least keeping them all apart would prevent them from abusively leveraging their power in one market to assist them in another, or providing special capabilities to some of their applications but not those developed by others.
Really, if you wanted to deal with an abusive monopoly in a situation like Microsoft, the only way to deal with it quickly and easily is to prevent them from becoming an abusive monopoly at all. Sort of like what the EU is trying to do here. But they didn't and now it's too late. Now the best they can do (besides things that will never happen like what I suggested) is split it up and keep a very close eye on the resulting pieces. But doing that sort of thing would be difficult in the land of Freedom and Dangerously Unregulated Business that is America, so I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
I'm talking about the "The DoJ looks at where there is harm to consumers" part of the quote. He's saying the EU is "completely different" from the DoJ and the DoJ would never do this (being concerned about keeping the market full of lots of small competitors), thus implying that he thinks that a lack of competition is not harmful to consumers. Or perhaps he was just very bad with words and meant to say that the DoJ only deals with stuff it thinks harms consumers (not that objectively harms consumers), and thus is hilariously incompetent and overlooks concerns like this.
I don't really have any experience myself with setting any Linux distro up as an HTPC. As for the average person who wants to watch anime, they're not going to be setting up a fancy HTPC setup like you are, so the situations aren't really comparable. And I think you're underestimating them a bit. I know quite a few who are into anime and have switched to Linux (or at least dual-boot it), generally with few problems, and often willing to work through the problems they have.
Technical competence in general seems to be a lot higher in the anime community. Another poster was spot on when he linked to this. It's not rare for me to have lengthy and in-depth conversations about theoretical physics or the finer points of operating system design in channels ostensibly about discussing anime.
You already decided on one, namely MPC-HC.
I'm curious as to exactly what combinations do this, and with which player. I've got a bunch of stuff in all the common formats (Matroska/{H.264,MPEG-4 ASP}/{Vorbis,AAC,MP3}/ASS, AVI/MPEG-4 ASP/MP3, raw DVDs), and some stuff in some less common formats (OGM/SRT, anyone?), and mplayer plays anything I throw at it without a problem, even incomplete or broken files.
And I'm also curious about these sound issues. I hear people complaining about general sound under Linux all the time (though it's Just Worked for me since forever), but I've never heard of sound issues with mplayer specifically.
For video, there's always piracy: cheaper and you get a better product for your (lack of money) too! Or you could always take over the big media companies and get them to stop producing evil formats that hate your freedom and want to take it away. Though if being able to play Blu-ray videos without a bit of extra effort to get around the shit they lock it up in is by itself important enough to you to switch OSes, then I guess there's nothing I can really do for you.
As for the games, you brought up Touhou and VNs; all the Touhous work fine (as noted), and out of the box, with no 'preparing' anything in any way. With VNs, generally what you see is what you get. If it crashes horribly and vomits out some cryptic error when you try to run it under Wine, probably even the darkest of dark magics won't get it running, so 'preparing' is futile. Though with their low resource usage and lack of using things like fancy 3D graphics, you can usually get them running flawlessly under a VM (I suggest VirtualBox if you're willing to consider this).
I just went and downloaded a more recent VLC version and played something with it and surprisingly it wasn't hilariously broken. It's like I'm really using a player developed in the 21st century. I suppose I must tentatively (only tentatively because I didn't do a thorough test of its capabilities) retract my jab at VLC's subtitle support, but maintain my vague assertions about its general quality as a video player and the frequency with which it kicks defenseless little puppies.
Now see, here's your problem: You're an arrogant asshole. I have TONS of video clips that vlc won't play; mplayer plays them all. From where I'm sitting, vlc is the crap software.
Please note the story and the OP's post. This is in the context of anime, not in general.
That quote is rather bizarre. It seems to be implying that having a market utterly dominated by a few large companies instead of being composed of many smaller, less individually influential ones isn't harmful to consumers.
Not really.
See, here's your problem. You're comparing competent players to an incompetent player. One that in particular has terrible support for ASS, by far the most popular subtitle format for fansubs. Try mplayer (or a GUI frontend if that's your thing) sometime.
For you, maybe. For most people it is a tiny, tiny issue though. And anyways, that's certainly not the case anyway.
Plenty of them run well with Wine, but the amount that manage to make something as simple as a VN not work at all under Wine is certainly impressive.
The Touhou games all work fine under Wine, minus the occasional minor graphical glitch.
And then we unleash them upon Slashdot.jp and set back Western-Japanese relations by decades. The plan is flawless.
That line bears only the most vague resemblance to his post. This is not the patent system. Credit is not due just because someone else came up with a similar idea before you.
Well, I suppose it's my own fault for trusting The Register. After reading the first article, I got curious and went on to check out the technical details of the exploit. What The Register phrases as "it's Twitter's API's fault" is actually "holy fuck you can POST the whole HTTP message to arbitrary locations (hosted on the same server, anyway)", which is a tad bit worse. While the Internet still isn't going to go down in flames, this does open up potential for some sites to get some nasty burns, and in a way they almost surely won't already be protected against, even if the developers aren't idiots.
Important part of the article:
The only reason it was exploitable was because of Twitter's API. Understandably, I'm not too worried about the rest of the Internet going down in flames any time soon.
They don't need to open source the code for that. Mono is already behind and always will be. The .NET Micro Framework is a stripped-down version of .NET for use on embedded devices and such. It only has a small subset of the whole .NET library, and the VM itself is much simpler. Opening up the code gives away none of the interesting stuff, and probably nets them greater market share. There's absolutely no downside for them. There's also really no downside for the free software community, but they don't gain anything from it either.
Dear god, you're right! It's all so clear now! The Iwomenati are behind everything!