North Korea uses windows too. Mainly unlicensed copies of Windows 98. Ofcourse, they don't really have to worry about ActiveX compatibility issues because nobody has internet access, and I can guarantee that not many have even heard of Vista, let alone have machines powerful enough to run it.
If it was the US military credibility that was reflected in the value of the US dollar, then right now it would take a thousand bucks to buy you a can of peanut butter. There is no reality in a world where the US would use force to secure the supplies that it currently imports and pays for in dollars. Currently the US military is not even capable of holding together Iraq, a purveyor of a fraction of its oil needs.
Don't be silly. No politician is afraid that some foreign military is going to come in and "hold together" their country for them. The threat from a military comes from it's ability to destroy, not re-build. And if you or anyone else thinks that the US mil has lost it's ability to destroy...well, we must not be living in the same world.
Whenener I posted this opinion on this here forum, I was modded as a troll.
Yes. You're suggesting that the US government was behind 9/11. That's either trolling, insanity, an inability to deal with reality, or all three.
There's a lot of stupid people on these forums, and on the internet as a whole, but all your fear-mongering doesn't change a thing. You can run in circles like a chicken with it's head cut off, screaming "THE SKY IS FALLING!!!" for as long as you like, but those of us actually capable of rational thought will simply shake our heads and carry on helping the world keep running. In the end, people like you don't matter because you're not capable of ever actually DOING anything.
In a world full of Irans and North Koreas, only an idiot would compare the US to Nazi Germany. And while idiots may be mildly amusing or annoying depending on my current mood, they're certainly no threat.
...I'm sorry....did you SERIOUSLY just suggest that slavery was ended as a result of popular choice?
That was, without a doubt, the most ignorant statement I've seen on Slashdot so far. And that's saying a lot. What do you do for an encore? Deny that the holocaust ever happened?
What do I have to do, pummel you with my clue-by-four?
Now that this fool's gotten modded insightful, I'll clarify.
There's a big difference between loss of freedom for an individual and loss of freedom for a society. The GPP was referring to the latter, while our anonymous friend completely ignored that and started talking about the former. And while I agree that imprisonment, regardless of the charges, is the "essence of loss of freedom" for an individual, FALSE arrest leaves the opportunity for financial compensation that is, under the US system, far greater than the inconvenience caused by the imprisonment. In Canada, I'd be lucky if I could get $20,000 for false imprisonment. In the US you could get $2,000,000.
In conclusion, no, these arrests in no way show a "loss of freedom" in the US. Stop being a bunch of pussies.
Right then, shall we get busy re-imprisoning those negros then? Obviously that was a mistake. Let me go grab my hood, and we can re-implement your perfect democracy.
I don't much like people who are moral absolutists. You have to understand that for every good thing in life, there is a limit at which it starts to become bad. As the old saying goes, "the dose makes the poison". If you are unable to see why democracy needs a guiding hand once in a while...well, I'm not here to be your teacher. I've pointed you in the right direction; if you chose to be a stubborn prick, so be it.
If we could build nano-machines, we wouldn't need tags. Want to kill a person? Steal one of his hairs, program the nanite to home in on his DNA, and then drop a bunch in the punch-bowl at the next party. Done and done.
Or, want to commit genocide? Figure out a unique genetic trait possessed mainly by your "target", and then release the nanites into the population at large. Granted you'll probably take out a few hundred thousand people who don't fall into the target category, but genocidal maniacs aren't normally concerned about causing unintended casualties.
Yes, because, CLEARLY this program was initiated and funded by the Bush administration. And CLEARLY they're going to start tagging all Americans on Monday morning. It says so right in the article!
Were you born this paranoid/delusional/retarded, or did it take practice?
Ah, yes. So, Osama, if caught, will be tried in an "international court", right?
Don't be silly.
He's wanted under US laws for attacks which occurred on US soil. The fact that he wasn't on US soil at the time is irrelevant. Just like it's irrelevant that someone who sends child-porn to a US citizen happened to be in Zambia, or that someone shipping weed to the US or running an online gambling service for US citizens happens to be in Canada. All of these crimes are by definition being conducted on US soil. Maybe you disagree with that definition, but that's just too damn bad.
Sorry, but you're wrong. If we didn't have provisions for dealing with cases when the democratic vote was "wrong", then blacks would have never gotten their freedom in the US. They were the minority and they couldn't vote anyway. If it were up to the voters, at the time, this would never have changed.
Google "tyranny of the majority". John Stuart mill is the one who coined the phrase, and there are some excellent writings about it. Lots of people hold the same misconceptions that you do, but if you read up on it you'll find that democracy is not and should not be an absolute. At least, not if you want a moral society.
How did slashdot become a repository for faulty logic and anti-US bigotry? I mean, granted, a lot of the people I met while working in the IT industry weren't exactly rocket-scientist material, but I always figured that as far as statistical averages go, people here should be more logical, intelligent, and informed than the majority of the western world.
Ah well. Anyway, to my main point: In order to grasp just how silly it is to complain about long-arm laws, all you have to do is realize that, technically speaking, Osama Bin Laden never committed any crimes while on US soil.
Thank you all for coming out, better luck next week!
"Land of the free", huh? I'm lost for words. The American legal system is just a joke.
Don't be a silly bugger. If your amateur-lawyer assessment is correct, they'll be found innocent and will have the opportunity to sue the government for millions. It takes a heck of a twisted mind to equate every questionable arrest with loss of freedom.
"You can be as condescending and vehement as you want, and so can I, but unless one of us can point to a study showing media bias, this is all just pointless opinion waving."
Hey, wow, you got it! Congrats!
You'll notice that my original post wasn't meant to show liberal bias, but rather the lack of a conservative/corporate one. Since I'm not trying to show media bias, it becomes a lot easier to prove my case. Unfortunately people like you always see what they want to see instead of seeing what I actually write.
Anyway, really, congrats on being reasonable. That's pretty rare around here. Ofcourse, you kinda spoiled the effect by going on your diatribe about capitalistic oppressors, but hey, it's still better than the slashdot average...
It has nothing to do with that they've "done to us" and everything to do with what their ideology and goals have the POTENTIAL to do. It's not my fault you like making stupid assumptions.
Now untwist your panties and maybe we can have a logical discussion.
The "if it bleeds it leads" nonsense gets used as a defence all the time and it's simply not true. Or rather, it doesn't explain the political slant. For example, you could report:
"30 Insurgents were killed following a series of raids today! Hell yeah, we're kicking their asses!"
or
"3 American soldiers were killed by IED's today. Run Away!!!!"
Either way you've got lots of blood and guts to sell your story with, but which ones do you see most often?
Or as an even better example, look at some of the spin put on POSITIVE events! Saddam gets hung, and the media plays it as a failure of the Bush administration! Christ, man. There's an "if it bleeds it leads" story if I ever saw one, and it should have been shit simple to sell it as a positive thing to most readers. Yet the coverage of it was overwhelmingly negative and critical of Bush, who really had nothing to do with it in the first place.
So no, sorry, I'm not buying your excuses. Try again if you want.
Although, I will admit that this part was hilarious:
"You are not in any way the underdogs or martyrs, you are the overlords and tyrants"
Great sense of humour my man. I look forward to more.
There's a big difference between a democracy and a tyranny of the majority.
For instance, imagine that tomorrow the UK removes all immigration restrictions, and fundamentalist Muslims start arriving by the millions. Within a year, 75% of the UK is Muslim.
Now, according to your logic, it'd be perfectly fine for this 75% to use democracy in order to vote in Sharia law, dissolve parliament, and institute a theocracy. After all, that's democracy, right? If the majority of the people want to vote in a theocracy, why should the rest argue, eh?
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. And don't think I'm picking solely on Muslims. They happen to be the current threat, but there have historically been all sorts of groups which would have been very happy to use the ideals of democracy in order to institute a dictatorship, or to oppress other groups.
Don't act like the US is some beacon of how a country should be run. To the rest of the west it's quite the opposite.
Speak for yourself asshole.
apologise if this sounds like an anti-US rant, but I guess it technically is, as it's countering an anti-Chinese rant by demonstrating the hypocrisy employed by many people with regard to not acknowledging their own country's short comings, and jumping on another's.
Oh really? Then how about going into a list of things that are wrong with YOUR country, instead of launching into a diatribe about the US? Hypocrite.
Very nice. Did you come up with that all by yourself? Here, I've got a yellow paper star to stick on you. And there's juice boxes and cookies in the corner, just help yourself.
Anyway , what the f*ck have turks got to do with Jews? Please tell us.... Or is it that ANY right wing view should be suppressed?
Turkey is 99% Muslim. As such, it's got quite a bit more than it's share of anti-semitism. "Mein Kampf" is a very popular title there, so you can see how Turks in Austria might be a bit of a problem.
I don't see why you're flipping out on this guy - he's absolutely right. I'm not a big fan of restricting speech, however, in places like Germany and Austria it was definitely necessary after the war, and is still not a bad idea. And at a certain point, it might not be a bad idea in other nations too. You as an individual expressing your views is one thing, but an organization with hundreds of thousands of members expressing the same views becomes a much bigger problem. With the growth of Islam in the west, we might be well advised to start considering our own language laws.
Not exactly. DVD-9 movies are already compressed with the MPG2 format, so what happens when people use a backup utility like Nero Recode to fit one on a DVD-5 disc? That's right, they recode it to the same format. By your logic the quality should go down massively, but in most cases the difference is unnoticeable. It all depends on what bitrate you need in order to maintain the quality.
As for recoding 360kbps MP3's to 90kbps, I actually went even lower. I had a bunch of spoken-word MP3's at 196, and recompressed them down to 40-ish. I haven't noticed any difference in quality, and they take up way less space. Same principle. You just need to figure out what bitrate to maintain with the codec that you're using for the material that you're encoding.
Uh, no. The codec used is the same, only at a lower bitrate. Go to a torrent site and take a look at one of these. You can download a 2 minute sample clip, and just look at the quality on that. I guarantee it won't be much different than an HD-DVD. It seems like they're going overboard with HD-DVD bitrates just for the sake of actually being able to fill the damn disks. There's no benefit to having a 2 hour MPEG4 clip take up 20 gigabytes. That's the equivalent of encoding your MP3's at 3200kbps. Not much point when 320 gets you almost the exact same quality, and 1/10th the file size.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea uses windows too. Mainly unlicensed copies of Windows 98. Ofcourse, they don't really have to worry about ActiveX compatibility issues because nobody has internet access, and I can guarantee that not many have even heard of Vista, let alone have machines powerful enough to run it.
Teat's and toilets? Have you been watching German sheize videos again???
Eh. Yeah, we're definitely living on different planets. Let's start again:
Hi I'm from Earth. Where are you from?
There's a lot of stupid people on these forums, and on the internet as a whole, but all your fear-mongering doesn't change a thing. You can run in circles like a chicken with it's head cut off, screaming "THE SKY IS FALLING!!!" for as long as you like, but those of us actually capable of rational thought will simply shake our heads and carry on helping the world keep running. In the end, people like you don't matter because you're not capable of ever actually DOING anything.
In a world full of Irans and North Koreas, only an idiot would compare the US to Nazi Germany. And while idiots may be mildly amusing or annoying depending on my current mood, they're certainly no threat.
...I'm sorry....did you SERIOUSLY just suggest that slavery was ended as a result of popular choice?
That was, without a doubt, the most ignorant statement I've seen on Slashdot so far. And that's saying a lot. What do you do for an encore? Deny that the holocaust ever happened?
What do I have to do, pummel you with my clue-by-four?
Now that this fool's gotten modded insightful, I'll clarify.
There's a big difference between loss of freedom for an individual and loss of freedom for a society. The GPP was referring to the latter, while our anonymous friend completely ignored that and started talking about the former. And while I agree that imprisonment, regardless of the charges, is the "essence of loss of freedom" for an individual, FALSE arrest leaves the opportunity for financial compensation that is, under the US system, far greater than the inconvenience caused by the imprisonment. In Canada, I'd be lucky if I could get $20,000 for false imprisonment. In the US you could get $2,000,000.
In conclusion, no, these arrests in no way show a "loss of freedom" in the US. Stop being a bunch of pussies.
Right then, shall we get busy re-imprisoning those negros then? Obviously that was a mistake. Let me go grab my hood, and we can re-implement your perfect democracy.
I don't much like people who are moral absolutists. You have to understand that for every good thing in life, there is a limit at which it starts to become bad. As the old saying goes, "the dose makes the poison". If you are unable to see why democracy needs a guiding hand once in a while...well, I'm not here to be your teacher. I've pointed you in the right direction; if you chose to be a stubborn prick, so be it.
If we could build nano-machines, we wouldn't need tags. Want to kill a person? Steal one of his hairs, program the nanite to home in on his DNA, and then drop a bunch in the punch-bowl at the next party. Done and done.
Or, want to commit genocide? Figure out a unique genetic trait possessed mainly by your "target", and then release the nanites into the population at large. Granted you'll probably take out a few hundred thousand people who don't fall into the target category, but genocidal maniacs aren't normally concerned about causing unintended casualties.
Yes, because, CLEARLY this program was initiated and funded by the Bush administration. And CLEARLY they're going to start tagging all Americans on Monday morning. It says so right in the article!
Were you born this paranoid/delusional/retarded, or did it take practice?
Ah, yes. So, Osama, if caught, will be tried in an "international court", right?
Don't be silly.
He's wanted under US laws for attacks which occurred on US soil. The fact that he wasn't on US soil at the time is irrelevant. Just like it's irrelevant that someone who sends child-porn to a US citizen happened to be in Zambia, or that someone shipping weed to the US or running an online gambling service for US citizens happens to be in Canada. All of these crimes are by definition being conducted on US soil. Maybe you disagree with that definition, but that's just too damn bad.
Sorry, but you're wrong. If we didn't have provisions for dealing with cases when the democratic vote was "wrong", then blacks would have never gotten their freedom in the US. They were the minority and they couldn't vote anyway. If it were up to the voters, at the time, this would never have changed.
Google "tyranny of the majority". John Stuart mill is the one who coined the phrase, and there are some excellent writings about it. Lots of people hold the same misconceptions that you do, but if you read up on it you'll find that democracy is not and should not be an absolute. At least, not if you want a moral society.
How did slashdot become a repository for faulty logic and anti-US bigotry? I mean, granted, a lot of the people I met while working in the IT industry weren't exactly rocket-scientist material, but I always figured that as far as statistical averages go, people here should be more logical, intelligent, and informed than the majority of the western world.
Ah well. Anyway, to my main point: In order to grasp just how silly it is to complain about long-arm laws, all you have to do is realize that, technically speaking, Osama Bin Laden never committed any crimes while on US soil.
Thank you all for coming out, better luck next week!
Right, now, replace "the US" with "any nation", and you'll be good to go.
"You can be as condescending and vehement as you want, and so can I, but unless one of us can point to a study showing media bias, this is all just pointless opinion waving."
Hey, wow, you got it! Congrats!
You'll notice that my original post wasn't meant to show liberal bias, but rather the lack of a conservative/corporate one. Since I'm not trying to show media bias, it becomes a lot easier to prove my case. Unfortunately people like you always see what they want to see instead of seeing what I actually write.
Anyway, really, congrats on being reasonable. That's pretty rare around here. Ofcourse, you kinda spoiled the effect by going on your diatribe about capitalistic oppressors, but hey, it's still better than the slashdot average...
considering != implementing
It has nothing to do with that they've "done to us" and everything to do with what their ideology and goals have the POTENTIAL to do. It's not my fault you like making stupid assumptions.
Now untwist your panties and maybe we can have a logical discussion.
"unbiased studies" conducted by whom? Markos? :)
The "if it bleeds it leads" nonsense gets used as a defence all the time and it's simply not true. Or rather, it doesn't explain the political slant. For example, you could report:
"30 Insurgents were killed following a series of raids today! Hell yeah, we're kicking their asses!"
or
"3 American soldiers were killed by IED's today. Run Away!!!!"
Either way you've got lots of blood and guts to sell your story with, but which ones do you see most often?
Or as an even better example, look at some of the spin put on POSITIVE events! Saddam gets hung, and the media plays it as a failure of the Bush administration! Christ, man. There's an "if it bleeds it leads" story if I ever saw one, and it should have been shit simple to sell it as a positive thing to most readers. Yet the coverage of it was overwhelmingly negative and critical of Bush, who really had nothing to do with it in the first place.
So no, sorry, I'm not buying your excuses. Try again if you want.
Although, I will admit that this part was hilarious:
"You are not in any way the underdogs or martyrs, you are the overlords and tyrants"
Great sense of humour my man. I look forward to more.
There's a big difference between a democracy and a tyranny of the majority.
For instance, imagine that tomorrow the UK removes all immigration restrictions, and fundamentalist Muslims start arriving by the millions. Within a year, 75% of the UK is Muslim.
Now, according to your logic, it'd be perfectly fine for this 75% to use democracy in order to vote in Sharia law, dissolve parliament, and institute a theocracy. After all, that's democracy, right? If the majority of the people want to vote in a theocracy, why should the rest argue, eh?
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. And don't think I'm picking solely on Muslims. They happen to be the current threat, but there have historically been all sorts of groups which would have been very happy to use the ideals of democracy in order to institute a dictatorship, or to oppress other groups.
Oh really? Then how about going into a list of things that are wrong with YOUR country, instead of launching into a diatribe about the US? Hypocrite.
How does this junk get modded insightful?
STOP MODDING ON CRACK!!!
Very nice. Did you come up with that all by yourself? Here, I've got a yellow paper star to stick on you. And there's juice boxes and cookies in the corner, just help yourself.
I don't see why you're flipping out on this guy - he's absolutely right. I'm not a big fan of restricting speech, however, in places like Germany and Austria it was definitely necessary after the war, and is still not a bad idea. And at a certain point, it might not be a bad idea in other nations too. You as an individual expressing your views is one thing, but an organization with hundreds of thousands of members expressing the same views becomes a much bigger problem. With the growth of Islam in the west, we might be well advised to start considering our own language laws.
Ah. I thought it said 1080i, which should be more or less the same as 720p. nm. thanks.
Not exactly. DVD-9 movies are already compressed with the MPG2 format, so what happens when people use a backup utility like Nero Recode to fit one on a DVD-5 disc? That's right, they recode it to the same format. By your logic the quality should go down massively, but in most cases the difference is unnoticeable. It all depends on what bitrate you need in order to maintain the quality.
As for recoding 360kbps MP3's to 90kbps, I actually went even lower. I had a bunch of spoken-word MP3's at 196, and recompressed them down to 40-ish. I haven't noticed any difference in quality, and they take up way less space. Same principle. You just need to figure out what bitrate to maintain with the codec that you're using for the material that you're encoding.
Uh, no. The codec used is the same, only at a lower bitrate. Go to a torrent site and take a look at one of these. You can download a 2 minute sample clip, and just look at the quality on that. I guarantee it won't be much different than an HD-DVD. It seems like they're going overboard with HD-DVD bitrates just for the sake of actually being able to fill the damn disks. There's no benefit to having a 2 hour MPEG4 clip take up 20 gigabytes. That's the equivalent of encoding your MP3's at 3200kbps. Not much point when 320 gets you almost the exact same quality, and 1/10th the file size.