I think I'd still go with a Beagleboard Black. The thing you want is documentation and source code. I can't find any on Allwinner's site (and the other component's manufacturers aren't named), and given Allwinner is a Chinese company I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the English documentation. Likewise, the Broadcom SOC in the Raspberry Pi's full documentation is only available under NDA and then only to volume customers, which is BS (moreover, no source for the bare metal stuff--an opaque binary blob does that).

If you're selling something as an educational development platform, some things are a lot more important than a few dollar's savings.

Definitely -- I was anticipating seeing 1 branch at the top control the single binary bit of shift / no shift for uppercase or lowercase, which would be pretty cool to see I think.

"Arguments for" an idea are worthless. "Evidence" is what is needed, and there simply isn't any provided here.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/argument/

:That's not even addressing the straw man at the very beginning. That's not a binary question being asked.:

I think it is addressing the presuppositions of naturalism mainly:

nat·u·ral·ism
ˈnaCH(ə)rəˌlizəm/
noun
noun: naturalism
1.
(in art and literature) a style and theory of representation based on the accurate depiction of detail.
2.
a philosophical viewpoint according to which everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.

You could expand the question to include many conceptions of God, or something supernatural, but essentially the argument is dealing with a being which is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

"Arguments for" an idea are worthless. "Evidence" is what is needed, and there simply isn't any provided here.

That's not even addressing the straw man at the very beginning. That's not a binary question being asked.

These people really work hard at their stupidity though.

Well, the issue is that the only way we measure contribution is with video posts and "quality comments". Both of those two tend to be very binary, in that either they give you a point or they don't.

I would like to see a more gradual approach to putting a value on a user - stack overflow uses an interesting system, which I'm sure videosift is also inspired by.

I think, for instance, comments should give more, but not if they're negative or 0 votes - as soon as they've been upvotes, they should give something - maybe even on a increasing scale: 1 vote, 1 point, 2 votes 3 points, 3 votes 6.5 points etc something in that vein. Yes, this would mean that each person would get many more points, but the star thresholds should be adjusted accordingly.

Same with videos - a video with 4 votes, should still give you something in the form of value; lets say it gives 10 times the amount as a comment. Then the video posters are still the most valuable players, but commenters aren't completely powerless.

Sift talk posts could also give something, using special powers in a positive way could give something.

Maybe a heated discussion in a single thread could trigger something; each award could also result in a certain amount of points.

I would make videosift much more of a game.

Oh Bob, how I envy you. The world must be such a nice place if you can view it only in black or white. Binary thinking must be easy on the synapses.
Here's one thing I don't understand, though. Maybe you can help me out.
Why do you hate liberty so much?
I mean, you're an american, right? Land of the free, home of the brave?
Home of the Liberty Bell? The country whose most famous landmark is called the "Statue of Liberty".
Why so much hate the most american thing? I always wanted to asked somebody who's so obviously republican as you.
Here's something I found on Wikipedia:
"Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property."

Hmmm... generally supporting following ideas:
- free and fair elections (voter id laws and voting fraud prevention)
- civil rights (Dude! Don't tread on me!)
- freedom of the press (concern about lamestream media and "liberal bias" in the media)
- freedom of religion (for example the freedom of teaching children creationism)
- free trade (capitalism yay!)
- private property (for some reason the name "Ron Jeremy" came to mind but I think I got the name wrong)

I can understand a dislike for equality (come on, slaves are super useful) but not for liberty. Not if you're a true american.

Shouldn't you call yourself a liberal? Is it just a weird closet you're in?

You are thinking about QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Thats an interesting question because QAM essentially produces the same results that the prof talks about in this video. By using interesting ways to change the beat and phase of a single carrier, one can represent a whole array of numbers greater than just a 1 or a zero with a single pulse, case in point.

In QAM, lets just use the easy example of QAM, QPSK (4QAM), where there are 4 possible binary positions for any given 'carrier' signal at a known frequency.

By shifting both phase and amplitude, you can get a 0, 1, 2 or 3, where each position represents a power of 2, up to a total value of 16 unique numbers.

Rather than just a 0 or a 1, you can have 0 through to 15. However doing this requires both a timeslot, and a known carrier window.

The fastest the QAM transmitter can encode onto a carrier is limited by the nyquist rate, that is, less than half the frequency which the receiver can sample at its fastest rate (on the remote end). As you increase the speed of the encoding, you also increase the error rate, and introduce more noise into the base carrier signal, in turn, reducing your effective available bandwidth.

So it then becomes a balancing act, do I want to encode faster, or do I want to increase my constellation density? The obvious answer is the one we went with, increase in constellation density.

There are much more dense variants, I think the highest ive heard of was 1024 QAM, where a single carrier of 8MHz wide could represent 1024 bits (1,050,625 unique values for a given 'pulse' within a carrier).

I actually had a lot more typed out here, but the maths that goes into this gets very ugly, and you have to account for noise products that are introduced as you increase both your transmission speed, and your receiver sensitivty, thus lowering your SNR, reducing your effective bandwidth for a given QAM scheme.

So rather than bore you with the details, the Shannon Hartley theorem is the hard wired physical limitation.

Think of it as an asymptote, that QAM is one method of trying to milk the available space of.

You can send encoded pulses very fast, but you are limited by nyquist, and your receivers ability to determine noise from signal.

The faster you encode, the more noise, the less effective bandwidth....and so begins the ritule of increasing constellation density, and receivers that can decode them....etc....

There is also the aspect of having carriers too close to one another that you must consider. If you do not have enough of a dead band between your receivers cut off for top end, and the NEXT carrier alongs cutoff for deadband at its LOW end, you can induce what is known as a heterodyne. These are nasty, especially so when talking about fibre, as the wavelengths used can cause a WIDE BAND noise product that results in your effective RF noise floor to jump SUBSTANTIALLY, destroying your entire network in the process.

So not only can you not have a contiguous RF bandwidth of carriers, one directly after another...if you try and get them close, you end up ruining everyones day.

I am sure there will be newer more fancy ways to fill that spectrum with useable numbers, but I seriously doubt they will ever go faster than the limit I proposed earlier (unless they can get better SNR, again that was just a stab in the dark).

It gives you a good idea of how it works though.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest checking wikipedia for the following;

Shannon Hartley theorem.
Nyquist Rate
Quadrature Phase Shift Key
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
Fibre Optic Communication Wavelengths
Stimulated Brillouin Scattering
Ebrium Doped Fibre Amplifiers

Check your facts, dude. "Normal" religious folks think that gay people are just fine and that God made them that way.

Our human need for black and white, male and female, binary simplistic thinking that you seem to be bound by is just that -- Human.

God is smarter and more wondrously complicated than we can begin to comprehend.

After, he is God the Father, right? And parental units tend to talk simply to their young children.

Which is what we are. Limited in our ability to understand.

Unless you think you are as smart as God? You are God-like in your understanding?

Wow. Interesting discussion going on here, and I say "interesting" because there's a lot of conflict between people who share the same vision of what society should be, but place blame for the reasons why it's not (in the context of this video) in completely different pieces from one another.
I've never posted to a thread this long before because I assume that it will get lost in the shuffle/argument/whatever, but I wanted to share how I broke the scene down and what I gathered from the video.
The fundamental problem here, which is subjective so I understand if someone doesn't agree, is that:
"most people" would not be comfortable walking down the street in this neighborhood.
"Most people" want safety, or more specifically; as much of a chance to not fear for their lives while existing.
What would remedy this? The hard rule of law? Or let it pan out as-is. The former has never stopped me from an action that society might not agree with. I don't run people over or shoot guns into the air because I believe in not hurting others, and both those actions either do, or have a decent chance to.
On the other hand, I really believe this is one step removed from a war-zone. Not to mistakenly define this scenario as a binary gradient between order or chaos, but if one group of friends became violently entangled with another group of friends, that's exactly what would result: armed, faction opposition.
Most people seem to argue over the solutions we know of, rather than the problems that exist, but it seems to me that none of those are working.
So I guess my question is: how would you make these neighborhoods "safe" for non-violent people to live in that isn't attributed to some form of government?

@chingalera
/chuckles
oh i know man.

my comment was with tongue firmly planted in cheek but my basic point remains the same.

some people have to make concessions in order to survive in this fucked up system.
maybe they have children.
maybe they are married with an asston of debt hanging over their heads.

i am an anarchist.
so i have arranged my life in a way where my participation in this zombie system is shaved to a bare minimum but i also have to recognize that some people do not have that luxury.since i am not living their lives i refuse to judge them.

just look at the comments here.
your assertion of an imagined polemic plays out in this thread,quite conveniently making your point.

we have @bobknight33 posting the heritage foundations position almost verbatim (thanks for responding bob,i like when you participate.sincerely),in regards to capitalism.

then we have @Sagemind posting a more "left" leaning comment.

and then we have the always ironic @lantern53 bemoaning the ills of government.yet his salary is provided by taxpayers,and hence the very government he is deriding.he is such a closet socialist.(loooove you lantern../hugs).

yet all these positions have validity.

the governments role should be criticized and examined.
corporations should be exposed for their undue influence.

this is not a simple issue and it is where i think you and i totally agree.
i too get frustrated when people talk about this subject in a binary way.
it is NOT just a black/white,good/evil,right/left matter.

and when people engage in this form of perception they also tend to demonize the "other" side.
so if someone posits an opinion that happens to be contrarian to ones views,they are automatically dismissed as "wrong" and anything they have to say is discarded as being stupid,ill-thought or just plain downright wrong.

this is the fundamental flaw in this binary thinking.
and it is not by accident but rather by design.

divide and conquer.

in the developed western world we have 30 choices for toilet paper but when it comes to things that TRULY matter?
we get two.

so the true elite and powerful of this country pick their prized horse and offer up to us,the american public,a choice of TWO rich fuckers.
would you like democrat?
or republican?

doesnt really matter who you choose because either one is going to serve their masters.
who of course are wall street and corporate america.
not you or i.

we are fed a constant stream of populist bullshit that gives the appearance of solidarity and nationalism but in reality serves only the corporate masters in fleecing the american people of more and more of their own hard earned:money,rights,liberties and ultimately our independence.

the problems with un-fettered capitalism are well known and well understood.
just as the problems with socialism are well known.

it is the SYSTEM that needs to be challenged and questioned,examined and ultimately discarded if we find it lacking.

and i find it lacking.
morally,socially and financially.

it is time we kill the beast.
because it is feeding on itself and putting us ALL at risk.

bah..you fucker.got me ranting.

let me conclude with this:
i find all structures of power and authority to be illegitimate until proven otherwise.
i find the system of plutocracy currently in place to be illegitimate.
it serves only the upper eschelon and commodifies the poor.
the poor have become fodder for the military industrial complex as well as the private prison system.
the working poor have become cogs in a machine that is slowly crushing them under the weight of the hubris of those who feel entitled to their fortunes and that somehow they are more deserving then their fellow man.

the beast is sick with its own arrogance and needs to be put down.
the only recourse us normal folk have is to stop feeding the beast.

if only 5% stopped going to work and took to the streets you will see a very frightened beast begging us all to the negotiating table.

thats my 2 cents anyways.

Why do you believe that this is a binary choice? It is not about default, our course of action isn't working, was not designed to work in the first place. Their course of action of terrorism while understandable (and something we do as well) isn't intelligent either and will not fix anything.

So we need to address legitimate grievances, just like what happened in Ireland. If we want to keep bombing random towns where militants MIGHT be we'll simply create more militants.

Know thy enemy, also know thyself. How would we react to our innocent civilians being attacked? I think we know.

I'm sorry, I used to think that way too, but it's just not so.

You're confusing atheism with anti-theism. You're stuck in a "if you're not with me, you must be against me" binary mentality. The lack of (or being without by your definition) something is not equivalent to being opposed to something. Bald is not a hair color

As for your argument about "New Atheists," you're just creating a strawman. Never claimed anything about agnostics, especially nothing as derogatory as you seem to be implying.

It can be argued that everyone is agnostic since no one knows with certainty of the existence of a creator. People claim to have faith, but by definition, that's believing without proof so that doesn't hold up as "knowing" People also claim to "know" but their evidence never holds up beyond human conceit.

That's why I mentioned Grimm in my last post, we were talking about this subject on another sift, the mis-communication of what Atheism is. There's that tired theist claim that Atheists hate god. well you can't hate something if you don't have evidence that it exists.

An atheist is not in opposition to a creator, it's just that there is no proof and every claim out there so far can pretty much be summed up as human conceit. An atheist would probably be excited to find proof as it would expand on our understanding and thus, improve science even more.

Hopefully we can get back on topic after another ching-jacking

@Grimm, Mordhaus is a textbook example of the misunderstanding of atheism I was talking about earlier.

Atheism is the calling of bullshit on theist claims. Atheism is not "there are no gods" I'm sure there are some atheists who do believe that, but that's not atheism, that's anti-theism.

If you can prove a creator exists, an atheist will believe it. IF you can prove it, then it's no longer a myth, it's a fact and that creator becomes part of the realm of science. You really gotta remember that a creator is separate from religion. There could be a creator, but a religion can still be wrong or immoral.

There is actual nuance to this stuff. But people, in general, don't give a shit for nuance. Binary thinking at it's worst. That was the mistake @brycewi19 made earlier. Stanhope not wishing someone well is *not* the same thing as him wishing them ill

If you think religion is putting out a bunch of false claims that haven't been proven, then you're an atheist. If you're agnostic, then you're an atheist. Even if you think there could be a creator, just that you don't think any of the religions are right..that's still atheism. You're not saying no gods exist, you're just calling bullshit on their claims because they haven't proved them.

It's not left vs right, it's not the fallacious "both sides suck" idea the ching-jacker was trying to sell earlier.

Back when i thought Atheism was "there are positively no gods" I didn't didn't agree with that either.

you can make a non-tea party case for fiscal conservatism.

but you really can't make a huge case these days for social conservatism and that's where they really lose. You can't tell gays to go back into the closet, you can't tell minorities to be quiet, you can't tell women to accept lower pay and forfeit reproductive rights and health. You can't tell poor people to fuck off and die in an alley.

I don't know this guy, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that he might even agree with all these things. This illustrates the problem with using vague binary terms like liberal and conservative to describe political views. Depending on the person "conservative" can mean completely different things.

This is the problem with the two party system. You can't sum up nuanced , complex political views into two parties. It's stupid.

Republicans have a huge perception problem they need to solve. Many people view them as old, white, racist, plutocrats. I know for a fact that they are not all this way. But the problem is, there are plenty of people who identify as Republican who DO fall completely into that view.

Fortunately, old people do have a habit of dying. so that solves part of the problem. But some people have to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming the entire way. If the Republican party wishes to survive, they need to decide pretty quick how they're going to deal with that.

I think there are too many people who identify as Republican for romantic reasons only. They're obsessed with the idea that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican even though the Republican party of then is completely different from the way it is now and it is due largely to racism. (google Southern Strategy)

As i've said before. All parties and lobbying need to be abolished. You can't stop people from assembling into voting blocs, but at the very least we can refuse to officially acknowledge them and do away with the RNC and DNC and remove money from our elections and force the person, not the party to run for office.

"even cats and babies could be atheists"

The alternative is call them theists. You're either one or the other – it's a binary position. Since babies and cats are not theists, then logically they're atheists. WLC just calls this ridiculous, but doesn't say why.

Shinyblurry: "If you are unwilling to say God does not exist, you are an agnostic and not an atheist"

A/gnosticism deals with knowledge, A/theism deals with belief. They are two separate subjects. I can say I don't believe in aliens visiting earth without claiming any knowledge on the subject. I could be wrong, but as it happens I don't believe. You can say "I don't believe aliens visit earth, but I could be wrong". You CAN'T say "Aliens don't visit earth, but I could be wrong".
The first sentence is coherent, the second is self-contradictory. Thus it's pretty obvious that belief statements and knowledge statements are not the same.