Jesus! Accuse me of unrighteous inclination and "react" rather than respond to my sentiments. I offered my thoughts to the situation from the POV of the litterbug, not Johnny (death by road rage) Webcam (although in the litterbug's place, IF it was a dick like you described, I'd most-likely be fucking up his grill with my rear bumper in reverse, because I don't leave a car when peeps are obviously unstable).

SO, what you're saying is that yourself as the litterbug, would have done something similar in response to the situation as I would have?

If you take me for someone who would illicit a reaction from an unknown motorist then end-up somehow mysteriously out of my vehicle between mine and theirs while they are still inside their vehicle well, maybe you'd do this, but I ain't goin' out like that.

Who the FUCK, is as passionately insane about dying to get out of their car to teach a stranger a lesson about littering? The litter-police guys' a dick, plain and simple and the litterbugs' a cunt for throwing his trash out so brazenly.

...oh and yes, my name is chingalera that, "little fucking thing over there."

^ Just to be clear people with Schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions do have an elevated risk of committing violent acts. It's about 20% of pre diagnosed patients and around 9% of post treatment/diagnosis patients. As opposed to around 1-2% of the "normal" population.

The only big exception to this is in hospital itself where it can rise as high as 50%, however this is pretty well understood to be a product of the environment and circumstances (i.e. you are forcibly being held against your will). It's also one of the reasons you managed to evoke such hostility from me, the idea that people should just be committed/sectioned because they appear somewhat unstable is one that causes a great deal more harm that good.
There are people that are a genuine danger to themselves and or others when in the grips of an "episode", such people are why mental health sections exist, however extreme care and attention must be applied when considering someone who has yet to commit an "index offence".

If she's attacked people (or herself) before when displaying the same symptoms fine, if she has a history of refusing reasonable treatment fine, if she goes and attacks someone fine. But you can't just go around locking people up because they behave strangely. For all we know this lady has never hurt anyone and is not likely to do so, you can't make the kind of judgements your making without fully understanding the patient and the nature of their condition.
There are people I work with you'd instantly label as crazy and possibly dangerous. One guy has a trait of sometimes staring hard at you (esp strangers) while talking intensely under his breath to himself. If you saw him doing that to you and you'd never met him you'd probably shit yourself a bit (I know I did) but the dude is about as gentle as they come! He'd only ever act violently if you cornered him while he was confused and even then probably not. (never been a problem in the 2 years I worked with him)

I'm not saying this lady definitely isn't in any way dangerous, or even that it might not be better to taker her in under a section. I'm simply saying that making assumptions like that is extremely damaging both to the sufferers and to our ability to understand and help them.

Now the whole Gay/Lesbian/Transgender thing has started to become a normal part of our culture mental health is the perhaps one of the last great bullshit taboos left.

Their not crazies, THEIR FUCKING PEOPLE!!!

And I know this because I've yet to meet a truly "sane" human in my life.

He has since become an actor.
He also seems to have a mind that allows him to really throw himself into the role of a mentally unstable character.

What I inferred from this video isn't what I think the author intended. I believe the implication was that we're lost our "economic freedom" (whatever that's a euphemism for) and that's why our country is so unstable.

What I took from it, is that the increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor in this country are both a cause and effect of economic freedom.

@VoodooV Like I've been saying all along, your posts are mostly attempts at intimidation. I enjoy answering some of your questions, because it helps me question my beliefs, something I think is constructive and that you seriously shouldn't be afraid of. We are all supposedly looking for the truth anyways. All this could be settled by answering my simple question, whether you'd agree or not, it wouldn't even necessarily be an argument against gun control. I was pointing out the apparent conflict between wanting people to be more responsible by taking their freedoms away, when taking their freedoms away might not contribute to making them responsible people in the long run. An unpresumptuous suggestion meant to be taken as food for thought.

Instead, you resort to being juvenile and making fun of me, while writing huge posts with my entire posts quoted afterwards as an attempt at making me turn away in horror at the sight of a huge wall of text. Sure, it takes me time to sift through all of it to see what really matters. You're trying to muscle your way through, and it's a waste of everyone's time. I actually take the time to make my posts short and to the point, did you notice that? I happen to think it's a good habit to have some consideration for the reader, why am I not surprised you have none for me?

So, instead of appreciating that I don't waste your time by making an effort at being succinct, you accuse me of avoiding some of your arguments. It's true, I avoid a few of them because I think they're irrelevant, it's called being selective. Now I know that was a bad idea. I'm terribly sorry. I won't do it anymore. I will take the time to answer the most points I can to the best of my ability, and if that my makes my posts tiresomely long and wastes my time, so be it.

I bet you're trying to flood me with words because this isn't about any truth, is it? It's about discouraging and distracting me from something. Ever heard of picking your fights? It's about being reasonable about yours and other people's times. After all, I do assume you have a life outside of this internet topic on videosift, don't you? Anyway, let's get to it:

- About emotional manipulation, you FAILED to prove it, and here's why:

When you obey traffic laws, you are being coerced if there is coercion as consequence for not obeying them. Will you get arrested? Will you get your car, which is your property, impounded if you disobey? Then yes, they are coercive laws.

When you decide not kill someone because the law will coerce you if you do, you're being coerced into not killing, even if you freely decide not to kill out of good morals and empathy for fellow human beings, the option of killing is always there in reality (you can always kill anyone if you really want to), but not legally. If you kill, you're under the threat of going to prison. The positive or negative language seems completely irrelevant, what matters is what happens when you disobey the law. If coercion ensues, the law is coercive, or, more accurately, its enforcement. I'm not actually making the distinction right now if it's a rule related to coercion itself (a rule that makes coercion more or less likely to happen), just pointing out the irrelevance of your distinction between negative and positive language.

Now, I have to admit that there is divergence when it comes to defining coercion, but there is no emotional content here as far as I can tell. I'm using it in the sense that people have a right to their life, property and freedoms, and when you take or threaten to take away any of those things (and have the power to do so), THAT is coercion. There is no emotion here, I am offended that you would think that I would resort to that, because I don't even have to. Coercion has a meaning to me, I'm just using the concept as it is. If there is an emotional content, SHOW ME what emotion that is. Up until now, you have FAILED to do so.

- About requiring things before freedoms are granted, I think you FAILED to make your point, here's why:

To type boring senseless posts on the internet, you require a keyboard. Maybe, if you could type with voice recognition, like I do, you wouldn't need a keyboard, but what matters is that you use something to type or produce characters that will be submitted to the videosift website and become a useless post. So, for the sake of argument, let's call this an "actual physical requirement".

Now, with a gun to your head, if I require that you, VoodooV, jump through actual flaming hula-hoops positioned vertically on an intricate obstacle course before typing in your videosift comments, the world would be a better place (at least videosift would). However, my requirements would be arbitrary in the sense that it imposes something not actually physically necessary to enjoy the hypothetical "freedom to post inane ramblings on videosift" (we are assuming it's a right), can you spot the difference?

So, requiring things that are not necessary to enjoy a freedom is not something that makes the freedom better or is in any way justifiable just because history is littered with the precedent of assholes like kings and despots requiring stupid things before we can enjoy freedoms that we supposedly already have. When it comes to guns, a law says we have a right to bear them. Any laws that restrict that supposed right are infringing on the freedom that comes from having that right.

- About the claim that people will be less responsible if they have less freedom:

"If I made decisions for you, I could make you act more responsibly, but that's not the same thing as making you a more responsible person."

"Over time, when we take people's freedoms away, they tend to be less responsible about the decisions we're not letting them make. There's no way they can learn about any different (good or bad) outcomes related to decisions they couldn't make, and they can't be held responsible for them either, so they can hardly become more responsible."

- About your reduction to absurdity claim that removing all the rules would make us "SUPER-Responsible":

"I don't think rules inevitably destroys our freedoms, let's make a more refined distinction:

- If a rule is meant to stop people from infringing on each other's freedoms, if it's a rule that makes people less likely to coerce each other, it's a good rule because we end up with less coercion happening (even counting the coercion necessary to enforce the rule), we end up with a more civilized society. There are not many of those kinds of rules around.

- If it's a rule that imposes some regulation because we don't trust that people will be responsible enough to do what's best for them regarding something unrelated to coercion, we not only restrict their freedom by coercion (in this case, coercion by the government), it doesn't make coercion less likely, so it's likely a bad rule."

The problem with removing all rules is that, without rules related to coercion, people would be too subjected to the threat or actual coercion from other people around them, society would be less civilized. Would that make them more responsible? That's a good question. On one side, they would have a lot more responsibilities if they had to worry about their own lives and safety every frickin' day, and all the terrible worries that comes with the unstable chaos of anarchy. However, given that they would enjoy less freedoms due to the constant coercion of others, they would likely end up being a lot less responsible, because they would have far less choices.

That's why I took the time to explain the difference between rules related to coercion and rules that just infringe on freedoms.

- About your examples of requirements before freedoms and rights are granted, here's a list of your "numerous examples" and my reply to each of them:

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to go to college..."
VoodooV: "You have the freedom to have a certain job..."

"Going to college or getting a job are not things people are entitled to (supposedly), there are no rights involved, so no freedom is being denied."

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to imbibe alcohol....IF you are a certain age and can demonstrate that you can use it safely"

I don't know about using it safely (what does that mean?), but regarding age restriction, I don't agree with those laws. I know, very "liberal" of me, but I think children are the responsibility of their parents, so it's a law that steps into parenting territory.

VoodooV: "And according to the right, you have the freedom to vote..."

About voting, I don't know, I guess being registered is a requirement for the voting process? Like the right to life requires... being alive?

"The voting process, on the other hand, seems to be something that requires registration (again, I'm not an expert on voting, so forgive me if I'm wrong), otherwise we end up just shouting to ourselves, "I vote for X"!"

VoodooV: "And having a gun, or a car, has a significant risk to infringe upon other's freedoms so it's not unreasonable to ask that you demonstrate proficiency and safety before using said items."

A driver's license is not about owning or using a car, but about driving in public venues. I could be wrong, but we don't need a license to drive a car in our own backyards, do we?

Simply owning a gun, on the other hand, not only isn't a violation of anything, it supposedly provides protection against these violations.

- About me supposedly contradicting myself, saying "there are no rules for us talking", then proposing a dare:

Did I shoot you in the face when you failed my dare? So I guess it's not the kind of rule in the sense that I didn't threaten to coerce you if you failed it. Do you understand what kind of rule I was talking about? Do you even understand what a contradiction means, or are you just taking advantage that not everyone that reads your posts knows exactly what you're referring to make yourself look smart even though you can't point out a contradiction if it rested flat in your deepest held political beliefs?

On the subject of contradictions, strictly speaking, there's no contradiction between calling you juvenile and being juvenile myself, even if I did so afterwards, and in retaliation, to give you a taste of it.

Ooooooooh... must be very embarrassing for you not to know what a contradiction stands for.

Here's your entire post quoted, because, why not?

I think that cat is already out of the bag.

Would you be surprised to learn that Australia is monitoring internet activity in other countries? I bet you $10 they do.

It would piss me off to learn that the NSA was reading our hot daily sexts, but does that potential for abuse mean they shouldn't be able to check out what Kim Jong Un is doing in NK, or check up on unstable regions with nuclear capabilities?

What do you think?

Words Elicit Emotion in Unstable Man! Film at 11!

I think some of the L points are gravity "hills" instead of "wells", so they are unstable. The wells will trap things. If you put something into orbit around a gravity hill, they have to actually orbit around the hill.

Benghazi is a scam because:

1. a rescue team was being assembled, but it was too late
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222833/Emails-reveal-U-S-military-team-ready-rescue-mission-Benghazi--didnt-make-time.html
2. a local militia does not AL-QAEDA make, he called it an 'act of terror' that day and the he 'covered it up' for a whole three days...
3. the death of a State Department official in a dangerous and unstable country, while unfortunate, is not particularly surprising. Of course, if Republicans had not cut funding for embassy security, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/jason-chaffetz-embassy_n_1954912.html
4. the released emails about the talking points show that the State Department didn't want to take all the blame and that the CIA actually edited out the strongest language
http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/15/read-newly-released-benghazi-emails/

As has been stated before, there are plenty of real scandals and real reasons to distrust/detest this president, but Benghazi ain't one of 'em.

tl;dr: No, not really and no, probably not.

-

MP3 compression methods are pretty good these days. A well encoded mp3 sounds quite good at 224k. 320k is ideal, but 224k sounds fine to me.

I think most people would be incredibly hard pressed to tell the difference between a well encoded 320k MP3 and a FLAC file.

To showcase this and hopefully answer your question through demonstration, I've put together an odd sound file here for ya: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/837649/soundtest.wav

It's a 24bit 48kHz wav file of a piece of bright and full audio thrown together just for this (using 24-bit 48kHz audio sources). The audio loops a few times and each time it loops it's in a different format or quality.

The odd part is that I've dropped the audio volume down all the way to just barely above the 16-bit noise floor before exporting into each format, then cranked the volume back up again. Just to see what would happen.

Anyway, the play order is as follows:
1. Original 16-bit audio (sound normal, as it should.)
2. 16-bit audio re-gained (noise city - the 16-bit FLAC was the same.)
3. 24-bit audio re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
4. FLAC 24-bit re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
5. MP3 8 k re-gained (What?)
6. MP3 64 k re-gained (Sounds like a bad MP3, because it is. but, do note it's mostly just dull and a bit unstable sounding, not all weird like the 8k one.)
7. MP3 128 k re-gained (Pretty good, but still a bit dull. Not horrible though.)
8. MP3 224 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original? Pretty close, I'd say.)
9. MP3 320 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original as far as I'm concerned.)

This is just one test though. There are most certainly songs or sounds out there that wouldn't fare as well as this one. No idea what those would be though, as everything I've MP3-ified in the last decade or so sounds absolutely fine to me.

A sinkhole started in this guy's brother's bedroom, sucked him and his bed into it-The man here tried in vain to help his bro before help arrived, rescue got there and most likely decided the area was unstable, the guy's bro was already a goner, and CNN swoops in for some heart-wrenching camera-time with this poor grieving man like the cunts they are-
Anderson Cooper: Super Concerned Newscunt 360!

Of course, lets all rush in the possibly unstable sinkhole that could collapse more with the added weight killing the brother if hes not dead already (prolly roaming the Goonie Cave under there) and possibly killing the rescuers

you can have my hammer when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Holy shit, that guy that Piers was interviewing was unstable.

When you acknowledge that it's OK that we take firearms away from criminals and the mentally ill. Then you acknowledge that weapons are not a right, they are a privilege. A privilege that can be taken away with the consent of the governed.

I think a good way to sum up what most people want to do is weed out the irresponsible gun owners from the responsible. Every time someone makes an argument for sensible regulation, the strawman of a total gun ban is thrown back. Sorry, but please try and pay attention.

Maybe YOU take owning firearms seriously. Maybe YOU train diligently, maybe YOU have your weapons securely locked up. Maybe YOU take safety seriously. Maybe YOU would be beneficial to have around in a time of crisis. But a lot of people don't and aren't.

If you acknowledge that the firearms are a responsibility, then regulation is a very responsible thing to be asking for.

We don't want your guns (except maybe assault weapons), keep them, just prove you can keep them safe. I think that's what most people are asking for.

This video contains disingenuous information. Those statistics are completely false.

@chingalera It's working a lot better than the current USA situation. Here's a few legitimate facts relating to the content in that video.

1. You can still buy guns (pistols, rifles, shotguns), just not the ridiculously unjustified mass human slaying variants.
2. It's better controlled with systems setup to decrease the chance of consistently unstable minds getting hold of guns of any type.
3. Gun homicides were increasing leading up to the gun control (1996), from that peak to now, it's about a 59% drop.
4. 1996-2006 about 65% drop in gun suicides.
5. Robberies involving guns dropped significantly.
6. There was no increase in home invasions.
7. In the 10 years leading up to the gun control there were 11 mass shootings.. since gun control went into affect, there have been 0.

Homicide weapon statistics (image): Guns vs Knives from 1989/90 to 2006/7
Quick answer: 50% drop for guns, 30% rise for knives
http://aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide/weapon.html

"A 2011 letter published in the British Medical Journal by Simon Chapman, a professor of public health from the University of Sydney, observed that the U.S. had 14.4 times the population of Australia but 141 times as as many deaths from firearms in 2008 as Australia and 238 times the rate of firearms-related homicide."
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2012/12/20/gun-control-searching-down-under-for-change-to-believe-in/
If the current ratio's are even remotely similar to this quote, then Americans can't say jack about the Australian statistics.

@charliem Good links mate.

Upvote for the 'Lies' tag.

It is probably a near perfect mirror from this liquid mecury.

The big problems with liquids for telescope surfaces are -

1) gravity - the mirrors can only point straight up

2) the thermal coefficient of expansion for liquids is huge, as temps change, liquid components are dimensionally unstable

I suspect what you see is the state of the art for liquid mirrors and you shouldn't expect to see much more in our lifetimes.