According to the thread I found this on yesterday he was still at large.

It's now being reported that there was more than one shooter, and at least one still at large.

Thanks for the reply and sharing your expertise -- sounds like you'd confirm everything that the video said.

This probably just displays my ignorance more, but specifically with regards to the MP3 format, do you think it adds any noticeable compression artifacts even at high-quality settings? Part of my problem was that I was thinking of MP3 *bit*rate as sampling rate (128 kbit/s = 128 kHz, which is not at all correct). But still, MP3 is a lossy format (obviously since one can turn a 650M CD into ~60M of 128k MP3s, or still a large filesize savings even for 320k) and even my relatively untrained ear can sometimes hear the difference at low (say, 128k or lower) bitrates.

I guess that a music producer wouldn't record/master anything in a compressed format like MP3, so that is sort of entirely separate from the point of this video and your comment. But just out of curiosity, do you think that people can detect differences between a 16 bit 44 kHz uncompressed digital recording (flac maybe?) and a very high quality MP3 (say, 320 kbit)?

There are two things that I think are overlooked with Windows 8...

First up it's an operating system that has a UI designed specifically for touch input. The UI is obviously not intended for regular desktop usage, and is Microsoft's attempt at reaching out to the consumer market. Let's face it, Microsoft has pretty much got the business side of things covered with Windows 7, and there is still a large business user base who have yet to put migrations to Windows 7 into effect. Why use a keyboard and mouse with an operating system designed for touch input? Windows 7 will be available for a long time yet, because Microsoft know Windows 8 is a stretch too far for most businesses.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the whole desktop UI is still there, and you can run your entire Windows session in the traditional desktop without having to step in and out of the "modern UI" (aka metro) shell. The start menu is lacking, but easily recreated with a shortcut to the start menu folder in your user profile pinned to the task bar.

Yep, there'll be many geeks who wanted to persuade their bosses that everyone needs their monitors replaced with touchscreens but let's face it, Windows 8 is a consumer product and is not yet geared up for business use. Touch input is slowly creeping into the business world with many executives loving their shiny pads/tablets/slabs that make them look professional. It'll be a bit longer before tech departments start envisioning an overhaul of their entire workstation setups and are willing to embrace Windows 8.

One last thought crossed my mind... As far as touch input goes, Windows 8 is pretty sweet.

>> ^aurens:

>> ^rougy:
"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.

Video from the Doubletree Hotel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc
Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?
"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?


Thanks for taking the time to post the video you mentions. I personally found it to be worthless. It shows nothing. It also appears to have been tampered with.

Most of the evidence was summarily destroyed, which is why it's so easy for the people who buy the official 9/11 story to say "Where's the evidence?"

Forgive me for skipping the link, because I can't think of the right keywords for Google, but there was a fire inspector who was very angry at how the WTC cleanup was handled. He said that his team was not allowed to investigate the evidence, and that he was only shown partial examples of the building, offsite, after it had been sifted by the cleanup officials.

I'm done. I know I won't change your mind. Not even gonna try, really, but others will listen.

Whoever attacked America on 9/11 is still out there, and their arrogance will hang them yet.

>> ^rougy:

"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.


Video from the Doubletree Hotel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc

Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?

"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?

"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.

It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.

It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.

Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.

>> ^Trancecoach:

Did they really leave the baby inside a running vehicle with the keys in the ignition?
White folks.

Also, did the YT write-up say that the carjacker is a woman, and still "at large." Dude, local police need to get on that.


Shall they wave their magic wands and conjure up evidence?

There's no face in the security camera, the parents don't look like they'd have gotten a good enough view of the suspect to describe them (The father was in the car with them upside-down for about 5 seconds before they took off)

So the only thing they -might- have is fingerprints, and even then, judging by the amount of visible exhaust coming out of the car, that was a cold night, they were probably wearing gloves.

I agree something should be done, but you cant expect something from nothing.

Did they really leave the baby inside a running vehicle with the keys in the ignition?

White folks.


Also, did the YT write-up say that the carjacker is a woman, and still "at large." Dude, local police need to get on that.

Rabid otter, still at large.


In other news, Mel Gibson is dating again.

Chapter 1 courtesy of the http://richarddawkins.net/article,4217,Extract-from-Chapter-One-of-The-Greatest-Show-on-Earth,Richard-Dawkins---Times-Online

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

It is frequently, and rightly, said that senior clergy and theologians have no problem with evolution and, in many cases, actively support scientists in this respect. This is often true, as I know from the agreeable experience of collaborating with the Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries, on two separate occasions. In 2004 we wrote a joint article in The Sunday Times whose concluding words were: “Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.” The last sentence was written by Richard Harries, but we agreed about all the rest of our article. Two years previously, Bishop Harries and I had organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

[In the letter, eminent scientists and churchmen, including seven bishops, expressed concern over the teaching of evolution and their alarm at it being posed as a “faith position”at the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead.] Bishop Harries and I organised this letter in a hurry. As far as I remember, the signatories to the letter constituted 100 per cent of those we approached. There was no disagreement either from scientists or from bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

They may think God had a hand in starting the process off, and perhaps didn’t stay his hand in guiding its future progress. They probably think God cranked the Universe up in the first place, and solemnised its birth with a harmonious set of laws and physical constants calculated to fulfil some inscrutable purpose in which we were eventually to play a role.

But, grudgingly in some cases, happily in others, thoughtful and rational churchmen and women accept the evidence for evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

To repeat, they constitute more than 40 per cent of the American population. The equivalent figure is higher in some countries, lower in others, but 40 per cent is a good average and I shall from time to time refer to the history-deniers as the “40percenters”.

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled. Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay? Lest ye fall into condemnation, shouldn’t you be going out of your way to counter that already extremely widespread popular misunderstanding and lend active and enthusiastic support to scientists and science teachers? The history-deniers themselves are among those who I am trying to reach. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those who are not history-deniers but know some — perhaps members of their own family or church — and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, thereby, it seems, giving spurious comfort to those of a creationist persuasion — the history-deniers, the 40-percenters — who think the word “theory” is a concession, handing them some kind of gift or victory? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”. As for the claim that evolution has never been “proved”, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting.

Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.

Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the Moon is smaller than the Sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of “fact” seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town,* some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer’s actions have vanished into the past.

The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes. What the detective does have is traces that remain, and there is a great deal to trust there. There are footprints, fingerprints (and nowadays DNA fingerprints too), bloodstains, letters, diaries. The world is the way the world should be if this and this history, but not that and that history, led up to the present.

Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

*Not my favourite Yeats line, but apt in this case.

© Richard Dawkins 2009

That's the only plausible explanation, but the magnitude of the effect still seems large to me. A pleasant surprise I guess, and I agree that it's a very cool effect.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
Among other things, death involves permanent loss of consciousness, and it's just hard for me to wrap my puny human brain around the concept that my awareness will stop one day.


I find it easier to think that I wasn't conscious or aware prior to my birth (or my conception, depending when awareness begins) and that I'll return to a similar state upon death. Alternatively, I'm also not conscious during the periods of sleep when I'm not dreaming.

I agree it's still too large a concept for me to fully comprehend, but these are like stepping stones on the way there, for me.

Since we're all using anecdotal evidence about whether or not guns make a difference, here's some from this week.

http://www.wsls.com/sls/news/local/article/troutville_man_who_shot_intruder_says_911_tapes_are_accurate/33207/

You can find plenty of cases like this in casual news searches. I've had similar problems in my neighborhood over the last year alone where home invaders were scared off by homeowners with firearms. It's true that people without police/military training are not likely to be Rambo in high stress situations like the one demonstrated in the sift. Hell, even with training there is still a large element of chance when sitting in what is essentially a shooting gallery while you're ambushed by a gunman that has the draw on you. However, I don't think that makes a compelling argument for writing off concealed carrying.

Now for some real evidence. The Lott study from the University of Chicago contains plenty of real data on crime deterrance and firearms. Studies done in Florida showed crime dropped significantly after concealed carry laws were enacted. Also, of the crimes reported in Florida between 1987 and 1994, only 18 were attributed to legally licensed owners (of which there were over 220,000). There is a documented connection between decreased homicides, rapes, and assaults in states where citizens can legally carry firearms. Facing a serious risk of death while attempting a burglary or robbery tends to deter people. If that knowledge still isn't enough to stop them, then bullets get the job done quite effectively.

http://www.mtssa.org/lott.htm

Kinda freaky. I was at work in Sherman Oaks when it happened, but my gf got off work early and couldn't get back to our apartment in North Hollywood because it was inside the area the police cordonned off when they thought there was a 3rd gunman still at large. I was totally fascinated with the incident, it was so unique and so much like the climax of the movie Heat. At the time I thought it was remarkable how little attention it got in L.A. ... it was pretty much forgotten the next week, only popping back up in the news when the mother of one of the shooters sued the LAPD for letting her son bleed out from a head wonund.