It's not a strawman.. nowhere did I say that those things were equilvalent. In fact I was illustrating a vector of unreasonable search and seizure, from one plateau of disreason to another. I see from your handle that you could possibly be British, which would explain your comfort with the government's head up your arse.

Who's to say a drunk driver hasn't killed one, or more, of my friends at various times? Being against random stops is not being pro drunk driving.

>> ^liverpoolfc:

Bahahah nice straw men. Why not just eliminate the police force entirely, speed limits, laws etc. No one has any business telling you what you can or can't do right???
Wonder if you'd feel the same way if a drink driver killed your mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, son or daughter.
>> ^budzos:
I didn't watch the clip but I do not agree with random road-checks for any reason. I don't care if the premise is that you're making the roads safer... I think Benjamin Franklin has a quote about that.
If the government thought they could get away with it, they'd institute random house searches. Why wouldn't you want your house searched unless you have something to hide!?
What about forced screenings/vaccinations for various diseases? I'm sure that's in the public/economic interest?
Let's just give our whole bodies and souls over to the government daddy to tell us where we can go and what we can consume at all times. It's good for the economy.

@renatojj

Very nice. You can't come up with a decent argument so you just give up and pretend it's because of my lack of understanding.

I came up with a variety of cogent points during this little debate, you went off on wild vectors about freedom of speech and other fallacious angles. Now you just give up when I keep pressing a very solid point to which you have no rebuttal. Why not just admit it? You lose. Your side is wrong.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^Truckchase:
Why would anyone write a virus that targets less than a 5% desktop user base?
Because it would also target about 80% of all web servers?
Why tamper with kitchen faucets when you can poison the water supply?
talks

Absolutely! That's a different attack vector though; this vid is addressing client side desktop infection. (DDOS bot, "security" blackmail, etc.)

Edit: That said though, great point. It is odd that so much effort goes into client infection. It's unfortunate that default firewalling tech on any client isn't to a L7 packet inspection level yet. It would seem to make any client an easier target. mmmmm..._Computers

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Good Neighbor, forensic, sketch, police, magnify' to 'Good Neighbor, forensic, sketch, police, magnify, enhance, zoomify, vector graph' - edited by lucky760

Hmm. I think there would be a better way to explain it, assuming that I understood the idea properly:

Lets for a moment ignore the finite speed of light; Alan Davies was I think suggesting that might be what is being referenced here. For example, light from the sun takes about 8 minutes (8.3 roughly) to get to Earth, therefore where we see the sun in the sky is actually where the sun was 8 minutes ago. However, I don't think that is the idea here, because that would be universally true rather than happening when the sun sets in particular.

Instead I think that the idea is that the atmosphere bends the light from the sun when it is coming through at that low angle, so what we are seeing had actually been bent around and altered like a mirage. If I am getting that right, I think some better ways to explain it would include:

Shooting a bow and arrow at fish in a lake. If you aim directly at the fish and release your arrow, you will miss because the water has bent the light that you see. The atmosphere is doing the same thing to the sun's light in this case. OR

Lets assume that you had a gun which could shoot bullets at infinite speed, beyond the speed of light even. If you aimed and shot at the sun as it was setting, you would miss the sun because your bullet would fly out in a straight vector, but the sun wouldn't actually be where it appears due to the light being bent by the atmosphere.

Pretty cool, but explained in a way that wasn't quite as clear as normal QI for me.

Vector thrust anyone ?

Wall of text warning. No tl;dr. Learn to read dammit (see what I did there?).

@quantumushroom

Unusual post from you there qm. But again you miss the point (what did you expect?).

First off, religion necessarily has an effect on society otherwise no one would care if you adhered or not (i.e. there would be no religious wars, no religious-based hatred etc.). The problem is not that religion enhances your sense of well-being, it's that as a consequence (or side effect if you will) you close yourself off from people of a different religion and from contrary opinions on many different matters: you trade freedom of thought for psychological safety and by doing that you deserve neither. Now, if you're a "religious scientist" type then your either not really religious or not really a scientist. Compartmentalization can only get you so far.

Second, wtf does any of this has to do with liberalism? Your tangent does not intersect my argument at any point. I bet you can't derive for shit. Do you even know what derivation is?

Third, atheism is neutral. Atheism is to theism as amoralism is to moralism. The antonym to moral is not amoral but immoral. In the same way, the antonym to theism is non-theism. A non-theist can be religious, he simply does not believe in a deity or deities. Atheism was a term invented by theists to vilify non-theist and polytheists. It has been adopted by non-religious people like "nigger" has been adopted by African-Americans, as a way of empowerment. It encompasses many views, most of them non-religious. It does not mean atheists cannot suffer from the same delusions as religious people, only that they are less likely because by identifying and refusing to accept the kind of bad thinking that goes on in religious circles, they have inoculated themselves to a point.

Fourth, on the contrary one could say that there have never been a religion without a state. Every religion needs a vector of power to affirm its authority and convert others. The Jews in Pharaonic Egypt formed a state within a state, electing their own leaders and applying the laws of Abraham to their brethren, much like Muslims try to do in western countries by following sharia law and even trying to make it official. I would go so far as to say that religion is the prototype of the state. Look at Buddhism. Not a year after the Buddha died and already sects formed and tried to control the movement he started. The conflicts may not have been overtly violent, but they were power struggles and as such quite far from the detachment from worldly matters taught by the Buddha. All prophets are dictators. Their intentions may be good, but it will always turn sour when they're gone as they, and not their god or teachings, are really what unify their followers. The continuation depends not on the person or the teachings but on the institutions that they or their successors build, just like a state. You could see what I mean if you had read the Leviathan of Hobbes (that's not what he says, but the parallels he makes and his insistence that religion is necessary for the state's well-being goes in this direction). This, to me, argues for anarchism but of course with people like quantumushroom - not to mention the potential for greed and cruelty still in all of us - I would have to say we are not ripe for it just yet. It may well be that a great part of the population will need to be forced to become atheists just to live among an atheist society comfortably, like atheists were once forced to recant their views in religious societies. While it would mean some psychological violence, as long as we stay in a democratic state it would not do more damage than what religion does now and I believe it would benefit humankind in the long run.

@Gallowflak

Nowhere did I say atheists were more rational than the religious. In fact, most rationalists (like Descartes) are religious for various reasons, one which I will explore below. I said that atheists are more reasonable and detached in their understanding of the world. Now, while "reasonable" comes from "reason" it does not mean here that a reasonable person uses more reason than another. It means that a person is more sensible than another. For example, there are no empirically verifiable evidence of a god or gods. Any religious person not mentally ill will agree. They may argue for the acceptance of anecdotal evidence or of natural phenomena as "acts of God", but just saying something doesn't make it so and anecdotal evidence is not verifiable/repeatable by a third-party and thus of very little value. So there doesn't seem to be any evidence for deities, even Pascal admitted that fact in the frickin 17th century, that's why he had to make a wager with non-believers: he tried to say that by betting on an infinite reward you cannot lose (many think that Pascal says the odds are infinite, but that would be empirical. Pascal says that since god is presumably infinite, and that you presumably gain this infinity when you die, you should take the bet since by doing so you lose nothing in this life. Of course the last part I think is false, also the dying part. Only the "god is infinite" has any kind of weight and it is very light). Of course he didn't really understand mathematical infinity and thus didn't realize that doing so meant you only had an infinitesimal chance of winning in return.

Digression aside, this means that the natural state of a rational being would be non-theistic. Only non-rational belief (based on logical fallacies or the sentiment of faith) or logical arguments based on non-empirical premises can lead to the existence of a god as part of one's thinking. Thus, while not necessarily non-rational, religious thinking most of the time is. In other cases, when dubious premises are used, we would say that the conclusions are not reasonable, meaning that they do not agree with our raw, unfiltered experiences of the world. This is exactly why many religious persons and theists resort to rationalism, as it lets them bypass primary experience in order to define god a priori as the creator of our experiences by some logical argument with dubious premises. Of course this comes from an empiric viewpoint, but then again rationalists don't have a monopoly on reason even though they let us empiricists have a monopoly on experience: that's where the Kantians enter, but that's a story for another time I'm afraid.

This was very simple text-to-vector based software. Like etch-a-sketch...

>> ^quantumushroom:

Rarer still: Empire Strikes Back vector arcade


Is that on MAME yet? You should submit this video to VS.

Rarer still: Empire Strikes Back vector arcade

I've been running Linux on my production machine for 2 years now, after trying it out for a year before that. For out-of-the-box usability, there are several distros that are very close to Windows or OSX and even surpass them in some ways. Ubuntu is a great place to start.

And let's not forget that open-source goes way beyond Linux. OpenOffice, the GIMP image editor, Inkscape vector editor, Pidgin IM, Audacity audio editor, Firefox, Thunderbird... there is a huge list of FOSS applications that can do just about anything you want.

Games, agreed, are more problematic on Linux, but as Tymbrwulf mentioned that is a function of the userbase, if it does catch on the way Firefox did, you can be sure that there will be a lot of Linux game releases. Meanwhile games and proprietary software can be run in VirtualBox.

>> ^blankfist:

"That's why I wanna" - Every central planning statist's sentence begins that way.

Actually, it's a common way to segue from description of a problem to a proposed solution.

My tummy is grumbling, that's why I wanna go get lunch.

My balls itch, that's why I want you to wiggle your chin.

>> ^blankfist:

As a point of information, I voted for Kerry in 2004 because I was terrified of what four more years of Bush would mean for us. I was told "if you don't vote for Kerry, you'll be throwing your vote away." The truth is, Bush won again, and sure those four years weren't ice cream and puppies, but we lived through it.

So why not stay home, if voting never matters? I'd prefer if you, and everyone who believed as you do followed that advice.

>> ^blankfist:
The point is, at some point or another we have to stop with this chicken little 'sky is falling' attitude and vote our conscience.

Well, here's the thing. Consider a game of football. Every time you take possession of the football, you want to get it into the end zone. Does that mean you should always "vote your principles", and throw passes to the end zone, no matter what? Or do you look at where you are on the field, think about the kind of defense the other team has, and come up with a play that you think will get the ball as far down field as you can?

Most people who play football, and most people who vote, think backing the play that will bring them the best result is the play to back.

I vote based on what I think will help bring about something closer to what I want than where we are. I would love to change things so all I had to do was show up each year and say "I want us to be there", and then let the process calculate the vector sum of our preferences in some more accurate manner, and give us a congress that can implement policies that line up with the result of that vector sum.

Instead it's a series of zero-sum competitions, and that's what's causing a lot of the problem.

I guess some people feel more comfortable hating someone for being Muslim than hating them for being black. That's why, imho, many of these nutters don't even bother to learn the truth about this guy, or, say... a President. The truth doesn't matter. He's black. Label him a Muslim and you've found a less socially-remonstrated vector to spew your racism.

I thought those sorts of maneuvers weren't really possible without thrust vectoring, and I don't believe F-18's have thrust vectoring (though it may have been added in an update or later models). Anyways, it's kind of a good thing he ejected while facing away from where the giant fireball was going to be a couple seconds later.

edit:

In repsonse to Throbbin: See?! This is why we need thrust vectoring in our jet planes! It's godless commie terrorists like you who don't get a hardon watching hundred million dollar war machines at airshows as god intended, like real red-blooded [insert nationality] citizens, that are the reason we're in this predicament.

"I haven't seen ANY flatscreens, including TFT, that show rich and accurate colors. Even with graphic designers' monitors. CRT FTW."

although You might not get the same contrast in blacks with TFT you get a crispness not possible with CRT , also majority of people viewing digital content are using TFT screens , most TFT screens also have the advantage of being 1-1 pixel mapped.

if you are doing stuff for print i still would prefer to use a TFT to work on the image due to the pixel clarity as for colours and contrast you would send out a sample/samples to the printers to make sue you are getting what you actually want back.

In short all the benofits of TFT outway CRT by far.

still love old school 70s,80s vector graphics on a CRT or oscilloscope graphics but other than that and specific artistic motivations CRT is largely redundant.