>> ^Hybrid:

Well I tend to resize the thumbnail down in Photoshop to the exact size required by Videosift anyway, which is 130 x 98 pixels.
So for me, what I do is:
1. Take a screenshot of the video at the part I want to become the thumbnail.
2. Paste into Photoshop.
3. Take a long horizontal selection of the video from which I'll make my thumbnail, and copy and paste that into a new image. This may be a very wide image for now.
4. Resize this new wide image down to 98 pixels vertically. Photoshop will maintain the ratio for the width, so no stretching.
5. Now I have a 98 pixel high image but it's too wide, so with another selection box I choose the 130 pixel wide area I want to become the thumb. Copy and paste into a new 130 x 98 image and voila.
I admit for poorer quality videos I may play around with the contrast/brightness/colour to make the thumb stand out more.


That is way more convoluted than it needs to be. As radx said, all you need to do is paste a screencap into Photoshop, and then crop a rectangular selection of the video with a fixed ratio of 4:3. That's it, no extra steps needed.

>> ^Hybrid:

Well I tend to resize the thumbnail down in Photoshop to the exact size required by Videosift anyway, which is 130 x 98 pixels.
So for me, what I do is:
1. Take a screenshot of the video at the part I want to become the thumbnail.
2. Paste into Photoshop.
3. Take a long horizontal selection of the video from which I'll make my thumbnail, and copy and paste that into a new image. This may be a very wide image for now.
4. Resize this new wide imsage down to 98 pixels vertically. Photoshop will maintain the ratio for the width, so no stretching.
5. Now I have a 98 pixel high image but it's too wide, so with another selection box I choose the 130 pixel wide area I want to become the thumb. Copy and paste into a new 130 x 98 image and voila.
I admit for poorer quality videos I may play around with the contrast/brightness/colour to make the thumb stand out more.


Nice one......Thanks @Hybrid

Well I tend to resize the thumbnail down in Photoshop to the exact size required by Videosift anyway, which is 130 x 98 pixels.

So for me, what I do is:

1. Take a screenshot of the video at the part I want to become the thumbnail.
2. Paste into Photoshop.
3. Take a long horizontal selection of the video from which I'll make my thumbnail, and copy and paste that into a new image. This may be a very wide image for now.
4. Resize this new wide image down to 98 pixels vertically. Photoshop will maintain the ratio for the width, so no stretching.
5. Now I have a 98 pixel high image but it's too wide, so with another selection box I choose the 130 pixel wide area I want to become the thumb. Copy and paste into a new 130 x 98 image and voila.

I admit for poorer quality videos I may play around with the contrast/brightness/colour to make the thumb stand out more.

TLDR: Lump capital gains together with personal income for the purposes of personal income tax, and voila.

S'okay man, I felt the same. Though I figured I would give it half an upvote. I thought you might too so between us it deserved one et voila >> ^spoco2:

I can't, in good conscience, upvote anything with 'wacky' music and a terrible laugh track like that... I just can't

All that's left is to insert a random Eurobeat song. And voila! Initial D: 5th Stage!

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner, why do you think giving people more freedoms is trading for a system with no freedoms of any kind?

Because you're not "giving people more freedoms", you're talking about removing the institution that defends our freedom.

>> ^blankfist:
Right now, hypothetically if you made slavery legal, do you think slavery would come rushing back to the US? I'd venture to say no, because the world's opinion on slavery has changed, as it does and will do for everything we collectively see as bad.

Well "everyone" agrees that murder is wrong, but still people do it all the time. And frankly, I think there's less consensus on the idea that slavery is wrong than on murder being wrong.

It probably wouldn't come "rushing" back though. Our oligarchs have studied history well enough to know that they'd need to go through a slow roll out of such a thing, accompanied by some Orwellian rebranding.

My guess is that they'd start by expanding prison labor, and reinstituting the practice of sending people to jail if they default on their debts. Then they'd just continue the kind of right-wing dehumanization of poor people and criminals we see today. They'd probably couple it with how selling off prison labor contracts to private businesses will help them with the state budget or allow a new round of high-income tax cuts, but then I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing a Republican governor of some state when I say that already.

It's only one more step to go from selling a "prison labor contract" where the prisoner goes back to a state-run cell each night, to being allowed to be kept in bondage by the owner of his contract in a privately owned cell.

Then, voila! Slavery is back in the USA.

Alternatively, just abolish minimum wage, outlaw union organization, and crush what's left of small business with anti-competitive business practices, and come up with some snappy new name for "indentured servitude" like "work-equity debt reconstruction", and you're 80% of the way there.

>> ^blankfist:
Government is a necessary evil in the processes of human evolution, but an evil nonetheless.


Eh. I know this is one of your favorites, but it's a bit Manichean, don't you think?

People are ultimately the ones who make the moral decisions. Even then, I don't really believe in "evil" people, so much as people who do things that are morally wrong.

What's the NRA slogan, "guns don't kill people, people kill people"? Well, governments don't commit evil acts, people do.

>> ^conan:

i now it's probably rude but i wish they'd subtitle hawking. for a non-native english speaker it's very hard to understand him because the pronounciation is all messed up by that computer....


I suggest studying. Just grab your run-of-the-mill 90s Apple computer, and use the text-to-speech. Do that for a few months and voila! you're fluent in Stephen Hawking!

Just get the corporates to pay taxes and voila, problem solved. Uncut.

So I've never seen that check box before, and I don't know how it got switched.
I have unchecked the box and voila, all fixed!

Stupid me!

>> ^JiggaJonson:

It sounds easy enough in principal, but you can't just wish things like theft away. Like it, or want to believe it, or not, there are other people who will occasionally want to do you harm.
Faced with that realization, I wonder how the author of this video would respond. Someone comes in and holds his family hostage. He has an opportunity to stop it but must use violence as a means of self defense. Or perhaps there is no violence that would be required on his part. Perhaps he could end the situation with a call to the police but he won't because "Then the police would kidnap the criminal."
^Sounds like a lot of idealistic crap to me.
Assuming he's right about the situation, he still has offered no alternatives or answers as to how to run his newfound society. All we have to do is "Always do no harm to others," and voila' everything is perfect. Except, that would require that everyone adopt the same principal rather quickly to work.
And even if that idea was implanted in people's minds, if you put people in a situation where "it's him or me," survival instincts will trump morality more often than not.


You're right. My pacifist sister talks about great tragedies performed by people and said "they should have stopped him before all the killing and war began!" - but if you ask her how to stop a person who doesn't want to listen to kind words, she has no answer. A fully pacifist world might be ok, but if one single person decided not to be, you're boned.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

It sounds easy enough in principal, but you can't just wish things like theft away. Like it, or want to believe it, or not, there are other people who will occasionally want to do you harm.
Faced with that realization, I wonder how the author of this video would respond. Someone comes in and holds his family hostage. He has an opportunity to stop it but must use violence as a means of self defense. Or perhaps there is no violence that would be required on his part. Perhaps he could end the situation with a call to the police but he won't because "Then the police would kidnap the criminal."
^Sounds like a lot of idealistic crap to me.
Assuming he's right about the situation, he still has offered no alternatives or answers as to how to run his newfound society. All we have to do is "Always do no harm to others," and voila' everything is perfect. Except, that would require that everyone adopt the same principal rather quickly to work.
And even if that idea was implanted in people's minds, if you put people in a situation where "it's him or me," survival instincts will trump morality more often than not.


If we want to break this down into the base structure of things we can do that.

What is the purpose of an organism? That's easy. To reproduce and propagate its genes through offspring. With that in mind, what is the purpose of a complex organism such as a Human? That's simple too. To produce offspring. Now we come to the reason why religions, Ideas, and passions have such powerful hold on complex organisms. Simply knowing the real truth of the situation is a lonely proposition.

All this bullshit we argue about is created by the need to fill a vast expanse that all the eons of evolution couldn't fill except by providing the brainpower that the only apex predator to kill for pleasure, contains.

With all that in mind, what really matters? Nothing. So enjoy it.



The above is an argument from absurdity, I really didn't know what the fuck was going on in the video or what we're discussing here.

It sounds easy enough in principal, but you can't just wish things like theft away. Like it, or want to believe it, or not, there are other people who will occasionally want to do you harm.

Faced with that realization, I wonder how the author of this video would respond. Someone comes in and holds his family hostage. He has an opportunity to stop it but must use violence as a means of self defense. Or perhaps there is no violence that would be required on his part. Perhaps he could end the situation with a call to the police but he won't because "Then the police would kidnap the criminal."

^Sounds like a lot of idealistic crap to me.

Assuming he's right about the situation, he still has offered no alternatives or answers as to how to run his newfound society. All we have to do is "Always do no harm to others," and voila' everything is perfect. Except, that would require that everyone adopt the same principal rather quickly to work.

And even if that idea was implanted in people's minds, if you put people in a situation where "it's him or me," survival instincts will trump morality more often than not.

In reply to this comment by SDGundamX:
@BicycleRepairMan

I think that if, instead of railing against religion, you actually took the time to study it (study...not practice--I'm not proselytizing here) you would find that all of the major religions have important messages of wisdom to offer us about how to live our lives. .... I think you're missing out.

Hmm, well what can I say.. I dont consider myself a biblical scholar, but I'd say I know just as much about the bible or religion in general as the average religious person does, perhaps in some cases even more. I may be missing the ability to actually believe in the various myths, but I am nevertheless capable of reading them and even seeing the value in them. For instance, I find the mantra of "forgiveness" that Jesus represents to be an interesting idea(or should i say ideal?) in the moral realm. And its one of those things worth considering before acting out our too common revenge-instinct. It is an idea I have given serious consideration, and I think that in some sense, the world would have been poorer off without it. I consider such thinking a contribution to moral philosophy as I would any other contribution. (I do have several objections to it, but thats a somewhat separate issue)

There are also similar examples from other religions that are interesting in their own way, and even if I dont believe a word of it, I can always appreciate the concepts and ideas

As an atheist, I am perfectly comfortable borrowing any good idea from any religion, its no different from lets say a Christian person borrowing from Buddhism or vice versa. But do you think I'm "missing out" because I dont subscribe to a particular religion? Since there are so many religions, is it ok if I just make my own, that lets say believe potatoes are intelligent, and I borrow some concepts from here and there of other religions, and voila I wont "miss out"? IAW: do i have to believe some supernatural nonsense to really "get it" when it comes to religious moral teachings?

And what about the BAD stuff? Lets just get it straight: some of the moral codes outlined in the bible are just downright EVIL. How, as a believer in the bible, can people tell the difference? Who or what tells christians that punishing people for killing is ok, but stoning homosexuals or disobedient children to death isnt? How do they decide? I'm guessing they decide the exact same way I decide. By thinking for themselves. By not living in a desert tribe 2000 years ago, and by having an innate sense of right and wrong that works with facts, knowledge an philosophy cumulated over hundreds of years.

So what am i missing exactly?

This video is proof that beggar's canyon works! It had 2 votes for 2 months. I added a bit to the title, changed the description and begged et voila!