Ross Scott

This sort of bleeds into other topics, but I think it should have its own thread. This may be old news for some people, but this was certainly news for me. Check out what this guy (director of economic research for the Reason Foundation) says around the 5 minute mark: Hjl3qT_xETA He's saying there's not enough American dollars in circulation in the entire world to pay off America's debt. I didn't know this. This sounds like an even bigger mess than I thought. I'm wondering what the most sane way of dealing with a situation like that is. I think printing extra money to inflate the hell out of things is a pretty bad solution, but I'm not sure what the best solution would be. I think you would almost half to completely change or break some laws in order to remedy this, but I'm not an economist either.

In my example I'm trying not to make YOU the one who owns the bean, because this isn't a judgment of your own character, but your attitude towards the morality of people in general. But assume the person with the bean has not eaten the berry, nor does it have high value to him like in scenario #5. He has no present or planned need for the bean, but it is his property. You're saying it's not immoral to let the berry-eater die right in front of him when he can prevent it, even if the bean has minimal value to him? You're describing a slippery slope scenario. That's possible, but to say that ANY compromise means there's nothing stopping total corruption is incorrect. In practice, rights aren't actually unalienable. We have freedom of speech, but the classic example is you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater where a panic could be caused and people could be trampled. That's not protected under the government, it's a situation where your would-be right can directly result in physical harm to others, even if you didn't physically harm anyone yourself. Well this is where the NEED comes in. I think EVERYONE'S need for survival should be taken into consideration. Look at scenarios #5-7. In all of those, I have a real NEED for the bean as well. I think scenario #5 is debatable, but in scenarios #6-7, I NEED the bean just as much as you do. In those scenarios, I'm not suggesting it's immoral to keep the bean for myself at all, I think that's perfectly human. That's not how I nor the dictionary defines altruism: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altruism Kindness I consider helping someone who is in need because you have some concern for them. Altruism I consider to be an act of kindness so great that it comes at great personal cost to yourself, beyond what the majority of people would be willing to do. In BOTH kindness and altruism you're sacrificing SOMETHING, it's just a matter of scale. Even in calling 911 for someone, you're sacrificing your TIME. I think what we disagree on is the scale of where something ceases to be kindness and becomes altruism. I think you're saying ANY sacrifice of property is altruism, no matter how small or inconsequential to you it is. I disagree and think altruism requires a high personal cost. I don't have a solid definition as to what I consider the crossover point, that's why I outlined some scenarios. To be clear, I consider scenarios #2-3 where I give the bean to be kindness, and #5-7 to be altruism. Also I've never heard of the view before that altruists think people who don't sacrifice themselves as they do think others don't deserve to exist. Quite the opposite; my perception of altruists are that they tend to care about people so much, they want to help everyone as much as possible. I'm not an altruist myself. Scenarios 2-4 I would give the bean, scenario 5 I don't know, scenario 6-7 I definitely wouldn't. That's not how I define altruism at all. Maybe my definition is incorrect (if you think it is, please point to evidence saying so), but I think a true altruist wouldn't make anyone part with their beans, they would take the burden entirely on themselves to try and save the people by finding beans on their own. I think they could try to convince you of the benefit of giving up your beans, but would never force you to do so. Someone like Jesus Christ I consider the classic altruist. What you're describing here sounds like communism, which isn't what I'm advocating at all. Communism would say you have no right to any of those 2000 beans and they should be redistributed. I'm saying that if one person is dying right in front of you and you don't have an equal or at least significant need as him, it's unethical to not give him 1 bean. If your value of property means you refuse to give him the one bean anyway, then I think there should be some force that compels you to give up your one bean so he can live, not all of your 2000 beans. I think personal property counts for something, but not everything. Again, I'm not trying to target you personally, but anyone in the situation conceptually.

Looks like it was a false alarm: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/11/30/1510252/amd-confirms-commitment-to-x86 Michael Archer: The difference is without ANY competition it becomes a monopoly, a position Intel would almost certainly abuse given its history. Imagine in 2 years something that's 5% faster than the exact same offerings now, and at twice the cost. Whereas if AMD was around in a competitive capacity, pricing might remain similar with a 30% boost in performance from Intel. Also your argument doesn't hold up so well since back in the early 00s AMD was making faster AND cheaper processors than Intel, and it took Intel YEARS to catch up again. During that time AMD gained almost NO marketshare however, due to a lot of anti-competitive and / or flat out illegal business practices on Intel's part. If Intel had actually obeyed the law, AMD might not even be in this situation today since it would have had resources to work with now. The conclusion I draw then is if you say it's objectively "the best", that means the "best" is not in fact, determined by the best product or pricing (even though I agree they make the better product today), but it means a willingness to crush your competition by any means necessary, even if it means breaking the law, instead of making a superior product yourself. Eventually, they did the latter, but not after a long campaign of suppressing their competition first.

A new Geforce 560 has card has come out, called literally Geforce 560 Ti with 448 cores. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/nvidia_rolls_out_special_edition_gtx_560_ti_448_cores I've been wanting to upgrade for a while, I'd love something like this, it feels like a cheaper version of the 570, with barely a performance drop. It also looks like the 560 line-up is Nvidia's new 8800, considering their naming schemes. Compare: Geforce 8800 models: Geforce 8800 GS Geforce 8800 GT 256MB Geforce 8800 GT 512MB Geforce 8800 GT 1GB Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB Geforce 8800 GTS 640MB Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB Geforce 8800 GTX Geforce 8800 Ultra Considering the massive speed differences between some models, it's one of their worst naming schemes in their history. Here's the 560: Geforce GTX 560 1GB Geforce GTX 560 2GB Geforce GTX 560 Ti 1GB Geforce GTX 560 Ti 2GB Geforce GTX 560 Ti 2Win Geforce GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores Like the 8800, it becomes more comical considering how some of the models with less memory will be faster in almost all applications than others with more memory.

Actually it's that transistors in a chip would double, not necessarily performance. That's more or less been true due to the addition of more cores in CPUs over the past few years. Performance has actually started tapering off for single threaded applications (which is arguably still the majority of software) for the past few years compared to the leaps we saw in the past.

This is pretty bad news, regardless of what CPUs you use: http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Not-Competing-With-Intel-Anymore-Goes-Mobile-237103.shtml If they really wind down on making desktop processors, that means Intel will have a monopoly on the market, which is never good. In fact if they really do phase out, I'm guessing you'll see Moore's Law come to a stop pretty fast for desktop CPUs if Intel has no competition.

Waffle Irons! 02RrePAvRxU 4GB memory cards and heavy metal! lGMrpO5sG54 More Xbox games! zktjKEHvNnI Get those Xbox games! Z0OLYPywePA Did somebody say Xbox games? l8_QQPjjj1k Xbox games and potatoes! 4tb7CJ6StMU More towels! o1zGjbFU1uE

No, assume there's lots of vegetation and resources and the island is big enough that someone can probably go off and survive on their own if they choose. Yes there is. You may not AGREE to any middle ground scenarios, but here are several variations, ranging from one spectrum to the other: 1. Different scenario, you're fine and didn't eat the berry. You want my bean so you can smoke it in a pipe. (loss of property to me for something foolish) 2. Original scenario, and I also own 2,000 beans. I have no immediate plans for them, but I put in the work in collecting them all. (one bean has minimal value to me, albeit some) 3. Original scenario, but I have no plans for my one bean (one bean may have some value to me, but I'm not sure) 4. Original scenario, but there are 5 people who accidentally ate the berries. If I give the bean to one of them, it might cause the others to become to violent towards the recipient. (bean might not help if I give it to him) 5. Original scenario, but I was going to trade my bean for a boat to get off the island. (bean has very high personal value to me) 6. Original scenario, but we've both accidentally eaten the berry. If I cut the bean in half and share it, we both have a 50% chance of living (great personal risk to my life if I share any of the bean) 7. Same scenario, but we've both eaten the berry, and only the full bean will cure one of us (the only way to save your life is to sacrifice mine) There's plenty of middle ground in these scenario variations, the effects of each scenario for you personally ranges from minimal to extreme. I see a BIG difference between scenario #2 and scenario #7. If you only see something in terms of absolutes, then you're right, there is no compromise in any scenario, even if it means people die with negligible loss to yourself. I find that view sociopathic. I consider people's lives to be generally more valuable than personal property, even if they won't contribute anything to me. However the more I have to sacrifice to help someone (my own life being the most extreme example), the less likely I am to give something up. For me it's a spectrum, not a binary all-or-nothing scale. I can agree to give up my bean in some of the scenarios, but not others, and still have general principles I adhere to. That's only true if you look at principles in binary and as 100% absolutes. So if I say you (and myself) are entitled to your own efforts in 99% of situations, but not in 1% of situations where your decisions mean people will die (not by your hand, but from a situation you can very easily prevent) if you're not forced to do so, then me saying you're "not" entitled to your own efforts is only true if you count any exception whatsoever as a tyranny, despite having the vast majority of your rights uninfringed. My understanding was that she hates what her parents did to acquire that wealth (which we know nothing about from the picture). Maybe they built a successful company using forced child labor from a 3rd world region, who knows. I don't think she hates the fact that they gave her wealth, but what they did to get it. Well I do think that the "overall good" can get into grey area fast. While you disagree, I think scenario #2 quite clearly benefits the overall good. I am "robbed" of 0.0005% of my bean supply, and the end result is a man asking for help doesn't right die in front of me. Since the negative impact on me is so miniscule and my intervention is the only thing that will allow this man to live, I think it's unethical to not give him the bean. Otherwise, it's akin to saying I consider my one bean out of 2000 to be worth more than his life, which I think is kind of a monstrous way to look at the world. Scenario #5 I consider murkier however. Yes, I could save his life, but that could severely hinder my ability to improve my own life and escape my conditions. I could even try to get help for everyone else if I leave the island. To me the "overall good" isn't as obvious in that situation. I'd say it's probably the better moral decision to give him the bean, but it would be a very human response to not give it to him in that scenario, because of the value associated with it. And for what it's worth, I'm a strong believer in self-preservation. I only believe in the common good so long as a society HAS resources to easily support everyone. If it's an impoverished region that does NOT, then I feel anything goes, people will do whatever they can to survive. Well, I also like horror movies.

There are some good ones starting to come in, here are some more: Clothing store opening! DigiWS1YhxI Xbox games! chiuhV2Yaw8 Cell phones! qGlGMxGP4Mo Towels! paLO5VN3hPM

This deserves an honorable mention: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501363_162-57331142/woman-pepper-sprays-other-black-friday-shoppers/

Have a couple more good ones. This one is from 2010, I love the fight that spills over and involves the worker while they're still at the entrance: os_s15cJU64 A friend of mine sent me this one, looks like the employees changed their minds about the customers: Best Buy opening 2011

I love watching Black Friday mob videos. It is sad about the incident where a worker got trampled to death in 2008, but for anything less, I love it when this stuff gets captured on video. I'm guessing some new ones will trickle in over the next few days, in the meantime go ahead and post the best Black Friday videos you can find. Here are a few I've found: This has almost ALL the best Black Friday footage I've seen. I remember in the past seeing somebody mix music from Left 4 Dead to some of these, but I can't seem to find that anymore: _dIBL4tYQPI This is another one that's pretty good. The uploader added some music video afterwards, but this is the best quality copy I've seen: RRiILStjZWE

Michael Archer: I don't think I can give much further discussion with regarding what's ethical or good for society. It all comes down to this argument for me: If it helps, assume you're part of a crew that shipwrecked on an island and I found my bean in the forest earlier. If your answer is still no, I consider that a little bit sociopathic, because I think it means you value property rights over human lives in all circumstances. I'll respond to some things where I think you misunderstood my meaning or answer your questions however: I'm not saying before capitalism, I'm saying it's become that way. Like if you were to compare the middle class in America 40 years ago to what it is now, the percentage of people that belong to it has gone down notably. If she's part of the upper 1% and has a fund of sorts, she's probably earning well over what most hard working Americans do just from interest and / or share dividends from stocks. It doesn't matter if it was all given to her, that's a common case with many wealthy families, she's now earning the income from what was given to her. Now you can argue that she didn't "earn" it in a traditional sense of putting work into it, but there are loads of millionaires who the same is true of. If it's made from interest / stocks dividends, she is still legally acquiring that money and the IRS would consider it "earnings." I'm not sure, my basic attitude is that if a society has enough resources collectively to do so (or an abundance of them), it should be able to provide basic needs for all its citizens, regardless of their condition. If that's not being done, then I think something should be changed so that is accomplished. I'm not anti-capitalism, but I also think there should be limits to it. Like say there was a society where no one could earn more than 100 million dollars. The excess money would be used to fund projects like roads, public schools, libraries, etc. I think that would be great, because I think the overall good that would create for people would outweigh the person's plans for their money past 100 million dollars. At 100 million dollars, the individual still has more wealth, resources and power than the vast, vast majority of humanity. You could even have a system where the earner over 100 million could choose how his extra money was distributed within certain channels. Say the money would normally be going to go to roads, but he wants it all to go to non-profit cancer research instead, that would be fine too. The excess money could NOT go towards buying a new mansion or investing in bank company stock however. The "acid test" for this would be to demonstrate the clear connection as to how this improves society as a whole. Simply "creating jobs" wouldn't count, it would have to do more than that. I'm not sure if this is utilitarian or not, I think it contains elements, but doesn't take it to an extreme. Your tyranny of the majority argument is valid, but I think imposing limits on some of the most powerful people on earth isn't the same as "tyranny." Besides, the limits wouldn't be applied unequally. In my conceptual society, EVERYONE would be under the 100 million limitation. The difference is people earning $20,000 wouldn't be so worried about it. Yes, that is part of it, but taxes are also lower than they've ever been. On a micro level, if your paycheck was cut in half and you can no longer pay medical bills, are your medical bills the sole cause of you going into debt? I wasn't trying to imply Bush was, but he WAS responsible for a LOT of tax cuts, which you can use to see if there's any correlation between that and poverty. As for Obama's job plans, I always felt like it was just stalling the problems from 2008.

Not that far, I have the video footage recorded, but I'm wondering if I should redo it since it has some spots that didn't go as well as I wanted to. I've already redone the sequence some 20-30 times trying to get it right. I've lost several days working on finalizing the results for the sound editing contest. I've also lost days to trying to solve bugs I'm getting with MKV encoding and playback. In addition to releasing the videos, I want to use RGB encoding to make archive quality copies in MKV format, but be able to convert them back to uncompressed AVI again in case I need to edit them later. It's proving to be much more of a pain in the ass than I anticipated, but it would mean saving a ton of space and having higher quality copies of the videos in the future. Lately I've been trying to get stuff rolling on CP again since I only last week got the fix back from Valve, so I've been encouraged by that, but it needs I mean to contact and organize a lot of things in order to get production started on that again. I'll resume work on FM very soon, there just haven't been enough hours in the day.

That and racing, I think leaving these out kind of skews results you'd get.

Things like nuclear and solar power are for electricity production. Very little of oil goes towards that. If we could magically have every power plant in the world operating on renewable energy, it would have almost no impact on the problem with oil dependence. The majority of oil use goes towards fuel, with industrialized farming in particular also relying heavily on it for chemical use. If we had been busting ass to create a transportation network that doesn't rely on oil 10 years ago, it might be such a huge issue. As it stands, we're unlikely to respond until it becomes a crisis situation, and by then we have less resources to work with in making a transition. So the question is how do you feed a growing population when the cost of farming doubles over a matter of a few years?

Ha, sorry, that wasn't the intent. Here's an alternate image if it helps:

http://www.accursedfarms.com/freemans-mind-episode-35/ 3rd paragraph.

The sound contest is finally over and I have the winners announced. The winner ended up being a tie between two people, so elements of both their entries were combined on the final mix. It's not perfect, but after multiple revisions from the contestants plus several hours of additional editing on my part, I'm declaring it done. You can download the video in MKV format below, which is much higher quality than any copy released so far. I decided to give awards to everyone who entered the contest, though some are more prestigious than others: Download new & improved "Diary of A Zombie" 1280x720 MKV (94MB) WINNERS: "TheDazro" (www.youtube.com/thedazro) Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au) GOLD AWARD: "TheDazro" (www.youtube.com/thedazro) Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au) Darrin Smith ([email protected]) SILVER AWARD: "AndrewN" (www.andreworks.com) "Chuck the 2nd" Ólafur Arons (www.youtube.com/OlafurArons) Ian Davis Chad Keating ([email protected]) Sean "Ita" Larkin ([email protected]) BRONZE AWARD: "av3nger" "Joannou1" (gldesert.com) Daniel Eriksson Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson Robert Fryer BEST VOLUME BALANCING: "Chuck the 2nd" MOST ORIGINAL SOUND EFFECTS: Darrin Smith ([email protected]) LOUDEST GUNSHOTS AWARD: "av3nger" JUST KIND OF DID HIS OWN THING REGARDLESS OF THE INSTRUCTIONS AWARD: "Joannou1" (gldesert.com) Daniel Eriksson Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson TURNED IN ENTRY AFTER THE DEADLINE WAS OVER AWARD: "Chuck the 2nd" Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson Robert Fryer That should be everyone. If you sent me an entry for the contest, but don't see your name up here (I hope not), that means gmail swallowed your email somehow and you should probably contact me again.

I thought the world ended for Y2K.

I know I'm pretty biased in this area, but there's a strong correlation with the massive increase of the population of the earth and the growth of the oil industry. Modern farming uses fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that depend heavily on petrochemicals, let alone the additional oil that goes into running farm equipment and transporting it to market. My understanding is that we could theoretically support all 7 billion people we have on the planet now with no one going hungry or starving, but only with our modern production methods. Without the use of oil, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we can't sustain the current population we have.

I saw this today, might be significant: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change?newsfeed=true The IEA is known for being almost unrealistically optimistic in terms of predictions regarding oil, I don't know what their record is on climate projections.

I'd have to see a study showing no correlation between government spending on welfare and the poverty rate before I could just take your word for it. I mean if you spend 50 billion above average one year and the poverty rate drops 1%, it may not seem like much, but there could be a correlation. What I do know is our government welfare system didn't really start until after the Great Depression, so you would have to look at rates prior to that. I believe in the late 1800s and early 1900s you had poverty rates from 30-60%, which is much higher than what we have now. There's lots of variables at work in this, but that suggests that simply eliminating government welfare would just make the overall situation worse. In an anecdotal sense, say you're unemployed, can't find a job, and receive welfare money and food stamps. Now take that money away so that you can't pay rent or buy groceries. Now say that a private charity is overstretched and has to provide to even needier people than you. What options do you have then? I did a search on google and this is one of the first links I found: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/13/rick-santorum/rick-santorum/ It sounds like the numbers aren't as high as 42%, but it makes sense that if you have half the earners in a family, they'll have less to work with. Again though, I think this is an argument that our system needs improvement, if welfare was taken away these numbers would likely be higher.

I think this for AMD's APU processors. For gaming enthusiasts, this isn't going to mean a whole lot, but for the general market this is a much bigger deal because it means you could have cheap systems shipping with capable GPUs built as part of the processor. The main competitor to this is Intel integrated graphics, which is crap for anything related to 3D.