Ross Scott

Michael Archer: I seem to be getting this vibe from you that if you're a business or corporation, and you obey the letter of the law, you can do no wrong. If I'm misunderstanding, let me know. Some of the scenarios I've described I would consider unethical behavior, even if they're 100% legal. What sort of behavior by a corporation would you consider unethical, even if they're perfectly within their rights / the law to do it? I think this might better help me understand your perspective. Well Exxon-Mobil made 15 billion in 2009, and paid no U.S. income tax General Electric made almost 11 billion in 2010 and also paid no U.S. income tax but I agree, just saying "more" doesn't really help anything. I think they're implying that currently the 99% have LESS rights than the highest-earning 1%. I personally believe a substantial portion of our Congress has more loyalty to lobbyists supplying millions to their campaign than it does to actual voters. It makes sense in a way, since without all that money, it's difficult to get elected, but I think it's become more of a mess It seems to me that they want socialism, with all the benefits of capitalism i.e. they want government support for the 99% and they want the corporations to be heavily regulated and taxed (i.e. punished for being good), but they still want the jobs and the products that the corporations make. Well there's a difference between creating wealth and extracting it. In my scenario, I believe it's being extracted (explained below). Creating wealth would be something like working a mine and discovering a mineral deposit, or working a tract of land and using it to grow crops. In those cases, wealth is genuinely being created. And I totally understand your point regarding workers and it's valid, but I think there are other factors to consider as well. I agree that there shouldn't be a right to a job, but I also think it's important to consider the motivations in this scenario. If a corporation is based and founded in the USA and has been in operation in a town like that for some 30 years, it could be argued that there's some sense of dependence of the town on the company. While that's nothing sacred, it's worth considering. What I think is more important, is if this shift in workers is done during a time when the company is having record profits. So by closing the American factories and moving things to Mexico, the money saved goes straight to the upper management. The company may save 350 million, the CEO gets a 10 million dollar bonus, etc. So the rich get richer. I have no problem with that if that's ALL it means, but this isn't a vacuum. The workers in that town are largely ruined financially, so they all get poorer. In Mexico, it's true the workers have gained some prosperity, but now the standards have changed. The company now only has to pay them a third of what they were paying the workers in the U.S. They may not need to provide health care or other benefits anymore. The workers may now be required to work 12+ hours instead of 8. This is exactly how the middle class is eroded. Look at the net result of this scenario: -A small number of already wealthy people in upper management get even richer -the company becomes even more valuable -thousands of people get economically devastated -a lesser number of people (since they won't need to hire as many now) do have better lives, since their previous conditions were likely very impoverished -the standard of living for workers overall has been lowered From a utilitarian perspective, the amount of societal "good" has been lowered. While I think the Mexicans are just as deserving as Americans, I also feel the standards for working for the company should also be the same. If you've ever read or are familiar with "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, this illustrates the problem I have with complete unbridled capitalism. It has a tendency to marginalize workers' rights so that the only people of value are those that will work their absolute hardest for the lowest amount of pay. Well this is a more radical perspective, but I can understand that. Let me ask though, where should the funding come from for having clean water, a fire department, a police department, public schools, public roads, etc. if it's not coming from taxes? I guess this wasn't the best example. What I was really thinking of is when millions (or billions) of dollars of profit come at the expense of finding ways that people should NOT be given health care coverage (excluding fraud obviously) this system strikes me as harmful to people overall. I think you might be missing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about Starbucks opening up a store next to them and competing that way, that's perfectly fair. I'm talking about a Starbucks management decision where they decide this area is very valuable, but they can't compete with this local store on quality or price, but because they're bigger, they open a cluster of 4 stores around them, all of which are operating at a loss, with the sole goal of putting this local store out of business. The local store can hold out, but with 4 Starbucks all around them, only the most loyal customers will support them, which isn't enough for them to survive long-term. Eventually, the local store goes out of business. Afterwards, Starbucks shuts down the other 3 stores, since they're unprofitable and their only real purpose was to weaken the competing store. It's not a matter of the company being "better", it's a matter of them being more powerful. Well the blackmail portion would be that vendors would not receive the massive discount if they also sold AMD cpu's. Really it's a different flavor of the starbucks situation, not winning because your product or service is better / cheaper, but because you're more powerful.

The protests are a gathering place for everybody who's mad about anything at all. They have no cohesive or coherent message, according to their own website. They're still looking for a consensus on "what we should think." They're not going to find one. Some of them are probably more damaging to the cause than others: http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-types-wall-street-protesters-hurting-their-own-cause/ That cracked.com article is well written. I like the links at the beginning, since that hones back more to the points I was making, but the rest of the article also points out the downfalls; I didn't realize the protests as a whole were as incoherent as they were. This isn't a matter of random people just complaining and there not being a real issue, it's that the legitimate points behind it may be getting thoroughly muddied by the catch-all "supporters." Like the author, I also thought it was odd that this was focused on wall street and not in Washington D.C.

I have news on several items. First off, I JUST received the audio back from Otto for the next Freeman's Mind episode. I still have to do final processing on everything, but I'm pretty sure I can have it completed and sent to Machinima.com in the next 24 hours. After that it will go up whenever it works out for their scheduling. My apologies this episode took so long. It took me a while, it took Otto a while, then I didn't get as far ahead on the next episode as I intended. Second, while I'm guessing some of you may not believe me due to the timing, I've come down sick with something in the past day or two that's gone after my throat. It's currently painful for me to speak for more than a few seconds, making more voice recording not an option right now. I'll resume recording on the next FM as soon as my throat is better. Third, things may not be so great on the code end of things for the Source engine (again). I did get in contact with Valve, and the last email I received from them said that while it would take them a while to release a bug fix of the code officially, they could hook me up with a part of the code that fixes the stuttering of animations during demo playback. Unfortunately that was over a month ago. I've been sending them a check-in email each week since then, with no reply. While I suppose I'm the last person to criticize others of being late on emails (considering my current backlog), if someone is emailing me once a week as a reminder about something I already said I would help them with, I would almost certainly respond in a more timely manner. Anyway, I hope the employee I'm in touch with is just busy and will get back to me, but I may have to figure out alternatives in the meantime. Fourth, I still have plenty of other things to catch up on. Round two of reviewing the sound editing contestants, finalizing the MKV tests, getting more things (like broken links) fixed on the website, and catching up on emails. The next post here will likely be the sound contest winners or else FM #39.

I recently acquired a copy of the soundtrack to The Man With One Red Shoe if you're interested. This one is rare as hell, you can't even buy it; I have no idea how the guy I got in touch with got a copy of it.

On the chart you sent, they show the 6970M as 2,614 marks, and the 560M as 1,298. Now granted, this doesn't measure them in crossfire / SLI, but that puts the 6970M as basically double the speed of the 560M.

Well that's part of the point, is that middle class has been shrinking over the past several decades. Besides even in the middle ages you had tradesman. A blacksmith wouldn't have been the same status as a serf. It depends, the link can sometimes be complicated to draw out. For instance, is someone making a lot of money harming you in these scenarios: -You have a grandmother depending on Medicaid. Lobbyists hired by a corporation push to have drastic tax cuts so they can increase their profit margin even farther. The government votes for this and has to make up the money somewhere, so her check gets cut in half from removing funding. -You work at an automotive factory maintaining the robotics used in the assembly, this factory employs most of the town. The car company ends up shutting down everything, doesn't pay benefits, moves the entire operation to Mexico where they can operate at a third of the price due to more lax labor laws. The company was already making record profits and doing this causes the CEO to receive an extra 15 million dollar bonus, leaving 30,000 people unemployed in a town it's been operating in for the past 30 years. -A company is able to funnel their earnings to offshore banking operations so that they don't pay taxes in the places they are operating in, or severely less than any individual would. Because of this, the state no longer has the funding it was depending on and ends up having to close some libraries and cut the funds for public schools in half. -A health insurance company wants to raise their earnings by 500 million this year, up from earnings of 4.2 billion in order to keep shareholders happy. In order to achieve this, they become more aggressive concerning who they will provide coverage too. Any technicality that may have been overlooked in the past will no longer be covered. So you get in a car accident with a medical bill of $50,000 and are expecting coverage, but because you forgot to mention that you have sleep apnea on your application form, your coverage is denied. This isn't really a comparable situation. Given this analogy, it would be more like half the class is already busting their ass and have the answers correct, but one student not only paid the teacher to give him all A's, but also went further saying that she'll have to flunk 20% more of the class, regardless of what their answers are. I saw this quote before in another forum: "A tremendous number of people have been raised and conditioned all their life to believe in what George Carlin would rather sarcastically refer to as the "American Dream". They don't have sufficient knowledge of how things really work, and/or the critical thinking skills, to consider how many of the rich white men got rich. In their mind, their instinctive grasp of the situation is that every one of those bankers and hedge fund managers is a genius who rolled his sleeves up, took a hammer to a pile of lumber, and personally built this business empire by himself and is justly rewarded by the founding fathers and God." You mention "hard honest work" and "producers", that really doesn't describe the biggest players in this. What does a company like AIG produce? The majority of their income comes from manipulating stocks. This contributes practically nothing to society. I think it depends on your definition of "good." In my mind there should be more practices that should be illegal and enforced as such. For example if a Starbucks opens up 4 stores in a cluster around a local coffee shop, operating at a loss, then after the local shop goes out of business, they pull back and shut down the other stores so that they only have one again, it might be smart business, but I consider it a little unethical. Or back about 10 years ago, where Intel sold their chips to vendors below cost on the condition that they not buy any from AMD, so they could kneecap them and prevent them from gaining market share, I also consider that unethical. It's hard to compete against a larger company when they're essentially blackmailing vendors and selling their products below cost.

It means some of those things. I don't think anyone rational is arguing about someone making more than someone else, but there's some perspective too. Here's the most recent graph showing wealth distribution in the United States, recently updated: Note: In the "Actual" line, the bottom two quintiles are not visible because the lowest quintile owns just 0.1% of all wealth, and the second-lowest quintile owns 0.2%. Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20120052-503544.html This graph may not mean much to you, although I found this video: If you don't feel like watching it, the short version that strictly in terms of wealth distribution, the current level of wealth distribution in the United States is practically identical with feudalism during the Middle Ages. That's not exactly a progressive thing. Things haven't always been this way, it's been a steady shift in this direction for the past several decades. The economic injustice means a very small percentage of people are controlling an unprecedented level of wealth, to the point that it's having serious social impacts on society and the population as a whole is largely powerless to influence it. In practical terms, this translates to many, many side effects. Rising unemployment, many Americans who cannot afford health care, a collapse of many social services, having your wages cut, having your retirement cut or eliminated, etc. A lot of harm to society is coming out of this shift in overall wealth. This is just a more extremist view of one of the protestors. The economic changes that are occurring affect over 99% of the population in a negative way, regardless of whether they're protesting or not.

If the majority had voted for MP4, I would have gone with that. I don't use Apple hardware, so I don't have a strong opinion on it one way or the other. While the results of the tests were all over the damn place, I actually saw some posts / emails / can't remember where people had smooth playback with MKV, but not MP4. Who knows. The workload for me increases exponentially for each additional format I add, because that's some 50+ videos I'll have to convert. Since H264 offers the highest quality for the space, I'll be releasing the videos as MKV, then users can convert them to whatever they want. I actually hope to modify the website so that additional users can submit mirrors in any format they want.

Vapymid: This basically reflects my own attitude on this. There's not a sole group responsible for this situation, nor is there one clear solution. I think the most fundamental problem of this is the influence of corporate lobbying in modern government, but I also think it's more complicated than that. Doom Shepard: I don't think people with their heads in the clouds is an especially new trend. In fact, I believe Generation X was characterized by having unrealistic expectations for their careers and had a lot of difficulty obtaining jobs. I don't think that's at the core of what's happening here. Our current wealth distribution is similar to what existed under Feudalism. As for who is to blame for this, this is my general thought process on that: 1. Well Wall Street and corporate America has gouged our economic livelihood and profiteering at the expense of 99% of the populace, except 2. That's what business people DO, most successful businesses today operate on greed to some extent, this is expected. If you fuck people over, but maximize profit, that just means you're a good businessman. That's why we have government and laws to try and stop the most egregious practices and try and restore some balance to society, except 3. You can make the argument that much of our current government is halfway run by corporate interests and lobbyists now, except 4. The representatives got voted in there somehow, by us as a people, so that would be our fault except 5. Politics are such a mess now, you don't really have great candidates, even less so in a two party system. For me personally, I feel like neither party is capable of handling the changes I think government needs for the future until after-the-fact. Hell, my ideal governing system that could handle the problems I think we're likely to face in the next decade are closer to something out of science-fiction. So that's not a realistic alternative unless 6. Things get so out of control that the only avenue left IS radical action, but who really wants to go that route unless you have nothing to lose? Besides, I think the individual is practically helpless to bringing about a meaningful change, it has to be on a massive group scale. Except: 7. In its current state, these protests aren't scaring nearly enough powerful people to have a long-lasting impact in my opinion. This whole thing is a mess. So I guess you could say we're all to blame, but not because of work ethic. Whether you work hard at a job or not doesn't really impact any of this on a macro-level. I'm also unsure what or if there is a practical solution to this, but the protests are definitely an interesting reflection of the current state of society.

I actually had no knowledge of who the moderator was, Jexius (or Nagisa or whatever he's calling himself now) just told me there was someone he had in mind that had experience with the forum, a lot of moderators were inactive, so I said sure. In general I want level-headed people who won't incite a lot of aggravation from people as a moderator. If you feel like any moderators don't fit that description, or feel like someone else is a prime candidate, you can let me know; though I'd prefer a well-explained court-case style argument with post examples backing up your claims.

This guy is screwing up his facts and/or math somewhere. First off, I saw this comment from that same page: "This is stupid and poorly thought out. First you include the caveat that this is about households. Then you use spurious statistics like 1 in 10 americans are millionaires when you just said it was about HOUSEHOLDS. Since there are 300 million people and you said there are 100 million households, the real statistic is 1 in THIRTY people." So that means his math is flat out incorrect, regardless of the real data. As for that number, I think it's still inflated. I found this on wikipedia, this pretty much lays it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States In 2005 that showed about 1.5% of people earning over 250k. That is just income however. Still, the thought of 1 in 10 people being a millionaire feels like a fantasy. The article doesn't specify how he quantifies being a millionaire. I think income combined with all assets you would STILL have trouble getting those numbers. Maybe if you combined the entire payout value of retirement pensions you MIGHT get those numbers. Afterall, if you work a 33k job for 30 years, that's about a million dollars.

I thought this was worth mentioning, it's been going on a while now: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/10/earlyshow/main20118005.shtml The short version is a bunch of people nationally are protesting economic inequality and other miscellaneous grievances. In general, the top 20% of people in America control about 85% of the wealth. To look at another way, it's a protest on behalf of 99% of Americans over how much government influence the richest 1% has. If you earn less than $350,000 a year, you're in that 99%. I put this under the Civilization Problems section since I think this is a reflection of potentially major impending economic problems the USA is facing. Personally I don't think much will come from these protests directly, though I'm cynical. I think our current political process is too deadlocked to accomplish much of anything significant. From the Democrat side, I don't think I've heard any proposals that sound like anything more than a band-aid to try and address financial inequality problems, from the Republican side, I'm not aware of any sort of proposals that would seek to address this. Anyway, it's good there is some kind of social awareness of this issue, though it doesn't seem especially guided. In its current state, I think the most that will come from this is to skew voting results some for 2012. If they start burning buildings, maybe we'll see something change though.

Well a few weeks ago you told me it WASN'T possible, the complaints kept escalating, so then I decided to take more final action on it by the time I was told it was possible again.

It was sent to Otto about a week and a half ago, he'll be working on the sound editing while I'll be working on Episode 40.

Well I've reviewed all the entries for the sound contest and I think I'm just a picky bastard in that none of them jump out at me as a clear winner, though some of them are close. I've gone and emailed all the contestants and a few have been eliminated. The rest I've written up a list of things each person could do to improve their mixes. I think after another round of revising we'll have a clear winner. My attention to detail on this may seem excessive, but it's nothing I wouldn't do myself. Work continues on the videos and I hope to have some more work started on improvements to the website (including broken links) sometime soon. As for the video releases, for those that have a preference, people seem to favor MKV over MP4 almost 2:1, so I plan to be transitioning to that. From the feedback I received, there seems to be NO consistency with what stutters on people's computers. It's almost like each format is different for every person. MKV at least has the advantage of being one of the highest quality options, so even if you don't like the format, you'll be working with a better source if you want to convert it to something else. Also if you prefer the existing WMV copies of the videos for some reason, I recommend grabbing them now, because I plan to take them down later and replace them with the higher quality .MKV files.

This is the first game I've ever pre-ordered (if it counts that way since it's pre-alpha). Just the feature list alone had me hooked. My main complaint right now is that I can't play it in fullscreen. I found this link, but the link provided doesn't even connect to anything now. It is pre-alpha though, so I'll probably just wait to play it until that becomes a standard feature.

Really when the forum was created, I just added in signatures because that's generally what people expect in a forum. I don't use them myself in other forums and I think most of what's on a signature would be better for a person's profile page. After seeing huge images and lots of animations since, I've kind of regretted having that. For me, forums are all about information and communication and seeing pictures everywhere (of anything) can interfere with that. Many forums don't even have signatures or avatars, it's not unheard of. I'm trying to appease the majority of people for things I don't have a strong opinion on, signatures were initially like that. The majority of the complaints I was getting were about the images and not MLP, but a significant portion was about that. As for the ponies, even without the complaints (but especially because of them), I'm still not sure what to make of this. What I DID notice was that on multiple threads I was interested in reading, I was seeing 20+ pony pictures per page, when the discussion had nothing to do with that. I was seeing so many pony pictures just from signatures, avatars, etc. that it was outnumbering every other kind of picture type. Since I'm not interested in ponies, living or otherwise, this felt rather weird to see on my forum. So even though people were just expressing themselves, the reality was the forums here were getting flooded with pony pictures, which isn't what I want the forum to be about. It's the same thing if these forums had pictures of marijuana leaves all over them, moreso than any other kind of image. It's not related to the videos, it's not related to my own interests, yet it's somehow dominating my own forum. Anyway, I think removing the signatures makes all of this a non-issue, makes the forums more readable (for me at least), and makes it so I don't have to ostracize any group, which is a losing battle in itself. Today people are upset over ponies, tomorrow it's PETA, the next day it's ewoks, etc. This makes things less of a headache for me so hopefully I have more time to focus on the videos themselves. I'm happy for everyone to watch my videos who are interested in them, regardless of whatever else they're interested in.

Look, you're not the one getting 2+ emails a day complaining about the signatures, with a significant portion of them about My Little Pony. I have plenty of other legitimate emails (about 200) I'm behind on without having to add all these as well. The large signatures in general I wasn't fond of and was told weeks ago it wasn't a fixable situation (though that stance was changed recently). Regardless, it puts me in a position to defend something I don't really care about in the first place. I'd rather focus more on getting more videos out, cleaning up the website, and adding functionality to it. As for the ponies, I don't really understand the burning desire to post them everywhere, but I can understand the perspective of the people complaining about them that they seemed to be saturating the forum. I remember looking at a few general threads and in some of them it looked like half the images, many of them large and / or animated, were of ponies. At that point, the pony pictures are becoming spam, which I don't like. So I'm asking that you don't create manual image signatures to circumvent this, it only recreates the original problem. If you're hellbent on posting irrelevant pictures to every post, you'll be banned for spamming. This whole situation has become way bigger of a deal than it should be. The forum is for taking about topics you're interested in. Signatures are being removed, it's not the end of the world.

The reality is MANY people will be using VLC player, so I tested it with VLC Player and MPC-HC with the Matroska Splitter. I tried to make this as compatible as possible using the "High Profile" setting, I found that almost ANY deviation from this resulted in minor errors in VLC Player. I was using Handbrake to do the encoding, but I'm still new to x264 encoding. Thus, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by the level 4.1. By all means recommend a better encoder / settings I can test out. Also if I have to use a commandline encoder, it would be highly preferable for me to have some sort of frontend. I don't think so, the results show that the majority of people here don't seem to have a preference as to how it's released. If 70% of people voted for "none of the above", I'd stop considering these formats and figure out what people wanted. People seem divided or to not care about this, so I'm trying to find an option that's high quality and at least semi-compatible with a lot of things.

Yeah, they got taken down, then Jexius suggested text-only signatures, so I said okay, so now they all seem to be enabled again like before. I think he may have gone to sleep, so I guess this will get resolved later.

Some of the complaints were about that, I'm not really sure what to make of it myself, when about half the threads here have been covered in pony pictures seeing as how none of the videos have anything to do with ponies.

Hey, I'm guessing this is going to piss people off, but I've decided to remove signatures from the forum. I was getting several complaints about the sizes of them and the animations being distracting and I generally agreed. I tried to get the sizes lowered, but there was some trouble with that for a few weeks and I'd rather not receive a complaint or two a day on this, since I was kind of indifferent on it in the first place. Sorry if this disappoints people, though ideally people will be focusing on what's being said instead of the signatures anyway.