Ross Scott

For what it's worth, I encountered minor stuttering on CCCP (though I used CCCP 2 years ago on XP without any problems), K-Lite, and the CoreAVC trial on MPC-HC when doing testing . The only solution I've found so far that's worked (thanks to a viewer helping me out) was using MPC-HC with the MadVR renderer, and even THEN after unchecking the "present several frames in advance" option or it. As he explained it to me, this has to do with some Direct3D functions and how they're called. It's likely Nvidia's drivers are a culprit in this, I'm just glad I was able to sort it out. I'll check out Potplayer though and do some tests on it to see how it performs, I hadn't heard of that one before.

Hey everybody, I have a small update for Halloween. I don't have any new videos, but I'm far enough along with the encoding process to release the MKV copies of some of the earlier videos. My original plan was to release "Diary of A Zombie", "Halloween Safety", and "The Tunnel" for a Halloween-themed release in high-quality x264 MKV format, so you could see all the detail. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the revised audio back from the finalists in time for Diary of a Zombie, Halloween Safety gave me an error when trying to open the original source file in Windows 7, but The Tunnel worked! So below here is a re-release of The Tunnel: Download "Civil Protection: The Tunnel" 1280x720 MKV (250MB) So not as Halloween-ish as I hoped, but 1 out of 3 I guess is better than nothing. I think the quality is quite good on this copy, however I ran into some minor errors for EVERY method I tried for x264 encoding when using VLC Player to play it back. The setting I decided on resulted in the least amount of visual errors, but there still are some small ones when using that player. I'll be slowly rolling out MKV copies of other videos (including the past 2 FM episodes) as I get around to it. I'm pretty impressed with the visual quality from x264 encoding, so if you don't like the format, I recommend checking the forums to see if anyone wants to convert these to other formats. In other news, my throat is mostly healed, so I plan to start again on the next Freeman's Mind soon, and I also hope to get the sound editing contest resolved soon as well. Beyond that, everything I work on feels like a giant spinner I turn to figure out what I'll do next.

Well the problem with oil sands is that the EROEI is way lower than normal oil extraction. Even if we removed all obstacles and extracted as much as possible, it would never meet even our daily level of consumption. It will buy some time, but it's nothing resembling a solution. The most immediate energy problem we'll be facing will be from oil, not from electric power generation. The majority (about 2/3) of oil goes towards fuel. What I think is likely to happen is we could start having a real oil crisis because of a decline in production, but still have the ability to produce plenty of electricity. Not that electricity generation in the future isn't an issue, but I consider it a separate and less immediate one.

Actually everything I've read indicates that even if the electricity is being produced via coal, the amount of pollution from an electric car is less than or roughly equal to what would be produced via gasoline. And this is a worst-case scenario coal plant, not one with secondary scrubbers, etc. Regardless, I see the pollution as a secondary issue. The larger one is that our society is incredibly dependent on oil and I think we'll start seeing a decline for it in a few years, with not having any real solution in sight. Having a giant switch to electric cars isn't an end-all solution, but it could buy a lot of time.

While I'm not a parkour expert or anything, I've done a lot of climbing before. If you climb up by giving yourself a vertical jump boost as you're doing it, it will help push most of your weight up (so you don't have to lift your entire weight) assuming the gripping point is low enough. Once you can get up enough to have your stomach over the point, you can kind of scramble upright from that carefully. The only space you really "need" is for one foot and at least the side for one hand. Regardless, what I wanted to do was just stack the dog containers, but the game wouldn't let me move them.

Download 848x480 MKV (108MB) Here is the much-delayed episode 39. I like this one if just for the fact that it finally ends the seemingly never-ending factory sections (for now anyway). For some reason, I started having a lot more ideas once I got out of the factory section of the game. For those that haven't played the game before, the upcoming episodes will have a lot more of the environment to "interact" with, so that makes things easier for me. While the filming is more or less done, voicework won't resume on Episode 40 until my throat gets better. Also it looks like the color got skewed on Youtube again, it feels like a dice toss these days as to how that will turn out, but the downloadable copy should look correct once I encode that.

People have protested (or revolted rather) for centuries, before corporations existed. It doesn't make the protest possible, but I agree the irony is pretty thick, I like that picture. How about a situation where you have two major competitors for a single product, but both are so powerful, neither can really overtake the other. So instead of competing, they enter an agreement where they'll both raise prices on their products by 15%, thus making their profits much higher. Do you consider this ethical? Some countries have laws against price fixing like this, others don't. When it happens, it's hands-down a very effective way to maximize profit over normal competition. There's loads of real-life scenarios similar to this, generally look at cities that had a large manufacturing industry about 30 years ago. Places like Detroit, Cleveland, Grand Rapids, have all been hit very hard economically because of manufacturing industries pulling out. Yes, the demand gets met, but it gets met in other countries where labor laws are more lax and thus the average standard of living for employees of the company goes down. Well this part is easy, sure, pull out of the town, but wherever they open up, have equal working conditions as to where they pulled out of. So if you were paying the robotics guy $15 an hour and gave him health coverage, then give the Mexican workers $15 an hour and health coverage. Yes there are, here are some objective "goods" for society: -Access to clean water -Access to affordable housing -Access to affordable food -Access to affordable waste disposal / sewage -Access to affordable heating / lighting / electricity -Access to affordable health care -Access to affordable education -Protection against crime -Some sort of safety net for people unable to work or find work -Being able to afford leisure time There's plenty of others, but the things people need to survive and services / comforts that a modern civilization can easily afford its citizens is a good place to start. Since the government doesn't provide all those things, many people depend on wages to try and achieve them. By lowering the standards for workers, it jeopardizes more people from having all of these things. As for whom and what it's good for, it's good for the happiness and survival of the entire population living in an area. All these things are frequently NOT always good for maximizing profit margins. If you think these are subjective goods and not objective ones, I would love to hear who you think should NOT be entitled to those things. It's a contributor to his problems, but I'd say it's easily not the source of them. I think the source is that he can't afford all those societal "goods" I discussed before for his family, and that's with he, his wife, and later his children all being very hard workers and spending almost their entire waking lives working. For me, "The Jungle" represents largely unbridled capitalism. In the book, interference from the government with business is minimal (I don't remember any at all, but I read it two years ago), there's competing industries, and they all offer equally shitty conditions, management is far, far wealthier than the working class, and the populace is largely in poverty and engaged in wage slavery. I'd say it's a paradise for pure capitalists; you have cheap, cheap labor, a fair market to compete on, and there's basically no regulation for how you operate your business. I said UNBRIDLED Capitalism, in other words, capitalism with basically no limits other than the free market. Taken to extremes, it doesn't FORCE things directly, but it can directly impact and incentivize the majority of a population to work harder for less money, thus lowering the standard of living and quality of life for the majority. Now granted, quality of life is subjective, but I think we can agree that it's better to get paid $9 an hour (assuming the company can EASILY afford it) than 30 cents an hour, and better to have the option of working 8 hours a day or less, than only 12 or more. Alright, let's focus on water companies then. Suppose the government no longer is in charge of water purification. A company moves into a town and sets up a water purification service, based on demand. After they're established, they do market research to determine that they will maximize profits if they charge prices that only 90% of the local population can afford. Other companies look at this region, but decide to dismiss it, because while they could open up a competing facility at lower prices, the initial overhead would lead to a profit loss for at least 10 years, so they all decide it's not worth it since the existing company is already there. So 90% of the population has water to drink, and the remaining 15% have to use the river, which is polluted. How does privatization provide for these bottom 10%? Are they simply on their own and don't receive clean drinking water? I can listen to the audio when I run, but I won't be doing that until I'm no longer sick. It was mainly the dialogue in Atlas Shrugged that drove me crazy, the rest I figured was worth reading since it's such a famous book.

You're right, I overlooked some aspects of this example, but it's a common scenario and I think one that illustrates how the class divide can larger. I put a "small" number for the CEO since the majority of the income boost is likely to go to shareholders. But even then, that I think moves the overall wealth more towards the upper end of the spectrum, I was able to find an article that shows the divide: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/11/17/who-owns-the-stock-market.aspx Upper class earners almost certainly see benefits from larger stock values, middle class earners, perhaps. Most of the middle class isn't involved with stocks directly, though some may have retirement funds, pensions, or some limited stock options given to them from their employers. The working class is lucky to have any excess cash at all, let alone to be thinking about stocks, so they don't see much if any benefit from that. There are many, many variables at work in a situation like this, but I think you can make a strong case that a practice like this leads to a shrinking middle class, a richer upper class, and harsher working conditions for the average global employee.

Hey, you can take the Craig Mengel challenge! Craig (voice of Dave on CP) is a political science major, working towards his Master's degree, and he challenges any anarchists out there to play the computer game STALKER then afterwards still say you support anarchy. While it does have fictional things like mutants and anomalies, he considers it a great anarchy simulator.

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.