Vapymid

You seem to be saying that wealth is created by individuals, irrespective of the society in which they live. I say it's wrong. Without society there can be no wealth in the first place. Wages are your direct costs, wealth is equity, a surplus. The society has costs which cannot directly be attributed to individuals in the form of specific charges and fees, yet those costs must be covered. The source of funds for this is the equity attained by individuals. If you ever run a business of your own you will know what I mean as in most businesses it is impossible to attribute each cost to individual employee/product/desk. Furthermore, to develop itself the society needs investment. The source of funding for that is the same - the net worth of individuals. Finally, I understand that in your view each individual must have the absolute right to decide how much of his equity he wants to spend or reinvest and in what. Just like in corporations, there are cost and profit centres in the operation of societies (countries). And just like in corporations it is inefficient, impractical and unfeasible to let individual profit cetnres to solely decide how much of their profits, if at all, they would agree to transfer to cover the costs of specific cost centres. That's why both countries and businesses must have central management, which takes a view of the entire operation and then decides on allocation of resources. Regards

Which in turn constitutes a belief (as there is no objective proof one way or the other). Regards

Yes, the rest of the Middle East too, of course. With the amount of meddling by the Europeans (Britain, France, Russia), by Turkey, by the US, that whole area is a mess and all of these countries bear at least some responsibility for that. But the past is past and it can't be changed whereas the future can, if people will try to think by their heads instead of by their asses. Oh, and stop believing everything they hear on TV... I don't know. You should not ever take these analogies literally but I think this particular one is quite apposite. What about the restaurant, anyway? Portions here in Europe are not like in the US - there is no danger of exploding, no matter what you order (you can burst into flames if you order certain type of curry, though). Also, I see you disagree with my suggestion that "There is no such war [on terror]. There is a blitz of paranoia known under that name, which has been politically exploited for many years to push through otherwise politically difficult legislation and to justify more pork barrels for the defence industry." Do you have evidence to the contrary? Regards

"The power of what has been before" CrHGELlFskA Regards

That means your Frapps capture is already compressed using another codec. What type of file is produced? AVI? Open it with GSpot - it should give you detailed information about the parameters of the video and audio and compression used. Regards

Wealth is meaningless without a society which gives value to things and concepts. You can try to sell iPads to prehistoric aboriginals but for them they would be of very little value. You society gave you the education, roads, history, arts, security of the borders (kind of ), law and order. What you give back is a share of the value you received from other members in exchange for the fruits of your labour. Once you received your income, economically it has crystallised as funds available for spending or reinvestment. The society then requires you to spend a portion of these funds in a certain way for a "common benefit". There are three issues here: 1) paying taxes to the state as a matter of principle, 2) the magnitude of such taxes and what is the base for their calculation, 3) spending tax money already collected by the state (on what and how much). The necessity of number 1 is unquestionable, the numbers 2 and 3 are open and subject to (never ending) debates. And so they should be. Regards

That makes two of us Price fixing and free market are mutually exclusive. If you have one you cannot have the other. If price fixing is allowed the market is no longer free. Can you please clarify what do you mean by "price fixing"? I don't see any contradiction in terms. Dictatorship or any other method of governance does not automatically invalidate the state's right to existence. There is a whole body of international law which governs relationships between states. If a dictatorship is within these laws and someone will attack it in breach of these laws the dictatorial state will have the high moral ground. OK, so it may have an interest in the region, but that in itself cannot justify it invading another country. In this we appear to be in agreement. Except that I would also add "It would be immoral to send our boys to die in a country that we have no legal or moral rights to invade". Civilisation does not equal morality. Just because a society thinks of itself as civilised does not a) automatically mean it is and b) prevent it from acting as a savage itself. There is no such war. There is a blitz of paranoia known under that name, which has been politically exploited for many years to push through otherwise politically difficult legislation and to justify more pork barrels for the defence industry. But the actual war there isn't. Few half-hearted neo-colonial expeditions to countries with very hot climate and full of angry people hardly qualify as a "war" especially as "war on terror" (which is technically impossible anyway). What would your reaction be if you would be told that from today a bunch of "Occupy here or there" protesters will take over a few rooms in your house and live in it as lawful tenants and, no, you have no say on the matter? The whole Israel debacle is a case how not to build new states. It's a political failure of the "civilised" Western world (to which I would also add Russia/USSR) of massive proportions. To blame it solely on some "uncivilised barbarians" will be to deceive ourselves... Regards

If you want to retain the best quality for further edits/processing then I would suggest to use HuffYUV 2.1.1 http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HuffYUV If will reduce the data size to about 50% of the uncompressed RGB footage if you set it to "Convert RGB to YUY2". If will be practically lossless (only have the colourspace conversion errors, which you will probably end up with anyway subsequently downstream in your editing process). The good thing about HuffYUV is it is very quick in both encoding and decoding, so editing will be easy on your computer resources. If you use other codecs - such as MJPEG, high profile high level MPEG2 or MPEG4 (h263, h264, AVC etc) the compression will be increasingly lossy and processing-intensive, especially h264/AVC but will reduce your data rates significantly. If your computer and editing package can handle such compression/decompression in (near)real time you can go that way, otherwise I would recommend HuffYUV. Note that if you use high-compression codec at high bitrates (depends on the resolution of your video captures) for your source material then you need not worry too much about quality loss during re-encoding of your final output video. Regards

The problem seems to be that the script writers and movie directors usually have no idea what is and isn't important for a game-based movie because they never played the actual game themselves... Regards

At school our philosophy teacher used to illustrate it by drawing a small circle on the blackboard. Inside the circle was what we know, outside - what we don't know and the perimeter is what we realise we don't know. As our knowledge grows so is the interface between known and unknown becoming bigger. Fractal? Quite possibly. I like that idea. On the scientific method - we can theorise about what we have not yet empirically confirmed, beyond that we can hypothesise, beyond that we can speculate and further yet it's a matter of belief. Until the circle expands. Regards

Speaking about Winds of Change CPlxBA1o4OQ Regards

Alyxx is right, it's a habit, comes instinctive to me now, like putting full stop at the end of a sentence... Regards

OK, here is a metaphysical proposition on the issue of being and existence: We all exist within a computer simulation run on hyper-computer, capable of parallel processing of interactions between each individual subatomic particle in real time. The c (speed of light) is then determined by the processing power of the machine. The scope of the simulation - maybe a hundred galaxies wide, maybe a thousand. The rest is a pre-programmed skybox. We have no way of knowing if that true or not unless the builders of the machine provided a specific way for us to find out. Could be a basis for a Sci-Fi novel... Possible ending: Administrator: "Professor! Our Board of Trustees has been greatly impressed by your achievements! I have it on a good authority that the Supreme Leader himself is closely following your progress. The implications of your research for our defence industry are tremendous and they have put our Facility to the forefront of the Funding Committee's priority list." Operator: "Ahh... about that cat..." Administrator: "What cat?" Operator: "Mr. Shroedinger's one..." Professor: "That's nothing to worry about, we have made major strides since then. Major strides!" Administrator, taking Professor by the elbow and walking with him to a quiet corner of the Ops Room, away from the Control Console: "But Professor, there is one matter... I trust you were not under, eh, false impression, that in our tough times, you know, with the economy in tatters and our neighbours behaving, let's say, erratically, you know... That we could afford to fund running of your simulation indefinitely? Good, I thought as much!" Professor: ?!!! Regards

@Doom Shepherd: I don't mind aggression and I am prepared to escalate my argument to match the aggression of the other party but I don't like it because aggression (or other strong emotions) tend to obfuscate the issues at the heart of the debate. Regards

@Blue: you don't need to apologise, there was no offence. I was simply a bit annoyed at the suggestion that I've been wasting everybody's time by trolling around. Your seat belt analogy is not directly applicable - here it is a matter of trust rather than faith. You can, if you want, test reliability of the mechanism and the strength of the belt objectively, using scientific methods. With faith you accept concepts which cannot (for the time being or ever) be tested objectively. Now, this: is what I've been trying to say all along, but not only this. Let me recap my points: - God cannot come into being after the appearance of the Universe and still be God (otherwise he will just be a superior life form, one of many), therefore if God exists he must be greater than this Universe, hence the question really is "what appeared first - mind (God) or matter (no God)". - An objective answer to this question is not possible, therefore both Theism and Atheism are equally the matters of faith. - If God exists, he created the Universe the way it is by setting its fundamental laws in a certain way at the time of creation. Anything that is happening since is subject to these fundamental laws, including existence of life, intelligence and the aspects of human behaviour. If God does not exist, the Universe has appeared spontaneously with just the right settings of the same fundamental laws. - There is no process that we humans can effect within this Universe which will violate its fundamental laws, therefore there cannot be such things as "playing God" or "unnatural actions" (there still is a concept of "artificial", which is not the same as "unnatural"). Anything we can do we will do within the Universal laws, which, if we assume that God exists, were predetermined by God and therefore allowed and natural. - That does not mean that there is no difference between "bad" and "good" events and actions as "good" and "bad" are subjective, human, interpretations of specific aspects of objective reality. - Because the concepts of "good" and "bad" or "evil" are rooted in objective reality, it is logical to assume that related concepts, such as morality, can also be objectively established. That implies existence of universal morality, which will be the same for all humans (and, indeed, any lifeforms) across the Universe. - none of the above invalidates any particular religion, be it Christianity, Islam or Atheism (where everything within the Universe still holds, only the origin of the Universe changes), in as much as the premises of such religion are based on the said fundamental morality. However, when specific propositions put forward by a particular religion come into conflict with objective reality, as tested by the scientific method, they must no longer be accepted as literal truth. Regards

Quite the opposite. I am trying not to be distracted by either side's propaganda and parochial infighting and look at the situation objectively. I don't care if each of them has his own strong opinion on what age one should be circumcised at or what type of skullcap one must wear or which direction one should look at when praying. Regards

Put those screenshots into a slideshow with some HL audio FX added (this is cross-eyed only): Regards

There are several threads that ended up talking about the same thing, so I post this here as it seems the most relevant: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/22/synthetic_hydrocarbons/ I think the author is probably a bit on the optimistic side when he is making his 15 years prediction and abundance of oil IMHO will not by itself put an end to all human conflict but it's still an interesting overview. Rehatfs

You can always find an exception for any rule. But the space program is not an exception. There was no way for either the US or USSR to have developed the technologies and done the launches either commercially or on charitable contributions. Now, of course when the technologies have been understood, market formed it's easy (well not really but figuratively speaking...) for commercial interests to come in... Regards

Listen, I have no interest in either side's reading of history. I also have absolutely no desire to go into what they think are the reasons for their mutual hatred - they can hate to their hearts content. All I see, as a disinterested third party is one group of people put in a ghetto by another group of people. There are a number of obvious observations one is forced to make: - those living in ghetto will not ever feel any disposition to be nice to those who keep them here. Rockets and terrorists is what the captors MUST expect from the captives. - those who put the others into a ghetto are not interested in giving the latter freedoms, self-determination, human rights, peaceful coexistence, all that crap. The only reason for that is to force the captive to either die or go away. That is the essence of what is going on - Israeli powers that be do not want a Palestinian solution, they want THE Palestinian solution (hence my analogy to the Nazi Germany). It is stupid of anyone to expect or demand from Palestinians (whether you like them or not) to stop trying to hurt the Israelis back. It's a physical impossibility, it is happening on instinctive level, like bees attacking you if you put a stick into their beehive. The difference is that if you watch a movie about Jewish resistance in WWII the bombing of a Nazi gauleiter is OK, when you are on the receiving end of a Kassam it isn't. As for the US support, it's political. Anything political is not permanent. One forgets about it to his peril. Regards

What the hell's that supposed to mean??? Do you consider any debate which does not have a purpose of proselytising a "practice"? First you go all sensitive about your beliefs being objected to (which they weren't), then you seem to complain that noone is trying to convert you... Your faith is your faith. By definition it is not subject to logical reasoning - cannot be, otherwise it won't be a faith. But only a portion of one's views are really a true unquestioning belief. The rest is a mixture of traditions, cultural influences and rites which purpose is solely to demonstrate one's belonging to a particular group of like-minded people. The core beliefs is pointless to argue about, the rest is a fair game. Regards

I have no objections to your beliefs nor am I trying to somehow weaken or subvert your faith. I was looking at our debate purely as at an intellectual exercise which could help refine my (and hopefully other participants') understanding of where the boundaries between the core values and the extraneous "fluff" of our beliefs are (amongst other things). It is unlikely that anything I can learn about Christianity can cause me to technically become a Christian, my views are pretty much set by now. Talking about teach old dogs new trick etc... Regards

Sorry, my mistake. Regards

Here is the definitive answer to the original post (Amongst other things...): http://www.zerohedge.com/news/europe-according Regards

Your wealth only belongs to you by virtue of your living in a civilised society. With rights come responsibilities back to that society. Who is going to pay for the Navy, Army? Where are you going to get your sailors and soldiers if you can't keep your population healthy? Who is going to fund fundamental scientific research, paved roads and other high-risk ventures with uncertain return? How are you going to find the best brains among the young if you don't provide education widely across society? If you live on an isolated island alone and are self-sufficient in everything then you can claim your absolute prerogatives. If you live in a community you are going to have to compromise and temper your personal interests where they clash with those of others. So, in a sense your wealth would also belong to me (if I lived in the same country) - if I pay my taxes then you also must, or you will owe me (as I'm funding your shortfall). Regards