Huh? I'd say THE choice for realtime embedded operating systems is probably vxWorks.

We love to rag on cops, but they do a dangerous job

Farmers are more likely to be killed on the job than cops are, and most cops who die on the job die in vechicular accidents, not assaults. Cops' seige mentality is bullshit.

If you start firing cops for every mistake or worse, jailing them, you quickly run out of cops

(Of course a citizen watch would be a huge social/poltiical change. But I'm not sure anything less than a huge social/poltiical change would fix the problem.)

You and OP look to be in the same clan when he claims they're doing this "in a rather violent manner". Hyperbole much?

An unjustifed arrest is assault and kidnapping. It is a violent crime.

That's true even when the pigs (and those who trample citizen's rights deserve that epithet) don't apply chemical weapons or electrical torture devices, or beat citizens into submission, or use lethal force.

If I forced someone into a cage at gunpoint for no good reason, I would go to jail for a long time. The same should apply to a cop.

This post, not least because of the sig, wins the internet today. It's why I persist in reading Slashdot. Even as this site declines, it still has moments like this when someone posts something intellectually challenging, scientifically insightful and sardonically clever as fuck.

JPEG2000 had some serious technical issues. The reference library was itself non-compliant (I know, I used it extensively), which meant that there was no fully reference-compliant implementation available anywhere. The library was cumbersome and hard to integrate into existing image processing/viewing programs. And there wasn't much benefit to using JPEG2000; it had only slightly better compression and the wavelet scheme they used caused a lot of unpleasant artifacts (especially around large, uniformly-colored areas with gradual change of brightness).

BPG doesn't seem to have these problems; the images genuinely look better and it's easy to integrate it into the web. I don't really see a major need for a new image compression format but it would be nice to have an option to use it.

I guess you've never seen a regular web user. They don't write documents at the same time they're reading a website.

At home, perhaps their media masters have managed to turn the web into as passive and one-way a medium as television. But at work, even these drones are quite likely creating documents in a word processor, or e-mail messages in their MUA, or entering data into a web form, while referring to another document (e-mail message, website).

There is a reason that every physical desk is in landscape mode. Put documents next to each other.

How 'bout Jane Fonda?

C'mon, her workout videos weren't that offensive!

Yeah, but what about Comcast? They're the most hated company in the country. They screw their customers and no one wants to do business with them. So everyone exercised their power as consumers and sued Comcast or simply took their business elsewhere. Eventually Comcast went out of business because they provided such terrible service.

Isn't that how it happened?

People, and free-market Libertarians in particular, have this idea that if there is a problem between two parties, one can just sue the other and it'll get worked out. They don't seem to realize that a lawsuit is a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved (except the lawyers), and is also very expensive. Lawsuits are out of reach for most people simply because of the cost. It's just not realistic.

For more insight, I would point you to Fletcher Reede in "Liar Liar", when his car is damaged by a tow company:

"You know what I'm going to do about this? Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"

Look up "proxy", you simpering halfwits.

Not as bizzaro as Bizarro Stormy, mind you.

What exactly are you trying to say? That there is a scientific controversy around the idea that humans are the major cause of climate change? Well, no, there's not. Now you can dig up random people saying random things and you can change the goalposts, but you can never prove there's a controversy when there isn't. Have a read here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

FTA: "97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers."

97% of scientists rarely agree on anything.

Indeed. When someone manages to get something like this past, say, Computational Linguistics, then we'll have something newsworthy. This is akin to announcing "House without door has lock picked!"

But there really isn't any controversy, no matter how many times you or other people say it or want to believe that it exists.

In this context, controversy would mean a scientific controversy over the main aspects of climate change: that it is happening and it's due to human activities. There is no scientific controversy around this.

Science is full of controversies. You can go to the 'letters' section of any reputable journal and see how much scientists argue over things. But climate change just isn't one of these issues. There might be argument over small details or specifics, but nobody familiar with the science disputes that humans are causing the climate to change.

If you go outside the USA (and a few other anglosphere countries), climate change is pretty much accepted across the political spectrum. But in the USA you have this huge party that's made it it's job to spread FUD, which is exactly what we're seeing here in this thread. It's manufactured controversy. And it works.

No they don't.

Not climate scientists, anyway.