If you want to see a prime example of a TV show's aspect ratio being changed for the DVD release and the outcome being horribly wrong, check out the second season of Angel. In the very first episode, there's a climactic fight at the end in the hotel lobby between Angel and some demon. In the original 4:3 aspect ratio, no problem. In the 16:9, there is a very bored set hand off to the right of the fight in plain sight. It was clearly a lazy, shitty conversion (IIRC even Angel's own showrunners were appalled) but it stands as an object lesson of what not to do.

Even dramatic moments won't feel right when converting aspect ratios. A tight shot on an actor's face that looks right in 4:3, suddenly reveals another character standing behind him in 16:9. Two characters conversing in 4:3 fill the screen; in 16:9 there's dead space to either side of them (this one was also quite prevalent in that Angel set).

Bottom line: stick to the originally intended aspect ratio.

Password Safe is another program that will do the job. I can't live without it. Runs well enough in Linux under Wine, too. So I'd echo the recommendation to share your master password with a trusted family member and then store all other accounts & passwords in the KeyPass/Password Safe database. Another thing to watch for on auto-generated passwords is symbols. Some sites won't accept them.

Untrue, and I've run RSLogix5000 for years, starting way back at version 7 I think. The major version of the software & firmware must match to go online to a processor or open its program, but not the minor & point releases.

Rockwell is evil for many reasons, but this is not one of them.

"Can only cut so much"? In 2005, the US federal government spent $2.47 trillion. Today the figure is $3.72 trillion. The fed.gov. hasn't even tried to cut since Clinton left office. Bush II had a bad enough fiscal record but Obama's making him look like a piker.

Let me guess: Liara's mission where she wants you to find out who one of the Shadow Broker's agents is? It makes you think it's a logic puzzle but it's really just a swerve, which I realized only after I flubbed it. I won't write any more lest I spoil it.

Stories can't be filtered out of the RSS feed, nor can you even tell what section they're under if you're using a Firefox live bookmark.

Two HFT supercomputers passing the same 100 shares back and forth all day making fractions of a penny every time isn't liquidity. There's no valid reason that a solid business like IBM typically trades a few million shares per day in volume while a bailed-out insolvent shell like Citigroup trades in the hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions. That's the "liquidity" HFT provides.

Fuck, to listen to HFT defenders spout this nonsense, you'd think the stock markets were completely functionless before they came along, that the previous century were full of crooks out to hose investors until the white knights of HFT came along. All the HFT big boys really do is siphon off all the difference in the spreads for themselves.

I'm with the commenter below; this shit is not "insightful". It's a lot of pretty words meant to look insightful, but all it did was suck up otherwise good mod points. Just like HFT is a lot of trading meant to look valuable, but all it does is suck up a lot of otherwise good money from the real investors.

Interesting you linked to a Canadian article to explain that, because Canada (in a rare moment of government sanity) actually legalized exactly this situation several years ago. Private non-commercial copying is legal so long as you don't distribute the copies. Who knows if it will stay legal with this new POS copyright bill being discussed, mind you..

/Raises hand!

To this day I don't know what the KDE (and Amarok!) developers were thinking in blowing apart their fantastic software, rebuilding it from the ground up, and choosing to throw out all the great functionality they had and replace it with "Look isn't this shiny!".

I switched to Ubuntu from Mandriva after the first KDE4 Mandriva release came out and haven't looked back. I never particularly liked GNOME but KDE took a flying leap backward and put GNOME in the lead by default.

When you've got a legal document that needs to be signed, dated, and potentially witnessed, there's no other sure-fire, legally-binding way to do it besides putting pen to paper. After that's done you can scan in the now-signed document, provide copies to those who need it, but that original one, with the original ink, is the one you want when TSHTF.

Not at all; I'm saying the apparent stance of the GP poster, that because DNA matching is not 100% accurate it should not be used by the police/courts, is flat-out stupid. It's a tool, sometimes a very valuable tool, and sometimes subject to abuse, just as any other police power can be. That does not mean you take it away from them, now and forever.

That said, whether or not the police should have a perpetual DNA database of anyone they ever get DNA samples from is a legitimate public policy debate. I'd probably lean toward "no" on privacy grounds, but I'd like to see metrics such as: cases solved using said database that otherwise would not have been, false positives leading to false arrests and/or false convictions, cost of the database, etc.

You say all this as if the police walk into a crime scene having absolutely no clue who the perpetrator could possibly be, taking some DNA samples, running it through the computer, then arresting the resultant match and passing it on to the courts. In reality the list of suspects is going to be considerably narrowed by old-fashioned police work: finding witnesses, finding out the victim's history, looking for motive, etc.

In other words, fat lot of good it's going to do you to claim, "But there's a 0.1% chance that DNA isn't mine!" when you've been spotted leaving the crime scene by a witness, were seen having an argument with the victim a couple days prior, he owed you money, etc. Not to mention that if you go to find those other, say, 30 DNA matches, you find out that 21 of them live hundreds of miles away, 3 of them are in nursing homes, 1 is a kid, 2 are already in prison and have been for years...

I plead bad sarcasm. It probably should've read something like, "The most perfect example of ruthlessly perfect exploitation of our so-called 'free market' in existence today." The Wall Street big boys are pikers compared to the corporate fascists that are the IOC.

VANOC trademarked the line, "With Glowing Hearts", which comes directly out of Canada's national anthem.

Today's Olympics are all about whoring themselves out to corporate sponsors, being absolute dicks to anyone who isn't one, and stiffing local taxpayers with the bills for years if not decades on end. If you're the type who worships at the altar of the free market, you've got to admire their ruthlessly perfect exploitation of it.

I keep thinking that it's only a matter of time before they figure out they don't need to. Forget defeating the security lineup; just strap on some old-fashioned bombs, walk into said security lineup, and before being searched, blow themselves to hell and take a hundred or so innocents with them. Coordinate that at a few different airports around the world, and watch the entire airline industry collapse overnight.