It's a demonstration of the fact that fires simply don't have enough oxygen to stay burning on flammable materials.

Read further. They're a gaming community. I'm super confused as to why they were quoted as something meaningful.

I'll commit slashdot heresy by quoting the first paragraph of the actual article instead of knee-jerk imagination usage.

1. http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

First paragraph.

2. You are completely wrong on this claim. Eurosceptics overwhelmingly vote. It's the mainstream that "sleeps" in the European elections. It's a very well documented fact that European elections are more populist than mainstream and as a result of less mainstream voters, a lot of small parties that don't have enough mainstream support to push through in local general elections can still get their candidates elected. We're seeing it here in Finland right now, when a populist right wing politician gathered most votes and his party gave him a PM post. As a result, party crashed in popularity because mainstream voters turned their backs on him and his populist agenda. Same thing happened to True Finns, who trailblazed to ~20% of vote in European election on Eurosceptic agenda, and are almost a quarter less popular in mainstream local elections just a bit later. Local elections factually have more voters because a lot of mainstream voters who view EU as too remote and inconsequential vote in local elections.

This is factual, and almost every country in Europe has concrete examples of this, on all sides of political spectrum.

But we just came to an agreement that it did indeed improve on democratic front. You yourself admitted to it!

P.S. Do note that after that study we had an election to European Parliament and while there was a wide Eurosceptic offering in all member states, they got only a small minority in parliament, whereas more mainstream pro-EU movement got an overwhelming majority.

As I have noted in the original post, I was specifically addressing large public. That is why I included the following phrase:

"In fact, to untrained eye, a good upscaler will typically look almost as good or just as good as source material."

Then basically what you have is a chicken or egg problem. No powers to EU until it's even more democratic. And EU will stay powerful and less democratic as a result with no real motivation to democratize because they will never be democratic enough for naysayers.

And mind you, in most European countries, laws that have any real chance to go through are proposed by Governments. In many cases any MP can propose laws, but their chance of going to through is typically extremely slim to none. Europe needs practical solutions, not hypothetical possibilities that will never have any real meaning.

At the same time, smaller states are far easier to pressure in undemocratic ways from outside and in the age of superpowers, no single European state can survive pressure from US or China and would have serious issues handling pressure from Russia. You would basically be sawing the branch you're sitting on.

I suspect that your point of view is "common" mainly in UK, which is a notable outlier in EU when it comes to this issue. Most people I've met across Europe are certainly wary of EU's undemocratic tendencies, but generally don't even know how their own country's political system actually works, much less EU. The only practical difference to these people is that EU seems more remote.

You two really don't understand what I was talking about, do you?

Laws work retroactively, promising consequences for actions. They provide little to no proactive protection, and in general require for the target criminal action to be less valuable to criminal than cumulative risk of getting caught and punishment.

And after you get beyond certain level of wealth, potential gains go high enough that consequences become largely irrelevant. As a result, super-rich are forced to get private protection because law is no longer protecting them.

Then there's the issue of becoming attractive target for other crime such as complex fraud that would not be cost effective against average person due to much lower potential gains.

What you two are talking about is rich pushing the law to help them get richer. That is a completely separate issue from issues I mention.

This is not "theoretically possible" but a reality. I've actually conducted tests about ten years ago on early MPEG-4 compression (specifically divx and xvid compression artefacts in relation to usability) as a part of lab excercise. We brought in around 50 volunteers for screenings iirc. Basically random students we grabbed from hallways and promised them a free lunch if they gave us a few hours of their time. They were told that we were testing something else, I think it was something about "acting quality in relation to your general interest" or some similar bullshit.

We had them watch three short movies. All three were either original MPEG-2 DVD, DIVX at high quality and original resolution (notable artefacts, DIVX was in early stage back then and generally pretty good and churning out macroblocking and other artefacts even on high bandwish) and DIVX at low quality and half resolution (massive compression artefacts around edges, heavy "washout" loss of detail).

Around 2/3 couldn't tell the difference between massively artefacted XVID re-encoded to half the original resolution and original MPEG-2 DVD on a large TV. Almost no one could tell the difference between original and high quality XVID. And that's young people from technical university with much better eyesight and interest in technology than average public.

Our conclusion was pretty much in line with similar blind tests. Overwhelming majority of people will not spot a difference unless they're specifically looking for it. That is why broadcasters get away with massive overcompression of streams and a lot of content HD broadcasters show is upscaled. Most people never notice. You need a trained eye and to know to look for problems to spot those things.

Ah yes, the "they should do better" fallacy. Also known as "victim blaming".

Fact is, those people don't get a choice. They are barely surviving, and they are facing men who hoarded resources to procure weapons and other tools that help them to stay in power.

Regardless, I don't think this is going to lead anywhere. You are utterly convinced that poverty is a choice, even though you yourself state points that tell you that it is not. With that amount of doublethink, argument is quite impossible without proper third party moderator.

I guess when you get hit by "capitalism is great because regulations prevent it from doing too much damage" when we are discussing problems with distribution in the world where top 1% control about half of world's total wealth while billions live in abject misery, followed by ad hominem attack, there's really not much else to be said.

Election of who?

Right. You are here, suggesting that corruption exists in a vacuum rather than as a result of our resource distribution system creating overwhelming motivator for those in leadership position to become corrupt in order to grab more resources?

I'm not even sure what "marxist" means here. Pretty much every single economist in the world subscribes to the same notion. The only thing they disagree with one another is what is the better alternative that would serve both needs and desires of imperfect human beings while keeping their vices in check. Are they all marxist in your opinion?

Someone will one day post you the obvious "can condoms protect you from" post where they will list things like hand wounds in boxing.

But that will not be today :D

No, we disagree on the amount of pressure parliament can put on commission simply by declaring that it will not pass certain piece of legislation. Example: Patent directive.

On your second point, you clearly admitted earlier that you support democratization. Now you are saying you're against it, because treaty wasn't perfect.

That leads me to conclude that you either don't quite understand what you're talking about, or you're a young/inexperienced/idealist who genuinely believed that progress should instantly reach its goal and that any half way progress is a bad thing.