I needed a good laugh. I suppose as a potential investor, I'm happy to know that his company is woefully unprepared to compete in a rapidly-evolving marketplace. It's kind of surprising to encounter such honesty in this day and age. Of course, he probably doesn't realize that he just admitted his company is woefully unprepared to compete in a rapidly-evolving marketplace, but that's one of the root causes of them being woefully unprepared to compete in this marketplace, isn't it?

Hey, you know where you might be able to get some Chinese biotech researchers for cheap? Alibaba!

Hey, you know where might be a good place to get some Chinese biotech researchers for cheap? Alibaba!

Should there be an ice bucket challenge for Ebola? I'm sure if we had one of those, it would be sorted out in a jiffy!

I have a hypothesis that in a western hospital, the survival rate might be a bit more than 50%, too. We don't have a large sample size to judge by, yet.

The Nazis didn't view the Jews as being people either. The first thing you do when you're looking to oppress some group is to fire up the propaganda machine and dehumanize that group. Hell, it was in the Constitution for a while, a slave's counted as 2/3rds of a person. You want to make an argument that marriage is for children, I'm FINE with what, as long as a man and a woman won't be able to get married if they'd be unable to produce children. You never see that in any of those "Marriage Protection" laws, and there'd be riots if you did.

You think the Ferguson police force views the citizens there as people? I think they'd randomly stop and harass them a lot less if they did. It's awfully hard to do that sort of thing to people. It's also a lot harder to be so terrified of them that faced with an unarmed one (person,) with his hands up, you'd point an assault rifle at them and threaten to kill them.

Well, that didn't take long.

If they're people. Many of the discriminatory laws in the USA over the years are obviously based on the assumption that the discriminated-against group, being different from us, are obviously not people. Take, for example, the current marriage fight. It's pretty easy to make the argument that gays should not be allowed to marry, if you don't consider them to be people. Kind of like how in the '60's, most states didn't allow interracial marriage. That was before we discovered that other races were also people. Though some groups are quite resistant to changing their philosophy on THAT subject. That's why the favorite straw-man argument of those in favor of denying those rights is always "Where does this stop? We'll eventually have to issue a marriage license between a man and his horse!" Sure, if the horse is a person. It's immediately obvious from that argument that the person making it does not consider a homosexual person to actually be a person. But I digress...

Anywhoo, the upshot of that is that if the cyborg is a person, the cyborg should have the same rights as a person, and should damn well be able to marry another cyborg if they want to. I'm not going to allow some uneducated shithead to stand between me and my Sony HD Eyeballs (Now with TerminatorVision(tm)).

In assorted languages. Java and vbscript being particularly problematic, if you're a library programmer. "Oh, I'd like to write this generic container of things but I can't make it generic because some programmer might try to store an int in it :-/" Java's introduced some features to address that, and it's quite easy to solve in vbscript by never programming in vbscript.

You can index negatively in C as well, if you want to.

If you REALLY want your array to start at 1, why not just subtract one from its pointer? Then it'll start at 1 just fine!

I'm still bummed out that the "Grapple" isn't some genetic abomination created by a DNA scientist in a lab somewhere. The reality is far more boring. If these scientists wanted to do something truly horrific, they could engineer up a strain of coffee with no caffeine. That's like one step off of building a "Death Ray" and holding the world for hostage with it.

Brian W. Aldiss wrote a story about this many years ago.

Poor Shrub. He just wanted so badly to prove he could do something his daddy couldn't...

First, a gratuitous plug for my Let's Play/Drown Out video series, currently focusing on 3DO console titles: http://www.youtube.com/playlis...

Why is that link relevant? Because they were all made using Kdenlive.

When I first started mucking around with digital video, I tried a bunch of free/libre packages, and formed the following opinions of each:

Windows Movie Maker
Yes, $(GOD) help me, I gave it a serious try. To my utter surprise, it mostly worked and did what I wanted without crashing. However, the UI was rather inflexible, and I needed more than the handful of features it offered, so I kept looking.

Cinelerra
Every Google search for free video editing software always turns this up, so I tried it. Then, ten minutes later, I had to stop trying it because it kept crashing and/or hanging at the slightest provocation. It has an impressive-looking array of features, and the editing timeline looks quite powerful. Evidently, you can do some fairly impressive things with Cinelerra, provided you can identify and avoid all its weak spots.

Pitivi
The last time I tried this, it was unreliable, under-featured, and incredibly slow. Just loading a one hour-long video clip into the timeline took several minutes as it tried to generate thumbnails and an audio waveform for the clip.

OpenShot
Assuming I'm remembering this package correctly, all it does is assemble edits -- that is, you can tack together a bunch of clips one after the other to create a larger work. If you want to do any effects or titling, you're SOL. Perhaps the Kickstarter-funded upgrade will yield some improvements.

Lightworks
I had to learn something the hard way with this package: This is a professional package. By that, I don't mean it has a ton of features (although it certainly does). I mean it expects a certain level of media asset before it will operate on it in the manner you expect. Us mere proles are satisfied to use MP4 or MKV or ($(GOD) help us) AVI files. However, in the pro space, you have files that contain not just compressed audio and video, but also timecode. And not just timecode measured relative to when you last pressed the RECORD button, but also a master timecode from an achingly accurate central timecode generator fed to all your cameras and microphones. This not only means all your cameras and mics are in precise sync ('cause otherwise their internal clocks will drift relative to each other), but you can trivially sync all your master footage and then intercut shots without even thinking about it. Also, near as I can tell, there's no such thing as inter-frame compression in professional video. Each frame is atomic, which means you can cleanly cut anywhere, but it doesn't compress anywhere near as small as, say, H.264.

The result is that, if you don't have equipment that generates all this metadata for you, then you need to convert it from the puny consumer format you're likely using. This means having truly monstrous amounts of disk available just to store the working set, and tons of RAM to make it all work. And hopefully your conversion script(s) didn't cough up bogus timecode.

So, yes, Lightworks is very very nice, if you have the proper resources to feed it. I don't, so I've set it aside for that glorious day when I get some proper equipment :-).

Kdenlive
Kdenlive is built on top of the MLT framework, and is about the best and most reliable thing I've found out there that doesn't cost actual money (either directly or indirectly). It has a non-linear timeline editor, it supports a wide variety of media formats, and it has a modest collection of audio and video effects (almost none of which you will use).

One of the more amazing things Kdenlive does is transparently convert sample and frame rates. Without thinking about it, my first video involved using a 44KHz WAV file, a 48KHz WAV file, and a 44KHz MP3 file, with the output audio to be 48KHz AAC. I feared I was going to have to convert all the sources to the same format, but Kdenlive quietly resampled them all when compiling the output video file, and everything came out undistorted and in sync.

Kdenlive does occasionally crash, which is annoying, but it has never destroyed my work. It has a fairly robust crash recovery mechanism, and you may lose your most recent one or two tweaks to the timelines, but you won't lose hours of work.

Kdenlive is not perfect, of course. It has limitations and annoyances that occasionally make me search for another video editor. But if, as I was, you're new to video editing, it will take you a while to find those limitations. Kdenlive has certainly served me very well in the meantime, and I think it's the most reliable, most capable, and most easily accessible Open Source video editor out there.

One would hope the headline would say. Linux? OpenBSD? FreeBSD? OSX?

I can see how that would be relaxing, and I have an application at work where I may try this: cleaning up a mess of a telecom closet when I have some spare cycles to burn.