Either you do not, in fact, disagree with Adrian Lopez, or you are committing the naturalistic fallacy.

You seem to be arguing why things are the way they are, while Adrian is arguing how things should be in a rational society. These positions are not in conflict, contrary to your tone, unless you intend to argue an "ought" from an "is."

I know two Brits at work who have moved to our Canadian office, and have described the situation as night-and-day. One, while on his decision-making trip, took notice of the well-traveled path through a tree-dense field and was surprised to see actual children walking on it. Without adult escorts. He was further struck by the absence of tall, barbed fences blockading the school he was evaluating for his kids.

He told me that if he were walking across the street back home and a child in front of him tripped and fell, his first instinct would probably be to keep walking and turn a blind eye (and indeed, he figured that most men in that situation would do exactly that). I was reminded of this recently when watching Torchwood - Children of the Earth, when an adult male character, seated with a female colleague at a picnic table at a playground, rushed to help a kid who hurt herself. The mother yelled at him to get away, calling him a pervert.

Is this really representative of the situation over there? Or does the above paint an overly extreme picture?

Is personal responsibility compatible with atheism?

Book recommendation: Freedom Evolves by Dan Dennett.

Dennett argues that the the kinds of free will worth wanting (especially those needed for moral responsibility) are compatible with a deterministic universe. (Determinism doesn't necessarily follow from atheism, but it quite often does, and since Dennett is an atheist and a compatibilist, he argues from that perspective.)

You can encode movies in faster than realtime on current GPUs. Something you can't do with current CPUs.

I think you're going to need to qualify this, because the second quoted sentence (fragment) is not true.

I did read this comparison some time ago. I think a year makes all the difference though. x264 has, this year, added a lot of important (and beneficial) psychovisual improvements.

doom9 is gearing up for a new comparison this year. Should be interesting.

Obviously I've been asleep a while. I wasn't aware that DivX acquired MainConcept.

Well, MainConcept isn't horrible, but it still lags behind x264. It's to x264 what DivX is to Xvid. (Let the flaming begin!)

I understood the point of your original reply to mean "moderates of other groups behave the same way too." When I pointed out the extremist position of Islam (and implied that it is quite different as things stand today), you then implicitly accused me of a straw man.

The moderate reaction is unavoidably related to the extremist reaction when that extremist reaction represents a significant percentage of the group. When mobs march the streets, embassies get torched, and people beheaded for expressing an opinion and the moderate reaction is "you should not have offended our Prophet," it is a tacit approval of the extremist reaction.

When someone insults the Pope and the fundamentalists by and large do little more than thump their chests and yell a lot, a moderate reaction of "you should not have offended our Pope" sends a much different message in this context.

When you insult the pope, large mobs don't raise the placards demanding "behead those who insult Catholicism." They don't execute people on the streets or burn down embassies.