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Comment Re:Lost a Friend Yesterday (Score 1) 385

by Psyborgue (#42433465) Attached to: China's Controversial Brain Surgery To Cure Drug Addiction
You're judging a group (drug users) by individual's actions, implying they are all the same and are collectively guilty of crimes before they even commit them. You reduce human beings to robots, denying them any personal responsibility. It's not the government's business what a person puts in their body. It's their business if they hurt others directly, and the motive for such action, whether chemical or otherwise is utterly and completely and totally irrelevant. Drugs do not make people do things. The may provide some motive, but they cannot force a person.

Comment Re:Lost a Friend Yesterday (Score 1) 385

by Psyborgue (#42433413) Attached to: China's Controversial Brain Surgery To Cure Drug Addiction
You lost a friend because he was told his entire life that he was powerless over a disease he was born with and had to rely on a fictional deity to make his decisions for him. Societal stupidity killed your friend and nobody has learned from it. Your solution is to remove the ability to feel any pleasure whatsoever. Sorry, but death is preferable to that existence. If somebody ever removes my ability to feel pleasure I hope somebody kills me.

Comment Re:Software side... (Score 1) 272

by Psyborgue (#42428557) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Easiest Way To Consolidate Household Media?

The player supports HDMI out for the raw audio stream, at least on windows. It does handle ,multiple audio streams. It also handles multiple subtitle streams either in the file, in the same folder, or grabbed from online on the fly if it can find them (YMMV, but it sometimes works).

It does transcode for certain portable devices (obviously you do then lose the multichannel audio and some quality) but I believe it can also serve up the file raw. O haven't tested it with my TV's dlna. I have my gaming / mpc computer plugged directly into the amp and tv so it's using the plex client, which it does not transcode for. I personally love Plex. It matches all my rips out of ~3TB of data, even TV downloads... Hardly any errors, and those are easy to fix. I have no problems playing back 1080p with DTS / DD. I haven't tested any remuxes with master audio, but I would be very surprised if it didn't work.
Censorship

Pakistan Lifts YouTube Ban For 3 Minutes, Finds More Blasphemy 275

Posted by timothy from the reality-preempts-the-onion dept.
On Saturday, Pakistan briefly lifted the months-old ban on YouTube, spurred by the widely distributed U.S.-made video presented as a trailer for a film titled "Innocence of Muslims" and decried in many places around the world as blasphemous toward Islam. "After months of criticism of the ban, the government decided to allow Pakistanis to have access to YouTube again, saying steps had been taken to ensure that offensive content would not be visible. But those efforts apparently failed, and the authorities quickly backtracked," writes the New York Times. "Quickly" is right: access to YouTube was apparently open for just three minutes, which seems about right; it shouldn't take longer than that to discover things on the site to which adherents of any particular religion might take umbrage. What's surprising is that this took lifting the censorship on a wide scale, rather than just taking a smaller peek through tunneling software.

Comment Re:Such a wonderful person (Score 1) 243

by Psyborgue (#42410071) Attached to: John McAfee Tells World How He Fooled Cops and Escaped Belize
I think it's perfectly reasonable not to hand your fate over to some third world country's justice system. That being said, i'm not sure he's telling the truth about everything he says in his blog. Then again, he could very well have good reason to lie or mislead until he feels he's safe enough to let down his guard and come out publicly. So what if he's a bit crazy or paranoid. Living in a shitty country with a lot of money you often have good reason to be.

Comment Re:Wonder drug? I think not. (Score 1) 358

by Psyborgue (#42403131) Attached to: Link Between Marijuana and Psychosis Goes Both Ways
I was in Amsterdam this summer. They had no issues selling to me although I am not a citizen. Some coffee shops even had signs saying "no wietpass, tourists welcome". I have a feeling it's only enforced in the border regions. Amsterdam would take too big a hit to tourist revenue if it was actually enforced there.

Comment Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score 1) 223

by Psyborgue (#42368293) Attached to: Polio Eradication Program Suspended In Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot
It almost reminds me of a Babylon 5 Episode where an entire race was wiped out because they believed an illness to be a curse and a cure to be against god's will. Problem is in this case, it's just a section of the population and the results of their ignorance could easily pose a danger to the rest of us.

Comment Re:Hillbilly regions and their conspiracy theories (Score 1) 223

by Psyborgue (#42368147) Attached to: Polio Eradication Program Suspended In Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot
In this case, I think cultural eradication would be a plus... unless you think there is some redeeming value to the taliban. Short term discomfort -- long term stability. This is not saying I would actually support such an endeavor. It's far too expensive and we don't have the stomach for the brutality required to accomplish the task. The soviets did, and had we not interfered in Afghanistan, they would have exterminated the religious caste and we would all be better off. No 9/11. No Taliban, etc...
Medicine

Polio Eradication Program Suspended In Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot 223

Posted by Soulskill from the got-to-be-kidding-me dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Jamal Khan reports that the United Nations has suspended its polio vaccination drive in Pakistan after eight people involved in the effort were shot dead in the past few days. The killings dealt a grave blow to the drive to bring an end to the scourge of polio in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the crippling disease still survives. Militants accuse health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and claim the vaccine makes children sterile. Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country. Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake polio vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest. The Pakistani government has condemned the attacks against aid workers, saying they deprive Pakistan's most vulnerable populations — specifically children — of basic life-saving health interventions. A total of 56 polio cases have been reported in Pakistan during 2012, down from 190 the previous year, according to the U.N. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. Clerics and tribal elders were recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers. 'This is undoubtedly a tragic setback,' says UNICEF spokeswoman Sarah Crowe, 'but the campaign to eradicate polio will and must continue.'"

Comment Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software (Score 1) 93

by Psyborgue (#42324017) Attached to: Blender 2.65 Released
Nodes in blender are currently only for shading and compositing. There are no geometry nodes, for example. Maya is a lot more flexible in this regard and all nodes are treated as equal. A float can be plugged into any float. A vector into any vector and so on. As long as it make sense to you and give you the result you want -- go for it.

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