As another said, it's hardly stupid. There are soft (Wikipedia) and hard consensus (Jury). Most consensus are not unanimous, because what is or isn't a consensus could be different in a smaller or larger community. Whatever side you are on, climate change is a world-wide consensus, man-made climate change is one in scientific circles, but it is not one for the US public opinion, and some circles have a strong consensus against. A Jury is a strong consensus, unanimous even, since this is the total size of the relevant community, anything outside of the Jury means nothing.

If the EFF had been alone and it came down to it VS the rest, I would still see that as a consensus and I do not believe the EFF would have left in that situation. This was hardly the case.

Exactly. The issue is not about a vote, losing, or the majority; W3C works on consensus because a majority vote is not good for everything in life and that's why the W3C works on consensus, and the EFF is right in taking a stance. This is not a "we're at B and need to know if we move toward A or C", it's a "We're at 0 and should we chose 1 instead", it's not a vote, it's a binary choice. You can only be pro, against or neutral on that issue. It came down to 58% something pro, the rest against or neutral (not sure if any were).

This reminds me a quote a saw that I find pertinent: "The far right is fascist, the far left is anti-fascist, so the middle ground is to be moderately fascist" or some such. That just does not make sense (I believe both sides would agree), at some point it becomes a stance, and DRM is such an issue - the process could not come to a compromise ("moderate DRM" is not a thing, they found no possible middle ground), so the W3C said fuck it, let's ditch our values and process, and implement it anyway. It's a real step back, and they are losing my trust. Whether it's to please big corps or hippies, the process was eschewed, period.

Imagine if Wikipedia did not work on consensus at all and it was simply a majority vote. Whether you like the current state of Wikipedia or not, it's easy to see what this would lead to - the "strongest" community wins, opposing viewpoints are suppressed. Exactly what happened at the W3C. Some processes simply are not compatible with a democratic process, but are critical to a democratic society (e.g. a jury)

Global Affairs Canada has confirmed at least one Canadian diplomat in Cuba has been treated in hospital after suffering headaches and hearing loss.

The information comes a day after the U.S. government said it believed some of its diplomats in Havana had been targeted with a covert sonic device that left them with severe hearing loss.

The Canadian diplomat's family members were also affected and treated.

"We are aware of unusual symptoms affecting Canadian and U.S. diplomatic personnel and their families in Havana. The government is actively working - including with U.S. and Cuban authorities - to ascertain the cause," said Brianne Maxwell, a Global Affairs Canada spokesperson.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

I like my Z10 and Z30. I really like BB OS 10. I love the way messages are organized in "Blackberry Hub"

But if Blackberry is moving to an OS they don't write, on hardware they don't design or build - is there any reason to buy their stuff any more?

Sad. I've had a Blackberry in my pocket since the 5790, a three line pager with the iconic keyboard. :(

And the passport.

And I've got both a Z10 and Z30, and love them as much as my BB 5790, 6210, 6750, 7230, 8820, 9700 Bold, and 9900.

Ghost of Tiber, we hardly knew you. :(

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Funny how is number of users is 2^10 + 2^9 - 1. 'Lot of code smell in this article.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

This is because release groups are completely, utterly clueless about video. The file size is set ahead of time. Most groups set e.g. "8GB for 1080p movie", "4GB for a 720p movie" etc. in x264. Historically speaking, these pre-selected sizes were designed to fit on different media types, such as CD, single-layer DVD, dual-layer DVD.
Few people use DVDs anymore, but most groups still make files far larger than they need to be.

I rarely download pre-made videos because of this, so haven't downloaded any encoded in h.265, but I suspect they simply chose a smaller pre-set size.

The correct, non-stupid thing to do is to set the quality and let the movie be however large it needs to be, usually under 4GB. This allows more easily encoded video, like CGI films (Toy Story, etc.) to be small while very difficult films (anything with a lot of noise and movement, like war films) are large but don't look terrible.

I always use Staxrip
https://github.com/stax76/stax...

Forgot to add: I was using recent builds (about a month back) of x265.
Whenever a comparison is made, the x265 folks always say that the latest versions are much improved over whatever was used in the comparison. They may be, but they still need some work based on my tests.

I have done my own comparisons of AVC (using x264, single-thread, veryslow preset) and HEVC (using x265, disabling wavefront processing because it slightly reduces quality, veryslow preset). All 1080p video, significant because HEVC is supposed to scale to 4K better than AVC.

My conclusions:

1) x265 takes FAR longer to encode, but we knew that. Understandable.
2) When "low in bits", x265 blurs images rather than making them look blocky. This sometimes looks better but to me often looks worse.
3) x265 seems to force a denoise filter. Video is far easier to encode efficiently when denoised, so I figure this is part of the data savings. It's a bit of a cheat, however, because I can get far smaller file sizes by running a denoise filter myself for x264-encoded video.

I looked closely, for example, at Captain America the Blu-ray. Much of the detail of, e.g. car leather and grass and tree leaves is lost in an x265 encode, even at about the same overall data rate as x265/

x265 supports "--tune grain", roughly analogous to "--tune film" for x264, but it makes the video vastly larger -- often larger than x264's version, and it often looks worse. It does a better job of keeping grain, however.

My experience is very similar to many others' in forums. I had committed to switching my encoding to HEVC, but the results of my tests showed it is not ready for prime time. Some may not mind blurry ("soft" is probably a better word) video, or video that looks like it has been through a denoise filter, but I do.

This is not to say that x265 is junk. I am sure it will mature over time just like x264 had to over time. x264 started out as being not all that much better than divx, the previous generation.