Flash 6 was the first version of Flash to support an even remotely usable video codec, and still only supported the incredibly limited ActionScript 1.0.

You're wrong.

Whoosh.

Wow. Last time I was in Italy (2006) I had frequent trouble paying for may items without exact change - not everywhere, but enough to tell me that, at least at that time and place m,any cashiers expected exact change. For instance, I tried to get a bottle of water and an apple with a 20 and had to go to three markets before one would take my bill.

Nonsense - I signed up for the iPhone Developer Program as an Individual, as have many. It's one of the first questions asked, as it determines how you're listed in the App Store.

Well, I doubt someone who works fulltime is going to be homeschooling. Beyond that, most teachers (particularly at the elementary level) have expertise in educational process/techniques more so than in specific subject matter (though most have some subject matter expertise, but rarely in all - or even most - subjects they teach). Much of this training involves crafting lessons in ways that can be understood and appeal to a broad range of students with different learning styles, needs and capacity. When you have one or two children, whom you know intimately, being a subject matter expert may be much more effective than being an educator. For instance, on a one-on-one basis I know I can teach math and computer science much more effectively than my wife; if I had 30 kids to deal with, perhaps she'd do better simply because she better understands the range of teaching styles and methods available.

My wife is a public school teacher in California - award winning, highly regarded, highly educated, and therefore soon to be unemployed. When we have kids, it may well make great sense to home school, and I wouldn't rule it out.

Actually, it is possible with some products to get higher quality out of the same or lower bitrate when you're using a better encoder - just because they all output bitstreams that comply with the same spec doesn't mean they are all equal, even when given comparable parameters and the same input. Not knowing what encoders BBC was using, and which they switched to, it's hard to say, but there are certainly better and worse encoders, particularly in MPEG-2 (where there's a long history and lot of variety).

That said, I'd not expect a something as radical as a 50% bitrate reduction to result in better encodes unless the original encoder was the original iDVD - the differences are rarely that extreme.

Bah - I hate his show, have never found him funny, but he is well known for being friendly and down to earth in person, unlike many of his peers - he's a lucky bastard and he knows it. I met him briefly once (working in the automotive media industry in LA) and had a similar experience as the GP, and everyone I know who's had encounters with him has said the same.

Not all celebs are total douches, and making a ton of money doing something that is basically harmless and using it to enjoy your life is forgivable in my book.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear - I agree with the overrated network whore with pedestrian humor part.

We have ourselves as evidence that intelligent, sentient, wholy natural beings can and do exist - it's not nearly the same leap of faith to assume other creatures like us might exist.

Of course, that's difference from *believing* they do exist - that's purely conjecture, perhaps with slightly stronger ground than belief in God but nonetheless just guessing.

And when there is absolutely no way one could repay what they have taken from others? Do you think Bernie Maddof should be working off his debts, and if so how does one propose he is given the financial power to earn back those billions lost without granting him the trust he has already demonstrated he is unworthy of?

Ever noticed that most people actually remove their foot from the accelerator before applying the brakes? Ever tried stomping the brakes *while* the accelerator is floored?

There was a recent case in Southern California of an off-duty sherrifs deputy, I believe, dying (with several members of his family) in a Lexus whose accelerator was stuck (floor mats, apparently)... applying the brakes did nothing but disintegrate his brakes, enough so that witnesses said flames were licking out of the wheels. At 120mph, with the accelerator stuck, your brakes are not going to help much.

Can you please provide any example where the input of other countries was ignored by ICANN, leading to a negative outcome? Just wondering.

Lions need air.

So if I'm otherwise a male - have a penis, for instance - but cannot produce sperm at all due to a physical abnormality, I'm not a male?

Keep in mind, the Warcraft universe has a highly developed lore - while the story isn't always a major focus in WoW, it's there, it's been explored in novels, comics and other media - I'd expect the movie to be more like this, a telling of the underlying Warcraft story, than an attempt to translate the game into cinema.

The image toolkit TinEye is based on (Piximilar) is far more powerful even than TinEye. Awesome stuff, one of the best commercial CBIR engines I've seen.

If you just want to group near-identical images, which vary only by minor processing - resolution, minor color correction - there are simple, low-end tools that can do this easily. imgseek is open source and works pretty well; I also use the Windows-based VSDIF, which isn't bad for finding duplicates in various formats, scales, and color spaces (I use it for deduplicating image libraries - the corporate edition has a command line interface). Both of these tools have limits when it comes to cropping, non-right-angle rotations, whereas Piximilar and some of its competitors can handle pretty radically modified images, or recognize individual components of larger images.