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.

The parent's post might be worded rather harshly and somewhat unfairly, but the general point is valid.

During the Danish cartoon incident, I was quite surprised that the primary reaction of moderate Islam wasn't condemning the violence of their fellow Muslims, but rather insisting that the cartoonist should not have insulted their prophet.