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The only difference between architectures is the instructions available and sometimes what they do.

"What they do" can vary considerably. A microcontroller based on an 8-bit 6502 core needs a really different programming style from anything i386. Some architectures (like 6502) prefer structure-of-arrays; others (like anything with a shifter in its address generator) prefer array-of-structures. (There's a difference.)

Reply to GP: harryfeet

On the one hand, XP does not support large expanses of RAM.

On the other hand, XP does not consume large expanses of RAM (compared to Vista and Win7)

To make a car analogy out of this, you are suggesting that fuel efficient vehicles with less than 400 gallon gas tanks would become obsolete if petrol suddenly became less expensive.

I suppose my point is that a commodity becoming relatively inexpensive is no excuse to wantonly waste the commodity. I am not a fan of the resource treadmill our technology is currently on where all design mistakes are swept under the rug of Moore's Law.

Does your software have memory leaks? Well, today's hemorrhage will be tomorrow's perspiration. Don't fix it, add more features instead.

What, are you still coding to check for exhausted resource exceptions? What kind of nut are you? There will always be more RAM! :P

No, I think a design limitation at 3.2GB for another year or five would do application developers some good. Eventually even well written software will require more RAM than that, but I really think by that time such software would include a raft of better OSen, making the present day virtualization mantra of "stack bloated kernel atop bloated kernel" a thing of the past.

This is my 02c,YMMV

Wow, if you think I'll get any mileage off of 02c, then I guess you took that car analogy mighty seriously! ;D

I DO NOT believe there will be a significant number of 32 bit XP machines converting to Windows 7.

The long of it can be read in an article I wrote after my experience with trying Windows 7.

The short of it is: While it is a great improvement over Vista and a marginal improvement over XP, it offers an XP user no benefits worth ripping an OS out of existing hardware. There is nothing groundbreaking to be had. It provides no end-user-visible capacity that XP lacked.

My recommendation is, when you get a new high end computer, go with a 64 bit beast armed with Win7 instead of XP. For netbooks, pick whichever is cheapest. For your existing iron, 8 or 9 years has not been long enough for M$ to make anything but inches of progress past XP: re-installing all your apps and retweaking your settings will be nowhere near worth your time.

"I hate computer languages because they force me to learn a bunch of shit that are completely irrelevant to what I want to use them for. When I design an application, I just want to build it. I don't want to have to use a complex language to describe my intentions to a compiler. Here is what I want to do: I want to look into my bag of components, pick out the ones that I need and snap them together, and that's it! That's all I want to do." Quoted from Why I Hate All Programming Languages.

Functional languages are worse because they are painfully counterintuitive. I don't want to write a function if all I want to do is link a sensor directly to an effector. Drawing a line from A to B is an order of magnitude simpler. Which is the way it should be.

table based programming plus Rock, Paper, Scissors can work well. For a while. (It eventually does get obvious that any X is just X pwns A....M and gets pwnd by N....W and ignores YZ for varying description of pwn.) Blizzard does that style well.

Don't know what table based programming is? Hand in your D&D Player's handbook, please. Also, stay the hell away from any of my games--I mean spreadsheets.

Probably the most robust JVM compatible language to date. Even the creater of Groovy digs Scala: http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_j4BAix7ZCvo/SOYJHrk2bdI/AAAAAAAACB8/pYhHHwrYP1I/s1600-h/Mandelson+moustache.jpg

Peter Mandelson with hairy worm under nose.

i totally agree with him ..its not collada
  Cash Online Get Easy cash at your door step

According to these guys, movie data's usefulness recedes as more sophisticated data mining algorithms are implemented.

Since they are part of the winning team, there's a good chance they're right. (They could also be lying about it to throw off the competition, but I believe they are required to publish their method so we will find out.)

Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but I only did it because the authority in question claims to have access to strong evidence.

Nuclear power is NEVER a viable solution to ANY problem for the simple reason that the knowledge to create nuclear power is the knowledge to make nuclear weapons. For the simpler people in the crowd, NUCLEAR POWER EQUALS NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There is NO SUCH THING as a "peaceful" nuclear program. All nuclear material can and will be weaponized. For this reason alone nuclear power must be forever abolished and forgotten.

Thorium reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.

Please check Kirk Sorensen's Google Talk about thorium nuclear reactors. And here are the actual slides used in the presentation.

From the Introduction and Basic Principles of thorium based reactors on Kirk's blog: A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor operating only on thorium and using a "start charge" of pure U-233 will produce almost no transuranic isotopes. This is because neutron capture in U-233 (which occurs about 10% of the time) will produce U-234, which will further absorb another neutron to produce U-235, which is fissile. U-235 will fission about 85% of the time in a thermal-neutron spectrum, and when it doesn't it will produce U-236. U-236 will further absorb another neutron to produce Np-237, which will be removed by the fluorination system. But the production rate of Np-237 will be exceedingly low because of all the fission "off-ramps" in its production.

-k

The power consumption of Elektron (the electrolysis based russian oxygen generator on the ISS) is "~ 1kW" in total, and the three Elektrons together are capable of supporting a crew of 3-4.

She is not a watch-dog. She likes these guys a lot. A little too much perhaps. I've pointed this out in several comments now. Go read her blog. And I mean read at least the last two pages worth of posts. It's fine if you think that the cops are weird, creepy, and threatening. But that is not the issue here. She is not monitoring the Drug Task Force to defend freedom. The amount of criticism of the police in her blog is little to none. She's doing it because it excites her. And from the sounds of it, it excites her in a very special way.

It does sound like the police did warn her on at least more than one occasion.

It does sound like the police did warn her on at least more than one occasion.

If true, I don't know, you are free to cite rates of incarceration and crimes and the demographics involved, simply being an illegal alien doesn't necessarily translate into being a criminal.

Allow me to point you to the word ILLEGAL in your sentence above.

And it's never "just" being in the US "without papers." There's the fraud of giving fake names to cops, or on welfare documents, or on hiring documents. There's the massive amount of fraud involved in illegal aliens stealing social security numbers, which winds up costing people money in higher interest rates (when they run off on bills) and in damage to citizens' credit ratings.

And that's not even touching the fact that illegals make up almost 30% of federal prisoners, not to mention half of California's state prison population, and the fact that the membership of drug gangs like MS-13 is predominantly illegals as well.

Oh, and then there's the numerous number of illegals who jumped the US border to escape prosecution in Mexico...

Or how about the fact that more Americans have been killed by illegal aliens than in Iraq since 9/11?

Well?

Read her freaking blog. This whole situation has nothing to do with monitoring the activity of police for the sake of protecting citizen rights. She just has a fetish for these police and is genuinely interested in their tactics. There's nothing wrong that per say. But when you start stalking, it just gets weird, creepy, and threatening.

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions

If they believe they get the death penalty if caught and they are 100% egotistical, they will now kill anybody necessary to avoid getting caught.

If they are incurably psychotic and have no compunction about killing people, yes. In the same vein, though, we cannot consider someone like that a rational actor.

A "rational actor", for purposes of discussion of crime/punishment deterrence, is a person who (a) is mentally capable of correctly weighing the risk of punishment vs the reward of getting caught. The calculation, while perhaps not as easy to pin down to numbers, is very similar to the idea of your mathematical expectation for playing the lottery.

Now obviously, not everyone is deterred from committing crimes (and we'll leave off the "petty, stupid shit crimes that shouldn't even be on the books") all the time. People determine all the time (probably quite rationally) that the expectation of arrest/fine/accident for exceeding the speed limit by X miles per hour or running a stop sign/red light, versus the "reward" of getting where they are going that much faster, is worth it. Some people are simply psychotic. Some are just plain stupid. Some have a mental defect (due to genetic/hormonal anomalies, illness, physical injury, etc) that prevents their brain from correctly associating cause and predicting likely effect.

In your example, you are assuming a very odd possibility, however. You have assumed:

1 - the person is a rational actor (inasmuch as they see the "risk" of getting caught for committing a robbery with a loaded gun as inconsequential compared to the reward of the money).
2 - the person is relatively sane and moral enough not to wish physical harm or death upon another human being, thus your claim that the guns were brought "just to scare people" (rather than, say, to shoot any uppity guards, or cops, or someone else who got in the way).
3 - that as a "rational actor", the person will then decide that the presence of the death penalty means that they should go on a killing spree, despite the fact that just moments ago they wished harm upon no other human.

I see a major contradiction here. I don't doubt that it could happen, but I do say that your suggested case is inapplicable to rational actor theory and thus inapplicable to a discussion of whether or not increased severity of punishment would increase the deterrence factor for rational actors.

And, this is precisely why so many people fear guns. They want to hide behind the AC tag, and use vulgarity - knowing they are safe. They also expect to be just as safe when they choose to run their mouth on the street. I'll bet my dollar against your penny, if a real man answers his little potty mouth, AC will pick up a rock, a club, a knife, or something because he's AC. When the real man shoots him dead, then that man is in the wrong for having a weapon. Go figure.

Anonymous COWARD.

http://www.legis.state.wi.us/LRB/pubs/ttp/ttp-09-2003.html
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

Go, coward, read. The facts are, when the populace is armed, violent crimes go down. When citizens are disarmed, crime goes up.

Since we have already established that you are a coward, allow me to ask a simple question: If/when you ever creep out of your Mama's basement, hoping to drag a female into your den, would you rather face women who are armed, and are able to resist? Or, would you rather face defenseless women? I don't give you much chance in either instance - but I am perfectly happy with armed women. Knowing that she can shoot you dead if you get out of line just helps to keep a guy honest.

I love headlines like these, which you will NEVER read in gaywad anonymous coward magazines:
http://wheelgun.blogspot.com/2005/04/jacksonville-great-grandmother-shoots.html
http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-47396.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_20001128/ai_n9979806/

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin were both gun control proponents. I suppose you would like those individuals, right? Douchebag, yourself.

Some "Gian" answered that in the _first_ comment [1] to said blog post so I will just quote him/her in full:

(I already posted this on the thread on HackerNews, but I decided to add it here as well for the purposes of discussion):

This seems to assume a fixed number of programmers, all of whom program during the week and at the weekend.

My guess would be that it's much more likely to be two largely disjoint sets:

Professional programmers at work during the week, and amateur programmers who have other day jobs (e.g. school or non-programming jobs) who are more likely to be programming during the weekends.

If we assume that this is the case, then the data simply suggests that professional programmers are more likely to use C# and Java, whereas hobbyist/amateur programmers are more likely to use Python or Ruby.

This is just a hypothesis, but it is equally well supported by the data as the article's hypothesis:

"programmers choose to use languages like Python and Ruby for their personal projects, despite their weaknesses, because these languages are more fun to program in"

Which assumes that all professional programmers are also hobbyist programmers in the weekends, and that the numbers of amateur programmers are not significant enough to make an impact on search statistics.

[1] http://danlorenc.blogspot.com/2009/08/stackoverflow-experiment-results.html?showComment=1250369874824#c5965860415709029932

His constituents, for example: "Sheriff Joe Arpaio says hi to his neo-Nazi supporters, poses for pix"

A posting from today on NYCL's site indicates that the lead DOJ lawyer in this opinion has a media industry background. Evidently, he was a partner at a law firm that represented a music publisher's association.

I just learned that the lead signatory on the DOJ's brief has a content industry background and recently recused himself in another case.

I suppose this is what happens when you appoint a half-dozen ex-RIAA attorneys to top spots in the Justice Department. President Obama assured us that rules were put into place to prevent this sort of activity, but apparently that doesn't matter. Not that I'm the least bit surprised by that. Frankly, I think the Justice Department should have better things to occupy their time than civil lawsuits. That kind of bias ought to be considered malfeasance in office, or something else worthy of immediate dismissal. 1.92 million dollars for copyright violations by an individual? Now that's Justice for you. Personally, I've never believed that the law should be used to make examples out of people, no matter how distasteful their crimes. That simply breeds more disrespect for the law, which is something the RIAA is apparently unable to understand. They will continue to reap the rewards of that lack of understanding, regardless of what ultimately happens to Jammie Thomas.

What really goes on at DOJ, I can't say, but I will point out the following:

1. If President Obama's rules are being applied, the six or more ex-RIAA attorneys were recused from dealing with this case, and had nothing to do with the brief.

2. The brief's arguments are not dissimilar to the arguments made by the Bush administration when they filed their brief on this issue (pdf) in 2007.

3. In the important Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings case, the Solicitor General filed a brief which directly contravened the positions the RIAA's lawyers had taken in that very case. (See Slashdot discussion.)

Interestingly, the DOJ brief asks the Court not to decide the constitutional question, requesting the Court to instead decide the issue on "common law" grounds, i.e. whether the award "shocks the conscience".

Also interesting in the DOJ's brief is that it totally ignores the actual wording and reasoning of the Supreme Court's "due process" jurisprudence concerning "punitive awards", which we have pointed out in the past. Presumably Ms. Thomas-Rasset's lawyers will bring this to the Court's attention.

Interestingly, the DOJ brief asks the Court not to decide the constitutional question, requesting the Court to instead decide the issue on "common law" grounds, i.e. whether the award "shocks the conscience".

Also interesting in the DOJ's brief is that it totally ignores the actual wording and reasoning of the Supreme Court's "due process" jurisprudence concerning "punitive awards", which we have pointed out in the past. Presumably Ms. Thomas-Rasset's lawyers will bring this to the Court's attention.

There seems to be a lot of comments about how the average joe is going to be pissy when he discovers that he can't run his windows applications on his arm netbook, or print well for that matter. That is obvious, and therefore redundant to talk about. This is a website dedicated to (hopefully intelligent) nerds, right? I'm more interested in running Linux anyway, or possibly an up-and-coming Mac OS X for ARM.

I would like to say to DELL - excellent idea!!! ARM for netbooks / smartbooks only makes perfect sense! The battery will last longer, they're fully capable of doing everything that a netbook should (including all multimedia applications), they're SILENT / FANLESS. All of that makes me (a green geek / engineer) very happy! If you could pull off an aluminium unibody, then you would have Apple beat if they ever got around to making a Mac smartbook.

My advice though, is to choose your components wisely. People won't want to wait for application contexts to be reactivated from swap, so make sure that you have enough RAM to keep everything going. Also, make sure that you prelink all binaries so that loading times are much faster! Last but not least, I would highly recommend that you choose a dual-core ARM SoC like the TI OMAP-4, which is based on the Cortex-A9 ARM family. With dual-cores, there would be many more pipelines available for concurrent threads, which means very little noticeable lag times.

Specifically for the OMAP, I really hope that the integrated PowerVR 3D graphics core and integrated video codec will get full Linux support at some point soon. TI seems pretty dedicated to supporting Linux on their devices, so I don't think that full support is unrealistic. The enhanced DSP ARM instructions will accelerate any multimedia applications in the mean time, and those are fully supported by GCC, with optimizations in the works for mplayer, ffmpeg, etc, until a decent architecture-agnostic kernel drm layer is in place, with PowerVR / IVA support.

For Windows enthusiasts, I'm sure that Windows 7 will be available at some point for ARM, as we have seen some of the demonstrations already at Computex (although Android seemed to be much easier to port). Will Microsoft even bother making a compatibility layer for ARM? I have to hand it to Apple, that they are in a better position than MS to make a fully featured ARM netbook, given their universal binary format in Mac OS X.

Where most people will be scared of trying linux, they'll trust it when it has the Google brand. Where many people might be confused by an OS that looks mostly like Windows but where everything is just different enough to be confusing, they'll probably understand the concept of "Chrome OS is just a browser & nothing else". The remaining question is if ARM + Chrome OS will drive prices down low enough that people will be willing to forego the flexibility & familiarity of a regular Windows laptop.

This is such a stupid idea...I don't want my internet records being perused by anyone let alone the government...I posted on my blog about this so read my post here

Bioguy here: decided to blog some superficial thoughts about this here, http://ascienceguy.blogspot.com/2009/08/little-sleep.html Sleep is really complicated, and compounding the difficulty of one subject we don't understand (nearly at all: information is not understanding when we speak of sleep) with another (genetics aren't really that understood--good for guys like me who want a good career possibilities to remain open) isn't too helpful, except comparative study will likely open up our understanding more by taking little bits we understand to decode more pieces of the puzzle. :D

Comparing caricatures with realistic depiction of humans? Come on... That ain't even a proper straw-man.

Try these instead:

Japanse Spiderman manga vs. American Spiderman Comic.

Note how lips, nostrils and ears are generally unarticulated (particularly noses and ears that often are not present at all, or are just hinted) and how much more detailed american (comic) faces are.
On the other hand... manga artists attribute much greater attention to eyes and hair.

You can tell the character by his/her eyes immediately.
Bigger and more detailed the eyes - more innocent the character. Slits with a tiny dot for a pupil - evil fucker.

Perhaps most shocking are items such as the list submitted by D.C. Attorney Ronald L. Drake who decided he wasn't being paid on time by the D.C. schools and thus raised his rates retroactively from $390/hour to $425/hour, submitting as evidence the names, home addresses, ages and social security numbers of 67 children.

I hope every judge in the District of Columbia knows about that. What's even more humorous is that Carl Malamud includes a hyperlink in that letter to FindLaw in case you wish to contact Mr. Drake.

And the response informs Malamud that it's taken care of with the SSNs redacted and the documents removed from public display. I wonder how long public.resource.org and Scribd have to demonstrate their usefulness before federal court documents are uploaded there by default in addition to being available through the court?

On a related note, I read in a Google blog that you can now release your works under Creative Commons on books.google.com and they happen to have Carl Malamud's A World's Fair for the Global Village available for download. And if you wish to release your works under the Creative Commons, Google will host them.

Of course not, but a Wiki is the way to go.
You can limited who can edit a wiki.
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-obvious-and-yet-so-not-done.html

open and free text books.
We can reduces texts costs by 90%.

I talk about it here:
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-obvious-and-yet-so-not-done.html

No, they just stopped planting those guys.

If given that God is omniscient and we are not, then there would be some questions to which we will not have an answer. You raise some of them.

And yet, we have to have some way to distinguish a true god from a false one, or a just god from an unjust one. Why would I want to worship an unjust god?

Given that, I don't buy the "God knows better than I do" argument. Maybe he does, but I can only work with the knowledge and understanding that I have, and I must make a decision. Does this god exist, or is he imaginary? If he exists, would I worship him?

The Book of Job is about a man who raises many of the same kind of questions and more. In the end, he recognizes that he is not God's peer (by a long shot) in wisdom, knowledge or understanding, but Job continued to have faith.

The Book of Job is interesting for other reasons.

Let's recap the plot, shall we? God is bragging about Job to Satan. Satan makes a bet with God that Job only worships God because God has blessed him, and that if God were to remove those blessings, Job would curse him.

So, in order to settle a bet, God utterly ruins Job's life. He destroys everything Job had -- his crops, his house, his family, and eventually, his health.

All to settle a fucking bet.

And this is the all-loving creature I'm supposed to worship?

Never mind, of course, the blatant errors in God's message to Job. "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?" It doesn't have foundations, or corners, or any of the other things mentioned. And this is also a fairly cruel thing for God to do -- basically saying, "I'm better than you, so I get to make the rules."

Would we accept that from a person?

Think about that. Just for fun, suppose Bruce Wayne walked up to you and punched you, for no reason. Would you just accept that he knows best, because he's Batman? I mean, Batman is stronger, faster, smarter, richer, and cooler than you -- better than you in pretty much every way -- but you still wouldn't tolerate him being an ass.

I mean, it seems like an elaborate "might makes right" argument.

The difference is that God, by definition, is flawless. The problem is, how do you know he's flawless, when he seems to do such flawed things? Couldn't Bruce Wayne simply define himself to be flawless?

I don't think I'm in any kind of position second guess God.

I think it's your duty as a rational being to question everything. You absolutely should second guess God. Lot did, after all.

On the other hand, there's always the possibility that God will kill me for complaining.

My lack of understanding of his way doesn't prove that he is not all good, it proves that I am not all knowing.

Again, substitute any human for God. Does that sentence still apply?

You accept that he's all good, and based on that, you assume that there must be something you don't know that justifies the evil that he does. I start from the assumption that, whether it's my own rationality or a gift from God, I do have the ability to tell right from wrong.

Second, the punishment was not merely death; it was much worse, separation from God.

I'm actually pretty happy in my separation from God. But I'm not quite sure what you're getting at -- this was the punishment that Jesus endured?

Finally, I don't want to cop-out on God's alleged control of Pharoh's heart (and likely other alleged contradictions in different sections of scripture). I tried to write out a number of explanations in a number of different ways, but all were unsatisfactory to me.... Its human literature. It was inspired by God but written by human authors

That is something I think we'll strongly agree on -- that the Bible is a flawed book, written by flawed humans.

According to the French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, a molecular endocrinologist and a member of two French government commissions evaluating GM food, the corn variety in question, called MON 810, has shown statistically significant problems in animal studies.

They found the effects of the GM crops were similar to that of pesticides, causing inflammation disorders, and problems with livers and kidneys, two major organs involved with detoxification.

This website provides a lot of information about genetically modified food and unlike your post, actually provides sources for its facts.

guy 1 is 6'10'' and looks like this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YGLQQZTHoU0/R--tYCHQNGI/AAAAAAAABy0/i-suLNPSqRY/s400/skinhead.jpg
Guy 2 is 4'11' and looks like this:
http://savvygeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/026_lucky_nerd.jpg

Guy 1:
GIMME 5 FUCKING BUCKS!
Guy 2:
*Quivering in terror, paralised with fear*BBB... *hands over 5 dollars with a hand shaking like a leaf*

Just package that which Google has patented...
http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/article-patent-reveals-googles-book.html

If someone "borrows" your new car while you sleep and returns it all scratched and dented, it would be wrong to say "Well, you were sleeping so you didn't lose use of the car and when you woke up you were able to drive it so it wasn't really stolen." The car was stolen and now you'll need to take time (and spend money) fixing the damage done.

When your identity is stolen, the thieves steal your good credit rating and your time to fix the mess. I was lucky that the thieves tripped up before any real damage was done to my credit. Had the card gone to them, they would have maxed it out and stuck me with the bill. Collections agencies don't really care if you tell them someone else ran up the charges. They just want to be paid and will hound you until you pay up. (Side Note: The thieves actually tried getting a $5,000 cash advance before the card was activated. Capital One denied the request but didn't flag this as suspicious behavior.)

Also, ID Theft can lead to Criminal ID Theft. For example, this guy: http://g27radio.blogspot.com/2007/04/think-youre-safe.html Because someone stole his identity and gave the stolen identity to police, this guy's life has gone down the tubes. Criminal checks by employers uncover his (wrongfully assigned) criminal history. Police (unconvinced that he really isn't the guy who was arrested) hound him waiting for any slight trip-up. His life is a living hell and all because some guy said he was Joe Smith instead of Jim Jones.

So when a criminal takes some private information of yours and winds up trashing your credit rating, possibly ruining you financially and causing you to have to spend tons of time/money repairing the damage, I feel that "theft" is an appropriate term.

I like this take on it better:
http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-taxonomy-of-gamers-table-of.html

The types are Tourist, Skill player, Completionist. Also, on a value scale, you can range from wholesale to premium.

'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,'

Yeah, well I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out fabrication. Could we have a source for this assertion please?

I think it's actually the (a?) purpose of the "additional permissions" language, to make GPLv3 flexible enough for anyone to use.

Anything beyong one simple license that we can clearly explain the use and restrictions around open source software fails the future use and growth of the adoption of such software.

I've also seen calls to have only 4 licenses (BSD, LGPL, GPL, AGPL).

I'm not sure why people are hating on this car so much other than the fact that it's GM and everyone is mad at them for the whole bailout thing right now.

I'm still mad at them for the EV1 thing.

I saw this post earlier and did quick math to show how much power this really is:

http://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2009/08/some-quick-math-on-gms-new-volt.html

i do NOT have adsense on my blog

Cables. Duh... Search for MultiSeat.

http://netpatia.blogspot.com/2009/06/multiseat-in-ubuntu-904.html
http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html

Great if you have kids or a larger family. One decently powered machine can power multiple "computers".

The technology they used was sending VGA & Audio over USB.

Try living in the sticks sometime. There may not be as much to do but you can actually afford to live out here. Combine that with lower crime, less traffic, better air quality and less stress overall and it's a win-win.

I worked in an ungrateful IT industry for far too many years. I am now well out of it, building my own home, off the grid, enjoying using my computers instead of hating the sight of them. And have found that watching chickens is a lot more enjoyable than all that stuff in the city you can supposedly do (if you can afford the money to do it, or you can afford the time away from making the money to afford to pay to do it).

http://buildingourhome.blogspot.com -- rarely updated as the chickens have been exceptionally exciting for the last few years. (what a shameless plug for my just for profit website)