Memory leakage was NOT fixed in FF3, as the obligatory crashes will tell you.
What crashes? I leave FF3 running for days at a time with at least a dozen tabs open. I haven't had any crashes, and the memory situation seems pretty stable. It stays around 90-120MB depending on how many tabs I have open. I also use several add-ons like NoScript, Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Gmail Manager, etc. I think the only crash I've experienced was when I tried running a game at instantaction.com. Apparently FF3 isn't exactly supported there.
I think it's time for the Boy Scouts of America to file suit and get their acronym back.
Yeah, right. You think they want to piss off the BSA? They'll be back to cutting notches in sticks to calculate their finances instead of using software. The BSA can find issues with anyone's accounting of their licenses.
Now, say American Idol switched to Instant Runoff or some other voting system (implemented backwards, I suppose, for choosing losers instead of winners). People would immediately see the benefits and grow to trust it. In time, with much luck, the people will demand a change in voting procedures.
Problem with that is that it would also need to be a system that could be easily made to work by punching in numbers on your phone.
If anything, George W. Bush and William H. Black should get punished for the whole mess. That would be "rule of law". But we all know that's never going to fucking happen.
Damn right it won't happen. Especially now that the people who we should be prosecuting and recruiting to testify against the administration all have immunity. That really helps to build a fucking case, you know? What do you think the whole fucking point of immunity was? The administration tells us that it's to protect the poor telecoms who were just trying to do the right thing to protect America, but it's really their own asses that they're covering and everyone swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.
If Americans actually get good service from the power companies (and I'm not going to take your word for it as you might be slightly biased;)) then there is no reason to nationalise it. But for a lot of things, that's a pretty massive assumption.
I've never had any problem with the energy companies where I live, but people out in California and surrounding areas got royally screwed a few years back by Enron and others gaming the system. I don't think that nationalizing the energy companies is the answer though. That would just change the location of the corruption. Hell, most of the same people would probably still be running things.
If a police officer asks you to do something, saying he has the proper paperwork taken care of, you'll most likely do it. It's the same thing with the telecoms.
The telecoms have had to follow FISA for decades. They know the law. They have huge legal departments that know it better than the government does. Yes, they got leaned on. No, that doesn't excuse them. They should be investigated and prosecuted. They can minimize their repercussions by providing prosecutors with the evidence and information about those in the government who were responsible for this gross Constitutional breach. If they have immunity, then the government has immunity too. That's what this whole issue was about!
However, my only point is that like any good crime fighter, we need to focus on the ringleader (the Bush Administration), not the mindless thugs who obeyed orders (the telecoms).
And like any investigation that is attempting to get to the ringleader, you have to work your way up through the stooges/cronies to get there. That's why the administration is so adamant that the telecoms get immunity. So that the chain is cut with the telecoms and no case can be built. There's no leverage there at all.
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections.
That's not the whole of it though. I believe he is guilty of insider trading. I'm think there are thousands of top-level execs who are guilty of it. The problem is that it's very difficult to prove. The real question is whether Qwest lost government contracts because it refused to follow illegal orders. That's the question that I want the answer to.
Furthermore, the article is ridiculously biased. At the end, the author closes with the line "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician"- one of the most popular right-wing attacks on Obama.
True. He makes the charge based on a non-issue. That doesn't make the charge incorrect, though. I still don't see what positions Obama has that make him different than any other democratic candidate. He speaks better than most, but I haven't seen him take any positions that run contrary to the mainstream democrats. He initially took a contrary stance on the FISA bill, but ultimately caved and voted for it even though he said he wouldn't vote for a bill that contained the immunity amendment. So really, what's special about him? I just don't see it.
Until we change our voting system to something like Instant Runoff voting, the large parties will never be beaten because voting for a 3rd party really is throwing away your vote.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away. Period. More importantly, the only thing that keeps third parties from gaining power in this country is thinking like yours. We should get a different voting system, but barring that, people need to wake the fuck up and realize they're only shooting themselves in the foot by voting for "not that guy". Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
There is a logical reason why people vote the way they do in our system. That's why we need a new system so badly. The problem is that those in power will do everything possible to discredit any system but ours and fight incredibly hard to prevent any change to the system that got them where they are. They know how to game the current system. Why would they want to change the rules?
Unfortunately, while you're busy forming a great new party, the party most sympathetic to your new party's ideals is getting drained and beaten. You cut off your nose despite your face.
Neither party is much different, so it doesn't really matter which one gets elected. They both screw us in different ways. McCain might move a little left from GWB's positions in some areas. Obama's running to the right like there's a bear chasing him. Might as well vote your conscience. Especially when the outcome for your state is a foregone conclusion. I'm sick of the insane plurality system we have.
Anyone with any sort of brain knows that Obama has no idea about anything; the only people voting for him are the ones too stupid to realize he is just saying whatever he needs to, to get elected.
Which is different from any other major candidate, how?
While I agree with you about fast virtualization being the more ideal solution, it just doesn't seem likely that we'll get it anytime soon on home PCs. I think that a gaming mode would be a pretty bright line that application vendors would cross at their peril. They would become known as unfriendly apps pretty quickly and start losing business if they didn't play along with it. There would definitely need to be certain rules, and they should err on the side of staying out of the way, but the user needs to be able to make the final call about what should run.
No, no, no! I do *not* want to go back to the days of editing my autoexec.bat and config.sys files every time I install a new game, with the inevitable mutually exclusive settings, thank you very much!
Realy, Windows built-in services don't take up that much in the way of resources to begin with: it's more for security reasons that many/most should be off by default, not performance.
The performance hogs are anti-virus programs, software firewalls, and malware (including anti-cheat software). Sure, you could kill the anti-virus stuff for gaming, but I suspect any gains would be short-lived as the malware would take up the slack.
This is nothing like going back to editing autoexec.bat and config.sys. Believe me, I used to have to do that crap too. At least here there's only one memory pool to worry about. This is simply choosing which programs you allow to start when in "gaming mode". That's it. It's not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. It's what most of us already do manually, but made easier.
It's not just anti-virus and firewalls. There's a hundred other apps that get loaded by default as well. I look at my brother's PC or my wife's, and they have a task tray that takes up practically half the taskbar. Not all of those things are resource hogs, but some of them are, and almost none of them are needed for gaming. I may only have a few things there, and I know which ones I can shut off when gaming, but it would be easier to just have a couple of clicks to shut down all except what's needed. Then turn them all back on afterwards.
A "Gaming Mode" to disable some services? When is the last time you said "Ah, crap, my error reporting service is making me lag?"
Given all the crap people install, and how damn near everything seems to want to make its presence known in the task tray at least, sucking up however much memory it cares to, having some minimal configuration that you can run that just loads the absolute essentials for gaming (customizable of course) would be great to have. Maybe you want to run a lot of that crap when you're just browsing, listening to music, working, etc. But for gaming, you want to kill all of those unnecessary background processes and services.
However, if I'm buying someone else's product instead, that implies that your game has no value to me, since I believe your competitor's product to be superior enough to spend my time on it rather than on your game.
No, it just implies that the competitor's product has more value you than the other guy's product. The other product could still be quite valuable as well though. Either way, it's still a different animal than physical theft, which is why we call it copyright infringement. Copyright is a monopoly right granted to the creator for a (supposedly) limited period of time. Violating that monopoly right isn't the same as stealing. In fact, if you get caught, you'd probably face a much stiffer penalty than if you had stolen the equivalent value in cash or goods.
It is copyright violation, which is wrong, but not stealing. It is wrong because it violates the social contract you agree to by continuing to live in our society.
Of course there is also the argument that copyright law, as it exists today, violates the Constitution, and the various laws that have been quickly and quietly pushed through congress to extend the duration and rights associated with copyright, have not giving consideration to the public interest or opportunity for public comment.
At its core, copyright is a bargain between those who create new works and the public. It should be balanced and fair to both, yet virtually every change to it since its inception has extended the rights of the creators without any attempt to balance those changes. Now that the law is pretty obviously unjust, it's no surprise that many people don't respect it. Because it's not a big voting issue, politicians feel free to sell out the public at every opportunity.
Here's a hint, if you truly can't return the game, you can't reject the EULA, and as such aren't bound by the terms.
Which means that you'd be able to distribute as you like.
What are you smoking? The EULA doesn't take away the right to distribute, copyright law does. That is in effect whether you agree to the EULA or not, so no, you could not distribute the game if you refuse the EULA. You're stuck with a box of discs that are essentially worthless unless you can sell them to someone else. Of course if it was an online game or application, then that person would be stupid to buy the opened box b/c you could have already gotten the CD Key from it and they would not be able to use it online. Of course sites like Ebay will probably shoot down your auction of it too. Sucks to be a software consumer these days.
This roe over domestic spying is a smear no more fair or accurate that the swift boat campaign against Kerry. It simply is not a true characterization of the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). The whole idea behind TSP is that NSA intercepts communications over US based fiber infrastructure originating at foreign sources. Any intercepts of US persons are accidents and discarded. Further, no evidence accidentally collected on a US person may be used in court, nor may it be communicated to any officer of government investigating any crime but terrorism.
Calling this domestic spying does severe semantic damage to our language, and THAT is a danger to our freedom. Newspeak people.
FISA's role in this endeavor is whether TSP requires court orders preceding each and every intercept. The FISA courts cannot authorized "domestic spying". There is not a domestic spying component to these programs.
The original FISA was at least some oversight, but this new bill limits even what the FISA court gets to see, and forces them to sign off with only the most minimal information and justification for tapping unknown numbers of people, both foreign and domestic. Now, given that even the secret oversight is being severely limited, I wonder what oversight still exists to ensure that these capabilities aren't abused. You know, the kind of abuse that FISA was established to prevent in the first place?
If he votes against this bill, he loses far more votes in the middle of America (both the literal and political middle) than he's going to lose from the left (and the coasts) by voting FOR the bill.
The left is what got him to where he is now. It's where he's been raking in the money. It's where all his enthusiastic support comes from. If he abandons the left, all that remains is some part of the middle (and it's a very finicky middle at that, so he can't really count on knowing how he'll do with them until it's over). I'm sure that some on the left will still vote for him as a vote against McCain, but all those enthusiastic voters that supported him in the primaries may just get disillusioned and not vote at all, or vote third party.
He's already lost my vote, even though I voted for him in the primary. I don't see how he could redeem himself enough for me to want to support him. He doesn't seem to have a spine, and that explanation he put out was pure cowardice. The strongest point in it was that some control is better than the president's claim that he can basically do as he pleases. Those few months of limits on his spying aren't worth giving every last Constitution-violating one of them a get-out-of-jail free card. Especially when the bill essentially gives them carte blanche to spy on practically anyone for nearly any reason with "oversight" that is even more token than the existing FISA system. I simply can't accept his reasoning for refusing to honor his oath to defend the Constitution.
So basically he voted for this to undo things from the bill from last year. If this bill failed a worse one was in the works that the Bush gang would have liked to see get passed. So I'm guessing if Dems started to vote ageist it GOP members (who wanted the worse one) would have voted ageist this one. The dems might have been able to dead lock things but that might have meant that the NSA could continue to do wire taps with out restriction.
I would rather they continue the taps until January and then be held accountable than to allow them to get a free pass on the whole thing. No harm in violating the Constitution, right? Any way you look at it, voting for this bill is the wrong thing to do. The fact that he didn't do a lot more publicly to encourage opposition to this bill is disturbing as well. He doesn't seem to take his oath to defend the Constitution very seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Memory leakage was NOT fixed in FF3, as the obligatory crashes will tell you.
What crashes? I leave FF3 running for days at a time with at least a dozen tabs open. I haven't had any crashes, and the memory situation seems pretty stable. It stays around 90-120MB depending on how many tabs I have open. I also use several add-ons like NoScript, Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Gmail Manager, etc. I think the only crash I've experienced was when I tried running a game at instantaction.com. Apparently FF3 isn't exactly supported there.
I think it's time for the Boy Scouts of America to file suit and get their acronym back.
Yeah, right. You think they want to piss off the BSA? They'll be back to cutting notches in sticks to calculate their finances instead of using software. The BSA can find issues with anyone's accounting of their licenses.
Now, say American Idol switched to Instant Runoff or some other voting system (implemented backwards, I suppose, for choosing losers instead of winners). People would immediately see the benefits and grow to trust it. In time, with much luck, the people will demand a change in voting procedures.
Problem with that is that it would also need to be a system that could be easily made to work by punching in numbers on your phone.
If anything, George W. Bush and William H. Black should get punished for the whole mess. That would be "rule of law". But we all know that's never going to fucking happen.
Damn right it won't happen. Especially now that the people who we should be prosecuting and recruiting to testify against the administration all have immunity. That really helps to build a fucking case, you know? What do you think the whole fucking point of immunity was? The administration tells us that it's to protect the poor telecoms who were just trying to do the right thing to protect America, but it's really their own asses that they're covering and everyone swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.
If Americans actually get good service from the power companies (and I'm not going to take your word for it as you might be slightly biased ;)) then there is no reason to nationalise it. But for a lot of things, that's a pretty massive assumption.
I've never had any problem with the energy companies where I live, but people out in California and surrounding areas got royally screwed a few years back by Enron and others gaming the system. I don't think that nationalizing the energy companies is the answer though. That would just change the location of the corruption. Hell, most of the same people would probably still be running things.
If a police officer asks you to do something, saying he has the proper paperwork taken care of, you'll most likely do it. It's the same thing with the telecoms.
The telecoms have had to follow FISA for decades. They know the law. They have huge legal departments that know it better than the government does. Yes, they got leaned on. No, that doesn't excuse them. They should be investigated and prosecuted. They can minimize their repercussions by providing prosecutors with the evidence and information about those in the government who were responsible for this gross Constitutional breach. If they have immunity, then the government has immunity too. That's what this whole issue was about!
However, my only point is that like any good crime fighter, we need to focus on the ringleader (the Bush Administration), not the mindless thugs who obeyed orders (the telecoms).
And like any investigation that is attempting to get to the ringleader, you have to work your way up through the stooges/cronies to get there. That's why the administration is so adamant that the telecoms get immunity. So that the chain is cut with the telecoms and no case can be built. There's no leverage there at all.
None of which explains why Obama sold us out on this issue.
I thought that was obvious. He's a politician!
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections.
That's not the whole of it though. I believe he is guilty of insider trading. I'm think there are thousands of top-level execs who are guilty of it. The problem is that it's very difficult to prove. The real question is whether Qwest lost government contracts because it refused to follow illegal orders. That's the question that I want the answer to.
The only places that taxes can be cut is on the rich* b/c they are the only ones paying taxes!
They're also the only ones profiting from the policies of our government. Seems fitting that they should pay for them.
Furthermore, the article is ridiculously biased.
At the end, the author closes with the line "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician"- one of the most popular right-wing attacks on Obama.
True. He makes the charge based on a non-issue. That doesn't make the charge incorrect, though. I still don't see what positions Obama has that make him different than any other democratic candidate. He speaks better than most, but I haven't seen him take any positions that run contrary to the mainstream democrats. He initially took a contrary stance on the FISA bill, but ultimately caved and voted for it even though he said he wouldn't vote for a bill that contained the immunity amendment. So really, what's special about him? I just don't see it.
Until we change our voting system to something like Instant Runoff voting, the large parties will never be beaten because voting for a 3rd party really is throwing away your vote.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away. Period. More importantly, the only thing that keeps third parties from gaining power in this country is thinking like yours. We should get a different voting system, but barring that, people need to wake the fuck up and realize they're only shooting themselves in the foot by voting for "not that guy". Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
There is a logical reason why people vote the way they do in our system. That's why we need a new system so badly. The problem is that those in power will do everything possible to discredit any system but ours and fight incredibly hard to prevent any change to the system that got them where they are. They know how to game the current system. Why would they want to change the rules?
Unfortunately, while you're busy forming a great new party, the party most sympathetic to your new party's ideals is getting drained and beaten. You cut off your nose despite your face.
Neither party is much different, so it doesn't really matter which one gets elected. They both screw us in different ways. McCain might move a little left from GWB's positions in some areas. Obama's running to the right like there's a bear chasing him. Might as well vote your conscience. Especially when the outcome for your state is a foregone conclusion. I'm sick of the insane plurality system we have.
Why is this not surprising?
Anyone with any sort of brain knows that Obama has no idea about anything; the only people voting for him are the ones too stupid to realize he is just saying whatever he needs to, to get elected.
Which is different from any other major candidate, how?
I've generally got better things to do with my time than clicking preview, waiting, blah, etc.
Liar. I see you here on /.
While I agree with you about fast virtualization being the more ideal solution, it just doesn't seem likely that we'll get it anytime soon on home PCs. I think that a gaming mode would be a pretty bright line that application vendors would cross at their peril. They would become known as unfriendly apps pretty quickly and start losing business if they didn't play along with it. There would definitely need to be certain rules, and they should err on the side of staying out of the way, but the user needs to be able to make the final call about what should run.
No, no, no! I do *not* want to go back to the days of editing my autoexec.bat and config.sys files every time I install a new game, with the inevitable mutually exclusive settings, thank you very much!
Realy, Windows built-in services don't take up that much in the way of resources to begin with: it's more for security reasons that many/most should be off by default, not performance.
The performance hogs are anti-virus programs, software firewalls, and malware (including anti-cheat software). Sure, you could kill the anti-virus stuff for gaming, but I suspect any gains would be short-lived as the malware would take up the slack.
This is nothing like going back to editing autoexec.bat and config.sys. Believe me, I used to have to do that crap too. At least here there's only one memory pool to worry about. This is simply choosing which programs you allow to start when in "gaming mode". That's it. It's not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. It's what most of us already do manually, but made easier.
It's not just anti-virus and firewalls. There's a hundred other apps that get loaded by default as well. I look at my brother's PC or my wife's, and they have a task tray that takes up practically half the taskbar. Not all of those things are resource hogs, but some of them are, and almost none of them are needed for gaming. I may only have a few things there, and I know which ones I can shut off when gaming, but it would be easier to just have a couple of clicks to shut down all except what's needed. Then turn them all back on afterwards.
A "Gaming Mode" to disable some services? When is the last time you said "Ah, crap, my error reporting service is making me lag?"
Given all the crap people install, and how damn near everything seems to want to make its presence known in the task tray at least, sucking up however much memory it cares to, having some minimal configuration that you can run that just loads the absolute essentials for gaming (customizable of course) would be great to have. Maybe you want to run a lot of that crap when you're just browsing, listening to music, working, etc. But for gaming, you want to kill all of those unnecessary background processes and services.
You can however hack it if you refuse the EULA.
Sure, as long as you're not circumventing any copyright protection.
However, if I'm buying someone else's product instead, that implies that your game has no value to me, since I believe your competitor's product to be superior enough to spend my time on it rather than on your game.
No, it just implies that the competitor's product has more value you than the other guy's product. The other product could still be quite valuable as well though. Either way, it's still a different animal than physical theft, which is why we call it copyright infringement. Copyright is a monopoly right granted to the creator for a (supposedly) limited period of time. Violating that monopoly right isn't the same as stealing. In fact, if you get caught, you'd probably face a much stiffer penalty than if you had stolen the equivalent value in cash or goods.
It is copyright violation, which is wrong, but not stealing. It is wrong because it violates the social contract you agree to by continuing to live in our society.
Of course there is also the argument that copyright law, as it exists today, violates the Constitution, and the various laws that have been quickly and quietly pushed through congress to extend the duration and rights associated with copyright, have not giving consideration to the public interest or opportunity for public comment.
At its core, copyright is a bargain between those who create new works and the public. It should be balanced and fair to both, yet virtually every change to it since its inception has extended the rights of the creators without any attempt to balance those changes. Now that the law is pretty obviously unjust, it's no surprise that many people don't respect it. Because it's not a big voting issue, politicians feel free to sell out the public at every opportunity.
Here's a hint, if you truly can't return the game, you can't reject the EULA, and as such aren't bound by the terms.
Which means that you'd be able to distribute as you like.
What are you smoking? The EULA doesn't take away the right to distribute, copyright law does. That is in effect whether you agree to the EULA or not, so no, you could not distribute the game if you refuse the EULA. You're stuck with a box of discs that are essentially worthless unless you can sell them to someone else. Of course if it was an online game or application, then that person would be stupid to buy the opened box b/c you could have already gotten the CD Key from it and they would not be able to use it online. Of course sites like Ebay will probably shoot down your auction of it too. Sucks to be a software consumer these days.
Apparently you do not understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
This roe over domestic spying is a smear no more fair or accurate that the swift boat campaign against Kerry. It simply is not a true characterization of the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). The whole idea behind TSP is that NSA intercepts communications over US based fiber infrastructure originating at foreign sources. Any intercepts of US persons are accidents and discarded. Further, no evidence accidentally collected on a US person may be used in court, nor may it be communicated to any officer of government investigating any crime but terrorism.
Calling this domestic spying does severe semantic damage to our language, and THAT is a danger to our freedom. Newspeak people.
FISA's role in this endeavor is whether TSP requires court orders preceding each and every intercept. The FISA courts cannot authorized "domestic spying". There is not a domestic spying component to these programs.
The original FISA was at least some oversight, but this new bill limits even what the FISA court gets to see, and forces them to sign off with only the most minimal information and justification for tapping unknown numbers of people, both foreign and domestic. Now, given that even the secret oversight is being severely limited, I wonder what oversight still exists to ensure that these capabilities aren't abused. You know, the kind of abuse that FISA was established to prevent in the first place?
If he votes against this bill, he loses far more votes in the middle of America (both the literal and political middle) than he's going to lose from the left (and the coasts) by voting FOR the bill.
The left is what got him to where he is now. It's where he's been raking in the money. It's where all his enthusiastic support comes from. If he abandons the left, all that remains is some part of the middle (and it's a very finicky middle at that, so he can't really count on knowing how he'll do with them until it's over). I'm sure that some on the left will still vote for him as a vote against McCain, but all those enthusiastic voters that supported him in the primaries may just get disillusioned and not vote at all, or vote third party.
He's already lost my vote, even though I voted for him in the primary. I don't see how he could redeem himself enough for me to want to support him. He doesn't seem to have a spine, and that explanation he put out was pure cowardice. The strongest point in it was that some control is better than the president's claim that he can basically do as he pleases. Those few months of limits on his spying aren't worth giving every last Constitution-violating one of them a get-out-of-jail free card. Especially when the bill essentially gives them carte blanche to spy on practically anyone for nearly any reason with "oversight" that is even more token than the existing FISA system. I simply can't accept his reasoning for refusing to honor his oath to defend the Constitution.
So basically he voted for this to undo things from the bill from last year. If this bill failed a worse one was in the works that the Bush gang would have liked to see get passed. So I'm guessing if Dems started to vote ageist it GOP members (who wanted the worse one) would have voted ageist this one. The dems might have been able to dead lock things but that might have meant that the NSA could continue to do wire taps with out restriction.
I would rather they continue the taps until January and then be held accountable than to allow them to get a free pass on the whole thing. No harm in violating the Constitution, right? Any way you look at it, voting for this bill is the wrong thing to do. The fact that he didn't do a lot more publicly to encourage opposition to this bill is disturbing as well. He doesn't seem to take his oath to defend the Constitution very seriously.