While many others seem to have commented on your use of "better for the shareholders" in the technical sense, I'd just like to point out how absurdly perverse a world view you must be to value shareholder profit above all other considerations (as you clearly do). There's more to life, there's more to BUSINESS, and to being a good citizen of your country and the world, as a business and as a person, than immediate shareholder profit. Always depressing to see how many people's vision ends at the shareholder profit horizon. Public trading has not been good for our culture.
Formal logic would have to disagree with you. To be specific, the principle of non-contradiction (or law of the excluded middle if you prefer) dictates that, given two positions that are logical negations of eachother, one or both of them MUST, in fact, be false. Specifically, the law can be symbolized: -(A & -A). It seems, to me, that one of the claims they've been making is absolutely necessarily false (a conclusion that can be formally derived using the principle of non-contradiction by reasoning of reductio ad absurdum).
So I'm not buying your prevarications on their behalf. I say they are, by logical necessity, lying. That is to be read specifically as "making a positive claim to the truth of a set of facts that is not true, and that they know can not be true," which I think is a reasonable definition of lying under the circumstances, and seems to be in fact what they are doing. To put it another way, if they had claimed either one or the other, they could not have been said to be necessarily lying either way. Claiming both, however, is a lie by basic logical necessity. It doesn't really matter that they're doing so in separate cases.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I would never suggest Asimov to anybody until they're well into and comfortable with Sci-Fi and prepared to appreciate it entirely on a conceptual and intellectual level. The sad fact is, while his imagination was amazing, the actual craft of Asimov's writing is, to put it mildly, badly lacking. Flatter, more affectless characters have rarely been put to paper. Don't get me wrong, the Foundation series and I, Robot (absolutely not its sequels though--yikes) are some of the best Sci-Fi I've read, but I really don't think his writing is something that will engage young people.
Ventrilo can be run in Wine you know. Well, it's about a year since I stopped playing WoW on Linux, but it worked on Wine back then, so I assume it still does.
I don't really get it. Blizzard has the reputation for being probably the highest quality development house in the entire industry... by a solid margin. And they are already printing money with World of Warcraft. This seems like a giant leap backwards for them on all fronts, but maybe I'm missing something.
There is a certain concept postulated by Wittgenstein that I think would resolve this confusion. "Public" as is meant with respect to the first amendment is used in a very different game from "public" as is meant by MySpace or Flickr being public (that is, open to general consumption). I've always found it rather silly when people get incensed by their first amendment rights being "violated" in privately owned fora. Unless I'm really missing something this is just such a non-issue.
A remorseful, intelligent man would've realized that a life with a murder on your conscience i just as bad as prison, maybe even worse.
I think this is one of those things that works out a lot better in theory than practice. Life outside of prison with a murder on my conscience vs. life inside of prison with a murder on my conscience. Hmm...
It's nice, to live in a country where you don't really have to be anally paranoid about things like that, yes? I invite you to spend some time in China (or any other such country) doing anything "subversive" online (like, say for example, uploading images of Tibetans being "pacified" so the rest of the world can know what's going on), without keeping your activities encrypted WITH plausible deniability and a lot of other precautions beside. I'll ask you how it went in twenty years... you know... when you get out of prison.
Which is all to make the point that in ACTUAL REAL REALITY there are "movie scenarios" where this functionality is vitally important. That 1% you mention who really need it, they're worth consideration.
(I would have simply accepted your post as a sarcastic joke, but it had been modded "Insightful," so I figured I'd respond to it in kind)
I hate to break it to you, but his story wasn't really the sort of subjective hypothesizing that you can accuse of "drinking the kool-aid." He said he HAS been through both countries and he HAS had the experience that HE PERSONALLY is treated better on the Chinese side of things than the US when it comes to this particular kind of activity. Either he's telling the truth and the story is accurate, or he's making it up, but "fanboyism" doesn't really come into the picture.
Don't get me wrong. China's not the best of places by a long shot. But, sadly, in a lot of ways, neither is my own country anymore. Fascism is well on its way, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and the only embarrassing or dangerous activity is to let those decorations blind you from what's behind them.
There are many ways to fix this problem which have not (as of yet) been implemented by truecrypt:
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's because the easiest fix by far has nothing to do with the way TrueCrypt works. Simply keep separate partitions for your OS/software and your user data. This is actually a very common practice in the Unix world (mount one drive as / and another drive as/home,/tmp, and whatever else gets written to with any frequency) and has a number of very obvious benefits completely apart from anything illicit. The thing is, once you have your system set up and running, the drive mounted as / will almost never have any significant amount of new data written to it, and could conceivably be run for a long time without filling up. The extra space would, of course, simply be there against future need if you were to need to install more software onto the system.
To top it off, buy your hard drive used (it's very common for companies to sell used hard drives that have been wiped with random data). So you've got a used hard drive which understandably has had random data written to its entire volume, and you have a setup where a large portion of space is intentionally and understandably left free. And it's a perfectly sensible and common way of setting things up to boot (pun intended). Am I missing anything?
Finally a real reason to upgrade! (actually, if you use C++ you should really upgrade to VS2003 or later for a much more conformant compiler, but that's another story:P)
I'm not so sure your point is quite that significant. There is a graph, towards the end, that seems to be multiplying throughput by total battery life, giving a sort of "megabyte-minutes" rating for the different drives. In terms of simple hard drive throughput, this seems to indicate that the work per watt of the traditional drive was still superior (albeit by a small margin over the most expensive SDD), despite your complaint. But obviously it's not quite that simple--no real life usage would cause non-stop disk access like that.
The claim that the CPU stays more active with the faster drive, while technically true, is a little misleading and not nearly as clear cut as you're making it out to be. The only time the CPU would really be more active with a faster drive is under circumstances where it would be waiting for some kind of blocking I/O from the drive, which in my experience (at least under mundane use) isn't all that much. Most of the time you're much more likely to be dealing with system RAM than hard drive storage during program use (unless you run out of memory and start swapping things out, but then you've got other problems).
In short, while you point out perhaps an interesting oversight, I don't think it is quite as serious as you make it out to be.
When I purchase a product, with that purchase come a number of assumed contingent rights to my further use of that product. What a EULA is, essentially, is an attempt to further restrict those rights after the fact of purchase. Sneaking restrictions in through the back door if you will. What's more, as the purchaser, it is often at not inconsiderable inconvenience to me, should I decide to reject that further agreement after the point of purchase (try convincing a vendor not to charge you a "restocking fee" if you should return it). This inconvenience is, largely, unavoidable, because the EULA is not generally publicly available until AFTER the purchase agreement has been made and settled. None of that is the case for the GPL and that is a substantial and meaningful difference.
Maybe I missed something, but the Libertine seems to only be a serif font. Sans serif is very important. Bitstream Vera is great, but I think you're missing the main point of this which is that Liberation is more metrically compatible with Windows fonts (Bitstream Vera isn't even close). That means that they work as a much better drop-in replacement without everything in a document having to be resized and repositioned because of different sized fonts.
Good font design is, perhaps surprisingly, incredibly difficult. It takes very talented and experienced individuals to make a usable general purpose font, and to be honest Microsoft has some of the best designed fonts out there (all claims of "borrowing" aside).
As another poster mentioned, but I'll try to make a little clearer, whether you want Liberation or not depends on whether you use font anti-aliasing (smoothing). In my experience, Liberation interacts with FreeType (the font rendering engine used by Linux) MUCH better than Microsoft fonts do when it comes to FreeType's anti-aliasing, producing much smoother and more consistent lines. If you prefer your fonts without anti-aliasing, Microsoft's fonts seem much better designed for that.
And what's more, I don't know how things work in computer science, but in the humanities (at least where I went) you generally have to sit in front of a panel of professors and actually PRESENT post-grad dissertations. You don't have to just write it, you have to sit there for a few hours proving you know every nuance of what you claim to be talking about.
The facts do not support your statement. The fact is, obese people who smoke cost society less.
The facts do not support your statement either.
You might take care to note that all those articles you are citing refer specifically to health care costs, not total cost to society. Obese people who smoke do not "cost society less," they consume fewer health care resources over their life time. Big difference.
The farmer's market was just the first, maybe the most interesting, option that came to mind. Any local grocery store/butcher's should give you very good prices over Whole Foods. Honestly, the prices at Whole Foods isn't indicative of fresh food being expensive, it's just what you pay to be shopping at Whole Foods. I don't know what city you live in, but in mine there isn't really a residential area anywhere that's not within reasonable distance of a local grocer. Farmers' markets may be more interesting, but they're hardly the only option for inexpensive fresh food.
That doesn't even make sense. Unhealthy people don't just fall over dead one day. They linger in the system too, albeit for a shorter period of time. The problem with your reasoning, though, is that a person with, say, heart disease or kidney failure consumes DRASTICALLY more resources than a healthy person, even over a shorter stay in the health system.
Your point makes even less sense when you factor in life insurance. You know, that kind of insurance that costs the insurance companies more the shorter you live? The kind of insurance that makes them the most money on people who live long healthy lives? I guarantee you that every life insurance company in existence wants nothing more than for all their subscribers to "linger in the system," preferably indefinitely, paying for a service that they aren't using yet.
Where on earth do you live where fresh food costs more to buy and make yourself than prepackaged meals? Whole Foods isn't expensive because it's fresh, it's expensive because it's chic--I have no idea why you'd go there if you want cheap fresh food. Go to a farmer's market and you'll get fresh food at a fraction the cost of prepackaged crap.
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While many others seem to have commented on your use of "better for the shareholders" in the technical sense, I'd just like to point out how absurdly perverse a world view you must be to value shareholder profit above all other considerations (as you clearly do). There's more to life, there's more to BUSINESS, and to being a good citizen of your country and the world, as a business and as a person, than immediate shareholder profit. Always depressing to see how many people's vision ends at the shareholder profit horizon. Public trading has not been good for our culture.
Formal logic would have to disagree with you. To be specific, the principle of non-contradiction (or law of the excluded middle if you prefer) dictates that, given two positions that are logical negations of eachother, one or both of them MUST, in fact, be false. Specifically, the law can be symbolized: -(A & -A). It seems, to me, that one of the claims they've been making is absolutely necessarily false (a conclusion that can be formally derived using the principle of non-contradiction by reasoning of reductio ad absurdum).
So I'm not buying your prevarications on their behalf. I say they are, by logical necessity, lying. That is to be read specifically as "making a positive claim to the truth of a set of facts that is not true, and that they know can not be true," which I think is a reasonable definition of lying under the circumstances, and seems to be in fact what they are doing. To put it another way, if they had claimed either one or the other, they could not have been said to be necessarily lying either way. Claiming both, however, is a lie by basic logical necessity. It doesn't really matter that they're doing so in separate cases.
That'd be my argument at least.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I would never suggest Asimov to anybody until they're well into and comfortable with Sci-Fi and prepared to appreciate it entirely on a conceptual and intellectual level. The sad fact is, while his imagination was amazing, the actual craft of Asimov's writing is, to put it mildly, badly lacking. Flatter, more affectless characters have rarely been put to paper. Don't get me wrong, the Foundation series and I, Robot (absolutely not its sequels though--yikes) are some of the best Sci-Fi I've read, but I really don't think his writing is something that will engage young people.
Ventrilo can be run in Wine you know. Well, it's about a year since I stopped playing WoW on Linux, but it worked on Wine back then, so I assume it still does.
Yeah, but then he'd really be in trouble.
I don't really get it. Blizzard has the reputation for being probably the highest quality development house in the entire industry... by a solid margin. And they are already printing money with World of Warcraft. This seems like a giant leap backwards for them on all fronts, but maybe I'm missing something.
Or, more accurately, writing legislation apparently. Fear doesn't get much more pronounced than the Patriot Act.
There is a certain concept postulated by Wittgenstein that I think would resolve this confusion. "Public" as is meant with respect to the first amendment is used in a very different game from "public" as is meant by MySpace or Flickr being public (that is, open to general consumption). I've always found it rather silly when people get incensed by their first amendment rights being "violated" in privately owned fora. Unless I'm really missing something this is just such a non-issue.
I think this is one of those things that works out a lot better in theory than practice. Life outside of prison with a murder on my conscience vs. life inside of prison with a murder on my conscience. Hmm...
It's nice, to live in a country where you don't really have to be anally paranoid about things like that, yes? I invite you to spend some time in China (or any other such country) doing anything "subversive" online (like, say for example, uploading images of Tibetans being "pacified" so the rest of the world can know what's going on), without keeping your activities encrypted WITH plausible deniability and a lot of other precautions beside. I'll ask you how it went in twenty years... you know... when you get out of prison.
Which is all to make the point that in ACTUAL REAL REALITY there are "movie scenarios" where this functionality is vitally important. That 1% you mention who really need it, they're worth consideration.
(I would have simply accepted your post as a sarcastic joke, but it had been modded "Insightful," so I figured I'd respond to it in kind)
I hate to break it to you, but his story wasn't really the sort of subjective hypothesizing that you can accuse of "drinking the kool-aid." He said he HAS been through both countries and he HAS had the experience that HE PERSONALLY is treated better on the Chinese side of things than the US when it comes to this particular kind of activity. Either he's telling the truth and the story is accurate, or he's making it up, but "fanboyism" doesn't really come into the picture.
Don't get me wrong. China's not the best of places by a long shot. But, sadly, in a lot of ways, neither is my own country anymore. Fascism is well on its way, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and the only embarrassing or dangerous activity is to let those decorations blind you from what's behind them.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's because the easiest fix by far has nothing to do with the way TrueCrypt works. Simply keep separate partitions for your OS/software and your user data. This is actually a very common practice in the Unix world (mount one drive as / and another drive as /home, /tmp, and whatever else gets written to with any frequency) and has a number of very obvious benefits completely apart from anything illicit. The thing is, once you have your system set up and running, the drive mounted as / will almost never have any significant amount of new data written to it, and could conceivably be run for a long time without filling up. The extra space would, of course, simply be there against future need if you were to need to install more software onto the system.
To top it off, buy your hard drive used (it's very common for companies to sell used hard drives that have been wiped with random data). So you've got a used hard drive which understandably has had random data written to its entire volume, and you have a setup where a large portion of space is intentionally and understandably left free. And it's a perfectly sensible and common way of setting things up to boot (pun intended). Am I missing anything?
Finally a real reason to upgrade! (actually, if you use C++ you should really upgrade to VS2003 or later for a much more conformant compiler, but that's another story:P)
One of those times I wish you could moderate the moderation as +1 Funny.
I'm not so sure your point is quite that significant. There is a graph, towards the end, that seems to be multiplying throughput by total battery life, giving a sort of "megabyte-minutes" rating for the different drives. In terms of simple hard drive throughput, this seems to indicate that the work per watt of the traditional drive was still superior (albeit by a small margin over the most expensive SDD), despite your complaint. But obviously it's not quite that simple--no real life usage would cause non-stop disk access like that.
The claim that the CPU stays more active with the faster drive, while technically true, is a little misleading and not nearly as clear cut as you're making it out to be. The only time the CPU would really be more active with a faster drive is under circumstances where it would be waiting for some kind of blocking I/O from the drive, which in my experience (at least under mundane use) isn't all that much. Most of the time you're much more likely to be dealing with system RAM than hard drive storage during program use (unless you run out of memory and start swapping things out, but then you've got other problems).
In short, while you point out perhaps an interesting oversight, I don't think it is quite as serious as you make it out to be.
When I purchase a product, with that purchase come a number of assumed contingent rights to my further use of that product. What a EULA is, essentially, is an attempt to further restrict those rights after the fact of purchase. Sneaking restrictions in through the back door if you will. What's more, as the purchaser, it is often at not inconsiderable inconvenience to me, should I decide to reject that further agreement after the point of purchase (try convincing a vendor not to charge you a "restocking fee" if you should return it). This inconvenience is, largely, unavoidable, because the EULA is not generally publicly available until AFTER the purchase agreement has been made and settled. None of that is the case for the GPL and that is a substantial and meaningful difference.
Maybe I missed something, but the Libertine seems to only be a serif font. Sans serif is very important. Bitstream Vera is great, but I think you're missing the main point of this which is that Liberation is more metrically compatible with Windows fonts (Bitstream Vera isn't even close). That means that they work as a much better drop-in replacement without everything in a document having to be resized and repositioned because of different sized fonts.
Good font design is, perhaps surprisingly, incredibly difficult. It takes very talented and experienced individuals to make a usable general purpose font, and to be honest Microsoft has some of the best designed fonts out there (all claims of "borrowing" aside).
As another poster mentioned, but I'll try to make a little clearer, whether you want Liberation or not depends on whether you use font anti-aliasing (smoothing). In my experience, Liberation interacts with FreeType (the font rendering engine used by Linux) MUCH better than Microsoft fonts do when it comes to FreeType's anti-aliasing, producing much smoother and more consistent lines. If you prefer your fonts without anti-aliasing, Microsoft's fonts seem much better designed for that.
And what's more, I don't know how things work in computer science, but in the humanities (at least where I went) you generally have to sit in front of a panel of professors and actually PRESENT post-grad dissertations. You don't have to just write it, you have to sit there for a few hours proving you know every nuance of what you claim to be talking about.
All I want to know is this: how much did Google pay for this article?
The facts do not support your statement either.
You might take care to note that all those articles you are citing refer specifically to health care costs, not total cost to society. Obese people who smoke do not "cost society less," they consume fewer health care resources over their life time. Big difference.
The farmer's market was just the first, maybe the most interesting, option that came to mind. Any local grocery store/butcher's should give you very good prices over Whole Foods. Honestly, the prices at Whole Foods isn't indicative of fresh food being expensive, it's just what you pay to be shopping at Whole Foods. I don't know what city you live in, but in mine there isn't really a residential area anywhere that's not within reasonable distance of a local grocer. Farmers' markets may be more interesting, but they're hardly the only option for inexpensive fresh food.
That doesn't even make sense. Unhealthy people don't just fall over dead one day. They linger in the system too, albeit for a shorter period of time. The problem with your reasoning, though, is that a person with, say, heart disease or kidney failure consumes DRASTICALLY more resources than a healthy person, even over a shorter stay in the health system.
Your point makes even less sense when you factor in life insurance. You know, that kind of insurance that costs the insurance companies more the shorter you live? The kind of insurance that makes them the most money on people who live long healthy lives? I guarantee you that every life insurance company in existence wants nothing more than for all their subscribers to "linger in the system," preferably indefinitely, paying for a service that they aren't using yet.
Where on earth do you live where fresh food costs more to buy and make yourself than prepackaged meals? Whole Foods isn't expensive because it's fresh, it's expensive because it's chic--I have no idea why you'd go there if you want cheap fresh food. Go to a farmer's market and you'll get fresh food at a fraction the cost of prepackaged crap.