Basing a whole civilization's infrastructure on endless cheap oil when oil isn't endless - that was the primary act of idiocy. The secondary act of idiocy is basing your own lifestyle around infinite oil.
In an ideal world, you're right.
But what all of you people are failing to understand is that, while getting rid of cheap oil to focus on alternative fuels and renewable resources is a good thing, THE SPEED WITH WHICH GAS PRICES HAVE INCREASED IS MURDERING OUR ECONOMY.
If gas had gone from $0.85/gal to $4.00/gal in, say, 50 years, we would have had the time to build up the infrastructure that we need to make use of this - that being developing more energy efficient cars, better energy storage methods, developing more nuclear power plants, putting in electric rail infrastructure, researching biodiesel, etc.
But instead, we've gone from $0.85/gal to $4.00/gal in 8 years. Most of us are still spinning our heads, trying to figure out how it happened. It can't be 5x as expensive to produce a gallon of gas as it was in 2000. You'd think that those mythical production plants in the gulf coast that were taken out by Katrina would be back online by now. The week before Katrina, I was buying gas at $1.60/gal. The day after, I was buying it at $3.00/gal. We thought it was all terrible short term profiteering. But I've seen gas drop under $2/gal ONCE since Katrina, and that was during the election season in 2006.
It's not that I/we/other people in this thread are disagreeing that in the long term, we need to move away from gas. But the answer is not to have a 500% increase in the price in less than a decade, ramming the increased cost up our collective asses like so many huge plastic dildos, while the oil companies are making more profit than any company in the history of the world, ever.
Basically, the COST of an asset on your books (which is what was on your physical inventory list) does not match to the NET BOOK VALUE of an asset.
Well, I don't know what you call it in legalese, but from where I was standing, they were telling us that our inventory was 1.5 million bucks short, and that it was our fault. There wasn't any discussion of any of that kind of stuff you're talking about. I brought up "why can't we depreciate it in the inventory?" and they said it doesn't work like that.
Now if they'd had a way to change the net book asset of this thing, I don't know why they didn't just declare it's cost to be 1.5M but current value to be $10 and just write it off. This was a big deal, I mean, when the provost of a multi billion dollar public institution gets involved over a dispute from inventory, it's important.
I mean, the guy was incredibly intelligent, highly motivated, extremely hardworking, and super nice. He was socially conservative, but never pushed his views on anyone. Really a great guy. But he seriously had one of those mustaches that looks exactly like what you're thinking.
Well, he was a great guy as long as you didn't work directly for him. He didn't understand that not everyone wants to work 70 hour weeks, so secretaries under him usually lasted 6 months or so. But he got all the good grad students.
Anyway, he wasn't my supervisor. My supervisor was like 70 years old and just drifting through life living off of his Ph.D. and tenure.
Usually the biggest pain is the stupid paperwork needed by the state to remove computers from inventory systems. They ought to just expire all computers from inventory after 5 years (or whatever), automatically.
Having worked at virginia tech's computer science department in the past for a few years, I can tell you that what you're saying is logical, but impossible in the current government system.
The inventory people basically accept goods in, give them to you, and expect to get them back. In our situation, after that happens, they auction them off (VT auctions are like every other month, in an old warehouse looking building). The paperwork is intense. But the long and short of it is that the department cannot do anything with the computers.
Problem two is that the inventory system at Tech doesn't account for depreciation. At all.
Case in point: We had a professor create what he called a "pedoplex", which was this huge gazebo (shoot arrows into it?) looking thing that was just banks and banks of hard drives. In 199X or whatever, it cost $1.5 MILLION DOLLARS pinky to lips. Now? We'd be hard pressed to sell it for scrap metal - and I'm not kidding. Well, anyway, the guy that was the contractor that built it for the professor after a while realized that the prof wasn't using it anymore, and was like "this thing is neat, I built it and I'm proud of my work". The professor basically gave it to the guy. He moved to Pennsylvania.
SO... every year, during inventory, someone would have to go UP to PA and walk into a storage locker and go "Pedoplex: One each, check!" and drive back. Not kidding at all. Then the guy moved to Austrailia. All of a sudden, in 2005, this freaking thing shows up in our inventory, marked as "missing", with a value of negative $1.5 million. Meaning even if we had been able to locate TWO (not to mention one) of everything on our inventory list, we were still waaaaaaay over quota for dollar amount of missing equipment.
What ensues? Did we call the guy and ask if we could get into his storage locker? Did we write the piece of equipment off? Did we mark its value to be, say, $5,000? No, none of those things. The administration called the guy a thief (he was given the device), said that we lost valuable state property and should be held accountable (wtf, i'm a sysadmin, not a gopher, and this was before I was employed), and started a bickering shouting match between inventory, provost, and the department.
Your tax dollars at work!
's ok, though, after the 2nd year in a row when the professor who makes $220,000/yr for 5 hours of work per week who's my boss told me "sorry there's no money for a raise, we'll just keep paying you the legal minimum we can pay you in your pay grade", I left all that crap behind and got a job working for Rackspace, which is waaaay more awesome.
Freenet users choose to give up the right to control your speech on Freenet. In doing so, they protect themselves from responsibility for what you say.
I like you, man. I do, and I also appreciate what freenet is trying to do.
But here's the problem.
What if there's child porn on my computer because of freenet?
Now, you *say* that it'd be impossible to know, and you *say* that i'd never be held responsible for it. But, whatever, what if I went on freenet looking for anarchist's cookbook or something that's of marginal legality, and in doing so, I open my hard drive up to be a repository for (anonymous, encrypted, obfuscated) child porn?
That's really the issue at heart, at least for me. The idea that "everyone gives up control, therefore no one gets in trouble" works in a perfect world, and works in a legally sane world, and works in a world where people write perfect code and where the government doesn't have absolute power. But, come on, I live in Virginia. That shit doesn't fly here. I don't want child porn on my computer, under any circumstances, and with any amount of technical and/or legal protection from trouble - I just don't want it. And I'm unwilling to give up the right to control "your" (other freenet users) free speech rights, because, while I'm all about *my* rights, I'm not all about *your* rights at the expense of *my* virgin asshole being pounded in prison for being a pedophile.
Also, getting the legal limit lowered (in most states) to 0.08BAC. I mean, seriously, two glasses of wine with a lengthy romantic dinner and you'll blow 0.08 for the next 3 hours, but it doesn't, or barely, impairs your driving ability. Talking on a cellphone or driving while tired impair you to a far greater extent than 0.08. I think a legal limit around 0.12 is reasonable, if still a little low. But I've heard rumblings that MADD is trying to get it pushed to 0.05 in some places now.
Seriously. 0.05. That's one beer two hours ago. That wouldn't phase a 7 year old.
I won't "slam on the brakes" for a yellow light, but I may use more of my car's braking abilities for a yellow than I would if I was farther away.
I have a friend who went to Estonia in High School, and he says that people ALL slam on their breaks at a yellow light there. Reason? When you're approaching a light in america, the normal sequence is 1.) light turns yellow to warn you that it's about to turn red so you should either move it or slow down, 2.) light turns red, 3.) After a brief delay, the light going the perpendicular direction turns green.
In estonia, however, at the same time you're getting green-yellow-red, people going the other way are getting red-yellow-green. All the lights in the intersection are yellow at the same time, and then one direction flips green, while the other flips red.
So, while you're getting "Safe", then "Caution", then "Stop"... they're getting "Ready", "Set", "Go".
For those who are skeptical (and i'm one) regarding the fraud or non-fraud of optoutprescreen.com, See this:
One: Verisign signature.
SITE NAME: www.optoutprescreen.com
SSL CERTIFICATE STATUS: Valid (28-Sep-2006 to 18-Oct-2008)
COMPANY/ ORGANIZATION: CONSUMER DATA INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION Washington District of Columbia, US
Encrypted Data Transmission This Web site can secure your private information using a VeriSign SSL Certificate. Information exchanged with any address beginning with https is encrypted using SSL before transmission.
Identity Verified CONSUMER DATA INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION has been verified as the owner or operator of the Web site located at www.optoutprescreen.com. Official records confirm CONSUMER DATA INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION as a valid business.
There are also some blog entries around the web where people have had the same feelings about the website and it's possibility of fraud. As always, do your own research. But it looks legit.
The thing is - it's the rush I'm after. All this stuff about pirates and camping stargates and whatnot is all true - for low security space. It makes people risk adverse - don't go there unless you have to; use scouts; use less traveled routes; don't go to Rancer, etc.
But the thing that gets me going in eve isn't low sec or piracy. It's 0.0 security, lawless space. You can't *be* risk adverse and live in 0.0 (and I have, almost consistently, for two years now). Yes, it is sometimes blob or be blobbed, but really, you have to fight to hold space, and you will take losses. In part, it's a war of attrition every day - make other people so "risk adverse" that they don't want to come bother you in your space. But, really for me, what gets my blood hot is going out in roaming gangs - and the further you get away from your space, the further you get behind enemy lines, the better.
In situations like that, when you're taking a 10 man gang out, and your fleet commander jumps everyone into a 20 man gate camp - that's a fucking rush. Yeah, you might lose your ship, and in fact some of you probably will. But if you're better skilled, better geared, and most importantly, have a better fleet commander, how fucking epic would it be to jump into 20 people with only 10 ships, and completely own them.
Yeah, it doesn't happen that often. But, let me tell you - when it does, it's like heroin. Once it's happened once, you spend the entire game trying to recapture that feeling. Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's a bit boring, but... when you hit it again... what an adrenaline rush.
That's what I play for. I don't do non-consensual combat unless I am forced to, and only then as a military objective (securing a transportation route for POS fuel being the most common one). By going into 0.0 space, you are consenting to combat.
In EVE, the mmo I play, taking a ship out is a risk. Take out a cheap ship, and you're likely to get wtfpwned by someone in a better ship. Take out an expensive ship, and lose it, and you may seriously be out an entire month's money making - but what a rush. Not to mention, if you die a bunch, someone else may move in and take your space.
In WoW, you die. Then nothing happens, you resurrect, and you pay 2 gold to repair your equipment that would be worth 45,000 gold if you could sell it (or more to the point, lost it and had to re-buy it), and then you go about your life.
Death needs consequence. I do agree with your qualm about not wanting to run 1-20 over again - but that's easily solved. You "save" your game in some magical fashion (i dunno, you talked to the tree faerie, and she knows of your deeds, and if you die, can revive a piece of your soul, with a loss of 10% of the exp you've gained since the last level up - whatever). In EVE, this is settled with cloning, but it could just as easily be called "magic".
If you want this in a fantasy game, wait for darkfall.
This stupid dickering over population density and whatall manages to totally miss the point. In the U.S. there IS NO FREE MARKET for telco. Not even close. In which case, inertia is the biggest culprit, which explains why a very significant minority of the populous STILL can't get anything better (bandwidth/latency-wise) than freakin' dialup.
I would argue that free market isn't the only solution. In fact, pretty much any system other than the one we have now would be better for ISP's in the USA.
For instance, free market might solve some of the problems, except that the established companies already own the cable. A startup can't put in cable without negotiating with the town and without a huge startup capital investment. In this situation, a socialized internet provider would work, too, like water. Buy your internet from the government, which runs a nominally third party entity that handles the technology but that has service requirements and price caps.
Honestly, the fact that right now we have a government-granted monopoly, and that it's essentially unregulated, is what's causing the problems.
The Acid test uses actual web standards. Therefore, browsers that pass it conform to the web standards used in the test.
Well, yes and no. The acid test, where actual web standards are well established and universally agreed upon, does test these. But the problem with the acid test is that in all actuality, it tests a series of obscure, next-generation "standards", some of which haven't been hammered out in their entirety. Which means, in this case, that the Acid 3 test, and the Acid 2 test before it, at the time they were released, didn't test web standards. They tested the author's *interpretation* of web standards.
This is one of those situations, in IE8. It fails in a more secure way than the acid 2 test dictates. Well, who's to say that after actually reading the standard that Microsoft is wrong the way they did it? Have you read the spec? I have, and it is written in such a way that it's open to interpretation.
Therein lies the crux of the Acid Test Testing Model - it assumes that it tests for well-established tests with no room for interpretation, when in actuality, not only is the test not indicative of real-world usage, but also in the real world, we deal with standards that are fluid, moving targets, and that have a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.
Not to mention, what's the point of a test that no browser passes? Who gives a shit? That's like an independent car testing company developing a test that says that a car should be able to slam into a steel wall 6 ft thick at 150 miles per hour and also have a bomb go off in the trunk, and all of the passengers should be present with not only an airbag to save their lives, but also a pleasant scent of lilac for their troubles.
Not gonna happen, and also utterly and completely worthless in the real world. As proof of this, when websites fail in Safari, where to people turn? Firefox, if they have the option - firefox, according to the Acid test is *LESS* standards compliant than Safari, but somehow *MORE* functional. And when Firefox doesn't work, where to people turn? Internet Explorer, which is HORRIBLE at standards compliance. Why is this? You could say it's because everyone who isn't safari is doing it wrong. But you'd have 99.999% of the browser-using population that doesn't care about your bullshit, and just wants to be able to view their webpage / play their web game / order their new shoes / view their video.
In my book, 99.999% writes the standard. The other 0.001% who think they're right, and everyone else is wrong, can go piss up a rope.
I have this long post in my head, planned out, talking about "what is a record label?". It's really just a bank, where they loan you money, then dictate how you spend it, and want an insane interest rate. How really, you should pay a recording studio with cash/loaned money if you want to make an album, then just distribute digitally, etc. But, rather than that, I think I'll quote a post I saw. This is from a forum on a torrent tracker that deals in underground punk rock and where posting an album that even uses an RIAA distribution channel is grounds for account deletion - for you and the person who invited you. Same thing with posting a "benefit album".
Anyway, in this scenario, the OP is some aging hipster who's complaining that his tiny record label is probably losing money because of piracy.
I don't feel bad at all downloading music. Screw record labels all together. The big ones, the small ones, all of em. Why the hell does a record label even exist anymore? So what if some guy is stupid enough to not notice that and has dumped his own money into a hole instead of investing it somewhere intelligent; people make bad decisions all the time and no one cares unless he has the intention of "having fun with my friends". If I wanted to help the band I'd hand them $10 or let them crash on my floor (yes, I've done both), if I wanted to give to a charity I sure would find a better one than some business school reject running a desperate attempt to be part of a music scene but is too dimwitted to start a band or open a decent venue.
Bands can exist without bank-like support. They can write and record albums, they can play shows, they can produce merch and they can make PROFIT without financial backing from a record contract. (Nor do you need a record label for distro purposes either, so don't argue that angle. The interbutt offers FREE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION, PERIOD.) I know, because I personally do it in my band, and would *NEVER* have it any other way. With $1500 (small price for 3-5 people's *HOBBY*) in recording gear, a few hours messing with a computer and time to hang out with some of my best friends and have fun we learned out to do it all on our own, at the pace we want, and producing exactly what we want. My website with more bandwidth than god could offer is like $8 a month for which we use to distro out our music for free. We don't have to give it away...if we wanted to charge a few bucks for it we could. It's just not the model we personally choose to use.
So as far as I'm concerned, I'm voting with my dollars. I go to shows. I buy Tshirts. But I'm sure as hell not going to keep giving record labels the feeling they are needed by buying albums from them.
True rights don't require or aren't about anything technological. Rights exist apart from technology, so that if you're stranded on an deserted island, your rights still exist.
This is one of those things that people on the left have no concept of. They think rights are things you're entitled to by government decree, which is completely contrary to the founding document of the USofA. Government ought to be extremely limited, not an all powerful monolithic demigod that it has become. And rights don't require forcing others into situations they don't want to be in (eg Universal Health Care).
Wow, this is some ignorant shit.
The need for enumerating rights isn't something that "people on the left have no concept of". It's something that the entire civilized world does. Thanks for painting a political picture of yourself, though.
Anyway, while I may agree that certain rights come with existence as a member of the human race, people have shown TIME AND TIME AGAIN a blatant, flagrant willingness to disregard them when it's convenient or for the sake of greed, or for any of a hundred other reasons, or for no reason at all.
The practice of enumerating rights serves to ensure that when corporations, the wealthy, or the majority oppress someone, that person has a legal recourse. Without legal recourse, you end up with things like segregation. To put it in the same terms as your ISP metaphor: "Oh, I'm sorry, mister nigra, you don't like the school you're in? Well clearly, you should choose to go to a different school, or to go without." And that went on for 75 years after the civil war was over, before someone in the big bad scary government made a law that said "Nigras get the same schooling as whites".
Another poster said it more or less right: You're confusing an ideal with an actuality.
Either that, or you're just being a dick. It's so hard to tell.
Besides, I see these as a process or goal -- giving the browser makers something concrete and visual to shoot for, as well as an easy way for users to judge the quality of their browser of choice.
Bullshit. The Acid tests have become the SAT's of the browser world. People *think* it's a measure of how standards compliant your browser is, but all it *really* is, is a measure of how well your browser does on the acid test.
That's it, nothing more, nothing less. The acid test is incredibly nit-picky and it's possible to even argue some of the decisions the guy has made about how things should be rendered (i.e. questioning his interpretation of the standard). And it's important that if your browser fails the acid test, but looks fine when you surf fark/slashdot/cnn/myspace, then whothefuck cares? The browser exists to deliver content to you; not to make some jackass feel happy that his CSS and Ajax code is the hardest thing to render in the known fucking universe.
I really, really wish people would get over the Acid tests; perhaps in favor of "the CNN test", or the "does it work with my proprietary intranet badly-coded webapps?" test. If it passes these, then just roll with it.
Some artist who's not a jackass should bring a class action lawsuit on behalf of the artists, claiming that they're owed $750 per successful litigation of a confirmed act of copyright infringement. Seeing as how the RIAA is determined to ram that valuation through the courts.
I won't take a job where the person interviewing treats me as if they are doing me a favor in offering the job. They are after me, not the other way around.
Well, if you're a superstar developer, you can probably expect red-carpet treatment. I'm not one; but I'd like to interject that an interview is a two-way conversation. You're interviewing a potential candidate, and they're interviewing a potential employer. Unless you really are the top 0.1% (of potential employees, OR of employers), don't go into the interview thinking the other party owes you. Both sides are interviewing the other.
Well, sort of. They may not be great at optimizing for web usage, but if they can come up with the right graphics, I mean, how hard is it to resize and save-for-web from a graphics program.
Slashdot Mirror
Basing a whole civilization's infrastructure on endless cheap oil when oil isn't endless - that was the primary act of idiocy. The secondary act of idiocy is basing your own lifestyle around infinite oil.
In an ideal world, you're right.
But what all of you people are failing to understand is that, while getting rid of cheap oil to focus on alternative fuels and renewable resources is a good thing, THE SPEED WITH WHICH GAS PRICES HAVE INCREASED IS MURDERING OUR ECONOMY.
If gas had gone from $0.85/gal to $4.00/gal in, say, 50 years, we would have had the time to build up the infrastructure that we need to make use of this - that being developing more energy efficient cars, better energy storage methods, developing more nuclear power plants, putting in electric rail infrastructure, researching biodiesel, etc.
But instead, we've gone from $0.85/gal to $4.00/gal in 8 years. Most of us are still spinning our heads, trying to figure out how it happened. It can't be 5x as expensive to produce a gallon of gas as it was in 2000. You'd think that those mythical production plants in the gulf coast that were taken out by Katrina would be back online by now. The week before Katrina, I was buying gas at $1.60/gal. The day after, I was buying it at $3.00/gal. We thought it was all terrible short term profiteering. But I've seen gas drop under $2/gal ONCE since Katrina, and that was during the election season in 2006.
It's not that I/we/other people in this thread are disagreeing that in the long term, we need to move away from gas. But the answer is not to have a 500% increase in the price in less than a decade, ramming the increased cost up our collective asses like so many huge plastic dildos, while the oil companies are making more profit than any company in the history of the world, ever.
~X
Basically, the COST of an asset on your books (which is what was on your physical inventory list) does not match to the NET BOOK VALUE of an asset.
Well, I don't know what you call it in legalese, but from where I was standing, they were telling us that our inventory was 1.5 million bucks short, and that it was our fault. There wasn't any discussion of any of that kind of stuff you're talking about. I brought up "why can't we depreciate it in the inventory?" and they said it doesn't work like that.
Now if they'd had a way to change the net book asset of this thing, I don't know why they didn't just declare it's cost to be 1.5M but current value to be $10 and just write it off. This was a big deal, I mean, when the provost of a multi billion dollar public institution gets involved over a dispute from inventory, it's important.
~Wx
Dude, you just have absolutely no idea.
I mean, the guy was incredibly intelligent, highly motivated, extremely hardworking, and super nice. He was socially conservative, but never pushed his views on anyone. Really a great guy. But he seriously had one of those mustaches that looks exactly like what you're thinking.
Well, he was a great guy as long as you didn't work directly for him. He didn't understand that not everyone wants to work 70 hour weeks, so secretaries under him usually lasted 6 months or so. But he got all the good grad students.
Anyway, he wasn't my supervisor. My supervisor was like 70 years old and just drifting through life living off of his Ph.D. and tenure.
Usually the biggest pain is the stupid paperwork needed by the state to remove computers from inventory systems. They ought to just expire all computers from inventory after 5 years (or whatever), automatically.
Having worked at virginia tech's computer science department in the past for a few years, I can tell you that what you're saying is logical, but impossible in the current government system.
The inventory people basically accept goods in, give them to you, and expect to get them back. In our situation, after that happens, they auction them off (VT auctions are like every other month, in an old warehouse looking building). The paperwork is intense. But the long and short of it is that the department cannot do anything with the computers.
Problem two is that the inventory system at Tech doesn't account for depreciation. At all.
Case in point: We had a professor create what he called a "pedoplex", which was this huge gazebo (shoot arrows into it?) looking thing that was just banks and banks of hard drives. In 199X or whatever, it cost $1.5 MILLION DOLLARS pinky to lips. Now? We'd be hard pressed to sell it for scrap metal - and I'm not kidding. Well, anyway, the guy that was the contractor that built it for the professor after a while realized that the prof wasn't using it anymore, and was like "this thing is neat, I built it and I'm proud of my work". The professor basically gave it to the guy. He moved to Pennsylvania.
SO... every year, during inventory, someone would have to go UP to PA and walk into a storage locker and go "Pedoplex: One each, check!" and drive back. Not kidding at all. Then the guy moved to Austrailia. All of a sudden, in 2005, this freaking thing shows up in our inventory, marked as "missing", with a value of negative $1.5 million. Meaning even if we had been able to locate TWO (not to mention one) of everything on our inventory list, we were still waaaaaaay over quota for dollar amount of missing equipment.
What ensues? Did we call the guy and ask if we could get into his storage locker? Did we write the piece of equipment off? Did we mark its value to be, say, $5,000? No, none of those things. The administration called the guy a thief (he was given the device), said that we lost valuable state property and should be held accountable (wtf, i'm a sysadmin, not a gopher, and this was before I was employed), and started a bickering shouting match between inventory, provost, and the department.
Your tax dollars at work!
's ok, though, after the 2nd year in a row when the professor who makes $220,000/yr for 5 hours of work per week who's my boss told me "sorry there's no money for a raise, we'll just keep paying you the legal minimum we can pay you in your pay grade", I left all that crap behind and got a job working for Rackspace, which is waaaay more awesome.
~W
I'll bite:
Apple:
* Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Harpertown" processors
* 2GB memory (800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
* ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256MB memory
* 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1
* 16x double-layer SuperDrive
$2,799
add 3 year warranty, $3,048
Dell:
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5440 (2.83GHz,2X6M L2,1333)
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5440 (2.83GHz,2X6M L2,1333)
3 Year Limited Hardware Warranty with Next Business Day On-Site Service
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI Capable
2GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (2 DIMMS)
16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM) and Roxio Creator(TM) Dell Ed
320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive
$3,973
Waaay more expensive to go to dell.
Apple laptop:
# MacBook Pro 15-inch Widescreen Display
# 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
$2,499
Dell:
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo Processor T8300 (2.4GHz/800Mhz FSB, 3MB Cache) edit
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition edit
High Resolution, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD(1440x900) & 2MP Camera edit
2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2 Dimms) edit
Size: 250GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive edit
Slot Load DVD+/-RW (DVD/CD read/write) edit
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT edit
Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Mini Card edit
Finger Print Reader XPS M1530 edit
$1,374
Better graphics card, and way cheaper at dell.
If you're willing to skip the dvd writer and use an intel graphics card, from dell you can get one with 3GB of ram, and it's $999.
~X
Freenet users choose to give up the right to control your speech on Freenet. In doing so, they protect themselves from responsibility for what you say.
I like you, man. I do, and I also appreciate what freenet is trying to do.
But here's the problem.
What if there's child porn on my computer because of freenet?
Now, you *say* that it'd be impossible to know, and you *say* that i'd never be held responsible for it. But, whatever, what if I went on freenet looking for anarchist's cookbook or something that's of marginal legality, and in doing so, I open my hard drive up to be a repository for (anonymous, encrypted, obfuscated) child porn?
That's really the issue at heart, at least for me. The idea that "everyone gives up control, therefore no one gets in trouble" works in a perfect world, and works in a legally sane world, and works in a world where people write perfect code and where the government doesn't have absolute power. But, come on, I live in Virginia. That shit doesn't fly here. I don't want child porn on my computer, under any circumstances, and with any amount of technical and/or legal protection from trouble - I just don't want it. And I'm unwilling to give up the right to control "your" (other freenet users) free speech rights, because, while I'm all about *my* rights, I'm not all about *your* rights at the expense of *my* virgin asshole being pounded in prison for being a pedophile.
~W
Also, getting the legal limit lowered (in most states) to 0.08BAC. I mean, seriously, two glasses of wine with a lengthy romantic dinner and you'll blow 0.08 for the next 3 hours, but it doesn't, or barely, impairs your driving ability. Talking on a cellphone or driving while tired impair you to a far greater extent than 0.08. I think a legal limit around 0.12 is reasonable, if still a little low. But I've heard rumblings that MADD is trying to get it pushed to 0.05 in some places now.
Seriously. 0.05. That's one beer two hours ago. That wouldn't phase a 7 year old.
~W
From now on, I'm renaming all the tarballs I package.
tar -cvf XXX-9yo-boys-blowjobs-and-crystal-meth.tar dovecot-1.0-stable/
~Wx
I won't "slam on the brakes" for a yellow light, but I may use more of my car's braking abilities for a yellow than I would if I was farther away.
I have a friend who went to Estonia in High School, and he says that people ALL slam on their breaks at a yellow light there. Reason? When you're approaching a light in america, the normal sequence is 1.) light turns yellow to warn you that it's about to turn red so you should either move it or slow down, 2.) light turns red, 3.) After a brief delay, the light going the perpendicular direction turns green.
In estonia, however, at the same time you're getting green-yellow-red, people going the other way are getting red-yellow-green. All the lights in the intersection are yellow at the same time, and then one direction flips green, while the other flips red.
So, while you're getting "Safe", then "Caution", then "Stop"... they're getting "Ready", "Set", "Go".
~Wx
send yer email to waffles@dunnclan.net.
I'll send you a 14 day trial, and if you sign up, supposedly you get another 14 days free. So... free for a month.
Send me an in-game mail, and I'll spot you a few million isk to get you started.
One: Verisign signature.
Two: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.shtm
FTC.gov page about the website.
There are also some blog entries around the web where people have had the same feelings about the website and it's possibility of fraud. As always, do your own research. But it looks legit.
~Wx
The thing is - it's the rush I'm after. All this stuff about pirates and camping stargates and whatnot is all true - for low security space. It makes people risk adverse - don't go there unless you have to; use scouts; use less traveled routes; don't go to Rancer, etc.
But the thing that gets me going in eve isn't low sec or piracy. It's 0.0 security, lawless space. You can't *be* risk adverse and live in 0.0 (and I have, almost consistently, for two years now). Yes, it is sometimes blob or be blobbed, but really, you have to fight to hold space, and you will take losses. In part, it's a war of attrition every day - make other people so "risk adverse" that they don't want to come bother you in your space. But, really for me, what gets my blood hot is going out in roaming gangs - and the further you get away from your space, the further you get behind enemy lines, the better.
In situations like that, when you're taking a 10 man gang out, and your fleet commander jumps everyone into a 20 man gate camp - that's a fucking rush. Yeah, you might lose your ship, and in fact some of you probably will. But if you're better skilled, better geared, and most importantly, have a better fleet commander, how fucking epic would it be to jump into 20 people with only 10 ships, and completely own them.
Yeah, it doesn't happen that often. But, let me tell you - when it does, it's like heroin. Once it's happened once, you spend the entire game trying to recapture that feeling. Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's a bit boring, but... when you hit it again... what an adrenaline rush.
That's what I play for. I don't do non-consensual combat unless I am forced to, and only then as a military objective (securing a transportation route for POS fuel being the most common one). By going into 0.0 space, you are consenting to combat.
Live on the edge, man.
~W
It's not the dying.
It's the lack of consequence.
In EVE, the mmo I play, taking a ship out is a risk. Take out a cheap ship, and you're likely to get wtfpwned by someone in a better ship. Take out an expensive ship, and lose it, and you may seriously be out an entire month's money making - but what a rush. Not to mention, if you die a bunch, someone else may move in and take your space.
In WoW, you die. Then nothing happens, you resurrect, and you pay 2 gold to repair your equipment that would be worth 45,000 gold if you could sell it (or more to the point, lost it and had to re-buy it), and then you go about your life.
Death needs consequence. I do agree with your qualm about not wanting to run 1-20 over again - but that's easily solved. You "save" your game in some magical fashion (i dunno, you talked to the tree faerie, and she knows of your deeds, and if you die, can revive a piece of your soul, with a loss of 10% of the exp you've gained since the last level up - whatever). In EVE, this is settled with cloning, but it could just as easily be called "magic".
If you want this in a fantasy game, wait for darkfall.
~X
This stupid dickering over population density and whatall manages to totally miss the point. In the U.S. there IS NO FREE MARKET for telco. Not even close. In which case, inertia is the biggest culprit, which explains why a very significant minority of the populous STILL can't get anything better (bandwidth/latency-wise) than freakin' dialup.
I would argue that free market isn't the only solution. In fact, pretty much any system other than the one we have now would be better for ISP's in the USA.
For instance, free market might solve some of the problems, except that the established companies already own the cable. A startup can't put in cable without negotiating with the town and without a huge startup capital investment. In this situation, a socialized internet provider would work, too, like water. Buy your internet from the government, which runs a nominally third party entity that handles the technology but that has service requirements and price caps.
Honestly, the fact that right now we have a government-granted monopoly, and that it's essentially unregulated, is what's causing the problems.
~X
The Acid test uses actual web standards. Therefore, browsers that pass it conform to the web standards used in the test.
Well, yes and no. The acid test, where actual web standards are well established and universally agreed upon, does test these. But the problem with the acid test is that in all actuality, it tests a series of obscure, next-generation "standards", some of which haven't been hammered out in their entirety. Which means, in this case, that the Acid 3 test, and the Acid 2 test before it, at the time they were released, didn't test web standards. They tested the author's *interpretation* of web standards.
This is one of those situations, in IE8. It fails in a more secure way than the acid 2 test dictates. Well, who's to say that after actually reading the standard that Microsoft is wrong the way they did it? Have you read the spec? I have, and it is written in such a way that it's open to interpretation.
Therein lies the crux of the Acid Test Testing Model - it assumes that it tests for well-established tests with no room for interpretation, when in actuality, not only is the test not indicative of real-world usage, but also in the real world, we deal with standards that are fluid, moving targets, and that have a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.
Not to mention, what's the point of a test that no browser passes? Who gives a shit? That's like an independent car testing company developing a test that says that a car should be able to slam into a steel wall 6 ft thick at 150 miles per hour and also have a bomb go off in the trunk, and all of the passengers should be present with not only an airbag to save their lives, but also a pleasant scent of lilac for their troubles.
Not gonna happen, and also utterly and completely worthless in the real world. As proof of this, when websites fail in Safari, where to people turn? Firefox, if they have the option - firefox, according to the Acid test is *LESS* standards compliant than Safari, but somehow *MORE* functional. And when Firefox doesn't work, where to people turn? Internet Explorer, which is HORRIBLE at standards compliance. Why is this? You could say it's because everyone who isn't safari is doing it wrong. But you'd have 99.999% of the browser-using population that doesn't care about your bullshit, and just wants to be able to view their webpage / play their web game / order their new shoes / view their video.
In my book, 99.999% writes the standard. The other 0.001% who think they're right, and everyone else is wrong, can go piss up a rope.
Get over the acid test.
~Wx
See, I agree with you, but this is what I got flamed for a couple of weeks ago:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=476844&cid=22660062
The ACID Test is a measure of HOW WELL A BROWSER DOES ON THE ACID TEST, not how standards compliant it is, and not a measure of it's worth.
Wish we'd get over the acid test already.
I have this long post in my head, planned out, talking about "what is a record label?". It's really just a bank, where they loan you money, then dictate how you spend it, and want an insane interest rate. How really, you should pay a recording studio with cash/loaned money if you want to make an album, then just distribute digitally, etc. But, rather than that, I think I'll quote a post I saw. This is from a forum on a torrent tracker that deals in underground punk rock and where posting an album that even uses an RIAA distribution channel is grounds for account deletion - for you and the person who invited you. Same thing with posting a "benefit album".
Anyway, in this scenario, the OP is some aging hipster who's complaining that his tiny record label is probably losing money because of piracy.
That's actually a great name for a band and a single!
"...And now, straight from NewYorkCountyLawyer's iPod, it's the hit single 'Killing Dolphins', by new sensation 'Direct Threat'!"
Sounds very post-punk.
My brother was down at Fort Meade working for *cough cough cough*
My dad referred to it as "No Such Agency".
Evolution uses CVS, then, eh?
~Wx
True rights don't require or aren't about anything technological. Rights exist apart from technology, so that if you're stranded on an deserted island, your rights still exist.
This is one of those things that people on the left have no concept of. They think rights are things you're entitled to by government decree, which is completely contrary to the founding document of the USofA. Government ought to be extremely limited, not an all powerful monolithic demigod that it has become. And rights don't require forcing others into situations they don't want to be in (eg Universal Health Care).
Wow, this is some ignorant shit.
The need for enumerating rights isn't something that "people on the left have no concept of". It's something that the entire civilized world does. Thanks for painting a political picture of yourself, though.
Anyway, while I may agree that certain rights come with existence as a member of the human race, people have shown TIME AND TIME AGAIN a blatant, flagrant willingness to disregard them when it's convenient or for the sake of greed, or for any of a hundred other reasons, or for no reason at all.
The practice of enumerating rights serves to ensure that when corporations, the wealthy, or the majority oppress someone, that person has a legal recourse. Without legal recourse, you end up with things like segregation. To put it in the same terms as your ISP metaphor: "Oh, I'm sorry, mister nigra, you don't like the school you're in? Well clearly, you should choose to go to a different school, or to go without." And that went on for 75 years after the civil war was over, before someone in the big bad scary government made a law that said "Nigras get the same schooling as whites".
Another poster said it more or less right: You're confusing an ideal with an actuality.
Either that, or you're just being a dick. It's so hard to tell.
~Wx
Besides, I see these as a process or goal -- giving the browser makers something concrete and visual to shoot for, as well as an easy way for users to judge the quality of their browser of choice.
Bullshit. The Acid tests have become the SAT's of the browser world. People *think* it's a measure of how standards compliant your browser is, but all it *really* is, is a measure of how well your browser does on the acid test.
That's it, nothing more, nothing less. The acid test is incredibly nit-picky and it's possible to even argue some of the decisions the guy has made about how things should be rendered (i.e. questioning his interpretation of the standard). And it's important that if your browser fails the acid test, but looks fine when you surf fark/slashdot/cnn/myspace, then whothefuck cares? The browser exists to deliver content to you; not to make some jackass feel happy that his CSS and Ajax code is the hardest thing to render in the known fucking universe.
I really, really wish people would get over the Acid tests; perhaps in favor of "the CNN test", or the "does it work with my proprietary intranet badly-coded webapps?" test. If it passes these, then just roll with it.
~Wx
Heh.
Some artist who's not a jackass should bring a class action lawsuit on behalf of the artists, claiming that they're owed $750 per successful litigation of a confirmed act of copyright infringement. Seeing as how the RIAA is determined to ram that valuation through the courts.
~Wx
I won't take a job where the person interviewing treats me as if they are doing me a favor in offering the job. They are after me, not the other way around.
Well, if you're a superstar developer, you can probably expect red-carpet treatment. I'm not one; but I'd like to interject that an interview is a two-way conversation. You're interviewing a potential candidate, and they're interviewing a potential employer. Unless you really are the top 0.1% (of potential employees, OR of employers), don't go into the interview thinking the other party owes you. Both sides are interviewing the other.
~wX
Well, sort of. They may not be great at optimizing for web usage, but if they can come up with the right graphics, I mean, how hard is it to resize and save-for-web from a graphics program.
~Wx