See, sending most of our production capacity over to China was part of a brilliant deep game. We're not hamstringing ourselves and guaranteeing systemic unemployment for the next generation, we're making sure we have another Cold War, and the glory days of the US defense industry will be/back/, baby!
*Now* we have need of long-range stealth bombers, ICBMs, aircraft carriers, and the whole shebang.
Probably too much to hope that we'll have another space race to get us motivated to get out to Mars, though.
That system could still be gamed: one party wants to play dirty, so it runs its second-stringers against the other guys, then does something to cause the election to be vacated and ban both slates from running again,/then/ they can bring their best people out for the replacement election.
There wouldn't be any evidence. There seldom is if the perps are competent, and if the evidence trail pointed upwards some flunky would fall on his sword to protect the Big Boss. This has been done many times before, and will again.
You have a point, but writing well is a courtesy to one's readers. If a poster writes poorly enough I'll skip over the remainder of his post to save myself pain, and usually I don't miss much anyway.
I think I was still rocking a 486DX2-50, 4MB of RAM, and a 420MB IDE hard drive - the CPU and hard drive were upgrades from a 25 MHz 486SX and a 106MB drive. Onboard WD Paradise graphics with 512KB and VBE 1.01 compatibility, Sound Blaster 16 Basic (also an upgrade), 1x LMS CD-ROM drive on a proprietary bus, 14.4 Kbps external modem (this was a mistake; the computer had 16450 UARTs on its serial ports which couldn't keep up & kept causing CRC errors; should have gotten an internal), MS-DOS 6.20 and Windows 3.11 (not Workgroups).
Now I have a 3.4 GHz Core i5-2500K, 8GB of RAM, 1.5 TB SATA hard drive, Radeon 4850/512MB, Xonar DX sound, 10 Mbps Internet connection, don't bother with optical drives, and dual-boot Win7 x64 and Kubuntu 11.10 x64. My Model M keyboard is from 1988.
Yeah, I couldn't believe how bloated and unoptimized some of those vintage mouse drivers were. Good TSRs and drivers back then would claim a certain amount of space when they started up (initialization and displaying a splash, mainly) and then give back a predictable and contiguous chunk of that once it was only the resident stuff that needed to stay in memory, rather than always claiming the ~25kb.
This could confuse the hell out of early memory managers, though; IIRC QEMM and 386max were especially good about dealing with those.
I do remember Zone 66! It was technically amazing for its day - fast and written entirely in 386 assembly, but finicky: if you didn't have the machine set up just so it'd crash.
I did this too back when my 486SX with 4MB ran DOS 5.0. Then I upgraded to DOS 6.x and learnt how to use the config.sys configuration menus, which made loading games a breeze - you'd set up a configuration and put some if statements into autoexec.bat, and you'd launch your game straight from the boot menu with an optimal configuration.
It required a bit of manual work, since memmaker wasn't smart enough to understand the config menus - you'd have to create scratch config.sys and autoexec.bat files configured specifically for that game (or games with similar requirements, anyway) then run memmaker and paste the results into your main files.
Sticking your mouse driver in upper memory probably wouldn't have helped anyway on a 4MB system. Doom really wanted all of that 4MB and it used a DOS extender so all its memory was a flat space. If you had 8MB you could have loaded the mouse driver into conventional memory and Doom wouldn't have cared.
People gripe about how hard roundabouts are to use, and I don't see it at all. Maybe it helps that the local ones were laid out intelligently so there's obviously only one way to go in - the entrances are canted to the right so that even the biggest idiot doesn't try to enter to the left.
Also Intel bribed big OEMs to use their processors instead of AMD's. Dell was an especial example of this: in the K7/K8 days they'd make noise every year or two about how they were considering selling AMD-based systems rather than being exclusively Intel, and those of us in IT who wanted/better/ computers would get very excited, but then Intel reliably came along and gave Dell an even better sweetheart deal on their CPUs, which was probably Dell's objective the whole time.
It wasn't AMD's fault for choosing the wrong market; they'd made a far better desktop and mobile processor than the P4, it was just that Intel was abusing its market position.
But we don't have a free market and that's all the government's fault.
I've known an Internet Libertarian or two who basically argued from the premise that all ills were either directly caused by the gov't, or indirectly caused by the government doing something else foolish or malicious, then presented things (I shan't call them facts) to bolster that opinion.
Except that improperly-done nasal irrigation can kill. There were a couple people in Louisiana who used tap water to irrigate their sinuses, but the water was infected with an amoeba that killed them.
Ought to use distilled water for that at the least.
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Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!
See, sending most of our production capacity over to China was part of a brilliant deep game. We're not hamstringing ourselves and guaranteeing systemic unemployment for the next generation, we're making sure we have another Cold War, and the glory days of the US defense industry will be /back/, baby!
*Now* we have need of long-range stealth bombers, ICBMs, aircraft carriers, and the whole shebang.
Probably too much to hope that we'll have another space race to get us motivated to get out to Mars, though.
Atlas Shrugged was a masturbatory revenge fantasy.
Who cares? Madison's dead and he's just one of the founders.
You've shared this story on /. before, haven't you? That bit about the crackheads getting beaten up by little kids seems vaguely familiar.
This assumes that the guilty party can be ascertained fairly quickly if at all.
That system could still be gamed: one party wants to play dirty, so it runs its second-stringers against the other guys, then does something to cause the election to be vacated and ban both slates from running again, /then/ they can bring their best people out for the replacement election.
Interesting idea, but unworkable.
There wouldn't be any evidence. There seldom is if the perps are competent, and if the evidence trail pointed upwards some flunky would fall on his sword to protect the Big Boss. This has been done many times before, and will again.
Just saying.
Never fear, there'll be another GOP presidential debate soon.
You have a point, but writing well is a courtesy to one's readers. If a poster writes poorly enough I'll skip over the remainder of his post to save myself pain, and usually I don't miss much anyway.
I think I was still rocking a 486DX2-50, 4MB of RAM, and a 420MB IDE hard drive - the CPU and hard drive were upgrades from a 25 MHz 486SX and a 106MB drive. Onboard WD Paradise graphics with 512KB and VBE 1.01 compatibility, Sound Blaster 16 Basic (also an upgrade), 1x LMS CD-ROM drive on a proprietary bus, 14.4 Kbps external modem (this was a mistake; the computer had 16450 UARTs on its serial ports which couldn't keep up & kept causing CRC errors; should have gotten an internal), MS-DOS 6.20 and Windows 3.11 (not Workgroups).
Now I have a 3.4 GHz Core i5-2500K, 8GB of RAM, 1.5 TB SATA hard drive, Radeon 4850/512MB, Xonar DX sound, 10 Mbps Internet connection, don't bother with optical drives, and dual-boot Win7 x64 and Kubuntu 11.10 x64. My Model M keyboard is from 1988.
I don't really miss the old days, you know?
Are you kidding? IL-2: Forgotten Battles destroyed any flight sim that came before it, and DCS: A-10C Warthog is an amazingly detailed study sim.
Yeah, I couldn't believe how bloated and unoptimized some of those vintage mouse drivers were. Good TSRs and drivers back then would claim a certain amount of space when they started up (initialization and displaying a splash, mainly) and then give back a predictable and contiguous chunk of that once it was only the resident stuff that needed to stay in memory, rather than always claiming the ~25kb.
This could confuse the hell out of early memory managers, though; IIRC QEMM and 386max were especially good about dealing with those.
I do remember Zone 66! It was technically amazing for its day - fast and written entirely in 386 assembly, but finicky: if you didn't have the machine set up just so it'd crash.
I did this too back when my 486SX with 4MB ran DOS 5.0. Then I upgraded to DOS 6.x and learnt how to use the config.sys configuration menus, which made loading games a breeze - you'd set up a configuration and put some if statements into autoexec.bat, and you'd launch your game straight from the boot menu with an optimal configuration.
It required a bit of manual work, since memmaker wasn't smart enough to understand the config menus - you'd have to create scratch config.sys and autoexec.bat files configured specifically for that game (or games with similar requirements, anyway) then run memmaker and paste the results into your main files.
Sticking your mouse driver in upper memory probably wouldn't have helped anyway on a 4MB system. Doom really wanted all of that 4MB and it used a DOS extender so all its memory was a flat space. If you had 8MB you could have loaded the mouse driver into conventional memory and Doom wouldn't have cared.
Can you point to where a state /can/?
The matter was settled by the Civil War, and the secesh lost.
Do you really think that once the USA repulses an invasion that it will let Alaska's imaginary independence stand?
A good second-order use is when someone wants to stoke the flames of anti-Google hysteria, as seen with this article and many of the posters.
People gripe about how hard roundabouts are to use, and I don't see it at all. Maybe it helps that the local ones were laid out intelligently so there's obviously only one way to go in - the entrances are canted to the right so that even the biggest idiot doesn't try to enter to the left.
It was a rare bit of sanity from MoDOT.
Also Intel bribed big OEMs to use their processors instead of AMD's. Dell was an especial example of this: in the K7/K8 days they'd make noise every year or two about how they were considering selling AMD-based systems rather than being exclusively Intel, and those of us in IT who wanted /better/ computers would get very excited, but then Intel reliably came along and gave Dell an even better sweetheart deal on their CPUs, which was probably Dell's objective the whole time.
It wasn't AMD's fault for choosing the wrong market; they'd made a far better desktop and mobile processor than the P4, it was just that Intel was abusing its market position.
Some areas, especially thinly-populated hilly areas and especially out West, really are not well-served.
Can I guess that you live east of the Mississippi in relatively flat terrain?
But we don't have a free market and that's all the government's fault.
I've known an Internet Libertarian or two who basically argued from the premise that all ills were either directly caused by the gov't, or indirectly caused by the government doing something else foolish or malicious, then presented things (I shan't call them facts) to bolster that opinion.
It's very tiring to argue with them.
I said "improperly done", idiot.
Filling up my nasal passages with /honey/ does not pass the squick filter.
Except that improperly-done nasal irrigation can kill. There were a couple people in Louisiana who used tap water to irrigate their sinuses, but the water was infected with an amoeba that killed them.
Ought to use distilled water for that at the least.
I'm filing this under "textbook strawmen".