Processor that faild virtualisation instruction are simply market with virtualisation disabled. Would you rather have them to trash all but perfect cpu, raise price and pollute more? If someone dont need virtualisation then this cheaper "defective" cpu will be good enough for his need. Everyone win.
No, the buyer looses because s/he can't reasonably know what the hell it is s/he is buying.
You want to remarket defective chips that can't support virtualisation. Fine. Give them a different name, so a reasonably intelligent and informed buyer can make an informed decision without being forced to research all the minutia of Intel product sub-codes.
As it is, this is deceptive market, and stupid of Intel. Wrapping it in a green blanket and calling it eco-friendly doesn't change this. And yes, if the choice is a binary one between having to ferret out if the chip I'm buying is defective and won't support virutalisation, or filling the landfill with the things, then please, fill up the damn landfill.
Better yet, take the third path: remarket the things, but be honest and label them clearly so people don't end up buying the wrong thing. We shouldn't all have to be experts in every technical detail of Intel chips to be sure we're getting the product we want, any more than we should all have to be experts in aviation in order to board an aircraft and know we'll reach our destination.
It's sillier than you realise. Now we can't even RTFA, as it just forwards you straight to pricewatch shopping. What a waste of screenspace... this is one article Slashdot should just retroactively shitcan (or at least edit out the misleading link).
London != UK. Most people in the UK find Londoners extremely rude. It's why we will visit it but wouldn't ever want to actually live there.
Ah, probably should have qualified that then.:-)
I also should have made clearer that "in-your face rudeness" is not a general phenomenon of UK culture (most people are still pretty polite, though not to the degree as when I worked here fourteen years ago), it is (or appears to be) a culternal phenomenon of many of the youth in the country, which may cause a portion of then to tip over into overt violence (or not...as I said, I have no idea what led to this situation). It's interesting in that it is in some ways analogous to so-called gang culture in the US (how the word "culture" can be associated with gangs is beyond me--strikes me as political correct speak run amok), yet is very different in terms of demographics, the form of misbehaviour, and what drives it (random violence seems more common than enforcing a drug turf, for example).
I think it is absolutely brilliant that folks here have come up with such an elegant, non-violent solution to at least one facet of the problem--playing beautiful classical music until their ears bleed. Clever, effective, almost certainly thought up by someone most of us would deem somewhat eccentric--absolutely brilliant, and quintessentially British.
I don't know which parts of London you frequent, or how much of an asshole you must be
Your ad homonem attack in response to a little criticism of the current state of affairs (that frankly, nearly every British person I've met has echoed) kind of makes my point on rudeness for me. You sound as angry and bitter as any Teabagger I've met when faced with criticism of the US, no matter how obviously true that criticism is.
I've seen women on crutches shoved aside by young people in a hurry to get past. I've seen elderly people left standing by teenages and adults on the tube (and shoved past by said people so they can grab the last empty seat). I saw one woman on the bust pushed to the floor by a kid who couldn't have been more than twelve years old because he wanted to get past and apparently couldn't bring himself to utter an "excuse me".
And I've seen the behaviour a numerous groups of teenagers roaming the streets where I live. As for the part of town I live in, I happen to be on the same square as Tony Blair, so your theory that this is somehow a "bad part of town" really doesn't wash (and won't with anyone who knows London).
There are a lot of wonderful things about the UK, and I love it here, but polite and well-behaved youth isn't one of them. Does that make all young people bad? No, but it does lower the bar of expectation for everyone, and unfortunately, most people tend to live up to what is expected of them. Which came first is a chicken and egg question, and predates my own experince here, but I can obverve what is going on around me, and you insinuating it must be me is disengenious at best.
Stop shooting the messenger (unless you want to also set your sites on ITV, the BBC, and just about every other news organisation in the country, and every person with two eyes in their head).
General social mores in the United States may give you 'fascist right-wing wackos', but they also give you kids who aren't feral.
Hardly. Vast swathes of the south side of Chicago, Eastern LA, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Miami, New York, Philadelphia, etc. etc. have "ferel youth" running rampent. The middle class doesn't acknowledge this as they are safely tucked away in their gated communities, but anyone who has lived downtown knows this, even without seeing newscasts of this or that drive-by shooting.
And that doesn't even begin to touch the spate of school and university killings in the middle and upper class campuses that have blighted the US, usually in the heart of these so-called "moral" communities you talk about (and the so-called "gun rights" they support).
I do prefer the government in the UK over that of the US (the country is, by and large, more governable, and better governed, than the US)... but the country here is by no means perfect, and out-of-control youth are a big problem. Too many of them watching the wire and trying to mimic American kids they think are cool, perhaps. What is telling is that they have found an effective, non-violent solution to the problem (playing classical music), and folks are comparing it to the Marquis de Sade for crying out loud -- probably some of the same folks who would favour calling in the police to crack heads if it were happening on their side of the pond, or in their neighbourhood. And then go to church on Sunday and expound on America's "moral superiority" while decrying any kind of sane healthcare system and lamenting the current administration's reversal on the use of torture against "foreign combatants."
really don't know about the UK, but is there really such a big problem with "unruly youths" that you have to bombard them with "deterrents" that seem to come from the privy closet of Marquis de Sade?
Yes.
(I say this as an American living over here who has to listen to these gangs of kids roaming the neighbourhood all night, smashing things and vandalising the place, and I happen to live in a very good neighbourhood not far from our erstwhile prime minister. It was even worse when I lived on the South Bank.)
I don't know what happened in UK society (it was obviuosly before I lived here)...hell, I don't understand what went wrong in American society to bring our fascist right-wing wackos out like postnuclear cockroaches, so I certainly cannot begin to divine what happened on this side of the pond. Certainly basic politeness, for which the UK was known for so long, has all but vanished, replaced by belligerance and in-your-face animosity as a default greeting that makes us Americans look downright polite by comparison (go figure). Whether it is down to this, or some more fundamental cultural misfiring I really don't know. What I do know, from personal experience, is that there are a bunch of kids over here (a small minority, but still more than enough) that are completely out of control and downright dangerous, and unlike the US, they don't stay tucked away in "the bad part of town", they roam everywhere and wreak havoc all over the place. If you're extremely unlucky, you own a house worth less than your mortgage in an area they like to roam, in which case you're pretty much finished (thank [deity] I didn't buy during the boom years).
Playing classical music is hardly out of the Marquis de Sade playbook, and if it pushes the yobs on down the road, then I'm all for it. Beats having the police around to crack heads...which was Chicago's solution to a similar problem.
Feh, slashdot reformatted/sbin/shutdown to be part of the preceeding line, ruining the joke. Ah well, time to get more coffee and do some more day-job work.
The Nazis were more than just superficially Christian, most of them were very Christian, and had the overt support of the leadership of both the two main Christinan churches in Germany at the time (Catholic and Lutheren), for both the party in general and the policy of exterminating the Jews in particular.
The reason so many people believe the Nazis were athiests is because of a couple of quotes taken out of context, and because the Catholic church has spared no expense (or Jesuit historian) rewriting history and glossing over their own involvement in both the policies and the atrocities. Indeed, they've even managed to gloss over the fact that Hitler was quite devoutly Catholic (and not particularly out of character in his behaviour--just look at how Columbus treated the natives of the West Indies, or Cortez the Mayans and Aztecs, or...the list goes on, ad nauseum, all with the blessing, both tacit and overt, of the Catholic Christian authorities).
This actually becomes more obviuos when you look at the longer history of Catholic pogroms and inquisitions against the Jews that litter the history of Europe. The Nazi holocaust is merely the latest and most notorious. What a coup, to help organise and support such a massive Christian pogrom against a people, then send out your cadres of revisionist "historians" to recharacterise those responsible not as fellow Christians, but as Athiests...about the only group who wouldn't be inclined to support, much less lead, a pogrom against a population simply because their ancesters are rumourted to have cricified one of their deities two thousand years earlier.
Indeed, as you note, the Nazis came after Athiests with much the same ferver as todays Teabaggers, Truthers, and other right-wing zealots. Some things never change.
Anyone mash this up with googlemaps and streetview yet? That would really drive the point home.
At last a little payback for all this unfettered twitter narcisism. It's probably not very nice, but I can't help feeling more than my share of shadenfreude...
How about "Adobe Reader is the only relevant PDF reader on the market"? Is it really that hard to understand?
Or how about:
"Adobe Reader is shit. Zero day exploits are like shooting ducks in a barrel." Or maybe "It's the platform, and Adobe is just the vector de jour. IE was last months, Office the month before that, and Flash (or something equally widespread, complex, superfulous and buggh) is next month's..."
Microsoft Windows users are known as the road-kill of the Information Superhighway for a reason, and Adobe can only take some small credit for their contribution to that.
He may no longer be a thief, but I still won't trust him. There are plenty of other people who have not already demonstrated their untrustworthiness, so I can get by without that former thief just fine.
Exactly right. As a middle-eastern friend of mine once said: "If someone steals from you, forgive them. But tie up your camel." Or put in more familiar terms: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Microsoft has fooled everyone at least once. Let them do it to you again, and you have only yourself to blame.
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid.
Before you can get a sensible answer, you need to learn to ask a sensible question.
He asked a perfectly sensible question. It's called context, something most of us have understood implicitly since childhood.
In case you can't be bothered to look around, you've logged into and posted on an American website. Yes, it may have an international readership, but it is located in America, run by Americans, and the post is made by another American. If you got your head out of our self-righteous ass perhaps you'd make less of ass yourself when browsing non-UK sites.
As for *our* grid (I happen to reside in the UK btw, but unlike you at least know enough not to lambast the British for posting British-centric questions on British Websites, or Americans for posting American-centric questions on) American websites) here in the UK, yes, we might not be as vulnerable to single-point failures or software hackery as those in the states, but given *our* current lack of a coherent energy policy, we are vulnerable to having zero electricity for extended periods of time in the coming years, due to insufficient power to meet *our* needs. So if I were you I'd be a little less cocky.
We even believe you have the right to replace your damaged lung, liver, or fatty heart. What we do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill. Most Americans consider that theft. We are amazed that Europeans do not.
And it is this basic, fundamental inability to grasp the most basic aspects of community and civilization (cooperation and combining of resources for the public good where private competition undermines the public interest) that illustrates the ignorancy and myopia of America. Government healthcare is no more theft than public roads are, and your rhetoric reveals yourself to be so far extreme to the right that it is no surprise you consider MSNBC to be to the left.
You have illustrated my point brilliantly. And, as I said before, you don't even know enough to be ashamed.
No, that was me, driving my Mac Truck(tm) Lorry Load(tm) Malware Package through the gaping holes in your operating system. The patch you think you applied is just a little eye-candy to make you feel all warm, snug, and safe. It's working. too.:-)
SuperGenPass is a good option for online passwords. especially since the website lets you customize the bookmarklet before you download it. though why there is an option to hardcode your master password into the bookmarklet, thereby completely defeating the security of it, is beyond me.
Maybe it is to cope with URLs that change. It doesn't happen often, but it does occur occasionally, and when it does, poof! There goes your password hash. Bad news if its your banking site that's just done a major upgrade (I've seen this twice, once on my trading account, once on my online banking account). That said, for financial matters I use a unique password, handwritten on a sheet of paper and stored on a locked filing cabinet. If for some reason I do forget the password, I can go home and get it.
Password hashing is nice, but it will break when web pages move or reorganise.
I'd rather watch both sides of an argument (FOX and MSNBC) rather than assume I can trust a single source.
Ahem. On most topics, FOX and MSNBC are on the same side of the argument, or close enough not to matter much. The American political spectrum has become so narrow, and so far skewed to the right, that differentiating between the American "left" and American "right" seems to be more about trying to decide who is further to the right, Gengis Khan or Benito Mousselini, than discussing any real differences.
Then along comes Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who would be considered to the right in any other part of the developed world, proposing sweeping (and belated) healthcare reform, and from the myopic and illiterate perspective of most Americans, they are seen as radically left.
It's amazing. To anyone else in the developed world, MSNBC and FOX are equally far out in right field, both bordering on unabashed extremism. As is most of America, for that matter. The fact that America is still struggling to sort out its medical system, 60-90 years after everyone else did, is telling in and of itself. For a bunch of creationists, the American right sure does seem to believe in Social Darwinism.
The sad thing is, most Americans don't even know enough to be ashamed of the rhetoric that is accepted as normal in politics over there, whether it's on defense, healthcare, women's rights, racial equality, or the so-called war on terror.
It has gotten to the point where "left wing" in America is not packing a pistol to an event where the president is expected to appear. Pathetic...and I don't see MSNBC, or CNN, as reporting these events all that differently than FOX these days. The do seem to be less tasteless in the talk shows they broadcast, but that's a far cry from broadcasting content that contains any real substance or concrete information, much less reporting balanced news a la the BBC.
But then, I'm an American lucky enough to be living elsewhere for the time being, and able to get relatively unbiased information without having to jump through a million hoops, or listen to Hannity screaming on my televison set.
And yet the most saavy investors in the country still pay the money to read it. They wouldn't read it if it lost them money.
Sure they would. And do. Or have you forgotten 2008 already?
You may argue that reading the Wall Street Journal didn't cause them to lose trillions, and you'd be right insofar as it wasn't the sole cause, but clearly the myth that less regulation is better, that a Republican-controlled congress and Republican brow-beaten president (Clinton) repealing Glass-Stiegl was a good idea, and that the spoiled children running our banks could do no wrong (and should therefor have no oversight) created the conditions that allowed for such a crisis to arise in the first place. As an often informative publication, but one laced through and through with this poisonous and obviously false idealogy, the Wall Street Journal and similar publications have indeed influenced people and policy, and as a result "cost them money."
Yet still they read it, which just goes to show that the wealthy are as susceptable to putting idealogy ahead of their own good as the poor and middle class fools who still fight national healthcare tooth and nail while facing bankrupcy as a direct result of that lack of healthcare. The WSJ can say government bad/regulation bad/business good despite mounting losses and blatent evidence to the contrary, and wealthy idealogues will stick by it and lose millions more, just as working poor conservatives can say no to national health and tell themselves America's system is "the best in the world", despite the fact that it is 37th in the world by every objective measure of results (longevity, child mortality, per capita health statistics, you name it), and in distant last place when you consider only the developed world. Sure, it's better than sub-Saharan Africa, but only Americans find that impressive (and I say this with emberressment, as an American).
But will these facts change people's minds, even those who need the reforms most? Not likely, just as the fools who tanked the financial system won't change their minds or stop reading the WSJ, no matter how obviously misguided their idealogy is, or how many billions it costs them (and the rest of us, who suffer first, and more).
I find some television to be educational. Granted, it isn't discovery, it tends to be the BBC (or made for BBC shows aired on PBS back when I lived in the States), but things like Sir David Attenborough's works are highly educational--if a little "bloody" at times. Watching 3 big cats bring down an Ostrich is high-def may be quite dramatic, and more than a little disturbing, but coupled with his eloquent narration and explanation, it is most definitely educational.
Now maybe an expert biologist would disagree, but for those of us not an expert in the field, it does provide a basic understanding of that particular area of science. Ditto for some of the shows on Discover, though your point is well taken: it can be difficult to pick the educational out of the hysterical at times. Super-volcanoes and meteor impacts are interesting, but "OMG we're overdue for the Apocalypse!!!" fearmongering tends to dilute the scientific and educational value of any such show. But then, my recollection of US television is that fearmongering permeates just about everything, from so-called news to so-called educational television. Even sit-coms don't seem to have escaped that particular malaise entirely...but that's a rant for another day.
So it is hurting the industry, but not as much as the industry claims.
No, or at least not necessarily. This 1 lost album per 2500 (or 5000) downloads must be offset against another widely documented statistic, namely the number of sales filesharing actually results in that wouldn't have happened otherwise. It has been widely documented, in numerous studies, that fileshares buy considerably more music than the rest of us (who don't give a shit about the current trendy **AA artists or the--mostly tripe and agonizing to listen to--music they promote).
If you've got 10 sales being generated by the same filesharing habits that are costing the industry 1 sale, that's a net result of +9 sales for the industry, in which case filesharing is not only not hurting the industry, it's the only thing keeping it on life support.
Which is saying a lot, as it has been years since the recording industry has produced anything worth buying.
As an aside, all of my music is legal, owned on CD and ripped for my personal use on my mp3/ogg player. I don't share, upload, or download music. I listen to the radio, online streaming stations, and my CD collection (via one level of indirection, as ogg/vorbis files on my digital playback media). That said, I haven't bought a CD in at least 5 years, because, quite frankly, I haven't heard anything remotely worth paying for. This is not the fault of filesharers or non-sharing fans like myself. It is the fault of a moribund industry that has taken "safe" (read: vapid, lame, and uninteresting) music over innovative music and crammed it down our unwilling throats for at least two decades, arguably longer. They've grown used to stripping the authenticity and soul from our culture and selling us the remaining dregs at a 1000% markup, and we've grown tired of consuming it. Thus we've stopped buying their crap, and they are dying.
Or at leat most of us have. Apparantly a few fileshares remain enthusiastic about this tripe and buy some of their music, keeping the dinasaurs alive for perhaps another generation. This won't change no matter what they do to digital media, the internet, or so-called pirates. It will only change when the industry reforms itself, or, even better, dies. Already decent indie artists are coming to the fore through alternative channels (internet radio, online sharing, etc.)... the sooner the old school industry dies, X-Factor and American Idol are replaced with some decent sci-fi (OK, I'm dreaming, I know...), the better off we'll all be.
Why does everyone assume fancy cars or superbikes will get you laid. When I bought my £4k superbike every person (men and women) all thought the said the same thing. The problem is if you pull up outside a crowded pub in a top class Mercedes/ Audi A4 controvertible or a superbike all that happens is 10 guys come up to have a look at it and tell you how awesome it is. Then they tell you how they'd love to own one and ask you how it drives/rides.
It's like the myth that owning a motorcyle makes you cool to the opposite sex. Honestly in 7 years of riding I've met three random girls who liked the idea. Every other woman I've met when it comes up in conversation has used this exact phrase "Thats so cool, but I could never ride a bike its too scary."
That was exactly the response I got when I bought my airplane! I can count on one hand the number of girls who were willing to go up in it (small plane = scary as hell to most people). I suspect the only real "chick magnets" are boats...generally when they're tied up at the dock, with a bottle of champaign chilling on the deck.
Luckilly when I was dating my wife she overcame her fear of small planes and was supportive of my crack^H^H^H^H^H aviation habit, and as a result we've had some awesome trips together around the US and Canada...but I digress.
In a lamp test by a Finnish magazine the 3 EUR fluorescent lamp died at 3000 hours. The more expensive ones are still going on but starting to show longer warming times, stains/cracks and other problems. In addition to these problems fluorescents are hazardous waste and should be recycled. At 10x longer lifespan the LED light sounds like a good deal to me.
Not only that, compact florescent lamp aren't worth the £2/3 price tag (hell, they aren't worth 1/10th of that). Ever try reading by a compact florescent bulb? The experience will pull your eyes out of their sockets and leave you blind by the time your thirty. Here in the UK incandescent bulbs are getting difficult to find. For many months I found myself trying to read by the highest-wattage crapola "green" bulbs you're allowed to buy, and damaging my eyesight in the process. Luckily you can still get halogen bulbs, but now they're talking about banning those too because they don't save enough energy. Better to be blind than burn a few extra kilowatt hours. What's even stupider, people are burning four times as many "green" bulbs in a vain effort to get their rooms as brightly lit as they once were with incandescent bulbs (for those not in the UK, try looking at pictures of interior designs for UK and European housing. See all those lights in the ceilings? Dozens and dozens, where once a track with 4 120 watt Incandescent bulbs sufficed. Great for the light-bulb industry, lousy for the environment and your eyesight, because even with all those goddamn lights rooms still feel like a dark cave and you still can't read a book without tearing your eyes out, and yes, I still have 20/20 vision, though I miss the 20/15 I had before going green).
LEDs look very promising: power saving, long lasting, and bright. Well worth $40 if they work as advertised. And no toxic chemicals in your house to boot, unlike these still-dim-despite-propoganda-to-the-contrary, toxic so-called green bulbs industry and government are trying to brainwash and coerce us into buying. Hopefully the US will go straight from incancescent to LED... not mandating mecury-filled compact-florescent bulbs and banning incandescents to save a little energy is one of the few things the US really is getting right (and the EU dead wrong).
As you've probably guessed this particular subject really hacks me off -- mandating an extremely modest improvement in industrial effeciency would save orders of magnitude more energy than these asinine not-fit-for-purpose bulbs, but it's easier for the politicians to stick the average citizen with a load of busy work and darker rooms, than it is to stand up to industry and require a little more effeciency from their energy-intensive manufacturing processes.
I miss my incandescent bulbs, my bright living room, and the ability to read a book for hours on end without getting a headache... something I can now do only on sunny days thanks to the fools touting this energy-saving bulb crap.
People gripe about the NHS, and like every medical system in the world, it does have its problems, but I've seen worse reports about far worse hospitals and systematic medical abuse in the US. Indeed, google "malpractice", "medical abuse", and "nursing home abuse" and you'll find the horrors in the American system dwarf those of most of the rest of the industrialized world, not just in number, but in severity.
As someone who has used both the American and British systems (as well as the French and German system by the way), I can unequivocably say that the NHS is as good as and often better than the American system by every metric, including timliness of treatment, quality of treatment, professionalism, cost, you name it. Unlike most of the right-wing ignoramouses here I've actually travelled beyond the borders of my country and indeed lived many years abroad, and have seen different systems first hand. Wait times in the US for privately insured patients are, contrary to myth and right-wing propoganda, at least as long as they are in the UK (where I currently reside), and longer than in France and Germany (both of which also have what Americans call "socialized" medicine).
And before my fellow countrymen start chanting "Best in the World" to themselves, they really ought to stop and ask themselves why the richest Russians, Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans all tend to go to France, Germany and the UK for their treatment rather than the US (not always, but more often than not). Hell, even Farah Faucette ended up travelling to Germany to treat her cancer because she couldn't get the proper treatment in the US (and lived for years longer than expected as a result). Why do so many travel to France, Germany, and the UK rather than the United States? I'll give you a hint: it isn't about money (these people are richer than God), nor about getting a Visa (these people belong to the moneyed elite and can buy their way into anyplace, be it the European Union, the United States, hell, even Switzerland). These people go where they believe they'll get the best medical treatment bar none, at any price, and more often than not, it isn't the United States. And that will probably continue, no matter how often we lie to ourselves about being "the best in the world." We're not, in many things, most especially medicine, and it's high time we recognized this and remediated it.
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Processor that faild virtualisation instruction are simply market with virtualisation disabled. Would you rather have them to trash all but perfect cpu, raise price and pollute more? If someone dont need virtualisation then this cheaper "defective" cpu will be good enough for his need. Everyone win.
No, the buyer looses because s/he can't reasonably know what the hell it is s/he is buying.
You want to remarket defective chips that can't support virtualisation. Fine. Give them a different name, so a reasonably intelligent and informed buyer can make an informed decision without being forced to research all the minutia of Intel product sub-codes.
As it is, this is deceptive market, and stupid of Intel. Wrapping it in a green blanket and calling it eco-friendly doesn't change this. And yes, if the choice is a binary one between having to ferret out if the chip I'm buying is defective and won't support virutalisation, or filling the landfill with the things, then please, fill up the damn landfill.
Better yet, take the third path: remarket the things, but be honest and label them clearly so people don't end up buying the wrong thing. We shouldn't all have to be experts in every technical detail of Intel chips to be sure we're getting the product we want, any more than we should all have to be experts in aviation in order to board an aircraft and know we'll reach our destination.
It's sillier than you realise. Now we can't even RTFA, as it just forwards you straight to pricewatch shopping. What a waste of screenspace ... this is one article Slashdot should just retroactively shitcan (or at least edit out the misleading link).
London != UK. Most people in the UK find Londoners extremely rude. It's why we will visit it but wouldn't ever want to actually live there.
Ah, probably should have qualified that then. :-)
I also should have made clearer that "in-your face rudeness" is not a general phenomenon of UK culture (most people are still pretty polite, though not to the degree as when I worked here fourteen years ago), it is (or appears to be) a culternal phenomenon of many of the youth in the country, which may cause a portion of then to tip over into overt violence (or not...as I said, I have no idea what led to this situation). It's interesting in that it is in some ways analogous to so-called gang culture in the US (how the word "culture" can be associated with gangs is beyond me--strikes me as political correct speak run amok), yet is very different in terms of demographics, the form of misbehaviour, and what drives it (random violence seems more common than enforcing a drug turf, for example).
I think it is absolutely brilliant that folks here have come up with such an elegant, non-violent solution to at least one facet of the problem--playing beautiful classical music until their ears bleed. Clever, effective, almost certainly thought up by someone most of us would deem somewhat eccentric--absolutely brilliant, and quintessentially British.
I don't know which parts of London you frequent, or how much of an asshole you must be
Your ad homonem attack in response to a little criticism of the current state of affairs (that frankly, nearly every British person I've met has echoed) kind of makes my point on rudeness for me. You sound as angry and bitter as any Teabagger I've met when faced with criticism of the US, no matter how obviously true that criticism is.
I've seen women on crutches shoved aside by young people in a hurry to get past. I've seen elderly people left standing by teenages and adults on the tube (and shoved past by said people so they can grab the last empty seat). I saw one woman on the bust pushed to the floor by a kid who couldn't have been more than twelve years old because he wanted to get past and apparently couldn't bring himself to utter an "excuse me".
And I've seen the behaviour a numerous groups of teenagers roaming the streets where I live. As for the part of town I live in, I happen to be on the same square as Tony Blair, so your theory that this is somehow a "bad part of town" really doesn't wash (and won't with anyone who knows London).
There are a lot of wonderful things about the UK, and I love it here, but polite and well-behaved youth isn't one of them. Does that make all young people bad? No, but it does lower the bar of expectation for everyone, and unfortunately, most people tend to live up to what is expected of them. Which came first is a chicken and egg question, and predates my own experince here, but I can obverve what is going on around me, and you insinuating it must be me is disengenious at best.
Stop shooting the messenger (unless you want to also set your sites on ITV, the BBC, and just about every other news organisation in the country, and every person with two eyes in their head).
General social mores in the United States may give you 'fascist right-wing wackos', but they also give you kids who aren't feral.
Hardly. Vast swathes of the south side of Chicago, Eastern LA, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Miami, New York, Philadelphia, etc. etc. have "ferel youth" running rampent. The middle class doesn't acknowledge this as they are safely tucked away in their gated communities, but anyone who has lived downtown knows this, even without seeing newscasts of this or that drive-by shooting.
And that doesn't even begin to touch the spate of school and university killings in the middle and upper class campuses that have blighted the US, usually in the heart of these so-called "moral" communities you talk about (and the so-called "gun rights" they support).
I do prefer the government in the UK over that of the US (the country is, by and large, more governable, and better governed, than the US) ... but the country here is by no means perfect, and out-of-control youth are a big problem. Too many of them watching the wire and trying to mimic American kids they think are cool, perhaps. What is telling is that they have found an effective, non-violent solution to the problem (playing classical music), and folks are comparing it to the Marquis de Sade for crying out loud -- probably some of the same folks who would favour calling in the police to crack heads if it were happening on their side of the pond, or in their neighbourhood. And then go to church on Sunday and expound on America's "moral superiority" while decrying any kind of sane healthcare system and lamenting the current administration's reversal on the use of torture against "foreign combatants."
really don't know about the UK, but is there really such a big problem with "unruly youths" that you have to bombard them with "deterrents" that seem to come from the privy closet of Marquis de Sade?
Yes.
(I say this as an American living over here who has to listen to these gangs of kids roaming the neighbourhood all night, smashing things and vandalising the place, and I happen to live in a very good neighbourhood not far from our erstwhile prime minister. It was even worse when I lived on the South Bank.)
I don't know what happened in UK society (it was obviuosly before I lived here)...hell, I don't understand what went wrong in American society to bring our fascist right-wing wackos out like postnuclear cockroaches, so I certainly cannot begin to divine what happened on this side of the pond. Certainly basic politeness, for which the UK was known for so long, has all but vanished, replaced by belligerance and in-your-face animosity as a default greeting that makes us Americans look downright polite by comparison (go figure). Whether it is down to this, or some more fundamental cultural misfiring I really don't know. What I do know, from personal experience, is that there are a bunch of kids over here (a small minority, but still more than enough) that are completely out of control and downright dangerous, and unlike the US, they don't stay tucked away in "the bad part of town", they roam everywhere and wreak havoc all over the place. If you're extremely unlucky, you own a house worth less than your mortgage in an area they like to roam, in which case you're pretty much finished (thank [deity] I didn't buy during the boom years).
Playing classical music is hardly out of the Marquis de Sade playbook, and if it pushes the yobs on down the road, then I'm all for it. Beats having the police around to crack heads...which was Chicago's solution to a similar problem.
Feh, slashdot reformatted /sbin/shutdown to be part of the preceeding line, ruining the joke. Ah well, time to get more coffee and do some more day-job work.
Implemented for Linux, but analogously applicable to other systems. Running this once should reduce your PC's energy consumption to near zoro:
#!/bin/bash
#
# save-energy.sh
#
# Save enormous amounts of energy, irrespective of cost in lost computation
# must be run as root
Of course, effeciency will be lost if you do anything else with your PC (like turn it back on), but hey, no algorithm is perfect for all use cases.
The Nazi's were at least superficially Christian and opposed atheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views#Hitler.27s_reaction_to_atheism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
The Nazis were more than just superficially Christian, most of them were very Christian, and had the overt support of the leadership of both the two main Christinan churches in Germany at the time (Catholic and Lutheren), for both the party in general and the policy of exterminating the Jews in particular.
The reason so many people believe the Nazis were athiests is because of a couple of quotes taken out of context, and because the Catholic church has spared no expense (or Jesuit historian) rewriting history and glossing over their own involvement in both the policies and the atrocities. Indeed, they've even managed to gloss over the fact that Hitler was quite devoutly Catholic (and not particularly out of character in his behaviour--just look at how Columbus treated the natives of the West Indies, or Cortez the Mayans and Aztecs, or...the list goes on, ad nauseum, all with the blessing, both tacit and overt, of the Catholic Christian authorities).
This actually becomes more obviuos when you look at the longer history of Catholic pogroms and inquisitions against the Jews that litter the history of Europe. The Nazi holocaust is merely the latest and most notorious. What a coup, to help organise and support such a massive Christian pogrom against a people, then send out your cadres of revisionist "historians" to recharacterise those responsible not as fellow Christians, but as Athiests...about the only group who wouldn't be inclined to support, much less lead, a pogrom against a population simply because their ancesters are rumourted to have cricified one of their deities two thousand years earlier.
Indeed, as you note, the Nazis came after Athiests with much the same ferver as todays Teabaggers, Truthers, and other right-wing zealots. Some things never change.
Anyone mash this up with googlemaps and streetview yet? That would really drive the point home.
At last a little payback for all this unfettered twitter narcisism. It's probably not very nice, but I can't help feeling more than my share of shadenfreude...
How about "Adobe Reader is the only relevant PDF reader on the market"? Is it really that hard to understand?
Or how about:
"Adobe Reader is shit. Zero day exploits are like shooting ducks in a barrel." Or maybe "It's the platform, and Adobe is just the vector de jour. IE was last months, Office the month before that, and Flash (or something equally widespread, complex, superfulous and buggh) is next month's ..."
Microsoft Windows users are known as the road-kill of the Information Superhighway for a reason, and Adobe can only take some small credit for their contribution to that.
It will require that the people who ARE sick of it, run for office, and vote.
Nonsense. Anyone sick of this will be labelled a terrorist and ineligable to run for office or vote.
Game over.
Thank you for playing.
He may no longer be a thief, but I still won't trust him. There are plenty of other people who have not already demonstrated their untrustworthiness, so I can get by without that former thief just fine.
Exactly right. As a middle-eastern friend of mine once said: "If someone steals from you, forgive them. But tie up your camel." Or put in more familiar terms: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Microsoft has fooled everyone at least once. Let them do it to you again, and you have only yourself to blame.
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid.
Before you can get a sensible answer, you need to learn to ask a sensible question.
He asked a perfectly sensible question. It's called context, something most of us have understood implicitly since childhood.
In case you can't be bothered to look around, you've logged into and posted on an American website. Yes, it may have an international readership, but it is located in America, run by Americans, and the post is made by another American. If you got your head out of our self-righteous ass perhaps you'd make less of ass yourself when browsing non-UK sites.
As for *our* grid (I happen to reside in the UK btw, but unlike you at least know enough not to lambast the British for posting British-centric questions on British Websites, or Americans for posting American-centric questions on) American websites) here in the UK, yes, we might not be as vulnerable to single-point failures or software hackery as those in the states, but given *our* current lack of a coherent energy policy, we are vulnerable to having zero electricity for extended periods of time in the coming years, due to insufficient power to meet *our* needs. So if I were you I'd be a little less cocky.
We even believe you have the right to replace your damaged lung, liver, or fatty heart.
What we do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill. Most Americans consider that theft. We are amazed that Europeans do not.
And it is this basic, fundamental inability to grasp the most basic aspects of community and civilization (cooperation and combining of resources for the public good where private competition undermines the public interest) that illustrates the ignorancy and myopia of America. Government healthcare is no more theft than public roads are, and your rhetoric reveals yourself to be so far extreme to the right that it is no surprise you consider MSNBC to be to the left.
You have illustrated my point brilliantly. And, as I said before, you don't even know enough to be ashamed.
No, that was me, driving my Mac Truck(tm) Lorry Load(tm) Malware Package through the gaping holes in your operating system. The patch you think you applied is just a little eye-candy to make you feel all warm, snug, and safe. It's working. too. :-)
SuperGenPass is a good option for online passwords. especially since the website lets you customize the bookmarklet before you download it. though why there is an option to hardcode your master password into the bookmarklet, thereby completely defeating the security of it, is beyond me.
Maybe it is to cope with URLs that change. It doesn't happen often, but it does occur occasionally, and when it does, poof! There goes your password hash. Bad news if its your banking site that's just done a major upgrade (I've seen this twice, once on my trading account, once on my online banking account). That said, for financial matters I use a unique password, handwritten on a sheet of paper and stored on a locked filing cabinet. If for some reason I do forget the password, I can go home and get it.
Password hashing is nice, but it will break when web pages move or reorganise.
I'd rather watch both sides of an argument (FOX and MSNBC) rather than assume I can trust a single source.
Ahem. On most topics, FOX and MSNBC are on the same side of the argument, or close enough not to matter much. The American political spectrum has become so narrow, and so far skewed to the right, that differentiating between the American "left" and American "right" seems to be more about trying to decide who is further to the right, Gengis Khan or Benito Mousselini, than discussing any real differences.
Then along comes Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who would be considered to the right in any other part of the developed world, proposing sweeping (and belated) healthcare reform, and from the myopic and illiterate perspective of most Americans, they are seen as radically left.
It's amazing. To anyone else in the developed world, MSNBC and FOX are equally far out in right field, both bordering on unabashed extremism. As is most of America, for that matter. The fact that America is still struggling to sort out its medical system, 60-90 years after everyone else did, is telling in and of itself. For a bunch of creationists, the American right sure does seem to believe in Social Darwinism.
The sad thing is, most Americans don't even know enough to be ashamed of the rhetoric that is accepted as normal in politics over there, whether it's on defense, healthcare, women's rights, racial equality, or the so-called war on terror.
It has gotten to the point where "left wing" in America is not packing a pistol to an event where the president is expected to appear. Pathetic...and I don't see MSNBC, or CNN, as reporting these events all that differently than FOX these days. The do seem to be less tasteless in the talk shows they broadcast, but that's a far cry from broadcasting content that contains any real substance or concrete information, much less reporting balanced news a la the BBC.
But then, I'm an American lucky enough to be living elsewhere for the time being, and able to get relatively unbiased information without having to jump through a million hoops, or listen to Hannity screaming on my televison set.
And yet the most saavy investors in the country still pay the money to read it. They wouldn't read it if it lost them money.
Sure they would. And do. Or have you forgotten 2008 already?
You may argue that reading the Wall Street Journal didn't cause them to lose trillions, and you'd be right insofar as it wasn't the sole cause, but clearly the myth that less regulation is better, that a Republican-controlled congress and Republican brow-beaten president (Clinton) repealing Glass-Stiegl was a good idea, and that the spoiled children running our banks could do no wrong (and should therefor have no oversight) created the conditions that allowed for such a crisis to arise in the first place. As an often informative publication, but one laced through and through with this poisonous and obviously false idealogy, the Wall Street Journal and similar publications have indeed influenced people and policy, and as a result "cost them money."
Yet still they read it, which just goes to show that the wealthy are as susceptable to putting idealogy ahead of their own good as the poor and middle class fools who still fight national healthcare tooth and nail while facing bankrupcy as a direct result of that lack of healthcare. The WSJ can say government bad/regulation bad/business good despite mounting losses and blatent evidence to the contrary, and wealthy idealogues will stick by it and lose millions more, just as working poor conservatives can say no to national health and tell themselves America's system is "the best in the world", despite the fact that it is 37th in the world by every objective measure of results (longevity, child mortality, per capita health statistics, you name it), and in distant last place when you consider only the developed world. Sure, it's better than sub-Saharan Africa, but only Americans find that impressive (and I say this with emberressment, as an American).
But will these facts change people's minds, even those who need the reforms most? Not likely, just as the fools who tanked the financial system won't change their minds or stop reading the WSJ, no matter how obviously misguided their idealogy is, or how many billions it costs them (and the rest of us, who suffer first, and more).
I find some television to be educational. Granted, it isn't discovery, it tends to be the BBC (or made for BBC shows aired on PBS back when I lived in the States), but things like Sir David Attenborough's works are highly educational--if a little "bloody" at times. Watching 3 big cats bring down an Ostrich is high-def may be quite dramatic, and more than a little disturbing, but coupled with his eloquent narration and explanation, it is most definitely educational.
Now maybe an expert biologist would disagree, but for those of us not an expert in the field, it does provide a basic understanding of that particular area of science. Ditto for some of the shows on Discover, though your point is well taken: it can be difficult to pick the educational out of the hysterical at times. Super-volcanoes and meteor impacts are interesting, but "OMG we're overdue for the Apocalypse!!!" fearmongering tends to dilute the scientific and educational value of any such show. But then, my recollection of US television is that fearmongering permeates just about everything, from so-called news to so-called educational television. Even sit-coms don't seem to have escaped that particular malaise entirely...but that's a rant for another day.
So it is hurting the industry, but not as much as the industry claims.
No, or at least not necessarily. This 1 lost album per 2500 (or 5000) downloads must be offset against another widely documented statistic, namely the number of sales filesharing actually results in that wouldn't have happened otherwise. It has been widely documented, in numerous studies, that fileshares buy considerably more music than the rest of us (who don't give a shit about the current trendy **AA artists or the--mostly tripe and agonizing to listen to--music they promote).
If you've got 10 sales being generated by the same filesharing habits that are costing the industry 1 sale, that's a net result of +9 sales for the industry, in which case filesharing is not only not hurting the industry, it's the only thing keeping it on life support.
Which is saying a lot, as it has been years since the recording industry has produced anything worth buying.
As an aside, all of my music is legal, owned on CD and ripped for my personal use on my mp3/ogg player. I don't share, upload, or download music. I listen to the radio, online streaming stations, and my CD collection (via one level of indirection, as ogg/vorbis files on my digital playback media). That said, I haven't bought a CD in at least 5 years, because, quite frankly, I haven't heard anything remotely worth paying for. This is not the fault of filesharers or non-sharing fans like myself. It is the fault of a moribund industry that has taken "safe" (read: vapid, lame, and uninteresting) music over innovative music and crammed it down our unwilling throats for at least two decades, arguably longer. They've grown used to stripping the authenticity and soul from our culture and selling us the remaining dregs at a 1000% markup, and we've grown tired of consuming it. Thus we've stopped buying their crap, and they are dying.
Or at leat most of us have. Apparantly a few fileshares remain enthusiastic about this tripe and buy some of their music, keeping the dinasaurs alive for perhaps another generation. This won't change no matter what they do to digital media, the internet, or so-called pirates. It will only change when the industry reforms itself, or, even better, dies. Already decent indie artists are coming to the fore through alternative channels (internet radio, online sharing, etc.) ... the sooner the old school industry dies, X-Factor and American Idol are replaced with some decent sci-fi (OK, I'm dreaming, I know...), the better off we'll all be.
This should solve any peeping Tom/Big Bro Cop issues we have. Get out your paintbrush, ladder, and overalls...
Why does everyone assume fancy cars or superbikes will get you laid. When I bought my £4k superbike every person (men and women) all thought the said the same thing. The problem is if you pull up outside a crowded pub in a top class Mercedes/ Audi A4 controvertible or a superbike all that happens is 10 guys come up to have a look at it and tell you how awesome it is. Then they tell you how they'd love to own one and ask you how it drives/rides.
It's like the myth that owning a motorcyle makes you cool to the opposite sex. Honestly in 7 years of riding I've met three random girls who liked the idea. Every other woman I've met when it comes up in conversation has used this exact phrase "Thats so cool, but I could never ride a bike its too scary."
That was exactly the response I got when I bought my airplane! I can count on one hand the number of girls who were willing to go up in it (small plane = scary as hell to most people). I suspect the only real "chick magnets" are boats...generally when they're tied up at the dock, with a bottle of champaign chilling on the deck.
Luckilly when I was dating my wife she overcame her fear of small planes and was supportive of my crack^H^H^H^H^H aviation habit, and as a result we've had some awesome trips together around the US and Canada...but I digress.
In a lamp test by a Finnish magazine the 3 EUR fluorescent lamp died at 3000 hours. The more expensive ones are still going on but starting to show longer warming times, stains/cracks and other problems. In addition to these problems fluorescents are hazardous waste and should be recycled. At 10x longer lifespan the LED light sounds like a good deal to me.
Not only that, compact florescent lamp aren't worth the £2/3 price tag (hell, they aren't worth 1/10th of that). Ever try reading by a compact florescent bulb? The experience will pull your eyes out of their sockets and leave you blind by the time your thirty. Here in the UK incandescent bulbs are getting difficult to find. For many months I found myself trying to read by the highest-wattage crapola "green" bulbs you're allowed to buy, and damaging my eyesight in the process. Luckily you can still get halogen bulbs, but now they're talking about banning those too because they don't save enough energy. Better to be blind than burn a few extra kilowatt hours. What's even stupider, people are burning four times as many "green" bulbs in a vain effort to get their rooms as brightly lit as they once were with incandescent bulbs (for those not in the UK, try looking at pictures of interior designs for UK and European housing. See all those lights in the ceilings? Dozens and dozens, where once a track with 4 120 watt Incandescent bulbs sufficed. Great for the light-bulb industry, lousy for the environment and your eyesight, because even with all those goddamn lights rooms still feel like a dark cave and you still can't read a book without tearing your eyes out, and yes, I still have 20/20 vision, though I miss the 20/15 I had before going green).
LEDs look very promising: power saving, long lasting, and bright. Well worth $40 if they work as advertised. And no toxic chemicals in your house to boot, unlike these still-dim-despite-propoganda-to-the-contrary, toxic so-called green bulbs industry and government are trying to brainwash and coerce us into buying. Hopefully the US will go straight from incancescent to LED ... not mandating mecury-filled compact-florescent bulbs and banning incandescents to save a little energy is one of the few things the US really is getting right (and the EU dead wrong).
As you've probably guessed this particular subject really hacks me off -- mandating an extremely modest improvement in industrial effeciency would save orders of magnitude more energy than these asinine not-fit-for-purpose bulbs, but it's easier for the politicians to stick the average citizen with a load of busy work and darker rooms, than it is to stand up to industry and require a little more effeciency from their energy-intensive manufacturing processes.
I miss my incandescent bulbs, my bright living room, and the ability to read a book for hours on end without getting a headache ... something I can now do only on sunny days thanks to the fools touting this energy-saving bulb crap.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
People gripe about the NHS, and like every medical system in the world, it does have its problems, but I've seen worse reports about far worse hospitals and systematic medical abuse in the US. Indeed, google "malpractice", "medical abuse", and "nursing home abuse" and you'll find the horrors in the American system dwarf those of most of the rest of the industrialized world, not just in number, but in severity.
As someone who has used both the American and British systems (as well as the French and German system by the way), I can unequivocably say that the NHS is as good as and often better than the American system by every metric, including timliness of treatment, quality of treatment, professionalism, cost, you name it. Unlike most of the right-wing ignoramouses here I've actually travelled beyond the borders of my country and indeed lived many years abroad, and have seen different systems first hand. Wait times in the US for privately insured patients are, contrary to myth and right-wing propoganda, at least as long as they are in the UK (where I currently reside), and longer than in France and Germany (both of which also have what Americans call "socialized" medicine).
And before my fellow countrymen start chanting "Best in the World" to themselves, they really ought to stop and ask themselves why the richest Russians, Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans all tend to go to France, Germany and the UK for their treatment rather than the US (not always, but more often than not). Hell, even Farah Faucette ended up travelling to Germany to treat her cancer because she couldn't get the proper treatment in the US (and lived for years longer than expected as a result). Why do so many travel to France, Germany, and the UK rather than the United States? I'll give you a hint: it isn't about money (these people are richer than God), nor about getting a Visa (these people belong to the moneyed elite and can buy their way into anyplace, be it the European Union, the United States, hell, even Switzerland). These people go where they believe they'll get the best medical treatment bar none, at any price, and more often than not, it isn't the United States. And that will probably continue, no matter how often we lie to ourselves about being "the best in the world." We're not, in many things, most especially medicine, and it's high time we recognized this and remediated it.