In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. Skeptical communities and movements are nice - but very few people are really interested in learning how scams work before they're fooled by them, and it seems there's always a multiplying number of desperate swindlers looking to fool more folks out of money while hiding from consequences.
Ryan Fenton
Now those resources go to protect the extremely rich from poor people who might download music without paying for it.
I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.
Given the BIOS updates by HP and Dell that turn on the fan continuously on the subject notebooks, the reports of higher recalls of these models, Nvidia setting aside $191M in reserve to "deal with this issue", and Dell at least extending their notebook warranties on these notebooks specifically for an additional year, that's a lot of smoke with no fire underneath it somewhere.
The part of this article unrelated to the widely known evidence you cite, and the part that I will take a wait-and-see approach to, is the claim that every single nV 65 nm and 55 nm GPU is defective. On the other hand, net chatter makes them sound very stable, and there are far fewer complaints of broken 8800GTs than there are of 4870s (one of which I own, and mine is fine). I'm guessing that he's making a big overstatement with his claim that every single 55 or 65 nm nV GPU is defective.
I don't get people who show any sort of devotion to a GPU manufacturer. I just don't. The author of this article is one of them. That doesn't mean it's not true, but he's written a number of articles that later proved to be completely false in the past, for instance saying that the 8800 series would doom nV because of low performance and high power usage compared to the 1900 or 2900, whatever ATI was releasing at about the same time. I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.
Nerds should be able to estimate the voter turnout in their state here and calculate the probability that their one vote will swing the election in that state. Obviously the closeness of the race plays a huge role too, but there's no way to know how close the race is until after the elections (margin of error is +/- 3%, and the race will be won by less than 3%).
If you've done all this, you will see that the chance of your vote making a difference is extremely remote. Your entire trip to the voting booth is wasted. You're giving away time and money for nothing.
If tons of people stop voting and a single vote becomes meaningful, then it will be time to start voting again.
On the other hand, if every nerd believed you, 5% fewer people would vote, which will certainly have a good chance of deciding an election.
Call me old fashion, but the one person - one vote system still appeals to me. Trying to increase ones effective voting power feels more like Jim Crow rational: "We're the good guys, so we should have disproportionate power."
You realize that you're arguing that it's immoral to try to persuade anyone about anything, right?
Could perhaps the distance between the earth and the sun and the relationship for nuclear decay be in some way effected by the gravitational field fluctuations that occur as well? Time is dilated by gravity, so perhaps are we seeing a further proof of Special relativity?
Or are they simply looking for casual relationships where none actually exist. Perhaps the decay rate relates to the amount of pastafarians on earth.
Since the measurement and the material are both in the same location, time dilation would affect them both to the same extent, meaning that the detector would not be able to measure a difference in the half life.
Uh, they did? The article says they wrote a paper about their anodes and electrolytes (I expect the electrolyte isn't such a big deal).
So they made some viruses that are supposed to make little wires. Then they used the viruses to make some little wires. Then they wrote a paper. Then they worked on some more viruses to make some other wires that could be used as the other necessary component of a battery. And they're writing another paper.
That really sounds like pretty much how it's supposed to happen.
I think the poster was using a definition of secrecy along the lines of "not yet in Popular Mechanics." Now where did I park my secret car?
Why, are China and India doing basic science research? My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game. Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets. Consider the fact that UNIX started as an excuse to hack on computer games.
My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. China...not so much. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation. America's technical lead is still quite pronounced today, but not remotely secure.
1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 are still what most users are running by far. At those resolutions, a decent midrange card is more then any average user needs. Their games will run great.
Basicly SLI is great for those who are willing to pay through the nose to run the game at crazy resolutions, AA and AF maxxed to the tits. Because god knows that just improves the game experience so much that its worth shelling out more $$$.
Common among enthusiasts, who are the target market of high end video card, yes, most definitely. I saw a recent poll, I think on the hardocp forums, that showed 1920 and 1680 basically tied for the most popular resolutions for that enthusiast community. NV and ATI aren't selling multi-card systems for 1024x768, but the higher resolution market is quite large, growing very quickly, and is the market that has money to spend and people who can truly benefit from multi-card systems (assuming they don't care much about money, or computer gaming is ridiculously important to their lives)
Even at 1280x960 a rather new high end card is required to play a lot of games at 30+ fps at default settings. I was at 1280x1024 until recently (which is the 1280 LCD resolution - note that the steam survey shows that most people at 1280 are using CRTs still, given the 4:3 aspect ratio, which is interesting) and nothing short of an 8800 would run several games smoothly, and I never even tried Crysis.
Crysis. Everybody spends and spends and builds mammoth PCs to get the highest FPS in it but no one actually *plays* it as a game, it is just a benchmark and eye candy demo. Then they sit back and whine when all of the "blockbuster" games don't utilize a fraction of their uber systems. WoW, Warhammer: AR, GRID, Assassins Creed, Spore, etc. all run fine on systems over 4 years old.
WotLK is bogging down below 30 fps on systems with a brand new 4870 using the new shadow options, and even without that on 30" screens, which seem to be the target for SLI. So WoW benefits from SLI. Warhammer slows to the teens at 1920x1200, which is becoming a common resolution (seen on 22-28" monitors) in large RvR encounters on a 4870, but not on a 4870x2 or a couple gt280s. So Warhammer benefits from SLI. Assassin's Creed is slow at points on an 8800 GTX at 1680x1050, so with higher resolution it should probably benefit from SLI. I finally played Crysis, and when it's modded a bit it's actually a really good game. Not a 96, but easily a 91. People ignore the good gameplay because they're focused on the graphics, which certainly benefit from SLI and end up truly enhancing the gameplay. Love it or hate it, Oblivion even benefits from SLI at high resolution with HDR and forced AA. Half Life 2 E2 slowed down occasionally on my 4870 at 1920x1200, so it would benefit from SLI. Company of Heroes looks okay on a 4870, but I can't make it look great without framerates dropping to the teens. I could if I had SLI.
My point is that most popular games do have significant, tangible benefits from SLI.
I don't have SLI, though, and I don't want it. I don't think the cost and power usage justify the benefit, despite believing that the benefit is quite real, even with it being partially diminished by microstuttering.
Are there any key lessons to be learned from these rovers' success? Or is it simply that they have no critical consumables (being solar powered and all) and they evidently were overengineered? I guess for starters, having redundancy and the ability to turn off failing components is good, seeing as they're six wheel drive and one of the rovers is now dragging a bad wheel around. What else has been learned from these rovers about engineering long-lasting probes?
Another lesson to learn is that despite highly publicized mistakes, NASA does have a lot engineers who are both brilliant and wise.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office
I agree most secondary school IT teachers seem to think IT education == Microsoft training. But it's worse than that - in the UK, most schools actually buy all their MS stuff from a reseller such as RM Computers. Which is a giant rip because, for example with servers, they just take Windows 2003 and bolt a load of "admin tools" onto the side. They deliberately make it non-standard and harder to use so they can then charge the schools giant support contracts. It also doesn't help that most school IT techs are completely hopeless.
I speak from bitter experience, BTW.
In my schools in California, every computer was always a donated Apple, and the few pieces of software purchased came straight from the vendor at a massive discount. This is true in at least a lot of the U.S., and it's been a great marketing campaign - in America, the most common laptop in universities is a Mac.
That rant would be fine if it were accurate. It's not, and therefore it's ludicrous. For the English genitive, -' is relatively old-fashioned, and -'s is more common in recent years. I suggest you actually learn some grammar before deciding to harangue the rest of the planet. Come on, even Wikipedia gets this right. Stop wallowing in self-righteousness.
Only one half of one of his rules at the end is wrong, and then it's only somewhat wrong, because, as yous state, modern standard use is as he says. Also, you come off as more self-righteous, AC. The GP is a national treasure.
I'll have to give it to Splash Damage...they did an amazing job with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW). I was a little skeptical about how it might turn out, seeing as how Splash Damage started off as a mod 'company', but I've been thoroughly impressed with their results. Their QA is what I'd expect from id software or even Blizzard. I definitely look forward to future titles from them.
Blizzard games tend to ship with bugs. Don't get me wrong - they're way ahead of most developers in that respect, and bugs tend to be seldom encountered. Still, I think id manages to beat them handily when it comes to QA, so I'd reverse the order in which you mentioned id and Blizz.
I personally find Google's rankings to be terrible, far worse than Yahoo's, and much more likely to have a bunch of spam sites near the top. If they were to integrate results from this project, and if they can keep the spambots from flooding the project with fake rankings, or if they could learn from my submissions that I don't want fake sites with lists of nonsense words as results, they would become a far more powerful than I can imagine.
Good logic there and you make a valid point, but being perfectly honest, 2 years in the GPU industry is more like 5 years in the CPU industry.
And Intel's currently more like 6 years behind NV/ATI. LRB may change that, but Intel shouldn't count its chickens before they're rendered. Even then, don't expect LRB to approach 2 year old NV/ATI performance at the same price or power draw point.
2d performance is more than just how fast you can refresh a framebuffer from memory. Check out x11perf -aa10, which tests drawing 10pt anti-aliased fonts. My radeon 9250 with open source drivers gets about a 2x better score than my brand new 4850 with fglrx. The difference is that ati/amd (and nvidia as well) don't spend nearly as much time optimizing these parts of the driver(considered "2d" but they really use the 3d engine) while you need hardware acceleration and driver support to do it at a good speed(which the open source r200 driver does, even faster than pure software on my not too sluggish phenom 9950).
I find this interesting. I just upgraded from a 7950GT to a 4870, and while the 3d performance is outstanding, I actually have a noticeable lag now in drawing windows when I switch to or maximize them. It's probably 100 ms, but I'm the kind of person who turns off all OS animation because I hate that Maccy feeling of clicking something and waiting for a fancy animation to finish before I can click the next thing. I'm dual booting XP and Vista, and Vista's delay seems to be shorter, but it's still there. I'd assumed it was a driver problem, but wasn't able to fix it with drivers, and your post makes me wonder if the 4870 just doesn't have what it takes to keep up with the graphics cards I used in 1996 in 2d rendering.
Cigarette taxes are directly designed to decrease smoking rates to improve public health. According to you, it's working. The associated decrease in medical expenses for the state more than pays for the loss of cigarette-tax payers.
Also, while you have some good points dancing just outside your reach, you don't manage to make any of them. Use of the phrase "liberal orthodoxy" was a good hint that you weren't going to make much sense.
Your following post pretends to get more specific, but it also falls flat on its face. Your assertions aren't even internally consistent, and the "Reagonomics rules the world and has led to ultimate prosperity" idea is laughably out of touch with the fact that economic growth since Reagan's time has been focused in those nations with contrary economic systems.
So, where does that 27.9 BILLION dollars come from. The taxpayer. Exxon merely wrote the check for all the dollars it collected from you and me to pay it.
And in absence of said tax, they'd stuff that money in their pockets instead. What's your point?
Also without a tax, they'd be able to sell more and gas prices would be cheaper. This would be bad for the environment, and remember that much of that money goes to fund the governments of nations not so friendly to America. With a higher tax (too bad ours isn't as high as Europe's), the money goes back into the U.S. (and decreases the income taxes we need to pay to fund the government, or reduces the debt we'll need to pay in the future through income tax) instead of into the hands of oil barons and political enemies.
I've read enough of your police state + compromise with Islam crap in the UK and I can see that it is absolute crap. You can turn London into Al London if you like, but I prefer Washington DC to stay Washington DC, and if the Muzzies don't like it, then fuck them. They've already shit up their own part of the world and can't even put together a meaningful economy despite loads of oil money, and we're supposed to adopt elements of that failed culture?
Get real.
The economy of their part of the world was "shit up" by an elite few, usually backed by larger richer nations, often the United States. That's one of the reasons that terrorists exist at all. Poverty and a perception of exploitation and disdain from America creates terrorists. For every terrorist killed in Iraq, we're making 10 more who will show up in 10-30 years. Doing smaller, targeted, not publicized operations is the only military option than would actually make progress.
If or when the Chinese start to call in their debts on America and the economy here starts to tank on a level that makes the current downturn seem laughable, idiots here will start taking up the same sort of views that idiots in say, Iran, have now. If an American terrorist group attacked China and blew up a building, and the Chinese in response occupied the western United States, you and your buddies, along with a lot of other poorly educated, quick tempered people will be motivated to become terrorists yourselves. Then maybe you'll have a more nuanced perspective on today's radical Islam.
The botnets that send those spam messages from the Unites States are controlled by Russia(ns). Remember the news a few weeks ago when Russia invaded Georgia and 80% of the world's spam stopped while the botnets switched to attacking the Georgian government's web page?
Maybe this just means that we're getting dumb and dumberer as time goes on (backwards evolution)?
I think you could just call it normal evolution. Greater than average human intelligence isn't necessarily a survival or reproductive trait, at least not the way we define intelligence now.
The way Apple has locked down the iPhone may look draconian, but it also protects its users from all kinds of stuff you really don't want to worry about on your phone.
I block google analytics because I see no difference between their spying on me and any other advertiser spying on me. Seriously, how did we get to the point where everyone thinks its A-OK for google to spy, but no other advertiser?
That point came the moment you joined Slashdot. Evil's motto is "Don't be Google," you know.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. Skeptical communities and movements are nice - but very few people are really interested in learning how scams work before they're fooled by them, and it seems there's always a multiplying number of desperate swindlers looking to fool more folks out of money while hiding from consequences.
Ryan Fenton
Now those resources go to protect the extremely rich from poor people who might download music without paying for it.
Given the BIOS updates by HP and Dell that turn on the fan continuously on the subject notebooks, the reports of higher recalls of these models, Nvidia setting aside $191M in reserve to "deal with this issue", and Dell at least extending their notebook warranties on these notebooks specifically for an additional year, that's a lot of smoke with no fire underneath it somewhere.
The part of this article unrelated to the widely known evidence you cite, and the part that I will take a wait-and-see approach to, is the claim that every single nV 65 nm and 55 nm GPU is defective. On the other hand, net chatter makes them sound very stable, and there are far fewer complaints of broken 8800GTs than there are of 4870s (one of which I own, and mine is fine). I'm guessing that he's making a big overstatement with his claim that every single 55 or 65 nm nV GPU is defective.
I don't get people who show any sort of devotion to a GPU manufacturer. I just don't. The author of this article is one of them. That doesn't mean it's not true, but he's written a number of articles that later proved to be completely false in the past, for instance saying that the 8800 series would doom nV because of low performance and high power usage compared to the 1900 or 2900, whatever ATI was releasing at about the same time. I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.
Nerds should be able to estimate the voter turnout in their state here and calculate the probability that their one vote will swing the election in that state. Obviously the closeness of the race plays a huge role too, but there's no way to know how close the race is until after the elections (margin of error is +/- 3%, and the race will be won by less than 3%).
If you've done all this, you will see that the chance of your vote making a difference is extremely remote. Your entire trip to the voting booth is wasted. You're giving away time and money for nothing.
If tons of people stop voting and a single vote becomes meaningful, then it will be time to start voting again.
On the other hand, if every nerd believed you, 5% fewer people would vote, which will certainly have a good chance of deciding an election.
Call me old fashion, but the one person - one vote system still appeals to me. Trying to increase ones effective voting power feels more like Jim Crow rational: "We're the good guys, so we should have disproportionate power."
You realize that you're arguing that it's immoral to try to persuade anyone about anything, right?
Could perhaps the distance between the earth and the sun and the relationship for nuclear decay be in some way effected by the gravitational field fluctuations that occur as well? Time is dilated by gravity, so perhaps are we seeing a further proof of Special relativity?
Or are they simply looking for casual relationships where none actually exist. Perhaps the decay rate relates to the amount of pastafarians on earth.
Since the measurement and the material are both in the same location, time dilation would affect them both to the same extent, meaning that the detector would not be able to measure a difference in the half life.
Uh, they did? The article says they wrote a paper about their anodes and electrolytes (I expect the electrolyte isn't such a big deal).
So they made some viruses that are supposed to make little wires. Then they used the viruses to make some little wires. Then they wrote a paper. Then they worked on some more viruses to make some other wires that could be used as the other necessary component of a battery. And they're writing another paper.
That really sounds like pretty much how it's supposed to happen.
I think the poster was using a definition of secrecy along the lines of "not yet in Popular Mechanics." Now where did I park my secret car?
Why, are China and India doing basic science research? My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game. Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets. Consider the fact that UNIX started as an excuse to hack on computer games.
My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. China...not so much. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation. America's technical lead is still quite pronounced today, but not remotely secure.
1920x1200 is becoming a common resolution? Hardly, check out the Half Life 2 survey, a cool 2.29% of users are running it.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 are still what most users are running by far. At those resolutions, a decent midrange card is more then any average user needs. Their games will run great.
Basicly SLI is great for those who are willing to pay through the nose to run the game at crazy resolutions, AA and AF maxxed to the tits. Because god knows that just improves the game experience so much that its worth shelling out more $$$.
Common among enthusiasts, who are the target market of high end video card, yes, most definitely. I saw a recent poll, I think on the hardocp forums, that showed 1920 and 1680 basically tied for the most popular resolutions for that enthusiast community. NV and ATI aren't selling multi-card systems for 1024x768, but the higher resolution market is quite large, growing very quickly, and is the market that has money to spend and people who can truly benefit from multi-card systems (assuming they don't care much about money, or computer gaming is ridiculously important to their lives)
Even at 1280x960 a rather new high end card is required to play a lot of games at 30+ fps at default settings. I was at 1280x1024 until recently (which is the 1280 LCD resolution - note that the steam survey shows that most people at 1280 are using CRTs still, given the 4:3 aspect ratio, which is interesting) and nothing short of an 8800 would run several games smoothly, and I never even tried Crysis.
Crysis. Everybody spends and spends and builds mammoth PCs to get the highest FPS in it but no one actually *plays* it as a game, it is just a benchmark and eye candy demo. Then they sit back and whine when all of the "blockbuster" games don't utilize a fraction of their uber systems. WoW, Warhammer: AR, GRID, Assassins Creed, Spore, etc. all run fine on systems over 4 years old.
WotLK is bogging down below 30 fps on systems with a brand new 4870 using the new shadow options, and even without that on 30" screens, which seem to be the target for SLI. So WoW benefits from SLI. Warhammer slows to the teens at 1920x1200, which is becoming a common resolution (seen on 22-28" monitors) in large RvR encounters on a 4870, but not on a 4870x2 or a couple gt280s. So Warhammer benefits from SLI. Assassin's Creed is slow at points on an 8800 GTX at 1680x1050, so with higher resolution it should probably benefit from SLI. I finally played Crysis, and when it's modded a bit it's actually a really good game. Not a 96, but easily a 91. People ignore the good gameplay because they're focused on the graphics, which certainly benefit from SLI and end up truly enhancing the gameplay. Love it or hate it, Oblivion even benefits from SLI at high resolution with HDR and forced AA. Half Life 2 E2 slowed down occasionally on my 4870 at 1920x1200, so it would benefit from SLI. Company of Heroes looks okay on a 4870, but I can't make it look great without framerates dropping to the teens. I could if I had SLI.
My point is that most popular games do have significant, tangible benefits from SLI.
I don't have SLI, though, and I don't want it. I don't think the cost and power usage justify the benefit, despite believing that the benefit is quite real, even with it being partially diminished by microstuttering.
Are there any key lessons to be learned from these rovers' success? Or is it simply that they have no critical consumables (being solar powered and all) and they evidently were overengineered? I guess for starters, having redundancy and the ability to turn off failing components is good, seeing as they're six wheel drive and one of the rovers is now dragging a bad wheel around. What else has been learned from these rovers about engineering long-lasting probes?
Another lesson to learn is that despite highly publicized mistakes, NASA does have a lot engineers who are both brilliant and wise.
Local schools seem to be the worse offenders. They constantly bitch and moan about lack of funds, then piss away a pile of cash on a site license for Microsoft Office
I agree most secondary school IT teachers seem to think IT education == Microsoft training. But it's worse than that - in the UK, most schools actually buy all their MS stuff from a reseller such as RM Computers. Which is a giant rip because, for example with servers, they just take Windows 2003 and bolt a load of "admin tools" onto the side. They deliberately make it non-standard and harder to use so they can then charge the schools giant support contracts. It also doesn't help that most school IT techs are completely hopeless.
I speak from bitter experience, BTW.
In my schools in California, every computer was always a donated Apple, and the few pieces of software purchased came straight from the vendor at a massive discount. This is true in at least a lot of the U.S., and it's been a great marketing campaign - in America, the most common laptop in universities is a Mac.
That rant would be fine if it were accurate. It's not, and therefore it's ludicrous. For the English genitive, -' is relatively old-fashioned, and -'s is more common in recent years. I suggest you actually learn some grammar before deciding to harangue the rest of the planet. Come on, even Wikipedia gets this right. Stop wallowing in self-righteousness.
Only one half of one of his rules at the end is wrong, and then it's only somewhat wrong, because, as yous state, modern standard use is as he says. Also, you come off as more self-righteous, AC. The GP is a national treasure.
I'll have to give it to Splash Damage...they did an amazing job with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW). I was a little skeptical about how it might turn out, seeing as how Splash Damage started off as a mod 'company', but I've been thoroughly impressed with their results. Their QA is what I'd expect from id software or even Blizzard. I definitely look forward to future titles from them.
Blizzard games tend to ship with bugs. Don't get me wrong - they're way ahead of most developers in that respect, and bugs tend to be seldom encountered. Still, I think id manages to beat them handily when it comes to QA, so I'd reverse the order in which you mentioned id and Blizz.
I personally find Google's rankings to be terrible, far worse than Yahoo's, and much more likely to have a bunch of spam sites near the top. If they were to integrate results from this project, and if they can keep the spambots from flooding the project with fake rankings, or if they could learn from my submissions that I don't want fake sites with lists of nonsense words as results, they would become a far more powerful than I can imagine.
Good logic there and you make a valid point, but being perfectly honest, 2 years in the GPU industry is more like 5 years in the CPU industry.
And Intel's currently more like 6 years behind NV/ATI. LRB may change that, but Intel shouldn't count its chickens before they're rendered. Even then, don't expect LRB to approach 2 year old NV/ATI performance at the same price or power draw point.
2d performance is more than just how fast you can refresh a framebuffer from memory. Check out x11perf -aa10, which tests drawing 10pt anti-aliased fonts. My radeon 9250 with open source drivers gets about a 2x better score than my brand new 4850 with fglrx. The difference is that ati/amd (and nvidia as well) don't spend nearly as much time optimizing these parts of the driver(considered "2d" but they really use the 3d engine) while you need hardware acceleration and driver support to do it at a good speed(which the open source r200 driver does, even faster than pure software on my not too sluggish phenom 9950).
I find this interesting. I just upgraded from a 7950GT to a 4870, and while the 3d performance is outstanding, I actually have a noticeable lag now in drawing windows when I switch to or maximize them. It's probably 100 ms, but I'm the kind of person who turns off all OS animation because I hate that Maccy feeling of clicking something and waiting for a fancy animation to finish before I can click the next thing. I'm dual booting XP and Vista, and Vista's delay seems to be shorter, but it's still there. I'd assumed it was a driver problem, but wasn't able to fix it with drivers, and your post makes me wonder if the 4870 just doesn't have what it takes to keep up with the graphics cards I used in 1996 in 2d rendering.
Cigarette taxes are directly designed to decrease smoking rates to improve public health. According to you, it's working. The associated decrease in medical expenses for the state more than pays for the loss of cigarette-tax payers.
Also, while you have some good points dancing just outside your reach, you don't manage to make any of them. Use of the phrase "liberal orthodoxy" was a good hint that you weren't going to make much sense.
Your following post pretends to get more specific, but it also falls flat on its face. Your assertions aren't even internally consistent, and the "Reagonomics rules the world and has led to ultimate prosperity" idea is laughably out of touch with the fact that economic growth since Reagan's time has been focused in those nations with contrary economic systems.
So, where does that 27.9 BILLION dollars come from. The taxpayer. Exxon merely wrote the check for all the dollars it collected from you and me to pay it.
And in absence of said tax, they'd stuff that money in their pockets instead. What's your point?
Also without a tax, they'd be able to sell more and gas prices would be cheaper. This would be bad for the environment, and remember that much of that money goes to fund the governments of nations not so friendly to America. With a higher tax (too bad ours isn't as high as Europe's), the money goes back into the U.S. (and decreases the income taxes we need to pay to fund the government, or reduces the debt we'll need to pay in the future through income tax) instead of into the hands of oil barons and political enemies.
I've read enough of your police state + compromise with Islam crap in the UK and I can see that it is absolute crap. You can turn London into Al London if you like, but I prefer Washington DC to stay Washington DC, and if the Muzzies don't like it, then fuck them. They've already shit up their own part of the world and can't even put together a meaningful economy despite loads of oil money, and we're supposed to adopt elements of that failed culture?
Get real.
The economy of their part of the world was "shit up" by an elite few, usually backed by larger richer nations, often the United States. That's one of the reasons that terrorists exist at all. Poverty and a perception of exploitation and disdain from America creates terrorists. For every terrorist killed in Iraq, we're making 10 more who will show up in 10-30 years. Doing smaller, targeted, not publicized operations is the only military option than would actually make progress.
If or when the Chinese start to call in their debts on America and the economy here starts to tank on a level that makes the current downturn seem laughable, idiots here will start taking up the same sort of views that idiots in say, Iran, have now. If an American terrorist group attacked China and blew up a building, and the Chinese in response occupied the western United States, you and your buddies, along with a lot of other poorly educated, quick tempered people will be motivated to become terrorists yourselves. Then maybe you'll have a more nuanced perspective on today's radical Islam.
The botnets that send those spam messages from the Unites States are controlled by Russia(ns). Remember the news a few weeks ago when Russia invaded Georgia and 80% of the world's spam stopped while the botnets switched to attacking the Georgian government's web page?
They may just like sun on their backs and not in their eyes.
Not everything requires 'scientific' conjecture (which is, I think, your point.)
Mod parent up to +5.
In the northern hemisphere the sun is to the south.
Maybe this just means that we're getting dumb and dumberer as time goes on (backwards evolution)?
I think you could just call it normal evolution. Greater than average human intelligence isn't necessarily a survival or reproductive trait, at least not the way we define intelligence now.
The way Apple has locked down the iPhone may look draconian, but it also protects its users from all kinds of stuff you really don't want to worry about on your phone.
Like reliable reception?
I block google analytics because I see no difference between their spying on me and any other advertiser spying on me. Seriously, how did we get to the point where everyone thinks its A-OK for google to spy, but no other advertiser?
That point came the moment you joined Slashdot. Evil's motto is "Don't be Google," you know.