I seem to remember that even in the old Doom days, if you looked at the raw realtics and gametics you could come up with numbers higher than 35fps, even though the original engine was capped there. It still supplied some sort of benchmark data above the cap rate.
Besides, when Doom frame rates started going up too far they simply used more stressful levels for better benchmarks.
I've no doubt that some sort of many-monsters, many-colored-light-sources, many-other-things-too levels can be built that will stress today's fastest systems well under 60fps. (probably unplayable on my fastest system)
I heard some numbers for two doctors, (wife's uncle and co-worker's father) and their malpractice insurance premiums were higher than my salary.
Nor, IMHO, is lawsuit caps the solution. The way I hear it is that a small percentage of doctors are responsible for the majority of malpractice payouts. But either the decisions are sealed, or the news doesn't travel correctly. In any case, they hop to a new job, and do it again. The AMA should be a little more concerned with self-policing. Some (small number, I believe) doctors shouldn't be doctors.
But my other point is that we're funding the erosion of our own rights when we buy products from those corporations.
My question(s) is how much of the purchase price of, for instance, a PC goes to lobbying the government to allow the WinTel duopoly to continue, and is there a "good list" to buy instead, or do all corporations do it, and we can't escape it.
1: But that would be infringing on the rights of corporations to stop their lobbying.
2: I just can't ask my government to change as sincerely as a corporation can. After all, if you really mean it, say it in cash.
Which brings up my new pondering point. Take the purchase price of that ticket to a Disney movie, toy, or apparel. How much of that money I just paid goes into lobbying DIRECTLY against my rights? Not to single out Disney... How much of the purchase price of a new computer (which you practically can't buy without Windows) goes DIRECTLY into lobbying against a free and open computing/Internet market? Or how much of the price of overpriced medication goes to funding prime-time drug ads so I can see pictures of purple pills flying across the screen, when I don't even have much idea WHY I should take the silly thing?
We are funding the erosion of our own rights. We need a way to stop doing this, shy of dropping out of society.
You bring up a good point with the Macrovision. Joe probably just thinks it's because them thar darned teck-nik-al things just don't work right. He has no idea that he's up against a piece of deliberate policy.
We have fallen down as educators.
Of course we can treat this as a positive, by spinning it as, "Your DVD/VCR troubles aren't an accident or improperly working equipment - this is DELIBERATE sabotage, and they're about to do MORE of this to you. Listen to this..."
We keep talking about Joe SixPak and what HE cares about, and the fact that he DOESN'T care about geek issues.
Guess what? Right now DRM, broadcast flags, and the like are geek issues. Pretty soon they're going to become Joe SixPak issues, about the time he finds out that he can't do the things he used to be able to do.
Our challenge is to be prepared, and guide Joe into pushing for the Right Things as he gets incensed at his legislators. No doubt the Dark Side will also have some proposals to attempt to placate Joe and maintain Profit. If we're thoughtful and lucky, we can guide the course of events, soon.
Nobody wants the 44mi x 44mi x 120ft hole in their back yard. I have a sister who lives in Utah, and I've visited there, and they TREASURE their land. (So do we in Vermont, for that matter.) To get one Utah opinion that is shared by many (though assuredly not all) read the works of Edward Abbey.
Perhaps the best place for the landfill is next door to Roy E. Cordato's house or the Heartland Institute, though I'm sure they'd prefer it be next door to someone of lower income.
So many of these rants sound to me like, "Just let me keep making money, and keep my money, and don't bother me with these silly 'issues' and 'consequences.'"
Pardon my simplistic take on old growth forests, but...
1: Figure out how old "old" is. For sake of example, I'll use 300 years.
2: Figure out how many square miles of old growth forest you want to manage. For sake of example, I'll use 300 square miles. But remember, this argument can scale.
3: Use Simple Math. At the example scale, you can cut 1 square mile each year. If 1 square mile each year isn't enough, put more square miles under management.
OR
Decide you don't want old growth forests, any more. Make plans NOW for your current business plan to vaporize. If you cut any faster than some sort of "renewal rate" you're going to cut it all down and go out of business. It's just that simple. Or perhaps you mean to cut it all down and let your children go out of business.
There's obviously room to waffle on figuring out the "renewal rate", but in the end trees don't lie. Cut corners on allowing the forest to renew and you eventually go out of business.
There are times when perhaps ROTFL would be the first response, except when there's the ring of truth about it. Then ROTFCrying becomes sadly more appropriate.
Sometimes I wish there were mod points for "Ironic", "Sad, but true", and the like.
As someone else commented, I was playing with words and meanings of the word, 'assembly.'
But perhaps a dominant factor in the personhood of an AI will be precisely *who* wishes that personhood granted on the AI. I imagine at least the first few times an AI tries to argue for itself, the court will refuse to accept the case. To get it into court will no doubt take a person or corporation acting on behalf of the AI.
The political clout and capital of the person bringing the case on behalf of the AI, against the political clout and capital of the opposing side, will tell. The first case will also no doubt be lost. The issue will be *how* and *why* the case is lost, and what opening that leaves for the future.
But back around 1900 or so, the Supreme Court managed to grant the rights of personhood to corporations.
So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.' But assuming a true AI has been built/programmed by humans, I guess it could be considered an 'assembly of humans,' too.
I agree with you 'not always' but there were plenty of times when the destruction was supposed to be complete. There was one case (begins with A, but when I try to spell it, it looks wrong. (Amalekites, sort of, but not right)) where they were punished for NOT thoroughly destroying them. I supposed I can start looking up too, if needed. Really most of this stuff happens pre-David.
I live in Vermont, where Dean was governor for quite a few years.
I don't agree with everything he did, and I don't agree with everything he's saying now. All things told, I don't know who I favor for President, at the moment.
But there is one fact which stands out: Vermont is one of three states in the union that isn't wallowing in red ink.
As someone who has lived here through his entire tenure as governor, (and a few governors before him, too) it's not a case of a Republican legislature keeping spending in check over the governor's dead body. A significant portion of the time, Dean was keeping spending in check over the bodies of a Democratic legislature.
In any case, Dean was a key part of the fact that Vermont is solvent, today. (To me, that may be the ONLY thing in his favor, maybe not, but IMHO that simple fact is beyond doubt.)
He spent some amount of time "casting aspersions on the wisdom of the legislature" when fighting spending battles. His language could be refreshing at times, even colorful, but I'm not sure how it would play on a national stage. (I seem to remember him using terms like "irresponsible" and perhaps even "idiotic", though I'm less certain about that last one.)
Some have stated that Democrats would rig the voting machines, give the chance.
Others have asked for an enumeration of polls that were contradicted by election results, and of course cast doubt on the polls, themselves.
None of this matters a single bit. Three things matter:
1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
2: There appears to be no public audit process for code, patches, or patch installation for those voting machines.
3: (and this is the biggie) As a result of 1 and 2, I have very little faith in any results delivered by these voting machines.
NEWS LIKE THIS ERODES MY FAITH IN ELECTIONS IN THE USA. (further)
There is no way that this is anything but bad news.
Voting machines need security and transparency that can satisfy geeks nationwide, or at least let us know where we are, for those who simply can't be satisfied.
My plan is to generate a script to grab the necessary stuff off of the removable drive and populate a similar (but empty) filesystem structure on the fixed drive. I'd expect the result to look quite a bit like the existing bootable floppy/CDROM distributions, though probably not quite as space-efficient. (especially compared to the floppy-based ones) The key difference is that the script would allow me to regenerate the stripped version at will, say after applying security updates to the full version on the removable drive.
Probably the greatest interest would be in the stripping/transplant script, especially if I could get smart about it (recursive ldd to find needed libs, etc) instead of simple brute force. Brute force would likely only serve as an example, not something generally usable.
I also experimented with LIDS once. I wanted to cross-host it from my desktop (where there were development tools) to my firewall. (where there were none) At the time, both systems were running RH7.2, except that I'd stripped the firewall down to the essentials. The idea was to run./config and make on the desktop, tar the whole mess up, move it to the firewall, untar, and then install there. LIDS didn't like my trying to do that. It wanted to be built on the installation system. Presumably I might be able to get away with this with the removable drive system, though it would probably take extra knowledge to move any LIDS configs and/or databases.
From what I've studied, nations that don't get conquered seem to be able to survive any adversity but affluence. (Sometimes affluence also leads to getting conqueredy, by a variety of mechanisms.)
See, mega-rich CEOs and MBAs really have the nations best interests in mind as they export US jobs and destroy the middle class, thus grinding our economy to a standstill. They're trying to rescue us from affluence so our nation can survive.
The networks don't really care if you watch the shows, just that you watch the ads.
Just how much does late-night TV time cost, that there can be so many informercials? Has there been any data published about the effectiveness of those infomercials?
I was saying this back in my OS/2 days. But in those days, I felt Microsoft was leading people down a path, easy step by easy step, while those people didn't know where the path led. Now I think I see that the path never really led anywhere, other than away from alternatives. Microsoft wasn't after a destination, they were after mileage. Kind of like an unscrupulous taxi driver.
The same God said to kill the enemy, every man, woman, and child, and burn their cities to the ground. Take no booty, but destroy everything.
I might have to agree with the other reply, differentiating war from murder.
The thing that bugs me is the talk of a 'Judeo-Christian Ethic'. From what I can see, there's a major ethical disconnect between Old and New Testaments. Other than that Jesus was a Jew, there appears to be little commonality between His teachings and Jewish historical behavior.
So since the job of detecting and deflecting an asteroid is "hard", that means we should give up?
You've enumerated the problems well, and I'd rather see us working harder to overcome them than deciding it's just too hard, too expensive, or impossible.
IMHO: Using a nuke to move in asteroid is appropriate for the metallic ones. For snowballs a nuclear-powered mass driver may well be better. In either case, the most critical element is time, since longer lead times allow smaller deflections more time to work.
Note: This is a plan, purchases made, lacking time.
At a flea market, I purchased a hard drive hot-swap cradle. This is not to hot-swap, but to make a drive easily removable. I've also purchased an extra hard drive.
The base OS install will be on the removable hard drive. I plan to copy what's needed from the OS install over to the fixed hard drive, making a second, stripped install.
To run as a firewall, remove the extra hard drive. To build/install/upgrade, reboot with the extra hard drive plugged in, and rebuild the stripped installation. A few minor details (grub/lilo, etc) but nothing major.
I'm also thinking about small tricks like RO-root and possibly putting the RO parts of the stripped install into an ISO9660 partition on the fixed hard drive. Nothing's foolproof, but the more obstacles you can throw in their way...
The report wasn't for the user, I was thinking more of mailing some crash info to the developer, or at least save some info in an email that the user can simply forward to the developer. (The latter is probably more politically correct.)
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember that even in the old Doom days, if you looked at the raw realtics and gametics you could come up with numbers higher than 35fps, even though the original engine was capped there. It still supplied some sort of benchmark data above the cap rate.
Besides, when Doom frame rates started going up too far they simply used more stressful levels for better benchmarks.
I've no doubt that some sort of many-monsters, many-colored-light-sources, many-other-things-too levels can be built that will stress today's fastest systems well under 60fps. (probably unplayable on my fastest system)
I heard some numbers for two doctors, (wife's uncle and co-worker's father) and their malpractice insurance premiums were higher than my salary.
Nor, IMHO, is lawsuit caps the solution. The way I hear it is that a small percentage of doctors are responsible for the majority of malpractice payouts. But either the decisions are sealed, or the news doesn't travel correctly. In any case, they hop to a new job, and do it again. The AMA should be a little more concerned with self-policing. Some (small number, I believe) doctors shouldn't be doctors.
But my other point is that we're funding the erosion of our own rights when we buy products from those corporations.
My question(s) is how much of the purchase price of, for instance, a PC goes to lobbying the government to allow the WinTel duopoly to continue, and is there a "good list" to buy instead, or do all corporations do it, and we can't escape it.
A few responses:
1: But that would be infringing on the rights of corporations to stop their lobbying.
2: I just can't ask my government to change as sincerely as a corporation can. After all, if you really mean it, say it in cash.
Which brings up my new pondering point. Take the purchase price of that ticket to a Disney movie, toy, or apparel. How much of that money I just paid goes into lobbying DIRECTLY against my rights? Not to single out Disney... How much of the purchase price of a new computer (which you practically can't buy without Windows) goes DIRECTLY into lobbying against a free and open computing/Internet market? Or how much of the price of overpriced medication goes to funding prime-time drug ads so I can see pictures of purple pills flying across the screen, when I don't even have much idea WHY I should take the silly thing?
We are funding the erosion of our own rights.
We need a way to stop doing this, shy of dropping out of society.
You bring up a good point with the Macrovision. Joe probably just thinks it's because them thar darned teck-nik-al things just don't work right. He has no idea that he's up against a piece of deliberate policy.
We have fallen down as educators.
Of course we can treat this as a positive, by spinning it as, "Your DVD/VCR troubles aren't an accident or improperly working equipment - this is DELIBERATE sabotage, and they're about to do MORE of this to you. Listen to this..."
Joe Sixpak isn't annoyed, yet.
It's not a bad time to start getting the message out, and get the groundwork going, but no groundswell will start until Joe feels PAIN.
We keep talking about Joe SixPak and what HE cares about, and the fact that he DOESN'T care about geek issues.
Guess what? Right now DRM, broadcast flags, and the like are geek issues. Pretty soon they're going to become Joe SixPak issues, about the time he finds out that he can't do the things he used to be able to do.
Our challenge is to be prepared, and guide Joe into pushing for the Right Things as he gets incensed at his legislators. No doubt the Dark Side will also have some proposals to attempt to placate Joe and maintain Profit. If we're thoughtful and lucky, we can guide the course of events, soon.
I look forward to visiting and seeing your fine Cottonwood furniture. I'll be it makes great guitars and other musical instruments, too.
Maybe hemp has woody stems, if you look hard enough.
Nobody wants the 44mi x 44mi x 120ft hole in their back yard. I have a sister who lives in Utah, and I've visited there, and they TREASURE their land. (So do we in Vermont, for that matter.) To get one Utah opinion that is shared by many (though assuredly not all) read the works of Edward Abbey.
Perhaps the best place for the landfill is next door to Roy E. Cordato's house or the Heartland Institute, though I'm sure they'd prefer it be next door to someone of lower income.
So many of these rants sound to me like, "Just let me keep making money, and keep my money, and don't bother me with these silly 'issues' and 'consequences.'"
Pardon my simplistic take on old growth forests, but...
1: Figure out how old "old" is. For sake of example, I'll use 300 years.
2: Figure out how many square miles of old growth forest you want to manage. For sake of example, I'll use 300 square miles. But remember, this argument can scale.
3: Use Simple Math. At the example scale, you can cut 1 square mile each year. If 1 square mile each year isn't enough, put more square miles under management.
OR
Decide you don't want old growth forests, any more. Make plans NOW for your current business plan to vaporize. If you cut any faster than some sort of "renewal rate" you're going to cut it all down and go out of business. It's just that simple. Or perhaps you mean to cut it all down and let your children go out of business.
There's obviously room to waffle on figuring out the "renewal rate", but in the end trees don't lie. Cut corners on allowing the forest to renew and you eventually go out of business.
4: Profit!
There are times when perhaps ROTFL would be the first response, except when there's the ring of truth about it. Then ROTFCrying becomes sadly more appropriate.
Sometimes I wish there were mod points for "Ironic", "Sad, but true", and the like.
As someone else commented, I was playing with words and meanings of the word, 'assembly.'
But perhaps a dominant factor in the personhood of an AI will be precisely *who* wishes that personhood granted on the AI. I imagine at least the first few times an AI tries to argue for itself, the court will refuse to accept the case. To get it into court will no doubt take a person or corporation acting on behalf of the AI.
The political clout and capital of the person bringing the case on behalf of the AI, against the political clout and capital of the opposing side, will tell. The first case will also no doubt be lost. The issue will be *how* and *why* the case is lost, and what opening that leaves for the future.
But back around 1900 or so, the Supreme Court managed to grant the rights of personhood to corporations.
So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.' But assuming a true AI has been built/programmed by humans, I guess it could be considered an 'assembly of humans,' too.
I agree with you 'not always' but there were plenty of times when the destruction was supposed to be complete. There was one case (begins with A, but when I try to spell it, it looks wrong. (Amalekites, sort of, but not right)) where they were punished for NOT thoroughly destroying them. I supposed I can start looking up too, if needed. Really most of this stuff happens pre-David.
I live in Vermont, where Dean was governor for quite a few years.
I don't agree with everything he did, and I don't agree with everything he's saying now. All things told, I don't know who I favor for President, at the moment.
But there is one fact which stands out:
Vermont is one of three states in the union that isn't wallowing in red ink.
As someone who has lived here through his entire tenure as governor, (and a few governors before him, too) it's not a case of a Republican legislature keeping spending in check over the governor's dead body. A significant portion of the time, Dean was keeping spending in check over the bodies of a Democratic legislature.
In any case, Dean was a key part of the fact that Vermont is solvent, today.
(To me, that may be the ONLY thing in his favor, maybe not, but IMHO that simple fact is beyond doubt.)
He spent some amount of time "casting aspersions on the wisdom of the legislature" when fighting spending battles. His language could be refreshing at times, even colorful, but I'm not sure how it would play on a national stage. (I seem to remember him using terms like "irresponsible" and perhaps even "idiotic", though I'm less certain about that last one.)
Aaah, but in this case, you may well be wrong.
We're talking about voting machines throwing out your vote, and casting one for you that agrees with someone else's agenda.
Some have stated that Democrats would rig the voting machines, give the chance.
Others have asked for an enumeration of polls that were contradicted by election results, and of course cast doubt on the polls, themselves.
None of this matters a single bit. Three things matter:
1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
2: There appears to be no public audit process for code, patches, or patch installation for those voting machines.
3: (and this is the biggie) As a result of 1 and 2, I have very little faith in any results delivered by these voting machines.
NEWS LIKE THIS ERODES MY FAITH IN ELECTIONS IN THE USA. (further)
There is no way that this is anything but bad news.
Voting machines need security and transparency that can satisfy geeks nationwide, or at least let us know where we are, for those who simply can't be satisfied.
My plan is to generate a script to grab the necessary stuff off of the removable drive and populate a similar (but empty) filesystem structure on the fixed drive. I'd expect the result to look quite a bit like the existing bootable floppy/CDROM distributions, though probably not quite as space-efficient. (especially compared to the floppy-based ones) The key difference is that the script would allow me to regenerate the stripped version at will, say after applying security updates to the full version on the removable drive.
./config and make on the desktop, tar the whole mess up, move it to the firewall, untar, and then install there. LIDS didn't like my trying to do that. It wanted to be built on the installation system. Presumably I might be able to get away with this with the removable drive system, though it would probably take extra knowledge to move any LIDS configs and/or databases.
Probably the greatest interest would be in the stripping/transplant script, especially if I could get smart about it (recursive ldd to find needed libs, etc) instead of simple brute force. Brute force would likely only serve as an example, not something generally usable.
I also experimented with LIDS once. I wanted to cross-host it from my desktop (where there were development tools) to my firewall. (where there were none) At the time, both systems were running RH7.2, except that I'd stripped the firewall down to the essentials. The idea was to run
From what I've studied, nations that don't get conquered seem to be able to survive any adversity but affluence. (Sometimes affluence also leads to getting conqueredy, by a variety of mechanisms.)
See, mega-rich CEOs and MBAs really have the nations best interests in mind as they export US jobs and destroy the middle class, thus grinding our economy to a standstill. They're trying to rescue us from affluence so our nation can survive.
So in reality it comes down to this:
The networks don't really care if you watch the shows, just that you watch the ads.
Just how much does late-night TV time cost, that there can be so many informercials?
Has there been any data published about the effectiveness of those infomercials?
Microsoft's well-tested recipe.
I was saying this back in my OS/2 days. But in those days, I felt Microsoft was leading people down a path, easy step by easy step, while those people didn't know where the path led. Now I think I see that the path never really led anywhere, other than away from alternatives. Microsoft wasn't after a destination, they were after mileage. Kind of like an unscrupulous taxi driver.
The same God said to kill the enemy, every man, woman, and child, and burn their cities to the ground. Take no booty, but destroy everything.
I might have to agree with the other reply, differentiating war from murder.
The thing that bugs me is the talk of a 'Judeo-Christian Ethic'. From what I can see, there's a major ethical disconnect between Old and New Testaments. Other than that Jesus was a Jew, there appears to be little commonality between His teachings and Jewish historical behavior.
Right on all points.
So since the job of detecting and deflecting an asteroid is "hard", that means we should give up?
You've enumerated the problems well, and I'd rather see us working harder to overcome them than deciding it's just too hard, too expensive, or impossible.
IMHO: Using a nuke to move in asteroid is appropriate for the metallic ones. For snowballs a nuclear-powered mass driver may well be better. In either case, the most critical element is time, since longer lead times allow smaller deflections more time to work.
Note: This is a plan, purchases made, lacking time.
At a flea market, I purchased a hard drive hot-swap cradle. This is not to hot-swap, but to make a drive easily removable. I've also purchased an extra hard drive.
The base OS install will be on the removable hard drive. I plan to copy what's needed from the OS install over to the fixed hard drive, making a second, stripped install.
To run as a firewall, remove the extra hard drive.
To build/install/upgrade, reboot with the extra hard drive plugged in, and rebuild the stripped installation.
A few minor details (grub/lilo, etc) but nothing major.
I'm also thinking about small tricks like RO-root and possibly putting the RO parts of the stripped install into an ISO9660 partition on the fixed hard drive. Nothing's foolproof, but the more obstacles you can throw in their way...
The report wasn't for the user, I was thinking more of mailing some crash info to the developer, or at least save some info in an email that the user can simply forward to the developer. (The latter is probably more politically correct.)