All the miniaturization is nice, but one thing that has been missing from the music industry since the 1980s is the physical size of the record. A record album was a fairly large thing, and, covers were small posters in their own right. Nowadays, you get a little picture in a plastic case with the CD, which is nice and transportable, for sure, but it is not as effective as a total package visually as a big record used to be.
Well, the Jar Jar Binks was a little over the top. But, it was an over the top reaction to a movie that, really, when it came out, was a total flop with a bad ending. Blade Runner had stunning visuals, of that there is no doubt, but as a movie, released to my generation, most people didn't like it. Even my film professor made fun of the ending. So, take BR for what it is, a lot of great eye candy, without much more. If you look at it in the right way, it really is just another gloomy Phantom Menace. If you made Jar Jar really depressed, chain smoking and a bit noirish tipsy, he would actually be pretty cool, and he would fit right in BR. Meesa want another smoke!
Comparing a ground based turbine set up to a mobile IC is a bit off.
A steam plant on the ground actually spins, in the US, at a constant 60rpms when all is said done, that's how we get power at 60hz. In fact, one of the little known things about the power grid is that demand on the grid can actually "pull" on the generators, turning them into motors or slowing them down. In extreme cases, it is possible to physically damage the generator. Tales of bent shafts due to fluctuations in demand are common.
It should be obvious from that anecdote alone, that the physical requirements for land based power stations are vastly different. I rule out natural gas as a solution right away simply because its widely known with the industry that the country screwed up in the 1990s and built too many gas peakers and quite literally burned all the natural gas in Texas. Coal is coming back into vogue because the administration is friendlier and it is so cheap. So what does a coal plant do? Coal based plants today have onsite apparatus to powderize and dry the mile long trains of coal that they burn every month. Because the coal is powderized so finely, dust is everywhere. Coal plants are not clean. Even with today's high efficiency, combustion is not perfect and neither is the water used to make the steam with. Crews must periodically bring down the boiler, get inside there, and clean it out. It is truly a dirty job that requires special, well paid people to do. I should add, as an aside, that many coal plants are so old that utilities often have machine shops of their own to make their own parts with for maintenance.
All of this stuff weighs a lot. Automakers do a remarkable job fitting an engine and a motor / generator into a hybrid car, but I think adding a boiler would throw off the whole scheme. In order for a boiler to be really good, you need a lot of pressure, and in order to have pressure, you need a strong boiler and that means weight. Then, in addition to your fuel, you need to have a ready supply of water everywhere. If you read about the history of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, you'll see that they tried to bring steam engines into a competitive league with the diesels emerging in the 1930s, but the water was the deal breaker.
Bottom line is, if you wanted to have a mode of transportation that has you running for fuel and water both, asks you to bring a shovel along so you can shovel your ton of fuel a week into it, and requires you to do a periodic job of scrubbing out dirty tubing, and, in an accident, may literally blow up and kill you and everyone else in your car, then steam transporation is for you.
But I think steam power is best left to the professionals at your local energy company, and your best way to use it is with an electric car.
The present day was depressing enough back then, and now, it is even more depressing. I remember when Blade Runner came out. I saw it in the theater, and I thought that it sucked. It was too slow, too long, and the ending was weak and depressing.
When this movie came out, Reagan was President, the Cold War was on, and the real vision of the future was more about mushroom clouds rising up over all of Europe, Asia and North America. At least if the world was going to end, it wouldn't just burn out like BR did, it would go out in a blaze of manly glory.
Who cares if Harrison Ford's character turned out to be a replicant, and that was part of the bleak vision of the future. So what if a bunch of clone / droids / zombies get out of hand in the future. How sad. I laughed at the premise, and I still do. Had the end of the movie had a bunch of replicants dropping an asteroid on LA, that would have been cool. But, I remember watching that, and thinking, "jeez, the end is these two dudes sitting in the rain. Where's the war?"
The Ewoks were tougher than the Replicants, and infinetly more entertaining. They were probably smarter too - nab Carrie Fisher and put Mark Hamill on a spit. That's genius. You didn't see them whining like Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford did in BR. "Woe is me. I'm a clone. Life sucks". We're all clones anyway - each of us is an anonymous nuclear target. Get over it.
The movie was stupid. I'll take Jar Jar Binks any day, even, over this crap.
We really need to claim both. The idea, really, is that people are stupid and compete to get anything. If you say, we all get to share the planet, its essentially worthless. However, if the USA says "we're claiming the moon and mars", then, the Europeans, Russians, Chinese and Indians will all start to spend enormous amounts of money on space hardware as well. The USA will then respond by drawing down its own traditional, but gargantuan military, to match the combined spending of all of them. This will fuel an enormous space race, getting the things like nuclear rockets, bigger ships, orbiting construction facilities, that we really need to get people off of earth and onto other planets, with the added benefit that wars would be fought in space, and not on earth, sparing those of us who would prefer to live in peace at home.
I think it is obvious that the USA should claim the planet Mars and militarize it. Adding that much real estate to the USA would provide a huge amount of national wealth. Imagine, the first interplanetary empire!:-)
There are some climate theories that argue that the driver behind our climate change is that the solar wind is shrinking up, allowing more cosmic rays in and effecting cloud formation. What happens if this star blows up and we get the shock wave from it? Could there already be nebula on its way to us to choke our solar system with so much cosmic dust?
The advanced alien race created a machine that would do whatever they wanted, just by thinking about it, and, well, they destroyed each other!
You start building these machines, and the next thing you know, armies of robots tasked to do our bidding will wind up ripping the clothes off the most attractive people. Fortunately, our arms race of fat has prepared us for this.
Time to crack open a bag of Cheetos, before it is too late!
I think what I tried to speak to, but failed at, was that, at one time, the GPL was a rather revolutionary license, and had gotten a lot of mindshare.
The original GPL was essentially a rallying cry more than a license, and the GPLv2 was more sedately worded but just as radical in thought. Nowadays, free software is much more accepted as a thought, and so, GPL is becoming an important but not so dominant, flavor of free.
I've two open source projects that I'm working on, and both are either going to be released GPLv2 or maybe even BSD. I might even contemplate, gasp, Public Domain. Once you make the mental leap that you are going to be giving your software away, then, what difference does it make how you do so? I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.
The GPL is sorta irrelevant in a way. Any more, open source can mean any number of licenses. If people want to see the source code for my thing, they can always come to my web site. The odds of someone making a closed source product out of my code are probably rarer than the odds of me getting rich writing shareware for Windows, so what difference does it really make?
I just don't see the need for this license at all.
Democrats aren't pushing this bill so that people are being free. Democrats are pushing this bill because they hope the explosion of extra channels will dilute the audience for right wing radio stations. Given the right wing media's scathing rebuttal of elected Republicans on what is actually a damned good immigration bill, I would be surprised if Republicans in the Congress did not support this.
Still, pay close attention to how this bill is being written and who can actually get these stations and who can't. Democrats are going to push to make sure that their people get the stations, and Republicans need to be on their toes to make sure their people get theres. If you see things like city governments, universities, and public schools getting more stations (all traditionally liberal points), then the Democrats are playing games. If you see things like churches, local chambers of commerce, adult groups like the FreeMasons, or even gun clubs getting them, then you can bet that Republicans win.
If they compromise and everyone can get a station, then it is a good bill.
a) Acting out a patent lawsuit against a European company would be an utter political disaster for Microsoft. As soon as MS starts filing patent lawsuits against European companies, the EU will invent a reason to sue Microsoft again and again.
b) Acting out a patent lawsuit against an American company that is well funded, such as IBM, would be a disaster for the software industry and invite federal involvement, which no one wants.
c) Microsoft, like many tech companies, has managed to alienate Republican support. Ballmer might be a Republican, but Gates has already said he's, sigh, for the other side. So, I wouldn't expect a great many Republicans leaping to the defense of MS in the event some sort of legal war goes against them. And surely, Democrats aren't exactly going to rush to defend an oligarchical billionaire's company. Microsoft doesn't really have the allies on the hill that it thinks it has, and Republicans remember MS didn't do them any favors after they got a sweetheart anti-trust deal to begin with.
Bottom line is this: Microsoft's patent threat is a threat only, one that would it be stupid to use, and Linux distros shouldn't be afraid of it.
I have a soft spot for artists getting screwed by technology. Every technological advance seems to fall on artists particularly hard, so, while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry and movie industry, I still think there might be a place so someone could show pictures of their work on the internet without having them stolen.
My wife used to use Napster (pre-lawsuit), and Kazaa, but she switched to iTunes because iTunes was more convenient and not choked full of ads, and paying a $1 a song is not so bad. If you add the threat of RIAA letters, then, iTunes seems like a pretty good deal indeed. She also feels a need to support the artists.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large. Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working. Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
Must be a lot more popular than I thought! Continued theft of his work by legions of adoring but thrifty fans is depriving this important artist of his livelihood. Obviously, Ottawa has to get involved at once.
Right now, Republicans are leary of harvesting human clones for parts, and Democrats are all in favor of it, but just wait until someone makes $1 off of it. Then, the tables will turn.
It's all going to start when someone figures out how to clone men but with giant penises, for easy transplant. Why compete over cars, houses, plots of land and computer upgrades when you can just go buy the real deal? In America, EVERY MAN will be a porn star. There will be billions of dollars made there.
From there, we'll get on to using human skin and hair for clothing, and human bones as a proxy for ivory. At first, it will be a status symbol. You really could have a lampshade made out of human skin, or even a football for junior or a jacket for the mrs. But soon, with enough venture capital, human clones will be mass produced and harvested like so many sheep, and even more billions will be made.
Eventually, there will be, within the USA alone, a 200 billion dollar a year industry dedicated to the production, harvest, and manufacturing goods based on harvested clones. At that point, just as you once saw liberals hail the progress of animal antibiotics and industrial farming and then turn to an imaginary better day of all natural organic everything, you'll see liberals lamenting the devaluation of the human body, whereas, conservatives will merely say they are free and supporting consumer demand. Then liberals will eventually say the masses are stupid for supporting a human cloning industry and demand federal action to slow it down or stop it, write thousands of books decrying it, and support an endlessly array of Democratic candidates that promise to reform it but never really do. In the meantime, conservatives will argue the cloning is natural, its our right to do so, and its part of God's plan anyway, and to support their position, they will dredge up every last salamder that can regrow its own tail, every asexually produced thing in nature, and every supporting phrase in the bible. Oh yes, Jesus was very much in favor of harvesting clones, if you know which 4 passages to read.
Cheering for either company is ridiculous. So Bill Gates has a few more billions than Sergei and Larry, but so what. It's not like any of us have our own private 737 to fly around in.
I like an OS to come with more stuff out of the box with every release. It's just less complicated to put in one CD and get everything - that's why I like Linux and OS/X. People have a right to make their products, however they want them. It sucks to bolt rear views on a car after the fact, and it sucks to go and download a bunch of unintegrated utilities onto your drive.
Google could have been proactive and released a Vista Upgrade for their search, with an Aero look, that shuts of Microsoft search. They could go and see every OS out there, and for Vista owners, drop down a new FireFox and a new Google Search FOR VISTA. But instead of being agressive, they cry to lawyers just like Netscape did. The result will be the same.
Microsoft delivered a new search experience with their new OS, and it is time for Google to respond with product.
I would think that if you were writing with assembly code, you would have done the optimizations already.
C is dead on Windows. That's pretty much the gist of it. Windows has been extremely difficult to program in C since the advent of COM, and that was in Windows 3.1. I don't say that I like it, but it is what it is. So, either people are doing C++, or they are doing some other language. So, while I understand your frustration with the lack of support for C99, I can say that the marketplace hasn't really cried out for it. One of the reasons I like Linux is that they have studiously avoided making themselves dependent on a C++ derived technology for the OS.
I learned to program on an ATARI 800. I write code, the expression of which is my directive to use the hardware as it is. If I wanted a completely portable language, I'd write in Java. But, I want to be able to take advantage of a platform and in as succinctly a fashion as possible. I think that often times writing portable code means you have slow code on multiple platforms. With emulators and virtual machines continually improving, I don't think you really need to write portable code any more.
So really, when it all boils down to it, liberals watched Star Trek, and wanted to make the world like that, whereas conservatives watched Star Wars, and wanted to make the world look like that.
Just a like President and a Vice President, there is a master and apprentice. Which is which?
If everyone who is 40 thinks hanging out with 11 year olds is so great, then why are so many kids in daycare? If squeeky voices don't matter, then, where are they on radio?
The fact of the matter is, once you add voice chat to an experience, the tone of one's voice, the depth of one's experience, completely matters, and to pretend otherwise is just a way of being deliberately ignorant of the environment you are in. Going online is not just a game, its an escape, and part of that escape includes wanting to relax and part of that is an assumption of being with your peers.
It's not a question of prejudice. If you are relaxing, you want to be able to be yourself without the filter of making sure the cultural references you make are worthwhile. Being "open minded" and putting up with a bunch of different punks is a job, and sometimes, you just want to be with people like yourself. Online games should let players filter for age, gender, orientation or any number of criteria. If you want to play with the kids, go ahead and hook up your virtual swingset and have it, but sometimes, you just want to be with your own kind.
I find myself more likely to spend $99 to get a Linux Distro with KDE 4.0 when it becomes available, then I see myself spending $250 to get Vista x64 for System Builders.
I tend to prefer GCC on Linux, and CL on Windows, largely because of the integration. But, for choice of C++ environment, I think Linux winds hands down for 64 bit C++ and I've been saying that for quite some time.
In general, I don't like Visual C++ for 64 bits at all, either the environment or the compiler, and I find myself preferring KDevelop on Linux for it. GNU is better about standards, to be sure, and I've documented a couple of those in my blog, but, I think that in case of templates, I actually do prefer the Visual C++ approach as it results in more readable code, even if, well, it was non-standard.
C99 support doesn't interest me too much as I do C++, but one thing that REALLY annoys me is the death of the __asm tag in CL for 64 bit work. I've never liked GNU's inline assembly at all, and thought MS did it the "right way". But, MS actually took away a really nice feature, more or less leveling the playing field at all.
I'm very much looking forward to wrapping up my blog writer thing for Linux and using that republish my blog in a more readable format, along with more articles on the topic. I actually have Vista Ultimate slated to go onto my linux box on a separate drive, but, I enjoy Linux so much that I see no need to "upgrade". I'm actually more excited about KDE 4.0 than I am about Vista.
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All the miniaturization is nice, but one thing that has been missing from the music industry since the 1980s is the physical size of the record. A record album was a fairly large thing, and, covers were small posters in their own right. Nowadays, you get a little picture in a plastic case with the CD, which is nice and transportable, for sure, but it is not as effective as a total package visually as a big record used to be.
So, screw you Brits! Let me know when you theoretically run your car, and then I will put up a web site to theoretically build mine.
Well, the Jar Jar Binks was a little over the top. But, it was an over the top reaction to a movie that, really, when it came out, was a total flop with a bad ending. Blade Runner had stunning visuals, of that there is no doubt, but as a movie, released to my generation, most people didn't like it. Even my film professor made fun of the ending. So, take BR for what it is, a lot of great eye candy, without much more. If you look at it in the right way, it really is just another gloomy Phantom Menace. If you made Jar Jar really depressed, chain smoking and a bit noirish tipsy, he would actually be pretty cool, and he would fit right in BR. Meesa want another smoke!
Comparing a ground based turbine set up to a mobile IC is a bit off.
A steam plant on the ground actually spins, in the US, at a constant 60rpms when all is said done, that's how we get power at 60hz. In fact, one of the little known things about the power grid is that demand on the grid can actually "pull" on the generators, turning them into motors or slowing them down. In extreme cases, it is possible to physically damage the generator. Tales of bent shafts due to fluctuations in demand are common.
It should be obvious from that anecdote alone, that the physical requirements for land based power stations are vastly different. I rule out natural gas as a solution right away simply because its widely known with the industry that the country screwed up in the 1990s and built too many gas peakers and quite literally burned all the natural gas in Texas. Coal is coming back into vogue because the administration is friendlier and it is so cheap. So what does a coal plant do? Coal based plants today have onsite apparatus to powderize and dry the mile long trains of coal that they burn every month. Because the coal is powderized so finely, dust is everywhere. Coal plants are not clean. Even with today's high efficiency, combustion is not perfect and neither is the water used to make the steam with. Crews must periodically bring down the boiler, get inside there, and clean it out. It is truly a dirty job that requires special, well paid people to do. I should add, as an aside, that many coal plants are so old that utilities often have machine shops of their own to make their own parts with for maintenance.
All of this stuff weighs a lot. Automakers do a remarkable job fitting an engine and a motor / generator into a hybrid car, but I think adding a boiler would throw off the whole scheme. In order for a boiler to be really good, you need a lot of pressure, and in order to have pressure, you need a strong boiler and that means weight. Then, in addition to your fuel, you need to have a ready supply of water everywhere. If you read about the history of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, you'll see that they tried to bring steam engines into a competitive league with the diesels emerging in the 1930s, but the water was the deal breaker.
Bottom line is, if you wanted to have a mode of transportation that has you running for fuel and water both, asks you to bring a shovel along so you can shovel your ton of fuel a week into it, and requires you to do a periodic job of scrubbing out dirty tubing, and, in an accident, may literally blow up and kill you and everyone else in your car, then steam transporation is for you.
But I think steam power is best left to the professionals at your local energy company, and your best way to use it is with an electric car.
My favorite SCI-FI work, of all time, was Isamov's Foundation Trilogy. Heinlen is not even in the same league.
Anyone wants to see what quality film is should go get SpaceBalls.
Rick Moranis's "Dark Helmet" is pure genius.
May the Schwartz be With You!
The present day was depressing enough back then, and now, it is even more depressing. I remember when Blade Runner came out. I saw it in the theater, and I thought that it sucked. It was too slow, too long, and the ending was weak and depressing.
When this movie came out, Reagan was President, the Cold War was on, and the real vision of the future was more about mushroom clouds rising up over all of Europe, Asia and North America. At least if the world was going to end, it wouldn't just burn out like BR did, it would go out in a blaze of manly glory.
Who cares if Harrison Ford's character turned out to be a replicant, and that was part of the bleak vision of the future. So what if a bunch of clone / droids / zombies get out of hand in the future. How sad. I laughed at the premise, and I still do. Had the end of the movie had a bunch of replicants dropping an asteroid on LA, that would have been cool. But, I remember watching that, and thinking, "jeez, the end is these two dudes sitting in the rain. Where's the war?"
The Ewoks were tougher than the Replicants, and infinetly more entertaining. They were probably smarter too - nab Carrie Fisher and put Mark Hamill on a spit. That's genius. You didn't see them whining like Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford did in BR. "Woe is me. I'm a clone. Life sucks". We're all clones anyway - each of us is an anonymous nuclear target. Get over it.
The movie was stupid. I'll take Jar Jar Binks any day, even, over this crap.
We really need to claim both. The idea, really, is that people are stupid and compete to get anything. If you say, we all get to share the planet, its essentially worthless. However, if the USA says "we're claiming the moon and mars", then, the Europeans, Russians, Chinese and Indians will all start to spend enormous amounts of money on space hardware as well. The USA will then respond by drawing down its own traditional, but gargantuan military, to match the combined spending of all of them. This will fuel an enormous space race, getting the things like nuclear rockets, bigger ships, orbiting construction facilities, that we really need to get people off of earth and onto other planets, with the added benefit that wars would be fought in space, and not on earth, sparing those of us who would prefer to live in peace at home.
I think it is obvious that the USA should claim the planet Mars and militarize it. Adding that much real estate to the USA would provide a huge amount of national wealth. Imagine, the first interplanetary empire! :-)
There are some climate theories that argue that the driver behind our climate change is that the solar wind is shrinking up, allowing more cosmic rays in and effecting cloud formation. What happens if this star blows up and we get the shock wave from it? Could there already be nebula on its way to us to choke our solar system with so much cosmic dust?
The advanced alien race created a machine that would do whatever they wanted, just by thinking about it, and, well, they destroyed each other!
You start building these machines, and the next thing you know, armies of robots tasked to do our bidding will wind up ripping the clothes off the most attractive people. Fortunately, our arms race of fat has prepared us for this.
Time to crack open a bag of Cheetos, before it is too late!
I think what I tried to speak to, but failed at, was that, at one time, the GPL was a rather revolutionary license, and had gotten a lot of mindshare.
The original GPL was essentially a rallying cry more than a license, and the GPLv2 was more sedately worded but just as radical in thought. Nowadays, free software is much more accepted as a thought, and so, GPL is becoming an important but not so dominant, flavor of free.
I've two open source projects that I'm working on, and both are either going to be released GPLv2 or maybe even BSD. I might even contemplate, gasp, Public Domain. Once you make the mental leap that you are going to be giving your software away, then, what difference does it make how you do so? I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.
The GPL is sorta irrelevant in a way. Any more, open source can mean any number of licenses. If people want to see the source code for my thing, they can always come to my web site. The odds of someone making a closed source product out of my code are probably rarer than the odds of me getting rich writing shareware for Windows, so what difference does it really make?
I just don't see the need for this license at all.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086373/
Democrats aren't pushing this bill so that people are being free. Democrats are pushing this bill because they hope the explosion of extra channels will dilute the audience for right wing radio stations. Given the right wing media's scathing rebuttal of elected Republicans on what is actually a damned good immigration bill, I would be surprised if Republicans in the Congress did not support this.
Still, pay close attention to how this bill is being written and who can actually get these stations and who can't. Democrats are going to push to make sure that their people get the stations, and Republicans need to be on their toes to make sure their people get theres. If you see things like city governments, universities, and public schools getting more stations (all traditionally liberal points), then the Democrats are playing games. If you see things like churches, local chambers of commerce, adult groups like the FreeMasons, or even gun clubs getting them, then you can bet that Republicans win.
If they compromise and everyone can get a station, then it is a good bill.
Microsoft's patent threat can only go so far.
a) Acting out a patent lawsuit against a European company would be an utter political disaster for Microsoft. As soon as MS starts filing patent lawsuits against European companies, the EU will invent a reason to sue Microsoft again and again.
b) Acting out a patent lawsuit against an American company that is well funded, such as IBM, would be a disaster for the software industry and invite federal involvement, which no one wants.
c) Microsoft, like many tech companies, has managed to alienate Republican support. Ballmer might be a Republican, but Gates has already said he's, sigh, for the other side. So, I wouldn't expect a great many Republicans leaping to the defense of MS in the event some sort of legal war goes against them. And surely, Democrats aren't exactly going to rush to defend an oligarchical billionaire's company. Microsoft doesn't really have the allies on the hill that it thinks it has, and Republicans remember MS didn't do them any favors after they got a sweetheart anti-trust deal to begin with.
Bottom line is this: Microsoft's patent threat is a threat only, one that would it be stupid to use, and Linux distros shouldn't be afraid of it.
I have a soft spot for artists getting screwed by technology. Every technological advance seems to fall on artists particularly hard, so, while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry and movie industry, I still think there might be a place so someone could show pictures of their work on the internet without having them stolen.
My wife used to use Napster (pre-lawsuit), and Kazaa, but she switched to iTunes because iTunes was more convenient and not choked full of ads, and paying a $1 a song is not so bad. If you add the threat of RIAA letters, then, iTunes seems like a pretty good deal indeed. She also feels a need to support the artists.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large. Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working. Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
Then, musicians would starve.
Must be a lot more popular than I thought! Continued theft of his work by legions of adoring but thrifty fans is depriving this important artist of his livelihood. Obviously, Ottawa has to get involved at once.
Right now, Republicans are leary of harvesting human clones for parts, and Democrats are all in favor of it, but just wait until someone makes $1 off of it. Then, the tables will turn.
It's all going to start when someone figures out how to clone men but with giant penises, for easy transplant. Why compete over cars, houses, plots of land and computer upgrades when you can just go buy the real deal? In America, EVERY MAN will be a porn star. There will be billions of dollars made there.
From there, we'll get on to using human skin and hair for clothing, and human bones as a proxy for ivory. At first, it will be a status symbol. You really could have a lampshade made out of human skin, or even a football for junior or a jacket for the mrs. But soon, with enough venture capital, human clones will be mass produced and harvested like so many sheep, and even more billions will be made.
Eventually, there will be, within the USA alone, a 200 billion dollar a year industry dedicated to the production, harvest, and manufacturing goods based on harvested clones. At that point, just as you once saw liberals hail the progress of animal antibiotics and industrial farming and then turn to an imaginary better day of all natural organic everything, you'll see liberals lamenting the devaluation of the human body, whereas, conservatives will merely say they are free and supporting consumer demand. Then liberals will eventually say the masses are stupid for supporting a human cloning industry and demand federal action to slow it down or stop it, write thousands of books decrying it, and support an endlessly array of Democratic candidates that promise to reform it but never really do. In the meantime, conservatives will argue the cloning is natural, its our right to do so, and its part of God's plan anyway, and to support their position, they will dredge up every last salamder that can regrow its own tail, every asexually produced thing in nature, and every supporting phrase in the bible. Oh yes, Jesus was very much in favor of harvesting clones, if you know which 4 passages to read.
Cheering for either company is ridiculous. So Bill Gates has a few more billions than Sergei and Larry, but so what. It's not like any of us have our own private 737 to fly around in.
I like an OS to come with more stuff out of the box with every release. It's just less complicated to put in one CD and get everything - that's why I like Linux and OS/X. People have a right to make their products, however they want them. It sucks to bolt rear views on a car after the fact, and it sucks to go and download a bunch of unintegrated utilities onto your drive.
Google could have been proactive and released a Vista Upgrade for their search, with an Aero look, that shuts of Microsoft search. They could go and see every OS out there, and for Vista owners, drop down a new FireFox and a new Google Search FOR VISTA. But instead of being agressive, they cry to lawyers just like Netscape did. The result will be the same.
Microsoft delivered a new search experience with their new OS, and it is time for Google to respond with product.
I'm waiting for a new Google Search for Vista.
I would think that if you were writing with assembly code, you would have done the optimizations already.
C is dead on Windows. That's pretty much the gist of it. Windows has been extremely difficult to program in C since the advent of COM, and that was in Windows 3.1. I don't say that I like it, but it is what it is. So, either people are doing C++, or they are doing some other language. So, while I understand your frustration with the lack of support for C99, I can say that the marketplace hasn't really cried out for it. One of the reasons I like Linux is that they have studiously avoided making themselves dependent on a C++ derived technology for the OS.
I learned to program on an ATARI 800. I write code, the expression of which is my directive to use the hardware as it is. If I wanted a completely portable language, I'd write in Java. But, I want to be able to take advantage of a platform and in as succinctly a fashion as possible. I think that often times writing portable code means you have slow code on multiple platforms. With emulators and virtual machines continually improving, I don't think you really need to write portable code any more.
Is to compliment the army of droids with the orbiting battle station.
d ia_site_claims_Bush_will_1202.html
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Conservative_me
So really, when it all boils down to it, liberals watched Star Trek, and wanted to make the world like that, whereas conservatives watched Star Wars, and wanted to make the world look like that.
Just a like President and a Vice President, there is a master and apprentice. Which is which?
If everyone who is 40 thinks hanging out with 11 year olds is so great, then why are so many kids in daycare? If squeeky voices don't matter, then, where are they on radio?
The fact of the matter is, once you add voice chat to an experience, the tone of one's voice, the depth of one's experience, completely matters, and to pretend otherwise is just a way of being deliberately ignorant of the environment you are in. Going online is not just a game, its an escape, and part of that escape includes wanting to relax and part of that is an assumption of being with your peers.
It's not a question of prejudice. If you are relaxing, you want to be able to be yourself without the filter of making sure the cultural references you make are worthwhile. Being "open minded" and putting up with a bunch of different punks is a job, and sometimes, you just want to be with people like yourself. Online games should let players filter for age, gender, orientation or any number of criteria. If you want to play with the kids, go ahead and hook up your virtual swingset and have it, but sometimes, you just want to be with your own kind.
I find myself more likely to spend $99 to get a Linux Distro with KDE 4.0 when it becomes available, then I see myself spending $250 to get Vista x64 for System Builders.
Is anyone else in the same sort of boat?
I tend to prefer GCC on Linux, and CL on Windows, largely because of the integration. But, for choice of C++ environment, I think Linux winds hands down for 64 bit C++ and I've been saying that for quite some time.
In general, I don't like Visual C++ for 64 bits at all, either the environment or the compiler, and I find myself preferring KDevelop on Linux for it. GNU is better about standards, to be sure, and I've documented a couple of those in my blog, but, I think that in case of templates, I actually do prefer the Visual C++ approach as it results in more readable code, even if, well, it was non-standard.
C99 support doesn't interest me too much as I do C++, but one thing that REALLY annoys me is the death of the __asm tag in CL for 64 bit work. I've never liked GNU's inline assembly at all, and thought MS did it the "right way". But, MS actually took away a really nice feature, more or less leveling the playing field at all.
I'm very much looking forward to wrapping up my blog writer thing for Linux and using that republish my blog in a more readable format, along with more articles on the topic. I actually have Vista Ultimate slated to go onto my linux box on a separate drive, but, I enjoy Linux so much that I see no need to "upgrade". I'm actually more excited about KDE 4.0 than I am about Vista.