> It's absurd that the Wiki page you link to labels the "southern strategy" as racist
You make good arguments but failed to go for the kill. Go reexamine the election of 1968. Does anyone think a California liberal Republican like Nixon would think he had a shot at many 'racist southerners' in a cycle with George Wallace in the race? Nixon was many things, mostly bad, but fool wasn't one of them. This rewrite of history re: Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' requires putting that little historical fact in the memory hole.
Hyperinflation, total collapse of social order, cats and dogs sleeping together.
Their basic problem is they are spending far more on their welfare state than they can take in through taxes. Full stop. They are far beyond the point where any conceivable tax scheme is likely to actually generate more revenue to their treasury, that 'ol Laffer Curve is a reality that can no longer be denied for them. Their ability to borrow the difference between what they can raise through taxation and what their voters demand is about finished. If they repudiate their current debts and stop making the interest payments they can forget raising more through the international bond markets. That is reality.
Long term you can't spend more than you take in. An argument can be made for borrowing for a short term problem or perhaps for a long term capital improvement. But when you try to borrow for day to day expenses with no plan for getting income balanced to outflow the result is certain. You can't do it, business can't do it, corporations can't do it and governments can't do it.
> For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
It is worse. Just using those phrases implies a bias. NPOV is a very difficult thing, few could actually attain it and even fewer would actually be interested in the result. No, what most people want is their beliefs confirmed in such a way that they are assured that what they believe is the only Truth, thus defined as 'neutral'. The Truth has no Agenda, all that rot.
Gun Rights? Biased. Denies the possibility of common sense measures to stop the epidemic of gun violence on our streets. The Constitition isn't a suicide pact. Besides the 2nd Amendment only protects the government's right to an army you know. Framing it as a 'civil rights' issue is so loaded.
Same for 'gay marriage.' Implies the word 'marriage' somehow quietly morphed to cover groupings other than one male mated to one or more females in a reproductive unit. The idea it had such a strange and impractical (from a historical perspective) meaning would be amazing for all of human history up until the 20th Century. And to suddenly go from a novel new notion to a fundamental civil right being discovered in the space of a decade or two is even more amazing. Regardless of the desirability of the idea, it should be admitted it is a new one but the language usage of quietly overloading existing language is intentionally deceptive. Again, how would you even approach the notion of NPOV on such a controversial question since the very success of the project hinges on framing it as an uncontroversial and logical extension of 'civil rights' and just saying that is controversial. Tricky.
> It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic.
It isn't nearly as petty as you imply. Control of the language is control over the framing of the debate and usually gives whoever has that control an overwhelming advantage. Once you understand that things make a lot more sense.
Some example. Note that I am not interested in opening up these issues themselves so consider them OFF TOPIC here. Keep replies on the idea of bias and language.
Pro Choice/Pro Life? Both are carefully selected phrases that imply acceptance of that side's philosophy, even if the speaker hasn't made a conscious choice yet, so making sure your word selection is the one that most people who haven't yet thought it through pick is very important. Pro Choice carries the implied decision that it isn't a 'life' and therefore it isn't a very important choice at all. Pro Life on the other hand carries exactly the opposite implied decision, that the fetus is a 'life', thus murder can't be a valid 'choice.' And both are an attempt to short circuit the actual question, where does society draw the line of citizen/not a citizen. Birth is the only ljne that can be supported by the current Constitution but the question is whether that is the right place for it in light of modern neonatal medicine and philosophy. However since the very idea that the words in the Constitution have weight is a matter of political debate so again, what would define NPOV?
Is it public charity, welfare, an entitlement or 'the dole'? Which phrase you can get uninformed people to pick up will probably determine their eventual decison as to whether it is a good thing.
Fairness, Social Justice, Redistribution, Socialism. Admit it, that are all just closely related concepts that blur into simolar shades of grey that only hard core partisans can even really distinguish but they certainly carry a world of difference in the public square. And the same word games can be played with Capitalism, Free Market, Survival of the Fittest, etc. So which one is NPOV?
Not exactly. Gary Johnson was a libertarian who tried running as a Republican and is now running as a Libertarian. Although to a first approximation you can simplify to saying Gary Johnson is pro drug legalization since that is pretty much the only issue he is pushing now or when he ran as a Republican that distinguishes him from the other candidates. And his popular vote totals will pretty much track with the small demo of stoners who consider that the most important issue in an election cycle where that issue is going to be lost in the noise from the far more important economic issues and the distraction that will be created in the fall to distract from the economy.
There is actually a reason for the two parties being what they are now. Because the country is pretty much divided into two incompatible governing philosophies and things won't get better until one of them actually wins. There really isn't a practical middle and most of our problems are a result of trying to find one.
In other words you are too lazy to learn. If you are an 'end user' who is just getting things done that is acceptable, for you the computer is just a tool. If you are in the IT game you are worse than useless and should be kept from any position of responsibility, certainly never allowed to make any decisions.
This is a fast moving industry, and if you are posting on slashdot odds are you aren't just a random gamer, you work in the business. That means that it is your job to KNOW stuff about NOW, not blindly just keep reinstalling the exact same junk you learned a decade ago. Even on windows. That is what seperates the ones who got into computers because they thought it was a good job and those who see it as a career choice. What have you tried this week? What have you learned this week? These skills become obsolete damned fast, you better be replacing them.
And once you adopt that mindset of constant learning it just makes sense to broaden your knowledge to more than one platform. I have Win7 on this laptop to play games on, Fedora for everything else, Debian on my Mythtv, OpenWRT on my gateway, etc. That forces me to keep up to date on most of the major streams of development. Except for Apple, and frankly I could care less about wearing those chains.
Dunno, without knowing exactly what his planned use is, odds are a COTS solution is something to consider. A cheap tablet or phone that can be hacked to get a bit of I/O or that has USB host mode support just might be the fastest and cheapest way to solve the problem. After all he wants a bitmapped touchscreen and driving that is outside what I'd want to be doing on most AVRs, especially ones available in DIP packages.
> really dumb lockdown decision by RPi it seems to me
No, the really cheap SoC they got their hands on didn't support it. Beggars can't be choosers. On the other hand, VIA's does, probably because they wanted it to and so they made it that way. But the real win is the VIA has a network port that doesn't appear to be just bolted onto a USB bus through a converter. And four (and perhaps a header for two more) USB ports. But the huge difference is 512MB of RAM vs 256MB; especially since at least 64MB has to come out for video and many sources for the Pi are saying if you plan on actually doing 3d or heavy video you will end up splitting it 128/128. Give this board the same 128M for video and you end up with three times the program space, maybe even enough to run a app or two.
If this board had a few spare GPIO pins brought out to a header there really wouldn't be a reason for Pi to exist at this point. Add in the the hard reality that VIA will probably be able to actually ship product near the announced date in whatever quantity you care to order in and that has to count for some extra points in their favor.
And just wait until Win8 ships, bet we see ARM motherboards then with even better specs, stuff good and hefty enough to run Windows on. Of course we will have to wait a few months beyond that so that the usual suspects can jailbreak them before being able to load up a useful OS.
> Point me at a X86 Motherboard with processor that runs on 5 watts of power like this does.
This one doesn't either. It can peak out at a little over 13 watts. And I suspect that doesn't include draw on the USB ports. It has four on the rear shield and if that yellow header is for a front mounted pair that brings the power supply needs about thirty watts. Still most excellent but high by phone standards so one has to wonder what is up.
Actually, it isn't all that cheap. It is a motherboard with onboard video. Unlike the multitude of x86 motherboards selling for under $50 every day at a hundred different outlets this one comes with a lowball CPU and half a Gig of RAM soldered down. But on the other hand this product consumes a fraction of the board space, probably only needs at most four layers and skips the expensive ZIF socket and attachment hardware for a processor, the memory sockets, PCI/PCIe sockets, etc.
And Via should be large enough to produce in volume, unlike the charity making the Pi so that excuse vanishes. No, this isn't all that great a bargain. On the other hand if you want an ARM motherboard it isn't like you have many other choices to pick from right now. And if you need low power you can't beat em.
Kinda wierd to be releasing a product in 2012 that won't play 1080 video. I certainly wouldn't like a desktop on a 1280x720 display.
Some sites say the chip can do 1080, others only claim 720p. And if they are putting it on a *-ITX form factor would a SATA port have killed em to add? Any existing case will have this little guy rattling around in it, might as well have the option to put a small drive in. Sure Android probably won't use it but how many hours does anyone think it will take to get a more normal Linux distro on it?
> Android basically makes no money relative to Apple.
Who the hell cares? I don't own Apple stock and shareholders (and apparently fanboys since they seem to devive a lot of personal self worth from Apple quarterly reports) are the only ones who should care about that. The question is which ecosystem is (or will be) bigger. Right now Apple leads in both installed base and the readiness of their sheep are to be sheared at the App Store. But the numbers show that will prpbably not hold much longer. Android devices are starting to ship 4.0 in mass quantity and since it isn't reserved to only devides priced at Apple levels the power of the marketplace is about to make itself felt. Just like the generic PC destroyed both IBM (it's creator) and Apple, the widespread availability of both quality AND cheap Android devices will allow a top to bottom domination of the marketplace and that will eventually drive the apps to chase the installed base.
So again, who cares if Google won't ever make the kind of obscene profits Apple does? They ain't exactly going broke ya know and that is all that is needed to avoid fear of platform abandonment to weigh down adoption.
And that was the purpose of Porkulus. To piss away the better part of a Trillion dollars in the belief that just throwing such a huge sack of cash at the economy would somehow fix things. Of course it failed. But does anyone on the left admit that? Sure! Idiots like Paul Krugman insist that it failed because they didn't flush twice as much money down a rathole and that it isn't too late to flush some more.
Of course all too much of it would up taking backroads into the pockets of politically connected/favored people and organizations. And that was the actual goal.
I was thinking that if Party A sues Party B alleging 1B in damages and loses then a countersuit by B for the same Billion should be considered reasonable and what a court should default to unless some pretty unusual circumstances are involved. It would at least make people stop shooting for the moon and asking for insane amounts if they thought that if they lose that number would come back and bite em.
But you are right, patent trolls don't have anything to countersue for and if such a system were setup it would become commonplace to spin out a paper entity to hold the patent being used in lawfare. Even another idea spotted here to punish by shortening or even voiding a patent used for ill purpose wouldn't really do much. All most patents are aquired for is either defense (and thus never used in a court) or to attack with and if you lose one you have (or buy up) another ten and keep milking it.
We have to stop issuing so many patents. Not just stop issuing them for software, for the obvious, etc. That is low hanging fruit. We have to stop handing out so many period. So how about limit it to say a thousand a year? This way there would be fierce competition for the limited resource, perhaps even bid some or all of em out and raise revenue! With such a small number any professional could be legally expected to know about ones reading on their field so while few in number they could actually be enforced.
Really? I see most tablets are horribly overpriced and the only reason most vendors seem to be making them is the belief that they too can capture some of that sweet sweet insanely great Apple style profit margin.
Compare the original iPad to a laptop of the same period.
Apple give you a small 1024x768 display with a touch interface, a pokey ARM CPU and a paultry 256MB of RAM. You got WiFi and BT and perhaps (if you hold your ankles for an upfront and monthly charge) 3G. For that you paid a lot. The base unit was either $499 or $599, can't remember now. And they hosed you hard for a little more flash and you paid, because like all the iProducts there isn't an SD slot to or USB host port add your own later.
Now compare to any A brand notebook of the period selling for a similar price. You would have got a larger display, much faster CPU, a crapload more RAM. and at least twice the battery capacity. The notebook will also have a more complicated housing with a hinged display and a keyboard/pointer. The notebook would probably have had a much larger spinning hard drive vs the flash in the iPad but there are advantages to both so lets not award a win to either. And of course that larger battery still wouldn't have driven the Intel Inside nearly as long.... We are constantly told that an ARM solution is cheaper and consumes less power, which is supposed to compensate for the lower performance. Somehow tablets are getting half of that equation wrong by being more expensive.
Hell, the top of the line iPad was over $1000 which made it more expensive than the bottom of the line Apple notebook, which also beat the snot out of the iPad performance and spec wise.
You think an Apple based package built into a vehicle will be less expensive? Really? Based on what evidence? Name one market Apple has entered where they have competed on price?
The bigger problem is no automaker is likely to give Apple the sort of total control over the entire vehicle they would insist upon. And I doubt they would want to enter the aftermarket business.
> It's clear that most of the auto companies that offer more than a car stereo > want to lock you into their interface and services — as awful as they are.
Uh huh. So if Apple locked you into THEIR interface and services it would be insanely great and you would be lining up for it.
> Maybe they think they're hack-proof or something.
Almost certainly. It is the logical fallacy at the very heart of Fasism, Communism, Progressives and whole related set of 20th Century *isms. That a small super elite (called different names but always the same idea) can do damned near anything. It killed millions. Reality says "No they can't."
No, they can't direct every aspect of a whole nation's economy. No, they can't know everything and thus be in a position to tell far larger set of subjects to STFU and let them make all of the decisions and tell everyone else what is a fact, what they should do about it, etc. No, they can't decide who should get what. And to bring it back directly on topic, no they can't design a perfect CPU IA with a perfect backdoor that only they will ever be able to access. But they will believe they can and so they will try. Just like they and their ilk past and present believe in their Five Year Plans, their Genetic Supermen, Eugenics, Lysenkoism, Obamacare, etc. Because if they for a moment doubted their superior ability they would lose their only claim to power.
While 52% for Portugal is a nice number lets be realistic and look at the whole picture. First off, it is hard to hold up one of the PIIGS as a model for anything. When a country spends itself into such oblivion it threatens the entire world's economic system it is doing a lot of things WRONG. Both Portugal and Spain have been pissing away billions on green energy for example. Billions they didn't have.
Now consider that first off that 52% figure isn't, as you claim, 'energy' it is their electricity figure. Big difference. Means they are still burning just as much dead dinosaur to get around. Now consider their GDP per capita is less than half the U.S. and (without bothering to do real research for a/. article about to scroll off into oblivion) probably uses a lot less electricity than the US by area. That matters a lot because a lot of renewables are fairly fixed by geography. Being a small country it also makes it somewhat easier to transport power.
Here in the US we have vast deserts perfect for solar.... where nobody lives. The U.S. population is very clumped into a few areas and being filled with wealthy yuppies they don't want any energy production near them if they have to see it. Windmills and large solar installations are very visible, see the Kennedy family's successful fight vs an offshore windfarm near their home. The U.S. has long since tapped pretty much every profitable hydro location, now we are tearing more dams out than building new ones because the enviroweenies want to save fish and 'restore natural waterways.' We have a fair number of windmills and lots more going up all the time. I see the choo choo go by with the huge blades straddled across three flatcars. They don't go up around me, bad spot for wind, but I see on the Internet how a lot of em end up with the rotors clamped down as soon as the government subsidies run out because they aren't profitable enough to even pay routine maintaince on. Anywhere somebody tries to build a large solar array the enviros suddenly discover some insignificant subvariety of lizard, bug, etc. that ONLY lives where they want to put up the collectors and launch into a multi-year fight.
No I ain't. And your post proves it. Look how many "Assume a unicorn" statements are in it for tech that doesn't yet exist. And those cost numbers are almost certainly based on the current government subsidy schemes. Just take that subsidy away and photovoltiac isn't practical and not likely to be practical in our lifetime. Direct conversion of solar energy to steam is of course very practical in sunny areas but again the land area needed for the collectors are a magnet for eco freaks. It always comes back to that, either we tell the eco nuts to STFU or no possible energy source is going to be acceptable at consumption levels approximating current usage. And the world's population is still growing and worse, getting richer and demanding more energy per person.
I know ad hominem attacks are normally poor form, but Good Grief. Pseudofrog? More like Pseudomind.
>> They just recently started considering the effect of solar effects other than direct radiation and are finding it to be at least to the same rough scale as the CO2 variable.
Reread that, or better yet get someone who can actually read and comprehend English to break it down into little bits for you because I have no desire to do so.
> #1 Japan didn't turn off all nuclear. For one, it would take far longer than a few months to do so. For two, they're taking > them offline for security checks. They plan on bringing them back online.
If you seriously think they will ever go back online you aren't paying attention. Nope, the lights just went out over there for good. Germany is shutting their nuke down. Frace would if they weren't so utterly dependent on them, and being French and just electing a Socialist government I still wouldn't bet a lot on them still having nukes a decade out.
> #2 Solar panels work great. I have em, and they cut my bill in half.
Nope. Take the government subsidies out of photoelectric and you wouldn't have bought them. Because the total value of the electricity derived from one over it's normal service life doesn't equal the TCO of the equipment. Large scale solar is close to net positve vs fossil fuel and will eventually get there but the greens are already mobilizing against the large scale installations that are required to generate useful quantities of electricity.
> #3 One solar thermal plant wasn't built because the company didn't want to immediately fork over the money to alleviate environmental concerns..
Probably because they realized the money would tip the project to uncompetitive, or because they realized that paying off this group would not solve the problem, the lawsuits would be endless until they abandoned the project. Alleviating 'environmental concerns' are like achieving diversity, there is no way to actually do it but you can waste an unlimited amount of time and money trying.... or relocate to a more friendly climate.
#4 Even if we are in an ice age (and we really aren't), that doesn't matter one lick.
Actually, if we are heading into an Ice Age there probably isn't anything we can do about it. WIth the current state of Climate Science we probably can't say and with the politics in it no sane person should trust it anyway.
> What matters is that there are drastic changes coming to our civilization, which has been built > according to the climate variations of the past 300 years. That's going to cost money.
Considering that the only longterm constant in the environment is change that is almost certainly true. Whether it is going to change in the ways predicted by AGW theory, whether it will change BECAUSE of the influence of man, which influences but doesn't determine the BIG question of whether we can control the changes are all pretty open questions at this point.
You mean forget the horrid ecological cost to vital spawning grounds for (whatever blah blah).
> So because fringe enviro-kooks have a problem with anything...
Yup, because they are the, to a high enough percentage to ignore the outliers, the exact same set of people who are pushing AGW. Whether AGW is true or not doesn't really matter either. It is just one weapon all leading to the same result. In the 1970's it was Global Cooling. Same policy prescriptions. When the Soviet Union fell and the ChiComs moved to a more viable mixed economy the Reds occupying our elite institutions (universities, media, etc.) simply took down (well some of em) their Che and Lenin posters and replaced them with Green ones. And suddenly almost all of the same policy prescriptions were rebranded as saving the earth. Now we need a world government regulating every sparrow that falls to control carbon instead of the equally dishonest redistribution of wealth/elimination of poverty, etc. crap.
The only answer is to realize that playing their game at all is to lose. So don't.
> Don't be silly. Earth is warmer than its orbital position would indicate, so something is trapping solar heat.
Oh bullpoop. The Earth has been warmer than it is today and colder. And guess what, it's orbit has been pretty darned constant. The problem is somewhat more complicated and we are still discovering new variables every couple of years. They just recently started considering the effect of solar effects other than direct radiation and are finding it to be at least to the same rough scale as the CO2 variable. And it isn't in ANY model from the 20th Century being touted as predicting DOOM! Are we now arrogant enough to think that was the last piece of the puzzle or do we have the humility to consider that we will find still more.
We only have halfway reliable data for a century, really good sat based data for less than half that. But we have pretty good knowledge that the Earth's temp has been far beyond the top and bottom of the observed ranges in the last 100K years. So we have a very poor data set. To try to make firm predictions based on such poor samples and the piss poor things they are calling 'climate models' is laughable. In another couple hundred years we still won't have very much direct data compared to the time scales we are talking about. On the other hand it is hard to argue that we can make the sort of changes we are making to our environment and expect no changes.
It isn't an easy problem. Which is why it pisses some of us off when funding grubbing hucksters in lab coats team up with watermellons like Al Gore to scam the world into poverty to enrich themselves. By debasing science it makes it hard for real science. Why did so many fall for the vaccine/autism scam? Yup. Folks don't trust science anymore. And that is dangerous.
> Changing power sources is dismantling civilization?
If there isn't anything to change to it is. And there currently isn't. Name one potential source that could replace fossil fuels and I'll show you a source the same greens are already trying to deem unacceptable. Lets review:
1. Nuke. Do I even have to go there? Even if we perfect fusion the greens will still wet themselves over the notion of power from anything with the N word attached.
2. Hydro. Disrupts Gaia. Harms fish reproduction and prevents 'healthy' rivers. And there is some point to their arguments. If nothing else our attempts at dams for flood control have certainly had a mixed record of success.
3. Wind. Assume it could actually produce enough energy. (Work with me here.) NIMBY is already rampant, greens are up in arms because when you fill square mile after square mile with windmills birds die. Who would have thunk it?
4. Solar. Makes sense as a source of off-grid energy but will never compete on a cost basis. And that is if you ignore the horrid ecological side effects of making the panels. And again, now that there are plans to actually cover over mile after mile of desert with the things the usual suspects are aghast.
5. Geothermal. Causes earthquakes.
6. Biofuels. Will cause widespread famine long before providing a noticable fraction of world energy production. Take the recycled plant waste, switchgrass on land unusable for more productive use but don't plan on it being anything but a boost. Not a primary source.
And if I have left your pet alternative energy source off this list be assured that it won't work either. It is great for soaking up grant money, deploying on a small scale to give egoboo to celebs but the second someone things it can be produced at a profit the downside will become clear.
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> It's absurd that the Wiki page you link to labels the "southern strategy" as racist
You make good arguments but failed to go for the kill. Go reexamine the election of 1968. Does anyone think a California liberal Republican like Nixon would think he had a shot at many 'racist southerners' in a cycle with George Wallace in the race? Nixon was many things, mostly bad, but fool wasn't one of them. This rewrite of history re: Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' requires putting that little historical fact in the memory hole.
> Define doomed.
Hyperinflation, total collapse of social order, cats and dogs sleeping together.
Their basic problem is they are spending far more on their welfare state than they can take in through taxes. Full stop. They are far beyond the point where any conceivable tax scheme is likely to actually generate more revenue to their treasury, that 'ol Laffer Curve is a reality that can no longer be denied for them. Their ability to borrow the difference between what they can raise through taxation and what their voters demand is about finished. If they repudiate their current debts and stop making the interest payments they can forget raising more through the international bond markets. That is reality.
Long term you can't spend more than you take in. An argument can be made for borrowing for a short term problem or perhaps for a long term capital improvement. But when you try to borrow for day to day expenses with no plan for getting income balanced to outflow the result is certain. You can't do it, business can't do it, corporations can't do it and governments can't do it.
> For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
It is worse. Just using those phrases implies a bias. NPOV is a very difficult thing, few could actually attain it and even fewer would actually be interested in the result. No, what most people want is their beliefs confirmed in such a way that they are assured that what they believe is the only Truth, thus defined as 'neutral'. The Truth has no Agenda, all that rot.
Gun Rights? Biased. Denies the possibility of common sense measures to stop the epidemic of gun violence on our streets. The Constitition isn't a suicide pact. Besides the 2nd Amendment only protects the government's right to an army you know. Framing it as a 'civil rights' issue is so loaded.
Same for 'gay marriage.' Implies the word 'marriage' somehow quietly morphed to cover groupings other than one male mated to one or more females in a reproductive unit. The idea it had such a strange and impractical (from a historical perspective) meaning would be amazing for all of human history up until the 20th Century. And to suddenly go from a novel new notion to a fundamental civil right being discovered in the space of a decade or two is even more amazing. Regardless of the desirability of the idea, it should be admitted it is a new one but the language usage of quietly overloading existing language is intentionally deceptive. Again, how would you even approach the notion of NPOV on such a controversial question since the very success of the project hinges on framing it as an uncontroversial and logical extension of 'civil rights' and just saying that is controversial. Tricky.
> It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic.
It isn't nearly as petty as you imply. Control of the language is control over the framing of the debate and usually gives whoever has that control an overwhelming advantage. Once you understand that things make a lot more sense.
Some example. Note that I am not interested in opening up these issues themselves so consider them OFF TOPIC here. Keep replies on the idea of bias and language.
Pro Choice/Pro Life? Both are carefully selected phrases that imply acceptance of that side's philosophy, even if the speaker hasn't made a conscious choice yet, so making sure your word selection is the one that most people who haven't yet thought it through pick is very important. Pro Choice carries the implied decision that it isn't a 'life' and therefore it isn't a very important choice at all. Pro Life on the other hand carries exactly the opposite implied decision, that the fetus is a 'life', thus murder can't be a valid 'choice.' And both are an attempt to short circuit the actual question, where does society draw the line of citizen/not a citizen. Birth is the only ljne that can be supported by the current Constitution but the question is whether that is the right place for it in light of modern neonatal medicine and philosophy. However since the very idea that the words in the Constitution have weight is a matter of political debate so again, what would define NPOV?
Is it public charity, welfare, an entitlement or 'the dole'? Which phrase you can get uninformed people to pick up will probably determine their eventual decison as to whether it is a good thing.
Fairness, Social Justice, Redistribution, Socialism. Admit it, that are all just closely related concepts that blur into simolar shades of grey that only hard core partisans can even really distinguish but they certainly carry a world of difference in the public square. And the same word games can be played with Capitalism, Free Market, Survival of the Fittest, etc. So which one is NPOV?
I could go on but the point should be made.
Not exactly. Gary Johnson was a libertarian who tried running as a Republican and is now running as a Libertarian. Although to a first approximation you can simplify to saying Gary Johnson is pro drug legalization since that is pretty much the only issue he is pushing now or when he ran as a Republican that distinguishes him from the other candidates. And his popular vote totals will pretty much track with the small demo of stoners who consider that the most important issue in an election cycle where that issue is going to be lost in the noise from the far more important economic issues and the distraction that will be created in the fall to distract from the economy.
There is actually a reason for the two parties being what they are now. Because the country is pretty much divided into two incompatible governing philosophies and things won't get better until one of them actually wins. There really isn't a practical middle and most of our problems are a result of trying to find one.
In other words you are too lazy to learn. If you are an 'end user' who is just getting things done that is acceptable, for you the computer is just a tool. If you are in the IT game you are worse than useless and should be kept from any position of responsibility, certainly never allowed to make any decisions.
This is a fast moving industry, and if you are posting on slashdot odds are you aren't just a random gamer, you work in the business. That means that it is your job to KNOW stuff about NOW, not blindly just keep reinstalling the exact same junk you learned a decade ago. Even on windows. That is what seperates the ones who got into computers because they thought it was a good job and those who see it as a career choice. What have you tried this week? What have you learned this week? These skills become obsolete damned fast, you better be replacing them.
And once you adopt that mindset of constant learning it just makes sense to broaden your knowledge to more than one platform. I have Win7 on this laptop to play games on, Fedora for everything else, Debian on my Mythtv, OpenWRT on my gateway, etc. That forces me to keep up to date on most of the major streams of development. Except for Apple, and frankly I could care less about wearing those chains.
Dunno, without knowing exactly what his planned use is, odds are a COTS solution is something to consider. A cheap tablet or phone that can be hacked to get a bit of I/O or that has USB host mode support just might be the fastest and cheapest way to solve the problem. After all he wants a bitmapped touchscreen and driving that is outside what I'd want to be doing on most AVRs, especially ones available in DIP packages.
> really dumb lockdown decision by RPi it seems to me
No, the really cheap SoC they got their hands on didn't support it. Beggars can't be choosers. On the other hand, VIA's does, probably because they wanted it to and so they made it that way. But the real win is the VIA has a network port that doesn't appear to be just bolted onto a USB bus through a converter. And four (and perhaps a header for two more) USB ports. But the huge difference is 512MB of RAM vs 256MB; especially since at least 64MB has to come out for video and many sources for the Pi are saying if you plan on actually doing 3d or heavy video you will end up splitting it 128/128. Give this board the same 128M for video and you end up with three times the program space, maybe even enough to run a app or two.
If this board had a few spare GPIO pins brought out to a header there really wouldn't be a reason for Pi to exist at this point. Add in the the hard reality that VIA will probably be able to actually ship product near the announced date in whatever quantity you care to order in and that has to count for some extra points in their favor.
And just wait until Win8 ships, bet we see ARM motherboards then with even better specs, stuff good and hefty enough to run Windows on. Of course we will have to wait a few months beyond that so that the usual suspects can jailbreak them before being able to load up a useful OS.
> Point me at a X86 Motherboard with processor that runs on 5 watts of power like this does.
This one doesn't either. It can peak out at a little over 13 watts. And I suspect that doesn't include draw on the USB ports. It has four on the rear shield and if that yellow header is for a front mounted pair that brings the power supply needs about thirty watts. Still most excellent but high by phone standards so one has to wonder what is up.
Actually, it isn't all that cheap. It is a motherboard with onboard video. Unlike the multitude of x86 motherboards selling for under $50 every day at a hundred different outlets this one comes with a lowball CPU and half a Gig of RAM soldered down. But on the other hand this product consumes a fraction of the board space, probably only needs at most four layers and skips the expensive ZIF socket and attachment hardware for a processor, the memory sockets, PCI/PCIe sockets, etc.
And Via should be large enough to produce in volume, unlike the charity making the Pi so that excuse vanishes. No, this isn't all that great a bargain. On the other hand if you want an ARM motherboard it isn't like you have many other choices to pick from right now. And if you need low power you can't beat em.
Kinda wierd to be releasing a product in 2012 that won't play 1080 video. I certainly wouldn't like a desktop on a 1280x720 display.
Some sites say the chip can do 1080, others only claim 720p. And if they are putting it on a *-ITX form factor would a SATA port have killed em to add? Any existing case will have this little guy rattling around in it, might as well have the option to put a small drive in. Sure Android probably won't use it but how many hours does anyone think it will take to get a more normal Linux distro on it?
> Android basically makes no money relative to Apple.
Who the hell cares? I don't own Apple stock and shareholders (and apparently fanboys since they seem to devive a lot of personal self worth from Apple quarterly reports) are the only ones who should care about that. The question is which ecosystem is (or will be) bigger. Right now Apple leads in both installed base and the readiness of their sheep are to be sheared at the App Store. But the numbers show that will prpbably not hold much longer. Android devices are starting to ship 4.0 in mass quantity and since it isn't reserved to only devides priced at Apple levels the power of the marketplace is about to make itself felt. Just like the generic PC destroyed both IBM (it's creator) and Apple, the widespread availability of both quality AND cheap Android devices will allow a top to bottom domination of the marketplace and that will eventually drive the apps to chase the installed base.
So again, who cares if Google won't ever make the kind of obscene profits Apple does? They ain't exactly going broke ya know and that is all that is needed to avoid fear of platform abandonment to weigh down adoption.
And that was the purpose of Porkulus. To piss away the better part of a Trillion dollars in the belief that just throwing such a huge sack of cash at the economy would somehow fix things. Of course it failed. But does anyone on the left admit that? Sure! Idiots like Paul Krugman insist that it failed because they didn't flush twice as much money down a rathole and that it isn't too late to flush some more.
Of course all too much of it would up taking backroads into the pockets of politically connected/favored people and organizations. And that was the actual goal.
> Many patent trolls are in fact nimble upstarts.
Yea. That is the problem with my idea.
I was thinking that if Party A sues Party B alleging 1B in damages and loses then a countersuit by B for the same Billion should be considered reasonable and what a court should default to unless some pretty unusual circumstances are involved. It would at least make people stop shooting for the moon and asking for insane amounts if they thought that if they lose that number would come back and bite em.
But you are right, patent trolls don't have anything to countersue for and if such a system were setup it would become commonplace to spin out a paper entity to hold the patent being used in lawfare. Even another idea spotted here to punish by shortening or even voiding a patent used for ill purpose wouldn't really do much. All most patents are aquired for is either defense (and thus never used in a court) or to attack with and if you lose one you have (or buy up) another ten and keep milking it.
We have to stop issuing so many patents. Not just stop issuing them for software, for the obvious, etc. That is low hanging fruit. We have to stop handing out so many period. So how about limit it to say a thousand a year? This way there would be fierce competition for the limited resource, perhaps even bid some or all of em out and raise revenue! With such a small number any professional could be legally expected to know about ones reading on their field so while few in number they could actually be enforced.
Really? I see most tablets are horribly overpriced and the only reason most vendors seem to be making them is the belief that they too can capture some of that sweet sweet insanely great Apple style profit margin.
Compare the original iPad to a laptop of the same period.
Apple give you a small 1024x768 display with a touch interface, a pokey ARM CPU and a paultry 256MB of RAM. You got WiFi and BT and perhaps (if you hold your ankles for an upfront and monthly charge) 3G. For that you paid a lot. The base unit was either $499 or $599, can't remember now. And they hosed you hard for a little more flash and you paid, because like all the iProducts there isn't an SD slot to or USB host port add your own later.
Now compare to any A brand notebook of the period selling for a similar price. You would have got a larger display, much faster CPU, a crapload more RAM. and at least twice the battery capacity. The notebook will also have a more complicated housing with a hinged display and a keyboard/pointer. The notebook would probably have had a much larger spinning hard drive vs the flash in the iPad but there are advantages to both so lets not award a win to either. And of course that larger battery still wouldn't have driven the Intel Inside nearly as long.... We are constantly told that an ARM solution is cheaper and consumes less power, which is supposed to compensate for the lower performance. Somehow tablets are getting half of that equation wrong by being more expensive.
Hell, the top of the line iPad was over $1000 which made it more expensive than the bottom of the line Apple notebook, which also beat the snot out of the iPad performance and spec wise.
You think an Apple based package built into a vehicle will be less expensive? Really? Based on what evidence? Name one market Apple has entered where they have competed on price?
The bigger problem is no automaker is likely to give Apple the sort of total control over the entire vehicle they would insist upon. And I doubt they would want to enter the aftermarket business.
> It's clear that most of the auto companies that offer more than a car stereo
> want to lock you into their interface and services — as awful as they are.
Uh huh. So if Apple locked you into THEIR interface and services it would be insanely great and you would be lining up for it.
P.T. Barnum was an optimist.
> Maybe they think they're hack-proof or something.
Almost certainly. It is the logical fallacy at the very heart of Fasism, Communism, Progressives and whole related set of 20th Century *isms. That a small super elite (called different names but always the same idea) can do damned near anything. It killed millions. Reality says "No they can't."
No, they can't direct every aspect of a whole nation's economy. No, they can't know everything and thus be in a position to tell far larger set of subjects to STFU and let them make all of the decisions and tell everyone else what is a fact, what they should do about it, etc. No, they can't decide who should get what. And to bring it back directly on topic, no they can't design a perfect CPU IA with a perfect backdoor that only they will ever be able to access. But they will believe they can and so they will try. Just like they and their ilk past and present believe in their Five Year Plans, their Genetic Supermen, Eugenics, Lysenkoism, Obamacare, etc. Because if they for a moment doubted their superior ability they would lose their only claim to power.
While 52% for Portugal is a nice number lets be realistic and look at the whole picture. First off, it is hard to hold up one of the PIIGS as a model for anything. When a country spends itself into such oblivion it threatens the entire world's economic system it is doing a lot of things WRONG. Both Portugal and Spain have been pissing away billions on green energy for example. Billions they didn't have.
Now consider that first off that 52% figure isn't, as you claim, 'energy' it is their electricity figure. Big difference. Means they are still burning just as much dead dinosaur to get around. Now consider their GDP per capita is less than half the U.S. and (without bothering to do real research for a /. article about to scroll off into oblivion) probably uses a lot less electricity than the US by area. That matters a lot because a lot of renewables are fairly fixed by geography. Being a small country it also makes it somewhat easier to transport power.
Here in the US we have vast deserts perfect for solar.... where nobody lives. The U.S. population is very clumped into a few areas and being filled with wealthy yuppies they don't want any energy production near them if they have to see it. Windmills and large solar installations are very visible, see the Kennedy family's successful fight vs an offshore windfarm near their home. The U.S. has long since tapped pretty much every profitable hydro location, now we are tearing more dams out than building new ones because the enviroweenies want to save fish and 'restore natural waterways.' We have a fair number of windmills and lots more going up all the time. I see the choo choo go by with the huge blades straddled across three flatcars. They don't go up around me, bad spot for wind, but I see on the Internet how a lot of em end up with the rotors clamped down as soon as the government subsidies run out because they aren't profitable enough to even pay routine maintaince on. Anywhere somebody tries to build a large solar array the enviros suddenly discover some insignificant subvariety of lizard, bug, etc. that ONLY lives where they want to put up the collectors and launch into a multi-year fight.
> You're wrong about solar.
No I ain't. And your post proves it. Look how many "Assume a unicorn" statements are in it for tech that doesn't yet exist. And those cost numbers are almost certainly based on the current government subsidy schemes. Just take that subsidy away and photovoltiac isn't practical and not likely to be practical in our lifetime. Direct conversion of solar energy to steam is of course very practical in sunny areas but again the land area needed for the collectors are a magnet for eco freaks. It always comes back to that, either we tell the eco nuts to STFU or no possible energy source is going to be acceptable at consumption levels approximating current usage. And the world's population is still growing and worse, getting richer and demanding more energy per person.
I know ad hominem attacks are normally poor form, but Good Grief. Pseudofrog? More like Pseudomind.
>> They just recently started considering the effect of solar effects other than direct radiation and are finding it to be at least to the same rough scale as the CO2 variable.
Reread that, or better yet get someone who can actually read and comprehend English to break it down into little bits for you because I have no desire to do so.
> #1 Japan didn't turn off all nuclear. For one, it would take far longer than a few months to do so. For two, they're taking
> them offline for security checks. They plan on bringing them back online.
If you seriously think they will ever go back online you aren't paying attention. Nope, the lights just went out over there for good. Germany is shutting their nuke down. Frace would if they weren't so utterly dependent on them, and being French and just electing a Socialist government I still wouldn't bet a lot on them still having nukes a decade out.
> #2 Solar panels work great. I have em, and they cut my bill in half.
Nope. Take the government subsidies out of photoelectric and you wouldn't have bought them. Because the total value of the electricity derived from one over it's normal service life doesn't equal the TCO of the equipment. Large scale solar is close to net positve vs fossil fuel and will eventually get there but the greens are already mobilizing against the large scale installations that are required to generate useful quantities of electricity.
> #3 One solar thermal plant wasn't built because the company didn't want to immediately fork over the money to alleviate environmental concerns..
Probably because they realized the money would tip the project to uncompetitive, or because they realized that paying off this group would not solve the problem, the lawsuits would be endless until they abandoned the project. Alleviating 'environmental concerns' are like achieving diversity, there is no way to actually do it but you can waste an unlimited amount of time and money trying.... or relocate to a more friendly climate.
#4 Even if we are in an ice age (and we really aren't), that doesn't matter one lick.
Actually, if we are heading into an Ice Age there probably isn't anything we can do about it. WIth the current state of Climate Science we probably can't say and with the politics in it no sane person should trust it anyway.
> What matters is that there are drastic changes coming to our civilization, which has been built
> according to the climate variations of the past 300 years. That's going to cost money.
Considering that the only longterm constant in the environment is change that is almost certainly true. Whether it is going to change in the ways predicted by AGW theory, whether it will change BECAUSE of the influence of man, which influences but doesn't determine the BIG question of whether we can control the changes are all pretty open questions at this point.
> And don't forget tidal.
You mean forget the horrid ecological cost to vital spawning grounds for (whatever blah blah).
> So because fringe enviro-kooks have a problem with anything...
Yup, because they are the, to a high enough percentage to ignore the outliers, the exact same set of people who are pushing AGW. Whether AGW is true or not doesn't really matter either. It is just one weapon all leading to the same result. In the 1970's it was Global Cooling. Same policy prescriptions. When the Soviet Union fell and the ChiComs moved to a more viable mixed economy the Reds occupying our elite institutions (universities, media, etc.) simply took down (well some of em) their Che and Lenin posters and replaced them with Green ones. And suddenly almost all of the same policy prescriptions were rebranded as saving the earth. Now we need a world government regulating every sparrow that falls to control carbon instead of the equally dishonest redistribution of wealth/elimination of poverty, etc. crap.
The only answer is to realize that playing their game at all is to lose. So don't.
> Don't be silly. Earth is warmer than its orbital position would indicate, so something is trapping solar heat.
Oh bullpoop. The Earth has been warmer than it is today and colder. And guess what, it's orbit has been pretty darned constant. The problem is somewhat more complicated and we are still discovering new variables every couple of years. They just recently started considering the effect of solar effects other than direct radiation and are finding it to be at least to the same rough scale as the CO2 variable. And it isn't in ANY model from the 20th Century being touted as predicting DOOM! Are we now arrogant enough to think that was the last piece of the puzzle or do we have the humility to consider that we will find still more.
We only have halfway reliable data for a century, really good sat based data for less than half that. But we have pretty good knowledge that the Earth's temp has been far beyond the top and bottom of the observed ranges in the last 100K years. So we have a very poor data set. To try to make firm predictions based on such poor samples and the piss poor things they are calling 'climate models' is laughable. In another couple hundred years we still won't have very much direct data compared to the time scales we are talking about. On the other hand it is hard to argue that we can make the sort of changes we are making to our environment and expect no changes.
It isn't an easy problem. Which is why it pisses some of us off when funding grubbing hucksters in lab coats team up with watermellons like Al Gore to scam the world into poverty to enrich themselves. By debasing science it makes it hard for real science. Why did so many fall for the vaccine/autism scam? Yup. Folks don't trust science anymore. And that is dangerous.
> Changing power sources is dismantling civilization?
If there isn't anything to change to it is. And there currently isn't. Name one potential source that could replace fossil fuels and I'll show you a source the same greens are already trying to deem unacceptable. Lets review:
1. Nuke. Do I even have to go there? Even if we perfect fusion the greens will still wet themselves over the notion of power from anything with the N word attached.
2. Hydro. Disrupts Gaia. Harms fish reproduction and prevents 'healthy' rivers. And there is some point to their arguments. If nothing else our attempts at dams for flood control have certainly had a mixed record of success.
3. Wind. Assume it could actually produce enough energy. (Work with me here.) NIMBY is already rampant, greens are up in arms because when you fill square mile after square mile with windmills birds die. Who would have thunk it?
4. Solar. Makes sense as a source of off-grid energy but will never compete on a cost basis. And that is if you ignore the horrid ecological side effects of making the panels. And again, now that there are plans to actually cover over mile after mile of desert with the things the usual suspects are aghast.
5. Geothermal. Causes earthquakes.
6. Biofuels. Will cause widespread famine long before providing a noticable fraction of world energy production. Take the recycled plant waste, switchgrass on land unusable for more productive use but don't plan on it being anything but a boost. Not a primary source.
And if I have left your pet alternative energy source off this list be assured that it won't work either. It is great for soaking up grant money, deploying on a small scale to give egoboo to celebs but the second someone things it can be produced at a profit the downside will become clear.