> I have a constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures once inside the United > States, but not while entering it. The judges decision sounds nice, but I don't think it will stand.
It's worse. I fail to understand how a court can't order the asshole to produce the data. We have protection against unreasonable search. We have a right against self incrimination. But neither apply here. Nobody is going to argue that a judge can't issue an order for you to cough up documents whether on paper or a computer. Our whole system of law would collapse were law enforcement unable to obtain evidence, even with a court order.
Drop all the cyber bullshit and imagine this as a meatspace problem. Imagine you have a fortress of doom that it would be totally impractical for law enforcement to gain entrance to without the key. (perhaps you have crazed killbots inside, or whatever) If a judge issued a valid search warrant you would indeed be required to produce the key or be held in contempt. Why is it different because computers are involved?
Even better example. Judge issues warrant for you to produce paper files. You are the only one who knows where they are located. If you try saying that telling the court where they are would be self incrimination and thus you are invoking the 5th you should not be suprised to find yourself in a cell.
This case is going to come down to two sworn officers asserting they saw kiddie porn on exhibit A, the laptop. Almost any jury is going to be willing to accept that as proof beyond a reasonable doubt considering the defense could rebutt by simply unlocking the laptop and proving their innocence. This isn't a case of guilt until proven innoccent, this is two officers vs a suspect who refuses to allow anyone to see the evidence he claims would free him. Hell, I'd convict on that.
> And even then no one is going to mistake a frame of The Incredibles for a real people.
Which is intentional. Pixar has the computing power and human talent to make scenes look much more realistic than anything they have released to date. My point is they intentionally avoid doing photorealistic scenes or characters to keep viewers firmly in the cartoon mindset. Very good animation mind you, but always instantly recognizable as animation. Because once you try for photorealistic you have to succeed in every scene. And even Pixar realizes that while they could make most scenes real enough they would fall short enough times over the course of a feature film to end up with the FF problem.
> Only if you also have a picture-perfect 3D-model of Obama's face.
The guy has been on the cover of some magazine at pretty much every point to date in 2008. And I'm sure the nearest campaign office would be more than happy to supply as many camera ready samples as you needed with some fake press credentials. Just how many different angles to you think are required to build up a 3D model.
> No, this does not invalidate video as proof of anything. Take your hyperbole somewhere else.
Afraid it does. Without proof of pedigree video (especially the low res YouTube stuff) is worthless, and with a pedigree it is only as trustworthy as the pedigree. It really wouldn't be too hard to make fake videos at this point. Most fakes wouldn't stand up to heavy scrutiny though. To pull off a undetectable fake you would need to put enough people on the job that keeping the secret for long would be damned near impossible.. but an October Suprise might not get shot down in time. Remember that Dan Rather almost got away with a blindingly obvious fake.
> So, let's build a counter-example: the FF movie was called a clear example of the Uncanny Valley. > It's in the valley. Sony's Everquest 2 caused a similar reaction,
Never played an MMO myself, but I have been around enough Evercrack addicts (my brother for one) to have seen enough of the ingame graphics to be able to say this: If you have ever been confused between those graphics and the real world you should shutdown your computer and get the hell out of the house for a few hours.
The issue with FF was that some scenes looked real enough you forgot you were watching animation... and then something (many people couldn't even say what exactly) would act 'wrong' and snap you back to the realization it was just a cartoon. It was the back and forth between real and unreal that creeped people out. One or the other is not a problem.
Notice that successful feature animation take steps to make sure you never forget it is a cartoon. They avoid human characters as a general rule, break as many laws of physics as any classic Looney Tune and generally behave as us viewers expect cartoons to work. For another example Pixar didn't attempt a film with 'humans' as the principle cast until "The Incredibles", their sixth deature film.
> It's hard to feel revulsion from a still. When something tries to be alive (animated), that's when it kicks in.
That isn't even the whole problem. It is when a CG character bounces in and out of 'real' that creeps people out. Take Final Fantasy for example. When I watched it on the big screen it had exactly that effect for me, one minute I'd forget it was a cartoon and a second later WHAM, back to cartoon land. Interestingly enough though when I later watched a copy from a VHS tape it was much better. I think film made the defects too visible.
> A long life laptop inside your laptop with Instant on.
That's kinda retarded, and an indication of just how broken x86 is. But now that market forces are demanding lower power/longer battery life this seperate SoC is a stopgap measure at best.
What is needed is for Intel/AMD/Via to start taking power management serious. Give CPU's the ability to completely shutdown unneeded sections, the second core, the SSE, etc. Take clock reduction to the max. Be able to take a clock from 2GHz down to 200MHz with voltage scaling to go with it. Perhaps even power down the FPU when not needed. Power down memory sticks that aren't needed at the moment. Kill the 3D rendering unit and just keep the framebuffer.
It should be possible to run Linux on a laptop for a day without having to stuff a whole ARM SoC into the box. Vista probably isn't ever going to do that, but Linux should be able to do it on an x86 if it had the right hardware assist.
And no access to the primary HDD from the ON environment? Yea you don't want the HDD spinning all the time but it should be an option.
> Next month it'll be "Sound would be nice.". > Then you'll be bitching "Damn we need support for youtube and flickr up in this bitch.". > Then you'll say "Can we get a fucking IM client and some printer support? It's 2010!". > Ultra mobile / webtop / nettop / netbook / whatever is retarded.
Helloooo, Mcfly!
This Dell thing is kinda retarded but netbooks aren't. An ASUS EEEPC has sound, it ships with a version of mplayer that looks nice and has pretty broad codec support. Firefox has the flash plugin preloaded so youtube isn't an issue. IM? It's in there. Printing? Browse your Windows or CUPS printers out of the box. Browse SMB or NFS file shares while you are at it if the included SSD is getting a little full.
Of course the "can't add apps" thing Dell if throwing around is just crazy talk. Even if they try to close it down it won't work. If it has a penguin inside somebody will open it up and get Debian on it inside the first month. The drama will be whether one of the BSDs release first.
And sometimes somebody totally helps ya make your point.
> If we really read our history, it was those same conservative Democrats that jumped > ship and joined the Republican Party when Nixon embarked on his "Southern Strategy".
Another popular myth. Google DOES have quick answers on this one. Go look at the 1968 election results.
Nixon 43.42% Humphrey 42.72% Wallace 13.53%
Now go Google Wallace since you obviously don't know who he was. Now explain how Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was supposed to work? Uh huh. Of course he did win because of Wallace splitting the Democratic electorate but that wasn't a conscious strategy on Nixon's part unless you are really into conspiracy theories.
You bought into another myth of the left. Don't feel bad though, millions of politically uneducated people buy into that one and more like it. Quite a few who are otherwise politcally knowledgable buy into some of these just because they are stated as fact so often and they can't go google every fact for themselves.
> Democrats are the ones that got rid of poll taxes and voting tests with a constitutional amendment.
You really should read some real history. Things are not what you have been taught. All those bigots with firehoses during the civil rights movement? Lifelong Democrats all. Who passed the Civil Rights Act? Mostly Republicans over the fillibuster of Kleagal^WSenator Byrd. I couldn't find the stats in a few minutes of Googling, but it is a pretty safe bet that if you dug up the actual votes on the 13th, 14th, 15th and 24th Amendments you wouldn't find a majority of Democrats voting for any of them.
> "Balanced" in this case means that only the democratic party and the republican > party will have their voices heard.
If only. In practice the "Fairness Doctrine" meant overt political programs were off limits period. Except for the newscasts which were all (90%+ with the rest deep in the closet) Democrats and the not so hidden political plotlines in most 'entertainment that always promoted the Democratic talking points of the moment. So in effect it meant Republicans had Firing Line on PBS and the Democrats got the rest of radio and TV... this was believed by all 'right thinking people' to be a problem because even one disenting voice was a menace to the revolution.
> I would say that, but I also witnessed all three branches of the federal government > fail us spectacularly on McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.
Ain't it the truth. That's my problem with McCain, he loves to compromise with Democrats on big issues like whether the Constituition means anything. Democrats as a group tend to believe it doesn't, that whatever THEY think is a good idea is OK, constituition be damned. Their idea of a 'living constituition' is that it always says Democrats can do whatever they are hankering to do this week.
And since he still calls himself a Republican to many congresscritters that would know to oppose a Dem when they wipe their ass on the Constituition roll over for McCain in the name of party unity. If I figured the Repubs could hold enough Senate seats to mount fillibusters I'd be tempted to let the Dems win the white house on the grounds that Republicans would oppose Clinton or Obambi on issues they will cave to McCain on.
>..but to claim that DRM is a reason to steal the whole game?
I can see it. If I have to go get a usable copy from the pirates and risk getting a case of cyberherpes in the bargain, why am I giving out sack of cash for a box with a coaster in it? Games don't even come with pack in trinkets anymore.
Me, I don't have time for that stuff anymore. What little time I find for games I play the free stuff included in the distro. And ya know what? Some of it is pretty good.
I can't help it if you are too mentally limited to see objective reality.
The problem as I perceive it is that most people aren't going to take the time to study and ponder issues of morality. So religion short circuits all that and just gives them a prebuilt moral code and tell them "You WILL do this." Since any religion that lasts very long has a workable moral code embedded within this allows a stable society to exist.
Now observe what happens (go to any college or university) when people are freed from religion but not given any other basis for a moral code. They tend to become amoral, hedonistic and because we seem to be preprogrammed to 'need' a religion will fall for the first fruity new age crap that comes their way. Or they become socialists, which is even worse.
What too many people who have been educated beyond their intelligence can't seem to understand is that science ISN'T a religion. Science is just a way of asking a small subset of questions. But science can't be used to ask the big questions and attempts to misuse it in that way gets results about as meaningful as attempts to divide by zero or take the square root of a butterfly. Equally importantly, Secular Humanism IS a religion and can offer answers to the bigger questions... and is exactly as 'scientific' as Wicca.
> Behavioral studies show that people who don't have a belief in a god are as moral as those that use holy books to get their moral values.
They can say it all day long if it makes them feel better, but reality differs. At least from my observation of the world the unreligious tend to have a bent moral compass. It is a problem as I'm not a religious sort myself, agnostic actually. Almost by definition a successful religion embodies a moral code and a proven method to instill it in new followers. To date the only successful (defined as getting large mindshare) attempts at moral systems absent religion designed for mass instruction have been unspeakably evil. i.e. Socialism, National Socialism/Fascism, Communism.
When you talk to people who aren't religious yet have working moral compasses you find most went through a period where they had to work it out for themselves. We need to find a way to pass on a moral code (that isn't evil) before we try to free too many minds from religion. Because religion does 'work', successful societies can be built on them as we have proven. None have yet been built in the absence of them that a sane person would want to be a part of.
> The only thingn worse than democracy is everything else.
Incorrect. No cookie for you.:)
Democracy is just about the worst possible system of government possible, as it combines the worst aspects of the worst forms of government into a horrible mess. Which is why the Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with it and went to great pains to avoid it, instead giving us a Constituitional Republic. Too bad we pissed it away and have proved their suspicions correct.
And just perhaps the average voter somehow does get it. They have figured out that the media aren't to be trusted so since the media have been flogging global warming for the last decade they assume they are wrong/lying. Which is pretty much spot on.
You can't turn on the idiot box without getting a sermon about global warming. Ya can't even flip on the weather channel and see if it is going to rain without first sitting through a sermon about what YOU can do to save the Earth. Every half witted Celebutard on a reality show is either out to save the Earth or 'raise awareness' about some disease everybody and their freaking dog has heard too much about for a decade.
> Some people say there should be no national identification at the games, and while > it'll never happen, it would be better.
That isn't the problem. It is the myth of amateur sport the modern (but not ancient) Olymics are built around. It was a scam from day one. It was OK when the Soviets would pick out young children and train them (and drug them) for years. Now we do it. We send children / young adults off to training camps for years where they are fed and clothed by the US Olympic Committee. Yet the atheletes themselves can't earn a single dollar for themselves, they are indentured servants of the US Olympic committee. They wear corporate logos though, and the money from that is what pays their room and board and the salaries of their coaches. Just like college sports the coaches can make all they can rake in but the atheletes themselves will get sacked for accepting the smallest gift. The atheletes only hope is to win gold at something the public cares about, retire and THEN they can cash in on endorsements.
It would be better if we just allowed the atheletes to be free actors. But the Olymipic committee will no more give up tehir monopoly on all that corporate sponsor cash than the colleges will give up theirs. But in a sane world the 'experiment' in allowing the Dream Team to represent the US in Olympic basketball would be the rule rather than the exception. Olympic boxing would have the current Heavyweight Champion competing. Of course that would show the whole thing up as rather redundent.
Ok, if they spend enough money they can build themselves a model city and get cred with the greens. Probably even take a lot of their attentions away from the new coal fired plant going online every week. And since they are a communist country they can order people to live in the hell on earth they are making. But of what possible concern is this to normal sane people?
Any useful field testing of new tech could be done without building the whole showcase city around it... ya know, test THEN deploy?
> If the pollution of oil is the problem, questions of alleged supply > or not pertinent to the problem, they are not important or germane.
Yet you devote half of your original post to those other arguments, good to have my assertion you were just posing as a rational actor confirmed.
The problem, as I stated, is that oil is the NOW. And right NOW we have a limited set of choices:
1. Adopt your proposed reduced lifestyle of a green monastic order. Not going to happen. Argue all you will but people won't do it, and if Obambi tries to force people into it he will be a one term wonder.
2. Increase supplies of oil in the 1-5 year time horizon to keep our 1st world economy operating. As I asserted, only a 1st world economy has the spare resources to CARE about things like environmentalism.
3. A miracle occurs and somebody produces a new form of energy that can be quickly adapted to power every aspect of our world currently powered by fossil fuels. Personally I don't believe boxing ourselves into a corner where only a miracle can save us is sound policy. Obviously you do, thus faith based policy.
> Noting that I did live in St. Petersburg, Russia [1997] and that > I speak Russian...
But apparently unaware that recent polling shows Russia one of the countries that answered most favorably to the question of whether they thought their country was going well. They might notice the pollution and care on some level, but they won't DO anything about it until more important goals are met, like becoming a 1st World economy.
And I can promise you that if you idiots get control of the US economy and drive us into 2nd World status the ONLY thing American voters will care about is regaining our 'lost glory'... exactly like those Russians, and screw everything else like the environment. So ask yourself, is that the future you want? Choose carefully and remember that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
You have made it half way to the Truth. We can argue about when we will hit Peak Oil, nobody disputes the evident truth that we will hit it. So replacing oil isn't a question of whether, but one of what and when. So just suck it up and let the marketplace sort this out, secure in the knowledge that since it must, it will. The free market, unlike government, has yet to fail when given a challenge.
Oil is dirty, but so was coal before it and wood before that. Man is still crawling up from darkness and folks like yourself need to stop focusing on the negative and see the glass as half full once in awhile. And we will even backslide from time to time. We once though slavery was a given and evolved beyond it only to backslide into various *isms in the 20th Century that enslaved people more utterly than anything previous, only to correct course yet again and move upwards in a few short generations.
Have a little hope dude. Only instead of investing your Hope in one rather pathetic dude, have some hope in humanity in general. We screw up, but we do eventually learn.
>..so I have no faith in the Prince-William-Sound fouling oil industry > to not have major accidents and ruin our common coastlines and all > the wildlife and environments that live there.
Of course I realize facts will have no bearing on your arguments, your arguments are faith based, but I hope to influence others....
I would hold that the Exxon Valdez incident argues FOR drilling ANWR. Just about everything that could go wrong did. But today you could wander that area and never realize anything untoward had ever occurred.
> Oil is not a long-term solution.
Agreed. But it IS the only short term solution anyone is proposing. If you have something that can solve the short term problem show me the patent number of you invention. Because if it isn't already patented you won't be bringing it into production in a short term timescale.
> Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply.
Because we need energy NOW. We can't even build nuke plants fast enough to help NOW or in the 1-5 year time horizon. There are places we can drill that will, and just the information that we will be drilling will drive down energy futures instantly.
> We have clearly had something change in our weather patterns.
The weather is always changing. Whether we have Global Warming going on is debatable in light of the drop in global mean temp in the last year or so. And whether the cause of any remaining warming is human caused is even more debatable. Whether it is CO2 and the greenhouse effect is very shaky science. Personally I'd say that yes we are influencing the environment because you can't deforest half the Amazon basin and have zero impact. But whether it is warming or just a general jumbling of existing weather patterns is debatable.
> We know oil is a fossil fuel that is destined to run out.
Oil will never run out, anyone with a basic understanding of economics would have never made such a silly assertion. Oil will (as you did note) get harder to find and more expensive. If that plays out on a long enough time scale alternative sources will take over as they become viable. Long before that last drop gets hoovered up into a pipeline we will have switched to something else. Be patient, stop making things worse by entangling the government into things and believe in the invisible hand. It works.
> To use an analogy that would be understood by all the slashdotters, > you're the guy whose advocating that we rebuild our company's > systems in COBOL rather than Java/.NET/ or whatever newer.
Newer isn't always better. Bellsouth spent years with a website that was totally broken, to the you would just give up and call the landline and when you would mention you had TRIED to use the webpage get a tired "Ya we know it's broken." They finally either gave up or when AT&T bought em just consolidated the backends. Why do you think so much COBOL is still in service? Because successful companies know something you apparently don't. If it works leave it the hell alone. And yes, if my choices were limited to COBOL, Java or.NET I'd pick COBOL.
When was the last time you heard of a COBOL codebase on a mainframe falling over? Thought so.
> Anybody who roots for more oil drilling is just some deluded troglodyte
Way to demonize anyone for daring to disagree with their betters. Listen up you primitive screwhead, only 1st World enonomies have the luxury of caring about the environment. Show me the Greenpeace office is Somolia. Hell, show me the Greenpeace office in Russia and they are 2nd World. So job one, if you really cared about the environment, would be ensuring we stay 1st World long enough to succesfully migrate and that more people get 1st World status.
No it isn't. Oil is so TODAY. And it will be our short term future as well because no large scale migration on the scale you greens assume is coming has ever occured. Hell, it took a decade to migrate from VHS to DVD and the installed physical plant for home video is literally trivial compared to a full rip and replace for the whole petroleum extraction, refining, transport/storage, automobile market.
> McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil.
Damn, I haven't even committed to voting for the asshole (McCain Fiengold vs the 1st Amendment is the blocker) and now I have to defend his positions.... because you are just lying. He is a green. He is for cap and trade, alternative energy and all your gaywad issues so please try to be honest in the future. It is acceptable to believe he isn't 'pure enough' compared to a real green socialist like Obambi but you don't have to lie to debate. McCain is just realistic enough to know we need to do 'all of the above.' Right now we need to be working both the supply and demand sides of the equation. It's called economics, but I doubt you know much about that.
> This style of low-impact life, where you're not always dragging > around a big metal car with you..
That might work out for you in NYC where mass transit is plentiful and walking distances are reasonable. Try it in flyover country sometimes. Of course you like to preen and brag about your low-impact life but I'd suspect you folks living your low-impact NYC lifestyles consume more resources per capita than a redneck in a mobile home and a big ass pickup.
> Corporations don't like a low-stuff life because they can't take > as much of our money away, then.
And we just knew this was coming, the standard issue hate on the 'evil corporations' and their infernal ability to force people to buy their products. The solution is simple and market based, your arguments to live a simple green monastic lifestyle need to be more convincing than the TV's argument to BUY, BUY, BUY. So far you haven't so instead of continuing to attempt to convince those poor ignorant people clinging to their guns and religion you have decided to just use the government to tell em what they shall do because dammnit you are Right and they are Stupid and it just isn't fair that stupid people can ruin your plans.
Yup, it has replaced fusion as the tech that is always about twenty years away from being the Next Big Thing.
These days I doubt fusion would be greeted as a good thing unless somebody went straight to Mr. Fusion and there would still be die hard Greens trying to regulate or outlaw it just because of fear.
Of course what wouldn't be stated would be exactly what the fear was, they fear us finding a sustainable energy source they can't control to reduce total energy use by humans. Because in the end they will object to ANY energy source that doesn't result in humans living a reduced energy lifestyle because they have a religious belief that humans ARE the problem. Just wait, there have already been attempts to regulate large solar installations in the desert on environmental grounds, when large installations actually get ready for construction the legal groundwork to delay and control will be firmly in place.
But just how much longer can that be? How long can stupidity like 3GB memory specs on new PCs last? Of course the nasty secret is that Vista doesn't solve the 4GB limit either. Ok, it does but so can XP, problem is nobody in their right mind will install either product's 64bit flavor.
Microsoft botched their 64 bit migration totally, unlike Sun, Linux and Apple. Installing a 64bit Linux just means a few glitches, almost all of which are long since solved problems. Apple & Sun seems to have handled the issue by just installing a 64bit kernel and leaving almost all of userland 32bit, which sounds like a bad idea but actually works very nicely in practice. Microsoft on the other hand..... XP was only formally released in 64 bit at the very end of it's run so there are gaps in driver coverage that won't ever be filled. Vista took the 64bit migration as an opportunity to X-Box the platform with all closed and signed everything, plus lots of apps break.
> this is true. they may just hit 3% market share in the uk before > the end of the decade. woohoo!
I dunno, things are looking up lately. I know Amazon isn't exactly the first place people go to buy a computer but they publish a ranking chart in realtime. I looked at it yesterday and noticed some interesting figures on the laptop chart. These numbers are for the top 25 sellers:
Linux 9 WinXP 6 Vista 5 OS X 5
Even when you combine the Windows numbers you still have a very respectable 11/9/5 spread. And if you buy the Apple hype that OS X is a UNIX the Windows vs *NIX battle is 14 to 11.
The mininote has opened up a whole new front in the OS Wars. Of course if you ranked em by dollar volume Linux would be dead last since all of the Linux based machines are much less expensive than the fancy Sony and Apple kit.
Sorry. I didn't actually read the article... but I had seen a piece on the same story on TV and of course any details go right out the window when TV tries to cover ANY story.
If the light was on, it's HER fault for being clueless and HE should be executed promptly and given his Darwin Award. He thought he could get away with such a stunt with a frickin LIGHT going on and off?
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures once inside the United
> States, but not while entering it. The judges decision sounds nice, but I don't think it will stand.
It's worse. I fail to understand how a court can't order the asshole to produce the data. We have protection against unreasonable search. We have a right against self incrimination. But neither apply here. Nobody is going to argue that a judge can't issue an order for you to cough up documents whether on paper or a computer. Our whole system of law would collapse were law enforcement unable to obtain evidence, even with a court order.
Drop all the cyber bullshit and imagine this as a meatspace problem. Imagine you have a fortress of doom that it would be totally impractical for law enforcement to gain entrance to without the key. (perhaps you have crazed killbots inside, or whatever) If a judge issued a valid search warrant you would indeed be required to produce the key or be held in contempt. Why is it different because computers are involved?
Even better example. Judge issues warrant for you to produce paper files. You are the only one who knows where they are located. If you try saying that telling the court where they are would be self incrimination and thus you are invoking the 5th you should not be suprised to find yourself in a cell.
This case is going to come down to two sworn officers asserting they saw kiddie porn on exhibit A, the laptop. Almost any jury is going to be willing to accept that as proof beyond a reasonable doubt considering the defense could rebutt by simply unlocking the laptop and proving their innocence. This isn't a case of guilt until proven innoccent, this is two officers vs a suspect who refuses to allow anyone to see the evidence he claims would free him. Hell, I'd convict on that.
> And even then no one is going to mistake a frame of The Incredibles for a real people.
Which is intentional. Pixar has the computing power and human talent to make scenes look much more realistic than anything they have released to date. My point is they intentionally avoid doing photorealistic scenes or characters to keep viewers firmly in the cartoon mindset. Very good animation mind you, but always instantly recognizable as animation. Because once you try for photorealistic you have to succeed in every scene. And even Pixar realizes that while they could make most scenes real enough they would fall short enough times over the course of a feature film to end up with the FF problem.
> Only if you also have a picture-perfect 3D-model of Obama's face.
The guy has been on the cover of some magazine at pretty much every point to date in 2008. And I'm sure the nearest campaign office would be more than happy to supply as many camera ready samples as you needed with some fake press credentials. Just how many different angles to you think are required to build up a 3D model.
> No, this does not invalidate video as proof of anything. Take your hyperbole somewhere else.
Afraid it does. Without proof of pedigree video (especially the low res YouTube stuff) is worthless, and with a pedigree it is only as trustworthy as the pedigree. It really wouldn't be too hard to make fake videos at this point. Most fakes wouldn't stand up to heavy scrutiny though. To pull off a undetectable fake you would need to put enough people on the job that keeping the secret for long would be damned near impossible.. but an October Suprise might not get shot down in time. Remember that Dan Rather almost got away with a blindingly obvious fake.
> So, let's build a counter-example: the FF movie was called a clear example of the Uncanny Valley.
> It's in the valley. Sony's Everquest 2 caused a similar reaction,
Never played an MMO myself, but I have been around enough Evercrack addicts (my brother for one) to have seen enough of the ingame graphics to be able to say this: If you have ever been confused between those graphics and the real world you should shutdown your computer and get the hell out of the house for a few hours.
The issue with FF was that some scenes looked real enough you forgot you were watching animation... and then something (many people couldn't even say what exactly) would act 'wrong' and snap you back to the realization it was just a cartoon. It was the back and forth between real and unreal that creeped people out. One or the other is not a problem.
Notice that successful feature animation take steps to make sure you never forget it is a cartoon. They avoid human characters as a general rule, break as many laws of physics as any classic Looney Tune and generally behave as us viewers expect cartoons to work. For another example Pixar didn't attempt a film with 'humans' as the principle cast until "The Incredibles", their sixth deature film.
> It's hard to feel revulsion from a still. When something tries to be alive (animated), that's when it kicks in.
That isn't even the whole problem. It is when a CG character bounces in and out of 'real' that creeps people out. Take Final Fantasy for example. When I watched it on the big screen it had exactly that effect for me, one minute I'd forget it was a cartoon and a second later WHAM, back to cartoon land. Interestingly enough though when I later watched a copy from a VHS tape it was much better. I think film made the defects too visible.
> A long life laptop inside your laptop with Instant on.
That's kinda retarded, and an indication of just how broken x86 is. But now that market forces are demanding lower power/longer battery life this seperate SoC is a stopgap measure at best.
What is needed is for Intel/AMD/Via to start taking power management serious. Give CPU's the ability to completely shutdown unneeded sections, the second core, the SSE, etc. Take clock reduction to the max. Be able to take a clock from 2GHz down to 200MHz with voltage scaling to go with it. Perhaps even power down the FPU when not needed. Power down memory sticks that aren't needed at the moment. Kill the 3D rendering unit and just keep the framebuffer.
It should be possible to run Linux on a laptop for a day without having to stuff a whole ARM SoC into the box. Vista probably isn't ever going to do that, but Linux should be able to do it on an x86 if it had the right hardware assist.
And no access to the primary HDD from the ON environment? Yea you don't want the HDD spinning all the time but it should be an option.
> Next month it'll be "Sound would be nice.".
> Then you'll be bitching "Damn we need support for youtube and flickr up in this bitch.".
> Then you'll say "Can we get a fucking IM client and some printer support? It's 2010!".
> Ultra mobile / webtop / nettop / netbook / whatever is retarded.
Helloooo, Mcfly!
This Dell thing is kinda retarded but netbooks aren't. An ASUS EEEPC has sound, it ships with a version of mplayer that looks nice and has pretty broad codec support. Firefox has the flash plugin preloaded so youtube isn't an issue. IM? It's in there. Printing? Browse your Windows or CUPS printers out of the box. Browse SMB or NFS file shares while you are at it if the included SSD is getting a little full.
Of course the "can't add apps" thing Dell if throwing around is just crazy talk. Even if they try to close it down it won't work. If it has a penguin inside somebody will open it up and get Debian on it inside the first month. The drama will be whether one of the BSDs release first.
And sometimes somebody totally helps ya make your point.
> If we really read our history, it was those same conservative Democrats that jumped
> ship and joined the Republican Party when Nixon embarked on his "Southern Strategy".
Another popular myth. Google DOES have quick answers on this one. Go look at the 1968 election results.
Nixon 43.42%
Humphrey 42.72%
Wallace 13.53%
Now go Google Wallace since you obviously don't know who he was. Now explain how Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was supposed to work? Uh huh. Of course he did win because of Wallace splitting the Democratic electorate but that wasn't a conscious strategy on Nixon's part unless you are really into conspiracy theories.
You bought into another myth of the left. Don't feel bad though, millions of politically uneducated people buy into that one and more like it. Quite a few who are otherwise politcally knowledgable buy into some of these just because they are stated as fact so often and they can't go google every fact for themselves.
> Democrats are the ones that got rid of poll taxes and voting tests with a constitutional amendment.
You really should read some real history. Things are not what you have been taught. All those bigots with firehoses during the civil rights movement? Lifelong Democrats all. Who passed the Civil Rights Act? Mostly Republicans over the fillibuster of Kleagal^WSenator Byrd. I couldn't find the stats in a few minutes of Googling, but it is a pretty safe bet that if you dug up the actual votes on the 13th, 14th, 15th and 24th Amendments you wouldn't find a majority of Democrats voting for any of them.
> "Balanced" in this case means that only the democratic party and the republican
> party will have their voices heard.
If only. In practice the "Fairness Doctrine" meant overt political programs were off limits period. Except for the newscasts which were all (90%+ with the rest deep in the closet) Democrats and the not so hidden political plotlines in most 'entertainment that always promoted the Democratic talking points of the moment. So in effect it meant Republicans had Firing Line on PBS and the Democrats got the rest of radio and TV... this was believed by all 'right thinking people' to be a problem because even one disenting voice was a menace to the revolution.
> I would say that, but I also witnessed all three branches of the federal government
> fail us spectacularly on McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.
Ain't it the truth. That's my problem with McCain, he loves to compromise with Democrats on big issues like whether the Constituition means anything. Democrats as a group tend to believe it doesn't, that whatever THEY think is a good idea is OK, constituition be damned. Their idea of a 'living constituition' is that it always says Democrats can do whatever they are hankering to do this week.
And since he still calls himself a Republican to many congresscritters that would know to oppose a Dem when they wipe their ass on the Constituition roll over for McCain in the name of party unity. If I figured the Repubs could hold enough Senate seats to mount fillibusters I'd be tempted to let the Dems win the white house on the grounds that Republicans would oppose Clinton or Obambi on issues they will cave to McCain on.
> ..but to claim that DRM is a reason to steal the whole game?
I can see it. If I have to go get a usable copy from the pirates and risk getting a case of cyberherpes in the bargain, why am I giving out sack of cash for a box with a coaster in it? Games don't even come with pack in trinkets anymore.
Me, I don't have time for that stuff anymore. What little time I find for games I play the free stuff included in the distro. And ya know what? Some of it is pretty good.
> I fail to see how religion is any less evil.
I can't help it if you are too mentally limited to see objective reality.
The problem as I perceive it is that most people aren't going to take the time to study and ponder issues of morality. So religion short circuits all that and just gives them a prebuilt moral code and tell them "You WILL do this." Since any religion that lasts very long has a workable moral code embedded within this allows a stable society to exist.
Now observe what happens (go to any college or university) when people are freed from religion but not given any other basis for a moral code. They tend to become amoral, hedonistic and because we seem to be preprogrammed to 'need' a religion will fall for the first fruity new age crap that comes their way. Or they become socialists, which is even worse.
What too many people who have been educated beyond their intelligence can't seem to understand is that science ISN'T a religion. Science is just a way of asking a small subset of questions. But science can't be used to ask the big questions and attempts to misuse it in that way gets results about as meaningful as attempts to divide by zero or take the square root of a butterfly. Equally importantly, Secular Humanism IS a religion and can offer answers to the bigger questions... and is exactly as 'scientific' as Wicca.
> Behavioral studies show that people who don't have a belief in a god are as moral as those that use holy books to get their moral values.
They can say it all day long if it makes them feel better, but reality differs. At least from my observation of the world the unreligious tend to have a bent moral compass. It is a problem as I'm not a religious sort myself, agnostic actually. Almost by definition a successful religion embodies a moral code and a proven method to instill it in new followers. To date the only successful (defined as getting large mindshare) attempts at moral systems absent religion designed for mass instruction have been unspeakably evil. i.e. Socialism, National Socialism/Fascism, Communism.
When you talk to people who aren't religious yet have working moral compasses you find most went through a period where they had to work it out for themselves. We need to find a way to pass on a moral code (that isn't evil) before we try to free too many minds from religion. Because religion does 'work', successful societies can be built on them as we have proven. None have yet been built in the absence of them that a sane person would want to be a part of.
> The only thingn worse than democracy is everything else.
Incorrect. No cookie for you. :)
Democracy is just about the worst possible system of government possible, as it combines the worst aspects of the worst forms of government into a horrible mess. Which is why the Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with it and went to great pains to avoid it, instead giving us a Constituitional Republic. Too bad we pissed it away and have proved their suspicions correct.
And just perhaps the average voter somehow does get it. They have figured out that the media aren't to be trusted so since the media have been flogging global warming for the last decade they assume they are wrong/lying. Which is pretty much spot on.
You can't turn on the idiot box without getting a sermon about global warming. Ya can't even flip on the weather channel and see if it is going to rain without first sitting through a sermon about what YOU can do to save the Earth. Every half witted Celebutard on a reality show is either out to save the Earth or 'raise awareness' about some disease everybody and their freaking dog has heard too much about for a decade.
National Post - The Deniers
> Some people say there should be no national identification at the games, and while
> it'll never happen, it would be better.
That isn't the problem. It is the myth of amateur sport the modern (but not ancient) Olymics are built around. It was a scam from day one. It was OK when the Soviets would pick out young children and train them (and drug them) for years. Now we do it. We send children / young adults off to training camps for years where they are fed and clothed by the US Olympic Committee. Yet the atheletes themselves can't earn a single dollar for themselves, they are indentured servants of the US Olympic committee. They wear corporate logos though, and the money from that is what pays their room and board and the salaries of their coaches. Just like college sports the coaches can make all they can rake in but the atheletes themselves will get sacked for accepting the smallest gift. The atheletes only hope is to win gold at something the public cares about, retire and THEN they can cash in on endorsements.
It would be better if we just allowed the atheletes to be free actors. But the Olymipic committee will no more give up tehir monopoly on all that corporate sponsor cash than the colleges will give up theirs. But in a sane world the 'experiment' in allowing the Dream Team to represent the US in Olympic basketball would be the rule rather than the exception. Olympic boxing would have the current Heavyweight Champion competing. Of course that would show the whole thing up as rather redundent.
Ok, if they spend enough money they can build themselves a model city and get cred with the greens. Probably even take a lot of their attentions away from the new coal fired plant going online every week. And since they are a communist country they can order people to live in the hell on earth they are making. But of what possible concern is this to normal sane people?
Any useful field testing of new tech could be done without building the whole showcase city around it... ya know, test THEN deploy?
> If the pollution of oil is the problem, questions of alleged supply
> or not pertinent to the problem, they are not important or germane.
Yet you devote half of your original post to those other arguments, good to have my assertion you were just posing as a rational actor confirmed.
The problem, as I stated, is that oil is the NOW. And right NOW we have a limited set of choices:
1. Adopt your proposed reduced lifestyle of a green monastic order. Not going to happen. Argue all you will but people won't do it, and if Obambi tries to force people into it he will be a one term wonder.
2. Increase supplies of oil in the 1-5 year time horizon to keep our 1st world economy operating. As I asserted, only a 1st world economy has the spare resources to CARE about things like environmentalism.
3. A miracle occurs and somebody produces a new form of energy that can be quickly adapted to power every aspect of our world currently powered by fossil fuels. Personally I don't believe boxing ourselves into a corner where only a miracle can save us is sound policy. Obviously you do, thus faith based policy.
> Noting that I did live in St. Petersburg, Russia [1997] and that
> I speak Russian...
But apparently unaware that recent polling shows Russia one of the countries that answered most favorably to the question of whether they thought their country was going well. They might notice the pollution and care on some level, but they won't DO anything about it until more important goals are met, like becoming a 1st World economy.
And I can promise you that if you idiots get control of the US economy and drive us into 2nd World status the ONLY thing American voters will care about is regaining our 'lost glory'... exactly like those Russians, and screw everything else like the environment. So ask yourself, is that the future you want? Choose carefully and remember that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
You have made it half way to the Truth. We can argue about when we will hit Peak Oil, nobody disputes the evident truth that we will hit it. So replacing oil isn't a question of whether, but one of what and when. So just suck it up and let the marketplace sort this out, secure in the knowledge that since it must, it will. The free market, unlike government, has yet to fail when given a challenge.
Oil is dirty, but so was coal before it and wood before that. Man is still crawling up from darkness and folks like yourself need to stop focusing on the negative and see the glass as half full once in awhile. And we will even backslide from time to time. We once though slavery was a given and evolved beyond it only to backslide into various *isms in the 20th Century that enslaved people more utterly than anything previous, only to correct course yet again and move upwards in a few short generations.
Have a little hope dude. Only instead of investing your Hope in one rather pathetic dude, have some hope in humanity in general. We screw up, but we do eventually learn.
> ..so I have no faith in the Prince-William-Sound fouling oil industry
> to not have major accidents and ruin our common coastlines and all
> the wildlife and environments that live there.
Of course I realize facts will have no bearing on your arguments, your arguments are faith based, but I hope to influence others....
I would hold that the Exxon Valdez incident argues FOR drilling ANWR. Just about everything that could go wrong did. But today you could wander that area and never realize anything untoward had ever occurred.
> Oil is not a long-term solution.
Agreed. But it IS the only short term solution anyone is proposing. If you have something that can solve the short term problem show me the patent number of you invention. Because if it isn't already patented you won't be bringing it into production in a short term timescale.
> Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply.
Because we need energy NOW. We can't even build nuke plants fast enough to help NOW or in the 1-5 year time horizon. There are places we can drill that will, and just the information that we will be drilling will drive down energy futures instantly.
> We have clearly had something change in our weather patterns.
The weather is always changing. Whether we have Global Warming going on is debatable in light of the drop in global mean temp in the last year or so. And whether the cause of any remaining warming is human caused is even more debatable. Whether it is CO2 and the greenhouse effect is very shaky science. Personally I'd say that yes we are influencing the environment because you can't deforest half the Amazon basin and have zero impact. But whether it is warming or just a general jumbling of existing weather patterns is debatable.
> We know oil is a fossil fuel that is destined to run out.
Oil will never run out, anyone with a basic understanding of economics would have never made such a silly assertion. Oil will (as you did note) get harder to find and more expensive. If that plays out on a long enough time scale alternative sources will take over as they become viable. Long before that last drop gets hoovered up into a pipeline we will have switched to something else. Be patient, stop making things worse by entangling the government into things and believe in the invisible hand. It works.
> To use an analogy that would be understood by all the slashdotters,
> you're the guy whose advocating that we rebuild our company's
> systems in COBOL rather than Java/.NET/ or whatever newer.
Newer isn't always better. Bellsouth spent years with a website that was totally broken, to the you would just give up and call the landline and when you would mention you had TRIED to use the webpage get a tired "Ya we know it's broken." They finally either gave up or when AT&T bought em just consolidated the backends. Why do you think so much COBOL is still in service? Because successful companies know something you apparently don't. If it works leave it the hell alone. And yes, if my choices were limited to COBOL, Java or .NET I'd pick COBOL.
When was the last time you heard of a COBOL codebase on a mainframe falling over? Thought so.
> Anybody who roots for more oil drilling is just some deluded troglodyte
Way to demonize anyone for daring to disagree with their betters. Listen up you primitive screwhead, only 1st World enonomies have the luxury of caring about the environment. Show me the Greenpeace office is Somolia. Hell, show me the Greenpeace office in Russia and they are 2nd World. So job one, if you really cared about the environment, would be ensuring we stay 1st World long enough to succesfully migrate and that more people get 1st World status.
> Oil is yesterday.
No it isn't. Oil is so TODAY. And it will be our short term future as well because no large scale migration on the scale you greens assume is coming has ever occured. Hell, it took a decade to migrate from VHS to DVD and the installed physical plant for home video is literally trivial compared to a full rip and replace for the whole petroleum extraction, refining, transport/storage, automobile market.
> McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil.
Damn, I haven't even committed to voting for the asshole (McCain Fiengold vs the 1st Amendment is the blocker) and now I have to defend his positions.... because you are just lying. He is a green. He is for cap and trade, alternative energy and all your gaywad issues so please try to be honest in the future. It is acceptable to believe he isn't 'pure enough' compared to a real green socialist like Obambi but you don't have to lie to debate. McCain is just realistic enough to know we need to do 'all of the above.' Right now we need to be working both the supply and demand sides of the equation. It's called economics, but I doubt you know much about that.
> This style of low-impact life, where you're not always dragging
> around a big metal car with you..
That might work out for you in NYC where mass transit is plentiful and walking distances are reasonable. Try it in flyover country sometimes. Of course you like to preen and brag about your low-impact life but I'd suspect you folks living your low-impact NYC lifestyles consume more resources per capita than a redneck in a mobile home and a big ass pickup.
> Corporations don't like a low-stuff life because they can't take
> as much of our money away, then.
And we just knew this was coming, the standard issue hate on the 'evil corporations' and their infernal ability to force people to buy their products. The solution is simple and market based, your arguments to live a simple green monastic lifestyle need to be more convincing than the TV's argument to BUY, BUY, BUY. So far you haven't so instead of continuing to attempt to convince those poor ignorant people clinging to their guns and religion you have decided to just use the government to tell em what they shall do because dammnit you are Right and they are Stupid and it just isn't fair that stupid people can ruin your plans.
> Yet Another Solar Cell Story.
Yup, it has replaced fusion as the tech that is always about twenty years away from being the Next Big Thing.
These days I doubt fusion would be greeted as a good thing unless somebody went straight to Mr. Fusion and there would still be die hard Greens trying to regulate or outlaw it just because of fear.
Of course what wouldn't be stated would be exactly what the fear was, they fear us finding a sustainable energy source they can't control to reduce total energy use by humans. Because in the end they will object to ANY energy source that doesn't result in humans living a reduced energy lifestyle because they have a religious belief that humans ARE the problem. Just wait, there have already been attempts to regulate large solar installations in the desert on environmental grounds, when large installations actually get ready for construction the legal groundwork to delay and control will be firmly in place.
> Also, the longer the market stays in XP...
But just how much longer can that be? How long can stupidity like 3GB memory specs on new PCs last? Of course the nasty secret is that Vista doesn't solve the 4GB limit either. Ok, it does but so can XP, problem is nobody in their right mind will install either product's 64bit flavor.
Microsoft botched their 64 bit migration totally, unlike Sun, Linux and Apple. Installing a 64bit Linux just means a few glitches, almost all of which are long since solved problems. Apple & Sun seems to have handled the issue by just installing a 64bit kernel and leaving almost all of userland 32bit, which sounds like a bad idea but actually works very nicely in practice. Microsoft on the other hand..... XP was only formally released in 64 bit at the very end of it's run so there are gaps in driver coverage that won't ever be filled. Vista took the 64bit migration as an opportunity to X-Box the platform with all closed and signed everything, plus lots of apps break.
> this is true. they may just hit 3% market share in the uk before
> the end of the decade. woohoo!
I dunno, things are looking up lately. I know Amazon isn't exactly the first place people go to buy a computer but they publish a ranking chart in realtime. I looked at it yesterday and noticed some interesting figures on the laptop chart. These numbers are for the top 25 sellers:
Linux 9
WinXP 6
Vista 5
OS X 5
Even when you combine the Windows numbers you still have a very respectable 11/9/5 spread. And if you buy the Apple hype that OS X is a UNIX the Windows vs *NIX battle is 14 to 11.
The mininote has opened up a whole new front in the OS Wars. Of course if you ranked em by dollar volume Linux would be dead last since all of the Linux based machines are much less expensive than the fancy Sony and Apple kit.
Sorry. I didn't actually read the article... but I had seen a piece on the same story on TV and of course any details go right out the window when TV tries to cover ANY story.
If the light was on, it's HER fault for being clueless and HE should be executed promptly and given his Darwin Award. He thought he could get away with such a stunt with a frickin LIGHT going on and off?