This is all about salt water ceasing to flow like it does now when fresh water comes in and disrupts it, right? So what would happen if suddenly all the salt in the ocean dissapeared? If we could somehow assume that the deaths of all the animals in the ocean that need salinity won't have an effect (which I know we can't). Would the conveyor work the same with all fresh water?
Why go to the moon if there's an asteroid headed our way? When our poorly-planned Armegeddon-style drill team fails, we'll need to find new living arrangements.
Did they release the source this time? I remember earlier there were complaints that Lindows had taken GPL code and said they would only release the modified code after it came out of beta. And here we are at 2.0.
The really sad part is that Six Flags Great Adventure (in Jackson NJ) will basically be out of rides. Medusa is gone. Viper is gone. Scream Machine is gone. Nitro Might be gone. Batman is gone. Batman And Robin: The Chiller is gone. basically they might as well close the entire park. there are more deaths based on idiot drivers leaving great adventure every year than from the G forces. I love Coasters... I have been on every coaster in great adventure atleast 10 times each (except nitro its too new) and its a shame that we NJ asshats have to make laws about this... but hey it was a good run...
It wouldn't be as exiting as you are used to, but can't they just slow the rides down in sections? Heck, we know that if all those rides you mentioned went at merely one mile per hour, you wouldn't experience anywhere near those G-Forces. So that means all that the NJ park has to do is see if they can slow the ride down in certain parts to meet the restrictions and still make the ride enjoyable. It can even have those G-forces for fractions of a second. Find a nice happy medium.
I don't think this law is unreasonable at all. Better safe and ho-hum than finding out 40 years from now that super-fast Cedar Point was the cause of 10% of all future mental illness in the elderly. So you might not think that roller coaster park in NJ was worth the price of admission. Would you like me to play my violin?
Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need something that will run all those damned legacy apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22 days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate these old apps then to replace or upgrade them. A lot of other big companies probably stay on Windows for the same reason.
I disagree. I generally find that custom widgets charm developers, and annoy users.
Personally, I don't think that programmers should be given that much control over their apps. I mean for a full screen game sure, but a standard window enviornment? One app I use regularly has an "about" box that fades in and then out. What crap. I know that the programmer could very well choose not to create the app if they weren't given the option, but come on. An analogy: If I donate to a charity, I don't expect to be able to demand what direction their cupbard doors open. Giving programmers more control often means the user has less control. The user should have choices over how their apps look and work. They should be the ones who decide where the "preferences" option goes, whether it be File -> Options or Edit -> Preferences. What if I wanted to designate that a program will have no write access anywhere but the directory it was installed in? How many programs tolerate this? What if they were written for an operating system that won't have it any other way?
I'd like to see web pages take this route, too. Not user design, but raw data. The user decides where the email is to be shown on the screen if there is one. If there is an [email] tag, put it here. Otherwise it would read "none". Repeat for [last updated], [external links], [internal links], etc.
I'm sure many here would recoil at the idea of not being able to choose every aspect of how their baby runs, but I certainly don't. It would be nice to use an operating system that rips control from the anus of a programmer and lets the advanced user choose to make it simple. This doesn't mean letting the user compile their own, it means leaving it up to the user in the first place.
They need a cheap replacement for a 7400? No problem! I have an old 7800 they can have for free. I'll throw in some 2600 games that it can play - StarMaster & Missle Command, that should get them back into orbit in no time, right?
I remember reading in some magazine, Popular Science I think, the words of some company representative about how cheap "press pay" music would be compared to CDs. Say that it costs 10 cents a song. A low estimate of 10 songs per CD would be 1.00 per full play, much cheaper than the $10 or $15 a CD costs.... but this assumes that whoever buys CDs only listens to them a few times! In reality, people play the same CDs over and over and press pay costs would obviously add up. This also ignores the idea that music CDs are too expensive in the first place. I stopped renewing my subscription to the magazine after that.
The bull people are expected to believe today... Company representatives who smile and willfully lie through their teeth, telling us that the dog food we're being offered is chocolate ice cream. Bleh.
I can now go to my grave knowing that at least once in my life I used the term "spectral illusion" in a serious discussion.
And I'm sure many other Slashdot users will also be going to your grave, knowing that you got +3 Karma for that. Just don't ask how they will be paying their respect.
pour the glue/water mix into the borax solution and it with thicken up. You'll pull out a slimy, goopy mass that is too watery to play nicely with but if you work it in your hands for a bit to get the excess water out, you'll have some fun. Bounce it around, slap it, tear it and it's more like a solid. Let it sit on your hand and it flows like a liquid. Plenty of fun.
Napster was a big name, and the headphone-wearing-cat icon was well recognized. The name could still have served as a political force. Say that someone could go to Napster.com to read editorials on the state of intellectual property today, find links to all sorts of alternative file sharing systems and even to buy Napster merchandise, such as T-Shirts and coffee mugs. There's still life in the old cat yet, even if it isn't for sharing music. Shawn F. should take note.
Perhaps Napster will become a martyr for the file sharing community?
I miss the good old days of DB9 connectors on consoles. I can still today take a Sega Genesis control pad and plug it into an Atari 2600 to play games. Works wonders compared to the old joysticks. This was also the time when many consoles could connect to a TV adapter using one standard wire. (Plugged into the side of the adapter, which screwed into the back of the TV)
Why can't we standardize on one connector for many things? Imagine a connector that has identical ends that plug into identical ports on machines (they fit when you turn them around) that can transfer data two-ways and more power than a firewire connector. Is that so much to ask for?
Yes, and as in much election theory, I found the stated criteria filled with universal quantifiers ("must never," "must always," etc.) which as a practical matter refer to extremely rare events.
Right, just like how problems that crop up in plurality voting are extremely rare events.
The discussion at the end concerning the difficulty of counting IRV ballots is contrary to the actual experience of districts in Massachussets, Louisiana, Ireland, Australia, and many other places which use IRV.
Good point. If you write them about that section, please let me know what their response was.
Who picked these criterion, anyway? They are certainly not from the American Political Science Association, which uses IRV to elect its officers.
Your pet voting system doesn't pass the criteria, so you attack the criteria by it's source? I'm not sure who came up with it, some goat in Italy could have scratched paragraphs out in the dirt for all I know. Do they make sense? "Oh, that is rare that that would happen anyway" is a simple brush-off and is about as convincing as "Does not!". Need a real world example? You mentioned that Australia used IRV and hasn't had any troubles. Australia is *still* essentially a two-party country today. So apparently there are a few more troubles with it than you think there are. Look at the criteria again, do you not think they are valid points? What's wrong with, say, Summability Criterion? The webpage presents good arguments for it. I'd like some more detail on why you think each one of them isn't essential to a good voting system.
Oh, and "Appeal to Authority" is also a logical fallacy.
The answer could not be simpler than with IRV: Rank A first and B second. When A is eliminated, your support will transfer to B. Under no conditions will your ballot be counted in support of C.
Allow me to ask the question again:
What would the average voter do? What have they done in Australia? You know, plurality voting isn't all that terrible of an idea in theory. But people aren't honest enough at the polls to make it work. Heck, if it wasn't a common practice most people would read about it and think "You know, those problems would be really rare. The answer couldn't be simpler! Just tell people to vote for who they want." That's why you have to account for such things in the design of or when choosing any voting system. The webpage went into a lot more detail about why it doesn't work in practice than I did here. If you need to, refer to it again here. Remember, people won't vote honestly if they think they can beat the system. Why wouldn't they do it in IRV if they do it in plurality?
Contrast that to the Approval method, where you would be forced to support B to the same extent that you support A if you want to counter C at all.
Yes. You vote for who you approve of, or at least could tolerate. It is a nice way to work out a compromise without the problem of voters screwing themselves over. Anyway, if your purpose of going to the polls is to vote against someone, that's how you do it right there. Approval voting allows for no special manipulation that keeps systems like plurality and IRV down. To make an analogy, most people would keep antifreeze locked up in a cupboard than place it in a dish next to the rest of sparky's food. People are not much different from other animals -- if the temptation is there and it seems like a good idea at the time, people will do it. You'd need nearly as much effort to to educate people enough to use IRV honestly as it would to fix how people vote in the current system. If we're going to reform voting, why don't we do it right the first time?
Surely you can see from that simple case that you can send much more information about your preferences to be used for election with an IRV ballot than with an AV ballot.
Come again? You did research all the criteria that voting systems should pass, right? Simple tests, such as the Generalized Strategy-Free Criterion (Voters must not be able to shoot themselves in the foot by falsely ranking how they prefer candidates in an attempt to manipulate the outcome. See the example below). IRV fails all of them. Even plurality manages to pass two of them.
No, it does not. You can see from a purely information-theoretical perspective that IRV is more powerful than AV.
More information does not ensure a more accurate result when the voting system itself is almost certain to return bad information. In addition, the whole "more information" argument fails to regard whether the way the system processes the votes is sure to lead to an accurate result. From an information-processing-theoretical perspective, IRV is the least powerful voting system.
Example: So you step up to the polls. You know candidate B (who you could stand) is neck and neck with candidate C (who you really hate). You really prefer candidate A, but are scared to death that C could get in if you don't give B your top support.
What would the average voter do in this situation?
As for the simplicity of implementation, the Australian and Irish parliments have been doing just fine for a long time, and after a recent sudden conversion to IRV, respectivly.
Good for them, they managed to switch with no troubles. Approval works with existing voting equipment, so the change can be made quickly without waiting for new equipment. A whole country could change at the same time without a hitch.
The men in Nazi armies ate bread every now and then. Nazi's were not known as bastions for freedom by any means. Therefore, the people of a democracy should eat as much non-bread food as possible.
So, would you therefore agree that corn is better than bread?
People like to pick a first choice as "their" candidate. Approval makes you say yes to some set, and no to the rest.
No more than one-person-one-vote makes a voter say "yes" to one candidate and "no" to the rest. You know the details of approval voting, right? You can cast as many equal votes as you want. If you only want to vote for one candidate (for fear of your second choice winning), then only vote for "your" candidate. Personally, I don't like the concept of having to rank any candidate I hate over any other candidate I hate.
I agree it has some mathematical elegances,
Mathematical elegances? How about actual results? It allows for far better representation than either One-Person-One-Vote or IRV.
but I prefer IRV and so do the majority of reform activists judging by the initiative measures which have actually made it onto the ballots.
Another example of Argumentum Ad Populum: I am a fan of sports team A. Sports team A has the largest following of any team. Therefore, Sports Team A is the best team.
Do all the people who support IRV know about the other systems out there? Have they educated themselves on the pass-or-fail criteria for judging fair voting? Are they just on board because it is the biggest group working towards electoral reform? And would having everybody in the world agree on IRV make it the best system?
Do some research on the many alternative voting systems out there. Find a chart of what passes and what fails certain tests. You'll see that IRV doesn't hold a candle to Approval or Condorcet. Like I said, IRV is a step in the right direction, but think how much simpler Approval voting would be to implement than either IRV or Condorcet and how much more effective it can be than either IRV or one-person-one-vote.
Instant run-off voting is a step in the right direction, but it too is still leagues away from being able accurately representing the will of the voting populace. What about Approval voting? It is just one of many options out there.
Lycoris is supposed to be a really user-friendly Linux distro. It's actually aimed at the Windows XP crowd, that's how easy they want to make it. Has anybody here tried it, have any opinions to share?
Yeah, but by doing this, are they risking their status as a common carrier?
Dunno, but I think there's more common sense at work here than others might think. I'm going to look into that ISP, and if I can get service from them where I am, they have my business! Just think how much advertising Slashdot is giving them.
How many cats will be sacrificed to test a 1024x1024 quantum array I wonder?
Don't worry -- no cats are available for the project. We've already taken every cat we can find and they are all safely preoccupied within another project.
Why, Carmack, WHY? Why have you given into the Microsoft Machine and decided to create a version of what everybody expects to be the next hit game on the XBOX? I thought you were trying to avoid Microsoft domination by using things like OpenGL? You could bury the XBOX by announcing that there will be slimmed down PS2 and GameCube versions but that it will never be available for XBOX. DOOM III for XBOX only adds more weight to the already 800 lb gorilla. Consider me a troll if you must, but you have more control over this situation than anybody! Why have you chosen to aid Microsoft?!
Any image stored in.jpg that has lost data and then is stored in.png would be smaller than the original.jpg, right? Just because the data is lossless doesn't mean you can't reduce the color data and still store it in.png. All we need to do is come up with a "standard" lossy version of.png, like say one that is by definition 15-bit color.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all about salt water ceasing to flow like it does now when fresh water comes in and disrupts it, right? So what would happen if suddenly all the salt in the ocean dissapeared? If we could somehow assume that the deaths of all the animals in the ocean that need salinity won't have an effect (which I know we can't). Would the conveyor work the same with all fresh water?
Why go to the moon if there's an asteroid headed our way? When our poorly-planned Armegeddon-style drill team fails, we'll need to find new living arrangements.
Did they release the source this time? I remember earlier there were complaints that Lindows had taken GPL code and said they would only release the modified code after it came out of beta. And here we are at 2.0.
Whew! Imagine how many points that speeding ticket will add to your driver's license!
The really sad part is that Six Flags Great Adventure (in Jackson NJ) will basically be out of rides. Medusa is gone. Viper is gone. Scream Machine is gone. Nitro Might be gone. Batman is gone. Batman And Robin: The Chiller is gone. basically they might as well close the entire park. there are more deaths based on idiot drivers leaving great adventure every year than from the G forces. I love Coasters... I have been on every coaster in great adventure atleast 10 times each (except nitro its too new) and its a shame that we NJ asshats have to make laws about this... but hey it was a good run...
It wouldn't be as exiting as you are used to, but can't they just slow the rides down in sections? Heck, we know that if all those rides you mentioned went at merely one mile per hour, you wouldn't experience anywhere near those G-Forces. So that means all that the NJ park has to do is see if they can slow the ride down in certain parts to meet the restrictions and still make the ride enjoyable. It can even have those G-forces for fractions of a second. Find a nice happy medium.
I don't think this law is unreasonable at all. Better safe and ho-hum than finding out 40 years from now that super-fast Cedar Point was the cause of 10% of all future mental illness in the elderly. So you might not think that roller coaster park in NJ was worth the price of admission. Would you like me to play my violin?
Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need something that will run all those damned legacy apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22 days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate these old apps then to replace or upgrade them.
A lot of other big companies probably stay on Windows for the same reason.
So are you using FreeDOS?
Heh, sorry. Was just trying for some +funny Karma. :) I'm a big collector of classic gaming items -- back from the days when games were fun!
I disagree. I generally find that custom widgets charm developers, and annoy users.
Personally, I don't think that programmers should be given that much control over their apps. I mean for a full screen game sure, but a standard window enviornment? One app I use regularly has an "about" box that fades in and then out. What crap. I know that the programmer could very well choose not to create the app if they weren't given the option, but come on. An analogy: If I donate to a charity, I don't expect to be able to demand what direction their cupbard doors open. Giving programmers more control often means the user has less control. The user should have choices over how their apps look and work. They should be the ones who decide where the "preferences" option goes, whether it be File -> Options or Edit -> Preferences. What if I wanted to designate that a program will have no write access anywhere but the directory it was installed in? How many programs tolerate this? What if they were written for an operating system that won't have it any other way?
I'd like to see web pages take this route, too. Not user design, but raw data. The user decides where the email is to be shown on the screen if there is one. If there is an [email] tag, put it here. Otherwise it would read "none". Repeat for [last updated], [external links], [internal links], etc.
I'm sure many here would recoil at the idea of not being able to choose every aspect of how their baby runs, but I certainly don't. It would be nice to use an operating system that rips control from the anus of a programmer and lets the advanced user choose to make it simple. This doesn't mean letting the user compile their own, it means leaving it up to the user in the first place.
They need a cheap replacement for a 7400? No problem! I have an old 7800 they can have for free. I'll throw in some 2600 games that it can play - StarMaster & Missle Command, that should get them back into orbit in no time, right?
I remember reading in some magazine, Popular Science I think, the words of some company representative about how cheap "press pay" music would be compared to CDs. Say that it costs 10 cents a song. A low estimate of 10 songs per CD would be 1.00 per full play, much cheaper than the $10 or $15 a CD costs.... but this assumes that whoever buys CDs only listens to them a few times! In reality, people play the same CDs over and over and press pay costs would obviously add up. This also ignores the idea that music CDs are too expensive in the first place. I stopped renewing my subscription to the magazine after that.
The bull people are expected to believe today... Company representatives who smile and willfully lie through their teeth, telling us that the dog food we're being offered is chocolate ice cream. Bleh.
I can now go to my grave knowing that at least once in my life I used the term "spectral illusion" in a serious discussion.
And I'm sure many other Slashdot users will also be going to your grave, knowing that you got +3 Karma for that. Just don't ask how they will be paying their respect.
pour the glue/water mix into the borax solution and it with thicken up. You'll pull out a slimy, goopy mass that is too watery to play nicely with but if you work it in your hands for a bit to get the excess water out, you'll have some fun. Bounce it around, slap it, tear it and it's more like a solid. Let it sit on your hand and it flows like a liquid. Plenty of fun.
Egads! He's invented silly putty!
Napster was a big name, and the headphone-wearing-cat icon was well recognized. The name could still have served as a political force. Say that someone could go to Napster.com to read editorials on the state of intellectual property today, find links to all sorts of alternative file sharing systems and even to buy Napster merchandise, such as T-Shirts and coffee mugs. There's still life in the old cat yet, even if it isn't for sharing music. Shawn F. should take note.
Perhaps Napster will become a martyr for the file sharing community?
Yeah. Thought the same thing when I saw the title. Now I'll have the sound of Treasure Chest Gems raking up stuck in my head for the rest of the week.
Blee-dee blee-dee blee-dee blee-dee blee-dee...
Thanks, Slashdot!
I miss the good old days of DB9 connectors on consoles. I can still today take a Sega Genesis control pad and plug it into an Atari 2600 to play games. Works wonders compared to the old joysticks. This was also the time when many consoles could connect to a TV adapter using one standard wire. (Plugged into the side of the adapter, which screwed into the back of the TV)
Why can't we standardize on one connector for many things? Imagine a connector that has identical ends that plug into identical ports on machines (they fit when you turn them around) that can transfer data two-ways and more power than a firewire connector. Is that so much to ask for?
Nah. I'm not bitter. ;)
(Mod +5 insightful! No wait, mod -2 troll!)
Yes, and as in much election theory, I found the stated criteria filled with universal quantifiers ("must never," "must always," etc.) which as a practical matter refer to extremely rare events.
Right, just like how problems that crop up in plurality voting are extremely rare events.
The discussion at the end concerning the difficulty of counting IRV ballots is contrary to the actual experience of districts in Massachussets, Louisiana, Ireland, Australia, and many other places which use IRV.
Good point. If you write them about that section, please let me know what their response was.
Who picked these criterion, anyway? They are certainly not from the American Political Science Association, which uses IRV to elect its officers.
Your pet voting system doesn't pass the criteria, so you attack the criteria by it's source? I'm not sure who came up with it, some goat in Italy could have scratched paragraphs out in the dirt for all I know. Do they make sense? "Oh, that is rare that that would happen anyway" is a simple brush-off and is about as convincing as "Does not!". Need a real world example? You mentioned that Australia used IRV and hasn't had any troubles. Australia is *still* essentially a two-party country today. So apparently there are a few more troubles with it than you think there are. Look at the criteria again, do you not think they are valid points? What's wrong with, say, Summability Criterion? The webpage presents good arguments for it. I'd like some more detail on why you think each one of them isn't essential to a good voting system.
Oh, and "Appeal to Authority" is also a logical fallacy.
The answer could not be simpler than with IRV: Rank A first and B second. When A is eliminated, your support will transfer to B. Under no conditions will your ballot be counted in support of C.
Allow me to ask the question again:
What would the average voter do? What have they done in Australia? You know, plurality voting isn't all that terrible of an idea in theory. But people aren't honest enough at the polls to make it work. Heck, if it wasn't a common practice most people would read about it and think "You know, those problems would be really rare. The answer couldn't be simpler! Just tell people to vote for who they want." That's why you have to account for such things in the design of or when choosing any voting system. The webpage went into a lot more detail about why it doesn't work in practice than I did here. If you need to, refer to it again here. Remember, people won't vote honestly if they think they can beat the system. Why wouldn't they do it in IRV if they do it in plurality?
Contrast that to the Approval method, where you would be forced to support B to the same extent that you support A if you want to counter C at all.
Yes. You vote for who you approve of, or at least could tolerate. It is a nice way to work out a compromise without the problem of voters screwing themselves over. Anyway, if your purpose of going to the polls is to vote against someone, that's how you do it right there. Approval voting allows for no special manipulation that keeps systems like plurality and IRV down. To make an analogy, most people would keep antifreeze locked up in a cupboard than place it in a dish next to the rest of sparky's food. People are not much different from other animals -- if the temptation is there and it seems like a good idea at the time, people will do it. You'd need nearly as much effort to to educate people enough to use IRV honestly as it would to fix how people vote in the current system. If we're going to reform voting, why don't we do it right the first time?
Surely you can see from that simple case that you can send much more information about your preferences to be used for election with an IRV ballot than with an AV ballot.
Come again? You did research all the criteria that voting systems should pass, right? Simple tests, such as the Generalized Strategy-Free Criterion (Voters must not be able to shoot themselves in the foot by falsely ranking how they prefer candidates in an attempt to manipulate the outcome. See the example below). IRV fails all of them. Even plurality manages to pass two of them.
No, it does not. You can see from a purely information-theoretical perspective that IRV is more powerful than AV.
More information does not ensure a more accurate result when the voting system itself is almost certain to return bad information. In addition, the whole "more information" argument fails to regard whether the way the system processes the votes is sure to lead to an accurate result. From an information-processing-theoretical perspective, IRV is the least powerful voting system.
Example: So you step up to the polls. You know candidate B (who you could stand) is neck and neck with candidate C (who you really hate). You really prefer candidate A, but are scared to death that C could get in if you don't give B your top support.
What would the average voter do in this situation?
As for the simplicity of implementation, the Australian and Irish parliments have been doing just fine for a long time, and after a recent sudden conversion to IRV, respectivly.
Good for them, they managed to switch with no troubles. Approval works with existing voting equipment, so the change can be made quickly without waiting for new equipment. A whole country could change at the same time without a hitch.
Approval voting is widely used in the U.S. for electing corporate boards of directors -- not known as bastions of democracy by any means.
Sorry, your logic doesn't hold. You can't show something to be bad by association. That sentence is related to three logical fallacies: Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, post hoc ergo propter hoc, and Converse accident / Hasty generalization. Probably falls under the first.
Let me provide another example:
The men in Nazi armies ate bread every now and then. Nazi's were not known as bastions for freedom by any means. Therefore, the people of a democracy should eat as much non-bread food as possible.
So, would you therefore agree that corn is better than bread?
People like to pick a first choice as "their" candidate. Approval makes you say yes to some set, and no to the rest.
No more than one-person-one-vote makes a voter say "yes" to one candidate and "no" to the rest. You know the details of approval voting, right? You can cast as many equal votes as you want. If you only want to vote for one candidate (for fear of your second choice winning), then only vote for "your" candidate. Personally, I don't like the concept of having to rank any candidate I hate over any other candidate I hate.
I agree it has some mathematical elegances,
Mathematical elegances? How about actual results? It allows for far better representation than either One-Person-One-Vote or IRV.
but I prefer IRV and so do the majority of reform activists judging by the initiative measures which have actually made it onto the ballots.
Logical fallacy: Argumentum Ad Populum
Another example of Argumentum Ad Populum: I am a fan of sports team A. Sports team A has the largest following of any team. Therefore, Sports Team A is the best team.
Do all the people who support IRV know about the other systems out there? Have they educated themselves on the pass-or-fail criteria for judging fair voting? Are they just on board because it is the biggest group working towards electoral reform? And would having everybody in the world agree on IRV make it the best system?
Do some research on the many alternative voting systems out there. Find a chart of what passes and what fails certain tests. You'll see that IRV doesn't hold a candle to Approval or Condorcet. Like I said, IRV is a step in the right direction, but think how much simpler Approval voting would be to implement than either IRV or Condorcet and how much more effective it can be than either IRV or one-person-one-vote.
Instant run-off voting is a step in the right direction, but it too is still leagues away from being able accurately representing the will of the voting populace. What about Approval voting? It is just one of many options out there.
Lycoris is supposed to be a really user-friendly Linux distro. It's actually aimed at the Windows XP crowd, that's how easy they want to make it. Has anybody here tried it, have any opinions to share?
Yeah, but by doing this, are they risking their status as a common carrier?
Dunno, but I think there's more common sense at work here than others might think. I'm going to look into that ISP, and if I can get service from them where I am, they have my business! Just think how much advertising Slashdot is giving them.
How many cats will be sacrificed to test a 1024x1024 quantum array I wonder?
Don't worry -- no cats are available for the project. We've already taken every cat we can find and they are all safely preoccupied within another project.
Why, Carmack, WHY? Why have you given into the Microsoft Machine and decided to create a version of what everybody expects to be the next hit game on the XBOX? I thought you were trying to avoid Microsoft domination by using things like OpenGL? You could bury the XBOX by announcing that there will be slimmed down PS2 and GameCube versions but that it will never be available for XBOX. DOOM III for XBOX only adds more weight to the already 800 lb gorilla. Consider me a troll if you must, but you have more control over this situation than anybody! Why have you chosen to aid Microsoft?!
For god's sake, WHY?
Any image stored in .jpg that has lost data and then is stored in .png would be smaller than the original .jpg, right? Just because the data is lossless doesn't mean you can't reduce the color data and still store it in .png. All we need to do is come up with a "standard" lossy version of .png, like say one that is by definition 15-bit color.