I perhaps forgot the/sarcasm tag, but the point I was making:
But really, the parser is supposed to work with you, not against you, so why not write it on several lines to help readability? I fail to see how writing code on one line really proves its power.
Actually that example is not even valid Python code, you'll get an 'n not defined'. Furthermore you need to indent it properly. You probably want something like this:
def primes_upto(limit):
is_prime = [False] * 2 + [True] * (limit - 1)
for n in range(int(limit**0.5 + 1.5)):
if is_prime[n]:
for i in range(n*n, limit+1, n):
is_prime[i] = False
return [i for i, prime in enumerate(is_prime) if prime]
And VB6 you can actually do this on one line:)
Sub Eratost() : Dim sieve() As Boolean : Dim n As Integer, i As Integer, j As Integer: n = InputBox("limit:", n) : ReDim sieve(n) : For i = 1 To n : sieve(i) = True : Next i : For i = 2 To n : If sieve(i) Then : For j = i * 2 To n Step i : sieve(j) = False : Next j : End If : Next i : For i = 2 To n : If sieve(i) Then Debug.Print i : Next i : End Sub 'Eratost
If you want one-liner programs, we should really force people to use perl which is famous for that. Python is not friendly to 'one-liner' types of programs because it forces indentation.
But really, the parser is supposed to work with you, not against you, so why not write it on several lines to help readability? I fail to see how writing code on one line really proves its power.
For bragging rights, you could go full-genius mode [instead of full-retard] with APL (change 100 to whatever you want the vector of primes to be) :
The people who push systemd have serious issues with reality it seems. Pulseaudio is a brain damaged piece of software and one of the first things to be removed in any distribution.
There is no reason on earth device drivers need to live in kernel space either. Performance arguments are simply false, and this point has been disproven many times over.
Actually the performance arguments are the only arguments. Everyone is agreed that separating the various components is necessary for system stability. Yet for machines like home computers it is simply not possible. It is only with the relative advance of hardware that the microkernel can actually get close to a monolithic kernel in terms of performance. The address space separation always comes at the cost of inter-process communication and context-switching which necessarily have performance consequences. It is this performance consequence that made Windows NT, originally designed on a microkernel architecture, move towards a hybrid kernel. However even Windows engineers have struggled to move towards a microkernel, with Vista being the first version I believe which had some drivers run in user mode.
Of course arguments and hard data aren't meaningful in these discussions, and monolithic has clearly won in terms of marketshare. Once again, why fight the tid of history instead of being more constructive? You are going to lose.
Actually the monolithic kernel has already lost the marketshare battle. There are far more Mac and Windows installations than all Linux distributions combined. These are all microkernel or hybrid-kernel architectures.
You make an error in thinking that history has already been written. Unless you are a prophet of some sort, there is no way you can tell us what the tide of history is at this moment. Systemd may indeed be the end of Linux in server space, as many serious companies are already migrating to the BSDs. How large this migration may be we won't know until the statistics are taken after the fact. I'm old enough to remember the commercials for "New Coke", which was vaunted to be the formula to crush the competition. In reality the competition destroyed Coca-Cola. Systemd is all about marketing, and nothing about engineering. It too will fail and be replaced, just like PulseAudio by ALSA.
Actually, no. The modern linux kernel is far more modular than in the beginning. Now you have kernel 'modules' that can be unloaded during runtime, which wasn't possible in the past. In the end the real debate was HOW to accomplish the modularity, not whether to make the kernel modular or not. The modern linux kernel is not as monolithic as it used to be, and has absorbed many of the features of the microkernel.
You can run the kernel with any number of modules according to the functionality that you need, with various levels of dependancy. There are even distributions that remove all of these modules for embedded devices. You still have a kernel that provides a way to speak to the hardware it supports even without the other modules.
Systemd is nothing like this. You cannot run systemd without journald for instance, not simply because of a dependency but due to bad design. There is no reason on earth that an init system would need a specific journal daemon, and yet you cannot run systemd without journald. To use any other journaling software you have to use the output of journald. Thus journald is not separate from systemd in any meaningful term.
And who in their right mind makes a logging daemon write to binary files? That is just retarded. The first thing you look on a machine that has failed in some way is to look at the log, and the tool to look at the log is almost always from another machine that is different than the one you are looking at [because that one is broken, duh]. A technician will use tools that he has on hand, which sometimes is only a text editor, or even just cat. To expect someone to install another piece of software on their machine just so they can see what happened to the server IS JUST FUCKING INSANE.
You perhaps know that one of the reasons slashdot itself (one of the major tech sites on the internet) doesn't support unicode fully is not only due to the laziness of the developers. Gmail until recently also had difficulties. The DNS system as well has all sorts of troubles with the Russian 'a' and the ASCII 'a'. Just selecting through several pages of memory to draw the right symbol is not going to happen without some cost.
"Displaying text and pictures" is not so simple as it may sound. Do you remember the JPEG flaw that was used as an exploit in Internet Explorer?
I'm not against supporting all sorts of character sets, but we can't imagine that it doesn't come without a price and potentially with several possible dangers.
IF Wingdings fonts makes my computer run as slow as molasses and weakens its security, then it is simply a flaw and not a feature. If our beloved web browser programmers however spend more time on implementing emoj than web standards, we have a problem. If they can get it to work without destroying fundamental functionality, I don't really care.
Another reason browsers are way too bloated. This stuff does not come for free. Not to mention the possible security implications. What happens when a malformed emoj is put in the address field? What about in the preferences? What about as a http-header?
Seriously, some features should just not be implemented, just like kids should not be given everything they ask for. Not everything you want is good for you, nor good for the internet.
If you using a lot of terminals, I would suggest using a tiled window manager like i3. New terminal is only a key press away and it is very efficient once you master it.
If you are using a SSH tunnel or similarly with a VPN, you are already doing 'everything' over SSH, that is to say the whole network connection. Even my X11 server is using it right now.
However HTTP/S, SMTP and the like are protocols, not transport mechanisms.
True, the table is a question of space/accuracy trade-off.
The process of correcting is in the interpolation, which is why I included the additional links in the same thread.
For instance in the simple manner of simple linear interpolation one can interpolate an arbitrary \epsilon between two table values. Repeating this brings us closer to a fixed point. The book that I linked to gives also many other ways of interpolation, as well as the article. It is this interpolation that is the manner of finding increased accuracy.
The article I linked to states that the method that he employs shows a noticeable gain over recalculating the value [though it is not the same function in discussion]. As in most algorithms it depends a lot on what is more important - space or time.
For pow(a,b), [a,b real numbers], you are essentially calculating:
a^b = (e^log(a))^b) or pow(pow(e, log(a)), b) which is e^(b*log(a)) or pow(e, b*log(a)) where e is the base of the natural logarithm.
What you have in your table are the values for e^x and log(x), like any good book of logarithms of ancient times. Precision according to your needs. For quick lookup you can even index the mantissa in a b-tree if your table is huge.
Then it becomes very quick:
step 1: look up log (a) in the table, interpolate if needed. step 2: calculate b * (value in last step). step 3: lookup up e^x where x is the value at step 2 in your table, interpolate if needed. step 4: profit! as you now have your result.
And as a bonus, you are sure the result is within the precision of your table immediately, within the error of your interpolation.
Note that interpolation for exp(x) is quite fast. There are some exotic methods out there as well for interpolating exp(x) and log(x), as per this abstract which are quite efficient if you need high precision. For 10 digit precision you could easily fit both your tables into 8k.
What is perhaps a bit of irony of history, even for humans a lookup table is faster and more precise than manually calculating it via formula. That is why they published books of logarithms. Using interpolation you can even stretch out the precision to several more digits. With a table of values in memory you can also narrow down the inputs to Newton's method and calculate any differentiable function very quickly to an arbitrary precision. With some functions the linear approximation is so close that you can reduce it in just a few cycles.
Even in most trigonometric functions there is a simple table upon which the angle addition formulas are used to get the other values[an old example].
Given the size of most operating systems, where 8k of ram is hardly noticed (most gifs are larger than this), I am actually quite surprised that the lookup table method is not more used. It would seem one of the first things to put in cache on your ALU.
What is most disconcerting is the enormous amount of waste that Bitcoin produces. Just the amount of computing power wasted in 'mining' is such that the electricity used to run the machine no longer pays itself. When a currency costs more to produce than its worth, there is already an economic crisis and the currency is no viable. For instance, when a dime costs more than $.10 to produce, it will be more worthwhile to actually melt the coin down than actually use it. Bitcoin crossed this barrier quite awhile ago, making it actually more expensive to use than normal currency. When bitcoin cannot guarantee neither anonymity, nor any more security than cash, there is no real reason to use it.
Surely there must be some better way to make a cryptocurrency without the 'proof of work' concept. The original idea of 'proof of work' on which bitcoin is based was actually to prevent spam by making each email cost a few cpu cycles. Now the whole world is just burning cpu/gpu cycles for no other reason than trying to get money for free. Certainly there must be a better way to make financial transactions secure.
Reminds me a bit of the Tulip Mania, but in this case completely separated from any physical good. People are investing in cryptographic hashes of all things, which only have value inasmuch as some people think they do. There is no army paying its soldiers in bitcoin.
Thanks for the information. Volcanoes are amazing things. I remember when Mt. St. Helens erupted. It caused enormous damage and yet not too many things are extinct because of it. To have so many extinctions linked to one timespan seems to indicate something much more than just a series of volcanoes. Of course any life suffering from a cataclysmic event would not be helped by a long series of eruptions.
The summary states that over 750,000 years the volcanoes emitted 1.1 E 6 km^2. Over that timespan it doesn't seem like much, a bit more than 1 km^2 a year. This does not seem that significant.
For instance, the Bardarbung volcano in Iceland, which erupted this year, has already produced 1 km^2 of lava, and has no sign of stopping. At that rate, for 750,000 years it would be close to the magnitude of the volcanoes in the summary. And yet the impact of Bardarbung on earthly climate is close to negligible - we are not yet extinct in any case. For an extinction event one would expect something a bit more drastic, it would seem to me.
In Soviet America, voters don't chose their representatives, rather the representatives choose their voters.
Stalin is reported to have said that he takes little account of who votes, but rather it is he who counts the votes that matters. Politics in American have done him proud... it matters not who votes, but where you vote that counts. One vote in a swing state is worth thousands of votes in the so called "safe states". In fact with most districts there isn't even a meaningful contest.
Tyranny by definition is rule without mandate. When less than 50% of the people vote, and of them not all the votes have equal political value, then I think it is safe to state that the USA has perhaps crossed the line into tyranny.
I've been using BSD for a long time, both in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is fantastic. I use mostly just plain Xorg and i3 window manager. With emacs, LaTeX and conkeror I can accomplish all that I need to do, and do it efficiently. However you can put as many bells and whistles on your installation as you want. True, you could do that with linux but there are some very important advantages with using FreeBSD:
1/ ZFS file system. This alone is worth switching to FreeBSD. If you don't know what it is, learn how to use it. What is extremely useful is doing "zfs send" of snapshots to another machine. Need more storage? Just add a disk to the pool. ZFS is very much production grade in FreeBSD 10.1.
2/ Jails. These are better than VirtualBox in my humble opinion, but they do have a learning curve. The advantage is putting each jail on a zfs filesystem where you can do snapshots of different stages of your application deployment and if something doesn't work you can simply rollback. Yes, I know you can do this with VMWare and the rest but jails allow me to access the filesystem directly in the command line and in general it is much more intuitive for my work habits. Note that you can also install jails of different flavors - for instance a debian jail where you can run everything just like it is on linux.
VirtualBox works just fine on FreeBSD, but I'll admit I haven't used it much.
3/ General simplicity of the system. Linux is fastly becoming as non-unix like as possible [though to be fair GNU is Not Unix]. Just a simple install of Ubuntu and you will see tons of processes running that you sometimes wonder what they are all up to. This may provide some utility for some people, but most people will never use those features. In FreeBSD I know exactly what each process is doing and it is very easy to turn off or enable as I desire. FreeBSD provides me control because I know the system, and the system is easier to know because it is much simpler and in my opinion more coherently designed.
4/ Much better documentation. FreeBSD (and BSD in general) has a good reputation for providing documentation. Almost everything you need is in the handbook. Also there is a lot of stability in the way things are done. Often in Linux the entire manner of doing things is changed from one version to another. Plus there are no monstrosities like NetworkManager which are opaque and not very well documented.
5/ More secure - a system is only as secure in as much as you know how it is working and what it is doing. In this case FreeBSD is more secure because I know more of what it is doing. With Ubuntu giving web searches every time you try to find a file on your machine, there is just asking for trouble.
6/ The system is more responsive. FreeBSD simple feels more 'alive' in the sense it is doing only what you want it to do. You don't have to wait for that useless application to stop doing what it is doing because it is not there. You don't need to wait for the indexing of the harddrive to give you back control of the system, as you decide when it should be done, etc. But I think even the UI elements are much smoother even on large desktops like KDE. The scrolling of windows for instance seems much more responsive than it is on linux, but that could be due to all sorts of factors.
As to your particular needs: A/ Minecraft works just fine. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com... B/ I have no idea, but an acquaintance tells me it works. In the forums they mention FreeBSD so someone must be using it. C/ Mplayer works just fine, but I've seen a lot of people use VLC. D/ Firefox works extremely well, though I use Conkeror which is simply a different shell to the same browser. E/ Flash works with a multiple of different options. F/ No idea to be honest about OpenRA. If there is source code I'm sure you could get it to run. At the very worst there is a linux-emulation layer. G/ All the major Desktop Environments are in
A non-extensive List of Reasons why OpenBSD is better than linux:
1/ OpenBSD's mascot is a puffer fish. Puffer fish can kill you. Penguins are simply parasites living on property no one wants anyway. 2/ OpenBSD's project leader has better hygiene than RMS 3/ OpenBSD's project leader is also more dictatorial than Linus 4/ It's BSD which means it has the karma of open source and you don't need lawyers managing each release cycle. 5/ OpenBSD assumes the world is a bad place. Linux is just hoping no one will do something bad. 6/ It doesn't update stuff simply because it can, but because it has to. Linux just updates stuff because they can, and stuff breaks.
Perhaps someone else has something to add?
Seriously, it just works. If you like what you have, keep using it! Not like I'm going to force you to quit using whatever you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Like in C, the winning sequence starts with a 0:
Step 0) Don't do any criminal activity.
That's it, there are no more steps (not even profit!). So much can be avoided by following step 0 first.
I perhaps forgot the /sarcasm tag, but the point I was making:
But really, the parser is supposed to work with you, not against you, so why not write it on several lines to help readability? I fail to see how writing code on one line really proves its power.
Actually that example is not even valid Python code, you'll get an 'n not defined'. Furthermore you need to indent it properly. You probably want something like this:
def primes_upto(limit):
is_prime = [False] * 2 + [True] * (limit - 1)
for n in range(int(limit**0.5 + 1.5)):
if is_prime[n]:
for i in range(n*n, limit+1, n):
is_prime[i] = False
return [i for i, prime in enumerate(is_prime) if prime]
And VB6 you can actually do this on one line :)
Sub Eratost() : Dim sieve() As Boolean : Dim n As Integer, i As Integer, j As Integer: n = InputBox("limit:", n) : ReDim sieve(n) : For i = 1 To n : sieve(i) = True : Next i : For i = 2 To n : If sieve(i) Then : For j = i * 2 To n Step i : sieve(j) = False : Next j : End If : Next i : For i = 2 To n : If sieve(i) Then Debug.Print i : Next i : End Sub 'Eratost
If you want one-liner programs, we should really force people to use perl which is famous for that. Python is not friendly to 'one-liner' types of programs because it forces indentation.
But really, the parser is supposed to work with you, not against you, so why not write it on several lines to help readability? I fail to see how writing code on one line really proves its power.
For bragging rights, you could go full-genius mode [instead of full-retard] with APL (change 100 to whatever you want the vector of primes to be) :
(~vv.×v)/v1100
EDIT: Damn it, you can't even put APL code in Slashdot. Here is a link to explain the code
There is no such thing as a hybrid. You are either on fire, or you are not.
That is such an idiotic statement that I won't even bother continuing the discussion. This link is the wikipedia page. And is Linus himself speaking about the mix of kernel architectures.
The people who push systemd have serious issues with reality it seems. Pulseaudio is a brain damaged piece of software and one of the first things to be removed in any distribution.
There is no reason on earth device drivers need to live in kernel space either. Performance arguments are simply false, and this point has been disproven many times over.
Actually the performance arguments are the only arguments. Everyone is agreed that separating the various components is necessary for system stability. Yet for machines like home computers it is simply not possible. It is only with the relative advance of hardware that the microkernel can actually get close to a monolithic kernel in terms of performance. The address space separation always comes at the cost of inter-process communication and context-switching which necessarily have performance consequences. It is this performance consequence that made Windows NT, originally designed on a microkernel architecture, move towards a hybrid kernel. However even Windows engineers have struggled to move towards a microkernel, with Vista being the first version I believe which had some drivers run in user mode.
Of course arguments and hard data aren't meaningful in these discussions, and monolithic has clearly won in terms of marketshare. Once again, why fight the tid of history instead of being more constructive? You are going to lose.
Actually the monolithic kernel has already lost the marketshare battle. There are far more Mac and Windows installations than all Linux distributions combined. These are all microkernel or hybrid-kernel architectures.
You make an error in thinking that history has already been written. Unless you are a prophet of some sort, there is no way you can tell us what the tide of history is at this moment. Systemd may indeed be the end of Linux in server space, as many serious companies are already migrating to the BSDs. How large this migration may be we won't know until the statistics are taken after the fact. I'm old enough to remember the commercials for "New Coke", which was vaunted to be the formula to crush the competition. In reality the competition destroyed Coca-Cola. Systemd is all about marketing, and nothing about engineering. It too will fail and be replaced, just like PulseAudio by ALSA.
Actually, no. The modern linux kernel is far more modular than in the beginning. Now you have kernel 'modules' that can be unloaded during runtime, which wasn't possible in the past. In the end the real debate was HOW to accomplish the modularity, not whether to make the kernel modular or not. The modern linux kernel is not as monolithic as it used to be, and has absorbed many of the features of the microkernel.
You can run the kernel with any number of modules according to the functionality that you need, with various levels of dependancy. There are even distributions that remove all of these modules for embedded devices. You still have a kernel that provides a way to speak to the hardware it supports even without the other modules.
Systemd is nothing like this. You cannot run systemd without journald for instance, not simply because of a dependency but due to bad design. There is no reason on earth that an init system would need a specific journal daemon, and yet you cannot run systemd without journald. To use any other journaling software you have to use the output of journald. Thus journald is not separate from systemd in any meaningful term.
And who in their right mind makes a logging daemon write to binary files? That is just retarded. The first thing you look on a machine that has failed in some way is to look at the log, and the tool to look at the log is almost always from another machine that is different than the one you are looking at [because that one is broken, duh]. A technician will use tools that he has on hand, which sometimes is only a text editor, or even just cat. To expect someone to install another piece of software on their machine just so they can see what happened to the server IS JUST FUCKING INSANE.
You perhaps know that one of the reasons slashdot itself (one of the major tech sites on the internet) doesn't support unicode fully is not only due to the laziness of the developers. Gmail until recently also had difficulties. The DNS system as well has all sorts of troubles with the Russian 'a' and the ASCII 'a'. Just selecting through several pages of memory to draw the right symbol is not going to happen without some cost.
"Displaying text and pictures" is not so simple as it may sound. Do you remember the JPEG flaw that was used as an exploit in Internet Explorer?
I'm not against supporting all sorts of character sets, but we can't imagine that it doesn't come without a price and potentially with several possible dangers.
IF Wingdings fonts makes my computer run as slow as molasses and weakens its security, then it is simply a flaw and not a feature. If our beloved web browser programmers however spend more time on implementing emoj than web standards, we have a problem. If they can get it to work without destroying fundamental functionality, I don't really care.
Another reason browsers are way too bloated. This stuff does not come for free. Not to mention the possible security implications. What happens when a malformed emoj is put in the address field? What about in the preferences? What about as a http-header?
Seriously, some features should just not be implemented, just like kids should not be given everything they ask for. Not everything you want is good for you, nor good for the internet.
And get off my lawn.
If you using a lot of terminals, I would suggest using a tiled window manager like i3. New terminal is only a key press away and it is very efficient once you master it.
AKA Publicity Stunt. They are riding the coat-tails of the Sony hack and want everyone to talk about X Box.
If you are using a SSH tunnel or similarly with a VPN, you are already doing 'everything' over SSH, that is to say the whole network connection. Even my X11 server is using it right now.
However HTTP/S, SMTP and the like are protocols, not transport mechanisms.
True, the table is a question of space/accuracy trade-off.
The process of correcting is in the interpolation, which is why I included the additional links in the same thread.
For instance in the simple manner of simple linear interpolation one can interpolate an arbitrary \epsilon between two table values. Repeating this brings us closer to a fixed point. The book that I linked to gives also many other ways of interpolation, as well as the article. It is this interpolation that is the manner of finding increased accuracy.
The article I linked to states that the method that he employs shows a noticeable gain over recalculating the value [though it is not the same function in discussion]. As in most algorithms it depends a lot on what is more important - space or time.
And a nice pdf paper illustrating this technique and its merits
Here is a nice book that we had in our school days illustrating these sorts of techniques
For pow(a,b), [a,b real numbers], you are essentially calculating:
a^b = (e^log(a))^b) or pow(pow(e, log(a)), b) which is e^(b*log(a)) or pow(e, b*log(a)) where e is the base of the natural logarithm.
What you have in your table are the values for e^x and log(x), like any good book of logarithms of ancient times. Precision according to your needs. For quick lookup you can even index the mantissa in a b-tree if your table is huge.
Then it becomes very quick:
step 1: look up log (a) in the table, interpolate if needed.
step 2: calculate b * (value in last step).
step 3: lookup up e^x where x is the value at step 2 in your table, interpolate if needed.
step 4: profit! as you now have your result.
And as a bonus, you are sure the result is within the precision of your table immediately, within the error of your interpolation.
Note that interpolation for exp(x) is quite fast. There are some exotic methods out there as well for interpolating exp(x) and log(x), as per this abstract which are quite efficient if you need high precision. For 10 digit precision you could easily fit both your tables into 8k.
What is perhaps a bit of irony of history, even for humans a lookup table is faster and more precise than manually calculating it via formula. That is why they published books of logarithms. Using interpolation you can even stretch out the precision to several more digits. With a table of values in memory you can also narrow down the inputs to Newton's method and calculate any differentiable function very quickly to an arbitrary precision. With some functions the linear approximation is so close that you can reduce it in just a few cycles.
Even in most trigonometric functions there is a simple table upon which the angle addition formulas are used to get the other values[an old example].
Given the size of most operating systems, where 8k of ram is hardly noticed (most gifs are larger than this), I am actually quite surprised that the lookup table method is not more used. It would seem one of the first things to put in cache on your ALU.
Preach it brother! The whole world should be using BSD!
What is most disconcerting is the enormous amount of waste that Bitcoin produces. Just the amount of computing power wasted in 'mining' is such that the electricity used to run the machine no longer pays itself. When a currency costs more to produce than its worth, there is already an economic crisis and the currency is no viable. For instance, when a dime costs more than $.10 to produce, it will be more worthwhile to actually melt the coin down than actually use it. Bitcoin crossed this barrier quite awhile ago, making it actually more expensive to use than normal currency. When bitcoin cannot guarantee neither anonymity, nor any more security than cash, there is no real reason to use it.
Surely there must be some better way to make a cryptocurrency without the 'proof of work' concept. The original idea of 'proof of work' on which bitcoin is based was actually to prevent spam by making each email cost a few cpu cycles. Now the whole world is just burning cpu/gpu cycles for no other reason than trying to get money for free. Certainly there must be a better way to make financial transactions secure.
Reminds me a bit of the Tulip Mania, but in this case completely separated from any physical good. People are investing in cryptographic hashes of all things, which only have value inasmuch as some people think they do. There is no army paying its soldiers in bitcoin.
Thanks for the information. Volcanoes are amazing things. I remember when Mt. St. Helens erupted. It caused enormous damage and yet not too many things are extinct because of it. To have so many extinctions linked to one timespan seems to indicate something much more than just a series of volcanoes. Of course any life suffering from a cataclysmic event would not be helped by a long series of eruptions.
That should be km^3 of course, silly.
The summary states that over 750,000 years the volcanoes emitted 1.1 E 6 km^2. Over that timespan it doesn't seem like much, a bit more than 1 km^2 a year. This does not seem that significant.
For instance, the Bardarbung volcano in Iceland, which erupted this year, has already produced 1 km^2 of lava, and has no sign of stopping. At that rate, for 750,000 years it would be close to the magnitude of the volcanoes in the summary. And yet the impact of Bardarbung on earthly climate is close to negligible - we are not yet extinct in any case. For an extinction event one would expect something a bit more drastic, it would seem to me.
Some info on Bardarbung here
In Soviet America, voters don't chose their representatives, rather the representatives choose their voters.
Stalin is reported to have said that he takes little account of who votes, but rather it is he who counts the votes that matters. Politics in American have done him proud... it matters not who votes, but where you vote that counts. One vote in a swing state is worth thousands of votes in the so called "safe states". In fact with most districts there isn't even a meaningful contest.
Tyranny by definition is rule without mandate. When less than 50% of the people vote, and of them not all the votes have equal political value, then I think it is safe to state that the USA has perhaps crossed the line into tyranny.
Yet some tyrannies can be quite nice to live in.
I've been using BSD for a long time, both in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is fantastic. I use mostly just plain Xorg and i3 window manager. With emacs, LaTeX and conkeror I can accomplish all that I need to do, and do it efficiently. However you can put as many bells and whistles on your installation as you want. True, you could do that with linux but there are some very important advantages with using FreeBSD:
1/ ZFS file system. This alone is worth switching to FreeBSD. If you don't know what it is, learn how to use it. What is extremely useful is doing "zfs send" of snapshots to another machine. Need more storage? Just add a disk to the pool. ZFS is very much production grade in FreeBSD 10.1.
2/ Jails. These are better than VirtualBox in my humble opinion, but they do have a learning curve. The advantage is putting each jail on a zfs filesystem where you can do snapshots of different stages of your application deployment and if something doesn't work you can simply rollback. Yes, I know you can do this with VMWare and the rest but jails allow me to access the filesystem directly in the command line and in general it is much more intuitive for my work habits. Note that you can also install jails of different flavors - for instance a debian jail where you can run everything just like it is on linux.
VirtualBox works just fine on FreeBSD, but I'll admit I haven't used it much.
3/ General simplicity of the system. Linux is fastly becoming as non-unix like as possible [though to be fair GNU is Not Unix]. Just a simple install of Ubuntu and you will see tons of processes running that you sometimes wonder what they are all up to. This may provide some utility for some people, but most people will never use those features. In FreeBSD I know exactly what each process is doing and it is very easy to turn off or enable as I desire. FreeBSD provides me control because I know the system, and the system is easier to know because it is much simpler and in my opinion more coherently designed.
4/ Much better documentation. FreeBSD (and BSD in general) has a good reputation for providing documentation. Almost everything you need is in the handbook. Also there is a lot of stability in the way things are done. Often in Linux the entire manner of doing things is changed from one version to another. Plus there are no monstrosities like NetworkManager which are opaque and not very well documented.
5/ More secure - a system is only as secure in as much as you know how it is working and what it is doing. In this case FreeBSD is more secure because I know more of what it is doing. With Ubuntu giving web searches every time you try to find a file on your machine, there is just asking for trouble.
6/ The system is more responsive. FreeBSD simple feels more 'alive' in the sense it is doing only what you want it to do. You don't have to wait for that useless application to stop doing what it is doing because it is not there. You don't need to wait for the indexing of the harddrive to give you back control of the system, as you decide when it should be done, etc. But I think even the UI elements are much smoother even on large desktops like KDE. The scrolling of windows for instance seems much more responsive than it is on linux, but that could be due to all sorts of factors.
As to your particular needs:
A/ Minecraft works just fine. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com...
B/ I have no idea, but an acquaintance tells me it works. In the forums they mention FreeBSD so someone must be using it.
C/ Mplayer works just fine, but I've seen a lot of people use VLC.
D/ Firefox works extremely well, though I use Conkeror which is simply a different shell to the same browser.
E/ Flash works with a multiple of different options.
F/ No idea to be honest about OpenRA. If there is source code I'm sure you could get it to run. At the very worst there is a linux-emulation layer.
G/ All the major Desktop Environments are in
A non-extensive List of Reasons why OpenBSD is better than linux:
1/ OpenBSD's mascot is a puffer fish. Puffer fish can kill you. Penguins are simply parasites living on property no one wants anyway.
2/ OpenBSD's project leader has better hygiene than RMS
3/ OpenBSD's project leader is also more dictatorial than Linus
4/ It's BSD which means it has the karma of open source and you don't need lawyers managing each release cycle.
5/ OpenBSD assumes the world is a bad place. Linux is just hoping no one will do something bad.
6/ It doesn't update stuff simply because it can, but because it has to. Linux just updates stuff because they can, and stuff breaks.
Perhaps someone else has something to add?
Seriously, it just works. If you like what you have, keep using it! Not like I'm going to force you to quit using whatever you have.
OpenBSD is fantastic. Thanks to the developers who spend so much time to make it work well!