Personally, I think the HDR screen described, with HDR videos, would be more interesting and immediately useful than the ever-so-commonly-advertised but ever-so-rarely-purchased "3D" screens.
I totally agree -- it's quite clear the consumer electronics industry is thrashing around like crazy trying to find something to convince people to re-buy all their equipment, but the 3d tech they seem to have chosen is so completely "meh" (if not downright "ugh") that it seems almost guaranteed to fail to live up to the hopes they've pinned on it...
HDR display tech, by contrast [haha], works quite well, isn't really all that challenging technically, is well suited to price reduction through mass production, and the additional processing power required to handle the extra bandwidth is probably available these days. It meshes very well with high-definition and can generate the sort of "wow" factor (especially with games!) that they want to sell new equipment.
[It seems like the main technical issue would be a video format. For still images, we've got excellent formats like EXR (read Greg Ward's excellent comparison of HDR image encodings), but I'm not aware of any reduced-bandwidth formats for HDR video (AFAIK, film companies tend to simply store every frame as a separate EXR image).]
But noooooo, "it's 3d for you, sonny, like it or not"...:/
To my dismay, I learned that Lucid doesn't have the g77 package anymore, the gcc compiler suite has been "upgraded" to gfortran. And gfortran does not support the VAX extensions that g77 did.
Luckily there's still a way to install g77 in Lucid using the Hardy repositories, but how long will this last?
Hmm, why not just add the vax extensions to gfortran?
Being able to enter a car wherever you want and exiting it wherever you need is important for a society that believes in globalization. This flexibility is a must, IMO.
Not really. Ultimate flexibility is nice as an abstract goal, but there are always tradeoffs, and they vary by circumstance.
If you live in a dense urban area, but insist that even a 2 minute delay, or a 5 minute walk to a station, or sharing with even one other person or..., is too much you'll end with an unworkable system, simply because there isn't enough room to accomodate that without devoting the majority of your space and resources -- and you'll end up with a less efficient system, and a far less pleasant environment as a result.
But there are intermediate points where even conventional public transportation works very well when implemented efficiently (i.e., not any place in the U.S.), and offers very reasonable convenience -- even if not front-door service -- in a far more efficient manner that actually works without taking over the city.
On the other hand, the network of fuel stations to support private vehicles must be an astounding drain on resources. Also, a car that is used twice a day for an hour is also a very inefficient drain on resources.
... and the vast amounts of land and money devoted to parking and 12 lane roads...
... and the blighted landscapes of endless pavement...
... etc
There surely are new and untried methods that might yield a better set of tradeoffs, but unfortunately it's often very expensive to find out -- as much of the western world discovered after they put all their money into remaking the landscape for the automobile, and then realized that it actually doesn't work so well when everybody uses them...
I think the lesson of all this is that vague feel-good terms like "open" are useless, and even somewhat less vague terms like "standard" are not particularly useful without looking at the details ("standard" is usually a nice thing, all else being equal -- but of course, it's rarely the case that all else is actually equal!).
A second lesson, of course, is that the mainstream standardization process is very, very, broken (OK, we already knew that), and that a serious rethink is in order. That'll never happen, of course, because the entrenched interests are against it, and can afford the persuasion necessary to have their way...
the US government should claim eminent domain on all patents involving the h.264 technology, and then dare the large companies to make a move. After all, we're the ones with the guns.
In that case, can't we just shoot them?
Re:Xfce seems to be a pretty good compromise...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 2
Hmm, things I like about Gnome: (1) gtk, and (2) gnome-panel
Things I don't like about Gnome: Their continuing descent into the abyss
As xfce uses gtk, it's always sort of on my radar as something to use instead of gnome, but in the past their panel has always been a little clunkier and uglier than gnome-panel. I'd always try it out, but go back to gnome after a while.
Gnome 3 is looking pretty awful, so here's hoping for xfce 4.8!
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue: ...blah blah blah...
Naw, you're completely wrong. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it's very much a positive.
In areas where it "works" -- science, engineering, other technical subjects, reference information (e.g. documenting the stations of a country's rail networks) -- Wikipedia has vastly increased the consistency, coverage, and quality of easily-available information on a huge number of subjects. Prior to Wikipedia, even with a good search engine it was much less likely you'd find information on a particular subject, and if you found something, it was often very incomplete and of lower quality, or if high-quality, was often behind a paywall. What's on Wikipedia now is often a little less well-written than a professional reference would be, because of the multiple authors -- but that's in fact often not really a bad thing, because many wikipedia articles end up covering subjects in a way that's approachable to multiple levels of ability (e.g. they'll have sections targeted at experts, and easy examples for novices)
There are other references on technical subjects that are occasionally of higher quality than Wikipedia., but they're balkanized, often less complete even within their specialty simply because of the effort required to be complete, and far, far, more difficult to find in the first place (often the best way is through the references at the bottom of a corresponding Wikipedia page!). Of course these are useful as a sanity check or different of view for the corresponding information in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia's role, of binding together multiple subjects, and covering all the gritty details, is very valuable, and increases the usability and accessibility of these other sources (much as a traditional encyclopedia or survey might for more specialized sources).
Wikipedia is so useful for these technical subjects that I'm not sure what to think about people whining that "Wikipedia is crap!1!", other than they've never actually used it for anything other than looking up "George W Bush" and "abortion"...
Not really true. There are tons of little detail differences that favor FF over chrome.
It's a good thing that they're copying each others' best ideas; they're both still vastly different implementations, produced by very different teams, with different priorities, and will always have many differences.
There are other reasons why "STO" is bad -- primarily, I think, that it gives the code vendors using it a false sense of confidence, and that leads them to focus their manpower on other things. They think "Ok, this code is crap, but nobody can see it, and we'll fix it in the next release; for now we've got to focus on making the GUI shiny!" Of course momentum being momentum, often these problems aren't fixed in the next release, and become more and more entrenched and unfixable over time. [*]
In other words, the emphasis on "sparkly stuff" isn't entirely a coincidence, but rather to some degree a consequence of the proprietary closed-source model.
Of course, FOSS projects also release with crap code that'll "be fixed in the next release," but there's less of an illusion that nobody will notice, so there's more pressure to get it right.
Oddly, when I recently looked at Sony e-readers in the store, all the texts they had loaded onto the thing were actually quite hmm, "dirty" -- the characters didn't have the typical crisp shapes and outlines of electronic text but rather had ragged edges and dropouts all over the place. Maybe they loaded image-pdfs for some reason (presumably because the employee in charge of doing it was too clueless to tell the difference), or maybe there was a problem with the eink hardware.
Easier to remember or not, that really put me off...
Even the cheapest paperback novels I've bought recently were far more legible.
[eink e-readers are much nicer than the ipad or whatever, but still not really good enough.]
The first hit from Bing, by contrast, was some "fixya.com" link, which while the title sounds promising actually seems to contain no information, and instead invites you to "ask the experts"... maybe some sort of paid catch-all link?
So on this at least, I'd say Google: +1 (useful), Bing: -1 (actively misleading)
The term "open" has been abused like this for decades.
I don't know if you remember the "open wars" of the late '80s / early '90s, but pretty much anything and everything was getting re-branded with names like "opencrapola" in an attempt to get good PR ("ooooh, open must be good!") without actually changing anything...
I think the lesson is that vague terms like "open" are cheap, and when they start getting thrown around in an argument, it's often a sign that somebody's trying to pull a fast one. Ignore the names and look at the details, it's the only way to actually get anywhere.
In this case, of course, the "detail" is that H.264 is patent-encumbered to a degree that makes it a non-starter for anybody but a large corporation. If you're OK with all your software coming from large corporations, then great, you can be pro-H.264. If you're not OK with that, then things are more difficult.
Sure it sucks that the current "best" / most-well-supported / standardized codec is (legally) unusable for many, but that's the situation, and we have to figure out a way to deal with that; simply sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la just use h.264 ignore those stupid details la la la" (as seems to be the position of many of my friends) doesn't work.
What Google's doing is important: they certainly can afford to use H.264, but they're sending a signal that the game has changed, and what may have been OK in times past -- patent-encumbered standards blessed by and only really usable by well-funded corporations using a traditional product model -- is no longer acceptable.
Google's looking to the future, not the past, and yeah there may be some discomfort during the transition....
[I have a friend who traded in her iphone for a winphone7, as she was tired of various little annoyances with the iphone. She was initially impressed by "teh shiny" of WP7, but is now talking about going back to the iphone after only a couple of months... (what I notice is only that the sound quality is much worse when I call her; maybe that's a hardware issue though).]
Maybe the web just wasn't what a lot of people needed. A lot of people want Facebook as a medium for communication.
On the whole, I think most of this discussion is a false analogy. Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable. The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them. Facebook is, however. And while there are few, and mostly inferior alternatives to it, it will remain large.
I don't think that's really true. While a facebook-style social-networking site may be different than "the web" in general, there have been many social networking sites that had the same basic advantages, and failed hard (e.g. myspace). The concept of a social network may be solid -- but it doesn't have to be facebook.
I've been watching FB for many years, starting back when they were "college only", and it's clear that they know this, which is why they keep doing huge revamps of the site. They've been doing this constantly since the beginning, and it almost always annoys a lot of people, but apparently they figure it's better to annoy people than end up becoming "yesterday's site."
So far they've actually managed to pull this off, but it seems a delicate dance in some ways. The bigger FB the site gets, the harder it is to periodically change the way everything works, and the more conservative and slower-moving FB the company becomes.
While FB is super popular and has the users right now, it isn't a particularly good site, and there's ample room for somebody to do it better. Of course they have to be sufficiently better because of FB's dominance, but the opportunity remains for somebody to really do things right, and be "the Google of social sites" (the reason Google managed to dominate the search market is because they simply did it vastly better than everybody else).
[Of course a social-site lives by its connections, unlike a search site (where every use is mostly independent); but perhaps a competitor could scrape FB to try and bootstrap users and their connections and offer a "sync with FB" feature or something until they reach a critical mass, similarly to how FB and others will use your email address-list to add friends.]
I had a similar but opposite experience some years ago when I switched from ATI to NVidia. Is ATI actually working better than NVidia again? My card works great for it's age but my hardware is pretty old. Back when I preferred ATI I remember shelling out money for a few cards while never getting 3D acceleration to work decently. Finally I switched to NVidia. I don't want to risk buying 3 cards to finally end up with a working one again. Should I try AMD/ATI?
It's not just whether the ATI closed source drivers are a little better right now -- it's that ATI (AMD) chose the right route for the future, whereas Nvidia dug in its heels, stuck its fingers in its ears, and chanted "la la la la I can't hear you." That means that ATI/AMD GPUs will be far better integrated into the FOSS infrastructure in a few years, will be far more portable to many environments, and far less dependent on the whims of the market and dodgy closed-source coding practices.
If ATI's closed source drivers are also better at the moment, that's just gravy (though important gravy for many people). It's nice when you don't have to choose between long-term correctness and short-term convenience!
Current Wikipedia article text on her:
"... is an American adult model, comedian, actress, author, and activist/murderer whose ardent anti-vaccine quackery has doomed an unknown number of children to painful deaths by otherwise controllable diseases." [Emphasis mine]
Lovely.
Honestly, I don't care if there are 800,000 alcohol-related road fatalities each year. That would be incredibly unfortunate but freedom is worth that and then some, even if I end up among those 800,000. I'd rather retain the freedoms that many great men have fought and died for. The cowards who will surrender liberty for promises of safety are not worthy to lick the boots of those who understood the value of freedom. I am willing to take my chances with a few more drunks on the road. I consider that far less of a threat than the unchecked police power of the state, and history backs me up on this one without question.
I presume there are other solutions to the "lots of idiots driving out there" problem anyway, e.g. "negative" solutions like much harsher penalties for DUI convictions, more stringent requirements for driving licenses, etc (these may be politically harder to implement, but of course the idea is to make people take driving more seriously, and not just consider it something they do without thinking); and "positive" solutions like much stronger support for a decent public transit system (may be problematic due to cultural and historical issues in the U.S.), etc. But things are definitely messed up.
[I'm quite shocked by the blase attitude many people seem to have towards driving after drinking in the U.S.; I'm constantly hearing stories from friends in the states about how they went to a party/bar/etc and then drove home afterwards "but it's OK 'cause the driver only had a few drinks"...]
So we have 3 tablets listed in the summary. I haven't looked at the full article, but are we to conclude that tablets just suck?
I suppose they probably have approximately the same suckage rate as non-tablets, but the extreme amount of hype they received makes them tempting targets to bring down a notch or two.
(I was in a cafe today, and there was a guy next to me with both a laptop and an ipad -- and he spent 80% of his time typing (quite awkwardly) on the ipad. It was very hard not to smack him...)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think the HDR screen described, with HDR videos, would be more interesting and immediately useful than the ever-so-commonly-advertised but ever-so-rarely-purchased "3D" screens.
I totally agree -- it's quite clear the consumer electronics industry is thrashing around like crazy trying to find something to convince people to re-buy all their equipment, but the 3d tech they seem to have chosen is so completely "meh" (if not downright "ugh") that it seems almost guaranteed to fail to live up to the hopes they've pinned on it...
HDR display tech, by contrast [haha], works quite well, isn't really all that challenging technically, is well suited to price reduction through mass production, and the additional processing power required to handle the extra bandwidth is probably available these days. It meshes very well with high-definition and can generate the sort of "wow" factor (especially with games!) that they want to sell new equipment.
[It seems like the main technical issue would be a video format. For still images, we've got excellent formats like EXR (read Greg Ward's excellent comparison of HDR image encodings), but I'm not aware of any reduced-bandwidth formats for HDR video (AFAIK, film companies tend to simply store every frame as a separate EXR image).]
But noooooo, "it's 3d for you, sonny, like it or not"... :/
Exactly. I'm still pissed off that my Microsoft Bob certification didn't pay off.
Protip: You know those black thick-rimmed glasses you got with your bob cert? Wearing those will earn you instant respect at any Apple Store!
To my dismay, I learned that Lucid doesn't have the g77 package anymore, the gcc compiler suite has been "upgraded" to gfortran. And gfortran does not support the VAX extensions that g77 did.
Luckily there's still a way to install g77 in Lucid using the Hardy repositories, but how long will this last?
Hmm, why not just add the vax extensions to gfortran?
Being able to enter a car wherever you want and exiting it wherever you need is important for a society that believes in globalization. This flexibility is a must, IMO.
Not really. Ultimate flexibility is nice as an abstract goal, but there are always tradeoffs, and they vary by circumstance.
If you live in a dense urban area, but insist that even a 2 minute delay, or a 5 minute walk to a station, or sharing with even one other person or ..., is too much you'll end with an unworkable system, simply because there isn't enough room to accomodate that without devoting the majority of your space and resources -- and you'll end up with a less efficient system, and a far less pleasant environment as a result.
But there are intermediate points where even conventional public transportation works very well when implemented efficiently (i.e., not any place in the U.S.), and offers very reasonable convenience -- even if not front-door service -- in a far more efficient manner that actually works without taking over the city.
On the other hand, the network of fuel stations to support private vehicles must be an astounding drain on resources. Also, a car that is used twice a day for an hour is also a very inefficient drain on resources.
... and the vast amounts of land and money devoted to parking and 12 lane roads... ...
... and the blighted landscapes of endless pavement
... etc
There surely are new and untried methods that might yield a better set of tradeoffs, but unfortunately it's often very expensive to find out -- as much of the western world discovered after they put all their money into remaking the landscape for the automobile, and then realized that it actually doesn't work so well when everybody uses them...
I think the lesson of all this is that vague feel-good terms like "open" are useless, and even somewhat less vague terms like "standard" are not particularly useful without looking at the details ("standard" is usually a nice thing, all else being equal -- but of course, it's rarely the case that all else is actually equal!).
A second lesson, of course, is that the mainstream standardization process is very, very, broken (OK, we already knew that), and that a serious rethink is in order. That'll never happen, of course, because the entrenched interests are against it, and can afford the persuasion necessary to have their way...
the US government should claim eminent domain on all patents involving the h.264 technology, and then dare the large companies to make a move.
After all, we're the ones with the guns.
In that case, can't we just shoot them?
Hmm, things I like about Gnome: (1) gtk, and (2) gnome-panel
Things I don't like about Gnome: Their continuing descent into the abyss
As xfce uses gtk, it's always sort of on my radar as something to use instead of gnome, but in the past their panel has always been a little clunkier and uglier than gnome-panel. I'd always try it out, but go back to gnome after a while.
Gnome 3 is looking pretty awful, so here's hoping for xfce 4.8!
I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue:
...blah blah blah...
good luck with that.
Naw, you're completely wrong. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it's very much a positive.
In areas where it "works" -- science, engineering, other technical subjects, reference information (e.g. documenting the stations of a country's rail networks) -- Wikipedia has vastly increased the consistency, coverage, and quality of easily-available information on a huge number of subjects. Prior to Wikipedia, even with a good search engine it was much less likely you'd find information on a particular subject, and if you found something, it was often very incomplete and of lower quality, or if high-quality, was often behind a paywall. What's on Wikipedia now is often a little less well-written than a professional reference would be, because of the multiple authors -- but that's in fact often not really a bad thing, because many wikipedia articles end up covering subjects in a way that's approachable to multiple levels of ability (e.g. they'll have sections targeted at experts, and easy examples for novices)
There are other references on technical subjects that are occasionally of higher quality than Wikipedia., but they're balkanized, often less complete even within their specialty simply because of the effort required to be complete, and far, far, more difficult to find in the first place (often the best way is through the references at the bottom of a corresponding Wikipedia page!). Of course these are useful as a sanity check or different of view for the corresponding information in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia's role, of binding together multiple subjects, and covering all the gritty details, is very valuable, and increases the usability and accessibility of these other sources (much as a traditional encyclopedia or survey might for more specialized sources).
Wikipedia is so useful for these technical subjects that I'm not sure what to think about people whining that "Wikipedia is crap!1!", other than they've never actually used it for anything other than looking up "George W Bush" and "abortion"...
I love the awesome bar; the name is really the only problem with it. [It's also vastly better than chrome's poor copy of it...]
Not really true. There are tons of little detail differences that favor FF over chrome.
It's a good thing that they're copying each others' best ideas; they're both still vastly different implementations, produced by very different teams, with different priorities, and will always have many differences.
There are other reasons why "STO" is bad -- primarily, I think, that it gives the code vendors using it a false sense of confidence, and that leads them to focus their manpower on other things. They think "Ok, this code is crap, but nobody can see it, and we'll fix it in the next release; for now we've got to focus on making the GUI shiny!" Of course momentum being momentum, often these problems aren't fixed in the next release, and become more and more entrenched and unfixable over time. [*]
In other words, the emphasis on "sparkly stuff" isn't entirely a coincidence, but rather to some degree a consequence of the proprietary closed-source model.
Of course, FOSS projects also release with crap code that'll "be fixed in the next release," but there's less of an illusion that nobody will notice, so there's more pressure to get it right.
[*] this is based on painful experience
Oddly, when I recently looked at Sony e-readers in the store, all the texts they had loaded onto the thing were actually quite hmm, "dirty" -- the characters didn't have the typical crisp shapes and outlines of electronic text but rather had ragged edges and dropouts all over the place. Maybe they loaded image-pdfs for some reason (presumably because the employee in charge of doing it was too clueless to tell the difference), or maybe there was a problem with the eink hardware.
Easier to remember or not, that really put me off...
Even the cheapest paperback novels I've bought recently were far more legible.
[eink e-readers are much nicer than the ipad or whatever, but still not really good enough.]
My first result from Google was this: www.frigidaire.com > All Products > Kitchen > Refrigerators > FPHC2398LF, which seems pretty reasonable (there's a button on that page for "guides and manuals").
The first hit from Bing, by contrast, was some "fixya.com" link, which while the title sounds promising actually seems to contain no information, and instead invites you to "ask the experts"... maybe some sort of paid catch-all link?
So on this at least, I'd say Google: +1 (useful), Bing: -1 (actively misleading)
The term "open" has been abused like this for decades.
I don't know if you remember the "open wars" of the late '80s / early '90s, but pretty much anything and everything was getting re-branded with names like "opencrapola" in an attempt to get good PR ("ooooh, open must be good!") without actually changing anything...
I think the lesson is that vague terms like "open" are cheap, and when they start getting thrown around in an argument, it's often a sign that somebody's trying to pull a fast one. Ignore the names and look at the details, it's the only way to actually get anywhere.
In this case, of course, the "detail" is that H.264 is patent-encumbered to a degree that makes it a non-starter for anybody but a large corporation. If you're OK with all your software coming from large corporations, then great, you can be pro-H.264. If you're not OK with that, then things are more difficult.
Sure it sucks that the current "best" / most-well-supported / standardized codec is (legally) unusable for many, but that's the situation, and we have to figure out a way to deal with that; simply sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la just use h.264 ignore those stupid details la la la" (as seems to be the position of many of my friends) doesn't work.
What Google's doing is important: they certainly can afford to use H.264, but they're sending a signal that the game has changed, and what may have been OK in times past -- patent-encumbered standards blessed by and only really usable by well-funded corporations using a traditional product model -- is no longer acceptable.
Google's looking to the future, not the past, and yeah there may be some discomfort during the transition....
I think it's kind of cool that he manages to successfully be both a serious researcher and a serious crackpot at the same time... :]
Isn't the MS-only analogue of OpenCL/CUDA "DirectCompute"?
OpenCL is clearly the portable choice, but I presume Microsoft will try to gimp that on Windows to encourage people to use DirectCompute.
Is it that bad? Again?
But this time it has teh shiny!1!
[I have a friend who traded in her iphone for a winphone7, as she was tired of various little annoyances with the iphone. She was initially impressed by "teh shiny" of WP7, but is now talking about going back to the iphone after only a couple of months... (what I notice is only that the sound quality is much worse when I call her; maybe that's a hardware issue though).]
Maybe the web just wasn't what a lot of people needed. A lot of people want Facebook as a medium for communication.
On the whole, I think most of this discussion is a false analogy. Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable. The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them. Facebook is, however. And while there are few, and mostly inferior alternatives to it, it will remain large.
I don't think that's really true. While a facebook-style social-networking site may be different than "the web" in general, there have been many social networking sites that had the same basic advantages, and failed hard (e.g. myspace). The concept of a social network may be solid -- but it doesn't have to be facebook.
I've been watching FB for many years, starting back when they were "college only", and it's clear that they know this, which is why they keep doing huge revamps of the site. They've been doing this constantly since the beginning, and it almost always annoys a lot of people, but apparently they figure it's better to annoy people than end up becoming "yesterday's site."
So far they've actually managed to pull this off, but it seems a delicate dance in some ways. The bigger FB the site gets, the harder it is to periodically change the way everything works, and the more conservative and slower-moving FB the company becomes.
While FB is super popular and has the users right now, it isn't a particularly good site, and there's ample room for somebody to do it better. Of course they have to be sufficiently better because of FB's dominance, but the opportunity remains for somebody to really do things right, and be "the Google of social sites" (the reason Google managed to dominate the search market is because they simply did it vastly better than everybody else).
[Of course a social-site lives by its connections, unlike a search site (where every use is mostly independent); but perhaps a competitor could scrape FB to try and bootstrap users and their connections and offer a "sync with FB" feature or something until they reach a critical mass, similarly to how FB and others will use your email address-list to add friends.]
I had a similar but opposite experience some years ago when I switched from ATI to NVidia. Is ATI actually working better than NVidia again? My card works great for it's age but my hardware is pretty old. Back when I preferred ATI I remember shelling out money for a few cards while never getting 3D acceleration to work decently. Finally I switched to NVidia. I don't want to risk buying 3 cards to finally end up with a working one again. Should I try AMD/ATI?
It's not just whether the ATI closed source drivers are a little better right now -- it's that ATI (AMD) chose the right route for the future, whereas Nvidia dug in its heels, stuck its fingers in its ears, and chanted "la la la la I can't hear you." That means that ATI/AMD GPUs will be far better integrated into the FOSS infrastructure in a few years, will be far more portable to many environments, and far less dependent on the whims of the market and dodgy closed-source coding practices.
If ATI's closed source drivers are also better at the moment, that's just gravy (though important gravy for many people). It's nice when you don't have to choose between long-term correctness and short-term convenience!
Current Wikipedia article text on her: "... is an American adult model, comedian, actress, author, and activist/murderer whose ardent anti-vaccine quackery has doomed an unknown number of children to painful deaths by otherwise controllable diseases." [Emphasis mine] Lovely.
Of course that text was quickly removed by whoever, but here's a link to the appropriate version of the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jenny_McCarthy&oldid=406291290
Honestly, I don't care if there are 800,000 alcohol-related road fatalities each year. That would be incredibly unfortunate but freedom is worth that and then some, even if I end up among those 800,000. I'd rather retain the freedoms that many great men have fought and died for. The cowards who will surrender liberty for promises of safety are not worthy to lick the boots of those who understood the value of freedom. I am willing to take my chances with a few more drunks on the road. I consider that far less of a threat than the unchecked police power of the state, and history backs me up on this one without question.
I presume there are other solutions to the "lots of idiots driving out there" problem anyway, e.g. "negative" solutions like much harsher penalties for DUI convictions, more stringent requirements for driving licenses, etc (these may be politically harder to implement, but of course the idea is to make people take driving more seriously, and not just consider it something they do without thinking); and "positive" solutions like much stronger support for a decent public transit system (may be problematic due to cultural and historical issues in the U.S.), etc. But things are definitely messed up.
[I'm quite shocked by the blase attitude many people seem to have towards driving after drinking in the U.S.; I'm constantly hearing stories from friends in the states about how they went to a party/bar/etc and then drove home afterwards "but it's OK 'cause the driver only had a few drinks"...]
So we have 3 tablets listed in the summary. I haven't looked at the full article, but are we to conclude that tablets just suck?
I suppose they probably have approximately the same suckage rate as non-tablets, but the extreme amount of hype they received makes them tempting targets to bring down a notch or two.
(I was in a cafe today, and there was a guy next to me with both a laptop and an ipad -- and he spent 80% of his time typing (quite awkwardly) on the ipad. It was very hard not to smack him...)
So how does this relate/compare to BOINC...? I gather one doesn't want to run both of them simultaneously...
Modded "troll"?! How on earth was that a troll?