On the other hand, macadame roads are a time-tested technology. Although they don't make it possible to run around in high speeds they are one of the best road technologies developed up to this day.
MacAdam roads: because 40MPH should be enough for anyone.
Yeah, no kidding. And it's not like I was *endorsing* our current system or anything, just pointing out that the American economy really is built on nothing but IP these days.
While I agree with everyone else the Pirate Bay trial was a fiasco, that doesn't mean that a world with no IP laws would necessarily be any better than our current one.
I can't believe he admitted it. "After all, US copyright-based industries continue to be one of America's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors."
Next thing you know he'll say, "And if they won't buy our opium, we will sail our ironclads right into their harbours and open up their markets, whether they like it or not."
+1 for the Opium Wars reference. Most people don't realize jolly old England went to war to sell its drugs and buy its tea.
But Hatch is right as well. All America really has these days is its intellectual property rights. We design and engineer a product here, then we send it over to China to make it for us. Or we design and engineer a pop singer, and have China press copies of their DVDs and CDs for us. China is bad enough as it is - if there were no IP laws at all (or whatever anarchistic fantasy world the Pirate Bay people are living it), America's economy would go belly-up.
Accelerando by Charlie Strauss is a great work of fiction, and the early bit of the book argues this point very well, though from the opposite point of view (the main character argues we should move to a total freedom hippie society).
It's not a myth. The top 10 games are all made by Nintendo itself.
The Wii is flooded with crap 3rd party games (shelves of nothing but shovelware at my local Gamestop). Quality control on the XBox360 and PS3 seems to result in better 3rd party games.
I don't buy any games for the Wii any more I've been burned so many times. Who would have thought that a Super Monkey Ball game could have been so terribly bad? But it was.
>>If you're really good, you can wrap it all in C and includes to bring in Fortran libs, but why bother for an undergrad's first course?
For a first course? No. They taught C/C++ to CS people as their first language when I was at UCSD (now, Java), but Fortran to non-CS majors. I think it was intentional - the number of people wanting to keep doing programming after being exposed to Fortran as their first programming language ever was trivial, and the major was impacted.
But then again, Fortran code being called from a C program was how most of the programs I worked with were structured at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, so it's really not a bad idea to teach students how to call code from other languages.
Incorrect!!!!! I'm at work right now and can't get to it, but I have the US Department of Education statistics (through 2006) breakdown of Internet access in schools. The lowest access demographic is still near 95%. That means, on the average, the WORST demographic in the US still has a 95% access rate.
Sure, that doesn't do anything for that other 5% without access, but it's time to move beyond the myth of the "digital divide".
The digital divide is both truth and fiction. Truth in that I am really serious about backcountry schools having to provide showers to students here in "affluent" San Diego County because they can't shower where they live. Internet access in these families is - as you can imagine - trivially low. Fiction in that kids that don't have computers at home really aren't hurt very much when it comes to "computer literacy" skills. Honestly, it doesn't take long to learn to use a computer, and kids pick it up no problem even if they don't have a computer with internet access in their house.
But I wasn't talking about internet access in schools. I was talking about internet access in the *home*. As someone who has written numerous grants for various school districts in San Diego and Imperial Counties, I'm quite aware of the pretty severe needs kids in these districts have. What benefit are e-textbooks to kids if there is one computer per classroom? Do you seriously want just one kid to be able to read at a time? And only in school, not after school (since he has to take the bus home) or at home?
Without internet access, you lose a lot of the value-added of electronic textbooks ( Textbooks cost about $10 per student per class/subject per year, IIRC. So let's call it $50/kid/year. If we say a $100 OLPC lasts about 4 years (accounting for theft and damage), that'a $25 per year. How much are the licensing fees for textbooks? If it's less than $5/subject/year then it's a win.
But reading from an LCD is inferior to reading from paper. A Kindle is more readable, but also more expensive. It probably would work out to more than paper texts.
The "Not everybody has access to the internet" argument works in 3'rd world contries, but not in the USA, Everybody DOES have access to the internet, even those who don't have access to a fancy laptop.
Incorrect. My mother wrote and ran the Borderlink Project (http://www.borderlink.org/), which was a multi-million dollar technology grant for the rural and needy areas of southern California. Believe it or not, most of socal doesn't look like the OC - at some of the schools she worked with (near Warner Springs), the schools opened early so that kids could come to school early to take showers. 3rd world countries, indeed.
And if you're making the logical connection that kids that don't have showers, who live 30 miles away from the school up backcountry roads, don't have internet access, why, you'd be right. From what I remember working with a school district in Calexico (in the desert near the border), home computer access was around 30%, with around 60% having TV (and a slightly lower number having a Playstation or similar system), and 80% with phones.
I don't see how these kids would benefit at all from electronic textbooks. While I never really read my textbooks when I was in school, I think that students at least should be guaranteed access to the texts.
i read somewhere about a pilot flying an empty cargo plane (large-size jet, iirc) back who put it through a vertical loop (vomit-comet style) just for fun. seriously annoyed the company, as it knocked a few thousand hours off the lifespan of the plane.
Pilots in the airforce do this kind of stuff all the time. My colonel once had a fighter try to steal his landing approach when he was flying an empty cargo plane. Empty those things have tons of lift, so he threw the plane on its side and outturned the fighter to make the landing.
And like those scenes in Top Gun: When my dad was in Thailand during the Vietnam War, they got a new general in at Kurat AFB, and marshalled the whole base for this formal ceremony. Right in the middle of it, an F-4 pilot buzzed the crowd at a very low altitude (the general on the stage hit the deck). Nobody could figure out who did it ("oh, sorry sir, all the planes were in the hangar that day"), so the guy was never caught. But then again, they didn't try very hard either, since that's the culture in the Air Force.
>>I did take some exception to the term "battle-hardened" - a fair percentage of pilots who go through serious air emergencies end up dead, and since so few emergencies happen few pilots are experienced with them.
Pilots put in a lot of time on simulators, in which they are trained to deal with emergency situations, faulty sensors, etc.
Autopilots are, at best, well tested software. I took a course in fault tolerant designs, and that was enough for me to subscribe to the Boeing point of view instead of the Airbus one. It takes an amazing amount of effort to get software relatively bug-free, and even then, edge conditions that people haven't though of can cause your software to fault.
A crash in Microsoft Windows is not serious. Autopilot software behaving badly is.
>>Your fat ass will stay in its seat as will those of the hundreds of people you think would follow you in your playstation-fantasy of a situation. One day when you're in a real life/death situation you'll find it's not quite as easy as your slashdot-keyboard-aloofness suggests.
I was jumped a couple times when I was a teenager, and my fight or flight reflex is definitely set to fight. The fact that I'm 6'6" and have been doing martial arts for 10 years is just gravy on the cake. I wouldn't want to fight a guy with a gun, and I've done enough work with knives to be pretty cautious of them, but an X-acto knife? Come on, dude. And even knife wounds are better than being pancaked into a skyscraper.
Besides, actual examples (you know, in "real life") show that you're wrong. People are no longer willing to sit back and watch terrorists hijack a plane. There's been a lot of cases of passengers wrestling people to the ground, you just don't hear about them as much because the press only talks about security failures, not security successes, which biases our opinion on the matter.
As for the guy saying he'd trust strongbad's email because it had been hacked recently... I'll give you a hint. It was modded "funny".
The gameplay footage was really quite interesting, but I'd give good odds that within a week of release people will have identified thousands of common words that don't work with it, or have found one word (jetpack?) that lets you solve all levels.
>>No, they'd kill one flight attendant, then grab another one by the neck and ask "Who wants to come up and be next."
Have you SEEN a box cutter? They're x-acto knives, dude. If some terrorist has hijacked my plane by shouting at the pilot through the security door that he can't get through now, and the pilot is - what? - intimidated into steering into a skyscraper (think about why this doesn't make sense) AND is waving a box cutter with a 3/4th inch blade sticking out of it, then fuck yeah I'm taking the guy on, and there'll be another hundred people behind me in case I go down with a minor laceration to the arm or something.
The other guy is right - there's been a culture change on our airplanes after 9/11. Prior to it, the idea was to stay cool and let the terrorists land and try to get their money. After it, you have a hundred angry passengers trying to take you down.
I'm sorry you like the phrase "security theatre" so much, but think about the case of the Shoe Bomber. YES, we have the stupid fucking policy of "take off your shoes through security" which is probably the single biggest factor in the slow lines we have now, but, from Wikipedia, "The 6 foot 4 inch (193 cm) Reid was eventually subdued by other passengers on the airliner, using plastic handcuffs, seatbelt extensions, and headphone cords."
But don't let facts get in the way of your nice, pat, theory that you read somewhere.
>>How about the "Super-Hyper-Colossal-Magnetoresistence Effect?"
Yeah, they were really short sided when they skipped directly from "giant" to "colossal". As all nerds know, the progression goes: Fine -> Diminutive -> Tiny -> Small -> Medium -> Large -> Huge -> Gargantuan -> Colossal.
Since giants are Huge, the next step up in technology would be Gargantuan.
>>Final Fantasy VII was arguably the most popular of the Final Fantasy series.
Sure, because it hit new markets (the PS2 and the PC) for the first time, and was the first really big JRPG to hit the American consciousness since FF1 and FF2 (US name) back in the 80s.
That doesn't mean it's good, and it doesn't change the fact that it was one of the most linear craptastic games of all time. Essentially a movie with long tedious bouts of gameplay in between with absolutely no challenge (I didn't die once in the game, except when trying the optional encounters). It was so linear that unlocking a "foo" to get to the "bar" was only good for that one hop, and you'll be damned if you try and do anything else with it: Game: You have the jeep! Do you: 1) Cross the river or 2) Stay where you are. User: 1. Game: You have the jeep! Do you: 1) Enter Cosmo Canyon or 2) Try to drive past. User: 2! Game: Sorry! Your jeep has broken down! You must enter Cosmo Canyon for repairs. User: *&!^
The music was the best part.
Note to Slashdot editors: It's spelled Nobuo Uematsu, not Nobu.
After FPS of course. And load speeds make a big impact on real life (i.e. not benchmarked) gameplay. You wander in Crysis to a new part of the island at high speed, the game doesn't have time to page everything in, and the game gets real choppy, real fast, regardless of your 10xSLI video array that needs to be powered by a portable nuclear reactor.
That and the fact that waiting a couple minutes for a level to load kills a lot of the fun.
>>That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console.
Yeah. The fact that the top mods are often head and shoulders better than the original game helps as well. =)
Like I said, I'm still playing Quake 1, and have a library of older games (Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo 2) that I've been itching to play again after reading about some of the mods for them.
>According to some studies, properly inflated tires can save 1% to 2% of the 145 billion gallons of oil we use each year.
According to other studies, they make a negligible difference. And nobody is arguing that properly inflated tired aren't a good thing. Why not?
The point I was making was that there is a substantial difference between "reducing oil usage" and "reducing foreign oil usage". We can eliminate all foreign oil from our country, with negligible cost, but we don't have the political will to do so.
>>That savings alone, small as it seems, matches the projected amount increase of opening up offshore drilling.
>>In a deeply censored regime, there are no unblocked ports, and all traffic which looks encrypted is blocked, and perhaps illegal.
I've always been curious what "regimes" these are. In China, I could go to an internet cafe and ssh back to my box in San Diego, and if they allow that, I don't really see what the point of steno is.
In a country like Burma, they tend to just shut down the entire internet when the citizenry get "uppity".
It's an interesting distinction too. While most other Republicans were shouting, "reduce dependence on foreign oil", the REP was shouting, "reduce dependence on oil." But that distinction made them RINOs. Go figure. Yeah, because reducing the amount of oil we consume is a hard problem. Reducing the amount of foreign oil we consume is an easy problem. With our coal, oil shale and untapped oil reserves, there's no excuse for us to be funding problems in the Middle East.
Fast boot speeds and load times, man, are the holy grail for PC gaming. When SSDs fall enough in price that they're remotely competitive, I'm slapping a SSD RAID0 into my box.
As it is, my 2x7200RPM RAID0 from late 2004 still outperforms a single SSD drive in my SiSoft benchmarks, so I'm happy for now.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, macadame roads are a time-tested technology. Although they don't make it possible to run around in high speeds they are one of the best road technologies developed up to this day.
MacAdam roads: because 40MPH should be enough for anyone.
>>Mods: -1 Flamebait is not a disagree mod.
Yeah, no kidding. And it's not like I was *endorsing* our current system or anything, just pointing out that the American economy really is built on nothing but IP these days.
While I agree with everyone else the Pirate Bay trial was a fiasco, that doesn't mean that a world with no IP laws would necessarily be any better than our current one.
I can't believe he admitted it. "After all, US copyright-based industries continue to be one of America's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors."
Next thing you know he'll say, "And if they won't buy our opium, we will sail our ironclads right into their harbours and open up their markets, whether they like it or not."
+1 for the Opium Wars reference. Most people don't realize jolly old England went to war to sell its drugs and buy its tea.
But Hatch is right as well. All America really has these days is its intellectual property rights. We design and engineer a product here, then we send it over to China to make it for us. Or we design and engineer a pop singer, and have China press copies of their DVDs and CDs for us. China is bad enough as it is - if there were no IP laws at all (or whatever anarchistic fantasy world the Pirate Bay people are living it), America's economy would go belly-up.
Accelerando by Charlie Strauss is a great work of fiction, and the early bit of the book argues this point very well, though from the opposite point of view (the main character argues we should move to a total freedom hippie society).
I taught this dam myth was put to rest already, The wii is selling games, a lot of games in fact see here: http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Wii#Best-selling_video_games
It's not a myth. The top 10 games are all made by Nintendo itself.
The Wii is flooded with crap 3rd party games (shelves of nothing but shovelware at my local Gamestop). Quality control on the XBox360 and PS3 seems to result in better 3rd party games.
I don't buy any games for the Wii any more I've been burned so many times. Who would have thought that a Super Monkey Ball game could have been so terribly bad? But it was.
>>If you're really good, you can wrap it all in C and includes to bring in Fortran libs, but why bother for an undergrad's first course?
For a first course? No. They taught C/C++ to CS people as their first language when I was at UCSD (now, Java), but Fortran to non-CS majors. I think it was intentional - the number of people wanting to keep doing programming after being exposed to Fortran as their first programming language ever was trivial, and the major was impacted.
But then again, Fortran code being called from a C program was how most of the programs I worked with were structured at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, so it's really not a bad idea to teach students how to call code from other languages.
Just maybe not in their first class, ever.
Tom Lehrer is God?
Hmm, at least that explains the pornographic stained glass windows...
Incorrect!!!!! I'm at work right now and can't get to it, but I have the US Department of Education statistics (through 2006) breakdown of Internet access in schools. The lowest access demographic is still near 95%. That means, on the average, the WORST demographic in the US still has a 95% access rate.
Sure, that doesn't do anything for that other 5% without access, but it's time to move beyond the myth of the "digital divide".
The digital divide is both truth and fiction. Truth in that I am really serious about backcountry schools having to provide showers to students here in "affluent" San Diego County because they can't shower where they live. Internet access in these families is - as you can imagine - trivially low. Fiction in that kids that don't have computers at home really aren't hurt very much when it comes to "computer literacy" skills. Honestly, it doesn't take long to learn to use a computer, and kids pick it up no problem even if they don't have a computer with internet access in their house.
But I wasn't talking about internet access in schools. I was talking about internet access in the *home*. As someone who has written numerous grants for various school districts in San Diego and Imperial Counties, I'm quite aware of the pretty severe needs kids in these districts have. What benefit are e-textbooks to kids if there is one computer per classroom? Do you seriously want just one kid to be able to read at a time? And only in school, not after school (since he has to take the bus home) or at home?
Without internet access, you lose a lot of the value-added of electronic textbooks (
Textbooks cost about $10 per student per class/subject per year, IIRC. So let's call it $50/kid/year. If we say a $100 OLPC lasts about 4 years (accounting for theft and damage), that'a $25 per year. How much are the licensing fees for textbooks? If it's less than $5/subject/year then it's a win.
But reading from an LCD is inferior to reading from paper. A Kindle is more readable, but also more expensive. It probably would work out to more than paper texts.
The "Not everybody has access to the internet" argument works in 3'rd world contries, but not in the USA, Everybody DOES have access to the internet, even those who don't have access to a fancy laptop.
Incorrect. My mother wrote and ran the Borderlink Project (http://www.borderlink.org/), which was a multi-million dollar technology grant for the rural and needy areas of southern California. Believe it or not, most of socal doesn't look like the OC - at some of the schools she worked with (near Warner Springs), the schools opened early so that kids could come to school early to take showers. 3rd world countries, indeed.
And if you're making the logical connection that kids that don't have showers, who live 30 miles away from the school up backcountry roads, don't have internet access, why, you'd be right. From what I remember working with a school district in Calexico (in the desert near the border), home computer access was around 30%, with around 60% having TV (and a slightly lower number having a Playstation or similar system), and 80% with phones.
I don't see how these kids would benefit at all from electronic textbooks. While I never really read my textbooks when I was in school, I think that students at least should be guaranteed access to the texts.
>>A computer controlled system might have nosed down to get airspeed and saved 50 lives.
On a related note, Airbus has since patched the speed sensors on the A330. So it's not always a win to have computers running in hazardous situations.
i read somewhere about a pilot flying an empty cargo plane (large-size jet, iirc) back who put it through a vertical loop (vomit-comet style) just for fun. seriously annoyed the company, as it knocked a few thousand hours off the lifespan of the plane.
Pilots in the airforce do this kind of stuff all the time. My colonel once had a fighter try to steal his landing approach when he was flying an empty cargo plane. Empty those things have tons of lift, so he threw the plane on its side and outturned the fighter to make the landing.
And like those scenes in Top Gun:
When my dad was in Thailand during the Vietnam War, they got a new general in at Kurat AFB, and marshalled the whole base for this formal ceremony. Right in the middle of it, an F-4 pilot buzzed the crowd at a very low altitude (the general on the stage hit the deck). Nobody could figure out who did it ("oh, sorry sir, all the planes were in the hangar that day"), so the guy was never caught. But then again, they didn't try very hard either, since that's the culture in the Air Force.
>>I did take some exception to the term "battle-hardened" - a fair percentage of pilots who go through serious air emergencies end up dead, and since so few emergencies happen few pilots are experienced with them.
Pilots put in a lot of time on simulators, in which they are trained to deal with emergency situations, faulty sensors, etc.
Autopilots are, at best, well tested software. I took a course in fault tolerant designs, and that was enough for me to subscribe to the Boeing point of view instead of the Airbus one. It takes an amazing amount of effort to get software relatively bug-free, and even then, edge conditions that people haven't though of can cause your software to fault.
A crash in Microsoft Windows is not serious. Autopilot software behaving badly is.
>>Your fat ass will stay in its seat as will those of the hundreds of people you think would follow you in your playstation-fantasy of a situation. One day when you're in a real life/death situation you'll find it's not quite as easy as your slashdot-keyboard-aloofness suggests.
I was jumped a couple times when I was a teenager, and my fight or flight reflex is definitely set to fight. The fact that I'm 6'6" and have been doing martial arts for 10 years is just gravy on the cake. I wouldn't want to fight a guy with a gun, and I've done enough work with knives to be pretty cautious of them, but an X-acto knife? Come on, dude. And even knife wounds are better than being pancaked into a skyscraper.
Besides, actual examples (you know, in "real life") show that you're wrong. People are no longer willing to sit back and watch terrorists hijack a plane. There's been a lot of cases of passengers wrestling people to the ground, you just don't hear about them as much because the press only talks about security failures, not security successes, which biases our opinion on the matter.
As for the guy saying he'd trust strongbad's email because it had been hacked recently... I'll give you a hint. It was modded "funny".
The gameplay footage was really quite interesting, but I'd give good odds that within a week of release people will have identified thousands of common words that don't work with it, or have found one word (jetpack?) that lets you solve all levels.
If I'm wrong, though, it could be amazing.
>>No, they'd kill one flight attendant, then grab another one by the neck and ask "Who wants to come up and be next."
Have you SEEN a box cutter? They're x-acto knives, dude. If some terrorist has hijacked my plane by shouting at the pilot through the security door that he can't get through now, and the pilot is - what? - intimidated into steering into a skyscraper (think about why this doesn't make sense) AND is waving a box cutter with a 3/4th inch blade sticking out of it, then fuck yeah I'm taking the guy on, and there'll be another hundred people behind me in case I go down with a minor laceration to the arm or something.
The other guy is right - there's been a culture change on our airplanes after 9/11. Prior to it, the idea was to stay cool and let the terrorists land and try to get their money. After it, you have a hundred angry passengers trying to take you down.
I'm sorry you like the phrase "security theatre" so much, but think about the case of the Shoe Bomber. YES, we have the stupid fucking policy of "take off your shoes through security" which is probably the single biggest factor in the slow lines we have now, but, from Wikipedia, "The 6 foot 4 inch (193 cm) Reid was eventually subdued by other passengers on the airliner, using plastic handcuffs, seatbelt extensions, and headphone cords."
But don't let facts get in the way of your nice, pat, theory that you read somewhere.
>>How about the "Super-Hyper-Colossal-Magnetoresistence Effect?"
Yeah, they were really short sided when they skipped directly from "giant" to "colossal". As all nerds know, the progression goes:
Fine -> Diminutive -> Tiny -> Small -> Medium -> Large -> Huge -> Gargantuan -> Colossal.
Since giants are Huge, the next step up in technology would be Gargantuan.
(And after Colossal comes Colossal+, of course.)
>>Never ascribe to malice...
Never understood that phrase. In real life, with real people, it IS malice a lot of the time, not stupidity.
>>Final Fantasy VII was arguably the most popular of the Final Fantasy series.
Sure, because it hit new markets (the PS2 and the PC) for the first time, and was the first really big JRPG to hit the American consciousness since FF1 and FF2 (US name) back in the 80s.
That doesn't mean it's good, and it doesn't change the fact that it was one of the most linear craptastic games of all time. Essentially a movie with long tedious bouts of gameplay in between with absolutely no challenge (I didn't die once in the game, except when trying the optional encounters). It was so linear that unlocking a "foo" to get to the "bar" was only good for that one hop, and you'll be damned if you try and do anything else with it:
Game: You have the jeep! Do you: 1) Cross the river or 2) Stay where you are.
User: 1.
Game: You have the jeep! Do you: 1) Enter Cosmo Canyon or 2) Try to drive past.
User: 2!
Game: Sorry! Your jeep has broken down! You must enter Cosmo Canyon for repairs.
User: *&!^
The music was the best part.
Note to Slashdot editors: It's spelled Nobuo Uematsu, not Nobu.
>>This is how The Secret of Nimh began, isn't it?
I don't recall the mice whistling to each other in ultrasonic morse code, but then again, it's been a while.
>>AHAHAHAHAHA
After FPS of course. And load speeds make a big impact on real life (i.e. not benchmarked) gameplay. You wander in Crysis to a new part of the island at high speed, the game doesn't have time to page everything in, and the game gets real choppy, real fast, regardless of your 10xSLI video array that needs to be powered by a portable nuclear reactor.
That and the fact that waiting a couple minutes for a level to load kills a lot of the fun.
>>That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console.
Yeah. The fact that the top mods are often head and shoulders better than the original game helps as well. =)
Like I said, I'm still playing Quake 1, and have a library of older games (Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo 2) that I've been itching to play again after reading about some of the mods for them.
>According to some studies, properly inflated tires can save 1% to 2% of the 145 billion gallons of oil we use each year.
According to other studies, they make a negligible difference. And nobody is arguing that properly inflated tired aren't a good thing. Why not?
The point I was making was that there is a substantial difference between "reducing oil usage" and "reducing foreign oil usage". We can eliminate all foreign oil from our country, with negligible cost, but we don't have the political will to do so.
>>That savings alone, small as it seems, matches the projected amount increase of opening up offshore drilling.
Go back and read what I wrote.
Like I said, I ran a series of benchmarks on my drive, and they scored higher than the (downloaded) SSDs in the system.
>>In a deeply censored regime, there are no unblocked ports, and all traffic which looks encrypted is blocked, and perhaps illegal.
I've always been curious what "regimes" these are. In China, I could go to an internet cafe and ssh back to my box in San Diego, and if they allow that, I don't really see what the point of steno is.
In a country like Burma, they tend to just shut down the entire internet when the citizenry get "uppity".
It's an interesting distinction too. While most other Republicans were shouting, "reduce dependence on foreign oil", the REP was shouting, "reduce dependence on oil." But that distinction made them RINOs. Go figure.
Yeah, because reducing the amount of oil we consume is a hard problem. Reducing the amount of foreign oil we consume is an easy problem. With our coal, oil shale and untapped oil reserves, there's no excuse for us to be funding problems in the Middle East.
>>Are you seriously moving around THAT much data
Fast boot speeds and load times, man, are the holy grail for PC gaming. When SSDs fall enough in price that they're remotely competitive, I'm slapping a SSD RAID0 into my box.
As it is, my 2x7200RPM RAID0 from late 2004 still outperforms a single SSD drive in my SiSoft benchmarks, so I'm happy for now.