Have you ever been an immigrant? Ever seriously talked to one? They left their home country for a reason - as often as not, because they have an oppressive autocracy, theocracy or dictatorship. They tend to love their new country more than their old, and why not? You love France because you were born there by random chance. They love it because they looked at every country in the world, and decided France was the best one to emigrate to.
So immigrants tend to embrace their new culture. Most people who fled Soviet Bloc countries turned into ardent haters of communism - why wouldn't people who fled Muslim theocracies turn out to be pretty ardent haters of Muslim theocracies? They may keep the religion, but in a more moderate, modern form instead of the controlling throwback currently dominant in the Arab region.
And those are first-generation immigrants. What about their children? They'll raise them Muslim, of course, but they'll raise them *French*. They'll be well-educated and (knowing children) liberal. They'll hear the stories about how bad the home country was, and unless their new country does something to disillusion them (like your racist shitspouting) they'll be patriotic for *that* country, not some country they've never been to and hear only bad things about.
Since you call them the "Fifth Column", look at the supposed Japanese "Fifth Column". According to US Army reports from the time, most Japanese immigrants were Americans first, and the concentration camps not only went against the best intelligence, but was outright counterproductive, turning Japanese-Americans against America. And then look up the 442nd Infantry Regiment - Japanese-Americans fighting for America in WW2. With 3800 members, they earned nearly 9500 Purple Hearts (severely wounded or killed in action), 4000 Bronze Stars (acts of heroism or merit in combat) and 21 Medals of Honor (the absolute highest award in the US military). Oh, and they fought many of their battle in France - your country, in a small part, owes its current non-fascist existence to immigrants fighting against allies of their native land on behalf of a country that imprisoned their families for the very logic you support.
If you are an example of the other 90-95% of France, I think your country might be better off if you do let the Muslims take over. I know my fair share of people of that religion, and none of them are as reactionary and racist as you seem to be.
Seriously, I'm glad somebody else is going into space. NASA seems to be doing well in deeper space - Mars rovers, missions far out into the solar system, and deep-space satellites - but we still have plenty to discover in our own backyard.
Even though the rocketry task has been done before (putting a rover on the moon) there's a hell of a lot of difference between a 1960's Soviet rover and a 2010's rover, so they're going to be uncovering plenty of new stuff.
Individual games may also check that Steam is running and that the game is authorized, but I've noticed fewer and fewer games doing that over the years.
You've basically revealed yourself as a moron who doesn't know what he's talking about but thinks he knows better than everyone else anyways.
SteamOS is an OS designed not just for gaming, but for a specific subset of gaming - using a controller and television instead of a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. The UI needs to be significantly different. You know how everyone bitches whenever an OS tries to reinvent the UI so that it works on both tablets and computers? This could have been the same situation, but Valve was smart enough to realize "hey, nobody wants to use a 10-foot UI on a 23" monitor, and nobody wants to type with a controller when they have a keyboard. Instead of pissing off our existing users *and* alienating the new target audience by making a compromise that fails at both, let's have two completely separate modes".
That's what SteamOS is designed for - a difference user interaction method. Or to be more precise, that's what Big Picture Mode (the Steam mode that SteamOS boots to) is. Big Picture Mode can be enabled as the default on any Steam install (Windows, OS X or Linux), and it's relatively simple to get Steam to launch by default as well.
However, SteamOS includes more than just a few default UI settings. There's the incredibly simple installation script - it offers very little customization, but it requires almost zero knowledge outside "getting your computer to boot off media instead of primary disk". That's essential for this particular niche, but would you want Debian dumbed down like that?
Or the stripping of unneeded crap. As I read TFA, I learned they built a rather customized compositor focused on game performance. Doesn't work too well in windowed mode, but it works well for fullscreen with UI overlays. Does that sound like something Debian ought to use?
Same for their kernel tweaks (some realtime scheduling stuff and disabling things that caused bugs with games), or their stripped-down install, or the dozens of other changes people are still trying to find.
But here's the thing - they are making almost all of this available as patches. It's open-source, except for Steam itself and the improved proprietary drivers. If Debian sees a use for these changes, they can merge it in. But to counter your inevitable repetition of "just make it a patch shit-gargler", you need to look at Valve's logic.
They saw Windows 8, and they were afraid. They realized that as long as PC gaming was reliant on one company (Microsoft) for an essential component, and that company has not just apathy towards PC gaming, but an outright reason to try to kill it in favor of their higher-profit-margin console, no matter how well Valve did at making games or keeping Steam running, their business could be destroyed. And with the Metro stuff and the locked-down app store, they saw a direct death threat. Shortly afterward, they started pushing their Mac port harder, and started work on the Linux port.
Given that history, would you really expect them to make themselves reliant on someone else for their console? Their thinking is basically "if we control our own OS, even if every other OS maker turns hostile to our market segment we can still keep it running". They have no problem with people running Steam on Windows or Ubuntu or Debian or fucking Slackware for all they care - but they want to make sure that there's at least one OS that will *always* be there to play games on. Hell, they even recommend Ubuntu+Steam for the old desktop experience, not SteamOS. Nobody is going to be rebooting into SteamOS - they'll be running it as the only OS on the machine because it's the only one that's usable on that machine's setup.
But everything I just said was kind of pointless, because you don't understand the very issue you're bitching about. Fragmentation on Android is a problem because programs that use new features do not work on old versions. Fragmentation of window systems or other APIs is bad because you have to write a new version for each system. And desktop Linux dislikes f
It depends a lot on the shooter. Something like Doom is fine down at 20fps, and slower stuff like TF2 or Bioshock would be acceptable at 30-40fps. But some twitchier games would be significantly harder at 30fps - UT, Q3, FEAR, etc.
Even then, I prefer lowering settings to playing at sub-60fps. I'm not a paranoid watcher of FPS meters, but I can easily feel when a game has dropped below 60fps and it does have a noticeable effect. What's worse is when it isn't consistent - if your game is jumping between 40 and 80fps (as Far Cry 3 seems to do on auto-detected settings on my laptop), it's impossible to track a target.
I really ought to try one of those 120Hz/144Hz displays one of these days.
For my purposes (and, I suspect, most others') there is a difference between "sufficient for gaming" and "able to run certain games". Any computer can run games - Doom has been ported to damn near every 32-bit system, and many indie games may as well list requirements as "CPU: Yes".
I'm not denying that you can play a respectable number of games on a recent Intel GPU. But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware, especially on the GPU (it is less forgiving of CPU or RAM weaknesses). Looking at the same review, Battlefield 3, at minimum settings, 768p, runs at 37fps, which for a shooter is essentially unplayable. Civilization V was down to 15-20fps at low settings - not even remotely smooth, although I suppose since it's a turn-based game you could technically call it playable.
Don't get me wrong - Intel is improving quickly, and they're already good enough that SteamOS needs to support them eventually. They're already good enough for occasional gamers. But they are not something purchased by anyone who considers "gaming" a primary concern - and SteamOS is purely aimed at gaming. If you're installing an OS that boots into a game menu, you're already in the gaming niche.
That said, one of SteamOS's niches is as a game streaming box. Have a big, beefy (coughWindows-runningcough) box sitting elsewhere in your house, streamed to a small SteamOS box hooked up to your TV and controller. This is right up the alley for an Intel GPU, and I suspect this setup could become a primary use for SteamOS.
It's a very early release. I'm not surprised they decided to limit it to just one set of drivers, and Nvidia's drivers, while not that great in an absolute sense, are in a much better state than AMD's (and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming).
I really do hope they get support in soon, though I suppose that depends more on AMD than on Valve. I'm not particular to either vendor - both Kepler and GCN are pretty good hardware, and they're each doing some very interesting things in the software side.
Science cannot prove an absence - you cannot prove that there is no monster in Loch Ness, because maybe it's invisible or can fly or something else that lets it circumvent the rather exhaustive searches of the lake. But it can disprove specific claims - for instance, the "Doctor's Photograph" has been disproven (or rather, proven to be fabricated).
A scientific theory (explaining *why* something happens instead of just *what* happens) cannot be "proven" in the mathematical sense, but it can be disproven. Newtonian gravity has been proven wrong, for instance. However, for casual usage, you can say that a certain theory has been "proven", either in that a specific experiment was consistent with the theory while being inconsistent with others (eg. "the 1919 eclipse proved General Relativity" is a valid statement with this subtly different definition), or that the theory has been found consistent with a large number of experiments ("General Relativity has been proven correct" is not a valid usage of the technical term, but for casual usage is perfectly fine).
Much of this stems over confusion between a hypothesis and a theory. A hypothesis can be proven or disproven. Take the example hypothesis "with my computer as currently configured, clicking on "preview" followed by "submit" will cause data to be entered into a remote database". This hypothesis will be proven or disproven when I submit this post. This seems to be the usage you are using. However, a scientific theory cannot be proven, only disproven, as there may always be some circumstance that invalidates the theory. Using the example hypothesis "submitting a post to Slashdot will result in data being added to Slashdot's database", this may be disproven if my post somehow fails (if my incompetent ISP goes down again), but even if it succeeds, the theory is only "not disproven", not "proven". In this usage Hazem would be correct.
In the context of religion, there are many claims that can be disproven. For example, the Shroud of Turin has been disproven (it was forged sometime in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries). However, science cannot disprove the existence of a god (an omnipotent being by definition can violate the laws of physics). You may be able to disprove certain gods, if the religion commits to enough claims (I think we can safely call Zeus disproven, since we've explored Mt. Olympus quite thoroughly and have found no gods there), but long-lasting religions don't tend to have gods that can be easily disproven by experiment.
That's a decent point, I suppose - you can't really prepare for an entire industry collapsing. However, GM was already in trouble and was already demanding government aid BEFORE the banking industry went to shit. And the effect of the banking crisis on GM was indirect - it led to lower consumer spending (particularly on high-cost things like vehicles), and a sudden drop in consumer spending IS predictable, at least in that you can predict it will eventually happen, even if you don't know when; a competent company would have been prepared to drop production in order to meet reduced demand. The only thing GM needed credit for was an attempt to buy up a smaller company.
Obviously by the time things got to the point where they had, a bailout was unavoidable. My point is that we should not allow such situations to exist. While it may not have been obvious that these companies were too big until they started failing, it is obvious in hindsight that they are, and so we need to be breaking them up now.
The fundamental principle of capitalism is "good* companies succeed, bad companies fail". Without that, capitalism breaks down.
If a company is "too big to fail", that breaks capitalism. No company should ever get to such a position (even if it gets there legitimately), because when it does eventually fail, it's going to do too much damage.
That may not have been easy to see before the economy shit itself, but it was definitely something anyone could see while the bailouts were happening. It should have been MANDATORY for any company that accepted bailout money to be broken up into pieces that were small enough, individually, to fail without destroying the entire economy. The fact that this did not happen means that we're just waiting for them to fail and ask for a bailout again.
That said, I can think of a few situations where such a bailout would been justified. If the company's failure were caused by something truly unpredictable (meteor impact), or if it were not too-big-to-fail beforehand (eg. a military-equipment manufacturer could become essential to the nation if WW3 started up), it could make sense to do a bailout. It's not pure capitalism, but I'm not a pure capitalist. But these bailouts? None of them were at all unpredictable, and most of these companies have been "too big to fail" for longer than I've been alive (and that's not just because I'm young - AIG predates WW2, and GM predates WW1).
* I'm using a non-cynical definition of "good companies" and "bad companies" here - for my purposes, a good company is one that offers a product that is in demand at a price customers can afford while turning a profit (or at least breaking even), while a bad one either offers something nobody wants, cannot do so at a price customers can afford, or can only do those two things by burning through cash.
He dreams big. That makes some small-dreaming people hate him.
Yes, a lot of his talk is just ridiculous. That hyperloop thing? Preposterous. But then again, I'm sure people said the same about modern electric cars. That's why my stance on him is "ignore the pie-in-the-sky talk, focus on the actual actions", and by that measure he's doing very well. If he blows his entire fortune trying to build a vacuum-sealed tube for superconducting maglev trains to cross the country at R5, I'll laugh at him, but if he builds it and it actually works I'll applaud him.
Bitcoin exists because many people don't trust a) the major world governments or b) the major banking institutions.
So it is a *good* thing for some of those banking institutions from being prohibited from using Bitcoins. And really, banks do not need to be dealing with Bitcoins - do you really want a bank to be taking your money and "investing" it in Bitcoin?
Classifying it as a commodity, like gold or silver, for regulatory purposes makes sense, and much like there are few regulations on gold and silver themselves, these are regulations on the banks, not on Bitcoins.
Now, the anti-money-laundering stuff may be a cumbersome burden on Bitcoin exchanges, and tries to defeat the entire purpose of Bitcoin's pseudonymity, but the US already has similar restrictions, and they're not restrictions that are completely unreasonable. In fact, wouldn't regulations on converting Bitcoins to and from other currencies make people more inclined to use Bitcoin as an actual currency, instead of just a carrier system for other currency (the buyer buying BTC to immediately spend, and the seller immediately converting it back to a "usable" currency)? Even their attempts to undermine it seem likely to strengthen it.
You know what, sure, let's let ISPs discriminate traffic. Let's let them outright block any site that doesn't pay them enough. But in exchange, they lose their safe harbor protection.
So anyone who launches a DoS or other "attack" over that ISP? They're partially liable. After all, they could have slowed or stopped that attack.
Anyone pirates anything? Liable. If they're blocking sites for their own purpose, they can obviously block illegal downloads as well, right?
Somebody posts a threat on Facebook? Cyber-bullying? LIABLE. Fraud? LIABLE.
Basically, if it's illegal and done through an Internet connection provided by that ISP, that ISP is a co-defendant in any civil or criminal suit.
Of course, the only way for an ISP to operate in such a legal environment would be to block everything by default, and only whitelist acceptable sites. Which of course cannot include anything with user-generated content - no Facebook, no Wikipedia, no Ebay. Of the 23 sites in my bookmarks bar, the only one that probably wouldn't get blocked is Wolfram Alpha.
So sure! Let ISPs start filtering traffic - as long as they take responsibility for anything that they allow through.
I believe if you have a discrete GPU based on the same architecture (GCN in this case), you can use both simultaneously for a small speed boost, or switch between them depending on load (so your 250W video card doesn't need to spin its fans up just to render the desktop).
There's also some consideration for using the integrated GPU for lower-latency GPGPU stuff while using the discrete GPU for rendering. I don't think that's actually used in anything yet, but I'm not actually using an APU in any of my machines yet.
Metallica also did everything they could to destroy that strong reputation (Load, Reload and especially St. Anger) and antagonize their fanbase. Even without piracy, they'd be having issues.
Iron Maiden had a bit of a slump in the late 90s (a lot of metal bands did around that time), but they've been going very strong since Brave New World. Can't really compare the two.
I've been an Iron Maiden fan for a while. I first got into them (and a bunch of other bands) by pirating basically everything they ever made.
I have been trying lately to make up for it, usually by buying merchandise (since many bands don't get anything from CD sales). I hadn't gotten around to Iron Maiden yet, but I'm looking at their store now and their merch prices seem extremely low given how huge of a band they are. Normally big-name bands charge like $50, sometimes even $100 for a simple t-shirt, but they're charging £10 to £15, which should come out to $20-25, not much more expensive than any printed t-shirt. Definitely buying some of them.
I do have to wonder who the hell is buying "The Trooper" golf balls, though.
The selling feature of Bitcoin is that it is not backed, nor traceable by, governments. That's the main drive behind this boom - very little trust remains in the US government, or in many others. That covers the Silk Road-type drug-trade users - they have a very good reason not to trust the currency of a government that has declared war on them. That covers the technological side - tech-savvy people tend to be much less trusting of any government, and we in particular were betrayed by their widespread monitoring. And it even covers the investment bubble - the marketplace wants US monitoring of damn near everything to stop, and anything that steps in to fill that need will find a ready consumer base and investor backing. Those are the three groups *he* identifies as behind the Bitcoin boom, and each one is motivated, directly or indirectly, by a fear and hatred for the American government (note that it's specifically the government, not the American people, that are the target here).
Bitcoin will die as soon as we can get similar guarantees of security for official, government-backed currencies and banking systems. Oh, and not just from America - a currency that is secure not just from the issuing country, but all others.
Yeah, even if Bitcoin dies (I can see a big enough crash destroying the brand, and any currency is only as strong as the collective desire to use it), something else will come up to replace it.
How did we arrive at life of author plus seventy years, or 95 years from publication for "authorless" works? You cannot simply say that my number is wrong - defend your own position.
As for my own, it is partially based on computer history. Ten-year-old software is old enough to be of minimal use for current productive work, but is still important for learning and for maintenance of historical hardware.
However, it is also based on cultural relevance. It's enough time for the original work to be commercially exhausted, but for further adaptations (eg. for music, samples or covers) to remain relevant. This is the approximate amount of time it takes for a series reboot to occur, or for a movie to be remade, if we want to keep it relevant to your particular field instead of mine.
But yes, the ten-year figure was rather arbitrary. I'd be happy with a twenty-year term as well. Just think, for your own use, what would be available. Imagine film students learning their craft by re-editing classics. Imagine films being translated and dubbed into any language with a speaker who cares enough to translate it. And instead of these things happening in the shadows, hushed up for fear of lawyers, it being done out in the open for all to see and benefit from.
Or, for your own benefit, imagine you could use any song over ten years old in your soundtrack? Go ahead, think of whatever song would be just *perfect* for whatever moment in whatever film you're currently working on - nine times out of ten, it will be out of copyright under a ten-year term.
How much profit do you think Return of the King is still making? The Last Samurai? Finding Nemo? What about the 2003 movies that weren't top-grossing already - say, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Dreamcatcher and The Room?
Let's go back to 1993 then - are Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire and Schindler's List still making much money? If we made those films absolutely free, would any of the people involved be noticeably affected? And those are from the top five highest-grossing films from that year, the ones most likely to have a long profitable period.
So it's a reasonable statement to claim that artists would not be seriously affected by a significantly reduced copyright, save for those that are coasting off work done decades ago and have done nothing worthwhile in a decade. And it's also reasonable to claim that a reduced copyright would drive creativity, by opening decades of masterpieces to new use. Remasters of old movies and songs will be ubiquitous, not something done only for the commercial cream-of-the-crop.
And what's more, True Art, capital A, has a message, something its creator wanted to say to the world. Reducing copyright lets that message be heard while it is still relevant - and is that not worth doing?
Copyright, in and of itself, is a good idea. I have nothing wrong with the concept of a person having a degree of control over that which they produce.
The current system is absolutely broken. The punishment is completely out of proportion - it's like having the death penalty for jaywalking. It interferes with legitimate use and with security research. And it lasts long enough that some artists (or rather, the corporations that bought their rights) are effectively stealing from the public, not the other way around. We need ten-year copyrights, not seventy. And "personal-consumption piracy" needs to be separated from corporate hijacking of someone's work, what happened right here.
What Slashdot hates is not copyright, it is the abuse of power by the wealthy and the corporations. Which is EXACTLY what this was - rich corporations outright stole someone's work, and were directly profiting off it. If anything, there's two or three zeroes missing from their fine - when home users have been sued for millions over downloading one album, a complete abuse of copyright by a corporation shouldn't be just a million or two.
FWIW, I haven't watched your movie, probably never will. And I consider your studio's attempt to blackmail people they suspected of piracy to be little better than thuggish banditry.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for those who haven't memorized all the keybinds, "don't phone home" is c-m-X c-] by default.
Technically, yes.
Have you ever been an immigrant? Ever seriously talked to one? They left their home country for a reason - as often as not, because they have an oppressive autocracy, theocracy or dictatorship. They tend to love their new country more than their old, and why not? You love France because you were born there by random chance. They love it because they looked at every country in the world, and decided France was the best one to emigrate to.
So immigrants tend to embrace their new culture. Most people who fled Soviet Bloc countries turned into ardent haters of communism - why wouldn't people who fled Muslim theocracies turn out to be pretty ardent haters of Muslim theocracies? They may keep the religion, but in a more moderate, modern form instead of the controlling throwback currently dominant in the Arab region.
And those are first-generation immigrants. What about their children? They'll raise them Muslim, of course, but they'll raise them *French*. They'll be well-educated and (knowing children) liberal. They'll hear the stories about how bad the home country was, and unless their new country does something to disillusion them (like your racist shitspouting) they'll be patriotic for *that* country, not some country they've never been to and hear only bad things about.
Since you call them the "Fifth Column", look at the supposed Japanese "Fifth Column". According to US Army reports from the time, most Japanese immigrants were Americans first, and the concentration camps not only went against the best intelligence, but was outright counterproductive, turning Japanese-Americans against America. And then look up the 442nd Infantry Regiment - Japanese-Americans fighting for America in WW2. With 3800 members, they earned nearly 9500 Purple Hearts (severely wounded or killed in action), 4000 Bronze Stars (acts of heroism or merit in combat) and 21 Medals of Honor (the absolute highest award in the US military). Oh, and they fought many of their battle in France - your country, in a small part, owes its current non-fascist existence to immigrants fighting against allies of their native land on behalf of a country that imprisoned their families for the very logic you support.
If you are an example of the other 90-95% of France, I think your country might be better off if you do let the Muslims take over. I know my fair share of people of that religion, and none of them are as reactionary and racist as you seem to be.
Seriously, I'm glad somebody else is going into space. NASA seems to be doing well in deeper space - Mars rovers, missions far out into the solar system, and deep-space satellites - but we still have plenty to discover in our own backyard.
Even though the rocketry task has been done before (putting a rover on the moon) there's a hell of a lot of difference between a 1960's Soviet rover and a 2010's rover, so they're going to be uncovering plenty of new stuff.
The "Steam runtime" is open-source (it's on GitHub) and does not include any of the DRM, nor Steam itself. It's closer to "Linux DirectX" than "Games for Linux Live".
Individual games may also check that Steam is running and that the game is authorized, but I've noticed fewer and fewer games doing that over the years.
You've basically revealed yourself as a moron who doesn't know what he's talking about but thinks he knows better than everyone else anyways.
SteamOS is an OS designed not just for gaming, but for a specific subset of gaming - using a controller and television instead of a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. The UI needs to be significantly different. You know how everyone bitches whenever an OS tries to reinvent the UI so that it works on both tablets and computers? This could have been the same situation, but Valve was smart enough to realize "hey, nobody wants to use a 10-foot UI on a 23" monitor, and nobody wants to type with a controller when they have a keyboard. Instead of pissing off our existing users *and* alienating the new target audience by making a compromise that fails at both, let's have two completely separate modes".
That's what SteamOS is designed for - a difference user interaction method. Or to be more precise, that's what Big Picture Mode (the Steam mode that SteamOS boots to) is. Big Picture Mode can be enabled as the default on any Steam install (Windows, OS X or Linux), and it's relatively simple to get Steam to launch by default as well.
However, SteamOS includes more than just a few default UI settings. There's the incredibly simple installation script - it offers very little customization, but it requires almost zero knowledge outside "getting your computer to boot off media instead of primary disk". That's essential for this particular niche, but would you want Debian dumbed down like that?
Or the stripping of unneeded crap. As I read TFA, I learned they built a rather customized compositor focused on game performance. Doesn't work too well in windowed mode, but it works well for fullscreen with UI overlays. Does that sound like something Debian ought to use?
Same for their kernel tweaks (some realtime scheduling stuff and disabling things that caused bugs with games), or their stripped-down install, or the dozens of other changes people are still trying to find.
But here's the thing - they are making almost all of this available as patches. It's open-source, except for Steam itself and the improved proprietary drivers. If Debian sees a use for these changes, they can merge it in. But to counter your inevitable repetition of "just make it a patch shit-gargler", you need to look at Valve's logic.
They saw Windows 8, and they were afraid. They realized that as long as PC gaming was reliant on one company (Microsoft) for an essential component, and that company has not just apathy towards PC gaming, but an outright reason to try to kill it in favor of their higher-profit-margin console, no matter how well Valve did at making games or keeping Steam running, their business could be destroyed. And with the Metro stuff and the locked-down app store, they saw a direct death threat. Shortly afterward, they started pushing their Mac port harder, and started work on the Linux port.
Given that history, would you really expect them to make themselves reliant on someone else for their console? Their thinking is basically "if we control our own OS, even if every other OS maker turns hostile to our market segment we can still keep it running". They have no problem with people running Steam on Windows or Ubuntu or Debian or fucking Slackware for all they care - but they want to make sure that there's at least one OS that will *always* be there to play games on. Hell, they even recommend Ubuntu+Steam for the old desktop experience, not SteamOS. Nobody is going to be rebooting into SteamOS - they'll be running it as the only OS on the machine because it's the only one that's usable on that machine's setup.
But everything I just said was kind of pointless, because you don't understand the very issue you're bitching about. Fragmentation on Android is a problem because programs that use new features do not work on old versions. Fragmentation of window systems or other APIs is bad because you have to write a new version for each system. And desktop Linux dislikes f
It depends a lot on the shooter. Something like Doom is fine down at 20fps, and slower stuff like TF2 or Bioshock would be acceptable at 30-40fps. But some twitchier games would be significantly harder at 30fps - UT, Q3, FEAR, etc.
Even then, I prefer lowering settings to playing at sub-60fps. I'm not a paranoid watcher of FPS meters, but I can easily feel when a game has dropped below 60fps and it does have a noticeable effect. What's worse is when it isn't consistent - if your game is jumping between 40 and 80fps (as Far Cry 3 seems to do on auto-detected settings on my laptop), it's impossible to track a target.
I really ought to try one of those 120Hz/144Hz displays one of these days.
For my purposes (and, I suspect, most others') there is a difference between "sufficient for gaming" and "able to run certain games". Any computer can run games - Doom has been ported to damn near every 32-bit system, and many indie games may as well list requirements as "CPU: Yes".
I'm not denying that you can play a respectable number of games on a recent Intel GPU. But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware, especially on the GPU (it is less forgiving of CPU or RAM weaknesses). Looking at the same review, Battlefield 3, at minimum settings, 768p, runs at 37fps, which for a shooter is essentially unplayable. Civilization V was down to 15-20fps at low settings - not even remotely smooth, although I suppose since it's a turn-based game you could technically call it playable.
Don't get me wrong - Intel is improving quickly, and they're already good enough that SteamOS needs to support them eventually. They're already good enough for occasional gamers. But they are not something purchased by anyone who considers "gaming" a primary concern - and SteamOS is purely aimed at gaming. If you're installing an OS that boots into a game menu, you're already in the gaming niche.
That said, one of SteamOS's niches is as a game streaming box. Have a big, beefy (coughWindows-runningcough) box sitting elsewhere in your house, streamed to a small SteamOS box hooked up to your TV and controller. This is right up the alley for an Intel GPU, and I suspect this setup could become a primary use for SteamOS.
It's a very early release. I'm not surprised they decided to limit it to just one set of drivers, and Nvidia's drivers, while not that great in an absolute sense, are in a much better state than AMD's (and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming).
I really do hope they get support in soon, though I suppose that depends more on AMD than on Valve. I'm not particular to either vendor - both Kepler and GCN are pretty good hardware, and they're each doing some very interesting things in the software side.
You're both wrong in some sense.
Science cannot prove an absence - you cannot prove that there is no monster in Loch Ness, because maybe it's invisible or can fly or something else that lets it circumvent the rather exhaustive searches of the lake. But it can disprove specific claims - for instance, the "Doctor's Photograph" has been disproven (or rather, proven to be fabricated).
A scientific theory (explaining *why* something happens instead of just *what* happens) cannot be "proven" in the mathematical sense, but it can be disproven. Newtonian gravity has been proven wrong, for instance. However, for casual usage, you can say that a certain theory has been "proven", either in that a specific experiment was consistent with the theory while being inconsistent with others (eg. "the 1919 eclipse proved General Relativity" is a valid statement with this subtly different definition), or that the theory has been found consistent with a large number of experiments ("General Relativity has been proven correct" is not a valid usage of the technical term, but for casual usage is perfectly fine).
Much of this stems over confusion between a hypothesis and a theory. A hypothesis can be proven or disproven. Take the example hypothesis "with my computer as currently configured, clicking on "preview" followed by "submit" will cause data to be entered into a remote database". This hypothesis will be proven or disproven when I submit this post. This seems to be the usage you are using. However, a scientific theory cannot be proven, only disproven, as there may always be some circumstance that invalidates the theory. Using the example hypothesis "submitting a post to Slashdot will result in data being added to Slashdot's database", this may be disproven if my post somehow fails (if my incompetent ISP goes down again), but even if it succeeds, the theory is only "not disproven", not "proven". In this usage Hazem would be correct.
In the context of religion, there are many claims that can be disproven. For example, the Shroud of Turin has been disproven (it was forged sometime in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries). However, science cannot disprove the existence of a god (an omnipotent being by definition can violate the laws of physics). You may be able to disprove certain gods, if the religion commits to enough claims (I think we can safely call Zeus disproven, since we've explored Mt. Olympus quite thoroughly and have found no gods there), but long-lasting religions don't tend to have gods that can be easily disproven by experiment.
That's a decent point, I suppose - you can't really prepare for an entire industry collapsing. However, GM was already in trouble and was already demanding government aid BEFORE the banking industry went to shit. And the effect of the banking crisis on GM was indirect - it led to lower consumer spending (particularly on high-cost things like vehicles), and a sudden drop in consumer spending IS predictable, at least in that you can predict it will eventually happen, even if you don't know when; a competent company would have been prepared to drop production in order to meet reduced demand. The only thing GM needed credit for was an attempt to buy up a smaller company.
Obviously by the time things got to the point where they had, a bailout was unavoidable. My point is that we should not allow such situations to exist. While it may not have been obvious that these companies were too big until they started failing, it is obvious in hindsight that they are, and so we need to be breaking them up now.
The fundamental principle of capitalism is "good* companies succeed, bad companies fail". Without that, capitalism breaks down.
If a company is "too big to fail", that breaks capitalism. No company should ever get to such a position (even if it gets there legitimately), because when it does eventually fail, it's going to do too much damage.
That may not have been easy to see before the economy shit itself, but it was definitely something anyone could see while the bailouts were happening. It should have been MANDATORY for any company that accepted bailout money to be broken up into pieces that were small enough, individually, to fail without destroying the entire economy. The fact that this did not happen means that we're just waiting for them to fail and ask for a bailout again.
That said, I can think of a few situations where such a bailout would been justified. If the company's failure were caused by something truly unpredictable (meteor impact), or if it were not too-big-to-fail beforehand (eg. a military-equipment manufacturer could become essential to the nation if WW3 started up), it could make sense to do a bailout. It's not pure capitalism, but I'm not a pure capitalist. But these bailouts? None of them were at all unpredictable, and most of these companies have been "too big to fail" for longer than I've been alive (and that's not just because I'm young - AIG predates WW2, and GM predates WW1).
* I'm using a non-cynical definition of "good companies" and "bad companies" here - for my purposes, a good company is one that offers a product that is in demand at a price customers can afford while turning a profit (or at least breaking even), while a bad one either offers something nobody wants, cannot do so at a price customers can afford, or can only do those two things by burning through cash.
Excellent! Somebody buy a dozen of these for Wikipedia, I've heard they need citations.
He dreams big. That makes some small-dreaming people hate him.
Yes, a lot of his talk is just ridiculous. That hyperloop thing? Preposterous. But then again, I'm sure people said the same about modern electric cars. That's why my stance on him is "ignore the pie-in-the-sky talk, focus on the actual actions", and by that measure he's doing very well. If he blows his entire fortune trying to build a vacuum-sealed tube for superconducting maglev trains to cross the country at R5, I'll laugh at him, but if he builds it and it actually works I'll applaud him.
Bitcoin exists because many people don't trust a) the major world governments or b) the major banking institutions.
So it is a *good* thing for some of those banking institutions from being prohibited from using Bitcoins. And really, banks do not need to be dealing with Bitcoins - do you really want a bank to be taking your money and "investing" it in Bitcoin?
Classifying it as a commodity, like gold or silver, for regulatory purposes makes sense, and much like there are few regulations on gold and silver themselves, these are regulations on the banks, not on Bitcoins.
Now, the anti-money-laundering stuff may be a cumbersome burden on Bitcoin exchanges, and tries to defeat the entire purpose of Bitcoin's pseudonymity, but the US already has similar restrictions, and they're not restrictions that are completely unreasonable. In fact, wouldn't regulations on converting Bitcoins to and from other currencies make people more inclined to use Bitcoin as an actual currency, instead of just a carrier system for other currency (the buyer buying BTC to immediately spend, and the seller immediately converting it back to a "usable" currency)? Even their attempts to undermine it seem likely to strengthen it.
You know what, sure, let's let ISPs discriminate traffic. Let's let them outright block any site that doesn't pay them enough. But in exchange, they lose their safe harbor protection.
So anyone who launches a DoS or other "attack" over that ISP? They're partially liable. After all, they could have slowed or stopped that attack.
Anyone pirates anything? Liable. If they're blocking sites for their own purpose, they can obviously block illegal downloads as well, right?
Somebody posts a threat on Facebook? Cyber-bullying? LIABLE. Fraud? LIABLE.
Basically, if it's illegal and done through an Internet connection provided by that ISP, that ISP is a co-defendant in any civil or criminal suit.
Of course, the only way for an ISP to operate in such a legal environment would be to block everything by default, and only whitelist acceptable sites. Which of course cannot include anything with user-generated content - no Facebook, no Wikipedia, no Ebay. Of the 23 sites in my bookmarks bar, the only one that probably wouldn't get blocked is Wolfram Alpha.
So sure! Let ISPs start filtering traffic - as long as they take responsibility for anything that they allow through.
I believe if you have a discrete GPU based on the same architecture (GCN in this case), you can use both simultaneously for a small speed boost, or switch between them depending on load (so your 250W video card doesn't need to spin its fans up just to render the desktop).
There's also some consideration for using the integrated GPU for lower-latency GPGPU stuff while using the discrete GPU for rendering. I don't think that's actually used in anything yet, but I'm not actually using an APU in any of my machines yet.
Because if your drone is stealing package-carrying drones instead of just packages, you can sell the drones back to Amazon to get even more profit!
Metallica also did everything they could to destroy that strong reputation (Load, Reload and especially St. Anger) and antagonize their fanbase. Even without piracy, they'd be having issues.
Iron Maiden had a bit of a slump in the late 90s (a lot of metal bands did around that time), but they've been going very strong since Brave New World. Can't really compare the two.
I've been an Iron Maiden fan for a while. I first got into them (and a bunch of other bands) by pirating basically everything they ever made.
I have been trying lately to make up for it, usually by buying merchandise (since many bands don't get anything from CD sales). I hadn't gotten around to Iron Maiden yet, but I'm looking at their store now and their merch prices seem extremely low given how huge of a band they are. Normally big-name bands charge like $50, sometimes even $100 for a simple t-shirt, but they're charging £10 to £15, which should come out to $20-25, not much more expensive than any printed t-shirt. Definitely buying some of them.
I do have to wonder who the hell is buying "The Trooper" golf balls, though.
The selling feature of Bitcoin is that it is not backed, nor traceable by, governments. That's the main drive behind this boom - very little trust remains in the US government, or in many others. That covers the Silk Road-type drug-trade users - they have a very good reason not to trust the currency of a government that has declared war on them. That covers the technological side - tech-savvy people tend to be much less trusting of any government, and we in particular were betrayed by their widespread monitoring. And it even covers the investment bubble - the marketplace wants US monitoring of damn near everything to stop, and anything that steps in to fill that need will find a ready consumer base and investor backing. Those are the three groups *he* identifies as behind the Bitcoin boom, and each one is motivated, directly or indirectly, by a fear and hatred for the American government (note that it's specifically the government, not the American people, that are the target here).
Bitcoin will die as soon as we can get similar guarantees of security for official, government-backed currencies and banking systems. Oh, and not just from America - a currency that is secure not just from the issuing country, but all others.
Yeah, even if Bitcoin dies (I can see a big enough crash destroying the brand, and any currency is only as strong as the collective desire to use it), something else will come up to replace it.
How did we arrive at life of author plus seventy years, or 95 years from publication for "authorless" works? You cannot simply say that my number is wrong - defend your own position.
As for my own, it is partially based on computer history. Ten-year-old software is old enough to be of minimal use for current productive work, but is still important for learning and for maintenance of historical hardware.
However, it is also based on cultural relevance. It's enough time for the original work to be commercially exhausted, but for further adaptations (eg. for music, samples or covers) to remain relevant. This is the approximate amount of time it takes for a series reboot to occur, or for a movie to be remade, if we want to keep it relevant to your particular field instead of mine.
But yes, the ten-year figure was rather arbitrary. I'd be happy with a twenty-year term as well. Just think, for your own use, what would be available. Imagine film students learning their craft by re-editing classics. Imagine films being translated and dubbed into any language with a speaker who cares enough to translate it. And instead of these things happening in the shadows, hushed up for fear of lawyers, it being done out in the open for all to see and benefit from.
Or, for your own benefit, imagine you could use any song over ten years old in your soundtrack? Go ahead, think of whatever song would be just *perfect* for whatever moment in whatever film you're currently working on - nine times out of ten, it will be out of copyright under a ten-year term.
How much profit do you think Return of the King is still making? The Last Samurai? Finding Nemo? What about the 2003 movies that weren't top-grossing already - say, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Dreamcatcher and The Room?
Let's go back to 1993 then - are Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire and Schindler's List still making much money? If we made those films absolutely free, would any of the people involved be noticeably affected? And those are from the top five highest-grossing films from that year, the ones most likely to have a long profitable period.
So it's a reasonable statement to claim that artists would not be seriously affected by a significantly reduced copyright, save for those that are coasting off work done decades ago and have done nothing worthwhile in a decade. And it's also reasonable to claim that a reduced copyright would drive creativity, by opening decades of masterpieces to new use. Remasters of old movies and songs will be ubiquitous, not something done only for the commercial cream-of-the-crop.
And what's more, True Art, capital A, has a message, something its creator wanted to say to the world. Reducing copyright lets that message be heard while it is still relevant - and is that not worth doing?
My actual studio is Sony Pictures. You guys are cool with Sony, right? =D
Ha.
Haha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Copyright, in and of itself, is a good idea. I have nothing wrong with the concept of a person having a degree of control over that which they produce.
The current system is absolutely broken. The punishment is completely out of proportion - it's like having the death penalty for jaywalking. It interferes with legitimate use and with security research. And it lasts long enough that some artists (or rather, the corporations that bought their rights) are effectively stealing from the public, not the other way around. We need ten-year copyrights, not seventy. And "personal-consumption piracy" needs to be separated from corporate hijacking of someone's work, what happened right here.
What Slashdot hates is not copyright, it is the abuse of power by the wealthy and the corporations. Which is EXACTLY what this was - rich corporations outright stole someone's work, and were directly profiting off it. If anything, there's two or three zeroes missing from their fine - when home users have been sued for millions over downloading one album, a complete abuse of copyright by a corporation shouldn't be just a million or two.
FWIW, I haven't watched your movie, probably never will. And I consider your studio's attempt to blackmail people they suspected of piracy to be little better than thuggish banditry.