Yeah. It's difficult enough to use that you actually need both brain cells working, and a basic grasp of the English language. Linux is idiot-proof by virtue of being impenetrable to idiots.
But retards will call it such ("virus", to the layman, is "any software what breaks my computer", regardless of distribution method). And thus, all the retards claiming "macs don't get viruses" will now be countered.
But hey, at least we still have Linux. No viruses (by either definition) on that, right?
I was originally going to correct you for misspelling "wary" (characterized by caution; guarded; careful), but then I realized "weary" (expressive of fatigue) arguably made more sense in context (as in, you are tired of the things this implies will happen, ie. more remakes). So now I'm just asking which one you meant.
Is there any actual downside to including it? Bloat, perhaps, but doesn't Firefox already support obscure/archaic formats like APNG, PPM and XBM? It might be wasted effort, so I can understand not making it an active task, but refusing to add any patch adding it seems... dumb.
All those abuses are federal level - many not even federal police. Guantanamo is military. NSA is intelligence (in the political sense, not the mental sense).
Yes, the federal police-like agencies (FBI, DoHS, Customs) are at the level where something needs to be done. Not quite a casus revolutionis, but definitely at the level that major, actual change needs to happen.
However, this case was local police. The worst they usually do is unfairly ticket people for speeding. (Note that I said usually - given that there's over a quarter billion people in this country, I'm sure you can cite a dozen other cases of cops being assholes, but that's statistically insignificant).
Also, even the summary states that the DEA needed a subpoena just to get the energy use records. So they were not, in any way, spying on absolutely everyone's power use. Getting a subpoena for this (since there was no active case involved) requires evidence. So they already had at least one other thing suspicious about the bitminer.
That would not be reason to search. If you suspect (or are just paranoid), let the police know that you will have a lawyer on file to argue as such should they return with a warrant that has no actual evidence.
And I'm concerned about this growing culture of "never talk to cops, they hate freedom and will pin anything they can think of or even imagine on you". Mainly because of the implication that "the organizations dedicated to protecting the people are in fact the greatest threat to such". That is not (yet) the case. There are signs we're headed there, yes, and I am concerned about that as well, but this is the county police we're talking about, not the Gestapo or the Spanish Inquisition.
Look, I'm not going to argue on whether or not marijuana should or should not be legal. Let's just accept (for this argument) that it is, and continue on the presumption that stopping a crime is, in and of itself, a worthy goal.
Let's also assume that "exceptionally high electric usage" has a correlation (but not causation) with said illegal activity.
There is a huge fucking difference between "getting a search warrant" and "asking some questions". Get this straight. Not every cop is a power-obsessed Nazi just waiting for the chance to oppress everyone. Most of them, surprisingly enough, are human beings, not monsters. There's laws. They enforce them. Most laws, in fact, are just laws - murdering people is wrong, robbing people is wrong, raping people is wrong, all the way down to "playing music way too loud at four in the morning and causing a disturbance" being wrong.
Knocking on someone's door and asking a few questions ("We noticed your power bill was kinda high, we were just checking to make sure you knew. You happen to be doing anything really electricity-heavy? Arc welding? Homemade tesla coils?") is pretty much justified when you have something generally suspicious. It would be like "that driver just veered rather erratically, there's a decent chance he's drunk, might want to go check".
This is, of course, predicated on police, too, following the principles of the law. Refusing to talk to police in this case should not be evidence of anything other than not liking to talk to police. If that gets used as justification to later come back with a warrant, that's not good. Don't like that. But a polite status check is arguably a good thing - it lets any misunderstandings get cleared up before anything remotely serious happens, and it would probably be enough to get some exceptionally wasteful people to start using less electricity.
Now, understand this: I do not like how the police have become in the US. Or elsewhere, actually. There's many, many cases where police are clearly and flagrantly violating laws. There are far too many judges issuing free search warrants, far too many laws being misused, and more unjust laws than should be tolerated. Normally, I side with/. on issues like this. But sometimes,/. gets too caught up in it's own hatred of the establishment, and starts taking irrational positions. Blindly hating anything involving the police is just as bad as blindly defending anything involving the police.
If this ever does become a full-on police state, I'll be one of the first to grab my rifle, fill up some molotovs, and start taking back our rights. But until then, let's be reasonable - on both sides.
The average US home uses about 30kWh per day. Checking on people using triple that amount seems reasonable. I wouldn't justify a search warrant, or even a subpoena, but sending an officer to politely ask a few questions would be reasonable.
I'm currently a student at a tech school. I'm working on a web development degree, but I joined the Network Security Club for some cross-field experience. I'll see if I can convince the club to convert our test LAN (five old servers, a dozen desktops, several switches and a router) to IPv6. Hopefully the antique Cisco router can handle that - these guys will hate me if I swap that out for a cheap home router running DD-WRT.
Except for one thing: the cards are essentially identical. The processor, the memory, all that is essentially identical. You can, with some difficulty (there's heavy DRM on this part) reflash a gamer card to function as a workstation card or vice versa. The difference is essentially all in software - the workstation drivers have been optimized for accuracy, producing subpixel-perfect images, and are mainly tested (as you said) for OpenGL. The gamer drivers have been incredibly optimized for speed - trading off perfect rendering for vastly increased framerates. The only actual hardware difference I've seen is on many Quadro models, where you can plug in an external clock generator to run several displays on the same clock phase (useful when filming CRTs, as you can run the camera on the same clock and thus eliminate the problems inherent with that).
This, to extend your analogy, would be like Canon selling the exact same camera to hobbyists as professionals (same high-end lenses, same powerful image sensors, all the bells, whistles and gongs), but the hobbyist one saves to an SD card while the pro-grade saves to some proprietary super-high-density card, then selling the latter for five times the price.
Well, that $500 workstation card is a lot less powerful. Workstation cards are priced MUCH higher than their gamer equivelants - a FirePro V7800 is essentially a Radeon HD 5850 (clocked 50mHz lower, actually). Only real difference is the drivers they use. And the price tag - the FirePro costs $649, while the Radeon costs $349. And some of the higher-end ones get ridiculous - current going price for a V9800 is upwards of three grand.
As for how they can get away with that, I have no idea. Same way Microsoft can charge $300 for an Ultimate Edition OS, or how Apple can charge a fortune for a 133mHz increase in clock speed.
The consumer cards actually do make sense. For nVidia, it's "first number is the generation, second number is the part within that generation" - a 580 is better than a 570, but worse than a 590. Likewise, a 480 is newer than a 280, but not as new as a 580. You can also generally make the assertion that cards with the same ending numbers, but different generations, will fill the same role (and same rough price), but the newer one will be slightly better. AMD/ATI uses four numbers, but the last is always a 0 and can be ignored. They essentially follow a similar patter - first number is generation, middle two are part within that generation, and last one is a zero (to make it look cooler). So a 5870 is better than a 5770, but not as good as a 5970. And a 5970 is older than a 6990, but newer than a 4970. AMD recently changed how their within-generation numbers go, so you can't just assume that, say, a 6970 will outperform a 5970 (it won't, actually), but comparisons within a generation are still good. And these are hardly new - ATI/AMD has used that patten since 2006, while nVidia has been using theirs since 2008 (prior to that, they had a 4-digit number (really two digits with a 00 at the end) and a few letters).
The workstation cards, though, are an absolute mess. About the only claim you can even generally defend is that "bigger numbers are better". And even that is rather iffy. And trying to figure out which consumer card a workstation card was based on requires an encyclopedia of them.
While I imagine workstation cards can get away with having non-linear names like that (since anyone buying a $3,500 graphics card will do their research), I imagine even professionals get confused by it all easily.
Nope. A simile (you suck at spelling, by the way) is "X is like Y", whereas a metaphor is "X is Y". So when I say "your face looks like a horse's ass", I'm insulting you with a simile, but when I say "your brain is a black hole - things go in, and are lost to all time and space", I'm insulting you with a metaphor. Both of those (similes and metaphors) are examples of a broader category of analogies.
Slight disputes here (I generally agree with you, this is all technicalities):
"Glorious Revolution" (as it's been translated here, I've also seen "Revolution of Glory", "Battle of Glory", "Glorious War", etc.) is produced by the People's Liberation Army. It is, in effect, a government product, and cannot be directly compared to American entertainment-only products.
However, we can compare it to America's Army, the game produced by the US Army. Current version (AA3) does not have a foreign force - it is all American-vs-American combat. The story is that it's a training excercise. Rather boring. If I remember correctly, though, the last major version (AA2) was US vs vaguely-middle-eastern-insurgents. Still no actual story, though, so it could be anywhere from Morocco to Pakistan.
However, the point was made elsewhere that it might not be explicitly America in Glorious Revolution. American equipment, yes, maybe even American styling, but it doesn't seem to be American flags and American symbols. So it could be compared to how, in the 70s-90s, the stereotypical villain country was always vaguely Russian, but usually fictitious (look at, say, the GI Joe cartoon, how COBRA sounded/acted rather Eastern-Europe without (IIRC) actually being such).
I always enjoyed playing as Chinese in BF2. "Midnight Sun" map, usually, invading Alaska. Very interesting experience.
Part of it actually made me think. The visuals for the different locations are so wildly different (the good China maps actually feel like China, the good American maps feel like America, the good MEC maps feel like the Middle East). I can't shake the feeling that I'm in a new world, of sorts. Add in (talking an actual invasion now) the interaction with civilians, the learning about the new place, and I suspect that any Chinese army that invaded the US would return home and bring a lot of American ideas with them. Hell, that might even be how the revolution starts. So even if big bad evil China wins, they won't stay big bad and evil for long.
Well, since that game console is banned in China (as is the PS3, although since Nintendo partnered with a Chinese company to distribute there, the Wii isn't), I would venture to say "no".
Not to mention actual wargames. 11th Armored Cavalry (to name one, can't remember the others) is actually dedicated to acting as a training enemy during training/wargames. Up until '05 or so, it was a replica Soviet unit, with tanks modified to look like T-80s and transports modified to look like BMPs. Right now, they're a mock-insurgent unit, but I wouldn't be surprised if all the heavy gear is being modified to mimic Chinese gear (shouldn't be hard - most PLA infantry gear is derived from Soviet gear).
Is it really? As far as I can tell, that seems to be normal/. anti-corporate fear-mongering.
The reason cited for having community broadband is to service areas businesses do not, or can not, provide service to. Places that are too rural, or too out-of-the-way, or maybe just too inconvenient, to hook up normally. So any claims that "this is just to protect BIG BUSINESS" is just... stupid.
Further, how the fuck is it impossible for a department to not run a deficit? Sure, it might need a start-up loan, something provided for by this law, but departments running a deficit is the exception, not the rule.
And referendums are, believe it or not, good things. They're ways to actually get true democracy, not the graft-ridden kickback-laden representative democracy we usually have. A referendum on borrowing money? Yeah, that seems totally, sincerely, the correct way to do things.
The way I understand it is that fees will be paid by everyone who uses the service, and those fees will be used exclusively for the service (ie. broadband fees won't be used for storm drain maintenance, and school funds won't be used for community broadband). This also means that those who aren't using the service won't end up paying for it anyways via other taxes.
Public hearings - local governments hold these for everything. Proposal to change the date for holding the public hearing on changing the amount of dues for sewage fees? Yeah, let's hold a hearing on that, too.
Financially separate operations - I'd honestly be angry if they weren't separate.
No below-cost service - Again, reasonable. Because doing so would either mean other tax money is being used, or that the government is borrowing to support it. Neither is good.
No borrowing without a referendum - A bit restrictive, but not too much so. Besides, since when has democracy been a bad thing?
I can easily imagine private companies being able to compete with this without absolutely dominating. Community broadband will likely be relatively slow - there's no incentive to go beyond what most people will use. A small business could probably work by providing higher-speed access at higher cost - those who want more speed will pay for it, but those who just need "good-enough" internet will be fine on community broadband.
Now, the one thing I am worried about is potential censorship. Certain highly-conservative communities might try to ban, say, pornography. Hyper-liberal communities might try to limit other things (a gaming curfew, similar to the recent Korean law, might be one of them). As far as I'm concerned, both are completely unacceptable. And also very likely to be tried - American politics tends to be very polarizing, even in homogeneous-party communities. I imagine most courts will throw the laws out, but you never know.
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Yeah. It's difficult enough to use that you actually need both brain cells working, and a basic grasp of the English language. Linux is idiot-proof by virtue of being impenetrable to idiots.
But retards will call it such ("virus", to the layman, is "any software what breaks my computer", regardless of distribution method). And thus, all the retards claiming "macs don't get viruses" will now be countered.
But hey, at least we still have Linux. No viruses (by either definition) on that, right?
What the hell is Steve Jobs doing on /.?
I'm going to steal it. Next time I see something I'm both apprehensive, and tired of, I shall be /we?ary/ of it.
I was originally going to correct you for misspelling "wary" (characterized by caution; guarded; careful), but then I realized "weary" (expressive of fatigue) arguably made more sense in context (as in, you are tired of the things this implies will happen, ie. more remakes). So now I'm just asking which one you meant.
Is there any actual downside to including it? Bloat, perhaps, but doesn't Firefox already support obscure/archaic formats like APNG, PPM and XBM? It might be wasted effort, so I can understand not making it an active task, but refusing to add any patch adding it seems... dumb.
All those abuses are federal level - many not even federal police. Guantanamo is military. NSA is intelligence (in the political sense, not the mental sense).
Yes, the federal police-like agencies (FBI, DoHS, Customs) are at the level where something needs to be done. Not quite a casus revolutionis, but definitely at the level that major, actual change needs to happen.
However, this case was local police. The worst they usually do is unfairly ticket people for speeding. (Note that I said usually - given that there's over a quarter billion people in this country, I'm sure you can cite a dozen other cases of cops being assholes, but that's statistically insignificant).
Also, even the summary states that the DEA needed a subpoena just to get the energy use records. So they were not, in any way, spying on absolutely everyone's power use. Getting a subpoena for this (since there was no active case involved) requires evidence. So they already had at least one other thing suspicious about the bitminer.
That would not be reason to search. If you suspect (or are just paranoid), let the police know that you will have a lawyer on file to argue as such should they return with a warrant that has no actual evidence.
And I'm concerned about this growing culture of "never talk to cops, they hate freedom and will pin anything they can think of or even imagine on you". Mainly because of the implication that "the organizations dedicated to protecting the people are in fact the greatest threat to such". That is not (yet) the case. There are signs we're headed there, yes, and I am concerned about that as well, but this is the county police we're talking about, not the Gestapo or the Spanish Inquisition.
Look, I'm not going to argue on whether or not marijuana should or should not be legal. Let's just accept (for this argument) that it is, and continue on the presumption that stopping a crime is, in and of itself, a worthy goal.
/. on issues like this. But sometimes, /. gets too caught up in it's own hatred of the establishment, and starts taking irrational positions. Blindly hating anything involving the police is just as bad as blindly defending anything involving the police.
Let's also assume that "exceptionally high electric usage" has a correlation (but not causation) with said illegal activity.
There is a huge fucking difference between "getting a search warrant" and "asking some questions". Get this straight. Not every cop is a power-obsessed Nazi just waiting for the chance to oppress everyone. Most of them, surprisingly enough, are human beings, not monsters. There's laws. They enforce them. Most laws, in fact, are just laws - murdering people is wrong, robbing people is wrong, raping people is wrong, all the way down to "playing music way too loud at four in the morning and causing a disturbance" being wrong.
Knocking on someone's door and asking a few questions ("We noticed your power bill was kinda high, we were just checking to make sure you knew. You happen to be doing anything really electricity-heavy? Arc welding? Homemade tesla coils?") is pretty much justified when you have something generally suspicious. It would be like "that driver just veered rather erratically, there's a decent chance he's drunk, might want to go check".
This is, of course, predicated on police, too, following the principles of the law. Refusing to talk to police in this case should not be evidence of anything other than not liking to talk to police. If that gets used as justification to later come back with a warrant, that's not good. Don't like that. But a polite status check is arguably a good thing - it lets any misunderstandings get cleared up before anything remotely serious happens, and it would probably be enough to get some exceptionally wasteful people to start using less electricity.
Now, understand this: I do not like how the police have become in the US. Or elsewhere, actually. There's many, many cases where police are clearly and flagrantly violating laws. There are far too many judges issuing free search warrants, far too many laws being misused, and more unjust laws than should be tolerated. Normally, I side with
If this ever does become a full-on police state, I'll be one of the first to grab my rifle, fill up some molotovs, and start taking back our rights. But until then, let's be reasonable - on both sides.
The average US home uses about 30kWh per day. Checking on people using triple that amount seems reasonable. I wouldn't justify a search warrant, or even a subpoena, but sending an officer to politely ask a few questions would be reasonable.
I'm currently a student at a tech school. I'm working on a web development degree, but I joined the Network Security Club for some cross-field experience. I'll see if I can convince the club to convert our test LAN (five old servers, a dozen desktops, several switches and a router) to IPv6. Hopefully the antique Cisco router can handle that - these guys will hate me if I swap that out for a cheap home router running DD-WRT.
Except for one thing: the cards are essentially identical. The processor, the memory, all that is essentially identical. You can, with some difficulty (there's heavy DRM on this part) reflash a gamer card to function as a workstation card or vice versa. The difference is essentially all in software - the workstation drivers have been optimized for accuracy, producing subpixel-perfect images, and are mainly tested (as you said) for OpenGL. The gamer drivers have been incredibly optimized for speed - trading off perfect rendering for vastly increased framerates. The only actual hardware difference I've seen is on many Quadro models, where you can plug in an external clock generator to run several displays on the same clock phase (useful when filming CRTs, as you can run the camera on the same clock and thus eliminate the problems inherent with that).
This, to extend your analogy, would be like Canon selling the exact same camera to hobbyists as professionals (same high-end lenses, same powerful image sensors, all the bells, whistles and gongs), but the hobbyist one saves to an SD card while the pro-grade saves to some proprietary super-high-density card, then selling the latter for five times the price.
Well, that $500 workstation card is a lot less powerful. Workstation cards are priced MUCH higher than their gamer equivelants - a FirePro V7800 is essentially a Radeon HD 5850 (clocked 50mHz lower, actually). Only real difference is the drivers they use. And the price tag - the FirePro costs $649, while the Radeon costs $349. And some of the higher-end ones get ridiculous - current going price for a V9800 is upwards of three grand.
As for how they can get away with that, I have no idea. Same way Microsoft can charge $300 for an Ultimate Edition OS, or how Apple can charge a fortune for a 133mHz increase in clock speed.
The consumer cards actually do make sense. For nVidia, it's "first number is the generation, second number is the part within that generation" - a 580 is better than a 570, but worse than a 590. Likewise, a 480 is newer than a 280, but not as new as a 580. You can also generally make the assertion that cards with the same ending numbers, but different generations, will fill the same role (and same rough price), but the newer one will be slightly better. AMD/ATI uses four numbers, but the last is always a 0 and can be ignored. They essentially follow a similar patter - first number is generation, middle two are part within that generation, and last one is a zero (to make it look cooler). So a 5870 is better than a 5770, but not as good as a 5970. And a 5970 is older than a 6990, but newer than a 4970. AMD recently changed how their within-generation numbers go, so you can't just assume that, say, a 6970 will outperform a 5970 (it won't, actually), but comparisons within a generation are still good. And these are hardly new - ATI/AMD has used that patten since 2006, while nVidia has been using theirs since 2008 (prior to that, they had a 4-digit number (really two digits with a 00 at the end) and a few letters).
The workstation cards, though, are an absolute mess. About the only claim you can even generally defend is that "bigger numbers are better". And even that is rather iffy. And trying to figure out which consumer card a workstation card was based on requires an encyclopedia of them.
While I imagine workstation cards can get away with having non-linear names like that (since anyone buying a $3,500 graphics card will do their research), I imagine even professionals get confused by it all easily.
Nope. A simile (you suck at spelling, by the way) is "X is like Y", whereas a metaphor is "X is Y". So when I say "your face looks like a horse's ass", I'm insulting you with a simile, but when I say "your brain is a black hole - things go in, and are lost to all time and space", I'm insulting you with a metaphor. Both of those (similes and metaphors) are examples of a broader category of analogies.
Apparently, I neglected the "knowing" half of the battle.
Slight disputes here (I generally agree with you, this is all technicalities):
"Glorious Revolution" (as it's been translated here, I've also seen "Revolution of Glory", "Battle of Glory", "Glorious War", etc.) is produced by the People's Liberation Army. It is, in effect, a government product, and cannot be directly compared to American entertainment-only products.
However, we can compare it to America's Army, the game produced by the US Army. Current version (AA3) does not have a foreign force - it is all American-vs-American combat. The story is that it's a training excercise. Rather boring. If I remember correctly, though, the last major version (AA2) was US vs vaguely-middle-eastern-insurgents. Still no actual story, though, so it could be anywhere from Morocco to Pakistan.
However, the point was made elsewhere that it might not be explicitly America in Glorious Revolution. American equipment, yes, maybe even American styling, but it doesn't seem to be American flags and American symbols. So it could be compared to how, in the 70s-90s, the stereotypical villain country was always vaguely Russian, but usually fictitious (look at, say, the GI Joe cartoon, how COBRA sounded/acted rather Eastern-Europe without (IIRC) actually being such).
Just my $0.02.
I always enjoyed playing as Chinese in BF2. "Midnight Sun" map, usually, invading Alaska. Very interesting experience.
Part of it actually made me think. The visuals for the different locations are so wildly different (the good China maps actually feel like China, the good American maps feel like America, the good MEC maps feel like the Middle East). I can't shake the feeling that I'm in a new world, of sorts. Add in (talking an actual invasion now) the interaction with civilians, the learning about the new place, and I suspect that any Chinese army that invaded the US would return home and bring a lot of American ideas with them. Hell, that might even be how the revolution starts. So even if big bad evil China wins, they won't stay big bad and evil for long.
It's a somewhat reassuring thought.
Well, since that game console is banned in China (as is the PS3, although since Nintendo partnered with a Chinese company to distribute there, the Wii isn't), I would venture to say "no".
Not to mention actual wargames. 11th Armored Cavalry (to name one, can't remember the others) is actually dedicated to acting as a training enemy during training/wargames. Up until '05 or so, it was a replica Soviet unit, with tanks modified to look like T-80s and transports modified to look like BMPs. Right now, they're a mock-insurgent unit, but I wouldn't be surprised if all the heavy gear is being modified to mimic Chinese gear (shouldn't be hard - most PLA infantry gear is derived from Soviet gear).
Because we're rebels, and we don't do things that way. That's the way the man would do it.
Do you want to be the man? I didn't think so.
Is it really? As far as I can tell, that seems to be normal /. anti-corporate fear-mongering.
The reason cited for having community broadband is to service areas businesses do not, or can not, provide service to. Places that are too rural, or too out-of-the-way, or maybe just too inconvenient, to hook up normally. So any claims that "this is just to protect BIG BUSINESS" is just... stupid.
Further, how the fuck is it impossible for a department to not run a deficit? Sure, it might need a start-up loan, something provided for by this law, but departments running a deficit is the exception, not the rule.
And referendums are, believe it or not, good things. They're ways to actually get true democracy, not the graft-ridden kickback-laden representative democracy we usually have. A referendum on borrowing money? Yeah, that seems totally, sincerely, the correct way to do things.
The way I understand it is that fees will be paid by everyone who uses the service, and those fees will be used exclusively for the service (ie. broadband fees won't be used for storm drain maintenance, and school funds won't be used for community broadband). This also means that those who aren't using the service won't end up paying for it anyways via other taxes.
Public hearings - local governments hold these for everything. Proposal to change the date for holding the public hearing on changing the amount of dues for sewage fees? Yeah, let's hold a hearing on that, too.
Financially separate operations - I'd honestly be angry if they weren't separate.
No below-cost service - Again, reasonable. Because doing so would either mean other tax money is being used, or that the government is borrowing to support it. Neither is good.
No borrowing without a referendum - A bit restrictive, but not too much so. Besides, since when has democracy been a bad thing?
I can easily imagine private companies being able to compete with this without absolutely dominating. Community broadband will likely be relatively slow - there's no incentive to go beyond what most people will use. A small business could probably work by providing higher-speed access at higher cost - those who want more speed will pay for it, but those who just need "good-enough" internet will be fine on community broadband.
Now, the one thing I am worried about is potential censorship. Certain highly-conservative communities might try to ban, say, pornography. Hyper-liberal communities might try to limit other things (a gaming curfew, similar to the recent Korean law, might be one of them). As far as I'm concerned, both are completely unacceptable. And also very likely to be tried - American politics tends to be very polarizing, even in homogeneous-party communities. I imagine most courts will throw the laws out, but you never know.