The trick for this I learned is to switch the Device Manager to the "tree" mode, showing what drivers depend on which, find the driver that is the parent of both of the wrong sound cards, and remove that driver, even if it's something wierd like a motherboard bridge or something. That usually straightens Windows out. If it doesn't (sometimes), it's time to re-install from scratch. (Never in this situation have I seen an "on-top-of" install of Windows fix the problem.)
This also fixes the problem where Windows sees multiple copies of the same device, and refuses to do anything but install all three copies every time you reboot.... unless it doesn't , in which case, again, the only solution I've found it to reinstall from scratch.
I also have a hard drive that won't work with Windows, specifically XP. For some reason, the hard drive won't leave "slave" mode. The BIOS is happy. Linux is happy. Windows XP won't boot.
Windows XP, however, will wipe out the boot sector of this hard drive if you run Setup. I hate to infer "priority" based on that datum, but the fact that the boot sector whacking is more robust then the actual install procedure is at the very least fertile ground for speculation.
A point related to your post: If the frequency of the light is constantly changing, for any reason, it is unlikely to ever form a standing wave. I can imagine certain situations where you could still get standing waves but they are much more constrained in nature then the situation we're more used to, constant wavelength (or sharply constrained variance).
(I highlight the word "unlikely"; like I said I can imagine certain symmetrical situations where the light is frequency lowered somewhere and raised somewhere else, but the balancing act would be precarious.)
Tax preparation is a different story. The software author is functioning as a tax preparation provider. Unfortunately, I can not quickly find a link outlining what additional responsibilities that entails, and while the tax filer ultimately has the responsibility to ensure their return is correct I'd be surprised if the preparer gets off "scot free" in the event they make an egregious error. It is, as I said, a risk I might take on in return for compensation, but most assuredly not something I'd take on for free. I'm confident in the GPL's ability to shield me from any liability I may have for destroying a computer (in the unlikely event my software could every directly be responsible for that anyhow, and even more unlikely event it could be proven), but not its ability to shield me from the IRS.
(In the end, even if I'm wrong and tax preparers have no liability, the fact that I could not quickly find that out is enough to scare me, and anybody else sane, away from such a project.)
Maybe... maybe not. With the source you might be able to start migrating the game piece by piece onto a more friendly platform. You could take pieces of the game from VB to C++, and perhaps from there wrap it in Python/Perl or something via SWIG.
Unfortunately, VB is just about the worst choice for this scenario. C++ can be wrapped a bajillion different ways (my personal choice would be to migrate it into Python, but there are a wide variety of alternate good solutions too). Maybe, maybe, the game could be wrapped as a (gigantic) COM control and driven from a decent language, slowly migrating out the logic into the alternate language, but I don't have enough experience to know if this is feasible.
Still, it isn't hopeless; bare minimum, the pieces that WINE are choking on could probably be made such that WINE stops choking on them.
if anyone else has the gumption to actually start a tax preparation program for Linux, let me know. I may not have the time to work on it, but I'd definitely be interested in testing and donating what little time I do have to it.
There are some classes of programs where Open Source makes little sense, and it is unlikely to attract enough people to make it worthwhile. One of those classes is the set of programs that basically are gigantic business rules databases. (Note this is as opposed to systems that run the business rules, which you can come by cheaply or freely.) There is a huge amount of work every year, updating those rules for the Federal level, every state, and quite a few cities. You're not going to get this for free.
Moreover, the liability is horrid, if there's a mistake. Again, nobody's going to take that on for free.
Do not hold your breath waiting for Free tax software; speaking for myself, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, either as a user or a developer. If I expect someone to take on that kind of liability, I expect I'm going to have to pay them.
"Brain damage", feh. If you listen to self-contained music tracks, there's nothing wrong with random sorting. On the other hand, if you want to appreciate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Pink Floyd's The Wall, you need to listen to the whole thing straight through.
Anyhow, the innovation promised in the message title. With my diverse tastes, listening totally randomly is pretty jarring, with an Albinoni string concerto from the 18th century going straight into a psychedelic rock track. I broke my tracks up by genre and wrote a "randomizer" that would preferentially stay in the same genre, if it could, and randomly jumped out, and it worked pretty well.
Basically, you have an X% chance of jumping up a directory, then I pick from all the songs underneath the current directory that haven't been played in the last X song plays (the other major failing of random selection, inevitable repetition). With 2-4 directories deep of organization (say genre, composer, album), it minimizes the crash of incompatible genres while still allowing the pleasures of randomization.
Likewise, I can see no a priori reason why any of the possible standing waves should not have observable consequences.
As of right now, no light beam can travel from one end of the universe to the other and come back in any form, since the universe has expanded at greater then the speed of light.
If the universe is still expanding and the "big rip" scenario plays out, then you can't get a standing wave because you'll never get even one round trip out of a photon, which is a requirement for a standing wave.
You'd need a constrained universe that wasn't expanding faster then the speed of light (and ideally, much slower) to have a standing wave. Under those circumstances, one may develop.
Come to think of it, that might not be a good thing; Hawkings hypothesized a similar resonance as the way a universe would tear apart a black-hole-wormhole-based time machine. A universe with a resonant frequency, with vacuum fluctuations as we have, might tear itself apart.
I think the black hole is maximal entropy from the point of view of the exterior universe; "inside" the black hole can be a different story and most likely would be.
Also, if I'm understanding this correctly, from the point of view of the hypothetical "exterior" universe, our universe would be completely unobservable, so we aren't constrained by their entropy rules.
I used to not care about cookies, but I've found the latest incarnation of Mozilla has a nice system; set it to ask and click the "apply this to all cookies in the domain". If you mostly look at the same sites over and over, and that's true of most of us, you fairly quickly weed out the ad cookies and the "I don't know what that's for" cookies, and let through only the login cookies (just about the only legit use, but remember that cookies are about the only safe way to do web-site logins, so you can't just shut them off and they are not all evil). In a fairly short period of time, you just surf like normal but with better cookie control, except when you visit a new site.
Now that it's so easy, I'm actually controlling my cookies. (IE has a 'zone' implementation but since you have to go to the control panel to use it AFAIK, it's nearly useless.)
There is still the lack of a strong corresponding US movement.
Because we've largely already lost. I try to be optimistic, but at this point, the only thing that is going to undo software patents is if they start causing serious economic damange that nobody can claim is just "the way IP works", or we start getting our clocks cleaned by a country with saner laws and people correctly diagnose the problem and fix it... as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction we'll actually get to tighten IP laws since the only narrative lawmakers currently understand is "IP too weak".
I'm a certified anti-software patent wonk, but I still think the system isn't going to change until the damage these things causes gets into the billions, and it can no longer be denied by anybody the damage exceeds the benefits.
A question plagues humanity for thousands of years: "Do Platonic Ideals actually exist?"
It is not until 2004 that Slashdot User "radiumhahn" finally answers the question definatively, "Who cares?"
The Slashdot moderation "Insightful" proves the point is, indeed, insightful, and a deep and powerful question is finally laid to rest, once and for all.
Thank God for you, "radiumhahn"! Where ever would philosophy be without your "Insightful" contributions?
On what grounds will Microsoft pull out the DMCA? It may be a law with several evil clauses (and a couple of good ones, like the safe harbor provisions), but it's not an all-purpose beating stick.
I don't see how this can be construed as a mechanism to defeat copyright protection, and emulators are well established as legal; it's just the legality of actually having any ROM data to run the emulators on is occasionally questioned. (For the record, I think if you own a license to a copyrighted work you should have full rights to put it in whatever media format you like, as long as it is undistributed, but to be fair, the legal precendents are mixed at best.)
Designing from the top down is generally a disaster. But for an existing system, it is the best way to document it.
Few people document, even fewer do it well. One of the great crimes people commit against their fellow developers is to not give the bird's-eye view. If you want details, you can always go consult the source code. Getting the bird's eye view of the system, the unifying vision, the overall-architecture, that is much harder to extract from the raw code.
Draw the system out on a sheet of paper at a high level, the interacting concepts and major architectural features, the fundamental metaphors. These things need not literally exist in the code. That's your first diagram in the manual. The first chapter is a couple of paragraph overview of each blob, and a description of how they conceptually relate in the system.
Next, figure out some good order to drill down into the blobs, expanding them out as necessary and trying to minimize the pre-requisite knowlege necessary for each blob. As you drill down, you'll find you forgot high-level abstractions in the first chapter, and you may even find yourself eliminating some you thought were high level. (Few things refines your own understanding of a system like documenting it!) Document with a progressively-higher-detail "spiral" until you reach a reasonable level, such that there's no poing documenting any more since it would be faster to consult the code.
You are allowed to assume some domain knowlege, and the willingness to actually read the docs. (Without either of those two you're hosed; you can't teach the entire domain in a manual and you're not writing for people who won't read the docs, you're writing for those who will.)
Advantages:
Gives view of the program no amount of source reading can
Less reading leaves the user more capable of doing things in the system then a raw API table, shorn of context
You start off from day one with a usable, albiet incomplete document, whereas an API document will most likely be useless without understanding the rest of the system. (In theory, your system has isolated concerns and it is not necessary to understand the whole to understand part. In reality...) You can stop at any time and still have a valuable document.
The system itself will guide you towards what needs to be documented; you'll see what I mean as you get into this.
You may discover a new and wonderful design for the system, which even if you never get a chance to implement it may educate you enough to make this whole thing worthwhile.
I actually tend to enjoy writing docs, for the reasons above.
API references are necessary, eventually, but in a way, they are the least important thing you can pass on, not the most. As the old saying goes, "Give me your code, and I will not understand your data structures. Give me your data, and I won't need the code, it will be obvious." Similarly, "Give me your API, I won't understand the concepts. Give me your design, and I almost won't need the API; it will be obvious."
Do you have any references you can give for these claims? Some people are pre-disposed to make wild claims about the intelligence of animals, and others are pre-disposed to believe them, but they often get inflated in the telling. I would expect that if there was a scientifically confirmed mythology being transmitted by other primates, I would have heard about it; that would be amazing news, and the fact that I hear about it from a Slashdot comment makes it highly suspect.
For instance, see this on Koko the Gorilla, among others. I find this article fairly compelling and don't see much response to it, nor do I think there can be much response to it. Is your post able to be backed up with science, or is it third-generation hear-say and wishful thinking?
Mind you, I'm open to the idea, just being properly skeptical about what are really very strong claims from a dubious source.
if you don't stand and fight when someone wrongs you, you will be seen as weak,
This only applies when you will be seen being weak. If Microsoft backed down on the Lindows thing, everybody would see them being weak and your aphorism would be in full force. If FFR backed down without a peep, nobody would ever notice and nobody would really see them as a weakling. (And a trademark issue doesn't imply that the currently aggreived party will have any interest in following up on the perceived weakness, either.)
This is why you guys (USAians in general) need to switch to proportional representation and the approval vote - third parties could actually get some real support and the big two would have to distinguish themselves.
I used to think so too, but now I think this is a feature, not a bug. I want extremists marginalized and the center in control. Extremists get too much power in proportional representation systems; in our system, they don't get the swing vote, the centrists do. I'd say that's a good thing.
DRM is unfeasible from a security standpoint, even though you can make it difficult on the average Joe.
If you do a full-fledged security analysis, the system is "secure" if the cost of breaking the system is less then the value the system protects. DRM systems will be designed to protect billions of dollars of content. Billions of dollars will be able to crack any remotely feasible DRM scheme. Once cracked, the content can be freely copied by all.
Sure, you can cut down the number of crackers and you might even make it unfeasible, but you can never make it impossible.
All the outlawing and penalities and such just raise the price, but in the end, you can only fine one person so much (life in jail, all assets, that's it), and that's all the system needs to be broken with.
Since the breakdown of the Sovjet union, the world cheered for peace and everyone did their best to join as many international treaties as possible. The few who didn't was the US. The reason: to easier fight back on socalled "evil" societies.
The other posters have already torn apart your other empty-headed comments in your post, but I thought I'd take this one since nobody else seems to.
Do you honestly believe that since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been no war, except for the US? Do you honestly believe that North Korea, Libya, and Iran "cheers for peace" while developing their secret and illegal-even-by-UN-standards nuclear programs?
Do you actually look at the news ever? Wars have continued on in full swing. Africa often seems like one big civil war. North Korea is so bad, most people (including me) can't even comprehend the fact that it lives on the same globe as us. Ethnic cleansing and genocide have continued.
If this is "cheering for peace", I'd hate to see "agitating for war".
Look about you; you're being fed a line and you're buying it hook and sinker. The fact that that line includes the meme that you're so much smarter then the US is part of the line. Wake up.
Two words: Holographic media. That can have more "layers" then actual atoms, and will require scanning lasers (or something ferociously advanced that I wouldn't care to speculate on, but may be possible).
Hypothesizing advances in one type of media but not another is sophistry.
*sigh*... you're missing the point.... the grandparent was referring to *real* solid state storage, not 1-2 gigs.
Drop that "1-2 gigs" of storage back in time to yourself ten years ago and tell me it's not "real storage".
1-2 gigs holds damn near everything of interest to me in my life, including a book-length essay I spent three years on, all the digital photos I have, all the source code I've ever written, the source to all the music I've ever written, every website I've ever done, and all the misc. other data I consider critical, and would still have, well, nearly 1-2 gigs left over since all of the above clocks in at around 300 MB. Any storage that can back up all my critical data is real in my book, even though it holds only a fraction of my MP3 collection... this year.
If you're waiting for solid state to be as capacious as moving parts, you're going to be waiting forever; almost by definition, a moving part device will have more volume available to store data in then a solid-state device. (No matter how large your solid-state device, I can create a DVD-like disk even today that holds more then your solid-state device, for reasonable sizes.)
The largest device capacity I saw in there, a 1.5GB device, is still much, much smaller physically then the 300GB monster hard drives you can buy now. (Even extrapolating the density of the 1.5GB flash device to the hard drive's volume, I think the hard drive still wins, and in cost, it's no contest.)
Stop waiting, start buying. As usual, if you wait until the evolution ends, you'll never buy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Break the law" always seems to be the first choice for filling in the "???" part of the Underpants Gnome's plan, doesn't it?
The trick for this I learned is to switch the Device Manager to the "tree" mode, showing what drivers depend on which, find the driver that is the parent of both of the wrong sound cards, and remove that driver, even if it's something wierd like a motherboard bridge or something. That usually straightens Windows out. If it doesn't (sometimes), it's time to re-install from scratch. (Never in this situation have I seen an "on-top-of" install of Windows fix the problem.)
This also fixes the problem where Windows sees multiple copies of the same device, and refuses to do anything but install all three copies every time you reboot.... unless it doesn't , in which case, again, the only solution I've found it to reinstall from scratch.
I also have a hard drive that won't work with Windows, specifically XP. For some reason, the hard drive won't leave "slave" mode. The BIOS is happy. Linux is happy. Windows XP won't boot.
Windows XP, however, will wipe out the boot sector of this hard drive if you run Setup. I hate to infer "priority" based on that datum, but the fact that the boot sector whacking is more robust then the actual install procedure is at the very least fertile ground for speculation.
A point related to your post: If the frequency of the light is constantly changing, for any reason, it is unlikely to ever form a standing wave. I can imagine certain situations where you could still get standing waves but they are much more constrained in nature then the situation we're more used to, constant wavelength (or sharply constrained variance).
(I highlight the word "unlikely"; like I said I can imagine certain symmetrical situations where the light is frequency lowered somewhere and raised somewhere else, but the balancing act would be precarious.)
Tax preparation is a different story. The software author is functioning as a tax preparation provider. Unfortunately, I can not quickly find a link outlining what additional responsibilities that entails, and while the tax filer ultimately has the responsibility to ensure their return is correct I'd be surprised if the preparer gets off "scot free" in the event they make an egregious error. It is, as I said, a risk I might take on in return for compensation, but most assuredly not something I'd take on for free. I'm confident in the GPL's ability to shield me from any liability I may have for destroying a computer (in the unlikely event my software could every directly be responsible for that anyhow, and even more unlikely event it could be proven), but not its ability to shield me from the IRS.
(In the end, even if I'm wrong and tax preparers have no liability, the fact that I could not quickly find that out is enough to scare me, and anybody else sane, away from such a project.)
Maybe... maybe not. With the source you might be able to start migrating the game piece by piece onto a more friendly platform. You could take pieces of the game from VB to C++, and perhaps from there wrap it in Python/Perl or something via SWIG.
Unfortunately, VB is just about the worst choice for this scenario. C++ can be wrapped a bajillion different ways (my personal choice would be to migrate it into Python, but there are a wide variety of alternate good solutions too). Maybe, maybe, the game could be wrapped as a (gigantic) COM control and driven from a decent language, slowly migrating out the logic into the alternate language, but I don't have enough experience to know if this is feasible.
Still, it isn't hopeless; bare minimum, the pieces that WINE are choking on could probably be made such that WINE stops choking on them.
if anyone else has the gumption to actually start a tax preparation program for Linux, let me know. I may not have the time to work on it, but I'd definitely be interested in testing and donating what little time I do have to it.
There are some classes of programs where Open Source makes little sense, and it is unlikely to attract enough people to make it worthwhile. One of those classes is the set of programs that basically are gigantic business rules databases. (Note this is as opposed to systems that run the business rules, which you can come by cheaply or freely.) There is a huge amount of work every year, updating those rules for the Federal level, every state, and quite a few cities. You're not going to get this for free.
Moreover, the liability is horrid, if there's a mistake. Again, nobody's going to take that on for free.
Do not hold your breath waiting for Free tax software; speaking for myself, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, either as a user or a developer. If I expect someone to take on that kind of liability, I expect I'm going to have to pay them.
"Brain damage", feh. If you listen to self-contained music tracks, there's nothing wrong with random sorting. On the other hand, if you want to appreciate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Pink Floyd's The Wall, you need to listen to the whole thing straight through.
Anyhow, the innovation promised in the message title. With my diverse tastes, listening totally randomly is pretty jarring, with an Albinoni string concerto from the 18th century going straight into a psychedelic rock track. I broke my tracks up by genre and wrote a "randomizer" that would preferentially stay in the same genre, if it could, and randomly jumped out, and it worked pretty well.
Basically, you have an X% chance of jumping up a directory, then I pick from all the songs underneath the current directory that haven't been played in the last X song plays (the other major failing of random selection, inevitable repetition). With 2-4 directories deep of organization (say genre, composer, album), it minimizes the crash of incompatible genres while still allowing the pleasures of randomization.
Likewise, I can see no a priori reason why any of the possible standing waves should not have observable consequences.
As of right now, no light beam can travel from one end of the universe to the other and come back in any form, since the universe has expanded at greater then the speed of light.
If the universe is still expanding and the "big rip" scenario plays out, then you can't get a standing wave because you'll never get even one round trip out of a photon, which is a requirement for a standing wave.
You'd need a constrained universe that wasn't expanding faster then the speed of light (and ideally, much slower) to have a standing wave. Under those circumstances, one may develop.
Come to think of it, that might not be a good thing; Hawkings hypothesized a similar resonance as the way a universe would tear apart a black-hole-wormhole-based time machine. A universe with a resonant frequency, with vacuum fluctuations as we have, might tear itself apart.
I think the black hole is maximal entropy from the point of view of the exterior universe; "inside" the black hole can be a different story and most likely would be.
Also, if I'm understanding this correctly, from the point of view of the hypothetical "exterior" universe, our universe would be completely unobservable, so we aren't constrained by their entropy rules.
I used to not care about cookies, but I've found the latest incarnation of Mozilla has a nice system; set it to ask and click the "apply this to all cookies in the domain". If you mostly look at the same sites over and over, and that's true of most of us, you fairly quickly weed out the ad cookies and the "I don't know what that's for" cookies, and let through only the login cookies (just about the only legit use, but remember that cookies are about the only safe way to do web-site logins, so you can't just shut them off and they are not all evil). In a fairly short period of time, you just surf like normal but with better cookie control, except when you visit a new site.
Now that it's so easy, I'm actually controlling my cookies. (IE has a 'zone' implementation but since you have to go to the control panel to use it AFAIK, it's nearly useless.)
There is still the lack of a strong corresponding US movement.
Because we've largely already lost. I try to be optimistic, but at this point, the only thing that is going to undo software patents is if they start causing serious economic damange that nobody can claim is just "the way IP works", or we start getting our clocks cleaned by a country with saner laws and people correctly diagnose the problem and fix it... as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction we'll actually get to tighten IP laws since the only narrative lawmakers currently understand is "IP too weak".
I'm a certified anti-software patent wonk, but I still think the system isn't going to change until the damage these things causes gets into the billions, and it can no longer be denied by anybody the damage exceeds the benefits.
A question plagues humanity for thousands of years: "Do Platonic Ideals actually exist?"
It is not until 2004 that Slashdot User "radiumhahn" finally answers the question definatively, "Who cares?"
The Slashdot moderation "Insightful" proves the point is, indeed, insightful, and a deep and powerful question is finally laid to rest, once and for all.
Thank God for you, "radiumhahn"! Where ever would philosophy be without your "Insightful" contributions?
On what grounds will Microsoft pull out the DMCA? It may be a law with several evil clauses (and a couple of good ones, like the safe harbor provisions), but it's not an all-purpose beating stick.
I don't see how this can be construed as a mechanism to defeat copyright protection, and emulators are well established as legal; it's just the legality of actually having any ROM data to run the emulators on is occasionally questioned. (For the record, I think if you own a license to a copyrighted work you should have full rights to put it in whatever media format you like, as long as it is undistributed, but to be fair, the legal precendents are mixed at best.)
Few people document, even fewer do it well. One of the great crimes people commit against their fellow developers is to not give the bird's-eye view. If you want details, you can always go consult the source code. Getting the bird's eye view of the system, the unifying vision, the overall-architecture, that is much harder to extract from the raw code.
Draw the system out on a sheet of paper at a high level, the interacting concepts and major architectural features, the fundamental metaphors. These things need not literally exist in the code. That's your first diagram in the manual. The first chapter is a couple of paragraph overview of each blob, and a description of how they conceptually relate in the system.
Next, figure out some good order to drill down into the blobs, expanding them out as necessary and trying to minimize the pre-requisite knowlege necessary for each blob. As you drill down, you'll find you forgot high-level abstractions in the first chapter, and you may even find yourself eliminating some you thought were high level. (Few things refines your own understanding of a system like documenting it!) Document with a progressively-higher-detail "spiral" until you reach a reasonable level, such that there's no poing documenting any more since it would be faster to consult the code.
You are allowed to assume some domain knowlege, and the willingness to actually read the docs. (Without either of those two you're hosed; you can't teach the entire domain in a manual and you're not writing for people who won't read the docs, you're writing for those who will.)
Advantages:
- Gives view of the program no amount of source reading can
- Less reading leaves the user more capable of doing things in the system then a raw API table, shorn of context
- You start off from day one with a usable, albiet incomplete document, whereas an API document will most likely be useless without understanding the rest of the system. (In theory, your system has isolated concerns and it is not necessary to understand the whole to understand part. In reality...) You can stop at any time and still have a valuable document.
- The system itself will guide you towards what needs to be documented; you'll see what I mean as you get into this.
- You may discover a new and wonderful design for the system, which even if you never get a chance to implement it may educate you enough to make this whole thing worthwhile.
I actually tend to enjoy writing docs, for the reasons above.API references are necessary, eventually, but in a way, they are the least important thing you can pass on, not the most. As the old saying goes, "Give me your code, and I will not understand your data structures. Give me your data, and I won't need the code, it will be obvious." Similarly, "Give me your API, I won't understand the concepts. Give me your design, and I almost won't need the API; it will be obvious."
Do you have any references you can give for these claims? Some people are pre-disposed to make wild claims about the intelligence of animals, and others are pre-disposed to believe them, but they often get inflated in the telling. I would expect that if there was a scientifically confirmed mythology being transmitted by other primates, I would have heard about it; that would be amazing news, and the fact that I hear about it from a Slashdot comment makes it highly suspect.
For instance, see this on Koko the Gorilla, among others. I find this article fairly compelling and don't see much response to it, nor do I think there can be much response to it. Is your post able to be backed up with science, or is it third-generation hear-say and wishful thinking?
Mind you, I'm open to the idea, just being properly skeptical about what are really very strong claims from a dubious source.
if you don't stand and fight when someone wrongs you, you will be seen as weak,
This only applies when you will be seen being weak. If Microsoft backed down on the Lindows thing, everybody would see them being weak and your aphorism would be in full force. If FFR backed down without a peep, nobody would ever notice and nobody would really see them as a weakling. (And a trademark issue doesn't imply that the currently aggreived party will have any interest in following up on the perceived weakness, either.)
This is why you guys (USAians in general) need to switch to proportional representation and the approval vote - third parties could actually get some real support and the big two would have to distinguish themselves.
I used to think so too, but now I think this is a feature, not a bug. I want extremists marginalized and the center in control. Extremists get too much power in proportional representation systems; in our system, they don't get the swing vote, the centrists do. I'd say that's a good thing.
DRM is unfeasible from a security standpoint, even though you can make it difficult on the average Joe.
If you do a full-fledged security analysis, the system is "secure" if the cost of breaking the system is less then the value the system protects. DRM systems will be designed to protect billions of dollars of content. Billions of dollars will be able to crack any remotely feasible DRM scheme. Once cracked, the content can be freely copied by all.
Sure, you can cut down the number of crackers and you might even make it unfeasible, but you can never make it impossible.
All the outlawing and penalities and such just raise the price, but in the end, you can only fine one person so much (life in jail, all assets, that's it), and that's all the system needs to be broken with.
How can I buy a card with Linux support, when my whole point was that none of the cards on sale had Linux support available?
I emphasize the word "none".
I don't like buying used, too many times screwed, too little recourse.
Since the breakdown of the Sovjet union, the world cheered for peace and everyone did their best to join as many international treaties as possible. The few who didn't was the US. The reason: to easier fight back on socalled "evil" societies.
The other posters have already torn apart your other empty-headed comments in your post, but I thought I'd take this one since nobody else seems to.
Do you honestly believe that since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been no war, except for the US? Do you honestly believe that North Korea, Libya, and Iran "cheers for peace" while developing their secret and illegal-even-by-UN-standards nuclear programs?
Do you actually look at the news ever? Wars have continued on in full swing. Africa often seems like one big civil war. North Korea is so bad, most people (including me) can't even comprehend the fact that it lives on the same globe as us. Ethnic cleansing and genocide have continued.
If this is "cheering for peace", I'd hate to see "agitating for war".
Look about you; you're being fed a line and you're buying it hook and sinker. The fact that that line includes the meme that you're so much smarter then the US is part of the line. Wake up.
Two words: Holographic media. That can have more "layers" then actual atoms, and will require scanning lasers (or something ferociously advanced that I wouldn't care to speculate on, but may be possible).
Hypothesizing advances in one type of media but not another is sophistry.
I tried OSX for a week. Hated it then, still do. Your ad hominem doesn't stick.
*sigh*... you're missing the point.... the grandparent was referring to *real* solid state storage, not 1-2 gigs.
Drop that "1-2 gigs" of storage back in time to yourself ten years ago and tell me it's not "real storage".
1-2 gigs holds damn near everything of interest to me in my life, including a book-length essay I spent three years on, all the digital photos I have, all the source code I've ever written, the source to all the music I've ever written, every website I've ever done, and all the misc. other data I consider critical, and would still have, well, nearly 1-2 gigs left over since all of the above clocks in at around 300 MB. Any storage that can back up all my critical data is real in my book, even though it holds only a fraction of my MP3 collection... this year.
What are you talking about? Solid state storage is here, today, now. (If that link stops working, search for "removable flash drives" as a category.)
If you're waiting for solid state to be as capacious as moving parts, you're going to be waiting forever; almost by definition, a moving part device will have more volume available to store data in then a solid-state device. (No matter how large your solid-state device, I can create a DVD-like disk even today that holds more then your solid-state device, for reasonable sizes.)
The largest device capacity I saw in there, a 1.5GB device, is still much, much smaller physically then the 300GB monster hard drives you can buy now. (Even extrapolating the density of the 1.5GB flash device to the hard drive's volume, I think the hard drive still wins, and in cost, it's no contest.)
Stop waiting, start buying. As usual, if you wait until the evolution ends, you'll never buy.