I had to substitute 1 LoC for 10 terabyte myself, but according to google 100Pb/s*km = 2863278 LoC*mph. So if you give everyone in Chicago a copy of the library of congress and they drive around at 1 mph, it'll have the same bandwidth. Simple, right?
I've had 100-Petabit/decade internet at home for a while now.
Google is perfect if you want it in hogsheads per forthnight, in this case: 100 (petabits per decade) = 340.255519 megabits per second But just between us, if you want to brag about your connection I'd use a more common unit.
...for suggesting the Democans and Republicrats have anything to fear in a first-past-the-post system. Or maybe "+5, Sad truth" but that's not a moderation. Europe is the big threat, because to *briefly* try to describe ~30 different political landscapes most have proportional representation, a 4-5% lower limit, a big socialist block, a big conservative block and some smaller parties. These smaller parties can be both between the blocks (greens, christians, liberals) and extreme left/right wing parties.
This will very often lead to a distribution from left to right something like 5-35-20-35-5, one major party on each side who's looking to gather some adjoining parties for a coalition. Here's a very central point - it's not so that each side will necessarily want all their "own" parties in it. For example, many extreme right parties are shunned by the rest of the right side - they'll rather look to the center. This means that if you can get past the 4% and be in the center, you're very attractive. It's often easier for the big parties to swallow making some environmental or social policy changes than cooperating with the extremes, that has a price of its own.
That said, it's not so easy to start a new party in Europe either, even though it's easier in the US. Since there are more parties, they also tend to shift more trying to close up gaps of voters that aren't satisfied. Already you see a lot of parties moving in towards the Pirate Party trying to keep enough voters away so that it won't pass the limit. It's usually many years between a new party enters the parliament, the last round was really the greens.
Actually, I've found more and more are starting to understand. But it's an incredibly tough position because they constantly need to fend off their managers, the customer and at the same time organize the team to get something done. If they're too weak, it's like an American football team with no back line. You can have a great quarterback (architect) and runners (developers) but it doesn't matter because they'll get rushed by the opposition before they can get anything done.
A good manager is territorial and will defend his team so they get things done, a poor manager will pass the whippings he gets "more, faster, better". The more crap you will push, the more worst case or even substantially padded estimates you'll get. If you want a second opinion, then your second opinion can do it too not just tell me I should be able to do it in half the time. That's usually fairly effective because either they have to admit they don't have the qualifications to estimate it or they'll have to meet their own impossible deadlines.
Ok, so I know slashdot isn't the snappiest of news sites but the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. There was a few years there that IT would revolutionize mankind, change everything there was to know about economics, society, nations and borders and we'd all go live in some new-age cyberspace era. That's the last time I heard anyone use the word glorious about the IT industry, which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
You're not going to find any highly qualified help hanging around on a supermarket sales floor trying to sell to the lone person that actually appreciates that in the middle of all the bargain shoppers. Of course they all the right words to fool the casual customer, that's part of the job description but that's also it. That's not about computers, that's about pretty much anything. Most of them end up hiring basically nice and polite people that'll sell you on whatever you show an interest in along with whatever accessories they can or whatever has the highest margin if you don't.
It's one of the things you pay for if you visit niche shops, I'm not saying they're all saints either but most of them live off reputation and actual skills, not the goods they stock. Don't let them talk you way out of your budget, but they actually can make sense to listen to. But it all rather depends on you needing some personal advice, computer sales is way too dominated by online reviews that are valid for everyone. One round of reviews, one round of price checking, go to cheapest serious retailer, buy. It's quite different than shopping clothes were you actually need personal feedback.
Once the competence of a benchmarker is called into question all of a sudden I feel a massive urge to completely ignore everything they say.
You mean like pretty much every benchmark where there's a sore loser? Well, I'm sure they'll be glad to hearing spreading FUD is such an effective strategy. I'm not talking about this specific case, but for benchmarking in general your position is rather sad.
The point being is that it is not free and if the RIAA/MPAA or local equivalent is upset about that, then it's the ISP who will be faced with some form of tax or levy because presently there is no other way around it.
They know that's the road to hell paved with dubious intentions. Once you introduce a tax or levy, people feel entitled to download since why else are they paying? If you don't try to meter it, chances are people will download everything because it's a sunk cost and kill sales. If they try to raise the levy to a point that matches sales income, it'll be absurdly high and everyone not interested will cause a huge backlash. If they make the levy variable they're back to the impossible task of monitoring all forms of P2P. Starting off down that road will only lead to even more accusations of being leeches on the Internet infrastructure and will only give them even more bad will. They are losing the political maneuvering room all over Europe, according to the parliament elections (Bundestagswahl) in Germany today the pirate party got 2% of the votes. It's not enough to break the 5% limit but it will be if the music industry keeps being so hostile against people.
The point was that there's relatively few people that get rars from the topsite system. Once you get past the fan-up and fan-out and start sharing in any form of peer group it's more effective to put up a torrent. I've never felt the need to view anything inside rars, and I'd say my hookup is stellar. But then I probably know one of the two exceptions you speak of.
Funny how these days noone knows how the real Scene works. But it's surely better this way.
The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading. There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy. Or they stay as internals, which is just fine with me.
When you cut out the wishful thinking you pretty much agree with me that it isn't being used by those that do care about software patents or those that don't care about software patents. The former licenses H.264 or jumps at shadows, the latter uses H.264 without a license. Your futile attempts at counter attack against H.264 failed the save vs reality. Oh by the way, I also forgot one other big thing - modern digicams/video cameras record in AVCHD which is H.264, so unless they edit and transcode it that'll be in H.264 too. If you're doing something simple like posting a video of a speech it's easier just to trim and put it up there. That combined with all the other HD media means almost everyone has a H.264 decoder, the rest are GNU/special people like RMS.
It's an outdated video codec that loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout, and is in general ignored in HD media (H.264/VC-1), HD broadcasts (H.264/MPEG2), set top boxes, mobile players and so on. It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264. While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents meaning it's lost its only real shot at relevance as the default codec for HTML5 video, which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The end result is that it might be used by a few geeks and internally in video games and such that provide their own player, but it'll likely have as much impact as vorbis had on the mp3/aac format. That is, none.
I'll just have to ask... why? Except for some holdouts from Usenet I think pretty much everyone uses torrents without any rar/zip compression. And even those are automatically decompressed if you set up something like hellanzb. It certainly doesn't save you any space, it's just for grouping files together and intgrity checking. Except torrents already do that, same with PAR on the Usenet side. It's completely redundant these days.
Not really. It's well proven that people will break any limit a little as long as the risk/benefit is in their favor, and won't back down until you're way over the limit. Speeding is a very good example, I think everybody agree you need speed limits and can't have people going 100 km/h through a residential area that should have 35 km/h. So you make the limit 30 km/h, most people drive 35 km/h but you can hit those going 40 km/h+ hard because they're like "way over". Those that go 35 km/h aren't practically punished because there's so many and the fines would be so little because it's just over, in fact the speeding cameras and traffic controls normally don't issue tickets at the lowest level. It wouldn't matter if the limit is 40, 50 or 60 km/h, it's always this way. Call it a little bit of marketing - instead of increasing the limits and having a real sharp dropoff, they put the limits very conservatively, let people skirt the rules a little and get general agreement that too much is too much. So it's much more about human nature than actually being bad laws.
That really isn't a fair comparison. This is about using and abusing the many ways to understand "unlimited", just like many ISPs used it to limit bandwidth and claim it was still unlimited because you were connected 24/7. In this case, specifically that unlimited can be interpreted to mean "any song" and not "as much as you want". If they had said "Downlaod the latest Hollywood blockbusters with our new Unlimited Internet" then it'd quite clearly be foul play because it doesn't actually provide that. One of the reasons Grokster was so beaten in the 9-0 supreme court ruling if I recall correctly, is that they directly told you you'd be getting content that was there illegally. The same would an ISP be, so they have to define their "unlimited" wisely.
That said, it does not matter as bandwidth will increase regardless of promotions. It's not promotions that have made my internet speed go up ~300 times in the last decade. Nor is it promotions that means one mid-size tower with 5x2TB disks can store a library of congress. Soon we'll have enough bandwidth and storage that it's like tap water. Want something? Well your 1Gb/s+ connections draws a long sigh, and you have it. I'm already no longer a 24/7 bandwidth hog with this 20Mbit connection - and yes, 2.2MB/s actual download - because I see no point. I would never get around to watching/listening/play everything I could download. That wouldn't fundamentally change if I got a gigabit connecion. I'd get things faster but I'd still have no means to consume 1Gb/s of information. Not even streamed QuadHD super-BluRays.
The problem is that more then one zealot has loudly claimed that accidental use means all your proprietary code is now GPLed despite it never being intended for that.
It's not even possible to get such a verdict. But as a settlement offer you can make any offer you want, and "release your complete source" is a valid and often used offer. But if you do want to take it to court, the worst you'll get is 5 years in federal prison and fines of up to 250,000$. Hey, it's what the FBI warning on a 5$ DVD says...
Oracle is the stupidest database I know anyway. I made a simple SELECT x FROM xtable WHERE x NOT IN ( SELECT DISTINCT y FROM ytable ) and it just choked for 10+ minutes and never finished. After a rewrite do to the same thing it took less than 5 seconds, but it was another case where oracle is just terrible. Why it has so much appeal I got no idea, it certainly has nothing to do with performance. In MSSQL or PGSQL or MySQL I can write things any way I want, in Oracle I have to massage it to get in on some form Oracle likes or suffer eons of execution time.
but I'm betting they'll go pretty far--especially considering the fact that QA teams are far less expensive to business than programmers are.
Only if you get nice and reproducable errors, those you can squash in any language fairly easy. Chasing ghost bugs usually takes lots of programmer time even if the QA guys can tell you the application is crashing...
Drop in at your local community college and take a course on statistics. Pay close attention to the "profit maximization" section. It'll explain the math behind the relationship between unit cost, units sold and total profit. Fascinating stuff. If nothing else, it'll teach you to never spend more than $2 on lottery tickets, if you spend anything at all.
You needed that to figure out that if we pool our money, spend some on overhead and profit for the lottery and return the rest as prizes, then the prizes will be less than what we started with? By the way, you can say the same about fire insurance on your home - the insurance company is collecting a nice profit on your risk adversity. In both cases, you have to introduce a utility function to get sensible results. Your house burning down leaving you with nothing is much worse than paying a little each year - not in terms of expected outcome (cost of x*probability of x) but the mere possibility of you being in economical ruins.
In the same way, you're buying hope when you buy a lottery ticket, so you could be worth x+2$ this week and the next, big whoop. But if you buy a lottery ticket, there's a small chance of winning. So you stick it out this week because next week you might be a millionaire. Didn't happen? Well there's no reason to give up, you put down another 2$ and hope another week, and another, and another. Sure if you put those 2$ each week in a fund with compund interest and blah blah blah you might be a little richer in 20 years. It's not what people want, they want the possibility for radical and sudden change for the better. Some reason to see if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is right around the next bend.
...duct tape code is like the bad version of glue code. Instead of adapting two things that are modular and should work together, you have two completely different things that are just duct taped together with a ton of tape, and with lots of sharp edges tearing at it. Duct tape code can take you from a complete and utter failure to a mediocre result that's shippable, but it's never a very good solution. But if you know IT, you know most of it is built on workarounds of workarounds and pretty much the one rule of software is that if you knew what you know now, you'd never build it that way.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
And you can't? Seriously, look at the graphs on the review sites, they're cranking it all up to 2560x1600 with max AA/AF with Ultra High quality. It's not like you can't play with anything less...
My thinkpad has 1920x1200 on a 15" screen, so they exist. You might want to get the 75% more pixels before you complain. Honestly though, the biggest difference in gaming is what's *in* the pixels. Pretty important too, and todays games render in SPF (seconds per frame) instead of FPS on ten year old graphics cards. Or rather on your CPU, because it's doing all emulation in software. 1920x1200 is same resolution as a BluRay which is pretty damn good, if my games looked like that I'd be extremely impressed. So no, I don't think it's more lines we need.
The swastika represents an ideology that wants to deny many people fundamental freedoms, and it's always been a discussion whether these freedoms should support people that want to take the freedoms away. It's freedom of speech right up until you have a party getting 50,1% for taking it away, then they'll try doing it. Actually taking it away would be a violation of your rights, so basically you're willing to defend them right up until the point they stab you in the face.
Of course political parties can argue for changing the law, so that what today is illegal becomes legal. But it's nowhere near the same as arguing that certain human rights should cease to exist, at least for certain ethnic groups, religions or sexual preferences. Without getting to far into existential questions on human rights it's pretty much by definition rights that the tyranny of the majority should not be able to take away.
I know that many people here on slashdot are very much in favor of free speech. That if we just let the neonazis and every other creepy group out there talk their hollow talk, then truth, justice and reason will shine through them like vampires in daylight. Germany has first-hand experience that this is wrong. They know that under the right circumstances you can whip up a frenzy where a people are willing to commit great atrocities.
Quite frankly, I find it almost amusing that you suggest Germany hasn't looked enough into learning from its past. There's hardly a country on earth that has studied its past more than Germany, compared to being an ideology lasting less than 15 years its long, dark shadows have had a profound influence lasting much longer. They think of it more like a cancer that can't be allowed to grow, they might be right...
Slashdot Mirror
I had to substitute 1 LoC for 10 terabyte myself, but according to google 100Pb/s*km = 2863278 LoC*mph. So if you give everyone in Chicago a copy of the library of congress and they drive around at 1 mph, it'll have the same bandwidth. Simple, right?
I've had 100-Petabit/decade internet at home for a while now.
Google is perfect if you want it in hogsheads per forthnight, in this case:
100 (petabits per decade) = 340.255519 megabits per second
But just between us, if you want to brag about your connection I'd use a more common unit.
+5 Funny
...for suggesting the Democans and Republicrats have anything to fear in a first-past-the-post system. Or maybe "+5, Sad truth" but that's not a moderation. Europe is the big threat, because to *briefly* try to describe ~30 different political landscapes most have proportional representation, a 4-5% lower limit, a big socialist block, a big conservative block and some smaller parties. These smaller parties can be both between the blocks (greens, christians, liberals) and extreme left/right wing parties.
This will very often lead to a distribution from left to right something like 5-35-20-35-5, one major party on each side who's looking to gather some adjoining parties for a coalition. Here's a very central point - it's not so that each side will necessarily want all their "own" parties in it. For example, many extreme right parties are shunned by the rest of the right side - they'll rather look to the center. This means that if you can get past the 4% and be in the center, you're very attractive. It's often easier for the big parties to swallow making some environmental or social policy changes than cooperating with the extremes, that has a price of its own.
That said, it's not so easy to start a new party in Europe either, even though it's easier in the US. Since there are more parties, they also tend to shift more trying to close up gaps of voters that aren't satisfied. Already you see a lot of parties moving in towards the Pirate Party trying to keep enough voters away so that it won't pass the limit. It's usually many years between a new party enters the parliament, the last round was really the greens.
Actually, I've found more and more are starting to understand. But it's an incredibly tough position because they constantly need to fend off their managers, the customer and at the same time organize the team to get something done. If they're too weak, it's like an American football team with no back line. You can have a great quarterback (architect) and runners (developers) but it doesn't matter because they'll get rushed by the opposition before they can get anything done.
A good manager is territorial and will defend his team so they get things done, a poor manager will pass the whippings he gets "more, faster, better". The more crap you will push, the more worst case or even substantially padded estimates you'll get. If you want a second opinion, then your second opinion can do it too not just tell me I should be able to do it in half the time. That's usually fairly effective because either they have to admit they don't have the qualifications to estimate it or they'll have to meet their own impossible deadlines.
Ok, so I know slashdot isn't the snappiest of news sites but the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. There was a few years there that IT would revolutionize mankind, change everything there was to know about economics, society, nations and borders and we'd all go live in some new-age cyberspace era. That's the last time I heard anyone use the word glorious about the IT industry, which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
You're not going to find any highly qualified help hanging around on a supermarket sales floor trying to sell to the lone person that actually appreciates that in the middle of all the bargain shoppers. Of course they all the right words to fool the casual customer, that's part of the job description but that's also it. That's not about computers, that's about pretty much anything. Most of them end up hiring basically nice and polite people that'll sell you on whatever you show an interest in along with whatever accessories they can or whatever has the highest margin if you don't.
It's one of the things you pay for if you visit niche shops, I'm not saying they're all saints either but most of them live off reputation and actual skills, not the goods they stock. Don't let them talk you way out of your budget, but they actually can make sense to listen to. But it all rather depends on you needing some personal advice, computer sales is way too dominated by online reviews that are valid for everyone. One round of reviews, one round of price checking, go to cheapest serious retailer, buy. It's quite different than shopping clothes were you actually need personal feedback.
Once the competence of a benchmarker is called into question all of a sudden I feel a massive urge to completely ignore everything they say.
You mean like pretty much every benchmark where there's a sore loser? Well, I'm sure they'll be glad to hearing spreading FUD is such an effective strategy. I'm not talking about this specific case, but for benchmarking in general your position is rather sad.
The point being is that it is not free and if the RIAA/MPAA or local equivalent is upset about that, then it's the ISP who will be faced with some form of tax or levy because presently there is no other way around it.
They know that's the road to hell paved with dubious intentions. Once you introduce a tax or levy, people feel entitled to download since why else are they paying? If you don't try to meter it, chances are people will download everything because it's a sunk cost and kill sales. If they try to raise the levy to a point that matches sales income, it'll be absurdly high and everyone not interested will cause a huge backlash. If they make the levy variable they're back to the impossible task of monitoring all forms of P2P. Starting off down that road will only lead to even more accusations of being leeches on the Internet infrastructure and will only give them even more bad will. They are losing the political maneuvering room all over Europe, according to the parliament elections (Bundestagswahl) in Germany today the pirate party got 2% of the votes. It's not enough to break the 5% limit but it will be if the music industry keeps being so hostile against people.
The point was that there's relatively few people that get rars from the topsite system. Once you get past the fan-up and fan-out and start sharing in any form of peer group it's more effective to put up a torrent. I've never felt the need to view anything inside rars, and I'd say my hookup is stellar. But then I probably know one of the two exceptions you speak of.
Funny how these days noone knows how the real Scene works. But it's surely better this way.
The old scene follows obscure rules to be l33t like ftping around rars, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the people downloading. There's also a new scene that's not so lame, I can tell you there's original releases that go on private torrents first but are packed up to make the old scene happy. Or they stay as internals, which is just fine with me.
When you cut out the wishful thinking you pretty much agree with me that it isn't being used by those that do care about software patents or those that don't care about software patents. The former licenses H.264 or jumps at shadows, the latter uses H.264 without a license. Your futile attempts at counter attack against H.264 failed the save vs reality. Oh by the way, I also forgot one other big thing - modern digicams/video cameras record in AVCHD which is H.264, so unless they edit and transcode it that'll be in H.264 too. If you're doing something simple like posting a video of a speech it's easier just to trim and put it up there. That combined with all the other HD media means almost everyone has a H.264 decoder, the rest are GNU/special people like RMS.
And the real A:
It's an outdated video codec that loses to H.264 in pretty much every codec shootout, and is in general ignored in HD media (H.264/VC-1), HD broadcasts (H.264/MPEG2), set top boxes, mobile players and so on. It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264. While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents meaning it's lost its only real shot at relevance as the default codec for HTML5 video, which now also seems to be a mix probably dominated by H.264. The end result is that it might be used by a few geeks and internally in video games and such that provide their own player, but it'll likely have as much impact as vorbis had on the mp3/aac format. That is, none.
I'll just have to ask... why? Except for some holdouts from Usenet I think pretty much everyone uses torrents without any rar/zip compression. And even those are automatically decompressed if you set up something like hellanzb. It certainly doesn't save you any space, it's just for grouping files together and intgrity checking. Except torrents already do that, same with PAR on the Usenet side. It's completely redundant these days.
Not really. It's well proven that people will break any limit a little as long as the risk/benefit is in their favor, and won't back down until you're way over the limit. Speeding is a very good example, I think everybody agree you need speed limits and can't have people going 100 km/h through a residential area that should have 35 km/h. So you make the limit 30 km/h, most people drive 35 km/h but you can hit those going 40 km/h+ hard because they're like "way over". Those that go 35 km/h aren't practically punished because there's so many and the fines would be so little because it's just over, in fact the speeding cameras and traffic controls normally don't issue tickets at the lowest level. It wouldn't matter if the limit is 40, 50 or 60 km/h, it's always this way. Call it a little bit of marketing - instead of increasing the limits and having a real sharp dropoff, they put the limits very conservatively, let people skirt the rules a little and get general agreement that too much is too much. So it's much more about human nature than actually being bad laws.
That really isn't a fair comparison. This is about using and abusing the many ways to understand "unlimited", just like many ISPs used it to limit bandwidth and claim it was still unlimited because you were connected 24/7. In this case, specifically that unlimited can be interpreted to mean "any song" and not "as much as you want". If they had said "Downlaod the latest Hollywood blockbusters with our new Unlimited Internet" then it'd quite clearly be foul play because it doesn't actually provide that. One of the reasons Grokster was so beaten in the 9-0 supreme court ruling if I recall correctly, is that they directly told you you'd be getting content that was there illegally. The same would an ISP be, so they have to define their "unlimited" wisely.
That said, it does not matter as bandwidth will increase regardless of promotions. It's not promotions that have made my internet speed go up ~300 times in the last decade. Nor is it promotions that means one mid-size tower with 5x2TB disks can store a library of congress. Soon we'll have enough bandwidth and storage that it's like tap water. Want something? Well your 1Gb/s+ connections draws a long sigh, and you have it. I'm already no longer a 24/7 bandwidth hog with this 20Mbit connection - and yes, 2.2MB/s actual download - because I see no point. I would never get around to watching/listening/play everything I could download. That wouldn't fundamentally change if I got a gigabit connecion. I'd get things faster but I'd still have no means to consume 1Gb/s of information. Not even streamed QuadHD super-BluRays.
The problem is that more then one zealot has loudly claimed that accidental use means all your proprietary code is now GPLed despite it never being intended for that.
It's not even possible to get such a verdict. But as a settlement offer you can make any offer you want, and "release your complete source" is a valid and often used offer. But if you do want to take it to court, the worst you'll get is 5 years in federal prison and fines of up to 250,000$. Hey, it's what the FBI warning on a 5$ DVD says...
Oracle is the stupidest database I know anyway. I made a simple SELECT x FROM xtable WHERE x NOT IN ( SELECT DISTINCT y FROM ytable ) and it just choked for 10+ minutes and never finished. After a rewrite do to the same thing it took less than 5 seconds, but it was another case where oracle is just terrible. Why it has so much appeal I got no idea, it certainly has nothing to do with performance. In MSSQL or PGSQL or MySQL I can write things any way I want, in Oracle I have to massage it to get in on some form Oracle likes or suffer eons of execution time.
but I'm betting they'll go pretty far--especially considering the fact that QA teams are far less expensive to business than programmers are.
Only if you get nice and reproducable errors, those you can squash in any language fairly easy. Chasing ghost bugs usually takes lots of programmer time even if the QA guys can tell you the application is crashing...
Drop in at your local community college and take a course on statistics. Pay close attention to the "profit maximization" section. It'll explain the math behind the relationship between unit cost, units sold and total profit. Fascinating stuff. If nothing else, it'll teach you to never spend more than $2 on lottery tickets, if you spend anything at all.
You needed that to figure out that if we pool our money, spend some on overhead and profit for the lottery and return the rest as prizes, then the prizes will be less than what we started with? By the way, you can say the same about fire insurance on your home - the insurance company is collecting a nice profit on your risk adversity. In both cases, you have to introduce a utility function to get sensible results. Your house burning down leaving you with nothing is much worse than paying a little each year - not in terms of expected outcome (cost of x*probability of x) but the mere possibility of you being in economical ruins.
In the same way, you're buying hope when you buy a lottery ticket, so you could be worth x+2$ this week and the next, big whoop. But if you buy a lottery ticket, there's a small chance of winning. So you stick it out this week because next week you might be a millionaire. Didn't happen? Well there's no reason to give up, you put down another 2$ and hope another week, and another, and another. Sure if you put those 2$ each week in a fund with compund interest and blah blah blah you might be a little richer in 20 years. It's not what people want, they want the possibility for radical and sudden change for the better. Some reason to see if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is right around the next bend.
...duct tape code is like the bad version of glue code. Instead of adapting two things that are modular and should work together, you have two completely different things that are just duct taped together with a ton of tape, and with lots of sharp edges tearing at it. Duct tape code can take you from a complete and utter failure to a mediocre result that's shippable, but it's never a very good solution. But if you know IT, you know most of it is built on workarounds of workarounds and pretty much the one rule of software is that if you knew what you know now, you'd never build it that way.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Unfortunately, consistency checks won't help with repeated misspellings of "consistently."
Touché. Different browser with no spell check, it's one of those words I'm trying to unlearn because I've spelled it wrong for years.
And you can't? Seriously, look at the graphs on the review sites, they're cranking it all up to 2560x1600 with max AA/AF with Ultra High quality. It's not like you can't play with anything less...
My thinkpad has 1920x1200 on a 15" screen, so they exist. You might want to get the 75% more pixels before you complain. Honestly though, the biggest difference in gaming is what's *in* the pixels. Pretty important too, and todays games render in SPF (seconds per frame) instead of FPS on ten year old graphics cards. Or rather on your CPU, because it's doing all emulation in software. 1920x1200 is same resolution as a BluRay which is pretty damn good, if my games looked like that I'd be extremely impressed. So no, I don't think it's more lines we need.
The swastika represents an ideology that wants to deny many people fundamental freedoms, and it's always been a discussion whether these freedoms should support people that want to take the freedoms away. It's freedom of speech right up until you have a party getting 50,1% for taking it away, then they'll try doing it. Actually taking it away would be a violation of your rights, so basically you're willing to defend them right up until the point they stab you in the face.
Of course political parties can argue for changing the law, so that what today is illegal becomes legal. But it's nowhere near the same as arguing that certain human rights should cease to exist, at least for certain ethnic groups, religions or sexual preferences. Without getting to far into existential questions on human rights it's pretty much by definition rights that the tyranny of the majority should not be able to take away.
I know that many people here on slashdot are very much in favor of free speech. That if we just let the neonazis and every other creepy group out there talk their hollow talk, then truth, justice and reason will shine through them like vampires in daylight. Germany has first-hand experience that this is wrong. They know that under the right circumstances you can whip up a frenzy where a people are willing to commit great atrocities.
Quite frankly, I find it almost amusing that you suggest Germany hasn't looked enough into learning from its past. There's hardly a country on earth that has studied its past more than Germany, compared to being an ideology lasting less than 15 years its long, dark shadows have had a profound influence lasting much longer. They think of it more like a cancer that can't be allowed to grow, they might be right...