Sure, that's true in the Western world. China, however, is different. If you look at the history of Mao's revolution, you will find that its success came from the rural peasant being at the core.
It sounds like lyapunov wants us to do his research for him. If so, he should have chosen a more interesting topic like "Linux programmers who went crazy and switched to the Windows platform".
As to the gun issue, I would suggest that you take a look at the U.S. Constitution, specifically the second amendment. Disregarding the nonsense that is "Bowling for Columbine" would also be a good idea. Then you can take a look at John Lott, Jr's More Guns, Less Crime. In this book, Dr. Lott analyzes county-level data for the entire U.S. comparing the level of gun ownership and their respective crime rates. Not surpringly, his conclusion was that in areas with higher gun ownership, the crime rates are lower.
Q: It just seems to defy common sense that crimes likely to involve guns would be reduced by allowing more people to carry guns. How do you explain the results?
A: Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate--as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.
Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.
The best "research" the anti-gun crowd could come up with was Michael Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which tried to argue that early America didn't really believe in gun ownership and that our "gun culture" today is nothing more than a myth. This work has since been shown to contain outright lies and made-up research data and Michael Bellesiles had to resign from his university over the scandal.
Review shows extremetech's ignorance of XP4
on
Trident XP4 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While most of the/.ers have noted that the review of the XP4 on extremetech was unfair, they may not realize just how unreasonable extremetech was in putting this sub-$100 card against the best cards on the market.
Because the XP4 deviates from the long-established, direct-mode rendering (which is a brute force method) for tile-based rendering, they are going to need a lot of time to get their drivers in order before they will be able to compete properly with the familiar video cards. The only other card mainstream card that attempted this rendering approach was the Kyro series, which demonstrated that tile-based rendering does have huge potential and that drivers will make or break the card's performance.
Interesting enough, because video cards using the tile-based rendering method are more efficient by 200-300%* when compared to cards using the traditional method, they should see a much lower performance decrease as the screen resolution is increased when compared against direct-mode renderers (e.g. NVidia NV9 cards and ATI Radeon 9500s). While it's true that fill rates do increase substantially with increased resolution, direct-mode renderers simply will experience that much more overfill.
*Direct-mode renderers have an overfill rate of about 2 or 3; this means that for every pixel visible two or three more have been rendered and then disgarded. Tile-based renderers, on the other hand, disgard everything that won't be visible first and only render what's left, giving them an overfill of 0. Figuring out what to cull first before rendering has begun is more complicated than culling excess pixels after they are rendered; this complexity is what makes writing the drivers for a tile-based renderer such a difficult task.
Trident has set for themselves an incredibly difficult challenge: 1) Make a card that uses a tile-based rendering method, which means throwing out nearly everything the graphics card industry has learned the past couple decades. 2) In addition to the first task, they have added the complexity of sharing graphical resources, thus adding all the timing problems associated with such a configuration. If they achieve only 50% of the performance of Nvidia's Geforce4 TI4600, that alone would be a considerable achievement. If Trident meets the 80% performance target they set for themselves, it will be all the more impressive.
By working for a company engaged in business and commerce, you are contributing in a "productive, big picture kind of way". In fact, you are doing more where you are than you probably would were you to go into the non-profit/government sector.
Consider the following:
"But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it.
By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Etext available from the Project Gutenberg.
Re: Finally, a decent Jon Katz article...
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
"...this is the first one in 6 months that I have actually read beyond the preview text."
You bothered to read the preview text?
This does bring up another question though, how did Katz become the/. wiseman?
Judging from the volume and content of postings on the subject of Congressional involvement in the security issue, it is safe to say that many are hostile to the thought of new laws to regulate securing computer networks. This is entirely understandable considering the past history of govt. involvement in the Internet - NetworkSolutions long run as Internic and the DMCA quickly come to mind. Even though Congress does not act in Internet Time, involvement at a federal level is a necessary step in remedying some of the security problems for two reasons: 1) Many cybercrimes go across state lines, needing a federal jurisdiction, and 2) Only the federal govt. is large enough to place enough leverage on foreign nations from which international 'crackers' operate for those nations to take seriously.
With that said, Congress will have to limit the scope of their involvement in the issues regarding to securing the Internet if such a thing can happen. Here are a few suggestions of what any legislation and/or action should include:
1) Quantify Internet-related activities into the appropriate categories that already exist and determine what laws that already exist on the matter. To use an extreme example: If you use your computer and broad-band connection to steal $20,000,000 from a bank, does that make it anything other than theft? Also, the intangible products and services need to be recognized that they are in fact products and/or services extending liability to the companies who sell them and protection to the consumers who buy the products. This should be a relatively straightforward task; it would probably surprise those involved at just how unremarkable all things related to the Internet and computers really are and how little the difference between
physical and virtual realities. Only after this task is completed and only if the problem areas left require federal jurisdiction, new laws should be created.
2) Legislation should not outlaw the use of computer security tools and/or discussion and research about computer security. Although matches can be used for arson, the matches themselves are not responsible for criminal behavior.
Information about computer security fall into a similar category. Restricting this information is more harmful than productive.
3) Congress might find it fruitful to allocate the funds to setup a board of 'experts' from all computer-related fields to spend 2 years assessing the security situation for the federal government computers. This body would determine the current state of affairs of the systems, looking for any obvious flaws in the system - hopefully plugging the holes - and determine the real cost of any damages imposed by malicious crackers on the various systems. Maybe just studying a small subset of the networks would be sufficient.
In sum, Congress should place Internet and computer related fields in their proper contexts and apply existing laws to cover them. This will most likey take care of 95% of all cases out there. For the margin, new laws can be applied. Congress should be mindful not to restrict the rights of the people any further in their attempt to address the security issues. Finally, a serious study of the problem should be made in a real world situation - the federal government's computer systems provide a perfect setting for this test. Considering that there will be no quick fixes or magic bullet legislation to the problems the security faces, they should take their time and find out what needs direct involvement from the legislature and what can be left to the industry to contend with.
Probably, just holding companies such as MS liable for security failures in their systems would go a long way to improving the state of affairs. If only computer-related things were understood in their proper place... Hindenburg, Titanic, Challenger, Outlook Express security.
Be sure to build the website first and have it all ready to go so that you can upload your pages as soon as it is activated to ensure that the website is up and running before you receive the cease and decist order.
For those of you having trouble understanding
the ending, it means you don't watch enough
Star Trek and other science fiction. Prot
gave it away at the very beginning when he
explains to the doctor that a soap bubble
assumes the shape it does because it
is the "most energy efficient configuration."
Assume being the key word there. The body
served as a fine host for the alien while
Prot moved about the planet; and was left
behind after he returned to K-Pax.
Can I write a book entitled "What geeks do in their spare time" and quote you all for arguing about who owns the copyright of a quote in a public forum?
Just shows you "You can't please all the people all the time" as the old saying goes. The best thing that can come of this is for the/. community to lighten up on Andover &/. & the book's author, and for the above mentioned to find a tasteful way to repay the perceived wrong the angered minority?/majority? have expressed. In the words of Rodney King... "C..c..can't we all just get along?"
You're forgetting that you're probably "a geek" and most non-geeks are smart enough to figure something like that out and most geeks wouldn't have any reason to (other than boredom).:-)
All of you staying within this thread will be interested to know that between the time the question was first asked till 4/14/00, 3:40 AM PST, I counted at least 18 different urls given for nanotech information, 14 books, 1 usenet group, and at least 6 bad jokes. Not bad considering it only took 30 seconds or so to post the original question to/. Why is it that using someone else's ideas and/or work in academia it's plageurism; whereas in industry, it's called "networking"? I await your criticism or comments. No, Morficflux, don't even ask as I won't give you the list of sources.
Open source "assemblers" is a lot like open source operating systems. Which would you rather own, the Microsoft brand assembler or the Linux one? More than likely, the Microsoft one will be expensive as hell but at least it will work... and after you buy a few upgrade packages, and Assembler 5000 comes out you'll have a useable product. I don't understand what the concern is about nanotech "falling into the wrong hands". Its about like worring about when the sun will burn itself, 5 trillion years from now. Don't technogeeks have more pressing concerns such as what are we going to do when we run out of IP addresses, or what happens to freedom of speech if the United Nations puts together a committee to regulate the Internet (which there is talk about already)?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, that's true in the Western world. China, however, is different. If you look at the history of Mao's revolution, you will find that its success came from the rural peasant being at the core.
That's easy, the Internet is an information superhighway!
As to the gun issue, I would suggest that you take a look at the U.S. Constitution, specifically the second amendment. Disregarding the nonsense that is "Bowling for Columbine" would also be a good idea. Then you can take a look at John Lott, Jr's More Guns, Less Crime. In this book, Dr. Lott analyzes county-level data for the entire U.S. comparing the level of gun ownership and their respective crime rates. Not surpringly, his conclusion was that in areas with higher gun ownership, the crime rates are lower.
An interview with John Lott can be found here
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636
Here is a highlight from said interview:
The best "research" the anti-gun crowd could come up with was Michael Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which tried to argue that early America didn't really believe in gun ownership and that our "gun culture" today is nothing more than a myth. This work has since been shown to contain outright lies and made-up research data and Michael Bellesiles had to resign from his university over the scandal.
While most of the /.ers have noted that the review of the XP4 on extremetech was unfair, they may not realize just how unreasonable extremetech was in putting this sub-$100 card against the best cards on the market.
Because the XP4 deviates from the long-established, direct-mode rendering (which is a brute force method) for tile-based rendering, they are going to need a lot of time to get their drivers in order before they will be able to compete properly with the familiar video cards. The only other card mainstream card that attempted this rendering approach was the Kyro series, which demonstrated that tile-based rendering does have huge potential and that drivers will make or break the card's performance.
Interesting enough, because video cards using the tile-based rendering method are more efficient by 200-300%* when compared to cards using the traditional method, they should see a much lower performance decrease as the screen resolution is increased when compared against direct-mode renderers (e.g. NVidia NV9 cards and ATI Radeon 9500s). While it's true that fill rates do increase substantially with increased resolution, direct-mode renderers simply will experience that much more overfill.
*Direct-mode renderers have an overfill rate of about 2 or 3; this means that for every pixel visible two or three more have been rendered and then disgarded. Tile-based renderers, on the other hand, disgard everything that won't be visible first and only render what's left, giving them an overfill of 0. Figuring out what to cull first before rendering has begun is more complicated than culling excess pixels after they are rendered; this complexity is what makes writing the drivers for a tile-based renderer such a difficult task.
Trident has set for themselves an incredibly difficult challenge: 1) Make a card that uses a tile-based rendering method, which means throwing out nearly everything the graphics card industry has learned the past couple decades. 2) In addition to the first task, they have added the complexity of sharing graphical resources, thus adding all the timing problems associated with such a configuration. If they achieve only 50% of the performance of Nvidia's Geforce4 TI4600, that alone would be a considerable achievement. If Trident meets the 80% performance target they set for themselves, it will be all the more impressive.
Consider the following:
"...this is the first one in 6 months that I have actually read beyond the preview text."
/. wiseman?
You bothered to read the preview text?
This does bring up another question though, how did Katz become the
Judging from the volume and content of postings on the subject of Congressional involvement in the security issue, it is safe to say that many are hostile to the thought of new laws to regulate securing computer networks. This is entirely understandable considering the past history of govt. involvement in the Internet - NetworkSolutions long run as Internic and the DMCA quickly come to mind. Even though Congress does not act in Internet Time, involvement at a federal level is a necessary step in remedying some of the security problems for two reasons: 1) Many cybercrimes go across state lines, needing a federal jurisdiction, and 2) Only the federal govt. is large enough to place enough leverage on foreign nations from which international 'crackers' operate for those nations to take seriously.
With that said, Congress will have to limit the scope of their involvement in the issues regarding to securing the Internet if such a thing can happen. Here are a few suggestions of what any legislation and/or action should include:
1) Quantify Internet-related activities into the appropriate categories that already exist and determine what laws that already exist on the matter. To use an extreme example: If you use your computer and broad-band connection to steal $20,000,000 from a bank, does that make it anything other than theft? Also, the intangible products and services need to be recognized that they are in fact products and/or services extending liability to the companies who sell them and protection to the consumers who buy the products. This should be a relatively straightforward task; it would probably surprise those involved at just how unremarkable all things related to the Internet and computers really are and how little the difference between
physical and virtual realities. Only after this task is completed and only if the problem areas left require federal jurisdiction, new laws should be created.
2) Legislation should not outlaw the use of computer security tools and/or discussion and research about computer security. Although matches can be used for arson, the matches themselves are not responsible for criminal behavior.
Information about computer security fall into a similar category. Restricting this information is more harmful than productive.
3) Congress might find it fruitful to allocate the funds to setup a board of 'experts' from all computer-related fields to spend 2 years assessing the security situation for the federal government computers. This body would determine the current state of affairs of the systems, looking for any obvious flaws in the system - hopefully plugging the holes - and determine the real cost of any damages imposed by malicious crackers on the various systems. Maybe just studying a small subset of the networks would be sufficient.
In sum, Congress should place Internet and computer related fields in their proper contexts and apply existing laws to cover them. This will most likey take care of 95% of all cases out there. For the margin, new laws can be applied. Congress should be mindful not to restrict the rights of the people any further in their attempt to address the security issues. Finally, a serious study of the problem should be made in a real world situation - the federal government's computer systems provide a perfect setting for this test. Considering that there will be no quick fixes or magic bullet legislation to the problems the security faces, they should take their time and find out what needs direct involvement from the legislature and what can be left to the industry to contend with.
Probably, just holding companies such as MS liable for security failures in their systems would go a long way to improving the state of affairs. If only computer-related things were understood in their proper place... Hindenburg, Titanic, Challenger, Outlook Express security.
Be sure to build the website first and have it all ready to go so that you can upload your pages as soon as it is activated to ensure that the website is up and running before you receive the cease and decist order.
For those of you having trouble understanding
the ending, it means you don't watch enough
Star Trek and other science fiction. Prot
gave it away at the very beginning when he
explains to the doctor that a soap bubble
assumes the shape it does because it
is the "most energy efficient configuration."
Assume being the key word there. The body
served as a fine host for the alien while
Prot moved about the planet; and was left
behind after he returned to K-Pax.
Can I write a book entitled "What geeks do in their spare time" and quote you all for arguing about who owns the copyright of a quote in a public forum?
Just shows you "You can't please all the people all the time" as the old saying goes. The best thing that can come of this is for the /. community to lighten up on Andover & /. & the book's author, and for the above mentioned to find a tasteful way to repay the perceived wrong the angered minority?/majority? have expressed. In the words of Rodney King... "C..c..can't we all just get along?"
You're forgetting that you're probably "a geek" and most non-geeks are smart enough to figure something like that out and most geeks wouldn't have any reason to (other than boredom). :-)
All of you staying within this thread will be interested to know that between the time the question was first asked till 4/14/00, 3:40 AM PST, I counted at least 18 different urls given for nanotech information, 14 books, 1 usenet group, and at least 6 bad jokes. Not bad considering it only took 30 seconds or so to post the original question to /. Why is it that using someone else's ideas and/or work in academia it's plageurism; whereas in industry, it's called "networking"? I await your criticism or comments. No, Morficflux, don't even ask as I won't give you the list of sources.
Works for me.. only trouble is, why do you need tech. support when you can have a nanite fix your broken computers for you by rebuilding it?
Open source "assemblers" is a lot like open source operating systems. Which would you rather own, the Microsoft brand assembler or the Linux one? More than likely, the Microsoft one will be expensive as hell but at least it will work... and after you buy a few upgrade packages, and Assembler 5000 comes out you'll have a useable product. I don't understand what the concern is about nanotech "falling into the wrong hands". Its about like worring about when the sun will burn itself, 5 trillion years from now. Don't technogeeks have more pressing concerns such as what are we going to do when we run out of IP addresses, or what happens to freedom of speech if the United Nations puts together a committee to regulate the Internet (which there is talk about already)?
We all know what it means to assume something...
Whether "illegal" mp3s, hacking, and warez trading are evil or even the "bad element" of the Internet community is still questionable. :-)