Most of USA lives in poverty. Wouldn't it be better to fix that first before taking jobs away?
This is so ridiculous I can't help commenting. First of all, "most" of the USA does not live in poverty by ANY measure. Second, by the standards of the world, the poverty rate in the US is effectively zero. Take a look at how fat people are in "poverty" neighborhoods, and that will tell you something.
Not to say the US can't improve, but your point is just stupid.
So, you think a man should be allowed to cry "fire" in a crowded theater, and he's not responsible for the deaths that will ensue? Is that your definition of "freedom"?
There is a huge difference between inciting a panic in a crowded space, and having the thought police arrest someone for thinking the wrong thoughts.
Because this is exactly what your sig's post brings: a man that was arrested for inciting racial hatred -- causing a lot of deaths in the process, because every time the neo-nazis come out of the closet they bring with them their personal "final solution", and you know it.
People are responsible for their own actions. Do you think they are mindless automatons that will kill anyone that is advocated by any book?
So, in YOUR philosophy, what other books should be burned and their writers thrown in jail because of their thoughts? Go ahead. I would be very interested in where you draw the line. How about people how deny Global Warming? Should they be thrown in jail for their "heretical" thoughts? How about people who believe that oil wells are limitless? (the "hot earth" theory). How about people who believe in banning abortion in all cases? Should they be thrown in jail?
Sorry, but throwing someone in jail for thinking the wrong thoughts is one of the most heinous things I've seen in my life, and the lack of outrage in Europe is appalling. The irony is that this is how fascism starts. The government banning thought.
I don't know about that, but telling them to put me on the do-not-call list seems to work. Sure, I could screw around with caller ID solution, but I think it's much better to not have the phone ring at all. I can't even remember my last telemarketing/survey call. I'd say it's been years, but I'm sure there's something I'm not remembering. But it's so infrequent that it's effectively zero. I pick up the phone completely without fear.
I suppose it's useful if you have real people you don't want to hear from, but fortunately I don't seem to have too many of those types of friends/family.:)
I became so sick of getting multiple telemarketing calls between the hours of 5-10pm that I decided to just turn the ringer on its lowest volume setting, and let the machine answer.
If you're in the USA, I assume you're already on the national do-not-call list. Past that, if you want a solution, answer the phone, and just tell them before they even get started, "please put me on the do not call list." Really, it's as simple as that. Just repeat the magic phrase, and telemarketing calls will dry up. I did this even before the national call list, and it took about six months for it to drop to almost nothing.
the 4004 was intel's chip, not TI's - it was released at 1972
Jesus, you're right. What the hell am I babbling about, of course it was Intel. I don't know what part of my ass I pulled TI out of. I really need to not post when I'm sick.
Anyway, my point is that I don't think you can point to Apollo as the primary investor in microelectronics. It was permeating everything at that point, from transister radios to pocket calculators. Or to put it another way, if Apollo hadn't happened, would IC progress have happened significantly differently? I don't think so; I think it would've marched ahead more or less the same way.
America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race.
Unless you have some direct evidence of this (like a company spun off from NASA or something), this is totally wrong. The 4004 was created by Texas Instruments for a pocket calculator by a Japanese company. Semiconductors in general show a steady progression from the invention of the transistor is 1955 to ICs to today, completely independent of the space race. The fact that the shuttle computers still use early 1970s computer technology should tell you something.
Unfortunately, NASA paying for itself by giving us all sorts of wonderful technology is a total myth. A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much. Most of the popular notions are NASA propaganda, as you point out.
True story: back around 1985, I had a mail merge program that was about 5K, written in Assembly. I had a programmer that worked for me whose project was to convert it to C. He did so... and it was 64 friggin' K, compiled, when he was done. Man, I chewed his ass out.:D
It wasn't just a question of C being larger, incidently. I expected that. He did a lot of stupidity like copying big sections of code over and over instead of writing a subroutine. I should mention that the multiuser computer in question only had 64K partitions for each user, so it was a real problem.
But you can do a lot in 4K or thereabouts. Look at the size of MAME roms in classic era video games. A few samples (remember, this includes graphics, which is most of the space):
Asteroids: 8K
PacMan: 16K
SpaceWar: 4K
Donkey Kong: 34K
Defender: 26K (! That's a lot of game for 26K)
Robotron: 52K
-sigh- Ah, the good ol' days. I always cry the blues about the fact that programmers think Assembly language is so mysterious. It wasn't that hard, and you could do a LOT in a small space, and it was WAY faster than compiled code. And don't even bother quoting me the myth of the "optimizing compiler that produces code much better than humans can these days." It didn't exist then, and it doesn't exist now. And won't exist until we have true cognitive artificial intelligence. Optimization is a much harder problem than most people think.
-double sigh- I'm rambling tonight. I'm fighting a big-ass cold. Better not post on any political topics.:D
Sigh. You did it again. You used the phrase "absolute fact". Please get a dictionary.
My dictionary works fine, thank you. I suggest you take a Philosophy 101 class. You'll find all sorts of youngin's interested along with you in microdefining words into uselessness. For most of us, that concept lost its novelty long ago. ("Hyuk! Hyuk! You said 'absolutely'!! You did!! You did! Bwahahahahah! I WINNNNNNNNN!!!")
Yet you used the word "absolute." Really you did. Honest. Go read your own post if you don't believe me.
Yes, I did. So what? I'm assuming that people reading are smart enough to figure out that I'm not philosophically comparing the certainty of evolution to one's own existence. For all practical purposes (such as the probability of being found to be "false"), evolution is absolute fact.
But it is NOT absolute fact! Look up the word "fact"
You're using a childish definition of "fact", meaning "zero doubt". Nothing is "zero doubt", except your own existence. In the real world, we use the word "fact" to mean something that has no reasonable doubt, and is there is ZERO reasonable doubt about evolution, hence it is a fact.
Bringing up Newton's laws of gravity is interesting. You do realize that Newton didn't go out the window when Einstein refined the theory, right? Physicists and engineers still use newtonian physics. It's only flaw is that it doesn't represent the entire picture, just as certain tenants of evolution may not fully represent the entire picture.
Arguing that evolution is not a fact is like arguing that the earth isn't really round because it's slightly egg-shaped. The world will still never be flat.
so that people don't have to pay taxes to state schools when they send their children to private schools.
Well, there I'm with you. I'm totally in favor of allowing parents to choose their schools, as long as there is a reasonable baseline of education (and evolution isn't that important to me that every school has to teach it).
That some process we would call "evolution" accounts for the diversity of species is highly probable, it is stupidly dogmatic to consider the current theories of evolution being taught in schools to be "absolute scientific fact".
I said evolution was absolute fact. Of course, the myriad details of any theory are subject to refinement as we learn more. Just because we refine the details of the various processes by which evolution happens doesn't cast doubt on the fact of evolution.
Creationists shouldn't be forcing their beliefs upon your children, but neither should you be forcing your beliefs upon theirs.
That's what private religious schools are for. If someone wants an edited version of knowledge taught to their children, then that's where to go.
But if kids go to a state-sponsored school, then they will be taught knowledge as close to unfiltered by ignorant people as possible. Granted, this isn't always attainable by normal human beings, but evolution is absolute scientific fact.
I know, let's put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand IDEs - that ought to get us some code! Most non-programmers are simply not trained to think in a rigorous way. Hell, most programmers aren't trained to think rigorously.
That's also called "Open Source Software". Honestly, I have yet to see any OSS source code that wasn't a rats nest of crappy code with very little to no documentation. Maybe the Linux kernel source is better; I dunno, I've never looked at it. I specifically remember looking at the source code to ssh and was absolutely shocked at what a steaming turd it was, and that was presumably something you WANT well written!
Hell, I remember a Perl library (still might be there, for all I know) that used repeated subtraction to do some date calculations. I almost heaved my lunch when I saw it.
I suppose my point is that even the "thousand monkey" method can produce useful stuff with enough poking and prodding, even if you have to hold your nose to look under the hood.
For example, they fault Linux OpenOffice desktops for not having all the features in Microsoft Windows Office, even though few actually use all of the Microsoft stuff. So, in essence, they're saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features.
What idiocy. It's people like this that hold back OSS. In essence, it's the same old "if only people weren't so stupid they'd all switch over from Windows."
What doesn't occur to this guy is that Microsoft doesn't sit around thinking of "unnecessary" features, they're almost always in response to user requests. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they listen to their customer's feature requests.
The other thing this guy misses is that what is unnecessary to one man is a critical feature to another. The set of unncessary features is different for everyone.
Am I still missing the point or is this just as fundamental trivial as it seems?
The difference between a web page and a blog is that a blog generally has a built-in temporal component. In other words, a web page is typically an "about" page, whereas a blog is more like a diary where you make regular postings indexed by time and/or subject. Sure, you *could* make a blog using a regular web page, but the point of blogging is that the process is automated and intended to work that way.
The add in goodies like RSS or things like LiveJournal "friends" where it makes it easy to follow various blogs when they update, and you have something fundamentally different from static pages.
One must include his assumptions in order to make a valid argument. You have not included your assumptions. Therefore, your argument is pure horseshit.
If you can't be bothered to RTFA, you could at least RTF summary. An excerpt: "Look around inside most corporate offices, where most computers need to handle a few Office documents and light Internet use. They don't need to be able to burn CDs or handle 3D-intensive games, but they do need to be reliable and affordable. Lots of consumers out there probably want a similar box--an appliance that lets them get onto the Internet, take care of e-mail, and create a few documents. For them, being able to burn a CD-RW would probably be nice, but anything beyond that is an extra. Low-cost, reliability, and quality are key. That is what the Ultimate Budget Box is about: not skimping on components, but not loading it up with features either."
If that isn't clear enough for you, well, you're beyond the help of even my enormous brainpower.
Dealing with this "junk" negates any price savings to me.
I highly doubt that your time is so valuable that the under two minutes required "negates" the price savings.
Oh really? So your Dells came with a standard Windows install CD, not a "restore" CD or a hidden partition?
It came with a restore CD. So what? It's still a full copy of XP Home. Once again, you miss the point of this exercise. A minimal cost computer suitable for browsing, e-mail and light applications.
Some people like to fit more than two paragraphs of text on the screen at a time.
Sheesh, did you completely miss the premise of the article? No one is saying that more computer is useless. If it doesn't work for you, then spend more money. The budget box in the article also specs a 15" LCD.
Yes, the tenuous arguments you put forth most CERTAINLY makes you a superior being. How, oh sage, can I ever reach your level of wisdom? Oh wait, it's not wisdom, it's bullshit.
Considering I can understand the premise of the entire discussion, I think you might want to avoid throwing those rocks in your fragile glass house.
Dell is also notorious for pre-installing tons of crappy bundleware that cause lag and headaches, as well as not providing a "real" Windows CD (how do you think they get their prices so low?). If you buy a standard copy of Windows (or spend $0.10 for Linux burned onto a CD-R), you won't have to deal with the crappy stuff Dell wants to infest you with.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. I actually own two of these low-end boxes for the kids. I won't deny that there's some junk you have to delete (big frickin' deal), but yes, it comes with a full copy of Windows XP Home (as is listed in the system specs).
15" LCD starved for real estate? What are you talking about? It's 1024x768, and perfectly readable. Keep in mind that a 15" LCD is the equivalent of a 16"-17" CRT. The integrated video isn't spectacular, but is just fine for surfing the web and other tasks. In fact, I often jump on my office computer using RDP from the kids computers and it's fine.
I know this is Slashdot, but maybe you should get a clue. The lowest computer these days is WAY overpowered for almost everything short of video or heavy photo editing (though, I have to say that Photoshop runs pretty damn well on the kids computers).
If you see this post, You'll notice some differences
The premise of the article is BUDGET BOX for surfing, reading e-mail and a few documents. The article doesn't even include a CD writer. This $399 box is already way overkill even for the premise. Sure, you can load more features in, but who's arguing that you can't? The point is that their $525 box (which doesn't even include the freaking OS) is way inferior to this $399 box.
This is definitely a step up from normal, particularly when it comes to contrast and readability. But calling this like a laser printer is a big exaggeration. The screen resolution (a href="http://products.sel.sony.com/pa/prs/reader_s pecs.html">according to his is 800x600 or 170 dots per inch. Better, but let's not crazy.
I wish it wasn't made by Sony, which has too much of history of screwing up consumer devices. I fully expect there to be something radically stupid with it.
As to your sig. AFAIK it is only Austria and Germany that criminalise Holocaust denial.
France also has a lot of wacky laws regarding Nazi items (see the Yahoo case), but I don't know if it goes as far as banning speech. I agree those two countries don't make a continent, but there is also a shared European Culture. I suppose what shocks me is the lack of outrage at having literal Thought Police that put you in jail. Maybe others in Europe don't have the laws on books, but there is clearly a lot of sympathy out there.
Heck, look at yourself. Your objection isn't exactly very strong. The guy was LOCKED UP FOR THREE YEARS FOR THINKING THE WRONG THOUGHTS. Doesn't that shock you?
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This is so ridiculous I can't help commenting. First of all, "most" of the USA does not live in poverty by ANY measure. Second, by the standards of the world, the poverty rate in the US is effectively zero. Take a look at how fat people are in "poverty" neighborhoods, and that will tell you something.
Not to say the US can't improve, but your point is just stupid.
There is a huge difference between inciting a panic in a crowded space, and having the thought police arrest someone for thinking the wrong thoughts.
Because this is exactly what your sig's post brings: a man that was arrested for inciting racial hatred -- causing a lot of deaths in the process, because every time the neo-nazis come out of the closet they bring with them their personal "final solution", and you know it.
People are responsible for their own actions. Do you think they are mindless automatons that will kill anyone that is advocated by any book?
So, in YOUR philosophy, what other books should be burned and their writers thrown in jail because of their thoughts? Go ahead. I would be very interested in where you draw the line. How about people how deny Global Warming? Should they be thrown in jail for their "heretical" thoughts? How about people who believe that oil wells are limitless? (the "hot earth" theory). How about people who believe in banning abortion in all cases? Should they be thrown in jail?
Sorry, but throwing someone in jail for thinking the wrong thoughts is one of the most heinous things I've seen in my life, and the lack of outrage in Europe is appalling. The irony is that this is how fascism starts. The government banning thought.
I don't know about that, but telling them to put me on the do-not-call list seems to work. Sure, I could screw around with caller ID solution, but I think it's much better to not have the phone ring at all. I can't even remember my last telemarketing/survey call. I'd say it's been years, but I'm sure there's something I'm not remembering. But it's so infrequent that it's effectively zero. I pick up the phone completely without fear.
I suppose it's useful if you have real people you don't want to hear from, but fortunately I don't seem to have too many of those types of friends/family. :)
If you're in the USA, I assume you're already on the national do-not-call list. Past that, if you want a solution, answer the phone, and just tell them before they even get started, "please put me on the do not call list." Really, it's as simple as that. Just repeat the magic phrase, and telemarketing calls will dry up. I did this even before the national call list, and it took about six months for it to drop to almost nothing.
Jesus, you're right. What the hell am I babbling about, of course it was Intel. I don't know what part of my ass I pulled TI out of. I really need to not post when I'm sick.
Anyway, my point is that I don't think you can point to Apollo as the primary investor in microelectronics. It was permeating everything at that point, from transister radios to pocket calculators. Or to put it another way, if Apollo hadn't happened, would IC progress have happened significantly differently? I don't think so; I think it would've marched ahead more or less the same way.
Unless you have some direct evidence of this (like a company spun off from NASA or something), this is totally wrong. The 4004 was created by Texas Instruments for a pocket calculator by a Japanese company. Semiconductors in general show a steady progression from the invention of the transistor is 1955 to ICs to today, completely independent of the space race. The fact that the shuttle computers still use early 1970s computer technology should tell you something.
Unfortunately, NASA paying for itself by giving us all sorts of wonderful technology is a total myth. A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much. Most of the popular notions are NASA propaganda, as you point out.
It wasn't just a question of C being larger, incidently. I expected that. He did a lot of stupidity like copying big sections of code over and over instead of writing a subroutine. I should mention that the multiuser computer in question only had 64K partitions for each user, so it was a real problem.
But you can do a lot in 4K or thereabouts. Look at the size of MAME roms in classic era video games. A few samples (remember, this includes graphics, which is most of the space):
Asteroids: 8K
PacMan: 16K
SpaceWar: 4K
Donkey Kong: 34K
Defender: 26K (! That's a lot of game for 26K)
Robotron: 52K
-sigh- Ah, the good ol' days. I always cry the blues about the fact that programmers think Assembly language is so mysterious. It wasn't that hard, and you could do a LOT in a small space, and it was WAY faster than compiled code. And don't even bother quoting me the myth of the "optimizing compiler that produces code much better than humans can these days." It didn't exist then, and it doesn't exist now. And won't exist until we have true cognitive artificial intelligence. Optimization is a much harder problem than most people think.
-double sigh- I'm rambling tonight. I'm fighting a big-ass cold. Better not post on any political topics. :D
My dictionary works fine, thank you. I suggest you take a Philosophy 101 class. You'll find all sorts of youngin's interested along with you in microdefining words into uselessness. For most of us, that concept lost its novelty long ago. ("Hyuk! Hyuk! You said 'absolutely'!! You did!! You did! Bwahahahahah! I WINNNNNNNNN!!!")
Yes, I did. So what? I'm assuming that people reading are smart enough to figure out that I'm not philosophically comparing the certainty of evolution to one's own existence. For all practical purposes (such as the probability of being found to be "false"), evolution is absolute fact.
You're using a childish definition of "fact", meaning "zero doubt". Nothing is "zero doubt", except your own existence. In the real world, we use the word "fact" to mean something that has no reasonable doubt, and is there is ZERO reasonable doubt about evolution, hence it is a fact.
Bringing up Newton's laws of gravity is interesting. You do realize that Newton didn't go out the window when Einstein refined the theory, right? Physicists and engineers still use newtonian physics. It's only flaw is that it doesn't represent the entire picture, just as certain tenants of evolution may not fully represent the entire picture.
Arguing that evolution is not a fact is like arguing that the earth isn't really round because it's slightly egg-shaped. The world will still never be flat.
Well, there I'm with you. I'm totally in favor of allowing parents to choose their schools, as long as there is a reasonable baseline of education (and evolution isn't that important to me that every school has to teach it).
That some process we would call "evolution" accounts for the diversity of species is highly probable, it is stupidly dogmatic to consider the current theories of evolution being taught in schools to be "absolute scientific fact".
I said evolution was absolute fact. Of course, the myriad details of any theory are subject to refinement as we learn more. Just because we refine the details of the various processes by which evolution happens doesn't cast doubt on the fact of evolution.
That's what private religious schools are for. If someone wants an edited version of knowledge taught to their children, then that's where to go.
But if kids go to a state-sponsored school, then they will be taught knowledge as close to unfiltered by ignorant people as possible. Granted, this isn't always attainable by normal human beings, but evolution is absolute scientific fact.
I agree. It just gives power to the creationists. Do astronomers feel the need to attack flat-earthers every time they make an announcement?
The best way to fight them is to ignore them, unless they go out of their way to push their beliefs on others through legislations or in the schools.
That's also called "Open Source Software". Honestly, I have yet to see any OSS source code that wasn't a rats nest of crappy code with very little to no documentation. Maybe the Linux kernel source is better; I dunno, I've never looked at it. I specifically remember looking at the source code to ssh and was absolutely shocked at what a steaming turd it was, and that was presumably something you WANT well written!
Hell, I remember a Perl library (still might be there, for all I know) that used repeated subtraction to do some date calculations. I almost heaved my lunch when I saw it.
I suppose my point is that even the "thousand monkey" method can produce useful stuff with enough poking and prodding, even if you have to hold your nose to look under the hood.
What idiocy. It's people like this that hold back OSS. In essence, it's the same old "if only people weren't so stupid they'd all switch over from Windows."
What doesn't occur to this guy is that Microsoft doesn't sit around thinking of "unnecessary" features, they're almost always in response to user requests. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they listen to their customer's feature requests.
The other thing this guy misses is that what is unnecessary to one man is a critical feature to another. The set of unncessary features is different for everyone.
Slashdot isn't a blog, it's a news aggregator with comments.
The difference between a web page and a blog is that a blog generally has a built-in temporal component. In other words, a web page is typically an "about" page, whereas a blog is more like a diary where you make regular postings indexed by time and/or subject. Sure, you *could* make a blog using a regular web page, but the point of blogging is that the process is automated and intended to work that way.
The add in goodies like RSS or things like LiveJournal "friends" where it makes it easy to follow various blogs when they update, and you have something fundamentally different from static pages.
If you can't be bothered to RTFA, you could at least RTF summary. An excerpt: "Look around inside most corporate offices, where most computers need to handle a few Office documents and light Internet use. They don't need to be able to burn CDs or handle 3D-intensive games, but they do need to be reliable and affordable. Lots of consumers out there probably want a similar box--an appliance that lets them get onto the Internet, take care of e-mail, and create a few documents. For them, being able to burn a CD-RW would probably be nice, but anything beyond that is an extra. Low-cost, reliability, and quality are key. That is what the Ultimate Budget Box is about: not skimping on components, but not loading it up with features either."
If that isn't clear enough for you, well, you're beyond the help of even my enormous brainpower.
I highly doubt that your time is so valuable that the under two minutes required "negates" the price savings.
Oh really? So your Dells came with a standard Windows install CD, not a "restore" CD or a hidden partition?
It came with a restore CD. So what? It's still a full copy of XP Home. Once again, you miss the point of this exercise. A minimal cost computer suitable for browsing, e-mail and light applications.
Some people like to fit more than two paragraphs of text on the screen at a time.
Sheesh, did you completely miss the premise of the article? No one is saying that more computer is useless. If it doesn't work for you, then spend more money. The budget box in the article also specs a 15" LCD.
Yes, the tenuous arguments you put forth most CERTAINLY makes you a superior being. How, oh sage, can I ever reach your level of wisdom? Oh wait, it's not wisdom, it's bullshit.
Considering I can understand the premise of the entire discussion, I think you might want to avoid throwing those rocks in your fragile glass house.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. I actually own two of these low-end boxes for the kids. I won't deny that there's some junk you have to delete (big frickin' deal), but yes, it comes with a full copy of Windows XP Home (as is listed in the system specs).
15" LCD starved for real estate? What are you talking about? It's 1024x768, and perfectly readable. Keep in mind that a 15" LCD is the equivalent of a 16"-17" CRT. The integrated video isn't spectacular, but is just fine for surfing the web and other tasks. In fact, I often jump on my office computer using RDP from the kids computers and it's fine.
I know this is Slashdot, but maybe you should get a clue. The lowest computer these days is WAY overpowered for almost everything short of video or heavy photo editing (though, I have to say that Photoshop runs pretty damn well on the kids computers).
I should have said "way inferior for the stated purpose, which is the lowest possible cost."
The premise of the article is BUDGET BOX for surfing, reading e-mail and a few documents. The article doesn't even include a CD writer. This $399 box is already way overkill even for the premise. Sure, you can load more features in, but who's arguing that you can't? The point is that their $525 box (which doesn't even include the freaking OS) is way inferior to this $399 box.
2.53Ghz Celeron, 533 FSB
512MB RAM
XP Home
80 GB Drive
CD-RW drive
15" Flat Panel LCD
The price? $399. Why, again, would I pay $525 for this "ultimate" budget box?
I wish it wasn't made by Sony, which has too much of history of screwing up consumer devices. I fully expect there to be something radically stupid with it.
France also has a lot of wacky laws regarding Nazi items (see the Yahoo case), but I don't know if it goes as far as banning speech. I agree those two countries don't make a continent, but there is also a shared European Culture. I suppose what shocks me is the lack of outrage at having literal Thought Police that put you in jail. Maybe others in Europe don't have the laws on books, but there is clearly a lot of sympathy out there.
Heck, look at yourself. Your objection isn't exactly very strong. The guy was LOCKED UP FOR THREE YEARS FOR THINKING THE WRONG THOUGHTS. Doesn't that shock you?