Thanks to MS anti-piracy lobbying and differential pricing, it's not even possible to buy a PC without Windows on it from a major OEM any more. Or not without paying for Windows anyway: see Dell's Linux PCs or PCs without an OS, that cost exactly as much or more than the same with Windows. (And if you managed to get one without an OS anyway, it would get added to BSA's piracy statistics anyway.)
I had a choice of Windows 2003 R2, Windows 2003 R2 64bit, RedHat with different lengths of support, SUSE with different lengths of support, and no OS (for $800 less, than the Windows 2003 R2 option).
Not sure, if choosing "no OS" would've been added to BSA's statistics, but I don't care for them anyway.
Are you kidding? There is a highly dangerous terrorist using that very name [George W. Bush -mi] as we speak!
George W. Bush has neither committed, nor ordered to have committed a single Act of Terror. What you may be objecting to are his Acts of War, which are quite a different thing.
More likely, though, you are simply using the word "terrorist" as a slur...
So, how much warrentless wiretapping and patriot act powers did it take to monitor a chat room?
Quite possibly, they monitor (or try to monitor) everything. This time, the "Chat Room Monitoring Unit" (nickname charm4u) got lucky... Next month it may be the phone-wiretapping folks.
If, having grown up here on Earth, you travel to a place with lower gravity (like Moon), you will be a superman.
Other example exist too — some athletes excercise at high altitudes to adjust their bodies to lower oxygen levels. When they then compete at (just above) sea level, they have an advantage.
20 people in the office are watching the same soccer match and each one of them is getting their own stream, because the dimwitted providers have no multicast option.
Your God Bless America rant is amusing in its ignorance. You really, really need to meet someone from another country. Baby steps, after that you can perhaps travel a bit.
I am from another country. Displeased to meet you... And I am not an exception. A couple of years back, one of the uber-Left icons Margaret Cho (herself hardly a WASP) in an interview to "Time Out New York" lamented the immigrants, and how they tend to vote Conservative.
We know evil, and we are glad, America is fighting it, when it does...
They just want the west and their abusive corporations out of their countries.
And I was wondering, if there really exist morons like the "Team America" cartoon was portraying to be members of their F.A.G... There are, I guess. "Corporations sit in their giant corporation buildings, acting all corporationy". Priceless...
Do you really believe that Bush / Clinton are fighting "evil"? Do you really believe that there are people out there who are "evil"?
Yes, I do really believe that Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor, Saddam Hussein — to name only a few — were evil. Kim Jong-Il remains evil. There are no "ifs" nor "buts" about it.
"Evil" from your standpoint is "courage" from theirs. Ever heard the phrase "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"?
I heard it, and it is utterly moronic. This banner is carried by people, who are sooo good at seeing "the other side", the hard to see, they give it equal weight with the most obvious. The Serbs were not fighting for their freedom with neither Bosniaks, nor Horvats, nor Kosovars. The Somali warlord, whom Clinton (reluctantly) ordered arrested (see "Black Hawk Down") was not fighting for anyone's freedom — he was robbing the UN aid distribution. Kim Jong-Il is not fighting for anyone's freedom either — he just wants to preserve his own seat, as did Saddam Hussein.
Your "official" premise thus totally destroyed, let's go to what you really meant — the only people with any kind of the "freedom-fighting" claim, that oppose USA now are Iraqi insurgents. Heck, you even bring up America's founding fathers in comparision. Well, let's hear the insurgents' declaration. What is their list of grievances? Do we impose our own governors upon them? No. Do we dissolve their legislatures? No — we helped them elect their own. Do we levy unfair taxes on Iraqis? No we don't.
What are these "my terrorists, your freedom-fighters" fighting for? Don't begin with "they fight our occupation" — fighting something is simply means, rather than fighting for something, which would be ends. So, what are these "insurgents" fighting for? All we hear about are proclamation of "jihad" and the desirability of the world-wide umma — what other cause are these guys answering to?
The only plausible answer is: "restoration of the perks and privileges, Sunnis have enjoyed under Saddam Hussein". Hardly "freedom-fighting" material...
(Lastly, to put one more nail into your rhethorical coffin, it is the methods, rather than the aims, that makes someone terrorist — the term you introduced into this thread. Shooting at a tank is not terrorism. Targeting a funeral procession is — however noble is your cause.)
I wonder who in today's world will be considered terrorists in 100 years.
Well, yes, the same kind of people, who wear Che Guevara today, will be wearing Zarqawi in a few decades from now. They will be just as wrong, though...
I wonder, where you got all these "talking points" — and why are they all so inaccurate...
Just because these landmines can be easily disabled, doesn't mean that they will be disabled. Landmines kill and maim due to neglegence.
Currently, disabling the mines — even your own — is even harder than laying them down. Which is why it so often not done at all. If it could be done with a push of the button, it would be done more often, if not after during the hostilities, than after the end of the war. I wish, the mines laid by Syrians in the Golans, for example, were like this.
Land mines in principle are terrible ideas. They are indiscriminate warfare.
Maybe. But making them "smart" as described is an improvement.
As most of the conflicts that the US has to deal with now are asymmetrical, what good are landmines going to be?
Most, but not all. Where they aren't good for anything, we are not using them.
Most of the world thinks so, too bad the Bush administration doesn't.:^(
Bush's — and before it Clinton's — administrations are commanding the only real force capable of containing and occasionally even fighting evil. In addition to the lofty pronouncements, they also have to care about actual troops in the field, or, at least, listen to the generals who command them.
It sucks to have to kill people, but as long as the enemy wants to do and does do it to you and those you care about, you have to overcome your revulsion and be able to fight and kill it.
Back to the actual subject of the article, though, any such advancement in the weapons technology is, ultimately, a good thing. There'd be less of these things thrown around for one, and two, once the hostilities are over, dismantling the minefield (with the push of a button) will be rather easy...
And it is the deaths from the stale years-old minefields that drive that "whole world" to want to ban them altogether...
Not to belittle it or anything, but I don't know if it's something to be "concerned about", at least not in the same way as getting dragged off by the secret police in Myanmar and executed.
Myanmar would certainly not qualify for my (nor anyone's, I think) criteria of being "reasonably Democratic".
On Usenet. Someone quickly responded, that a bigger monster (emphasys mine) remains alive and well in the White House — an assessment I could not agree with.
I immediately had my mental faculties and education declared lacking and being "another evidence of Right Wing's neglect of schools" (never mind that amost all of my education happened in USSR). Among the epithets received were: "idiot", "nazi", and "traitor". Someone stated, that I need "deprogramming"...
Funny as it may sound, the point is, government is not the only thing to be concerned about. In fact, in a reasonably democratic country like US, government's persecution is the least of the concerns...
When does someone stop being human, once we can replace their body with a machine?
There is a very funny, insightful, and interesting (and informative too) short SciFi story by Stanislaw Lem on this subject. In it the protagonist (?) — a racing car driver, or something like this — is being sued by the protheses-makers to return the parts, because he defaulted on the payments...
Lem wrote it in Polish, and I read it in Russian, but there is, no doubt a translation available for your preferred language. Look for it. Lem is one of the greatest SciFi authors... Whatever you find (almost) will be worth reading.
Now, in the story even half of the guy's brain is artificial (and has a slight defect, causing him to count everything he sees), which really does make the question asked by the parent meaningful. But we are not there yet, and can not replace the brains, so the answer is rather obvious...
Regarding your second question, a dual dual-core Opteron 285 (4 cores) with 8 GB of RAM with a high-end mobo would costs about $3200 (1062*2+8*70+500). Add a $400 chassis and 2 x $150 harddisks and you end up with a total of $3900 (compared to your $5K). So yes, Opteron is definitively cheaper. What are the exact tech specs of your system ?
My $5265 quote (which includes Windows 2003 Server R2/64 — another $800 — regular WinXP/64 not available) is for two dual core Xeons. For the same price I can choose either "regular" Xeons 5080 @3.73GHz (much faster, than any available dual-core Opteron), or the cache-enhanced Xeons 5160 @3.0GHz, with twice more cache per core (2Mb insted of 1Mb).
Even the slower-clock 5160s seem — according to you — faster at computation, than the fastest available Opterons. So, the question is, whether their increased caches will help them at the memory access?
Here is the quote. I wish there was an Opteron-systems vendor, with such an easy system-build web-site like Dell's...
BASE SYSTEM OPTIONS PowerEdge 1950 Dual Core Intel® Xeon® 5160, 4MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 1333MHz FSB Operating System Windows Server® 2003 R2, Standard x64 Edition,Includes 5 CALs Additional Processors Dual Core Intel Xeon 5160, 4MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 1333MHZ FSB Memory 8GB 533MHz (4x2GB), Dual Ranked DIMMs Keyboard No Keyboard Option Monitor No Monitor Option TCP/IP Offload Engine Enablement Broadcom® Dual Port TCP/IP Offload Engine Enabled, Microsoft OS Only PCI Riser Riser with 2 PCIe Slots Primary Hard Drive 36GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15K RPM Hard Drive Primary Controller SAS 5/i Integrated, No RAID Mouse No Mouse Option Network Adapter Dual Embedded Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC CD/DVD Drive 24X IDE CD-ROM Bezel No Bezel Option Backplane 1x2 Backplane for 3.5-inch Hard Drives Operating System Addition 20GB Microsoft OS Partition Override Documentation Electronic Documentation and OpenManage CD Kit Hard Drive Configuration Integrated SAS/SATA No RAID, SAS 5/i Integrated Chassis Configuration No Rack Rails Included Hardware Support Services 3Yr BASIC SUPPORT: 5x10 HW-Only, 5x10 NBD Onsite Installation Support Services No Installation Assessment Power Supply Non-Redundant Power Supply Additional Documentation SAS 5/i and SAS 5/E English Documentation
The machine is intended for a very CPU intensive task, with substantial (although not database-caliber) datasets — never more than 800Mb per process. The disk and the network I/O are insignificant, as is the graphics... I would not mind going with quad Opterons (8 cores), but am unsure, whether this would give greater bang for the buck... What do you think?
That's entertaining, from my perspective the separation of powers don't seem to be working too well these days.
Works just as it used to over here... What distopia land are you posting from?
"It'd be interesting from a scientific point of view, but a civil liberties concern it is not. Unless, of course, the procedure is painful and/or damaging to the subject."
Amendment V (1791) of the constitution says otherwise in regard to the collection and presentation of evidence against a citizen. "No person may be compelled to testify against himself."
I don't see a contradiction, frankly. Nor does ACLU, apparently, because they are not using this argument...
As for the physical dangers of this type of procedure, this is pretty new science, 20 years or so of application.
That's just ridiculous. 20 years is not enough for you? Cell-phones have existed for shorter time...
This is a government accountability concern, not a civil liberties one...
Your [sic] a riot! Government accountability? Accountable to whom? Since when? I haven't [sic] any serious examples of accountability or responsibility either in the last six years or so.
Reading comprehension problems (in addition to writing)?.. Or just choking on your tofu? I'll try one more time: How the government spends money — whether you approve of it or not — is not a civil liberties concern, hence not one, I gave ACLU money to address...
Thank you, very informative. What about Xeons with larger caches, though? Available at speeds of up to 3.0GHz, the 4Mb cached (2Mb per core) are priced the same as 3.73GHz with 2Mb (1Mb per core).
Since there doesn't even exist an Opteron running at 3GHz (at any price), wouldn't such a large-cached Xeon beat the Opteron in both -- speed and memory access?
I can buy a dual (4-core) Xeon system from Dell right now with 8Gb of memory for just over $5K. Or are those a different kind of Xeon or memory?
Basically what you're saying here seems to be that law enforcement should be allowed to use whatever hokey crackpot ideas it wants to, and it's up to the courts to say if it's no good or not?
Yes, actually. That's what we have the separation of powers for.
First off, if the government is subjecting people to any kind of scans, be it speed radars or palm-reading, that is a civil rights issue, and something we should be given the full and complete details of.
It'd be interesting from a scientific point of view, but a civil liberties concern it is not. Unless, of course, the procedure is painful and/or damaging to the subject.
In particular when it's being used on non-US citizens which you apparently can incarcerate nowadays without bothering with a trial.
Now that is something for ACLU to fight tooth and nail... Even if they are enemy combatants.
Third, as a taxpayer, why the heck shouldn't I be concerned about the validity of any law-enforcement method (or any method in general) the government is blowing my money on?
This is a government accountability concern, not a civil liberties one...
These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood.
The results, if any, will be presented in courts, with experts from defense and prosecution debating their merits in front of juries. This happens to fingerprints, DNA, speed radars, and all other technologies used in crime-fighting.
In short, I feel, my ACLU donation is being misused...
What the heck? I understand, that its true, mass-produced cost is far lower, but you could still feed a few draught-stricken African villages for months with the money.
Why is it not reusable, or, at least, recyclable — change the wrapper, keep the electronics?
If the consumers of the medical care were the ones paying for it, I bet, the number of people suddenly capable of overcoming their revulsions would've risen significantly...
Even comparing simpler things, like shoes or knives, can not be reduced to a single measurement. Microwave ovens and air-conditioners are already far more complex and come with huge vectors of parameters to compare.
Can a meaningful comparision be made of computer systems based on just one number? N TFlop/s vs. M TFlop/s? I don't think so...
Huh? I didnt' talk about a loss. I did talk of no added benefit.
You did. Implicitly. And now you are explicitly confirming my impression:
What the community can lose could be, for example, enhancements, bugfixes etc., so in a sense there is a loss.
Well, if this is a "loss", than RIAA, MPAA, and the software companies are right counting each pirated copy of their wares as a lost sale. See, what I mean?
In fact, that big ugly corporation, that's out to steal your code, as soon as you put BSD license on it (and sell it to a heartless penguin-killing war-profiteer, of course), would not bother with the GPL. Hence there'd be no "enhancements, bugfixes etc." forthcoming from them one way or the other...
Slashdot Mirror
I had a choice of Windows 2003 R2, Windows 2003 R2 64bit, RedHat with different lengths of support, SUSE with different lengths of support, and no OS (for $800 less, than the Windows 2003 R2 option).
Not sure, if choosing "no OS" would've been added to BSA's statistics, but I don't care for them anyway.
Sucks, I know... We are talking about America, though.
George W. Bush has neither committed, nor ordered to have committed a single Act of Terror. What you may be objecting to are his Acts of War, which are quite a different thing.
More likely, though, you are simply using the word "terrorist" as a slur...
And 800 more comments on the subject...
Quite possibly, they monitor (or try to monitor) everything. This time, the "Chat Room Monitoring Unit" (nickname charm4u) got lucky... Next month it may be the phone-wiretapping folks.
If, having grown up here on Earth, you travel to a place with lower gravity (like Moon), you will be a superman.
Other example exist too — some athletes excercise at high altitudes to adjust their bodies to lower oxygen levels. When they then compete at (just above) sea level, they have an advantage.
And force the use of multicast on everyone.
20 people in the office are watching the same soccer match and each one of them is getting their own stream, because the dimwitted providers have no multicast option.
I am from another country. Displeased to meet you... And I am not an exception. A couple of years back, one of the uber-Left icons Margaret Cho (herself hardly a WASP) in an interview to "Time Out New York" lamented the immigrants, and how they tend to vote Conservative.
We know evil, and we are glad, America is fighting it, when it does...
And I was wondering, if there really exist morons like the "Team America" cartoon was portraying to be members of their F.A.G... There are, I guess. "Corporations sit in their giant corporation buildings, acting all corporationy". Priceless...
Yes, I do really believe that Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor, Saddam Hussein — to name only a few — were evil. Kim Jong-Il remains evil. There are no "ifs" nor "buts" about it.
I heard it, and it is utterly moronic. This banner is carried by people, who are sooo good at seeing "the other side", the hard to see, they give it equal weight with the most obvious. The Serbs were not fighting for their freedom with neither Bosniaks, nor Horvats, nor Kosovars. The Somali warlord, whom Clinton (reluctantly) ordered arrested (see "Black Hawk Down") was not fighting for anyone's freedom — he was robbing the UN aid distribution. Kim Jong-Il is not fighting for anyone's freedom either — he just wants to preserve his own seat, as did Saddam Hussein.
Your "official" premise thus totally destroyed, let's go to what you really meant — the only people with any kind of the "freedom-fighting" claim, that oppose USA now are Iraqi insurgents. Heck, you even bring up America's founding fathers in comparision. Well, let's hear the insurgents' declaration. What is their list of grievances? Do we impose our own governors upon them? No. Do we dissolve their legislatures? No — we helped them elect their own. Do we levy unfair taxes on Iraqis? No we don't.
What are these "my terrorists, your freedom-fighters" fighting for? Don't begin with "they fight our occupation" — fighting something is simply means, rather than fighting for something, which would be ends. So, what are these "insurgents" fighting for? All we hear about are proclamation of "jihad" and the desirability of the world-wide umma — what other cause are these guys answering to?
The only plausible answer is: "restoration of the perks and privileges, Sunnis have enjoyed under Saddam Hussein". Hardly "freedom-fighting" material...
(Lastly, to put one more nail into your rhethorical coffin, it is the methods, rather than the aims, that makes someone terrorist — the term you introduced into this thread. Shooting at a tank is not terrorism. Targeting a funeral procession is — however noble is your cause.)
Well, yes, the same kind of people, who wear Che Guevara today, will be wearing Zarqawi in a few decades from now. They will be just as wrong, though...
I wonder, where you got all these "talking points" — and why are they all so inaccurate...
Currently, disabling the mines — even your own — is even harder than laying them down. Which is why it so often not done at all. If it could be done with a push of the button, it would be done more often, if not after during the hostilities, than after the end of the war. I wish, the mines laid by Syrians in the Golans, for example, were like this.
Maybe. But making them "smart" as described is an improvement.
Most, but not all. Where they aren't good for anything, we are not using them.
Bush's — and before it Clinton's — administrations are commanding the only real force capable of containing and occasionally even fighting evil. In addition to the lofty pronouncements, they also have to care about actual troops in the field, or, at least, listen to the generals who command them.
It sucks to have to kill people, but as long as the enemy wants to do and does do it to you and those you care about, you have to overcome your revulsion and be able to fight and kill it.
Back to the actual subject of the article, though, any such advancement in the weapons technology is, ultimately, a good thing. There'd be less of these things thrown around for one, and two, once the hostilities are over, dismantling the minefield (with the push of a button) will be rather easy...
And it is the deaths from the stale years-old minefields that drive that "whole world" to want to ban them altogether...
Myanmar would certainly not qualify for my (nor anyone's, I think) criteria of being "reasonably Democratic".
On Usenet. Someone quickly responded, that a bigger monster (emphasys mine) remains alive and well in the White House — an assessment I could not agree with.
I immediately had my mental faculties and education declared lacking and being "another evidence of Right Wing's neglect of schools" (never mind that amost all of my education happened in USSR). Among the epithets received were: "idiot", "nazi", and "traitor". Someone stated, that I need "deprogramming"...
Funny as it may sound, the point is, government is not the only thing to be concerned about. In fact, in a reasonably democratic country like US, government's persecution is the least of the concerns...
There is a very funny, insightful, and interesting (and informative too) short SciFi story by Stanislaw Lem on this subject. In it the protagonist (?) — a racing car driver, or something like this — is being sued by the protheses-makers to return the parts, because he defaulted on the payments...
Lem wrote it in Polish, and I read it in Russian, but there is, no doubt a translation available for your preferred language. Look for it. Lem is one of the greatest SciFi authors... Whatever you find (almost) will be worth reading.
Now, in the story even half of the guy's brain is artificial (and has a slight defect, causing him to count everything he sees), which really does make the question asked by the parent meaningful. But we are not there yet, and can not replace the brains, so the answer is rather obvious...
This is not about privacy, but about information, which, in the prevailing Slashdot opinion, "wants to be free".
So I'm surprised, no one is outraged at LexisNexis collecting (and selling) these data in the first place.
The thieves are thieves, of course, and LexisNexis is not doing anything illegal, but sympathy for them is something, I just can't master...
My $5265 quote (which includes Windows 2003 Server R2/64 — another $800 — regular WinXP/64 not available) is for two dual core Xeons. For the same price I can choose either "regular" Xeons 5080 @3.73GHz (much faster, than any available dual-core Opteron), or the cache-enhanced Xeons 5160 @3.0GHz, with twice more cache per core (2Mb insted of 1Mb).
Even the slower-clock 5160s seem — according to you — faster at computation, than the fastest available Opterons. So, the question is, whether their increased caches will help them at the memory access?
Here is the quote. I wish there was an Opteron-systems vendor, with such an easy system-build web-site like Dell's...
The machine is intended for a very CPU intensive task, with substantial (although not database-caliber) datasets — never more than 800Mb per process. The disk and the network I/O are insignificant, as is the graphics... I would not mind going with quad Opterons (8 cores), but am unsure, whether this would give greater bang for the buck... What do you think?
Works just as it used to over here... What distopia land are you posting from?
I don't see a contradiction, frankly. Nor does ACLU, apparently, because they are not using this argument...
That's just ridiculous. 20 years is not enough for you? Cell-phones have existed for shorter time...
Reading comprehension problems (in addition to writing)?.. Or just choking on your tofu? I'll try one more time: How the government spends money — whether you approve of it or not — is not a civil liberties concern, hence not one, I gave ACLU money to address...
Since there doesn't even exist an Opteron running at 3GHz (at any price), wouldn't such a large-cached Xeon beat the Opteron in both -- speed and memory access?
I can buy a dual (4-core) Xeon system from Dell right now with 8Gb of memory for just over $5K. Or are those a different kind of Xeon or memory?
I'm afraid, the folks at Open Office.org, for example, will start bundling their own Java with their next release.
The fools are bundling so many other 3rd-party packages already (license be damned), it is frightening...
Yes, actually. That's what we have the separation of powers for.
It'd be interesting from a scientific point of view, but a civil liberties concern it is not. Unless, of course, the procedure is painful and/or damaging to the subject.
Now that is something for ACLU to fight tooth and nail... Even if they are enemy combatants.
This is a government accountability concern, not a civil liberties one...
The results, if any, will be presented in courts, with experts from defense and prosecution debating their merits in front of juries. This happens to fingerprints, DNA, speed radars, and all other technologies used in crime-fighting.
In short, I feel, my ACLU donation is being misused...
What the heck? I understand, that its true, mass-produced cost is far lower, but you could still feed a few draught-stricken African villages for months with the money.
Why is it not reusable, or, at least, recyclable — change the wrapper, keep the electronics?
If the consumers of the medical care were the ones paying for it, I bet, the number of people suddenly capable of overcoming their revulsions would've risen significantly...
Even comparing simpler things, like shoes or knives, can not be reduced to a single measurement. Microwave ovens and air-conditioners are already far more complex and come with huge vectors of parameters to compare.
Can a meaningful comparision be made of computer systems based on just one number? N TFlop/s vs. M TFlop/s? I don't think so...
You did. Implicitly. And now you are explicitly confirming my impression:
Well, if this is a "loss", than RIAA, MPAA, and the software companies are right counting each pirated copy of their wares as a lost sale. See, what I mean?
In fact, that big ugly corporation, that's out to steal your code, as soon as you put BSD license on it (and sell it to a heartless penguin-killing war-profiteer, of course), would not bother with the GPL. Hence there'd be no "enhancements, bugfixes etc." forthcoming from them one way or the other...
It better not be called "X11"...