Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program.
You do realize that: 1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration as the cost will be prohibitive for any single nation? The PR it's worth isn't in the public eye, it's in the eyes of the nations that the US will have to ally itself with in space if it has any hope of getting a more permanent place in space.
2) The shuttle program is done, with the shuttles expected to be retired in 2010, and that they've been working on a replacement for the shuttle for 10 years, though the short-term solution seems to be to use Soyuz capsules for manned launches? Suggesting that they get rid of the shuttle because it's a load of bullshit promises and tired old technology is a bit redundant when the shuttle has less than a year left before it's permanently grounded.
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance. Take every precaution to avoid losing people, but understand and accept that every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space, you're taking risks with your life. It's that 2nd part that the people at large don't seem to understand, and that's why every time there's an accident and somebody dies, the space program loses support.
The way it was explained to me (have a nurse in the family) and sorry if I don't explain it exactly correct, is there is a condition where when a person is stressed the heart's electrical system goes out of whack, throws a charge when it shouldn't and basically the heart just quivers instead of beating. Now since this doesn't show up unless under stress (like say...when in PE) it can be hard to catch, especially if you don't have someone previously diagnosed with it, as from what I have been told it tends to run in families.
When the heart starts quivering like that instead of beating, it's called Fibrillation. That's what a defibrillator is for. When you can get a defib for $1500 these days, it's criminal for a school to not have one on site (and indeed, most schools do have them, as well as most sports clubs). Even if it's not for the kids (though there are kids who have heart conditions that could require defibrillation), it's also very important for the adults and people in high risk categories.
As for what can cause fibrillation in a youth, it can be caused by a heart murmur, among other things. I used to have chest pains when I worked out hard, and it turned out that it was a congenital heart defect... one that'd been detected when I was a baby, but had calmed down when I was at rest to the point that it couldn't be detected... there's a small hole in my heart which can cause bleeding into the chest cavity when I'm over stressed. Usually it's nothing; my resting heart rate is usually between 60-64 bpm, and aside from a very slight arrhythmia that gets detected maybe 1 in 10 times (and has even snuck by unnoticed on an ECG). The thing that's important here is to *stop* when I feel pain or lightheaded. Teach the kids that it's more important to recognize your own limitations, and to stop when you reach them, and you're less likely to have this kind of issue. And it's still entirely possible to remain athletic: I have a black belt in jiu jitsu (the test took 6h of high energy output, and I was utterly exhausted at the end of it), and I jog 6 miles a day (usually takes me about 40 minutes).
Just... know your limitations and don't keep pushing yourself when you reach them. Especially with something like the heart.
As for wearing a heart monitor in PE class... I think the school should provide the armbands. They only need to buy about 40 of them, and it'd be a lot cheaper. I think it's silly that schools would need something like this, but the problem is that the kids are too competitive. To some extent that's the fault of the parents. If the kids were smart enough to realize when they had reached their limit and to pull back from it, then heart monitors wouldn't be needed. In the land of the lawsuit, it's obviously the school's fault for not noticing that the kid had a flushed face and was wheezing after sprinting all out. The parent's insistence on telling the kid that winning was more important than anything else and to play through the pain had nothing to do with it at all, nosiree....
Compare your statement, "Combine the small market share and the educated userbase together" with my own, "Ignorance is drastically reduced". In fact, you seem to be proving my statement. In fact, you seem to expand on my statement, saying that MOST people PREFER to be ignorant. Now - who is sitting on a high horse?
There's an element of "I don't need to know this" when it comes to the inner workings of computers and most of the users. I personally couldn't care less how a logic gate actually works, or how they get integrated into a CPU to provide the math functionality we expect. But I'm not saying that the userbase in Windows-land prefers to be ignorant. Just that, as a proportion, there's far more Windows and Mac users who fall into that category where they start asking questions like "do I really need to know this," and that more often than not the decision is that it's not really relevant to what you want to actually *do* with the computer. As much as we might hate it, the reality is that most computer users don't care about the maintenance of their system, or the inner workings, and will quite happily carry on in ignorance as long as they can still get on Facebook and read their e-mails. Using a car analogy, they're like those people who drive 15,000 miles between oil changes. It's pretty stupid, but the car will, for the most part, continue to work without them noticing the difference.
What I'm saying is that Linux tends to be the bastion of the geek. I'm not going to get into an argument about whether joe user can use Linux, or whether there are inexperienced computer users who can pick it up and use it without any problems. But I am going to say that *most* of the userbase of Linux are power users. People who, by and large, wouldn't balk at the thought of having to install their own OS, and who don't mind getting into the nitty gritty of their computer in order to configure it. For most Linux users, that tolerance for where they decide they don't need to know something is much higher. The average Linux user is less likely to glaze over and start doing Sudoku in their head when you start talking about the relative merits of different filesystems than the average Windows or Mac user.
The thing being, these are the users who aren't likely to get infected with a virus in the first place, because they're familiar with the trends, and know what to keep an eye out for. I know Windows users who have run without any antivirus for 15 years without ever getting infected or losing data. Some might argue they're playing with fire, but the truth is that they learned, a long time ago, what to avoid with their Windows-based PC, and as such they aren't really taking a risk.
Linux is part of the cure. It helps in treating one symptom of the disease. Ignorance is drastically reduced after just one installation of any unix like operating system.
Linux's main security comes through its relative obscurity on the desktop. It's big in servers, but virus writers in general don't go after servers (unless a glaring bug like Code Red exists), because server admins tend to be a more educated user base. Ditto for Linux users, on the whole... quite aside from having a very small proportion of the desktop market, the average Linux user is more educated about computer use than the average Windows or Mac user.
Combine the small market share and the educated userbase together, and you find that it's not a very ripe target for a virus-writer. But it's patently idiotic to think that no viruses exist for Linux, or that you're immune simple because you run Linux. You *still* need to be conscious of what you're doing, and you *still* need to be wary of what you're doing. Exploits do exist for Linux, and it's entirely possible to write a virus that specifically targets Linux. More so if you go after a single distribution, too... Ubuntu's user model, for example, means that you could write a virus that loads itself up in userspace, and monitors running tasks for either "sudo" or "gksu". Once one of those is invoked, start keylogging, and you've rooted a computer. Don't even need to keylog, at that, as you can simply invoke sudo after that's been done, and it won't ask for the password until the next time you log off.
So please, get off your high horse about Linux. It's a good choice for some, not for everybody. But you're opening yourself to a world of hurt if you make any assumptions about the security of your computer, especially if that assumption is something like the idea that you're immune to viruses. Just because there aren't any (known) viruses in the wild which target Linux doesn't mean they don't exist or that they won't exist. There will come a day when a virus writer decides that Linux is a ripe target, and they start going after the OS, and we'll be right back where we are with Windows right now.
ISPs regularly portscan connected clients to make sure that they aren't running a server in violation of the TOS... many large ISPs have terms of service that strictly forbid running such servers, and even the ones that don't have that prohibition will usually keep tabs on their users to see what they're running.
More than portscanning, they also monitor which ports account for the bulk of your traffic. If you're putting out more than 50MB/day average on port 25, it's a fairly safe bet that it's more than just personal e-mail use. Many large ISPs will also silently redirect all port 25 traffic directly to their own mail server, and some of htem won't be so silent about it, and will simply block outbound port 25 to anything other than their mail servers. When all outgoing mail has to go through their servers, it's pretty easy for them to check attachments for viruses.
Beyond active scanning, there's also abuse reports... those actually do get read, and if they have the appropriate information, then they can very easily be used to track down the user who's infected with a virus.
None of the methods are going to detect a user's virus infection the moment they're infected, but taking a few proactive steps as well as taking proper reactive steps can allow the ISP to pick up on suspicious activity, and to work with the user to clean things up.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for an ISP that did exactly this. We would portscan our users, we would monitor their mail traffic for viruses, and we'd actively monitor the abuse mailbox. When we detected a virus-infected user, we'd send them an e-mail notifying them that they were infected. If they hadn't cleaned up or replied to the e-mail within 5 business days, we'd phone them, and if there was no response within 5 days of that, we'd segregate their connection so that the only sites they could navigate to were the company website, and several notable antivirus sites (McAfee, Norton, AVG, Avast, PC-Cillin). I suspect that the Australian policy described here will work very much the same, and I don't really understand why people are up in arms about it. There's other methods to deal with BitTorrent besides defining it as "malicious" and "viral" (traffic shaping anybody?), and besides that, most piracy these days doesn't even happen through bittorrent. Direct downloads + hjsplit, rename file extensions. They can't really know what's being downloaded, and they can't throttle direct downloads because it'd piss off their customer base.
Storing your contacts on the SIM card isn't a solution to syncing your contacts with your computer, and it's not fair to assume that not having to re-enter his contacts is the only reason he'd like to be able to sync his computer contacts with his phone (even if that is the one example he gave). Keeping contacts synced between the computer and phone has other helpful uses as well, like keeping information up to date and not having several inconsistent phone numbers/email addresses/physical addresses spread across your phones and computers. Also, SIM card or not, if he could sync with his computer, he would be able to transfer the contacts to his new phone. So at best, you've offered a different way to achieve the goal of transferring contacts.
No, you're right. Storing them on the SIM card isn't the answer if you want to keep it in sync with your computer. However, you could easily buy a Nokia phone (there's other manufacturers who do the same, but I've had nothing but good experiences with Nokia). They include the USB Data cable with all of their phones, they never push useless bricking software to the phone on you, and their phone software, which is available for free (as in beer) download from their website allows you to sync apps/data to/from your phone, set the phone up as a tethered Internet device, and syncs the contacts on your SIM card with the ones in your Outlook or MS Mail address books.
There's other manufacturers who have the same functionality in their phones, I'm sure. But that's beside the point... my point is that you don't need to buy a $600 phone to have that functionality when a phone you can get for $50 can do the same thing. Heck, the phone I have right now (a Nokia 6086) could have been had for free if I was willing to sign a 3-year contract, and it also has an 802.11g chip built into the phone so it can be used as a VOIP phone when I'm at home, thus not using up my air time.
Frankly though, unless storing contacts on SIM cards has changed since I last tried it (admittedly several years ago), there are several big disadvantages to using SIM contacts (eg, you're limited to a single phone number/address/email per entry; can you even store physical addresses?, etc)...
The SIM card on my phone can store up to 3 phone numbers, an e-mail address, and a physical address for every contact.
The issue being that with different manufacturers pushing their own versions of N, there's no guarantee that all N-branded hardware will work with each other. I have a PCI 802.11n card that has exactly that problem: it doesn't work with the rest of the stuff on my network. It's sure to work when you push it back to 802.11g compatibility, as that standard is well defined, and backwards compatibility is one of the few things that the different factions deciding on N could agree on, but I can't use that system in N mode.
It did take them a long time to decide on a standard, but hopefully having done so, they'll be able to get rid of problems like the one I have with that equipment.
True, Dreamfall did get some bad returns... the original xbox version had a really buggy engine, and the PC version wasn't a very good port of the game. They did fix most of the engine problems that the xbox version had, but it still had some... quirky... behaviour.
Still... I have played TLJ through in the last year. The story is so good that you can ignore the fact that the engine is 10 years out of date and wasn't that good in the first place. The same is true for Dreamfall, IMO.
Take it with a grain of salt, though... I still play and love Advent Rising.
Ragnar is also working on the Secret World idea, which, according to the interviews he's given about it, have been percolating in his head since before he started working on Anarchy Online, long before he started developping Dreamfall.
I'd definitely like to see him finish that trilogy. Dreamfall was a very interesting story, and I am really looking forward to finding out what happens next. (though I still have issues with how difficult the Necropolis level was in the game...). But I also understand that Dreamfall came out in 2006, 7 years after The Longest Journey. Good stories are worth waiting for. And from what I know of Tornquist, I have no reason to believe that he won't finish that series.
I think the point was that it's a feature that SHOULD be included in cell phones, but isn't. Sure, legality aside, it can be done... if I want to carry around yet another piece of equipment with batteries to maintain, a cable to my phone (which in many phones would automatically disable the speaker on the phone itself, making wearing a headset mandatory to use the thing), and a placard that permanently identifies me as a geek without a love life. No thanks. If recording a conversation is illegal, then what happens if you have a perfect memory? And how long until someone (most likely a patent troll) makes it a crime to "retain" that data in your "personal memory" for more than 24 hours?
The problem being that cell phones are sold outside the US, as well. In most of the developped world, there's laws against any form of clandestine surveillance without notification and consent. For something like a bank or a casino, there's usually a notice that the premises are protected by video camera, and the very act of not leaving the store on finding this out is considered consent.
In Canada, for something like a phone conversation, the recording *must* include you saying that you are recording the conversation *and* all other parties saying that they agree to be recorded for anything to be admissable in court. Police wiretaps require a clandestine search warrant which is usually very difficult for them to get. More than that, if you do not advise me that you're recording the call, or if you tell me halfway through the conversation that you've been recording the call, I have a right to sue you for damages. It's considered a serious breach of privacy. And it's not enough to say at the start of the call, either... if you get transferred to another department, you *must* inform the new person you're speaking to and get their consent, too. That's why, when you call customer service lines, they make you listen to that disclaimer saying that the call may be recorded or monitored for training and quality assurance purposes... it's because if you find out that you've been recorded without your knowledge, you can hit them very hard... for personal damages it usually won't exceed $5000 per infraction, but for a big corporation that can be 10x as much.
It's because countries other than the US have decent privacy protection laws that cell phones don't have call recording software built in. It would make it far too easy to break a law that exists for a damned good reason.
And as to your question about somebody having an eidetic memory? *shrugs* I have eidetic memory, it's never been an issue. If I give testimony as to what somebody said, it's still considered hearsay, and is not considered any more accurate because of my memory. I may be able to close my eyes and relive an experience, every detail, every sound, every smell, every word of a conversation, every nuance of inflection, but there's still no way for me to make copies of that tape, or play it back for people other than myself. I can describe what I see, what I hear, etc., but I cannot make you experience it. That's the difference between memory and an actual true audio or video recording.
Hydro, geothermal and wave, fine. Wind and solar? You still have to keep fossil and nuclear plants running 24/7, or eat the brownouts. Power generation figures for wind and solar are bullshit - show me the figures for reductions in fossil and nuclear generation in areas where wind and solar are "contributing" to the load.
Actually, I have a friend who's got a cabin up in the hills that's completely off the grid. Septic system, well water, solar power, electric everything (including stove and bbq). The in-house lines have a natural 16V system which powers major appliances and lights, and there's an up-converted 120V power supply for things like TV or computer.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow. more practically, as the GP said, we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
Most low-end motherboards come with some sort of on-board GPU.
Fixed that for you.:) Most high-end motherboards don't have an on-board GPU, because most people who'd be willing to spend $250 on a motherboard (when you can get one for $60) probably won't balk at buying a discrete graphics card, and in fact, probably plan on buying a discrete graphics card anyway, because integrated graphics tend to be a generation or two out of date.
If I were building my own server, I'd make sure to get a motherboard that had on-board graphics (as long as chipset and I/O were up to snuff). If I were re-tooling old hardware, it's a coin toss as to whether I'd have on-board graphics. Point of fact, the only systems I have ever bought that had onboard graphics were purpose built for something that doesn't require gaming. They're both HTPCs, and they're both still in use.
Even easier, go to eBay and get a PCI video card for a couple of dollars. I got an ATI Rage with 8MB of memory for something like 2$ plus about 4$ shipping. It's only a few watts, which if you really freak out about power usage, you can recover by lowering the CPU voltage and the frequency to a bit lower than the normal. Well, anyways you'll make it more economic simply by replacing the power supply with a 80-85+ certified one, but it's probably more expensive than the whole computer, or the money saved in 2-3 years.
I'd agree with buying a cheap video card from e-bay. A few years ago, my local 2nd hand computer supplier put out a bin of old video cards, and I picked up about 20 ATI Mach64's with 512k-1mb of memory each...:) they work great in servers.:)
As to the OP's question... whatever happened to using a KVM? They're pretty inexpensive, and really easy to get your hands on. If it's just a play server, set it on the floor next to your regular computer, and use your existing keyboard/mouse/display. Most modern KVM's will emulate a connected display and input devices so that the computer will never know that it's not connected, meaning you don't have to tweak/configure anything in the computer to get it to run headless.
BS! It was less than $100. No where near your $500.
You didn't look hard enough, then. Start price $1999. Customize it to upgrade the screen to your desired resolution and bump the hard drive to 500GB, and you're at $2279. Canadian dollars. At the current exchange rate, that's just a shade under $2100. Not even close to the $3000 USD that you're talking about having spent on a Mac. You got taken.
Or are you honestly telling me that you bought a 24" external monitor that cost $800?
But I have to pay the Microsoft tax. Sure I could demand a refund from Alienware, but what's the likelihood I would get it, in a reasonable tyme period?
And? Even if you had to wait 6 months to see a cheque (Dell usually issues credits/cheques within 3-6 weeks, btw), you're still coming out ahead. Unless you actually *want* to spend a boatload more cash than you need to in order to get a pretty apple logo on the back of your LCD.
I can't understand gamers' "I will not budge" on in-game advertising. The "I've already paid money for it, why should I have to see advertisements" argument pops up EVERYWHERE. Consider that maybe the cost of making the game outweighs the amount made from 1-time sales? Games are becoming increasingly expensive to produce, with everyone expecting beautiful art, a well-made story, good voice acting, good music/sounds, an amazing graphics engine... etc. Yet the normal cost of a new game ($50) has been pretty static, at least for the last 5 years. Regardless of whether you think that the products that these people are producing are worth even that, it doesn't change the fact that they're expensive little things that the people in charge are trying to turn into a profit.
If the studios focused more on producing a good product, then I'd be more willing to spend the money on the game. And there was a time when new video games cost $70 or more. If they've decided that they need to advertise in game to help pay for it, then they have a *lot* of chutzpah charging me $50 for the game in the first place. If they can't make their production values then they either find a way to spend less money on production, or they need to raise their costs to reflect it.
I *expect* advertising in a game like America's Army. Admittedly, it's a very specific kind of advertising, but for the price I pay to play the game, I expect to be bombarded with advertising. When I'm playing a game I've paid for, I expect to be left alone to enjoy the game.
If they want to supplement their income with ads, then they need to find that price point where they can reasonably justify it to their consumers. Newspapers have done this by reducing the cost to the consumer to $0.50. That $0.50 doesn't cover the cost of the content, it covers the cost of the media and distribution. The cost of the content is paid for by advertisers. Similarly, if you want to cover the cost of producing content by advertising at me, fine, well and good, but don't have the gall to try to charge me for more than media and distribution. Set your price point at $5 and be honest about it.
1. Not dude. Not even close. 2. You suck at noticing facetious and tongue-in-cheek remarks. 3. If this is any attempt at logic at all, it's the Absurd Case.
What about all tje murders and other crimes that get committed while wearing Louis Vuitton apparel? Hmm? Does this mean we can hold them liable for it? After all, they have an obligation to stop any crimes that are committed using their product....
Ok, you're right. But then again, Nintendo controls everything that's being released for their consoles, so I guess one can say they both released it.
It's coming, I'm sure. They're not stupid, and they know they can make money from it. But it takes time to adapt the engines to work with the Wii.
Case in point, I've had my Wii for almost 2 years now, and I just now broke down and bought my first Wii points card. Why? Because they finally got off their asses and released Secret of Mana. They have partnerned with Square/Enix on VC titles, and I think it's a matter of time before they release other really popular titles.
Can you show me a Windows laptop that has two video systems and can drive a 17" 1900x1200 LCD and a 24" external LCD at the same tyme for less than $3000? Oh, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive are required too.
Go to Dell.com and configure an Alienware M17x. Upgrading it to a 17" 1920x1080 LCD and a 500GB hard drive brings the total price to under $2300. That's with 4GB of DDR2, 64-bit Windows Vista, and a 1GB GeForce 260 GTX video card. It has video out and can run an external LCD at a significantly higher resolution than you're asking for if you like. Even if you're buying the LCD yourself and including it in the cost of the laptop, the total price will come to around $2500. $500 *less* than the number you're asking for.
Also, you won't find a laptop that runs at 1900x1200 internal resolution, at all, because nobody makes LCDs in that aspect ratio. Even 16x10 aspect ratio is going the way of the dodo, in favour of 16x9.
And while I realize that it's not running Linux out of the box, you'll find that it's not difficult to reinstall Linux on that system if you like.
a proprietary OS for 30 bucks deserves 5 points on price.
Emphasis mine. That $30 price tag is dependant on buying the hardware that the OS is proprietary to. While there's numerous workarounds out there, it's been made pretty clear in the past that Apple does not support running their OS on non-Apple hardware, and that they have in the past, and likely will in the future, issued system updates that break your non-approved installation of their software.
Now... all comments about Windows tax aside, show me a new 15" Apple laptop computer that you can buy for under $500. Oh wait. You can't. In Windows-land, however, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have computers in that price range. The only thing that Apple has which is even close to that kind of pricing is the Mac Mini, which is a desktop computer, and which has a hardware configuration that's laughably underpowered when compared to the equivalent price range on PCs.
See... the difference between Apple and Microsoft retail pricing of the OS is that for OS/X, you've already given Apple a significant chunk of your money. For Windows, that could be the only time Microsoft ever sees a dime from you, as you may have bought the hardware from a 3rd party OEM, or you may have bought the components and built it yourself. You've already paid that difference between $30 and $120 to Apple when you bought the computer, probably 2 or 3 times over.
The only time I ever bought a DVD with mandatory "previews" at the start (which couldn't be skipped by pressing menu or fast forwarding through them), I returned it to the store, made certain that they knew exactly why I was returning it, and wrote a letter to both the publisher and studio explaining why it was seriously bad juju.
They probably ignored me, but I haven't seen any DVDs with unskippable previews since, and that was several years ago.
The world is a bad and cruel place. Everyone needs to learn that at some point.
You're right, but this is a case where somebody has abused their experience and better understanding of the human psyche in order to augment the nature of the harrassment that was ocurring. The woman had been on this planet for 20 years longer than her victim. In that time, she'd learned a great deal about what buttons to push and what to avoid saying. She had a great deal more experience, and that's really the gravity of the crime.
See... her victim wasn't another adult. It was a 12-year old child with mental illness (depression). Quite frankly, most 12-year olds have not been on the planet long enough to learn that the world can be a cruel place. People do need to learn that fact, but not at the expense of their childhood... most of us learn it in our teens/early 20's, not when we're still counting our age by quarter and half years, and have yet to see our first decade through. Add into that the effects that raging hormones can have on a pubescent body, as well as the fact that she was clinically depressed, and you have a recipe for an extremely confused and upset person who is not mentally equipped to deal with somebody like Drew. Somebody nearly 3x their age who is using her experience and understanding in order to specifically make her *more* miserable.
I've been clinically depressed. I've been suicidal. I wasn't much older than Drew's victim the first time I threatened to kill myself. I know, first hand, that this was not somebody who could deal with that kind of harrassment. And had Drew had any sort of sense or conscience, she would have realized that the child needed help, not another tormentor. The woman is psychopath, in the clinical sense.
Now, I do think that the feds screwed up in her prosecution. She should have been charged with child abuse, being a sexual predator, or any number of laws that she actually did break. They wanted a high profile online case, and so they tried using that vector to prosecute. What they should have done is treated it the same way they'd have treated her actions if they were done offline. I can only hope that it'll balance out in a civil case, but it's small penance for what she's done.
Are you out of your mind?;-) This implies that if an unstable individual listens to music that drives him/her to suicide, then the person(s) that performed and/or wrote the music is guilty of murder.
I suspect the GP would draw a distinction between music driving somebody to suicide and making a fraudulent online identity to drive somebody to suicide. If for no other reason, then on grounds of intent. Music isn't generally written with the expressed purpose of tormenting somebody to the point that they end up killing themselves. But it's pretty hard to argue that Drew had anything other than tormenting and harrassing the child in mind when she set up a fake identity to be her boyfriend.
It means "we've heard that joke too much & are sick of it." Your code word for this is obligatory, but since there's no "-1 Obligatory" the moderator used "-1 Redundant" which is actually a pretty common usage.
Pentium 75 achieves 87.1 VAX MIPS (Dhry2); Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, 6248. 32 times the clockspeed, 70 times the performance. And well short of Moore's law.
Not really. The raw performance that a CPU can provide hasn't really increased at all in the last 7 years. We're running with basically the same clock speeds, and all other things being equal, the performance of the CPUs hasn't improved that much. What performance improvement we've seen in that time has been from improvements to chipset architecture, memory speed, bus speed, and data transfer rates between different buses.
The single biggest improvement your computer has seen in the last decade has been the GPU performance, which is on track with Moore's Law and then some, because that's where you, the user, will actually see the difference. Try running Farcry at 1920x1080 resolution with all effects turned on using a GeForce3 Ti500 w/ 64MB of RAM.
But the thing is... the reason the average clock speed has actually gone down in the last 5 years isn't because they aren't capable of making faster chips. It's because they don't really have a reason to make faster chips. Data crunched by the CPU can only be received by the user so fast, and the CPU is much faster than it needs to be. So it's cheaper to make slower chips using older, more refined technologies, and they had/have reached a plateau where the CPU is far more powerful than the rest of the computer, and the user, can handle. Who cares if your CPU can clock to 10GHz or more if it won't be used? Heck, Civilization IV is the only game I play that actually manages to cap out even one of the cores on my 2-year old Core2 Duo laptop, and that's only because of the raw number crunching it does between turns.
And what improvements we *have* seen on the CPU haven't been limited by the inability to cram more transistors into a die. They've been focusing on streamlining processes (a war that AMD started with Intel, when they put out a 1GHz Athlon that outperformed a 3GHz Pentium), and most importantly, they've been focusing on improving power and heat efficiency. CPU power hasn't improved much in the last 5 years, but the amount of power a CPU requires is a fraction of what it was back then. I can remember when you were a fool to build an AMD-based system with less than 350W of power running through it, and it was strongly recommended that you have more than 500W. The last computer I bult is a Core2Duo 2.4GHz with a 120GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM, and it's powered by an 80W brick. It could get by with a 60W brick, but the 80W gives me more play room.
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You do realize that:
1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration as the cost will be prohibitive for any single nation? The PR it's worth isn't in the public eye, it's in the eyes of the nations that the US will have to ally itself with in space if it has any hope of getting a more permanent place in space.
2) The shuttle program is done, with the shuttles expected to be retired in 2010, and that they've been working on a replacement for the shuttle for 10 years, though the short-term solution seems to be to use Soyuz capsules for manned launches? Suggesting that they get rid of the shuttle because it's a load of bullshit promises and tired old technology is a bit redundant when the shuttle has less than a year left before it's permanently grounded.
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance. Take every precaution to avoid losing people, but understand and accept that every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space, you're taking risks with your life. It's that 2nd part that the people at large don't seem to understand, and that's why every time there's an accident and somebody dies, the space program loses support.
When the heart starts quivering like that instead of beating, it's called Fibrillation. That's what a defibrillator is for. When you can get a defib for $1500 these days, it's criminal for a school to not have one on site (and indeed, most schools do have them, as well as most sports clubs). Even if it's not for the kids (though there are kids who have heart conditions that could require defibrillation), it's also very important for the adults and people in high risk categories.
As for what can cause fibrillation in a youth, it can be caused by a heart murmur, among other things. I used to have chest pains when I worked out hard, and it turned out that it was a congenital heart defect... one that'd been detected when I was a baby, but had calmed down when I was at rest to the point that it couldn't be detected... there's a small hole in my heart which can cause bleeding into the chest cavity when I'm over stressed. Usually it's nothing; my resting heart rate is usually between 60-64 bpm, and aside from a very slight arrhythmia that gets detected maybe 1 in 10 times (and has even snuck by unnoticed on an ECG). The thing that's important here is to *stop* when I feel pain or lightheaded. Teach the kids that it's more important to recognize your own limitations, and to stop when you reach them, and you're less likely to have this kind of issue. And it's still entirely possible to remain athletic: I have a black belt in jiu jitsu (the test took 6h of high energy output, and I was utterly exhausted at the end of it), and I jog 6 miles a day (usually takes me about 40 minutes).
Just... know your limitations and don't keep pushing yourself when you reach them. Especially with something like the heart.
As for wearing a heart monitor in PE class... I think the school should provide the armbands. They only need to buy about 40 of them, and it'd be a lot cheaper. I think it's silly that schools would need something like this, but the problem is that the kids are too competitive. To some extent that's the fault of the parents. If the kids were smart enough to realize when they had reached their limit and to pull back from it, then heart monitors wouldn't be needed. In the land of the lawsuit, it's obviously the school's fault for not noticing that the kid had a flushed face and was wheezing after sprinting all out. The parent's insistence on telling the kid that winning was more important than anything else and to play through the pain had nothing to do with it at all, nosiree....
There's an element of "I don't need to know this" when it comes to the inner workings of computers and most of the users. I personally couldn't care less how a logic gate actually works, or how they get integrated into a CPU to provide the math functionality we expect. But I'm not saying that the userbase in Windows-land prefers to be ignorant. Just that, as a proportion, there's far more Windows and Mac users who fall into that category where they start asking questions like "do I really need to know this," and that more often than not the decision is that it's not really relevant to what you want to actually *do* with the computer. As much as we might hate it, the reality is that most computer users don't care about the maintenance of their system, or the inner workings, and will quite happily carry on in ignorance as long as they can still get on Facebook and read their e-mails. Using a car analogy, they're like those people who drive 15,000 miles between oil changes. It's pretty stupid, but the car will, for the most part, continue to work without them noticing the difference.
What I'm saying is that Linux tends to be the bastion of the geek. I'm not going to get into an argument about whether joe user can use Linux, or whether there are inexperienced computer users who can pick it up and use it without any problems. But I am going to say that *most* of the userbase of Linux are power users. People who, by and large, wouldn't balk at the thought of having to install their own OS, and who don't mind getting into the nitty gritty of their computer in order to configure it. For most Linux users, that tolerance for where they decide they don't need to know something is much higher. The average Linux user is less likely to glaze over and start doing Sudoku in their head when you start talking about the relative merits of different filesystems than the average Windows or Mac user.
The thing being, these are the users who aren't likely to get infected with a virus in the first place, because they're familiar with the trends, and know what to keep an eye out for. I know Windows users who have run without any antivirus for 15 years without ever getting infected or losing data. Some might argue they're playing with fire, but the truth is that they learned, a long time ago, what to avoid with their Windows-based PC, and as such they aren't really taking a risk.
Linux's main security comes through its relative obscurity on the desktop. It's big in servers, but virus writers in general don't go after servers (unless a glaring bug like Code Red exists), because server admins tend to be a more educated user base. Ditto for Linux users, on the whole... quite aside from having a very small proportion of the desktop market, the average Linux user is more educated about computer use than the average Windows or Mac user.
Combine the small market share and the educated userbase together, and you find that it's not a very ripe target for a virus-writer. But it's patently idiotic to think that no viruses exist for Linux, or that you're immune simple because you run Linux. You *still* need to be conscious of what you're doing, and you *still* need to be wary of what you're doing. Exploits do exist for Linux, and it's entirely possible to write a virus that specifically targets Linux. More so if you go after a single distribution, too... Ubuntu's user model, for example, means that you could write a virus that loads itself up in userspace, and monitors running tasks for either "sudo" or "gksu". Once one of those is invoked, start keylogging, and you've rooted a computer. Don't even need to keylog, at that, as you can simply invoke sudo after that's been done, and it won't ask for the password until the next time you log off.
So please, get off your high horse about Linux. It's a good choice for some, not for everybody. But you're opening yourself to a world of hurt if you make any assumptions about the security of your computer, especially if that assumption is something like the idea that you're immune to viruses. Just because there aren't any (known) viruses in the wild which target Linux doesn't mean they don't exist or that they won't exist. There will come a day when a virus writer decides that Linux is a ripe target, and they start going after the OS, and we'll be right back where we are with Windows right now.
ISPs regularly portscan connected clients to make sure that they aren't running a server in violation of the TOS... many large ISPs have terms of service that strictly forbid running such servers, and even the ones that don't have that prohibition will usually keep tabs on their users to see what they're running.
More than portscanning, they also monitor which ports account for the bulk of your traffic. If you're putting out more than 50MB/day average on port 25, it's a fairly safe bet that it's more than just personal e-mail use. Many large ISPs will also silently redirect all port 25 traffic directly to their own mail server, and some of htem won't be so silent about it, and will simply block outbound port 25 to anything other than their mail servers. When all outgoing mail has to go through their servers, it's pretty easy for them to check attachments for viruses.
Beyond active scanning, there's also abuse reports... those actually do get read, and if they have the appropriate information, then they can very easily be used to track down the user who's infected with a virus.
None of the methods are going to detect a user's virus infection the moment they're infected, but taking a few proactive steps as well as taking proper reactive steps can allow the ISP to pick up on suspicious activity, and to work with the user to clean things up.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for an ISP that did exactly this. We would portscan our users, we would monitor their mail traffic for viruses, and we'd actively monitor the abuse mailbox. When we detected a virus-infected user, we'd send them an e-mail notifying them that they were infected. If they hadn't cleaned up or replied to the e-mail within 5 business days, we'd phone them, and if there was no response within 5 days of that, we'd segregate their connection so that the only sites they could navigate to were the company website, and several notable antivirus sites (McAfee, Norton, AVG, Avast, PC-Cillin). I suspect that the Australian policy described here will work very much the same, and I don't really understand why people are up in arms about it. There's other methods to deal with BitTorrent besides defining it as "malicious" and "viral" (traffic shaping anybody?), and besides that, most piracy these days doesn't even happen through bittorrent. Direct downloads + hjsplit, rename file extensions. They can't really know what's being downloaded, and they can't throttle direct downloads because it'd piss off their customer base.
No, you're right. Storing them on the SIM card isn't the answer if you want to keep it in sync with your computer. However, you could easily buy a Nokia phone (there's other manufacturers who do the same, but I've had nothing but good experiences with Nokia). They include the USB Data cable with all of their phones, they never push useless bricking software to the phone on you, and their phone software, which is available for free (as in beer) download from their website allows you to sync apps/data to/from your phone, set the phone up as a tethered Internet device, and syncs the contacts on your SIM card with the ones in your Outlook or MS Mail address books.
There's other manufacturers who have the same functionality in their phones, I'm sure. But that's beside the point... my point is that you don't need to buy a $600 phone to have that functionality when a phone you can get for $50 can do the same thing. Heck, the phone I have right now (a Nokia 6086) could have been had for free if I was willing to sign a 3-year contract, and it also has an 802.11g chip built into the phone so it can be used as a VOIP phone when I'm at home, thus not using up my air time.
The SIM card on my phone can store up to 3 phone numbers, an e-mail address, and a physical address for every contact.
The issue being that with different manufacturers pushing their own versions of N, there's no guarantee that all N-branded hardware will work with each other. I have a PCI 802.11n card that has exactly that problem: it doesn't work with the rest of the stuff on my network. It's sure to work when you push it back to 802.11g compatibility, as that standard is well defined, and backwards compatibility is one of the few things that the different factions deciding on N could agree on, but I can't use that system in N mode.
It did take them a long time to decide on a standard, but hopefully having done so, they'll be able to get rid of problems like the one I have with that equipment.
True, Dreamfall did get some bad returns... the original xbox version had a really buggy engine, and the PC version wasn't a very good port of the game. They did fix most of the engine problems that the xbox version had, but it still had some... quirky... behaviour.
Still... I have played TLJ through in the last year. The story is so good that you can ignore the fact that the engine is 10 years out of date and wasn't that good in the first place. The same is true for Dreamfall, IMO.
Take it with a grain of salt, though... I still play and love Advent Rising.
Ragnar is also working on the Secret World idea, which, according to the interviews he's given about it, have been percolating in his head since before he started working on Anarchy Online, long before he started developping Dreamfall.
I'd definitely like to see him finish that trilogy. Dreamfall was a very interesting story, and I am really looking forward to finding out what happens next. (though I still have issues with how difficult the Necropolis level was in the game...). But I also understand that Dreamfall came out in 2006, 7 years after The Longest Journey. Good stories are worth waiting for. And from what I know of Tornquist, I have no reason to believe that he won't finish that series.
The problem being that cell phones are sold outside the US, as well. In most of the developped world, there's laws against any form of clandestine surveillance without notification and consent. For something like a bank or a casino, there's usually a notice that the premises are protected by video camera, and the very act of not leaving the store on finding this out is considered consent.
In Canada, for something like a phone conversation, the recording *must* include you saying that you are recording the conversation *and* all other parties saying that they agree to be recorded for anything to be admissable in court. Police wiretaps require a clandestine search warrant which is usually very difficult for them to get. More than that, if you do not advise me that you're recording the call, or if you tell me halfway through the conversation that you've been recording the call, I have a right to sue you for damages. It's considered a serious breach of privacy. And it's not enough to say at the start of the call, either... if you get transferred to another department, you *must* inform the new person you're speaking to and get their consent, too. That's why, when you call customer service lines, they make you listen to that disclaimer saying that the call may be recorded or monitored for training and quality assurance purposes... it's because if you find out that you've been recorded without your knowledge, you can hit them very hard... for personal damages it usually won't exceed $5000 per infraction, but for a big corporation that can be 10x as much.
It's because countries other than the US have decent privacy protection laws that cell phones don't have call recording software built in. It would make it far too easy to break a law that exists for a damned good reason.
And as to your question about somebody having an eidetic memory? *shrugs* I have eidetic memory, it's never been an issue. If I give testimony as to what somebody said, it's still considered hearsay, and is not considered any more accurate because of my memory. I may be able to close my eyes and relive an experience, every detail, every sound, every smell, every word of a conversation, every nuance of inflection, but there's still no way for me to make copies of that tape, or play it back for people other than myself. I can describe what I see, what I hear, etc., but I cannot make you experience it. That's the difference between memory and an actual true audio or video recording.
Actually, I have a friend who's got a cabin up in the hills that's completely off the grid. Septic system, well water, solar power, electric everything (including stove and bbq). The in-house lines have a natural 16V system which powers major appliances and lights, and there's an up-converted 120V power supply for things like TV or computer.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow. more practically, as the GP said, we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
Fixed that for you. :) Most high-end motherboards don't have an on-board GPU, because most people who'd be willing to spend $250 on a motherboard (when you can get one for $60) probably won't balk at buying a discrete graphics card, and in fact, probably plan on buying a discrete graphics card anyway, because integrated graphics tend to be a generation or two out of date.
If I were building my own server, I'd make sure to get a motherboard that had on-board graphics (as long as chipset and I/O were up to snuff). If I were re-tooling old hardware, it's a coin toss as to whether I'd have on-board graphics. Point of fact, the only systems I have ever bought that had onboard graphics were purpose built for something that doesn't require gaming. They're both HTPCs, and they're both still in use.
I'd agree with buying a cheap video card from e-bay. A few years ago, my local 2nd hand computer supplier put out a bin of old video cards, and I picked up about 20 ATI Mach64's with 512k-1mb of memory each... :) they work great in servers. :)
As to the OP's question... whatever happened to using a KVM? They're pretty inexpensive, and really easy to get your hands on. If it's just a play server, set it on the floor next to your regular computer, and use your existing keyboard/mouse/display. Most modern KVM's will emulate a connected display and input devices so that the computer will never know that it's not connected, meaning you don't have to tweak/configure anything in the computer to get it to run headless.
You didn't look hard enough, then. Start price $1999. Customize it to upgrade the screen to your desired resolution and bump the hard drive to 500GB, and you're at $2279. Canadian dollars. At the current exchange rate, that's just a shade under $2100. Not even close to the $3000 USD that you're talking about having spent on a Mac. You got taken.
Or are you honestly telling me that you bought a 24" external monitor that cost $800?
And? Even if you had to wait 6 months to see a cheque (Dell usually issues credits/cheques within 3-6 weeks, btw), you're still coming out ahead. Unless you actually *want* to spend a boatload more cash than you need to in order to get a pretty apple logo on the back of your LCD.
If the studios focused more on producing a good product, then I'd be more willing to spend the money on the game. And there was a time when new video games cost $70 or more. If they've decided that they need to advertise in game to help pay for it, then they have a *lot* of chutzpah charging me $50 for the game in the first place. If they can't make their production values then they either find a way to spend less money on production, or they need to raise their costs to reflect it.
I *expect* advertising in a game like America's Army. Admittedly, it's a very specific kind of advertising, but for the price I pay to play the game, I expect to be bombarded with advertising. When I'm playing a game I've paid for, I expect to be left alone to enjoy the game.
If they want to supplement their income with ads, then they need to find that price point where they can reasonably justify it to their consumers. Newspapers have done this by reducing the cost to the consumer to $0.50. That $0.50 doesn't cover the cost of the content, it covers the cost of the media and distribution. The cost of the content is paid for by advertisers. Similarly, if you want to cover the cost of producing content by advertising at me, fine, well and good, but don't have the gall to try to charge me for more than media and distribution. Set your price point at $5 and be honest about it.
1. Not dude. Not even close.
2. You suck at noticing facetious and tongue-in-cheek remarks.
3. If this is any attempt at logic at all, it's the Absurd Case.
What about all tje murders and other crimes that get committed while wearing Louis Vuitton apparel? Hmm? Does this mean we can hold them liable for it? After all, they have an obligation to stop any crimes that are committed using their product....
It's coming, I'm sure. They're not stupid, and they know they can make money from it. But it takes time to adapt the engines to work with the Wii.
Case in point, I've had my Wii for almost 2 years now, and I just now broke down and bought my first Wii points card. Why? Because they finally got off their asses and released Secret of Mana. They have partnerned with Square/Enix on VC titles, and I think it's a matter of time before they release other really popular titles.
Go to Dell.com and configure an Alienware M17x. Upgrading it to a 17" 1920x1080 LCD and a 500GB hard drive brings the total price to under $2300. That's with 4GB of DDR2, 64-bit Windows Vista, and a 1GB GeForce 260 GTX video card. It has video out and can run an external LCD at a significantly higher resolution than you're asking for if you like. Even if you're buying the LCD yourself and including it in the cost of the laptop, the total price will come to around $2500. $500 *less* than the number you're asking for.
Also, you won't find a laptop that runs at 1900x1200 internal resolution, at all, because nobody makes LCDs in that aspect ratio. Even 16x10 aspect ratio is going the way of the dodo, in favour of 16x9.
And while I realize that it's not running Linux out of the box, you'll find that it's not difficult to reinstall Linux on that system if you like.
Emphasis mine. That $30 price tag is dependant on buying the hardware that the OS is proprietary to. While there's numerous workarounds out there, it's been made pretty clear in the past that Apple does not support running their OS on non-Apple hardware, and that they have in the past, and likely will in the future, issued system updates that break your non-approved installation of their software.
Now... all comments about Windows tax aside, show me a new 15" Apple laptop computer that you can buy for under $500. Oh wait. You can't. In Windows-land, however, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have computers in that price range. The only thing that Apple has which is even close to that kind of pricing is the Mac Mini, which is a desktop computer, and which has a hardware configuration that's laughably underpowered when compared to the equivalent price range on PCs.
See... the difference between Apple and Microsoft retail pricing of the OS is that for OS/X, you've already given Apple a significant chunk of your money. For Windows, that could be the only time Microsoft ever sees a dime from you, as you may have bought the hardware from a 3rd party OEM, or you may have bought the components and built it yourself. You've already paid that difference between $30 and $120 to Apple when you bought the computer, probably 2 or 3 times over.
The only time I ever bought a DVD with mandatory "previews" at the start (which couldn't be skipped by pressing menu or fast forwarding through them), I returned it to the store, made certain that they knew exactly why I was returning it, and wrote a letter to both the publisher and studio explaining why it was seriously bad juju.
They probably ignored me, but I haven't seen any DVDs with unskippable previews since, and that was several years ago.
You're right, but this is a case where somebody has abused their experience and better understanding of the human psyche in order to augment the nature of the harrassment that was ocurring. The woman had been on this planet for 20 years longer than her victim. In that time, she'd learned a great deal about what buttons to push and what to avoid saying. She had a great deal more experience, and that's really the gravity of the crime.
See... her victim wasn't another adult. It was a 12-year old child with mental illness (depression). Quite frankly, most 12-year olds have not been on the planet long enough to learn that the world can be a cruel place. People do need to learn that fact, but not at the expense of their childhood... most of us learn it in our teens/early 20's, not when we're still counting our age by quarter and half years, and have yet to see our first decade through. Add into that the effects that raging hormones can have on a pubescent body, as well as the fact that she was clinically depressed, and you have a recipe for an extremely confused and upset person who is not mentally equipped to deal with somebody like Drew. Somebody nearly 3x their age who is using her experience and understanding in order to specifically make her *more* miserable.
I've been clinically depressed. I've been suicidal. I wasn't much older than Drew's victim the first time I threatened to kill myself. I know, first hand, that this was not somebody who could deal with that kind of harrassment. And had Drew had any sort of sense or conscience, she would have realized that the child needed help, not another tormentor. The woman is psychopath, in the clinical sense.
Now, I do think that the feds screwed up in her prosecution. She should have been charged with child abuse, being a sexual predator, or any number of laws that she actually did break. They wanted a high profile online case, and so they tried using that vector to prosecute. What they should have done is treated it the same way they'd have treated her actions if they were done offline. I can only hope that it'll balance out in a civil case, but it's small penance for what she's done.
I suspect the GP would draw a distinction between music driving somebody to suicide and making a fraudulent online identity to drive somebody to suicide. If for no other reason, then on grounds of intent. Music isn't generally written with the expressed purpose of tormenting somebody to the point that they end up killing themselves. But it's pretty hard to argue that Drew had anything other than tormenting and harrassing the child in mind when she set up a fake identity to be her boyfriend.
In Soviet Russia, Joke has heard YOU too much!
(sorry, I couldn't resist...)
Not really. The raw performance that a CPU can provide hasn't really increased at all in the last 7 years. We're running with basically the same clock speeds, and all other things being equal, the performance of the CPUs hasn't improved that much. What performance improvement we've seen in that time has been from improvements to chipset architecture, memory speed, bus speed, and data transfer rates between different buses.
The single biggest improvement your computer has seen in the last decade has been the GPU performance, which is on track with Moore's Law and then some, because that's where you, the user, will actually see the difference. Try running Farcry at 1920x1080 resolution with all effects turned on using a GeForce3 Ti500 w/ 64MB of RAM.
But the thing is... the reason the average clock speed has actually gone down in the last 5 years isn't because they aren't capable of making faster chips. It's because they don't really have a reason to make faster chips. Data crunched by the CPU can only be received by the user so fast, and the CPU is much faster than it needs to be. So it's cheaper to make slower chips using older, more refined technologies, and they had/have reached a plateau where the CPU is far more powerful than the rest of the computer, and the user, can handle. Who cares if your CPU can clock to 10GHz or more if it won't be used? Heck, Civilization IV is the only game I play that actually manages to cap out even one of the cores on my 2-year old Core2 Duo laptop, and that's only because of the raw number crunching it does between turns.
And what improvements we *have* seen on the CPU haven't been limited by the inability to cram more transistors into a die. They've been focusing on streamlining processes (a war that AMD started with Intel, when they put out a 1GHz Athlon that outperformed a 3GHz Pentium), and most importantly, they've been focusing on improving power and heat efficiency. CPU power hasn't improved much in the last 5 years, but the amount of power a CPU requires is a fraction of what it was back then. I can remember when you were a fool to build an AMD-based system with less than 350W of power running through it, and it was strongly recommended that you have more than 500W. The last computer I bult is a Core2Duo 2.4GHz with a 120GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM, and it's powered by an 80W brick. It could get by with a 60W brick, but the 80W gives me more play room.