Street owner says that it's his son, he's allowed to do it and you can fuck off and you're not allowed to walk or drive down the street any more.
So leave. It's his street. I personally am not 100% Libertarian, so I believe it's okay for government to own a few things like streets where the rules are set by a vote of the majority, but I don't think that it's anybody's (including the majority's) business what happens inside private homes. Do you really want someone else telling you what you can and can't do inside your own private home, assuming you keep the shades closed and you aren't putting anyone else at risk?
Libertarianism is the only political philosophy that allows people to be individuals. I'm a Libertarian (okay, only 97% Libertarian because I think it's okay for the government to own roads and streets in some cases) because I want to be an individual and not a slave to society, and I want to live my own life, not the life somebody else tells me I have to live, as long as I'm not hurting anyone else or putting anyone else at risk.
That's a bit of a pisser if your house fronts onto the street isn't it? You've just been jailed because breaking out of your jail would involve your instigating a threat of force against the street owner for which you can be shot.
You're talking about hypothetical extremes. Yes, if you take Libertarianism to absurd hypothetical extremes, you can come up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. Guess what? If you take Liberalism to an absurd hyptothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Conservativism to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Socialism to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Democracy to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in.
You've proven nothing. Guess what? If you take any political philosophy to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in.
What you ignore is the "common sense" factor. People are, at least to an extent, reasonable. Your absurd hypothetical scenarios are not. And something tells me, neither are you.
Me: "You must consume Oxygen in order to survive."
You: "But what if I consume so much Oxygen that my lungs burst? What if a poisonous snake crawls into my mouth when I open it to breathe? What if what I think is Oxygen turns out to actually be Carbon Monoxide? What if a witch places a Voodoo curse on me that'll cause me to melt into purple goo if I take a single breath?"
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Courageous, Slashdot, 2002.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Adolf Hitler, German, 1940.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Joseph Stalin, Russia, 1941.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Fidel Castro, Cuba, every bloody day for the past century.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Pol Pot, Cambodia, whenever it was.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Apartheid Guy, South Africa, until recently.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Taliban spokesman, Afghanistan, 2001.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~Bill Clinton, America, 1993-2001.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~John Ashcroft, America, 2001-2009.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail." ~U.N. Secretary-General Bill Gates, Earth, 2010.
You claim that "the will of the majority" should be unquestionable. So if 50.001% of the population belives it's okay to lynch African Americans or execute homosexuals, that's okay, right? Not only would you support the law, but you'd condemn the 49.999% of the population who opposes the murder of minorities, because they're "disrespecting the will of the majority"?
There's a name for people like you: it's "Nazi," or "bigot," or "hatemonger," or even more simply: "monster."
So if 2/3 of the population belives it's okay to lynch African Americans or execute homosexuals, that's okay, right? Not only would you support the law, but you'd condemn the 1/3 of the population who opposes the murder of minorities, because they're "disrespecting the will of the majority"?
There's a name for people like you: it's "Nazi," or "bigot," or "hatemonger," or even more simply, "monster."
A monster is what you are.
And to correct the gaps in your historical education, let me just point out to you that the First Ammendment was not added to the Constitution through the Constitution's process of Constitutional ammendment. It was in the very first ratified version of the constitution. It wasn't in the first draft, but the first draft was never ratified.
Also for your historical information, the first ammendment didn't grant freedom of speech, it only acknowledged that people always had, and always will have, free speech and that the government intended to respect the right that already existed. Free speech was originally granted (if you swing that way) by God(s)/Goddess(es), or (if you don't swing that way) by Nature, or by the Human Condition, or by Rationality, or whatever you happen to believe in. No matter what you believe, you had the right to Free Speech ever since the creation and/or evolution of the human race, and all the United States Constitution does is acknowledge that right, it doesn't claim to grant it, because you can't give someone something they already have, all you can do is acknowledge that they have it and you're not going to try to take it away from them.
Democracy is great, and I support Democracy, but I support CONSTITUTIONAL Democracy, where the absolute rights every person has been born with since the inception of the human race are acknowledged and protected by the Constitution and not subject to oppression by popular opinion.
Let popular opinion decide anything it wants as long as the majority doesn't try to violate the inborn rights of a single person.
You probably wouldn't understand the whole "freedom" concept. Monster.
Libertarianism is centered around the "will of the people" concept, but it takes it one step further -- it's about the will of each invididual person, and not just the will of the majority. The United States Constitution is a generally Libertarian document, and the United States was founded on generally Libertarian ideas. It's not quite true Libertarianism (which has never been implemented on a large scale except on the Internet), but it's close. The foundation of the United States government isn't just "majority rule", it's a combination of "majority rule" and "minority rights." The majority can do as it chooses, but not at the expense of the rights of the minority. True Libertarianism takes the combination of "majority rule" and "minority rights" just one step further by eliminating "majority" and "minority", and just having individuals -- individuals who are free to carve out their own path in life without being told how they have to live.
Under your idea of how government should work, solely based on "majority rule" without "minority rights," if 51% of the population believed it was okay to shoot homosexuals on sight, then it would be perfectly okay to shoot homosexuals on sight.
In fact, in your world, if 51% of the population believed it was okay to shoot homosexuals on sight, then you would consider it immoral to oppose shooting homosexual on sight, or to try to convince people that they shouldn't support shooting homosexuals on sight, because opposing the murder of homosexuals or trying to convince people that the legal murder of homosexuals is wrong would be classified as "defying the will of the majority."
Well, here's a shocking newsflash for you: speaking out against the morality of the majority viewpoint is not the same as being opposed to the concept of majority rule. You can still believe in majority rule but fight to change what the majority believe.
Since you believe so strongly in majority rule and that the "will of the people" should never be questioned, what will you do on the day when 51% of the population is Libertarian? Will you suddenly turn Libertarian yourself, and admit you were wrong, or will you oppose the majority Libertarian ideals and prove yourself wrong when you claimed to support "the will of the people"?
Those who claim it's wrong to question "the will of the majority" are probably only of that opinion because they're currently in the majority themselves. You're most likely a straight white middle- or upper-class male Christian/athesist/agnostic, and since you are the majority, that's why you believe "the majority must never be challenged."
So, just answer this one question. If "the majority" (50.0001% of the population, let's say) believe it's perfectly okay to murder homosexuals because homosexuality is morally wrong, and it becomes national law that it's okay to murder homosexuals, what do you do?
WHAT DO YOU DO???
Do you act proud that "the will of the people" is being done and homosexuals are being murdered legally, or do you protest the murder of homosexuals and renounce your blind worship of "the will of the people"?
The will of the people must be counterbalanced by the rights of all individuals within a society, not just the spoiled rich whiteboys driving their fat white asses around in their giant SUVs. How much gas mileage do you get on that thing, anyway?
The dry-cleaners called. Your white sheet isn't going to be ready in time for the cross-burning tonight.
What you spout is the same neo-facist, state-ist nonsense that every despot has spouted, from Ghengis Khan to Stalin to Hitler to Castro to Clinton. "Give up your freedom, and trust in society to take care of you! Society is your friend! Government can cure all your ills! The welfare of society outweighs your rights! The government knows what's best for you! People don't matter, society does!" Those are the fundamental ideas behind Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nazi-ism, Liberalism, Socialism, Leftism, Rightism, Reactionaryism, Progressivism, and every other destructive political philosophy that's every plauged human existence.
Actually, I did recognize it, as well as your tendency to be patronizing, which is probably related to your tendency to engage in absolutes.
Absolutes can be a very good thing. If you believe "everything is relative," then it's easy to go from "it's wrong to torture and murder children" to "I believe it's wrong to torture and murder children" to "it's mostly wrong to torture and murder children" to "torturing and murdering children is a neutral act" to "it's perfectly acceptable to torture and murder children" to "all children must be raped, tortured, and murdered for the good of society." That's where relativism leads you. Don't you think that Absolutes might not be so bad by comparison?
But not soon enough. Nitrocglycerine is volatile! Someone's mixing volatile explosives 8' under your ass, and your answer is "wait for the landlord to intervene"? Surely thou jesteth!
First of all, how are the private activities of your neighbor any business of yours? How do you know what he's doing down there?
Second, if it explodes, I fully support holding the guy responsible for the damage he does.
Third, what's wrong with "wait for the landlord to intervene"? Under your state-ist system, your solution would be "wait for the police to intervene" -- what makes you think that the police will act more expediently than the landlord will? The landlord's property is at stake, whereas the police are off arresting and murdering people for such "society-destroying" crimes like anal sex or consuming certain chemicals in the privacy of their homes.
Oh, Enlightened One, how would we survive without you and the morality police shooting homosexuals, pot-smokers, and other "criminals." We owe you a great debt.
Good that you should bring this up! In fact, the "Landlord", at our collective request, has indeed made such a rule in virtually every city around.
Oh, great. I expected this. The "government is just a regular guy like you and me" nonsense. The government is allowed to steal money from people and shoot them if they refuse to go along with the theft. The government is free to shoot people who consume certain chemicals and refuse to go to jail for it. The government is free to make arbitrary rules that the vast majority of the population is opposed to, and then shoot people for violating them. And if people don't like it, there's no recourse -- they could leave the country, but the governments control EVERY country.
It's an issue of CHOICE, and you hate CHOICE. What if I WANT to live in a building where I'm allowed to mix Nitro, along with other people who either mix Nitro themselves, or who don't mix Nitro personally but understand and agree to the risks? In a society where the government sets the rules, there's no choice -- every place has the same rules. In a society where every person makes the rules for his own property, you can live in an environment where the rules are custom-tailored to YOUR style of living, with other like-minded people.
That's choice, that's freedom, and that's what you want to destroy.
I didn't say that he deliberately deceived you, I said that he backed out. Changed his mind.
It doesn't matter if he originally planned to honor his promise or not. It you say you're going to do something in exchange for something else, and you get the something else, but you don't do the something, you're guilty of fraud -- plain and simple. You're ignorant.
Ahem. The front of the property.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. If the man is putting junk on somebody ELSE's property, then that's the use of force. If he's keeping junk on his OWN property, then all the surrounding people have to do is build walls on THEIR property to block the line of site to HIS property, so that they can't see the junk. Or they could just move. If odor is traveling from the junk onto other people's property, that's force, and the people whose property the odor is drifting onto can defend themselves.
He says "no," and tells you to fuck off.
Then either fucking deal with it, or leave to live among more like-minded people.
State-ism is based on the concept that everybody should be the same, have the same values, the same ideals, and believe the same thing.
Libertarianism is based on the concept that it's okay to have different ideals and values than other people -- for highest quality of life you'll want to live among like-minded people similar to yourself, but you don't force non-like-minded people to conform to your ideals.
That's what state-ism is all about: forcing other people to conform to your view of reality.
Well, to hell with your view of reality. You have your view of reality, and I have mine. Under a state-ist system, the people with minority views of reality have to live in servitude to the majority. In a Libertarian society, the people with one view of reality can live their own way with like-minded people, and people with another view of reality can live somewhere else among people similar to themselves, and some people can live all alone and answer to nobody but themselves.
It's wrong for the majority to force its ideals, morality, and worldview on the minority. That's fascism, and that's what every fascist from Ghengis Khan to Stalin to Hitler to Castro to Clinton have had in common, and that's what YOU have in common with them.
No. It's been tested and failed.
No, Libertarianism has never been implemented on a nation-sized scale in the real world. The Internet, however, is an example of a Libertarian government: everyone can do whatever they choose as long as they're not hurting anybody else, and people tend to hang out with like-minded individuals instead of trying to stamp non-like-minded individuals out of existence. There's absolutely no central government that tries to enforce a majority worldview on everyone -- everybody does their own thing and it works.
Government is an instrument of the collective will. Given a choice, people move away from the kind of anarchy that you propose.
No.
This is anarchy:
1. Do whatever. No law exists.
This is Libertarianism:
1. You're free to choose your own path in life as long as you don't deny anyone else the right to do the same.
If you can't see the difference, you're truly an idiot, and I'm wasting my time talking to you.
You must not have recognized it, but this is basically the Libertarian political philosophy. You'd best think about what you're saying before you go criticising the most principled, consistent, and well-respected political philosophy in the world.
Some pervert persuades your 9 year old daughter into having sex with him.
Children are not adults, and can't make most decisions for themselves. It is the job of parents to be responsible for their children until they're of an appropriate age to arbitrate their own lives. Until your daughter is an adult, she's effectively your property, within certain limits (maybe a fourth article should be added, like the one the Libertarian platform has, to address which rights over the children are given to the parents and which are reserved for the children themselves; for example, parents should be able to restrict the child's right to have sex, but the child should retain control of her right to use the restroom when she wishes), and thus if someone has sex with her without your consent, that's force against your property, and you're justified to retaliate.
The wierdo with the apartment directly beneath you likes to brew his own personal batches of nitro glycerine. Understandably, you're nervous.
Complain to the owner of the apartment, who has no obligation to rent the apartment to that person. Given the choice between losing you as a renter and losing the crazy guy with the bomb fetish, I'd say the situation will probably be dealt with to your satisfaction.
If the landlord creates a rule against having explosives on the property, and that person violates the rule by having explosives on the property, then that person has initiated force against the landlord and the landlord is free to retaliate.
If not, it's not your property, so leave.
An unscrupulous business person changes his mind and backs out of a contract.
That's fraud, which is a form of force. If someone says to you, "I will give you $500 in exchange for oral sex," and you provide the oral sex, and he doesn't provide the $500, he's initiated force against you and you're free to defend yourself.
A 17 year old teenager with a Trans Am drives through your residential neighborhood at over 100 miles an hour.
If the teenager incurs any damage to you or anyone else, he/she will be responsible for the damage. Beyond that, complain to the owner of the street, and convince the owner of the street to enforce a speed limit. You're only free to do what you want on your OWN property, on someone else's property, you have to follow their rules, otherwise you're using force against their property and they're free to defend themselves.
A slovenly neighbor leaves all manner of junk in his yard, bringing down local property values.
Convince everyone whose property borders on this man's property to build a wall on their property that obstructs view of his property. Or ask him nicely to remove his junk, or volunteer to remove it for him.
No, this doesn't work. Good idea, but it's not quite right.
Yes, it does work. Good idea, and it is quite right.
Do you even read the articles you link to? That article is not about DES, it's about CSC. The last time DNet did 56-bit DES, it didn't take two months, it took one day.
DNet has done DES three times, and it's gotten significantly faster each time. Here's the times that the three DES challenges were completed:
Feb 1998: 39 days.
Jul 1998: <3 days.
Jan 1999: 22 hours.
In the July 1998 challenge, DNet was just barely beaten by EFF's "Deep Crack" machine -- DNet and Deep Crack were both running at about the same speed, but they both started at different points and Deep Crack happened to find the key first. In the January 1999 competition, Deep Crack was part of DNet, and did about half the work, so without Deep Crack it would have taken DNet up to two days to finish the job -- significantly less than the two months you cite.
DNet hasn't done DES since January of 1999. Again, the article you like to is for CSC, not DES. 56-bit CSC took about two months, 56-bit DES took about 22 hours.
What will really decide the fate of this game is whether or not it can run on low-end machines (P200, 64MB RAM, 3 GB HD, NO 3-D Accelerator). A Mac release would also help the popularity.
I'm afraid the most low-end machine in the game runs at 60GHz, and has 24 Gigaquads of memory with a 1GQ/sec net connection. Your system seems a little aged.
While Token Ring initially had a scalability advantage over Ethernet in that Ethernet was contention-based and Token Ring wasn't, any such advantage died out long, long ago. In the age of switches, Ethernet is no longer contention-based either (unless you're one of the five people on the planet still using hubs), which kills the only disadvantage it ever had. Then, compare the base speeds -- 16 Mbit versus 100 Mbit (or, using Gigabit Ethernet hardware, you can actually get reasonably close to a gigabit using ordinary Cat5 UTP).
Token ring just will not cut it any more, and certainly can't scale nearly as far as switch-based Ethernet can. How exactly would you implement your 1000-node Token Ring network? One big ring? Assuming an average of 1ms between nodes, that's a full second for a complete traversal of the ring -- and with the ring being as busy as it is, it'd instantly collapse under the load. Okay, maybe you want to bridge multiple rings together. You're still going to have terrible network performance compared to switched Ethernet, where everything is effectively bridged.
And reliability? Are we talking about the same "token ring" here? Moses on a stick -- I still have nightmares.
I'm someone who often has trouble understanding abstract, complex, or "artsy-fartsy" plots, but I found All Roads to be thoroughly understandable and very enjoyable. The concept of (*SPOILER*) a story starts with the protagonist's death and then has his consciousness jumping back in time further and further into the past isn't a new one, but it's an interesting one, and All Roads adds some interesting twists to the concept at the end.
I didn't find the story to be confusing (not more so than it was intended to be, anyway) until the very very end, and even then things became clear after a few more runthroughs. I just loved trying to screw around with temporal causality and seeing what you could and couldn't get away with. Yes, the game is a bit "linear", but that's because the future has already happened and you can't take any course of actions that won't lead you to that future.
There was some very, very brilliant stuff in the game. At one point, after jumping back in time yet again, you eventually "catch up" with a part of the game you've already experienced and your character automatically repeats whatever you did the first time around, no matter what input you give. That was really creative, especially because you have no idea what's happening at first, but once you figure it out, it's the first point in the game that confirms 100% that you're jumping back in time. Shortly after that, you find out it's a bit more complex than that, and I can't say I have total comprehension of the ending, but I still got a good feeling out of it.
As for your other reviews...
"Colours" was pretty silly, yeah, but I found it had a certain bit of charm to it. A nasty bug can keep you from completing the game, and I was hoping for something more than "YOU HAVE WON" at the end, so I wouldn't really recommend wasting time with it unless you're a puzzle freak.
"Gostak": I also henzore bowenqo quit after onpexoz minutes. It might have orze fun if I'd figured out how to ligyung it, but I'm not a damn wezktronyi.
"Silicon Castles": As near as I can tell, this is just a chess game. The title screen has a chess quote, you're in a room with nothing but a genie chess board, and your genie happens to be a chess-playing genie: you didn't think to try actually playing chess? The genie's "brain level" can be adjusted, and I tried playing one game on the easiest level, but even at that level it seemed like victory would require actual skill at winning chess, not just knowledge of the rules, so I quit after one attempt. The dumbest thing was, the game didn't even recognize I was checkmated (and yes, I'm damn sure I was really checkmated -- I had nothing but my king left, surrounded in a corner by two enemy queens and no possible moves) so I had to resign prompting a serve "coward!" taunting from the genie. Maybe there's some form of plot if you beat the genie. I have no idea. People who aren't skilled at chess will never find out, and people who are skilled at chess probably wouldn't want to bother with this game anyway.
"Jump": I played the game to completion. In five minutes. I played it again, just to be sure I hadn't imagined it. What the hell? Here's a complete walkthrough for the game:
1. Find key to locker.
2. Unlock locker.
3. Take gun from locker.
4. At this point (after a few turns of waiting), the game automatically goes into a sequence where (I think) the main character (I think) shoots her (I think) abusive (I think) fater and then (I think) jumps off a cliff.
That's it. That's the game. Sure, there's "fiction", but where's the "interactive" part?
I also tried "Bane of the Builders" which was mildly interesting by very trivial, and "Crusader" which as pretty funny but also didn't have much substance to it.
I'm going to try out "Shattered Memory" now and a few of the others that look promising.
Some useful sites, and tips to stay safe.
on
The PayPal Phenomenon
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· Score: 4, Informative
I personally have had nothing but good experiences with Paypal, but I was shocked to learn that there was a dark side to it that many, many people have been burned by. It seems the fact that I've had no problems with Paypal is the exception rather than the rule -- many people haven't been so fortunate.
Some of the problems can just be attributed to "shit happens," but in many cases, Paypal is guilty of out-and-out theft: when they receive a complaint about a single transaction, they often freeze the accounts of everyone involved, and then do everything possible to make themselves inaccessible by phone or e-mail so that the accounts can never be unfrozen. They've just walked away with someone's money. Good job.
Anyway, here are some useful links that have many, many testimonials of bad experiences:
Based on the testimonials I've read, here are a few ways I can think of to make the Paypal experience as safe as possible.
1. NEVER leave money sitting in your Paypal account. Withdraw it IMMEDIATELY. They will freeze it, or steal it, if they get an excuse to do so -- any excuse will do. Don't be tempted by their "Paypal Money Market Fund". That 1.2% APR isn't going to make you rich. You'd be better transfering your money to your bank where it can't be stolen. They can't steal what isn't there.
2. Try to avoid setting up a bank account on Paypal or giving them your checking account number for any reason. They do everything in their power to convince/force you to set up a bank account, which should give you cause for suspicion. If you give them your checking account number, they can (and will) withdraw the money from your bank account at any time without permissions.
3. If you must set up a bank account with Paypal, contact your bank and tell them NOT to allow Electronic Funds Transfers from Paypal without your approval. Unlike with a credit card, there's no way to dispute EFT charges. Get this in writing from your bank.
4. Check your credit card statement carefully each month, and chargeback any mysterious charges immediately -- but not if you have money sitting in your Paypal account or they have your bank account number, because they will take your money away from you if you do a chargeback. Get your money safe first, then call the credit card company to do a chargeback.
5. Try to avoid using a debit card -- you have no fraud protection, and if the debit card draws from the same account as the bank account you have set up in Paypal, you might run into some problems because of the way Paypal does things. If you have $600 in your bank account, and you try to make a $500 Paypal payment from your bank account, it'll bounce! Why? Since bank transfers take 3 days, Paypal wants to avoid finding out 3 days later that there's no money in the account, so they use your credit/debit card to "secure" the transaction by "locking" $500 on the card and then releasing it after the bank transfer clears. So now, when you've tried to pay $500 from your bank account, Paypal has locked $500 of the $600 in the account, leaving only $100 in the account which will make the $500 bank transfer bounce. The bank will charge you a bounced transfer fee, Paypal will charge you a fee, and you'll be unhappy with the whole situation. Sometimes even when the transaction DOES complete, they still don't release the "hold" on the card for days, weeks, months, or ever.
6. Do not use Paypal for large transactions. Use some sort of escrow service. With the incredible fees Paypal is charging now, it wouldn't be much more expensive.
7. As an alternative to Paypal, consider using E-Gold instead. Instead of dealing in a national currency like Dollars or Pounds, it uses actual physical gold as currency: you actually own a stake in the vault of gold that the company owns, and you can send/receive electronic gold from others as payment. It's very expensive to get involved, though: getting money into an E-Gold account requires you to go through a currency exchange service (E-Gold does not offer this service directly) which generally charge a 15% conversion fee, and 1% of your balance is deducted per year.
The cool thing about E-Gold, though, is that if you buy 5 ounces of gold, you'll always have that 5 ounces of gold in your account no matter what happens to the value of gold or to your national currency. If you spend (for example) $200 on 2 ounces of gold, but six months later the price of gold has risen from $100/ounce to $300/ounce, you'll still have that 2 ounces of gold -- but it'll now be worth $600. Pretty nice, eh? A lot nicer than Paypal's 1.2% APR mutal fund.
Anyway, use Paypal if you have to, but be safe. Minimize the opportunities for them to steal your money. Don't use them as a bank. They're not a bank; they're not regulated as a bank, but they want you to use them as a bank so that they'll have more chances to take your money.
You've got me curious about this... I'd like to know what sort of non-RFC-compliant things an unpriveleged userland application could do that would cause so much trouble. Do you have any specific examples? And what sort of "application-priority procedures" do you use, because I'm not familiar with that term either. I'm passingly familiar with QoS and related issues, but I'm afraid I don't really understand.
Although advanced journaling filesystems only journal metadata, some journaling filesystems journal everything: when a disk write happens, the entire write is written to the journal file, then it's written to the real file, then it's deleted from the journal file.
When Ext3 was first created, it COULD NOT journal metadata -- the only option was full file journaling, which was incredibly slow. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I read the original release notes which said that metadata journaling was not available yet. I believe that Ext3 can now do metadata-only journaling -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but it's a fairly recent development, within the past year or so.
This mail message from about a year ago says that metadata support was "in an early state" at the time. I don't know if it's been perfected since then or not. But the e-mail proves that at one time, Ext3 could NOT do metadata-only journaling, which flat-out disproves your post that all journaling filesystems only journal metadata.
And RAID quite frankly has nothing to do with it; I can't even imagine why you brought it up because it's absolutely irrelevant.
You're a real bright one, aren't you? "Didn't realize"? XFS, ReiserFS, and JFS are different filesystems; they're not ext2. Ext3 is ext2, but with a journal file added and journaling turned on. They're the same filesystem. It's even a bit disingenuous (though still correct) to say "Ext2 systems can mount ext3 filesystems," because there's no such thing as an ext3 filesystem -- just an ext2 filesystem that can, when mounted by the right kernel, support journaling.
I don't really even know why someone would want to use ext3 anyway. Unless they've made some serious improvements in the past few months, the filesystem still writes at 50% the speed of ext2 (since all data is written twice). The only thing it has going for it is its interoperability with ext2, but that's really a perfidious "feature": systems that don't need journaling should just use ext2 to avoid the massive performance hit, and systems that do need journaling (namely, servers) have no reason to have their journaling filesystems compatible with ext2, and should use one of the high-performance journaling FS's.
It's not an issue of quality. I understand that re-recording analog (especially through a microphone rather than just plugging the line out of your sound card back into the line ine) will cause a hit in quality. But it will always WORK, it's something they can NEVER take away from us by ANY means short of banning the human ear and forcing us to install digital audio receiver chips in our brain if we want to hear anything. That's at least a century away, in addition to being rather silly, so for the time being I think it's safe to say that they CAN'T take our music away from us. Yes, we may have to resort to living with a drop in quality, but it doens't matter -- we'll still have the music. All it takes is for one person, with good equipment, to re-record the analog audio into a restriction-free digital format (yet, this will be illegal, but I don't see why that should be a problem), and then the rest of us all over the world can share, copy, and distribute it without any further loss of quality.
To what the other poster said about making microphones illegal -- it won't happen. A microphone is a very simple device at its core (it's basically the same as a loudspeaker but works in the opposite direction), so we'd be able to make our own, even if somehow microphones ever became banned (they'd also have to ban intercoms and other devices we use every day too).
However, I don't think it'll come to that. I think it'll be at least 20 years before we see sound cards that don't have either analog outputs or unrestricted digital outputs. Until then, we can always just loop the signal straight back into the sound card or another recording device, and re-record with a barely perceptible loss of quality.
You plug the Line Out of your soundcard into the Line In, and you record.
Problem solved.
Microsoft can control the digital, but they can't control the analog. Our ears are analog; at some point the audio HAS to be converted to analog, and then it can be freely re-recorded. Even if we eventually see soundcards with only digital outputs (an unlikely possibility), the data still gets converted into an analog audio signal somewhere down the line. Even if we see bizarre systems where the signal is digital all the way to the speaker, the sound waves that reach our ears are still analog and always will be -- and can be picked up by a microphone as easily as they can be picked up by our ears.
I don't see anything in the article or on the site that says it's not legitimate. Satire sites like the Onion at least make it clear that they're satire. It would be irresponsible not to. If Adequacy wasn't legit, it would say so somewhere -- I even e-mailed some of the people in charge to ask, and they said it was legitimate. I guess there are just a lot of misinformed people in the world.
Even if the article weren't legitimate, I don't see how the article could be considered satirical. Satire requires a lot of irony, and as little stupidity as possible.
I just recently found this guide to be a "dream PC" guide for "normal people," but it seems to make an awful lot of mistakes. In fact, parts of it are so bad that I had to laugh out loud at it. It won't help you build your dream PC, and certainly not an ultimate Linux box, but it'll certainly make you wonder what kind of person could write such a thing!
I read through the Adequacy website very thoroughly, and although I must admit that the site perplexes me, I see nothing that indicates the site isn't totally serious. I read through the mission statement, the FAQ, the meta page, and so forth, and I didn't see the word "Satire" anywhere. I even went so far as to e-mail one of the editors asking what was going on with the site, and once asked on their IRC channel, and every time I was told the site was completely serious.
It's a scary thought, but the site seems to be legit, unless you can document otherwise.
Certainly his facts are incorrect, and I myself had to stiffle a giggle at the Internet Explorer comments, but is it really productive to blame a new user for being a new user? "New users to Open Source are stupid about Open Source." Well, no kidding: that's why they're new users.
Does it really help the Open Source Community to call inexperienced users "idiots" rather than explaining to them how things work; for example, why there's no Internet Explorer for Linux? Now that most distros are shipping with either no manual (just a "quick install sheet"), a 12-page manual covering just the installation, or a 2000-page manual that'll never be opened, there's no way for new users to know these things -- they have to be told.
Do you really think most users who are frustrated by their first Linux installation experience (which is a perfectly normal situation for the new user to be in if he isn't a geek guru like us) and are told that they're "useless idiots" because of it are going to make a SECOND attempt?
A few days ago, I read this review of Mandrake 8.1 which was, to say the least, a bit controversial. After reading some of the comments on the story, I wonder about the accuracy of many things in the article, but you can't deny that it genuinely reflects someone's experience with Linux. It's important to keep up with reviews that AREN'T written by us UNIX gurus, because widespread adoption hinges on the experience new users have with the OS.
Factual or not, this is how new users see the operating system. The harassment that the author of the review received in the wake of writting it will probably drive him away from Open-Source forever and only further reinforce the stereotype of the Linux Community being elitists and jerks. Another story on that site (I can't really figure out the purpose of the site; some of the stuff is really weird) reinforces the same idea: new users like the authors of these two articles are insulted and demeaned for "factual errors" because they're... gasp... new users. The irrational desire for guruism and leetness wins out over the rational desire to encourage and help new users, and ultimately the Linux Community suffers.
Just something to think about.
I personally find Mandrake 8.1 to be a real gem (the X configuration has improved greatly, I love the changes to the package management, and I see little changes here and there that keep making me smile), but if the review reflects the experience that most new users have, maybe it'd make more sense to examine the OS experience rather than flaming the newbies.
I think most will remember a certain quote that came out of Redmond regarding the fact that no matter how fast Company X makes processor A, Software B will be able to slow it down.
Now, I'm not accusing anyone. I'm not saying all software developers are out to screw over the hardware people, but look...
Those who write the software are the last stage. Regardless of how well the engineers designed the hardware, the CS people can either make or break their designs with good or bad code respectively. CS people essentially have engineers at their whim.
So yes, I certainly agree they're jealous... but in more than one way. They're jealous because CS people, in a way, have more power over the flow of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Street owner says that it's his son, he's allowed to do it and you can fuck off and you're not allowed to walk or drive down the street any more.
So leave. It's his street. I personally am not 100% Libertarian, so I believe it's okay for government to own a few things like streets where the rules are set by a vote of the majority, but I don't think that it's anybody's (including the majority's) business what happens inside private homes. Do you really want someone else telling you what you can and can't do inside your own private home, assuming you keep the shades closed and you aren't putting anyone else at risk?
Libertarianism is the only political philosophy that allows people to be individuals. I'm a Libertarian (okay, only 97% Libertarian because I think it's okay for the government to own roads and streets in some cases) because I want to be an individual and not a slave to society, and I want to live my own life, not the life somebody else tells me I have to live, as long as I'm not hurting anyone else or putting anyone else at risk.
That's a bit of a pisser if your house fronts onto the street isn't it? You've just been jailed because breaking out of your jail would involve your instigating a threat of force against the street owner for which you can be shot.
You're talking about hypothetical extremes. Yes, if you take Libertarianism to absurd hypothetical extremes, you can come up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. Guess what? If you take Liberalism to an absurd hyptothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Conservativism to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Socialism to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in. If you take Democracy to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in.
You've proven nothing. Guess what? If you take any political philosophy to a silly hypothetical extreme, you wind up with a silly scenario that nobody could survive in.
What you ignore is the "common sense" factor. People are, at least to an extent, reasonable. Your absurd hypothetical scenarios are not. And something tells me, neither are you.
Me: "You must consume Oxygen in order to survive."
You: "But what if I consume so much Oxygen that my lungs burst? What if a poisonous snake crawls into my mouth when I open it to breathe? What if what I think is Oxygen turns out to actually be Carbon Monoxide? What if a witch places a Voodoo curse on me that'll cause me to melt into purple goo if I take a single breath?"
Me: "What are you saying?"
You: "I refuse to consume Oxygen!"
You: *dies*
Me: "Moron."
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Courageous, Slashdot, 2002.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Adolf Hitler, German, 1940.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Joseph Stalin, Russia, 1941.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Fidel Castro, Cuba, every bloody day for the past century.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Pol Pot, Cambodia, whenever it was.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Apartheid Guy, South Africa, until recently.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Taliban spokesman, Afghanistan, 2001.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~Bill Clinton, America, 1993-2001.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~John Ashcroft, America, 2001-2009.
"We have a healthy and well-regulated society which the vast majority of us actually approve of on the whole if often not in the detail."
~U.N. Secretary-General Bill Gates, Earth, 2010.
You claim that "the will of the majority" should be unquestionable. So if 50.001% of the population belives it's okay to lynch African Americans or execute homosexuals, that's okay, right? Not only would you support the law, but you'd condemn the 49.999% of the population who opposes the murder of minorities, because they're "disrespecting the will of the majority"?
There's a name for people like you: it's "Nazi," or "bigot," or "hatemonger," or even more simply: "monster."
So if 2/3 of the population belives it's okay to lynch African Americans or execute homosexuals, that's okay, right? Not only would you support the law, but you'd condemn the 1/3 of the population who opposes the murder of minorities, because they're "disrespecting the will of the majority"?
There's a name for people like you: it's "Nazi," or "bigot," or "hatemonger," or even more simply, "monster."
A monster is what you are.
And to correct the gaps in your historical education, let me just point out to you that the First Ammendment was not added to the Constitution through the Constitution's process of Constitutional ammendment. It was in the very first ratified version of the constitution. It wasn't in the first draft, but the first draft was never ratified.
Also for your historical information, the first ammendment didn't grant freedom of speech, it only acknowledged that people always had, and always will have, free speech and that the government intended to respect the right that already existed. Free speech was originally granted (if you swing that way) by God(s)/Goddess(es), or (if you don't swing that way) by Nature, or by the Human Condition, or by Rationality, or whatever you happen to believe in. No matter what you believe, you had the right to Free Speech ever since the creation and/or evolution of the human race, and all the United States Constitution does is acknowledge that right, it doesn't claim to grant it, because you can't give someone something they already have, all you can do is acknowledge that they have it and you're not going to try to take it away from them.
Democracy is great, and I support Democracy, but I support CONSTITUTIONAL Democracy, where the absolute rights every person has been born with since the inception of the human race are acknowledged and protected by the Constitution and not subject to oppression by popular opinion.
Let popular opinion decide anything it wants as long as the majority doesn't try to violate the inborn rights of a single person.
You probably wouldn't understand the whole "freedom" concept. Monster.
Libertarianism is centered around the "will of the people" concept, but it takes it one step further -- it's about the will of each invididual person, and not just the will of the majority. The United States Constitution is a generally Libertarian document, and the United States was founded on generally Libertarian ideas. It's not quite true Libertarianism (which has never been implemented on a large scale except on the Internet), but it's close. The foundation of the United States government isn't just "majority rule", it's a combination of "majority rule" and "minority rights." The majority can do as it chooses, but not at the expense of the rights of the minority. True Libertarianism takes the combination of "majority rule" and "minority rights" just one step further by eliminating "majority" and "minority", and just having individuals -- individuals who are free to carve out their own path in life without being told how they have to live.
Under your idea of how government should work, solely based on "majority rule" without "minority rights," if 51% of the population believed it was okay to shoot homosexuals on sight, then it would be perfectly okay to shoot homosexuals on sight.
In fact, in your world, if 51% of the population believed it was okay to shoot homosexuals on sight, then you would consider it immoral to oppose shooting homosexual on sight, or to try to convince people that they shouldn't support shooting homosexuals on sight, because opposing the murder of homosexuals or trying to convince people that the legal murder of homosexuals is wrong would be classified as "defying the will of the majority."
Well, here's a shocking newsflash for you: speaking out against the morality of the majority viewpoint is not the same as being opposed to the concept of majority rule. You can still believe in majority rule but fight to change what the majority believe.
Since you believe so strongly in majority rule and that the "will of the people" should never be questioned, what will you do on the day when 51% of the population is Libertarian? Will you suddenly turn Libertarian yourself, and admit you were wrong, or will you oppose the majority Libertarian ideals and prove yourself wrong when you claimed to support "the will of the people"?
Those who claim it's wrong to question "the will of the majority" are probably only of that opinion because they're currently in the majority themselves. You're most likely a straight white middle- or upper-class male Christian/athesist/agnostic, and since you are the majority, that's why you believe "the majority must never be challenged."
So, just answer this one question. If "the majority" (50.0001% of the population, let's say) believe it's perfectly okay to murder homosexuals because homosexuality is morally wrong, and it becomes national law that it's okay to murder homosexuals, what do you do?
WHAT DO YOU DO???
Do you act proud that "the will of the people" is being done and homosexuals are being murdered legally, or do you protest the murder of homosexuals and renounce your blind worship of "the will of the people"?
The will of the people must be counterbalanced by the rights of all individuals within a society, not just the spoiled rich whiteboys driving their fat white asses around in their giant SUVs. How much gas mileage do you get on that thing, anyway?
Dear Mr. Hitler:
The dry-cleaners called. Your white sheet isn't going to be ready in time for the cross-burning tonight.
What you spout is the same neo-facist, state-ist nonsense that every despot has spouted, from Ghengis Khan to Stalin to Hitler to Castro to Clinton. "Give up your freedom, and trust in society to take care of you! Society is your friend! Government can cure all your ills! The welfare of society outweighs your rights! The government knows what's best for you! People don't matter, society does!" Those are the fundamental ideas behind Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nazi-ism, Liberalism, Socialism, Leftism, Rightism, Reactionaryism, Progressivism, and every other destructive political philosophy that's every plauged human existence.
Actually, I did recognize it, as well as your tendency to be patronizing, which is probably related to your tendency to engage in absolutes.
Absolutes can be a very good thing. If you believe "everything is relative," then it's easy to go from "it's wrong to torture and murder children" to "I believe it's wrong to torture and murder children" to "it's mostly wrong to torture and murder children" to "torturing and murdering children is a neutral act" to "it's perfectly acceptable to torture and murder children" to "all children must be raped, tortured, and murdered for the good of society." That's where relativism leads you. Don't you think that Absolutes might not be so bad by comparison?
But not soon enough. Nitrocglycerine is volatile! Someone's mixing volatile explosives 8' under your ass, and your answer is "wait for the landlord to intervene"? Surely thou jesteth!
First of all, how are the private activities of your neighbor any business of yours? How do you know what he's doing down there?
Second, if it explodes, I fully support holding the guy responsible for the damage he does.
Third, what's wrong with "wait for the landlord to intervene"? Under your state-ist system, your solution would be "wait for the police to intervene" -- what makes you think that the police will act more expediently than the landlord will? The landlord's property is at stake, whereas the police are off arresting and murdering people for such "society-destroying" crimes like anal sex or consuming certain chemicals in the privacy of their homes.
Oh, Enlightened One, how would we survive without you and the morality police shooting homosexuals, pot-smokers, and other "criminals." We owe you a great debt.
Good that you should bring this up! In fact, the "Landlord", at our collective request, has indeed made such a rule in virtually every city around.
Oh, great. I expected this. The "government is just a regular guy like you and me" nonsense. The government is allowed to steal money from people and shoot them if they refuse to go along with the theft. The government is free to shoot people who consume certain chemicals and refuse to go to jail for it. The government is free to make arbitrary rules that the vast majority of the population is opposed to, and then shoot people for violating them. And if people don't like it, there's no recourse -- they could leave the country, but the governments control EVERY country.
It's an issue of CHOICE, and you hate CHOICE. What if I WANT to live in a building where I'm allowed to mix Nitro, along with other people who either mix Nitro themselves, or who don't mix Nitro personally but understand and agree to the risks? In a society where the government sets the rules, there's no choice -- every place has the same rules. In a society where every person makes the rules for his own property, you can live in an environment where the rules are custom-tailored to YOUR style of living, with other like-minded people.
That's choice, that's freedom, and that's what you want to destroy.
I didn't say that he deliberately deceived you, I said that he backed out. Changed his mind.
It doesn't matter if he originally planned to honor his promise or not. It you say you're going to do something in exchange for something else, and you get the something else, but you don't do the something, you're guilty of fraud -- plain and simple. You're ignorant.
Ahem. The front of the property.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. If the man is putting junk on somebody ELSE's property, then that's the use of force. If he's keeping junk on his OWN property, then all the surrounding people have to do is build walls on THEIR property to block the line of site to HIS property, so that they can't see the junk. Or they could just move. If odor is traveling from the junk onto other people's property, that's force, and the people whose property the odor is drifting onto can defend themselves.
He says "no," and tells you to fuck off.
Then either fucking deal with it, or leave to live among more like-minded people.
State-ism is based on the concept that everybody should be the same, have the same values, the same ideals, and believe the same thing.
Libertarianism is based on the concept that it's okay to have different ideals and values than other people -- for highest quality of life you'll want to live among like-minded people similar to yourself, but you don't force non-like-minded people to conform to your ideals.
That's what state-ism is all about: forcing other people to conform to your view of reality.
Well, to hell with your view of reality. You have your view of reality, and I have mine. Under a state-ist system, the people with minority views of reality have to live in servitude to the majority. In a Libertarian society, the people with one view of reality can live their own way with like-minded people, and people with another view of reality can live somewhere else among people similar to themselves, and some people can live all alone and answer to nobody but themselves.
It's wrong for the majority to force its ideals, morality, and worldview on the minority. That's fascism, and that's what every fascist from Ghengis Khan to Stalin to Hitler to Castro to Clinton have had in common, and that's what YOU have in common with them.
No. It's been tested and failed.
No, Libertarianism has never been implemented on a nation-sized scale in the real world. The Internet, however, is an example of a Libertarian government: everyone can do whatever they choose as long as they're not hurting anybody else, and people tend to hang out with like-minded individuals instead of trying to stamp non-like-minded individuals out of existence. There's absolutely no central government that tries to enforce a majority worldview on everyone -- everybody does their own thing and it works.
Government is an instrument of the collective will. Given a choice, people move away from the kind of anarchy that you propose.
No.
This is anarchy:
1. Do whatever. No law exists.
This is Libertarianism:
1. You're free to choose your own path in life as long as you don't deny anyone else the right to do the same.
If you can't see the difference, you're truly an idiot, and I'm wasting my time talking to you.
You must not have recognized it, but this is basically the Libertarian political philosophy. You'd best think about what you're saying before you go criticising the most principled, consistent, and well-respected political philosophy in the world.
Some pervert persuades your 9 year old daughter into having sex with him.
Children are not adults, and can't make most decisions for themselves. It is the job of parents to be responsible for their children until they're of an appropriate age to arbitrate their own lives. Until your daughter is an adult, she's effectively your property, within certain limits (maybe a fourth article should be added, like the one the Libertarian platform has, to address which rights over the children are given to the parents and which are reserved for the children themselves; for example, parents should be able to restrict the child's right to have sex, but the child should retain control of her right to use the restroom when she wishes), and thus if someone has sex with her without your consent, that's force against your property, and you're justified to retaliate.
The wierdo with the apartment directly beneath you likes to brew his own personal batches of nitro glycerine. Understandably, you're nervous.
Complain to the owner of the apartment, who has no obligation to rent the apartment to that person. Given the choice between losing you as a renter and losing the crazy guy with the bomb fetish, I'd say the situation will probably be dealt with to your satisfaction.
If the landlord creates a rule against having explosives on the property, and that person violates the rule by having explosives on the property, then that person has initiated force against the landlord and the landlord is free to retaliate.
If not, it's not your property, so leave.
An unscrupulous business person changes his mind and backs out of a contract.
That's fraud, which is a form of force. If someone says to you, "I will give you $500 in exchange for oral sex," and you provide the oral sex, and he doesn't provide the $500, he's initiated force against you and you're free to defend yourself.
A 17 year old teenager with a Trans Am drives through your residential neighborhood at over 100 miles an hour.
If the teenager incurs any damage to you or anyone else, he/she will be responsible for the damage. Beyond that, complain to the owner of the street, and convince the owner of the street to enforce a speed limit. You're only free to do what you want on your OWN property, on someone else's property, you have to follow their rules, otherwise you're using force against their property and they're free to defend themselves.
A slovenly neighbor leaves all manner of junk in his yard, bringing down local property values.
Convince everyone whose property borders on this man's property to build a wall on their property that obstructs view of his property. Or ask him nicely to remove his junk, or volunteer to remove it for him.
No, this doesn't work. Good idea, but it's not quite right.
Yes, it does work. Good idea, and it is quite right.
It just takes a little bit of common sense.
Do you even read the articles you link to? That article is not about DES, it's about CSC. The last time DNet did 56-bit DES, it didn't take two months, it took one day.
DNet has done DES three times, and it's gotten significantly faster each time. Here's the times that the three DES challenges were completed:
Feb 1998: 39 days.
Jul 1998: <3 days.
Jan 1999: 22 hours.
In the July 1998 challenge, DNet was just barely beaten by EFF's "Deep Crack" machine -- DNet and Deep Crack were both running at about the same speed, but they both started at different points and Deep Crack happened to find the key first. In the January 1999 competition, Deep Crack was part of DNet, and did about half the work, so without Deep Crack it would have taken DNet up to two days to finish the job -- significantly less than the two months you cite.
DNet hasn't done DES since January of 1999. Again, the article you like to is for CSC, not DES. 56-bit CSC took about two months, 56-bit DES took about 22 hours.
Yawn.
What will really decide the fate of this game is whether or not it can run on low-end machines (P200, 64MB RAM, 3 GB HD, NO 3-D Accelerator). A Mac release would also help the popularity.
I'm afraid the most low-end machine in the game runs at 60GHz, and has 24 Gigaquads of memory with a 1GQ/sec net connection. Your system seems a little aged.
Umm...
While Token Ring initially had a scalability advantage over Ethernet in that Ethernet was contention-based and Token Ring wasn't, any such advantage died out long, long ago. In the age of switches, Ethernet is no longer contention-based either (unless you're one of the five people on the planet still using hubs), which kills the only disadvantage it ever had. Then, compare the base speeds -- 16 Mbit versus 100 Mbit (or, using Gigabit Ethernet hardware, you can actually get reasonably close to a gigabit using ordinary Cat5 UTP).
Token ring just will not cut it any more, and certainly can't scale nearly as far as switch-based Ethernet can. How exactly would you implement your 1000-node Token Ring network? One big ring? Assuming an average of 1ms between nodes, that's a full second for a complete traversal of the ring -- and with the ring being as busy as it is, it'd instantly collapse under the load. Okay, maybe you want to bridge multiple rings together. You're still going to have terrible network performance compared to switched Ethernet, where everything is effectively bridged.
And reliability? Are we talking about the same "token ring" here? Moses on a stick -- I still have nightmares.
The first thing that religion does is brainwash it's proponents into believing that they are free because of religion.
Does it also brainwash them into learning how to spell properly?
I'm someone who often has trouble understanding abstract, complex, or "artsy-fartsy" plots, but I found All Roads to be thoroughly understandable and very enjoyable. The concept of (*SPOILER*) a story starts with the protagonist's death and then has his consciousness jumping back in time further and further into the past isn't a new one, but it's an interesting one, and All Roads adds some interesting twists to the concept at the end.
...
I didn't find the story to be confusing (not more so than it was intended to be, anyway) until the very very end, and even then things became clear after a few more runthroughs. I just loved trying to screw around with temporal causality and seeing what you could and couldn't get away with. Yes, the game is a bit "linear", but that's because the future has already happened and you can't take any course of actions that won't lead you to that future.
There was some very, very brilliant stuff in the game. At one point, after jumping back in time yet again, you eventually "catch up" with a part of the game you've already experienced and your character automatically repeats whatever you did the first time around, no matter what input you give. That was really creative, especially because you have no idea what's happening at first, but once you figure it out, it's the first point in the game that confirms 100% that you're jumping back in time. Shortly after that, you find out it's a bit more complex than that, and I can't say I have total comprehension of the ending, but I still got a good feeling out of it.
As for your other reviews
"Colours" was pretty silly, yeah, but I found it had a certain bit of charm to it. A nasty bug can keep you from completing the game, and I was hoping for something more than "YOU HAVE WON" at the end, so I wouldn't really recommend wasting time with it unless you're a puzzle freak.
"Gostak": I also henzore bowenqo quit after onpexoz minutes. It might have orze fun if I'd figured out how to ligyung it, but I'm not a damn wezktronyi.
"Silicon Castles": As near as I can tell, this is just a chess game. The title screen has a chess quote, you're in a room with nothing but a genie chess board, and your genie happens to be a chess-playing genie: you didn't think to try actually playing chess? The genie's "brain level" can be adjusted, and I tried playing one game on the easiest level, but even at that level it seemed like victory would require actual skill at winning chess, not just knowledge of the rules, so I quit after one attempt. The dumbest thing was, the game didn't even recognize I was checkmated (and yes, I'm damn sure I was really checkmated -- I had nothing but my king left, surrounded in a corner by two enemy queens and no possible moves) so I had to resign prompting a serve "coward!" taunting from the genie. Maybe there's some form of plot if you beat the genie. I have no idea. People who aren't skilled at chess will never find out, and people who are skilled at chess probably wouldn't want to bother with this game anyway.
"Jump": I played the game to completion. In five minutes. I played it again, just to be sure I hadn't imagined it. What the hell? Here's a complete walkthrough for the game:
1. Find key to locker.
2. Unlock locker.
3. Take gun from locker.
4. At this point (after a few turns of waiting), the game automatically goes into a sequence where (I think) the main character (I think) shoots her (I think) abusive (I think) fater and then (I think) jumps off a cliff.
That's it. That's the game. Sure, there's "fiction", but where's the "interactive" part?
I also tried "Bane of the Builders" which was mildly interesting by very trivial, and "Crusader" which as pretty funny but also didn't have much substance to it.
I'm going to try out "Shattered Memory" now and a few of the others that look promising.
You can turn your radio off.
I personally have had nothing but good experiences with Paypal, but I was shocked to learn that there was a dark side to it that many, many people have been burned by. It seems the fact that I've had no problems with Paypal is the exception rather than the rule -- many people haven't been so fortunate.
Some of the problems can just be attributed to "shit happens," but in many cases, Paypal is guilty of out-and-out theft: when they receive a complaint about a single transaction, they often freeze the accounts of everyone involved, and then do everything possible to make themselves inaccessible by phone or e-mail so that the accounts can never be unfrozen. They've just walked away with someone's money. Good job.
Anyway, here are some useful links that have many, many testimonials of bad experiences:
Paypal Warning
Testimonials from above site.
PaypalSucks.com
Based on the testimonials I've read, here are a few ways I can think of to make the Paypal experience as safe as possible.
1. NEVER leave money sitting in your Paypal account. Withdraw it IMMEDIATELY. They will freeze it, or steal it, if they get an excuse to do so -- any excuse will do. Don't be tempted by their "Paypal Money Market Fund". That 1.2% APR isn't going to make you rich. You'd be better transfering your money to your bank where it can't be stolen. They can't steal what isn't there.
2. Try to avoid setting up a bank account on Paypal or giving them your checking account number for any reason. They do everything in their power to convince/force you to set up a bank account, which should give you cause for suspicion. If you give them your checking account number, they can (and will) withdraw the money from your bank account at any time without permissions.
3. If you must set up a bank account with Paypal, contact your bank and tell them NOT to allow Electronic Funds Transfers from Paypal without your approval. Unlike with a credit card, there's no way to dispute EFT charges. Get this in writing from your bank.
4. Check your credit card statement carefully each month, and chargeback any mysterious charges immediately -- but not if you have money sitting in your Paypal account or they have your bank account number, because they will take your money away from you if you do a chargeback. Get your money safe first, then call the credit card company to do a chargeback.
5. Try to avoid using a debit card -- you have no fraud protection, and if the debit card draws from the same account as the bank account you have set up in Paypal, you might run into some problems because of the way Paypal does things. If you have $600 in your bank account, and you try to make a $500 Paypal payment from your bank account, it'll bounce! Why? Since bank transfers take 3 days, Paypal wants to avoid finding out 3 days later that there's no money in the account, so they use your credit/debit card to "secure" the transaction by "locking" $500 on the card and then releasing it after the bank transfer clears. So now, when you've tried to pay $500 from your bank account, Paypal has locked $500 of the $600 in the account, leaving only $100 in the account which will make the $500 bank transfer bounce. The bank will charge you a bounced transfer fee, Paypal will charge you a fee, and you'll be unhappy with the whole situation. Sometimes even when the transaction DOES complete, they still don't release the "hold" on the card for days, weeks, months, or ever.
6. Do not use Paypal for large transactions. Use some sort of escrow service. With the incredible fees Paypal is charging now, it wouldn't be much more expensive.
7. As an alternative to Paypal, consider using E-Gold instead. Instead of dealing in a national currency like Dollars or Pounds, it uses actual physical gold as currency: you actually own a stake in the vault of gold that the company owns, and you can send/receive electronic gold from others as payment. It's very expensive to get involved, though: getting money into an E-Gold account requires you to go through a currency exchange service (E-Gold does not offer this service directly) which generally charge a 15% conversion fee, and 1% of your balance is deducted per year.
The cool thing about E-Gold, though, is that if you buy 5 ounces of gold, you'll always have that 5 ounces of gold in your account no matter what happens to the value of gold or to your national currency. If you spend (for example) $200 on 2 ounces of gold, but six months later the price of gold has risen from $100/ounce to $300/ounce, you'll still have that 2 ounces of gold -- but it'll now be worth $600. Pretty nice, eh? A lot nicer than Paypal's 1.2% APR mutal fund.
Anyway, use Paypal if you have to, but be safe. Minimize the opportunities for them to steal your money. Don't use them as a bank. They're not a bank; they're not regulated as a bank, but they want you to use them as a bank so that they'll have more chances to take your money.
Play it safe, and you should be okay.
You've got me curious about this... I'd like to know what sort of non-RFC-compliant things an unpriveleged userland application could do that would cause so much trouble. Do you have any specific examples? And what sort of "application-priority procedures" do you use, because I'm not familiar with that term either. I'm passingly familiar with QoS and related issues, but I'm afraid I don't really understand.
Buy more RAM, fools.
Although advanced journaling filesystems only journal metadata, some journaling filesystems journal everything: when a disk write happens, the entire write is written to the journal file, then it's written to the real file, then it's deleted from the journal file.
When Ext3 was first created, it COULD NOT journal metadata -- the only option was full file journaling, which was incredibly slow. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I read the original release notes which said that metadata journaling was not available yet. I believe that Ext3 can now do metadata-only journaling -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but it's a fairly recent development, within the past year or so.
This mail message from about a year ago says that metadata support was "in an early state" at the time. I don't know if it's been perfected since then or not. But the e-mail proves that at one time, Ext3 could NOT do metadata-only journaling, which flat-out disproves your post that all journaling filesystems only journal metadata.
And RAID quite frankly has nothing to do with it; I can't even imagine why you brought it up because it's absolutely irrelevant.
You're a real bright one, aren't you? "Didn't realize"? XFS, ReiserFS, and JFS are different filesystems; they're not ext2. Ext3 is ext2, but with a journal file added and journaling turned on. They're the same filesystem. It's even a bit disingenuous (though still correct) to say "Ext2 systems can mount ext3 filesystems," because there's no such thing as an ext3 filesystem -- just an ext2 filesystem that can, when mounted by the right kernel, support journaling.
I don't really even know why someone would want to use ext3 anyway. Unless they've made some serious improvements in the past few months, the filesystem still writes at 50% the speed of ext2 (since all data is written twice). The only thing it has going for it is its interoperability with ext2, but that's really a perfidious "feature": systems that don't need journaling should just use ext2 to avoid the massive performance hit, and systems that do need journaling (namely, servers) have no reason to have their journaling filesystems compatible with ext2, and should use one of the high-performance journaling FS's.
It's not an issue of quality. I understand that re-recording analog (especially through a microphone rather than just plugging the line out of your sound card back into the line ine) will cause a hit in quality. But it will always WORK, it's something they can NEVER take away from us by ANY means short of banning the human ear and forcing us to install digital audio receiver chips in our brain if we want to hear anything. That's at least a century away, in addition to being rather silly, so for the time being I think it's safe to say that they CAN'T take our music away from us. Yes, we may have to resort to living with a drop in quality, but it doens't matter -- we'll still have the music. All it takes is for one person, with good equipment, to re-record the analog audio into a restriction-free digital format (yet, this will be illegal, but I don't see why that should be a problem), and then the rest of us all over the world can share, copy, and distribute it without any further loss of quality.
To what the other poster said about making microphones illegal -- it won't happen. A microphone is a very simple device at its core (it's basically the same as a loudspeaker but works in the opposite direction), so we'd be able to make our own, even if somehow microphones ever became banned (they'd also have to ban intercoms and other devices we use every day too).
However, I don't think it'll come to that. I think it'll be at least 20 years before we see sound cards that don't have either analog outputs or unrestricted digital outputs. Until then, we can always just loop the signal straight back into the sound card or another recording device, and re-record with a barely perceptible loss of quality.
"What do you do then?"
You plug the Line Out of your soundcard into the Line In, and you record.
Problem solved.
Microsoft can control the digital, but they can't control the analog. Our ears are analog; at some point the audio HAS to be converted to analog, and then it can be freely re-recorded. Even if we eventually see soundcards with only digital outputs (an unlikely possibility), the data still gets converted into an analog audio signal somewhere down the line. Even if we see bizarre systems where the signal is digital all the way to the speaker, the sound waves that reach our ears are still analog and always will be -- and can be picked up by a microphone as easily as they can be picked up by our ears.
I don't see anything in the article or on the site that says it's not legitimate. Satire sites like the Onion at least make it clear that they're satire. It would be irresponsible not to. If Adequacy wasn't legit, it would say so somewhere -- I even e-mailed some of the people in charge to ask, and they said it was legitimate. I guess there are just a lot of misinformed people in the world.
Even if the article weren't legitimate, I don't see how the article could be considered satirical. Satire requires a lot of irony, and as little stupidity as possible.
I just recently found this guide to be a "dream PC" guide for "normal people," but it seems to make an awful lot of mistakes. In fact, parts of it are so bad that I had to laugh out loud at it. It won't help you build your dream PC, and certainly not an ultimate Linux box, but it'll certainly make you wonder what kind of person could write such a thing!
I read through the Adequacy website very thoroughly, and although I must admit that the site perplexes me, I see nothing that indicates the site isn't totally serious. I read through the mission statement, the FAQ, the meta page, and so forth, and I didn't see the word "Satire" anywhere. I even went so far as to e-mail one of the editors asking what was going on with the site, and once asked on their IRC channel, and every time I was told the site was completely serious.
It's a scary thought, but the site seems to be legit, unless you can document otherwise.
Certainly his facts are incorrect, and I myself had to stiffle a giggle at the Internet Explorer comments, but is it really productive to blame a new user for being a new user? "New users to Open Source are stupid about Open Source." Well, no kidding: that's why they're new users.
Does it really help the Open Source Community to call inexperienced users "idiots" rather than explaining to them how things work; for example, why there's no Internet Explorer for Linux? Now that most distros are shipping with either no manual (just a "quick install sheet"), a 12-page manual covering just the installation, or a 2000-page manual that'll never be opened, there's no way for new users to know these things -- they have to be told.
Do you really think most users who are frustrated by their first Linux installation experience (which is a perfectly normal situation for the new user to be in if he isn't a geek guru like us) and are told that they're "useless idiots" because of it are going to make a SECOND attempt?
I don't.
A few days ago, I read this review of Mandrake 8.1 which was, to say the least, a bit controversial. After reading some of the comments on the story, I wonder about the accuracy of many things in the article, but you can't deny that it genuinely reflects someone's experience with Linux. It's important to keep up with reviews that AREN'T written by us UNIX gurus, because widespread adoption hinges on the experience new users have with the OS.
Factual or not, this is how new users see the operating system. The harassment that the author of the review received in the wake of writting it will probably drive him away from Open-Source forever and only further reinforce the stereotype of the Linux Community being elitists and jerks. Another story on that site (I can't really figure out the purpose of the site; some of the stuff is really weird) reinforces the same idea: new users like the authors of these two articles are insulted and demeaned for "factual errors" because they're... gasp... new users. The irrational desire for guruism and leetness wins out over the rational desire to encourage and help new users, and ultimately the Linux Community suffers.
Just something to think about.
I personally find Mandrake 8.1 to be a real gem (the X configuration has improved greatly, I love the changes to the package management, and I see little changes here and there that keep making me smile), but if the review reflects the experience that most new users have, maybe it'd make more sense to examine the OS experience rather than flaming the newbies.
Now, I'm not accusing anyone. I'm not saying all software developers are out to screw over the hardware people, but look...
Those who write the software are the last stage. Regardless of how well the engineers designed the hardware, the CS people can either make or break their designs with good or bad code respectively. CS people essentially have engineers at their whim.
So yes, I certainly agree they're jealous... but in more than one way. They're jealous because CS people, in a way, have more power over the flow of technology.