The launch event is in progress. There won't be a Slashdot article until it finishes, just as Slashdot generally waits until after a Stevenote or Google presentation before posting a story about the latest Apple crap or innovations in the Android world.
I'm actually 99% convinced that the reason people so readily believe vaccines cause terrible things is because the experience of holding an infant's hand while she receives their shots is so traumatizing people are looking for any excuse to not do it.
In which case you put a yellow bar at the top of the screen with "This webpage uses the Flash media player to show some content. Do you want to enable this plug-in?"
Also: do I need to guess that it's still not going to be the case that it'll be possible to prevent HTML5 video from playing if the bastards building the page have made it auto-play? NOTE TO MOZILLA: _nobody_ wants this. Nobody. There is nobody in the world who wants a massive multimegabyte video to download and start playing unless they've specifically acknowledged they're ready for it. I don't give a rat's ass that you've seen sites considered legit like Youtube auto-play videos, even Google f---s up from time to time.
I don't want massive multimedia crap to start downloading until I've explicitly given permission. That should have been the default right from the beginning, when the good people of Netscape first created the plug-in concept. Nobody else does either.
Why? Because people load pages in the background. Because others click on a link and go AFK for a moment while they wait for the page to prepare itself. Because people load pages where there are other people around and do not want their computers suddenly talking or playing music or otherwise disturbing others around them. And yes, because other people pay by the byte or have download caps, especially mobile users.
Not really. If it wasn't for treaties, Antigua could be doing whatever the hell it liked. No $21M limit or anything else. It could also impose a 100% tariff on imported US goods, as another example, or require people leaving Antigua to go to the US give up any dollar bills they have in their possession.
The treaty results in the US being objectively better off than it would be otherwise. The WTO creates a framework where limits are set as far as tit-for-tat punishments go.
Because Iran is a Muslim country, and the fact is that most right-wing Americans are brought up to believe that Islam is a monolithic entity practiced exactly the same way across the entire world, and that if you find a Muslim doing something that's objectionable, it must follow that every Muslim in the entire world does the same damned thing.
Also: Iran! Scary! They hate America therefore everything they do is bad!
(By comparison, Christianity is _always_ the Church of England. Anything that's not happy clappy and liberal is either NOT REAL CHRISTIANITY or it's RIGHT you liberal commie muslimlover.)
when the BSD userland is more unix-defacto-standards compliant
I'm not sure it is anymore. The prevalance of the GNU userland via GNU/Linux has effectly made it the standard. I gave up using ksh a decade ago because of the number of scripts etc that required bash's features, even when supposedly written for generic Bourne.
Now, of course, it'd be easy to argue that more Unixes implement something closer to BSD than GNU, but the counter argument to that is that GNU/Linux seems to be, by the far, the most commonly implemented. Mac OS X comes close, but developers tend to actually ignore the Unix side of Mac OS X for the most part anyway - given a package that includes scripts, it's far more likely to have been provided primarily for a GNU user than a BSD user.
I bought a T60 shortly after the takeover and it's excellent.
Unfortunately I also bought a X series (the lower cost subnotebooks) two years ago and it was awful. I don't mean in a "Poorly spec'd" kind of way, I mean appalling quality, right down to constant freezes if connected to the wireless because of the way the wireless driver operated. And the other options at the time, in the Thinkpad range, were dreadful, with virtually every larger device having a crappy WXGA screen regardless of computer size and a sad set of CPU/GPU options.
I bought that for my home office. I replaced my T60 a year or so ago with a Dell. That's right, a Dell. NOBODY buys Dells for themselves. But I did. The choice of Thinkpads, coupled with my new experience of Lenovo "quality" pushed me to abandon the laptops I've loved and bought exclusively (one Powerbook excepting) since 1999.
It's only anecdotal evidence (but so was yours...) but I genuinely don't see Thinkpads today as having anything in common with the range at IBM except for having the only decent mobile pointing device in existence. They need to be better quality, and they need to go back to having decent hardware specs - decent screens, CPUs and GPUs.
To which the manufacturer, not the carrier, holds the copyright. But okay so far...
That's correct, but meaningless in context. The manufacturer is the company who would initiate a DMCA lawsuit, assuming the ACM wasn't provided by the carrier. Remember the manufacturer, not the carrier, is the company that implemented the lock in the first place, and they do have incentives to make their locks work
If I replace the firmware, then the phone no longer contains the original copyrighted code. This seems like a self-correcting "problem".
Nope, because you've still bypassed the ACM which wasn't yours to bypass, just as George Lucas wouldn't have been able to build his own Blu-ray player simply because he released Star Wars on Blu-ray Disc. I'd also question whether merely uploading custom firmware is enough to replace all copyrightable aspects of a mobile phone.
You're describing how it should be, not how it is.
The firmware of a mobile phone is covered by copyright law. The copyright holder in virtually all locked phones has implemented an Access Control Mechanism, per the DMCA, that prevents anything but the official copyrighted firmware from being programmed into a locked phone. That copyrighted firmware does not allow access to other carriers other than the carrier the phone was subsidized by.
In order to unlock the phone, either an official lock code is required (which may be obtained unofficially, and whose legal status if obtained unofficially is dubious) or the firmware needs to be replaced, the latter of which would require circumventing, in some shape or form, even if it's via an EPROM programmer or whatever the devil it is you young people use to write firmware these days, the ACM.
That's where the DMCA comes in. Do that, and you're facing four years in the slammer, just as you would if you did the infinitely more evil and just downright despicable action of building your own DVD player. I hope they throw away the key...
It's a two-way thing, you keep your message short and people will read it. Moreover, people will read them even if you post a lot of messages.
Think of it this way, as a reader: you may have noticed that most blogging services like LiveJournal initially provided a feed that showed every single post, in full, that had been posted by the people you follow (obviously paged, and obviously in date order.) While I rather liked that, it started to get unwieldy when you started to follow a lot of people, and started to see a lot of messages on your feed. Meanwhile, many messages were hidden. Each blog entry, after all, usually had a comments section, and people would write comments that you often wanted to read, but weren't in that feed.
The result was that blogging services started to decline. Some, like Multiply, replaced their UI entirely and prevented anyone from getting hold of that kind of feed, regardless of whether they wanted it or not. Others, like LiveJournal, started to lose readers. Those that rejigged their UIs tended to do so suboptimally too, the new user interfaces for the most part didn't replicate the conversational aspect of seeing blog entries from the people you followed and made it easier to miss things in the noise.
Twitter is a relatively good approach to fixing that. It comes in from the other direction: fix the bloggers, not the reader. People are encouraged to keep their messages short. If someone has something complicated to say, they can always post a headline and a link. If someone has something easy to say that just won't fit in 140 characters, you can always split your message across two or more tweets. Because of the 140 character limit, you can now handle more messages, which means implementation changes that help readers: for example, tweets don't have a comment section, you reply to tweets with more tweets, and those tweets also appear in the timelines of people following you, so they don't miss the conversation.
It's not ideal, but for the most part I think it works.
On a server a browser or wordprocessor is close to useless. Also, on the web browser front, have you investigated what's in a modern browser these days?
Meanwhile on both end-user and server platforms, a well designed, well integrated, DBMS is an extremely useful component to have for, well, storing data. Not that anyone would argue that of MySQL, but it says a lot that, for example, SQLite is part of Android.
I'm pretty sure that actually Anonymous's actions shutting down websites have been seen to be illegal, and widely condemned (if also widely praised by an entirely different set of people) when they've happened.
Of more concern to me is the precedent any politician shows by attempting to shut down the dispersal of scientific information (or forced dispersal of anti-science propaganda) on religious grounds. That happens in too many countries, and unfortunately the West doesn't seem to be short of such zealots, even if certain areas of the world seem to have slightly more dangerous variants.
That's not the same Atari, although both Ataris have their origins in Nolan Bushnell's original Atari.
The company was broken up in the early eighties. Part went to Jack Tramiel, but not the games bit. The Atari you see around these days is related to the games bit.
Or it's a list of homes to burgle to get their hands on a gun they otherwise wouldn't be able to get due to background checks. The "Yes, but they're at risk of being shot!" argument only works if you assume that every gun owner stays at home all day, every day, and leaves no evidence of their absence behind if they do leave for any reason.
I still don't see the point of the disclosure beyond straightforward harassment of gun owners. And all this does is encourage gun owners to be scared of registration and permit requirements, no matter how legitimate. Given some kind of permitting system ought to be part of any discussion of sane gun control, it's hard to see how this kind of idiocy helps the public debate.
The injustice here is that he's being imprisoned for expressing an opinion that involves the King and his role in politics. That's rotten.
I suspect most people here will assume, instead, that the injustice is that he didn't name the King explicitly, but courts tend to make reasonable inferences that people using certain language and gestures intend to communicate a concept even if they don't state it explicitly in ${language}. Just as you couldn't say "One of my co-workers is a pedophile and it's not" ${list of everyone except the person you're refusing to name} without being at serious risk of being sued for libel, likewise it sounds like the dissident made gestures that would only be interpreted in one way by the crowd.
There are several issues here, one of which is that you're using hot button phrases like "common sense restrictions" that tend to be used by people who then propose fairly arbitrary and often severe restrictions that aren't likely to have any meaningful effect. As a result, you're being jumped on.
Look, the simple truth is that this isn't simple. Guns are owned for a variety of reasons. Guns are used for a variety of reasons. It's not actually that easy to point at a gun and say "This is designed to be use for "bad things"", even leaving aside the Janus nature of things like causing harm to another person (which is nominally bad, except when you're defending yourself.)
The Assault Weapon thing is a classic, and I know you stopped reading after someone raised the issue with you but I'm going to mention it because the AWB pretty much always comes up when someone uses the term "Common sense restrictions".
What makes a rifle an "Assault Weapon"? According to the legal definition, it's basically that the gun is semi-automatic, uses detachable magazines, and (here's the kicker) has two or more features from a list. And those features are features that make the gun more deadly, right?
Well, as it happens, no. Some, such as barrel shrouds, are safety features. Others, such as pistol grips, could be argued to be features that encourage safe usage (by allowing a shooter to keep their hand close to the trigger without actually being to accidentally shoot something.) Forward pistol grips? Ergonomics, and perhaps accuracy. And then there's telescoping or foldable stocks, which is a convenience feature.
OK, so where did this list come from? Well, you'll note that many AWB supporters describe assault weapons as "Military-style rifles". Because that's what they're aiming to get rid of. Unsurprisingly, they assume a weapon designed for a soldier would be intended for killing lots of people quickly and easily. I mean, that's what soldiers, at the end of the day, when all else fails, have to use their guns for.
And it's true, the military wants guns that can do that. But they also want features that are common to those you'd want a responsible gun owner to desire. They want guns that are easy to use, are safe, can be aimed accurately, and encourage responsible use. The "kill lots of people quickly and easily" aspects of the rifles really boil down to:
- The weapon being semi-automatic. (Actually military rifles are so-called "select-fire", which means they have multiple modes, but semi-automatic is the general use.)
- The use of lightweight, powerful, ammunition (called.223 Remmington, or 5.56 NATO)
- The use of detachable magazines
Remove any one of those three features, and the military wouldn't buy the weapon. On the other hand, if the cost difference between a rifle with a pistol grip and one without was substantial, the chances are the military wouldn't bother having one.
So... the AWB is daft. It's not common sense at all. It's based upon several misunderstandings, and on top of everything else, it appears to be ineffective in practice. Few murders are committed with such weapons.
Back to your point: you say we should at least agree there are some weapons that aren't generally available.
OK, yes, kinda. We already have restrictions on certain types of gun. It's difficult, for example, to get hold of a fully-automatic weapon (like a Tommy Gun), although ironically the barrier is cost, not passing some extra level of testing of responsibility. Fully automatic weapons manufactured after an arbitrary date in the 1980s can't be owned privately at all, so the number in circulation is fixed, which makes them relatively expensive, and people who buy them have to buy a "stamp" from the ATF that allows them to own the weapon.
But it starts to get harder when you're talking about the guns that aren't restricted. Some weapons are clearly more useful to a deranged killer than others, but that doesn't mean they're not us
OK, first of all pretty much any sliding Android phone has "gaming controls", even if they're labeled with letters like "Q", "W", "E"... etc..
Secondly, if a two year old Android phone can have a decent screen, why can't this? Even if you accept the premise that Android phones don't generally come with an explicit D-pad, it's not as if the designers had to make some stomach-churning trade off decision - shall we include a decent screen, or add a dedicated D-pad? Because, like, it's one or the other.
I think the specs are absolutely abysmal. A single 320x240 2D 4:3 screen? Maybe they can add a CD ROM and we can watch VCDs on it too!
Or, I know, a VHS slot!
Good luck to them, but I just wonder if they need to raise their standards just a little if they want this to work. As it is, the "I don't want fifty devices in my pocket, and my Galaxy Nexus already has a 1280x720 display" factor is going to be tough to beat.
* Dalvik is not Java. While the Java programming language is available for Dalvik, together with a subset of the J2SE library, the runtime itself is unrelated.
* Windows 8 Metro "does not use.NET" is kinda meaningless, neither does Win32. However, you certainly can build Metro apps in.NET. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2012/04/17/net-for-metro-style-apps.aspx
* The comment about the author of the article testing Java "by using a C# client" is bizarre and misleading. A language had to be picked, with the choice having the same impact on both tests. Chosing to test a Java server with a Java client, and then a C# server with a C# client would cause the test to be different in both situations and render the test results invalid.
* The author of the article concluded that Java was generally faster than C#, not that "it was a dog".
* Other than that, your comment is completely 100% correct. Possibly. Or maybe I didn't check.
Read that sideways and you have an interesting way to evaluate programming languages. Write equivalent, readable, code in the languages you're evaluating.
Now print out each example, and weigh it. The one that weighs least is probably written in the programming language to use.
I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything, but also bought into Java as the development platform to standardize on. Developers would be required to develop Java under Windows, and the Gods of IT would refuse to countenance a Linux server in their server room even if the developers wanted Windows.
RHEL's rise has changed things somewhat, but it's still a common combination.
No, that's not fine tuned enough. Standard practice here is to program an FPGA to do the less important work, with wire wrapped transistors doing anything that needs to perform well.
The third operating system mentioned, Chrome OS, is Linux. What Linus's fans call "Linux" goes by many names these days, Debian, Ubuntu, Chrome OS, RHEL, SuSE, Slackware, Fedora. Sometimes the full names of each distribution includes "Linux" in the title but we avoid saying it because it's kinda redundand, and sometimes they don't.
And yes, there's a monthly component. That's how Dell is making the money. The concept is you use the widget to access virtual PCs. You rent the latter. Depending on what your needs are, it may be better for you than buying PCs, given the decreased set-up, power and maintenance requirements.
That would be dumb... if you weren't missing the business model completely.
Dell is selling the widget as a way to access the service. The service, that Dell makes money on, is the provision of virtual computers that can be accessed from anywhere. The widget is a terminal, it may even be sold at a loss.
From Dell's point of view, it would be fantastic if monitor makers incorporated the functionality of the widget into their devices. That's one less thing you need to sign up for a virtual Dell computer.
Is it a good idea? Time will tell. I can see small businesses finding something like this a god-send. Enterprises might, but would typically require a decade or more to switch over.
Slashdot Mirror
The launch event is in progress. There won't be a Slashdot article until it finishes, just as Slashdot generally waits until after a Stevenote or Google presentation before posting a story about the latest Apple crap or innovations in the Android world.
I'm actually 99% convinced that the reason people so readily believe vaccines cause terrible things is because the experience of holding an infant's hand while she receives their shots is so traumatizing people are looking for any excuse to not do it.
In which case you put a yellow bar at the top of the screen with "This webpage uses the Flash media player to show some content. Do you want to enable this plug-in?"
Also: do I need to guess that it's still not going to be the case that it'll be possible to prevent HTML5 video from playing if the bastards building the page have made it auto-play? NOTE TO MOZILLA: _nobody_ wants this. Nobody. There is nobody in the world who wants a massive multimegabyte video to download and start playing unless they've specifically acknowledged they're ready for it. I don't give a rat's ass that you've seen sites considered legit like Youtube auto-play videos, even Google f---s up from time to time.
I don't want massive multimedia crap to start downloading until I've explicitly given permission. That should have been the default right from the beginning, when the good people of Netscape first created the plug-in concept. Nobody else does either.
Why? Because people load pages in the background. Because others click on a link and go AFK for a moment while they wait for the page to prepare itself. Because people load pages where there are other people around and do not want their computers suddenly talking or playing music or otherwise disturbing others around them. And yes, because other people pay by the byte or have download caps, especially mobile users.
It also appears to be on EA's site: http://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Last-Plea-For-Offline-Mode/m-p/418246#M2693
I'm a little confuzzled by the story. Nothing here makes sense. Is it possible EA disabled the wrong user account, and has since re-enabled it?
Not really. If it wasn't for treaties, Antigua could be doing whatever the hell it liked. No $21M limit or anything else. It could also impose a 100% tariff on imported US goods, as another example, or require people leaving Antigua to go to the US give up any dollar bills they have in their possession.
The treaty results in the US being objectively better off than it would be otherwise. The WTO creates a framework where limits are set as far as tit-for-tat punishments go.
Because Iran is a Muslim country, and the fact is that most right-wing Americans are brought up to believe that Islam is a monolithic entity practiced exactly the same way across the entire world, and that if you find a Muslim doing something that's objectionable, it must follow that every Muslim in the entire world does the same damned thing.
Also: Iran! Scary! They hate America therefore everything they do is bad!
(By comparison, Christianity is _always_ the Church of England. Anything that's not happy clappy and liberal is either NOT REAL CHRISTIANITY or it's RIGHT you liberal commie muslimlover.)
I'm not sure it is anymore. The prevalance of the GNU userland via GNU/Linux has effectly made it the standard. I gave up using ksh a decade ago because of the number of scripts etc that required bash's features, even when supposedly written for generic Bourne.
Now, of course, it'd be easy to argue that more Unixes implement something closer to BSD than GNU, but the counter argument to that is that GNU/Linux seems to be, by the far, the most commonly implemented. Mac OS X comes close, but developers tend to actually ignore the Unix side of Mac OS X for the most part anyway - given a package that includes scripts, it's far more likely to have been provided primarily for a GNU user than a BSD user.
I bought a T60 shortly after the takeover and it's excellent.
Unfortunately I also bought a X series (the lower cost subnotebooks) two years ago and it was awful. I don't mean in a "Poorly spec'd" kind of way, I mean appalling quality, right down to constant freezes if connected to the wireless because of the way the wireless driver operated. And the other options at the time, in the Thinkpad range, were dreadful, with virtually every larger device having a crappy WXGA screen regardless of computer size and a sad set of CPU/GPU options.
I bought that for my home office. I replaced my T60 a year or so ago with a Dell. That's right, a Dell. NOBODY buys Dells for themselves. But I did. The choice of Thinkpads, coupled with my new experience of Lenovo "quality" pushed me to abandon the laptops I've loved and bought exclusively (one Powerbook excepting) since 1999.
It's only anecdotal evidence (but so was yours...) but I genuinely don't see Thinkpads today as having anything in common with the range at IBM except for having the only decent mobile pointing device in existence. They need to be better quality, and they need to go back to having decent hardware specs - decent screens, CPUs and GPUs.
That's correct, but meaningless in context. The manufacturer is the company who would initiate a DMCA lawsuit, assuming the ACM wasn't provided by the carrier. Remember the manufacturer, not the carrier, is the company that implemented the lock in the first place, and they do have incentives to make their locks work
Nope, because you've still bypassed the ACM which wasn't yours to bypass, just as George Lucas wouldn't have been able to build his own Blu-ray player simply because he released Star Wars on Blu-ray Disc. I'd also question whether merely uploading custom firmware is enough to replace all copyrightable aspects of a mobile phone.
You're describing how it should be, not how it is.
The firmware of a mobile phone is covered by copyright law. The copyright holder in virtually all locked phones has implemented an Access Control Mechanism, per the DMCA, that prevents anything but the official copyrighted firmware from being programmed into a locked phone. That copyrighted firmware does not allow access to other carriers other than the carrier the phone was subsidized by.
In order to unlock the phone, either an official lock code is required (which may be obtained unofficially, and whose legal status if obtained unofficially is dubious) or the firmware needs to be replaced, the latter of which would require circumventing, in some shape or form, even if it's via an EPROM programmer or whatever the devil it is you young people use to write firmware these days, the ACM.
That's where the DMCA comes in. Do that, and you're facing four years in the slammer, just as you would if you did the infinitely more evil and just downright despicable action of building your own DVD player. I hope they throw away the key...
Yes, it's stupid. The whole ACM thing is stupid.
It's a two-way thing, you keep your message short and people will read it. Moreover, people will read them even if you post a lot of messages.
Think of it this way, as a reader: you may have noticed that most blogging services like LiveJournal initially provided a feed that showed every single post, in full, that had been posted by the people you follow (obviously paged, and obviously in date order.) While I rather liked that, it started to get unwieldy when you started to follow a lot of people, and started to see a lot of messages on your feed. Meanwhile, many messages were hidden. Each blog entry, after all, usually had a comments section, and people would write comments that you often wanted to read, but weren't in that feed.
The result was that blogging services started to decline. Some, like Multiply, replaced their UI entirely and prevented anyone from getting hold of that kind of feed, regardless of whether they wanted it or not. Others, like LiveJournal, started to lose readers. Those that rejigged their UIs tended to do so suboptimally too, the new user interfaces for the most part didn't replicate the conversational aspect of seeing blog entries from the people you followed and made it easier to miss things in the noise.
Twitter is a relatively good approach to fixing that. It comes in from the other direction: fix the bloggers, not the reader. People are encouraged to keep their messages short. If someone has something complicated to say, they can always post a headline and a link. If someone has something easy to say that just won't fit in 140 characters, you can always split your message across two or more tweets. Because of the 140 character limit, you can now handle more messages, which means implementation changes that help readers: for example, tweets don't have a comment section, you reply to tweets with more tweets, and those tweets also appear in the timelines of people following you, so they don't miss the conversation.
It's not ideal, but for the most part I think it works.
Can Torvalds not add another API to get the 64 bit time for 32 bit systems (or has he already done that and the original poster was wrong)?
On a server a browser or wordprocessor is close to useless. Also, on the web browser front, have you investigated what's in a modern browser these days?
Meanwhile on both end-user and server platforms, a well designed, well integrated, DBMS is an extremely useful component to have for, well, storing data. Not that anyone would argue that of MySQL, but it says a lot that, for example, SQLite is part of Android.
I'm pretty sure that actually Anonymous's actions shutting down websites have been seen to be illegal, and widely condemned (if also widely praised by an entirely different set of people) when they've happened.
Of more concern to me is the precedent any politician shows by attempting to shut down the dispersal of scientific information (or forced dispersal of anti-science propaganda) on religious grounds. That happens in too many countries, and unfortunately the West doesn't seem to be short of such zealots, even if certain areas of the world seem to have slightly more dangerous variants.
That's not the same Atari, although both Ataris have their origins in Nolan Bushnell's original Atari.
The company was broken up in the early eighties. Part went to Jack Tramiel, but not the games bit. The Atari you see around these days is related to the games bit.
Or it's a list of homes to burgle to get their hands on a gun they otherwise wouldn't be able to get due to background checks. The "Yes, but they're at risk of being shot!" argument only works if you assume that every gun owner stays at home all day, every day, and leaves no evidence of their absence behind if they do leave for any reason.
I still don't see the point of the disclosure beyond straightforward harassment of gun owners. And all this does is encourage gun owners to be scared of registration and permit requirements, no matter how legitimate. Given some kind of permitting system ought to be part of any discussion of sane gun control, it's hard to see how this kind of idiocy helps the public debate.
The injustice here is that he's being imprisoned for expressing an opinion that involves the King and his role in politics. That's rotten.
I suspect most people here will assume, instead, that the injustice is that he didn't name the King explicitly, but courts tend to make reasonable inferences that people using certain language and gestures intend to communicate a concept even if they don't state it explicitly in ${language}. Just as you couldn't say "One of my co-workers is a pedophile and it's not" ${list of everyone except the person you're refusing to name} without being at serious risk of being sued for libel, likewise it sounds like the dissident made gestures that would only be interpreted in one way by the crowd.
There are several issues here, one of which is that you're using hot button phrases like "common sense restrictions" that tend to be used by people who then propose fairly arbitrary and often severe restrictions that aren't likely to have any meaningful effect. As a result, you're being jumped on.
Look, the simple truth is that this isn't simple. Guns are owned for a variety of reasons. Guns are used for a variety of reasons. It's not actually that easy to point at a gun and say "This is designed to be use for "bad things"", even leaving aside the Janus nature of things like causing harm to another person (which is nominally bad, except when you're defending yourself.)
The Assault Weapon thing is a classic, and I know you stopped reading after someone raised the issue with you but I'm going to mention it because the AWB pretty much always comes up when someone uses the term "Common sense restrictions".
What makes a rifle an "Assault Weapon"? According to the legal definition, it's basically that the gun is semi-automatic, uses detachable magazines, and (here's the kicker) has two or more features from a list. And those features are features that make the gun more deadly, right?
Well, as it happens, no. Some, such as barrel shrouds, are safety features. Others, such as pistol grips, could be argued to be features that encourage safe usage (by allowing a shooter to keep their hand close to the trigger without actually being to accidentally shoot something.) Forward pistol grips? Ergonomics, and perhaps accuracy. And then there's telescoping or foldable stocks, which is a convenience feature.
OK, so where did this list come from? Well, you'll note that many AWB supporters describe assault weapons as "Military-style rifles". Because that's what they're aiming to get rid of. Unsurprisingly, they assume a weapon designed for a soldier would be intended for killing lots of people quickly and easily. I mean, that's what soldiers, at the end of the day, when all else fails, have to use their guns for.
And it's true, the military wants guns that can do that. But they also want features that are common to those you'd want a responsible gun owner to desire. They want guns that are easy to use, are safe, can be aimed accurately, and encourage responsible use. The "kill lots of people quickly and easily" aspects of the rifles really boil down to:
- The weapon being semi-automatic. (Actually military rifles are so-called "select-fire", which means they have multiple modes, but semi-automatic is the general use.) .223 Remmington, or 5.56 NATO)
- The use of lightweight, powerful, ammunition (called
- The use of detachable magazines
Remove any one of those three features, and the military wouldn't buy the weapon. On the other hand, if the cost difference between a rifle with a pistol grip and one without was substantial, the chances are the military wouldn't bother having one.
So... the AWB is daft. It's not common sense at all. It's based upon several misunderstandings, and on top of everything else, it appears to be ineffective in practice. Few murders are committed with such weapons.
Back to your point: you say we should at least agree there are some weapons that aren't generally available.
OK, yes, kinda. We already have restrictions on certain types of gun. It's difficult, for example, to get hold of a fully-automatic weapon (like a Tommy Gun), although ironically the barrier is cost, not passing some extra level of testing of responsibility. Fully automatic weapons manufactured after an arbitrary date in the 1980s can't be owned privately at all, so the number in circulation is fixed, which makes them relatively expensive, and people who buy them have to buy a "stamp" from the ATF that allows them to own the weapon.
But it starts to get harder when you're talking about the guns that aren't restricted. Some weapons are clearly more useful to a deranged killer than others, but that doesn't mean they're not us
OK, first of all pretty much any sliding Android phone has "gaming controls", even if they're labeled with letters like "Q", "W", "E"... etc..
Secondly, if a two year old Android phone can have a decent screen, why can't this? Even if you accept the premise that Android phones don't generally come with an explicit D-pad, it's not as if the designers had to make some stomach-churning trade off decision - shall we include a decent screen, or add a dedicated D-pad? Because, like, it's one or the other.
I think the specs are absolutely abysmal. A single 320x240 2D 4:3 screen? Maybe they can add a CD ROM and we can watch VCDs on it too!
Or, I know, a VHS slot!
Good luck to them, but I just wonder if they need to raise their standards just a little if they want this to work. As it is, the "I don't want fifty devices in my pocket, and my Galaxy Nexus already has a 1280x720 display" factor is going to be tough to beat.
* Dalvik is not Java. While the Java programming language is available for Dalvik, together with a subset of the J2SE library, the runtime itself is unrelated. .NET" is kinda meaningless, neither does Win32. However, you certainly can build Metro apps in .NET. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2012/04/17/net-for-metro-style-apps.aspx
* Windows 8 Metro "does not use
* The comment about the author of the article testing Java "by using a C# client" is bizarre and misleading. A language had to be picked, with the choice having the same impact on both tests. Chosing to test a Java server with a Java client, and then a C# server with a C# client would cause the test to be different in both situations and render the test results invalid.
* The author of the article concluded that Java was generally faster than C#, not that "it was a dog".
* Other than that, your comment is completely 100% correct. Possibly. Or maybe I didn't check.
Read that sideways and you have an interesting way to evaluate programming languages. Write equivalent, readable, code in the languages you're evaluating.
Now print out each example, and weigh it. The one that weighs least is probably written in the programming language to use.
I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything, but also bought into Java as the development platform to standardize on. Developers would be required to develop Java under Windows, and the Gods of IT would refuse to countenance a Linux server in their server room even if the developers wanted Windows.
RHEL's rise has changed things somewhat, but it's still a common combination.
No, that's not fine tuned enough. Standard practice here is to program an FPGA to do the less important work, with wire wrapped transistors doing anything that needs to perform well.
Anything less is, well, lazy.
The third operating system mentioned, Chrome OS, is Linux. What Linus's fans call "Linux" goes by many names these days, Debian, Ubuntu, Chrome OS, RHEL, SuSE, Slackware, Fedora. Sometimes the full names of each distribution includes "Linux" in the title but we avoid saying it because it's kinda redundand, and sometimes they don't.
And yes, there's a monthly component. That's how Dell is making the money. The concept is you use the widget to access virtual PCs. You rent the latter. Depending on what your needs are, it may be better for you than buying PCs, given the decreased set-up, power and maintenance requirements.
That would be dumb... if you weren't missing the business model completely.
Dell is selling the widget as a way to access the service. The service, that Dell makes money on, is the provision of virtual computers that can be accessed from anywhere. The widget is a terminal, it may even be sold at a loss.
From Dell's point of view, it would be fantastic if monitor makers incorporated the functionality of the widget into their devices. That's one less thing you need to sign up for a virtual Dell computer.
Is it a good idea? Time will tell. I can see small businesses finding something like this a god-send. Enterprises might, but would typically require a decade or more to switch over.