When I was a kid I worked in a grocery store.... I saw first hand just how many able bodied people are on the 'dole.' That was then, this is now. RIGHT NOW, in the United States, ABSOLUTELY NOBODY gets a "dole" except the handicapped. You pay into social security and unemployment. You have to work to get AFDC, and even then it's difficult. That's why we're seeing the big push for child support, and jail for not paying it. People who used to get AFDC now need child support to get by.
The public dole is there to help people get back on their feet or the ones who truly need it because of disabilities or mental health issues. The last time I checked, 'laziness' or 'have as many kids as I can' isn't a mental health disorder. Which is what it has always been used for. Here is a simple question:
What PERCENTAGE of the total amount handed out for AFDC, SSI, social security, etc. goes to fraud? 5%? 10%? Does that percentage completely invalidate the other 90-95% that is legitimate?
Let me put it another way: Should we completely disband the armed forces because weapons procurement and spending is incredibly corrupt? Should we disband all police departments because some police are corrupt? If not, why not?
So what, the police print every major crime scene because they like the smell of the powder? No, because decades of false information have told them latent print identification works. It doesn't. The courts are beginning to figure this out.
Are you trolling or genuinely know nothing about the subject? I know a lot about fingerprint identification. I've worked on electronic fingerprint identification, in QA. If you had done my work you would know that the ID software, which was far superior to the human eye, needed multiple high-quality images of prints to get a match. If it was smeared, it wouldn't work. Ever. What does that tell you?
For the computer, "close enough" doesn't cut it. It must match the 16 points on it's map exactly. That's NOT how forensic fingerprint identification works. In "forensic" fingerprint identification they run the smeared print through NCIC and get a few dozen vaguely close (4 or 5 point) matches. Then a technician eyeballs it to make the "match". Fingerprint technicians seem to do a good job "matching" black men with criminal records and a lousy job "matching" anyone else. Objective studies show that on smeared prints, fingerprint technicians do only slightly better than chance. Not good enough.
Many people here are asking why the "international community" is so opposed to US control of the internet through ICANN. The main reason is because they are concerned that the US will promote it's own commercial interests on the internet above those of other players. In effect, that control over the internet will give the US a competitive business advantage. And it does. ICANN clearly favors the US and US business interests.
3) Police services who are very quick, methodical and vigilant... When it comes to handing out speeding or parking tickets, but couldn't be bothered to even so much as *show up* when my car was broken into. (as a side note, the perpetrator left their fingerprints everywhere, which my wife was easily able to recover as a demonstration to her first year criminology students). The United States employs vast armies of police officers when compared to the Europeans. For the most part they are poorly-trained union workers. They don't do a good job because they have little incentive to do so. We, as a society, also dump everything on them. We have no public assistance, so they have to deal with the homeless, desperately poor, and drug-addicted. We have no mental health system, so they have to deal with all the people with mental health problems.
(as a side note, the perpetrator left their fingerprints everywhere, which my wife was easily able to recover as a demonstration to her first year criminology students). Latent print identification is snake oil. Lifting prints from the crime scene doesn't accomplish anything because for identification prints have to be near-perfect, even slight smearing will make them useless. Such prints simply do not appear in the field.
6) what about all of the people who are now entering their fifth generation of living off the public dole? We have done such wonderful things for them too haven't we? Where are these people? There is no "dole" or welfare in the United States to speak of excluding SSI. Are you saying disable people shouldn't get public assistance? Should the blind be living on the streets?
So it's a dual boot system? In this narrow case, there might be some advantage. If you manually create your partitions such that the swap partition is at the physical start of the disk, that particular partition will always be marginally faster since it's at the start. You would also save a little disk space. The performance difference would be very, very small though. If you're worried about I/O throttling switch to SAS and/or a caching RAID controller.
I can't think of a good reason to do this, since you don't need to access the swap file from Linux. Why do you want to do this? Performance? If that's the case you should make a small FAT32 partition.
It's probably going to get buried, but this article is based off a screenshot of one of the beta-tester ticket trackers. Those raw bugs are pretty far from a "feature list". It's just a list of features beta-testers requested. There is no reason to believe that Microsoft is acting on any of these issues.
"Our new security company, Nemean Networks, has developed a new IPS technology that will cure cancer and raise the dead."
What's with this blatant ad? When and if they ship a product or release their technology, we can talk about it. But right now it's just a bunch of hot air.
To expound a bit: If you make an analogy between IP packets and letters sent via USPS, then clearly the gov't must not search your correspondence. However, you could just as plausibly (read: not very plausibly) make an analogy between IP packets and shouting across a crowded room. In that case, anything the gov't hears is fair game. I could also "plausibly" make an analogy between IP packets and tossing baseballs into garbage cans, but that analogy would make no sense, just like your analogy of shouting across the room. You analogy is equivalent to broadcast radio or television, as opposed to IP packets which are ROUTED to a specific location.
The analogy of USPS letters is exactly spot on and clearly reflects the intent of the law. If the government can't search your mail, they can't search your e-mail. This strikes me as common sense to everyone except law enforcement, who aren't really interested in the Constitution anyway.
Howzabout Bandwidth. Does anyone actually believe there is basically a complete second internet that mirrors the first all to send it to some room an San Francisco? That if I ping my neighbor's router that traffic gets copied, along with every other little bit, out to the NSA?
I'd have a very tough time believing that they're routing all backbone traffic through something like this. It doesn't mirror ALL of the internet, it mirrors all of the traffic going through that particular backbone hub. So it monitors all of a big chunk of the internet. If you one of those rooms in all of the major backbone facilities (I believe there are around 16, with 4 big ones), you get most of the internet.
Most people perceive fiber as being expensive because of the cost of long, miles long, runs between facilities. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about 10ft of fiber split form the trunks. As others pointed out, this is done ALREADY by the backbone providers for various reasons.
Christian Fundamentalists have been here since the 1600s and haven't turned this country into Afghanistan yet. Look into the Puritans. Their religious restrictions were extremely similar to those of the Taliban.
On the other hand you look at sizable immigrant Muslim communities in countries like Canada and the UK, and people are pushing for Sharia courts. Unlike the Amish, who ask for no special accommodations. Or Quakers. Or orthodox Jews. Or Native Americans. Or . Lots of religious groups have asked for changes to existing laws or new laws to accommodate their beliefs. In a democratic society, people have the right to determine the laws that govern them. If a significant portion of the UK population wants Sharia and choose to vote it in, so be it. I seriously doubt this is going to happen. Conservatives (of all stripes) who travel to more liberal nations tend to liberalize quickly, usually within one generation.
For that matter, Christianity doesn't even have an equivalent of Jihad in either codification or practice. Nonsense. The Catholic Church (which is the source of Christian law and tradition, don't try to weasel) has repeatedly endorsed the killing of infidels and heretics, as recently as last year. Pat Robertson and other major American religious leaders have advocated a Crusade against the Muslim world, as well as assassination and murder.
We've had a couple of abortion doctor shooters, which were loners and which has been uniformly denounced by all major Christian denominations. The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists, two of the largest American denominations (as well as lots of smaller denominations), have backhandedly endorsed these actions. Almost all anti-abortion terrorists are members of, and worked closely with, Operation Rescue, the largest anti-abortion group. In recent years Operation Rescue/Save America (who agree with you) have expanded their terrorist efforts to bombing mosques and harassing Muslims.
Compare this to honor killing. Honor killings happen in the United States, committed by Christians. You don't think there are white fathers that would kill their white daughters for sleeping with a black man? Or kill their sons for being gay? Happens all the time. Honor killing for rape, which is what you're taking about, is only common in nations that have a "bride price" or dowry. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.
Man, you need to do some research before spouting off. I did. Maybe you should read my other response. Another poster made the exact same comments you did and I don't feel like repeating myself.
I would point out that the Tesla is a tiny specialty car (it's smaller than a Miata), that isn't even in production, and costs $100K. It's not for the masses. My comments are applicable to the electric cars targeted to the masses, like the EV1.
There is also the issue of charge time, as another poster pointed out.
in excess of 90%, were caused by... OTHER IRAQIS! Really? Do you think you can prove that?
Because it's my understanding that the #1 cause of violent death in Iraq is still US airstrikes. Lots of explosives going off in urban areas leads to lots of death. In all this talk about suicide bombers people see to forget that the US air power drops MUCH larger bombs on targets in Iraq. Shia death squads are a very close second. Deaths from Sunni insurgent snipers and bombers don't even really come close. This is easy to understand when you realize they're outnumbered 5 to 1 by the Americans and 3 to 1 by the Shia militias.
I'm willing to concede that deaths from Shia death squads may have eclipsed deaths from US airstrikes in the past year or so. Nobody really knows, except perhaps the Pentagon, and they aren't talking. However, this would still mean that the majority of deaths in Iraq came from US airstrikes. As the war drags on, that percentage is dwindling.
Actually, there's no reason electric cars have to be "gutless". Electric motors get all their torque right from the get-go. As long as the electronics are laid out right, you should be able to actually out accelerate almost any gas car. Assuming all else is equal, you'd be right. But all else isn't equal. Every electric car I have seen has had very little torque for it's weight, to save power. You could easily build an electric car that would out-accelerate any gas car, but it would require a LOT of power to do so so it would kill your range. That's exactly the case with the Tesla roadster, which has great acceleration but a 200 mile range.
We have Nickel-Metal-Hydride and Lithium Ion batteries that are lighter, provide far more power, and are made of chemicals that are mostly inert from an environmental standpoint. And dramatically more expensive because Lithium Ion is much more expensive, and more importantly, have to be replaced after far fewer cycles. NiMH and Li-Ion were available when the EV1 was developed and they were rejected for exactly these reasons.
The other thing you need to make electric vehicles a possibility is somewhere to plug them in. Here in Chicago, most people live in apartments and park on the street. That means we have no power plug to plug into at the end of the day. Even if the apartment complex you live in happens to rent garages (and you want to shell out the $100+/month for it) it's unlikely to have power running to it. So run an extension cord. I've seen people doing this with electric cars in San Francisco. This seems like a trivial issue to me compared to the whole "grossly inefficient way to travel" problem.
There are gamers that are so obsessed they will get up in the middle of the night to play when they should be sleeping and going to school the next day. Tell me how a parent is supposed to monitor their child 24x7? And how did the kids get to this point? One word: negligence. Their parents were too busy or too lazy to pay attention to their emotionally-volatile kids and they let them get sucked into bad habits. This is exactly how kids pick up drug habits too. Chaos in the household doesn't help either (divorce, moving a lot, etc.).
Why can't the parents just ask the kid to shut the system off at curfew? If he doesn't do it, THAT'S the problem, not the video game system. The issue is why the kid has no respect for his parents (and it's likely because they've fucked up).
Who bought them the video game system to begin with? If the kid is passing out in school and their grades are failing, it's perfectly okay for his parents to take the video game system away from him until his grades improve. If he completely flips out in response to this, his parents have done something else to screw him up long before he got the video games. This can also be done in terms of rewards: Do well in school and I'll get you new games.
All of the above pretty much strikes me as common sense.
Yes, I totally want to drive around in a completely gutless (it HAS to be to save power) electric car with a 200 mile range filled with 500 lbs. of lead-acid batteries. No pollution there. And it costs twice as much as a comparable gas vehicle.
Pure electric cars are a nice IDEA. Few people mention that the best thing about them is that they're very, very, quiet. You don't realize what a cacophony gasoline cars generate until you see a street filled with electric vehicles (I have). But that's basically all you get, and it's not enough to justify all the other problems.
Don't get me started on the incredibly bad idea of alcohol fuel either.
The solution to the current problem of auto pollution is to force the manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient cars by changing the CAFE standards to raise efficiency standards and narrow the exception for SUVs. 65 MPG is completely achievable on a 4-door sedan RIGHT NOW for 2009 models. SUVs should be pushed off the market or taxed as luxury vehicles. I have no problem with people paying $350,000 for their Lotus that gets 11 MPG, and I'd have no problem with people paying $150,000 for their H3 that gets 8 MPG.
I think his point is more that the PSP isn't the complete disaster that previous non-Nintendo handhelds (Sega Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, etc.) have been. It's enough of a success that the "PSP2" stands a shot at beating Nintendo.
Actually, it's "pressured by everybody". The sales folks at both Sony and Microsoft (don't know about Nintendo) have decided that releasing the console sales charts to the "public" is hurting them because the accurate information puts them at a disadvantage in licensing negotiations with third-parties. i.e. "You are selling only half of the consoles of your competitor, why should we pay the same licensing fees if we can expect reduced sales?" And the marketing people don't like the data being "public" because it can lead to negative press (console X isn't doing well against console Y).
People should do whatever the fuck they want with the hardware they buy and let giant soulless corporations like Nintendo, Sega, and Sony take care of themselves.
Most of the games released for the PSP and the DS are just PORTS of older games for old consoles. I find it crazy that Sony and Nintendo feel the need to charge $30 for a game released 15 years ago. And why not release multi-game carts or carts that contain flash memory that you can download multiple ROMs? (like the 3rd-parties have done for the DS)
The whole Virtual Console thing is a scam too. On the Wii they're using off the shelf emulators that are very buggy. N64 games work WAY better under UltraHLE on my modded XBOX. SNES games are a wash. If I'm actually PAYING for an emulated game from Nintendo the emulation should be PERFECT. It's not. Why should I pay good money for buggy games?
Though, for the record, I strongly recommend voting with your wallet and staying the fuck away from Gamestop. They are good for the industry in an abstract sense, but the price the customer pays is too high.
Just so people are aware, at least in California, Gamestop's return policy is illegal. In California you have the right to a full refund within 30 days for defective merchandise if you present proof of purchase. In practice, this means you have the right to a full refund within 30 days on anything because if the retailer objects you could just break it before you return it. The obligation is on the retailer to prove that YOU broke it as opposed to the customer breaking the merchandise. This applies to both new and used merchandise unless the used item is specifically described as non-functional or is obviously non-functional.
I have successfully sued Gamestop on this very point.
I never bought the DVD remote because the one thing I wanted it to do, turn the XBOX on and off from across the room, it can't do. You're better off with a wireless controller.
He's probably confusing federal and state law. Booker only applied to mandatory federal sentencing, not state. This is why you can get automatic life without parole for stealing a candy bar in California.
Slashdot Mirror
What PERCENTAGE of the total amount handed out for AFDC, SSI, social security, etc. goes to fraud? 5%? 10%? Does that percentage completely invalidate the other 90-95% that is legitimate?
Let me put it another way: Should we completely disband the armed forces because weapons procurement and spending is incredibly corrupt? Should we disband all police departments because some police are corrupt? If not, why not?
Whoops, here's the correct link.
For the computer, "close enough" doesn't cut it. It must match the 16 points on it's map exactly. That's NOT how forensic fingerprint identification works. In "forensic" fingerprint identification they run the smeared print through NCIC and get a few dozen vaguely close (4 or 5 point) matches. Then a technician eyeballs it to make the "match". Fingerprint technicians seem to do a good job "matching" black men with criminal records and a lousy job "matching" anyone else. Objective studies show that on smeared prints, fingerprint technicians do only slightly better than chance. Not good enough.
Many people here are asking why the "international community" is so opposed to US control of the internet through ICANN. The main reason is because they are concerned that the US will promote it's own commercial interests on the internet above those of other players. In effect, that control over the internet will give the US a competitive business advantage. And it does. ICANN clearly favors the US and US business interests.
So it's a dual boot system? In this narrow case, there might be some advantage. If you manually create your partitions such that the swap partition is at the physical start of the disk, that particular partition will always be marginally faster since it's at the start. You would also save a little disk space. The performance difference would be very, very small though. If you're worried about I/O throttling switch to SAS and/or a caching RAID controller.
I can't think of a good reason to do this, since you don't need to access the swap file from Linux. Why do you want to do this? Performance? If that's the case you should make a small FAT32 partition.
It's probably going to get buried, but this article is based off a screenshot of one of the beta-tester ticket trackers. Those raw bugs are pretty far from a "feature list". It's just a list of features beta-testers requested. There is no reason to believe that Microsoft is acting on any of these issues.
"Our new security company, Nemean Networks, has developed a new IPS technology that will cure cancer and raise the dead."
What's with this blatant ad? When and if they ship a product or release their technology, we can talk about it. But right now it's just a bunch of hot air.
The analogy of USPS letters is exactly spot on and clearly reflects the intent of the law. If the government can't search your mail, they can't search your e-mail. This strikes me as common sense to everyone except law enforcement, who aren't really interested in the Constitution anyway.
I'd have a very tough time believing that they're routing all backbone traffic through something like this. It doesn't mirror ALL of the internet, it mirrors all of the traffic going through that particular backbone hub. So it monitors all of a big chunk of the internet. If you one of those rooms in all of the major backbone facilities (I believe there are around 16, with 4 big ones), you get most of the internet.
Most people perceive fiber as being expensive because of the cost of long, miles long, runs between facilities. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about 10ft of fiber split form the trunks. As others pointed out, this is done ALREADY by the backbone providers for various reasons.
I would point out that the Tesla is a tiny specialty car (it's smaller than a Miata), that isn't even in production, and costs $100K. It's not for the masses. My comments are applicable to the electric cars targeted to the masses, like the EV1.
There is also the issue of charge time, as another poster pointed out.
Because it's my understanding that the #1 cause of violent death in Iraq is still US airstrikes. Lots of explosives going off in urban areas leads to lots of death. In all this talk about suicide bombers people see to forget that the US air power drops MUCH larger bombs on targets in Iraq. Shia death squads are a very close second. Deaths from Sunni insurgent snipers and bombers don't even really come close. This is easy to understand when you realize they're outnumbered 5 to 1 by the Americans and 3 to 1 by the Shia militias.
I'm willing to concede that deaths from Shia death squads may have eclipsed deaths from US airstrikes in the past year or so. Nobody really knows, except perhaps the Pentagon, and they aren't talking. However, this would still mean that the majority of deaths in Iraq came from US airstrikes. As the war drags on, that percentage is dwindling.
Why can't the parents just ask the kid to shut the system off at curfew? If he doesn't do it, THAT'S the problem, not the video game system. The issue is why the kid has no respect for his parents (and it's likely because they've fucked up).
Who bought them the video game system to begin with? If the kid is passing out in school and their grades are failing, it's perfectly okay for his parents to take the video game system away from him until his grades improve. If he completely flips out in response to this, his parents have done something else to screw him up long before he got the video games. This can also be done in terms of rewards: Do well in school and I'll get you new games.
All of the above pretty much strikes me as common sense.
Yes, I totally want to drive around in a completely gutless (it HAS to be to save power) electric car with a 200 mile range filled with 500 lbs. of lead-acid batteries. No pollution there. And it costs twice as much as a comparable gas vehicle.
Pure electric cars are a nice IDEA. Few people mention that the best thing about them is that they're very, very, quiet. You don't realize what a cacophony gasoline cars generate until you see a street filled with electric vehicles (I have). But that's basically all you get, and it's not enough to justify all the other problems.
Don't get me started on the incredibly bad idea of alcohol fuel either.
The solution to the current problem of auto pollution is to force the manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient cars by changing the CAFE standards to raise efficiency standards and narrow the exception for SUVs. 65 MPG is completely achievable on a 4-door sedan RIGHT NOW for 2009 models. SUVs should be pushed off the market or taxed as luxury vehicles. I have no problem with people paying $350,000 for their Lotus that gets 11 MPG, and I'd have no problem with people paying $150,000 for their H3 that gets 8 MPG.
I think his point is more that the PSP isn't the complete disaster that previous non-Nintendo handhelds (Sega Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, etc.) have been. It's enough of a success that the "PSP2" stands a shot at beating Nintendo.
Actually, it's "pressured by everybody". The sales folks at both Sony and Microsoft (don't know about Nintendo) have decided that releasing the console sales charts to the "public" is hurting them because the accurate information puts them at a disadvantage in licensing negotiations with third-parties. i.e. "You are selling only half of the consoles of your competitor, why should we pay the same licensing fees if we can expect reduced sales?" And the marketing people don't like the data being "public" because it can lead to negative press (console X isn't doing well against console Y).
People should do whatever the fuck they want with the hardware they buy and let giant soulless corporations like Nintendo, Sega, and Sony take care of themselves.
Most of the games released for the PSP and the DS are just PORTS of older games for old consoles. I find it crazy that Sony and Nintendo feel the need to charge $30 for a game released 15 years ago. And why not release multi-game carts or carts that contain flash memory that you can download multiple ROMs? (like the 3rd-parties have done for the DS)
The whole Virtual Console thing is a scam too. On the Wii they're using off the shelf emulators that are very buggy. N64 games work WAY better under UltraHLE on my modded XBOX. SNES games are a wash. If I'm actually PAYING for an emulated game from Nintendo the emulation should be PERFECT. It's not. Why should I pay good money for buggy games?
Though, for the record, I strongly recommend voting with your wallet and staying the fuck away from Gamestop. They are good for the industry in an abstract sense, but the price the customer pays is too high.
Just so people are aware, at least in California, Gamestop's return policy is illegal. In California you have the right to a full refund within 30 days for defective merchandise if you present proof of purchase. In practice, this means you have the right to a full refund within 30 days on anything because if the retailer objects you could just break it before you return it. The obligation is on the retailer to prove that YOU broke it as opposed to the customer breaking the merchandise. This applies to both new and used merchandise unless the used item is specifically described as non-functional or is obviously non-functional.
I have successfully sued Gamestop on this very point.
I never bought the DVD remote because the one thing I wanted it to do, turn the XBOX on and off from across the room, it can't do. You're better off with a wireless controller.
He's probably confusing federal and state law. Booker only applied to mandatory federal sentencing, not state. This is why you can get automatic life without parole for stealing a candy bar in California.
Hibernate/standby have worked fine in Windows since at least Windows 2000. This isn't 1999.
However if you want to compare the feature sets of MacOS 9.x and Windows 2000 we can.