Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
i think this persons "study" was just based on how many times someone said something that seemed to be "illegal" or "legal" based on keywords in what they have to say.
Well, with names like #nethack, of course the channel is devoted to illegal activities.;)
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.
Bullshit.
When I say "I can build it for less", I am counting for my time. Building a computer isn't rocket science: the main timesink is researching components, and that's necessary for the prebuilt route as well.
Once that is done, hop over to Newegg and order the parts up. When they arrive, spend an hour assembling them. Find a test suite and let it run overnight. Done.
Advantages:
Standard parts. No bizarre power supply or case. Good if something breaks.
Quality parts. No "we sold this PC based on CPU frequency and memory size, have fun with the shitty hard drive, north bridge, and slow memory imported from Mongolia".
I'm not sure about you, but I want _quality_ parts. Decent, fast, reliable drives. A modem that isn't a misguided sound card. A network card that doesn't offload its calculations to the main CPU. A motherboard with a decent chipset. A certain revision of processor. A decent sound card (dual DSP, please so I can sacrifice one to the the esound gods!). A case with the cables routed for airflow.
Why are a lot of mass market PCs slower than a homebuild PC with the same processor speed and amount of memory? Because mass market PCs tend to skimp where most customers won't notice.
"Let's face it - black people are just better than us at basketball. Of course, they're not very smart, but that's not their fault!"
(Since I have yet to be called racist on/.)
Pygmies tend to make damn awful basketball players.:)
On a more serious note: Race does affect the structure of the body. Pygmies show that height is different for at least one race. All things being equal (and they aren't): What if race affected median height? Or lung capacity? What if it affected the chances of getting certain diseases like malaria or AIDS? (It does, btw.) Does that make one race better than another?
On gender: Why are more men locked up than women, especially for violent crimes? Why do men seem to kill for different reasons than women? Why do sex offenders seem to be mostly male?
Interestingly, a lot of geeks like to joke about the pseudo-aspergers-type geek stereotype. Aspergers and Autism are both predominately male orders. If this isn't due to a gender bias in
diagnosis, perhaps a lot of well-known male geekiness is due to the same causes as Aspergers. I know more than a few geeks that have insane powers of hyperconcentration.
In their respective locations, both types of censorship is done to protect the public. Both are about as silly. (Oh no! Think of the children! On no! We can't have neonazis! Lets limit free speech!)
PS: Wasn't it the English that started adding figleafs to statues? Unfortunately, America imported English prudishness and kept it alive long after the English realized just how silly it was.
Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies?
I agree that this is a large jump to make. Just because the solar radiation isn't getting to the ground doesn't mean that the atmosphere isn't getting the full force of the solar radiation.
Ah, but the sun does dim and brighten (on at least one regular schedule that we can predict (sunspot cycle) and perhaps several cycles we can't predict) and the entire solar system is moving through a relatively dust-free region of the galaxy known as the "local bubble" but may be entering a more dusty region known as the "local fluff".:)
Well in the *context* of the story we have encryption schemes that might be broken at any time. While we have a physical paint that stops the waves from getting out (noting that the farady cage predates fancy encryption). And will continue to do so as long as it's maintained.*
I doubt the paint is 100% effective.
Even assuming that the paint is 100% effective, most houses have unpainted openings.
Would that happen to be the same encryption that cable, satellite and content provider pirates brag about cracking, no matter how much it changes? Or did you mean some other "never to be broken" encryption?*
Lets see:
Satellite TV decryption: Decryption keys given out to millions of subscribers.
Cable TV 'decryption': Tends to be a filter on the input.
Content decryption: Depends on the content. Wasn't CSS broken because of Drink or Die reverse engineered a DVD player? Ne'ermind that CSS was weak 40bit encryption scheme. (Btw, notice the theme that having millions of decoders out there with the decryption key may be a problem?) Adobe's ebook encryption had several weaknesses making it vulnerable to attack.
So, what do we have? Weak security schemes that involve 'security through obscurity'. Kind of like setting up a wireless network and hoping that nobody finds it.:)
Now, lets look at wireless encryption:
WEP: Original version had several weaknesses, a newer version 'strong-WEP' avoids 'weak packets' and has, AFAIK, not been broken.
IPSEC: The 'heavy hitter' of ip encryption, works well on wireless or wired networks, optional for IP4, part of IP6, and has never been broken.
Yes, some encryption sucks. We know that. Some 'encryption' turns out to be slightly more than access control -- encryption on certain Microsoft formats used to be able to be broken by just erasing the password field in the document! Some encryption is a more obfucated version of ROTn.
That doesn't make all encryption schemes worthless.
Some encryption schemes have been peer-reviewed for many, many years without flaws being found. Short of a "Sneakers"-style mathmatical breakthrough, its doubtful that some of these schemes will ever be broken. Others may be vulnerable to the sheer brute force that a quantum computer may do. A good OTP systems using a good scheme to collect its random numbers will never be breakable without a pad.
Currently, there are encryption schemes which are for all practical purposes, unbreakable. Want to snoop in on a SSH session? You better be willing to compromise a computer on one end, or torture someone for information. Want to feed information from an IPSEC-protected wireless network? Break into one of the machines or break out the bamboo splints.
*Physics verses encryption? My votes for physics.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about? Other than physically torturing someone for information, or building a better brute-force machine, physics doesn't break encryption. Mathmatics does.
Crichton's "State of Fear" is fiction, and should be treated as such.
That doesn't mean that the crowd which is arguing against doing anything about global warming is nuts.
The most accepted consensus out there is that Earth's climate changes. It may change relatively fast (dryads, little ice age, etc).
Less accepted (but still widely supported) is the idea that earth's climate is getting warmer.
I agree with the first point, and find the second point rather likely.
The evidence seems to indicate the earth's climate is naturally getting warmer, and, in addition, human pollution is further raising the temperature.
This brings up an interesting issue: Earth's climate will change even in the absence of human pollution. In short, we can't stop the climate from changing.
The question is: How much and how fast will human pollution change the climate by?
This is where I disagree with people and say: We don't know.
I've seen reasonable proposals that suggest normal volcanic activity produces greenhouse gasses on an order of magnitude far greater than human activity. If so, changing our habits will only have an effect until some ubervolcano erupts someplace, dumping a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Others disagree, saying that human activity dwarfs volcanic CO2 activity. (Interesting link how 1/10th of a square mile in Italy releases 150 tons of CO2 a day! Mt Etna releases 35k tons of CO2 a day. Here's another link about the over 2 million tons of CO2 (if my math is right) a day emitted by waterways in tropical forests.)
People who disagree with me tend to reply "But if we don't know, shouldn't we err on the safe side?"
The problem is that changing our ways has a cost. Or, as I like to put it: How many lives should we sacrifice in order to prevent a.1C rise? How many acres of wilderness do you propose destroying in order to prevent a.1C rise? How can we assess the risk and figure out what we are willing to spend and how far we should go? We can't.
Instead, we seem to run around trying to pass "feel good" treaties such as Kyoto without considering their effectiveness on global warming or their human cost.
I disagree with MacOS's windowing environment. I know its a paradigm of user friendlyness and UI sexiness, but I prefer *gasp* FVWM just for the whole 'this isn't sexy, this isn't pretty, but if you want to hack up some counterintuitive interface that you like, go right ahead'.
Combine that with the fact that almost all of my apps are unix/linux, it seems easier just to wipe MacOS off a system, grab a PPC port, and do a fresh install. I have the WM I like, and a system that I can tweak.:)
There are probably a lot of cases just like this where either the hacked party isn't even aware they got hacked, or the hacked party knows they got hacked and isn't talking about it. Which makes you wonder how long our credit system can stand up to rampant large-scale ID theft.
Stock up on canned goods, folks.
Americans have one of the lowest savings rates for a developed nation. There are several studies which indicated many Americans spend more than they earn. Even worse, other than home ownership, many goods and services that Americans buy do almost nothing to help their financial health.
Now there is nothing wrong with spending money on what makes you happy as long as its within reason, but how many people out there have maxed out credit cards, drive a new car, have a full entertainment package ($80+ cable bills, cell phones with every feature and service imaginable, big "going-out" entertainment budget), and shop out of boredom, all while having little or no savings?
This "buy now, pay later, I don't have to plan for my future" is what I'm worried about. A little ID theft here and there won't kill us.
Assume you have more than one nice server, at least two machines with ethernet connections, and all with bioses that understand the serial port (and yes, you can find x86 bioses that will do this):
Consider daisy-chaining the machines together by serial port:
+-[ Server 4 ] | ^ | | | [ Server 3 ] | ^ | | | [ Server 2 ] | ^ | | +>[ Server 1 ]
Now, when a server has problems, its always possible to connect through ethernet to the
server 'one hop down' from it, then connect through the serial port to the machine in question. If the machine 'one hop down' doesn't have ethernet, try the next machine 'one hop down'. Hopefully, you have at least 2 machines
with ethernet connections, or else you run the
risk that the faulty machine may be the machine
with the ethernet card.
Needless to say, this works best with a
unix-style OS.
That doesn't mean that you should only target your largest audience. Women are still a huge market, even if they're not as large as men, just because the gaming industry is so huge.
Women may be a large demographic, but they are not a large gamer's market.
Therefore, a lot more game companies appeal to men than to women.
To use a different example, look at the typical book rack: most places have a huge selection of romance novels. There are book companies who specialize in romance novels, who only sell romance novels. Yet we don't run around screaming that women are uncultured, medieval thinkers just because of the huge market for romance novels. Novels which portray men as unrealistically as most games portray women.
Now, there are some damn fun games for both genders, as there are some damn good books for both genders. (My wife is rather fond of "the Sims" and Civ-style games.)
Probably as cost effective as laying out broadband infrastructure, but more benefit to education.
The Internet does have some benefits, but lets be honest: 26k over phone lines out in ruralsville has most of the advantage of broadband for education.
I know, the old building-full-of-books isn't as sexy as fibre optic networks, but for a "step up", a good interlibrary loan system should be able to find you the reference manuals and guides to blue-collar certifications. Broadband probably won't.
I don't see why they couldn't have the new standard
be twice the height of the current PCMCIA cards, but only half the width.
That's large enough for one of the following, flush with the end of the card:
RJ-45 jack
RJ-11 jack
2 USB ports
Firewire port
3 mini-audio jacks
Under this scheme, dongles wouldn't be needed for
the most common cards. There would be no protruding connection so that the laptop would fit without any problems in its carrying case. 2 slot machines could be arranged side to side, allowing "double-width" cards to be used for more room.
I've noticed SMARTd telling me latley that his life may be running short these days, but, after a e2fsck, it's fine./me shrugs. I still need to replace him regardless.
Er, yes.
SMART handles stuff such as "this drive takes several tries before reading the right data" or "this drive has remapped a lot of bad clusters lately". Its much more than filesystem integrety checking, and even if fsck is fixing your problems now, you might want to see why smart is pestering you.
It's the news we're fed. When networks and local news want to downplay real current events, we get this kind of crap instead. I'm not saying that there's some vast conspiracy or something, but there does seem to be a definite push for "catchy" yet unimportant news which helps keep the populace mis-informed.
The push that you speak of is the public itself: News caters to the lowest common denominator.
To be blunt, it really makes me think that most of America's youth is too stupid to know that X messages @ $0.yy ea = $lots'ocash.
Why are you limiting it to youth? How many older adults do you know that don't have any clue what they are paying for their vehicle?
Its as simple as:
down_payment + monthly_payment x
months = total_payment[1]
This requires nothing more than addition and multiplication. Yet most adults don't appear to realize that their $20k new car cost them a lot more than $20k after interest.
[1] Not including the cost of full coverage insurance, which would be as easy to calculate.
So basically, your kid has the $40 for a new video game on him, and if he goes against your will and buys it, he knows he won't be punished and the game confiscated and returned?
Watch out: Without your permission, the law will also allow your kid to be sold markers (to write on the walls with), bottled water (fun to pour on electronics), scissors (great for cutting up clothing), and even spoons (entertaining to stick in outlets)!
If Homosexuality is a CHOICE then it would be falling in the same part as religion, thus the religious right who talks of a homosexual agenda might be right and you can have your moral discussion.
First, a pre-emptive statement for the mods: I'm all for gay marriage.
With that out of the way, let me explain the failure in your logic.
If homosexuality was innate, instead of being a civil right, it may be a behavioral abnormality. In which case, it requires as much "rights" under law as pedophilia or the sort. (Under this logic, gay marriage would be damaging to both participants since it encourages their abnormality and discourages them from seeking fulfilling heterosexual marriages which may help them).
I don't agree with that homosexuality is an abnormality (other than in the strictest, most limited sense of the word), but that is a seperate argument.
There are millions of meters of 'dark fiber' in the ground already. This is the ultra high bandwidth fiber optic cable that was put in place quietly by the utilities during the boom years of the 1990s. It was all this unused fiber-optic capacity that gave rise to all the talk about video-on-demand and other high bandwidth predictions at the time.
And does it reach a little farmhouse 5 miles outside of Ely, Minnesota? Nope, didn't think so.
Almost everyplace where you want broadband has power, but they don't tend to have dark fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
i think this persons "study" was just based on how many times someone said something that seemed to be "illegal" or "legal" based on keywords in what they have to say.
Well, with names like #nethack, of course the channel is devoted to illegal activities. ;)
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.
Bullshit.
When I say "I can build it for less", I am counting for my time. Building a computer isn't rocket science: the main timesink is researching components, and that's necessary for the prebuilt route as well.
Once that is done, hop over to Newegg and order the parts up. When they arrive, spend an hour assembling them. Find a test suite and let it run overnight. Done.
Advantages:
I'm not sure about you, but I want _quality_ parts. Decent, fast, reliable drives. A modem that isn't a misguided sound card. A network card that doesn't offload its calculations to the main CPU. A motherboard with a decent chipset. A certain revision of processor. A decent sound card (dual DSP, please so I can sacrifice one to the the esound gods!). A case with the cables routed for airflow.
Why are a lot of mass market PCs slower than a homebuild PC with the same processor speed and amount of memory? Because mass market PCs tend to skimp where most customers won't notice.
"Let's face it - black people are just better than us at basketball. Of course, they're not very smart, but that's not their fault!"
(Since I have yet to be called racist on /.)
Pygmies tend to make damn awful basketball players. :)
On a more serious note: Race does affect the structure of the body. Pygmies show that height is different for at least one race. All things being equal (and they aren't): What if race affected median height? Or lung capacity? What if it affected the chances of getting certain diseases like malaria or AIDS? (It does, btw.) Does that make one race better than another?
On gender: Why are more men locked up than women, especially for violent crimes? Why do men seem to kill for different reasons than women? Why do sex offenders seem to be mostly male?
Interestingly, a lot of geeks like to joke about the pseudo-aspergers-type geek stereotype. Aspergers and Autism are both predominately male orders. If this isn't due to a gender bias in diagnosis, perhaps a lot of well-known male geekiness is due to the same causes as Aspergers. I know more than a few geeks that have insane powers of hyperconcentration.
In the NYTimes.com picture, they added a leaf... Is this some American thing? /European
Let me explain the difference between American and European censorship:
In America, you can't see naked people.
In Europe, you can't see swastikas.
In their respective locations, both types of censorship is done to protect the public. Both are about as silly. (Oh no! Think of the children! On no! We can't have neonazis! Lets limit free speech!)
PS: Wasn't it the English that started adding figleafs to statues? Unfortunately, America imported English prudishness and kept it alive long after the English realized just how silly it was.
Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies?
FVWM
May require some tweaking to look nice. :)
On the plus side, its small, its fast, its common, and its the most tweakable WM outside of sawfish.
"SF and fantasy" is a very strange way to typo "porn"...
I agree that this is a large jump to make. Just because the solar radiation isn't getting to the ground doesn't mean that the atmosphere isn't getting the full force of the solar radiation.
Ah, but the sun does dim and brighten (on at least one regular schedule that we can predict (sunspot cycle) and perhaps several cycles we can't predict) and the entire solar system is moving through a relatively dust-free region of the galaxy known as the "local bubble" but may be entering a more dusty region known as the "local fluff". :)
Just a quibble...
I'm in the midst of coding a small graphical mud as a hobby, just to play with some new ideas and exercize my code skills.
Part of that mud will be a persistant world.
I can see someone reading this whitepaper, patenting something as blatently obvious as "persistant world through database storage" and suing me.
Oh well, if it involves computers, it must be revolutionary, right?
(Do other fields get patents as blatently obvious as IT? "Mechanism to attach widget arm to wodget flapper with chain" patent granted?
Well in the *context* of the story we have encryption schemes that might be broken at any time. While we have a physical paint that stops the waves from getting out (noting that the farady cage predates fancy encryption). And will continue to do so as long as it's maintained.*
[1] UHF includes HDTV broadcasts.
[2] On the plus side, if your microwave is faulty, you stopped irridating the neighborhood kids.
Would that happen to be the same encryption that cable, satellite and content provider pirates brag about cracking, no matter how much it changes? Or did you mean some other "never to be broken" encryption?*
Lets see:
So, what do we have? Weak security schemes that involve 'security through obscurity'. Kind of like setting up a wireless network and hoping that nobody finds it. :)
Now, lets look at wireless encryption:
Yes, some encryption sucks. We know that. Some 'encryption' turns out to be slightly more than access control -- encryption on certain Microsoft formats used to be able to be broken by just erasing the password field in the document! Some encryption is a more obfucated version of ROTn.
That doesn't make all encryption schemes worthless.
Some encryption schemes have been peer-reviewed for many, many years without flaws being found. Short of a "Sneakers"-style mathmatical breakthrough, its doubtful that some of these schemes will ever be broken. Others may be vulnerable to the sheer brute force that a quantum computer may do. A good OTP systems using a good scheme to collect its random numbers will never be breakable without a pad.
Currently, there are encryption schemes which are for all practical purposes, unbreakable. Want to snoop in on a SSH session? You better be willing to compromise a computer on one end, or torture someone for information. Want to feed information from an IPSEC-protected wireless network? Break into one of the machines or break out the bamboo splints.
*Physics verses encryption? My votes for physics.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about? Other than physically torturing someone for information, or building a better brute-force machine, physics doesn't break encryption. Mathmatics does.
Crichton's "State of Fear" is fiction, and should be treated as such.
That doesn't mean that the crowd which is arguing against doing anything about global warming is nuts.
The most accepted consensus out there is that Earth's climate changes. It may change relatively fast (dryads, little ice age, etc).
Less accepted (but still widely supported) is the idea that earth's climate is getting warmer.
I agree with the first point, and find the second point rather likely.
The evidence seems to indicate the earth's climate is naturally getting warmer, and, in addition, human pollution is further raising the temperature.
This brings up an interesting issue: Earth's climate will change even in the absence of human pollution. In short, we can't stop the climate from changing.
The question is: How much and how fast will human pollution change the climate by?
This is where I disagree with people and say: We don't know.
I've seen reasonable proposals that suggest normal volcanic activity produces greenhouse gasses on an order of magnitude far greater than human activity. If so, changing our habits will only have an effect until some ubervolcano erupts someplace, dumping a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Others disagree, saying that human activity dwarfs volcanic CO2 activity. (Interesting link how 1/10th of a square mile in Italy releases 150 tons of CO2 a day! Mt Etna releases 35k tons of CO2 a day. Here's another link about the over 2 million tons of CO2 (if my math is right) a day emitted by waterways in tropical forests.)
People who disagree with me tend to reply "But if we don't know, shouldn't we err on the safe side?"
The problem is that changing our ways has a cost. Or, as I like to put it: How many lives should we sacrifice in order to prevent a .1C rise? How many acres of wilderness do you propose destroying in order to prevent a .1C rise? How can we assess the risk and figure out what we are willing to spend and how far we should go? We can't.
Instead, we seem to run around trying to pass "feel good" treaties such as Kyoto without considering their effectiveness on global warming or their human cost.
I disagree with MacOS's windowing environment. I know its a paradigm of user friendlyness and UI sexiness, but I prefer *gasp* FVWM just for the whole 'this isn't sexy, this isn't pretty, but if you want to hack up some counterintuitive interface that you like, go right ahead'.
Combine that with the fact that almost all of my apps are unix/linux, it seems easier just to wipe MacOS off a system, grab a PPC port, and do a fresh install. I have the WM I like, and a system that I can tweak. :)
There are probably a lot of cases just like this where either the hacked party isn't even aware they got hacked, or the hacked party knows they got hacked and isn't talking about it. Which makes you wonder how long our credit system can stand up to rampant large-scale ID theft.
Stock up on canned goods, folks.
Americans have one of the lowest savings rates for a developed nation. There are several studies which indicated many Americans spend more than they earn. Even worse, other than home ownership, many goods and services that Americans buy do almost nothing to help their financial health.
Now there is nothing wrong with spending money on what makes you happy as long as its within reason, but how many people out there have maxed out credit cards, drive a new car, have a full entertainment package ($80+ cable bills, cell phones with every feature and service imaginable, big "going-out" entertainment budget), and shop out of boredom, all while having little or no savings?
This "buy now, pay later, I don't have to plan for my future" is what I'm worried about. A little ID theft here and there won't kill us.
Just an additional comment.
Assume you have more than one nice server, at least two machines with ethernet connections, and all with bioses that understand the serial port (and yes, you can find x86 bioses that will do this):
Consider daisy-chaining the machines together by serial port:
Now, when a server has problems, its always possible to connect through ethernet to the server 'one hop down' from it, then connect through the serial port to the machine in question. If the machine 'one hop down' doesn't have ethernet, try the next machine 'one hop down'. Hopefully, you have at least 2 machines with ethernet connections, or else you run the risk that the faulty machine may be the machine with the ethernet card.
Needless to say, this works best with a unix-style OS.
I love my Macs, but clearly you've never used X11 on one. BALLS slow, even for X apps on the local machine (never mind the network).
There is always the Debian PPC port, and the BSD's PPC ports as well.
I'd probably do that anyways since I'm not really fond of MacOS X (no troll intended).
OTOH, mini-ITX would work just as well, probably be as quiet, and may be cheaper.
That doesn't mean that you should only target your largest audience. Women are still a huge market, even if they're not as large as men, just because the gaming industry is so huge.
Women may be a large demographic, but they are not a large gamer's market.
Therefore, a lot more game companies appeal to men than to women.
To use a different example, look at the typical book rack: most places have a huge selection of romance novels. There are book companies who specialize in romance novels, who only sell romance novels. Yet we don't run around screaming that women are uncultured, medieval thinkers just because of the huge market for romance novels. Novels which portray men as unrealistically as most games portray women.
Now, there are some damn fun games for both genders, as there are some damn good books for both genders. (My wife is rather fond of "the Sims" and Civ-style games.)
Public Libraries!
Probably as cost effective as laying out broadband infrastructure, but more benefit to education.
The Internet does have some benefits, but lets be honest: 26k over phone lines out in ruralsville has most of the advantage of broadband for education.
I know, the old building-full-of-books isn't as sexy as fibre optic networks, but for a "step up", a good interlibrary loan system should be able to find you the reference manuals and guides to blue-collar certifications. Broadband probably won't.
I don't see why they couldn't have the new standard be twice the height of the current PCMCIA cards, but only half the width.
That's large enough for one of the following, flush with the end of the card:
Under this scheme, dongles wouldn't be needed for the most common cards. There would be no protruding connection so that the laptop would fit without any problems in its carrying case. 2 slot machines could be arranged side to side, allowing "double-width" cards to be used for more room.
I've noticed SMARTd telling me latley that his life may be running short these days, but, after a e2fsck, it's fine. /me shrugs. I still need to replace him regardless.
Er, yes.
SMART handles stuff such as "this drive takes several tries before reading the right data" or "this drive has remapped a lot of bad clusters lately". Its much more than filesystem integrety checking, and even if fsck is fixing your problems now, you might want to see why smart is pestering you.
More Info
It's the news we're fed. When networks and local news want to downplay real current events, we get this kind of crap instead. I'm not saying that there's some vast conspiracy or something, but there does seem to be a definite push for "catchy" yet unimportant news which helps keep the populace mis-informed.
The push that you speak of is the public itself: News caters to the lowest common denominator.
Blame the public.
I find that the following quote explains nethack vs. commercial games quite well:
"Commercial games want you to live [win], Nethack doesn't care if you live or die."
There is the following corollary as well:
Slash'em wants you to die.
To be blunt, it really makes me think that most of America's youth is too stupid to know that X messages @ $0.yy ea = $lots'ocash.
Why are you limiting it to youth? How many older adults do you know that don't have any clue what they are paying for their vehicle?
Its as simple as:
down_payment + monthly_payment x months = total_payment[1]
This requires nothing more than addition and multiplication. Yet most adults don't appear to realize that their $20k new car cost them a lot more than $20k after interest.
[1] Not including the cost of full coverage insurance, which would be as easy to calculate.
So basically, your kid has the $40 for a new video game on him, and if he goes against your will and buys it, he knows he won't be punished and the game confiscated and returned?
Watch out: Without your permission, the law will also allow your kid to be sold markers (to write on the walls with), bottled water (fun to pour on electronics), scissors (great for cutting up clothing), and even spoons (entertaining to stick in outlets)!
If Homosexuality is a CHOICE then it would be falling in the same part as religion, thus the religious right who talks of a homosexual agenda might be right and you can have your moral discussion.
First, a pre-emptive statement for the mods: I'm all for gay marriage.
With that out of the way, let me explain the failure in your logic.
If homosexuality was innate, instead of being a civil right, it may be a behavioral abnormality. In which case, it requires as much "rights" under law as pedophilia or the sort. (Under this logic, gay marriage would be damaging to both participants since it encourages their abnormality and discourages them from seeking fulfilling heterosexual marriages which may help them).
I don't agree with that homosexuality is an abnormality (other than in the strictest, most limited sense of the word), but that is a seperate argument.
There are millions of meters of 'dark fiber' in the ground already. This is the ultra high bandwidth fiber optic cable that was put in place quietly by the utilities during the boom years of the 1990s. It was all this unused fiber-optic capacity that gave rise to all the talk about video-on-demand and other high bandwidth predictions at the time.
And does it reach a little farmhouse 5 miles outside of Ely, Minnesota? Nope, didn't think so.
Almost everyplace where you want broadband has power, but they don't tend to have dark fiber.