Yes, submachineguns are more effective and are better for home defense. They are not offensive weapons; effective range is limited to a hundred meters or so.
Perhaps your definition of "offensive" and mine differ. Being able to effectively use a submachine gun from a football field away seems like it's appropriate for all sorts of offensive uses, and certainly good enough to clean out an office building or two in short order.
you better move to New York or California if you want your vote to count for anything
That's just an absurd line of reasoning. The Democrats are already a lock on all of both NY and CA, and by no means does that guarantee them the election. Doing away with the Electoral College would actually allow some of the Republicans in both those states to have their voices heard.
There's simply no rational reason why a vote in Ohio should have such a vastly more significant impact on the election that does my vote in Texas.
With the money they spent, they could have easily purchased a diet book with all the nutritional information already compiled in it
Could the consumer really buy a book that would allow them to compare the trans-fatty acid content of Oreos vs CheezIts? Or, in the absense of the regulations, would they have no idea about which item is, in this particular aspect, healthier?
Funny, I was pretty sure the 1GB = 1000MB. Perhaps you should do a little more research yourself, and note that what you're thinking of is 1GiB = 1024MiB
Yes, I know that technically there's such a thing as GiB and MiB, but absolutely no one I know uses them, and I'm a programmer. In fact, I've never heard anyone say "Gibibyte" or "Mebibyte" in my life. Ever. Plus, my OS (WinXP) doesn't use MiB or GiB.
Point being, I buy a hard drive that's advertized as being 60GB. I take it home, put it in my computer, and it's reported as being 55.8GB. Even if it's technically correct, it sure seems like misleading advertising to me.
For those pro-free-market folks out there, where are all the companies actually putting 100GiB on the standard "100GB" drive? Wouldn't the lack of deception be benefical to them? Or could, perhaps, it be true that deception actually helps the bottom line in some situations?
I think you are reversing things here. It's with *regulated* markets that producers have an incentive to lie on their labels.
How so? If there are standardized labels and an organization that people recognize and trust, I bet that the public outrage is going to be higher than if some independent organization makes a complaint about false labeling.
Furthermore, regulated labeling means that companies can't leave out information that would be damaging to them. Do you think that food high in saturated fat would be making that information public and widespread if not for standardized labeling?
Or do you believe that, just because the law says so, no one will do otherwise?
I believe they WILL provide the information that is required of them, and that if they DO lie about it, it will be a bigger deal.
In an unregulated market, scrupulous suppliers gain a reputation advantage, as labels in general are less likely to be automatically trusted, so they can gain from being trusted more than their rivals.
The problem with that is that scrupulousness isn't foremost in the consumer's mind when making a purchase (in almost all cases cost is). Furthermore, without regulation they can pretty much just lie on their labels, and how many consumers will be able to figure that out?
I can appreciate the free market in the abstract, but when looked at practically, the power is too concentrated in the hands of corporations, and consumers end up getting screwed.
They have an opinion, they ARE informed, they just don't think their vote counts or matters. You and I know this isn't true
Actually, I live in Texas, where my vote doesn't count. My hope is that by getting more politically informed, people will get more fed up with the situation and work towards better voting systems.
The uninformed person is the one who thinks voting isn't worth the time or the effort.
Unless that person happens to be informed enough that they realize just how broken the American political system is.
I'm living in Texas, so I harbor no illusions that my Presidential vote is going to make a whit of difference. And thanks to the unbelievably blatant and brazen gerrymandering that our lovely Republican leadership has just forced through, even my local Congressional races have become ridiculously one-sided.
I'll inform myself, and vote, but I realize that it's largely a symbolic gesture. It's sad when my political conversations with my parents (who live in Ohio) hold FAR more political weight than does my actual vote.
Motivating someone to vote is a respectable goal no matter what the means.
Well that's a bit of a ridiculous statement -- I doubt you'd support my motivating someone to vote via the use of a shotgun.
I think one of the points that are trying to be made is that voting, in and of itself, isn't a worthy goal. Being informed enough to want to voice your political opinion is the goal that we should be shooting for. If you're voting simply because you feel obligated to or because it's "cool" without taking the time to actually educate yourself on the issues and form a coherent, defensible position...you're doing no favors to your country.
I've always found the "rock the vote"-type efforts to be somewhat putting the cart ahead of the horse -- voting isn't what we should be encouraging -- developing a political opinion that citizens want to voice is.
Are there web resources that clearly explain the technical details of how to arrive at this conclusion? While I suspect you are correct, it would be nice to have a URL that I could point people toward.
There is, and it'e even on the electionmethods.org site itself. Here is the link.
Every single one I know puts the health and well-being of their cats above any financial concern.
Yet some health problems are due to the purebreeding itself. Yes, I'm sure they take very good care of the cats they breed, but there's a certain amount of damage that is done simply by the act of purebreeding.
For example, my parents have had 4 purebreed Golden Retrievers which have a far higher incidence of hip dysplasia than do mixed breeds.
Coupled with the fact that there are thousands of cats and dogs euthanized for lack of adoption and I have a hard time empathising with those that intentionally breed more animals and by doing so encourage hereditary defects.
Personally I'd be happy with traffic lights that were just a little bit smarter. Like:
1. Not turning yellow when there is ONE more car remaining to make a left turn. 2. Trying to prevent cars from waiting multiple cycles in general. 3. Doing very short green lights when there are only a few cars waiting. 4. Adjusting timing based on time-of-day and traffic patterns.
There have been attempts to "smarten up" lights here in Austin, but half the time they just end up misreading the situation and doing something wacky like giving a special left turn green for 30 seconds when there's no one waiting to turn left. Couple that with some of the nation's longest red lights, and you get one of the nation's highest rates of red lights being run.
Even a good web-based feedback mechanism where the public can point out poorly timed lights would be a huge benefit.
The other significant benefit is in cropping. If you take a high-res photo, you can crop and zoom in without noticing a drop in image quality.
The optics of the camera also play a large part in how much you can crop an image and still have it look good. Even the difference in lenses between my Canon Powershot 2 and my wife's Cannon S400 is significant enough to be pretty noticable when cropping photos.
Presumaly they paired this high a megapixel CMOS with some nice optics, so you're probably right in this case. But it's not always true that higher megapixel indicates better cropping ability.
They may be spoilers, but the American election process is so out of whack that third party candidates are simply not going to have any realistic chance at being elected. You're complaining about the effect rather than the cause -- once third-parties are viable, they will be included in the debates. Including them now would just be a waste of time.
How are these engines 'better'? More realistic physics models? Curved surfaces? Support for DX9 shaders? How do any of these things make a game more fun?
They help create a more believable world that more easily immerses the player in the gameplay experience.
Are they the most important thing? Of course not, and yes they're often overemphasized. But I'd wager my HL2 gameplay experience is going to be considerably more compelling in the Source in than it would be in the Build (original Duke Nuke'm) engine.
Translation: without a 97-page "agreement" where the people who do all the work give away every last shred of value in the product in exchange for NOTHING so the people who do no work can stuff their pockets.
Translation: without an ambitious game design that will require millions of dollars of capital to develop before haivng any hope of becoming a saleable product and recouping those costs.
Disclaimer: I'm a professional game developer and no lover of publishers...I just don't think it's productive to think of them as nothing but evil money-grubbing corporations.
And I can always spot Windows devs at conferences - they're the ones who will argue to the death that assembly is obsolete
Unless you're writing very performance-critical device drivers, assembly is dead. And even then, C will probably do just fine.
I develop video games for a living so just about everything I write needs to be fast (and consistent, spikes aren't allowed), and we do everything in C++. We have to pay close attention so that we don't end up running a whole lot of code that we don't intend to, but I can guarantee that rewriting even the slowest bits in assembly wouldn't make any appreciable performance difference.
In fact, with the exception of a software renderer seven years ago, all of our performance issues have been much higher level than that. Agorithms for database queries, data access patterns blowing out your caches, and GPU stalls are the things that hurt modern performance-critical software (at least in my domain). Assembly isn't going to do a thing about any of those problems.
Unless your whole app does one very specific, narrowly-scoped thing (like maybe a video codec), assembly is just not worth your time.
It pains me a bit to say that -- I learned all my graphics programming in assembly and have been in a few "write a game in 256 bytes" competitions, so assembly has a certain nostalgic charm. But there's just no way 99.9% of windows programmers should even be thinking about writing assembly code.
One thing being able to code in assembly is good for is debugging, though -- being able to drop down into the disassembly and track exactly what's going on is often invaluable.
Their disadvantage is that HDTV can be quite the high-bandwidth application, and that means the limitations of the PCI bus, and even the AGP connection can sometimes cause quality loss.
Not that I've ever experienced and I've been using a HiPix for years. HD isn't that high-bandwidth...it's only 19.2Mb/s, or 2.4MB/s. The standard 33Mhz PCI bus spec is for 133MB/s so there's plenty of headroom there.
Far more of a concern is how fast you can write those bits to disk, though even there I've never had a problem.
Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right?
on
SpamAssassin 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So I've heard good things about SpamAssassin and headed over the webpage to figure out what I needed to do to install, and I found this.
I'm probably going to flamed for this, but that install process is ridiculous. I'm not even close to being a newbie, but there's no way I'd go through that much hassle to install a spamblocker compared to something like SpamBayes that does a standard windows install and hooks right into Outlook. Does anyone thing that these things are reasonable?
1. I'm supposed to extract it to the root of my drive. Sorry, my root is sacrosanct. If the/. crowd is going to complain about RealPlayer dumping shortcuts in my desktop, quickstart bar, and main start menu, how is SpamAssassin making directories in my root any better? At least I can delete the stuff RealPlayer litters around.
2. I've got to install Perl modules? And it doesn't work with certain versions of Perl? The install should include whatever it needs to run. Don't make me track down some particular version of outside software.
3. I've got to generate a batch file and run it to generate the documentation? Why not just include the generated documentation?
4. Step 10 of the install FAQ mentions a D drive. I don't have a D drive. Does SpamAssassin really require TWO drives to run/test properly?
5. The whole install process includes 13 steps, some of which are fairly complicated.
This is one of the reasons why the whole open-source initiative has such a bad, pointy-headed reputation. Where is the focus on usability and user-friendliness? I often get the impression that it's "not cool" to actually put time and energy into making your software anything other that esoteric in its usage. I realy would like to try SpamAssassin, but dealing with the minor annoyances of SpamBayes for the next six months is clearly less work than installing SpamAssassin today. Why doesn't that bother anyone?
I'm probably going get either flamed or ignored for this post, but I would appreciate a reasonable response if there is one. We'll see I guess.
This is a prime example of survival of the fittest. You friend was stupid enough to be pointing a loaded gun at himself.
Well, to be fair, he was only 10 years old at the time.
And say what you will about education being an important part of owning a gun...so long as guns exist in our society, there will be uneducated people with them. It's part-and-parcel.
It's also worth noting that supposedly "pro-gun-education" organizations like the NRA have fought against training being required to purchase a gun.
I know a handful of people that are alive today because they had their pistol with them and ended up in a situation they didn't start nor want to be in.
And I know not a single person that can be said for. I know one person who might be dead if they had a gun and a scary situation escalated, and another who was almost killed when a gun he was looking at accidentally discharged.
Point being, personal experience might not be the best thing to base this kind of stuff on.
Cutting bitrates means you are getting creative with how much frequency information you throw away, but doesn't that seem backward? The whole point of HDTV is to get more pixels, which means *higher* frequency information than you could display otherwise. Instead we're all hell-bent on quantizing it all away with all these DCT-style algorithms.
Well given that you're going to be cutting out some higher frequencies no matter what codec you use, why not use the one that's the most creative about it? The size of Blu-Ray discs is known, so content authors know what bitrates they have to work with. Why not get the most out of that bitrate?
Slashdot Mirror
There's simply no rational reason why a vote in Ohio should have such a vastly more significant impact on the election that does my vote in Texas.
Point being, I buy a hard drive that's advertized as being 60GB. I take it home, put it in my computer, and it's reported as being 55.8GB. Even if it's technically correct, it sure seems like misleading advertising to me.
For those pro-free-market folks out there, where are all the companies actually putting 100GiB on the standard "100GB" drive? Wouldn't the lack of deception be benefical to them? Or could, perhaps, it be true that deception actually helps the bottom line in some situations?
Furthermore, regulated labeling means that companies can't leave out information that would be damaging to them. Do you think that food high in saturated fat would be making that information public and widespread if not for standardized labeling?
I believe they WILL provide the information that is required of them, and that if they DO lie about it, it will be a bigger deal.
I can appreciate the free market in the abstract, but when looked at practically, the power is too concentrated in the hands of corporations, and consumers end up getting screwed.
But I'm not holding my breath.
I'm living in Texas, so I harbor no illusions that my Presidential vote is going to make a whit of difference. And thanks to the unbelievably blatant and brazen gerrymandering that our lovely Republican leadership has just forced through, even my local Congressional races have become ridiculously one-sided.
I'll inform myself, and vote, but I realize that it's largely a symbolic gesture. It's sad when my political conversations with my parents (who live in Ohio) hold FAR more political weight than does my actual vote.
I think one of the points that are trying to be made is that voting, in and of itself, isn't a worthy goal. Being informed enough to want to voice your political opinion is the goal that we should be shooting for. If you're voting simply because you feel obligated to or because it's "cool" without taking the time to actually educate yourself on the issues and form a coherent, defensible position...you're doing no favors to your country.
I've always found the "rock the vote"-type efforts to be somewhat putting the cart ahead of the horse -- voting isn't what we should be encouraging -- developing a political opinion that citizens want to voice is.
I find the essay extremely compelling.
I can't resist, I just love this picture so much.
We have two cats, Felix and Oscar. Yes, they live up to their names perfectly.
For example, my parents have had 4 purebreed Golden Retrievers which have a far higher incidence of hip dysplasia than do mixed breeds.
Coupled with the fact that there are thousands of cats and dogs euthanized for lack of adoption and I have a hard time empathising with those that intentionally breed more animals and by doing so encourage hereditary defects.
Personally I'd be happy with traffic lights that were just a little bit smarter. Like:
1. Not turning yellow when there is ONE more car remaining to make a left turn.
2. Trying to prevent cars from waiting multiple cycles in general.
3. Doing very short green lights when there are only a few cars waiting.
4. Adjusting timing based on time-of-day and traffic patterns.
There have been attempts to "smarten up" lights here in Austin, but half the time they just end up misreading the situation and doing something wacky like giving a special left turn green for 30 seconds when there's no one waiting to turn left. Couple that with some of the nation's longest red lights, and you get one of the nation's highest rates of red lights being run.
Even a good web-based feedback mechanism where the public can point out poorly timed lights would be a huge benefit.
Presumaly they paired this high a megapixel CMOS with some nice optics, so you're probably right in this case. But it's not always true that higher megapixel indicates better cropping ability.
They may be spoilers, but the American election process is so out of whack that third party candidates are simply not going to have any realistic chance at being elected. You're complaining about the effect rather than the cause -- once third-parties are viable, they will be included in the debates. Including them now would just be a waste of time.
Take a look at electionmethods.org, and in particular the page on Why the Electoral College Should be Abolished.
Are they the most important thing? Of course not, and yes they're often overemphasized. But I'd wager my HL2 gameplay experience is going to be considerably more compelling in the Source in than it would be in the Build (original Duke Nuke'm) engine.
Disclaimer: I'm a professional game developer and no lover of publishers...I just don't think it's productive to think of them as nothing but evil money-grubbing corporations.
I develop video games for a living so just about everything I write needs to be fast (and consistent, spikes aren't allowed), and we do everything in C++. We have to pay close attention so that we don't end up running a whole lot of code that we don't intend to, but I can guarantee that rewriting even the slowest bits in assembly wouldn't make any appreciable performance difference.
In fact, with the exception of a software renderer seven years ago, all of our performance issues have been much higher level than that. Agorithms for database queries, data access patterns blowing out your caches, and GPU stalls are the things that hurt modern performance-critical software (at least in my domain). Assembly isn't going to do a thing about any of those problems.
Unless your whole app does one very specific, narrowly-scoped thing (like maybe a video codec), assembly is just not worth your time.
It pains me a bit to say that -- I learned all my graphics programming in assembly and have been in a few "write a game in 256 bytes" competitions, so assembly has a certain nostalgic charm. But there's just no way 99.9% of windows programmers should even be thinking about writing assembly code.
One thing being able to code in assembly is good for is debugging, though -- being able to drop down into the disassembly and track exactly what's going on is often invaluable.
Far more of a concern is how fast you can write those bits to disk, though even there I've never had a problem.
So I've heard good things about SpamAssassin and headed over the webpage to figure out what I needed to do to install, and I found this.
/. crowd is going to complain about RealPlayer dumping shortcuts in my desktop, quickstart bar, and main start menu, how is SpamAssassin making directories in my root any better? At least I can delete the stuff RealPlayer litters around.
I'm probably going to flamed for this, but that install process is ridiculous. I'm not even close to being a newbie, but there's no way I'd go through that much hassle to install a spamblocker compared to something like SpamBayes that does a standard windows install and hooks right into Outlook. Does anyone thing that these things are reasonable?
1. I'm supposed to extract it to the root of my drive. Sorry, my root is sacrosanct. If the
2. I've got to install Perl modules? And it doesn't work with certain versions of Perl? The install should include whatever it needs to run. Don't make me track down some particular version of outside software.
3. I've got to generate a batch file and run it to generate the documentation? Why not just include the generated documentation?
4. Step 10 of the install FAQ mentions a D drive. I don't have a D drive. Does SpamAssassin really require TWO drives to run/test properly?
5. The whole install process includes 13 steps, some of which are fairly complicated.
This is one of the reasons why the whole open-source initiative has such a bad, pointy-headed reputation. Where is the focus on usability and user-friendliness? I often get the impression that it's "not cool" to actually put time and energy into making your software anything other that esoteric in its usage. I realy would like to try SpamAssassin, but dealing with the minor annoyances of SpamBayes for the next six months is clearly less work than installing SpamAssassin today. Why doesn't that bother anyone?
I'm probably going get either flamed or ignored for this post, but I would appreciate a reasonable response if there is one. We'll see I guess.
And say what you will about education being an important part of owning a gun...so long as guns exist in our society, there will be uneducated people with them. It's part-and-parcel.
It's also worth noting that supposedly "pro-gun-education" organizations like the NRA have fought against training being required to purchase a gun.
Point being, personal experience might not be the best thing to base this kind of stuff on.