First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a
point-of-view from which they appear circular.
This would necessarily hold true purely by geometry
(at least using the standard meaning of "elliptical galaxy"),
even if his more rigorous condition (Earth happens to occupy
that magic spot) has no cosmological basis.
Although we can hypothesize the existance of some bizarre shape
that always looks longer than its width from any angle, that
seems a bit of a stretch (no topology-geek pun intended) when
just about every sufficiently-large object in the universe we
know of looks like some form of standard 3d elliptical blob.
Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort
of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results.
Having myself done modelling and analysis of real-world (cognitive
psychology testing) data, I can assure you that in most cases, you
can get a FAR better significance level by randomized simulations
than trying to use preexisting data (or worse, just assume everything
as Gaussian, which I've seen far more often than I'd like to admit).
In the lab, you
consider yourself lucky to have an n>10; in the local universe, we
only have so many galaxies visible as more than a nondescript pinpoint
of light. In both cases, you can quickly generate billions of
samples that lack a preferential value for the traits of interest,
giving you a much better population to compare against.
this seems to put a lower bound on the distance over which
we can assume the universe is isotropic
I have to wonder - Could this particular anisotropy account for
the Voyager paradox? That would set a much lower bound...
Even if not, though, I really find this sort of anomaly fascinating.
Almost everything cosmology has found since the dawn of modern science
has pointed to a bleak, cold, basically empty univers that goes on
identically forever in every direction. Even learning that the universe
has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot more
comforting.
is what the Judge actually did to learn what RAM does
and the suitable means to archive it.
Simple answer - The MPAA asked for it (no doubt doing their
best not to burst out laughing), describing it as absolutely
critical to making their case, with probably a snipe about
how those damned pirates would try to get out of it by claiming
they couldn't realistically get to it.
As for the suitable means to archive it, we don't really
need to ask that here on Slashdot, because we already know
the answer - You can't, in practice. In theory,
you could set up a system with some sort of virtual memory transaction
log, but it would run so slowly as to make subpoena-ing its
contents irrelevant ("well, after a two week boot time, we've
finally gotten to the login screen. We expect to have a shell
session by Saturday...").
Single point of failure should a catastrophe happen.
User's can't go in and break the system.
There is one system to maintain, one anti-virus package, one system
to back up and so on.
All of the benefits you mention depend on all software
running as a service, not just MS Office and a few other "enterprise"
apps. That simply won't ever happen, even if everyone buys into
this scam-of-a-revenue-model, because something absolutely
critical won't play well with others.
You are not in control of your own destiny.
And it all comes down to that one point. Every other fact or
opinion aside, what does it mean when Microsoft EOL'ing a product
means you no longer have any program with which to review the
last ten years' worth of customer transactions or tax records?
"Sorry, you'll have to cancel that audit, Microsoft cut us off.
But no doubt the IRS understands completely and trusts that we
filed accurately, right?"
It's easy to make a superficial comparison with other
countries - particularly European - who have higher population
densities. I'd like to see a study in which the figures for
broadband access were weighted for density.
New England (and this article refer to NH) does have a
population density, including distribution of urban-vs-rural areas,
comparable to Western Europe.
Face it, "We're number 17!". Broadband availability in the US
sucks, and the mono/duopolist providers have no interest in
improving coverage (quite the opposite, they've actively fought
changes in the way they can report availability statistics that
would paint a more accurate picture).
but the best YOU can do is to show total indifference. MPAA is a has-been on
the way down, and is best ignored, lest it drag you with it.
Bingo.
Colleges love PR opportunities. They don't love people who take it upon themselves to spoil
PR opportunities. Does the FP author like his job?
The single most effective way to "confront" this guy involves actively ignoring him.
The FP author could start an underground (since he should want nothing to do with it,
officially) movement to boycott any event attended by Taylor. Make sure he speaks to
empty rooms, rubs elbows with ghosts, and even eats in near-solitude. Getting
a sizeable chunk of the faculty in on it would help greatly (those intimate champagne
and fois-gras socials can look even more empty than a vacant lecture hall).
Guys like that thrive on opposition. Even given a chance to educate the
students beforehand and fair debate, he'll just twist the message into whatever
he wants. So don't give him that chance. Ignore him as befits an irrelevant dinosaur.
Skip to Linux? Doesn't sound to me like you're a gamer then
which is interesting in a thread about gaming.
In the sense that you mean, no, not a hardcore gamer. If I can't
play "Halo 6 Ultimate Special Edition Gold SE" until emulation catches up
to that level of CPU/GPU power in another few years, I won't cry over it.
That said...
Linux is just not a realistic choice for people like myself who
own countless games that were never ported outside of Windows.
1) Older games frequently run better in emulation than they ever did on real
hardware. Remember really trying to get DX6 to support your video card and
cutting-edge non-standard gamepad? Ever played a 386-era CPU-throttled game on an
Athlon 64?
2) Old "real" Windows CDs (not to mention the games themselves) go cheap
second-hand. Looked at the HDD reqs lately for a kickass Win95 system compared
to, say, the size of a typical USB drive (hint: Set your BIOS to full USB emulation
mode, anything older than Win2k won't know the difference)?
3) Personally, I care more about gameplay than twitch. In the past year, I've put
more hours into SimCity 2000 than the typical (but employed) hardcore gamer has into
the latest disposeable FPS.
That said, even as a non-twitch gamer, I think YOU missed the point
here. By doing their best to force Vista on the gaming world by using DX10 for
leverage, Microsoft themselves have deprived you of your very point - Linux
didn't hold a candle to Windows when it came to gaming. Thank you, Microsoft,
for trying to fix that.
This cannot be put back into XP because this sort of
control and separation could not be done in XP.
I call BS.
At the lowest level, a video driver (for XP or any architecture,
really) just translates requests from applications (including the OS
itself) into something the video card understands. Whether the video
hardware can handle multiple simultaneous renderings or not depends only
on the hardware and the API (in this case, Direct X provides the API, as
exported by the actual driver).
For XP to support DX10 would require literally nothing more than
compatible hardware with functional drivers supporting the DX10 API.
Now, some older apps may cause problems by trying to monopolize access
to the screen, but that differs entirely from saying XP can't
do it.
The whole driver-OS interface was changed.
Well... Yes, it has, because the OS changed. Which makes that something
of a circular argument - DX10 will only run on Vista because the
interface changed because OS changed and the only DX10 implementation
uses that new interface. And Apache for Linux doesn't run on Windows,
surprisingly enough.
I never understood why people get all excited about
the piratebay and torrentspy. They are shitty trackers
filled with horribly named, low quality garbage.
For the same reason the US fought in Vietnam and Korea,
and imposed sanctions on Cuba in the first place (though
we seem to have forgotten the "why" of that one, considering
that the former Soviet Union collapsed quite a few years
ago now).
If you can trick your enemy into attacking a strawman rather than
your real vulnerabilities, you pretend to defend that strawman as
long as you can (or until your enemy gets a clue, which seems
safely outside the realm of possibility with the MPAA).
Hell, I personally consider the entirety of P2P as one nice
strawman for the RIAA and MPAA to waste resources on. The real
pirates simply trade exteral HDDs these days, and I'd like to see
the **AA try to stop that. But by all means, we should
encourage them to keep flailing at grannies and foreign torrent
trackers as long as they seem willing.
Do you get several failed requests before a successful one?
The tor exit node would have to be outside the US, so I imagine
there must be many failed queries for every success.
Thanks to a cultural obsession with (fighting) child porn in the US,
I would expect just the opposite - No sane American would allow
exit connections unless they had high enough 3rd party traffic to claim
basically no control over or knowledge of the vast majority of
the content (ie, an ISP, and they rarely give anything away).
And if the real feds don't ruin you, Dateline will, regardless of
the actual facts. I can just about hear the announcement: "Up next,
the newest threat to your children: We put 250 megs of fake child
porn on a website, and found we could retrieve it anonymously with
a new program for terrorists called Tor. We've hunted down,
had fired, and forwarded evidence to the DA about the beast running
this smut ring, known perversely as 'Exit Node'.
Another 16 months of this fuckwad Bush/Cheney administration to endure.
You assume, of course, that whatever "attack" they have planned to allow
Bush to declare martial law a month or two before the election doesn't
kill us.
Or did you mean that you think it will happen mere days before the election?
if they did, asshat downloaders would lawyer the total and if
lets say it was 100, they'd use 99.9999
I really don't see the problem there - If you sell 100GB/mo, you damned
well better have the capacity to provide 100GB/mo.
Likewise, if you have no caps, you damned well better have the ability
to provide something approaching 3Mb/s 24/7.
Okay, cue all the apologists
complaining about how much that would actually cost - Because I understand
that, and simply do not care in the least. No sympathy. If you don't have
a dozen apples, don't sell me a dozen apples then try to back out of the
deal after I eat four of them on the grounds that you consider me
"hungrier than the average customer".
Hitting those caps is very difficult to do unless you're running non
stop multiple torrents.
BS. Welcome to the world of streaming video as a reality. You can
easily blow through a gig checking out YouTube for an hour.
Going higher-quality, ever used NetFlix's "Watch now" feature? Someone
with no life could, doing NOTHING ELSE with their network connection,
chew through half a terabyte each month watching movies.
From 500MB game demos, to the latest Linux distro, to remote online
filesystems... The argument that you can't legally, or even the weaker
"easily", chew through 5-10GB per day just doesn't hold true any more.
I'd consider it hard to use less than 50GB per month, and that
only counts legal uses.
it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything.
When we look directly at something, everything else in our field of vision
goes blurry. But we don't notice that, because our brains
automatically filter it out. Subjectively, our entire world always stays
in focus, because wherever we look, we focus.
Now, used "artistically"... Yes, blurry backgrounds force me to miss
details that the director doesn't want me to know yet - Who blurrily
crept up on the protagonist? Did that car in the background belong
to the prime suspect? Gaffer or extra or shadowy main character?
As someone easily distracted in real life, however, I find such forced
attention-drawing one of the single most annoying techniques in modern
cinematography (right after glaringly stupid protagonists, but I'll save
that for another rant). If the
director wants to limit my knowledge to first-person rather than
omnipotent observer, fine, just keep any extra detail out-of-frame,
rather than out-of-focus. But if I wouldn't actually have missed
those details as an actual observer, it just pisses me off that the
director denies me them, in effect saying "sorry, I consider you
too dumb to notice this, but can't help teasing you a bit".
Now, the use of over-saturation, that might give a neat effect or it might
look like crap. But I would like to see everything always in focus.
Nothing "artistic" about it.
Police are handing out speeding tickets to drivers who exceed secret limit.
I wouldn't have responded (and from the subject, thought one of your child posts had already
made this point), but apparently some people don't "get" the problem here...
When you stay within more-or-less "tolerated" speeds above the posted limit, you do so
knowing the posted speed and that, at least theoretically, you could get a ticked if
a cop wants to give you a hard time (someone mentioned a few states officially allow a
certain headroom - True or not, police always have the nebulous "reckless driving"
or "driving to endanger" charge when they can't stick you with anything else).
With arbitrary broadband caps, what "official but rarely enforced" limit could we stay within
to avoid the problem? 5GB/mo? 50? 500? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in
this thread, and that causes the problem here.
If I violate the TOS, however arbitrary they seem, I can at least take some comfort in
the fact that I chose to do so. If I exceed a magical unpublished number, the
situation goes from "irregular enforcement of a written policy" to "we don't like you,
go away".
Making this even worse, the local cable franchise almost always has a monopoly or at best
a duopoly on broadband service. Imagine if the phone company could drop you because you
actually use all that free local calling they offer.
I'm 32 and I have never had any faith or positive feelings towards Congress. I faintly remember
liking Reagan, but at the time I knew nothing of politics or policies, just that Regan gave good
speeches. Outside of that I have never felt proud of our government, or had an elected leader that
I actually wanted to follow.
"The America you come from. Who was president when you left?"
"I didn't leave. Or maybe... Well. Clinton. Bill Clinton."
"And before him?"
"George Bush".
"Ah. And before Bush, Reagan, and before him... Who?"
"Jimmy Carter."
"Ah, you come from one of those Americas. You have my sympathy."
There's no sin in using a session cookie to provide dynamic content.
Explain to me how the offending comic
counts as "dynamic content" such that it would conceivably require a cookie to get to?
It uses a static JPG, at a static path, linked by a static (except for ads) page, accessible via a
well-defined click-path from the Salon main page. Nothing about that requires cookies.
Now, personally I have stopped caring about cookies, since Firefox will clear them (and all
"private data") on exit. But mechanism aside, I must second the GP's point - No cookie for you,
Salon! Except that instead of depriving myself of whatever I may want to see there, I simply
let them set whatever useless (and short-lived) cookies they want, if it makes them feel better to
think they've "tracked" a "new" viewer every time I visit.
should this news article be moderated as troll bait?
Well, it counts as both "News for Nerds" (despite the odd number of posters saying they've
never heard of it) and "Stuff that Matters" (when censorship* stops mattering,
we've lost the game).
As for whether or not it trolls the target audience - The announcement reads in an
extremely neutral way. No finger-pointing, no discussion of why or what content
the papers may have objected to; no editorializing on the fairness of such
censorship*. As announcements of disturbing facts go, I'd have to call this
one as un-troll-like as possible given the circumstances.
I have to wonder, though, what it says about us that even a vanilla announcement
of the non-publishing of a comic dealing with Islam warrants such delicate wording and
still ends up viewed as potential troll-fodder... Sad, really.
* Of the non-governmental kind; The 1st amendment doesnt define censorship, it just
prohibits certain kinds of censorship.
Yes and no. If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even
with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption.
For a user-oriented workstation, true. Even with the Via C7, a single
HDD (at spin-up, anyway) could consume more than the CPU.
I think, though, these things mostly don't go into actual desktop machines.
They go into car audio solutions (with a 4x20 non-backlit LCD or even VFD),
or routers (headless and with CF or USB storage) or various low-demand
servers (also headless).
But for use in a laptop, yes, a backlit LCD would dwarf this CPU for
power consumption. But then, in a laptop, ever watt matters - If this
CPU only cuts the total load by 10%, that means 10% more runtime on a
given battery, or the same runtime with a smaller and lighter battery.
Also, consider that low-power system designers typically pick the
lowest fruit first... If we have a 1W CPU, solid-state primary storage,
that leaves the LCD as the worst offender. How long will it take them
to find ways to improve that? Whether making better use of
ambient light (I've never understood why laptop screens don't have
a clear/frosted back anyway, giving you the option of turning off
the backlight), or using active OLED pixels that don't require an
external light source, or something else entirely new and different.
I, for one, look forward to a moderately powerful portable PC that can
run for over a day on a pair of AA batteries.
And I have nothing against that. "Grape-pickers" and all
that - Thanks for the cheap stuff you've destroyed your bodies
and your local environment to produce for us; enjoy the increasingly
less valuable paper we traded it for (and to think, we laugh
in school when we first learn the price of Manhattan...).
Slashdot Mirror
First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
This would necessarily hold true purely by geometry (at least using the standard meaning of "elliptical galaxy"), even if his more rigorous condition (Earth happens to occupy that magic spot) has no cosmological basis.
Although we can hypothesize the existance of some bizarre shape that always looks longer than its width from any angle, that seems a bit of a stretch (no topology-geek pun intended) when just about every sufficiently-large object in the universe we know of looks like some form of standard 3d elliptical blob.
Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results.
Having myself done modelling and analysis of real-world (cognitive psychology testing) data, I can assure you that in most cases, you can get a FAR better significance level by randomized simulations than trying to use preexisting data (or worse, just assume everything as Gaussian, which I've seen far more often than I'd like to admit). In the lab, you consider yourself lucky to have an n>10; in the local universe, we only have so many galaxies visible as more than a nondescript pinpoint of light. In both cases, you can quickly generate billions of samples that lack a preferential value for the traits of interest, giving you a much better population to compare against.
this seems to put a lower bound on the distance over which we can assume the universe is isotropic
I have to wonder - Could this particular anisotropy account for the Voyager paradox? That would set a much lower bound...
Even if not, though, I really find this sort of anomaly fascinating. Almost everything cosmology has found since the dawn of modern science has pointed to a bleak, cold, basically empty univers that goes on identically forever in every direction. Even learning that the universe has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot more comforting.
is what the Judge actually did to learn what RAM does and the suitable means to archive it.
Simple answer - The MPAA asked for it (no doubt doing their best not to burst out laughing), describing it as absolutely critical to making their case, with probably a snipe about how those damned pirates would try to get out of it by claiming they couldn't realistically get to it.
As for the suitable means to archive it, we don't really need to ask that here on Slashdot, because we already know the answer - You can't, in practice. In theory, you could set up a system with some sort of virtual memory transaction log, but it would run so slowly as to make subpoena-ing its contents irrelevant ("well, after a two week boot time, we've finally gotten to the login screen. We expect to have a shell session by Saturday...").
Single point of failure should a catastrophe happen.
User's can't go in and break the system.
There is one system to maintain, one anti-virus package, one system to back up and so on.
All of the benefits you mention depend on all software running as a service, not just MS Office and a few other "enterprise" apps. That simply won't ever happen, even if everyone buys into this scam-of-a-revenue-model, because something absolutely critical won't play well with others.
You are not in control of your own destiny.
And it all comes down to that one point. Every other fact or opinion aside, what does it mean when Microsoft EOL'ing a product means you no longer have any program with which to review the last ten years' worth of customer transactions or tax records? "Sorry, you'll have to cancel that audit, Microsoft cut us off. But no doubt the IRS understands completely and trusts that we filed accurately, right?"
It's easy to make a superficial comparison with other countries - particularly European - who have higher population densities. I'd like to see a study in which the figures for broadband access were weighted for density.
New England (and this article refer to NH) does have a population density, including distribution of urban-vs-rural areas, comparable to Western Europe.
Face it, "We're number 17!". Broadband availability in the US sucks, and the mono/duopolist providers have no interest in improving coverage (quite the opposite, they've actively fought changes in the way they can report availability statistics that would paint a more accurate picture).
but the best YOU can do is to show total indifference. MPAA is a has-been on the way down, and is best ignored, lest it drag you with it.
Bingo.
Colleges love PR opportunities. They don't love people who take it upon themselves to spoil PR opportunities. Does the FP author like his job?
The single most effective way to "confront" this guy involves actively ignoring him. The FP author could start an underground (since he should want nothing to do with it, officially) movement to boycott any event attended by Taylor. Make sure he speaks to empty rooms, rubs elbows with ghosts, and even eats in near-solitude. Getting a sizeable chunk of the faculty in on it would help greatly (those intimate champagne and fois-gras socials can look even more empty than a vacant lecture hall).
Guys like that thrive on opposition. Even given a chance to educate the students beforehand and fair debate, he'll just twist the message into whatever he wants. So don't give him that chance. Ignore him as befits an irrelevant dinosaur.
Skip to Linux? Doesn't sound to me like you're a gamer then which is interesting in a thread about gaming.
In the sense that you mean, no, not a hardcore gamer. If I can't play "Halo 6 Ultimate Special Edition Gold SE" until emulation catches up to that level of CPU/GPU power in another few years, I won't cry over it.
That said...
Linux is just not a realistic choice for people like myself who own countless games that were never ported outside of Windows.
1) Older games frequently run better in emulation than they ever did on real hardware. Remember really trying to get DX6 to support your video card and cutting-edge non-standard gamepad? Ever played a 386-era CPU-throttled game on an Athlon 64?
2) Old "real" Windows CDs (not to mention the games themselves) go cheap second-hand. Looked at the HDD reqs lately for a kickass Win95 system compared to, say, the size of a typical USB drive (hint: Set your BIOS to full USB emulation mode, anything older than Win2k won't know the difference)?
3) Personally, I care more about gameplay than twitch. In the past year, I've put more hours into SimCity 2000 than the typical (but employed) hardcore gamer has into the latest disposeable FPS.
That said, even as a non-twitch gamer, I think YOU missed the point here. By doing their best to force Vista on the gaming world by using DX10 for leverage, Microsoft themselves have deprived you of your very point - Linux didn't hold a candle to Windows when it came to gaming. Thank you, Microsoft, for trying to fix that.
Eventually everyone got there - or skipped Win95 and went right to Win98.
Some of us skipped right from DOS 6.2 to NT4. 2K rocked, and XP, meh, I resisted until SP2 but decent enough now.
And if MS keeps pushing this "Vista or else" crap, I'll "skip" right from XP to Linux.
This cannot be put back into XP because this sort of control and separation could not be done in XP.
I call BS.
At the lowest level, a video driver (for XP or any architecture, really) just translates requests from applications (including the OS itself) into something the video card understands. Whether the video hardware can handle multiple simultaneous renderings or not depends only on the hardware and the API (in this case, Direct X provides the API, as exported by the actual driver).
For XP to support DX10 would require literally nothing more than compatible hardware with functional drivers supporting the DX10 API.
Now, some older apps may cause problems by trying to monopolize access to the screen, but that differs entirely from saying XP can't do it.
The whole driver-OS interface was changed.
Well... Yes, it has, because the OS changed. Which makes that something of a circular argument - DX10 will only run on Vista because the interface changed because OS changed and the only DX10 implementation uses that new interface. And Apache for Linux doesn't run on Windows, surprisingly enough.
Shouldn't we call them "torrorists"?
:)
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here the whole week.
Good one!
Actually I had come up with "You can't spell Terror without Tor, but couldn't work it in smoothly so skipped it. But I do like yours.
I never understood why people get all excited about the piratebay and torrentspy. They are shitty trackers filled with horribly named, low quality garbage.
For the same reason the US fought in Vietnam and Korea, and imposed sanctions on Cuba in the first place (though we seem to have forgotten the "why" of that one, considering that the former Soviet Union collapsed quite a few years ago now).
If you can trick your enemy into attacking a strawman rather than your real vulnerabilities, you pretend to defend that strawman as long as you can (or until your enemy gets a clue, which seems safely outside the realm of possibility with the MPAA).
Hell, I personally consider the entirety of P2P as one nice strawman for the RIAA and MPAA to waste resources on. The real pirates simply trade exteral HDDs these days, and I'd like to see the **AA try to stop that. But by all means, we should encourage them to keep flailing at grannies and foreign torrent trackers as long as they seem willing.
Do you get several failed requests before a successful one? The tor exit node would have to be outside the US, so I imagine there must be many failed queries for every success.
Thanks to a cultural obsession with (fighting) child porn in the US, I would expect just the opposite - No sane American would allow exit connections unless they had high enough 3rd party traffic to claim basically no control over or knowledge of the vast majority of the content (ie, an ISP, and they rarely give anything away).
And if the real feds don't ruin you, Dateline will, regardless of the actual facts. I can just about hear the announcement: "Up next, the newest threat to your children: We put 250 megs of fake child porn on a website, and found we could retrieve it anonymously with a new program for terrorists called Tor. We've hunted down, had fired, and forwarded evidence to the DA about the beast running this smut ring, known perversely as 'Exit Node'.
On the other hand, I wonder whether any slashdotter can tell me what good has been accomplished by my president to-date.
Well, he's done more to provide a training ground for terrorists than Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Liberia combined could ever dream of...
He's gutted the Constitution so effectively that his children and grandchildren and so on until the next revolution will thank him for it daily...
He's improved the trade imbalance by dropping the dollar to near record lows...
Umm... Let's see, something positive... He's made Jon Stewart's job almost too easy?
Another 16 months of this fuckwad Bush/Cheney administration to endure.
You assume, of course, that whatever "attack" they have planned to allow Bush to declare martial law a month or two before the election doesn't kill us.
Or did you mean that you think it will happen mere days before the election?
Ditto.
if they did, asshat downloaders would lawyer the total and if lets say it was 100, they'd use 99.9999
I really don't see the problem there - If you sell 100GB/mo, you damned well better have the capacity to provide 100GB/mo.
Likewise, if you have no caps, you damned well better have the ability to provide something approaching 3Mb/s 24/7.
Okay, cue all the apologists complaining about how much that would actually cost - Because I understand that, and simply do not care in the least. No sympathy. If you don't have a dozen apples, don't sell me a dozen apples then try to back out of the deal after I eat four of them on the grounds that you consider me "hungrier than the average customer".
Hitting those caps is very difficult to do unless you're running non stop multiple torrents.
BS. Welcome to the world of streaming video as a reality. You can easily blow through a gig checking out YouTube for an hour. Going higher-quality, ever used NetFlix's "Watch now" feature? Someone with no life could, doing NOTHING ELSE with their network connection, chew through half a terabyte each month watching movies.
From 500MB game demos, to the latest Linux distro, to remote online filesystems... The argument that you can't legally, or even the weaker "easily", chew through 5-10GB per day just doesn't hold true any more. I'd consider it hard to use less than 50GB per month, and that only counts legal uses.
it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything.
When we look directly at something, everything else in our field of vision goes blurry. But we don't notice that, because our brains automatically filter it out. Subjectively, our entire world always stays in focus, because wherever we look, we focus.
Now, used "artistically"... Yes, blurry backgrounds force me to miss details that the director doesn't want me to know yet - Who blurrily crept up on the protagonist? Did that car in the background belong to the prime suspect? Gaffer or extra or shadowy main character?
As someone easily distracted in real life, however, I find such forced attention-drawing one of the single most annoying techniques in modern cinematography (right after glaringly stupid protagonists, but I'll save that for another rant). If the director wants to limit my knowledge to first-person rather than omnipotent observer, fine, just keep any extra detail out-of-frame, rather than out-of-focus. But if I wouldn't actually have missed those details as an actual observer, it just pisses me off that the director denies me them, in effect saying "sorry, I consider you too dumb to notice this, but can't help teasing you a bit".
Now, the use of over-saturation, that might give a neat effect or it might look like crap. But I would like to see everything always in focus. Nothing "artistic" about it.
Police are handing out speeding tickets to drivers who exceed secret limit.
I wouldn't have responded (and from the subject, thought one of your child posts had already made this point), but apparently some people don't "get" the problem here...
When you stay within more-or-less "tolerated" speeds above the posted limit, you do so knowing the posted speed and that, at least theoretically, you could get a ticked if a cop wants to give you a hard time (someone mentioned a few states officially allow a certain headroom - True or not, police always have the nebulous "reckless driving" or "driving to endanger" charge when they can't stick you with anything else).
With arbitrary broadband caps, what "official but rarely enforced" limit could we stay within to avoid the problem? 5GB/mo? 50? 500? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in this thread, and that causes the problem here.
If I violate the TOS, however arbitrary they seem, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that I chose to do so. If I exceed a magical unpublished number, the situation goes from "irregular enforcement of a written policy" to "we don't like you, go away".
Making this even worse, the local cable franchise almost always has a monopoly or at best a duopoly on broadband service. Imagine if the phone company could drop you because you actually use all that free local calling they offer.
I'm 32 and I have never had any faith or positive feelings towards Congress. I faintly remember liking Reagan, but at the time I knew nothing of politics or policies, just that Regan gave good speeches. Outside of that I have never felt proud of our government, or had an elected leader that I actually wanted to follow.
"The America you come from. Who was president when you left?"
"I didn't leave. Or maybe... Well. Clinton. Bill Clinton."
"And before him?"
"George Bush".
"Ah. And before Bush, Reagan, and before him... Who?"
"Jimmy Carter."
"Ah, you come from one of those Americas. You have my sympathy."
There's no sin in using a session cookie to provide dynamic content.
Explain to me how the offending comic counts as "dynamic content" such that it would conceivably require a cookie to get to?
It uses a static JPG, at a static path, linked by a static (except for ads) page, accessible via a well-defined click-path from the Salon main page. Nothing about that requires cookies.
Now, personally I have stopped caring about cookies, since Firefox will clear them (and all "private data") on exit. But mechanism aside, I must second the GP's point - No cookie for you, Salon! Except that instead of depriving myself of whatever I may want to see there, I simply let them set whatever useless (and short-lived) cookies they want, if it makes them feel better to think they've "tracked" a "new" viewer every time I visit.
should this news article be moderated as troll bait?
Well, it counts as both "News for Nerds" (despite the odd number of posters saying they've never heard of it) and "Stuff that Matters" (when censorship* stops mattering, we've lost the game).
As for whether or not it trolls the target audience - The announcement reads in an extremely neutral way. No finger-pointing, no discussion of why or what content the papers may have objected to; no editorializing on the fairness of such censorship*. As announcements of disturbing facts go, I'd have to call this one as un-troll-like as possible given the circumstances.
I have to wonder, though, what it says about us that even a vanilla announcement of the non-publishing of a comic dealing with Islam warrants such delicate wording and still ends up viewed as potential troll-fodder... Sad, really.
* Of the non-governmental kind; The 1st amendment doesnt define censorship, it just prohibits certain kinds of censorship.
Unit of Productivity = 1 / (hours of down time)
Personally, I would have phrased it "1 / (hours reading Slashdot)", but, yours looks close enough...
Yes and no. If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption.
For a user-oriented workstation, true. Even with the Via C7, a single HDD (at spin-up, anyway) could consume more than the CPU.
I think, though, these things mostly don't go into actual desktop machines. They go into car audio solutions (with a 4x20 non-backlit LCD or even VFD), or routers (headless and with CF or USB storage) or various low-demand servers (also headless).
But for use in a laptop, yes, a backlit LCD would dwarf this CPU for power consumption. But then, in a laptop, ever watt matters - If this CPU only cuts the total load by 10%, that means 10% more runtime on a given battery, or the same runtime with a smaller and lighter battery.
Also, consider that low-power system designers typically pick the lowest fruit first... If we have a 1W CPU, solid-state primary storage, that leaves the LCD as the worst offender. How long will it take them to find ways to improve that? Whether making better use of ambient light (I've never understood why laptop screens don't have a clear/frosted back anyway, giving you the option of turning off the backlight), or using active OLED pixels that don't require an external light source, or something else entirely new and different.
I, for one, look forward to a moderately powerful portable PC that can run for over a day on a pair of AA batteries.
The only one they can quote is Nason herself. However, she refused to be interviewed about the no-attribution policy.
...And as my boss Ms. Nason once said, "I", "am", "an", "asshat". I think her words stand on their own. Thank you.
and North America more than 15 percent.
Nice tactful way to say "Mexico", guys...
And I have nothing against that. "Grape-pickers" and all that - Thanks for the cheap stuff you've destroyed your bodies and your local environment to produce for us; enjoy the increasingly less valuable paper we traded it for (and to think, we laugh in school when we first learn the price of Manhattan...).