So download a Monaco TTF, and override it in your browser preferences as the
default monospace/np/fixed font.
You have it right that this "act of goodwill" on MS's part means nothing to
most people - But for the wrong reason... If the music industry thinks it
has a problem with getting people to recognize its copyrights, I pity the font
industry. At least most people "know" copying music counts as wrong on some
level. Copying fonts, no one even thinks twice about, they view it as more
of a program dependancy to resolve. "This popup says I should use font X...
Okay, let's download this 1000 bitstream fonts pack and see if it has it.
Nope? Okay, how about 2215 linotype fonts? Ah, that did it."
They give you more than enough warnings that recording
devices aren't allowed, so if you use one during the movie,
you should expect consequences.
We live in a world where everywhere has admonitions against
the use of cameras or recording devices. And 99% of them have
no teeth whatsoever (as Starbucks learned).
In this specific case, the MPAA managed to buy a very specific
law to give their otherwise-meaningless warnings some
actual basis in law. You and I, as geeks reading and posting in
a/. YRO thread, understand that; almost no non-geeks have ever
even heard of FECA, much less fully understand the implications
to performing a simple common action such as whipping out a camera
phone and capturing a few seconds of video.
Wouldn't work in Australia, compliance penalties apply if you can't dredge up the data within a specified period of time.
The hardcopy just "proves" that no one has tampered with the normal (and searcheable) logs. You would
never actually use the hardcopy, you would just have it in storage somewhere. You would still
use the standard system (or application) logs for day-to-day auditing.
And if/when you find yourself in court, answering the question "can you prove this as the real logged data?", you
can confidently say "yes" and have the dumptruck full of printouts pull up in front of the courthouse.
Though, personally, I don't see the problem with using a non-rewriteable DVD. Yes, each log entry would take
up a full sector, but that still gives you, per disc, 2.3 million log entries of up to 2k each. That should
last at least a few days (more likely, a few months) at any company small enough to balk at the cost
of an OEM solution.
I would think that 3D games would be considered a 'real time task'
(i.e. you must draw the next frame within 1/30th of a second or else
it won't look right)
Once upon a time, that more-or-less held true. Games would poll the
input, do some internal work, then refresh the screen; rinse, wash,
repeat. The game behaved as sluggishly as its maximum frame rate
allowed, regardless of which part of the game limited that rate.
Modern games have almost no hard connection between internal game state
and the FPS. They perform all their core functionality as needed, and
update the screen asynchronously as fast as available resources permit.
If the engine has too much to do for a while, the frame rate drops
accordingly (you can see this most obviously in many games immediately
after loading a level, when the screen updates look very jittery
for a few seconds).
So no, you really don't need (or even want, since "realtime"
usually means the process can preempt even otherwise-critical system
tasks) games to run as realtime processes. Ironically, you don't even
want to run them above normal priority, because you'll find in some
cases the game will actually run slower as other processes go
from well-behaved to I/O bound (especially when the game depends on
other processes for some of its activities, such as input, rendering,
and sound).
On the other hand, All police forces everywhere are so amateurish,
so untrained and ignorant that they will automatically behave in the
most irresponsible and dangerous manner possible when given a non-lethal
alternative weapon.
Well gee, that pretty much describes the modern history of the
Taser (and before that, pepper spray), doesn't it? "It doesn't
kill, so we can aim directly for the balls and fire away over
and over". Completely passive student giving you lip? Zap the
motherfucker. Some damned hippies refusing to clear the way for the
bulldozers? Hold 'em down and apply pepper spray directly to their
eyes with a q-tip. Some punk won't pull over? Blind him from the
helicopter ("oops, how could we have known he'd hit that bridge
truss doing a buck-ten?")
Keep in mind that the folks who decide to work as cops (not necessarily
talking about detectives here) don't usually do so due to their
extensive education. They look physically intimidating (most places
have minimum height requirements) and generally got off on beating
random people up in their youth (ie, bullies). Give these guys a
weapon that doesn't automatically result in an inquiry when used,
and they'll use it as often and at the highest intensity (including
"improvised" higher-than-normal settings) possible.
lcds have a backlight, it only covers the light for black, it won't save any energy.
Wow, the only actual "informative" comment so far, and only at a +4? Sad...
Playing Devil's Advocate, though, I had an idea - As you point out, Blackle will result in
no real savings on LCD monitors; But the decreased light output does raise the
temperature of the monitor, thus very slightly increasing your AC demands (in the summer).
Okay, that one kinda goes out on a limb. For a more practical problem, while a nice large
LCD showing a screen of mostly light colors will effectively illuminate my work area, a
black screen does not; as a result, I would need to turn the overhead light on.
So, Blackle will do more to waste energy than save it.
To be on the safe side, users should, in the authors' opinion, deregister all unnecessary URIs - without, however, elucidating which are superfluous.
I can answer that one for ya - Everything that FireFox doesn't
handle internally; So basically, kill everything except "http", "https",
and "ftp".
If you want to send email, open your email program and paste the address in.
If you want to read newsgroups, open your newsreader and select the desired
group. If you want to use some specialized protocol that requires a dedicated
app anyway (like many P2P URIs), open them in the appropriate program.
Your web browser should not serve as a no-click interface to every
network-enabled app on your machine. Period.
Really? I don't remember that part of the Constitution. Where was
that, exactly?
Curiously, it would seem that such a right does not explicitly
exist (in the US constitution), instead occuring only as a
matter of common law (from Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois).
Several state constitutions do explicitly spell it out, but not the
Big Daddy.
You speak from (apparently) only your experience with home
or office-worker PC hardware. In business world (the one
most OEMs care about - Home use counts as nothing more
than trickle-down), you have instrumentation frontends using
embedded or irreplaceable dedicated old PCs; Same goes for
machine (large automated cutters/welders/etc) controllers.
Servers ALMOST ALWAYS have PS2 to support KVMs (USB gets
really flakey when you switch it, and few admins want to
deal with finding the correct keyboard and mouse out of the
forty dangling from each rack).
There are Many common and cheap solutions for legacy devices. No
need for the old physical legacy ports to waste the precious real
estate on the back panel area.
And the Real Thing(tm) almost always works far, far better than
interface converters . As for back panel real-estate... What do
you have back there that you need more space for? You can fit
two PS2, one parallel and two serial ports, VGA and DVI, dual-NIC,
six USB and two 1394, and 6-channel audio plus SP/DIF just fine in
the standard ATX style cutout (I have a board with all of
those except the DVI, and yes, you could indeed fit it just fine).
Seriously - What more do you want on there?
I must have misread this, surely you don't have to pay to go the beach.
In the US, we have a constitutional guarantee of access to the
ocean - No one can privately own the strip of land between the low
and high tide marks or block your access to the same (though in practice,
some entities, in particular shipping ports, can do so in the name of
"security").
As for the massive expanses of shining white sand above the high
tide mark - No such guarantee exists for that; And the actual rights-of-way
to get to the high-tide line also form something of a questionable
issue, in that you can have a right to stand somewhere you have no right
to get to. On sandy beaches that doesn't so much apply, but
on some of our more rugged (and IMO far more beautiful than sand)
coastal areas, you can only legally get there by water.
Does this really need a book?
on
Project Arcade
·
· Score: 1
Most of the "post-mortem" reviews of DIY cabinets give far, far more
than enough detail to reproduce them.
Why?
Because this involves a relatively easy task! If you
have an old cabinet and can build a PC, buy an X-Arcade dual
(and perhaps the trackball), and whip out your jigsaw. Half
an hour of work (not counting the PC itself and finding romsets
for your favorite games) will give you a decent base cabinet
ready to roll. Add another hour if you want to go all out on
decorations.
So those of us who are able to drive and talk safely
should suffer with the rest of you?
Yes.
Most people can drive safely under
normal conditions on the phone. Most people can
drive safely under normal conditions with a BAC up to
0.15 or even 0.20. Most people can drive safely at 20-30mph
over the posted speed limit.
Driving laws exist for the "not most" situations, however.
Some people can't safely drive a monotonously straight
road on a clear day while sober and well-slept. Roads
occasionally get icy (in the North). Kids (or deer) sometimes
jump out in front of your car with no warning (hey, I'd call
that "Evolution", but the pesky legal system tends to call
it "involuntary manslaughter"). People age and their eyes and
reflexes get worse.
Put bluntly, we cripple the majority rather than take away
the licenses of the 10% or so who should never get behind the
wheel in the first place.
If you can't trust your OS to enforce the separation between
processes, then you need to start re-evaluating your choice of OS.
And for the most part, modern OSs handle that well. They do allow
for a certain degree of IPC, but mostly, two processes not strongly competing
for the same resources can run simultaneously just fine.
The problem arises in knowing what programs need what access... The OS
can't make that call (without resorting to running 100% signed binaries,
and even then, I personally lump plenty of "legitimate" programs
in the "useless or slightly malicious" category), and we obviously can't
trust the applications to say what they need. Most programs, for example,
will need to at least write in their own directory, many need access to
your home dir, some create files in your temp directory, some need to write
in random places around the machine, some need logging access, some even
need to write directly to system directories; Some programs need network access,
but the majority don't (even though they may want to use it - I don't
care if Excel wants to phone home, I don't use any of its
features that would require network access and would prefer to outright
block them). How does the OS know which to consider legitimate and which to disallow?
The concepts of chroot(and now registry) jails and outbound firewalling
work well, as long as the user knows exactly what resources a given
program will need
access to; But even IT pros often don't know that ahead of time,
and many well-behaved programs still snoop around in places
you wouldn't expect.
The problem
mentioned by the GP, with the likes of Java and.NET, arise from them
still running on the real machine - They may waste CPU cycles running
on a virtual CPU with what amounts to chroot'ed memory, but all of their
actions still occur on the real system. Deleting a file really deletes
a file.
"real" VMs basically avoid the entire issue by letting even a highly
malicious program do whatever it wants to a fake machine. They can
have full unlimited access, but any damage ends when you halt the VM.
Repair of worst-case destruction requires nothing more than overwriting
your machine image file with a clean version (you could argue the same
for a real machine, but "copy clean.vm current.vm" takes a hell of a lot
less time than installing Win2k3, MSSQL, IIS, Exchange, and whatever else
you might have running on a random server, from scratch.
Or, to take your argument one layer lower, I would tend to consider
XP the untrusted app, and VMWare the OS.
Props to the low UID (and I probably would have withheld
the sarcasm had I noticed), but I disagreed with your
original statement, and still do.
Historically, content has grown to fill the pipes available
to it. 300bps modems, we had text-only forums. 14.4kbps,
image-light web-based content. 56k, image-heavy content.
1.5Mbps, YouTube. 12MBps, and we've just started seeing
standard-def VOD.
I see no reason for that trend to continue - If we all have
100M to 1G FTTP links, we'll see realtime HD streaming content
appear to make use of that. FIOS already demonstrates that,
though in more of a dedicated provider push-format than on-demand
service.
As for pockets of high-bandwidth, true, they do tend to occur
mostly in cities; rural areas still get the short end of the
stick, and probably always will, by comparison. But compare
the US East coast to North-Western Europe, which has a similar
population density, and we pay 4x as much for comparable services,
and rarely even have the option of home-level connections
over 12MBps.
Translation: Other than all of the legally-obtained sound/video
files I've encountered, I've never encountered a legally-obtained
sound/video file.
While I would consider that a "fair" translation, you completely
removed the ever-so-important subtlety that all such media I've
encountered uses open (or at least free) codecs.
Unless you mean to imply that people willingly use not-quite-legal
codecs to rip their own media collection, then get squeamish
about having no legal way to play it back... Certainly an odd
situation to deliberately put oneself in.
I presume then you dont have a problem with MS using GPL code in their software even
though that pesky license says they should GPL the linked shit too? I mean, if its free
it should be unconditionally free right?
As soon as you change from the realm of "personal use" to "for-profit", everything
changes. I don't hold profit against anyone - we all need to make a living - But
you or I watching the emailled-clip-of-the-week differs greatly (ethically if
not legally) from someone selling that same clip.
The language is a bit vague, but calling this a defeat of
the Fifth Amendment is overly hyperbolic.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous
crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in
cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in
actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be
subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or
limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness
against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken
for public use, without just compensation."
I have to agree with you, this only strikes down one part of the 5th
amendment. Of course, one could argue that, already having lost
all those other silly little rights, this puts the last few nails in
the coffin; bet technically, this EO alone doesn't kill the 5th.
As for those (not you specifically) arguing that the government already
had this power - The last clause in what I bolded above makes the key
distinction there. The government can seize our assets after
"due process of law" has played out. Not before. After.
If your entire collection of mp3s is illegal to begin
with, who cares if the software you have to install to
play them is illegal too?
Not to detract from the humor of that, I think you more
fairly should have received an "insightful" mod...
Other than media I personally encode (basically ripped CDs and
DVDs, which I own and have the right to format-shift) and Creative
Commons material - Both of which would use an open codec anyway - I
don't think I've ever encountered a legally-obtained
sound and/or video file. Not even indirectly as a request
to help someone else play something.
Seriously.
Sure, plenty of people ask me how to open videos received via
email, or compressed music a friend gave them on CD, but those
don't actually count as legal. Arguably they both could;
Someone could have asked a friend to rip their music collecion,
or they could send home videos to a relative. But no one does.
Such content unwaveringly comes from (copyrighted) websites, or "sharing"
a collection of music that frequently neither person actually
owns.
Not to say I consider those uses in any way immoral (illegal, whole different
ballpark) - Fair use, IMO, exists so people can mail cheesy video
clips to friends. I also don't have a problem with installing free codecs
on the "wrong" OS simply because the EULA has the word "Windows" somewhere
in it.
But we delude ourselves by thinking that we actually have any legal
right to such content; Indeed, we hurt fair use by not standing
up and demanding both the right and the ability to share such
content.
Also: anyone know how a 1.5GHz VIA C7 performs? Comparable to
a 1 GHz PIII at least?
Yeah, the Epia and JetWay microATX/miniITX boards use that line, and I
have one with that exact chip.
I'd say it compares favorably with the PIII, clock-for-clock.
It works pretty well for a general purpose PC. You can use all your
normal "productivity" apps no problem, it can handle audio just fine,
some video (they usually have hardware MPEG2 and now even MPEG4
decoders, though I don't know what the exact setup mentioned has).
Even some older gaming, but don't expect any modern FPSs to run
well, if at all.
As a VERY nice feature, they suck very little power. For a system
with one of these, using the on-board video, with one HDD, you can
realistically expect to see under 40W peak consumption. And
of course, that shows in the cooling needs as well - A single low-RPM
CPU fan works fine, you won't even hear it outside the case (of course,
for a dirt-cheap WallyWorld PC, you can probably count on getting a
POS power supply with a nice loud 80mm fan in it).
"rendition" What about it? We are fighting a war
See, there we part ways in our stances.
First, we most certainly do not have a "war", in any meaningful
sense, going on. Don't conflate "occupation of Iraq" with "War on
Terror" - The former exists, the latter makes a great catchphrase
for promoting otherwise unacceptible behavior on the part of the US
government, no different than the "War On [some] Drugs", the "War
on Poverty", or "For the Children". And as for the former, which I
will of course admit exists... Yeah, we have soldiers in a war zone,
but not a war between the US and an enemy; a war between Sunni and
Shia. We have boys getting killed playing peacekeeper between two
groups of zealots determined to kill one another over a minor matter
of a long-irrelevant succession (in which the loser still got
his turn to play Caliph a few years later anyway).
Second, and MUCH more importantly - How the fuck does saying
"we are fighting a war" justify outsourced torture? NO human should
ever tolerate the torture of another, under ANY circumstance. We
shouldn't just object to it, we should demand, under threat of
outright rebellion, that each and every person in the chain of command
that led to such atrocities step down and face criminal charges!
You, actually, agree that America's Department of Homeland
Security can justifiably be compared with Hitler's Gestapo
Of course you can compare them - You could compare both to
the Girl Scouts, too.
I would not call DHS nearly as bad as the Gestapo - yet. But only a fool
would deny that certain rather disconcerting parallels exist. Laws
we can go to prison for but can't know; evidence secret even from
the defendant; "rendition"... Do we have Muslims vanishing by the
trainload? Of course not. But that we have anyone vanishing
means we damned well better start watching our watchers a bit more
closely.
If we make it socially unacceptible to even reflect on certain
unpleasant aspects of the past, we will end up back there,
and sooner rather than later.
it would require an unusual development house to create a game
with no programming bugs and reasonable graphics engine to support
a totally shoddy gameplay that allowed for humour and enjoyment.
I'd say you've hit the nail there...
The FP compares technical problems that prevent game-play,
with technical problems documented in but not affecting movie-play.
As the best analogy to a B-movie I can think of, take something like
Maniac Mansion... Completely absurd plot and bad "acting", yet it has a
pretty strong cult following. But as you point out, that occurs
deliberately rather than accidentally, making it more of a
spoof than an actual "B"-game in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I want my fixed-pitch text rendered in Monaco.
So download a Monaco TTF, and override it in your browser preferences as the default monospace/np/fixed font.
You have it right that this "act of goodwill" on MS's part means nothing to most people - But for the wrong reason... If the music industry thinks it has a problem with getting people to recognize its copyrights, I pity the font industry. At least most people "know" copying music counts as wrong on some level. Copying fonts, no one even thinks twice about, they view it as more of a program dependancy to resolve. "This popup says I should use font X... Okay, let's download this 1000 bitstream fonts pack and see if it has it. Nope? Okay, how about 2215 linotype fonts? Ah, that did it."
They give you more than enough warnings that recording devices aren't allowed, so if you use one during the movie, you should expect consequences.
/. YRO thread, understand that; almost no non-geeks have ever
even heard of FECA, much less fully understand the implications
to performing a simple common action such as whipping out a camera
phone and capturing a few seconds of video.
We live in a world where everywhere has admonitions against the use of cameras or recording devices. And 99% of them have no teeth whatsoever (as Starbucks learned).
In this specific case, the MPAA managed to buy a very specific law to give their otherwise-meaningless warnings some actual basis in law. You and I, as geeks reading and posting in a
If he was demanded to do so, it's not poor human behavior, it's called "doing your job".
/autoGodwinning the thread. Nothing to see here, move along...
How'd that work in the Nuremberg trials?
Wouldn't work in Australia, compliance penalties apply if you can't dredge up the data within a specified period of time.
The hardcopy just "proves" that no one has tampered with the normal (and searcheable) logs. You would never actually use the hardcopy, you would just have it in storage somewhere. You would still use the standard system (or application) logs for day-to-day auditing.
And if/when you find yourself in court, answering the question "can you prove this as the real logged data?", you can confidently say "yes" and have the dumptruck full of printouts pull up in front of the courthouse.
Though, personally, I don't see the problem with using a non-rewriteable DVD. Yes, each log entry would take up a full sector, but that still gives you, per disc, 2.3 million log entries of up to 2k each. That should last at least a few days (more likely, a few months) at any company small enough to balk at the cost of an OEM solution.
I would think that 3D games would be considered a 'real time task' (i.e. you must draw the next frame within 1/30th of a second or else it won't look right)
Once upon a time, that more-or-less held true. Games would poll the input, do some internal work, then refresh the screen; rinse, wash, repeat. The game behaved as sluggishly as its maximum frame rate allowed, regardless of which part of the game limited that rate.
Modern games have almost no hard connection between internal game state and the FPS. They perform all their core functionality as needed, and update the screen asynchronously as fast as available resources permit. If the engine has too much to do for a while, the frame rate drops accordingly (you can see this most obviously in many games immediately after loading a level, when the screen updates look very jittery for a few seconds).
So no, you really don't need (or even want, since "realtime" usually means the process can preempt even otherwise-critical system tasks) games to run as realtime processes. Ironically, you don't even want to run them above normal priority, because you'll find in some cases the game will actually run slower as other processes go from well-behaved to I/O bound (especially when the game depends on other processes for some of its activities, such as input, rendering, and sound).
On the other hand, All police forces everywhere are so amateurish, so untrained and ignorant that they will automatically behave in the most irresponsible and dangerous manner possible when given a non-lethal alternative weapon.
Well gee, that pretty much describes the modern history of the Taser (and before that, pepper spray), doesn't it? "It doesn't kill, so we can aim directly for the balls and fire away over and over". Completely passive student giving you lip? Zap the motherfucker. Some damned hippies refusing to clear the way for the bulldozers? Hold 'em down and apply pepper spray directly to their eyes with a q-tip. Some punk won't pull over? Blind him from the helicopter ("oops, how could we have known he'd hit that bridge truss doing a buck-ten?")
Keep in mind that the folks who decide to work as cops (not necessarily talking about detectives here) don't usually do so due to their extensive education. They look physically intimidating (most places have minimum height requirements) and generally got off on beating random people up in their youth (ie, bullies). Give these guys a weapon that doesn't automatically result in an inquiry when used, and they'll use it as often and at the highest intensity (including "improvised" higher-than-normal settings) possible.
lcds have a backlight, it only covers the light for black, it won't save any energy.
Wow, the only actual "informative" comment so far, and only at a +4? Sad...
Playing Devil's Advocate, though, I had an idea - As you point out, Blackle will result in no real savings on LCD monitors; But the decreased light output does raise the temperature of the monitor, thus very slightly increasing your AC demands (in the summer). Okay, that one kinda goes out on a limb. For a more practical problem, while a nice large LCD showing a screen of mostly light colors will effectively illuminate my work area, a black screen does not; as a result, I would need to turn the overhead light on.
So, Blackle will do more to waste energy than save it.
To be on the safe side, users should, in the authors' opinion, deregister all unnecessary URIs - without, however, elucidating which are superfluous.
I can answer that one for ya - Everything that FireFox doesn't handle internally; So basically, kill everything except "http", "https", and "ftp".
If you want to send email, open your email program and paste the address in. If you want to read newsgroups, open your newsreader and select the desired group. If you want to use some specialized protocol that requires a dedicated app anyway (like many P2P URIs), open them in the appropriate program.
Your web browser should not serve as a no-click interface to every network-enabled app on your machine. Period.
Really? I don't remember that part of the Constitution. Where was that, exactly?
Curiously, it would seem that such a right does not explicitly exist (in the US constitution), instead occuring only as a matter of common law (from Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois).
Several state constitutions do explicitly spell it out, but not the Big Daddy.
My mistake.
Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore?
Yes, on a daily basis.
You speak from (apparently) only your experience with home or office-worker PC hardware. In business world (the one most OEMs care about - Home use counts as nothing more than trickle-down), you have instrumentation frontends using embedded or irreplaceable dedicated old PCs; Same goes for machine (large automated cutters/welders/etc) controllers. Servers ALMOST ALWAYS have PS2 to support KVMs (USB gets really flakey when you switch it, and few admins want to deal with finding the correct keyboard and mouse out of the forty dangling from each rack).
There are Many common and cheap solutions for legacy devices. No need for the old physical legacy ports to waste the precious real estate on the back panel area.
And the Real Thing(tm) almost always works far, far better than interface converters . As for back panel real-estate... What do you have back there that you need more space for? You can fit two PS2, one parallel and two serial ports, VGA and DVI, dual-NIC, six USB and two 1394, and 6-channel audio plus SP/DIF just fine in the standard ATX style cutout (I have a board with all of those except the DVI, and yes, you could indeed fit it just fine). Seriously - What more do you want on there?
I must have misread this, surely you don't have to pay to go the beach.
In the US, we have a constitutional guarantee of access to the ocean - No one can privately own the strip of land between the low and high tide marks or block your access to the same (though in practice, some entities, in particular shipping ports, can do so in the name of "security").
As for the massive expanses of shining white sand above the high tide mark - No such guarantee exists for that; And the actual rights-of-way to get to the high-tide line also form something of a questionable issue, in that you can have a right to stand somewhere you have no right to get to. On sandy beaches that doesn't so much apply, but on some of our more rugged (and IMO far more beautiful than sand) coastal areas, you can only legally get there by water.
Most of the "post-mortem" reviews of DIY cabinets give far, far more than enough detail to reproduce them.
Why?
Because this involves a relatively easy task! If you have an old cabinet and can build a PC, buy an X-Arcade dual (and perhaps the trackball), and whip out your jigsaw. Half an hour of work (not counting the PC itself and finding romsets for your favorite games) will give you a decent base cabinet ready to roll. Add another hour if you want to go all out on decorations.
So those of us who are able to drive and talk safely should suffer with the rest of you?
Yes.
Most people can drive safely under normal conditions on the phone. Most people can drive safely under normal conditions with a BAC up to 0.15 or even 0.20. Most people can drive safely at 20-30mph over the posted speed limit.
Driving laws exist for the "not most" situations, however. Some people can't safely drive a monotonously straight road on a clear day while sober and well-slept. Roads occasionally get icy (in the North). Kids (or deer) sometimes jump out in front of your car with no warning (hey, I'd call that "Evolution", but the pesky legal system tends to call it "involuntary manslaughter"). People age and their eyes and reflexes get worse.
Put bluntly, we cripple the majority rather than take away the licenses of the 10% or so who should never get behind the wheel in the first place.
If you can't trust your OS to enforce the separation between processes, then you need to start re-evaluating your choice of OS.
.NET, arise from them
still running on the real machine - They may waste CPU cycles running
on a virtual CPU with what amounts to chroot'ed memory, but all of their
actions still occur on the real system. Deleting a file really deletes
a file.
And for the most part, modern OSs handle that well. They do allow for a certain degree of IPC, but mostly, two processes not strongly competing for the same resources can run simultaneously just fine.
The problem arises in knowing what programs need what access... The OS can't make that call (without resorting to running 100% signed binaries, and even then, I personally lump plenty of "legitimate" programs in the "useless or slightly malicious" category), and we obviously can't trust the applications to say what they need. Most programs, for example, will need to at least write in their own directory, many need access to your home dir, some create files in your temp directory, some need to write in random places around the machine, some need logging access, some even need to write directly to system directories; Some programs need network access, but the majority don't (even though they may want to use it - I don't care if Excel wants to phone home, I don't use any of its features that would require network access and would prefer to outright block them). How does the OS know which to consider legitimate and which to disallow?
The concepts of chroot(and now registry) jails and outbound firewalling work well, as long as the user knows exactly what resources a given program will need access to; But even IT pros often don't know that ahead of time, and many well-behaved programs still snoop around in places you wouldn't expect.
The problem mentioned by the GP, with the likes of Java and
"real" VMs basically avoid the entire issue by letting even a highly malicious program do whatever it wants to a fake machine. They can have full unlimited access, but any damage ends when you halt the VM. Repair of worst-case destruction requires nothing more than overwriting your machine image file with a clean version (you could argue the same for a real machine, but "copy clean.vm current.vm" takes a hell of a lot less time than installing Win2k3, MSSQL, IIS, Exchange, and whatever else you might have running on a random server, from scratch.
Or, to take your argument one layer lower, I would tend to consider XP the untrusted app, and VMWare the OS.
So which Google should Congress believe?"
The one under oath, rather than the one issuing a press release.
It's ok, you don't know who you're talking to.
Props to the low UID (and I probably would have withheld the sarcasm had I noticed), but I disagreed with your original statement, and still do.
Historically, content has grown to fill the pipes available to it. 300bps modems, we had text-only forums. 14.4kbps, image-light web-based content. 56k, image-heavy content. 1.5Mbps, YouTube. 12MBps, and we've just started seeing standard-def VOD.
I see no reason for that trend to continue - If we all have 100M to 1G FTTP links, we'll see realtime HD streaming content appear to make use of that. FIOS already demonstrates that, though in more of a dedicated provider push-format than on-demand service.
As for pockets of high-bandwidth, true, they do tend to occur mostly in cities; rural areas still get the short end of the stick, and probably always will, by comparison. But compare the US East coast to North-Western Europe, which has a similar population density, and we pay 4x as much for comparable services, and rarely even have the option of home-level connections over 12MBps.
Best of luck getting the content producers to provide you free content at HDTV speeds.
They produce that content so people will boost their ad revenue.
If it takes "giving away" HD content - Yes, they most certainly will.
And best of luck actually switching that many packets per second at the NOCs.
You mean, like the rest of the 1st world (other than the US) has?
Yeah, totally untenable.
Translation: Other than all of the legally-obtained sound/video files I've encountered, I've never encountered a legally-obtained sound/video file.
While I would consider that a "fair" translation, you completely removed the ever-so-important subtlety that all such media I've encountered uses open (or at least free) codecs.
Unless you mean to imply that people willingly use not-quite-legal codecs to rip their own media collection, then get squeamish about having no legal way to play it back... Certainly an odd situation to deliberately put oneself in.
I presume then you dont have a problem with MS using GPL code in their software even though that pesky license says they should GPL the linked shit too? I mean, if its free it should be unconditionally free right?
As soon as you change from the realm of "personal use" to "for-profit", everything changes. I don't hold profit against anyone - we all need to make a living - But you or I watching the emailled-clip-of-the-week differs greatly (ethically if not legally) from someone selling that same clip.
The language is a bit vague, but calling this a defeat of the Fifth Amendment is overly hyperbolic.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I have to agree with you, this only strikes down one part of the 5th amendment. Of course, one could argue that, already having lost all those other silly little rights, this puts the last few nails in the coffin; bet technically, this EO alone doesn't kill the 5th.
As for those (not you specifically) arguing that the government already had this power - The last clause in what I bolded above makes the key distinction there. The government can seize our assets after "due process of law" has played out. Not before. After.
"The Republicans hate your freedom!"
And they do... But so do the Democrats.
If your entire collection of mp3s is illegal to begin with, who cares if the software you have to install to play them is illegal too?
Not to detract from the humor of that, I think you more fairly should have received an "insightful" mod...
Other than media I personally encode (basically ripped CDs and DVDs, which I own and have the right to format-shift) and Creative Commons material - Both of which would use an open codec anyway - I don't think I've ever encountered a legally-obtained sound and/or video file. Not even indirectly as a request to help someone else play something.
Seriously.
Sure, plenty of people ask me how to open videos received via email, or compressed music a friend gave them on CD, but those don't actually count as legal. Arguably they both could; Someone could have asked a friend to rip their music collecion, or they could send home videos to a relative. But no one does. Such content unwaveringly comes from (copyrighted) websites, or "sharing" a collection of music that frequently neither person actually owns.
Not to say I consider those uses in any way immoral (illegal, whole different ballpark) - Fair use, IMO, exists so people can mail cheesy video clips to friends. I also don't have a problem with installing free codecs on the "wrong" OS simply because the EULA has the word "Windows" somewhere in it.
But we delude ourselves by thinking that we actually have any legal right to such content; Indeed, we hurt fair use by not standing up and demanding both the right and the ability to share such content.
Also: anyone know how a 1.5GHz VIA C7 performs? Comparable to a 1 GHz PIII at least?
Yeah, the Epia and JetWay microATX/miniITX boards use that line, and I have one with that exact chip.
I'd say it compares favorably with the PIII, clock-for-clock. It works pretty well for a general purpose PC. You can use all your normal "productivity" apps no problem, it can handle audio just fine, some video (they usually have hardware MPEG2 and now even MPEG4 decoders, though I don't know what the exact setup mentioned has). Even some older gaming, but don't expect any modern FPSs to run well, if at all.
As a VERY nice feature, they suck very little power. For a system with one of these, using the on-board video, with one HDD, you can realistically expect to see under 40W peak consumption. And of course, that shows in the cooling needs as well - A single low-RPM CPU fan works fine, you won't even hear it outside the case (of course, for a dirt-cheap WallyWorld PC, you can probably count on getting a POS power supply with a nice loud 80mm fan in it).
"the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Ninth Circuit appeals court decision which found that Americans do not have a "right to travel by any particular form of transportation" and do not have the right to know the laws and regulations they must obey."
evidence secret even from the defendant Whah?
"According to the Military Commissions Act, defendants can still be convicted on the basis of hearsay and secret evidence. Not only are defendants and their lawyers not always able to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, they may not even know the nature of the accusations against them, if this information is classified by military authorities."
"rendition" What about it? We are fighting a war
See, there we part ways in our stances.
First, we most certainly do not have a "war", in any meaningful sense, going on. Don't conflate "occupation of Iraq" with "War on Terror" - The former exists, the latter makes a great catchphrase for promoting otherwise unacceptible behavior on the part of the US government, no different than the "War On [some] Drugs", the "War on Poverty", or "For the Children". And as for the former, which I will of course admit exists... Yeah, we have soldiers in a war zone, but not a war between the US and an enemy; a war between Sunni and Shia. We have boys getting killed playing peacekeeper between two groups of zealots determined to kill one another over a minor matter of a long-irrelevant succession (in which the loser still got his turn to play Caliph a few years later anyway).
Second, and MUCH more importantly - How the fuck does saying "we are fighting a war" justify outsourced torture? NO human should ever tolerate the torture of another, under ANY circumstance. We shouldn't just object to it, we should demand, under threat of outright rebellion, that each and every person in the chain of command that led to such atrocities step down and face criminal charges!
You, actually, agree that America's Department of Homeland Security can justifiably be compared with Hitler's Gestapo
Of course you can compare them - You could compare both to the Girl Scouts, too.
I would not call DHS nearly as bad as the Gestapo - yet. But only a fool would deny that certain rather disconcerting parallels exist. Laws we can go to prison for but can't know; evidence secret even from the defendant; "rendition"... Do we have Muslims vanishing by the trainload? Of course not. But that we have anyone vanishing means we damned well better start watching our watchers a bit more closely.
If we make it socially unacceptible to even reflect on certain unpleasant aspects of the past, we will end up back there, and sooner rather than later.
it would require an unusual development house to create a game with no programming bugs and reasonable graphics engine to support a totally shoddy gameplay that allowed for humour and enjoyment.
I'd say you've hit the nail there...
The FP compares technical problems that prevent game-play, with technical problems documented in but not affecting movie-play.
As the best analogy to a B-movie I can think of, take something like Maniac Mansion... Completely absurd plot and bad "acting", yet it has a pretty strong cult following. But as you point out, that occurs deliberately rather than accidentally, making it more of a spoof than an actual "B"-game in itself.