Except that if a clause like this were upheld, all
the spyware makers would start adding similar clauses
in short order, and anti-spyware makers would be out
of business.
Nope. Just this one.
Because, a really obvious response exists - The
anti-spyware makers just need to add the same clause to
their EULA, without the "anti" (or with an extra one);
then, the spyware makers would have no legal way to
determine if a given antispyware product could detect
them.
Of course, that wouldn't hold up either, but I
say this on the condition that RetroCoder actually
has a case.
all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board
that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside
Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election.
That Schoolboard actually has nine members, of which
only eight came up for reelection this year.
You can expect the ninth to get the boot next year, but
for now, they still have one idiot left. Let's just hope
their charter doesn't include a lot of ways for a lone
moron voice to cause endless trouble.
Granted, I don't like how CDDB presents the trackname for
most classical music (Personally, I like the artist to
refer to the composer and the track to include the K/BMV/Opus
or similar reference for the composer - Which I have yet to
find a CDDB entry do).
But as far as outright not having
an entry for any "real" CD? I've even ripped home-made promos
of local bands and CDDB had it (though with somewhat less than
a 50% chance, but way more than I expected from a privately
released run of 10 or so discs).
Well, anyway, you know the standard comeback - If you don't
find it in CDDB, enter it.:)
Yeah, but if you like listening to CDs on your
computer, you're going to be butting heads with DMA
before long.
You say that as though:
A) Circumventing DRM actually took some effort, and/or
B) I cared about obeying laws bought-and-paid-for by
corporate interests.
As neither of those holds true, I'll second the GP's
response. I deal with attempts to lock me into
vendor-specific formats by buying uncompressed
media either with no DRM or with losslessly removeable
DRM (which currently means CDs), and ripping it
losslesssly (to FLAC).
I can then transcode to whatever format my current
player prefers without incuring serially degraded
quality from using lossy compression (as much as I
don't care for MP3, everything currently supports
it so it makes a good choice). When my current player
dies, I can get another and at worst (if it doesn't
support old-player's-preferred-format), I'll need to
let my PC run overnight transcoding from the original
FLACs to the new-player's-preferred-format.
You're a dick, and I'm going to ask that you quit
talking out of your ass.
Talking out of my ass?
I grew up in a town of 300 where I lived half a mile from
the nearest neighbor, and had up to a whopping 22
kids in my "class" (meaning three grades in one half of
two-room schoolhouse straight out of a Norman Rockwell
painting). You don't get much closer to the mythical
Republican ideal of "the good ol' days" without inventing
a time machine. And we still had frauds, criminals,
premarital sex, underage drinking, even a murder once
upon a time (well, okay, actually that happened in an
adjacent town, but "close enough").
What part of that do you consider "talking out of [my]
ass"?
You can't escape human nature - If you have two or more
humans in close proximity, one of them will find a way
to gain advantage over the other(s). To put my earlier
point more bluntly, you attributed your aunt's naïveté
to her environment - Your aunt either doesn't exist, or
you should have her locked up for her own safety, because
the environment required to cause that level of trust in
any sane human with an IQ over 80 most certainly
does not exist. No joking or cruelty or general
asshole-ness intended... If you have someone you care about
that naïve, it strikes me as cruel not to
disillusion that person, for their own good.
"Does this guy really strike you as evil?"
No, buddy
"But at least as long as it continues what protection it
offers, a few stupid people will get their money back
from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate
evil bastards more."
Sorry, which part of that did I misinterpret?
Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, mind
you... But the government doesn't have the job title of
"babysitter of the weak", as much as they try to wear
that particular hat.
cause that would mean you could get something about
the W x H dimensions of an LCD monitor
Actually, I had something more like a double-high
and slightly deeper DVD drive in mind (including
an actual DVD drive as part of it, of course. But
then, I prefer cubes to pizza-boxes, personally...
The actual shape wouldn't much matter. "Much smaller",
at any rate, with the cooling probably taking up
more room than the active components themselves.
I suppose that would make water cooling a lot more
attractive - Considering a flatpanel monitor as
the form factor, how about an LCD on one side, an
inch thicker than a typical current displays, and
a 19" (diagonal) aluminum radiator/heatsink on the back?
just thinking of how to dissipate the heat from a
Radeon 9800 and an Opteron if they're literally on the
same board
Ever opened up a 1U rackmounted dual Xeon machine (like
a PowerEdge 1750)? Desktop-stype CPU cooling could do
a whole lot better if we didn't insist on trying
to cool the CPU with already warm air. Think of a
heatsink wrapped around on itself to form a rectangular
tube 1U high, then take air from outside the case into
the tube, and vent it outside the case on the opposite
side.
Personally I never imagined integrating a
PCI Express controller in a CPU. If this trend
of intregation continues, what would be the
next logical step?
Single-chip computers - A CPU, and a totally
passive backplane that does nothing but provide
real-estate for connectors. And most likely,
you wouldn't strictly need any extra
cards, with a decent (but not high end, thus the
need for a bus at all) GPU included right on-die.
Realistically, I expect two-chip computers as
far more likely. Something along the lines of
having your CPU plug directly into your video
card, which has the standard video card parts
on one side, and standard motherboard connectors
on the other. And the whole thing could
mount via a SECC-style connector to a power bus,
right inside something just a tad bigger than
current ATX power supplies.
Drives? Uhhh... I'll have to think about that
one.;-)
does anyone really know how many birds those
propellers actually kill?
As a better question - Why does anyone care?
Stupid birds fly into things. We call that "evolution".
The birds without the sense to avoid rapidly moving
blades die, the ones with a bit more brains survive,
to produce offspring with the sense to avoid giant
poultry-processors-of-death.
We haven't banned cars, picture windows, or electric
lines yet - Why such a fuss over a technology that
has the potential to substantially reduce our dependance
on foreign oil (no, not a complete solution, but a
damned fine start)?
Also, the turbines are noisy as hell
Not the newer ones, and not from 300+ feet below.
Still not exactly silent (certainly noisy enough to
scare away any bird with a few grams of grey matter),
but then, have you ever stood the same distance from
a gas-fired reserve power station? A HELL of
a lot louder... Not that the relative volume
completely exonerates wind turbines, but it certainly
makes "too loud" a far less valid criticism.
She falls for it because she's gullible and
has always lived in a town filled with people
she can trust absolutely.
I grew up in a small rural town. And they
don't match the Donna Reed TV fantasy world you
appear to believe in.
As long as one domesticated primate can gain advantage
over another via deception, they will. Doesn't matter
if you live in the Bronx or Pleasantville.
She's not taking risks because she thinks she
has nothing to lose
Then (if she exists) welcome her to the real world.
She also has nothing to gain, unless you left out
the part about the town's cliche mad scientist
nearing completion on his revolutionary new gerbil
powered hyperdrive.
I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards
more.
Does this guy really strike you as evil? This seems
more like a novelty product. Like the ISR, or a
"Your face on a real New York Times front page".
Or perhaps more similar, buying "land" on a real
Scottish (for example) estate to convey the title
of "Lord" on the buyer - Of course, you only get
one square foot or so, and can't use it for anything
(though unlike the moon, I suppose you could at
least visit it) - But it makes a cute gift
to someone proud of their ancestry.
No, no... Really, I'd rather work to a well-defined
spec. Not that I can say that I often enjoy such a
luxury, but I couldn't ask for much more (in the "job
responsibilities" category, I mean).
I don't "do" business. I don't speak it, I don't
think it, I don't understand it. If I did (and
this applies just as much to all those waiting to
pounce on the "reply" button to belittle me for
my admission of weakness), I would work for myself
rather than giving away a "cut" of the fruits of
my labor.
I don't care about the "business case" for adding
feature-X to a project. I care about what feature-X
should do, if I should focus more on performance or
reliability/accuracy, how much time I have to implement
feature-X, and the single most important point of all,
that I get paid for working on project-X (and preferably
will keep getting paid after finishing it). Will
it make the company money? Who cares? Well, I
suppose the CFO cares, because that describes his
job. And he can have it!
What benefits does the business hope to accrue from
my labor? MONEY. Same as me. Key difference, the
company knows how to turn my labor directly into
money, whereas I require a middle-man to do so for
me - Namely, the company itself.
There's an easy solution.
Everyone should complain.
I had the same thought...
Let's see how much they want to keep abusing this power
if, once a year, they get 250 million requests for
mediation!
Of course, sadly, in reality only a few of us "paranoids"
will bother to complain, and rather than taking us out
of their records for not having committed any crimes, it
will simply red-flag us for further scrutiny...
at lease for Seattle electric rates (~$0.06/kWh)...
I'll agree that, without question the 90nm Athlon 64's completely
crush Intel for power consumption... But even at the 840's TDP of
130W, that still only comes out to $5.62 total per month.
Now, I'll even agree that AMD gives a VERY conservative TDP for
their current chips, while Intel even disclaims that you can't
count on theirs as an upper limit. But I don't think you can
claim that the dual core P4s draw anywhere near the
continual 1450W it would take to make up $87 in one month's
electric bill. After one year, it comes out a lot
closer, but still a bit short.
Of course, I consider it stupid that the parent chose to
compare the price of the 3800 to the 820, when in many
of the tests, the 3800 beat even the 840. Using
that to make a dollar comparison, the X2 3800 costs $200
less.
The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist
suspects because it takes that long to crack a
suspect's PC hard drive
I write this as a 'Merkin, so forgive if I don't
fully "get" UK law, but...
At the point where the police would waste 90 days of
supercomputer-level CPU power on cracking an
encrypted HDD, wouldn't they already have enough
other evidence to charge the suspect with an actual
crime, and could just ask for that 90 days as a
delay before the actual trial?
The idea of the police making people dissapear for
three months at a time on a whim scares the hell
out of me. Suddenly sarcasm, or wearing the wrong
clothes, or "driving while black" becomes punishable
by three months in prison? Time to invest in
prison/industrial stock...
Iraq most certainly possessed WMD during Saddam's reign
and used them without mercy on civilian Kurds.
Well, DUH! Of course he had them,
once upon a time - We (I say this as an American) sold
/ gave them to him! And did our damnedest to look the other
way and blame Iran when he used them on the Kurds.
Did he have them in 2003, though? And even if so, did they
pose any threat whatsoever to the US, with their whopping
700-mile range 50-year-old tech SCUDs?
and the fact that he had started a nuclear reactor
construction program for any purpose he chose
Oh no! Not "any purpose he chose!" anything
but that, for the democratically-elected leader of the
once-sovereign nation of Iraq, as regards an internal
domestic Iraq research program! The horrors!
Where oh where will it all end, this bloody
race toward energy independance... Fission plants that
don't waste 90% of their fuel? Fusion? Antimatter?
WIND TURBINES??? YOU BASTARDS!
The US does not have the right to impose nuclear hegemony
over the rest of the world (except those who might
actually have the capacity to fight back,
such as N. Korea, which we have pretty much left alone).
Our actions in Iraq count as
nothing short of an atrocity, and I can only pray that
the rest of the world, when sanctioning us for our crimes,
will consider that Bush never actally legitimately won a
US presidential election.
I'm not a great fan of how this war was justified, but Saddam
was hardly running a regime friendly to anyone but himself and
his cronies.
If you accept that excuse, you need to ponder why we
still consider the Saud royal family our allies (y'know, the
country currently ruled by a theocratic monarchy, and from which
all but three of the 9/11 hijackers came?). Why we didn't
go after half of the petty African tyrants currently still
in power. Why we didn't revolt at the sweeping of Ohio under
the rug.
But hey, what do I know? I just watch Fox and
vote a straight Republican ticket like any Good Christian
American.
"The way I see it, people should pay income tax in the state
that they earn the income, not the state in which they reside."
makes sense.
No, it most certainly does not make sense!
We pay taxes for (what little) services the government
provides to us. We do not pay taxes for the privelage
of earning a living. Taxation without representation? Hello?
"Representation", strictly, means we get a vote. Even in the modern
degraded sense (sorry, what silly terroristic ideals did our
forefathers throw their lives away for? "Boston tea party"? Sounds
like a drug reference, ya commie!), "representation" at least means
you get to make some use of the services provided by the
government you fund, whether roads or legal protection or some
similarly vague idea. But this?
Bread and circuses will only go so far. If the government
thinks they can just refuse to make a decision on outright
extortion, the revolution will come sooner than even cynical
ol' me expects.
Corporations in the modern sense have been around since the 1600's.
And modern human history extends back to at least 6000BCE, possibly
as early as 20,000BCE. Historically new.
As a matter of logic, when your premises are bad,
the conclusion is worthless.
I had only one premise - Corporations exist solely for profit.
Do you disagree with that? On what basis?
Yes, with an invalid premise, the logic fails (though it doesn't
necessarily make the conclusion false). But ipse dixit
(or in this case, ego ipse dixit) on your part doesn't do
much to disprove my premise.
Re:Defiance is a changing the system too
on
Modding and the Law
·
· Score: 1
I trust that you never do anything creative in
your life. Certainly not an expect any sort of
compensation or reimbursment for it.
Copyright provides for a LIMITED monopoly on
one's creations.
The legal-fictional entities known as "corporations"
have managed to trump actual human rights to
their own culture by "modding" the laws so as to
make copyright a doctrine of exclusion, rather than
a means of encouraging new creations. They have perverted
even the underlying goal, of rewarding the creators
themselves, by finding ways to either keep the vast
bulk of profits, or to actually acquire the copyrights
for themselves in exchange for a pittance for the
creator.
You, the consumer, do not have the right to make that
decision for them.
True, if you want to think of yourself as "Consumer".
Some of us consider ourselves "humans", however. And
as such, we most certainly DO have both the
power and the authority to violate oppressive laws such
as copyright. We have the power because, as scary as the
government may seem, "The Law" does not equal reality,
but merely a set of game-rules that most of us agree to
play by; And we have the authority because the government
(and thus its laws) exists ONLY at the whim of
those HUMANS who tolerate it. When the governent
becomes worse than anarchy, the people not only can, but
have a duty to, get rid of that establishment and replace
it with something less pathological.
So "consume" on, my friend, but I'll choose physics over
economics, thankyouverymuch.
The list you quoted does not include "everything".
Jus three things, one a historically-new serious problem
(corporations), and two on-going basic traits
(but "broken" in the context of the current world) of
our evolution as domesticated primates.
That's a good plan... for what? One rhetorical
question: Does different = good?
And a not-so-rhetorical answer: Yes, when what you have
now clearly has serious fundamental problems.
Corporations have a single motive (profit), the pursuit
of which has the logical outcome of destroying the planet
and enslaving the human race.
People's day-to-day behavior, while "mostly harmless"
in isolation, adds up to nothing less than the evironmental
nightmare we now face. That needs to change.
And our social relationships - As long as you can describe
"haves" and "have-nots", yet we have the technological capacity
for everyone to "have", we have a problem. As long as some
people feel so trapped that they need to hurt others to cope,
we have problems. As long as we have people so ignorant they
need to blow up other people for their imaginary friends, we have
a problem.
Now, random change won't help. But only a fool would
avoid carefully thought-out change, even experimental,
to address any of those issues.
Check out my other post on this topic for a more detailed
answer, but...
I didn't mean flicker in the sense of "the pixel gets lit,
fades, gets lit again, I can detect the different brightness
levels". More along the lines of the human eye's "refresh
rate".
If your eyes update 30 times per second, then you
will gain absolutely nothing by having a display capable
of more than 60fps (yes, the Nyquist limit applies here).
For me, I find that I can still just barely make
out flicker at 70-75hz, with 80hz safely above (2x) my limit
to distinguish separate states.
I find this easiest to describe as "flicker", but with an
LCD, you mostly notice it as mud - For example, scrolling
contrasty text rapidly will cause it to momentarily look
"dim" on a too-slow LCD, since it takes two (or more) human
visual updates for the pixel itself to fully change.
I thought the Refresh Rate (Hertz) didn't apply to
LCDs because the pixel on a CRT has to be constantly
refreshed, where as with a LCD its only refreshes when
it needs to, needs to change that is.
You have two different concepts here called the same
thing.
With a CRT, the "refresh rate" means, literally, the
rate at which the electron beam can scan and "refresh"
all the pixels in one full screen.
The signal going into the display has its own rate,
perhaps best described as the "pixel clock". If you
divide the pixel clock by the resolution (plus the
padding around it to allow the electron beam to move
to the next line or do a vertical retrace), you get a
different sort of refresh rate, also in terms of full
screens per second.
With a CRT, those two different "refresh rates" almost
always match or have a 2:1 ratio (in the case of an
interlaced signal). You can't really avoid that
tight lock, since the video signal actually acts to
directly tell the electron beam what to do "now".
With an LCD, though, each pixel has a distinct value,
which can update almost arbitrarily often (much
faster than any video card can tell it to change, anyway).
The response time of the pixel measures how long it
takes to change the visiblestate of the pixel itself
(think of that like a fluorescent light bulb... You can
flip the light switch far faster than the light can
turn on and off).
So, what does this mean in relation to the GP post?
What your video card thinks of as the "refresh rate"
matters in that no individual pixel will update faster
than that, whether or not they can. So, while a 3ms
response time means you could change the state
of a pixel 333 times per second, it will only actually
change at the video card's refresh rate (rarely over 85Hz).
But I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.
Not so much wrong, as just (understandably)
confusing a "rose" for a "rose".
I have a 19" LCD that I use everyday. Is it THAT
noticeable if I have 7-10 ms instead of 3?
No, with the condition that the stated time actually
measures the real response time (ie, the worst
case from any state to any other state). Humans cannot
resolve different colors or brightnesses that change
faster than roughly 15ms (most people don't even notice
changes under 25-30ms, but for some reason, geeks as a
group tend to notice flicker far more than the general
population).
As my main display, I currently use a 19in DVI panel
with a "mere" 12ms response time (note that the "DVI"
part of that makes a HUGE difference - Most of the
artifacts people blame on poor response time actually
come from doing an unnecessary D2A2D conversion). And
it looks simply beautiful, even for action movies... No
muddiness or ghosting whatsoever.
That said, I don't think any manufacturers
measure their response time as a worst-case. So
currently, the only real test of how well it will
look playing movies or games - Try one out. Go into
Best Buy or CC or even Wallyworld, pick out a few
models you like based on appearance, then go home
and buy your favorite for half the price online.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that if a clause like this were upheld, all the spyware makers would start adding similar clauses in short order, and anti-spyware makers would be out of business.
Nope. Just this one.
Because, a really obvious response exists - The anti-spyware makers just need to add the same clause to their EULA, without the "anti" (or with an extra one); then, the spyware makers would have no legal way to determine if a given antispyware product could detect them.
Of course, that wouldn't hold up either, but I say this on the condition that RetroCoder actually has a case.
all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election.
That Schoolboard actually has nine members, of which only eight came up for reelection this year.
You can expect the ninth to get the boot next year, but for now, they still have one idiot left. Let's just hope their charter doesn't include a lot of ways for a lone moron voice to cause endless trouble.
And poorly served by CDDB, etc., I might add.
:)
Really?
Granted, I don't like how CDDB presents the trackname for most classical music (Personally, I like the artist to refer to the composer and the track to include the K/BMV/Opus or similar reference for the composer - Which I have yet to find a CDDB entry do).
But as far as outright not having an entry for any "real" CD? I've even ripped home-made promos of local bands and CDDB had it (though with somewhat less than a 50% chance, but way more than I expected from a privately released run of 10 or so discs).
Well, anyway, you know the standard comeback - If you don't find it in CDDB, enter it.
Yeah, but if you like listening to CDs on your computer, you're going to be butting heads with DMA before long.
You say that as though:
A) Circumventing DRM actually took some effort, and/or
B) I cared about obeying laws bought-and-paid-for by corporate interests.
As neither of those holds true, I'll second the GP's response. I deal with attempts to lock me into vendor-specific formats by buying uncompressed media either with no DRM or with losslessly removeable DRM (which currently means CDs), and ripping it losslesssly (to FLAC).
I can then transcode to whatever format my current player prefers without incuring serially degraded quality from using lossy compression (as much as I don't care for MP3, everything currently supports it so it makes a good choice). When my current player dies, I can get another and at worst (if it doesn't support old-player's-preferred-format), I'll need to let my PC run overnight transcoding from the original FLACs to the new-player's-preferred-format.
You're a dick, and I'm going to ask that you quit talking out of your ass.
Talking out of my ass?
I grew up in a town of 300 where I lived half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and had up to a whopping 22 kids in my "class" (meaning three grades in one half of two-room schoolhouse straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting). You don't get much closer to the mythical Republican ideal of "the good ol' days" without inventing a time machine. And we still had frauds, criminals, premarital sex, underage drinking, even a murder once upon a time (well, okay, actually that happened in an adjacent town, but "close enough").
What part of that do you consider "talking out of [my] ass"?
You can't escape human nature - If you have two or more humans in close proximity, one of them will find a way to gain advantage over the other(s). To put my earlier point more bluntly, you attributed your aunt's naïveté to her environment - Your aunt either doesn't exist, or you should have her locked up for her own safety, because the environment required to cause that level of trust in any sane human with an IQ over 80 most certainly does not exist. No joking or cruelty or general asshole-ness intended... If you have someone you care about that naïve, it strikes me as cruel not to disillusion that person, for their own good.
"Does this guy really strike you as evil?"
No, buddy
"But at least as long as it continues what protection it offers, a few stupid people will get their money back from evil bastards. I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more."
Sorry, which part of that did I misinterpret?
Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, mind you... But the government doesn't have the job title of "babysitter of the weak", as much as they try to wear that particular hat.
cause that would mean you could get something about the W x H dimensions of an LCD monitor
Actually, I had something more like a double-high and slightly deeper DVD drive in mind (including an actual DVD drive as part of it, of course. But then, I prefer cubes to pizza-boxes, personally... The actual shape wouldn't much matter. "Much smaller", at any rate, with the cooling probably taking up more room than the active components themselves.
I suppose that would make water cooling a lot more attractive - Considering a flatpanel monitor as the form factor, how about an LCD on one side, an inch thicker than a typical current displays, and a 19" (diagonal) aluminum radiator/heatsink on the back?
just thinking of how to dissipate the heat from a Radeon 9800 and an Opteron if they're literally on the same board
Ever opened up a 1U rackmounted dual Xeon machine (like a PowerEdge 1750)? Desktop-stype CPU cooling could do a whole lot better if we didn't insist on trying to cool the CPU with already warm air. Think of a heatsink wrapped around on itself to form a rectangular tube 1U high, then take air from outside the case into the tube, and vent it outside the case on the opposite side.
Personally I never imagined integrating a PCI Express controller in a CPU. If this trend of intregation continues, what would be the next logical step?
;-)
Single-chip computers - A CPU, and a totally passive backplane that does nothing but provide real-estate for connectors. And most likely, you wouldn't strictly need any extra cards, with a decent (but not high end, thus the need for a bus at all) GPU included right on-die.
Realistically, I expect two-chip computers as far more likely. Something along the lines of having your CPU plug directly into your video card, which has the standard video card parts on one side, and standard motherboard connectors on the other. And the whole thing could mount via a SECC-style connector to a power bus, right inside something just a tad bigger than current ATX power supplies.
Drives? Uhhh... I'll have to think about that one.
does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill?
As a better question - Why does anyone care?
Stupid birds fly into things. We call that "evolution". The birds without the sense to avoid rapidly moving blades die, the ones with a bit more brains survive, to produce offspring with the sense to avoid giant poultry-processors-of-death.
We haven't banned cars, picture windows, or electric lines yet - Why such a fuss over a technology that has the potential to substantially reduce our dependance on foreign oil (no, not a complete solution, but a damned fine start)?
Also, the turbines are noisy as hell
Not the newer ones, and not from 300+ feet below. Still not exactly silent (certainly noisy enough to scare away any bird with a few grams of grey matter), but then, have you ever stood the same distance from a gas-fired reserve power station? A HELL of a lot louder... Not that the relative volume completely exonerates wind turbines, but it certainly makes "too loud" a far less valid criticism.
She falls for it because she's gullible and has always lived in a town filled with people she can trust absolutely.
I grew up in a small rural town. And they don't match the Donna Reed TV fantasy world you appear to believe in.
As long as one domesticated primate can gain advantage over another via deception, they will. Doesn't matter if you live in the Bronx or Pleasantville.
She's not taking risks because she thinks she has nothing to lose
Then (if she exists) welcome her to the real world. She also has nothing to gain, unless you left out the part about the town's cliche mad scientist nearing completion on his revolutionary new gerbil powered hyperdrive.
I hate stupid people, but I hate evil bastards more.
Does this guy really strike you as evil? This seems more like a novelty product. Like the ISR, or a "Your face on a real New York Times front page". Or perhaps more similar, buying "land" on a real Scottish (for example) estate to convey the title of "Lord" on the buyer - Of course, you only get one square foot or so, and can't use it for anything (though unlike the moon, I suppose you could at least visit it) - But it makes a cute gift to someone proud of their ancestry.
I think what you really want is
No, no... Really, I'd rather work to a well-defined spec. Not that I can say that I often enjoy such a luxury, but I couldn't ask for much more (in the "job responsibilities" category, I mean).
I don't "do" business. I don't speak it, I don't think it, I don't understand it. If I did (and this applies just as much to all those waiting to pounce on the "reply" button to belittle me for my admission of weakness), I would work for myself rather than giving away a "cut" of the fruits of my labor.
I don't care about the "business case" for adding feature-X to a project. I care about what feature-X should do, if I should focus more on performance or reliability/accuracy, how much time I have to implement feature-X, and the single most important point of all, that I get paid for working on project-X (and preferably will keep getting paid after finishing it). Will it make the company money? Who cares? Well, I suppose the CFO cares, because that describes his job. And he can have it!
What benefits does the business hope to accrue from my labor? MONEY. Same as me. Key difference, the company knows how to turn my labor directly into money, whereas I require a middle-man to do so for me - Namely, the company itself.
There's an easy solution.
Everyone should complain.
I had the same thought...
Let's see how much they want to keep abusing this power if, once a year, they get 250 million requests for mediation!
Of course, sadly, in reality only a few of us "paranoids" will bother to complain, and rather than taking us out of their records for not having committed any crimes, it will simply red-flag us for further scrutiny...
at lease for Seattle electric rates (~$0.06/kWh)...
I'll agree that, without question the 90nm Athlon 64's completely crush Intel for power consumption... But even at the 840's TDP of 130W, that still only comes out to $5.62 total per month.
Now, I'll even agree that AMD gives a VERY conservative TDP for their current chips, while Intel even disclaims that you can't count on theirs as an upper limit. But I don't think you can claim that the dual core P4s draw anywhere near the continual 1450W it would take to make up $87 in one month's electric bill. After one year, it comes out a lot closer, but still a bit short.
Of course, I consider it stupid that the parent chose to compare the price of the 3800 to the 820, when in many of the tests, the 3800 beat even the 840. Using that to make a dollar comparison, the X2 3800 costs $200 less.
The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist suspects because it takes that long to crack a suspect's PC hard drive
I write this as a 'Merkin, so forgive if I don't fully "get" UK law, but...
At the point where the police would waste 90 days of supercomputer-level CPU power on cracking an encrypted HDD, wouldn't they already have enough other evidence to charge the suspect with an actual crime, and could just ask for that 90 days as a delay before the actual trial?
The idea of the police making people dissapear for three months at a time on a whim scares the hell out of me. Suddenly sarcasm, or wearing the wrong clothes, or "driving while black" becomes punishable by three months in prison? Time to invest in prison/industrial stock...
Iraq most certainly possessed WMD during Saddam's reign and used them without mercy on civilian Kurds.
Well, DUH! Of course he had them, once upon a time - We (I say this as an American) sold / gave them to him! And did our damnedest to look the other way and blame Iran when he used them on the Kurds.
Did he have them in 2003, though? And even if so, did they pose any threat whatsoever to the US, with their whopping 700-mile range 50-year-old tech SCUDs?
and the fact that he had started a nuclear reactor construction program for any purpose he chose
Oh no! Not "any purpose he chose!" anything but that, for the democratically-elected leader of the once-sovereign nation of Iraq, as regards an internal domestic Iraq research program! The horrors! Where oh where will it all end, this bloody race toward energy independance... Fission plants that don't waste 90% of their fuel? Fusion? Antimatter? WIND TURBINES??? YOU BASTARDS!
The US does not have the right to impose nuclear hegemony over the rest of the world (except those who might actually have the capacity to fight back, such as N. Korea, which we have pretty much left alone). Our actions in Iraq count as nothing short of an atrocity, and I can only pray that the rest of the world, when sanctioning us for our crimes, will consider that Bush never actally legitimately won a US presidential election.
I'm not a great fan of how this war was justified, but Saddam was hardly running a regime friendly to anyone but himself and his cronies.
If you accept that excuse, you need to ponder why we still consider the Saud royal family our allies (y'know, the country currently ruled by a theocratic monarchy, and from which all but three of the 9/11 hijackers came?). Why we didn't go after half of the petty African tyrants currently still in power. Why we didn't revolt at the sweeping of Ohio under the rug.
But hey, what do I know? I just watch Fox and vote a straight Republican ticket like any Good Christian American.
"The way I see it, people should pay income tax in the state that they earn the income, not the state in which they reside."
makes sense.
No, it most certainly does not make sense!
We pay taxes for (what little) services the government provides to us. We do not pay taxes for the privelage of earning a living. Taxation without representation? Hello?
"Representation", strictly, means we get a vote. Even in the modern degraded sense (sorry, what silly terroristic ideals did our forefathers throw their lives away for? "Boston tea party"? Sounds like a drug reference, ya commie!), "representation" at least means you get to make some use of the services provided by the government you fund, whether roads or legal protection or some similarly vague idea. But this?
Bread and circuses will only go so far. If the government thinks they can just refuse to make a decision on outright extortion, the revolution will come sooner than even cynical ol' me expects.
Unless you're some obsessive weirdo, I doubt you'll watch the same movie a couple of times a week
So, not a Monty Python fan, eh?
Now go and bring me... A... HERRING!
Corporations in the modern sense have been around since the 1600's.
And modern human history extends back to at least 6000BCE, possibly as early as 20,000BCE. Historically new.
As a matter of logic, when your premises are bad, the conclusion is worthless.
I had only one premise - Corporations exist solely for profit. Do you disagree with that? On what basis?
Yes, with an invalid premise, the logic fails (though it doesn't necessarily make the conclusion false). But ipse dixit (or in this case, ego ipse dixit) on your part doesn't do much to disprove my premise.
You're scary
Happy Halloween.
I trust that you never do anything creative in your life. Certainly not an expect any sort of compensation or reimbursment for it.
Copyright provides for a LIMITED monopoly on one's creations.
The legal-fictional entities known as "corporations" have managed to trump actual human rights to their own culture by "modding" the laws so as to make copyright a doctrine of exclusion, rather than a means of encouraging new creations. They have perverted even the underlying goal, of rewarding the creators themselves, by finding ways to either keep the vast bulk of profits, or to actually acquire the copyrights for themselves in exchange for a pittance for the creator.
You, the consumer, do not have the right to make that decision for them.
True, if you want to think of yourself as "Consumer".
Some of us consider ourselves "humans", however. And as such, we most certainly DO have both the power and the authority to violate oppressive laws such as copyright. We have the power because, as scary as the government may seem, "The Law" does not equal reality, but merely a set of game-rules that most of us agree to play by; And we have the authority because the government (and thus its laws) exists ONLY at the whim of those HUMANS who tolerate it. When the governent becomes worse than anarchy, the people not only can, but have a duty to, get rid of that establishment and replace it with something less pathological.
So "consume" on, my friend, but I'll choose physics over economics, thankyouverymuch.
Change *everything*?
... for what? One rhetorical
question: Does different = good?
The list you quoted does not include "everything". Jus three things, one a historically-new serious problem (corporations), and two on-going basic traits (but "broken" in the context of the current world) of our evolution as domesticated primates.
That's a good plan
And a not-so-rhetorical answer: Yes, when what you have now clearly has serious fundamental problems.
Corporations have a single motive (profit), the pursuit of which has the logical outcome of destroying the planet and enslaving the human race.
People's day-to-day behavior, while "mostly harmless" in isolation, adds up to nothing less than the evironmental nightmare we now face. That needs to change.
And our social relationships - As long as you can describe "haves" and "have-nots", yet we have the technological capacity for everyone to "have", we have a problem. As long as some people feel so trapped that they need to hurt others to cope, we have problems. As long as we have people so ignorant they need to blow up other people for their imaginary friends, we have a problem.
Now, random change won't help. But only a fool would avoid carefully thought-out change, even experimental, to address any of those issues.
Not Viewable ... VISIBLE!!!
But you didn't have a problem with "has just began"?
Is flicker really a problem with LCD monitors
Check out my other post on this topic for a more detailed answer, but...
I didn't mean flicker in the sense of "the pixel gets lit, fades, gets lit again, I can detect the different brightness levels". More along the lines of the human eye's "refresh rate".
If your eyes update 30 times per second, then you will gain absolutely nothing by having a display capable of more than 60fps (yes, the Nyquist limit applies here). For me, I find that I can still just barely make out flicker at 70-75hz, with 80hz safely above (2x) my limit to distinguish separate states.
I find this easiest to describe as "flicker", but with an LCD, you mostly notice it as mud - For example, scrolling contrasty text rapidly will cause it to momentarily look "dim" on a too-slow LCD, since it takes two (or more) human visual updates for the pixel itself to fully change.
I thought the Refresh Rate (Hertz) didn't apply to LCDs because the pixel on a CRT has to be constantly refreshed, where as with a LCD its only refreshes when it needs to, needs to change that is.
You have two different concepts here called the same thing.
With a CRT, the "refresh rate" means, literally, the rate at which the electron beam can scan and "refresh" all the pixels in one full screen.
The signal going into the display has its own rate, perhaps best described as the "pixel clock". If you divide the pixel clock by the resolution (plus the padding around it to allow the electron beam to move to the next line or do a vertical retrace), you get a different sort of refresh rate, also in terms of full screens per second.
With a CRT, those two different "refresh rates" almost always match or have a 2:1 ratio (in the case of an interlaced signal). You can't really avoid that tight lock, since the video signal actually acts to directly tell the electron beam what to do "now".
With an LCD, though, each pixel has a distinct value, which can update almost arbitrarily often (much faster than any video card can tell it to change, anyway). The response time of the pixel measures how long it takes to change the visiblestate of the pixel itself (think of that like a fluorescent light bulb... You can flip the light switch far faster than the light can turn on and off).
So, what does this mean in relation to the GP post?
What your video card thinks of as the "refresh rate" matters in that no individual pixel will update faster than that, whether or not they can. So, while a 3ms response time means you could change the state of a pixel 333 times per second, it will only actually change at the video card's refresh rate (rarely over 85Hz).
But I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.
Not so much wrong, as just (understandably) confusing a "rose" for a "rose".
I have a 19" LCD that I use everyday. Is it THAT noticeable if I have 7-10 ms instead of 3?
No, with the condition that the stated time actually measures the real response time (ie, the worst case from any state to any other state). Humans cannot resolve different colors or brightnesses that change faster than roughly 15ms (most people don't even notice changes under 25-30ms, but for some reason, geeks as a group tend to notice flicker far more than the general population).
As my main display, I currently use a 19in DVI panel with a "mere" 12ms response time (note that the "DVI" part of that makes a HUGE difference - Most of the artifacts people blame on poor response time actually come from doing an unnecessary D2A2D conversion). And it looks simply beautiful, even for action movies... No muddiness or ghosting whatsoever.
That said, I don't think any manufacturers measure their response time as a worst-case. So currently, the only real test of how well it will look playing movies or games - Try one out. Go into Best Buy or CC or even Wallyworld, pick out a few models you like based on appearance, then go home and buy your favorite for half the price online.
I 100% agree, why bother even having passwords in the first place?
"We don't rely on passwords, we rely on integrity"
Integrity stops us from doing such things.
Passwords stop (or at least slow down) them.