I don't think the support will be so expensive, or require too many people.. remember, the systems are probably going to be largely homogenous, since they're all performing the same sort of function - so the configurations of all of them are likely to be pretty similar - you can pretty much automate much of the administration. Once the systems are installed and running stably (is that a word?) they will probably require minimal maintenance. Mainly fixing of hardware problems (an issue no matter what you run, especially with that many PC's, but it doesn't require anybody expensive to fix PC hardware) and software patches/upgrades, which as I said, can probably be mostly automated. Sounds like a fun job, actually.
"By using the word Guiness in those URLs, they were in essence using the trademark name without the permission of Guiness. That is illegal"
Well, actually, you're presenting an over-simplified view of trademark law here. Trademarks are registered in categories of products (and additionally must be registered in each country that a company wishes to use it but thats besides the point here.) What this means is that Guiness does not "own" the name outright, but only when it is being used to refer to an alcoholic beverage. (An example, we have a "McDonalds plumbing" in our area - perfectly legal, nobody is going to confuse plumbing with hamburgers. Likewise, I could legally create a "Linux detergent")
If this guy had created a "guiness-really-sucks" site, and created content on the site that did not relate at all to lager, but perhaps discussed (say for example) some piece of software called 'guiness' (or perhaps he was dissing some online game player whose nick was Guiness), then there would be no trademark infringement - there would clearly be no intent to profit from the well-known Guiness lager brand name, nor to take away their customers.
In this case, yes, trademark infringement does hold, as the guy basically admitted that the site was talking about Guiness, the lager. But that is incidental - it isn't as clear-cut "can't use a trademark without permission" as you imply that it is.
"or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating"
Forgot to mention.. an interesting example of this.. grab your mouse down on the scroll bar of a Quake3 dedicated server dialog box while people are playing..:)
"I'm surprised to read that games like Q3 don't do this. (Physics depending on your refresh rate is just nutty.)"
Quake does do this, so the physics engine is not dependent on the frame rate. *However* there is a *bug* in Quake3Arena that makes the physics engine slightly different at different frame rates, but it is a bug, and doesn't have to do with the game loop design. The physics engine runs in a.qvm module, which runs on a virtual machine, and apparently there is a floating point rounding error in the virtual machine implementation itself that causes the bug. The newest patch is supposed to fix it.
As far as LionKimbro's post goes, I don't think there's too much difference between how you've mentioned it, and parallelizing it. Parallelizing it makes things quite a bit more complex - it sounds pretty beautiful on the surface, run your model/view each in their own threads and they can update at their own rates. But somewhere along the line these two threads must exchange data - and this happens often - every time something moves, every time something new joins, or geometry changes etc etc (all the time, in other words) - you can't just update that while your rendering thread is rendering. This isn't an easy problem to solve, it requires very careful design and thought into how the threads will communicate. We currently do our stuff the parallelization way, but one of the main reasons we do it is so that the application main thread cannot "accidentally" stop the simulation - e.g. if a modal dialog box pops up on the server applications, or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating. So we run the simulation stuff in another thread.
Sure, you don't need 200 fps in a game.. but that doesn't exactly imply that nVidia is wasting their time improving their chipsets.. if you Mr Carmack can get Quake3Arena to render at 200fps, then he can take some of those "excess" frames and use that time to make the visuals of his next engine look that much nicer, since you at 200 fps, you can render a second pass of effects, and drop to 100 fps.
What many people here probably aren't aware of is that a lot of Quake3 players bumped their frame rate up to 120 *not* because they thought the higher frame rate itself gave them an edge, but because up until the most recent Q3A patch, there was a bug in the quake physics engine that allowed you to jump just a little higher at 120 fps than at others (a big plus in q3dm13 for the megahealth..)
A bit of "tragic" irony on Carmack's part here - if you've watched the "pro" Quake players play, you'll notice that they set their graphics settings horribly low, to the point where the graphics really looks crap. For various reasons this gives you advantages (not just the speed, but a high r_picmip lets you, for example, see more clearly through the plasma gun textures.) So while Carmack is working his life away at making the stuff look as good at possible, the hardcore gamers end up playing the game so it looks like crap anyway..:)
Something else that some people don't know about, is that if they buy a souped up PC, and install Windows98 and Quake3Arena, the default mouse rate on the PS/2 port is 40 Hz, and if mouse smoothing in Quake is off, even when you're rendering at 90 fps, you won't see it, because your view will be tied to the 40Hz mouse update rate (you can get utils like ps2rate to set this rate) but in any case, I can imagine that at least some people may walk away thinking that that is how 90 fps actually looks, and that they can't tell the difference between 40 and 90.
Something else that may be worth mentioning, in my experience programming 3d networked simulations, depending on how the network code is structured, a slightly lower frame rate may improve the network performance, as limitting the frame rate can give a bit of CPU idle for network threads and improve latency. Depending on the design of the network code, this can be noticeable. Not sure about Quake in this regard..
"It might be difficult to know for an OSS maintainer that a contribution to his software does not come from M$ stolen code"
For that matter, there is no reason why MS themselves wouldn't submit some of their own code to be used in OS projects (under false pretences naturally) - then wait a little while, and "discover", to their horror, that (say) some of their own code is in (say) the Wine source code - and the lawyers pounce..
"I may not be a father... but I know I saw my fair share of bare skin when I was a kid. "
Just a "me too", but I would like to add the important point that this was quite a number of years before I'd even heard of the Internet. A lot of people seem to be going around talking about kids looking at porn on the internet like the internet is the first thing ever that allows kids to look at porn. Hell, there was tonnes of the stuff around (magazines, videos etc) when I was at school. I can remember getting access to porn at school as far back as probably about age 10 or 11. And strangely enough, even though a fair percentage of guys looked at the stuff even at that young age, IT WASN'T HARMFUL. If you think that you're going to stop your child from looking at porn just by buying some point-n-click censorware, you're deluding yourself. If you think your child isn't already getting porn *somewhere*, you're in denial. And if you think it's going to irreperably harm him to be seeing that porn, you're demented.
I guess free speech has at least some downsides.. but luckily everybody here realises that free speech is so incredibly important to maintaining freedom that we'll fight to keep it in spite of the one or two annoyances it may create.. right?
I mean, come on.. if you need to use the flipping free internet machine in the library, just ask the bum surfing porn to move for a while so you can use it.. get authorities to move him if it becomes a serious problem..
"At my next job, the reverse could be true. I wonder if your attitude would change if it was NT invading a Linux environment"
My attitude would be the same, if you'd read my post properly I think I clearly made my point. Control/power freaks are the same no matter what field they're in. It seems you've some stuff into my post that just plain wasn't there. It was not implied either. My post should be read as it was written. I was not attacking *you* or "your kind" - it doesn't sound to me like you are one of the people I'm talking about anyway. You'll
know if you meet some.
"Mostly, though, I'd be proud, and a little bit scared, to have a fellow geek on board."
I have a suspicion though that a fair portion of the IT admin's they interviewed for that article are so dead against Linux because they probably don't understand Linux/Unix based networking, and don't want to let on how clueless they are. They certainly don't want to have to admit that one of their users, over which they are "god" in that domain (no pun intended), may know more than they do. It's far easier to just hide behind excuses like "we have standards around here, and we've standardized on NT, so anything else goes".
Sure, they're not all like this (and naturally you get clueless people playing around with Linux too), and many are pretty clued up. But some aren't; some just need to feel that certain amount of control that they have by managing IT in a company. Letting clued up "renegade" users start using Linux means losing some of that control.
Thats probably why they don't feel comfortable about asking confronting people who plugged Linux into the network - it's a perfect situation to get into a conversation where it may become obvious that they don't know as much as everybody there thinks they do - so they feel insecure, maybe?
Some time ago, for some strange reason (I must have had a good reason at the time but I don't remember what it was) I entered one of my e-mail aliases into some form at microsoft's web site. Suddenly I started to get crap-mail from them (didn't ask for it.) Nonetheless, they provided no less than 2 options for removing oneself from the list: (1) reply to a specific e-mail address with remove in the subject line, and (2) unsubscribe using a form on their web site.
I tried option 1 first. Soon after that, I got some more crap-mail from them.
I tried option 1 again. Soon after that, I got more crap-mail from them. Then I tried both option 1 and option 2. Soon after that I got crap-mail from them again.
After another few attempts, I gave up, and eventually just deleted that e-mail alias.
Even though it was MS, I somehow expected at least a *little bit* more professionalism than that. Incredibly unprofessional and pushy.
I have an account with Amazon, and I vaguely remember there was an option to not receive spam from them. I don't have a spam problem with them. I get maybe one or two e-mails from them a year, normally for relatively 'important' things, e.g. if they change their TOS or something. I can't remember when last I got crap-mail from them.
I do have a more general spam problem though. My spam-to-real-email ratio is about 5 to 1.
Reminds me of a "the lighter side of.." that once appeared in MAD magazine. A girl is sitting doing her homework, and asks her dad, "Dad, what's a 'cult'?" and her dad answers "Um.. any religion other than ours is a cult"..
"Both science and organized religion are a matter of faith -- you have to accept what you are tolded by the more learned "clergy.""
Actually that's where you've made your mistake - this is the point where science is 180 degrees the opposite to religion. Real science teaches you to question everything, to make sure science is "keeping on the right track", everything must be verifiable experimentally. In pretty much every single current religion, you are told what to believe and are not allowed to question that ("do not test the lord your god blah blah blah"). In science, you are actively encouraged to "test your god" - "please verify this notion experimentally and try to debunk it". The typical (Christian) religion viewpoint says "we know everything, this is how it is." Science says, "damn, there is so much we are clueless about, lets try to figure this stuff out". Many religous people simply don't seem to be capable of understanding the concept of "not knowing".
"I'm going to get flamed for this, of course, because the vast majority of atheists get unbelievably upset when they're told that they take things on faith. But that's too bad, because it's one hundred percent true"
Not at all actually. I don't "take science on faith". Any piece of science must be verifiable. Remember, atheist!=scientist. Maybe some atheists just "take things on faith", but don't confuse that with science.
"I'm really surprised that nobody has taken Photoshop to task for what it really is -- an amusing toy, but absolutely useless for any kind of real-world editing of streaming video"
Uh, like, are you living in the same "real world" I'm living in? Because in the "real world" I'm living in, PS is by far the most commonly used professional photo editting tool. Go down to your local bookstore and pick up any magazine off the shelf that has any photos in - you guessed it, PS was used somewhere in making that magazine.
PS isn't supposed to be used for editing streaming video, you twit. Who claimed it was?
Your post is pure FUD.
The GIMP is really excellent, and has some very powerful features that PS simply does not have - but please, lose that rabid zealotry and open your eyes, PS is also a really excellent, powerful, professional tool. I tend to prefer PS over GIMP, partially because I prefer the interface, but there are other reasons.
"And now that graffiti is almost always a felony based on some objective view of what the amount of damage done is, and we have a three strikes law, a minor could find themselves facing a life sentence in prison for graffiti"
I'm sorry, but if anybody (minor or otherwise) is stupid enough to go out and paint graffiti a third time, after already getting caught twice, andknowing about the three-strikes law, then they deserve what's coming to them. Hell, kids might not always have the clearest judgment, but please, lets give them some credit. They are not that stupid. I can only imagine a minor doing something like this because they have emotional problems making them self-destructive - a soft alternative to suicide, if you will. This is a different problem that needs to be dealt with differently (OK I agree, life in prison is not going to sort out anyone's emotional problems), and is closely linked to events like Columbine.
"Either a child is given privacy and all the responsibilities that come with it, or the parent must be able to check on their child"
No, sorry, completely wrong. This is not a black-and-white all-or-nothing issue, there is such a thing as "inbetween", you know. A balance needs to be struck between privacy/freedom and responsibility while children are growing up, and as a child gets older, that balance should be periodically re-evaluated, so that the child can learn to deal with responsibility gradually, and be prepared for it when they have to leave home. Children that are never given responsibility while growing up turn into adults who can't handle responsibility, and children who are given too much freedom too soon don't turn out so hot either. Naturally this is different for each child, so somewhere there must be a thing in this equation called "parenting", where parents can determine how best to teach their kids.
Simple, right? Why do so many people always want issues to be black and white?
The problem is, they both lie.
You can use their positions on the Internet, however, to determine something about their basic philosophies
You think? They want one thing; votes. They know that the majority of voting adults are sheeplike creatures (who don't fully appreciate what free speech is about) who only want to know that somehow, by voting for a specific candidate, that they are somehow being good parents, because this candidate if elected will censor porn and then they don't have to bother to watch their kiddies.
Kid's can't vote anyway, so Gore/Bush will say what most parent's want to hear, regardless of whether or not it is for or against their philosophies. By the time today's kids are old enough to vote, not only will they no longer be politicians, but those kids will have become sheep-parents, just like their parents before them, who want the government to protect their kiddies from porn.
"God forbid that kids see people engaged in sex. Violent sex is another matter (becuase the violence is bad!), but healthy and positive sex is a good thing."
Heard a nice quote summarising strange American attitudes to sex.. "it's OK to bare arms but not to bare breasts". It's amazing, really. I remember watching action shows on TV when I was a kid - you could literally see dozens of people shot to death in one episode (it was OK because it was the "bad guys" getting shot) - but God forbid that you actually saw a woman's nipple!
"If taxpayer money is being used to fund the computer and the access, then the government has every right to dictate what acceptable use of that resource is"
I hope you didn't mean that the way it sounded when I read it. Sounds like you're advocating handing all the power to the government and away from the people. The government is not a private entity, so no, they do not have every right to dictate use of public resources. They theoretically have to listen to the will of the people.
Not surprising, considering
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Hollywood movies these days just suck so much, its not surprising at all that people find video games more entertaining. Please, people are getting tired of the same old predictable formulaic stories with the same old stereotypical, one-dimensional cardboard cut-out characters. Or are they?
Hmm.. basic capitalist economic principles, upon which the wealthiest nation in the world is built, are now considered "twenty year old conservative dogma"? How insightful, not. Obviously spewed forth from somebody who lives in such a society. Why not go live in some socialist and communist countries for a while, and have a first-hand look at how wildly they've benefitted from their principles?
"To "fritter" means that the money is not wisely invested and put to productive use, but merely consumed"
You missed the guys point. Money that is "merely consumed" doesn't vanish into the ether, it ends up in other peoples' pockets. So when the rich guy "fritters" away his money by buying McDonalds food twice a day, he is feeding a market for burger franchises, which in turn creates dozens of jobs for people who would otherwise have no jobs. Sure, working at McDonalds is a crappy low-paying job - but when the alternative is no job at all, it's a godsend. Perhaps that's difficult to understand for people living in the USA, where unemployment is 4% - come live in a country for a while with over 30% unemployment. Every job is precious. Sure, I may be squandering away my money when I buy crappy overpriced burgers, but some of that money directly benefits the people who provide those services to me (i.e. making burgers.)
You're correct, the money could be invested wisely and put to good cause in charities. But the previous poster is also right. Either way, that money will end up benefitting a number of people.
"Thank you. Last time I brought this point up on slashdot, I was shot down by people who find it easier to group the parties together than actually follow the issues"
The notion that the republican and democratic parties are basically the same probably stems from the fact that no matter which side is currently in power, American life seems to go on pretty much the same. So while there may be differences on a number of issues, the fact is that for a large percentage of the population (for whom those issues are not such big issues), they really might just as well *be* the same parties.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons that US elections seem to be influenced so much by really lame things like kissing Oprah / kissing your wife / "sighing too much" etc. For the average American, the quality of the rest of their life isn't going to be much different, if it's any different at all, depending on who wins.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the support will be so expensive, or require too many people .. remember, the systems are probably going to be largely homogenous, since they're all performing the same sort of function - so the configurations of all of them are likely to be pretty similar - you can pretty much automate much of the administration. Once the systems are installed and running stably (is that a word?) they will probably require minimal maintenance. Mainly fixing of hardware problems (an issue no matter what you run, especially with that many PC's, but it doesn't require anybody expensive to fix PC hardware) and software patches/upgrades, which as I said, can probably be mostly automated. Sounds like a fun job, actually.
"By using the word Guiness in those URLs, they were in essence using the trademark name without the permission of Guiness. That is illegal"
Well, actually, you're presenting an over-simplified view of trademark law here. Trademarks are registered in categories of products (and additionally must be registered in each country that a company wishes to use it but thats besides the point here.) What this means is that Guiness does not "own" the name outright, but only when it is being used to refer to an alcoholic beverage. (An example, we have a "McDonalds plumbing" in our area - perfectly legal, nobody is going to confuse plumbing with hamburgers. Likewise, I could legally create a "Linux detergent")
If this guy had created a "guiness-really-sucks" site, and created content on the site that did not relate at all to lager, but perhaps discussed (say for example) some piece of software called 'guiness' (or perhaps he was dissing some online game player whose nick was Guiness), then there would be no trademark infringement - there would clearly be no intent to profit from the well-known Guiness lager brand name, nor to take away their customers.
In this case, yes, trademark infringement does hold, as the guy basically admitted that the site was talking about Guiness, the lager. But that is incidental - it isn't as clear-cut "can't use a trademark without permission" as you imply that it is.
"or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating"
Forgot to mention .. an interesting example of this .. grab your mouse down on the scroll bar of a Quake3 dedicated server dialog box while people are playing .. :)
"I'm surprised to read that games like Q3 don't do this. (Physics depending on your refresh rate is just nutty.)"
Quake does do this, so the physics engine is not dependent on the frame rate. *However* there is a *bug* in Quake3Arena that makes the physics engine slightly different at different frame rates, but it is a bug, and doesn't have to do with the game loop design. The physics engine runs in a .qvm module, which runs on a virtual machine, and apparently there is a floating point rounding error in the virtual machine implementation itself that causes the bug. The newest patch is supposed to fix it.
As far as LionKimbro's post goes, I don't think there's too much difference between how you've mentioned it, and parallelizing it. Parallelizing it makes things quite a bit more complex - it sounds pretty beautiful on the surface, run your model/view each in their own threads and they can update at their own rates. But somewhere along the line these two threads must exchange data - and this happens often - every time something moves, every time something new joins, or geometry changes etc etc (all the time, in other words) - you can't just update that while your rendering thread is rendering. This isn't an easy problem to solve, it requires very careful design and thought into how the threads will communicate. We currently do our stuff the parallelization way, but one of the main reasons we do it is so that the application main thread cannot "accidentally" stop the simulation - e.g. if a modal dialog box pops up on the server applications, or the user presses 'alt' by mistake and the window enters the menu loop, then you don't want everything on the network to suddenly stop updating. So we run the simulation stuff in another thread.
Sure, you don't need 200 fps in a game .. but that doesn't exactly imply that nVidia is wasting their time improving their chipsets .. if you Mr Carmack can get Quake3Arena to render at 200fps, then he can take some of those "excess" frames and use that time to make the visuals of his next engine look that much nicer, since you at 200 fps, you can render a second pass of effects, and drop to 100 fps.
What many people here probably aren't aware of is that a lot of Quake3 players bumped their frame rate up to 120 *not* because they thought the higher frame rate itself gave them an edge, but because up until the most recent Q3A patch, there was a bug in the quake physics engine that allowed you to jump just a little higher at 120 fps than at others (a big plus in q3dm13 for the megahealth ..)
A bit of "tragic" irony on Carmack's part here - if you've watched the "pro" Quake players play, you'll notice that they set their graphics settings horribly low, to the point where the graphics really looks crap. For various reasons this gives you advantages (not just the speed, but a high r_picmip lets you, for example, see more clearly through the plasma gun textures.) So while Carmack is working his life away at making the stuff look as good at possible, the hardcore gamers end up playing the game so it looks like crap anyway .. :)
Something else that some people don't know about, is that if they buy a souped up PC, and install Windows98 and Quake3Arena, the default mouse rate on the PS/2 port is 40 Hz, and if mouse smoothing in Quake is off, even when you're rendering at 90 fps, you won't see it, because your view will be tied to the 40Hz mouse update rate (you can get utils like ps2rate to set this rate) but in any case, I can imagine that at least some people may walk away thinking that that is how 90 fps actually looks, and that they can't tell the difference between 40 and 90.
Something else that may be worth mentioning, in my experience programming 3d networked simulations, depending on how the network code is structured, a slightly lower frame rate may improve the network performance, as limitting the frame rate can give a bit of CPU idle for network threads and improve latency. Depending on the design of the network code, this can be noticeable. Not sure about Quake in this regard ..
"It might be difficult to know for an OSS maintainer that a contribution to his software does not come from M$ stolen code"
For that matter, there is no reason why MS themselves wouldn't submit some of their own code to be used in OS projects (under false pretences naturally) - then wait a little while, and "discover", to their horror, that (say) some of their own code is in (say) the Wine source code - and the lawyers pounce ..
"I may not be a father ... but I know I saw my fair share of bare skin when I was a kid. "
Just a "me too", but I would like to add the important point that this was quite a number of years before I'd even heard of the Internet. A lot of people seem to be going around talking about kids looking at porn on the internet like the internet is the first thing ever that allows kids to look at porn. Hell, there was tonnes of the stuff around (magazines, videos etc) when I was at school. I can remember getting access to porn at school as far back as probably about age 10 or 11. And strangely enough, even though a fair percentage of guys looked at the stuff even at that young age, IT WASN'T HARMFUL. If you think that you're going to stop your child from looking at porn just by buying some point-n-click censorware, you're deluding yourself. If you think your child isn't already getting porn *somewhere*, you're in denial. And if you think it's going to irreperably harm him to be seeing that porn, you're demented.
I guess free speech has at least some downsides .. but luckily everybody here realises that free speech is so incredibly important to maintaining freedom that we'll fight to keep it in spite of the one or two annoyances it may create .. right?
I mean, come on .. if you need to use the flipping free internet machine in the library, just ask the bum surfing porn to move for a while so you can use it .. get authorities to move him if it becomes a serious problem ..
"At my next job, the reverse could be true. I wonder if your attitude would change if it was NT invading a Linux environment"
My attitude would be the same, if you'd read my post properly I think I clearly made my point. Control/power freaks are the same no matter what field they're in. It seems you've some stuff into my post that just plain wasn't there. It was not implied either. My post should be read as it was written. I was not attacking *you* or "your kind" - it doesn't sound to me like you are one of the people I'm talking about anyway. You'll know if you meet some.
"Mostly, though, I'd be proud, and a little bit scared, to have a fellow geek on board."
I have a suspicion though that a fair portion of the IT admin's they interviewed for that article are so dead against Linux because they probably don't understand Linux/Unix based networking, and don't want to let on how clueless they are. They certainly don't want to have to admit that one of their users, over which they are "god" in that domain (no pun intended), may know more than they do. It's far easier to just hide behind excuses like "we have standards around here, and we've standardized on NT, so anything else goes".
Sure, they're not all like this (and naturally you get clueless people playing around with Linux too), and many are pretty clued up. But some aren't; some just need to feel that certain amount of control that they have by managing IT in a company. Letting clued up "renegade" users start using Linux means losing some of that control.
Thats probably why they don't feel comfortable about asking confronting people who plugged Linux into the network - it's a perfect situation to get into a conversation where it may become obvious that they don't know as much as everybody there thinks they do - so they feel insecure, maybe?
Some time ago, for some strange reason (I must have had a good reason at the time but I don't remember what it was) I entered one of my e-mail aliases into some form at microsoft's web site. Suddenly I started to get crap-mail from them (didn't ask for it.) Nonetheless, they provided no less than 2 options for removing oneself from the list: (1) reply to a specific e-mail address with remove in the subject line, and (2) unsubscribe using a form on their web site.
I tried option 1 first. Soon after that, I got some more crap-mail from them.
I tried option 1 again. Soon after that, I got more crap-mail from them. Then I tried both option 1 and option 2. Soon after that I got crap-mail from them again.
After another few attempts, I gave up, and eventually just deleted that e-mail alias.
Even though it was MS, I somehow expected at least a *little bit* more professionalism than that. Incredibly unprofessional and pushy.
I have an account with Amazon, and I vaguely remember there was an option to not receive spam from them. I don't have a spam problem with them. I get maybe one or two e-mails from them a year, normally for relatively 'important' things, e.g. if they change their TOS or something. I can't remember when last I got crap-mail from them.
I do have a more general spam problem though. My spam-to-real-email ratio is about 5 to 1.
Reminds me of a "the lighter side of .." that once appeared in MAD magazine. A girl is sitting doing her homework, and asks her dad, "Dad, what's a 'cult'?" and her dad answers "Um .. any religion other than ours is a cult" ..
"Both science and organized religion are a matter of faith -- you have to accept what you are tolded by the more learned "clergy.""
Actually that's where you've made your mistake - this is the point where science is 180 degrees the opposite to religion. Real science teaches you to question everything, to make sure science is "keeping on the right track", everything must be verifiable experimentally. In pretty much every single current religion, you are told what to believe and are not allowed to question that ("do not test the lord your god blah blah blah"). In science, you are actively encouraged to "test your god" - "please verify this notion experimentally and try to debunk it". The typical (Christian) religion viewpoint says "we know everything, this is how it is." Science says, "damn, there is so much we are clueless about, lets try to figure this stuff out". Many religous people simply don't seem to be capable of understanding the concept of "not knowing".
"I'm going to get flamed for this, of course, because the vast majority of atheists get unbelievably upset when they're told that they take things on faith. But that's too bad, because it's one hundred percent true"
Not at all actually. I don't "take science on faith". Any piece of science must be verifiable. Remember, atheist!=scientist. Maybe some atheists just "take things on faith", but don't confuse that with science.
"I'm really surprised that nobody has taken Photoshop to task for what it really is -- an amusing toy, but absolutely useless for any kind of real-world editing of streaming video"
Uh, like, are you living in the same "real world" I'm living in? Because in the "real world" I'm living in, PS is by far the most commonly used professional photo editting tool. Go down to your local bookstore and pick up any magazine off the shelf that has any photos in - you guessed it, PS was used somewhere in making that magazine.
PS isn't supposed to be used for editing streaming video, you twit. Who claimed it was?
Your post is pure FUD.
The GIMP is really excellent, and has some very powerful features that PS simply does not have - but please, lose that rabid zealotry and open your eyes, PS is also a really excellent, powerful, professional tool. I tend to prefer PS over GIMP, partially because I prefer the interface, but there are other reasons.
"And now that graffiti is almost always a felony based on some objective view of what the amount of damage done is, and we have a three strikes law, a minor could find themselves facing a life sentence in prison for graffiti"
I'm sorry, but if anybody (minor or otherwise) is stupid enough to go out and paint graffiti a third time, after already getting caught twice, and knowing about the three-strikes law, then they deserve what's coming to them. Hell, kids might not always have the clearest judgment, but please, lets give them some credit. They are not that stupid. I can only imagine a minor doing something like this because they have emotional problems making them self-destructive - a soft alternative to suicide, if you will. This is a different problem that needs to be dealt with differently (OK I agree, life in prison is not going to sort out anyone's emotional problems), and is closely linked to events like Columbine.
"Either a child is given privacy and all the responsibilities that come with it, or the parent must be able to check on their child"
No, sorry, completely wrong. This is not a black-and-white all-or-nothing issue, there is such a thing as "inbetween", you know. A balance needs to be struck between privacy/freedom and responsibility while children are growing up, and as a child gets older, that balance should be periodically re-evaluated, so that the child can learn to deal with responsibility gradually, and be prepared for it when they have to leave home. Children that are never given responsibility while growing up turn into adults who can't handle responsibility, and children who are given too much freedom too soon don't turn out so hot either. Naturally this is different for each child, so somewhere there must be a thing in this equation called "parenting", where parents can determine how best to teach their kids.
Simple, right? Why do so many people always want issues to be black and white?
You think? They want one thing; votes. They know that the majority of voting adults are sheeplike creatures (who don't fully appreciate what free speech is about) who only want to know that somehow, by voting for a specific candidate, that they are somehow being good parents, because this candidate if elected will censor porn and then they don't have to bother to watch their kiddies.
Kid's can't vote anyway, so Gore/Bush will say what most parent's want to hear, regardless of whether or not it is for or against their philosophies. By the time today's kids are old enough to vote, not only will they no longer be politicians, but those kids will have become sheep-parents, just like their parents before them, who want the government to protect their kiddies from porn.
"God forbid that kids see people engaged in sex. Violent sex is another matter (becuase the violence is bad!), but healthy and positive sex is a good thing."
Heard a nice quote summarising strange American attitudes to sex .. "it's OK to bare arms but not to bare breasts". It's amazing, really. I remember watching action shows on TV when I was a kid - you could literally see dozens of people shot to death in one episode (it was OK because it was the "bad guys" getting shot) - but God forbid that you actually saw a woman's nipple!
Did you have your sense of humour surgically removed or what?
"If taxpayer money is being used to fund the computer and the access, then the government has every right to dictate what acceptable use of that resource is"
I hope you didn't mean that the way it sounded when I read it. Sounds like you're advocating handing all the power to the government and away from the people. The government is not a private entity, so no, they do not have every right to dictate use of public resources. They theoretically have to listen to the will of the people.
Hollywood movies these days just suck so much, its not surprising at all that people find video games more entertaining. Please, people are getting tired of the same old predictable formulaic stories with the same old stereotypical, one-dimensional cardboard cut-out characters. Or are they?
Hmm .. basic capitalist economic principles, upon which the wealthiest nation in the world is built, are now considered "twenty year old conservative dogma"? How insightful, not. Obviously spewed forth from somebody who lives in such a society. Why not go live in some socialist and communist countries for a while, and have a first-hand look at how wildly they've benefitted from their principles?
"To "fritter" means that the money is not wisely invested and put to productive use, but merely consumed"
You missed the guys point. Money that is "merely consumed" doesn't vanish into the ether, it ends up in other peoples' pockets. So when the rich guy "fritters" away his money by buying McDonalds food twice a day, he is feeding a market for burger franchises, which in turn creates dozens of jobs for people who would otherwise have no jobs. Sure, working at McDonalds is a crappy low-paying job - but when the alternative is no job at all, it's a godsend. Perhaps that's difficult to understand for people living in the USA, where unemployment is 4% - come live in a country for a while with over 30% unemployment. Every job is precious. Sure, I may be squandering away my money when I buy crappy overpriced burgers, but some of that money directly benefits the people who provide those services to me (i.e. making burgers.)
You're correct, the money could be invested wisely and put to good cause in charities. But the previous poster is also right. Either way, that money will end up benefitting a number of people.
"Thank you. Last time I brought this point up on slashdot, I was shot down by people who find it easier to group the parties together than actually follow the issues"
The notion that the republican and democratic parties are basically the same probably stems from the fact that no matter which side is currently in power, American life seems to go on pretty much the same. So while there may be differences on a number of issues, the fact is that for a large percentage of the population (for whom those issues are not such big issues), they really might just as well *be* the same parties.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons that US elections seem to be influenced so much by really lame things like kissing Oprah / kissing your wife / "sighing too much" etc. For the average American, the quality of the rest of their life isn't going to be much different, if it's any different at all, depending on who wins.