Edison didn't have all that many scientific acheivements.
The record player was really the only truely unique thing he did. Everything else was a duplication of someone else's efforts where he succeeded and the others failed- or was something one of his employees came up with. Did you know that he'd "Westinghouse" a cat "to show the dangers of AC power" during the time where he was trying to compete with AC power versus his DC system (From which ConEd initially came from...)? This would entail hooking up a grid of alternating plates with some small amount of insulating gap to an AC power connection, place them inside a cage that one's keeping a cat and then plug it in. Edison's NOT someone to be holding up as an example of scientific achievement- unless you want to hold Mengele up as well. Sure, we got a lot further in medical science because of that "Doctor", but how he got his information, I'd rather he didn't do what he did- and it's not a good example of a scientific achievement.
DC and AC both have their place. DC is good for short-haul power distribution, but if you short out the lines you'll destroy the entire power run. AC doesn't do that anywhere near as bad- which is why electric power is distributed as AC- it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Considering that Intel released a security report for their drivers in recent times that a malicous attacker being able to have this exploit available to them, I'd say the odds are good that Occam's Razor cuts the other way. One must consider that there's another CPU running in there (or more...) doing the actual work of the WiFi device- it can be exploited too if there's a design flaw in it's firmware or in the hooks the OS uses to talk to it.
If that's the case, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself except not use the device.
I'm not going to say they're not guilty of a hoax, but considering all the details- if it is a hoax, it's an awfully believable one based on all the other information floating about.
While I'm not saying this stuff's not snake oil, there is something to be said for something else that slows down the framerates that has little to do with latency in and of itself- what's your CPU utilization when you're pushing data down the wire?
With 100Mbit cards, the utilization can approach 50-60% at full wireline speeds. With 1Gbit cards, if you don't do clever things to offset the CPU use, it can be as 80%. We won't even go into raw 10Gbit speeds...
If you're burning 20-25% of your CPU handling the NIC at load in a game at a LAN Party, it would make some small sense to offload that onto something else- IF it really made that much of a difference. It remains to be seen what they've done, but it looks like a TOE that also supports UDP packets (Though there's not a LOT to be done there to be offloaded...). At a 100Mbit rate, it's a difficult sell to convince me that it's worth >$200 for a card to do transport offload just so I can see an extra 5-20fps on an otherwise already maxed out machine. This is being sold to enthusiasts with more cash than brains, I suspect. Now, if they offer this as a generic offload engine for higher speeds, say 10Gbit Ethernet, for the purposes of a cluster interconnect, then they might have my interests...
IF you are driving the card to wireline speed, you'll see a performance jump, under Windows, because the CPU isn't addressing the NIC, it's just handing off the data to be sent to the Transport Offload Engine (TOE) on the card, which then sends it via DMA out to the wire. If you're lan-partying, on a Windows box, it might make a difference on a 100Mbit card. A Gig-E or higher is a slightly different story, as is with running on Linux. With Linux, you're already close to those performance levels with any old NIC at up to Gigabit speeds. With Gig-E or 10Gig-E, your CPU's overhead with all the cache touches, etc., you'll start seeing more and more demand from the machine (And more benefit) from those cards.
Now, having said this, it's an Offload Engine- this means that you've done an end-run around ANY security measures on-machine you might have for networking, etc. (In other words, if you're using a firewalling app on the machine, you're wasting your time if you're using this NIC...)
Re:Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
64-bit Linux x86_64 users have 2 options:
1 - Go the 32-bit route (If you're on x86_64, mind...) 2 - Use Gnash and hope they're not doing anything "fancy" because it's not there yet with all of Flash7's feature set.
I'm looking into the "Use a 32-bit app wrapper and use Mozplugger" route, and see if someone's done that one yet or if I need to do that. That would be the best short-term solution. The best long-term solution is to pour all our efforts into getting people to use something better or to get Gnash fully up to speed and supporting Flash9's capabilities. As long as it's taking Adobe to make this all happen, I'm just not going to wait for them to get it all together here.
Hmph... No wonder they're lagging on Linux supt.
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Geez. It's not Java, nor is it a Java work alike or an app solution- it's NOT cross-platform, it's not supported solidly past Windows. No wonder that they're not out with the Linux or MacOS x86 versions- or even a 64-bit version for any OS. They're frittering time away trying to make another Java out of it.
Flash behaves consistently cross-browser, cross/platform -- and most features cannot be disabled by the user. (compare that to a user being able to turn off JS, or Java -- something often mandated in a corporate environment.) It's either "all on" or "all off." (w/ a few minor exceptions, eg: local storage and camera/mic access.)
This would imply that it is honestly cross-platform.
It is NOT.
There's no 64-bit version for Linux or Windows- won't be for some time to come. There's no latest version for Linux or anything other than Windows or MacOS.
That doesn't meet the criteria for cross-platform or consistent behavior any better than Java or.NET/Mono does.
I mean, Java has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now. Mono has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now.
Both of those sit on pretty much everything. But, would I be doing applications against them for Web stuff? No. Why would Flash, which is only consistent within Windows, really, be any different.
Actually, he was nice to the cops to a point, if you'd read the story.
They didn't have a warrant. They tried to push their way in, etc.
Doesn't matter if his kid was Jack The Ripper or Hannibal The Cannibal- if they didn't see the perp in the act and see him go into my house with the evidence for the act, they have to get a warrant to search my premises or it's a violation of the Fourth Ammendment. Those cops broke the law.
It's that plain, that simple. He didn't do anything that honestly could be claimed an actual violation of the wiretap law; the cops came up with that BS to intimidate him and bury the proof that the cops DID break the law investigating the case. (Unless that gun was found with a warrant, it probably will get thrown out as evidence- going in with the BS charges they went in with on Gannon won't count as probable cause if the lawyer's worth his/her salt.)
You'll note I didn't say that Gannon, Jr. was innocent- I just said the cops clean overstepped their bounds and left it open for a good lawyer to get an acquittal for him. If they'd followed the rules properly (Which meant being nice and leaving when Gannon said "Good Night" to them and getting a search warrant from a judge...) they'd not have this and would be looking at an airtight case now.
Gannon's gear was ripped out of the walls. He was wrongly arrested (sorry, I don't buy the wiretap law bull that the cops there keep spouting...). They say there will be a disciplinary action taken against the detectives as they did something wrong, etc.- but you don't know that to be the case.
All that happened was Gannon's bogus charges were dropped.
I wouldn't call that "turning out right". I'd call that a half-assed victory at best. A bunch of wrongs were commited and little has been done to rectify the situation so they won't be easily repeated any time soon.
It's not on all models. The biggest problem they have is that they've got magic tags in the BIOS that XP sees and uses to allow an OEM install intended for Dell machines to go on without plugging in the CD key on the labels they're sticking on the machines. They've got to make a "special" version of the machines they're offering no XP preinstall on that doesn't HAVE this magic key to "prevent piracy", especially since they've apparently caught at least three major businesses cheating on licenses this way in the past. The same goes for at least HPaq (I didn't need to key in the license when I re-imaged my laptop for a small XP partition for my wife's benefit and put Linux (Then Mandriva, now FC5 x86-64 on it...) on.
Blame their wishing for an "easier" way of things for the customer- I blame them for doing something silly that ties them even tighter than ever to Microsoft that honestly wasn't something that was relevant save for the fact that the damn thing needs regular re-installs to be of any use to anyone.
The ECU is a modular affair- a little box with molex plugs going into it. All they needed do was KEEP the ECU with the RFID with the vehicle and hook it back in. Takes all of 5-10 minutes and makes it look like an impossible crime with the law not chasing after them "Because the guy had to be in on it- everybody "knows" that you can't steal these new cars with those RFID tags in the keys...".
I think he was pointing at the seminal example of "vaporware" in the entire computer industry : Duke Nukem Forever. I think you'll find that 3D Realms has been at DNF for...well...forever now, and while the tantalizing tidbits that we've seen of THIS iteration of the game show promise, we still don't have a working demo of the game, let alone the title proper- yet. It's been MANY years now and it's still "Not Ready Yet."
C'mon, I definitely know how to use Windows XP (Considering that I port games and other software to/from it for a living, I would have to)- it's unstable, rent with Spyware, Virii, Worms, and the lot because of bad design decisions. People don't bitch more because they've grown used to all the crap, weren't told the truth about things, and are amazed when they get told that other people using something else don't have a problem. Many assume that it's because we're technical and we're able to better avoid the problems. Nope. Your OS has issues- and when they're told the truth about all of it they're pissed as hell.
As for the second, I doubt you will be allowed to get to define what "easy to use" is. It's not Windows. MacOS, maybe, but not Windows. I won't say that Linux is "easy to use" (It is, but that's a different discussion altogether...)- but that it's about as easy to use as Windows, it's just different than it in some ways and many find that "Different" is "Difficult", whether it is or not.
Is any of your post "insightful" like the mods claim it to have been? Nope.
Typically, if an ARB or other extension is offered by the driver (VBO support, for example...), it's hardware accelerated- typically, the driver suppliers don't bother advertising things that don't have at least a little hardware boost backing them as it makes them look bad. Now, having said this, it doesn't mean that the boost is as much as it ought to be for the OS (i.e. the ATI drivers for their chipsets don't perform anywhere near as well as they ought to on Linux...) so it's still a mixed bag- but then, it was that way with DirectX too.
That's bogus considering that Khronos provided (and still does) all the spec details for all the other specs, including OpenGL ES (Which is what's used on most of the mobile platforms today), OpenMP, and others. They've got more invested in being open than the ARB did- and I doubt they'll do what you say.
For starters, most of the "little guys" can't DO E3 anyhow- everyone that did, however, wasted a LOT of energy on trying to make demos to showboat there. Like Comdex that fell before it, it became a victim of its own success and was a massive timesink rather than a useful thing to do- but you did it anyway because "everyone else is doing it..."
There's at least a few venues picking up speed that are more for the "little" guys to connect up with publishers and tool vendors (The Texas Independent Game Conference is one of the most recent examples of this- and something that apparently went so well that it's going to get repeated next year without question. The glitz probably ought to be happening at venues like PAX or QuakeCON (Yes, QuakeCON...) and things like the vendors and publishers meeting up with studios, etc. should probably happen at GDC, TIGC, or similar- it'll be a better use of everybody's time and resources that way.
In reality, you've little say over the how the President is being selected- for the reasons you state in your post. However, you DO have a say over how your Representative and your Senators get selected from the populace. The President gets to sign things into law, choose potential Supreme Court appointments (which then get approved by the Senate...), but he doesn't QUITE get to make laws unless Congress isn't doing it's job like it's supposed to. That's Congress' job. For all of your talk of not having a value to your vote, you let the one thing you CAN control languish- and it's something that can put a curb or choke off the problem caused by the thing you can't control. Remember, you get to pick the people that propose the laws and have the authority to remove the President if he's breaking the law.
The reason the country's in the situation that is in this day and age is from talk like yours and people BELIEVING it, hook line and sinker.
Or a swapped out ECU. Don't for a moment think that the crooks stealing the expensive vehciles don't have access to resources to glom onto a hacked or tuner's ECU somewhere that doesn't DO the RFID check. If it doesn't have an alarm system, it's very believeable that someone could have busted into the vehicle, swapped out ECUs, busted the column lock and cover and drove off in about 10 minutes or so- less if they've got more than one thief working in parallel.
Yep. Odds are, they found something not unlike this, and an ECU is mostly modular, with cable jacks in the device housing to allow the manufacturers to easily install the things on the new vehicle and to easily install a new one if the thing fails (which they do occasionally do...)- all it takes is is knowing where the ECU is on the vehicle, develop a procedure for swapping it out that takes 10 or less minutes to execute.
You break in, break the column cover to get the ignition switch access without the key, you swap the ECU out with power tools and practice behind you and just go. It's not QUITE "Gone in 60 Seconds" speeds, but it's still within the timeframe of doing the deed and not getting caught speed.
They actually HAD something like that recently...
on
The End of E3?
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· Score: 4, Informative
...I was just broke and couldn't attend. It was called the Texas Independent Games Development Conference and it had all kinds of people that were sponsoring the thing- according to the promoters, it was a stunning success and they're doing it again next year (And I HOPE to be able to attend the next time...). It was intended for Texas indie studios for the large part, but it's a good start in the right direction- and I don't think we need to see something like GDC or E3 (GDC's good for meeting up with the tech companies supplying the resources to make the games happen and seeing the people face- but if it were to shrink or go away, it'd only be mildly annoying. E3, on the other hand... That was a massive resource sink, in all honesty- it may be that it is its time to go.)
If a criminal is afraid they will be seen/caught, they're less likely to commit the act of crime- hate to tell you this, but that's an actual known fact. By and of itself, the argument's not magically fallacious because you don't think it actually does this- because of the above stated fact.
It might be a weak argument, perhaps, but it's NOT fallacious- it doesn't apply chop-logic, circular reasoning, straw-men, or red-herrings. It actually has a valid grounds and a fairly reasonable and valid premise. Just because you don't agree with the premise, in and of itself, doesn't make it fallacious.
In reality, it might be cheaper, depending on the the changes in question.
In the case of online distribution, etc. it ends up being cheaper for them to go with the flow than all this stupid fighting. It was the same way with cassette. It was the same way with VHS.
Why is THIS any different- it was cheaper for them to capitulate and go with the new tech that torched off old business models (because those two items above changed everything for the players just like the stuff is doing now...). Of course, they fought it kicking and screaming, if memory serves (Jack Valenti was referring to Cassette to being like Jack the Ripper back in the days of cassette...). It doesn't surprise me at all that they're being stupid, yet again, about all of this. I just wish they were poorer like they were back in earlier times- now they've got more cash to do more damage over a longer period of time before they realize that they're wasting money and resources- and burning up mindshare (brand recognition- Sony, for example, is not looking too rosy to anyone right now over DRM debacles...) capital at an alarming rate.
When it works like it's supposed to, yeah it pastes Intel's current offerings all over the place, performing like a low-end discrete display adapter. But, under Linux, as many will attest, while the drivers work, they're so sub-par in performance compared to the other cards, that we're still looking for NVidia on-board GPUs in our laptops...
...it doesn't work well. Technically, it's supposed to be about a 9600 or so in performance, overall. I see about HALF that performance on this chip under Linux- under Windows, it seems to perform about the same level. No good reason for that or the lack of full and proper Sideport support in the driver either- in order to get this all to work even as poorly as it does, I've got to turn off the Sideport dedicated video memory and go all UMA operation. All of their drivers, for that matter, have similar issues.
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Edison didn't have all that many scientific acheivements.
The record player was really the only truely unique thing he did. Everything else was a duplication of someone else's efforts where he succeeded and the others failed- or was something one of his employees came up with. Did you know that he'd "Westinghouse" a cat "to show the dangers of AC power" during the time where he was trying to compete with AC power versus his DC system (From which ConEd initially came from...)? This would entail hooking up a grid of alternating plates with some small amount of insulating gap to an AC power connection, place them inside a cage that one's keeping a cat and then plug it in. Edison's NOT someone to be holding up as an example of scientific achievement- unless you want to hold Mengele up as well. Sure, we got a lot further in medical science because of that "Doctor", but how he got his information, I'd rather he didn't do what he did- and it's not a good example of a scientific achievement.
DC and AC both have their place. DC is good for short-haul power distribution, but if you short out the lines you'll destroy the entire power run. AC doesn't do that anywhere near as bad- which is why electric power is distributed as AC- it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Considering that Intel released a security report for their drivers in recent times that a malicous attacker being able to have this exploit available to them, I'd say the odds are good that Occam's Razor cuts the other way. One must consider that there's another CPU running in there (or more...) doing the actual work of the WiFi device- it can be exploited too if there's a design flaw in it's firmware or in the hooks the OS uses to talk to it.
If that's the case, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself except not use the device.
I'm not going to say they're not guilty of a hoax, but considering all the details- if it is a hoax, it's an awfully believable one based on all the other information floating about.
While I'm not saying this stuff's not snake oil, there is something to be said for something else
that slows down the framerates that has little to do with latency in and of itself- what's your
CPU utilization when you're pushing data down the wire?
With 100Mbit cards, the utilization can approach 50-60% at full wireline speeds.
With 1Gbit cards, if you don't do clever things to offset the CPU use, it can be as 80%.
We won't even go into raw 10Gbit speeds...
If you're burning 20-25% of your CPU handling the NIC at load in a game at a LAN Party, it would
make some small sense to offload that onto something else- IF it really made that much of a
difference. It remains to be seen what they've done, but it looks like a TOE that also supports
UDP packets (Though there's not a LOT to be done there to be offloaded...). At a 100Mbit rate,
it's a difficult sell to convince me that it's worth >$200 for a card to do transport offload
just so I can see an extra 5-20fps on an otherwise already maxed out machine. This is being
sold to enthusiasts with more cash than brains, I suspect. Now, if they offer this as a generic
offload engine for higher speeds, say 10Gbit Ethernet, for the purposes of a cluster interconnect,
then they might have my interests...
IF you are driving the card to wireline speed, you'll see a performance jump, under Windows, because the CPU isn't addressing the NIC, it's just handing off the data to be sent to the Transport Offload Engine (TOE) on the card, which then sends it via DMA out to the wire. If you're lan-partying, on a Windows box, it might make a difference on a 100Mbit card. A Gig-E or higher is a slightly different story, as is with running on Linux. With Linux, you're already close to those performance levels with any old NIC at up to Gigabit speeds. With Gig-E or 10Gig-E, your CPU's overhead with all the cache touches, etc., you'll start seeing more and more demand from the machine (And more benefit) from those cards.
Now, having said this, it's an Offload Engine- this means that you've done an end-run around ANY security measures on-machine you might have
for networking, etc. (In other words, if you're using a firewalling app on the machine, you're wasting your time if you're using this NIC...)
64-bit Linux x86_64 users have 2 options:
1 - Go the 32-bit route (If you're on x86_64, mind...)
2 - Use Gnash and hope they're not doing anything "fancy" because it's not there yet with all of Flash7's feature set.
I'm looking into the "Use a 32-bit app wrapper and use Mozplugger" route, and see if someone's done that one yet or
if I need to do that. That would be the best short-term solution. The best long-term solution is to pour all our
efforts into getting people to use something better or to get Gnash fully up to speed and supporting Flash9's capabilities.
As long as it's taking Adobe to make this all happen, I'm just not going to wait for them to get it all together here.
Geez. It's not Java, nor is it a Java work alike or an app solution- it's NOT cross-platform, it's not supported solidly past Windows.
No wonder that they're not out with the Linux or MacOS x86 versions- or even a 64-bit version for any OS. They're frittering time
away trying to make another Java out of it.
This would imply that it is honestly cross-platform.
It is NOT.
There's no 64-bit version for Linux or Windows- won't be for some time to come.
There's no latest version for Linux or anything other than Windows or MacOS.
That doesn't meet the criteria for cross-platform or consistent behavior any better than Java or
I mean, Java has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now.
Mono has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now.
Both of those sit on pretty much everything. But, would I be doing applications against them for
Web stuff? No. Why would Flash, which is only consistent within Windows, really, be any different.
Actually, he was nice to the cops to a point, if you'd read the story.
They didn't have a warrant. They tried to push their way in, etc.
Doesn't matter if his kid was Jack The Ripper or Hannibal The Cannibal-
if they didn't see the perp in the act and see him go into my house with
the evidence for the act, they have to get a warrant to search my premises
or it's a violation of the Fourth Ammendment. Those cops broke the law.
It's that plain, that simple. He didn't do anything that honestly could
be claimed an actual violation of the wiretap law; the cops came up with
that BS to intimidate him and bury the proof that the cops DID break the
law investigating the case. (Unless that gun was found with a warrant,
it probably will get thrown out as evidence- going in with the BS charges
they went in with on Gannon won't count as probable cause if the lawyer's
worth his/her salt.)
You'll note I didn't say that Gannon, Jr. was innocent- I just said the
cops clean overstepped their bounds and left it open for a good lawyer
to get an acquittal for him. If they'd followed the rules properly
(Which meant being nice and leaving when Gannon said "Good Night" to
them and getting a search warrant from a judge...) they'd not have this
and would be looking at an airtight case now.
But they didn't did they?
Gannon's gear was ripped out of the walls. He was wrongly arrested (sorry, I don't buy the wiretap law
bull that the cops there keep spouting...). They say there will be a disciplinary action
taken against the detectives as they did something wrong, etc.- but you don't know that to be the case.
All that happened was Gannon's bogus charges were dropped.
I wouldn't call that "turning out right". I'd call that a half-assed victory at best. A bunch of wrongs
were commited and little has been done to rectify the situation so they won't be easily repeated any time
soon.
It's not on all models. The biggest problem they have is that they've got magic tags in the BIOS that XP sees and uses to allow an OEM install intended for Dell machines to go on without plugging in the CD key on the labels they're sticking on the machines. They've got to make a "special" version of the machines they're offering no XP preinstall on that doesn't HAVE this magic key to "prevent piracy", especially since they've apparently caught at least three major businesses cheating on licenses this way in the past. The same goes for at least HPaq (I didn't need to key in the license when I re-imaged my laptop for a small XP partition for my wife's benefit and put Linux (Then Mandriva, now FC5 x86-64 on it...) on.
Blame their wishing for an "easier" way of things for the customer- I blame them for doing something silly that ties them even tighter
than ever to Microsoft that honestly wasn't something that was relevant save for the fact that the damn thing needs regular re-installs
to be of any use to anyone.
The ECU is a modular affair- a little box with molex plugs going into it. All they needed do was KEEP the ECU with the RFID with the vehicle and hook it back in. Takes all of 5-10 minutes and makes it look like an impossible crime with the law not chasing after them "Because the guy had to be in on it- everybody "knows" that you can't steal these new cars with those RFID tags in the keys...".
I think he was pointing at the seminal example of "vaporware" in the entire
computer industry : Duke Nukem Forever. I think you'll find that 3D Realms
has been at DNF for...well...forever now, and while the tantalizing tidbits
that we've seen of THIS iteration of the game show promise, we still don't
have a working demo of the game, let alone the title proper- yet. It's been
MANY years now and it's still "Not Ready Yet."
C'mon, I definitely know how to use Windows XP (Considering that I port games and other software to/from it for a living, I would have to)- it's unstable, rent with Spyware, Virii, Worms, and the lot because of bad design decisions. People don't bitch more because they've grown used to all the crap, weren't told the truth about things, and are amazed when they get told that other people using something else don't have a problem. Many assume that it's because we're technical and we're able to better avoid the problems. Nope. Your OS has issues- and when they're told the truth about all of it they're pissed as hell.
As for the second, I doubt you will be allowed to get to define what "easy to use" is. It's not Windows.
MacOS, maybe, but not Windows. I won't say that Linux is "easy to use" (It is, but that's a different
discussion altogether...)- but that it's about as easy to use as Windows, it's just different than it in
some ways and many find that "Different" is "Difficult", whether it is or not.
Is any of your post "insightful" like the mods claim it to have been? Nope.
...it oughtta work for Microsoft!
Typically, if an ARB or other extension is offered by the driver (VBO support, for example...), it's hardware accelerated- typically, the driver suppliers don't bother advertising things that don't have at least a little hardware boost backing them as it makes them look bad. Now, having said this, it doesn't mean that the boost is as much as it ought to be for the OS (i.e. the ATI drivers for their chipsets don't perform anywhere near as well as they ought to on Linux...) so it's still a mixed bag- but then, it was that way with DirectX too.
That's bogus considering that Khronos provided (and still does) all the spec details for all the other specs, including OpenGL ES (Which is what's used on most of the mobile platforms today), OpenMP, and others. They've got more invested in being open than the ARB did- and I doubt they'll do what you say.
For starters, most of the "little guys" can't DO E3 anyhow- everyone that did, however,
wasted a LOT of energy on trying to make demos to showboat there. Like Comdex that fell
before it, it became a victim of its own success and was a massive timesink rather than
a useful thing to do- but you did it anyway because "everyone else is doing it..."
There's at least a few venues picking up speed that are more for the "little" guys to
connect up with publishers and tool vendors (The Texas Independent Game Conference
is one of the most recent examples of this- and something that apparently went so well
that it's going to get repeated next year without question. The glitz probably ought
to be happening at venues like PAX or QuakeCON (Yes, QuakeCON...) and things like the
vendors and publishers meeting up with studios, etc. should probably happen at GDC, TIGC,
or similar- it'll be a better use of everybody's time and resources that way.
In reality, you've little say over the how the President is being selected- for the reasons you state in your post. However, you DO have a say over how your Representative and your Senators get selected from the populace. The President gets to sign things into law, choose potential Supreme Court appointments (which then get approved by the Senate...), but he doesn't QUITE get to make laws unless Congress isn't doing it's job like it's supposed to. That's Congress' job. For all of your talk of not having a value to your vote, you let the one thing you CAN control languish- and it's something that can put a curb or choke off the problem caused by the thing you can't control. Remember, you get to pick the people that propose the laws and have the authority to remove the President if he's breaking the law.
The reason the country's in the situation that is in this day and age is from talk like yours and people BELIEVING it, hook line and sinker.
Or a swapped out ECU. Don't for a moment think that the crooks stealing the expensive
vehciles don't have access to resources to glom onto a hacked or tuner's ECU somewhere
that doesn't DO the RFID check. If it doesn't have an alarm system, it's very believeable
that someone could have busted into the vehicle, swapped out ECUs, busted the column
lock and cover and drove off in about 10 minutes or so- less if they've got more than
one thief working in parallel.
Yep. Odds are, they found something not unlike this, and an ECU is mostly modular, with cable jacks
in the device housing to allow the manufacturers to easily install the things on the new vehicle and
to easily install a new one if the thing fails (which they do occasionally do...)- all it takes is
is knowing where the ECU is on the vehicle, develop a procedure for swapping it out that takes 10 or
less minutes to execute.
You break in, break the column cover to get the ignition switch access without the key, you swap the
ECU out with power tools and practice behind you and just go. It's not QUITE "Gone in 60 Seconds"
speeds, but it's still within the timeframe of doing the deed and not getting caught speed.
...I was just broke and couldn't attend. It was called the Texas Independent Games Development Conference and it had all kinds of people that were sponsoring the thing- according to the promoters, it was a stunning success and they're doing it again next year (And I HOPE to be able to attend the next time...). It was intended for Texas indie studios for the large part, but it's a good start in the right direction- and I don't think we need to see something like GDC or E3 (GDC's good for meeting up with the tech companies supplying the resources to make the games happen and seeing the people face- but if it were to shrink or go away, it'd only be mildly annoying. E3, on the other hand... That was a massive resource sink, in all honesty- it may be that it is its time to go.)
If a criminal is afraid they will be seen/caught, they're less likely to commit
the act of crime- hate to tell you this, but that's an actual known fact.
By and of itself, the argument's not magically fallacious because you don't think
it actually does this- because of the above stated fact.
It might be a weak argument, perhaps, but it's NOT fallacious- it doesn't apply
chop-logic, circular reasoning, straw-men, or red-herrings. It actually has
a valid grounds and a fairly reasonable and valid premise. Just because you
don't agree with the premise, in and of itself, doesn't make it fallacious.
In reality, it might be cheaper, depending on the the changes in question.
In the case of online distribution, etc. it ends up being cheaper for them to go with the flow than all this stupid fighting.
It was the same way with cassette.
It was the same way with VHS.
Why is THIS any different- it was cheaper for them to capitulate and go with the new tech that torched off
old business models (because those two items above changed everything for the players just like the stuff
is doing now...). Of course, they fought it kicking and screaming, if memory serves (Jack Valenti was referring
to Cassette to being like Jack the Ripper back in the days of cassette...). It doesn't surprise me at all
that they're being stupid, yet again, about all of this. I just wish they were poorer like they were back
in earlier times- now they've got more cash to do more damage over a longer period of time before they
realize that they're wasting money and resources- and burning up mindshare (brand recognition- Sony, for example,
is not looking too rosy to anyone right now over DRM debacles...) capital at an alarming rate.
When it works like it's supposed to, yeah it pastes Intel's current offerings all over the place, performing like a low-end discrete display adapter. But, under Linux, as many will attest, while the drivers work, they're so sub-par in performance compared to the other cards, that we're still looking for NVidia on-board GPUs in our laptops...
...it doesn't work well. Technically, it's supposed to be about a 9600 or so in performance, overall. I see about HALF that performance on this chip under Linux- under Windows, it seems to perform about the same level. No good reason for that or the lack of full and proper Sideport support in the driver either- in order to get this all to work even as poorly as it does, I've got to turn off the Sideport dedicated video memory and go all UMA operation. All of their drivers, for that matter, have similar issues.