Yeah, that 6 year old study is a goto conservative argument against social programs these days. It is an interesting theory, but just because a couple of economists posit a theory doesn't make it true. For balance, here's a well stated summary of its flaws (that I'm sure the liberal camp likes to quote in response):
Except if you knew anything about history, unregulated capitalism helped cause the Great Depression, and FDR's rather socialist policies helped get the US out of it.
If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.
Yep. It's like dying in an at-fault auto accident and blaming the car. Or having a heart attack while playing basketball and blaming the ball. You'd have to be fairly insane to propose outlawing cars and basketballs for those reasons.
This seems more in line with having an allergy to an antibiotic - there is no doubt that it's a life-saving drug, but unfortunately there are always rare cases where it makes things worse. Medicine is not an exact science, and if we keep blaming doctors and drugs that harm an occasional person despite saving thousands, progress and costs will suffer (and are already, clearly).
Eh, I didn't remotely say "boot loaders aren't open for discussion", my quote was "these facts are not open to discussion". As in, the two very simple facts that I stated in reply to the OP's comment of:
There is only 446 bytes available in the MBR. That's insufficient for code that can read a filesystem to find the 2nd stage image."
All I stated was (direct quotes):
1) "It's a fact that the PC BIOS reads the MBR to start the boot process"
2) "the FreeBSD menu system also loads out of a secondary location"
Anything incorrect about those as stated? (without reading anything else into them, as you seem to have done) And given those very limited assertions I don't really think the tone was arrogant, just slightly annoyed that people were posting untrue statements without verifying them.
Anyway, to the rest of the boot loader discussion that is very open...:)
GRUB 1 aka "GRUB Legacy" (which is in fact still used more than "GRUB 2") can work in one of 2 ways: use a "stage 1.5" located just after the MBR, which then boots stage 2 (which I imagine can cause the same issues as with GRUB2) or boot stage 2 directly (stage 2 can be located anywhere, and is usually on a real partition).
I (like many posters to this story, I see) still think it's bad practice for ANY program to use an unparitioned location to store data - whether it's a boot loader, AV software, or DRM scheme. It's like storing vital files in "/tmp" and being surprised when they are deleted.
As some others have pointed out, there is "some convention" for boot loaders to do this, but clearly not enough convention to keep their software from breaking, and they share some of the blame for that.
Yeah, that's actually why most Linux distros recommend a "/boot" partition that is as simple as possible (ie ext2, not a journaling fs). Once the files are written to that partition, it stores the exact location of the executable and config files into the MBR so that it can find them.
At least that's how "GRUB 1" worked... sounds like "GRUB 2" tried to be clever and it didn't work out so well...
Well, you are correct that the parent is wrong ("retarded" I will leave to others to judge). It's a fact that the PC BIOS reads the MBR to start the boot process, so if it was not capable of subsequently reading from a secondary location then the boot process of ALL PCs MUST BE MAGIC!
But to your comment, the FreeBSD menu system also loads out of a secondary location. it's just not enough space to store the code and data for anything more than loading something else.
I have worked on bootloaders for more than one architecture in the past, so these facts are not open to discussion:)
The way most other boot loaders have done it (including the original GRUB). Put enough code in the MBR to load the rest of the code and config out of a second location. The smart ones actually use a real partition for that, though, so no one overwrites it.
Yes, obviously everyone knows that TV shows are shorter to account for commercials, your pedantism doesn't add anything to the discussion.
And it's not necessarily even correct, either. It depends on the show. A lot of the series on HBO, Showtime, BBC, etc run longer. Some episodes are edited down to fit, and are longer in the DVD/VOD version. Others (The Office, 24, etc) are "supersized" or have occasional "limited commercial" episodes.
Yeah, I was thinking $1 an hour starts to become interesting. That's 2 hours a day of shows you *want* to watch (as opposed to channel surfing) for $60 a month. Still a lot less than a premium cable package.
Remember, though, this is apples to oranges vs. buying a DVD or the current iTunes offerings. This is for *rentals*, so you only have 24 hours once you start watching it, then you have to pay again. Current iTunes TV shows are purchased.
Not that I am arguing it's a good price at $0.99 "per show" (though at "$1 per hour" it starts to be tempting)... but $118 is pretty close to what a lot of people pay for cable. And 2 hours a day (or up to 4 hours a day for 1 hour dramas) is a SHITLOAD OF TV. Wow.
And, since you mentioned retail markup... I think it's going to be *really* interesting to watch how Blizzard does with their model for Starcraft 2, where they are doing significant sales via download, letting them keep 100% of the purchase price.
Of course there are 2 angles to that: 1) studios make a shitload more money 2) studios can lower their prices on games because there is no longer a need for a now-useless middleman. Who wants to take odds against the studios attempting #1?
Hah, I can't decide whether you are making a really subtle joke or trolling. Either way, none of the mods got it.
Besides the totally absurd estimate of "a few thousand dollars" it's just not physically possible. You can only make Helium from deuterium or tritium (or some more exotic fusion reaction like boron + H1). Without a neutron you CANNOT make Helium from H1. Deuterium, tritium, and boron are all much rarer and more expensive than helium.
Only because those countries are *not at war*, let alone a guerrilla war. If either country decides to attack the other fences and minefields are not going to do much.
The US has spent about a trillion dollars and effectively "won" the Iraq war. Now the economy is in shambles, and the national debt is mindboggling. What was the net gain?
Here is the thing I don't understand. Why did they even put boots on the ground? They should have just air dropped a million mines across the middle of the country and called it a day. Then invade Camboia and Laos to make sure the VC didn't do an end run around the minefield.
They did. Didn't work. And now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are still clearing them (and farmers losing limbs) today.
If games about frolicking through Candy Land killing unicorns sold millions of copies every time an expansion came out, you'd see just as many of those types of games, guaranteed.
Classic game, I have such fond memories of it as a 6 year old. I look forward to a remake that involves both more frolicking and more unicorn killing.
Actually, my neurobiology professor (who has a definite knack for explaining complex ideas in everyday language) gives a great lecture on Haitian zombies from a neurobiological and athropological perspective.
Basically, some Haitian (or more commonly, a bunch of Haitians) gets really pissed off at a person, and hires a witch doctor to "curse" them. The curse turns out to be slipping them some tetrodotoxin (better known in popular culture as "the thing in blowfish/fugu that paralyzes you"), which then... paralyzes them to a state in which they can be mistaken for dead.
Most probably die. It's a pretty good poison. But once in a while one of them, after being taken for dead for up to a couple days, actually "comes back to life". This of course freaks everyone out (and gives the witch doctor some major cred). And now this person was officially cursed by the witch doctor, and came back from the dead. He's a zombie! Everyone in town is now both disgusted and somewhat frightened of him, and he starts to believe the stories (and conform to the stereotypes/myths). A zombie is born!
they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.
Into the molecular structure?!? Sure, the cable can have some random water or oxygen molecules sticking to it, and (infrared, I assume - ultraviolet or lower might just ionize them and cause *more* oxidation) irradiating may remove them. But if it's "in the molecular structure" it's already oxidizied the metal and irradiating it isn't going to do squat.
Reading TFA, he replaced the *SATA* cables on a *NAS*, which then sent the audio files over Ethernet to his network. I think it's pretty safe to write it off as an ignorant misunderstanding of digital electronics (by him, not you - you are just giving him WAAY too much credit:)
Yeah, yeah, blah blah so original. Since when does your keyboard, or your mouth for that matter, deliver 1s and 0s? It's just analog pressure waves that happened to be determined as a 1 or 0 by your ears and brain.
Under your definition there really isn't such thing as "digital" in the world beyond abstract boolean logic. It's an analog world, and all concrete implementations of digital electronics have to be represented in it.
I'm not sure the time to load the cars is really the factor - it's just a matter of cost.
Even with the subsidies it gets, Amtrak only seems to be about 1/2 the cost of an airplane ticket covering the same distance - and takes a lot longer. And that's for a seat that's only marginally larger than an airplane seat - if you want to go cross country with enough room to lie down flat, it's more like 2-3x the cost, and 2 days of travel.
Use the same cost structure, and add the a car that takes up the space of 10 or more passenger seats - it just doesn't make sense any more. It would be MUCH CHEAPER to rent a car at the destination.
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Yeah, that 6 year old study is a goto conservative argument against social programs these days. It is an interesting theory, but just because a couple of economists posit a theory doesn't make it true. For balance, here's a well stated summary of its flaws (that I'm sure the liberal camp likes to quote in response):
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/18/the_new_deal_and_right_wing_revisionism/
Except if you knew anything about history, unregulated capitalism helped cause the Great Depression, and FDR's rather socialist policies helped get the US out of it.
If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.
Yep. It's like dying in an at-fault auto accident and blaming the car. Or having a heart attack while playing basketball and blaming the ball. You'd have to be fairly insane to propose outlawing cars and basketballs for those reasons.
This seems more in line with having an allergy to an antibiotic - there is no doubt that it's a life-saving drug, but unfortunately there are always rare cases where it makes things worse. Medicine is not an exact science, and if we keep blaming doctors and drugs that harm an occasional person despite saving thousands, progress and costs will suffer (and are already, clearly).
Eh, I didn't remotely say "boot loaders aren't open for discussion", my quote was "these facts are not open to discussion". As in, the two very simple facts that I stated in reply to the OP's comment of:
There is only 446 bytes available in the MBR. That's insufficient for code that can read a filesystem to find the 2nd stage image."
All I stated was (direct quotes):
1) "It's a fact that the PC BIOS reads the MBR to start the boot process"
2) "the FreeBSD menu system also loads out of a secondary location"
Anything incorrect about those as stated? (without reading anything else into them, as you seem to have done) And given those very limited assertions I don't really think the tone was arrogant, just slightly annoyed that people were posting untrue statements without verifying them.
Anyway, to the rest of the boot loader discussion that is very open... :)
GRUB 1 aka "GRUB Legacy" (which is in fact still used more than "GRUB 2") can work in one of 2 ways: use a "stage 1.5" located just after the MBR, which then boots stage 2 (which I imagine can cause the same issues as with GRUB2) or boot stage 2 directly (stage 2 can be located anywhere, and is usually on a real partition).
I (like many posters to this story, I see) still think it's bad practice for ANY program to use an unparitioned location to store data - whether it's a boot loader, AV software, or DRM scheme. It's like storing vital files in "/tmp" and being surprised when they are deleted.
As some others have pointed out, there is "some convention" for boot loaders to do this, but clearly not enough convention to keep their software from breaking, and they share some of the blame for that.
Yeah, that's actually why most Linux distros recommend a "/boot" partition that is as simple as possible (ie ext2, not a journaling fs). Once the files are written to that partition, it stores the exact location of the executable and config files into the MBR so that it can find them.
At least that's how "GRUB 1" worked... sounds like "GRUB 2" tried to be clever and it didn't work out so well...
Well, you are correct that the parent is wrong ("retarded" I will leave to others to judge). It's a fact that the PC BIOS reads the MBR to start the boot process, so if it was not capable of subsequently reading from a secondary location then the boot process of ALL PCs MUST BE MAGIC!
But to your comment, the FreeBSD menu system also loads out of a secondary location. it's just not enough space to store the code and data for anything more than loading something else.
I have worked on bootloaders for more than one architecture in the past, so these facts are not open to discussion :)
The way most other boot loaders have done it (including the original GRUB). Put enough code in the MBR to load the rest of the code and config out of a second location. The smart ones actually use a real partition for that, though, so no one overwrites it.
Not really... without the touchscreen, it's pretty much the equivalent to an RTS from 1998.
From TFA...
In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.
Fixing the vulnerabilities takes time. It was just an emergency measure until they could investigate and come up with better policy.
Yes, obviously everyone knows that TV shows are shorter to account for commercials, your pedantism doesn't add anything to the discussion.
And it's not necessarily even correct, either. It depends on the show. A lot of the series on HBO, Showtime, BBC, etc run longer. Some episodes are edited down to fit, and are longer in the DVD/VOD version. Others (The Office, 24, etc) are "supersized" or have occasional "limited commercial" episodes.
Yeah, I was thinking $1 an hour starts to become interesting. That's 2 hours a day of shows you *want* to watch (as opposed to channel surfing) for $60 a month. Still a lot less than a premium cable package.
Remember, though, this is apples to oranges vs. buying a DVD or the current iTunes offerings. This is for *rentals*, so you only have 24 hours once you start watching it, then you have to pay again. Current iTunes TV shows are purchased.
Not that I am arguing it's a good price at $0.99 "per show" (though at "$1 per hour" it starts to be tempting)... but $118 is pretty close to what a lot of people pay for cable. And 2 hours a day (or up to 4 hours a day for 1 hour dramas) is a SHITLOAD OF TV. Wow.
And, since you mentioned retail markup... I think it's going to be *really* interesting to watch how Blizzard does with their model for Starcraft 2, where they are doing significant sales via download, letting them keep 100% of the purchase price.
Of course there are 2 angles to that: 1) studios make a shitload more money 2) studios can lower their prices on games because there is no longer a need for a now-useless middleman. Who wants to take odds against the studios attempting #1?
Hah, I can't decide whether you are making a really subtle joke or trolling. Either way, none of the mods got it.
Besides the totally absurd estimate of "a few thousand dollars" it's just not physically possible. You can only make Helium from deuterium or tritium (or some more exotic fusion reaction like boron + H1). Without a neutron you CANNOT make Helium from H1. Deuterium, tritium, and boron are all much rarer and more expensive than helium.
Only because those countries are *not at war*, let alone a guerrilla war. If either country decides to attack the other fences and minefields are not going to do much.
Not at all. Ever heard of a Pyrrhic victory?
The US has spent about a trillion dollars and effectively "won" the Iraq war. Now the economy is in shambles, and the national debt is mindboggling. What was the net gain?
Here is the thing I don't understand. Why did they even put boots on the ground? They should have just air dropped a million mines across the middle of the country and called it a day. Then invade Camboia and Laos to make sure the VC didn't do an end run around the minefield.
They did. Didn't work. And now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are still clearing them (and farmers losing limbs) today.
If games about frolicking through Candy Land killing unicorns sold millions of copies every time an expansion came out, you'd see just as many of those types of games, guaranteed.
Classic game, I have such fond memories of it as a 6 year old. I look forward to a remake that involves both more frolicking and more unicorn killing.
Actually, my neurobiology professor (who has a definite knack for explaining complex ideas in everyday language) gives a great lecture on Haitian zombies from a neurobiological and athropological perspective.
Basically, some Haitian (or more commonly, a bunch of Haitians) gets really pissed off at a person, and hires a witch doctor to "curse" them. The curse turns out to be slipping them some tetrodotoxin (better known in popular culture as "the thing in blowfish/fugu that paralyzes you"), which then... paralyzes them to a state in which they can be mistaken for dead.
Most probably die. It's a pretty good poison. But once in a while one of them, after being taken for dead for up to a couple days, actually "comes back to life". This of course freaks everyone out (and gives the witch doctor some major cred). And now this person was officially cursed by the witch doctor, and came back from the dead. He's a zombie! Everyone in town is now both disgusted and somewhat frightened of him, and he starts to believe the stories (and conform to the stereotypes/myths). A zombie is born!
My favorite was his sentence:
they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.
Into the molecular structure?!? Sure, the cable can have some random water or oxygen molecules sticking to it, and (infrared, I assume - ultraviolet or lower might just ionize them and cause *more* oxidation) irradiating may remove them. But if it's "in the molecular structure" it's already oxidizied the metal and irradiating it isn't going to do squat.
Reading TFA, he replaced the *SATA* cables on a *NAS*, which then sent the audio files over Ethernet to his network. I think it's pretty safe to write it off as an ignorant misunderstanding of digital electronics (by him, not you - you are just giving him WAAY too much credit :)
Something... happens with them.
(For the lazy readers out there: http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM)
Yeah, yeah, blah blah so original. Since when does your keyboard, or your mouth for that matter, deliver 1s and 0s? It's just analog pressure waves that happened to be determined as a 1 or 0 by your ears and brain.
Under your definition there really isn't such thing as "digital" in the world beyond abstract boolean logic. It's an analog world, and all concrete implementations of digital electronics have to be represented in it.
I'm not sure the time to load the cars is really the factor - it's just a matter of cost.
Even with the subsidies it gets, Amtrak only seems to be about 1/2 the cost of an airplane ticket covering the same distance - and takes a lot longer. And that's for a seat that's only marginally larger than an airplane seat - if you want to go cross country with enough room to lie down flat, it's more like 2-3x the cost, and 2 days of travel.
Use the same cost structure, and add the a car that takes up the space of 10 or more passenger seats - it just doesn't make sense any more. It would be MUCH CHEAPER to rent a car at the destination.
No need, those countries are already doing a fine job of changing their climate on their own.