In nations with stringent gun control, what is the plan for overthrowing the government when the time comes?
Put down the goddamn crack pipe!
Nobody's going to overthrow any government using the weapons that are legal for U.S. citizens to own.
Look at the last few decades of history. The only weapons that have even the slightest impact on modern militaries are suicide bombs and car bombs, and even then that's only because of heavy TV coverage. If that were censored, you wouldn't have a chance in hell of affecting anything.
News flash: U.S. citizens already aren't allowed to keep bombs in their homes.
Bickering over the right to bear your peashooter popguns is a red herring designed to keep you pacified. The only way to avoid tyranny in a world full of armed flying drones and H-bombs is to work within the system to prevent it from happening in the first place.
on one hand, a person with a dual core chip is likely to get slightly better performance than 2 actual chips.
I payed about $20 for a copy of Doom in 1994. I recently dug it out and ran it on an Athlon XP with about 50X the speed of the original machine that I had when I bought the license. I guess by that logic I now owe id Software another $1000.
I think people really really like saying "tsunami".
Not me. I liked it better when most people called it a "tidal wave". It just sounds better IMO. Tidal wave is also not significantly more inaccurate than the literal translation of tsunami, "harbor wave"; the wave doesn't have any more to do with harbors than it does with tides.
That doesn't make my ownership of my car coercive if I turn to the gov'ment to help me preserve my ownership of it.
Maybe you just define uses of government force that you personally disapprove of as "coercive", while you define uses of government force that you personally approve of as "not coercive".
Why not go with a logo with a proven track record? This one helped build one of the largest corporations on the planet, and it's currently languishing unused. I think it would be a great symbol for FreeBSD to use.
You're not only trying to prove a negative, but your "proof" is that you can't remember any counterexamples off of the top of your head from some classes you took. Whatever.
It's never been a gradual change from stable democracy to totalitarianism. It's always been a sudden, abrupt event punctuated by something like a collapse or a coup or a revolution or an invasion.
*Always?* *Never?*
That's an extremely strong assertion made with absolutely zero evidence to back it up. Why should anybody believe it?
Of course, you can always play semantic games like "Germany was already 'unstable', ergo abrupt event". What does that mean? If you define any occurrence you want as an "sudden abrupt event", then of course your assertion is a tautology.
Do you really think those regimes fell because of 1984?
No. Instead, I think that it very likely prevented at least some non-totalitarian states from moving in that direction.
Countries don't just slip into totalitarianism
Sure they do. A leader with dictatorial tendencies gets voted into office, then starts changing the laws to increase his powers and decrease checks and balances. It has happened dozens of times, including Germany in the 1930s.
It takes the insidiousness of totalitarianism as a given.
Which was a perfectly reasonable stance since the book was about Stalinism, which in fact was a given.
The book doesn't contain a discussion about whether the slope is slippery or not; it just assumes that the slope is slippery and tells a story based on that premise.
There certainly is a slippery slope; a good number of countries slid all the way down during the 20th century. What further discussion does that need?
Orwell's contribution was to take Stalinism, extrapolate a little bit based what it could become with slightly more advanced IT, and painting a picture that was vivid enough for any idiot, even politicians, to understand. It was a hugely valuable work that has probably helped save millions from life under oppressive regimes. Listening to a few overzealous analogies derived from the book is a small price to pay for that.
the same group of people who berate the US for our dependence on mideast oil, while at the same time vehemently protesting any movement down any path that might actually allow us to realistically release ourselves from some of that dependence, e.g., new nuclear plants.
That's because they both suck. Life is tough. Your easiest two choices aren't always good ones.
Fossil fuels are going to hose the climate, and nuclear power is a totally unacceptable WMD proliferation risk. Just look at the current Iran situation. It's a no-brainer that we don't want any more countries playing around with nuclear fuel cycles.
Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar, and the mechanisms for extracted energy from them, are NOT ENOUGH to sustain any semblance of the current lifestyles, right or wrong, without drastic and dramatic changes that would have far-reaching economic and social implications.
That's mainly because nobody has put in enough resources into the research that would be required to make them more viable. If solar power got the multi-$Trillion dollar levels of investment that oil-related exploration, production and military security have received, it would probably be well on the way to providing 100% of the world's energy needs right now.
(I'm not talking about hippies putting expensive silicon collectors on their roofs to run their TVs either. A viable solution would probably be ocean-based and involve plastic photovoltaics or bioengineered photosynthesis.)
But seriously - show me two commercial compilers from different vendors that ever demonstrate 100% intercompatibility.
Nothing's perfectly compatible, but over time people work to improve interoperability at least with older features. The difference here is that nobody would be able to fix this incompatibility for the next 20 years.
..and they spend 20 seconds doing a global find-and-replace.
Assuming they have the source. One of the current criticisms of Linux is its lower level of support for running commercial closed-source applications. This patent could end up being a barrier to running many commercial applications that happen to be written in VB.
In some cases a Linux port might not be on the vendor's priority list, but customers might wish to run the app on Linux using mono, Wine or some similar technology. However, patents like this could thwart the ability to fully emulate the Windows platform. This could effectively prevent Linux from reaching a critical mass as a platform for those apps, and it would tend to ensure that customers can never really get rid of all their Windows boxes.
It's all a very shrewd move on the part of Microsoft, but IMO patent law should be changed to somehow prevent this purely obstructionist usage of patents. Maybe mandatory RAND licensing on all patents would be a solution to the problem. At least then people could choose to pay a reasonable royalty and continue with their work instead of giving the patent holder the total ability to block out competition.
OK, let's talk archiveability. Let's talk about a medium that you can leave in a shoebox for a hundred years and read just by shining a light through it.
Most if not all film from 100 years ago was made from nitrocellulose. If you left that in a shoebox for 100 years, you would probably end up with a box of dust.
Most of the color film from 50 years ago was made with unstable dyes. If you kept that for 100 years, you'd have a box of transparent plastic.
Now they think they have film that's more stable. Call me back in a century and we'll see if they're right.
If there's any tendency for an analog copy to deteriorate, even if it takes centuries, you'll need reprint it periodically to preserve it. The same holds for digital copies. The difference is that each successive analog copy loses more of the original information.
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers.
The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
Just like with browsers and web pages, most developers will casually use whatever features Microsoft gives them by default. Thus, it will not be possible for Linux to reliably run Basic code developed for Microsoft platforms without somebody going through the source to manually remove all ISNOTs. This barrier to entry into the market for the most popular RAD language environment in the business world can be extremely valuable to Microsoft, and it could effectively cripple Linux-based attempts to provide a competing platform for hosting business apps written in VB.
I wouldn't say that most franchised businesses have much latitude over their operations. They are usually indistinguishable.
The goal really isn't to delegate decision making like you're proposing. It's to get somebody else (the franchisee) to assume the financial risks and debt load of starting a new site. The chain usually retains most control over supplies, marketing, menus, etc.
If localized decision making is always more efficient, then why is the trend in the private sector towards restaurants, retail chains, etc. that are centrally planned to operate hundreds of almost totally identical sites nationwide?
We don't see Starbucks letting each store manager pick out decor, menus and coffee suppliers.
Are fifty redundant and inconsistent bureaucracies really better than one larger one? Does a national mail-order computer retailer have to deal with 50 new sets of rules?
Why dig for silicon if it's already in PCs put out to the curb?
A typical computer probably has many times less silicon than a single beer bottle.
It's not the silicon itself that is resource intensive; it's the purification, crystal growing and doping processes, which are incredibly energy intensive and involve lots of chemicals for cleaning, masking, etc.
Recycling the silicon in chips would probably only cover an infinitesimal portion of the total environmentel impact of chip production, since each chip represents just a tiny spoonful of sand. You would still have to go through all of the other steps to produce a chip; maybe more since the silicon would be pre-contaminated with various obscure doping elements.
Even if you were going to use the silicon for something else, it would be just silly to take the effort to pick tiny slivers out of tightly sealed packages when they're scooping sand out of quarries by the kiloton.
For recycling computers, the metal components would be the top priority, maybe followed by chemically transforming plastic parts into fuel or other useful substances. Those two items cover the majority of the computer's mass. Most everything else is junk.
Well, they often use that special CB dialect (vaguely related to English) that's hard for us to understand, but I think that they understand each other pretty well.
The other funny thing I've noticed is that CB communications often make every trucker seem like they share the exact same personality. I think that's another thing that makes it less distracting than a phone; they're not trying to project a very broad range of emotions.
In fact, the CB is MORE distracting, as you need to "press to talk", whereas you just babble into a cell phone.
I disagree with that assertion. CB communications has evolved specifically for use while operating a vehicle. It's half-duplex, so you're not straining to listen while you talk. It's usually cranked up to a very high volume, so you're not straining to hear it. The speaker usually enunciates very loudly and clearly directly into the mic. There are standardized abbreviations, acknowledgments, etc. all designed to accommodate the distractions and miscues involved while you're doing something else. Long pauses before responses (while you're attending to road conditions) are not unexpected. There's no dialing numbers or fiddling with complex menus involved.
Anybody using a phone like a CB would be considered incredibly rude by the person on the other end, who often don't even know that you're driving. People talking on the phone are trying hard to emulate a face-to-face conversation. People talking on the CB are not.
Shall I assume that you have reasonably unbiased and scientifically valid data to back your assertion?
How about the fact that businesses spend countless $Billions each year to fly people to meet face-to-face instead of making cheaper conference calls.
Why is this? Because the extra mental effort required to communicate over the phone greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the meeting, even if you're not trying to simultaneously drive a car.
It took the guys at Scaled composites to show you that they could build a cheap light, ingenious low-earth-orbit vehicle and launch it cheaply from its mother plane.
From an energy standpoint, Space Ship One only got 3% of the way to low-earth-orbit. They still have 97% more work to do. It design is totally unsuitable for going into or out of orbit; at hypersonic speeds it would snap apart like a toothpick an burn up. Scaled Composites is basically at square one with respect to an orbital vehicle.
Flipside is, instead of putting a single 60 MW reactor, we put several smaller ones in orbit. We have already made reactors that can survive their rocket being blown up (as in without spreading any nuclear material around) so that is no problem.
If "We" is the US, you're probably confusing nuclear reactors with RTGs. RTGs only produce around 1 KW.
The Soviet Union is the only country that actually launched significant numbers of genuine nuclear reactors. These were only in the ~100KW power range (2% of the size required for this application). Several famous international incidents demonstrated that they had not figured out how to make their reactors survive space mishaps.
Wouldn't it be far wiser to build solar panels in orbit, use them to power Microwaves, and avoid the attenuation in the atmosphere?
Talk about penny wise, pound foolish. A 60 MW solar power station in orbit would be far larger than the International Space Station. It cost dozens of $Billions just to launch the space station; designing, launching and maintaining a 60MW station would probably cost hundreds of $Billions.
When you spend money on something, you're allocating a certain fraction of the economy towards a that purpose. That comes with a roughly similar fraction of the world's energy consumption. Dedicating huge teams of people designing, building and launching an orbital power platform will consume a commensurate amount of energy down here on this planet as they go about their tasks. Building the station and the massive rockets to launch it will consume vast energy resources before it even gets off the ground; vastly more energy than the station could ever produce.
For example, assume the station costs $100 Billion. That's about 1% of one year of the ~$10 Trillion US economy. The US consumes about 1e20 joules of energy per year, so if the money spent on the station is associated with a proportional amount of energy, that's 1e18 joules. That's more power than a 60MW power plant would produce in 500 years.
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Put down the goddamn crack pipe!
Nobody's going to overthrow any government using the weapons that are legal for U.S. citizens to own.
Look at the last few decades of history. The only weapons that have even the slightest impact on modern militaries are suicide bombs and car bombs, and even then that's only because of heavy TV coverage. If that were censored, you wouldn't have a chance in hell of affecting anything.
News flash: U.S. citizens already aren't allowed to keep bombs in their homes. Bickering over the right to bear your peashooter popguns is a red herring designed to keep you pacified. The only way to avoid tyranny in a world full of armed flying drones and H-bombs is to work within the system to prevent it from happening in the first place.
1974 called. It wants its CMOS logic signal voltages back.
I payed about $20 for a copy of Doom in 1994. I recently dug it out and ran it on an Athlon XP with about 50X the speed of the original machine that I had when I bought the license. I guess by that logic I now owe id Software another $1000.
Not me. I liked it better when most people called it a "tidal wave". It just sounds better IMO. Tidal wave is also not significantly more inaccurate than the literal translation of tsunami, "harbor wave"; the wave doesn't have any more to do with harbors than it does with tides.
Maybe you just define uses of government force that you personally disapprove of as "coercive", while you define uses of government force that you personally approve of as "not coercive".
Why not go with a logo with a proven track record? This one helped build one of the largest corporations on the planet, and it's currently languishing unused. I think it would be a great symbol for FreeBSD to use.
You're not only trying to prove a negative, but your "proof" is that you can't remember any counterexamples off of the top of your head from some classes you took. Whatever.
*Always?* *Never?*
That's an extremely strong assertion made with absolutely zero evidence to back it up. Why should anybody believe it?
Of course, you can always play semantic games like "Germany was already 'unstable', ergo abrupt event". What does that mean? If you define any occurrence you want as an "sudden abrupt event", then of course your assertion is a tautology.
I.e., slip.
No. Instead, I think that it very likely prevented at least some non-totalitarian states from moving in that direction.
Countries don't just slip into totalitarianism
Sure they do. A leader with dictatorial tendencies gets voted into office, then starts changing the laws to increase his powers and decrease checks and balances. It has happened dozens of times, including Germany in the 1930s.
Which was a perfectly reasonable stance since the book was about Stalinism, which in fact was a given.
The book doesn't contain a discussion about whether the slope is slippery or not; it just assumes that the slope is slippery and tells a story based on that premise.
There certainly is a slippery slope; a good number of countries slid all the way down during the 20th century. What further discussion does that need?
Orwell's contribution was to take Stalinism, extrapolate a little bit based what it could become with slightly more advanced IT, and painting a picture that was vivid enough for any idiot, even politicians, to understand. It was a hugely valuable work that has probably helped save millions from life under oppressive regimes. Listening to a few overzealous analogies derived from the book is a small price to pay for that.
That's because they both suck. Life is tough. Your easiest two choices aren't always good ones.
Fossil fuels are going to hose the climate, and nuclear power is a totally unacceptable WMD proliferation risk. Just look at the current Iran situation. It's a no-brainer that we don't want any more countries playing around with nuclear fuel cycles.
Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar, and the mechanisms for extracted energy from them, are NOT ENOUGH to sustain any semblance of the current lifestyles, right or wrong, without drastic and dramatic changes that would have far-reaching economic and social implications.
That's mainly because nobody has put in enough resources into the research that would be required to make them more viable. If solar power got the multi-$Trillion dollar levels of investment that oil-related exploration, production and military security have received, it would probably be well on the way to providing 100% of the world's energy needs right now.
(I'm not talking about hippies putting expensive silicon collectors on their roofs to run their TVs either. A viable solution would probably be ocean-based and involve plastic photovoltaics or bioengineered photosynthesis.)
Same can of pop from aisle inside the supermarket = 20 cents.
Nothing's perfectly compatible, but over time people work to improve interoperability at least with older features. The difference here is that nobody would be able to fix this incompatibility for the next 20 years.
Assuming they have the source. One of the current criticisms of Linux is its lower level of support for running commercial closed-source applications. This patent could end up being a barrier to running many commercial applications that happen to be written in VB.
In some cases a Linux port might not be on the vendor's priority list, but customers might wish to run the app on Linux using mono, Wine or some similar technology. However, patents like this could thwart the ability to fully emulate the Windows platform. This could effectively prevent Linux from reaching a critical mass as a platform for those apps, and it would tend to ensure that customers can never really get rid of all their Windows boxes.
It's all a very shrewd move on the part of Microsoft, but IMO patent law should be changed to somehow prevent this purely obstructionist usage of patents. Maybe mandatory RAND licensing on all patents would be a solution to the problem. At least then people could choose to pay a reasonable royalty and continue with their work instead of giving the patent holder the total ability to block out competition.
Most if not all film from 100 years ago was made from nitrocellulose. If you left that in a shoebox for 100 years, you would probably end up with a box of dust.
Most of the color film from 50 years ago was made with unstable dyes. If you kept that for 100 years, you'd have a box of transparent plastic.
Now they think they have film that's more stable. Call me back in a century and we'll see if they're right.
If there's any tendency for an analog copy to deteriorate, even if it takes centuries, you'll need reprint it periodically to preserve it. The same holds for digital copies. The difference is that each successive analog copy loses more of the original information.
The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
Just like with browsers and web pages, most developers will casually use whatever features Microsoft gives them by default. Thus, it will not be possible for Linux to reliably run Basic code developed for Microsoft platforms without somebody going through the source to manually remove all ISNOTs. This barrier to entry into the market for the most popular RAD language environment in the business world can be extremely valuable to Microsoft, and it could effectively cripple Linux-based attempts to provide a competing platform for hosting business apps written in VB.
The goal really isn't to delegate decision making like you're proposing. It's to get somebody else (the franchisee) to assume the financial risks and debt load of starting a new site. The chain usually retains most control over supplies, marketing, menus, etc.
Are fifty redundant and inconsistent bureaucracies really better than one larger one? Does a national mail-order computer retailer have to deal with 50 new sets of rules?
A typical computer probably has many times less silicon than a single beer bottle.
It's not the silicon itself that is resource intensive; it's the purification, crystal growing and doping processes, which are incredibly energy intensive and involve lots of chemicals for cleaning, masking, etc.
Recycling the silicon in chips would probably only cover an infinitesimal portion of the total environmentel impact of chip production, since each chip represents just a tiny spoonful of sand. You would still have to go through all of the other steps to produce a chip; maybe more since the silicon would be pre-contaminated with various obscure doping elements.
Even if you were going to use the silicon for something else, it would be just silly to take the effort to pick tiny slivers out of tightly sealed packages when they're scooping sand out of quarries by the kiloton.
For recycling computers, the metal components would be the top priority, maybe followed by chemically transforming plastic parts into fuel or other useful substances. Those two items cover the majority of the computer's mass. Most everything else is junk.
The other funny thing I've noticed is that CB communications often make every trucker seem like they share the exact same personality. I think that's another thing that makes it less distracting than a phone; they're not trying to project a very broad range of emotions.
I disagree with that assertion. CB communications has evolved specifically for use while operating a vehicle. It's half-duplex, so you're not straining to listen while you talk. It's usually cranked up to a very high volume, so you're not straining to hear it. The speaker usually enunciates very loudly and clearly directly into the mic. There are standardized abbreviations, acknowledgments, etc. all designed to accommodate the distractions and miscues involved while you're doing something else. Long pauses before responses (while you're attending to road conditions) are not unexpected. There's no dialing numbers or fiddling with complex menus involved.
Anybody using a phone like a CB would be considered incredibly rude by the person on the other end, who often don't even know that you're driving. People talking on the phone are trying hard to emulate a face-to-face conversation. People talking on the CB are not.
How about the fact that businesses spend countless $Billions each year to fly people to meet face-to-face instead of making cheaper conference calls.
Why is this? Because the extra mental effort required to communicate over the phone greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the meeting, even if you're not trying to simultaneously drive a car.
From an energy standpoint, Space Ship One only got 3% of the way to low-earth-orbit. They still have 97% more work to do. It design is totally unsuitable for going into or out of orbit; at hypersonic speeds it would snap apart like a toothpick an burn up. Scaled Composites is basically at square one with respect to an orbital vehicle.
If "We" is the US, you're probably confusing nuclear reactors with RTGs. RTGs only produce around 1 KW.
The Soviet Union is the only country that actually launched significant numbers of genuine nuclear reactors. These were only in the ~100KW power range (2% of the size required for this application). Several famous international incidents demonstrated that they had not figured out how to make their reactors survive space mishaps.
Wouldn't it be far wiser to build solar panels in orbit, use them to power Microwaves, and avoid the attenuation in the atmosphere?
Talk about penny wise, pound foolish. A 60 MW solar power station in orbit would be far larger than the International Space Station. It cost dozens of $Billions just to launch the space station; designing, launching and maintaining a 60MW station would probably cost hundreds of $Billions.
When you spend money on something, you're allocating a certain fraction of the economy towards a that purpose. That comes with a roughly similar fraction of the world's energy consumption. Dedicating huge teams of people designing, building and launching an orbital power platform will consume a commensurate amount of energy down here on this planet as they go about their tasks. Building the station and the massive rockets to launch it will consume vast energy resources before it even gets off the ground; vastly more energy than the station could ever produce.
For example, assume the station costs $100 Billion. That's about 1% of one year of the ~$10 Trillion US economy. The US consumes about 1e20 joules of energy per year, so if the money spent on the station is associated with a proportional amount of energy, that's 1e18 joules. That's more power than a 60MW power plant would produce in 500 years.