This statement suggests that you don't know what Lincoln did to the Federal Government once the South seceeded.
You misread what I wrote. My point was that slavery started ending long before Lincoln - and if it hadn't been for the minimalistic Federal Government Lincoln changed, it wouldn't have been possible for the Northern states to start ending it.
That, I am forced to hypothesize, is why you answered neither of my questions. Your attack on decentralized government for ending slavery in only some states depends on ignoring the likelihood that a centralized government might not have ended it anywhere.
the idea of a minimalistic Federal government proved incapable of properly dealing with the economic disparity between the Northern and Southern states and its most obvious effect; slavery.
I'd say the idea of a minimalistic Federal government was exactly what allowed slavery to end in the first place.
A couple quick questions from someone who must have "damn little understanding of history":
1) When did the South stop dominating American politics?
2) Given that your most optimistic answer to (1) could be "well the 2000 and 2004 elections were really close, so I'm sure it'll stop any day now", wasn't it a great thing that the Northern states were allowed to abolish slavery one by one, because the minimalistic Federal government didn't override state decisions on even such important matters?
I'll grant you that sometimes oppressive nations are so bad that invading them and deposing their governments is worth it; but if the United States didn't need to annex Nazi Germany or the Japanese empire on moral grounds, I'd be willing to bet they didn't even need to re-annex the Confederacy, or even keep armies there for longer than necessary to assist in the evacuation of and reparations for it's former prisoners.
It may seem as if human capability is receding for the moment, but that just means that one or two millenia from now the Apollo landing sites (and possibly the Constellation landing sites, if we continue to value flags and footprints over sustainability) will be more popular attractions than Antoninus's and Hadrian's Walls. There's a poignancy about a monument saying "This is as far as they got before they started to decline" which can really draw the tourists.
But I'm afraid that at the moment both are still overwhelmed by fear.
The most interesting new rumor today: I see that someone at Wikipedia claims to have noticed "coop" as one of the listed features on a Deus Ex 3 whiteboard on the Eidos Montreal webpage. This could mean, in decreasing order of probability:
A. Cooperative multiplayer was an idea they were tossing around but eventually dropped when they realized how much extra work it would be for the designers.
B. The "storyline" is so noninteractive and linear that it can be played either in single player or coop without too much extra work (i.e. they're just using the "Deus Ex" name to sell more copies).
C. They're managing to take the complex universe, huge multipath levels, engaging writing and interactive branching of the original Deus Ex story to make something which is just as brilliant but which still works seamlessly when you and your friends/significant other play together.
I'm pretty sure C can't be true... I mean, the "Baldur's Gate" games only pulled it off because even the single player game included a party of characters... but I WANT TO BELIEVE.
"It's only been half a century since we developed powered flight, and we're on our way to the Moon" is inspiring.
"It's been half a century since we went to the Moon, and we're having trouble just putting a little space station in Low Earth Orbit" is depressing.
Or as someone else summed it up: "The Cold War is over." Nobody who could afford to build orbital spaceships ever really wanted to, not when making really big ICBMs was all it took to embarrass the Soviets, and certainly not after our first spaceship prototype turned out to be a flop.
They learned a lot from Deus Ex 2
on
Deus Ex 3 Announced
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Although getting rid of those nasty complicated parts like "complex plot", "skills" and "unique ammo" did make Deus Ex 2 more accessible to console game players, there were still people out there who lacked the higher cognitive functions and opposable thumbs necessary to really immerse themselves in that first sequel. So, some of those innovations will just have to be taken farther:
Linear plot: Although Deus Ex 2 successfully obliterated the choices that players could make in the first game's ending, mushing them all together into some sort of hybrid plot, some players were confused by the residual choices available in the sequel. Deus Ex 3 will prevent further confusion by standardizing the "auto aim" features and adding "auto move", as well as by replacing the "choose your own adventure" style conversations with a new "we chose your adventure, now shut up and listen" interface.
Gun: The unified ammunition, one-size-fits-all inventory, and reduced upgradability of weapon skills in Deus Ex 2 really made that game more accessible to the "can't tie their own shoelaces" audience. Deus Ex 3 will build on this success by replacing the varied and confusing weapon selections from the previous games with "Gun", a generic rifle which will shoot shiny graphics effects and will be the only weapon equipped by the player and all NPCs at all times. Gun will never hurt anyone friendly, will automatically correct your aim when shooting at anyone unfriendly, and will expend no ammunition. Gun will therefore double as a convenient way of eliminating from the game confusing questions about which characters are really good guys and which are really bad guys - shoot 'em all and let Gun sort 'em out!
Box: Because of the wonderful reception that the Deus Ex 2 levels and textures received, we now know that it's just fine to scale back level design for console systems with limited RAM. Accordingly, Deus Ex 3 will be even able to run on all popular handheld game systems, with a few minor plot and setting adjustments to fit the limited level files into available memory. Can you fight your way past the defenders of Square Tunnel and make it to the enemy's hidden Box base?
Length: Although Deus Ex 2 was significantly shorter than the first, it was still way longer than the average movie, and what kind of person wants to sit in front of a screen that long? What are you, some kind of gamer geek? Deus Ex 3 will be 90 minutes; 95 minutes in the "Directors Cut" version.
(disclaimer: Deus Ex: Invisible War was actually an okay game; it just really disappointed by comparison with the first)
There's a difference between being "against free speech" by imprisoning the speaker and being "against free speech" by posting things which contradict a speaker's arguments. I'm sorry if you've been emotionally scarred by the latter experience, but my advice is to try sucking it up, accepting that some of your opinions are unsubstantiated and unpopular, and moving on.
Claiming that it's cowardly to protest Bush and get stuffed into the Pier 57 cages just makes it seem more pathetic that you're simultaneously whining about Slashdot users modding you down. Somehow I'm guessing you're not battling the evil Modstapo from an airport wifi connection on your way to Darfur.
Bad permissions cause Vista to copy files VERY slowly because it has to reset them on all files.
On the Lame Excuses List, this falls somewhere above "You can't take bottled water on an airplane or the terrorists might win" but still doesn't beat out "He only hits me because he loves me."
If the equivalents of "cp -r" and "cp -pr" take noticeably different amounts of time to complete on your operating system, something is broken, because a multi-gigahertz processor can finish fiddling with even complicated permission bits long before a 50MB/s disk needs to have them ready to write.
If they spend $Z to get DRM on every CD, they'll stop X% piracy leading to $Y more revenue. If Y is greater than Z, then it makes sense to put on DRM. If Y is less than Z, then the DRM won't be put on.
It's really that simple.
"For every complex problem, there is an answer which is clear, simple, and wrong."
For one thing, you missed the fact that DRM will also stop V% of legitimate sales leading to $W less revenue, because people don't want to buy crippled products. Whether it's unskippable commercials and nagging preceding their movies, unrippable CDs that won't work with their MP3 players, or self-destructing software that mistakenly thought it was being pirated, most people by this point have experienced media crippled by DRM, and some of them now think twice before repeating such purchases.
In fact, many of those people have discovered the second flaw in your argument: "X%" and "$Y" are negative. Your DRM-encrusted media has already been cracked, uploaded, and made available on peer-to-peer networks - all the annoying DRM accomplished was to make sure the P2P networks have a superior product available. It's hard enough to persuade people not to rip you off when they can get a copy of your product for free; imagine how hard it is when they can get an improved copy for free!
DRM doesn't sell because media executives are "smarter than most people" and have carefully done the math. It sells because media executives can be tricked by such simplistic arguments into buying snake oil.
Technically they'll have the "be compatible with open standards" feature so that they slip by people's procurement requirements, but they'll make it difficult enough to switch from the default "be compatible with other Microsoft products only" feature that nothing will really change.
Voting is a simple enough proccess, why would anybody need a machine to do it?
Voting is an irrational process from a selfish perspective - the sum of the probabilities of me changing an election times the magnitude of the effect each election has on my own life is negligible even compared to the inconvenience of waiting in line to vote.
So when people do vote anyway, it's for some combination of: a. irrationality, b. zealotry, c. entertainment, d. altruism
People in category d are too rare to decide elections (although most of us in category b would mistakenly self-categorize there). Given the remaining three choices, our best hope may be to have elections settled by category c. And although following the debates and picking a good candidate is fun on it's own, most people in c want to see a fun minute-by-minute "horse race" during their election party at the end of the process. These people want instant official returns, and electronic voting seems to be the surest way to count a hundred million complex ballots with dozens of candidates and issues in a couple of hours.
What's worse, even the folks in category d are easily seduced by electronic voting - after the 2000 elections everybody in the USA understands the risks of ambiguous pencil marks and "hanging chads", and people who don't understand the risks of invisible databases and corruptible software think that electronic voting will fix all that.
This case also serves as a warning that California will not take any crap from the vendors.
I'd say it serves as a warning that the only way California can detect vendors' crap is by noticing new model numbers and obvious visible physical changes to certified software. The only way they can even hope to detect invisible changes to certified software is with a chain of trust which has again been proven to be missing most of its links.
It may prevent any further 'mistakes.'
It may discourage any further mistakes, but I'd say it only encourages 'mistakes'.
a) This will help catch ; and b) I'm not a so why should I care?
These sorts of powers have always been abused in the past. (bring up concrete examples if necessary; J. Edgar's FBI is a good place to start) What's to keep them from being abused in the future, the impeccable honesty of modern politicians like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani?
If you really need to chop it down to one sentence, I'd go with that last one.
Of course, it just blows my mind that those are our front-runners. There's got to be like ten people left with land-line phones, five of whom still haven't figured out this "cellular" thing and five of whom just like being eligible to screw with election pollsters.
Is there another company better suited for designing aircraft and other military technolgies?
No, but there used to be about 50.
If so, why aren't they bidding on more military contracts?
Because the government has trouble effectively wielding the power they hold with a plurality of demand, whereas the merging aerospace companies fully understood how much power they would hold with a plurality of experienced supply.
To be fair, this is hardly a government-exclusive problem. It's just another version of industry's complaint that they can't find enough experienced employees and they don't want to hire anyone unexperienced. Make too many good short term decisions without worrying about the negative long term consequences and eventually it catches up with you.
Deciding that every law is allowed by the Interstate Commerce Clause as long as it applies to people who a) live in a state. or b) sometimes engage in commerce.
Sorry, but if you speak up for the 9th and 10th Amendments today you get ignored and/or publicly reviled as a crazy person, unless you're transparently applying one of them only to a single issue where half of the country is on your side anyway. The opportune time to stand up for a generally limited Federal government passed before any of us were born.
Or is there some obvious flaw in such a scheme which keeps it from being used?
The only catch is that many applications want lots of random numbers quickly, whereas others want them truly unpredictable for cryptographic security and can wait as long as that takes. You want to try to make both types of apps happy. In Linux, for example,/dev/random tries to predict event timings from mouse/keyboard/hard drives, and gets its random numbers from the deviations from predictability. However, it doesn't "save up" any random numbers, just generates them as requested, so this may be a reasonable thing to do for generating encryption keys (as long as the keygen prompts the user to wiggle the mouse a little) but it's not fast enough for random numbers in video games or numerical simulations. For that, there's pseudo-random number generators in the C library, as well as a/dev/urandom that starts with seeds from/dev/random but pads them out with a PRNG when the non-pseudo randomness runs low.
Phrases like "a complete redesign" generally just indicate that people have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it
That's unfair; mpathy also said "they want to stay with their window policy which is IMHO unusable for a image manipulation program", indicating that he has an incorrect idea of what's wrong and how to fix it.
It's the most common complaint I've seen about the Gimp UI: people with inferior window managers complain that Gimp doesn't try to reinvent the window manager for them. The fact that the Gimp developers haven't buckled under to these complaints and made their program less useful for the rest of us is commendable, not just stubborn.
It's not as geeky as most of the stories here, but I think a narrow vote regarding the impeachment of the Vice President is relevant enough for the Politics section.
Like I said, my first target for blame was the people who ported Flash player to Linux, but maybe it's a problem with just the particular binary I've got installed. What distribution, and what version of Flash are you running?
Slashdot Mirror
This statement suggests that you don't know what Lincoln did to the Federal Government once the South seceeded.
You misread what I wrote. My point was that slavery started ending long before Lincoln - and if it hadn't been for the minimalistic Federal Government Lincoln changed, it wouldn't have been possible for the Northern states to start ending it.
That, I am forced to hypothesize, is why you answered neither of my questions. Your attack on decentralized government for ending slavery in only some states depends on ignoring the likelihood that a centralized government might not have ended it anywhere.
But if your emotions are getting the best of your reading skills, that's easily forgivable in this context.
the idea of a minimalistic Federal government proved incapable of properly dealing with the economic disparity between the Northern and Southern states and its most obvious effect; slavery.
I'd say the idea of a minimalistic Federal government was exactly what allowed slavery to end in the first place.
A couple quick questions from someone who must have "damn little understanding of history":
1) When did the South stop dominating American politics?
2) Given that your most optimistic answer to (1) could be "well the 2000 and 2004 elections were really close, so I'm sure it'll stop any day now", wasn't it a great thing that the Northern states were allowed to abolish slavery one by one, because the minimalistic Federal government didn't override state decisions on even such important matters?
I'll grant you that sometimes oppressive nations are so bad that invading them and deposing their governments is worth it; but if the United States didn't need to annex Nazi Germany or the Japanese empire on moral grounds, I'd be willing to bet they didn't even need to re-annex the Confederacy, or even keep armies there for longer than necessary to assist in the evacuation of and reparations for it's former prisoners.
It may seem as if human capability is receding for the moment, but that just means that one or two millenia from now the Apollo landing sites (and possibly the Constellation landing sites, if we continue to value flags and footprints over sustainability) will be more popular attractions than Antoninus's and Hadrian's Walls. There's a poignancy about a monument saying "This is as far as they got before they started to decline" which can really draw the tourists.
Debian's dpkg will abort if it runs into a package that attempts to overwrite a file owned by another package
So will Red Hat's (and presumably SuSE's, etc) rpm.
Then I'm sure the White House will get right on that.
But I'm afraid that at the moment both are still overwhelmed by fear.
The most interesting new rumor today: I see that someone at Wikipedia claims to have noticed "coop" as one of the listed features on a Deus Ex 3 whiteboard on the Eidos Montreal webpage. This could mean, in decreasing order of probability:
A. Cooperative multiplayer was an idea they were tossing around but eventually dropped when they realized how much extra work it would be for the designers.
B. The "storyline" is so noninteractive and linear that it can be played either in single player or coop without too much extra work (i.e. they're just using the "Deus Ex" name to sell more copies).
C. They're managing to take the complex universe, huge multipath levels, engaging writing and interactive branching of the original Deus Ex story to make something which is just as brilliant but which still works seamlessly when you and your friends/significant other play together.
I'm pretty sure C can't be true... I mean, the "Baldur's Gate" games only pulled it off because even the single player game included a party of characters... but I WANT TO BELIEVE.
"It's only been half a century since we developed powered flight, and we're on our way to the Moon" is inspiring.
"It's been half a century since we went to the Moon, and we're having trouble just putting a little space station in Low Earth Orbit" is depressing.
Or as someone else summed it up: "The Cold War is over." Nobody who could afford to build orbital spaceships ever really wanted to, not when making really big ICBMs was all it took to embarrass the Soviets, and certainly not after our first spaceship prototype turned out to be a flop.
Although getting rid of those nasty complicated parts like "complex plot", "skills" and "unique ammo" did make Deus Ex 2 more accessible to console game players, there were still people out there who lacked the higher cognitive functions and opposable thumbs necessary to really immerse themselves in that first sequel. So, some of those innovations will just have to be taken farther:
Linear plot: Although Deus Ex 2 successfully obliterated the choices that players could make in the first game's ending, mushing them all together into some sort of hybrid plot, some players were confused by the residual choices available in the sequel. Deus Ex 3 will prevent further confusion by standardizing the "auto aim" features and adding "auto move", as well as by replacing the "choose your own adventure" style conversations with a new "we chose your adventure, now shut up and listen" interface.
Gun: The unified ammunition, one-size-fits-all inventory, and reduced upgradability of weapon skills in Deus Ex 2 really made that game more accessible to the "can't tie their own shoelaces" audience. Deus Ex 3 will build on this success by replacing the varied and confusing weapon selections from the previous games with "Gun", a generic rifle which will shoot shiny graphics effects and will be the only weapon equipped by the player and all NPCs at all times. Gun will never hurt anyone friendly, will automatically correct your aim when shooting at anyone unfriendly, and will expend no ammunition. Gun will therefore double as a convenient way of eliminating from the game confusing questions about which characters are really good guys and which are really bad guys - shoot 'em all and let Gun sort 'em out!
Box: Because of the wonderful reception that the Deus Ex 2 levels and textures received, we now know that it's just fine to scale back level design for console systems with limited RAM. Accordingly, Deus Ex 3 will be even able to run on all popular handheld game systems, with a few minor plot and setting adjustments to fit the limited level files into available memory. Can you fight your way past the defenders of Square Tunnel and make it to the enemy's hidden Box base?
Length: Although Deus Ex 2 was significantly shorter than the first, it was still way longer than the average movie, and what kind of person wants to sit in front of a screen that long? What are you, some kind of gamer geek? Deus Ex 3 will be 90 minutes; 95 minutes in the "Directors Cut" version.
(disclaimer: Deus Ex: Invisible War was actually an okay game; it just really disappointed by comparison with the first)
How many BogoMIPS do they get?
There's a difference between being "against free speech" by imprisoning the speaker and being "against free speech" by posting things which contradict a speaker's arguments. I'm sorry if you've been emotionally scarred by the latter experience, but my advice is to try sucking it up, accepting that some of your opinions are unsubstantiated and unpopular, and moving on.
Claiming that it's cowardly to protest Bush and get stuffed into the Pier 57 cages just makes it seem more pathetic that you're simultaneously whining about Slashdot users modding you down. Somehow I'm guessing you're not battling the evil Modstapo from an airport wifi connection on your way to Darfur.
Bad permissions cause Vista to copy files VERY slowly because it has to reset them on all files.
On the Lame Excuses List, this falls somewhere above "You can't take bottled water on an airplane or the terrorists might win" but still doesn't beat out "He only hits me because he loves me."
If the equivalents of "cp -r" and "cp -pr" take noticeably different amounts of time to complete on your operating system, something is broken, because a multi-gigahertz processor can finish fiddling with even complicated permission bits long before a 50MB/s disk needs to have them ready to write.
If they spend $Z to get DRM on every CD, they'll stop X% piracy leading to $Y more revenue. If Y is greater than Z, then it makes sense to put on DRM. If Y is less than Z, then the DRM won't be put on.
It's really that simple.
"For every complex problem, there is an answer which is clear, simple, and wrong."
For one thing, you missed the fact that DRM will also stop V% of legitimate sales leading to $W less revenue, because people don't want to buy crippled products. Whether it's unskippable commercials and nagging preceding their movies, unrippable CDs that won't work with their MP3 players, or self-destructing software that mistakenly thought it was being pirated, most people by this point have experienced media crippled by DRM, and some of them now think twice before repeating such purchases.
In fact, many of those people have discovered the second flaw in your argument: "X%" and "$Y" are negative. Your DRM-encrusted media has already been cracked, uploaded, and made available on peer-to-peer networks - all the annoying DRM accomplished was to make sure the P2P networks have a superior product available. It's hard enough to persuade people not to rip you off when they can get a copy of your product for free; imagine how hard it is when they can get an improved copy for free!
DRM doesn't sell because media executives are "smarter than most people" and have carefully done the math. It sells because media executives can be tricked by such simplistic arguments into buying snake oil.
Technically they'll have the "be compatible with open standards" feature so that they slip by people's procurement requirements, but they'll make it difficult enough to switch from the default "be compatible with other Microsoft products only" feature that nothing will really change.
Voting is a simple enough proccess, why would anybody need a machine to do it?
Voting is an irrational process from a selfish perspective - the sum of the probabilities of me changing an election times the magnitude of the effect each election has on my own life is negligible even compared to the inconvenience of waiting in line to vote.
So when people do vote anyway, it's for some combination of:
a. irrationality,
b. zealotry,
c. entertainment,
d. altruism
People in category d are too rare to decide elections (although most of us in category b would mistakenly self-categorize there). Given the remaining three choices, our best hope may be to have elections settled by category c. And although following the debates and picking a good candidate is fun on it's own, most people in c want to see a fun minute-by-minute "horse race" during their election party at the end of the process. These people want instant official returns, and electronic voting seems to be the surest way to count a hundred million complex ballots with dozens of candidates and issues in a couple of hours.
What's worse, even the folks in category d are easily seduced by electronic voting - after the 2000 elections everybody in the USA understands the risks of ambiguous pencil marks and "hanging chads", and people who don't understand the risks of invisible databases and corruptible software think that electronic voting will fix all that.
This case also serves as a warning that California will not take any crap from the vendors.
I'd say it serves as a warning that the only way California can detect vendors' crap is by noticing new model numbers and obvious visible physical changes to certified software. The only way they can even hope to detect invisible changes to certified software is with a chain of trust which has again been proven to be missing most of its links.
It may prevent any further 'mistakes.'
It may discourage any further mistakes, but I'd say it only encourages 'mistakes'.
a) This will help catch ; and b) I'm not a so why should I care?
These sorts of powers have always been abused in the past. (bring up concrete examples if necessary; J. Edgar's FBI is a good place to start) What's to keep them from being abused in the future, the impeccable honesty of modern politicians like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani?
If you really need to chop it down to one sentence, I'd go with that last one.
Of course, it just blows my mind that those are our front-runners. There's got to be like ten people left with land-line phones, five of whom still haven't figured out this "cellular" thing and five of whom just like being eligible to screw with election pollsters.
Is there another company better suited for designing aircraft and other military technolgies?
No, but there used to be about 50.
If so, why aren't they bidding on more military contracts?
Because the government has trouble effectively wielding the power they hold with a plurality of demand, whereas the merging aerospace companies fully understood how much power they would hold with a plurality of experienced supply.
To be fair, this is hardly a government-exclusive problem. It's just another version of industry's complaint that they can't find enough experienced employees and they don't want to hire anyone unexperienced. Make too many good short term decisions without worrying about the negative long term consequences and eventually it catches up with you.
Where's the Supreme Court when you need them?
Deciding that every law is allowed by the Interstate Commerce Clause as long as it applies to people who
a) live in a state.
or
b) sometimes engage in commerce.
Sorry, but if you speak up for the 9th and 10th Amendments today you get ignored and/or publicly reviled as a crazy person, unless you're transparently applying one of them only to a single issue where half of the country is on your side anyway. The opportune time to stand up for a generally limited Federal government passed before any of us were born.
I hear that 100% of computer users have used someone else's HTTP server without permission!
Or is there some obvious flaw in such a scheme which keeps it from being used?
/dev/random tries to predict event timings from mouse/keyboard/hard drives, and gets its random numbers from the deviations from predictability. However, it doesn't "save up" any random numbers, just generates them as requested, so this may be a reasonable thing to do for generating encryption keys (as long as the keygen prompts the user to wiggle the mouse a little) but it's not fast enough for random numbers in video games or numerical simulations. For that, there's pseudo-random number generators in the C library, as well as a /dev/urandom that starts with seeds from /dev/random but pads them out with a PRNG when the non-pseudo randomness runs low.
The only catch is that many applications want lots of random numbers quickly, whereas others want them truly unpredictable for cryptographic security and can wait as long as that takes. You want to try to make both types of apps happy. In Linux, for example,
Phrases like "a complete redesign" generally just indicate that people have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it
That's unfair; mpathy also said "they want to stay with their window policy which is IMHO unusable for a image manipulation program", indicating that he has an incorrect idea of what's wrong and how to fix it.
It's the most common complaint I've seen about the Gimp UI: people with inferior window managers complain that Gimp doesn't try to reinvent the window manager for them. The fact that the Gimp developers haven't buckled under to these complaints and made their program less useful for the rest of us is commendable, not just stubborn.
the people that want to impeach are significantly in the minority
Where by "significantly in the minority", you mean 54 percent.
It's not as geeky as most of the stories here, but I think a narrow vote regarding the impeachment of the Vice President is relevant enough for the Politics section.
Like I said, my first target for blame was the people who ported Flash player to Linux, but maybe it's a problem with just the particular binary I've got installed. What distribution, and what version of Flash are you running?