There are at least a million people who would like to cut our heads off/blow stuff up
Yup. It used to be only a few hundred thousand, but the collateral damage from decades of "Shock and Awe" campaigns made great PR for them to recruit others. Osama Bin Laden planned to try to trick the USA into starting an all out war between Western and Muslim states as a means to unite the latter under his brand of fundamentalist Islam, and like a bunch of suckers we've started following his script line by line.
The other billion Muslims aren't nearly as menacing as you want to make them, although I see you're encouraging us to change that as well. Weasel-worded euphemisms like "going all in for the win" are a good start; although that has more of a redneck vibe than "Final Solution" I'm sure your targets know what you mean.
Speaking of euphemisms, since you're currently on Slashdot and not FreeRepublic you probably shouldn't have abbreviated "Bush Derangement Syndrome". You might want to explain the term in some detail, too; to the objective observer it might not be immediately obvious that people who object to thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths in a war started under false pretenses are "deranged".
Who, in his autobiography, admitted to lying to animal shelters so that he could adopt their cats, take them home, vivisect and kill them.
Of course, it's also possible that you're not thinking at all, that you're trying to use "Slashdot thinks Republican leaders would kill kittens" as some sort of slur against Slashdot, because you didn't know that until a few months ago Senate Republicans were in fact led by a man who killed kittens. For future irony, I suggest accusing the anti-Bush crowd of thinking that Bush would illegally wiretap our phones without search warrants or that Cheney would shoot a guy in the face.
Well, in the rest of the 'free' world we do it through something called an 'election'. We actually get to choose our government and thereby exercise a fair amount of control. If we want something really bad we can even involve our self directly by joining a political party or even start our own. The entire process is commonly known as 'democracy'.
You Americans should try it once... it's pretty cool actually.
We've actually been trying it for a centuries - so long that the powers that be have learned to game the flaws in the system. That's why you could find Republicans donating to a Green party opponent of Rick Santorum, for instance, because unlike in your naive "we could start our own political party" fantasy, in the real world plurality voting causes third parties to siphon votes away from the major party that more closely expresses their views. Perhaps I'm wrong, and your democracy uses Condorcet voting? No? Didn't think so. I hope you've at least got Proportional Representation, or you can expect your oligarchies to figure out how to abuse the system even faster than ours did.
Amazingly, although they didn't understand the tradeoffs in different multi-party vote counting systems, the American founding fathers did understand an even deeper flaw with representative democracy: sometimes, 51% of the voters pick a dickhead. Their solution, a constitution which limits the authority that even popularly-elected leaders have, would work here if any of our opposing leaders had the balls to help enforce it. The Ninth and Fourth Amendments in the Bill of Rights would both apply here, if only the Democrats hadn't long ago agreed to ignore the Ninth to fight the "War on Poverty" and ignore the Fourth to fight the "War on Drugs". The "War on Terrorism" is just another step in the same direction, not an unprecidented disaster.
No difference between Bush and Gore? Jesus fucking hell, get a clue.
While I agree with you that there are many huge differences between Bush and Gore, this probably isn't the right discussion in which to depend on those differences. Google "Clipper chip" and "key escrow" for more information. Gore doesn't exactly have a history of valuing individual privacy rights over ease of government wiretapping.
Also, thanks to the electoral college system, it is often possible to safely vote for a third party, because most of us live in states where preelection polling makes the results entirely predictable and the margins are such that a vote to increase a third party candidate's results can be more valuable than a vote for one of the major candidates. It's clear that most of the Nader voters in Florida were idiots, but voting for Nader might have been reasonable in California or Texas.
Now all you've got to do is fake up an email from your bank, send it to yourself. Then when you fall for the trick you'll have your username/account number and passwords. You are truly a l33t hax0r.
That, or he'd have to hack into someone else's computer. I know that's impossible today, but a few pessimistic computer scientists suggest that one day Microsoft's crack team of programmers may make a mistake, allowing a malformed file or network connection to initiate the execution of malicious code on an innocent person's computer! Worse yet, some fear that the vigilance of today's sophisticated computer users may itself fail. It's unlikely that anyone would be foolish enough to run an executable file from an untrustworthy source without at least rigorously testing it in a "sandbox" environment, but rumor says that in a few underfunded public schools the computer security classes don't even teach kids how to set up a virtual machine!
He's been worried about flagging CD sales since before he ever tried to have accused copyright violators' computers destroyed, but for some reason the profits he should be seeing from How His Glory Shines are still vanishing, as if down some Glory hole. Could it be that Orrin's music no longer resonates with today's youth? Could it be that the "Order" link at the top of his music webpage is broken, and nobody even noticed until some jerk on Slashdot decided to click it to look for more things to make fun of?
No. Of course not. It must be the counterfeit used CDs' fault.
Yeah, lets see a newspaper pull that off. "But your honor one of our sources reported that Celebrity T was doing R bad thing at the time therefore we didn't slander them."
It's good to see you've discovered the internet since waking from your coma, although you may be disappointed to find out that along with television it's eating the newspaper industry alive. There have been some other changes for the worse during the lastsixyears, too. You're not going to be happy with the state of the news media today. Not only can they pass along lies without facing the repercussions, but they refuse to reveal the identity of lying "anonymous sources" thereby protecting those liars from facing any negative consequences at all.
Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore?...
Do you really think George Washington, Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson would approve of the Patriot Act?
Judging by your sig, your education must not have been functional enough. Don't you realize that those men whose approval you seek were misbehaving rule-breakers, and that the Patriot Act is part of our nation's body of rules now? It sounds like you're starting to step over your boundaries; I suggest you turn yourself in for reeducation at once!
It's the programs that other companies write on top of their middleware. You know how Microsoft uses standards for network protocols, file formats, etc. that were developed for non-Microsoft platforms? Well, one of the reasons we yell "Microsoft sucks!" so often is that we've noticed how hard they work to prevent any de facto standards from spreading in the other direction.
There's a couple reasons for it not being in the kernel. First, it misleads users who expect some degree of data security.
What security? When you use "rm", that doesn't overwrite your file on disk, it just unlinks it. Anyone with root access can read your recently deleted files from/dev/[sh]d? if you didn't overwrite them before deleting, and making data theft less convenient for someone who has already rooted your system isn't worth making data recovery less convenient for you. And from the other direction, anyone without root access wouldn't be able to read your.Trash files any more than they can read your/tmp files; you say "We can't have one global.Trash bin in a multiuser system", but that's a solved problem.
For example, if I delete a file on a USB drive, does it go in a.Trash storage in the USB drive, or do we copy it over to a main.Trash folder?
On the USB drive. When one answer to your question has the downside of "takes a microsecond to relocate a hard link" and the other has the downside of "takes an arbitrarily large time to move a file", it's probably safe to make the former answer global policy.
Many people don't realize they have to empty the trash to reclaim space on their thumbdrive in GNOME.
That's because Gnome's trash implementation is in userspace, and so the obvious behavior of "automatically delete the oldest things in the.Trash directory whenever you need new space" isn't an option for them. It would be an option for the kernel. It's a fine philosophy to move policy into userspace whenever possible, but some policies just aren't possible in userspace. If you dug into glibc you could probably implement "automatically delete *my* oldest trash whenever I need new space", but you'd probably need some funky ACLs in.Trash to allow people to delete each other's deleted files but not to read them (or even to read their filenames).
Professor Dave Touretzky has all the humorous DeCSS art I remember (and a lot more I don't) archived in his gallery here. It's just cute watching the MPAA try to censor internet publication of movie decryption information again. They can't really be stupid enough to think it'll work this time, can they?
The company is almost dead now, let them die alright. It'll be a history lesson for future companies.
Companies are legal fictions that cannot learn from history. Company decisions are amde by their managers. And unfortunately, the lesson we're teaching future managers is "If you make false accusations and wild threats in order to pump and dump your stock, you can make millions of dollars from an otherwise failed company but suffer no legal repercussions."
Anyone else find it ridiculous that we're seeing all the reports of how oppressive Iran is to it's people? WHO CARES?
Anyone with sympathy for fellow human beings.
If the people there didn't like it, and were fed up, they'd fix it.
Or they'd be arrested or executed. That turns out to be a remarkably effective government strategy for preventing fed up people from fixing anything.
I'm seeing this as a preamble to invasion/attack.
Yeah, I have to admit, the current US media and leadership isn't exactly Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, and looking for the former groups' ulterior motives isn't a bad idea. I can't believe even Bush would be dumb enough to try to invade Iran right now, but for them to launch air strikes on the "we can't trust you to create nuclear energy" excuse sounds alarmingly plausible.
On the other hand, it could be that this isn't a preamble to anything, but instead it's just a consequence of the desire of those in power to have more Enemies to denounce. Someone in a post above pointed out that "it is pretty easy to keep a regime going for a very long time if there is a widespread perception of an iminent external threat", and he was talking about Iran, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, but the same psychology applies to the USA too.
Games are less engrossing than other media. Games are also more engrossing than other media. When you're comparing two categories as broad as "games" and "other media", almost any statement you can make will be true for some examples in each category. Trying to lump "games" and "other media" together in some sort of average sense to compare the two is ridiculous.
I'm sure that "players having less of an emotional connection to in-game events than the events in a book or movie" is exactly what happens when the game is Doom 3 and the movie is The Godfather; the opposite happens when the movie is Doom 3 and the game is Deus Ex. In cases where you might expect a game, film, and book to be roughly comparable, I can think of examples where each form of media was the most emotional experience of the three.
Glancing over the complete report, though, it's not as trite as the synopsis makes it sound. Here's an excellent example from the report of a game player being moved, to which the report author commented, "It is clear from this account that games can be very emotionally affecting."
"There's a point at the end of [Shadow of the Colossus] where everything you think is going to happen has happened, but it hasn't, and the horse is killed in a rock fall. It's just devastating... The impact it has on you. This has been your only friend and companion who has helped you and protected you. I really didn't see it coming. He just dies, then you are alone but you have to keep going. Nothing else can do that. There are countless extraordinary books that are extraordinarily moving, but they can't do that. Films and books can't make you lose anything. You can read about someone else's loss, you can empathise in a book, but a book can't ever take anything from you. But that game took my horse from me. He was my horse. He was my friend by that stage!
In that game if I wanted to get from here to here I had a horse and that was nice and quick and I could canter and jump over things and now I can't do that anymore. So in a basic, mechanical way something has been taken from me.
There are lots of tragic horse deaths in all kinds of films and books but... in a film everything that happens next is pre-calculated so the music will come in on a particular second and you will have your attention moved to something else, and your feelings are then manipulated and extrapolated by what happens next. In a game, I stood there looking down at where he had fallen. Nothing is going to happen until I make it happen. I could have stood there for the rest of my life. I could have put the game down and never played it again. Or started again and tried to make it not happen, which it wouldn't. That changes the character of the experience."
I'm not saying that memory bandwidth isn't an important bottleneck (and I'd bet that's one reason they're going with AMD for TACC's next cluster), but depending on your application's behavior you can bring in enough work to keep two dual-core Xeons busy on each node, and I'm sure there are applications that won't starve two quad-core Xeons either.
Why would companies want to attract people who aren't willing to accept the conditions of the job?
You said it, brother. I mean, if we were talking about jobs which are well-suited to working from home, like construction workers or surgeons, things might be different, but these are IT positions! To allow these women to work from home, we'd probably have to create a whole globe-spanning computer network!
If the Novell-Microsoft pact has taught us anything, it's that these agreements aren't a "company pays Microsoft millions of dollars to run Linux" sort of trade. The Novell agreement was more of a "Microsoft pays company hundreds of millions of dollars to cast legal FUD on Linux" deal. Until I hear some dollar figures (including the direction of the payments), I think it's ridiculous to guess what "Samsung's perspective" really is.
Why would Microsoft release software to enhance Linux?
To make money, of course. What, you think Adobe is a charity? Even porting free applications like media readers can be worth the investment because of the increased demand for the corresponding media creation software.
Linux users do not pay for software; that's the nature of the beast. I've been running Linux full-time since the early 1.x versions, and I've never purchased a single piece of software for it.
For personal use I've purchased a couple hundred dollars of Red Hat versions (back when such a thing was possible with their most up-to-date distros), two Loki-ported games, four Id games (although I would have bought two of those even if they were Windows-only), and a Cedega subscription. At the school research lab I admin we've bought a few copies (nominally $1400, but I'm sure Dell gets a nice discount) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and multiple commercial licenses for Linux versions of Maple, Matlab, and Tecplot.
Of course it would be nuts to try to generalize from our two anecdotes, but not quite as ridiculous as generalizing from just your one.
For those that don't know, the second-worst mass shooting in U.S. history (IIRC) was in a Luby's restaurant in Texas.
Not quite - even if you exclude the Civil War and Indian massacres, the Luby's shooting (and the VT shooting) were both topped by the Mountain Meadows Massacre, with over a hundred victims.
The moral is the same, though: in Mountain Meadows, the initial attack inflicted casualties, but was finally fought off by the armed emigrant victims. The emigrants believed the attack to be the sole work of Paiute Indians, however, and surrendered their weapons after a promise of protection from the Mormons, who rewarded that surrender by killing every man, woman, and child old enough to talk.
But the idea is that every candidate must have some minimal amount of VETTED signatures (say 5%).
That number sounds familiar... ah, yes, here it is:
"Georgia: The legislature passed a law in 1943 requiring that new party and independent candidates submit a petition signed by 5% of the number of registered voters in order to get on the ballot for any office. Previously, any party could get on the ballot just by requesting it. The result has been that since 1943, there has not been one third party candidate on the Georgia ballot for U.S. House of Representatives."
I'm sure you have the best intentions at heart. All you need now is a cynical appreciation of just how easy it can be for incumbents to abuse the election system to shut out challengers. I suspect that public campaign financing will never become as anti-democratic as, say, plurality voting, but I'm sure that after it's been through a few Republican- and Democrat-controlled rulemaking sessions it'll make a nice extra moat around their castle.
TV commercials, in the most expensive case. From the politician's point of view, they don't care whether a person or corporation gives them money to buy production and airtime or whether the donor just buys those things directly, so banning the donation of money won't remove the influence of anyone who gives in large chunks. It'll only remove the influence of smaller donors who need to pool their funds to buy a campaign commercial.
Really, the root of the problem is that people tend to vote for whoever most of the talking heads in the picture box tell them to. Trying to haphazardly control how the talking heads and the picture companies get paid is just an attack on the problem's symptoms, usually proposed with insufficient consideration of the potential side effects.
let's say he gets 100x whatever he has raised up to the amount needed to match the best funded candidate. This would keep the flying saucer party candidate off the presidential ballot
Who wants to get on the presidential ballot? I'll just be registering as a candidate for the campaign events. At a 100-to-1 investment return ratio, even if I can't get many votes I'll bet I can get some big crowds to attend my $5-a-plate campaign banquets. We're serving all-you-can-eat lobster, and you're all invited!
the only way to stop all of this is to move to public Financing of campaigns.
Does that mean public financing of every nutjob who runs for president, or public financing of only Republicrat candidates? I assure you that either alternative would be a disaster.
"No, wait," you might say, "we can decide who gets funding on a case-by-case basis!" But in practice, "we" becomes "some government entity", and if you want to fix the government then the last thing you want to do is to give the current rulers power to decide which potential future rulers are and aren't acceptable.
Then ALL money would be prevented from moving from ANYBODY to a congressman. Many will fight this, and will claim that it violates their first amendment rights.
Well, that depends - can I still use my money to buy commercials, newspaper ads, signs, webpage hosting, etc? If so then you might not technically be violating my first amendment rights, but you will be squeezing me out of the political process pretty effectively anyway. I can't afford to buy a TV commercial myself; if I'm not allowed to donate my money to a group that can pool those funds, then your attempt to keep rich people from having too much political influence will ensure that *only* rich people will have much political influence.
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least a million people who would like to cut our heads off/blow stuff up
Yup. It used to be only a few hundred thousand, but the collateral damage from decades of "Shock and Awe" campaigns made great PR for them to recruit others. Osama Bin Laden planned to try to trick the USA into starting an all out war between Western and Muslim states as a means to unite the latter under his brand of fundamentalist Islam, and like a bunch of suckers we've started following his script line by line.
The other billion Muslims aren't nearly as menacing as you want to make them, although I see you're encouraging us to change that as well. Weasel-worded euphemisms like "going all in for the win" are a good start; although that has more of a redneck vibe than "Final Solution" I'm sure your targets know what you mean.
Speaking of euphemisms, since you're currently on Slashdot and not FreeRepublic you probably shouldn't have abbreviated "Bush Derangement Syndrome". You might want to explain the term in some detail, too; to the objective observer it might not be immediately obvious that people who object to thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths in a war started under false pretenses are "deranged".
Who, in his autobiography, admitted to lying to animal shelters so that he could adopt their cats, take them home, vivisect and kill them.
Of course, it's also possible that you're not thinking at all, that you're trying to use "Slashdot thinks Republican leaders would kill kittens" as some sort of slur against Slashdot, because you didn't know that until a few months ago Senate Republicans were in fact led by a man who killed kittens. For future irony, I suggest accusing the anti-Bush crowd of thinking that Bush would illegally wiretap our phones without search warrants or that Cheney would shoot a guy in the face.
Well, in the rest of the 'free' world we do it through something called an 'election'. We actually get to choose our government and thereby exercise a fair amount of control. If we want something really bad we can even involve our self directly by joining a political party or even start our own. The entire process is commonly known as 'democracy'.
You Americans should try it once... it's pretty cool actually.
We've actually been trying it for a centuries - so long that the powers that be have learned to game the flaws in the system. That's why you could find Republicans donating to a Green party opponent of Rick Santorum, for instance, because unlike in your naive "we could start our own political party" fantasy, in the real world plurality voting causes third parties to siphon votes away from the major party that more closely expresses their views. Perhaps I'm wrong, and your democracy uses Condorcet voting? No? Didn't think so. I hope you've at least got Proportional Representation, or you can expect your oligarchies to figure out how to abuse the system even faster than ours did.
Amazingly, although they didn't understand the tradeoffs in different multi-party vote counting systems, the American founding fathers did understand an even deeper flaw with representative democracy: sometimes, 51% of the voters pick a dickhead. Their solution, a constitution which limits the authority that even popularly-elected leaders have, would work here if any of our opposing leaders had the balls to help enforce it. The Ninth and Fourth Amendments in the Bill of Rights would both apply here, if only the Democrats hadn't long ago agreed to ignore the Ninth to fight the "War on Poverty" and ignore the Fourth to fight the "War on Drugs". The "War on Terrorism" is just another step in the same direction, not an unprecidented disaster.
No difference between Bush and Gore? Jesus fucking hell, get a clue.
While I agree with you that there are many huge differences between Bush and Gore, this probably isn't the right discussion in which to depend on those differences. Google "Clipper chip" and "key escrow" for more information. Gore doesn't exactly have a history of valuing individual privacy rights over ease of government wiretapping.
Also, thanks to the electoral college system, it is often possible to safely vote for a third party, because most of us live in states where preelection polling makes the results entirely predictable and the margins are such that a vote to increase a third party candidate's results can be more valuable than a vote for one of the major candidates. It's clear that most of the Nader voters in Florida were idiots, but voting for Nader might have been reasonable in California or Texas.
Now all you've got to do is fake up an email from your bank, send it to yourself. Then when you fall for the trick you'll have your username/account number and passwords. You are truly a l33t hax0r.
That, or he'd have to hack into someone else's computer. I know that's impossible today, but a few pessimistic computer scientists suggest that one day Microsoft's crack team of programmers may make a mistake, allowing a malformed file or network connection to initiate the execution of malicious code on an innocent person's computer! Worse yet, some fear that the vigilance of today's sophisticated computer users may itself fail. It's unlikely that anyone would be foolish enough to run an executable file from an untrustworthy source without at least rigorously testing it in a "sandbox" environment, but rumor says that in a few underfunded public schools the computer security classes don't even teach kids how to set up a virtual machine!
He's been worried about flagging CD sales since before he ever tried to have accused copyright violators' computers destroyed, but for some reason the profits he should be seeing from How His Glory Shines are still vanishing, as if down some Glory hole. Could it be that Orrin's music no longer resonates with today's youth? Could it be that the "Order" link at the top of his music webpage is broken, and nobody even noticed until some jerk on Slashdot decided to click it to look for more things to make fun of?
No. Of course not. It must be the counterfeit used CDs' fault.
Yeah, lets see a newspaper pull that off. "But your honor one of our sources reported that Celebrity T was doing R bad thing at the time therefore we didn't slander them."
It's good to see you've discovered the internet since waking from your coma, although you may be disappointed to find out that along with television it's eating the newspaper industry alive. There have been some other changes for the worse during the last six years, too. You're not going to be happy with the state of the news media today. Not only can they pass along lies without facing the repercussions, but they refuse to reveal the identity of lying "anonymous sources" thereby protecting those liars from facing any negative consequences at all.
Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
...
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore?
Do you really think George Washington, Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson would approve of the Patriot Act?
Judging by your sig, your education must not have been functional enough. Don't you realize that those men whose approval you seek were misbehaving rule-breakers, and that the Patriot Act is part of our nation's body of rules now? It sounds like you're starting to step over your boundaries; I suggest you turn yourself in for reeducation at once!
It's the programs that other companies write on top of their middleware. You know how Microsoft uses standards for network protocols, file formats, etc. that were developed for non-Microsoft platforms? Well, one of the reasons we yell "Microsoft sucks!" so often is that we've noticed how hard they work to prevent any de facto standards from spreading in the other direction.
There's a couple reasons for it not being in the kernel. First, it misleads users who expect some degree of data security.
/dev/[sh]d? if you didn't overwrite them before deleting, and making data theft less convenient for someone who has already rooted your system isn't worth making data recovery less convenient for you. And from the other direction, anyone without root access wouldn't be able to read your .Trash files any more than they can read your /tmp files; you say "We can't have one global .Trash bin in a multiuser system", but that's a solved problem.
.Trash storage in the USB drive, or do we copy it over to a main .Trash folder?
.Trash directory whenever you need new space" isn't an option for them. It would be an option for the kernel. It's a fine philosophy to move policy into userspace whenever possible, but some policies just aren't possible in userspace. If you dug into glibc you could probably implement "automatically delete *my* oldest trash whenever I need new space", but you'd probably need some funky ACLs in .Trash to allow people to delete each other's deleted files but not to read them (or even to read their filenames).
What security? When you use "rm", that doesn't overwrite your file on disk, it just unlinks it. Anyone with root access can read your recently deleted files from
For example, if I delete a file on a USB drive, does it go in a
On the USB drive. When one answer to your question has the downside of "takes a microsecond to relocate a hard link" and the other has the downside of "takes an arbitrarily large time to move a file", it's probably safe to make the former answer global policy.
Many people don't realize they have to empty the trash to reclaim space on their thumbdrive in GNOME.
That's because Gnome's trash implementation is in userspace, and so the obvious behavior of "automatically delete the oldest things in the
Professor Dave Touretzky has all the humorous DeCSS art I remember (and a lot more I don't) archived in his gallery here. It's just cute watching the MPAA try to censor internet publication of movie decryption information again. They can't really be stupid enough to think it'll work this time, can they?
The company is almost dead now, let them die alright. It'll be a history lesson for future companies.
Companies are legal fictions that cannot learn from history. Company decisions are amde by their managers. And unfortunately, the lesson we're teaching future managers is "If you make false accusations and wild threats in order to pump and dump your stock, you can make millions of dollars from an otherwise failed company but suffer no legal repercussions."
Anyone else find it ridiculous that we're seeing all the reports of how oppressive Iran is to it's people? WHO CARES?
Anyone with sympathy for fellow human beings.
If the people there didn't like it, and were fed up, they'd fix it.
Or they'd be arrested or executed. That turns out to be a remarkably effective government strategy for preventing fed up people from fixing anything.
I'm seeing this as a preamble to invasion/attack.
Yeah, I have to admit, the current US media and leadership isn't exactly Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, and looking for the former groups' ulterior motives isn't a bad idea. I can't believe even Bush would be dumb enough to try to invade Iran right now, but for them to launch air strikes on the "we can't trust you to create nuclear energy" excuse sounds alarmingly plausible.
On the other hand, it could be that this isn't a preamble to anything, but instead it's just a consequence of the desire of those in power to have more Enemies to denounce. Someone in a post above pointed out that "it is pretty easy to keep a regime going for a very long time if there is a widespread perception of an iminent external threat", and he was talking about Iran, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, but the same psychology applies to the USA too.
Games are less engrossing than other media. Games are also more engrossing than other media. When you're comparing two categories as broad as "games" and "other media", almost any statement you can make will be true for some examples in each category. Trying to lump "games" and "other media" together in some sort of average sense to compare the two is ridiculous.
I'm sure that "players having less of an emotional connection to in-game events than the events in a book or movie" is exactly what happens when the game is Doom 3 and the movie is The Godfather; the opposite happens when the movie is Doom 3 and the game is Deus Ex. In cases where you might expect a game, film, and book to be roughly comparable, I can think of examples where each form of media was the most emotional experience of the three.
Glancing over the complete report, though, it's not as trite as the synopsis makes it sound. Here's an excellent example from the report of a game player being moved, to which the report author commented, "It is clear from this account that games can be very emotionally affecting."
"There's a point at the end of [Shadow of the Colossus] where everything you think is going to happen has happened, but it hasn't, and the horse is killed in a rock fall. It's just devastating... The impact it has on you. This has been your only friend and companion who has helped you and protected you. I really didn't see it coming. He just dies, then you are alone but you have to keep going. Nothing else can do that. There are countless extraordinary books that are extraordinarily moving, but they can't do that. Films and books can't make you lose anything. You can read about someone else's loss, you can empathise in a book, but a book can't ever take anything from you. But that game took my horse from me. He was my horse. He was my friend by that stage!
In that game if I wanted to get from here to here I had a horse and that was nice and quick and I could canter and jump over things and now I can't do that anymore. So in a basic, mechanical way something has been taken from me.
There are lots of tragic horse deaths in all kinds of films and books but... in a film everything that happens next is pre-calculated so the music will come in on a particular second and you will have your attention moved to something else, and your feelings are then manipulated and extrapolated by what happens next. In a game, I stood there looking down at where he had fallen. Nothing is going to happen until I make it happen. I could have stood there for the rest of my life. I could have put the game down and never played it again. Or started again and tried to make it not happen, which it
wouldn't. That changes the character of the experience."
Except the shared bus the Xeons sit on is a seriously limiting factor, no-one in HPC is using Xeons because of it.
UT-Austin's current supercomputer isn't in the top ten right now, but "no-one" is a little harsh for number 12, don't you think?
I'm not saying that memory bandwidth isn't an important bottleneck (and I'd bet that's one reason they're going with AMD for TACC's next cluster), but depending on your application's behavior you can bring in enough work to keep two dual-core Xeons busy on each node, and I'm sure there are applications that won't starve two quad-core Xeons either.
Silly, they'll just make eleven louder, and keep eleven as the top number. Sheesh. ...
These go to twelve.
Why would companies want to attract people who aren't willing to accept the conditions of the job?
You said it, brother. I mean, if we were talking about jobs which are well-suited to working from home, like construction workers or surgeons, things might be different, but these are IT positions! To allow these women to work from home, we'd probably have to create a whole globe-spanning computer network!
If the Novell-Microsoft pact has taught us anything, it's that these agreements aren't a "company pays Microsoft millions of dollars to run Linux" sort of trade. The Novell agreement was more of a "Microsoft pays company hundreds of millions of dollars to cast legal FUD on Linux" deal. Until I hear some dollar figures (including the direction of the payments), I think it's ridiculous to guess what "Samsung's perspective" really is.
Why would Microsoft release software to enhance Linux?
To make money, of course. What, you think Adobe is a charity? Even porting free applications like media readers can be worth the investment because of the increased demand for the corresponding media creation software.
Linux users do not pay for software; that's the nature of the beast. I've been running Linux full-time since the early 1.x versions, and I've never purchased a single piece of software for it.
For personal use I've purchased a couple hundred dollars of Red Hat versions (back when such a thing was possible with their most up-to-date distros), two Loki-ported games, four Id games (although I would have bought two of those even if they were Windows-only), and a Cedega subscription. At the school research lab I admin we've bought a few copies (nominally $1400, but I'm sure Dell gets a nice discount) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and multiple commercial licenses for Linux versions of Maple, Matlab, and Tecplot.
Of course it would be nuts to try to generalize from our two anecdotes, but not quite as ridiculous as generalizing from just your one.
Throw in "99% off on football tickets", and you will have officially kicked "bread and circuses" *ass*!
For those that don't know, the second-worst mass shooting in U.S. history (IIRC) was in a Luby's restaurant in Texas.
Not quite - even if you exclude the Civil War and Indian massacres, the Luby's shooting (and the VT shooting) were both topped by the Mountain Meadows Massacre, with over a hundred victims.
The moral is the same, though: in Mountain Meadows, the initial attack inflicted casualties, but was finally fought off by the armed emigrant victims. The emigrants believed the attack to be the sole work of Paiute Indians, however, and surrendered their weapons after a promise of protection from the Mormons, who rewarded that surrender by killing every man, woman, and child old enough to talk.
But the idea is that every candidate must have some minimal amount of VETTED signatures (say 5%).
That number sounds familiar... ah, yes, here it is:
"Georgia: The legislature passed a law in 1943 requiring that new party and independent candidates submit a petition signed by 5% of the number of registered voters in order to get on the ballot for any office. Previously, any party could get on the ballot just by requesting it. The result has been that since 1943, there has not been one third party candidate on the Georgia ballot for U.S. House of Representatives."
http://www.ballot-access.org/winger/fbfp.html
I'm sure you have the best intentions at heart. All you need now is a cynical appreciation of just how easy it can be for incumbents to abuse the election system to shut out challengers. I suspect that public campaign financing will never become as anti-democratic as, say, plurality voting, but I'm sure that after it's been through a few Republican- and Democrat-controlled rulemaking sessions it'll make a nice extra moat around their castle.
TV commercials, in the most expensive case. From the politician's point of view, they don't care whether a person or corporation gives them money to buy production and airtime or whether the donor just buys those things directly, so banning the donation of money won't remove the influence of anyone who gives in large chunks. It'll only remove the influence of smaller donors who need to pool their funds to buy a campaign commercial.
Really, the root of the problem is that people tend to vote for whoever most of the talking heads in the picture box tell them to. Trying to haphazardly control how the talking heads and the picture companies get paid is just an attack on the problem's symptoms, usually proposed with insufficient consideration of the potential side effects.
let's say he gets 100x whatever he has raised up to the amount needed to match the best funded candidate. This would keep the flying saucer party candidate off the presidential ballot
Who wants to get on the presidential ballot? I'll just be registering as a candidate for the campaign events. At a 100-to-1 investment return ratio, even if I can't get many votes I'll bet I can get some big crowds to attend my $5-a-plate campaign banquets. We're serving all-you-can-eat lobster, and you're all invited!
the only way to stop all of this is to move to public Financing of campaigns.
Does that mean public financing of every nutjob who runs for president, or public financing of only Republicrat candidates? I assure you that either alternative would be a disaster.
"No, wait," you might say, "we can decide who gets funding on a case-by-case basis!" But in practice, "we" becomes "some government entity", and if you want to fix the government then the last thing you want to do is to give the current rulers power to decide which potential future rulers are and aren't acceptable.
Then ALL money would be prevented from moving from ANYBODY to a congressman. Many will fight this, and will claim that it violates their first amendment rights.
Well, that depends - can I still use my money to buy commercials, newspaper ads, signs, webpage hosting, etc? If so then you might not technically be violating my first amendment rights, but you will be squeezing me out of the political process pretty effectively anyway. I can't afford to buy a TV commercial myself; if I'm not allowed to donate my money to a group that can pool those funds, then your attempt to keep rich people from having too much political influence will ensure that *only* rich people will have much political influence.