You mean, despite all that time I spent in MS Paint doctoring screenshots of eMule so the title bar reads "Roy's Internets" and changing the files-in-progress to read "Roy's stealing stoled Metallica musics" and "Star Wars that Roy didn't pay moneys for," my work is now pointless? Damn, I'll never get those three minutes back, and will just have to find some other way to get Roy thrown in jail.
This cannot be said when you are using Vonage. Vonage over a DOCSIS connection is strictly best effort, meaning that you voice packets have no more priority on the line than you neighbors downloads.
My neighbors' downloads come in at 400kBps and their uploads go out at 40kBps; even the slow lane there is enough to carry several VoIP connections at once. If that's not good enough for even one connection at a time, you can bet there's someone in the middle deliberately interfering with it.
So what should have been mentioned to the commission, that some guy had no concrete evidence but had a gut feeling?
Well, if you replace "some guy" with "the CIA director and his counterterrorism chief", then replace "no concrete evidence but" with "communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence and": yeah, that's exactly what should have been mentioned to the 9/11 Commission. Did you even read the article?
The fact that this is non-news but is still getting reported makes it propaganda.
The fact that they all managed to keep important facts secret from the 9/11 Commission and from the public for so long makes this non-new, but absolutely doesn't make this non-news. Just like the previous distinctions you didn't understand, this one's important.
Voting for a 3rd party sends a message to both major parties that you are fed up with both of them, and that you aren't going to fall for the "throwing your vote away" lie any more.
"Lie"? You misspelled "game theory". In a plurality system, voting for a party who polls give no realistic chance of winning is better than not voting at all, but either way you abdicate your ability to help choose between the two leading candidates. If you honestly don't care much about the differences between the two leading candidates (e.g. I would have voted Perot in 1992), then that's not a problem. If you already are unable to cast an effective vote between those candidates (e.g. I voted Badanarik in Texas in 2004), then that's not a problem. But sometimes it is a serious problem: about 20,000 Bush-preferring Floridans voted for Nader in 2000 and nearly cost Bush the election, and about 40,000 Gore-preferring Floridans voted for Nader in 2000 and *did* cost Gore the election.
In any case, I'm not sure this is an argument you really want to win. In my lifetime I haven't seen a political candidate who I would prefer to my father, from any party large or small. Since he's never going to run for any office, do you think I should follow my conscience and just cast write-in votes from now on, or should I avoid "throwing my vote away" and instead continue to cast ballots for candidates that actually have a chance to win?
That's the only message they truly fear. If 20% voted for a 3rd party, one or both other parties would try to change to win back those votes.
Not if they were smart. If the split is 45%/35%/20%, for example: the 45% party has no incentive to change, because they're winning. The 35% party has an incentive to change... but it's more likely to be able to change successfully by converting a nineth of the victor's voters than by converting half of the loser's. The "successful" 20% party will just end up driving winning candidates further away.
Of course, either way the 35% party may be screwed. For example, although the Democrats don't seem to be having much success with "We're like the Republicans, but less self-confident!", I don't think they'll do much better with "We're like the Greens, but less idealistic!"
Couldn't said DRM operating system be run inside of a virtual machine?
Not until one of the real machines has been successfully hacked. The first link in this chain is supposed to be an uncrackable chip with the private encryption keys that will be necessary to run an OS's "Trusted Computing" features.
So all this program has to do is encrypt itself with a private key only available to DRM operating systems which support the "no screenshots of me" API. Hole plugged.
No, the real threat here is from Muslim extremists. I've heard rumors that an Egyptian named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham is working on technology to foil such electronic protection mechanisms. If his "qamara" experiments succeed, all hope of being able to send unsavable or unforwardable messages may be lost.
But this week I've been so perturbed by the progress of the torture-enabling bill that I didn't even notice a surveillance-enabling bill slipping through the pipeline.
So what is the average apathetic voter thinking right now? CNN's current headline for the former bill is "GOP, White House snap terror bill deadlock" (see, because we would only torture terrorists) and I didn't see any mention of the latter bill at all. The only thing that's been even lower on the news radar is the Democratic Party - are they being shut out of the media and ignored by the blogs, are they pro police state, or are they just being quiet so as not to lose too much of the pro police state vote in November?
So you're the one who littered a bunch of tiny 40 ton monoliths all over the database hills I arranged, huh? Jerk. Now I have to wait for the next glaciation to reformat.
Approval voting is the least complicated of all the voting systems that gives a fair result. IRV is far too complicated for the type of people who will accidentally vote for Buchanan.
Approval voting is less complicated than ranked voting, naturally, because it conveys less information. You only get to express a preference of one set over another set, and if your preferences are any more complicated than that, you're out of luck. I preferred Badnarik to Kerry to Nader to Bush in 2004 - clearly I should have approved of Badnarik and disapproved of Bush, but what do I do about the other two? Should I approve of Kerry to give him a better chance of beating Bush, or should I disapprove to give Badnarik a better chance of beating him? I'd have the same problem I do today: I'd have to check the preelection polls to figure out who I can "safely" vote for.
If you want to vote "yes" for half the candidates and "no" for the other half, Condorcet (another ranked voting method with fewer mathematical problems than IRV) will let you do that - but unlike Approval voting it'll let you do that without taking away other voters' right to express a more detailed preference.
In our current understanding, photons are forbidden from having mass
Technically aren't they just forbidden from having a non-zero "rest mass"? They still have energy, and that energy is still convertible to mass and still generates a gravitational field like mass. There are still reasons why photons can't directly account for the effects of dark matter, but it's not an intrinsic impossibility.
(I'd say photons can't indirectly account for the effects of dark matter either, but that would be tempting fate; you just know that the Foe would pick that moment to come pouring out of the Kugelblitz and wipe out civilization.)
the author of the GPL licensed Jin Chess Client is taking IchessU to court for violations of the GPL license.
It's not illegal to violate the terms of a contract you never agreed to. If you take someone to court for violating your software license, then (unless you're unlucky enough to live in a jurisdiction that takes EULAs seriously) you'd better have their signature, a record of their online agreement, or something to prove that they agreed to your license.
If you don't have any of those things and you feel like your software's GPL has been violated, then you take the violators to court for copyright infringement, not license violations. Let them bring up "but I had a license whose terms I didn't accept" as a defense if they dare.
see Robinson's embarrassingly bad article "Rah Rah R.A.H."
It's up on the web here, for anyone who really does want to see for themselves. I think "embarassingly bad" is an undeserved insult, but "shameless fan-wanking" is pretty accurate so maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
Up until recently (ie, the last six months or so) most of the bulbs you'd find in the typical discount stores were 4000-5000 degree.
Am I really the only one who doesn't think that's a bad thing? On a sunny day, outdoor "white" is about 6000 degree IIRC, and that's about as pleasing as lighting gets in my opinion; the 2500-3000 degree traditional indoor lights just seem dirty yellow by comparison. I've happily replaced all but two incandescent bulbs with CFL; when those last two burn out am I going to have trouble finding the bluer white lights I prefer?
You can restrict your library and OS dependencies to APIs with a clear set of specs, but that won't make your program as reliable as a console game, because it's almost always easy for you to accidentally write code that doesn't conform to the specs but that does work on particular implementations of those specs, even if the implementations are technically correct. So you write your program, you mistakenly think it's correct, and it doesn't break on the test machines you try, so you ship it. Then some user runs your code on software that implements the specs less leniently or on hardware that happens to switch between your threads differently, and the next thing you know it's broken.
With consoles, the system you test on is pretty much identical to the system all your users have. If your program is technically out of spec but still runs fine on your test hardware, it'll run just as fine on your users' hardware. You can't test every possible combination of variables that might exist at every point in your code, but you still stand a much better chance of testing every major program situation that most of your users will encounter.
Despite all that I much prefer the PC way of doing things, however. I like it that I can buy a video card that didn't exist two years ago and it manages to make my five year old games play better. It's nice to move from operating system to operating system without having to keep the old ones around to play old games. Even for new games, it's great to be able to choose between cheap "just give me some polygons at 640x480" hardware and expensive "I want 1600x1200, 16x oversampling, 60fps high-texture HDR gorgeousness" for the same game. And finally there's a bit of principle involved, too - I wouldn't buy Tor books if they could only be read through Tor-approved glasses under Tor-approved lighting, and I wouldn't buy a Toyota car if I could only drive it on the Toyota-compatible roads using gas from Toyota-allied filling stations. The idea of handing one console company or another a monopoly on what games can be marketed to me is nearly as irritating.
If you cause any serious illness, you can get your ass sued off, regardless of the fact that your "victim" shouldn't have been eating stolen pizza in the first place.
Did you ever see the movie "Home Alone"? In today's world, those burglars would end up making far more money from personal injury lawsuits than they ever could have stolen from one house.
They're black boxes. Anyone who can reprogram them to produce corrupted output in the first place can program them to produce uncorrupted output when it's not election day.
The best you can do with that sort of testing is to build more voting machines than you need, then on election day randomly pick some of them out to be the "control group" to count known dummy votes - and even that assumes that there aren't any corruptable machines (like the central tabulators) outside the testers' control.
Re:The new result, in a nutshell
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We have known for several decades now that large clusters of galaxies are immersed in giant clouds of very hot gas, at temperatures of millions of degrees. The gas emits copious amounts of X-rays.
Do we know yet what keeps that gas at million-degree temperatures? Maybe I'm naive, but I'd expect radiation (especially X-Rays!) to cool the gas, and I can't think of any mechanisms that would heat it back up that quickly.
I think you may be missing the point. Companies are switching to Linux because it is a viable OS alternative. However, OOo is NOT a viable Office alternative.
Those premises are mostly true.
They want to make sure they at least make SOME money from this explosion of Linux adoption.
But that conclusion doesn't follow.
Users who prefer Linux to Windows but do not find OOo a viable alternative to MS Office are strong incentives for Microsoft *not* to create a Linux port of MSO. Those users are already buying MSO plus Windows, and giving them a Linux port would mean that in the future they'd be buying MSO without Windows instead, giving less money (or the same amount, if they started on Macs) to Microsoft.
If OOo was a viable (but not superior) alternative to MSO, on the other hand, *then* Microsoft would want to port MSO to Linux. They'd then be converting OOo plus Linux customers into MSO plus Linux customers, and that would be an increase in revenues.
Of course, porting complex software from Windows to Unix isn't easy; if Microsoft has reason to believe that OOo will become a significant competitor in a few years, they may well want to start preparing to counter it today.
It's not as simple as that, the NSA has a certain degree of authority that they most certainly abused. If a government agency that high up came to you and told you to do something that wouldn't really affect your company financially would you do it?
"Am I under arrest?" "Do you have a warrant?" "I do not consent to a search." "I want a lawyer." "Am I free to go?"
I first heard this checklist (or some similar list) of "what to say if you're being intimidated by the police" from some pothead. Crazy druggies; for some reason they thought that the abusive police tactics being practiced in the "War On Some Drugs" might one day be expanded and used on normal people!
Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.
First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.
Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.
Seriously. Who gives a ****?
In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.
Well CD-rs and DVD-r have upwards of 4-8 years and counting for life. Those people that claim 1-2 years, they are full of shit.
Or they've just bought the wrong batches of media. I have some CD-Rs (Memorex) that I burned in 1997 which are still perfectly readable. I have some other CD-Rs (a PNY spindle, I think) that started to show unrecoverable errors within months. Maybe some brand names are cheaper than others, but I've also had good discs from PNY, and I wouldn't be surprised if other people have encountered bad Memorexes.
Sometimes when other people say something that sounds "full of shit", the problem is actually just that you think you know everything, and you're wrong.
It's too late for that. The "dump" phase of this pump-and-dump scam may be over, but the crooks responsible have already made millions of dollars through SCOX stock sales. The investors losing money now aren't the executives responsible for a bunch of crooked lawsuits, they're the suckers who fell for the "our copyrights are being violated!" talk.
Unless there's an SEC investigation, it doesn't matter that some corporate entity called The SCO Group will go down in flames - the people who caused it all made out like bandits.
What's the point of hypothesizing about "if", when emulators are cheap and plentiful? If you think that Castlevania 1 was better than it's latest sequel, go play it. Nobody's going to pick on you for not keeping up with the times.
Sometimes I find out that I just had low expectations when I was young. (e.g. Dragon Warrior 1, Final Fantasy 1, Paperboy)
Sometimes I find out that games which were good have nevertheless been surpassed by better alternatives or sequels. (e.g. Zelda 1, Mario Kart 1, Duke Nukem 3D).
And sometimes, the old games are fondly remembered because they were really, really good. Star Control 2, Deus Ex 1, and the Baldur's Gate series are each 5 or 10 years old, but (despite playing Starcon 3, Deus Ex 2, Neverwinter Nights, and lots of similar games from the same genres) I still haven't found any similar-but-better games to replace any of them. Judging by sales, there are a lot of people that feel the same way about Starcraft and Half Life 1. We don't all have some retro-gaming fetish, we just know what we like and know how rare it can be.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, despite all that time I spent in MS Paint doctoring screenshots of eMule so the title bar reads "Roy's Internets" and changing the files-in-progress to read "Roy's stealing stoled Metallica musics" and "Star Wars that Roy didn't pay moneys for," my work is now pointless? Damn, I'll never get those three minutes back, and will just have to find some other way to get Roy thrown in jail.
What the hell, man? What did I ever do to you?!?
Latency: 48-64 milliseconds round trip to yahoo.com. If my cell phone connection had only quadruple that latency I'd be thrilled.
This cannot be said when you are using Vonage. Vonage over a DOCSIS connection is strictly best effort, meaning that you voice packets have no more priority on the line than you neighbors downloads.
My neighbors' downloads come in at 400kBps and their uploads go out at 40kBps; even the slow lane there is enough to carry several VoIP connections at once. If that's not good enough for even one connection at a time, you can bet there's someone in the middle deliberately interfering with it.
So what should have been mentioned to the commission, that some guy had no concrete evidence but had a gut feeling?
Well, if you replace "some guy" with "the CIA director and his counterterrorism chief", then replace "no concrete evidence but" with "communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence and": yeah, that's exactly what should have been mentioned to the 9/11 Commission. Did you even read the article?
The fact that this is non-news but is still getting reported makes it propaganda.
The fact that they all managed to keep important facts secret from the 9/11 Commission and from the public for so long makes this non-new, but absolutely doesn't make this non-news. Just like the previous distinctions you didn't understand, this one's important.
Voting for a 3rd party sends a message to both major parties that you are fed up with both of them, and that you aren't going to fall for the "throwing your vote away" lie any more.
"Lie"? You misspelled "game theory". In a plurality system, voting for a party who polls give no realistic chance of winning is better than not voting at all, but either way you abdicate your ability to help choose between the two leading candidates. If you honestly don't care much about the differences between the two leading candidates (e.g. I would have voted Perot in 1992), then that's not a problem. If you already are unable to cast an effective vote between those candidates (e.g. I voted Badanarik in Texas in 2004), then that's not a problem. But sometimes it is a serious problem: about 20,000 Bush-preferring Floridans voted for Nader in 2000 and nearly cost Bush the election, and about 40,000 Gore-preferring Floridans voted for Nader in 2000 and *did* cost Gore the election.
In any case, I'm not sure this is an argument you really want to win. In my lifetime I haven't seen a political candidate who I would prefer to my father, from any party large or small. Since he's never going to run for any office, do you think I should follow my conscience and just cast write-in votes from now on, or should I avoid "throwing my vote away" and instead continue to cast ballots for candidates that actually have a chance to win?
That's the only message they truly fear. If 20% voted for a 3rd party, one or both other parties would try to change to win back those votes.
Not if they were smart. If the split is 45%/35%/20%, for example: the 45% party has no incentive to change, because they're winning. The 35% party has an incentive to change... but it's more likely to be able to change successfully by converting a nineth of the victor's voters than by converting half of the loser's. The "successful" 20% party will just end up driving winning candidates further away.
Of course, either way the 35% party may be screwed. For example, although the Democrats don't seem to be having much success with "We're like the Republicans, but less self-confident!", I don't think they'll do much better with "We're like the Greens, but less idealistic!"
Couldn't said DRM operating system be run inside of a virtual machine?
Not until one of the real machines has been successfully hacked. The first link in this chain is supposed to be an uncrackable chip with the private encryption keys that will be necessary to run an OS's "Trusted Computing" features.
So all this program has to do is encrypt itself with a private key only available to DRM operating systems which support the "no screenshots of me" API. Hole plugged.
No, the real threat here is from Muslim extremists. I've heard rumors that an Egyptian named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham is working on technology to foil such electronic protection mechanisms. If his "qamara" experiments succeed, all hope of being able to send unsavable or unforwardable messages may be lost.
But this week I've been so perturbed by the progress of the torture-enabling bill that I didn't even notice a surveillance-enabling bill slipping through the pipeline.
So what is the average apathetic voter thinking right now? CNN's current headline for the former bill is "GOP, White House snap terror bill deadlock" (see, because we would only torture terrorists) and I didn't see any mention of the latter bill at all. The only thing that's been even lower on the news radar is the Democratic Party - are they being shut out of the media and ignored by the blogs, are they pro police state, or are they just being quiet so as not to lose too much of the pro police state vote in November?
So you're the one who littered a bunch of tiny 40 ton monoliths all over the database hills I arranged, huh? Jerk. Now I have to wait for the next glaciation to reformat.
Approval voting is the least complicated of all the voting systems that gives a fair result. IRV is far too complicated for the type of people who will accidentally vote for Buchanan.
Approval voting is less complicated than ranked voting, naturally, because it conveys less information. You only get to express a preference of one set over another set, and if your preferences are any more complicated than that, you're out of luck. I preferred Badnarik to Kerry to Nader to Bush in 2004 - clearly I should have approved of Badnarik and disapproved of Bush, but what do I do about the other two? Should I approve of Kerry to give him a better chance of beating Bush, or should I disapprove to give Badnarik a better chance of beating him? I'd have the same problem I do today: I'd have to check the preelection polls to figure out who I can "safely" vote for.
If you want to vote "yes" for half the candidates and "no" for the other half, Condorcet (another ranked voting method with fewer mathematical problems than IRV) will let you do that - but unlike Approval voting it'll let you do that without taking away other voters' right to express a more detailed preference.
In our current understanding, photons are forbidden from having mass
Technically aren't they just forbidden from having a non-zero "rest mass"? They still have energy, and that energy is still convertible to mass and still generates a gravitational field like mass. There are still reasons why photons can't directly account for the effects of dark matter, but it's not an intrinsic impossibility.
(I'd say photons can't indirectly account for the effects of dark matter either, but that would be tempting fate; you just know that the Foe would pick that moment to come pouring out of the Kugelblitz and wipe out civilization.)
the author of the GPL licensed Jin Chess Client is taking IchessU to court for violations of the GPL license.
It's not illegal to violate the terms of a contract you never agreed to. If you take someone to court for violating your software license, then (unless you're unlucky enough to live in a jurisdiction that takes EULAs seriously) you'd better have their signature, a record of their online agreement, or something to prove that they agreed to your license.
If you don't have any of those things and you feel like your software's GPL has been violated, then you take the violators to court for copyright infringement, not license violations. Let them bring up "but I had a license whose terms I didn't accept" as a defense if they dare.
Or do they expect their employees to carefully inspect the SMTP headers to make sure it's not a forgery?
Or does Radio Shack management just not understand technology?
Oh, never mind, I get it.
see Robinson's embarrassingly bad article "Rah Rah R.A.H."
It's up on the web here, for anyone who really does want to see for themselves. I think "embarassingly bad" is an undeserved insult, but "shameless fan-wanking" is pretty accurate so maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
Up until recently (ie, the last six months or so) most of the bulbs you'd find in the typical discount stores were 4000-5000 degree.
Am I really the only one who doesn't think that's a bad thing? On a sunny day, outdoor "white" is about 6000 degree IIRC, and that's about as pleasing as lighting gets in my opinion; the 2500-3000 degree traditional indoor lights just seem dirty yellow by comparison. I've happily replaced all but two incandescent bulbs with CFL; when those last two burn out am I going to have trouble finding the bluer white lights I prefer?
You can restrict your library and OS dependencies to APIs with a clear set of specs, but that won't make your program as reliable as a console game, because it's almost always easy for you to accidentally write code that doesn't conform to the specs but that does work on particular implementations of those specs, even if the implementations are technically correct. So you write your program, you mistakenly think it's correct, and it doesn't break on the test machines you try, so you ship it. Then some user runs your code on software that implements the specs less leniently or on hardware that happens to switch between your threads differently, and the next thing you know it's broken.
With consoles, the system you test on is pretty much identical to the system all your users have. If your program is technically out of spec but still runs fine on your test hardware, it'll run just as fine on your users' hardware. You can't test every possible combination of variables that might exist at every point in your code, but you still stand a much better chance of testing every major program situation that most of your users will encounter.
Despite all that I much prefer the PC way of doing things, however. I like it that I can buy a video card that didn't exist two years ago and it manages to make my five year old games play better. It's nice to move from operating system to operating system without having to keep the old ones around to play old games. Even for new games, it's great to be able to choose between cheap "just give me some polygons at 640x480" hardware and expensive "I want 1600x1200, 16x oversampling, 60fps high-texture HDR gorgeousness" for the same game. And finally there's a bit of principle involved, too - I wouldn't buy Tor books if they could only be read through Tor-approved glasses under Tor-approved lighting, and I wouldn't buy a Toyota car if I could only drive it on the Toyota-compatible roads using gas from Toyota-allied filling stations. The idea of handing one console company or another a monopoly on what games can be marketed to me is nearly as irritating.
If you cause any serious illness, you can get your ass sued off, regardless of the fact that your "victim" shouldn't have been eating stolen pizza in the first place.
Did you ever see the movie "Home Alone"? In today's world, those burglars would end up making far more money from personal injury lawsuits than they ever could have stolen from one house.
Then, reset them
They're black boxes. Anyone who can reprogram them to produce corrupted output in the first place can program them to produce uncorrupted output when it's not election day.
The best you can do with that sort of testing is to build more voting machines than you need, then on election day randomly pick some of them out to be the "control group" to count known dummy votes - and even that assumes that there aren't any corruptable machines (like the central tabulators) outside the testers' control.
We have known for several decades now that large clusters of galaxies are immersed in giant clouds of very hot gas, at temperatures of millions of degrees. The gas emits copious amounts of X-rays.
Do we know yet what keeps that gas at million-degree temperatures? Maybe I'm naive, but I'd expect radiation (especially X-Rays!) to cool the gas, and I can't think of any mechanisms that would heat it back up that quickly.
I think you may be missing the point. Companies are switching to Linux because it is a viable OS alternative. However, OOo is NOT a viable Office alternative.
Those premises are mostly true.
They want to make sure they at least make SOME money from this explosion of Linux adoption.
But that conclusion doesn't follow.
Users who prefer Linux to Windows but do not find OOo a viable alternative to MS Office are strong incentives for Microsoft *not* to create a Linux port of MSO. Those users are already buying MSO plus Windows, and giving them a Linux port would mean that in the future they'd be buying MSO without Windows instead, giving less money (or the same amount, if they started on Macs) to Microsoft.
If OOo was a viable (but not superior) alternative to MSO, on the other hand, *then* Microsoft would want to port MSO to Linux. They'd then be converting OOo plus Linux customers into MSO plus Linux customers, and that would be an increase in revenues.
Of course, porting complex software from Windows to Unix isn't easy; if Microsoft has reason to believe that OOo will become a significant competitor in a few years, they may well want to start preparing to counter it today.
It's not as simple as that, the NSA has a certain degree of authority that they most certainly abused. If a government agency that high up came to you and told you to do something that wouldn't really affect your company financially would you do it?
"Am I under arrest?"
"Do you have a warrant?"
"I do not consent to a search."
"I want a lawyer."
"Am I free to go?"
I first heard this checklist (or some similar list) of "what to say if you're being intimidated by the police" from some pothead. Crazy druggies; for some reason they thought that the abusive police tactics being practiced in the "War On Some Drugs" might one day be expanded and used on normal people!
Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.
First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.
Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.
Seriously. Who gives a ****?
In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.
Well CD-rs and DVD-r have upwards of 4-8 years and counting for life. Those people that claim 1-2 years, they are full of shit.
Or they've just bought the wrong batches of media. I have some CD-Rs (Memorex) that I burned in 1997 which are still perfectly readable. I have some other CD-Rs (a PNY spindle, I think) that started to show unrecoverable errors within months. Maybe some brand names are cheaper than others, but I've also had good discs from PNY, and I wouldn't be surprised if other people have encountered bad Memorexes.
Sometimes when other people say something that sounds "full of shit", the problem is actually just that you think you know everything, and you're wrong.
It's too late for that. The "dump" phase of this pump-and-dump scam may be over, but the crooks responsible have already made millions of dollars through SCOX stock sales. The investors losing money now aren't the executives responsible for a bunch of crooked lawsuits, they're the suckers who fell for the "our copyrights are being violated!" talk.
Unless there's an SEC investigation, it doesn't matter that some corporate entity called The SCO Group will go down in flames - the people who caused it all made out like bandits.
What's the point of hypothesizing about "if", when emulators are cheap and plentiful? If you think that Castlevania 1 was better than it's latest sequel, go play it. Nobody's going to pick on you for not keeping up with the times.
Sometimes I find out that I just had low expectations when I was young. (e.g. Dragon Warrior 1, Final Fantasy 1, Paperboy)
Sometimes I find out that games which were good have nevertheless been surpassed by better alternatives or sequels. (e.g. Zelda 1, Mario Kart 1, Duke Nukem 3D).
And sometimes, the old games are fondly remembered because they were really, really good. Star Control 2, Deus Ex 1, and the Baldur's Gate series are each 5 or 10 years old, but (despite playing Starcon 3, Deus Ex 2, Neverwinter Nights, and lots of similar games from the same genres) I still haven't found any similar-but-better games to replace any of them. Judging by sales, there are a lot of people that feel the same way about Starcraft and Half Life 1. We don't all have some retro-gaming fetish, we just know what we like and know how rare it can be.