Re:If you can call 1.3 Trillion
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Superbowling
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Your numbers are rather strange. According to the US Treasury, the debt has gone up 1.3 trillion in the three years since Bush took office. That's a bunch more than 100 billion a year (in fact, it's $433 billion). In his entire 8 years, Clinton raised it 2 trillion - $250 billion a year.
Obviously, Clinton wasn't a perfect president (such a thing has never existed). I disagree with him on plenty of issues (blowjobs, for one). But against a president to whom "getting things done" means giving away money to the wealthy, when we're already spending it faster than we're making it, I'd take Clinton any day.
It may be that only amateurs copy and paste, but amateurs are 95% of the people editing photos. Obviously, passing such a test shouldn't allow a photo into court, but it would be a decent general guide to a photo's authenticity.
Re:How is child labor
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Superbowling
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· Score: 1
that the national debt is bad and no president has managed to do anything about it for a very long time.
Debt != Deficit. The ad refers to the deficit. Reagan, the Bushes, and to some extent Clinton may have dramatically enlarged the national debt, but Clinton was showing a budget surplus by the end of his second term (which Gore proposed to use to pay off part of the debt). Meanwhile, Bush has led us into a (projected) trillion dollar deficit over the next couple years. This is not accumulated debt. This is money that Bush has personally spent.
The Democratic policy of Robinhood Economics needs to be corrected
That's the philosophical issue here. Some people do hard physical labor all day and earn peanuts for it. Some people do amazingly skilled work (teachers, social work, non-popular musicians, engineers, etc.) and get barely enough to provide for their families. Some others (professional athletes and musicians, CEOs, actors, investors, brokers, etc.) earn millions or billions for doing work often less difficult or skilled than that done by those earning many times less. Even the most skilled brain surgeons earn less than the average NBA bench-warmer.
Yes, some people (like Bill Gates) start from nothing and work their way up to incredible riches. However, does Gates work 100,000 times harder than the average American? Is he 100,000 times better? If your answer to those questions is no, then you have to ask yourself: does he deserve 100,000 times the wealth of the average American?
The position of many Democrats is that no one can possibly actually earn the enormous fortunes that many people have. That's why they generally support massive taxation of the incredibly rich, and the use of that money to go towards improving conditions for the poor (especially education). When, in the face of a massive deficit, Bush takes money that the government badly needs, and gives it to the people who need it least, people have a reason to be angry.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
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Superbowling
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· Score: 1
I never said anything about freedom of speech. MoveOn does not have the right to speek freely on CBS, because CBS is a private company not bound by the first amendment. Still, when CBS refuses to air the ad, they are censoring it, because that's what the definition of censorship is - "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable". CBS consideres the ad objectionable (although apparently less so than drugs->terrorism ads), and so they are censoring it. It's their right, but it's still stupid of them.
Re:Hey, if we're talking about CBS...
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Superbowling
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· Score: 1
The ad itself isn't contraversial, but the issue that it brings forward, are deficits bad for the future, is.
That's controversial? You're spending more than you're making. Someone, eventually, is going to have to pay all of that money back, along with billions in interest. It will either be us or our children (or their children, etc.). How can you argue against that?
I'm not a big football player, but I can say that, while most sports do involve amazingly complex strategy, it's not something you really think about. I play soccer, which as a complicated a game as any, and I don't really think about what I'm going to do - I just instinctively do it. While I'm sure there are many smart football players, it's not an intellectual game on the same level as something like chess.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A corporation not playing an ad because of its political viewpoints is censorship. It's their right, and it's perfectly legal (unless you want to get into some argument about the "public" airwaves), but it's still censorship. Besides nothing in that ad is at all controversial - the deficit estimate is even a bit low, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If they're gonna air ads from the White House (containing some very shaky statements about drugs and terrorism), they should air this ad (which doesn't even promote a candidate).
He's talking about replacing the battery. Which you can't do on an Ipod.
You don't need to. That's the whole point. If you're using it to commute, you can recharge it at home or work. If you're going on a long trip, you can recharge it in the car. If you're flying (for more than 8 hours - pretty rare), you can recharge it in an airport. If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail, you can buy the AA battery-pack addon.
YOu can guy a MP3 CD player that will play CD-RW for $40. That is compelling enough for me. I use clamshell cases for the cds so they fit in the same pocket as the mp3 player. I usually don't need an extra cd and if I am traveling, I have plenty of storage space for plenty of cds.
I'm not saying that iPods are better than MP3 CD players, because obviously they're different devices with different purposes. The iPod is a convenient luxury - you can have your entire music collection available at the push of a button, in a device smaller than a single CD (practically speaking, as far as fitting it in pockets is concerned). It's also backlit, has a powerful interface (at least more so than a $40 CD player), stores notes/contacts/calenders, plays games, serves as a hard drive, and can take in music files faster than you can burn a CD. It's just generally sexy.
Plus my music collection will work in any modern day, non-crappy cd player with no messy wires.
I know of a bunch of modern-day, non-crappy CD players that don't play MP3 CDs. There's one in my car and one in my living room. So, in many cases, you're gonna have to use the "messy" wire anyway.
Some people have >$300 to spend on a music player, and some people would rather spend their money other ways (I don't own a TV, so a PVR isn't exactly compelling). Obviously, people (such as you) can be perfectly happy with MP3 CD players, and people (such as me) can be perfectly happy with iPods.
The Havoc engine is aiming for that, of course (as are all other physics engines), but it's not anywhere close yet. Probably nothing will be for at least another decade.
Not true - CD players skip. MP3 players don't. I think the whole "shocks trash your hard drive" deal is a myth - I've never once heard of anyway's iPod having shock-related problems. I take mine jogging, and it has no issues whatsoever. If there was any kind of significant risk from everyday shocks, Apple would warn you about it.
don't use special batteries
You can recharge the iPod from any AC outlet, and car adapters are available. Also, you can buy an add-on AA battery pack, if you anticipate not nearing civilization for a long time.
and have virtually unlimited "storage" capacity
If you want to carry around racks of CDs. I can fit my iPod in a pocket, and listen to anything I want, anywhere. With an MP3-CD player, you can barely fit the player itself in one pocket, let alone extra CDs. That's not an issue if you use it only in the car, but car audio is not the iPod's target use.
90% of the population has no idea how big a gigabyte is. Songs are a unit they can understand. While obviously you can't specify an exact number of songs, you can make reasonable assumptions (4 minutes, 160kbps) and work from there. I don't know about you, but I don't have an 30sec songs at 32kbps.
Neither the GBASP nor the Clie has to fit a both a logic board and hard drive inside a tiny case. Look at an actual iPod sometime. The entire thing is barely thicker than a AA battery. No way could you fit two of them (which is what you'd need, at the very least) inside an iPod without substantially enlarging it.
If you're proposing to replace the actual li-ion polymer battery, that might open Apple up to liability issues, because those batteries aren't exactly the most stable things in the world. Also, the iPod's battery isn't exactly trivial to replace even once you do access it - it's glued in, and difficult to disconnect. While I'm sure Apple could address that if they wanted to, it would again result in making the thing bigger.
Yes, I realize that (although most UDP-using games effectively end up implementing some TCP features anyway). There is still some point where the game recieves info from the network, and has to process it.
You outright admitted that MTA is an "unofficial" mod for GTA. Do you honestly believe that they can do a mod to match a release by the developers of the game?
Of course not. I don't expect it. I'm not complaining about the lag in MTA. I know that there are other reasons why MTA is slow, but when everything you do locally updates instantly, and other players moving around take upwards of a second to update, that does indicate the netcode is at fault.
Furthermore, the net code in a mod like MTA is a whole helluva lot more complex, since it's not integrated into the games engine.
While I'm sure that's true, it's irrelevent. It's still the netcode that's slow. I'm not comparing MTA's situation to Halo's, I'm just showing that, in one extreme case, the netcode can be the source of major slowdowns. It's not unreasonable to think that, in Halo, where the original netcode was designed for an XBox on a LAN, the netcode may not be as up to standards as in, say, Quake or UT.
Do you have any idea at all how a game works, on the code level? I'm not going to admit to being an expert, but I've got at least a bit of room to walk with. Your post seems to imply you've got no clue.
I've never written a networked game, but I understand the general concepts. I know that netcode should just take information from the server and pass it straight to the engine, but it's (of course) not quite that simple, and I can imagine plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Given the general quality of the Halo Windows port, I wouldn't be surprised if there was actually some bug that impacted performance. Again, if everything local updates instantly, and you're playing with people and a server having decent pings, and you've got lag, there is something wrong.
Everyone else here seems to think you'd never need either of those, and I think I agree - I've got an iPod, and I can't hear the difference between 192kbps AAC and FLAC, even on good equipment. However, if you want them, the Rio Karma is 20GB, supports Ogg and FLAC, works with Linux, and runs around $275.
Sorry, but you're wrong. For an extreme example, look at Multi Theft Auto, the unofficial multiplayer mod for GTA. On DSL, dual Athlon, and a Radeon 9700 PRO, there is still tremendous lag (and this is with everyone involved having a
Obviously, since Halo's multiplayer isn't a hacked add-on (at least not in this sense), the same specific issues don't apply. But the fact remains that netcode can have a very real impact on a game's multiplayer performance. Unless, of course, you want to be anal and define netcode as only the lines of code involved in actually sending/recieving packets - which is just stupid.
Aside from the fact that it would be unlocatable on the Moon (and useless if we could find it), such a mission would probably be more expensive than one to service the Hubble. The moon is pretty fucking far away. Such a mission wouldn't be exactly trivial.
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Obviously, Clinton wasn't a perfect president (such a thing has never existed). I disagree with him on plenty of issues (blowjobs, for one). But against a president to whom "getting things done" means giving away money to the wealthy, when we're already spending it faster than we're making it, I'd take Clinton any day.
It may be that only amateurs copy and paste, but amateurs are 95% of the people editing photos. Obviously, passing such a test shouldn't allow a photo into court, but it would be a decent general guide to a photo's authenticity.
Debt != Deficit. The ad refers to the deficit. Reagan, the Bushes, and to some extent Clinton may have dramatically enlarged the national debt, but Clinton was showing a budget surplus by the end of his second term (which Gore proposed to use to pay off part of the debt). Meanwhile, Bush has led us into a (projected) trillion dollar deficit over the next couple years. This is not accumulated debt. This is money that Bush has personally spent.
The Democratic policy of Robinhood Economics needs to be corrected
That's the philosophical issue here. Some people do hard physical labor all day and earn peanuts for it. Some people do amazingly skilled work (teachers, social work, non-popular musicians, engineers, etc.) and get barely enough to provide for their families. Some others (professional athletes and musicians, CEOs, actors, investors, brokers, etc.) earn millions or billions for doing work often less difficult or skilled than that done by those earning many times less. Even the most skilled brain surgeons earn less than the average NBA bench-warmer.
Yes, some people (like Bill Gates) start from nothing and work their way up to incredible riches. However, does Gates work 100,000 times harder than the average American? Is he 100,000 times better? If your answer to those questions is no, then you have to ask yourself: does he deserve 100,000 times the wealth of the average American?
The position of many Democrats is that no one can possibly actually earn the enormous fortunes that many people have. That's why they generally support massive taxation of the incredibly rich, and the use of that money to go towards improving conditions for the poor (especially education). When, in the face of a massive deficit, Bush takes money that the government badly needs, and gives it to the people who need it least, people have a reason to be angry.
I never said anything about freedom of speech. MoveOn does not have the right to speek freely on CBS, because CBS is a private company not bound by the first amendment. Still, when CBS refuses to air the ad, they are censoring it, because that's what the definition of censorship is - "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable". CBS consideres the ad objectionable (although apparently less so than drugs->terrorism ads), and so they are censoring it. It's their right, but it's still stupid of them.
That's controversial? You're spending more than you're making. Someone, eventually, is going to have to pay all of that money back, along with billions in interest. It will either be us or our children (or their children, etc.). How can you argue against that?
That's what computer monitors are for. TV's are too low-res :-).
And no one plays checkers instinctively, instantaneously. They do sit and think about what they're doing, as do chess and go players.
What about that ad is controversial?
I'm not a big football player, but I can say that, while most sports do involve amazingly complex strategy, it's not something you really think about. I play soccer, which as a complicated a game as any, and I don't really think about what I'm going to do - I just instinctively do it. While I'm sure there are many smart football players, it's not an intellectual game on the same level as something like chess.
A corporation not playing an ad because of its political viewpoints is censorship. It's their right, and it's perfectly legal (unless you want to get into some argument about the "public" airwaves), but it's still censorship. Besides nothing in that ad is at all controversial - the deficit estimate is even a bit low, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If they're gonna air ads from the White House (containing some very shaky statements about drugs and terrorism), they should air this ad (which doesn't even promote a candidate).
You don't need to. That's the whole point. If you're using it to commute, you can recharge it at home or work. If you're going on a long trip, you can recharge it in the car. If you're flying (for more than 8 hours - pretty rare), you can recharge it in an airport. If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail, you can buy the AA battery-pack addon.
YOu can guy a MP3 CD player that will play CD-RW for $40. That is compelling enough for me. I use clamshell cases for the cds so they fit in the same pocket as the mp3 player. I usually don't need an extra cd and if I am traveling, I have plenty of storage space for plenty of cds.
I'm not saying that iPods are better than MP3 CD players, because obviously they're different devices with different purposes. The iPod is a convenient luxury - you can have your entire music collection available at the push of a button, in a device smaller than a single CD (practically speaking, as far as fitting it in pockets is concerned). It's also backlit, has a powerful interface (at least more so than a $40 CD player), stores notes/contacts/calenders, plays games, serves as a hard drive, and can take in music files faster than you can burn a CD. It's just generally sexy.
Plus my music collection will work in any modern day, non-crappy cd player with no messy wires.
I know of a bunch of modern-day, non-crappy CD players that don't play MP3 CDs. There's one in my car and one in my living room. So, in many cases, you're gonna have to use the "messy" wire anyway.
Some people have >$300 to spend on a music player, and some people would rather spend their money other ways (I don't own a TV, so a PVR isn't exactly compelling). Obviously, people (such as you) can be perfectly happy with MP3 CD players, and people (such as me) can be perfectly happy with iPods.
The Havoc engine is aiming for that, of course (as are all other physics engines), but it's not anywhere close yet. Probably nothing will be for at least another decade.
Not true - CD players skip. MP3 players don't. I think the whole "shocks trash your hard drive" deal is a myth - I've never once heard of anyway's iPod having shock-related problems. I take mine jogging, and it has no issues whatsoever. If there was any kind of significant risk from everyday shocks, Apple would warn you about it.
don't use special batteries
You can recharge the iPod from any AC outlet, and car adapters are available. Also, you can buy an add-on AA battery pack, if you anticipate not nearing civilization for a long time.
and have virtually unlimited "storage" capacity
If you want to carry around racks of CDs. I can fit my iPod in a pocket, and listen to anything I want, anywhere. With an MP3-CD player, you can barely fit the player itself in one pocket, let alone extra CDs. That's not an issue if you use it only in the car, but car audio is not the iPod's target use.
90% of the population has no idea how big a gigabyte is. Songs are a unit they can understand. While obviously you can't specify an exact number of songs, you can make reasonable assumptions (4 minutes, 160kbps) and work from there. I don't know about you, but I don't have an 30sec songs at 32kbps.
While you're right, the reviewer here specifically admits to never having used an iPod. So, the complaint is still valid.
If you're proposing to replace the actual li-ion polymer battery, that might open Apple up to liability issues, because those batteries aren't exactly the most stable things in the world. Also, the iPod's battery isn't exactly trivial to replace even once you do access it - it's glued in, and difficult to disconnect. While I'm sure Apple could address that if they wanted to, it would again result in making the thing bigger.
Yes, I realize that (although most UDP-using games effectively end up implementing some TCP features anyway). There is still some point where the game recieves info from the network, and has to process it.
Of course not. I don't expect it. I'm not complaining about the lag in MTA. I know that there are other reasons why MTA is slow, but when everything you do locally updates instantly, and other players moving around take upwards of a second to update, that does indicate the netcode is at fault.
Furthermore, the net code in a mod like MTA is a whole helluva lot more complex, since it's not integrated into the games engine.
While I'm sure that's true, it's irrelevent. It's still the netcode that's slow. I'm not comparing MTA's situation to Halo's, I'm just showing that, in one extreme case, the netcode can be the source of major slowdowns. It's not unreasonable to think that, in Halo, where the original netcode was designed for an XBox on a LAN, the netcode may not be as up to standards as in, say, Quake or UT.
Do you have any idea at all how a game works, on the code level? I'm not going to admit to being an expert, but I've got at least a bit of room to walk with. Your post seems to imply you've got no clue.
I've never written a networked game, but I understand the general concepts. I know that netcode should just take information from the server and pass it straight to the engine, but it's (of course) not quite that simple, and I can imagine plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Given the general quality of the Halo Windows port, I wouldn't be surprised if there was actually some bug that impacted performance. Again, if everything local updates instantly, and you're playing with people and a server having decent pings, and you've got lag, there is something wrong.
Everyone else here seems to think you'd never need either of those, and I think I agree - I've got an iPod, and I can't hear the difference between 192kbps AAC and FLAC, even on good equipment. However, if you want them, the Rio Karma is 20GB, supports Ogg and FLAC, works with Linux, and runs around $275.
Sorry, but you're wrong. For an extreme example, look at Multi Theft Auto, the unofficial multiplayer mod for GTA. On DSL, dual Athlon, and a Radeon 9700 PRO, there is still tremendous lag (and this is with everyone involved having a Obviously, since Halo's multiplayer isn't a hacked add-on (at least not in this sense), the same specific issues don't apply. But the fact remains that netcode can have a very real impact on a game's multiplayer performance. Unless, of course, you want to be anal and define netcode as only the lines of code involved in actually sending/recieving packets - which is just stupid.
That's an infrared telescope. Hubble is an optical telescope. The JWST is not a replacement for Hubble.
Aside from the fact that it would be unlocatable on the Moon (and useless if we could find it), such a mission would probably be more expensive than one to service the Hubble. The moon is pretty fucking far away. Such a mission wouldn't be exactly trivial.
My Radeon 9700 PRO (not PCI, but close enough) has a separate power connector. A PCI x86 card could conceivably do the same.
And gave back. Have you used Konqueror lately?
The only remote root I've heard about is the DHCP thing, which is hardly a serious vulnerability. Are there others I'm not aware of?