All the people who I know who download movies enjoy a good theater movie. Spending $10 to get to see a movie on a giant screen with no compression artifacts and an awesome sound system is still a reasonably good deal. The thing that downloading really replaces is DVD rentals, which are strictly a bad deal compared to 2CD XviD releases.
I'll admit, the last time I used the slackware package system it involved automatically running "tar xzf" in the root directory. Looking at stuff, it looks like Slackware packages still don't handle dependency checking & automatic dependency resolution - that means that functionality like you get out of Apt / Yum / Emerge isn't possible.
That's not necessarily bad for Slackware users - no dependency checking means that you can't have dependency errors if you mix binary packages with generic source tarballs. On the other hand, that makes you responsible for getting everything right - I'm pretty competent and I'd much prefer to let the package system handle dependencies, even if that means slightly more effort to install my own libpango or whatever.
Have you actually ever seriously used any of the full Linux package systems? Apt, Yum, or the Gentoo thing? All three work fine, and meet all the reasonable requirements that a packaging system should meet.
Your two requirements that were obviously inserted to disqualify Apt / Yum (the Gentoo system is another issue) are really unnecessary - there's rarely a reason to install software in weird locations by hand and if you're going to resort to that you should understand the package system enough to work with it. And if you really need to compile your own libpango - go use Gentoo, that's what it's for.
Whatever. It's still so far in the future that trying to make predictions like that is absurd. It's like if someone had tried to prevent the development of Velcro on the basis that it could be used to tie people into restraints easier.
Yea, and back in my day we had to transmit bits as words over the telegraph:
ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO STOP
Just because you think that surfing the web with images turned off and sending email is the whole value of the Internet doesn't mean that you're right. Streaming video is marginally possible at a couple of megs/second - and it's not just for porn either. Video conferencing is the overhyped application, but it could also replace public access television with something much more flexible. Another useful application is multi-party serverless voice chat - even 4 people requires more than 200kbps bidirectional bandwidth.
The advantage to decent broadband access isn't just the applications that are available now (although stuff like MIT's opencourseware video lectures show the potential), it's the applications that can be developed easily once high quality network connectivity is the norm. You know how VoIP is sort of marginally adopted now? There'd be no reason to use anything else if we all had connections of even T-1 quality.
I don't know why federal agencies in the United States tend to get corrupted, but I have a guess: Sheer size. I'd bet that we'll be seeing similar things in the E.U. as pan-European regulatory bodies get formed. As the size of the market regulated increases, the sheer amount of funding that the industry can spend on lobbying increases as well - it's easy to turn down a $10,000 bribe - but if there's an "understanding" that you'll be hired for an executive position with a guaranteed $20,000,000 signing bonus, that's much harder to refuse.
My conclusion is that government agencies probably work best at a maximum size of European countries or USA states. Any bigger than that and the financial lobbying force that a company can bring to bear on a single target is just too great compared to the political force that any reasonably sized group of people has.
Removal of government restrictions [...] increases competition.
You have to be really careful with that sort of plan in practice. The game that you're playing isn't economics, it's politics - and in politics, people *love* to spin "removing the regulation that's preventing us from dominating the market" into "deregulation will increase competition".
The high end cards are useful for two reasons:
- They give game developers something to work on so they can target mid-range performance levels a year in the future.
- They keep the pressure on to continue significant performance improvements.
People will always complain about having to upgrade / buy new hardware, but go play through Half Life I after playing Half Life II and tell me that the graphics improvements were "a waste of money" or "utterly unnecessary for the enjoyment of the game". I enjoy decent graphics, and I can assure you that Oblivion at 2560x1600 with 16xAA / 8xAF isn't "good enough" to stop improving yet.
There's a tradeoff between "planning ahead" and "planning ahead so far that your plans have no chance of applying to the reality". You're risking the latter. An increase in understanding how our body works and how to interface with it / repair it is a good thing. Let's wait until we actually have prototype cybernetic implants working before we worry about the government making them mandatory.
People are too infatuated with the Frankenstein myth, the absurd belief that research is innately dangerous. Research is *essential*, and not something that we should be stopping just because someone can come up with some unlikely scenario in which new technology could cause problems.
A radioactive dirty bomb really isn't any more effective than a much easier to acquire and use "chemical weapon" bomb. Radioactive material scares people because it's been overhyped - some sort of chemical agent that causes nerve damage would scare me *much* more than a bit of radiation poisoning.
As for it being as easy to sell nuclear waste as it is to grow pot at a nuclear plant - bullshit. Do you know how quickly even a couple hundred grams of missing material would be caught at an american plant with all the audits?
Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.
Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!
Yea, and if they had chosen something that people could say without looking like a retard then they might have gotten somewhere. Unfortunately, "I just picked up an extra 512 mebibytes of RAM for my computer" sounds really, really dumb.
I'll stick with my "bytes are not a SI unit, so megabyte can mean 2^20 bytes" argument.
Hz is a SI unit, so it's *always* powers of 10 and *never* powers of 2. The only special case is bits/bytes, which aren't SI units so there's an argument for the bastardized binary SI-esque prefixes.
Pardon me, but I voted for Kerry because I wanted to see him win. If these people had a hand in throwing the election, I want them in jail.
Yea, and I voted for Badnarik because he was the only candidate left after eliminating all the obvious douchebags on the ballot. That doesn't mean I'd be OK with people committing election fraud if it had favored him - the whole concept of voting becomes utterly worthless (even more than it already is) if people can mess with the votes and get away with it.
Saying that LaTeX is "too complex" compared to a word processor is blatantly wrong. The word you're looking for is "scary", and that's something one gets over after either actually learning LaTeX or finding a decent GUI LaTeX editor.
A sniper operating alone trying to cause maximum damage / maximum morale damage but not hold territory on a tactical timescale takes one shot and move. A tactical sniper (aka "sharpshooter") tasked to hold an urban intersection by himself or even to support other troops advancing will take multiple shots from a single location.
What are these amazing capabilities that Linux doesn't have? I mean... games work fine on Linux, so obviously they're getting written somehow. Just because the audio toolkit and the graphics toolkit are different libraries doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Who cares. My point was that a layer or eight of Kevlar won't stop *any* half-decent rifle round, and thus that Kevlar isn't a better answer to snipers than a mobile shot location calculator.
Slashdot Mirror
All the people who I know who download movies enjoy a good theater movie. Spending $10 to get to see a movie on a giant screen with no compression artifacts and an awesome sound system is still a reasonably good deal. The thing that downloading really replaces is DVD rentals, which are strictly a bad deal compared to 2CD XviD releases.
I'll admit, the last time I used the slackware package system it involved automatically running "tar xzf" in the root directory. Looking at stuff, it looks like Slackware packages still don't handle dependency checking & automatic dependency resolution - that means that functionality like you get out of Apt / Yum / Emerge isn't possible.
That's not necessarily bad for Slackware users - no dependency checking means that you can't have dependency errors if you mix binary packages with generic source tarballs. On the other hand, that makes you responsible for getting everything right - I'm pretty competent and I'd much prefer to let the package system handle dependencies, even if that means slightly more effort to install my own libpango or whatever.
How about this: We leave the terms "prove" and "disprove" for mathematical theorems, and we just don't use them at all for experimental science.
A Slackware user, eh?
Have you actually ever seriously used any of the full Linux package systems? Apt, Yum, or the Gentoo thing? All three work fine, and meet all the reasonable requirements that a packaging system should meet.
Your two requirements that were obviously inserted to disqualify Apt / Yum (the Gentoo system is another issue) are really unnecessary - there's rarely a reason to install software in weird locations by hand and if you're going to resort to that you should understand the package system enough to work with it. And if you really need to compile your own libpango - go use Gentoo, that's what it's for.
Whatever. It's still so far in the future that trying to make predictions like that is absurd. It's like if someone had tried to prevent the development of Velcro on the basis that it could be used to tie people into restraints easier.
Yea, and back in my day we had to transmit bits as words over the telegraph:
ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO STOP
Just because you think that surfing the web with images turned off and sending email is the whole value of the Internet doesn't mean that you're right. Streaming video is marginally possible at a couple of megs/second - and it's not just for porn either. Video conferencing is the overhyped application, but it could also replace public access television with something much more flexible. Another useful application is multi-party serverless voice chat - even 4 people requires more than 200kbps bidirectional bandwidth.
The advantage to decent broadband access isn't just the applications that are available now (although stuff like MIT's opencourseware video lectures show the potential), it's the applications that can be developed easily once high quality network connectivity is the norm. You know how VoIP is sort of marginally adopted now? There'd be no reason to use anything else if we all had connections of even T-1 quality.
I don't know why federal agencies in the United States tend to get corrupted, but I have a guess: Sheer size. I'd bet that we'll be seeing similar things in the E.U. as pan-European regulatory bodies get formed. As the size of the market regulated increases, the sheer amount of funding that the industry can spend on lobbying increases as well - it's easy to turn down a $10,000 bribe - but if there's an "understanding" that you'll be hired for an executive position with a guaranteed $20,000,000 signing bonus, that's much harder to refuse.
My conclusion is that government agencies probably work best at a maximum size of European countries or USA states. Any bigger than that and the financial lobbying force that a company can bring to bear on a single target is just too great compared to the political force that any reasonably sized group of people has.
You have to be really careful with that sort of plan in practice. The game that you're playing isn't economics, it's politics - and in politics, people *love* to spin "removing the regulation that's preventing us from dominating the market" into "deregulation will increase competition".
Here's the thing - just because someone suggests a solution doesn't mean that it's a good solution.
The high end cards are useful for two reasons:
- They give game developers something to work on so they can target mid-range performance levels a year in the future.
- They keep the pressure on to continue significant performance improvements.
People will always complain about having to upgrade / buy new hardware, but go play through Half Life I after playing Half Life II and tell me that the graphics improvements were "a waste of money" or "utterly unnecessary for the enjoyment of the game". I enjoy decent graphics, and I can assure you that Oblivion at 2560x1600 with 16xAA / 8xAF isn't "good enough" to stop improving yet.
There's a tradeoff between "planning ahead" and "planning ahead so far that your plans have no chance of applying to the reality". You're risking the latter. An increase in understanding how our body works and how to interface with it / repair it is a good thing. Let's wait until we actually have prototype cybernetic implants working before we worry about the government making them mandatory.
People are too infatuated with the Frankenstein myth, the absurd belief that research is innately dangerous. Research is *essential*, and not something that we should be stopping just because someone can come up with some unlikely scenario in which new technology could cause problems.
No.
A radioactive dirty bomb really isn't any more effective than a much easier to acquire and use "chemical weapon" bomb. Radioactive material scares people because it's been overhyped - some sort of chemical agent that causes nerve damage would scare me *much* more than a bit of radiation poisoning.
As for it being as easy to sell nuclear waste as it is to grow pot at a nuclear plant - bullshit. Do you know how quickly even a couple hundred grams of missing material would be caught at an american plant with all the audits?
You're right that nuclear power is a good idea. Absolutely.
You're wrong that we should be using shit reactor designs like pebblebed or candu. Blech! Fast neutrons or you're wasting precious uranium.
Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.
Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!
Yea, and if they had chosen something that people could say without looking like a retard then they might have gotten somewhere. Unfortunately, "I just picked up an extra 512 mebibytes of RAM for my computer" sounds really, really dumb.
I'll stick with my "bytes are not a SI unit, so megabyte can mean 2^20 bytes" argument.
Hz is a SI unit, so it's *always* powers of 10 and *never* powers of 2. The only special case is bits/bytes, which aren't SI units so there's an argument for the bastardized binary SI-esque prefixes.
Yea, and I voted for Badnarik because he was the only candidate left after eliminating all the obvious douchebags on the ballot. That doesn't mean I'd be OK with people committing election fraud if it had favored him - the whole concept of voting becomes utterly worthless (even more than it already is) if people can mess with the votes and get away with it.
Saying that LaTeX is "too complex" compared to a word processor is blatantly wrong. The word you're looking for is "scary", and that's something one gets over after either actually learning LaTeX or finding a decent GUI LaTeX editor.
A sniper operating alone trying to cause maximum damage / maximum morale damage but not hold territory on a tactical timescale takes one shot and move. A tactical sniper (aka "sharpshooter") tasked to hold an urban intersection by himself or even to support other troops advancing will take multiple shots from a single location.
What are these amazing capabilities that Linux doesn't have? I mean... games work fine on Linux, so obviously they're getting written somehow. Just because the audio toolkit and the graphics toolkit are different libraries doesn't mean that they don't exist.
I have an amazing piece of technology I'd like to suggest that makes hole punching absolutely obsolete: the Sharpie Brand Permanent Marker.
Who cares. My point was that a layer or eight of Kevlar won't stop *any* half-decent rifle round, and thus that Kevlar isn't a better answer to snipers than a mobile shot location calculator.
That's actually amusing. I obviously meant "home networking router", where the WAN port is Ethernet.
So then the user can run a DSL router. What's the problem?