Either that, or Linux development leaves the US, just as much OpenBSD development left because of our ill-conceived laws. It would further the US decline in technology dramatically, and make Microsoft a huge enemy of all business. Their software would likely become taboo around the world, for fear of giving them enough influence to pull the same stunts in other countries.
That won't work, for one of two reasons that I can think of off the top of my head. Either you'll get malware that will only spam 9000 messages per day, or you'll get customers that are cut off regularly, get pissed, and change ISPs. If you're unlucky, you'll also get some lawsuits about it, justified or not.
You're better off trying to force rate limit outgoing email, keep state on your clients, and trying to cut off outgoing SMTP for abusive hosts. However, you would then be monitoring traffic, and that might not work out so well, either.
Yes, actually, in this case it is the language choice to blame. Java can't directly interact with things outside of the sandbox. This means that you have to either draw the UI using Java, or a hook library to interact with the system as the rest of your program does. You also have difficulty reusing the code that you wrote in another language from your Java code. I am not attacking the concept of a portable application, or even Java, itself, but the concept of mixing languages that have such different paradigms.
Take the case of OpenOffice. If they stuck with C++ for the application, then they could use all of the same calls to do their UI, they would be portable to more platforms with just a recompile, since there are platforms that Java won't run on, and they would have faster launch speeds without random slowdowns caused by launching a JVM in-process. If they went for all Java, they would have a slower launch speed, but only that once. They would also be directly portable to any platform with a JVM available, without a recompile.
In the OOo way, you don't get the direct execution portability of Java, the recompile portability of C++, the launch speed of C++, or the consistent speed of a JVM after launch. You have to deal with the Java sandbox, and the ease of making mistakes in C++. You can't reuse the Java code in C++, nor vice versa, since you can't make calls without big performance hits. So, in short, you get the worst of C++ combined with the worst of Java.
Agreed 100% that Azureus is total crap. It's so bad that after I got sick of dealing with KTorrent, which I like a lot more than Azureus, I switched back to uTorrent, and just run it through WINE.
Using Java in Azureus is just as silly as using it for OpenOffice. If the whole thing isn't Java, then what's the point? My biggest complaint with OpenOffice is that it's slow to start and parts don't work like the rest. Unsurprisingly, these parts are written in Java, while the rest is C++.
I have an eight year old CRT that I bought for $350 that will do 1080p. I also have a laptop that will do better (1920x1200) on a 15.1", and a standalone 20" LCD panels that will do that same resolution. You can pick up quite a few rather high quality LCD panels that will do 1920x1200 for around $400. Quite a few of my friends also have panels that are capable of 1080p, as well.
Of course, none of us really intend to buy an HD-DVD drive, or a Blu-Ray drive, or any commercial HD content for quite a while. The reasons for this are very simple: DRM and a format war.
If you were to settle into one area, and your wife took one teaching job, it she would have her lesson plan stable. This would allow her to grade work much more quickly, not that it gets any more interested with practice. Teaching is not the only career that you are expected to work overtime without additional compensation. Take a look into research, IT, or programming, for example, and you see the same thing. Those careers don't give you 20 holidays and two to four months off a year, either. I'm not saying that teachers don't deserve good salaries, because they do. It is one of the most important careers out there, to society as a whole, and is certainly worth paying for. I *am* serious though, if you want to fix problems with teacher wage and competence, you need to deconstruct much of the teacher unions. They hold back good teachers from earning what they deserve, while helping poor teachers to earn just as much.
You keep calling things lies. I've personally read teacher contract; I've personally watched tactics used by their unions, and personally seen the budgets involved. I know the waste the occurs, and the horrible methods that are used to prop it up. Please notice that I didn't say that we need to dissolve these unions with nothing to replace them. As you pointed out, the representation does serve important functions, such as allowing a teacher to grade properly without fear of being fired for it.
I also did not say that schools have everything they need. While some teachers waste what money the can get on ridiculous classroom toys, most do not. The waste is occurring above the heads of the teachers, but that is still within the schools.
What I was trying to say is that teachers can be paid what they deserve, but between incompetent administration, ignorant voters, and unfair union practices, it doesn't happen. More money assigned to school systems will not fix it, because the amount of money is not the problem; the allocation of that money is. I want to see teachers get paid what they deserve, too, but other things have to get fixed before "give school money so we can pay teachers more" will ever work.
No, money is not the problem with teachers in the US; teachers' unions are the problem. We already are paying most public school teachers $50,000 and up for 2/3 year of work. We already provide some of the best health benefits out there. Paying more will attract more people to teach, but that does not make them magically better at teaching, nor does it fix any of the real problems in public education. The unions that teachers belong to do not allow merit raises, they do not allow the school to fire poor performing teachers, and they give raises to a teacher for longevity. This means you keep your head down and don't do anything noticeable, and you make your tenure and get the top salary grade.
The reason public education is shambles is all of the people, much like you, that think the problem is money. School budgets are out of control, spending is through the roof. We buy into all sorts of gimmicks that do *nothing* to actually fix the problems. We need to fix teachers' unions, substantially decrease State interference into the curriculum, and get rid of all of the staff that just loves throwing around money for magic beans. Maybe after we get rid of all of that, we can drop the foolish idea that everyone has the same capabilities, and start teaching to everyones differing abilities.
You're right, TFAs idea would just encourage cheating, but you are completely wrong about teacher salaries being what the problem is.
All of what you say might be completely true. The point I was making is that the scale of everything that has been tauted so loudly in the media, and pushed by the UN and others, is very possibly false. The planetary average temperature is rising, and has been for many years; this is fact. The several degrees C that the UN keeps saying the temperature has risen, or would rise, did not happen because they picked the result they wanted, and changed the math to make it "work".
If the temperature continues to rise at the current rate, it would be centuries before truly catastrophic environmental effects threatened humanity. All of the environmental related regulation that groups have been trying to force on us will not stop the temperature increases, but they *will* slow down our technological advancement. Even more, these controls are meaningless for developing nations, as they cannot develop while following the "rules" that the UN decided for them.
The point of the article is allegation that the UN lied. The author is outright stating that the UN used make-believe math and provably false assumptions in order to create a global panic about human demise, and that they did it to try to undermine the governments of the world and create an unelected global regime.
So, historically you are probably correct about how humanity dealt with some of the effects of higher global temperatures. The one disagreement I have is about Africa, since the growth of the Sahara isn't caused by global average temperature increases. The continental plate is also stationary which causes a host of other problems. Quite a bit of the rest of Africa's problems are the direct result of homicidal dictators and tribal warfare. You'd see more advanced civilization if they would sort that out, which they have to do on their own, because I certainly wouldn't support going there and forcing the issue.
As far as the future, if you figure that the UN is lying, which would be par for the course for them, then humanity has quite a bit of time to prepare for potential climate disaster. That disaster probably won't occur anyway, but it is still wise to plan for it. We will have already needed to develop past fossil fuels, since we won't have any to depend on in the near future, and that eliminates our largest set of pollutants. After that, if haven't developed the technology necessary to reverse the climate change, then most people will end up dying. However, if humanity had never existed, this climate change would still be occurring.
New Orleans was caused by a hurricane. This is a risk you take when you build a city on land that is under sea level. Even if the city was just above sea level, it would have been devastated.
People lived in Africa with those ice deposits melted in the past.
There didn't used to be much ice at the north pole, and we all were doing just fine.
Read the article; the guy does a good job of explaining why those knee-jerk responses were probably propagated as lies by the UN.
My stance is that the law isn't preventing any behavior, but it is discouraging the behavior. If it were to prevent the action, then by having the law, some people would literally be unable to commit the act the law was making illegal. That seems to be your stance, too. However, what you had typed was that some people will lose the ability to do something because the law exists, which is not what you seem to have meant at all.
You can't prevent the drunk from trying to drive down the freeway. You can make driving while drunk illegal, and then prosecute those that violate it.
You can't prevent the person from yelling "fire" in a theater and causing a panic. You can prosecute them for causing a panic and endangering others.
There is no law that prevents one person from killing another, or one person from stealing from another, or one from libeling another. In such cases, you have to make the repercussion such that the act isn't worth committing. Your interpretation of what law is and does is not possible, and hopefully never will be possible.
Actually, *YES* you should, and generally do, have the right to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. However, the panic and injury that you cause will be your fault, and that's what you will, and should, be tried on. The reason censorship is so bad is because it effectively is the government preventing you from doing something that it has decided is not acceptable. The government can't prevent you from saying whatever you please, whenever you please.
As an extreme example, you have the right to brandish a weapon and kill another person. If you do so for the wrong reason, then after the fact, you will be arrested, tried, and imprisoned. This is how it should be.
What Verizon has done is prevent the person from saying "FIRE!" while taking advantage of a protection that is contingent upon them not preventing people from saying anything they like.
Human pollution is a bad trend with known negative effects. The article is saying that the warming trend across the globe is *not* a catastrophe, and is *not* a bad trend. The article is saying that the UN has exaggerated the trends to such an extent as to make it appear that we're all going to die. The implication is that we will be fine, and the warming trend is nothing to be concerned with at this time.
So it does matter, because if the article is true, then global warming is nothing scary, but there is a massive conspiracy to propagate lies in order to seize power.
And if you *had* read TFA, you would notice that it was claiming that this climate trend has happened before, and to a larger degree. The point is that the apocalypse did not come, and that all the propaganda that it will this time is for political gain. It points out how all of the UN projections are coming up false, because they massaged the numbers and science to fit some agenda.
If you actually take the oil company money, then you are branded a tool of the petroleum industry and your opinion is ignored. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you let government basically control research by controlling the grant/project monies. You are half-right: there *was* decent funding in private sector before government took over.
The "it costs so much/is so wasteful to run" argument has been null and void for years, as well. If nothing else, it's that much longer that I have to wait for bittorrent downloads, that many more phone calls that I would have to deal with instead of queued IMs, and all the interruption of losing my place in various bits of work.
Suspend/standby loses network connections. That closes all of my SSH connections and forwarded X applications. I might as well turn off the computer and turn it back on at that point. The difference in price between your way and mine is still such that it isn't worth my time, especially when you consider what I now would need to do for your way to work for me.
You can do it your way and turn your PC off, and I'll do it mine and get more utility and productivity from my PC.
You make up an interesting point... I run a 460W computer with a 230W 19" CRT and a 90W 19" LCD, an amped two speaker set with a powered subwoofer, 900VA UPS, 500VA UPS, 5 port switch, and a 4 port USB hub, and I run it 24x7x365. The PC is an Athlon64 with a GeForce 6600GT card. While I am using it, with everything powered up, I use around 225W. If I spike the CPU and video to near 100%, I use around 275W. At 275W, I use 6.6KWh/day and 9.5cents/KWh, which is $18.81/mo.
My computer setup is not exactly the most power efficient, either, but it still only uses as much as most peoples' television sets. I have low efficiency fans, too large a power supply, a power hungry GPU and CPU, a high RPM hard drive, older CRT, older LCD, old speakers, and an external USB hub and network switch, in addition to the UPSes. Most people would eliminate the switch, hub, CRT, both UPSes, and have lower draw internal components.
Now, since leaving the displays running, pegging the GPU and CPU, and having the speakers going 24x7 doesn't happen, I will calculate for my real use. I *REALLY* use 165W for around 20hrs/day for idle. If I were to run the CPU at 100%, it goes up to 175W, so I'll use that number. That means my PC draws 3.5KWh with no output devices ("idle") plus 1.1KWh for active use. (Note that I am still calculating for 24x7 100% CPU utilization.) The 4.6KWh/day draw is $13.11/month.
Now, since my use case is extremely atypical, let's adjust for the vast majority of cases. Get rid of my CRT, and that eliminates 70W, run the CPU at mostly idle, and that drops 10W. That makes active use go to 195W and idle drops to 165W. That makes the numbers be 0.78KWh/day active and 3.3KWh/day, or $11.63/month. Running Folding@home 24x7 adds $0.68 to the bill. Also, I pay 0.095$/KWh, compared to most people and their 0.045$ ~ 0.080$/KWh.
So really, you're paying $12/mo to not wait for the computer to boot, get queued up IMs, and download torrents, and $0.68/mo to run Folding@home.
I did get a power meter, hence the exact numbers. I just realized that if I turn off my computer, I would have to boot it twice daily at around a minute each. That's an hour a month, and an hour of my time pays considerably more than $12. I have a better idea: I leave the computer running and donate the difference between the two.
MS has this ridiculous system service called "SBSCore" that exists only to turn off the computer every hour if you aren't running as a DC. Install SysInternals' Process Explorer, suspend/pause sbscrexe, go into the registry to set the service to disabled, then remove all read permissions for every account from the actual file. The file is in \windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe. Then you can terminate the process. Don't delete the file, though, that really got Windows upset when I tried that.
In regedit, right click, give Administrators permission to the key and all child nodes. Then change the Start DWORD that will appear undernearth that to 4.
I second the CrossOver idea. www.codeweavers.com and $40 will get you the latest (5.0.3) and a free upgrade to 6.x, which is in beta. It runs a lot of things that just WINE won't, and it works a lot nicer, in general. I've certainly used it to run Office and IE6.
For anyone that makes it this far, theft is legally defined as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it." Until recently, copyright infringment was a civil matter. That means that you couldn't be brought to court by the state, and you couldn't serve jail time. You could be made to pay reparations to the party or parties whose copyrights you infringe, though.
So seriously, five months in prison is a gross miscarraige of justice. It's definitely five months, an arrest, and a criminal case too much.
Sony used a trumped up basis for their lawsuits, basically lying to the judges involved. They claimed that the electrical devices that Lik-Sang was importing were of dubious quality, were untested in the European countries in question, and could cause consumer harm. Sony left out the part where the electronics were tested and certified, and were every bit as tested and safe as the stuff Sony sold, because *they were the same exact product*. Lik-Sang was reselling official Sony gear, and Sony sued them in such a way that Lik-Sang could not afford to fight it without going bankrupt.
I can't speak for the odd problems that the GP had with keyboard/mouse, but Windows XP *DOES NOT* come with drivers for most modern hardware. Most Linux distributions come with drivers for nearly anything out there.
To finish installing XP, you need to go download video drivers, sound drivers, network drivers, motherboard drivers, etc. Hell, you can't even install on many SATA systems without having a floppy drive and teaching XP how to talk to a SATA controller.
To make Vista have accelerated 3D, I still needed to go download and install a driver. The MS driver for my network chipset won't do gigabit, but Linux and XP don't have trouble with it. It also wasn't too fond of my 802.11g USB dongle, and doesn't (and probably never will) support some of my older hardware, like a scanner and a few printers.
As for Linux, I've never had to install a non-distribution supplied driver for my system for anything other than video. In that case, I clicked "Add/Remove..." from my "Applications" menu, selected "NVIDIA binary X.Org driver", and hit OK. The one place I see Linux having bad support is for 802.11g chipsets, and that is 100% a problem created by the manufacturers and not one with Linux.
The way it tends to work in the US is that if a portion of your contract attempts to do something illegal, or contradict something that there is specific protection for/against, then that portion is void. The rest of the contract would continue to be in force in most US states.
UAC: This doesn't work that well. I found it to be the second most annoying thing in Vista, beaten only by the terrible Aero theme. It's a very nice idea, it's been available on any UNIX based system for many years, and MS still didn't make it work right. The video mode switching alone is just silly to no end.
Address space rand: Increasing security is always good.
DX10: If it isn't getting backported then it isn't very useful. Besides, of course it's going to seem fast, you have to upgrade your CPU and video card to use Vista properly. I personally so absolutely no speed improvement in graphics out of Vista/DX10. I did see my system run slower, though.
Shadow copies: This is LVM. I've had this for a decade. If you want a better version than VSC in Vista, go buy a Net.App.
Bitlocker: I do not want any partition/file system/disc encrypted at home, and I certainly don't want it at work. People forget passwords, systems need repairing, etc, etc. It has a niche use, though.
Resizing: I don't resize my system partitions, and very few other people do. Most people don't even know what a partition is. It's nifty, and ties right in with LVM.
Power management: Just as everyone else said, you can't get the gains that you claim. You can't slow the CPU down under its base clock. That means 600-800MHz on most Intel chips. Throw battery gains out the window if you're using the GPU hungry Aero theme... I only get slightly better battery from my Pentium-M system under Ubuntu than I do under WinXP, and that's mostly because there are fewer things trying to run in the background.
You might repeat your post over and over, but that doesn't make anything you mention earth shattering. Nearly all of these "huge improvements" in Vista are either incremental over XP or have been available on other platforms for years, and then there is the pile of mis-features that nobody actually wants.
Anyone that does some research on Vista would know that this is the first NT based OS that Microsoft shipped that offered no real user improvements. It doesn't even put into place that last piece of Cairo, which would have been WinFS. All of the features that people were excited about, MS has ripped out. However, as the GP pointed out, MS sure had enough devs and time to throw in all of the total bullshit DRM that none of their customers actually wants to pay for.
Hell, the MS DRM, especially mandatory driver signing, means that I *can't* even use Vista. I have too many pieces of software and too many devices that I would have to purchase a new product, retest, redeploy, and retrain to get away from what already works with XP. For all these wonderful "features" that Vista offers, it gives us three that range from simply useless to outright malicious to the end user.
You're having problems *because* you're using Vista. It isn't anything close to release quality. Driver support isn't there and software support isn't there. Going back to a usable and stable platform, like XP, will definitely solve your issues. You should not be surprised that beta drivers on a beta OS has issues. FWIW, I demoed Vista with a NVIDIA 6600GT, and I definitely got decent performance, but the OS (RC1) was too far from finished to continue using.
It has been well known since ATI started making products that they never stabilize their drivers. Their Radeon line has been very good hardware, and terrible software. They even had one driver set that could damage your CRT by screwing up screen clocks. Their drivers cause many crashes, and constantly screw up quality and performance on all but the newest hardware. NVIDIA release drivers work excellently, with stability and only performance increases, if there is such a change. In other words, NVIDIA actually tests their drivers, and ATI just throws any old crap out onto the net, and calls it release.
Watch out with support for your i965, too, since it is a very new chipset, and there is limited support on non-Windows. Try a live CD before you go and do an install. I ended up having to use Slackware 11 with the testing 2.6.18 kernel to get my Dell Optiplex 745 to work, just because the support is so new. I'm not sure how it sits on FreeBSD.
As for Windows, I can't say this enough, get rid of Vista and run XP and your life with your computer will improve dramatically.
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Either that, or Linux development leaves the US, just as much OpenBSD development left because of our ill-conceived laws. It would further the US decline in technology dramatically, and make Microsoft a huge enemy of all business. Their software would likely become taboo around the world, for fear of giving them enough influence to pull the same stunts in other countries.
That won't work, for one of two reasons that I can think of off the top of my head. Either you'll get malware that will only spam 9000 messages per day, or you'll get customers that are cut off regularly, get pissed, and change ISPs. If you're unlucky, you'll also get some lawsuits about it, justified or not.
You're better off trying to force rate limit outgoing email, keep state on your clients, and trying to cut off outgoing SMTP for abusive hosts. However, you would then be monitoring traffic, and that might not work out so well, either.
Yes, actually, in this case it is the language choice to blame. Java can't directly interact with things outside of the sandbox. This means that you have to either draw the UI using Java, or a hook library to interact with the system as the rest of your program does. You also have difficulty reusing the code that you wrote in another language from your Java code. I am not attacking the concept of a portable application, or even Java, itself, but the concept of mixing languages that have such different paradigms.
Take the case of OpenOffice. If they stuck with C++ for the application, then they could use all of the same calls to do their UI, they would be portable to more platforms with just a recompile, since there are platforms that Java won't run on, and they would have faster launch speeds without random slowdowns caused by launching a JVM in-process. If they went for all Java, they would have a slower launch speed, but only that once. They would also be directly portable to any platform with a JVM available, without a recompile.
In the OOo way, you don't get the direct execution portability of Java, the recompile portability of C++, the launch speed of C++, or the consistent speed of a JVM after launch. You have to deal with the Java sandbox, and the ease of making mistakes in C++. You can't reuse the Java code in C++, nor vice versa, since you can't make calls without big performance hits. So, in short, you get the worst of C++ combined with the worst of Java.
Agreed 100% that Azureus is total crap. It's so bad that after I got sick of dealing with KTorrent, which I like a lot more than Azureus, I switched back to uTorrent, and just run it through WINE.
Using Java in Azureus is just as silly as using it for OpenOffice. If the whole thing isn't Java, then what's the point? My biggest complaint with OpenOffice is that it's slow to start and parts don't work like the rest. Unsurprisingly, these parts are written in Java, while the rest is C++.
I have an eight year old CRT that I bought for $350 that will do 1080p. I also have a laptop that will do better (1920x1200) on a 15.1", and a standalone 20" LCD panels that will do that same resolution. You can pick up quite a few rather high quality LCD panels that will do 1920x1200 for around $400. Quite a few of my friends also have panels that are capable of 1080p, as well.
Of course, none of us really intend to buy an HD-DVD drive, or a Blu-Ray drive, or any commercial HD content for quite a while. The reasons for this are very simple: DRM and a format war.
If you were to settle into one area, and your wife took one teaching job, it she would have her lesson plan stable. This would allow her to grade work much more quickly, not that it gets any more interested with practice. Teaching is not the only career that you are expected to work overtime without additional compensation. Take a look into research, IT, or programming, for example, and you see the same thing. Those careers don't give you 20 holidays and two to four months off a year, either. I'm not saying that teachers don't deserve good salaries, because they do. It is one of the most important careers out there, to society as a whole, and is certainly worth paying for. I *am* serious though, if you want to fix problems with teacher wage and competence, you need to deconstruct much of the teacher unions. They hold back good teachers from earning what they deserve, while helping poor teachers to earn just as much.
You keep calling things lies. I've personally read teacher contract; I've personally watched tactics used by their unions, and personally seen the budgets involved. I know the waste the occurs, and the horrible methods that are used to prop it up. Please notice that I didn't say that we need to dissolve these unions with nothing to replace them. As you pointed out, the representation does serve important functions, such as allowing a teacher to grade properly without fear of being fired for it.
I also did not say that schools have everything they need. While some teachers waste what money the can get on ridiculous classroom toys, most do not. The waste is occurring above the heads of the teachers, but that is still within the schools.
What I was trying to say is that teachers can be paid what they deserve, but between incompetent administration, ignorant voters, and unfair union practices, it doesn't happen. More money assigned to school systems will not fix it, because the amount of money is not the problem; the allocation of that money is. I want to see teachers get paid what they deserve, too, but other things have to get fixed before "give school money so we can pay teachers more" will ever work.
No, money is not the problem with teachers in the US; teachers' unions are the problem. We already are paying most public school teachers $50,000 and up for 2/3 year of work. We already provide some of the best health benefits out there. Paying more will attract more people to teach, but that does not make them magically better at teaching, nor does it fix any of the real problems in public education. The unions that teachers belong to do not allow merit raises, they do not allow the school to fire poor performing teachers, and they give raises to a teacher for longevity. This means you keep your head down and don't do anything noticeable, and you make your tenure and get the top salary grade.
The reason public education is shambles is all of the people, much like you, that think the problem is money. School budgets are out of control, spending is through the roof. We buy into all sorts of gimmicks that do *nothing* to actually fix the problems. We need to fix teachers' unions, substantially decrease State interference into the curriculum, and get rid of all of the staff that just loves throwing around money for magic beans. Maybe after we get rid of all of that, we can drop the foolish idea that everyone has the same capabilities, and start teaching to everyones differing abilities.
You're right, TFAs idea would just encourage cheating, but you are completely wrong about teacher salaries being what the problem is.
All of what you say might be completely true. The point I was making is that the scale of everything that has been tauted so loudly in the media, and pushed by the UN and others, is very possibly false. The planetary average temperature is rising, and has been for many years; this is fact. The several degrees C that the UN keeps saying the temperature has risen, or would rise, did not happen because they picked the result they wanted, and changed the math to make it "work".
If the temperature continues to rise at the current rate, it would be centuries before truly catastrophic environmental effects threatened humanity. All of the environmental related regulation that groups have been trying to force on us will not stop the temperature increases, but they *will* slow down our technological advancement. Even more, these controls are meaningless for developing nations, as they cannot develop while following the "rules" that the UN decided for them.
The point of the article is allegation that the UN lied. The author is outright stating that the UN used make-believe math and provably false assumptions in order to create a global panic about human demise, and that they did it to try to undermine the governments of the world and create an unelected global regime.
So, historically you are probably correct about how humanity dealt with some of the effects of higher global temperatures. The one disagreement I have is about Africa, since the growth of the Sahara isn't caused by global average temperature increases. The continental plate is also stationary which causes a host of other problems. Quite a bit of the rest of Africa's problems are the direct result of homicidal dictators and tribal warfare. You'd see more advanced civilization if they would sort that out, which they have to do on their own, because I certainly wouldn't support going there and forcing the issue.
As far as the future, if you figure that the UN is lying, which would be par for the course for them, then humanity has quite a bit of time to prepare for potential climate disaster. That disaster probably won't occur anyway, but it is still wise to plan for it. We will have already needed to develop past fossil fuels, since we won't have any to depend on in the near future, and that eliminates our largest set of pollutants. After that, if haven't developed the technology necessary to reverse the climate change, then most people will end up dying. However, if humanity had never existed, this climate change would still be occurring.
New Orleans was caused by a hurricane. This is a risk you take when you build a city on land that is under sea level. Even if the city was just above sea level, it would have been devastated.
People lived in Africa with those ice deposits melted in the past.
There didn't used to be much ice at the north pole, and we all were doing just fine.
Read the article; the guy does a good job of explaining why those knee-jerk responses were probably propagated as lies by the UN.
More that I misinterpreted you. :)
My stance is that the law isn't preventing any behavior, but it is discouraging the behavior. If it were to prevent the action, then by having the law, some people would literally be unable to commit the act the law was making illegal. That seems to be your stance, too. However, what you had typed was that some people will lose the ability to do something because the law exists, which is not what you seem to have meant at all.
You can't prevent the drunk from trying to drive down the freeway. You can make driving while drunk illegal, and then prosecute those that violate it.
You can't prevent the person from yelling "fire" in a theater and causing a panic. You can prosecute them for causing a panic and endangering others.
There is no law that prevents one person from killing another, or one person from stealing from another, or one from libeling another. In such cases, you have to make the repercussion such that the act isn't worth committing. Your interpretation of what law is and does is not possible, and hopefully never will be possible.
Actually, *YES* you should, and generally do, have the right to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. However, the panic and injury that you cause will be your fault, and that's what you will, and should, be tried on. The reason censorship is so bad is because it effectively is the government preventing you from doing something that it has decided is not acceptable. The government can't prevent you from saying whatever you please, whenever you please.
As an extreme example, you have the right to brandish a weapon and kill another person. If you do so for the wrong reason, then after the fact, you will be arrested, tried, and imprisoned. This is how it should be.
What Verizon has done is prevent the person from saying "FIRE!" while taking advantage of a protection that is contingent upon them not preventing people from saying anything they like.
Human pollution is a bad trend with known negative effects. The article is saying that the warming trend across the globe is *not* a catastrophe, and is *not* a bad trend. The article is saying that the UN has exaggerated the trends to such an extent as to make it appear that we're all going to die. The implication is that we will be fine, and the warming trend is nothing to be concerned with at this time.
So it does matter, because if the article is true, then global warming is nothing scary, but there is a massive conspiracy to propagate lies in order to seize power.
And if you *had* read TFA, you would notice that it was claiming that this climate trend has happened before, and to a larger degree. The point is that the apocalypse did not come, and that all the propaganda that it will this time is for political gain. It points out how all of the UN projections are coming up false, because they massaged the numbers and science to fit some agenda.
If you actually take the oil company money, then you are branded a tool of the petroleum industry and your opinion is ignored. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you let government basically control research by controlling the grant/project monies. You are half-right: there *was* decent funding in private sector before government took over.
The "it costs so much/is so wasteful to run" argument has been null and void for years, as well. If nothing else, it's that much longer that I have to wait for bittorrent downloads, that many more phone calls that I would have to deal with instead of queued IMs, and all the interruption of losing my place in various bits of work.
Suspend/standby loses network connections. That closes all of my SSH connections and forwarded X applications. I might as well turn off the computer and turn it back on at that point. The difference in price between your way and mine is still such that it isn't worth my time, especially when you consider what I now would need to do for your way to work for me.
You can do it your way and turn your PC off, and I'll do it mine and get more utility and productivity from my PC.
You make up an interesting point... I run a 460W computer with a 230W 19" CRT and a 90W 19" LCD, an amped two speaker set with a powered subwoofer, 900VA UPS, 500VA UPS, 5 port switch, and a 4 port USB hub, and I run it 24x7x365. The PC is an Athlon64 with a GeForce 6600GT card. While I am using it, with everything powered up, I use around 225W. If I spike the CPU and video to near 100%, I use around 275W. At 275W, I use 6.6KWh/day and 9.5cents/KWh, which is $18.81/mo.
My computer setup is not exactly the most power efficient, either, but it still only uses as much as most peoples' television sets. I have low efficiency fans, too large a power supply, a power hungry GPU and CPU, a high RPM hard drive, older CRT, older LCD, old speakers, and an external USB hub and network switch, in addition to the UPSes. Most people would eliminate the switch, hub, CRT, both UPSes, and have lower draw internal components.
Now, since leaving the displays running, pegging the GPU and CPU, and having the speakers going 24x7 doesn't happen, I will calculate for my real use. I *REALLY* use 165W for around 20hrs/day for idle. If I were to run the CPU at 100%, it goes up to 175W, so I'll use that number. That means my PC draws 3.5KWh with no output devices ("idle") plus 1.1KWh for active use. (Note that I am still calculating for 24x7 100% CPU utilization.) The 4.6KWh/day draw is $13.11/month.
Now, since my use case is extremely atypical, let's adjust for the vast majority of cases. Get rid of my CRT, and that eliminates 70W, run the CPU at mostly idle, and that drops 10W. That makes active use go to 195W and idle drops to 165W. That makes the numbers be 0.78KWh/day active and 3.3KWh/day, or $11.63/month. Running Folding@home 24x7 adds $0.68 to the bill. Also, I pay 0.095$/KWh, compared to most people and their 0.045$ ~ 0.080$/KWh.
So really, you're paying $12/mo to not wait for the computer to boot, get queued up IMs, and download torrents, and $0.68/mo to run Folding@home.
I did get a power meter, hence the exact numbers. I just realized that if I turn off my computer, I would have to boot it twice daily at around a minute each. That's an hour a month, and an hour of my time pays considerably more than $12. I have a better idea: I leave the computer running and donate the difference between the two.
MS has this ridiculous system service called "SBSCore" that exists only to turn off the computer every hour if you aren't running as a DC. Install SysInternals' Process Explorer, suspend/pause sbscrexe, go into the registry to set the service to disabled, then remove all read permissions for every account from the actual file. The file is in \windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe. Then you can terminate the process. Don't delete the file, though, that really got Windows upset when I tried that.
c es\SBCore
Reg key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servi
In regedit, right click, give Administrators permission to the key and all child nodes. Then change the Start DWORD that will appear undernearth that to 4.
I second the CrossOver idea. www.codeweavers.com and $40 will get you the latest (5.0.3) and a free upgrade to 6.x, which is in beta. It runs a lot of things that just WINE won't, and it works a lot nicer, in general. I've certainly used it to run Office and IE6.
For anyone that makes it this far, theft is legally defined as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it." Until recently, copyright infringment was a civil matter. That means that you couldn't be brought to court by the state, and you couldn't serve jail time. You could be made to pay reparations to the party or parties whose copyrights you infringe, though.
So seriously, five months in prison is a gross miscarraige of justice. It's definitely five months, an arrest, and a criminal case too much.
Sony used a trumped up basis for their lawsuits, basically lying to the judges involved. They claimed that the electrical devices that Lik-Sang was importing were of dubious quality, were untested in the European countries in question, and could cause consumer harm. Sony left out the part where the electronics were tested and certified, and were every bit as tested and safe as the stuff Sony sold, because *they were the same exact product*. Lik-Sang was reselling official Sony gear, and Sony sued them in such a way that Lik-Sang could not afford to fight it without going bankrupt.
I can't speak for the odd problems that the GP had with keyboard/mouse, but Windows XP *DOES NOT* come with drivers for most modern hardware. Most Linux distributions come with drivers for nearly anything out there.
To finish installing XP, you need to go download video drivers, sound drivers, network drivers, motherboard drivers, etc. Hell, you can't even install on many SATA systems without having a floppy drive and teaching XP how to talk to a SATA controller.
To make Vista have accelerated 3D, I still needed to go download and install a driver. The MS driver for my network chipset won't do gigabit, but Linux and XP don't have trouble with it. It also wasn't too fond of my 802.11g USB dongle, and doesn't (and probably never will) support some of my older hardware, like a scanner and a few printers.
As for Linux, I've never had to install a non-distribution supplied driver for my system for anything other than video. In that case, I clicked "Add/Remove..." from my "Applications" menu, selected "NVIDIA binary X.Org driver", and hit OK. The one place I see Linux having bad support is for 802.11g chipsets, and that is 100% a problem created by the manufacturers and not one with Linux.
The way it tends to work in the US is that if a portion of your contract attempts to do something illegal, or contradict something that there is specific protection for/against, then that portion is void. The rest of the contract would continue to be in force in most US states.
UAC: This doesn't work that well. I found it to be the second most annoying thing in Vista, beaten only by the terrible Aero theme. It's a very nice idea, it's been available on any UNIX based system for many years, and MS still didn't make it work right. The video mode switching alone is just silly to no end.
Address space rand: Increasing security is always good.
DX10: If it isn't getting backported then it isn't very useful. Besides, of course it's going to seem fast, you have to upgrade your CPU and video card to use Vista properly. I personally so absolutely no speed improvement in graphics out of Vista/DX10. I did see my system run slower, though.
Shadow copies: This is LVM. I've had this for a decade. If you want a better version than VSC in Vista, go buy a Net.App.
Bitlocker: I do not want any partition/file system/disc encrypted at home, and I certainly don't want it at work. People forget passwords, systems need repairing, etc, etc. It has a niche use, though.
Resizing: I don't resize my system partitions, and very few other people do. Most people don't even know what a partition is. It's nifty, and ties right in with LVM.
Power management: Just as everyone else said, you can't get the gains that you claim. You can't slow the CPU down under its base clock. That means 600-800MHz on most Intel chips. Throw battery gains out the window if you're using the GPU hungry Aero theme... I only get slightly better battery from my Pentium-M system under Ubuntu than I do under WinXP, and that's mostly because there are fewer things trying to run in the background.
You might repeat your post over and over, but that doesn't make anything you mention earth shattering. Nearly all of these "huge improvements" in Vista are either incremental over XP or have been available on other platforms for years, and then there is the pile of mis-features that nobody actually wants.
Anyone that does some research on Vista would know that this is the first NT based OS that Microsoft shipped that offered no real user improvements. It doesn't even put into place that last piece of Cairo, which would have been WinFS. All of the features that people were excited about, MS has ripped out. However, as the GP pointed out, MS sure had enough devs and time to throw in all of the total bullshit DRM that none of their customers actually wants to pay for.
Hell, the MS DRM, especially mandatory driver signing, means that I *can't* even use Vista. I have too many pieces of software and too many devices that I would have to purchase a new product, retest, redeploy, and retrain to get away from what already works with XP. For all these wonderful "features" that Vista offers, it gives us three that range from simply useless to outright malicious to the end user.
You're having problems *because* you're using Vista. It isn't anything close to release quality. Driver support isn't there and software support isn't there. Going back to a usable and stable platform, like XP, will definitely solve your issues. You should not be surprised that beta drivers on a beta OS has issues. FWIW, I demoed Vista with a NVIDIA 6600GT, and I definitely got decent performance, but the OS (RC1) was too far from finished to continue using.
It has been well known since ATI started making products that they never stabilize their drivers. Their Radeon line has been very good hardware, and terrible software. They even had one driver set that could damage your CRT by screwing up screen clocks. Their drivers cause many crashes, and constantly screw up quality and performance on all but the newest hardware. NVIDIA release drivers work excellently, with stability and only performance increases, if there is such a change. In other words, NVIDIA actually tests their drivers, and ATI just throws any old crap out onto the net, and calls it release.
Watch out with support for your i965, too, since it is a very new chipset, and there is limited support on non-Windows. Try a live CD before you go and do an install. I ended up having to use Slackware 11 with the testing 2.6.18 kernel to get my Dell Optiplex 745 to work, just because the support is so new. I'm not sure how it sits on FreeBSD.
As for Windows, I can't say this enough, get rid of Vista and run XP and your life with your computer will improve dramatically.