VMWare tools will catch up so I can upgrade. At the moment they don't support anything later than 5.10 out of the box, and I'm not going to cobble together a working version from "how to" posts on the forum.
"Some of the books froze up," he said, referring to the systems in which traders place their orders. "You couldn't really trade. You couldn't really make sales." He said orders appeared to become backed up. "Once they unfroze the Dow fell."
It sounds like at least some of the trade processing systems rely on the DJIA calculator in some way. Perhaps they query it to report the DJIA at the time of the transaction or some such. So trades were being processed but the feedback mechanism was frozen so people weren't sure if their trades were actually going through. It likely took them a while to realize this, so there was a backlog of trades in the system once people stopped to figure out what was going on. Timely feedback is obviously crucial to trading because decisions are made based on current market conditions. It's a good thing more automated "sell" triggers weren't fired when the DJIA caught up or this could have turned into quite a mess.
If you really want the Win32 model, it is easy enough to build it on top of PThreads, but there is no way to build PThreads on top of Win32.
Not strictly true. It is possible to build condition variables for Windows (Windows has Semaphores after all, which can be used to make just about anything), but the Windows threading model makes doing so far from easy. Please note that I'm not defending WinThreads, however, so much as clarifying this particular issue.
To keep power usage down, laptops tend to have slower hard drives. The one I use is fine so long as I'm working completely in RAM, but the moment something hits the disk there is a significant slowdown. This is particularly an issue because virtual memory resides on disk, and Windows swaps even with plenty of free RAM available, not to mention application-specific caching (Adobe Acrobat seems one of the worst offenders). The upshot is that my laptop is orders of magnitude slower than my full-sized PC for many common tasks even though the laptop has twice the RAM (2GB vs. 1GB).
This is why I don't accept the argument that someone is not responsible for their actions because they've had a "hard life" or were "born bad" or live in a "bad neighbourhood". I can be sympathetic, but ultimately I must insist that people take responsibilty for the decisions they have made. I don't think it's a lot to ask.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that "nature" frees one from responsibility so much as brings to light the uncomfortable truth that "nurture" isn't always enough.
People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
But does that suggest that one should never do what is unacceptable? And how does one determine what is unacceptable? There are myriad and conflicting sets of mores: those specific to particular social groups, cultures, societies, etc, all layered on top of one another.
I think it's perhaps worth making a parallel to the "nurture" argument here to explain the "nature" side of things. If a child learns he can get what he wants by exhibiting some specific form of bad behavior, then the bad behavior is being rewarded and therefore reinforced. But what if a person learns that they can do the same thing and for some reason (be it rational or biological) feels no guilt for such behavior, and further, doesn't mind the consequences? What negative stimuli really exists to dissuade that person from acting in an unacceptable manner? That person is still clearly responsible for their actions--they violated a social taboo--and even worse, rehabilitation in the traditional sense is impossible. Worse yet, what if that person is a child and is therefore largely exempt from the expectations and controls normally placed on adults?
This story actually reminds me a bit of Albert Camus' "The Stranger." The salient point is that the main character kills someone, and throughout the book he exhibits absolutely no emotion concerning his situation or his actions. The jury of his trial is so horrified by his manner that he ends up being executed for a crime that would have likely received a far lighter sentence had he behaved otherwise during the trial.
I envisioned a modular OS where the core provided essential features and all the trappings were completely pluggable. Don't like the UI framework? Use a different one. Same for the filesystem, etc. At the heart of the OS I expected to see a sort of object database where all these features were installed and managed, with some sort of OpenDOC layer on top to retrieve modules as needed. Of course, I was way off the mark, but this is the kind of OS I would like to see in the future.
Unix has this to some degree, partially by virtue of it being old, but there exists no structured management system for the packages at this basic level (that I'm aware of). And while I grant that one isn't necessary (the shell/filesystem combination is fine for package management), the lack of one tends to complicate things from a user perspective. Linux has made great progress over the years in achieving high-level usability, but many low-level tasks still require a good bit of domain knowledge and thought, largely because of the filesystem/shell nature of how these tasks are typically performed. If this process could be simplified and in turn made more reliable (it's a bad example, but compare installing an application on MacOS compared to any other operating system), then I think things would be moving in the right direction. This isn't to say that being able to mess with the core of things is bad, but it should be an option, not a requirement.
Honestly, now. If a non-participant has a way to watch the game and enjoys doing so then it's a spectator sport. Some games even have spectator modes built-in, like Guild Wars.
If you want a handheld graphing calculator, the TI-89 is about as good as it gets. With a broad selection of pre-loaded applications and the ability to load more from a PC, there's really nothing it can't do. If you want even more flash, the TI Voyage 200 has a full (small) keyboard, but basically the same hardware features as the TI-89. I have an HP RPN calculator also and I like it a lot, but the HPs don't do linear algebra which pretty much excludes them from use in a number of undergrad courses.
If you're interested in just anything that can do advanced maths, you might want to look into an academic license of MATLAB, which runs about $100. You get a limited number of reinstalls and the license may expire four years after purchasing it, but it's a tremendous deal nevertheless. If only commercial licenses were affordable...
I've not seen differing standards based on gender though...talented, knowledgeable females are accepted as readily males...after a period of skepticism of course.
I haven't seen it in my current workplace, but I have in social situations--some male geeks don't seem to take well to women who know more than they do. But really what I'm going on here is more what I've heard from women than what I've witnessed myself. I agree that there can be a rite of passage as it were, but I do think the obstacle can be greater for women in a male-dominated group. And this in itself is enough to prevent some tech-oriented women from pursuing tech careers.
I've been trying to decide whether there's a particular age group where sexual discrimination may be a bit lower. I'd be inclined to say that the 30+ crowd may be easier to deal with because many of them are married, but that's pure conjecture.
I've talked to quite a few tech-oriented women who aren't in tech jobs simply because they don't feel like dealing with the male geek mentality. It's no secret that the average male geek is socially maladjusted, and many are egotistical, domineering, and dismissive of women. Given that sort of a social climate and its side-effects--a difficulty in obtaining proper regocnition for work done or getting assigned meaningful work in the first place, not to mention problems simply putting up with male coworkers--and it's no wonder many choose other professions. In fact it's easy to make a comparison between the tech industry and with other male-dominated fields... disc jockey, automobile racing, even graffiti art. In each case the relatively few women who do participate often have difficulty overcoming the stigma of being a woman. Interviews often focus on how it feels to be the only one around who can have babies even though the issue is completely irrelevant, and they have to work much harder for the same recognition that a man with equivalent talent would receive. I saw other posters making comments about how gender has no relation to productivity so workplace diversity should not be an issue, but that dismisses the idea that there are capable women who might be interested in the profession if the environment were less hostile. And I realize I'm making generalizations with the above. In fact, I work at a software company with a pretty reasonable male/female ratio even among the programmers. But I think this is not characteristic of the industry as a whole.
The episodic release format has been around for over a century, and probably for as long as print media has been sufficiently inexpensive to produce. It's perhaps worth noting that many books we regard today as classics were originally published in an episodic style in the pulp rags of the time--Charles Dickens being one notable episodic author (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#Episo dic_writing). So as for whether the release style has merit--I think that's long since been proven. More important for games is getting the cost and development time to a point where the public is willing to pay for it and will not lose interest waiting for the next release.
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for their actions.
Sure, but the issue here is protecting society from those who are pre-disposed to criminal activity by removing those people from society. In some respects it's like modern-day Calvinism, but this time biology, instead of God, is what predetermines behavior. Of course, it would be just as easy to protect society from a supposed child molester by placing them in an environment without children as in prison, but of course the former would be much more difficult. However, it raises an interesting point: even if this idiotic law is passed, if a person can show that they will not be in an environment where they are subject to temptation, is there any reason to send them to jail? This may be an easy out for the wealthy, since they have the capacity to lead a completely insular existence. I suppose it isn't much different from Calvinism after all.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will, then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning. Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
I'm guessing the motivation for this is related to physiology rather than social conditioning. However, that raises another question. If a person with mental illness X is a danger and should therefore be locked up, is there any point in treating their illness? What if there are treatments (let's say medicines, to stick with "biology") available that can mitigate the perceived dangers of their condition?
They are also far more expensive to create, transport and update. There's a reason why we rely on electronic storage and access to data in the developed world. These reasons apply equally to the developing world. More so, in fact, because wireless technology (like the OLPC uses) is cheaper than any other data transmission technology currently available.
I agree with the issue of transportation costs. Putting a bunch of books on a boat is far more expensive than elextronically transferring e-copies of the books. But electronic transport assumes a great deal of infrastructure, plus "one laptop per child" to actually make the data accessible to the community. Creation and update costs aren't an issue for textbooks however. Just ship the penultimate release rather than the latest release. The differences in content are typically marginal to nonexistent, and schools unload these books by the truckload each year as the new ones are released and students are forced to upgrade. Unless it is a problem with the publisher, I'd spend money creating an avenue for these old textbooks to be donated and shipped to developing countries (assuming this isn't done already). The cost should be quite low, particularly when amortized across the useful lifetime of the material (perhaps ten years). se (And by the way, if you'd seen just how pitiful the average books-for-schoolkids project is in the developing world, you'd never suggest it except in the absence of all other alternatives. Having helped to unpack containers-full of tattered, outdated and useless crap, I speak from experience.)
But this is clearly a problem with the process rather than the idea, isn't it? Used college textbooks are generally in reasonable condition, and dating is rarely a problem. Even college-level computer science courses teach theory that was largely established before 1980. How much material truly needs to be "bleeding edge" in lower-level academia?
Attach a DVD full of literature to the teacher's machine, and every child can access and store more data than an entire library full of books could contain.
Please note that I'm not at all against the idea of computers in developing countries. And this is one reason why. However, I'm not convinced that laptops to the exclusion of traditional media is truly the best route. As I stated above, I think the content of decent textbooks ages quite well, and books can survive bad weather, rough handling, and they don't need power or an internet connection to be useful. And it isn't necessary for developing countries to only receive books otherwise destined for the garbage bin. There are plenty of high-quality textbooks that are returned to the publisher each year as new editions are released (not to mention lower-quality copied available for fraction of the cost and specifically intended for developing countries). Or is this simply a case of publishers' greed preventing the re-distribution of these used books?
It's been said from the beginning that the cost was just for producing the hardware.
Frankly, I still don't entirely understand why there is such a huge push to distribute laptops to the world. Books are far more durable and require no training or infrastructure (though teachers help). And then there's medicine and other necessities. Even if laptops end up being distributed to many of these locations, I expect the majority of them to go unused either from lack of interest or infrastructure, or simply to break. I think the idea of offering resources or education to impoverished areas is a noble goal, but this particular plan has always seemed tremendously impractical.
Nothing personal, but Bjarne Stroustrup comes real short in the real world department. He has not been in the position of solving real world problems with C++.
So you're saying that he invented C++ and prompty retired? That patent must have been worth a fortune!
Is using a non-lethal device for crowd control a bad idea? I'd guess it would depend on if this can create permanent harm or not. If it has no ill side-effects I'd say it's one hell of a lot better than tear gas that can kill people with some respiratory conditions.
For the record, there is no such thing as a non-lethal crowd control device that relies on pain for its effect. There are simply some methods that have a sufficiently high survival rate that they are considered acceptable for use in these situations.
There's some kind of rule regarding security policy which states that if security is so tight as to be an obstacle to normal work, legitimate users will attempt to circumvent the security measures just so they can do their work at a reasonable level of efficiency (ie. without undue irritation). I think that rule applies to media security as well. Right now, media security measures are still largely invisible and legitimate use does "just work" for the most part. But what will happen if that changes? If the security measures become so draconian as to impede legitimate use, it's extremely likely that legitimate users who had never considered pirating will begin to look for ways to circumvent the system just to continue using the product in a convenient manner. Basically, I think it's quite likely that if media security measures get much tighter then the media companies will effectively create a consumer base of "pirates" as a simple reaction to the inconvenience the new security measures present. And once a person becomes used to the convenience presented by circumvention, it will be difficult to convince them to play by the rules again, even if future security measures are relaxed.
Companies can already purchase a Google search engine for their internal documents and such. It seems a natural extension for it to be good at searching source code as well.
Socket 939 systems are really quite adequate, and the prospect of swapping out a substantial portion of my hardware for yet another upgrade (I thought I'd be set for a while with a 939 mainboard and memory) is unappealing, so I'm trying to put off a major upgrade as long as possible. Also, the Intel Core processor is both cheaper and faster than the current AMD AM2 processors, so if I'm going to replace my mainboard and memory anyway, why not get the hardware that will give me the best return on my investment? If AMD fails to deliver a product competitive with the Intel Core by the time of my next upgrade then I'll move back to Intel. It's as simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
VMWare tools will catch up so I can upgrade. At the moment they don't support anything later than 5.10 out of the box, and I'm not going to cobble together a working version from "how to" posts on the forum.
From the article:
"Some of the books froze up," he said, referring to the systems in which traders place their orders. "You couldn't really trade. You couldn't really make sales." He said orders appeared to become backed up. "Once they unfroze the Dow fell."
It sounds like at least some of the trade processing systems rely on the DJIA calculator in some way. Perhaps they query it to report the DJIA at the time of the transaction or some such. So trades were being processed but the feedback mechanism was frozen so people weren't sure if their trades were actually going through. It likely took them a while to realize this, so there was a backlog of trades in the system once people stopped to figure out what was going on. Timely feedback is obviously crucial to trading because decisions are made based on current market conditions. It's a good thing more automated "sell" triggers weren't fired when the DJIA caught up or this could have turned into quite a mess.
When a pompous man hears a question, he replies with a non sequitur?
If you really want the Win32 model, it is easy enough to build it on top of PThreads, but there is no way to build PThreads on top of Win32.
Not strictly true. It is possible to build condition variables for Windows (Windows has Semaphores after all, which can be used to make just about anything), but the Windows threading model makes doing so far from easy. Please note that I'm not defending WinThreads, however, so much as clarifying this particular issue.
To keep power usage down, laptops tend to have slower hard drives. The one I use is fine so long as I'm working completely in RAM, but the moment something hits the disk there is a significant slowdown. This is particularly an issue because virtual memory resides on disk, and Windows swaps even with plenty of free RAM available, not to mention application-specific caching (Adobe Acrobat seems one of the worst offenders). The upshot is that my laptop is orders of magnitude slower than my full-sized PC for many common tasks even though the laptop has twice the RAM (2GB vs. 1GB).
This is why I don't accept the argument that someone is not responsible for their actions because they've had a "hard life" or were "born bad" or live in a "bad neighbourhood". I can be sympathetic, but ultimately I must insist that people take responsibilty for the decisions they have made. I don't think it's a lot to ask.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that "nature" frees one from responsibility so much as brings to light the uncomfortable truth that "nurture" isn't always enough.
People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
But does that suggest that one should never do what is unacceptable? And how does one determine what is unacceptable? There are myriad and conflicting sets of mores: those specific to particular social groups, cultures, societies, etc, all layered on top of one another.
I think it's perhaps worth making a parallel to the "nurture" argument here to explain the "nature" side of things. If a child learns he can get what he wants by exhibiting some specific form of bad behavior, then the bad behavior is being rewarded and therefore reinforced. But what if a person learns that they can do the same thing and for some reason (be it rational or biological) feels no guilt for such behavior, and further, doesn't mind the consequences? What negative stimuli really exists to dissuade that person from acting in an unacceptable manner? That person is still clearly responsible for their actions--they violated a social taboo--and even worse, rehabilitation in the traditional sense is impossible. Worse yet, what if that person is a child and is therefore largely exempt from the expectations and controls normally placed on adults?
This story actually reminds me a bit of Albert Camus' "The Stranger." The salient point is that the main character kills someone, and throughout the book he exhibits absolutely no emotion concerning his situation or his actions. The jury of his trial is so horrified by his manner that he ends up being executed for a crime that would have likely received a far lighter sentence had he behaved otherwise during the trial.
I envisioned a modular OS where the core provided essential features and all the trappings were completely pluggable. Don't like the UI framework? Use a different one. Same for the filesystem, etc. At the heart of the OS I expected to see a sort of object database where all these features were installed and managed, with some sort of OpenDOC layer on top to retrieve modules as needed. Of course, I was way off the mark, but this is the kind of OS I would like to see in the future.
Unix has this to some degree, partially by virtue of it being old, but there exists no structured management system for the packages at this basic level (that I'm aware of). And while I grant that one isn't necessary (the shell/filesystem combination is fine for package management), the lack of one tends to complicate things from a user perspective. Linux has made great progress over the years in achieving high-level usability, but many low-level tasks still require a good bit of domain knowledge and thought, largely because of the filesystem/shell nature of how these tasks are typically performed. If this process could be simplified and in turn made more reliable (it's a bad example, but compare installing an application on MacOS compared to any other operating system), then I think things would be moving in the right direction. This isn't to say that being able to mess with the core of things is bad, but it should be an option, not a requirement.
Honestly, now. If a non-participant has a way to watch the game and enjoys doing so then it's a spectator sport. Some games even have spectator modes built-in, like Guild Wars.
If you want a handheld graphing calculator, the TI-89 is about as good as it gets. With a broad selection of pre-loaded applications and the ability to load more from a PC, there's really nothing it can't do. If you want even more flash, the TI Voyage 200 has a full (small) keyboard, but basically the same hardware features as the TI-89. I have an HP RPN calculator also and I like it a lot, but the HPs don't do linear algebra which pretty much excludes them from use in a number of undergrad courses.
If you're interested in just anything that can do advanced maths, you might want to look into an academic license of MATLAB, which runs about $100. You get a limited number of reinstalls and the license may expire four years after purchasing it, but it's a tremendous deal nevertheless. If only commercial licenses were affordable...
I've not seen differing standards based on gender though...talented, knowledgeable females are accepted as readily males...after a period of skepticism of course.
I haven't seen it in my current workplace, but I have in social situations--some male geeks don't seem to take well to women who know more than they do. But really what I'm going on here is more what I've heard from women than what I've witnessed myself. I agree that there can be a rite of passage as it were, but I do think the obstacle can be greater for women in a male-dominated group. And this in itself is enough to prevent some tech-oriented women from pursuing tech careers.
I've been trying to decide whether there's a particular age group where sexual discrimination may be a bit lower. I'd be inclined to say that the 30+ crowd may be easier to deal with because many of them are married, but that's pure conjecture.
Pardon my confusion, but what does being dismissive of women have to do with flirting? Or charisma, for that matter?
I've talked to quite a few tech-oriented women who aren't in tech jobs simply because they don't feel like dealing with the male geek mentality. It's no secret that the average male geek is socially maladjusted, and many are egotistical, domineering, and dismissive of women. Given that sort of a social climate and its side-effects--a difficulty in obtaining proper regocnition for work done or getting assigned meaningful work in the first place, not to mention problems simply putting up with male coworkers--and it's no wonder many choose other professions. In fact it's easy to make a comparison between the tech industry and with other male-dominated fields... disc jockey, automobile racing, even graffiti art. In each case the relatively few women who do participate often have difficulty overcoming the stigma of being a woman. Interviews often focus on how it feels to be the only one around who can have babies even though the issue is completely irrelevant, and they have to work much harder for the same recognition that a man with equivalent talent would receive. I saw other posters making comments about how gender has no relation to productivity so workplace diversity should not be an issue, but that dismisses the idea that there are capable women who might be interested in the profession if the environment were less hostile. And I realize I'm making generalizations with the above. In fact, I work at a software company with a pretty reasonable male/female ratio even among the programmers. But I think this is not characteristic of the industry as a whole.
The episodic release format has been around for over a century, and probably for as long as print media has been sufficiently inexpensive to produce. It's perhaps worth noting that many books we regard today as classics were originally published in an episodic style in the pulp rags of the time--Charles Dickens being one notable episodic author (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#Episo dic_writing). So as for whether the release style has merit--I think that's long since been proven. More important for games is getting the cost and development time to a point where the public is willing to pay for it and will not lose interest waiting for the next release.
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for their actions.
Sure, but the issue here is protecting society from those who are pre-disposed to criminal activity by removing those people from society. In some respects it's like modern-day Calvinism, but this time biology, instead of God, is what predetermines behavior. Of course, it would be just as easy to protect society from a supposed child molester by placing them in an environment without children as in prison, but of course the former would be much more difficult. However, it raises an interesting point: even if this idiotic law is passed, if a person can show that they will not be in an environment where they are subject to temptation, is there any reason to send them to jail? This may be an easy out for the wealthy, since they have the capacity to lead a completely insular existence. I suppose it isn't much different from Calvinism after all.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will, then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning. Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
I'm guessing the motivation for this is related to physiology rather than social conditioning. However, that raises another question. If a person with mental illness X is a danger and should therefore be locked up, is there any point in treating their illness? What if there are treatments (let's say medicines, to stick with "biology") available that can mitigate the perceived dangers of their condition?
They are also far more expensive to create, transport and update. There's a reason why we rely on electronic storage and access to data in the developed world. These reasons apply equally to the developing world. More so, in fact, because wireless technology (like the OLPC uses) is cheaper than any other data transmission technology currently available.
I agree with the issue of transportation costs. Putting a bunch of books on a boat is far more expensive than elextronically transferring e-copies of the books. But electronic transport assumes a great deal of infrastructure, plus "one laptop per child" to actually make the data accessible to the community. Creation and update costs aren't an issue for textbooks however. Just ship the penultimate release rather than the latest release. The differences in content are typically marginal to nonexistent, and schools unload these books by the truckload each year as the new ones are released and students are forced to upgrade. Unless it is a problem with the publisher, I'd spend money creating an avenue for these old textbooks to be donated and shipped to developing countries (assuming this isn't done already). The cost should be quite low, particularly when amortized across the useful lifetime of the material (perhaps ten years).
se
(And by the way, if you'd seen just how pitiful the average books-for-schoolkids project is in the developing world, you'd never suggest it except in the absence of all other alternatives. Having helped to unpack containers-full of tattered, outdated and useless crap, I speak from experience.)
But this is clearly a problem with the process rather than the idea, isn't it? Used college textbooks are generally in reasonable condition, and dating is rarely a problem. Even college-level computer science courses teach theory that was largely established before 1980. How much material truly needs to be "bleeding edge" in lower-level academia?
Attach a DVD full of literature to the teacher's machine, and every child can access and store more data than an entire library full of books could contain.
Please note that I'm not at all against the idea of computers in developing countries. And this is one reason why. However, I'm not convinced that laptops to the exclusion of traditional media is truly the best route. As I stated above, I think the content of decent textbooks ages quite well, and books can survive bad weather, rough handling, and they don't need power or an internet connection to be useful. And it isn't necessary for developing countries to only receive books otherwise destined for the garbage bin. There are plenty of high-quality textbooks that are returned to the publisher each year as new editions are released (not to mention lower-quality copied available for fraction of the cost and specifically intended for developing countries). Or is this simply a case of publishers' greed preventing the re-distribution of these used books?
It's been said from the beginning that the cost was just for producing the hardware.
Frankly, I still don't entirely understand why there is such a huge push to distribute laptops to the world. Books are far more durable and require no training or infrastructure (though teachers help). And then there's medicine and other necessities. Even if laptops end up being distributed to many of these locations, I expect the majority of them to go unused either from lack of interest or infrastructure, or simply to break. I think the idea of offering resources or education to impoverished areas is a noble goal, but this particular plan has always seemed tremendously impractical.
Nothing personal, but Bjarne Stroustrup comes real short in the real world department. He has not been in the position of solving real world problems with C++.
So you're saying that he invented C++ and prompty retired? That patent must have been worth a fortune!
Is using a non-lethal device for crowd control a bad idea? I'd guess it would depend on if this can create permanent harm or not. If it has no ill side-effects I'd say it's one hell of a lot better than tear gas that can kill people with some respiratory conditions.
For the record, there is no such thing as a non-lethal crowd control device that relies on pain for its effect. There are simply some methods that have a sufficiently high survival rate that they are considered acceptable for use in these situations.
The orcs are referred to as Goblins
There are Goblins in the Mines of Moria as well, which is a LoTR event. I'm not sure they are actually the same creature, as the Wiki suggests.
New studies have found that research helps doctors identify diseases they are not familiar with!
the technical term is "gender identity," not just "gender." The use of "identity" clearly conveys, to me, that chromosomes are not at issue.
There's some kind of rule regarding security policy which states that if security is so tight as to be an obstacle to normal work, legitimate users will attempt to circumvent the security measures just so they can do their work at a reasonable level of efficiency (ie. without undue irritation). I think that rule applies to media security as well. Right now, media security measures are still largely invisible and legitimate use does "just work" for the most part. But what will happen if that changes? If the security measures become so draconian as to impede legitimate use, it's extremely likely that legitimate users who had never considered pirating will begin to look for ways to circumvent the system just to continue using the product in a convenient manner. Basically, I think it's quite likely that if media security measures get much tighter then the media companies will effectively create a consumer base of "pirates" as a simple reaction to the inconvenience the new security measures present. And once a person becomes used to the convenience presented by circumvention, it will be difficult to convince them to play by the rules again, even if future security measures are relaxed.
Companies can already purchase a Google search engine for their internal documents and such. It seems a natural extension for it to be good at searching source code as well.
Socket 939 systems are really quite adequate, and the prospect of swapping out a substantial portion of my hardware for yet another upgrade (I thought I'd be set for a while with a 939 mainboard and memory) is unappealing, so I'm trying to put off a major upgrade as long as possible. Also, the Intel Core processor is both cheaper and faster than the current AMD AM2 processors, so if I'm going to replace my mainboard and memory anyway, why not get the hardware that will give me the best return on my investment? If AMD fails to deliver a product competitive with the Intel Core by the time of my next upgrade then I'll move back to Intel. It's as simple as that.
How do these cases even make it to court?