Which is even better, because kudzu is fairly high in cellulose, grows very quickly, and will grow pretty much everywhere you want it to grow (and lots of places you don't).
Another really good, fast-growing source of cellulose is hemp, but don't hold breath for that in the US. It looks like it could be pot, just like powdered sugar looks like it could be cocaine. So the timber and cotton industries ^W^W^W^W DEA people keep making sure it's illegal to grow here.
Pardoned is at least still convicted. They don't serve their time, but they've still been convicted. Also, while the criminal conviction doesn't assure anything in civil court, I believe it is admissible as evidence. Of course a pardon could be used as counter-evidence I suppose.
By the way... IANAL, this isn't legal advice, no warranty is made on these remarks, jurisdictions probably differ, YMMV, don't blame me, seek reputable counsel if you have questions, results not necessarily typical, rinse eyes with water for fifteen minutes after accidental contact, not for internal use, do not induce vomiting if swallowed, do not use outdoors without properly designed and installed safety measures, and if you piss into the wind you'll probably get wet.
He wasn't talking abut calling a native method from a Java program. He was talking about the JVM itself using native libraries to do some of its work. And yes, at that level it's often advisable to make some vertical scalability-minded decisions.
Okay, so here's AT&T's line: if the spectrum is cheaper, and the contracts for service are cheaper, then the government doesn't collect as much money leasing the spectrum at auction and doesn't collect as much taxes on the service contracts. So the taxes paid are diminished, and the FCC has to be funded, but where, AT&T would like to know, are those funds coming from?
Gee, if Google, Skype, my hometown, LG, Mattel, or Playskool sell me a device that is cheaper, uses cheaper services, and the services are made even cheaper by the fact that the spectrum was cheaper, where's it costing me money? Maybe I pay a little more tax somewhere, sure, if it's needed. But I'm saving money up front, and will the new taxes (if they ever come about) be worse than AT&T's rapacious fees?
See, AT&T, the tax payers are the consumers. Say it with me now. The taxpayers are the consumers. You can't claim you'll be hurting the taxpayers by helping the consumers. It's all the same money. It's just that now someone else might be paying the taxes instead of paying you and you paying taxes on our obscene profits.
It's the taxpayers' spectrum, not yours, AT&T. It's the taxpayers' money that you've been extracting for them for this incompatible feature, that locked handset, this early termination charge because you sold a phone that broke four times under warranty and you wouldn't fix or replace it the fifth time the same thing broke one week after the warranty period. Perhaps in your newfound quest to protect the taxpayers, you should stop screwing your customers at every turn, since they'r ethe ones paying the damn taxes.
And I think that John F. Kennedy should not have been elected by thousands of dead people in Cook County. And Boss Tweed said he didn't mind not being able to pick the election winner as long as he got to pick the candidates. And the Democrats outed a perfectly legal but morally questionable act from a previously sealed court document to get Jack Ryan out of the Senate race for their darling Obama, which was simply abhorrent.
Democrats bus people to the polls in larger cities. They have party-funded voter registration drives in which they announce to the people they're registering which party is doing them the favor.
It's all corrupt, and to pretend the Democrats have clean hands is dishonest and pitiful.
I doubt they'd forget. I can see them laughing about it at parties and talking about how stupid the politicians were for handing them such an all-around win for them. They'd talk about the pledge whenever it's convenient to their purposes, and they'd ask for government help in overcoming the financial burdens of it in some way, even if they're not doing what they promised. They'd also be sure to remember this attack on the public on two fronts come election time, when the gift givers need a little extra push toward office.
You can't change the wording of the license, I don't believe. If that clause is in place, you have the right to use GPLv2 or later, but so does everyone you redistribute it to. Only the copyright holder can change the license terms, but they can allow you and every other member of the public to choose which license to use out of their prescribed set.
IANAL, but it doesn't make much sense that you could just change the license wording yourself, unless there's explicit permission to do so. Choosing to be bound by a later version of the license doesn't mean you can take that choice away from others.
There's little to no evidence that asthma is primarily linked to genetics. Pesticides, herbicides, tobacco smoke, paints, carpet fumes, colds and bronchitis early in life, lack of exposure to certain infections, bird droppings, and lots of other possible causes are being looked at as environmental causes or triggers of asthma.
What you're describing with your 99% "do it" and 1% "don't do it" is a fuzzy-to-discrete system. It has a fuzzy logic aspect to it, but the output is being converted into a discrete binary action.
Those do exist. There's another type, though, that is a fully fuzzy system. A canonical example is a thermostat.
Instead of 99% "do it" vs 1% "don't do it" as to turning on a furnace to raise a temperature (a fuzzy to discrete system), a variable valve could be used to turn the fuel flow on to 99%, or to 3%, or 57%.
A third type is a fuzzy random system, in which you adjust your somewhere between 0.01 and 1, then randomize a number between 0 and 1 and then make a discrete output based on whether the fuzzy value and the random number are in agreement. The fuzzy value is kind of like a cut-off in this case, where if the fuzzy value is 93%, then anything randomized as 0.93 or less triggers an "on" state and anything randomized as 0.94 to 1.0 triggers an "off" state.
Now, there's obviously a bunch of neat stuff in quantum computing besides the point I'm wanting clarified, and I do thank you again for pointing those things out. I still have an intuitive feeling that the second and third types of fuzzy system I've listed above can be realized more quickly in a quantum system than with the fuzzy values being stored as floating point values in a classical binary system. I'm just not sure we're reaching one another, and much of that is probably my limited knowledge of the quantum computing topic. Anyway, thanks so much for the conversation although we've been mostly talking past one another. It can be fun to try to hash these things out, even when we fail.
The releasing of source code for a device that must have its software vetted by the phone companies does not mean the owners of a phone will be allowed to run modified versions on their phones when attached to the network. It's entirely possible to release source code to the public, and also make sure that only cryptographically signed versions of that source work in a particular situation.
Let's face it, the Tivo effect has to be allowed here, because Apple didn't release a product with code that had been licensed under a license released the same day as the product. The only versions of the GPL in force on any of the software they used would be 2 and maybe 1. If GPLv3 was released the same day as the product, there's no way the already extant code they used at the time of the release was licensed exclusively under GPLv3.
I haven't read TFA yet, but I'm betting some of them think it's a good thing for the project and are willing to do what they're doing, despite the desire to do more coding.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm aware that entanglement means that changing the state of one causes a corresponding change in the other, and that that's a primary strength of quantum computers.
What I'm really wanting to know though, is not how it's done, but how it's to be used.
In current fuzzy systems, it's simple enough to have something that's neither 1 nor 0 until your collapse the value. It's even easy enough to not collapse a value and to do things to a certain degree when that makes sense. That's what fuzzy is all about. It's all multi-state logic and that makes certain kinds of programming really much easier to make accurate than using binary logic. Now, the big drawback here is that in a classical fuzzy system, there are many checks to be made and many adjustments to be made to a value before it's in its required state to make a decision.
If there was a multiply entangled system measuring multiple inputs simultaneously, and one could collapse all that input into one or a couple of outputs immediately instead of serially applying adjustments to a value then one could use these qubits as a fuzzy system that operates essentially instantaneously compared to the serial progression through revaluation cycles needed in fuzzy systems of today. This would make many types of process control and even AI perform much faster, and that would be a wonderful application of the technology. I'm not nearly so interested in quantum cryptography and blind searches day-to-day as I am in, say, seeing multiply redundant, fuzzy-based control systems working suitably fast to handle obstacle avoidance and balance maintenance in off-road vehicles.
Okay, then, is it piracy for you to get your song into an MP3 format? It's a fair use to do it yourself. It's piracy for someone else to let you download the MP3 (AAC, OGG, whatever), but you're not the one distributing something without compensating the artist. You've got a license to that song, and getting the song into a different format for easier listening is your right.
The guy in this case didn't give a bunch of copies away. He just got a copy for which he already had a license -- because he didn't pay for a copy which did not work. He paid for a copy that would work and the company in question failed to provide it. $13,000 is a lot of money for a blank disk, which is effectively what they sold him. That's bad faith on their part, and he could have sued to get his money back and gone to spend it with the competition. The software company is probably happier to keep his money and let him have the cracked copy.
Also, would it be piracy if, instead of downloading the new copy already cracked, he just downloaded a cracking program that when run made his original copy work? Would it be piracy to provide that program? It is probably illegal under the DMCA, because it could be construed as deliberately breaking copy protection to enable piracy. However, the purpose here wasn't to enable piracy. It was to make the damn thing work as purchased.
That sounds a lot like a fuzzy value, only stored in a single qubit instead of as a floating-point representation of possibility.
Fuzzy logic is, after all, all about multi-state truth values and proportions of truth. So given your description, it sounds like with this gate what can be done is to (eventually, of course) create a non-deterministic fuzzy application platform with very high speed and very small storage requirements.
Is that in the right stall, conceptually, or am I missing the barn?
FWIW, I think GWB is a good guy with good intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell, don't you?
I think Bush could take some advice that he doesn't and could get rid of many of his current advisers. I think he puts loyalty above ability even at the cost of the well-being of his country and the world. I think he means well, and if he could successfully accomplish what he wants to do it'd be great for both the US and the world at large. Unfortunately, poor execution of a plan is sometimes worse than having the wrong plan.
I think a lot of people disagree with Bush because they think he's a bad guy. I don't. I agree with using military might, if necessary, to stop terrorism. I also think it's gone too far (like having US forces instead of a pan-Arab army trying to keep order after the fall of Saddam, or attacking Iraq at all when it means taking troops away from Afghanistan) and been horribly bungled in application. So I support Bush in theory, but not necessarily in practice.
If Bush could command his troops to the victory he wanted, that would be fine by me. However, he remembered the gunboats and forgot the diplomacy. While I'm sure certain other administrations would have done better, I'm sure some would have done worse (Gore if he was in office, Dukakis if he'd ever been elected Ford, Johnson) if these circumstances plopped in their laps.
"encourages individuals to add to or modify software without fear of legal repercussions, so long as they abide by the conditions of the general public license, which stipulates that the program must remain open and sharable" sounds like a pretty reasonable shortened form of the intent of the GPL for lay people. I'm not sure one should expect a news article in the mainstream press to contain the text of the license or an entire treatise on how it came about and how it is applied.
I thought I read somewhere that TSMC was gearing up to do 32nm fabrication on contract for other companies. Here's a reference to assure me I have some sliver of sanity left. 45nm by September, and 32nm by Q4 of '09. So it seems that at least one company might be an option for outsourcing some fabrication.
Chartered Semi just signed another tech partnership with IBM, Samsung, Infineon, and Freescale. This one goes down to 32nm.
Fujitsu, although not especially known for fabbing chips for third parties, is working on getting down to 32nm as well. They do some fabbing for others now.
In any case, this story at Fabtech gives a much more reasoned and insightful look at the issues. They says it's likely AMD will outsource lower-end CPUs and continue to outsourc emuch of the GPU business as ATI already did. They may ramp up more outsourced work to Chartered than they currently do, and may share some fab space at Dresden and in New York. That's a far cry from going fully fabless.
If 2600 Pacman was closer to the arcade original, it might have been a console-drawing purchase. The mazes are different on the 2600, and the graphics are not as good as in the arcade. It's not a system issue, because Ms. Pacman was much truer to the arcade.
Yes, my wife and I still have two working Sears VCSes (the store branded 2600, made by Atari for Sears) and a spare new and unplayed 2600 in the box in case our two VCS units ever fail. We also have a Colecovision, and Intellevision, a C64, two Genesis systems, an NES, a SuperNES, and an Amiga in addition to our PCs. The PCs ar eour primary gaming platform now. Out of all the consoles and older computers, though, the NES gets the most play time. That's mostly because I have some great strategy games like Ghenghis Khan, Shingen the Ruler, and Defender of the Crown for the NES that have wonderful replay value. There's jsut something to be said even today, though, for games like Pitfall!, Combat, Megalomania, Eggomania, Warlords, and Circus Atari.
There are places that tax cars as personal property each year. I used to live in Missouri and paid hundreds of dollars in sales tax, then hundreds of dollars each year to keep my car, and hundreds of dollars a year in gasoline taxes, about a hundred on state and city licenses for the car with the required safety inspection, and ten bucks for a new driver's license every time I moved or one expired (every three years). License plates cost more based on horsepower, or at least they used to. Custom plates are seriously more expensive than random plates. They tax on the depreciated value of the car, and if the car is under a certain value you pay no tax. IIRC, the personal property tax was actually to your county of residence.
Now I live in Illinois. I paid sales tax. My driver's license is good for six years. I don't pay personal property taxes on the car. Plates are a bit more expensive than basic Missouri plates, but there's no mandatory yearly safety inspection to pay for, there's no horsepower tax, and custom plates are only nominally more. Yet, Illinois roads and bridges tend to be in better shape than those in Missouri. Part of it is, of course, because the state has so many more residents paying those taxes, and the fuel tax is higher. It still seems like a better system to me. Some areas of the state do have smog inspections and additional taxes, and large parts of the Chicago area have tolls on the Interstate highway system. The effect still seems to be better on regular guys like me.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is even better, because kudzu is fairly high in cellulose, grows very quickly, and will grow pretty much everywhere you want it to grow (and lots of places you don't).
Another really good, fast-growing source of cellulose is hemp, but don't hold breath for that in the US. It looks like it could be pot, just like powdered sugar looks like it could be cocaine. So the timber and cotton industries ^W^W^W^W DEA people keep making sure it's illegal to grow here.
Pardoned is at least still convicted. They don't serve their time, but they've still been convicted. Also, while the criminal conviction doesn't assure anything in civil court, I believe it is admissible as evidence. Of course a pardon could be used as counter-evidence I suppose.
By the way... IANAL, this isn't legal advice, no warranty is made on these remarks, jurisdictions probably differ, YMMV, don't blame me, seek reputable counsel if you have questions, results not necessarily typical, rinse eyes with water for fifteen minutes after accidental contact, not for internal use, do not induce vomiting if swallowed, do not use outdoors without properly designed and installed safety measures, and if you piss into the wind you'll probably get wet.
I'm really very sorry for you that noone with mod points has noticed this gem. I'm not sur eif I'd go with "funny", or "insightful", but it's both.
He wasn't talking abut calling a native method from a Java program. He was talking about the JVM itself using native libraries to do some of its work. And yes, at that level it's often advisable to make some vertical scalability-minded decisions.
Okay, so here's AT&T's line: if the spectrum is cheaper, and the contracts for service are cheaper, then the government doesn't collect as much money leasing the spectrum at auction and doesn't collect as much taxes on the service contracts. So the taxes paid are diminished, and the FCC has to be funded, but where, AT&T would like to know, are those funds coming from?
Gee, if Google, Skype, my hometown, LG, Mattel, or Playskool sell me a device that is cheaper, uses cheaper services, and the services are made even cheaper by the fact that the spectrum was cheaper, where's it costing me money? Maybe I pay a little more tax somewhere, sure, if it's needed. But I'm saving money up front, and will the new taxes (if they ever come about) be worse than AT&T's rapacious fees?
See, AT&T, the tax payers are the consumers. Say it with me now. The taxpayers are the consumers. You can't claim you'll be hurting the taxpayers by helping the consumers. It's all the same money. It's just that now someone else might be paying the taxes instead of paying you and you paying taxes on our obscene profits.
It's the taxpayers' spectrum, not yours, AT&T. It's the taxpayers' money that you've been extracting for them for this incompatible feature, that locked handset, this early termination charge because you sold a phone that broke four times under warranty and you wouldn't fix or replace it the fifth time the same thing broke one week after the warranty period. Perhaps in your newfound quest to protect the taxpayers, you should stop screwing your customers at every turn, since they'r ethe ones paying the damn taxes.
And I think that John F. Kennedy should not have been elected by thousands of dead people in Cook County. And Boss Tweed said he didn't mind not being able to pick the election winner as long as he got to pick the candidates. And the Democrats outed a perfectly legal but morally questionable act from a previously sealed court document to get Jack Ryan out of the Senate race for their darling Obama, which was simply abhorrent.
Democrats bus people to the polls in larger cities. They have party-funded voter registration drives in which they announce to the people they're registering which party is doing them the favor.
It's all corrupt, and to pretend the Democrats have clean hands is dishonest and pitiful.
I doubt they'd forget. I can see them laughing about it at parties and talking about how stupid the politicians were for handing them such an all-around win for them. They'd talk about the pledge whenever it's convenient to their purposes, and they'd ask for government help in overcoming the financial burdens of it in some way, even if they're not doing what they promised. They'd also be sure to remember this attack on the public on two fronts come election time, when the gift givers need a little extra push toward office.
You can't change the wording of the license, I don't believe. If that clause is in place, you have the right to use GPLv2 or later, but so does everyone you redistribute it to. Only the copyright holder can change the license terms, but they can allow you and every other member of the public to choose which license to use out of their prescribed set.
IANAL, but it doesn't make much sense that you could just change the license wording yourself, unless there's explicit permission to do so. Choosing to be bound by a later version of the license doesn't mean you can take that choice away from others.
There's little to no evidence that asthma is primarily linked to genetics. Pesticides, herbicides, tobacco smoke, paints, carpet fumes, colds and bronchitis early in life, lack of exposure to certain infections, bird droppings, and lots of other possible causes are being looked at as environmental causes or triggers of asthma.
s thmat hma/asthma-causes.phps es.htmm a/Asthma_Causes.html
http://www.healthinsite.gov.au/topics/Causes_of_A
http://www.lungdiseasefocus.com/articles/about-as
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~aair/asthma_cau
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/asthma/causes.htm
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/Asth
It's terribly cold-hearted and factually wrong to blame the guy for his son having asthma.
What you're describing with your 99% "do it" and 1% "don't do it" is a fuzzy-to-discrete system. It has a fuzzy logic aspect to it, but the output is being converted into a discrete binary action.
Those do exist. There's another type, though, that is a fully fuzzy system. A canonical example is a thermostat.
Instead of 99% "do it" vs 1% "don't do it" as to turning on a furnace to raise a temperature (a fuzzy to discrete system), a variable valve could be used to turn the fuel flow on to 99%, or to 3%, or 57%.
A third type is a fuzzy random system, in which you adjust your somewhere between 0.01 and 1, then randomize a number between 0 and 1 and then make a discrete output based on whether the fuzzy value and the random number are in agreement. The fuzzy value is kind of like a cut-off in this case, where if the fuzzy value is 93%, then anything randomized as 0.93 or less triggers an "on" state and anything randomized as 0.94 to 1.0 triggers an "off" state.
Now, there's obviously a bunch of neat stuff in quantum computing besides the point I'm wanting clarified, and I do thank you again for pointing those things out. I still have an intuitive feeling that the second and third types of fuzzy system I've listed above can be realized more quickly in a quantum system than with the fuzzy values being stored as floating point values in a classical binary system. I'm just not sure we're reaching one another, and much of that is probably my limited knowledge of the quantum computing topic. Anyway, thanks so much for the conversation although we've been mostly talking past one another. It can be fun to try to hash these things out, even when we fail.
Is that enough time to discharge the power into the Flux Capacitor?
The releasing of source code for a device that must have its software vetted by the phone companies does not mean the owners of a phone will be allowed to run modified versions on their phones when attached to the network. It's entirely possible to release source code to the public, and also make sure that only cryptographically signed versions of that source work in a particular situation.
Let's face it, the Tivo effect has to be allowed here, because Apple didn't release a product with code that had been licensed under a license released the same day as the product. The only versions of the GPL in force on any of the software they used would be 2 and maybe 1. If GPLv3 was released the same day as the product, there's no way the already extant code they used at the time of the release was licensed exclusively under GPLv3.
I haven't read TFA yet, but I'm betting some of them think it's a good thing for the project and are willing to do what they're doing, despite the desire to do more coding.
No, you want juicy and tangy. Theo's prickly and bitter. ;-)
... Transgaming? Trolltech?
MSFT, Linux, and Transmeta? Hmmm. M, L,
Thanks for the explanation. I'm aware that entanglement means that changing the state of one causes a corresponding change in the other, and that that's a primary strength of quantum computers.
What I'm really wanting to know though, is not how it's done, but how it's to be used.
In current fuzzy systems, it's simple enough to have something that's neither 1 nor 0 until your collapse the value. It's even easy enough to not collapse a value and to do things to a certain degree when that makes sense. That's what fuzzy is all about. It's all multi-state logic and that makes certain kinds of programming really much easier to make accurate than using binary logic. Now, the big drawback here is that in a classical fuzzy system, there are many checks to be made and many adjustments to be made to a value before it's in its required state to make a decision.
If there was a multiply entangled system measuring multiple inputs simultaneously, and one could collapse all that input into one or a couple of outputs immediately instead of serially applying adjustments to a value then one could use these qubits as a fuzzy system that operates essentially instantaneously compared to the serial progression through revaluation cycles needed in fuzzy systems of today. This would make many types of process control and even AI perform much faster, and that would be a wonderful application of the technology. I'm not nearly so interested in quantum cryptography and blind searches day-to-day as I am in, say, seeing multiply redundant, fuzzy-based control systems working suitably fast to handle obstacle avoidance and balance maintenance in off-road vehicles.
Okay, then, is it piracy for you to get your song into an MP3 format? It's a fair use to do it yourself. It's piracy for someone else to let you download the MP3 (AAC, OGG, whatever), but you're not the one distributing something without compensating the artist. You've got a license to that song, and getting the song into a different format for easier listening is your right.
The guy in this case didn't give a bunch of copies away. He just got a copy for which he already had a license -- because he didn't pay for a copy which did not work. He paid for a copy that would work and the company in question failed to provide it. $13,000 is a lot of money for a blank disk, which is effectively what they sold him. That's bad faith on their part, and he could have sued to get his money back and gone to spend it with the competition. The software company is probably happier to keep his money and let him have the cracked copy.
Also, would it be piracy if, instead of downloading the new copy already cracked, he just downloaded a cracking program that when run made his original copy work? Would it be piracy to provide that program? It is probably illegal under the DMCA, because it could be construed as deliberately breaking copy protection to enable piracy. However, the purpose here wasn't to enable piracy. It was to make the damn thing work as purchased.
It's not really piracy to pay for software then download a cracked copy, is it? I mean, he's just using the working copy for which he paid.
That sounds a lot like a fuzzy value, only stored in a single qubit instead of as a floating-point representation of possibility.
Fuzzy logic is, after all, all about multi-state truth values and proportions of truth. So given your description, it sounds like with this gate what can be done is to (eventually, of course) create a non-deterministic fuzzy application platform with very high speed and very small storage requirements.
Is that in the right stall, conceptually, or am I missing the barn?
FWIW, I think GWB is a good guy with good intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell, don't you?
I think Bush could take some advice that he doesn't and could get rid of many of his current advisers. I think he puts loyalty above ability even at the cost of the well-being of his country and the world. I think he means well, and if he could successfully accomplish what he wants to do it'd be great for both the US and the world at large. Unfortunately, poor execution of a plan is sometimes worse than having the wrong plan.
I think a lot of people disagree with Bush because they think he's a bad guy. I don't. I agree with using military might, if necessary, to stop terrorism. I also think it's gone too far (like having US forces instead of a pan-Arab army trying to keep order after the fall of Saddam, or attacking Iraq at all when it means taking troops away from Afghanistan) and been horribly bungled in application. So I support Bush in theory, but not necessarily in practice.
If Bush could command his troops to the victory he wanted, that would be fine by me. However, he remembered the gunboats and forgot the diplomacy. While I'm sure certain other administrations would have done better, I'm sure some would have done worse (Gore if he was in office, Dukakis if he'd ever been elected Ford, Johnson) if these circumstances plopped in their laps.
"encourages individuals to add to or modify software without fear of legal repercussions, so long as they abide by the conditions of the general public license, which stipulates that the program must remain open and sharable" sounds like a pretty reasonable shortened form of the intent of the GPL for lay people. I'm not sure one should expect a news article in the mainstream press to contain the text of the license or an entire treatise on how it came about and how it is applied.
I thought I read somewhere that TSMC was gearing up to do 32nm fabrication on contract for other companies. Here's a reference to assure me I have some sliver of sanity left. 45nm by September, and 32nm by Q4 of '09. So it seems that at least one company might be an option for outsourcing some fabrication.
Chartered Semi just signed another tech partnership with IBM, Samsung, Infineon, and Freescale. This one goes down to 32nm.
UMC and TI are working on 32nm together, too.
Fujitsu, although not especially known for fabbing chips for third parties, is working on getting down to 32nm as well. They do some fabbing for others now.
In any case, this story at Fabtech gives a much more reasoned and insightful look at the issues. They says it's likely AMD will outsource lower-end CPUs and continue to outsourc emuch of the GPU business as ATI already did. They may ramp up more outsourced work to Chartered than they currently do, and may share some fab space at Dresden and in New York. That's a far cry from going fully fabless.
If 2600 Pacman was closer to the arcade original, it might have been a console-drawing purchase. The mazes are different on the 2600, and the graphics are not as good as in the arcade. It's not a system issue, because Ms. Pacman was much truer to the arcade.
Yes, my wife and I still have two working Sears VCSes (the store branded 2600, made by Atari for Sears) and a spare new and unplayed 2600 in the box in case our two VCS units ever fail. We also have a Colecovision, and Intellevision, a C64, two Genesis systems, an NES, a SuperNES, and an Amiga in addition to our PCs. The PCs ar eour primary gaming platform now. Out of all the consoles and older computers, though, the NES gets the most play time. That's mostly because I have some great strategy games like Ghenghis Khan, Shingen the Ruler, and Defender of the Crown for the NES that have wonderful replay value. There's jsut something to be said even today, though, for games like Pitfall!, Combat, Megalomania, Eggomania, Warlords, and Circus Atari.
There are places that tax cars as personal property each year. I used to live in Missouri and paid hundreds of dollars in sales tax, then hundreds of dollars each year to keep my car, and hundreds of dollars a year in gasoline taxes, about a hundred on state and city licenses for the car with the required safety inspection, and ten bucks for a new driver's license every time I moved or one expired (every three years). License plates cost more based on horsepower, or at least they used to. Custom plates are seriously more expensive than random plates. They tax on the depreciated value of the car, and if the car is under a certain value you pay no tax. IIRC, the personal property tax was actually to your county of residence.
Now I live in Illinois. I paid sales tax. My driver's license is good for six years. I don't pay personal property taxes on the car. Plates are a bit more expensive than basic Missouri plates, but there's no mandatory yearly safety inspection to pay for, there's no horsepower tax, and custom plates are only nominally more. Yet, Illinois roads and bridges tend to be in better shape than those in Missouri. Part of it is, of course, because the state has so many more residents paying those taxes, and the fuel tax is higher. It still seems like a better system to me. Some areas of the state do have smog inspections and additional taxes, and large parts of the Chicago area have tolls on the Interstate highway system. The effect still seems to be better on regular guys like me.
...and where do you think the majority of NVidia's market is?
Damn, does /. have a FPS rating on your system? I mean, come on, at least upgrade to core storage.