If you are doing VMs and games, I'd wait a month for the i5 systems from Intel to hit the market. These are the more-affordable mainstream versions of the i7 that are still faster than the AMD boxes while being lower-priced that even a i920, plus the motherboards will be simpler and less expensive than the X58 boards for current i7's. With 4 cores and good power characteristics, you should be fine. The problem with the newest AMD's, aside from power consumption, is that AMD has nothing new planned until at least the end of 2010 aside from maybe . It is very unclear whether or not Bulldozer is going to work on an AM3 platform, while there is a very clear upgrade path for the 1156 sockets through at least 2011.
Tom's Hardware's review points out that the real competitor to this chip is the Core i5 750 which is coming out next month and from Tom's simulations using a downgraded Core i920 it looks like the AMD chip is already beaten.. meaning that AMD is going to have to cut the price on this thing quickly. Basically: If you want one of these things, wait a month until the i5's become available and then buy them for $200 where AMD will be forced to price them. Or, if you are building a whole new system, I'd get an i5 since it combines most of the performance of the i7 with a lower cost structure and future-upgradeability which AMD cannot offer right now. The Phenom II's had a decent if short run as competitors to the Core 2. Unfortunately for AMD the Core 2 is heading for bargain basement territory by the end of the year, and AMD (which desparately needs a new microarchitecture) has nothing to offer but overclocks of an already hot chip until at least last 2010 if not 2011.
That story did not make the front page, it was squirreled away under a hard to reach subsection... but a whiny complaint about Microsoft's search engine (which everyone here claims to never use anyway) did make the front page. My point stands.
Maybe you should have actually read my post instead of rabidly foaming at the mouth since I didn't automatically bash Microsoft. If you had read what I posted, I specifically said that the first 4 Google results were for why Microsoft software is so expensive, but additionally, that the link to an article on Macs was shown on the first page. Maybe it is you who should be posting AC since you don't even take the time to comprehend anything that might disagree with your hatred of anything from Microsoft. Let me guess, you've never actually made any contributions to open source software or done anything positive have you? It's much easier to hate anyone you disagree with, especially when you come to a site like Slashdot that rewards groupthink. My suggestion is that you go out and contribute something of value, it doesn't even have to be a huge coding project. I personally have reported a bunch of bugs to the KDE team that helped in a very small way to make KDE 4.3 a better release... what have you done?
Google also puts "Why are Macs so expensive?" on the first page of its search, although the first 4 hits are for various Microsoft products including Windows and Office. Frankly, this is the standard sensationalist crap that Slashdot excels at now a days... Hey Slashdot, how about covering the fact that KDE 4.3 was just released today? Oh I forgot, this site is about nitpicking and hating everything Microsoft does, while still secretly using there software and never contributing anything of value to open-source.
All excellent points. One other thing is that if the defendant's counsel (Nesson or otherwise) never objected to that question and did not properly preserve the objection for appeal, it might not be an appealable issue even if the question was improper.
The Tenenbaum litigation was dominated by the larger-than-life personality of Tenenbaum's counsel, Harvard Law School professor [Charles Nesson], who infuriated the plaintiffs, and at times Judge Nancy Gertner, with his unusual litigation tactics. These included making audio recordings of the attorneys and the court, and then posting the results to his blog, and publicizing internal discussions with potential expert witnesses about legal strategy. A sanctions motion against Nesson for his recording practices remains pending.
Moral of the story: Just because some crazy-ass professor has "Harvard" next to his name does not mean he is going to magically get you off. Hell, from the looks of this case this Nesson guy should probably be brought up on sanctions for trying to turn this trial into a circus for his own fantasy-version of fair use. An attorney representing a client is supposed to act in the client's best interest, and not in the best-interest of his political cause. From what I've seen of this Nesson guy, his argument that P2P of complete copyrighted works constitutes "fair use" is completely ridiculous.. just see the four factors reiterated in Acuff-Rose case: There's no transformative use at all, these are all commercial works not some political diatribe, and the guy was distributing complete copyright works online. About his only defense is that he wasn't charging for the works, but that factor alone is never going to win. Oh, I'm sure this new "fair use" theory is popular with other faculty at Harvard and in some bizzaro academic enclaves, but in the real world it was a great way to get his client screwed over. Not that Nesson cares, it will just make for publishing fodder he can push out to a hapless law review that's more wowed by his "Harvard" credentials than by his complete lack of legal reasoning.
Oh, and pending my passage of the bar exam I finished two days ago, yes I will be a lawyer. I also went to a school with a much better copyright curriculum than whatever these jokers at Harvard are pushing.
You beat me to posting the URL, good catch. This whole incident does pose an interesting point about Linux security: Linux is becoming less secure because Firefox (sometimes on its own) or Firefox + Flash are allowing for cross-platform hijacks that no longer care about which OS you are running. Hacker's don't have to become root to do real damage now, and if Linux wants to keep its edge the next step in security is how to protect the user from the browser.
So I'm assuming you are typing your comment in from somebody else's computer, because following your impeccable logic nobody should ever buy any piece of computer technology ever because something else is going to come along and make it obsolete. I can also say that if you are not a hypocrite you'd wake up every single day and loudly thank everyone who does buy technology, because if nobody went out and paid for computers, they would not exist for you to act like a smarmy bitch on.
I assure you that the new drive's performance is quite fine for the amount of money I paid for it, and (because I'm a lot smarter than you) I was quite aware that newer and better drives were on the horizon, but I still made my purchase and have no regrets. Since I use my laptop for work that you can't even comprehend, I know I'm getting the value out of it that I put into it, making it a fair deal.
Fortunately I got it for only about ~$300 so I only "lost" $100 with the new ones coming out. That having been said, I don't regret the purchase at all, it is insanely faster than any other laptop drive out there, while being completely silent and power-friendly. As for TRIM support, I've heard that Intel is not going to add it for the older drives, but I'm not sure if that is just speculation or if it's been officially confirmed by Intel (Intel not expressly say the old drives are getting TRIM support is not the same as expressly denying the support). Fortunately, the drives with the newer firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
Oh and yes, it does run Linux (Arch 64-bit to be precise) just fine.
I can't wait for next year with the ONFI 2.1 FLASH chips (the new drives are not using the new ONFI standard yet) as well as 6Gbit SATA support. At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
Wow... Double Hearsay that we're supposed to believe without any evidence because... uh... we assume that Bush personally ordered individual cops all over the country to arrest people!
A better explanation is that eihter: 1. you're just lying because you know it will get upmodded on Slashdot; 2. The cop was lying to you to make himself sound more badass; 3. Even if the cop wasn't lying, his police chief issued the order and was not operating under orders that came from Cheney's deathstar, despite what you would like to believe in conspiracy land.
How can I say this? Well, if I haven't heard about all these muslims being arrested on Olberman's show, the daily show, the daily kos, huffington, moveon.org, or I hate Bush so much I don't mind if innocent people die to make me feel self-righteous.com, then it likely never happened. Considering all the stuff they make up, I'm sure they'd jump on anything that actually happened.
And to reply to myself.. several other posters have noted that taking the DCT of the compression blocks in the image will give information on how highly compressed the image is... there's one example.
I don't know about "quality", but frankly it shouldn't be too hard to compare similar images just by doing simple mathematical analysis on the results. I'm only vaguely familiar with image compression, but if a "worse" JPEG image is more blocky, would it be possible to run edge detection to find the most clearly defined blocks that indicates a particular picture is producing "worse" results? That's just one idea, I'm sure people who know the compression better can name many other properties that could easily be measured automatically. What a computer can't do is tell you if the image is subjectively worse, unless the same metric that the human uses to subjectively judge a picture happens to match the algorithm the computer is using, and even then it could vary by picture to picture. For example, a highly colorful picture might hide the artifacting much better than a picture that features lots of text. While the "blockiness" would be the same mathematically, the subjective human viewing it will notice the artifacts in the text much more.
X is already implemented badly... at least when it comes to running over the Internet. Don't let the fact that you managed to run xeyes once over an SSH connection on your Gigabit LAN fool you into thinking that X will runs well over the Internet, as I can assure you it doesn't. The kicker that drove me over the edge was when I noticed that X was sending a packet over the wire every time the #%@#%@T cursor blinked. I posted it to some forums where there were multiple fingers pointed back & forth between the X server, the toolkit, the desktop environment, etc. etc.... lots of blaming, but no solutions.
Your nickname is a bit ironic here. Oh, it's not ironic at all. BadAnalogy guy is a meta-troll who posts things that are blatantly factually incorrect, but gets modded up because he knows how to play on the biases that exist on Slashdot. For example, it is very popular with the "elite" Slashdot moderators to negatively compare the US to any other country in the world, no matter how despotic they are, and BadAnalogy guy did this to get moderation points here. Then somebody who actually has a clue about what is really going on invariably corrects him, but unfortunately is often not up-modded to match the original troll. In that regard, it would only be ironic if his name was GoodAnalogyGuy.
Yes, because the president is supposed to lead the country, not waste taxpayer money every time somebody has a real or imagined beef with the federal government. If you want to change the government, the Constitution has these things called "elections", not "lawsuits". I don't even agree with Obama on most topics, and I'm 100% convinced that his expansions of the federal government that Slashdot seems to completely approve of will have a vastly higher negative impact on my individual rights than the hypothetical outrage that people here feel that somebody in Al Queda might have had his "right to privacy" intruded upon. However, the proper way for me to affect change in the government is not by suing every time they adopt a policy I don't agree with.
Hey I have a question about that. I remember back in the early days of Compiz in 2007 seeing some really cool demos that used input redirection so that you could to a 3D transform on a screen and still directly interact with windows. This allowed you to project a bunch of windows onto the desktop with an Expose like feature, and then dynamically zoom & interact with them with your mouse clicks being put through a mesh transformation so that the mouse would interact with the correct point on the transformed display. This was billed as a neat "coming attraction" in X.. and over 2 years later there is no support for it whatsoever in the X server (another failure of X). I was wondering if you could do something similar with Clutter handling the input redirection instead of a lower-level display server. This would allow for your wall of windows to open up, and for people to interact with them even if the windows are in a non-standard screen transformation.
That's incredibly insightful.. it is astounding to see the number of people who think that healthcare is a right when it objectively is not a right and can never be a right... and that is not my opinion but an objective fact. A "right" is only a protection from other people curtailing your own freedoms. Your right to free speech is a protection against others preventing you from speaking, your second amendment right to bear arms is a protection from the government banning you from lawfully owning firearms. However, a right NEVER entitles you to be given anything. My first amendment right does not entitle me to be given free airtime to rant at society and my second amendment right does not entitle me to steal guns.
Anyone who claims to have a "right" to healthcare does not actually believe in the constitution because the 13th amendment outlawed slavery. If you expect to enslave doctors and society in general for the simple reason that you got sick, then not only are you guaranteeing that the already heavily-socialized medical system will become even worse, but you also have no respect for real "human rights".
That's not really an accurate portrayal of what's going on. In reality it's more like, Intel is against the CPU side of AMD, in a semi-cordial relationship with the graphics side of AMD (ATI) and swatting at Nvidia like an annoying bug... which is all that Nvidia is compared to Intel despite Jen-Hsun Huang's deluded sense of grandeur. Remember that Intel has supported ATI's crossfire configuration natively for a long time, and this support continues into the high-end X58 chipsets making Crossfire a very easy solution to implement. SLI on the other hand is either done through a dodgy "certification" of motherboard BIOS's by Nvidia, or by an actual bridge chip which has to be added to the motherboard simply to do SLI.
Larrabee will change many things, especially bringing Intel into competition for high end graphics. Frankly, I can't wait because it will mean that a fully documented architecture (vectorized x86) with pre-existing compiler support will finally be available. Linux stands to gain as the biggest beneficiary since getting graphics and general-purpose software running on Larrabee won't require the black-box drivers that NVidia and ATI supply, or the "documentation" that ATI dumps out that takes 2 years for open source developers to get even half working.
In your "fundamentalists" group I sincerely hope you are also adding in all the left-wing teachers unions and academics who REALLY run the school system. Modern educators hate things like objective tests since not everybody does equally well, and they desperately want to eliminate competition from schools since it is considered to promote terrible things like capitalism. When your math teacher only cares about "feelings" and not objective laws of mathematics, it doesn't matter that he followed his Union leader's instructions to vote for Obama, you'll still get morons coming out of the school system.
Huh?? She appeared to have had excellent counsel throughout the first trial, appeal, and second trial. The facts are what they are and while the award is stupidly high, it seemed pretty reasonable that a preponderance of the evidence did indicate she was trading songs over Kazaa....
No it is not a loophole allowing that in the slightest. Notice what I said about state actors where a person is acting at the direction of the government. If the government hires people to conduct searches... they become state actors and now the 4th amendment applies. The Best Buy guys had nothing to do with the government, and voluntarily reported what they found. They were not compelled or even actively encouraged to call the cops, they chose to do it on their own, which means they were not state actors.
No they wouldn't have been, because there is nothing about this case that is legally novel or particularly controversial. The techs were not state actors (meaning working for the government either officially or at the direction of somebody from the government). Therefore, the 4th amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search & seizure do NOT apply (notice how I'm NOT talking about expectation of privacy... you don't even get to that issue when there's no state action).
There have been cases in the past where criminals have broken into people's houses and stole items that prove crimes (like say papers proving bank fraud or something like that). Later when the cops bust them and recover the items, those papers were completely valid as evidence against the original owners of the papers, even though the police would have needed a warrant to get the papers if they had conducted a direct search & seizure. If a criminal breaking into your house doesn't count as state action, then voluntarily handing over your computer to techs who are supposed to know how to fix the computer is not the brightest move.
Why? Despite the fact that some AMD drivers use DRM, it has nothing whatsoever to do with AMD or ATI. Considering most of the developers who actually write the code work for Intel (including the ones who created the modern DRM2), and none of them work for AMD (who does little to contribute to OSS despite the fanboyish praise they get on this site) it would be more accurate to call it IDRM, but that would also be dumb.
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If you are doing VMs and games, I'd wait a month for the i5 systems from Intel to hit the market. These are the more-affordable mainstream versions of the i7 that are still faster than the AMD boxes while being lower-priced that even a i920, plus the motherboards will be simpler and less expensive than the X58 boards for current i7's. With 4 cores and good power characteristics, you should be fine. The problem with the newest AMD's, aside from power consumption, is that AMD has nothing new planned until at least the end of 2010 aside from maybe . It is very unclear whether or not Bulldozer is going to work on an AM3 platform, while there is a very clear upgrade path for the 1156 sockets through at least 2011.
Tom's Hardware's review points out that the real competitor to this chip is the Core i5 750 which is coming out next month and from Tom's simulations using a downgraded Core i920 it looks like the AMD chip is already beaten.. meaning that AMD is going to have to cut the price on this thing quickly. Basically: If you want one of these things, wait a month until the i5's become available and then buy them for $200 where AMD will be forced to price them. Or, if you are building a whole new system, I'd get an i5 since it combines most of the performance of the i7 with a lower cost structure and future-upgradeability which AMD cannot offer right now. The Phenom II's had a decent if short run as competitors to the Core 2. Unfortunately for AMD the Core 2 is heading for bargain basement territory by the end of the year, and AMD (which desparately needs a new microarchitecture) has nothing to offer but overclocks of an already hot chip until at least last 2010 if not 2011.
That story did not make the front page, it was squirreled away under a hard to reach subsection... but a whiny complaint about Microsoft's search engine (which everyone here claims to never use anyway) did make the front page. My point stands.
Maybe you should have actually read my post instead of rabidly foaming at the mouth since I didn't automatically bash Microsoft. If you had read what I posted, I specifically said that the first 4 Google results were for why Microsoft software is so expensive, but additionally, that the link to an article on Macs was shown on the first page. Maybe it is you who should be posting AC since you don't even take the time to comprehend anything that might disagree with your hatred of anything from Microsoft. Let me guess, you've never actually made any contributions to open source software or done anything positive have you? It's much easier to hate anyone you disagree with, especially when you come to a site like Slashdot that rewards groupthink. My suggestion is that you go out and contribute something of value, it doesn't even have to be a huge coding project. I personally have reported a bunch of bugs to the KDE team that helped in a very small way to make KDE 4.3 a better release... what have you done?
Google also puts "Why are Macs so expensive?" on the first page of its search, although the first 4 hits are for various Microsoft products including Windows and Office. Frankly, this is the standard sensationalist crap that Slashdot excels at now a days... Hey Slashdot, how about covering the fact that KDE 4.3 was just released today? Oh I forgot, this site is about nitpicking and hating everything Microsoft does, while still secretly using there software and never contributing anything of value to open-source.
All excellent points. One other thing is that if the defendant's counsel (Nesson or otherwise) never objected to that question and did not properly preserve the objection for appeal, it might not be an appealable issue even if the question was improper.
Moral of the story: Just because some crazy-ass professor has "Harvard" next to his name does not mean he is going to magically get you off. Hell, from the looks of this case this Nesson guy should probably be brought up on sanctions for trying to turn this trial into a circus for his own fantasy-version of fair use. An attorney representing a client is supposed to act in the client's best interest, and not in the best-interest of his political cause. From what I've seen of this Nesson guy, his argument that P2P of complete copyrighted works constitutes "fair use" is completely ridiculous.. just see the four factors reiterated in Acuff-Rose case: There's no transformative use at all, these are all commercial works not some political diatribe, and the guy was distributing complete copyright works online. About his only defense is that he wasn't charging for the works, but that factor alone is never going to win. Oh, I'm sure this new "fair use" theory is popular with other faculty at Harvard and in some bizzaro academic enclaves, but in the real world it was a great way to get his client screwed over. Not that Nesson cares, it will just make for publishing fodder he can push out to a hapless law review that's more wowed by his "Harvard" credentials than by his complete lack of legal reasoning.
Oh, and pending my passage of the bar exam I finished two days ago, yes I will be a lawyer. I also went to a school with a much better copyright curriculum than whatever these jokers at Harvard are pushing.
You beat me to posting the URL, good catch. This whole incident does pose an interesting point about Linux security: Linux is becoming less secure because Firefox (sometimes on its own) or Firefox + Flash are allowing for cross-platform hijacks that no longer care about which OS you are running. Hacker's don't have to become root to do real damage now, and if Linux wants to keep its edge the next step in security is how to protect the user from the browser.
So I'm assuming you are typing your comment in from somebody else's computer, because following your impeccable logic nobody should ever buy any piece of computer technology ever because something else is going to come along and make it obsolete. I can also say that if you are not a hypocrite you'd wake up every single day and loudly thank everyone who does buy technology, because if nobody went out and paid for computers, they would not exist for you to act like a smarmy bitch on.
I assure you that the new drive's performance is quite fine for the amount of money I paid for it, and (because I'm a lot smarter than you) I was quite aware that newer and better drives were on the horizon, but I still made my purchase and have no regrets. Since I use my laptop for work that you can't even comprehend, I know I'm getting the value out of it that I put into it, making it a fair deal.
Fortunately I got it for only about ~$300 so I only "lost" $100 with the new ones coming out. That having been said, I don't regret the purchase at all, it is insanely faster than any other laptop drive out there, while being completely silent and power-friendly. As for TRIM support, I've heard that Intel is not going to add it for the older drives, but I'm not sure if that is just speculation or if it's been officially confirmed by Intel (Intel not expressly say the old drives are getting TRIM support is not the same as expressly denying the support). Fortunately, the drives with the newer firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
Oh and yes, it does run Linux (Arch 64-bit to be precise) just fine.
I can't wait for next year with the ONFI 2.1 FLASH chips (the new drives are not using the new ONFI standard yet) as well as 6Gbit SATA support. At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
Wow... Double Hearsay that we're supposed to believe without any evidence because... uh... we assume that Bush personally ordered individual cops all over the country to arrest people!
A better explanation is that eihter: 1. you're just lying because you know it will get upmodded on Slashdot; 2. The cop was lying to you to make himself sound more badass; 3. Even if the cop wasn't lying, his police chief issued the order and was not operating under orders that came from Cheney's deathstar, despite what you would like to believe in conspiracy land.
How can I say this? Well, if I haven't heard about all these muslims being arrested on Olberman's show, the daily show, the daily kos, huffington, moveon.org, or I hate Bush so much I don't mind if innocent people die to make me feel self-righteous.com, then it likely never happened. Considering all the stuff they make up, I'm sure they'd jump on anything that actually happened.
And to reply to myself.. several other posters have noted that taking the DCT of the compression blocks in the image will give information on how highly compressed the image is... there's one example.
I don't know about "quality", but frankly it shouldn't be too hard to compare similar images just by doing simple mathematical analysis on the results. I'm only vaguely familiar with image compression, but if a "worse" JPEG image is more blocky, would it be possible to run edge detection to find the most clearly defined blocks that indicates a particular picture is producing "worse" results? That's just one idea, I'm sure people who know the compression better can name many other properties that could easily be measured automatically.
What a computer can't do is tell you if the image is subjectively worse, unless the same metric that the human uses to subjectively judge a picture happens to match the algorithm the computer is using, and even then it could vary by picture to picture. For example, a highly colorful picture might hide the artifacting much better than a picture that features lots of text. While the "blockiness" would be the same mathematically, the subjective human viewing it will notice the artifacts in the text much more.
X is already implemented badly... at least when it comes to running over the Internet. Don't let the fact that you managed to run xeyes once over an SSH connection on your Gigabit LAN fool you into thinking that X will runs well over the Internet, as I can assure you it doesn't. The kicker that drove me over the edge was when I noticed that X was sending a packet over the wire every time the #%@#%@T cursor blinked. I posted it to some forums where there were multiple fingers pointed back & forth between the X server, the toolkit, the desktop environment, etc. etc.... lots of blaming, but no solutions.
Your nickname is a bit ironic here.
Oh, it's not ironic at all. BadAnalogy guy is a meta-troll who posts things that are blatantly factually incorrect, but gets modded up because he knows how to play on the biases that exist on Slashdot. For example, it is very popular with the "elite" Slashdot moderators to negatively compare the US to any other country in the world, no matter how despotic they are, and BadAnalogy guy did this to get moderation points here. Then somebody who actually has a clue about what is really going on invariably corrects him, but unfortunately is often not up-modded to match the original troll. In that regard, it would only be ironic if his name was GoodAnalogyGuy.
s/affect/effect near the end there... preemptive grammar strike.
Yes, because the president is supposed to lead the country, not waste taxpayer money every time somebody has a real or imagined beef with the federal government. If you want to change the government, the Constitution has these things called "elections", not "lawsuits". I don't even agree with Obama on most topics, and I'm 100% convinced that his expansions of the federal government that Slashdot seems to completely approve of will have a vastly higher negative impact on my individual rights than the hypothetical outrage that people here feel that somebody in Al Queda might have had his "right to privacy" intruded upon. However, the proper way for me to affect change in the government is not by suing every time they adopt a policy I don't agree with.
Hey I have a question about that. I remember back in the early days of Compiz in 2007 seeing some really cool demos that used input redirection so that you could to a 3D transform on a screen and still directly interact with windows. This allowed you to project a bunch of windows onto the desktop with an Expose like feature, and then dynamically zoom & interact with them with your mouse clicks being put through a mesh transformation so that the mouse would interact with the correct point on the transformed display. This was billed as a neat "coming attraction" in X.. and over 2 years later there is no support for it whatsoever in the X server (another failure of X).
I was wondering if you could do something similar with Clutter handling the input redirection instead of a lower-level display server. This would allow for your wall of windows to open up, and for people to interact with them even if the windows are in a non-standard screen transformation.
That's incredibly insightful.. it is astounding to see the number of people who think that healthcare is a right when it objectively is not a right and can never be a right... and that is not my opinion but an objective fact. A "right" is only a protection from other people curtailing your own freedoms. Your right to free speech is a protection against others preventing you from speaking, your second amendment right to bear arms is a protection from the government banning you from lawfully owning firearms. However, a right NEVER entitles you to be given anything. My first amendment right does not entitle me to be given free airtime to rant at society and my second amendment right does not entitle me to steal guns.
Anyone who claims to have a "right" to healthcare does not actually believe in the constitution because the 13th amendment outlawed slavery. If you expect to enslave doctors and society in general for the simple reason that you got sick, then not only are you guaranteeing that the already heavily-socialized medical system will become even worse, but you also have no respect for real "human rights".
That's not really an accurate portrayal of what's going on. In reality it's more like, Intel is against the CPU side of AMD, in a semi-cordial relationship with the graphics side of AMD (ATI) and swatting at Nvidia like an annoying bug... which is all that Nvidia is compared to Intel despite Jen-Hsun Huang's deluded sense of grandeur.
Remember that Intel has supported ATI's crossfire configuration natively for a long time, and this support continues into the high-end X58 chipsets making Crossfire a very easy solution to implement. SLI on the other hand is either done through a dodgy "certification" of motherboard BIOS's by Nvidia, or by an actual bridge chip which has to be added to the motherboard simply to do SLI.
Larrabee will change many things, especially bringing Intel into competition for high end graphics. Frankly, I can't wait because it will mean that a fully documented architecture (vectorized x86) with pre-existing compiler support will finally be available. Linux stands to gain as the biggest beneficiary since getting graphics and general-purpose software running on Larrabee won't require the black-box drivers that NVidia and ATI supply, or the "documentation" that ATI dumps out that takes 2 years for open source developers to get even half working.
In your "fundamentalists" group I sincerely hope you are also adding in all the left-wing teachers unions and academics who REALLY run the school system.
Modern educators hate things like objective tests since not everybody does equally well, and they desperately want to eliminate competition from schools since it is considered to promote terrible things like capitalism. When your math teacher only cares about "feelings" and not objective laws of mathematics, it doesn't matter that he followed his Union leader's instructions to vote for Obama, you'll still get morons coming out of the school system.
ineffective assistance of counsel
Huh?? She appeared to have had excellent counsel throughout the first trial, appeal, and second trial. The facts are what they are and while the award is stupidly high, it seemed pretty reasonable that a preponderance of the evidence did indicate she was trading songs over Kazaa....
No it is not a loophole allowing that in the slightest. Notice what I said about state actors where a person is acting at the direction of the government. If the government hires people to conduct searches... they become state actors and now the 4th amendment applies. The Best Buy guys had nothing to do with the government, and voluntarily reported what they found. They were not compelled or even actively encouraged to call the cops, they chose to do it on their own, which means they were not state actors.
No they wouldn't have been, because there is nothing about this case that is legally novel or particularly controversial. The techs were not state actors (meaning working for the government either officially or at the direction of somebody from the government). Therefore, the 4th amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search & seizure do NOT apply (notice how I'm NOT talking about expectation of privacy... you don't even get to that issue when there's no state action).
There have been cases in the past where criminals have broken into people's houses and stole items that prove crimes (like say papers proving bank fraud or something like that). Later when the cops bust them and recover the items, those papers were completely valid as evidence against the original owners of the papers, even though the police would have needed a warrant to get the papers if they had conducted a direct search & seizure. If a criminal breaking into your house doesn't count as state action, then voluntarily handing over your computer to techs who are supposed to know how to fix the computer is not the brightest move.
Why? Despite the fact that some AMD drivers use DRM, it has nothing whatsoever to do with AMD or ATI. Considering most of the developers who actually write the code work for Intel (including the ones who created the modern DRM2), and none of them work for AMD (who does little to contribute to OSS despite the fanboyish praise they get on this site) it would be more accurate to call it IDRM, but that would also be dumb.