However, in the context of this discussion, when talking about rights "endowed by your creator" it may help to consider them rights endowed by virtue of your existence, regardless of how you got here.
Not to sound like a broken record; but this still doesn't answer anything.
Mind you, I'm not arguing against rights, or for taking them away. I just think there the concept needs a sound basis before we really can take them for granted, and drop them nonchalantly in conversation as if they are a thing in the world (like a toaster).
I don't have a God, therefore they didn't come from him. The universe doesn't give a crap, therefore not from that. Evolution is impersonal and mindless, therefore not from that either. We are not terribly special, so we don't have an intrinsic aura of "rights" that is unique to us. Animals, for the most part, don't have them, so it isn't something magical floating about life. Humans are animals, so... what gives us them but not dolphins. Etc...
Further, the whole idea of them being universal is very new, so the idea itself isn't immalleable, so they can't be truly universal. Hell, we can't even "enumerate" them, so we can't even say what they are. We can't even agree on the ones that have some acceptance (arms, property, health, marriage, life-or-abortion)...
Human rights are inalienable and universal, therefore they apply to all human beings.
Which is begging the question, and a bit of tautology. The question remains; where do they come from? We talk about "rights" as if they are a real thing, existing in the world, like the sky, rocks, or a toaster, but for some reason we never actually question what they are, or where they come from. This annoys me. Having a clear definition would get rid of a lot of issues and arguments.
If bearing arms is a right, then is owning a car, equality in marriage? If bearing arms is a right, than at what level can we restrict it? Hand guns for the menally ill, felons, personal nuclear warheads and tanks? Unreasonable search and seizure; at what level do things get unreasonable, what is the test for "reasonability"? I think they are a necessary thing, obviously, but the issues with such a fuzzy concept annoy me.
he government, when it treats non-citizens as a lower class having reduced rights, is acting against the constitution and the spirit of the declaration of independence.
On this we agree... though I'm sure there are legal interpretations that drive things, more than our opinion.
Where do they come from? They aren't natural, since in a wild state (no government, or enforcement of these rights) they wouldn't exist. Some of them didn't exist throughout much of human history, or only existed selectively to certain populations. I don't accept a concept of a creator, deist or otherwise, so they can't spring from that. Evolution and nature doesn't give a shit about us, or our rights, so it didn't come from there. This leaves one place where they could have come from; us.
Rights are a social construct, they only exist because we believe in them, and take action to enforce them. Rights are very much magic. One could argue that our constitution created said rights via social construct. The act of saying "these are your rights" and people believing it, made them so. If we all decided marriage or access to healthcare was a right, it would be tomorrow. I we all decided that freedom of speech or religion wasn't a right, it wouldn't be.
Also, if they are inalienable, and universal, then why do they only apply to American citizens, and only some sets of them, still, and only in circumstances not deemed special (terrorism)? Why shouldn't an illegal immigrant have the same rights as me, or a foreign national in another country when acted upon by US powers?
I ordered a $500 monitor from them, and it came in a box that exactly fit the actual box the product was in, no padding, no air space, nothing. Luckily it was fine, unlike the previous one where the outer box was crushed, and barely saved by their cheap plastic bubble sheets. The monitor survived, luckily, but had 3 dead pixels in the middle of the screen. Amazon returns can be nice (or knuckle headed).
Then I ordered a $10 picture frame and it came in a box, within another box, within another box, with a bunch of baffles, and the frame itself was suspended by styrofoam blocks. This picture frame doesn't even have a glass window to protect.
My favorite is ordering a small 52mm step-up ring, and it came in a HUGE (probably about 3'-square) box, full of those bubble sheets, protecting a 2 inch box with a small aluminum ring in it.
I don't give a shit if the US is "relevant". I don't see how this matters at all to my day to day existence. I'd rather be "irrelevant" with decent health care and education, to be honest. Without the USA being Boss Hog, I'm sure people would use their own militaries for actual threats, and they might not bomb countries to the stone age for idiotic political reasons (Iraq), which is a plus. Less violence is always good. Celebrating my society would be a nice thing, for a change. It feels like its been awhile now since America had anything to celebrate about itself.
but exposing hacking of a Chinese university serves no US interests whatsoever, it only gives China the moral high ground to continue its cyber attack against the US. If this is not planned by the central committee of the communist party, I don't know what is.
I'd say it does. Its like the diplomatic cable leaks, you can't be humiliated if you didn't do anything humiliating. We violated various treaties by hacking into the networks of a sovereign state. This isn't "good behavior". We also really can't bitch about China doing it to us anymore, since it is a game we like to play too. This is our government misbehaving, and it deserves to have its know rubbed in it a bit.
I'm all for everything coming out, at this point. National Security be damned. We need a clean slate, and we need heads; just to restore any modicum of faith in our masters (which is how they must see themselves). We, the people (ostensibly the real "masters"), need to see the whole mess exposed, so we can make a fair judgement and reckoning of ourselves.
Last time I checked, politicians could still be voted out of office by citizens, and corporations couldn't hold office or vote.
This is true on paper... But voting requires an informed public, the government is becoming fully opposed to this. I wouldn't vote for any politician that had a hand in the NSA's actions... But I'm not allowed to know this. If I have no way of knowing if my rights are being abused, how much, or by whom, how am I supposed to vote in an educated manner?
Transparency is a necessary requirement to informed voting, and transparency is increasingly seeming anathema to our government.
Further, it is harder to be a responsible voter thanks to politicians using money and psychological marketing techniques instead of actually talking to us like understanding people. There is no debate in this country anymore. The only issues you ever get to hear about is "Did You Know John Smith Want to Kill Your Children?!".
The only point in which your correct, is the end result of this reasoning; we, sadly, very much have the government we deserve. Which is depressing, since I never thought I'd actively be ashamed of being American. I never really thought I could buy into the idea that our government is out to get us, and has nothing but general contempt for us. These statements are becoming more true feeling everyday. I'm beginning to sound like a tin-foil hat Libertarian, of late, which depresses me since I really can't stand most of their ideology (being a far left, progressive, social libertarian).
We really need a Roosevelt (zombie Teddy, or zombie Franklin, I choose you).
This is what confuses me... It is trivial to encode messages in ways that no one but the intended target would ever know what your talking about. "I am going to the store to buy eggs" could mean all sorts of terrible things, if we got together and prearranged meanings. You can never catch things like this, unless your lucky.
All of our "terorrists will kill everyone, so trust us" actions seem to work on the presumption that all terrorists are morons. Which is probably pretty far from the truth.
It's 105 (40C) outside right now, please don't take my A/C away, this summer its going to be hotter than that, going up to 115+. When I was a kid it was 122 (50C), and our AC kicked the bucked (as it did in our car a week previous). That was not fun. That was pretty much the opposite of fun. Worse, when I was a kid, all we had was swamp coolers most the time, and in the middle of August they pretty much just make things more humid. I would have killed to have A/C during the summer then.
If I lived somewhere with sane temperatures, I'd agree though. Especially since most offices like to be subarctic, for some reason. Unless its winter, then they want to be hell.
Actually some people might notice things that others don't. Most LED tail-lights drive me absolutely crazy, but my dad doesn't even notice them. Same for sounds, the old TV in our bedroom has a high whine that only I can hear, my girlfriend can't hear it, and thinks I'm crazy since I unplug the TV before going to bed. Same for flourencent lights, some people can see the flicker from crappy ballasts, some are oblivious. People have different sensitivity to frequencies at the edge of perception, some people won't notice it, and some will. Welcome to normal human variation.
I recently went shopping for decent IPS displays, and most of the LED ones do noticeably flicker at low backlight levels. Some, cheaper ones, were tested with noticeable flickers at all levels. I picked one that still used tubes, since I generally work with low brightness levels (for print work), and even decent LED monitors started flickering there (and its hard to get a good, wide gamut, monitor with LEDs and not break the bank).
Actually it did via various access laws that give politicians very low rates for campaign advertising. The claim behind the laws was that a network has to provide equal time but the reality is that it lowered rates.
Huh? EAS doesn't even have rates, its emergency broadcast. It has never had advertising, and the idea of equal time on it is not applicable.
This will primarily be used to put out propaganda things post disaster. "Our hearts ache for the people of LowerDisasterWater. We shall stand together in our unwavering support for their re-emergence as a third rate backwater."
Because that happened with EAS on TV and radio. Oh... wait... it didn't.
What can/would the President send to every citizen on this other than a declaration of nation wide Martial Law? Storms and disasters are LOCAL issues
Kids these days... they exists mostly for nuclear war, and invasions. Something that was a background threat not that long ago. They haven't been used, thankfully, but if they ever need to be used, it would be a good thing. I really don't see having the potential to send out an emergency broadcast as a bad thing.
Imagine in the case of a truly large scale disaster (such as an asteroid) , or an actual nuclear attack, not being in range of an active TV or radio...
What can/would the President send to every citizen on this other than a declaration of nation wide Martial Law?
Ah... you're one of them. But even accepting that this is something that might happen in our lifetimes, I would think that some segment of our population (the rarely vindicated paranoids) would like to know, so they can grab their 10,000 firearms and cans of beans, and go out with their bullhorns to scream at their neighbors "I told you so!".
I admit, including cores in my silly example was a bad idea. Cores is still something that matters, somewhat. Most things are still horribly optimized for multiple cores, but in some "normal" applications, like encoding, they do matter. But, if you take a high end x-core AMD, and a high end x-core Intel, the difference will still be very subtle.
Hey, I've got a $10 Holga lens for my mirrorless setup. It was $10 (cheapest lens I own by a large margin), it takes fun pictures at parties, and it was ten dollars. I've been tempted to get a lomo or holga cheap film body for awhile now... Just because it is amusing, and exponentially cheaper than some of the other film cameras I want "for fun" (an old Leica, or Voigtlander Bessa). I say "fun", because I have a full DSLR kit, and a full mirrorless kit, both of these fulfill all my serious and professional needs. Holga and Lomos are for playing around with, and for taking photography back to its simplest principles. They fill the same roll as, and I hate to say this, Instagram.
There are still film labs floating around. Most towns with a college probably have some. Also, and I might be wrong, but I think the Lomography guys will develop film for you. You can ship it out of course, or drop it off at most Costcos or Walgreens. I'm not sure if those last two hold for 120, though.
I actually have a good deal of respect for Lomography, they've been working on keeping film stock alive, which benefits more than just them, or the mythical "hipsters".
And what about when the world is consuming trillions of gallons of Water from the oceans?
It is a good thing that the water cycle is really fast, then, especially when we ignore ground and surface fresh water. It also is a good thing that the oceans are stupendously large. Water, on a grand scale, isn't really a limited resource, or at least until we start cracking it for hydrogen, or something. Water is as renewable as oxygen and free (non-fossil) carbon.
The actual, functional, real-world , difference between most mid-high tier processors is pretty much nil. My 12 core 4.77 Intel Wacknut, is as subjectively fast as my 8 core, 4.55 AMD Dognugget. I pretty much guarantee that is is impossible to tell the difference with most computing tasks. For some, rare, tasks you might be able to tell, but these fall out of the experience of 99% of users (even gamers). For most modern PCs, the only big thing that will lead to a subjective performance gain is SSDs. For gamers, SSDs and decent GPUs (though even there we see huge diminishing returns, thanks to nothing really pushing the envelope much).
One reason I've been putting off upgrading my venerable AMD Quad-core 965 Black is that the performance gains would still be minimal for almost any application. I might gain 8-9 FPS, but that isn't worth $200+ (for Intel much more, since I'd need a new mobo and RAM). For my other uses, browsing the internet, email, writing, photography and light video editing, it wouldn't lead to any real gains whatsoever, even getting the biggest, baddest, hottest CPU out there. Upgrading my GPU would lead to much more bang for the back, as would getting a decent SSD.
But then again, at one point in my life I strived for the bleeding edge of everything, and my computer cost far more money than I could ever justify now, and 99% of the time all that power was largely sitting idle.
I've been looking at the 8350 for my next upgrade, but sadly it is finally time for a new mobo and RAM. Its been awhile since CPUs were the big bottleneck in gaming. My 965 is perfectly adequate, to be honest, it might not be when things are being optimized for the next console generation though. RAM isn't terribly important anymore either, since it is dirt cheap, and I rarely utilize my full 8gb outside of some games, and and some image/video editing tasks. GPU and HDD are the biggest improvements now.
Granted I'm a rather light user, not doing big databases, servers, compiling, etc... Heavier than average, but still not as heavy as some people around here. For average, there still really isn't a reason to get more than a $50-100 dual core chip, 4gb of RAM, and integrated GPU. AMD should be slaughtering that market.
Probably just either Intel or AMD fanboys being mad because I didn't heap unequivocal praise on whatever they like, or scorn on what they don't. I probably should have just posted "Meh. Buy what works for you."
basically, the 8-core AMD was slower performance-wise the 4-core Intel with the AMD running a few MHz faster
Take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. While Intel has been generally winning for awhile now, that doesn't really mean AMD is completely inferior. With like chips there are certain things a modern AMD will out-perform Intel on, such as single threaded tasks. Intel will generally smoke AMD on multithreaded tasks, though. There is also cost, while AMD might be 10% less benchmark happy than a like Intel chip, it generally is over 25% less expensive, and will generally run without need to buy a new costly motherboard.
My last big upgrade, several years ago now, the price difference between the AMD (Phenom II 4x 965 Black) and Intel (i7 something or another) was hugely dramatic, considering the fact that I'd need a new motherboard and new RAM on top of the CPU. It was about $300-400 difference (fully upgrading 8gb of RAM, with a new mobo). I took the 10% performance hit, happily. For enthusiast CPUs, you'd best take the hit, and use the cash on a better GPU.
I just wish I could mark articles as "unread" within a feed, without having to back out to a list and do a dodgy swipe (on Android, where I do most of my RSS browsing these days). Also there is still no way to easily subscribe to feed on Firefox, for some strange reason. Easy on Chrome, PiTA on Firefox.
Other than that it is perfectly adequate. Nothing more, nothing less.
Commafeed looks good, but won't play well on my phone or tablets, so... Web interfaces are great, but generally can be stupid on mobile devices. I'd rather have a dedicated app.
iGoogle is still going to be the killer. I'm going to miss having all my feeds, my mail, my weather, and/. waiting for me when I open my browser. There really isn't a replacement for it, as far as I can see. There are pages that try to duplicate it, but generally falls short by either being too much, too slow, or two kludgy and wonky.
Nah, it was Genocide. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Genocide, the one that is inexplicably still alive. Come to think of it, it might not have even been Diku. Time was a bit slippery back then, helped along by cheap booze, and copious amounts of illicit substances.
I just poked around to see if any sign of it was still around, and it seems to have been completely buried in obscurity. Not terribly surprised, most of my "pre-internet" youth is pretty much forgotten these days. I say BBS in polite company and people just shrug, the last one familiar to me died long ago (they managed to keep it going into the early 2000's, albeit only on telnet). Its odd, being nostalgic for something no one remembers.
Ah.. memories. Back in the late '90's some friends and I maintained a fork of decent sized MUD. We were constantly rewriting aspects of it, and as such tested things on unsuspecting players all the time. We definitely killed one character daily with some flavor of Vorpal Bunny. He was a good sport, so we also gave him "one use" God-like items in return.
Once, one of my bunnies got loose (didn't set nowander, or whatever it was), and pretty much decimated the newbie zones. My fellow IMMs were pissed.
Some of the code-bases for old MUDs were glorious. The one we had was Diku, but so heavily modified to be almost completely unrecognizable. It was a beast.
The big thing that we lost with MMOs is the ability for Imms to be directly involved with players. Imms could help players, hurt them, taunt them, and were generally involved in their lives. We were even working on a trials system to promote a player into the pantheon, giving them some subset of god powers, including the ability to spawn items, edit rooms, and have limited abilities over players. Hell, all it took to be a God was being good enough friends with the maintainers, and supplying them with a decent flow of beer. I kind of miss that.
I remember getting privileges in medium sized MUSH by just telling someone an idea for a zone I had. They had no problem with some random stranger creating content for them.
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However, in the context of this discussion, when talking about rights "endowed by your creator" it may help to consider them rights endowed by virtue of your existence, regardless of how you got here.
Not to sound like a broken record; but this still doesn't answer anything.
Mind you, I'm not arguing against rights, or for taking them away. I just think there the concept needs a sound basis before we really can take them for granted, and drop them nonchalantly in conversation as if they are a thing in the world (like a toaster).
I don't have a God, therefore they didn't come from him.
The universe doesn't give a crap, therefore not from that.
Evolution is impersonal and mindless, therefore not from that either.
We are not terribly special, so we don't have an intrinsic aura of "rights" that is unique to us.
Animals, for the most part, don't have them, so it isn't something magical floating about life.
Humans are animals, so... what gives us them but not dolphins.
Etc...
Further, the whole idea of them being universal is very new, so the idea itself isn't immalleable, so they can't be truly universal. Hell, we can't even "enumerate" them, so we can't even say what they are. We can't even agree on the ones that have some acceptance (arms, property, health, marriage, life-or-abortion)...
Human rights are inalienable and universal, therefore they apply to all human beings.
Which is begging the question, and a bit of tautology. The question remains; where do they come from? We talk about "rights" as if they are a real thing, existing in the world, like the sky, rocks, or a toaster, but for some reason we never actually question what they are, or where they come from. This annoys me. Having a clear definition would get rid of a lot of issues and arguments.
If bearing arms is a right, then is owning a car, equality in marriage? If bearing arms is a right, than at what level can we restrict it? Hand guns for the menally ill, felons, personal nuclear warheads and tanks? Unreasonable search and seizure; at what level do things get unreasonable, what is the test for "reasonability"? I think they are a necessary thing, obviously, but the issues with such a fuzzy concept annoy me.
he government, when it treats non-citizens as a lower class having reduced rights, is acting against the constitution and the spirit of the declaration of independence.
On this we agree... though I'm sure there are legal interpretations that drive things, more than our opinion.
I hate the word "rights"...
Where do they come from? They aren't natural, since in a wild state (no government, or enforcement of these rights) they wouldn't exist. Some of them didn't exist throughout much of human history, or only existed selectively to certain populations. I don't accept a concept of a creator, deist or otherwise, so they can't spring from that. Evolution and nature doesn't give a shit about us, or our rights, so it didn't come from there. This leaves one place where they could have come from; us.
Rights are a social construct, they only exist because we believe in them, and take action to enforce them. Rights are very much magic. One could argue that our constitution created said rights via social construct. The act of saying "these are your rights" and people believing it, made them so. If we all decided marriage or access to healthcare was a right, it would be tomorrow. I we all decided that freedom of speech or religion wasn't a right, it wouldn't be.
Also, if they are inalienable, and universal, then why do they only apply to American citizens, and only some sets of them, still, and only in circumstances not deemed special (terrorism)? Why shouldn't an illegal immigrant have the same rights as me, or a foreign national in another country when acted upon by US powers?
I ordered a $500 monitor from them, and it came in a box that exactly fit the actual box the product was in, no padding, no air space, nothing. Luckily it was fine, unlike the previous one where the outer box was crushed, and barely saved by their cheap plastic bubble sheets. The monitor survived, luckily, but had 3 dead pixels in the middle of the screen. Amazon returns can be nice (or knuckle headed).
Then I ordered a $10 picture frame and it came in a box, within another box, within another box, with a bunch of baffles, and the frame itself was suspended by styrofoam blocks. This picture frame doesn't even have a glass window to protect.
My favorite is ordering a small 52mm step-up ring, and it came in a HUGE (probably about 3'-square) box, full of those bubble sheets, protecting a 2 inch box with a small aluminum ring in it.
4. ???
5. Profit...
I don't give a shit if the US is "relevant". I don't see how this matters at all to my day to day existence. I'd rather be "irrelevant" with decent health care and education, to be honest. Without the USA being Boss Hog, I'm sure people would use their own militaries for actual threats, and they might not bomb countries to the stone age for idiotic political reasons (Iraq), which is a plus. Less violence is always good. Celebrating my society would be a nice thing, for a change. It feels like its been awhile now since America had anything to celebrate about itself.
but exposing hacking of a Chinese university serves no US interests whatsoever, it only gives China the moral high ground to continue its cyber attack against the US. If this is not planned by the central committee of the communist party, I don't know what is.
I'd say it does. Its like the diplomatic cable leaks, you can't be humiliated if you didn't do anything humiliating. We violated various treaties by hacking into the networks of a sovereign state. This isn't "good behavior". We also really can't bitch about China doing it to us anymore, since it is a game we like to play too. This is our government misbehaving, and it deserves to have its know rubbed in it a bit.
I'm all for everything coming out, at this point. National Security be damned. We need a clean slate, and we need heads; just to restore any modicum of faith in our masters (which is how they must see themselves). We, the people (ostensibly the real "masters"), need to see the whole mess exposed, so we can make a fair judgement and reckoning of ourselves.
Last time I checked, politicians could still be voted out of office by citizens, and corporations couldn't hold office or vote.
This is true on paper... But voting requires an informed public, the government is becoming fully opposed to this. I wouldn't vote for any politician that had a hand in the NSA's actions... But I'm not allowed to know this. If I have no way of knowing if my rights are being abused, how much, or by whom, how am I supposed to vote in an educated manner?
Transparency is a necessary requirement to informed voting, and transparency is increasingly seeming anathema to our government.
Further, it is harder to be a responsible voter thanks to politicians using money and psychological marketing techniques instead of actually talking to us like understanding people. There is no debate in this country anymore. The only issues you ever get to hear about is "Did You Know John Smith Want to Kill Your Children?!".
The only point in which your correct, is the end result of this reasoning; we, sadly, very much have the government we deserve. Which is depressing, since I never thought I'd actively be ashamed of being American. I never really thought I could buy into the idea that our government is out to get us, and has nothing but general contempt for us. These statements are becoming more true feeling everyday. I'm beginning to sound like a tin-foil hat Libertarian, of late, which depresses me since I really can't stand most of their ideology (being a far left, progressive, social libertarian).
We really need a Roosevelt (zombie Teddy, or zombie Franklin, I choose you).
This is what confuses me... It is trivial to encode messages in ways that no one but the intended target would ever know what your talking about. "I am going to the store to buy eggs" could mean all sorts of terrible things, if we got together and prearranged meanings. You can never catch things like this, unless your lucky.
All of our "terorrists will kill everyone, so trust us" actions seem to work on the presumption that all terrorists are morons. Which is probably pretty far from the truth.
It's 105 (40C) outside right now, please don't take my A/C away, this summer its going to be hotter than that, going up to 115+. When I was a kid it was 122 (50C), and our AC kicked the bucked (as it did in our car a week previous). That was not fun. That was pretty much the opposite of fun. Worse, when I was a kid, all we had was swamp coolers most the time, and in the middle of August they pretty much just make things more humid. I would have killed to have A/C during the summer then.
If I lived somewhere with sane temperatures, I'd agree though. Especially since most offices like to be subarctic, for some reason. Unless its winter, then they want to be hell.
Actually some people might notice things that others don't. Most LED tail-lights drive me absolutely crazy, but my dad doesn't even notice them. Same for sounds, the old TV in our bedroom has a high whine that only I can hear, my girlfriend can't hear it, and thinks I'm crazy since I unplug the TV before going to bed. Same for flourencent lights, some people can see the flicker from crappy ballasts, some are oblivious. People have different sensitivity to frequencies at the edge of perception, some people won't notice it, and some will. Welcome to normal human variation.
I recently went shopping for decent IPS displays, and most of the LED ones do noticeably flicker at low backlight levels. Some, cheaper ones, were tested with noticeable flickers at all levels. I picked one that still used tubes, since I generally work with low brightness levels (for print work), and even decent LED monitors started flickering there (and its hard to get a good, wide gamut, monitor with LEDs and not break the bank).
Well clearly YOU need a little more connectivity to current events
So how's life in that FEMA camp? I'm sorry to hear that Muslim, Communist, jackbooted thugs broke into your house and took all your guns.
Things are bad, but not nearly as bad as a segment of the population wishes it was.
Actually it did via various access laws that give politicians very low rates for campaign advertising. The claim behind the laws was that a network has to provide equal time but the reality is that it lowered rates.
Huh? EAS doesn't even have rates, its emergency broadcast. It has never had advertising, and the idea of equal time on it is not applicable.
This will primarily be used to put out propaganda things post disaster. "Our hearts ache for the people of LowerDisasterWater. We shall stand together in our unwavering support for their re-emergence as a third rate backwater."
Because that happened with EAS on TV and radio. Oh... wait... it didn't.
What can/would the President send to every citizen on this other than a declaration of nation wide Martial Law?
Storms and disasters are LOCAL issues
Kids these days... they exists mostly for nuclear war, and invasions. Something that was a background threat not that long ago. They haven't been used, thankfully, but if they ever need to be used, it would be a good thing. I really don't see having the potential to send out an emergency broadcast as a bad thing.
Imagine in the case of a truly large scale disaster (such as an asteroid) , or an actual nuclear attack, not being in range of an active TV or radio...
What can/would the President send to every citizen on this other than a declaration of nation wide Martial Law?
Ah... you're one of them. But even accepting that this is something that might happen in our lifetimes, I would think that some segment of our population (the rarely vindicated paranoids) would like to know, so they can grab their 10,000 firearms and cans of beans, and go out with their bullhorns to scream at their neighbors "I told you so!".
I admit, including cores in my silly example was a bad idea. Cores is still something that matters, somewhat. Most things are still horribly optimized for multiple cores, but in some "normal" applications, like encoding, they do matter. But, if you take a high end x-core AMD, and a high end x-core Intel, the difference will still be very subtle.
Hey, I've got a $10 Holga lens for my mirrorless setup. It was $10 (cheapest lens I own by a large margin), it takes fun pictures at parties, and it was ten dollars. I've been tempted to get a lomo or holga cheap film body for awhile now... Just because it is amusing, and exponentially cheaper than some of the other film cameras I want "for fun" (an old Leica, or Voigtlander Bessa). I say "fun", because I have a full DSLR kit, and a full mirrorless kit, both of these fulfill all my serious and professional needs. Holga and Lomos are for playing around with, and for taking photography back to its simplest principles. They fill the same roll as, and I hate to say this, Instagram.
There are still film labs floating around. Most towns with a college probably have some. Also, and I might be wrong, but I think the Lomography guys will develop film for you. You can ship it out of course, or drop it off at most Costcos or Walgreens. I'm not sure if those last two hold for 120, though.
I actually have a good deal of respect for Lomography, they've been working on keeping film stock alive, which benefits more than just them, or the mythical "hipsters".
And what about when the world is consuming trillions of gallons of Water from the oceans?
It is a good thing that the water cycle is really fast, then, especially when we ignore ground and surface fresh water. It also is a good thing that the oceans are stupendously large. Water, on a grand scale, isn't really a limited resource, or at least until we start cracking it for hydrogen, or something. Water is as renewable as oxygen and free (non-fossil) carbon.
You're kidding right?
The actual, functional, real-world , difference between most mid-high tier processors is pretty much nil. My 12 core 4.77 Intel Wacknut, is as subjectively fast as my 8 core, 4.55 AMD Dognugget. I pretty much guarantee that is is impossible to tell the difference with most computing tasks. For some, rare, tasks you might be able to tell, but these fall out of the experience of 99% of users (even gamers). For most modern PCs, the only big thing that will lead to a subjective performance gain is SSDs. For gamers, SSDs and decent GPUs (though even there we see huge diminishing returns, thanks to nothing really pushing the envelope much).
One reason I've been putting off upgrading my venerable AMD Quad-core 965 Black is that the performance gains would still be minimal for almost any application. I might gain 8-9 FPS, but that isn't worth $200+ (for Intel much more, since I'd need a new mobo and RAM). For my other uses, browsing the internet, email, writing, photography and light video editing, it wouldn't lead to any real gains whatsoever, even getting the biggest, baddest, hottest CPU out there. Upgrading my GPU would lead to much more bang for the back, as would getting a decent SSD.
But then again, at one point in my life I strived for the bleeding edge of everything, and my computer cost far more money than I could ever justify now, and 99% of the time all that power was largely sitting idle.
I've been looking at the 8350 for my next upgrade, but sadly it is finally time for a new mobo and RAM. Its been awhile since CPUs were the big bottleneck in gaming. My 965 is perfectly adequate, to be honest, it might not be when things are being optimized for the next console generation though. RAM isn't terribly important anymore either, since it is dirt cheap, and I rarely utilize my full 8gb outside of some games, and and some image/video editing tasks. GPU and HDD are the biggest improvements now.
Granted I'm a rather light user, not doing big databases, servers, compiling, etc... Heavier than average, but still not as heavy as some people around here. For average, there still really isn't a reason to get more than a $50-100 dual core chip, 4gb of RAM, and integrated GPU. AMD should be slaughtering that market.
Probably just either Intel or AMD fanboys being mad because I didn't heap unequivocal praise on whatever they like, or scorn on what they don't. I probably should have just posted "Meh. Buy what works for you."
I'll probably survive.
basically, the 8-core AMD was slower performance-wise the 4-core Intel with the AMD running a few MHz faster
Take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. While Intel has been generally winning for awhile now, that doesn't really mean AMD is completely inferior. With like chips there are certain things a modern AMD will out-perform Intel on, such as single threaded tasks. Intel will generally smoke AMD on multithreaded tasks, though. There is also cost, while AMD might be 10% less benchmark happy than a like Intel chip, it generally is over 25% less expensive, and will generally run without need to buy a new costly motherboard.
My last big upgrade, several years ago now, the price difference between the AMD (Phenom II 4x 965 Black) and Intel (i7 something or another) was hugely dramatic, considering the fact that I'd need a new motherboard and new RAM on top of the CPU. It was about $300-400 difference (fully upgrading 8gb of RAM, with a new mobo). I took the 10% performance hit, happily. For enthusiast CPUs, you'd best take the hit, and use the cash on a better GPU.
I just wish I could mark articles as "unread" within a feed, without having to back out to a list and do a dodgy swipe (on Android, where I do most of my RSS browsing these days). Also there is still no way to easily subscribe to feed on Firefox, for some strange reason. Easy on Chrome, PiTA on Firefox.
Other than that it is perfectly adequate. Nothing more, nothing less.
Commafeed looks good, but won't play well on my phone or tablets, so... Web interfaces are great, but generally can be stupid on mobile devices. I'd rather have a dedicated app.
iGoogle is still going to be the killer. I'm going to miss having all my feeds, my mail, my weather, and /. waiting for me when I open my browser. There really isn't a replacement for it, as far as I can see. There are pages that try to duplicate it, but generally falls short by either being too much, too slow, or two kludgy and wonky.
I agree. About as entertaining as when Fox did the same for Bush.
Nah, it was Genocide. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Genocide, the one that is inexplicably still alive. Come to think of it, it might not have even been Diku. Time was a bit slippery back then, helped along by cheap booze, and copious amounts of illicit substances.
I just poked around to see if any sign of it was still around, and it seems to have been completely buried in obscurity. Not terribly surprised, most of my "pre-internet" youth is pretty much forgotten these days. I say BBS in polite company and people just shrug, the last one familiar to me died long ago (they managed to keep it going into the early 2000's, albeit only on telnet). Its odd, being nostalgic for something no one remembers.
Ah.. memories. Back in the late '90's some friends and I maintained a fork of decent sized MUD. We were constantly rewriting aspects of it, and as such tested things on unsuspecting players all the time. We definitely killed one character daily with some flavor of Vorpal Bunny. He was a good sport, so we also gave him "one use" God-like items in return.
Once, one of my bunnies got loose (didn't set nowander, or whatever it was), and pretty much decimated the newbie zones. My fellow IMMs were pissed.
Some of the code-bases for old MUDs were glorious. The one we had was Diku, but so heavily modified to be almost completely unrecognizable. It was a beast.
The big thing that we lost with MMOs is the ability for Imms to be directly involved with players. Imms could help players, hurt them, taunt them, and were generally involved in their lives. We were even working on a trials system to promote a player into the pantheon, giving them some subset of god powers, including the ability to spawn items, edit rooms, and have limited abilities over players. Hell, all it took to be a God was being good enough friends with the maintainers, and supplying them with a decent flow of beer. I kind of miss that.
I remember getting privileges in medium sized MUSH by just telling someone an idea for a zone I had. They had no problem with some random stranger creating content for them.
And now I feel old. Thanks.