Not exactly. Yes, the disparity could be amplified due to population shifts between censuses, but that wasn't the case in the most recent presidential election. The states that went to Bush actually gained in electoral college votes since that election, so he would have had a more decisive win--yet he clearly lost the popular vote.
The disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college is mainly due to two things: (1) that each state recieves two extra votes not based upon population and (2) that most states have a winner-take-all system.
Point one makes it unlikely that any constitutional amendment to do away with the electoral college would pass: roughly half the states have (positive) disproportionate influence on the presidential election, so it would likely not be approved by the required 3/4 of the states. Point two makes it unlikely that either major political party would support an amendment, as the winner-takes-all system tends to nullify any minor political parties, as well as turning lackluster pluralities into majorities.
I would really say that this isn't fair to epics in general. I read LoTR as an adult, and I found the characters to be very deep at times. I don't think it would have been successful if the characters were all so simply acting out of necessity.
It was never my intention to say that epics can't have complex characters. Some do, some do not. In mainstream fiction you get characters made of cardboard and styrofoam as well as the ones that fell they may have come right out of your life. This is a question of talent, plain and simple--of whether the writer has the right kind of eye.
No, what I'm talking about is a type of perspective, and perhaps even a type of inspiration. The perspective of an epic is, by nature, "This is what happened." The whole narrative is driven with fate in mind. The characters may (or may not) have complex motivations of their own, but to the narrative those motivations matter very little.
In--let's be pretensious and just call it this--"serious fiction", the perspective closes in on the characters. The story here is "This is what is happening." The story is allowed to concentrate on trifling things, because it is about whatever the characters are about.
Ok, that's the perspective. The inspiration I mentioned is simply what drives the story as the author is writing it. In heavily fated stories the inspiration is plot, and the characters are marched around to carry out actions that fulfill this plot. Some writers are better at this than others, but most tend to be pretty clumsy. Any time you see a character acting for no good (character) reason, but bringing about a great deal of action... well, yeah.
The other method of storytelling (these are not completely exclusive) is to let the characters drive. That is, to move them on terms that would make sense to them internally. The problem with this is you can't really have more than a vague idea of where the story is going to end, that is until it does end. So in epics, this is mainly out.
I didn't compare Clarke's ability to Jane Austen, I compared her style (I also mentioned that this may be intentional).
To get a "very good" from me, this novel would need more emotional weight. I'd have to like the characters more. I'd have to believe the characters more.
To get a "great" from me, on top of that. the novel would have to be structurally more "tight." That is, it lollygags too much in the opening, and it doesn't work up to its climax quite like it should. And many other things...
But the style, the sentence-by-sentence writing, she hid dead on. That's where the Austen thing comes in.
The problem with this setup is that it eliminates the write benefit of RAID-0. You can only write to the array at the speed you can write to the parity drive.
A better solution would be RAID 1+0, combining the striping of RAID-0 with the mirroring of RAID-1. You effectively lose half the space, but no longer lose data due to the failure of one drive (or, in some cases, even two)--and you retain all the speed of RAID-0.
There's also RAID-5, which has a sort of rotating parity. It's more computationally expensive (more $$ for hardware), but has the reliability of a parity drive without the bottleneck of the setup you described.
Aah. So how do we get rid of these "real people" in Congress?
Oh, we get to vote for them too, you say? The whole House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate?
So the grandparent's suggestion that we vote in November is, um, the same exact suggestion you're making. You just like it better when you can berate someone?
Oh, and "loose" rhymes with "goose"--"lose" is the word you're looking for.
great, you nutfucker, what's the point of your post?
Probably that changing processor architecture would make backwards compatibility a lot harder / more expensive.
Or maybe he was just fucking nuts.
Re:Snow Crash
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not saying Snow Crash is "really good or something," though I do think it is a decent novel. I'm saying that it's hard to compare it to any of Stephenson's others, the same way it is hard to compare Vonnegut's other novels to Slaughterhouse Five: there's something about it--its place in sci. fi., its place in regard to the explosion of the internet--that makes it the one book that's always going to be mentioned in Stepehenson's "From the author of..." intros.
Orwell was a political writer. He wrote of class struggle and the working man and so on. His most famous books (1984 and Animal Farm) were political books critiquing Communism. Animal Farm is NOT fantasy, it's simple allegory (it was an explanation of how Communism began in Russia). 1984 was, to him, the logical conclusion of Communism. It was dystopian, set in the near future, but it wasn't really Science Fiction.
Funny, I thought that's what worms do. Oh wait, you said that's what worms do (self-execution, self-propogation).
[Email viruses] don't have a means to copy themselves into another program,
Ok, see, here's where you're wrong. Your standard
email virus is an executable and is not sandboxed, so yeah it has the means to do whatever it wants to do; the standard M.O. of an email virus is to send out more emails and open up some backdoors and so on. It could tapdance on the boot sector if it wanted to, though.
A real virus... you run an infected program (note: not the virus itself, an otherwise useful program that happens to be infected)
Do you know why a trojan is called a trojan? The Trojan Horse, something malicious hidden inside of something unoffensive, you let it into your city and the troops pour out... Sound a little like your definition of a "real virus"? Yeah, well that's because trojans and viruses are not mutually exclusive. A virus that hides inside another program is a trojan.
Email viruses (and yes, they are viruses) are mainly not trojans. They are malicious programs that are disguised, not embedded in other programs.
You did get the definition of "worm" right, though.
Oh, and every time I said "email virus" above, I should really have said "Outlook virus," because I believe that is the full and technical term of these programs.
In what way is Intel a follower instead of leader here?
You miss the point completely. Yeah, intel has produced a 64-bit chip (so have many others). But this intel chip is an instruction-level copy of AMD's chip design. They've built an AMD clone, the way AMD has for years produced intel clones.
I should be able to run 'make xconfig' on a machine with the basic X setup from x.org, and plain xfree86 on it and it should run.
Eh? You want the kernel to run a configuration on your preferred platform and they better damn well make sure they do it? The old xconfig was in the old, motif type toolkit, the new one is QT. Or you can
make gconfig
and use the gtk+ toolkit. Or you can
make menuconfig
and use curses in a terminal without really limiting usability. Or you can
make config
and answer a bunch of questions, which I admit is a little clunky and takes a long time.
The point I'm making is you don't have to install the "bloated pig" (as you put it) that is QT to compile a kernel; you have options. Your complaint is arbitrary, it's whining that the kernel is not exactly how you want it, rather than how most people want it. You want special treatment because you refuse to install a modern desktop environment and still don't want to use curses.
Your niche is no longer significant enough to deserve the default xconfig. There's always going to be someone dissatisfied and this time it is you.
I had the same reaction until I realized that the chart covers revenue for Upgrade Advantage, a program that was replaced by Software Assurance. Apparently a great number of users signed a new Upgrade Advantage contract right before the program was replaced, and these expire in July of this year, and there will be no further contracts.
This is revenue that MS will have to fold into the Software Assurance contract just to break even.
Ad flyers are copyrighted, yes. That is, the layout and presentation and so on are copyrighted implicitly. The data, howeverthe prices, the listingsare not copyrighted. They're not copyrightable. They are ideas, they are facts, and they are completely beyond the scope of copyright (and therefore fair use of that copyright).
They fall squarely and simply under the First Amendment and can be used for any sort of purpose (including commercial). News reporting or not. This is free speech, after all.
Unless--well, it is possible that they are trade secrets. But then why is Best Buy waving around the DMCA, a copyright law?
I have to wonder if this has anything to do with those same users leaving Kazaa, since it's pretty clear the recording industry is going to go after the most popular p2p network first.
Nah, that couldn't be it. That would mean this article is poorly-researched and misleading.
The way the scheduler determines interactivity is that an application sleeps, i.e. it waits for some sort of user input and then executes based upon that input.
Games, at least the type of games that lag, don't meet this definition of "interactivity" and so will see little benefit from this patch.
These scheduler improvements could be considered comparable to seek time on a disk, while game performance is more akin to burst speed.
Your argument is invalid as you are begging the question. If citizens are locked up indefinitely without trial, then how do we know they've forfeited their citizenship? That's like saying the guilty have forfeited their right to a fair trial: how do we know they're guilty without the trial? There is much complaint in certain circles about the ACLU et al trying to "protect" criminals. In reality, all they wish to do is prevent those who are innocent from being placed in a situation where the determination of their (lack of) guilt is supressed.
I can see, seeing how Mozilla is in the film business and the action figure business and generally in competition with Godzilla, that yeah, they have some sort of case here. Sure, guys.
Yep. Murderers don't kill people; guns do! Don't send the murderers to jail; go after the gun manufacturers.
The only way that analogy works is if the govt. passes a law that makes it legal to kill people. The assumption that unfair laws on the books should not be exploited is incredibly naive: It's the job of government to prevent, legally, exploitation (and murder); it is the role of private entities to do whatever they can, within the bounds of that law, to improve their own situations. Personal ethics may restrain them, but this is by no means necessarily so (or even all that likely).
The good, the bad, and the, uh...
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
I see IP law, or the good in IP law, as a protection from rogue publishers, a protection from, say, a book or an album being copied and sold by any company out there with a little technology (or a lot of patience). The bad side of IP is the use of it, by companies, to smack around the consumers.
IP laws should apply, not to the people listening to mp3s or dubbing videos for their own enjoyment... it should just be there to make sure, when people are being paid for the service, the right people are being paid.
The geek, in the cultural pantheon of post-columbine era, is the modern homosexual. Columbine itself was an attempt to purge the nation of geeks, just as Eastern Europe attempted to do with vampires and homosexuals in the imported version of the Inquisition.
Eesh.... I just couldn't let this one go. First of all, get over your own language: geek, the cultural pantheon? The post-columbine era? Christ, sorry, but I don't buy for a second that anyone anywhere near the production of this movie had Columbine on his mind; barring people who read a little too much of Jon Katz's more, well, convoluted posts and take them as gospel, I don't think anyone buys that we are in the post-columbine era. It was a trajedy, but by no means was it an about-face of anything. Geeks have always been on the fringe, and recent events have done nothing to change that. Hell, I just read a piece comparing Carrie to the Columbine killers. Enough of this post-columbine bullshit: it's just like malitia folks talking about the post-Waco (and don't forget, post-Ruby Ridge) era. Hell, I suppose everyone has to have a point of reference, but, man, the world doesn't revolve around yours.
Oh, and Columbine "was an attempt to purge the nation of geeks," eh? Huh? Columbine was an action carried out by geeks, provoked by the status quo... where does the purging come in. Ok... maybe you're trying to say that after Columbine, the country, the education system (etc.) has tried to purge the geeks. Wrong. No way. The powers that be were not actively trying to "purge the nation" (how do you purge 'em anyway... kill em, deport em?), it was a (simpleminded, perhaps misguided) attempt to avoid the deaths of children. I can't imagine how that would possibly appear to be a witchhunt for gays.
Simpleton@atari.net (ignore the email address below... haven't bothered to change sig yet)
Well... that's one part of it. But, in one way or another, I (if I'm buying, say, a new computer from Dell) am buying software from Dell. Or from the company they bought it from. Either way, neither company should have the right to dictate my terms of usage (nor Dell's, for that matter). Especially, in terms of First Sale, whether or not (and to whom) I can resell the software that I have purchased.
As far as I understand it, this is basically why we have copyright laws: that once a product is sold, the selling company has no rights in regard to what I (as a consumer) can do with the product they sold me. If they could dictate whatever they wanted, such laws would be unnecessary as any work of intellectual property would be sold with a licensing agreement requiring no copying/etc.
In this way of thinking, I suppose most software licenses would be invalid. Yet, even if this is not the case, OEM licenses specifically address First Sale in that they limit further sale explicitly. It can not, according to the licenses, be sold without the specific hardware with which it was purchased.
I suppose the argument is that software is not sold, that rather licenses to use software are sold... I'm curious as to whether that legally holds up, as it seems a rather precarious argument.
This one has been on my mind a while, and I guess this is near enough the topic to bring it up:
Are OEM licenses even legal? Don't they violate First Sale?
Jose M. Weeks
Re:I suspect this is scientifically invalid
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 1
Well, I took a shakespeare class a couple years ago, and the prof swore by this guy.... apparently he played a big role in the dating/chronological ordering of the plays.
Anyway, apparently this guy submitted some rather controvercial opinion to some board (don't remember specifics) based upon his analysis of a Shakespearean text... and apparently the board (I think it had three members) replied with a long statement that basically amounted to "that's absurd." So this guy did a little research into the writing history of the three board members, analyzed the reply, and pinpointed which one of them wrote the response to his opinion.
In short, I pretty much see this guy as legit. Jose M. Weeks
Slashdot Mirror
The disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college is mainly due to two things: (1) that each state recieves two extra votes not based upon population and (2) that most states have a winner-take-all system.
Point one makes it unlikely that any constitutional amendment to do away with the electoral college would pass: roughly half the states have (positive) disproportionate influence on the presidential election, so it would likely not be approved by the required 3/4 of the states. Point two makes it unlikely that either major political party would support an amendment, as the winner-takes-all system tends to nullify any minor political parties, as well as turning lackluster pluralities into majorities.
No, what I'm talking about is a type of perspective, and perhaps even a type of inspiration. The perspective of an epic is, by nature, "This is what happened." The whole narrative is driven with fate in mind. The characters may (or may not) have complex motivations of their own, but to the narrative those motivations matter very little.
In--let's be pretensious and just call it this--"serious fiction", the perspective closes in on the characters. The story here is "This is what is happening." The story is allowed to concentrate on trifling things, because it is about whatever the characters are about.
Ok, that's the perspective. The inspiration I mentioned is simply what drives the story as the author is writing it. In heavily fated stories the inspiration is plot, and the characters are marched around to carry out actions that fulfill this plot. Some writers are better at this than others, but most tend to be pretty clumsy. Any time you see a character acting for no good (character) reason, but bringing about a great deal of action ... well, yeah.
The other method of storytelling (these are not completely exclusive) is to let the characters drive. That is, to move them on terms that would make sense to them internally. The problem with this is you can't really have more than a vague idea of where the story is going to end, that is until it does end. So in epics, this is mainly out.
To get a "very good" from me, this novel would need more emotional weight. I'd have to like the characters more. I'd have to believe the characters more.
To get a "great" from me, on top of that. the novel would have to be structurally more "tight." That is, it lollygags too much in the opening, and it doesn't work up to its climax quite like it should. And many other things...
But the style, the sentence-by-sentence writing, she hid dead on. That's where the Austen thing comes in.
A better solution would be RAID 1+0, combining the striping of RAID-0 with the mirroring of RAID-1. You effectively lose half the space, but no longer lose data due to the failure of one drive (or, in some cases, even two)--and you retain all the speed of RAID-0.
There's also RAID-5, which has a sort of rotating parity. It's more computationally expensive (more $$ for hardware), but has the reliability of a parity drive without the bottleneck of the setup you described.
Oh, we get to vote for them too, you say? The whole House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate?
So the grandparent's suggestion that we vote in November is, um, the same exact suggestion you're making. You just like it better when you can berate someone?
Oh, and "loose" rhymes with "goose"--"lose" is the word you're looking for.
great, you nutfucker, what's the point of your post?
Probably that changing processor architecture would make backwards compatibility a lot harder / more expensive.
Or maybe he was just fucking nuts.
I'm not saying Snow Crash is "really good or something," though I do think it is a decent novel. I'm saying that it's hard to compare it to any of Stephenson's others, the same way it is hard to compare Vonnegut's other novels to Slaughterhouse Five: there's something about it--its place in sci. fi., its place in regard to the explosion of the internet--that makes it the one book that's always going to be mentioned in Stepehenson's "From the author of..." intros.
Orwell was a political writer. He wrote of class struggle and the working man and so on. His most famous books (1984 and Animal Farm) were political books critiquing Communism. Animal Farm is NOT fantasy, it's simple allegory (it was an explanation of how Communism began in Russia). 1984 was, to him, the logical conclusion of Communism. It was dystopian, set in the near future, but it wasn't really Science Fiction.
Funny, I thought that's what worms do. Oh wait, you said that's what worms do (self-execution, self-propogation).
[Email viruses] don't have a means to copy themselves into another program,
Ok, see, here's where you're wrong. Your standard email virus is an executable and is not sandboxed, so yeah it has the means to do whatever it wants to do; the standard M.O. of an email virus is to send out more emails and open up some backdoors and so on. It could tapdance on the boot sector if it wanted to, though.
A real virus ... you run an infected program (note: not the virus itself, an otherwise useful program that happens to be infected)
Do you know why a trojan is called a trojan? The Trojan Horse, something malicious hidden inside of something unoffensive, you let it into your city and the troops pour out... Sound a little like your definition of a "real virus"? Yeah, well that's because trojans and viruses are not mutually exclusive. A virus that hides inside another program is a trojan.
Email viruses (and yes, they are viruses) are mainly not trojans. They are malicious programs that are disguised, not embedded in other programs.
You did get the definition of "worm" right, though.
Oh, and every time I said "email virus" above, I should really have said "Outlook virus," because I believe that is the full and technical term of these programs.
You miss the point completely. Yeah, intel has produced a 64-bit chip (so have many others). But this intel chip is an instruction-level copy of AMD's chip design. They've built an AMD clone, the way AMD has for years produced intel clones.
I should be able to run 'make xconfig' on a machine with the basic X setup from x.org, and plain xfree86 on it and it should run.
Eh? You want the kernel to run a configuration on your preferred platform and they better damn well make sure they do it? The old xconfig was in the old, motif type toolkit, the new one is QT. Or you can
and use the gtk+ toolkit. Or you can and use curses in a terminal without really limiting usability. Or you can and answer a bunch of questions, which I admit is a little clunky and takes a long time.The point I'm making is you don't have to install the "bloated pig" (as you put it) that is QT to compile a kernel; you have options. Your complaint is arbitrary, it's whining that the kernel is not exactly how you want it, rather than how most people want it. You want special treatment because you refuse to install a modern desktop environment and still don't want to use curses.
Your niche is no longer significant enough to deserve the default xconfig. There's always going to be someone dissatisfied and this time it is you.
Get used to it.
This is revenue that MS will have to fold into the Software Assurance contract just to break even.
That's double plus ungood, dude.
They fall squarely and simply under the First Amendment and can be used for any sort of purpose (including commercial). News reporting or not. This is free speech, after all.
Unless--well, it is possible that they are trade secrets. But then why is Best Buy waving around the DMCA, a copyright law?
Nah, that couldn't be it. That would mean this article is poorly-researched and misleading.
The way the scheduler determines interactivity is that an application sleeps, i.e. it waits for some sort of user input and then executes based upon that input. Games, at least the type of games that lag, don't meet this definition of "interactivity" and so will see little benefit from this patch.
These scheduler improvements could be considered comparable to seek time on a disk, while game performance is more akin to burst speed.
Your argument is invalid as you are begging the question. If citizens are locked up indefinitely without trial, then how do we know they've forfeited their citizenship? That's like saying the guilty have forfeited their right to a fair trial: how do we know they're guilty without the trial? There is much complaint in certain circles about the ACLU et al trying to "protect" criminals. In reality, all they wish to do is prevent those who are innocent from being placed in a situation where the determination of their (lack of) guilt is supressed.
I can see, seeing how Mozilla is in the film business and the action figure business and generally in competition with Godzilla, that yeah, they have some sort of case here. Sure, guys.
The only way that analogy works is if the govt. passes a law that makes it legal to kill people. The assumption that unfair laws on the books should not be exploited is incredibly naive: It's the job of government to prevent, legally, exploitation (and murder); it is the role of private entities to do whatever they can, within the bounds of that law, to improve their own situations. Personal ethics may restrain them, but this is by no means necessarily so (or even all that likely).
Uh, "burn" is a verb.
I see IP law, or the good in IP law, as a protection from rogue publishers, a protection from, say, a book or an album being copied and sold by any company out there with a little technology (or a lot of patience). The bad side of IP is the use of it, by companies, to smack around the consumers.
IP laws should apply, not to the people listening to mp3s or dubbing videos for their own enjoyment... it should just be there to make sure, when people are being paid for the service, the right people are being paid.
Oh, and Columbine "was an attempt to purge the nation of geeks," eh? Huh? Columbine was an action carried out by geeks, provoked by the status quo... where does the purging come in. Ok... maybe you're trying to say that after Columbine, the country, the education system (etc.) has tried to purge the geeks. Wrong. No way. The powers that be were not actively trying to "purge the nation" (how do you purge 'em anyway... kill em, deport em?), it was a (simpleminded, perhaps misguided) attempt to avoid the deaths of children. I can't imagine how that would possibly appear to be a witchhunt for gays.
Simpleton@atari.net (ignore the email address below... haven't bothered to change sig yet)
Jose M. Weeks
Well... that's one part of it. But, in one way or another, I (if I'm buying, say, a new computer from Dell) am buying software from Dell. Or from the company they bought it from. Either way, neither company should have the right to dictate my terms of usage (nor Dell's, for that matter). Especially, in terms of First Sale, whether or not (and to whom) I can resell the software that I have purchased.
As far as I understand it, this is basically why we have copyright laws: that once a product is sold, the selling company has no rights in regard to what I (as a consumer) can do with the product they sold me. If they could dictate whatever they wanted, such laws would be unnecessary as any work of intellectual property would be sold with a licensing agreement requiring no copying/etc.
In this way of thinking, I suppose most software licenses would be invalid. Yet, even if this is not the case, OEM licenses specifically address First Sale in that they limit further sale explicitly. It can not, according to the licenses, be sold without the specific hardware with which it was purchased.
I suppose the argument is that software is not sold, that rather licenses to use software are sold... I'm curious as to whether that legally holds up, as it seems a rather precarious argument.
Jose M. Weeks
This one has been on my mind a while, and I guess this is near enough the topic to bring it up:
Are OEM licenses even legal? Don't they violate First Sale?
Jose M. Weeks
Well, I took a shakespeare class a couple years ago, and the prof swore by this guy.... apparently he played a big role in the dating/chronological ordering of the plays.
Anyway, apparently this guy submitted some rather controvercial opinion to some board (don't remember specifics) based upon his analysis of a Shakespearean text... and apparently the board (I think it had three members) replied with a long statement that basically amounted to "that's absurd." So this guy did a little research into the writing history of the three board members, analyzed the reply, and pinpointed which one of them wrote the response to his opinion.
In short, I pretty much see this guy as legit.
Jose M. Weeks