the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
Yes, but this kind of garbage is symptomatic of the larger bout of anti-intellectualism that's afflicting our society. People at all points on the political spectrum are making decisions based not on rational analysis, but by feelings and "common sense", which opens them up to mendacious, harmful demagoguery. Honestly, I don't see any way to reverse the collective stupidity that's overtaking us. It's like fighting the wind.
You can compile x.org yourself, you know. Actually, since you don't need to reboot to run a new X, it's easier than compiling a new kernel. That said, what exactly would you turn off?
I'm reminded of the famous "simply too many notes" scene from Amadeus.
Emperor Joseph II:My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect. Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
X11 is a whipping boy for anyone who's ever had a complaint about a Unix GUI. No matter whether it's a badly-designed application, an unstable driver, or poor kernel scheduling, or a deranged toolkit drag-and-drop model, people always fault X11. And no matter what the root cause of the problem, the solution is always to throw out the X protocol and design something else. People like you fail to account for the possibility that there's actually very little wrong with X, and that it can certainly be the basis for a modern, functional GUI.
There was a very interesting comment on Slashdot a few years ago by Mike Paquette (who wrote Apple's Quartz) explaining why Apple didn't use X11 for OS X. The funny thing, in retrospect, is that every single feature mentioned in Paquette's post has now been implemented for X11, and that's with volunteer work. If Apple had invested resources into making this happen for X instead of reinventing the wheel, everyone would have been better off. Yet despite these additional features, we still retain full network transparency along with full compatibility stretching back to the 80s.
Don't confuse "newer" and "better". X11's architecture is quite good, and is among one of the better designs for a windowing system ever created. It's clean, extensible, fast, and network-transparent. It defines mechanism, not policy, and does its job extremely well. That it's been extended to support all kinds of modern features is a testament to the strength of its original design.
If it weren't for the soul-crushing stupidity, it'd be hilarious that people claim X is slow. X ran quickly on computers with 1/000 the performance of even a modest desktop system today, but it's slow on these modern computers? That makes no sense. People claim that X's network transparency puts it at a performance disadvantage, but neglect that Unix Sockets, used for local communication, are among the faster IPC mechanisms in existence. Criticism of X as a platform is baseless.
Most of the driver is still in userspace. The modesetting is a relatively small part of modern graphics hardware. The reason for the switch, also, isn't performance, but consistency: with KMS, there's no flicker on boot as the X server proper starts.
Besides: a userspace driver can screw up the machine almost as easily as a kernel-mode one. Remember that a userspace driver needs to run as root, and must be able to write directly to IO ports and the PCI configuration space. Both kinds of driver can easily crash a machine.
If you need a bleeding-edge card, you're gaming, and to be frank, Linux is not the best environment for gaming. If, on the other hand, you're interested in solid 2D work with decent acceleration, a solid older card is just the thing. I just picked up a dirt-cheap R400-based card myself. (I'd have stuck with my trusty Matrox G450, but the driver will probably never support modern multihead with xrandr 1.3.)
I vowed that if McCain had won, I would leave the US. Now, I'm considering doing it anyway. It feels like the decline is irreversible now.
Krugman has an excellent column today about how corruption has not only made the rich richer, but has hamstrung our ability to govern at all. We've incapable of reacting in reasonable ways to real problems.
It's the Decline and Fall all over again. Why couldn't I have been born 50 years ago?
Orbiting the moon is a lot harder than orbiting the earth. The moon's gravitational field is exceptionally lumpy because of concentrations of mass beneath the surface. If not actively corrected for, these mass concentrations will make a satellite's orbit go through increasingly violent gyrations until it eventually intersects with the surface.
I wonder if this is what happened to the Indian probe.
Oh, fuck you. Obama's policies, if he can get undemocratic senate to pass them, would obviously benefit the common man. That his approval rating is falling is a refection of the skill of the satanic Republican provocateurs and not of any rational problem with his approach.
Huh? Either 1) the money goes to the FTC, and funds its activities, or 2) the money goes to the general fund, where it can offset taxes (or debt). Or are you claiming that money the government receives in fines is somehow specially vulnerable to embezzlement?
Or are you an idiot devoteé of Grover Norquist who believes that a dollar for the government is a dollar for evil?
For fuck's sake, a contract isn't an atomic sacred unit of holy marketology. It's just a piece of paper.
The problem is Common Law, which holds that a contract is almost as sacred a the Ten Commandments except in limited circumstances. Courts have long rules that many sorts of contract are invalid if one party is deceived. Long form contracts with surprisingly asymmetric benefits to the drafted of the contract are a relatively modern chapter in the long history of contracts design to deceive. In practice, nobody reads the fine print. Saying "well, people should" is counterproductive because you know in practice that very few people will. By that logic, you can reduce all law to "well, people really shouldn't hurt each other."
What matters is how the contract is commonly understood, not what it actually says. It's high time for contracts of adhesion to be held to much stricter standards. Specifically,
No requirement of a standard form contract not commonly understood to be part of a contract of that type is enforceable.
What "commonly understood" means is to be constituted by an impartial poll of the issue in question
That means that if a cell phone company, for instance, claims that their contract allows them to give your number to telemarketers, that clause is unenforceable unless the writer of the contract can show, via an impartial third party poll, that common people understand the contract to permit that right.
Yes, but the FTC is already funded with tax money as part of the budget. The 16K is just free money to them. Do you really think they should get a $16k bonus per incident to do what they should be doing anyway?
So that's $16k more worth of FTCish activities they can do. I fail to see the problem. It's still redistributing wealth from those who irritate society to those who can benefit it.
Because we only adopt "market-based" solutions when they benefit the existing oligarchs. Putting a fair price on a shared resource in order to establish an efficient market is SOCIALIST AND THEREFORE EVIL.
It's a handicap for the Right. Without robocall campaigns to catapulpt the propaganda, how are the Republicans supposed to have a fighting chance? For the sake of good sportsmanship, it's only fair that they be allowed.
What detractors against regulation miss is that their creed, if enacted, would also eliminate regulations that personally benefit them. It's just another aspect of the Right's extraordinary ability to convince otherwise-rational people to act against their own interests. Through careful stoking of innate fears via the media, the Right induces a pathology in approximately 33% of the population.
Crap! The drugs are wearing off!
RON PAUL! RON PAUL! THE GOVERNMENT WILL KILL YOUR BABIES!
Governmunt regulation is bad and socialist and communist and will make our children weak and effeminate. I know it's true because Ronald Raygun told me so. Why does the FTC hate America?
If you're working in an environment in which variable names and comments matter, then you still write with descriptive variable names and comments, and just pre-process the source to remove comments and shorten variable names. Writing obfuscated code directly is just foolish.
General-purpose declarative languages are bunk, I agree.
However, domain-specific declarative languages often work pretty well. Consider build systems (Make, ant, etc.), or SQL, both of which are declarative.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but this kind of garbage is symptomatic of the larger bout of anti-intellectualism that's afflicting our society. People at all points on the political spectrum are making decisions based not on rational analysis, but by feelings and "common sense", which opens them up to mendacious, harmful demagoguery. Honestly, I don't see any way to reverse the collective stupidity that's overtaking us. It's like fighting the wind.
As a society, we're doomed.
Troll. But I'll bite.
X11 is a whipping boy for anyone who's ever had a complaint about a Unix GUI. No matter whether it's a badly-designed application, an unstable driver, or poor kernel scheduling, or a deranged toolkit drag-and-drop model, people always fault X11. And no matter what the root cause of the problem, the solution is always to throw out the X protocol and design something else. People like you fail to account for the possibility that there's actually very little wrong with X, and that it can certainly be the basis for a modern, functional GUI.
There was a very interesting comment on Slashdot a few years ago by Mike Paquette (who wrote Apple's Quartz) explaining why Apple didn't use X11 for OS X. The funny thing, in retrospect, is that every single feature mentioned in Paquette's post has now been implemented for X11, and that's with volunteer work. If Apple had invested resources into making this happen for X instead of reinventing the wheel, everyone would have been better off. Yet despite these additional features, we still retain full network transparency along with full compatibility stretching back to the 80s.
Don't confuse "newer" and "better". X11's architecture is quite good, and is among one of the better designs for a windowing system ever created. It's clean, extensible, fast, and network-transparent. It defines mechanism, not policy, and does its job extremely well. That it's been extended to support all kinds of modern features is a testament to the strength of its original design.
If it weren't for the soul-crushing stupidity, it'd be hilarious that people claim X is slow. X ran quickly on computers with 1/000 the performance of even a modest desktop system today, but it's slow on these modern computers? That makes no sense. People claim that X's network transparency puts it at a performance disadvantage, but neglect that Unix Sockets, used for local communication, are among the faster IPC mechanisms in existence. Criticism of X as a platform is baseless.
Most of the driver is still in userspace. The modesetting is a relatively small part of modern graphics hardware. The reason for the switch, also, isn't performance, but consistency: with KMS, there's no flicker on boot as the X server proper starts.
Besides: a userspace driver can screw up the machine almost as easily as a kernel-mode one. Remember that a userspace driver needs to run as root, and must be able to write directly to IO ports and the PCI configuration space. Both kinds of driver can easily crash a machine.
If you need a bleeding-edge card, you're gaming, and to be frank, Linux is not the best environment for gaming. If, on the other hand, you're interested in solid 2D work with decent acceleration, a solid older card is just the thing. I just picked up a dirt-cheap R400-based card myself. (I'd have stuck with my trusty Matrox G450, but the driver will probably never support modern multihead with xrandr 1.3.)
I vowed that if McCain had won, I would leave the US. Now, I'm considering doing it anyway. It feels like the decline is irreversible now.
Krugman has an excellent column today about how corruption has not only made the rich richer, but has hamstrung our ability to govern at all. We've incapable of reacting in reasonable ways to real problems.
It's the Decline and Fall all over again. Why couldn't I have been born 50 years ago?
Orbiting the moon is a lot harder than orbiting the earth. The moon's gravitational field is exceptionally lumpy because of concentrations of mass beneath the surface. If not actively corrected for, these mass concentrations will make a satellite's orbit go through increasingly violent gyrations until it eventually intersects with the surface.
I wonder if this is what happened to the Indian probe.
Yes, when taxation captures externalities, it helps the market function better.
2008.
Joe Jobs.
Oh, fuck you. Obama's policies, if he can get undemocratic senate to pass them, would obviously benefit the common man. That his approval rating is falling is a refection of the skill of the satanic Republican provocateurs and not of any rational problem with his approach.
Huh? Either 1) the money goes to the FTC, and funds its activities, or 2) the money goes to the general fund, where it can offset taxes (or debt). Or are you claiming that money the government receives in fines is somehow specially vulnerable to embezzlement?
Or are you an idiot devoteé of Grover Norquist who believes that a dollar for the government is a dollar for evil?
For fuck's sake, a contract isn't an atomic sacred unit of holy marketology. It's just a piece of paper.
The problem is Common Law, which holds that a contract is almost as sacred a the Ten Commandments except in limited circumstances. Courts have long rules that many sorts of contract are invalid if one party is deceived. Long form contracts with surprisingly asymmetric benefits to the drafted of the contract are a relatively modern chapter in the long history of contracts design to deceive. In practice, nobody reads the fine print. Saying "well, people should" is counterproductive because you know in practice that very few people will. By that logic, you can reduce all law to "well, people really shouldn't hurt each other."
What matters is how the contract is commonly understood, not what it actually says. It's high time for contracts of adhesion to be held to much stricter standards. Specifically,
That means that if a cell phone company, for instance, claims that their contract allows them to give your number to telemarketers, that clause is unenforceable unless the writer of the contract can show, via an impartial third party poll, that common people understand the contract to permit that right.
So that's $16k more worth of FTCish activities they can do. I fail to see the problem. It's still redistributing wealth from those who irritate society to those who can benefit it.
Yes, but that's $16k you don't have to pay in taxes.
No, you do. A "scumbag" is a failed sociopath. We call the successful ones "CEO", "Hedge Fund Manager", and "Sir".
Because we only adopt "market-based" solutions when they benefit the existing oligarchs. Putting a fair price on a shared resource in order to establish an efficient market is SOCIALIST AND THEREFORE EVIL.
It's a handicap for the Right. Without robocall campaigns to catapulpt the propaganda, how are the Republicans supposed to have a fighting chance? For the sake of good sportsmanship, it's only fair that they be allowed.
What detractors against regulation miss is that their creed, if enacted, would also eliminate regulations that personally benefit them. It's just another aspect of the Right's extraordinary ability to convince otherwise-rational people to act against their own interests. Through careful stoking of innate fears via the media, the Right induces a pathology in approximately 33% of the population.
Crap! The drugs are wearing off!
RON PAUL! RON PAUL! THE GOVERNMENT WILL KILL YOUR BABIES!
Governmunt regulation is bad and socialist and communist and will make our children weak and effeminate. I know it's true because Ronald Raygun told me so. Why does the FTC hate America?
RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL!
If you're working in an environment in which variable names and comments matter, then you still write with descriptive variable names and comments, and just pre-process the source to remove comments and shorten variable names. Writing obfuscated code directly is just foolish.
My god: that's both disgusting and beautiful. It's like a Matisse painting. Cheers.
And how is that not the moral equivalent of goto?
General-purpose declarative languages are bunk, I agree.
However, domain-specific declarative languages often work pretty well. Consider build systems (Make, ant, etc.), or SQL, both of which are declarative.
Safe, standard "coroutines" in C. The code given in the article can be further optimized by using gcc's computed goto, but the effect is the same.