Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean it's better. You should never combine your business and home internet connections unless you're business doesn't really need the internet connection because it's just not worth it. There are a number of reasons for this.
You can write off a purely business internet connection as a legitimate business expense, if you use it for personal use as well you've got to do things like work out the percentage of business use vs personal use, this is unnecessary hassle. If you never use it for anything but work you'll never have any problems with the IRS.
You can get yourself a business connection with an SLA which means that you can rely on your connection. If your connection being down costs your business money paying money to make sure it's up is worth it.
No matter how clever you make your router there's still a chance that personal use will affect your VOIP services. If you're using your VOIP to talk to customers, then you look unprofessional, if your business is IT related and you can't get simple stuff like VOIP to work you look worse than unprofessional.
Realistically speaking if you're serious about your business and it has developed to the stage where it's providing a reasonable income you should have infrastructure(internet connection, phone line, and likely PC) dedicated to the purpose because the risks of not doing so aren't worth the piddling amount it costs you to do it properly($100 a month written off as a business expense shouldn't be a particularly huge burden for any business which is generating enough money to be your primary source of income, and paying it is substantially better than losing income because you didn't.
The problem with this is that "we the people" only get the right to hire, we don't have the right to fire, so we have to wait 4-6 years before we can do anything about something like this.
Add to that the fact that we have absolutely no direct control over the public service workers who actually do all of this stuff, and the fact that the pool of applicants we get to exercise our hiring authority on isn't exactly brimming with excellent candidates and "we the people" aren't exactly all that powerful.
I live in Australia the country from which the Chinese buy the ore they turn into steel(mind you the US will probably buy it to make their steal and the Chinese aren't going to stop building stuff just because the Americans aren't buying their steel anymore. They'll still want to build infrastructure and it'll still need iron ore and oil and natural gas and all the other stuff we sell them.
It is therefor technically in my personal best interest for the manufacture of steal to remain in China. That said, I'm not stupid enough not to realize that when the US economy tanks the rest of the world, including Australia goes with it, and that a small hiccup for China is overall less damaging to myself and to the world than the US in a tail spin.
True, but US consumers have more money because they've been paid more. China buys bugger all off the US so any money that gets sent over there doesn't come back. More money might be spent, but more money is injected directly into the local economy. The guy in China might have made cents on the dollar compared to the American(though of course with transport it wouldn't have been overall that much cheaper or else the increase in fuel costs wouldn't have hit this tipping point already), but he was spending those cents in China. Largely on things made somewhere other than the US, the US has a huge trade deficit and has for years(that means they push more money outside than they bring in). The guy in Pittsburg is going to buy his food at a local grocery store which is going to employ local people, he's going to buy his clothes at a local shopping establishment which is going to be staffed by local people, true the clothes will have been made elsewhere, but you can't have everything.
True globalization may be coming, but it's not here yet, we might be interdependent, but we are not interchangeable, $100 spent somewhere else is not the same as $100 spent locally, or even the same as $10 spent locally.
This isn't an example of the broken window fallacy at all.
Yes, producing locally will be more expensive than it used to be to produce externally, and yes this will result in a higher local cost(presumably your basis for the broken window theory).
However where the broken window takes something that was fine as it was and claims that by breaking it and producing work for someone else is a good thing where it actually just creates an unnecessary cost for the baker and lowers overall productivity, this isn't the same situation.
The manufacturing work was going to be done by someone regardless, all this has done is make it more economical to do it locally. It isn't unnecessary work, or lost productivity it's simply someone else doing it.
You could argue that the increase in cost will do more overall damage to the economy than bringing the jobs back home will do good, but even that's sort of immaterial, the cost increase is going to happen pretty much no matter what we do, so our net result from this move is an increase in capital flowing into our the US economy and job creation, from the perspective of the US that's a good thing, maybe not so much a good thing for China, but still a good thing.
European sized houses have nothing to do with the fact that oil costs a lot or that they're just an average wealthy nation, they have to do with the availability of viable land and/or adequate transportation networks.
The US has absolutely no shortage of viable land for development and probably won't see a shortage of viable land on the European scale for another century or so. The UK alone has 1/5 of the US, and it's area is about 244,820 square kilometers compared to 9,629,091 for the united. True, you couldn't live in all of that, but Europe isn't 100% habitable either.
Housing prices are in that sort of bracket in parts of Australia too, but that's most of this country is desert, and our cities sort of have to expand along the coasts.
It's possible that rising fuel prices will increase the cost of transportation meaning that people have to live closer to the cities than they do now and that this will drive up the price of housing in certain areas, but you're never going to see the same level of cost as Europe(well on average, places like New York and parts of California are that expensive, but you're not going to see median house prices in the half a million dollar range in the Midwest any time soon.
.GOV and.EDU are pretty useful too, and are almost never abused. I admit.NET is pretty useless though and with a few very rare exceptions is nearly always a site which also has a.ORG and a.COM.
.ORG also has some problems, but mostly because it's misused a little bit, and because the definitions of a not for profit/non profit/etc organization are a little blurry. Maybe.ORG would be cleaner if you had to prove that you were a registered non profit in order to get one, you wouldn't have any.ORG squatters then.
Of course the other interesting thing is that for almost every innocent person who goes to jail a guilty person fundamentally goes free(if you get the wrong person for a murder then the right person goes free).
There are exceptions of course in cases where you have a group of people and you pick up one or two extras(though the odds that you'll pick up 3 people get a 4th and that 4th isn't guilty and you didn't let one of the other 3 get off easy).
So realistically the only beneficial way(read innocent men get convicted without guilty men going free or getting off easy) is basically to arrest anyone who might possibly have done it, which involves a pretty awful innocent to guilty ratio.
This is why we have the whole beyond a reasonable doubt thing, because if we put the wrong man in prison the right man goes free.
The US doesn't exactly own the internet. ICANN however is supposed to be the central authority on DNS naming(someone has to be and they're the ones who started it), whether you agree with this or not is really rather immaterial.
However as this isn't really an issue of the US overriding China's rights on the internet it's not really all that important.
The registrar, who happens to be in China, but could be anywhere for all that it matters signed an agreement with ICANN to follow its rules regarding domain registration. One of those rules it that valid contact information has to be present for all domains. It doesn't as far as I can see have to lead to the person who runs the address, or to any individual involved in the domain(so it's not really an ID card), it simply has to lead to an actual someone who is responsible for that domain. That person is free to decline any requests for information regarding the actual users of their domain, and even to not collect said information at all. They are also entitled to allow said users to continue any activity which doesn't breach the agreement they signed with ICANN or any laws which are applicable to them(ie US law does not apply to a Chinese registrar, but the registrar's agreement with ICANN does). Yes there are potential issues of censorship and you might argue that requiring an individual to be responsible for the registration is wrong, it is however the agreement which the registrars signed in exchange for being able to give out registrations which will be honoured by the internet as a whole and so therefor they're responsible for holding to it.
glad i don't own AMD stocks. this is a wasted effort and will ultimately fail. no one makes games for linux - the tools just aren't good enough. Will gaming on Linux ever take off? Probably not in the next 5 years. Is there a large enough dual booting crowd who previously wouldn't have bought an ATI card and now will to make up any costs they have associated with it, probably.
More importantly there are an awful lot of geeks out there who had experience with the absolutely shocking performance, stability, and quality of ATI's linux drivers(IMO they'd have been better off not releasing any than releasing those pieces of crap) and who had relegated ATI to their do not buy, do not recommend, ever, under any circumstances pile, not even to people who won't ever use linux because any company that would release crap like that doesn't deserve my business when their competitors release an equal or better product and do support linux properly.
Open sourcing the drivers was probably about the only thing AMD could do to fix the bad reputation ATI in certain sectors of the community, and reversing that reputation will most likely result in more profits than it will cost to build the drivers(which they were making, badly, before anyway).
My next video card just might be an ATI, I just might recommend an ATI card to the next person who asks me. Might isn't will because it'll still probably take a few years before there's a decent ATI driver for linux, especially since they don't have a shared architecture like Nvidia and more drivers will have to be written, and the Nvidia ones work now, but might is better than won't.
If this works out for ATI we'll probably see it for Nvidia as well, and then probably Intel with whatever it is they'll decide to offer.
If we can get the graphics drivers open source then maybe we won't have the kernel and X11 devs randomly destroying the driver interfaces and we might be able to get an overall stable 3d acceleration system in Linux.
We might even start seeing open source drivers on Windows and a vastly improved support for OpenGL and therefor more games being written with it.
OpenGL games are far easier to port to linux than Direct X games, and Vista is already using an OpenAL system for its audio(as opposed to direct sound), which will again be easier to port.
Very few companies will ever write a native linux version of a Direct X/Direct Sound game, it's too much work, but converting an OpenGL/OpenAL game to linux is relatively easy(most if not all games that have been ported started life with an OpenGL engine of some sort).
This is overall a good thing for Linux, and probably for Mac too, there are other ways it could have happened, and it might have happened sooner with a little more understanding from some of the more extreme components of the linux community, but all in all this is a good thing for everyone.
I think the bigger issue is or was, at least with graphics drivers, the optimizations in the drivers themselves.
Nvidia uses basically the same driver for every card they've made, and a lot of times new drivers will give more performance to older cards(within reason of course). It's these optimizations they don't want seen, not the hardware itself.
As everyone else has said, you're allowed to do whatever you want to your machine, you're just not allowed to expect that updates or new official software will work/play nicely with what you've done.
To use an old meme, I can use my dvd drive as a cup holder if I want to, no one is going to stop me, but if I do I won't be guaranteed by the manufacturer that I can use it as a DVD drive afterwards.
Nintendo supports the Wii as they sold it or have modified it themselves, they can't and won't support what you've done to it, and they're perfectly within their rights to try give you the option of improving it or even required improvements to the OS in order to play new games.
Yes they should have fixed the stack smashing issue instead of just trying to block a the specific TP hack as that would have been an improvement to the security of the code, but that's really neither here nor there.
I'm going to tell you a secret. If you're the only person using your computer it doesn't matter if you run as admin or not. You can run your linux system as Root and it won't make the slightest bit of difference(so long as you're the only person using it).
The reason for this is the fact that the OS is trivially easy to install and set up, even a Gentoo system can be installed from scratch in less than a day and that's probably the worst case scenario for installation and setup.
The stuff that really matters is your own personal stuff, which in every OS imaginable your own user has the access to destroy. All the information you have that's worth stealing, everything that's valuable and hard to replace was created by your own user admin or otherwise. The state of your OS doesn't matter if your stuff is gone. You don't even have to be root to run a spam daemon in Linux(so long as you don't try to open a port Not running as admin is only really important in shared environments. If you lose your files, that shouldn't necessarily mean that everyone else loses there's too, but most desktops don't run this way, linux or otherwise. Very few shared family PC's will have separate data and program stores for each user, and as previously said anything that's yours you can write to and can destroy, encrypt, automatically upload to a web address, change permissions on and execute, and therefor anything that's taken over your system can do the same.
That's not to say that linux isn't more secure than windows, merely that for a single user PC running as admin doesn't really make a lot of difference.
Well if you stick the cell phone on the outside of the box, then even if it doesn't get spotted it'll get crushed when they pack the crate in the middle of a few thousand others on a ship.
That'll either render it useless or cause it to exploded at the time of original loading which is basically going to be in your own port and so not really all that desirable.
Square metreish holes in the metal patched with plastic would both alter the structural integrity of the box(possibly causing it to be crushed and again explode in your own port), and would also be fairly visible. No on really look at the contents of most shipping containers, but if one comes off the dock with a huge fucking window in it, someone's going to take a look through the window.
Shipping a nuke in a container is possible, but not terribly likely.
There's also the whole theory that since any degree of serious nuclear enrichment, let alone secretly doing so, involves having a great deal of infrastructure and organization and that any nation or group capable of doing so is usually sufficiently sane to realize that nuclear war is a no win situation and not launch the thing.
Plenty of "rogue" states have nukes, but if any "rogue" state launches one of them they're liking to end up a glowing parking lot(along with everyone else) and most of the guys who fund and organize this sort of thing aren't as interested in dieing for the jihad as the plebs they send out with explosives strapped to their chests.
If the United States stopped spending more money on their military(which doesn't work) than every other country in the world combined you could have socialized services and a tax rebate.
Private enterprise in the United States whether by design or circumstance, is absolutely terrible at providing any service that can't be measured directly on the bottom line. Most of this has to do with the fact that the people who sell the product don't have to pay the costs. Transport, Health Care, Education, etc, are very bad at providing needed services to people who can't afford to pay full price. All these things add to productivity for everyone and more money for everyone, but they don't lead directly to money for the companies running the services.
Economies of scale work in favor of productivity, this means that collective organizations get better deals for things, this applies to government as well as private enterprise. To properly provide a transport infrastructure for a city you would need a representative body to determine the best way to lay that out(as opposed to everyone building their own roads and making a mess), that's what a government is, it's why they exist, because things like that need to be done properly from the top down.
If I were in charge of the country, I would quite happily exclude all Libertarians who opted to do so from any taxes whatsoever. I'd also of course exclude them from all public services you're all free to leave as far as I'm concerned and good riddance to you.
Basically to your average right wing nut job there's no difference between forcing them to leave people who do things they don't like alone and forcing them to do the things they don't like.
They see allowing other people to believe what they want to believe as oppressing their right to believe what they want to believe and so they see anything like allowing gay marriage as an assault on them.
You've got to remember, the UK farmed all it's religious lunatics off onto the US, and the current crop are descended from those loonies. These are the same people who came up with the klan and all that sort. They exist in every country, but they exist in larger numbers in the US and form the backbone of the republican party(funny how the political party who freed the slaves and destroyed the 10th amendment is now the party of the very people they fought the war against), so republican politics even from otherwise reasonable people tend to be tainted by irrational lunacy.
TBH I don't think they really care about fiberglass boats that are just hull, mast and sail.
You can't crash a boat like that into much of anything and do any serious damage(without a lot of explosives at least), you can't outrun a motor launch in one of those, and you're not likely to get in a situation where there's a lot of innocent people on one of them and they're not too hard to sink.
Juries and cops might not be perfect, but they're not totally broken either. Yeah you can convince a jury that a poor man killed someone or that a rich man didn't, or that copyright deserves excessive punishment, but this is a different story. As for cops, they're as work averse as the rest of us, do you really think they want to do paperwork just to pick you up for a flame war, let alone the expense necessary to track you down.
Because the VAST, VAST majority of guns in America are owned by people who don't need a gun and in most cases don't even know how to use a gun properly and because the malfeasance of the minority involves people dieing.
A crazy woman did something which should have been illegal but wasn't. They made a law to make it illegal.
Yeah it's vague, yeah it could be used against almost anyone, but any criminal complaint against you has to get past cops, prosecutors, a judge, and a jury before you go to jail. If any one of those people says "that kid should HTFU" you're not going to go to jail. In all reality unless you're a sick demented fuck like the woman the law was created because of you're not even going to see a visit from the cops.
Some laws can be abused, this is unlikely to be one of them.
I think the author's issue is not so much the a problem with peer review as a concept and more to do with the particular "peer review" required to get into scientific journals, and more precisely with the specific "peers" doing the deciding.
Structured peer review has a somewhat simple problem caused by human nature. If your idea being correct means a lot of the "peers" reviewing your paper are wrong, then it's unlikely to be favorably reviewed, regardless of its actual merit.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
There shouldn't be a lack of resources regardless of whether it's compulsory or not. The issue wasn't so much a response to resources, as it was saying that if folks could vote at any time more people could get to vote and the load would be spread better.
Something needs execution privileges(ie a browser, media player, etc), not necessarily the file itself as if you have execution privileges you can give them to something else.
Most software(at least legal software) for Windows is installed off CD's from cling wrapped boxes, those distribution channels should(and usually are) virus and trojan free. This doesn't help when someone wants to install a screen saver, or when there's a hole in firefox or the like(which is what results in most windows infections, I run a firewall and a virus scanner and excluding a time I tried to update a windows XP installation from a pre sp1 disk in a post sp2 virus world before installing said software I've not had an infection in more than a decade.
If as you said everyone who doesn't switch gets what they deserve then you're advocating an increase in linux/OSX users till they're dominant so that old chestnut about greatest number(which doesn't support you're "They deserve it" spiel anyway) doesn't apply.
The fiery hail stones are a good solution, but they don't scale well and most spammers are unaffected by them.
You'd actually be amazed at what making guns illegal does to gun crime.
True, most guns used in crimes are not legally owned or purchased by the people who commit crimes with them. They were however, all legally owned and purchased by someone. If you can't go and buy a gun from walmart, you can't have that gun stolen and used by a criminal, you can't file off the serial number and on sell it to a criminal, or report it stolen after you've sold it to a criminal.
Guns come from somewhere, they don't just magically appear in the hands of criminals, and if you follow the chain of somewhere's back far enough it always starts with a legal purchase, without a legal purchase you don't have a chain of somewhere's and you don't have a gun in the hands of a criminal.
True it'll take a long time to clean up all the guns that are floating around out there, and during that period of time there will be far more illegal guns than legal ones, but it'll take a lot less time to clean up most of the ammunition out there. True you can hold up a bank with an empty gun(you can hold up a bank with something in your jacket that looks like a gun), but you can't kill anyone with it.
Most countries which outlaw guns have very low levels of gun related crime. It doesn't stop crime commited with other weapons, and admitedly granny doesn't have much chance against the 20 something thug if she's not armed, but the idea that you need a gun because criminals will have them if you don't is really rather facetious.
Guns change the playing field, that's their only real benefit, and they don't level it enough for it to be worth it. Granny might be able to scare off some thug with a gun, but if the thug has his gun out first then unless granny is a retired marine or has extensive gun and combat training from some other source, she's not going anywhere.
The one and only reasonable argument for not scrapping the second amendment is the fact that holding all of the bill of rights as sacred including the second amendment protects the other 9(well 8, the tenth hasn't really been in effect since 1865). However based on the fact that our current government has had absolutely no qualms about trampling all over the bill of rights including having an attorney general who tried to argue that because the constitution only limits in what ways certain rights can be curtailed and never actually grants them in the first place that they don't exist, this argument doesn't hold a lot of water.
Most governments would love to get rid of the 1st amendment, and maybe having already had a process to repeal the 2nd would make that process easier, but they're just ignoring it anyway.
You're told you're throwing your vote away because you are. That's not because voting for third parties is a bad thing, but because of the way the voting system works.
Get run off voting. I moved to Australia, we have it here. I got to vote for the fringe party of my choice and set my second preference to my lesser of two evils choice.
True my fringe party didn't get in, but at least I got to vote for them and show my lesser of two evils choice which direction I think they're policy should go without getting my worse of two evils choice elected.
Without run off voting third parties don't work, there hasn't been a successful third party in the US at the presidential level since Abraham Lincoln, and it took an issue so contentious that it caused a civil war to get him there.
Start campaigning for run off voting at your state level, 3rd parties have a chance there and so you might get it passed. Get it passed in enough states and you can get a third party in at th federal level, or at least shift one of the big two the way you want instead of having them both become exactly the same thing with differences of ideology.
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- You can write off a purely business internet connection as a legitimate business expense, if you use it for personal use as well you've got to do things like work out the percentage of business use vs personal use, this is unnecessary hassle. If you never use it for anything but work you'll never have any problems with the IRS.
- You can get yourself a business connection with an SLA which means that you can rely on your connection. If your connection being down costs your business money paying money to make sure it's up is worth it.
- No matter how clever you make your router there's still a chance that personal use will affect your VOIP services. If you're using your VOIP to talk to customers, then you look unprofessional, if your business is IT related and you can't get simple stuff like VOIP to work you look worse than unprofessional.
Realistically speaking if you're serious about your business and it has developed to the stage where it's providing a reasonable income you should have infrastructure(internet connection, phone line, and likely PC) dedicated to the purpose because the risks of not doing so aren't worth the piddling amount it costs you to do it properly($100 a month written off as a business expense shouldn't be a particularly huge burden for any business which is generating enough money to be your primary source of income, and paying it is substantially better than losing income because you didn't.Add to that the fact that we have absolutely no direct control over the public service workers who actually do all of this stuff, and the fact that the pool of applicants we get to exercise our hiring authority on isn't exactly brimming with excellent candidates and "we the people" aren't exactly all that powerful.
It is therefor technically in my personal best interest for the manufacture of steal to remain in China. That said, I'm not stupid enough not to realize that when the US economy tanks the rest of the world, including Australia goes with it, and that a small hiccup for China is overall less damaging to myself and to the world than the US in a tail spin.
True globalization may be coming, but it's not here yet, we might be interdependent, but we are not interchangeable, $100 spent somewhere else is not the same as $100 spent locally, or even the same as $10 spent locally.
Yes, producing locally will be more expensive than it used to be to produce externally, and yes this will result in a higher local cost(presumably your basis for the broken window theory).
However where the broken window takes something that was fine as it was and claims that by breaking it and producing work for someone else is a good thing where it actually just creates an unnecessary cost for the baker and lowers overall productivity, this isn't the same situation.
The manufacturing work was going to be done by someone regardless, all this has done is make it more economical to do it locally. It isn't unnecessary work, or lost productivity it's simply someone else doing it.
You could argue that the increase in cost will do more overall damage to the economy than bringing the jobs back home will do good, but even that's sort of immaterial, the cost increase is going to happen pretty much no matter what we do, so our net result from this move is an increase in capital flowing into our the US economy and job creation, from the perspective of the US that's a good thing, maybe not so much a good thing for China, but still a good thing.
The US has absolutely no shortage of viable land for development and probably won't see a shortage of viable land on the European scale for another century or so. The UK alone has 1/5 of the US, and it's area is about 244,820 square kilometers compared to 9,629,091 for the united. True, you couldn't live in all of that, but Europe isn't 100% habitable either.
Housing prices are in that sort of bracket in parts of Australia too, but that's most of this country is desert, and our cities sort of have to expand along the coasts.
It's possible that rising fuel prices will increase the cost of transportation meaning that people have to live closer to the cities than they do now and that this will drive up the price of housing in certain areas, but you're never going to see the same level of cost as Europe(well on average, places like New York and parts of California are that expensive, but you're not going to see median house prices in the half a million dollar range in the Midwest any time soon.
.ORG also has some problems, but mostly because it's misused a little bit, and because the definitions of a not for profit/non profit/etc organization are a little blurry. Maybe .ORG would be cleaner if you had to prove that you were a registered non profit in order to get one, you wouldn't have any .ORG squatters then.
There are exceptions of course in cases where you have a group of people and you pick up one or two extras(though the odds that you'll pick up 3 people get a 4th and that 4th isn't guilty and you didn't let one of the other 3 get off easy).
So realistically the only beneficial way(read innocent men get convicted without guilty men going free or getting off easy) is basically to arrest anyone who might possibly have done it, which involves a pretty awful innocent to guilty ratio.
This is why we have the whole beyond a reasonable doubt thing, because if we put the wrong man in prison the right man goes free.
However as this isn't really an issue of the US overriding China's rights on the internet it's not really all that important.
The registrar, who happens to be in China, but could be anywhere for all that it matters signed an agreement with ICANN to follow its rules regarding domain registration. One of those rules it that valid contact information has to be present for all domains. It doesn't as far as I can see have to lead to the person who runs the address, or to any individual involved in the domain(so it's not really an ID card), it simply has to lead to an actual someone who is responsible for that domain. That person is free to decline any requests for information regarding the actual users of their domain, and even to not collect said information at all. They are also entitled to allow said users to continue any activity which doesn't breach the agreement they signed with ICANN or any laws which are applicable to them(ie US law does not apply to a Chinese registrar, but the registrar's agreement with ICANN does). Yes there are potential issues of censorship and you might argue that requiring an individual to be responsible for the registration is wrong, it is however the agreement which the registrars signed in exchange for being able to give out registrations which will be honoured by the internet as a whole and so therefor they're responsible for holding to it.
More importantly there are an awful lot of geeks out there who had experience with the absolutely shocking performance, stability, and quality of ATI's linux drivers(IMO they'd have been better off not releasing any than releasing those pieces of crap) and who had relegated ATI to their do not buy, do not recommend, ever, under any circumstances pile, not even to people who won't ever use linux because any company that would release crap like that doesn't deserve my business when their competitors release an equal or better product and do support linux properly.
Open sourcing the drivers was probably about the only thing AMD could do to fix the bad reputation ATI in certain sectors of the community, and reversing that reputation will most likely result in more profits than it will cost to build the drivers(which they were making, badly, before anyway).
My next video card just might be an ATI, I just might recommend an ATI card to the next person who asks me. Might isn't will because it'll still probably take a few years before there's a decent ATI driver for linux, especially since they don't have a shared architecture like Nvidia and more drivers will have to be written, and the Nvidia ones work now, but might is better than won't.
If this works out for ATI we'll probably see it for Nvidia as well, and then probably Intel with whatever it is they'll decide to offer.
If we can get the graphics drivers open source then maybe we won't have the kernel and X11 devs randomly destroying the driver interfaces and we might be able to get an overall stable 3d acceleration system in Linux.
We might even start seeing open source drivers on Windows and a vastly improved support for OpenGL and therefor more games being written with it.
OpenGL games are far easier to port to linux than Direct X games, and Vista is already using an OpenAL system for its audio(as opposed to direct sound), which will again be easier to port.
Very few companies will ever write a native linux version of a Direct X/Direct Sound game, it's too much work, but converting an OpenGL/OpenAL game to linux is relatively easy(most if not all games that have been ported started life with an OpenGL engine of some sort).
This is overall a good thing for Linux, and probably for Mac too, there are other ways it could have happened, and it might have happened sooner with a little more understanding from some of the more extreme components of the linux community, but all in all this is a good thing for everyone.
Nvidia uses basically the same driver for every card they've made, and a lot of times new drivers will give more performance to older cards(within reason of course). It's these optimizations they don't want seen, not the hardware itself.
To use an old meme, I can use my dvd drive as a cup holder if I want to, no one is going to stop me, but if I do I won't be guaranteed by the manufacturer that I can use it as a DVD drive afterwards.
Nintendo supports the Wii as they sold it or have modified it themselves, they can't and won't support what you've done to it, and they're perfectly within their rights to try give you the option of improving it or even required improvements to the OS in order to play new games.
Yes they should have fixed the stack smashing issue instead of just trying to block a the specific TP hack as that would have been an improvement to the security of the code, but that's really neither here nor there.
The reason for this is the fact that the OS is trivially easy to install and set up, even a Gentoo system can be installed from scratch in less than a day and that's probably the worst case scenario for installation and setup.
The stuff that really matters is your own personal stuff, which in every OS imaginable your own user has the access to destroy. All the information you have that's worth stealing, everything that's valuable and hard to replace was created by your own user admin or otherwise. The state of your OS doesn't matter if your stuff is gone. You don't even have to be root to run a spam daemon in Linux(so long as you don't try to open a port Not running as admin is only really important in shared environments. If you lose your files, that shouldn't necessarily mean that everyone else loses there's too, but most desktops don't run this way, linux or otherwise. Very few shared family PC's will have separate data and program stores for each user, and as previously said anything that's yours you can write to and can destroy, encrypt, automatically upload to a web address, change permissions on and execute, and therefor anything that's taken over your system can do the same.
That's not to say that linux isn't more secure than windows, merely that for a single user PC running as admin doesn't really make a lot of difference.
That'll either render it useless or cause it to exploded at the time of original loading which is basically going to be in your own port and so not really all that desirable.
Square metreish holes in the metal patched with plastic would both alter the structural integrity of the box(possibly causing it to be crushed and again explode in your own port), and would also be fairly visible. No on really look at the contents of most shipping containers, but if one comes off the dock with a huge fucking window in it, someone's going to take a look through the window.
Shipping a nuke in a container is possible, but not terribly likely.
There's also the whole theory that since any degree of serious nuclear enrichment, let alone secretly doing so, involves having a great deal of infrastructure and organization and that any nation or group capable of doing so is usually sufficiently sane to realize that nuclear war is a no win situation and not launch the thing.
Plenty of "rogue" states have nukes, but if any "rogue" state launches one of them they're liking to end up a glowing parking lot(along with everyone else) and most of the guys who fund and organize this sort of thing aren't as interested in dieing for the jihad as the plebs they send out with explosives strapped to their chests.
Basically to your average right wing nut job there's no difference between forcing them to leave people who do things they don't like alone and forcing them to do the things they don't like.
They see allowing other people to believe what they want to believe as oppressing their right to believe what they want to believe and so they see anything like allowing gay marriage as an assault on them.
You've got to remember, the UK farmed all it's religious lunatics off onto the US, and the current crop are descended from those loonies. These are the same people who came up with the klan and all that sort. They exist in every country, but they exist in larger numbers in the US and form the backbone of the republican party(funny how the political party who freed the slaves and destroyed the 10th amendment is now the party of the very people they fought the war against), so republican politics even from otherwise reasonable people tend to be tainted by irrational lunacy.
You can't crash a boat like that into much of anything and do any serious damage(without a lot of explosives at least), you can't outrun a motor launch in one of those, and you're not likely to get in a situation where there's a lot of innocent people on one of them and they're not too hard to sink.
Juries and cops might not be perfect, but they're not totally broken either. Yeah you can convince a jury that a poor man killed someone or that a rich man didn't, or that copyright deserves excessive punishment, but this is a different story. As for cops, they're as work averse as the rest of us, do you really think they want to do paperwork just to pick you up for a flame war, let alone the expense necessary to track you down.
Because the VAST, VAST majority of guns in America are owned by people who don't need a gun and in most cases don't even know how to use a gun properly and because the malfeasance of the minority involves people dieing.
Yeah it's vague, yeah it could be used against almost anyone, but any criminal complaint against you has to get past cops, prosecutors, a judge, and a jury before you go to jail. If any one of those people says "that kid should HTFU" you're not going to go to jail. In all reality unless you're a sick demented fuck like the woman the law was created because of you're not even going to see a visit from the cops.
Some laws can be abused, this is unlikely to be one of them.
Structured peer review has a somewhat simple problem caused by human nature. If your idea being correct means a lot of the "peers" reviewing your paper are wrong, then it's unlikely to be favorably reviewed, regardless of its actual merit.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
There shouldn't be a lack of resources regardless of whether it's compulsory or not. The issue wasn't so much a response to resources, as it was saying that if folks could vote at any time more people could get to vote and the load would be spread better.
Most software(at least legal software) for Windows is installed off CD's from cling wrapped boxes, those distribution channels should(and usually are) virus and trojan free. This doesn't help when someone wants to install a screen saver, or when there's a hole in firefox or the like(which is what results in most windows infections, I run a firewall and a virus scanner and excluding a time I tried to update a windows XP installation from a pre sp1 disk in a post sp2 virus world before installing said software I've not had an infection in more than a decade.
If as you said everyone who doesn't switch gets what they deserve then you're advocating an increase in linux/OSX users till they're dominant so that old chestnut about greatest number(which doesn't support you're "They deserve it" spiel anyway) doesn't apply.
The fiery hail stones are a good solution, but they don't scale well and most spammers are unaffected by them.
True, most guns used in crimes are not legally owned or purchased by the people who commit crimes with them. They were however, all legally owned and purchased by someone. If you can't go and buy a gun from walmart, you can't have that gun stolen and used by a criminal, you can't file off the serial number and on sell it to a criminal, or report it stolen after you've sold it to a criminal.
Guns come from somewhere, they don't just magically appear in the hands of criminals, and if you follow the chain of somewhere's back far enough it always starts with a legal purchase, without a legal purchase you don't have a chain of somewhere's and you don't have a gun in the hands of a criminal.
True it'll take a long time to clean up all the guns that are floating around out there, and during that period of time there will be far more illegal guns than legal ones, but it'll take a lot less time to clean up most of the ammunition out there. True you can hold up a bank with an empty gun(you can hold up a bank with something in your jacket that looks like a gun), but you can't kill anyone with it.
Most countries which outlaw guns have very low levels of gun related crime. It doesn't stop crime commited with other weapons, and admitedly granny doesn't have much chance against the 20 something thug if she's not armed, but the idea that you need a gun because criminals will have them if you don't is really rather facetious.
Guns change the playing field, that's their only real benefit, and they don't level it enough for it to be worth it. Granny might be able to scare off some thug with a gun, but if the thug has his gun out first then unless granny is a retired marine or has extensive gun and combat training from some other source, she's not going anywhere.
The one and only reasonable argument for not scrapping the second amendment is the fact that holding all of the bill of rights as sacred including the second amendment protects the other 9(well 8, the tenth hasn't really been in effect since 1865). However based on the fact that our current government has had absolutely no qualms about trampling all over the bill of rights including having an attorney general who tried to argue that because the constitution only limits in what ways certain rights can be curtailed and never actually grants them in the first place that they don't exist, this argument doesn't hold a lot of water.
Most governments would love to get rid of the 1st amendment, and maybe having already had a process to repeal the 2nd would make that process easier, but they're just ignoring it anyway.
Get run off voting. I moved to Australia, we have it here. I got to vote for the fringe party of my choice and set my second preference to my lesser of two evils choice.
True my fringe party didn't get in, but at least I got to vote for them and show my lesser of two evils choice which direction I think they're policy should go without getting my worse of two evils choice elected.
Without run off voting third parties don't work, there hasn't been a successful third party in the US at the presidential level since Abraham Lincoln, and it took an issue so contentious that it caused a civil war to get him there.
Start campaigning for run off voting at your state level, 3rd parties have a chance there and so you might get it passed. Get it passed in enough states and you can get a third party in at th federal level, or at least shift one of the big two the way you want instead of having them both become exactly the same thing with differences of ideology.