Well I don't recall that option in warty (what I have here), I just told it to partition and formad my second hardrive and install there. I kept waiting for it to ask me about the bootloader to install and what disk to install to and what to make bootable. NOTHING it just toasted my other hd's boot sector so all I could do is boot ubuntu from grub, it even installed an smp kernal I have no use for running a single cpu on a single socket 939 board.
As far as getting it to burn iso's, well no seeing as how xxyyzz.iso is an mp3 as far as the system is concerned, when I finally did find a way to open a burning program it accepted unbuntu's claim that it was an mp3 file and said it couldn't burn it.
As far as being superior to the others, well when I can get madrake to install (before 8 no matter which comp or the three available to me I tried the installer died on a divide by zero error) everything works fine and I can even *GASP* change a setting other than background and choose a boot loader and how it behaves. Haven't had hardware issues in ages, last time was red hat 5 or 6 IIRC not recognizing an odball hand scanner I had. That and madrake 10.0's livecd don't like ATI AIW9600's.
I like ubuntu conceptually, and once they fix the problems with install and file type handling and a decent config and controll system it could be a nice system. But warty was just broken for me.
From my experience with warty, you have NO communication concerning boot. It just sets grub up on your primary hard-drive with just ubuntu kernals to boot to.
Admittedly it MIGHT be there well hidden, or as an obscure parameter when you start install. But after running into to many other broken things I didn't really fiddle with the install more than the two instals I did, though the second install was an attempt to restore my other boot options or see what I'd missed (nothing I could find) durring install that could have prevented it from trashing the boot sector on a disk other than where I installed it.
Well the disk they sent me ONLY had ubuntu as a boot option when grub showed up on boot. which is odd since I was booting from a drive I didn't install to, and never had it say ANYTHING about boot options or bootloaders or anything related during install.
Also YES you can change what the default app is for various file types, but you can't change what file type it thinks something is. And what it thinks something is apears to be random and doesn't apply to all files of an actual type. I had it miss-identify about half of the.iso files as.mp3 files and leave the other half alone, yet I have NO.iso's that are of cd's that have any music, let alone mp3's, on them in the folder I was working with. Nothing actually involving media files (in the usual sense of 'multi-media') that I noticed, but then after a day of trying to deal with it's unconfigureabilty and general brokeness I got rid of it and repaired the damage.
An example that would fit your case would be if it thought half of your.txt files were actually quicktime slideshows and you couldn't find any way to convince it otherwise.
Well as I said, it can be matter of perception, and mine could easily be off since I haven't really done any 'hard' studies, just gut impressions which are notoriously unreliable.
Good points about my use of freedom. It is a bit bague in that usage.
As far as attacking the GOP, I wasn't. My point really was that while eigther major party might be good for some rights, thier track record on others is often not so good.
The pc-ism I was refering to wasn't just, or even mostly, about social reaction. It was more about making some words and views a leagle liability. The most obvious is many of the hate crimes laws. Some make the words illeagle directly and some only indirectly. Don't get me wrong, most of what hate-crimes laws target is indeed foul behaviour, but the words or beliefs (however stupid and wrong) themselves should not be lest we find ourselves at the bottom of the proverbial slippery slope someday.
As far as running around in panic, no of course not, but by the same token simply hoping it will get fixed is not recommended eigther.
Someone around here has an apt sig. It lists the boxes to be used in defence of freedom and our rights in order as soap,ballot,ammo (I think I may have missed one, mail?).
Well this is the first time I've had anything barf on them. And it choses the mime types itself and had no visible (even with a couple hours digging around) method to change them.
These were standard.iso files that every other cd burning program I've tried recognized and burned with just fine.
I was thinking newbie in general. Fat chance getting them to buy a second computer just to try some os with a, to them, wierd name.
If it's not reasonably safe and easy to use on thier only computer the odds drop ALOT, and those aren't so good to begin with.
You say we. I take it you are somehow associated with ubuntu.
Can you tell me if the problem with ovewrighting the primary drive boot secotor without warning is fixed? and can you change the mime types Ubuntu seems to apply at random to common file types making them unusable been fixed?
I heard alot of good about Ubuntu and got some disks, but it was a disaster. I installed it to my secondary hard drive (I can easily choose wich hard drive to boot with two key presses as I post) and it nonetheless overwrote the boot on my primary hard-drive. Then when I tried to burn a cd.iso it had assigned the mime type such that it thought it was an mp3 music file!?!? not all my.iso were misslabled, just nearly half, yet all my.iso files (misslabled and not) where in ONE folder with nothing to distguish one from the other except name. And there was no way to fix this that I could find.
I've installed several varieties of red-hat and mandrake and slack once and have an ancient ver of caldera and debian around here I've toyed with among others. I've NEVER bought an off-the-shelf desktop except my first 286 I got used and converted to a 386 within weeks and actually make money helping people clean the spyware off thier xp systems and doing upgrades and such, so I doubt I did anything boneheaded (not impossible, but unlikely) and found ubuntu nearly unuseable because it made so many assumptions that I couldn't change with some serious deep digging into internalls I didn't want to screw with just to try a new distro.
I'm not trying to flame or complian, but I really don't see the version I got in the mail (about a month ago) as anywhere near ready for any but the linux geeks who would run just linux and like digging around in config files manually and issueing arcane commands with a dozen parameters discovered with yarrow sticks and a crystal ball.
The only significant fact that might contribute is I was using the amd64 version, so if it's just that version having birthing pains let me know.
My experience with the live cd was that it didn't do that the couple of times I booted it, however the install disk does this no matter what. Note this isn't the hoary version but previous version.
Given that the version I have on disk does wreck the boot sector so only it can boot, even the boot sector on disks it's NOT installed to, I wouldn't be suprised if he found a system the live cd would trash.
Problem, most newbies are going to want to dual boot. From experience this is a no-go with ubuntu.
Also newbies are going to be a bit peeved when half thier files don't work right because ubuntu has missguesed what they are and there is no obvious way to fix it, nor non-obvious way since it's miss-detection of file type seemed non-consistant, it's not like it thought all.txt files were movies or all.iso's were mp3 music. It just picked some random number of files with a particular extension and miss-categorized them.
Just works?!?!?!? Maybe this new release works, but when I tried the previous one it: a)toasted my mbr so I couldn't boot anything else, no warning, no option to do otherwise, just toast it. Never mind that I told it to install on my second harddrive and not touch the primary. b) it insisted that over half of my iso files were actualy mp3 music files (not iso's of mp3 cd's, but actual mp3's themselves?!?!?) and had NO way to change this assumption.
In the attempt to fix both the above I discovered it had almost no USEFULL configuration ability.
It looks like it might be a nice distro one day. but it's going to be quite a while before I trust it NOT to trash my system again. Fourtunately I'd taken some precautions and was able to restore things.
To me ovewriteing a boot sector it wasn't told to touch on a drive it wasn't being installed to isn't 'just works' it's 'just wrecks', and not recognizing a very common file type, worse misrecognizing it as another type and having no way to manually correct it's mistake is not working.
I can handle it not having every package and the kitchen sink thrown in like some distro's do, I'm ambivalent about all those extras. But making two brain-damaged amature mistakes like that mark it not ready for primetime IMHO.
Though if this version is better in these respects I'd like to hear about it.
Could you explain the part how smaller feature size means lower resistance. I was taught smaller conductors RAISE resistance, so I assume some other aspect of shrinking the feature size reduces resistance more than the reduced conductor size.
I could swear I saw a review or story somehwere on a new desktop motherboard designed to use the pentium-m chips.
There were a lot of people glad to see it, but the review of the board had it a bit middle of the road, o.k. or a little better, but with a chipset out for this a couple of really good boards might get made.
The only problem is with the new form-factors and switch over to 64bit chips I dunno how long it'll last or how many will build boards.
This was only a month or two ago IIRC. Can't recall for shure but I think eigther the board or the chipset could do pci-e. I didn't really pay it much attention as I like my AMD64-3500+ system (socket 939). And see no reason to go backwards.
It's only sad to me if Intell isn't working thier arses off to catch up thereby keeping Amd on thier toes.
Of course if you're Intell, or a fan of thiers, it might be sad.
Kind of ironic that the company that created the x86 arch that this all evolved from is no longer top dog in the field, but rather the company they contracted with to cover thier 'low end' is. Kinda like how IBM is no longer in the 'pc' bussiness.
Perhaps it is indeed a matter of perspective, every generation does indeed tend to consider the time of thier youth before the troubles of the world were so clearly visible to them as 'the good old days' and romanticise even further the days of thier parents and grandparents.
But it still seems to me that for every step forward in our rights in one area we loose just a tad more in another. Perhaps the 2nd suffers less under the gop, but doese not privacy and freedom suffer more? perhaps the big evils of slavery are finally cast down for what they are, but do we not through pc-ism find our right to speak our mind diminished?
A tough call I suppose, but when I find I am no longer safe from search or siezure in my own car because the officer's remote odds of reduced safty somehow trumps my rights under the fifth I am dispirited. Mind you I like most police officers I've met and feel they are underpaid and do a hard thankless job, but thier job is NOT about thier percieved safty but about the rule of law and public safty, which becomes jepordized when our constitionally protected (not granted or given!) rights are diminished.
There are thousands of tiny examples. I feel it's more we gone from a few big failures to a great many tiny faults, from a few bad timbers in the building to an infestation of termites and rot.
But I do hope your right and I'm merely mistaking an increase in awareness for what has always been there for an actual increase the faults themselves.
The reasons you cite did figure into why the founding fathers chose the system they did, in deed not only did they see a national campain as problematic, but distastefull and unseemly (the office should seek the man, not the man should seek the office). They did give reasons such the unlikelyness of the common man to learn much of people outside his own state or to have time to do so.
They did indeed desire to solve many problems including the well known potential disparities between the populous states and rural states (much the same problems as the two house congress we have solves). And they also recognized the tendancy for factionalization (parties) and sought to minimize that as well (they considered parties to be a bad idea indeed).
But they did make it clear one of thier reasons was to have a well informed and, hopefully wise and trustworthy, group of men who could choose a man for office based uppon his merits for the office. And by tying thier hands in the manner we have we short ciruit one of the many safeguards built into the consitution, this one against 'the passions of the moment'.
Fourtunately it's still possible for the electoral colledge to vote other than ordered should circumstance be sufficiently dire and thier courage strong enough, but in so doing they will violate the laws of thier home states and no doubt kick up a significant ruccus should an election be decided other than indicated by popular vote. But as far as I can tell there is no constitutional means to not count thier votes as they have cast them, laws and votes of thier home states notwithstanding.
Another factor is that they firmly believed, not in democracy, but in representation. They didn't shout no taxation with democracy, but none without representation. This, if anything, was thier guiding principle. That the people should participate yes, but via thier chosen proxies, people who could and should study the issues and make wise decisions on thier behalf.
An interesting tie in to current events is that the college of cardinals was one of the inspirations for our system, (My condollences to the Catholics and other Christians who might read this, he seemed a Good man honestly trying his best to make a better place of our world) as was the centurial assembly system in use in ancient rome.
I'm not shure about that. IF the electoral colledge had a tie yes, but a smaller group like that is less likely to tie, and can actively choose not to.
With the current system ties cannot be avoided through deliberation. That is once the popular votes are cast we're stuck with a tie. Where-as with the smaller group they can debate amongst themselves who's best fit for the job. IF there are no compelling arguments then I suspect a tie would be less troublesome as it'd be more likely the th parties to the tie would both have simular merit. With the current system all a tie means is that both parties put out good attack adds.
Aslo with the electoral colledge system you can more realistically have more than two choices (and this is why the current parties like the current system so much) and should the two majors put up for election looses who's only redeeming feature is charisma, the collede can choose a better candidate.
Not really from The Matrix, The Matrix is just a popularisation of the 'jack in' concept. Which it looks like they (the W brothers) went with electrical/inductive coupling as have most.
Sony's patent is about doing so with ultrasonics. I I don't know if thier is any 'prior art' over the idea of using ultrasonics to do this, but idea of 'jacking' into the global computer matrix goes back at least as far as Neuromancer by Gibson. Possibly farther then that, but a lot of people consider Neuromance the definitive classic of the cyber punk genre in wich The Matrix sorta falls. I tend to agree, but that's at least in part because me and the hero of said work share a first name (even if 'Ghebson' spelled it wrong:) ).
Actually perpetual motion machines are unpatentable under US law. So if such a patent were granted it'd be because the details were obfuscated enough the examiner missed it. Though these days simply not saying perpetual motion is enough obfuscation.
While my sampling is only one, the only ranger I ever met tried to get me to sign up for one of the idiot amyway clones.
He did a few other things to prove he wasn't exactly a thinker. He was classic middle iq jock.
Read the bill of rights sometimes and see wich of those in-aleinable rights haven't a defacto 'unless the federal government decides otherwise' tacted onto them.
An easy, if somewhat contriversial example: how is it possible to be jailed for simply having a firearm on you when BEAR and NOT INFRINGED both apear in the second amendment (and before some ignoramus quotes the 'well regulated millitia part' please be aware if you are a us citizen of leagle age and sound mind you ARE the millitia. That and well regulated means functioning, not legislated)
Going further the fifth prohibits the taking of private property for public use without 'fair compensation', yet look at the drug fortieture laws. One man was hired for a charter flight and flew the customer from one island to another. The customer was dressed like many of the bussinessmen he'd flown before and he had no reason to suspect this person as anything else. Yet when he landed he, <b>his plane</b>, and the customer were arrested (yes his plane was 'arrested' not impounded). The man was carrying a fair amount of of some illeagle drug in his briefcase (it was full). The charges against the pilot/owner was dropped, not even a grand jury or anything, but the plane was still sold off.
Many of these drug siezed properties were a result of an anonymous tip (errr, confront accusers, no warrents shall issue? there's two more), in some cases the tip turns out bogus, but since 'suspicion of drugs' is the cause of the search and siezure the state gets to sell it off at auction anyway. Though that last has slowed almost to a stop because of the outcry.
Or more recently the 14th amendment directly prohibits the draft, yet it has used since the 1th was passed.
Many of our rights are regularly ingored. Unless of course you were taking issue with the implication this is a recent phenomena, which of course it's not, it's just a bit more pronounced.
Actually the selection of president was originally designed with some meritocraticit elements. The current 'popular election' system where each state is 'winner take all' (with a couple exceptions) isn't the original design, but rather a cludge pasted onto it by the political party system to better enable them to get elected based popularity and momentary passions rather than merit and the deliberation of the electoral colledge. Who where supposed to be elected based on thier merit, that is ability to wisely select a supreme executive.
Most of the rest is spot on, and given the current system the glossing over of this detail is understandable, but it is actually pretty important IMHO.
The job of the electoral colledge is to be responsible to the people for WISELY selecting the president. However it is a good idea to have them not directly bound to the people's imediate wishes else the very rule of the mob the founders sought to avoid becomes much more closer to the norm.
The electoral colledge serves as buffer in the system. In theory it's THIER job to prevent us electing someone ill suited to the job or worse because of momentary passions. THEY are supposed to be how we avoid electing our own Hittler (don't ever forget that madman was elected).
Most of us don't have the time to study in detail a candidate, but the job of the electoral colledge was to do just that and decide there on.
These days they're reduced to being just yes men for the popular vote within thier state, wich is cast by people with time for little else than a 30second soundbite durring re-runs of whatever mindless drivle they watch on tv.
Is it any wonder we had a choice this last time between a pathalogical liar and a militant oil tycoon.
That's the other thing restoring the electoral college could do, give a better chance to third parties and independants. To many (IE most) who like a third partie candidate foolishly buy into the myth that voting for whom they want in office is wasting thier vote if it's not a republican or democrat stooge.
Actually it's my understanding that we cannot completely avoid eating some meat, or at least certain animal only protiens (or at least non-plant).
Where do you thing the needed protiens in some of those suppliments come from.
Thought FWIW some of the proteins can come from insects such. One speaker I heard on the issue said that one protien we need, but in tiny quantities, is often ingested in sufficient levels by accident through insects that wind up in the other food we eat in various ways.
The real problem is that technolodgy has reached the point where we can generate foods in proportion to our desires and tastes, which evolved to compensate for the scarcity of some of them. The result is we eat way to much of the 'tasty' foods which in reallity we only need small amounts of and start having cholesterol issues and sugar problems and so on.
Hopefully technology will continue to improve to the point where we can make the nutritional content and health value of a food match it's taste value. And perhaps find ways to manufacture from chemical or plant sources the protiens we must currently harvest from animal sources.
A side item that I recall is a study a few years ago that showed that food preferences and blood type tended to correlate, type O's had the highest prefference for meat and AB's the lowest with A and B in the middle.
Except for the fact that in many cases plant protiens are different from the animal protiens.
Many are the same, and our bodies can convert some. However it's my understanding that a few we need cannot be gotten by consuming plants, and cannot be artificially made.
One must eigther take supplements wich contain animal protiens or eat meat or eat 'fortified' foods that have animal protiens added.
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Well I don't recall that option in warty (what I have here), I just told it to partition and formad my second hardrive and install there. I kept waiting for it to ask me about the bootloader to install and what disk to install to and what to make bootable. NOTHING it just toasted my other hd's boot sector so all I could do is boot ubuntu from grub, it even installed an smp kernal I have no use for running a single cpu on a single socket 939 board.
As far as getting it to burn iso's, well no seeing as how xxyyzz.iso is an mp3 as far as the system is concerned, when I finally did find a way to open a burning program it accepted unbuntu's claim that it was an mp3 file and said it couldn't burn it.
As far as being superior to the others, well when I can get madrake to install (before 8 no matter which comp or the three available to me I tried the installer died on a divide by zero error) everything works fine and I can even *GASP* change a setting other than background and choose a boot loader and how it behaves. Haven't had hardware issues in ages, last time was red hat 5 or 6 IIRC not recognizing an odball hand scanner I had. That and madrake 10.0's livecd don't like ATI AIW9600's.
I like ubuntu conceptually, and once they fix the problems with install and file type handling and a decent config and controll system it could be a nice system. But warty was just broken for me.
Mycroft
From my experience with warty, you have NO communication concerning boot. It just sets grub up on your primary hard-drive with just ubuntu kernals to boot to.
Admittedly it MIGHT be there well hidden, or as an obscure parameter when you start install. But after running into to many other broken things I didn't really fiddle with the install more than the two instals I did, though the second install was an attempt to restore my other boot options or see what I'd missed (nothing I could find) durring install that could have prevented it from trashing the boot sector on a disk other than where I installed it.
Mycroft
Well the disk they sent me ONLY had ubuntu as a boot option when grub showed up on boot. which is odd since I was booting from a drive I didn't install to, and never had it say ANYTHING about boot options or bootloaders or anything related during install. .iso files as .mp3 files and leave the other half alone, yet I have NO .iso's that are of cd's that have any music, let alone mp3's, on them in the folder I was working with. Nothing actually involving media files (in the usual sense of 'multi-media') that I noticed, but then after a day of trying to deal with it's unconfigureabilty and general brokeness I got rid of it and repaired the damage. .txt files were actually quicktime slideshows and you couldn't find any way to convince it otherwise.
Also YES you can change what the default app is for various file types, but you can't change what file type it thinks something is. And what it thinks something is apears to be random and doesn't apply to all files of an actual type. I had it miss-identify about half of the
An example that would fit your case would be if it thought half of your
Mycroft
Well as I said, it can be matter of perception, and mine could easily be off since I haven't really done any 'hard' studies, just gut impressions which are notoriously unreliable.
Good points about my use of freedom. It is a bit bague in that usage.
As far as attacking the GOP, I wasn't. My point really was that while eigther major party might be good for some rights, thier track record on others is often not so good.
The pc-ism I was refering to wasn't just, or even mostly, about social reaction. It was more about making some words and views a leagle liability. The most obvious is many of the hate crimes laws. Some make the words illeagle directly and some only indirectly. Don't get me wrong, most of what hate-crimes laws target is indeed foul behaviour, but the words or beliefs (however stupid and wrong) themselves should not be lest we find ourselves at the bottom of the proverbial slippery slope someday.
As far as running around in panic, no of course not, but by the same token simply hoping it will get fixed is not recommended eigther.
Someone around here has an apt sig. It lists the boxes to be used in defence of freedom and our rights in order as soap,ballot,ammo (I think I may have missed one, mail?).
Mycroft
Well this is the first time I've had anything barf on them. And it choses the mime types itself and had no visible (even with a couple hours digging around) method to change them. .iso files that every other cd burning program I've tried recognized and burned with just fine.
These were standard
Mycroft
I was thinking newbie in general. Fat chance getting them to buy a second computer just to try some os with a, to them, wierd name.
If it's not reasonably safe and easy to use on thier only computer the odds drop ALOT, and those aren't so good to begin with.
Mycroft
You say we. I take it you are somehow associated with ubuntu. .iso it had assigned the mime type such that it thought it was an mp3 music file!?!? not all my .iso were misslabled, just nearly half, yet all my .iso files (misslabled and not) where in ONE folder with nothing to distguish one from the other except name. And there was no way to fix this that I could find.
Can you tell me if the problem with ovewrighting the primary drive boot secotor without warning is fixed? and can you change the mime types Ubuntu seems to apply at random to common file types making them unusable been fixed?
I heard alot of good about Ubuntu and got some disks, but it was a disaster. I installed it to my secondary hard drive (I can easily choose wich hard drive to boot with two key presses as I post) and it nonetheless overwrote the boot on my primary hard-drive. Then when I tried to burn a cd
I've installed several varieties of red-hat and mandrake and slack once and have an ancient ver of caldera and debian around here I've toyed with among others. I've NEVER bought an off-the-shelf desktop except my first 286 I got used and converted to a 386 within weeks and actually make money helping people clean the spyware off thier xp systems and doing upgrades and such, so I doubt I did anything boneheaded (not impossible, but unlikely) and found ubuntu nearly unuseable because it made so many assumptions that I couldn't change with some serious deep digging into internalls I didn't want to screw with just to try a new distro.
I'm not trying to flame or complian, but I really don't see the version I got in the mail (about a month ago) as anywhere near ready for any but the linux geeks who would run just linux and like digging around in config files manually and issueing arcane commands with a dozen parameters discovered with yarrow sticks and a crystal ball.
The only significant fact that might contribute is I was using the amd64 version, so if it's just that version having birthing pains let me know.
Mycroft
My experience with the live cd was that it didn't do that the couple of times I booted it, however the install disk does this no matter what. Note this isn't the hoary version but previous version.
Given that the version I have on disk does wreck the boot sector so only it can boot, even the boot sector on disks it's NOT installed to, I wouldn't be suprised if he found a system the live cd would trash.
Mycroft
Problem, most newbies are going to want to dual boot. From experience this is a no-go with ubuntu. .txt files were movies or all .iso's were mp3 music. It just picked some random number of files with a particular extension and miss-categorized them.
Also newbies are going to be a bit peeved when half thier files don't work right because ubuntu has missguesed what they are and there is no obvious way to fix it, nor non-obvious way since it's miss-detection of file type seemed non-consistant, it's not like it thought all
Mycroft
Just works?!?!?!?
Maybe this new release works, but when I tried the previous one it:
a)toasted my mbr so I couldn't boot anything else, no warning, no option to do otherwise, just toast it. Never mind that I told it to install on my second harddrive and not touch the primary.
b) it insisted that over half of my iso files were actualy mp3 music files (not iso's of mp3 cd's, but actual mp3's themselves?!?!?) and had NO way to change this assumption.
In the attempt to fix both the above I discovered it had almost no USEFULL configuration ability.
It looks like it might be a nice distro one day. but it's going to be quite a while before I trust it NOT to trash my system again. Fourtunately I'd taken some precautions and was able to restore things.
To me ovewriteing a boot sector it wasn't told to touch on a drive it wasn't being installed to isn't 'just works' it's 'just wrecks', and not recognizing a very common file type, worse misrecognizing it as another type and having no way to manually correct it's mistake is not working.
I can handle it not having every package and the kitchen sink thrown in like some distro's do, I'm ambivalent about all those extras. But making two brain-damaged amature mistakes like that mark it not ready for primetime IMHO.
Though if this version is better in these respects I'd like to hear about it.
Mycroft
Could you explain the part how smaller feature size means lower resistance. I was taught smaller conductors RAISE resistance, so I assume some other aspect of shrinking the feature size reduces resistance more than the reduced conductor size.
Mycroft
I could swear I saw a review or story somehwere on a new desktop motherboard designed to use the pentium-m chips.
There were a lot of people glad to see it, but the review of the board had it a bit middle of the road, o.k. or a little better, but with a chipset out for this a couple of really good boards might get made.
The only problem is with the new form-factors and switch over to 64bit chips I dunno how long it'll last or how many will build boards.
This was only a month or two ago IIRC. Can't recall for shure but I think eigther the board or the chipset could do pci-e. I didn't really pay it much attention as I like my AMD64-3500+ system (socket 939). And see no reason to go backwards.
Mycroft
It's only sad to me if Intell isn't working thier arses off to catch up thereby keeping Amd on thier toes.
Of course if you're Intell, or a fan of thiers, it might be sad.
Kind of ironic that the company that created the x86 arch that this all evolved from is no longer top dog in the field, but rather the company they contracted with to cover thier 'low end' is. Kinda like how IBM is no longer in the 'pc' bussiness.
Mycroft
Perhaps it is indeed a matter of perspective, every generation does indeed tend to consider the time of thier youth before the troubles of the world were so clearly visible to them as 'the good old days' and romanticise even further the days of thier parents and grandparents.
But it still seems to me that for every step forward in our rights in one area we loose just a tad more in another. Perhaps the 2nd suffers less under the gop, but doese not privacy and freedom suffer more? perhaps the big evils of slavery are finally cast down for what they are, but do we not through pc-ism find our right to speak our mind diminished?
A tough call I suppose, but when I find I am no longer safe from search or siezure in my own car because the officer's remote odds of reduced safty somehow trumps my rights under the fifth I am dispirited. Mind you I like most police officers I've met and feel they are underpaid and do a hard thankless job, but thier job is NOT about thier percieved safty but about the rule of law and public safty, which becomes jepordized when our constitionally protected (not granted or given!) rights are diminished.
There are thousands of tiny examples. I feel it's more we gone from a few big failures to a great many tiny faults, from a few bad timbers in the building to an infestation of termites and rot.
But I do hope your right and I'm merely mistaking an increase in awareness for what has always been there for an actual increase the faults themselves.
Mycroft
The reasons you cite did figure into why the founding fathers chose the system they did, in deed not only did they see a national campain as problematic, but distastefull and unseemly (the office should seek the man, not the man should seek the office). They did give reasons such the unlikelyness of the common man to learn much of people outside his own state or to have time to do so.
They did indeed desire to solve many problems including the well known potential disparities between the populous states and rural states (much the same problems as the two house congress we have solves). And they also recognized the tendancy for factionalization (parties) and sought to minimize that as well (they considered parties to be a bad idea indeed).
But they did make it clear one of thier reasons was to have a well informed and, hopefully wise and trustworthy, group of men who could choose a man for office based uppon his merits for the office. And by tying thier hands in the manner we have we short ciruit one of the many safeguards built into the consitution, this one against 'the passions of the moment'.
Fourtunately it's still possible for the electoral colledge to vote other than ordered should circumstance be sufficiently dire and thier courage strong enough, but in so doing they will violate the laws of thier home states and no doubt kick up a significant ruccus should an election be decided other than indicated by popular vote. But as far as I can tell there is no constitutional means to not count thier votes as they have cast them, laws and votes of thier home states notwithstanding.
Another factor is that they firmly believed, not in democracy, but in representation. They didn't shout no taxation with democracy, but none without representation. This, if anything, was thier guiding principle. That the people should participate yes, but via thier chosen proxies, people who could and should study the issues and make wise decisions on thier behalf.
An interesting tie in to current events is that the college of cardinals was one of the inspirations for our system, (My condollences to the Catholics and other Christians who might read this, he seemed a Good man honestly trying his best to make a better place of our world) as was the centurial assembly system in use in ancient rome.
Mycroft
I'm not shure about that. IF the electoral colledge had a tie yes, but a smaller group like that is less likely to tie, and can actively choose not to.
With the current system ties cannot be avoided through deliberation. That is once the popular votes are cast we're stuck with a tie. Where-as with the smaller group they can debate amongst themselves who's best fit for the job. IF there are no compelling arguments then I suspect a tie would be less troublesome as it'd be more likely the th parties to the tie would both have simular merit. With the current system all a tie means is that both parties put out good attack adds.
Aslo with the electoral colledge system you can more realistically have more than two choices (and this is why the current parties like the current system so much) and should the two majors put up for election looses who's only redeeming feature is charisma, the collede can choose a better candidate.
Mycroft
Not really from The Matrix, The Matrix is just a popularisation of the 'jack in' concept. Which it looks like they (the W brothers) went with electrical/inductive coupling as have most. :) ).
Sony's patent is about doing so with ultrasonics.
I I don't know if thier is any 'prior art' over the idea of using ultrasonics to do this, but idea of 'jacking' into the global computer matrix goes back at least as far as Neuromancer by Gibson. Possibly farther then that, but a lot of people consider Neuromance the definitive classic of the cyber punk genre in wich The Matrix sorta falls. I tend to agree, but that's at least in part because me and the hero of said work share a first name (even if 'Ghebson' spelled it wrong
Mycroft
hmm I get hell.pl for that ip addy.
any chance you misstyped it?
Mycroft
Actually perpetual motion machines are unpatentable under US law. So if such a patent were granted it'd be because the details were obfuscated enough the examiner missed it. Though these days simply not saying perpetual motion is enough obfuscation.
Mycroft
While my sampling is only one, the only ranger I ever met tried to get me to sign up for one of the idiot amyway clones.
He did a few other things to prove he wasn't exactly a thinker. He was classic middle iq jock.
Mycroft
I seriously doubt the Democrats will be that bad at it.
Mycroft
Read the bill of rights sometimes and see wich of those in-aleinable rights haven't a defacto 'unless the federal government decides otherwise' tacted onto them.
An easy, if somewhat contriversial example: how is it possible to be jailed for simply having a firearm on you when BEAR and NOT INFRINGED both apear in the second amendment (and before some ignoramus quotes the 'well regulated millitia part' please be aware if you are a us citizen of leagle age and sound mind you ARE the millitia. That and well regulated means functioning, not legislated)
Going further the fifth prohibits the taking of private property for public use without 'fair compensation', yet look at the drug fortieture laws. One man was hired for a charter flight and flew the customer from one island to another. The customer was dressed like many of the bussinessmen he'd flown before and he had no reason to suspect this person as anything else. Yet when he landed he, <b>his plane</b>, and the customer were arrested (yes his plane was 'arrested' not impounded). The man was carrying a fair amount of of some illeagle drug in his briefcase (it was full). The charges against the pilot/owner was dropped, not even a grand jury or anything, but the plane was still sold off.
Many of these drug siezed properties were a result of an anonymous tip (errr, confront accusers, no warrents shall issue? there's two more), in some cases the tip turns out bogus, but since 'suspicion of drugs' is the cause of the search and siezure the state gets to sell it off at auction anyway. Though that last has slowed almost to a stop because of the outcry.
Or more recently the 14th amendment directly prohibits the draft, yet it has used since the 1th was passed.
Many of our rights are regularly ingored. Unless of course you were taking issue with the implication this is a recent phenomena, which of course it's not, it's just a bit more pronounced.
Mycroft
Actually the selection of president was originally designed with some meritocraticit elements. The current 'popular election' system where each state is 'winner take all' (with a couple exceptions) isn't the original design, but rather a cludge pasted onto it by the political party system to better enable them to get elected based popularity and momentary passions rather than merit and the deliberation of the electoral colledge. Who where supposed to be elected based on thier merit, that is ability to wisely select a supreme executive.
Most of the rest is spot on, and given the current system the glossing over of this detail is understandable, but it is actually pretty important IMHO.
The job of the electoral colledge is to be responsible to the people for WISELY selecting the president. However it is a good idea to have them not directly bound to the people's imediate wishes else the very rule of the mob the founders sought to avoid becomes much more closer to the norm.
The electoral colledge serves as buffer in the system. In theory it's THIER job to prevent us electing someone ill suited to the job or worse because of momentary passions. THEY are supposed to be how we avoid electing our own Hittler (don't ever forget that madman was elected).
Most of us don't have the time to study in detail a candidate, but the job of the electoral colledge was to do just that and decide there on.
These days they're reduced to being just yes men for the popular vote within thier state, wich is cast by people with time for little else than a 30second soundbite durring re-runs of whatever mindless drivle they watch on tv.
Is it any wonder we had a choice this last time between a pathalogical liar and a militant oil tycoon.
That's the other thing restoring the electoral college could do, give a better chance to third parties and independants. To many (IE most) who like a third partie candidate foolishly buy into the myth that voting for whom they want in office is wasting thier vote if it's not a republican or democrat stooge.
Mycroft
Actually it's my understanding that we cannot completely avoid eating some meat, or at least certain animal only protiens (or at least non-plant).
Where do you thing the needed protiens in some of those suppliments come from.
Thought FWIW some of the proteins can come from insects such. One speaker I heard on the issue said that one protien we need, but in tiny quantities, is often ingested in sufficient levels by accident through insects that wind up in the other food we eat in various ways.
The real problem is that technolodgy has reached the point where we can generate foods in proportion to our desires and tastes, which evolved to compensate for the scarcity of some of them. The result is we eat way to much of the 'tasty' foods which in reallity we only need small amounts of and start having cholesterol issues and sugar problems and so on.
Hopefully technology will continue to improve to the point where we can make the nutritional content and health value of a food match it's taste value. And perhaps find ways to manufacture from chemical or plant sources the protiens we must currently harvest from animal sources.
A side item that I recall is a study a few years ago that showed that food preferences and blood type tended to correlate, type O's had the highest prefference for meat and AB's the lowest with A and B in the middle.
Mycroft
Except for the fact that in many cases plant protiens are different from the animal protiens.
Many are the same, and our bodies can convert some. However it's my understanding that a few we need cannot be gotten by consuming plants, and cannot be artificially made.
One must eigther take supplements wich contain animal protiens or eat meat or eat 'fortified' foods that have animal protiens added.
Mycroft