The P4 is compensating for the weak graphics card.
Actually, it's the other way around. In one of the benchmarks, two cards which had been getting fairly different results suddenly got identical ones. That's the sign of a game suddenly becoming CPU-bound. As another example, look at the first page of benchmarks. The ATI gains 11fps going from 1600x1200 to 1024x768. But the 6800GT gains only 6, and the 6800U a mere 4. The GPU is no longer the most significant limiting factor.
In both those examples, you can see the benchmarks are asymptotically approaching 72fps. Or maybe they forgot to turn off vsync. If there were no screwups, though... impressive that you can't possibly go over ~70fps with a 3.2GHz machine. That would pretty much limit me to 50 at best, no matter what video card I use. The lowest-spec CPU would net you about 30. Hmm. Probably not a screwup, then, since 30fps is a good low-end, but playable, target.
No, more likely you'll see hat-based profiling. Those who wear hats look like they have something to hide, to the people who operate these cameras, so you're more likely to get detained if you wear one.
Happened to me at work. Was out in the parking garage during the graveyard shift on a smoke break. Naturally the place has cameras all over. So I got bored of standing in the designated smoking area and decided to walk around and check the place out. The security guard came out and demanded to see my ID. In her defense, she hadn't seen me go from the lobby into the garage, so she thought I'd broken in somehow. But when she apologized, she did mention the fact that I was wearing a baseball cap (either sideways or backwards, I forget which) as a reason for being suspicious.
Colleges and universities are largely dependent on alumni donations (which should tell you all you need to know about their money-management skills). Athletics are a way to keep alumni involved for years and years after they graduate, and consistently strong programs can keep them going for decades. Even more, strong sports programs create national awareness of the school, which can encourage academically gifted students to attend as well. You may be surprised at the number of kids who decide which school to go to based on the quality of the sports program. I know I was.
Tell me about it. I can't believe the rest of Canada was actually against Quebec's seccession. I mean, I admit I'd miss Massachusetts a little if it went away, but... time heals all wounds, as they say, and I'm sure I could get a passport to visit every once in a while. It'd be a small price to pay not to have to endure any more Kennedys. I expect a third of America would say the same about Texas and a certain one of its favorite sons (the other third would be frantically getting votes for sending California floating gently into the Pacific sunset.)
Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.
I've never even heard of Angband. Maybe it's tremendously popular in whatever genre it's in, but by any meaningful metric, it can't possibly compare to Quake. I've heard of Nethack, but never played it, and outside of Slashdot I've never heard of anyone playing it either. In fact, I'm only assuming that your point is that those two games are more long-lived than Quake and Diablo, though it seems obvious to me the reverse is true. (I know many people who still play Quake and Diablo, even more if I can count Q3 and D2.)
The biggest key to their popularity, I think, is their status as Netscape Navigator's heir. Netscape has big name recognition, so people looking specifically for that browser easily find Mozilla. It's a lot like the "six degrees of separation" thing (you can establish a connection to anyone in the world, for example Kevin Bacon, going through at most six intermediaries). Mozilla has a big enough user base now that almost everyone knows somebody who uses it. That really increases its popularity because word of mouth is so effective. Most OSS projects never reach the level where that works for them.
Most of us can't, and don't. Which is why every new MMORPG is predicted to become wildly popular, and every new MMORPG is a big disappointment.
It's not like it needs huge tweaking, either. Drop the box or the monthly subscription, either one, and I'd be much more interested. But I'm not sure it's possible for publishers to swing that in terms of the need to make money. The only real solution I can see is some sort of massive peer-to-peer server solution. It would sure solve the cost problem, but man, would it ever be tough to build.
Still, if you managed to get a working platform, you could make buckets of money licensing it to other games.
Right, but vi and emacs are very different. Moz and Firefox are virtually identical, as long as you limit yourself to web browsing. It's really more like talking about two different versions of the same product rather than two separate products. A more apt comparison would be Emacs and XEmacs, though Moz and Firefox are much more similar. And of course, Moz is going to be replaced by Firefox et al. Real Soon Now, probably in time for the first Duke Nukem Forever patch, so if you have to choose just one I guess it makes the most sense to choose Firefox.
Oh, come on. Your first thought upon hearing of the space elevator wasn't "what happens if it breaks?" Who cares if science suggests it won't be a catastrophe? Most terrorists do not exactly subscribe to the latest scientific journals. A lightbulb will go off in one of their dim minds and they'll try to ram a plane into the cable, or the tower, or whatever, hoping it will somehow dislodge the asteroid from orbit and send it crashing into Washington D.C. or something. It'd make a great scifi action movie, wouldn't it?
And don't forget it'd be a tremendous icon of Western achievement. You'd better believe everyone in the US, or whatever country eventually builds one, would be proud as hell of it. The media would be going on and on about how it'll usher in a new age for mankind, and so on, and so forth. If terrorists could somehow take it out, wouldn't that have tremendous psychological value? Remember that they chose the World Trade Center and Pentagon to strike at us, two (or three) buildings that symbolized, to them, everything that's wrong with the US. Wouldn't a tower that reaches into the heavens (hello, Tower of Babel?) symbolize that even more?
It's quite reasonable to take terrorism into consideration when designing a structure. As long as you don't let it make the decision for you. Saying "We'll increase the no-fly zone from five miles to twenty five to give us time to shoot down hijacked planes" is good planning. Saying "We just can't eliminate the possibility of terrorism, let's just not build a space elevator" is not.
If the U.S. can justify blacklisting an entire country because of a minute security threat, do we, the rest of the world, not have more than sufficient justification to blacklist the entire United States?
That's something you'd need to decide for yourself. If you feel that the peril of doing business with the US outweighs the many advantages, then by all means, blacklist us. Of course, if we blacklist a country because of a "minute security threat," then odds are they have absolutely nothing to offer us for their dubious business.
Me, I'm not a fan of this, because it seems the goal is to protect those too dumb or careless to protect themselves. But that's one of the big goals of government, especially outside the US, so it's a point you might appreciate.
What I would like to see is a system that differentiates between patents a company intends to implement and those it just wants to prevent others from implementing. It's being used by some companies almost like the DMCA. In fact, it could be used in exactly the same way. ("Method for Decrypting CSS-Encrypted DVD Video Discs.")
Anyway, it would be interesting if the lifespan of a patent depended on whether you were using it in any products you sell. For example, you might have two years to start selling products based on the patent. If you weren't selling any by that time, the patent expires. But if you were, you'd get three extra years to enjoy your monopoly. It would reduce the harmful effect of bad patents, but it would really encourage rolling them out into actual products. And it would all but eliminate "far-off" patents, patents on stuff that won't even be technologically possible two years from now.
Incidentally, the idea - though with bigger numbers - could be extended to apply to copyright as well. If a work goes five years without being generally available, the copyright expires. Otherwise, you get to keep the copyright for as long as you live (but no longer!). If the copyright holder's not an individual, you get, say, 50 years. It'd sure cause some interesting rebranding. Let's say 50 years from now Windows is still alive and kicking. Well, as soon as it hits that magic number, it becomes public domain. So to prevent that, you might release it under a new name every 10 years or so, to "keep it fresh." But of course, five years after you make the switch, the previous incarnation becomes public domain. And I can see some hotshot twentysomething CEO of an incredibly successful startup putting all the copyrights in his name, because he's probably going to live more than 50 years... and he dies in a car crash the next day.
Ah, but this, like the flat tax, is just another interesting idea that will never in a million years be implemented. (Maybe I should patent it just in case.)
I wonder, does Microsoft have a problem getting good employees? I would think that most developers worth their salt would work anywhere rather than for M$.
If you'd thought for even fifteen seconds, you would've thought of at least one compelling reason to work for Microsoft: "I need money to buy food, and Microsoft is willing to give me money to work for them." It's not easy finding work in IT, no matter how good a programmer you are.
Even with that aside, not all the world regards Microsoft with the same jihadist attitude that some Slashdotters do. It may surprise you to learn this, but there are a great many very good programmers who - are you ready for this? - don't even read Slashdot.
I'm definitely a programmer worth my salt, unless you have some unusually high standard. And I'd love to work at MS. And why wouldn't I? The chance to work on the most well-known piece of software in the world? Even better, the chance to improve it, make into what I want it to be, in at least some small way? And who knows, if I did my job well and kissed the right asses, I might end up making serious decisions about the direction the OS takes. (No question that the odds are slim, but they're the same odds you get working as a programmer anywhere.) So instead of whining about how Windows sucks and is insecure, I could work at making it good and secure. Yes, yes, cue the jokes about a neverending task, but... perfection is boring. Far better to work on something flawed, but with real potential. That way you can really make a difference in the outcome.
Isn't that what everyone wants out of their jobs, the chance to make a real difference? How can you fault people who try to do just that at Microsoft?
Yeah, that's a good idea. Government censorship based on our foreign policy. Want to make a game that's critical of the war in Iraq? Too bad. Want to insult the Brits? They're our allies, buster, you just watch your mouth! Think the DPRK isn't as bad as it's commonly portrayed? What are you, a Communist?
That's not the start of a slippery slope, that's the end of it.
There have been various proposals for Constitutional Amendments that would almost do just that. I believe the most popular forms make laws "expire" after five years unless they get a supermajority in both the House and Senate. On the subject of spending, there's been a proposal (I think it's still floating around the House somewhere) for an Amendment that would cap spending increases at some level; I forget the price details, but it's tied to things like inflation and GDP, so it's a "real" increase. (That is, increasing funding just to keep up with inflation, or to take advantage of an economic boom, would not be affected by the Amendment.)
Both seem like very good ideas to me, but they have so little press coverage I've only heard them described by proponents. It might be worth writing to your Rep or Senator about, though; they have been debated in Congress, so you have a good chance of getting a topical form letter back.
As for why the Founding Fathers didn't think of this, remember that federal income taxes needed an Amendment. This might genuinely be something they never considered, or they might have hoped the Fed would never become so powerful that this would be relevant. They might have expected/hoped it to be more of a problem at a State level, in which case State Constitutional Amendments would be the appropriate solution.
Reread the original post, then think about how books get from the publisher to your hands. That's right, they're sold by the publisher to the bookstore (or eBay seller). That's the first sale, and that's what this ruling is all about. If you buy a book from someone (not the publisher) and then resell it, you're really selling a used book, even if you've never read it.
So yeah, this decision is specifically about the right of first sale; or rather, it's saying that there is no such right in Germany when it comes to books.
Re:Concerns: government wasting money on open sour
on
When Think Tanks Attack
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't be too cynical. Well, maybe you should be cynical, but about something else. The US Tax Code is enormous. It's written by a bunch of people with totally different ideas of economics, and it shows. It gets longer and more complex almost every year. It's like if 1500 people wrote one computer program over the span of a hundred years with no real direction where no old code is ever really deleted. (Instead, new code is written to selectively ignore or enforce previous code.) The end product is millions of lines of code long, and no one person who contributed to it has any grasp of the entire picture. People spend years and years studying your program just to understand what it does, and they become very wealthy explaining it to the rest of us. And even then, most of them only understand one relatively narrow aspect of it.
Starting to understand now how those loopholes come into effect? Even worse, think about what happens when a loophole that's being widely exploited is shut down. It works out to the same thing as a tax increase, and you know how Americans feel about those. Which is why so many genuinely accidental loopholes become permanent parts of the tax code. And the loopholes work both ways, like the now-gone "marriage penalty" (where a married couple pay more in taxes than they would filing separately). Those loopholes tend to last forever too, because tax reform - even tax reform that reduces the overall tax burden on a popular demographic - never plays as well as tax cuts. And if there's one thing politicians love, it's spending my money.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Remember how Sierra rose to prominence: quality games (and lots of them). And remember when they destroyed their rep with one game that was so buggy it was nearly unplayable. (What was it called, Outpost or something?) Then they seemed to decide they wanted to be publishers, not developers, had one huge hit (Half-Life). And they were bought out by Vivendi, another publisher. Not much point to having a distinct Sierra brand then, since they aren't putting out any big games, so Sierra gets the axe.
If Vivendi had bought out Sierra when SQ, LSL, QFG, and KQ were all still thriving, and gave the company the axe then... then you'd have a case. But Sierra is long past its glory days. Better to let it die now than to try to pump out some terrible games that capitalize on its past reputation (e.g. EA/Origin and Ultima IX).
Well, basically what BT does is treat all torrents as single files (even if one torrent includes many files). It then splits this pseudo-file up into many chunks of configurable size. Each chunk gets a checksum which is, I believe, included in the.torrent file - this is why some.torrent files are much larger than others (smaller chunk size, more chunks, more checksums to include in the file). I think BT uses SHA1, but I'm not sure. As each chunk arrives, it's checked by your BT client. If it fails - i.e. the checksums don't match - it redownloads the chunk. Most clients will also check the entire file when you go to resume a download, so it can determine what pieces it needs to (re-)download. Some clients will also check the file after you download it, just to make sure it's been written to disk properly.
What this has to do with PAR2s are obvious: the entire effective functionality of PAR2s is already integrated into BT, automatically. It's not something that users can turn on or off, it's an integral part of the protocol.
The cause of your problem is likely that your torrent ran out of seeds before you finished downloading. Look at the "distributed copies" number your client gives you. That represents how many effective copies there are of a torrent. (Say client A has the first 50% of a torrent, and client B has the second 50%. Those are the only two peers. That's 1.0 distributed copies, since even though neither peer has a full copy, the two of them together do.) If the number is below zero, you will never be able to download the entire torrent unless a seed pops in.
As BT clients advance, this is becoming rarer. There's a "super-seeding" option of some clients which helps get out sparsely-seeded torrents as fast as possible by refusing to send the same chunk more than once.
If this is a problem for you - trying to get poorly-seeded torrents - you might want to try out Azureus. It preferentially grabs complete files inside a torrent first, and you can tell it which files to try for.
Restrictions on free speech aren't the start of a slippery slope, they're the end. It should never be against the law to speak your mind, even if your ideas are unpopular or offensive to some (or most, or all). I have the human right to be whoever I want, even if I want to be a racist, sexist, prejudiced asshole. As long as I don't try to hurt people based on my views, naturally; but murder, assault, and all the rest are against the law anyway, and juries certainly have the sophistication to assign more or less blame based on the motivation of the crime.
Getting the government involved in cases like this might seem like a good thing, since nearly everyone is behind the idea. Anti-semitism is bad, and everyone knows it, so what's wrong with the government making a law about it? Well, the hidden problem is that ceding moral authority to the government frees its citizens from having to make moral decisions. It promotes an attitude of "If it's not against the law, it's okay." But the law does, and should, allow lots of immoral (or at least morally ambiguous) things. But most people don't grasp the distinction between justice and morality, and so most people think they're the same thing.
I'm not saying this is the source of our oft-reported (and dubious) moral backsliding as a civilization, but it's certainly a contributing factor to localized issues. And besides, so what if racists are able to recruit other racists? You can't make them stop being racists by preventing them from talking about it on the Internet. (Even if you could, are you willing to go down that road? The road of trying to control what people think by regulating speech? That's not 1984-like, that's just 1984.) If your society has a lot of racists, then you've got problems already - and trying to patch them by making racism illegal isn't going to help the problem one bit. The real solution is educating people and showing how and why racism is bad; it needs families, friends, everyone stepping up and saying, "Racism is not acceptable." If your society goes so far that most people are racists to one degree or another, well... it's not pleasant, but government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. If the people really do want to be racists... at a certain point you just have to let them, disgusting as it may be. You have to let people do as they will, even if they're making horrible mistakes.
We have several where I work. They all get the job done, and usually on older hardware (in the neighborhood of P3-500s). They aren't greased lightning, but they're also horribly overloaded: we typically host about 300 sites per server on that hardware.
So yeah, it happens, it scales, it gets results. I can't speak for the level of fuss since I'm not involved in that part of the process.
We number states chronologically; so the 28th State (Texas) is the 28th to join the Union. This is a bit of a problem for your argument, since Canada has clearly been a member of the Union longer than Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, it's probably older than Alaska and Hawaii (#48 is Arizona in 1912).
So the order goes: Arizona, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Iraq. Canada is the 49th State. Iraq is the 53rd.
That's right. Not only did I take the time to reply to a troll, I did some research too.
This story is posted because BSD doesn't generate a lot of exciting news. Well, that's not true: there's lots of exciting news for people who care about BSD. But none of the editors care much about BSD. They like Linux and MacOS X, and talking trash about MS and SCO. This means that they have trouble identifying the stories that actual, honest-to-God BSD users find interesting. But they still feel they ought to give us something, since after all BSD has an entire section on Slashdot. And I guess they are trying to encourage Open Source Brotherhood, not realizing that most BSD users would prefer not to be associated with most Linux users.
Last reinstall? Hah! How many have there been? Those two words say more than the rest of your message.
Well, if you swap in a bigger hard drive, you need to "re"-install. Or if you decide to play with Linux and need to repartition. Or maybe you bought a new computer, or whatever.
Let me know when you find a find a linux distribution that says editing.conf files can destroy your box, doesn't guarantee its safety--and then makes you do it anyway like MS and editing the registry.
I've never had to edit the registry on my Windows machine, for any reason. I do it at work because a big part of my job is cleaning out compromised Windows servers, but even there, I've never had to do it to make any program or service work properly - I've only had to do it to get rid of the stuff that Hacker Defender installs.
Also, all Linux systems ship with (at least) the following disclaimer:
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
Slashdot Mirror
In both those examples, you can see the benchmarks are asymptotically approaching 72fps. Or maybe they forgot to turn off vsync. If there were no screwups, though... impressive that you can't possibly go over ~70fps with a 3.2GHz machine. That would pretty much limit me to 50 at best, no matter what video card I use. The lowest-spec CPU would net you about 30. Hmm. Probably not a screwup, then, since 30fps is a good low-end, but playable, target.
Happened to me at work. Was out in the parking garage during the graveyard shift on a smoke break. Naturally the place has cameras all over. So I got bored of standing in the designated smoking area and decided to walk around and check the place out. The security guard came out and demanded to see my ID. In her defense, she hadn't seen me go from the lobby into the garage, so she thought I'd broken in somehow. But when she apologized, she did mention the fact that I was wearing a baseball cap (either sideways or backwards, I forget which) as a reason for being suspicious.
Colleges and universities are largely dependent on alumni donations (which should tell you all you need to know about their money-management skills). Athletics are a way to keep alumni involved for years and years after they graduate, and consistently strong programs can keep them going for decades. Even more, strong sports programs create national awareness of the school, which can encourage academically gifted students to attend as well. You may be surprised at the number of kids who decide which school to go to based on the quality of the sports program. I know I was.
Tell me about it. I can't believe the rest of Canada was actually against Quebec's seccession. I mean, I admit I'd miss Massachusetts a little if it went away, but... time heals all wounds, as they say, and I'm sure I could get a passport to visit every once in a while. It'd be a small price to pay not to have to endure any more Kennedys. I expect a third of America would say the same about Texas and a certain one of its favorite sons (the other third would be frantically getting votes for sending California floating gently into the Pacific sunset.)
The biggest key to their popularity, I think, is their status as Netscape Navigator's heir. Netscape has big name recognition, so people looking specifically for that browser easily find Mozilla. It's a lot like the "six degrees of separation" thing (you can establish a connection to anyone in the world, for example Kevin Bacon, going through at most six intermediaries). Mozilla has a big enough user base now that almost everyone knows somebody who uses it. That really increases its popularity because word of mouth is so effective. Most OSS projects never reach the level where that works for them.
It's not like it needs huge tweaking, either. Drop the box or the monthly subscription, either one, and I'd be much more interested. But I'm not sure it's possible for publishers to swing that in terms of the need to make money. The only real solution I can see is some sort of massive peer-to-peer server solution. It would sure solve the cost problem, but man, would it ever be tough to build.
Still, if you managed to get a working platform, you could make buckets of money licensing it to other games.
Right, but vi and emacs are very different. Moz and Firefox are virtually identical, as long as you limit yourself to web browsing. It's really more like talking about two different versions of the same product rather than two separate products. A more apt comparison would be Emacs and XEmacs, though Moz and Firefox are much more similar. And of course, Moz is going to be replaced by Firefox et al. Real Soon Now, probably in time for the first Duke Nukem Forever patch, so if you have to choose just one I guess it makes the most sense to choose Firefox.
And don't forget it'd be a tremendous icon of Western achievement. You'd better believe everyone in the US, or whatever country eventually builds one, would be proud as hell of it. The media would be going on and on about how it'll usher in a new age for mankind, and so on, and so forth. If terrorists could somehow take it out, wouldn't that have tremendous psychological value? Remember that they chose the World Trade Center and Pentagon to strike at us, two (or three) buildings that symbolized, to them, everything that's wrong with the US. Wouldn't a tower that reaches into the heavens (hello, Tower of Babel?) symbolize that even more?
It's quite reasonable to take terrorism into consideration when designing a structure. As long as you don't let it make the decision for you. Saying "We'll increase the no-fly zone from five miles to twenty five to give us time to shoot down hijacked planes" is good planning. Saying "We just can't eliminate the possibility of terrorism, let's just not build a space elevator" is not.
Me, I'm not a fan of this, because it seems the goal is to protect those too dumb or careless to protect themselves. But that's one of the big goals of government, especially outside the US, so it's a point you might appreciate.
Anyway, it would be interesting if the lifespan of a patent depended on whether you were using it in any products you sell. For example, you might have two years to start selling products based on the patent. If you weren't selling any by that time, the patent expires. But if you were, you'd get three extra years to enjoy your monopoly. It would reduce the harmful effect of bad patents, but it would really encourage rolling them out into actual products. And it would all but eliminate "far-off" patents, patents on stuff that won't even be technologically possible two years from now.
Incidentally, the idea - though with bigger numbers - could be extended to apply to copyright as well. If a work goes five years without being generally available, the copyright expires. Otherwise, you get to keep the copyright for as long as you live (but no longer!). If the copyright holder's not an individual, you get, say, 50 years. It'd sure cause some interesting rebranding. Let's say 50 years from now Windows is still alive and kicking. Well, as soon as it hits that magic number, it becomes public domain. So to prevent that, you might release it under a new name every 10 years or so, to "keep it fresh." But of course, five years after you make the switch, the previous incarnation becomes public domain. And I can see some hotshot twentysomething CEO of an incredibly successful startup putting all the copyrights in his name, because he's probably going to live more than 50 years... and he dies in a car crash the next day.
Ah, but this, like the flat tax, is just another interesting idea that will never in a million years be implemented. (Maybe I should patent it just in case.)
Even with that aside, not all the world regards Microsoft with the same jihadist attitude that some Slashdotters do. It may surprise you to learn this, but there are a great many very good programmers who - are you ready for this? - don't even read Slashdot.
I'm definitely a programmer worth my salt, unless you have some unusually high standard. And I'd love to work at MS. And why wouldn't I? The chance to work on the most well-known piece of software in the world? Even better, the chance to improve it, make into what I want it to be, in at least some small way? And who knows, if I did my job well and kissed the right asses, I might end up making serious decisions about the direction the OS takes. (No question that the odds are slim, but they're the same odds you get working as a programmer anywhere.) So instead of whining about how Windows sucks and is insecure, I could work at making it good and secure. Yes, yes, cue the jokes about a neverending task, but... perfection is boring. Far better to work on something flawed, but with real potential. That way you can really make a difference in the outcome.
Isn't that what everyone wants out of their jobs, the chance to make a real difference? How can you fault people who try to do just that at Microsoft?
That's not the start of a slippery slope, that's the end of it.
Both seem like very good ideas to me, but they have so little press coverage I've only heard them described by proponents. It might be worth writing to your Rep or Senator about, though; they have been debated in Congress, so you have a good chance of getting a topical form letter back.
As for why the Founding Fathers didn't think of this, remember that federal income taxes needed an Amendment. This might genuinely be something they never considered, or they might have hoped the Fed would never become so powerful that this would be relevant. They might have expected/hoped it to be more of a problem at a State level, in which case State Constitutional Amendments would be the appropriate solution.
So yeah, this decision is specifically about the right of first sale; or rather, it's saying that there is no such right in Germany when it comes to books.
Starting to understand now how those loopholes come into effect? Even worse, think about what happens when a loophole that's being widely exploited is shut down. It works out to the same thing as a tax increase, and you know how Americans feel about those. Which is why so many genuinely accidental loopholes become permanent parts of the tax code. And the loopholes work both ways, like the now-gone "marriage penalty" (where a married couple pay more in taxes than they would filing separately). Those loopholes tend to last forever too, because tax reform - even tax reform that reduces the overall tax burden on a popular demographic - never plays as well as tax cuts. And if there's one thing politicians love, it's spending my money.
If Vivendi had bought out Sierra when SQ, LSL, QFG, and KQ were all still thriving, and gave the company the axe then... then you'd have a case. But Sierra is long past its glory days. Better to let it die now than to try to pump out some terrible games that capitalize on its past reputation (e.g. EA/Origin and Ultima IX).
What this has to do with PAR2s are obvious: the entire effective functionality of PAR2s is already integrated into BT, automatically. It's not something that users can turn on or off, it's an integral part of the protocol.
The cause of your problem is likely that your torrent ran out of seeds before you finished downloading. Look at the "distributed copies" number your client gives you. That represents how many effective copies there are of a torrent. (Say client A has the first 50% of a torrent, and client B has the second 50%. Those are the only two peers. That's 1.0 distributed copies, since even though neither peer has a full copy, the two of them together do.) If the number is below zero, you will never be able to download the entire torrent unless a seed pops in.
As BT clients advance, this is becoming rarer. There's a "super-seeding" option of some clients which helps get out sparsely-seeded torrents as fast as possible by refusing to send the same chunk more than once.
If this is a problem for you - trying to get poorly-seeded torrents - you might want to try out Azureus. It preferentially grabs complete files inside a torrent first, and you can tell it which files to try for.
Robot Devil: Making bootleg tapes is wrong, musicians need that income to survive...
Getting the government involved in cases like this might seem like a good thing, since nearly everyone is behind the idea. Anti-semitism is bad, and everyone knows it, so what's wrong with the government making a law about it? Well, the hidden problem is that ceding moral authority to the government frees its citizens from having to make moral decisions. It promotes an attitude of "If it's not against the law, it's okay." But the law does, and should, allow lots of immoral (or at least morally ambiguous) things. But most people don't grasp the distinction between justice and morality, and so most people think they're the same thing.
I'm not saying this is the source of our oft-reported (and dubious) moral backsliding as a civilization, but it's certainly a contributing factor to localized issues. And besides, so what if racists are able to recruit other racists? You can't make them stop being racists by preventing them from talking about it on the Internet. (Even if you could, are you willing to go down that road? The road of trying to control what people think by regulating speech? That's not 1984-like, that's just 1984.) If your society has a lot of racists, then you've got problems already - and trying to patch them by making racism illegal isn't going to help the problem one bit. The real solution is educating people and showing how and why racism is bad; it needs families, friends, everyone stepping up and saying, "Racism is not acceptable." If your society goes so far that most people are racists to one degree or another, well... it's not pleasant, but government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. If the people really do want to be racists... at a certain point you just have to let them, disgusting as it may be. You have to let people do as they will, even if they're making horrible mistakes.
So yeah, it happens, it scales, it gets results. I can't speak for the level of fuss since I'm not involved in that part of the process.
So the order goes: Arizona, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Iraq. Canada is the 49th State. Iraq is the 53rd.
That's right. Not only did I take the time to reply to a troll, I did some research too.
I can see it now: the BSD Memorial Airport and polls suggesting that the national bird should be CowboyNeal.
This story is posted because BSD doesn't generate a lot of exciting news. Well, that's not true: there's lots of exciting news for people who care about BSD. But none of the editors care much about BSD. They like Linux and MacOS X, and talking trash about MS and SCO. This means that they have trouble identifying the stories that actual, honest-to-God BSD users find interesting. But they still feel they ought to give us something, since after all BSD has an entire section on Slashdot. And I guess they are trying to encourage Open Source Brotherhood, not realizing that most BSD users would prefer not to be associated with most Linux users.