For the record, I've been using linux on servers and for my desktop for years.
Documentation for big projects (apache, squid, etc) is usually easy to find. However, when you start running between versions and other isssues, suddenly the waters become a bit murky. Google is often friendly, but lately I've been lucky to find docs in english let along for the version(s) of software I'm using.
I've also been taking my LPI (my employer's idea). It's a freaking linux certification/exam and has no official documentation, other than a general overview of topics. That's right, no course materials, nothing. Even as an experienced linux user/admin I generally don't memorize the dozen different ways to do something, and then find that the one I didn't know is on the exam (which you can't study beforehand, because no documentation).
Sites like TLDP et al are very useful, but a more comprehensive set of documentation (and more up-to-date documentation coming with the software packages) would certainly be a useful thing.
Ahh, but it's the right of corporations to have their heads of theis asses.
As for the politicians that seem to be supporting them... their jobs are to have their heads in their same position while stating how nice the view is...
Well, to me it would be a lot of things, but overall probably the realism, flow, and immersiveness of the game environment. Yes, there was a lot of shooting, etc... but a lot of the game also seemed like it was scened up in a way similar to a movie.
The environments themselves were very realistic, and painted a very good concept of a post-apocolypse suffering civilization... much like one could mentally visualize with a good book or better see and empathize with in a good movie.
the events in that game are critical backstory to explain WTF is happening in HL2
I never really played HL1 (well, I played about 5 mins, and got distracted). So I wasn't really up on the plotline when I played HL2, but the game and plotline still made a lot of sense to me. In a way, it made things a bit more mysterious and interesting.
One way to do it would be to do the old trick of having an HL2 movie... and if it turned out well, add to the plot of HL1 a bit and do it later as a prequel. It's a possibility anyhow.
He is however, a theoretical physicist who tends be more like rambo in the aspects of blowing away baddies and being versed in the use of high-tech weaponry. Not exactly your typical specimen of geekdom.
Who would be the best actor for the scientist cross hero role? I'm voting for Will Peterson, but I doubt they'd transition him from TV to movie. Mark Harmon might also be a decent choice, though I tend to find that he falls more towards military image than scientific... and Peterson has a better 'look' for the Gordon Freeman, if a little extra bulk.
And this is a bad thing? The amount of advertising rampant on the net is partially a problem due to the fact that it is untargeted and largely (percentage-wise) ineffective. Sure, 1% sales out of millions of viewers (and that is an optimistic number) is good in terms of sales, but effectiveness... no.
Now if they increased their effectiveness, and managed to snake me into the proper categories:
(for example, not necessarily applicable to myself)
Geek
20-30 age group
Male
$40-50k income
Homeowner
etc
Then maybe rather than showing me an advertisement for the newest Martha Stuart book or whatever, but rather for a wireless home automation system... well it's more interesting to me and a better chance of a sale for them. Now if they were so targetted as to find that
(again an example, not actual data)
a) My sister likes Anne Rice novels
b) Her birthday is next week
etc
They could throw up an add for the newest Anne Rice novel... and I might say "gee, that sounds like a good idea a present. Sale for them
The implications of targetted advertising (vs the currently less targetted model) are not so bad. The implications that more and more people will get my email address to send me crap, especially since, targetted or no, I wouldn't buy from spam, though I might from those sites I've bought at that now send me catalogues.
If you read through the original (linked from this article) review of Half Life, and then look at what is to be in "Episode 1", it seems that HL2 paints a rather dramatic and almostly cinematically interactive picture. While I'm sure that a good start with episode one will promote the HL2 franchise, with all the other VG movies in the works, I do wonder if Valve would be considering something of a movie-proper related to the Half Life storyline. Certainly, if followed, the plotline could probably be drummed into something decent... especially with the expected content to be added through the continuing episode.
Has anyone heard any rumours/press in regards to this? Maybe I'm just hopeful (and overly optimistic that if it happened, it wouldn't be a massacre), but a movie involving post-war apocalypse, a savior scientist, the comedic relief (Barnie), a hot sidekick, a nuttie scientist, cruel otherworldly footsoldiers, government conspiracy, and aliens that attach to one's head for happy zombification sound like a good combination to me. Hell, headcrabs and headcrab-zombies are probably in itself one of the cooler things... like an upgrade to the freakiness of chest-bursting nasties from the Alien movie series.
d) Report your friend to the police, collect a bonus check from the RIAA, and watch him spend the rest of his life paying off $1,000,000 in RIAA lawsuits.
OK, so maybe it won't quite be worded that way, but probably something along those lines. Do we really need the RIAA et al creating comic books that encourage kids to report on their friends? What's next, reporting that your neighbour is possibly harbouring an arabic man in his attic (substitute arabic for jewish and step back about half a century, you'll see my point)?
This type of 'education' has no place with our youth. Shame!
If the government wasn't pulling wiretaps through the Bells, etc, then there would be absolutely no need for them to be involved, either to declare state secrets or otherwise. It would be just a lawsuit against a private company that would get settled out in court.
Can anyone think of any reason at all for the government to use this power were they not involved in that actions at hand, or those related to?
Well it's not as if people (outside of MS) are auditing/viewing the source-code and finding them. Either you hear about them on patch-day or you hear about them on crack-day.
I have an HP zd7000 laptop. It's new a few years out of date, but still manages to keep up with most desktops. In its time it was better than my desktop, with 80GB HDD (easily added to with a USB HDD, and some high-end laptops have two HDD bays), a GeForce 5600 (dedicated memory), and 1GB of RAM (well, that after I made HP send me a 1GB because a design flaw causes crashes with RAM in both slots), 17" widescreen (non-gloss), and a 2.8Ghz P-4 processor.
Nice and toasty on the lap if you're playing games, but on a desk and jacked in it still competes nicely against most desktops, and happily plays games up to Half Life 2, Quake 4, and BattleField 2 (which oddly plays better in Wine/Linux due to driver issues).
All-in-all, for what I use my laptop for I'd probably go for another 'desktop replacement' as it's rather convenient over hauling the ol 'hoss out to a LAN party.
The ability to define the content of the game is somewhat subjective as well here. Sometimes the violence is part of the game (for example, GTA), whereas in others it's part of the atmosphere.
Even games such as diablo had some pretty nasty things such as staked corpses and the like. However, that was atmospheric, designed to induce a feeling of fright or foreboding. You could also happily club at demons or humanoids with various weapons, etc. The overall environment, though, is one of fantasy.
GTA on the other hand is based on the premise that you are an individual who lives by violence in a contemporary environment. Driving a car down the street in a fairly modern-day scenario, with scenarios that reward inflicting violence and terror against fellow humans.
Should the game have a strong rating, heck yes. But now we have games being rated heavily because a mod lets you texture some characters with non-anatomically-correct bits, or because the neckline or one character was too low.
Shoudl we have the ability to make a criminal offense of selling those games to the wrong person? Should you get jailtime or heavy fines and record for selling an 18A game to a rather stable 17-year-old?
Here's a better idea. Persue active crimes more. Punish the 15-year-olds that are going out killing people. Punish the parents who sat idly by and watched their kids obsess in violence, with games and many other factors being part of that mix. Stop making new crimes out of people who aren't part of the problem, and fix the existing system before you make a new problem with an additional one.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go...
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
How about reporting it to ebay. Forward those emails along, they do somewhat pay attention.
Yes, bad sellers could create new accounts, but that does involve a credit card (for selling), which amateurs might run out after creating a few crap accounts.
Splash damage
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Except for the fact that some of the pictures are of people other than the owner. While the owner might be in for some karma, how about other people who are having their pictures posted on the 'revenge' site?
Final reason. You get episodes 1-4, but 4 doesn't sell very well at all. So they discontinue the series. Who's fucked then?
The same people that would have been screwed if they bought a full game that didn't offer a sequel. For example, see "Nocturne" (althought according to WikiPedia BloodRayne is somewhat of a sequel). There's nothing about full games with a cliffhanger ending that guarantees succession anymore than episodes. In fact, since it likely takes more money to make an entirely new game... you'll have better luck with the episode.
Interesting how the scorpions are completely white without any distinct markings, etc. In fact, I believe I've seen other creatures that live in no-light or low-light conditions that were all-white as well
While the debate that the 'dead' scorpion was blind due to evolution may be one way to think about it, how about the color of the creatures found (so far I've only seen scorpions). Do creatures that live in no-light situations evolve to be colourless as colour is not useful without light? Does this show that other creatures in light-available areas develop pigments etc to serve a function based on their environment?
To me, it seems to show that evolution works in a fashion (though to those that argue, it does not prove or disprove that men could come from fish or monkeys... whatever your opinion along those longs)
DVD was already standardized though. Blu-ray has not been assured a place succeeding DVD's. They are hoping that PS3 will push Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray will at the same time push PS3...not quite the same scenario as DVD's.
Also, as mentioned earlier. Even high-res PC games don't fully utilize the capacity of DVD's. While Half Life 2 or Doom3 could fit on a single burnable disk, the dual-layer variety carries twice the storage capacity. And PC games need to make allowances for varying hardware (duplicate textures of different resolutions, etc). So really, there's no need for Blu-ray storage as there was for DVD-over-CD back in the day.
Sony is just hoping that their name will once again push them onward...
HL2 was a very complete game in itself, but in the end, obviously, it was left hanging. The alternative to sequel episode therefore would have been to piss a lot of people off by leaving it hanging, or to release a full game (full price).
So instead we have episodes. At $20, well, that's about between 1/4 and 1/2 the price of a normal game.
What is good about this is that it encourages quality. Why? Because if an episode sucks incredibly, nobody will buy the next one. Therefore, in order to sell future episodes, the existing ones have to not suck.
There's nothing wrong with paying more for better service, for example a connection to a bigger pipe. That being said, this isn't what's happening. Rather, it's that you would be forced to pay for a transit-party (between you, your own ISP, and the client connecting to your site) to not degrade the regular connection. The problem is, that the connection has already been paid for. On the end of the client... to their ISP by them. If they don't want to pay for a higher-speed connection, then with dial-up or low-speed they will get overall lower performance. Fair enough
On your end, you have bandwidth and pipe limits imposed by your ISP. If you want more, you pay for the bigger package. Again, it depends on what service contract you choose.
What should not happen, is that the client's ISP will bill you (after the client is already paying for service) not to choke off your access. This also applies to the midpoints in the connection, and somebody has already footed the bill.
It's double-dipping, and it's extortion. It also strays far from the concept of an ISP being somewhat of a common carrier, and shows blatently that the can (and will abuse the ability to) monitor and/or restrict specific traffic.
If this passes it will be a dark day for the internet indeed... but if it does my hopes are that the first ones to try it will be hammered so mercilessly (lost customers, complaints, legislation, and banner ads everywhere proclaiming to existing customers that their ISP is evil) that the idea will quickly lose it's appeal.
That being said, perhaps we can create a master-pool of ISP's that use said service. In that case we could create something similiar to an anti-spam list wherein customers will get a memo stating "connections to this site will suffer extremely slowness and loss of quality because your ISP 'ASSHATINTERNETCO' is limiting your connection. Click here [link] for more information". I'd be happy to pop those up on my site, and it's easy enough with SHTML, etc.
Given the current trend towards various countries/continents/etc pushing for MS to modify their OS for unbundling purposes, etc... what would be the scenario around the "forced upgrade" for use of DirectX 10?
XP is still within the support cycle for MS. DirectX 10 could be seen as an upgrade or update for Windows OS's. Therefore, should MS not be supporting DX10 on XP?
I'd imagine that when Vista comes out, if things start requiring DX10 we may see a certain amount of political pressure against our favorite monopolist to backport proper support.
Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation.
Hmmm. So your father/son/sister/mother/brother/cousin/etc had some dramatic event happen overseas. Perhaps he was injured, or mugged, or perhaps everyone was just worried about him and he called to let you know he was safe.
One phone-call to the homeland, a bunch of calls among relatives and friends to pass the information along.
Sounds like it fits the pattern to me. In fact, this pattern would match up for overseas calls in many instances. In other words... useless.
Indeed, for you Americans I would think that your greatly admired "founding fathers" could be considered as zealots. They stood up for a cause that went against the way people were used to thinking. They gathered support, instilled new ideas, and eventually won (well, until latter governments started defecating on their works).
Just because something is popular and accept doesn't make it right. Slavery was wrong and yet well-accepted in its time.
It takes a little zealoty, that undying focus on what you (and those with you) believe is right, to make great change happen. Zealotism does not make one right or wrong. The path you follow does.
Whistleblowing is in many cases about going public. You can report it in-house if you want, but you stand a chance of getting fired. Hell, if there's something bad enough to be classified as "whistleblowing" when reported, would you want to be around at the same employer after you report it? Even if they don't fire your ass for that, they'll surely manage to drum up something else.
In the grand scheme, whether or not your job goes up might not be the big issue. The big issue is whether you can be fined, imprisoned, etc for reporting government corruption? Personally, if I reported (to the monitoring bodies, authorities, then papers, etc) that dept X was cleaning out senior citizen pensions for golf money, poisoning kids in the ghetto, and/or various other offenses, I'd still expect to be fired... but by that time I'd also expect to have quit. Now if dept X could also sue my ass for reporting them, and/or have me sent to the slammer... that's a bigger issue.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, I've been using linux on servers and for my desktop for years.
Documentation for big projects (apache, squid, etc) is usually easy to find. However, when you start running between versions and other isssues, suddenly the waters become a bit murky. Google is often friendly, but lately I've been lucky to find docs in english let along for the version(s) of software I'm using.
I've also been taking my LPI (my employer's idea). It's a freaking linux certification/exam and has no official documentation, other than a general overview of topics. That's right, no course materials, nothing. Even as an experienced linux user/admin I generally don't memorize the dozen different ways to do something, and then find that the one I didn't know is on the exam (which you can't study beforehand, because no documentation).
Sites like TLDP et al are very useful, but a more comprehensive set of documentation (and more up-to-date documentation coming with the software packages) would certainly be a useful thing.
What in the world would Wal-Mart need a loan for? They're not exactly strapped for cash.
Got an article?
Ahh, but it's the right of corporations to have their heads of theis asses.
As for the politicians that seem to be supporting them... their jobs are to have their heads in their same position while stating how nice the view is...
Well, to me it would be a lot of things, but overall probably the realism, flow, and immersiveness of the game environment. Yes, there was a lot of shooting, etc... but a lot of the game also seemed like it was scened up in a way similar to a movie.
The environments themselves were very realistic, and painted a very good concept of a post-apocolypse suffering civilization... much like one could mentally visualize with a good book or better see and empathize with in a good movie.
the events in that game are critical backstory to explain WTF is happening in HL2
I never really played HL1 (well, I played about 5 mins, and got distracted). So I wasn't really up on the plotline when I played HL2, but the game and plotline still made a lot of sense to me. In a way, it made things a bit more mysterious and interesting.
One way to do it would be to do the old trick of having an HL2 movie... and if it turned out well, add to the plot of HL1 a bit and do it later as a prequel. It's a possibility anyhow.
He is however, a theoretical physicist who tends be more like rambo in the aspects of blowing away baddies and being versed in the use of high-tech weaponry. Not exactly your typical specimen of geekdom.
Who would be the best actor for the scientist cross hero role? I'm voting for Will Peterson, but I doubt they'd transition him from TV to movie. Mark Harmon might also be a decent choice, though I tend to find that he falls more towards military image than scientific... and Peterson has a better 'look' for the Gordon Freeman, if a little extra bulk.
it makes their advertising a lot more effective.
And this is a bad thing? The amount of advertising rampant on the net is partially a problem due to the fact that it is untargeted and largely (percentage-wise) ineffective. Sure, 1% sales out of millions of viewers (and that is an optimistic number) is good in terms of sales, but effectiveness... no.
Now if they increased their effectiveness, and managed to snake me into the proper categories:
(for example, not necessarily applicable to myself)
Geek
20-30 age group
Male
$40-50k income
Homeowner
etc
Then maybe rather than showing me an advertisement for the newest Martha Stuart book or whatever, but rather for a wireless home automation system... well it's more interesting to me and a better chance of a sale for them. Now if they were so targetted as to find that
(again an example, not actual data)
a) My sister likes Anne Rice novels
b) Her birthday is next week
etc
They could throw up an add for the newest Anne Rice novel... and I might say "gee, that sounds like a good idea a present. Sale for them
The implications of targetted advertising (vs the currently less targetted model) are not so bad. The implications that more and more people will get my email address to send me crap, especially since, targetted or no, I wouldn't buy from spam, though I might from those sites I've bought at that now send me catalogues.
If you read through the original (linked from this article) review of Half Life, and then look at what is to be in "Episode 1", it seems that HL2 paints a rather dramatic and almostly cinematically interactive picture. While I'm sure that a good start with episode one will promote the HL2 franchise, with all the other VG movies in the works, I do wonder if Valve would be considering something of a movie-proper related to the Half Life storyline. Certainly, if followed, the plotline could probably be drummed into something decent... especially with the expected content to be added through the continuing episode.
Has anyone heard any rumours/press in regards to this? Maybe I'm just hopeful (and overly optimistic that if it happened, it wouldn't be a massacre), but a movie involving post-war apocalypse, a savior scientist, the comedic relief (Barnie), a hot sidekick, a nuttie scientist, cruel otherworldly footsoldiers, government conspiracy, and aliens that attach to one's head for happy zombification sound like a good combination to me. Hell, headcrabs and headcrab-zombies are probably in itself one of the cooler things... like an upgrade to the freakiness of chest-bursting nasties from the Alien movie series.
d) Report your friend to the police, collect a bonus check from the RIAA, and watch him spend the rest of his life paying off $1,000,000 in RIAA lawsuits.
OK, so maybe it won't quite be worded that way, but probably something along those lines. Do we really need the RIAA et al creating comic books that encourage kids to report on their friends? What's next, reporting that your neighbour is possibly harbouring an arabic man in his attic (substitute arabic for jewish and step back about half a century, you'll see my point)?
This type of 'education' has no place with our youth. Shame!
If the government wasn't pulling wiretaps through the Bells, etc, then there would be absolutely no need for them to be involved, either to declare state secrets or otherwise. It would be just a lawsuit against a private company that would get settled out in court.
Can anyone think of any reason at all for the government to use this power were they not involved in that actions at hand, or those related to?
Well it's not as if people (outside of MS) are auditing/viewing the source-code and finding them. Either you hear about them on patch-day or you hear about them on crack-day.
I have an HP zd7000 laptop. It's new a few years out of date, but still manages to keep up with most desktops. In its time it was better than my desktop, with 80GB HDD (easily added to with a USB HDD, and some high-end laptops have two HDD bays), a GeForce 5600 (dedicated memory), and 1GB of RAM (well, that after I made HP send me a 1GB because a design flaw causes crashes with RAM in both slots), 17" widescreen (non-gloss), and a 2.8Ghz P-4 processor.
Nice and toasty on the lap if you're playing games, but on a desk and jacked in it still competes nicely against most desktops, and happily plays games up to Half Life 2, Quake 4, and BattleField 2 (which oddly plays better in Wine/Linux due to driver issues).
All-in-all, for what I use my laptop for I'd probably go for another 'desktop replacement' as it's rather convenient over hauling the ol 'hoss out to a LAN party.
The ability to define the content of the game is somewhat subjective as well here. Sometimes the violence is part of the game (for example, GTA), whereas in others it's part of the atmosphere.
Even games such as diablo had some pretty nasty things such as staked corpses and the like. However, that was atmospheric, designed to induce a feeling of fright or foreboding. You could also happily club at demons or humanoids with various weapons, etc. The overall environment, though, is one of fantasy.
GTA on the other hand is based on the premise that you are an individual who lives by violence in a contemporary environment. Driving a car down the street in a fairly modern-day scenario, with scenarios that reward inflicting violence and terror against fellow humans.
Should the game have a strong rating, heck yes. But now we have games being rated heavily because a mod lets you texture some characters with non-anatomically-correct bits, or because the neckline or one character was too low.
Shoudl we have the ability to make a criminal offense of selling those games to the wrong person? Should you get jailtime or heavy fines and record for selling an 18A game to a rather stable 17-year-old?
Here's a better idea. Persue active crimes more. Punish the 15-year-olds that are going out killing people. Punish the parents who sat idly by and watched their kids obsess in violence, with games and many other factors being part of that mix. Stop making new crimes out of people who aren't part of the problem, and fix the existing system before you make a new problem with an additional one.
How about reporting it to ebay. Forward those emails along, they do somewhat pay attention.
Yes, bad sellers could create new accounts, but that does involve a credit card (for selling), which amateurs might run out after creating a few crap accounts.
Except for the fact that some of the pictures are of people other than the owner. While the owner might be in for some karma, how about other people who are having their pictures posted on the 'revenge' site?
What would be interesting is if after exposing a few generations to the sun they started being hatched with eyes again.
Final reason. You get episodes 1-4, but 4 doesn't sell very well at all. So they discontinue the series. Who's fucked then?
The same people that would have been screwed if they bought a full game that didn't offer a sequel. For example, see "Nocturne" (althought according to WikiPedia BloodRayne is somewhat of a sequel). There's nothing about full games with a cliffhanger ending that guarantees succession anymore than episodes. In fact, since it likely takes more money to make an entirely new game... you'll have better luck with the episode.
Interesting how the scorpions are completely white without any distinct markings, etc. In fact, I believe I've seen other creatures that live in no-light or low-light conditions that were all-white as well
While the debate that the 'dead' scorpion was blind due to evolution may be one way to think about it, how about the color of the creatures found (so far I've only seen scorpions). Do creatures that live in no-light situations evolve to be colourless as colour is not useful without light? Does this show that other creatures in light-available areas develop pigments etc to serve a function based on their environment?
To me, it seems to show that evolution works in a fashion (though to those that argue, it does not prove or disprove that men could come from fish or monkeys... whatever your opinion along those longs)
DVD was already standardized though. Blu-ray has not been assured a place succeeding DVD's. They are hoping that PS3 will push Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray will at the same time push PS3...not quite the same scenario as DVD's.
Also, as mentioned earlier. Even high-res PC games don't fully utilize the capacity of DVD's. While Half Life 2 or Doom3 could fit on a single burnable disk, the dual-layer variety carries twice the storage capacity. And PC games need to make allowances for varying hardware (duplicate textures of different resolutions, etc). So really, there's no need for Blu-ray storage as there was for DVD-over-CD back in the day.
Sony is just hoping that their name will once again push them onward...
HL2 was a very complete game in itself, but in the end, obviously, it was left hanging. The alternative to sequel episode therefore would have been to piss a lot of people off by leaving it hanging, or to release a full game (full price).
So instead we have episodes. At $20, well, that's about between 1/4 and 1/2 the price of a normal game.
What is good about this is that it encourages quality. Why? Because if an episode sucks incredibly, nobody will buy the next one. Therefore, in order to sell future episodes, the existing ones have to not suck.
There's nothing wrong with paying more for better service, for example a connection to a bigger pipe. That being said, this isn't what's happening. Rather, it's that you would be forced to pay for a transit-party (between you, your own ISP, and the client connecting to your site) to not degrade the regular connection. The problem is, that the connection has already been paid for. On the end of the client... to their ISP by them. If they don't want to pay for a higher-speed connection, then with dial-up or low-speed they will get overall lower performance. Fair enough
On your end, you have bandwidth and pipe limits imposed by your ISP. If you want more, you pay for the bigger package. Again, it depends on what service contract you choose.
What should not happen, is that the client's ISP will bill you (after the client is already paying for service) not to choke off your access. This also applies to the midpoints in the connection, and somebody has already footed the bill.
It's double-dipping, and it's extortion. It also strays far from the concept of an ISP being somewhat of a common carrier, and shows blatently that the can (and will abuse the ability to) monitor and/or restrict specific traffic.
If this passes it will be a dark day for the internet indeed... but if it does my hopes are that the first ones to try it will be hammered so mercilessly (lost customers, complaints, legislation, and banner ads everywhere proclaiming to existing customers that their ISP is evil) that the idea will quickly lose it's appeal.
That being said, perhaps we can create a master-pool of ISP's that use said service. In that case we could create something similiar to an anti-spam list wherein customers will get a memo stating "connections to this site will suffer extremely slowness and loss of quality because your ISP 'ASSHATINTERNETCO' is limiting your connection. Click here [link] for more information". I'd be happy to pop those up on my site, and it's easy enough with SHTML, etc.
Anyone in?
Given the current trend towards various countries/continents/etc pushing for MS to modify their OS for unbundling purposes, etc... what would be the scenario around the "forced upgrade" for use of DirectX 10?
XP is still within the support cycle for MS. DirectX 10 could be seen as an upgrade or update for Windows OS's. Therefore, should MS not be supporting DX10 on XP?
I'd imagine that when Vista comes out, if things start requiring DX10 we may see a certain amount of political pressure against our favorite monopolist to backport proper support.
Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation.
Hmmm. So your father/son/sister/mother/brother/cousin/etc had some dramatic event happen overseas. Perhaps he was injured, or mugged, or perhaps everyone was just worried about him and he called to let you know he was safe.
One phone-call to the homeland, a bunch of calls among relatives and friends to pass the information along.
Sounds like it fits the pattern to me. In fact, this pattern would match up for overseas calls in many instances. In other words... useless.
Indeed, for you Americans I would think that your greatly admired "founding fathers" could be considered as zealots. They stood up for a cause that went against the way people were used to thinking. They gathered support, instilled new ideas, and eventually won (well, until latter governments started defecating on their works).
Just because something is popular and accept doesn't make it right. Slavery was wrong and yet well-accepted in its time.
It takes a little zealoty, that undying focus on what you (and those with you) believe is right, to make great change happen. Zealotism does not make one right or wrong. The path you follow does.
Whistleblowing is in many cases about going public. You can report it in-house if you want, but you stand a chance of getting fired. Hell, if there's something bad enough to be classified as "whistleblowing" when reported, would you want to be around at the same employer after you report it? Even if they don't fire your ass for that, they'll surely manage to drum up something else.
In the grand scheme, whether or not your job goes up might not be the big issue. The big issue is whether you can be fined, imprisoned, etc for reporting government corruption? Personally, if I reported (to the monitoring bodies, authorities, then papers, etc) that dept X was cleaning out senior citizen pensions for golf money, poisoning kids in the ghetto, and/or various other offenses, I'd still expect to be fired... but by that time I'd also expect to have quit. Now if dept X could also sue my ass for reporting them, and/or have me sent to the slammer... that's a bigger issue.