If you want to spread humanity to another planet you better invest in automatic probes that can survive a few hundreds of years long trip and that can bread and educate some new humans on arrival. Sending live humans through interstellar space isn't going to work anytime soon and even if it one day would, it would be a waste of money.
There exist partial solution for that problem, such as TrackIR, which tracks your head movement and thus allows you to look around in the cockpit without awkward keyboard shortcuts. Also most advanced flightsims support multiple monitors, so throwing a bit of money at the problem can help as well.
Pilotwings goes into that direction, only problem is that the last version for home consoles was on th N64. There also has been a recent one on the 3DS.
So everyone runs computer models and expects us to believe the results of that instead.
So where are the models that predict that AGW doesn't happen? Where are the models that show that pumping endless amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is perfectly save?
The whole AGW industry,
Compared to the oil industry, the car industry and plenty of other industries that would like to continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere , the AGW industry is such a tiny thing that it is rather ridiculous to assume that they are the one doing the fraud.
The world is a complex and dangerous place and we really need to be able to trust scientists.
The bothersome part of all this isn't that people spend money on virtual entertainment, server space and computing time cost money after all, so one shouldn't expect to get everything for free. The bothersome is how it all developed in the last few years. It is no longer about providing the user with something of value, something that has actual real world scarcity, it all turned into a game of playing with human psychology and creating artificial scarcity. It's no longer about paying the provider for the servers and development time, now you are paying them for nothing more then removing the locks they put in place. It's also a model build inherently around a monopoly, as you can't buy your virtual goods from a manufacturer of your choice, once you bought into a game, you have to buy everything around that game from the manufacturer.
Has somebody who used to hex edit his savegames, this really sickens me. Essentially the developers took the savegames (and dedicated server) away from the player and now want money for giving us very limited access to them. It's a loss of freedom without benefit. The consumer becomes nothing more then a mass to milk money from, without ever getting anything tangible in return. And it's not just games, every kind of digital trade seems to develop around that scheme.
That dream of the Internet freeing us from the need for distributors? That bubble pretty much burst, we are now more depended on the distributors then ever, be it the Blizzard, Steam, Amazon, Apple or whoever.
My mistake, the new single-window mode is an option, the older empty-window thing is not to my knowledge, that's forced, but understandably so, as having the menubar ontop of the toolbox was always rather awkward.
For one thing it works better with multiple monitors IMO
Unless of course you have a graphic tablet configured to work on only one monitor and Gimp insists on putting its dialog windows (mainly the resize/rotate/scale dialog) on the *other* monitor. Still have no idea how to make Gimp stop doing that, moving it around with the mouse doesn't help, as it will ignore that on the next popup dialog.
Anyway, the main hate on Gimp is well deserved, while the app isn't bad, it's development is rather stagnant and still lacks features requested and implemeted(!) a decade ago (see FilmGimp/Cinepaint mess) or the single window mode and yet still gets hyped since forever as Photoshop-killer, while it has simply fallen more and more behind in the last decade.
That's not to say it's a bad app, it's a rather reliable one, but it really could need some competition in the Linux world (Krita might be getting there, but it's still way to buggy to be usable for me, half the time it doesn't even start).
the proper way to draw a line in GIMP is with the path tool.
Which is every bit as awkward and still force you to click through a dialog for every line. The path tool in Gimp is on the right track (i.e. full vector operations/layers in your pixel application), but it's such an half done ugly mess that I prefer to avoid it most of the time. It also doesn't help with the circle problem.
I doubt it. The sad part is that most people don't even realize that this isn't just an UI issue that is fixed by pressing Shift, but an actual issue that will make getting desired results not only far harder but sometimes even impossible to achieve.
For example the shift-line drawing thing of course works for basic lines quite fine. But when you try to draw transparent ones, your first click will produce and artifact that you have to undo. So you make it Click, Ctrl-Z, Shift-Click to draw a transparent line. Now you want to draw multiple connecting lines in a row. Wopos, again artifacts where transparent lines join and this time Ctrl-Z doesn't help. So you have to switch the procedure complete, instead of drawing the line directly, you draw the line on the selection mask, then create a new transparent layer, fill that layer by using the mask, adjust opacity and then merge it down. You still get the results you want, but it takes way more clicks and knowledge then a proper line tool would have used.
Of course the trouble continues with other geometric shapes, drawing a circle only works via selection mask to begin with. You will get a circle-like looking thing out of it, but try to get a proper 1 pixel width Bresenham circle out of that method, good luck, the results always tend to look like shit no matter what you try and even regular wider circle look completely awful. And this isn't rocket science, this is stuff your 1985 C64 drawing app would get done right.
Gimp simply doesn't provide the right tools for some jobs and all the alternatives it offers as "solutions" are nothing more then ugly cludges that don't really do what you want them to do when you investigate closer.
This also highlights a broader problem with Free Software: The goal of software should be about giving actual freedom to the user, letting him do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it and extent the software when he likes. Instead most Free Software projects only focus on theoretical freedoms, sure they give you a bunch of source code and a license that allows modification. But that the source code actually encourage extension? Is it flexible enough to handle new features without rewriting large parts of it? In a lot of cases the answer is simply: No. The code is inflexible and feature limited and as a result the user can do far less with it then with some proprietary software. For example 15 year old Corel Draw 6 allowed me to customize every menu and toolbar, macro record every function and script everything, Gimp doesn't even have a toolbar and I haven't seen a macro recorder either, making it a far less flexible tool as a result.
PS: Yeah, I have actually patched the Gimp and build by own toolbar.
Completely replacing isn't the issue, that's pretty easy. The far harder hard part is keeping an older version around, as a hell of a lot of the package and library packages will conflict as they use the same name. The.deb package management system simply doesn't allow keeping two versions of the same package around.
The whole point of FOSS is that if you do not like something, you can change it to make it more efficient and useful for you.
Yes, that should be the point. The sad truth however is that because of the way dependencies and distributions works that you can't just go around and change or replace such a central piece of software like Gnome without a major maintenance headache that just isn't worth it for an individual.
I think a large part of this problem and many problems similar to this is that to much focus in the FOSS community is given to source code and far to little is given to actually empowering the user. Source code is of course a very important step to accomplishing that, but its by no means the end. If software gets so huge and monolithic that modifying it becomes practically impossible for the individual user, then a very large part of the benefit, that FOSS should provide is lost. There should be a lot more focus in the FOSS community on making software not only open source, but actually flexible and modifiable by the user. If I need to dig through layers of source code and spend hours compiling, building packages and messing around just to customize a toolbar a little, something is seriously wrong.
Frustum culling removes parts of the scene outside your field of view, it does not remove parts based on visibility, for that you have to go into occlusion queries, which are a whole lot more complicated. I however seems to remember seeing screenshots of occlusion queries being used in Crysis 1 to cut down on the amount of water being rendered, so it looks a bit weird seeing them wasting so many polygons here on water that is neither visible or even needed, given that it would be invisible the whole time.
Travelling salesman doesn't seem to be an issue here, as the six-degrees of separation thing is a simple exercise of finding the shortest path between two people, not finding the shortest path crossing N people (with large N). And path finding isn't very complex, just throw some Dijkstra's algorithm at it and be done with it.
Of course what they are doing in the "experiment" (ad campaign?) isn't actually finding the shortest path, its about letting the users themselves try to find it by sending messages via their friends to a target person and then looking at how many friends it took.
This sounds more like the expectations have been lowered then that the problem has been solved. 30sec or even 15sec is still quite a long time, given that my C64 could boot up in 1 second. Even for PC those boot times are nothing special, as DOS or Windows95 could do the same. It also doesn't really matter if its 15sec or 30sec, as both are way to long for quick switching. If booting would be as fast as switching desktops or VTs, it would make OS switching a non issues and could allow new workflows across multiple different OS (like visualization, but without limited 3D support and other problems), but with 15sec switching to one OS and another 15sec to switching back that isn't much fun. And of course the really tricky part isn't just getting the OS to boot, but getting all the applications started and their state restored, it helps little if your OS is ready in 15sec when the application take another 2min to get to a point where the HDD isn't going crazy and the PC is actually fully responsive again.
Essentially, as long as I notice that boot actually exist, its simply not fast enough and given how fast our computers are today, it's just depressing how slow boot has become.
For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters.
It's not a trade-off and trying to dress it as one is nothing but a marketing lie. Forcing online play is simply about removing offline play, it doesn't improve online play one bit as nothing would stop them from offering offline play and online play and simply disallowing you to switch characters between both modes.
My guess is that it will be as always in sports: When something becomes so superior that it makes the sport boring to watch, there will be regulations to either make it less useful, forbid it or to make it a requirement. Sport really isn't about "fair competition" (which you can't really have anyway, as no two people are alike), it's about entertainment and advertising money.
The PS3's controller works then fine in Linux, using BT, like a regular controller work.
Does it? As mine doesn't. The two ways to make it work after the sync seems to be patching hidd or killing hidd/bluetoothd and using QTSixa, at least judging from what I have found so far on the Web and most of it seems rather outdated. There also seem to be issues with the controller not using authentification that one thus might need to disable in the bluetooth config.
Long story short: If somebody has an up to date HowTo on how to make the controller just work over Bluetooth without additional hackery in Linux, I'd like to know. As so far I didn't had any luck.
And no I do not see Google+ as infrastructure anymore than I see Blogger, Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook as infrastructure.
Blogger is a choice because it simply doesn't matter where your blog is hosted. Everybody can read it and comment on it, they don't have to join Blogger. That's why there are plenty of different blogging services around and why people can host their own blogs on their own server without problems.
Facebook and Google+ are not, if you want to communicate with people on there or sometimes even just read there, you have to have an account. It's infrastructure because it not under your control, everybody has to use the same service to make the thing work and you can just chose a different service without breaking contact with everybody on there. The very reason why Facebook is so insanely successful in the first place is exactly because of that fact, people can't just move away from it without losing a lot.
Can't answer the general case, but when it comes to the Playstation 3 controller the situation is basically this (at least as far as I understand it):
1) you connect the controller via USB to let him now the Bluetooth address of your computer/phone 2) you press the button on the controller to power it up 3) the controller now contacts your computer and says hello 4) your computer needs an application running to answer that call
The problem is step 4), the Playstation 3 controller seems to use well known ports for this (HID stuff I think) and your average OS already has an application listening on those ports, thus you can't just add another application to listen on the same ports and have to kill whatever is already running there to make it work. It's essentially the same thing as when you want to run two webservers on port 80, it simply doesn't work.
With the Wiimote in adhoc mode the situation is much simpler, as it is the computer that is contacting the Wiimote, not the Wiimote the computer. Thus there are no ports on the computer to worry about and you can simply run a Wiimote app on the PC and have that talk to the Wiimote. The Wiimote however can also be synced with the PC (when pressing the red sync button instead of 1+2), when that is done the situation reverses again, its now the Wiimote contacting the PC. Not sure what ports it uses for that and if there are any conflicts.
When it comes to old 2D games the Playstation 3 controller is pretty much the best on the market, thanks to its solid dpad. Also there really aren't many alternatives to begin with. The Xbox360 controller doesn't talk Bluetooth and the Wiimote lacks a lot of buttons. A Wiimote and a ClassicController together would work, but would be rather bulky. And as far as normal PC controller go: There aren't many Bluetooth controller either, most wireless ones talk their own proprietary protocol.
What people don't get is that it is 100% to judge someone based on what they say and how they act.
The problem with that is when the *other* are the racist. When you are a jew stuck in a class with a bunch of neo-nazis, you might wanna keep that secret. And that becomes a whole lot harder when your realname is plastered all over the Internet because Google thought realnames are cool. And where things become tricky is that right now you might be perfectly fine with publishing your realname, but you can't know in what situation you might be stuck in five or ten years with a lot of your personal history still available.
So why do you want to take away my freedom to have a forum that requires people stand behind what they say?
It's not a forum, its Internet infrastructure. Google+ isn't there yet, but that certainly is where they are aiming at and they are throwing there whole search monopoly behind it. And that is a very big difference that you seem to just ignore.
Why and how "on Earth" would any advanced ET have known hundreds of years ago to aim a directed beacon at not just Earth (if it were aimed at Saturn, we wouldn't detect it), but Earth now when we have the technology?
For the very same reason why we "know" where to aim our antennas: Looking at the stars and planets around them gives you a very rough estimation for the likely hood of life. The hypothetical alien race likely has much better telescopes then us and thus more information about our planet, its atmosphere and composition (which in theory could let you detect things such as industrialization). Now of course that doesn't preclude all our assumption from being wrong, maybe an advanced alien race will consist of robots that love to fly around Hot Jupiters instead of more Earth like planets. So SETI might be looking at the wrong things, but you can't know that until you start looking and have searched a reasonable number of the things out there.
If anything, SETI is a hell of a lot closer to playing the lottery then it is to religion. The chance of "winning" might be small, but its non-zero and the potential "win" could be gigantic.
This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.
It's also decades old and full of cruft, does no longer properly model how our hardware works and only held together by an endless number of extensions.
Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another.
Yeah and as soon as you want something more complicated, such as move an application from one display to another while its already running you run into issues. Something simple as changing color depth at runtime, something that Windows could do since at least Win98, if not already Win95, is still impossible in X11. The reason why I can't use the scroll wheel on my keyboard in X11 is because some arcane part of the protocol or implementation or whatever though that 256 keys ought to be enough for everybody. And there are plenty of more issues, be it multitouch, security or whatever.
Now I don't know what Wayland will or will not fix of those issues, but X11 certainly is showing its age.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to spread humanity to another planet you better invest in automatic probes that can survive a few hundreds of years long trip and that can bread and educate some new humans on arrival. Sending live humans through interstellar space isn't going to work anytime soon and even if it one day would, it would be a waste of money.
There exist partial solution for that problem, such as TrackIR, which tracks your head movement and thus allows you to look around in the cockpit without awkward keyboard shortcuts. Also most advanced flightsims support multiple monitors, so throwing a bit of money at the problem can help as well.
Pilotwings goes into that direction, only problem is that the last version for home consoles was on th N64. There also has been a recent one on the 3DS.
So everyone runs computer models and expects us to believe the results of that instead.
So where are the models that predict that AGW doesn't happen? Where are the models that show that pumping endless amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is perfectly save?
The whole AGW industry,
Compared to the oil industry, the car industry and plenty of other industries that would like to continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere , the AGW industry is such a tiny thing that it is rather ridiculous to assume that they are the one doing the fraud.
The world is a complex and dangerous place and we really need to be able to trust scientists.
Then why the heck do you mistrust them?
The bothersome part of all this isn't that people spend money on virtual entertainment, server space and computing time cost money after all, so one shouldn't expect to get everything for free. The bothersome is how it all developed in the last few years. It is no longer about providing the user with something of value, something that has actual real world scarcity, it all turned into a game of playing with human psychology and creating artificial scarcity. It's no longer about paying the provider for the servers and development time, now you are paying them for nothing more then removing the locks they put in place. It's also a model build inherently around a monopoly, as you can't buy your virtual goods from a manufacturer of your choice, once you bought into a game, you have to buy everything around that game from the manufacturer.
Has somebody who used to hex edit his savegames, this really sickens me. Essentially the developers took the savegames (and dedicated server) away from the player and now want money for giving us very limited access to them. It's a loss of freedom without benefit. The consumer becomes nothing more then a mass to milk money from, without ever getting anything tangible in return. And it's not just games, every kind of digital trade seems to develop around that scheme.
That dream of the Internet freeing us from the need for distributors? That bubble pretty much burst, we are now more depended on the distributors then ever, be it the Blizzard, Steam, Amazon, Apple or whoever.
Dialog for every line? Are you fucking kidding? You're nuts.
How else do I get the lines stroked, if not by going through the "Stroke Path.." dialog?
Outline selection.
And that gives a proper circle exactly how? It just produces a slightly different kind of broken circle-looking mess.
My mistake, the new single-window mode is an option, the older empty-window thing is not to my knowledge, that's forced, but understandably so, as having the menubar ontop of the toolbox was always rather awkward.
For one thing it works better with multiple monitors IMO
Unless of course you have a graphic tablet configured to work on only one monitor and Gimp insists on putting its dialog windows (mainly the resize/rotate/scale dialog) on the *other* monitor. Still have no idea how to make Gimp stop doing that, moving it around with the mouse doesn't help, as it will ignore that on the next popup dialog.
Anyway, the main hate on Gimp is well deserved, while the app isn't bad, it's development is rather stagnant and still lacks features requested and implemeted(!) a decade ago (see FilmGimp/Cinepaint mess) or the single window mode and yet still gets hyped since forever as Photoshop-killer, while it has simply fallen more and more behind in the last decade.
That's not to say it's a bad app, it's a rather reliable one, but it really could need some competition in the Linux world (Krita might be getting there, but it's still way to buggy to be usable for me, half the time it doesn't even start).
the proper way to draw a line in GIMP is with the path tool.
Which is every bit as awkward and still force you to click through a dialog for every line. The path tool in Gimp is on the right track (i.e. full vector operations/layers in your pixel application), but it's such an half done ugly mess that I prefer to avoid it most of the time. It also doesn't help with the circle problem.
Forcing a large blank window to remain open with no image loaded was a mistake.
Nobody is forcing anything. It's an option.
I doubt it. The sad part is that most people don't even realize that this isn't just an UI issue that is fixed by pressing Shift, but an actual issue that will make getting desired results not only far harder but sometimes even impossible to achieve.
For example the shift-line drawing thing of course works for basic lines quite fine. But when you try to draw transparent ones, your first click will produce and artifact that you have to undo. So you make it Click, Ctrl-Z, Shift-Click to draw a transparent line. Now you want to draw multiple connecting lines in a row. Wopos, again artifacts where transparent lines join and this time Ctrl-Z doesn't help. So you have to switch the procedure complete, instead of drawing the line directly, you draw the line on the selection mask, then create a new transparent layer, fill that layer by using the mask, adjust opacity and then merge it down. You still get the results you want, but it takes way more clicks and knowledge then a proper line tool would have used.
Of course the trouble continues with other geometric shapes, drawing a circle only works via selection mask to begin with. You will get a circle-like looking thing out of it, but try to get a proper 1 pixel width Bresenham circle out of that method, good luck, the results always tend to look like shit no matter what you try and even regular wider circle look completely awful. And this isn't rocket science, this is stuff your 1985 C64 drawing app would get done right.
Gimp simply doesn't provide the right tools for some jobs and all the alternatives it offers as "solutions" are nothing more then ugly cludges that don't really do what you want them to do when you investigate closer.
This also highlights a broader problem with Free Software: The goal of software should be about giving actual freedom to the user, letting him do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it and extent the software when he likes. Instead most Free Software projects only focus on theoretical freedoms, sure they give you a bunch of source code and a license that allows modification. But that the source code actually encourage extension? Is it flexible enough to handle new features without rewriting large parts of it? In a lot of cases the answer is simply: No. The code is inflexible and feature limited and as a result the user can do far less with it then with some proprietary software. For example 15 year old Corel Draw 6 allowed me to customize every menu and toolbar, macro record every function and script everything, Gimp doesn't even have a toolbar and I haven't seen a macro recorder either, making it a far less flexible tool as a result.
PS: Yeah, I have actually patched the Gimp and build by own toolbar.
Completely replacing isn't the issue, that's pretty easy. The far harder hard part is keeping an older version around, as a hell of a lot of the package and library packages will conflict as they use the same name. The .deb package management system simply doesn't allow keeping two versions of the same package around.
The whole point of FOSS is that if you do not like something, you can change it to make it more efficient and useful for you.
Yes, that should be the point. The sad truth however is that because of the way dependencies and distributions works that you can't just go around and change or replace such a central piece of software like Gnome without a major maintenance headache that just isn't worth it for an individual.
I think a large part of this problem and many problems similar to this is that to much focus in the FOSS community is given to source code and far to little is given to actually empowering the user. Source code is of course a very important step to accomplishing that, but its by no means the end. If software gets so huge and monolithic that modifying it becomes practically impossible for the individual user, then a very large part of the benefit, that FOSS should provide is lost. There should be a lot more focus in the FOSS community on making software not only open source, but actually flexible and modifiable by the user. If I need to dig through layers of source code and spend hours compiling, building packages and messing around just to customize a toolbar a little, something is seriously wrong.
Frustum culling removes parts of the scene outside your field of view, it does not remove parts based on visibility, for that you have to go into occlusion queries, which are a whole lot more complicated. I however seems to remember seeing screenshots of occlusion queries being used in Crysis 1 to cut down on the amount of water being rendered, so it looks a bit weird seeing them wasting so many polygons here on water that is neither visible or even needed, given that it would be invisible the whole time.
Travelling salesman doesn't seem to be an issue here, as the six-degrees of separation thing is a simple exercise of finding the shortest path between two people, not finding the shortest path crossing N people (with large N). And path finding isn't very complex, just throw some Dijkstra's algorithm at it and be done with it.
Of course what they are doing in the "experiment" (ad campaign?) isn't actually finding the shortest path, its about letting the users themselves try to find it by sending messages via their friends to a target person and then looking at how many friends it took.
This sounds more like the expectations have been lowered then that the problem has been solved. 30sec or even 15sec is still quite a long time, given that my C64 could boot up in 1 second. Even for PC those boot times are nothing special, as DOS or Windows95 could do the same. It also doesn't really matter if its 15sec or 30sec, as both are way to long for quick switching. If booting would be as fast as switching desktops or VTs, it would make OS switching a non issues and could allow new workflows across multiple different OS (like visualization, but without limited 3D support and other problems), but with 15sec switching to one OS and another 15sec to switching back that isn't much fun. And of course the really tricky part isn't just getting the OS to boot, but getting all the applications started and their state restored, it helps little if your OS is ready in 15sec when the application take another 2min to get to a point where the HDD isn't going crazy and the PC is actually fully responsive again.
Essentially, as long as I notice that boot actually exist, its simply not fast enough and given how fast our computers are today, it's just depressing how slow boot has become.
For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters.
It's not a trade-off and trying to dress it as one is nothing but a marketing lie. Forcing online play is simply about removing offline play, it doesn't improve online play one bit as nothing would stop them from offering offline play and online play and simply disallowing you to switch characters between both modes.
I wonder where the line should be drawn.
My guess is that it will be as always in sports: When something becomes so superior that it makes the sport boring to watch, there will be regulations to either make it less useful, forbid it or to make it a requirement. Sport really isn't about "fair competition" (which you can't really have anyway, as no two people are alike), it's about entertainment and advertising money.
The PS3's controller works then fine in Linux, using BT, like a regular controller work.
Does it? As mine doesn't. The two ways to make it work after the sync seems to be patching hidd or killing hidd/bluetoothd and using QTSixa, at least judging from what I have found so far on the Web and most of it seems rather outdated. There also seem to be issues with the controller not using authentification that one thus might need to disable in the bluetooth config.
Long story short: If somebody has an up to date HowTo on how to make the controller just work over Bluetooth without additional hackery in Linux, I'd like to know. As so far I didn't had any luck.
And no I do not see Google+ as infrastructure anymore than I see Blogger, Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook as infrastructure.
Blogger is a choice because it simply doesn't matter where your blog is hosted. Everybody can read it and comment on it, they don't have to join Blogger. That's why there are plenty of different blogging services around and why people can host their own blogs on their own server without problems.
Facebook and Google+ are not, if you want to communicate with people on there or sometimes even just read there, you have to have an account. It's infrastructure because it not under your control, everybody has to use the same service to make the thing work and you can just chose a different service without breaking contact with everybody on there. The very reason why Facebook is so insanely successful in the first place is exactly because of that fact, people can't just move away from it without losing a lot.
Can't answer the general case, but when it comes to the Playstation 3 controller the situation is basically this (at least as far as I understand it):
1) you connect the controller via USB to let him now the Bluetooth address of your computer/phone
2) you press the button on the controller to power it up
3) the controller now contacts your computer and says hello
4) your computer needs an application running to answer that call
The problem is step 4), the Playstation 3 controller seems to use well known ports for this (HID stuff I think) and your average OS already has an application listening on those ports, thus you can't just add another application to listen on the same ports and have to kill whatever is already running there to make it work. It's essentially the same thing as when you want to run two webservers on port 80, it simply doesn't work.
With the Wiimote in adhoc mode the situation is much simpler, as it is the computer that is contacting the Wiimote, not the Wiimote the computer. Thus there are no ports on the computer to worry about and you can simply run a Wiimote app on the PC and have that talk to the Wiimote. The Wiimote however can also be synced with the PC (when pressing the red sync button instead of 1+2), when that is done the situation reverses again, its now the Wiimote contacting the PC. Not sure what ports it uses for that and if there are any conflicts.
When it comes to old 2D games the Playstation 3 controller is pretty much the best on the market, thanks to its solid dpad. Also there really aren't many alternatives to begin with. The Xbox360 controller doesn't talk Bluetooth and the Wiimote lacks a lot of buttons. A Wiimote and a ClassicController together would work, but would be rather bulky. And as far as normal PC controller go: There aren't many Bluetooth controller either, most wireless ones talk their own proprietary protocol.
What people don't get is that it is 100% to judge someone based on what they say and how they act.
The problem with that is when the *other* are the racist. When you are a jew stuck in a class with a bunch of neo-nazis, you might wanna keep that secret. And that becomes a whole lot harder when your realname is plastered all over the Internet because Google thought realnames are cool. And where things become tricky is that right now you might be perfectly fine with publishing your realname, but you can't know in what situation you might be stuck in five or ten years with a lot of your personal history still available.
So why do you want to take away my freedom to have a forum that requires people stand behind what they say?
It's not a forum, its Internet infrastructure. Google+ isn't there yet, but that certainly is where they are aiming at and they are throwing there whole search monopoly behind it. And that is a very big difference that you seem to just ignore.
Why and how "on Earth" would any advanced ET have known hundreds of years ago to aim a directed beacon at not just Earth (if it were aimed at Saturn, we wouldn't detect it), but Earth now when we have the technology?
For the very same reason why we "know" where to aim our antennas: Looking at the stars and planets around them gives you a very rough estimation for the likely hood of life. The hypothetical alien race likely has much better telescopes then us and thus more information about our planet, its atmosphere and composition (which in theory could let you detect things such as industrialization). Now of course that doesn't preclude all our assumption from being wrong, maybe an advanced alien race will consist of robots that love to fly around Hot Jupiters instead of more Earth like planets. So SETI might be looking at the wrong things, but you can't know that until you start looking and have searched a reasonable number of the things out there.
If anything, SETI is a hell of a lot closer to playing the lottery then it is to religion. The chance of "winning" might be small, but its non-zero and the potential "win" could be gigantic.
This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.
It's also decades old and full of cruft, does no longer properly model how our hardware works and only held together by an endless number of extensions.
Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another.
Yeah and as soon as you want something more complicated, such as move an application from one display to another while its already running you run into issues. Something simple as changing color depth at runtime, something that Windows could do since at least Win98, if not already Win95, is still impossible in X11. The reason why I can't use the scroll wheel on my keyboard in X11 is because some arcane part of the protocol or implementation or whatever though that 256 keys ought to be enough for everybody. And there are plenty of more issues, be it multitouch, security or whatever.
Now I don't know what Wayland will or will not fix of those issues, but X11 certainly is showing its age.