Vista is just as much affected, the bug is there, just that Vista by default with UAC ON it can't do much more then write to the tmp folder. IF UAC is turned off, you are vulnerable to whatever somebody can cook up.
Since UAC is one of the more hated elements of Vista I would guess that a lot of people got it switched off. So the bug is still there, just that it can do less direct harm (do you really want a malicious coder to be able to write anything at all to your HD?)
Apparently there is a fault in the design, you can't underclock it anymore without flatlining when you watch reality tv and still peoples brain heat up. Mostly from its fevered attempts to crawl out your ear hole.
But hey, think of it like this, with proper cooling we can really start poring in the juice and all be geniusses. It will be brilliant, we grow so intelligent cooling our brain and powering it up, we might suddenly realize how stupid that is.
Now that is irony, overclocking your brain to become smart enough to realize it is going to kill you.
I keep hearing about these things but so far I have yet to spot them. I wonder what they are like...
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Gee, might that have something to do with the article? Not just people like me blocking ads (privoxy and squid) but including people like you with their notsafeforwork attitude.
IF you write an article in playboy (yes they do have them) then you can include ads to pay for that that are slightly more risky. IF you write a very similar piece but publish it on the net, well then it better be safe for work and kids and right wingers.
This all ads up to less revenue to pay the writers.
So less money, means less writing obviously, so shorter articles, less time to attract eyeballs, less time to get them watch ads, fewer ads, less money. Voila downwards spiral of doom leading to articles with no contents spanning 20 pages to which somekind slashdotter posts the print link meaning that NOT just do they not get ads views from me, but not even any pageviews.
I could almost feel sorry for them... Well not really.
Everytime you tell a story you have to set a certain limit where you just have to assume the person you are talking too understands your words. For instance, you just seem to assume that I know what an acronym is. That I get your use of the word "drift" what does your racing style have to do with slashdot editors?
This is slashdot, we do NOT explain words like RAM or CPU. If you don't understand those acronyms, you do not belong here. This is furthermore the game section of slashdot and Real Time Strategy is a well known genre of games. Do we have to explain FPS as well? (First Person Shooter) How about 3D?
At a certain point you just have to decide, allright my audience just knows this, and if they don't they are not my audience. If you don't, you end up like mainstream publications that have to dumb down everything to such an extent that EVERYONE feels insulted.
One of the more intresting approaches I have seen is/was (not sure if it still exists) is the dutch childerens news. It leaves out some stories but uses the extra time to more deeply explain the rest so that a person with limited world knowledge (like a kid or an american) can still follow what is happening in the world. You can also clearly see the problem there, they need a lot more time to cover the same event.
So unless you want slashdot stories to run several pages and be linked to hell to wikipedia, you are just going to have to use your own brain. This is the internet, the answer is only a few clicks away.
This may confuse many an american who live in a country that isn't free but they think it is. In europe we know we ain't got many of the supposed freedoms of the US of A and more or less, we like it that way. In for instance Holland the rules about banned books is VERY clear, it is the goverment that has banned them and those books are banned and ONLY those books. NO OTHER BOOKS CAN BE BANNED BY ANYONE ELSE!
No withholding funding from libraries that stock books somebody doesn't like. No pressure on printers, no self-censorship. IF the goverment wants to ban something, they got to come out and do it openly.
The US is very different, in theory every book is free, just that libraries that stock the wrong ones get no funding. An even greater evil exists in self-censorship. It allows the politicians to wash their hands off any anti-freedom policy while still having censorship.
Freespeech does not exist (shout fire in a crowded room to see just how free you are) so why even pretend it does exist? Far better to have extremely clear rules about what can and what cannot be said and make it very clear WHO wants it to be that way.
IF the british goverment wants to get rid of the page 3 girl, they would have to do it themselves, directly and show it to the public. In the US, the goverment would just hint at regulation, then the industry would self-regulate and nobody would be any the wiser.
Do I agree with the cookbook being under the terrorism law? No, but at least it is clear who is responsible for it (Labour party/Blair), it is clearly banned, not just not in stock at the local library. You go and live in lala land screaming to yourselve that you got freespeech. I prefer to live in the real world and KNOW what is forbidden and who forbids it. At least that gives me a target.
Lets be honest here, this is MICROSOFT we are talking about here warning us that Google doesn't respect our privacy. Well they should know shouldn't they? The creators of the least secure OS ever made, the OS that updates itself when we don't want it too, that has a EULA that gives MS the right to snoop around on your system, read whatever it wants and alter whatever it wants and if it destroys anything, too bad. The OS that has been known to phone home until someone found out and then they disable it saying that they couldn't identify you from just your IP and credit card number and every other bit of personal information they could find.
Sure google reads your gmail, we know this. It is how it works, they are very clear about it and if you don't like it, don't use it. It is not like google has a monopoly or anything they have been found guilty of abusing on several continents, that forces you to use their services.
Sometimes I think MS needs to hire a person to increase their public relations. The task would not be complex. He just stands next to the microphone at MS press-release center, and whenever an MS employee walks up to it, he zaps them.
Or put more simple? MS if you want to improve your image, SHUT UP. Do NOT say a single thing for the next year and your image will go through the roof, because you just keep saying these insane things that everyone with a brain can see for the complete and utter lying bullshit it really is.
FUD only works when you got a shred of believability left. If Steve Ballmer proclaimed that the sky was blue, I would doubt that.
What next, Bush calling Blair a bit of thicky who lied to his voters about Iraq? Britney Spears calling the Spice Girls a bad act? Germany commenting on the US tendency to start wars?
Really, MS needs to hire a public relation officer who knows that less is more. The only thing Steve Ballmer should be allowed to say in a year is, Hi, these are the profit figures for last year. Thank you, goodbye.
I wonder if the shareholders can demand he keeps his mouth shut because he is damaging the value of the company.
I am not, but even I heard of a small case that happened on your shores when a company went to far. Ever heard of the British East India Company? It had to do with some added tax/levy or something being added to tea. I think it caused a bit of a riot in boston, local affair, easy to miss but some people were upset about it.
Offcourse, this involved goverments but since back then the lines between goverment and business was often very blurred (unlike today when we see absolutly no blurring of any kind *cough*) this might be considered a case of a very succesfull (if you are an american) embargo against a company that pushed its customers too far.
Does it work in other cases? Well, note the difference in genetically engineered products in the US of A and europe, the europeans have long since been against any such crap and so companies make it very clear that they don't put it in their products.
More or less any normal business listens to its customers, the problems start to occur when a business becomes more then just trying to sell you a product and becomes a power. Your local supermarket is a business, Walmart is close to being a Power, the RIAA is a power. What do I mean by that? You can easily shop somewhere else then your local supermarket, it has no control over you, if the local manager does something you don't like, it is easy to boycot him. It is far harder to get around Walmart. Or for the dutch, AH. If AH does something bad, you are soon faced with the problem that they own many other chain of supermarkets as well.
The RIAA is even worse, in many cases they ARE music. The have become almost a legal power like the tax offices, they can collect their music tax for any music they like even if the original owner doesn't want them too. This would be roughly the same as the police ticketing people for driving to fast on private property (they can't and don't do this, this is why racetracks can operate).
It is very hard to get around the various music copyright groups because no matter what music you listen too, they have been given control over it.
But succesfull embargo's are legion, blacks boycotting businesses in america, the India rebellion against british rule etc etc.
On a much small scale, there were temporary success against the fur trade. Against whaling and sealing.
Embargo's work, even against semi-goverment organisations, but the "people" need a lot of will power to pull it off. Often the answer is that somebody equally powerfull takes up the fight, in recent years that have been popstars, who through their fame could pull the people into a single group to raise a voice. Bit of a pity that popstars and the RIAA are in the same bed eh?
Who re-elected him OR by not voting did nothing to oppose him? There is a saying, in the land of the blind, one-eyed is king. Think about this and see what it means to those ruled by Bush.
That you also lobby for Ron Paul suggests to me that you are not just a blind person ruled by a one-eyed freak but have lost all sensory capacities as well, rounded off with frontal lobotomy.
What I think is wrong with the world (Bush is far from the only "how the fuck did we elect him" leader) is television. Not the violence, or the sex but in how on tv solutions always come easy. Every problem is always one-dimensional and always gets solved before the end credits. Even "deep" series like Law & Order always only have ONE problem at the time. If the recent RIAA court cases were is TV land they would either just have the problem of how you indentify someone on the net, OR the moral problem of prosecuting someone for millions when they are pisspoor OR the issue of the morality of copyright BUT NEVER all at once, as in the real world.
You can even see this in the Oprah type shows, when she still had "difficult" shows, they still were about one thing and one thing only. The persons in trouble would abuse drugs OR have gambling problems OR come from broken homes OR have mental issues. The reason real world people are often so difficult to help is because they got ALL these problems at once and very few places are fit to deal with their combination.
But that is to difficult for tv, so everything is simplified and dumbed down till the point that perhaps many of us start to believe that simple solutions do exist.
Take the issue of that famous 300 dollar tax break, it is a pathetic amount of money based on even a low yearly income but what was the cost to society because of the numerous spending cuts that had to be made to pay for it?
Even if you believe those spending cuts were a good thing, then the US would still have been far better served if that money had been invested, if it had simple been put into a simple bank account, it could have been used to balance out any future required spending, like the disaster in new orleans or the war.
But no, people felt the effect of a down economy, so we get a simple one liner solution of being given a small amount of money and voila, guy gets elected.
But hey, what am I bothering for, you think Ron Paul is a good candidate. He has a lot of one-liner solutions, but if you actually would implement them then you would be hit with a ton of problems once the side effects kick in.
Get out of the various defence pacts like NATO? Where would the US base its operations out of that help secure the trade routes it needs for its economy? No the guy speak simple solutions for a simple audience who can't handle thinking about complex problems and reasoning out what any action might mean in the long term.
That is why really good leaders never do anything, because any change no matter how simple upsets everything else. Only once you have analyzed completely what each change might result in can you act. Do this for me, go to Ron Pauls wikipedia page, scroll down and read what he wants to do, then try to write down the total impact of each of his decisions. Can you even begin to imagine the chaos?
You are spouting bullshit, very fine, very fresh and very pure bullshit.
Why? The city/state of New York and other such places in the US easily have a similar population density as Tokyo. Nobody is claiming that the many remote regions in Japan are as well serviced as its major cities.
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
You don't have to cover the US in fiber anymore then any other country has, just the places were lots of people live. In between these major cities you can KEEP the existing fiber that is already in place. So please tell me again what is so different about japanese cities compared to american cities that the japanese have rolled out that LAST mile of fiber and the americans are still on copper?
Because again if you weren't a dumb american you would know that the US has a fiber network, this story is about the last mile.
I am currently play LOTRO and that game is becoming more and more like a direct WoW clone (not a good thing) so if there is anything that can avoid being a WoW/EQ clone I would welcome it.
So to any who have played it in the trials can you answer me this.
Does it have quests to gather X from Y and then X does not drop in a clear logical pattern?
Does it have items looted for crafting that drop from X that only spawns once in a blue moon if your avatar wears purple?
Is it impossible to craft to your own level (Lotro is very guilty of this) so that by the time you have harvested everything that is needed for a level 12 item, your are level 20?
Is there a reputation grind (we couldn't think of more story quests so now just go kill) that if you calculate the number of kills needed you realize you ain't getting out of the house this year?
Do the game makers put grinders and questers in the same place? (Lotro with its deeds (kill X Y for bonuss stats) often has people at very high levels killing X in low levels areas to get their deed and damned be any players at the right level questing there)
For that matter, does that crafting/loot system encourage, even enforce, farming?
Is there any system in place to deal with gold spammers (SWG has introduced player killing of gold sellers, WoW has finally introduced limits on spam messages, turbine... nothing).
In short, is this any different from the default EQ clone with all the same crap that really should have been elimenated since the days of EQ2? SWG tried, it really did but failed because of bugs ans was then turned into an EQ clone itself.
I once worked (note that past tense) for a large mobile phone company. At the time they were pushing two devices, one division was trying to sell the blackberry, the other a branded PDA/Phone, both of them to the same coorperate business customer. So I dared to ask, isn't there a conflict? I asked this during a large meeting/brain storming session and quickly learned why I should not work in these kind of enviroments. The room literally went quiet. It was not because I had pointed out the fatal flaw nobody else had spotted, it was because everyone else knew this and also knew that this stuff is just the way things are and you don't bring attention to it. You don't bring attention to ANYTHING because doing ANYTHING might get you noticed.
I got noticed alright and didn't last long, especially since I didn't learn my lesson and kept pointing out these stupid conflicts, for instance if we were to sell lots of data why did we limit the mobile web to just our own pathetic sites and not the web as a whole?
You get ahead in business by supporting the bosses decision, that includes NOT making a decision that goes against his previous decision not matter how wrong, after all if you improve the situation, you just shown that YOUR boss is an idiot.
The bigger the company/organization and the older it gets, the worse this becomes. It is even true in your own live. Take a challenge and change your job completly and then try to notice how quickly your world changes, go from IT to say construction and you will move from a world where the internet is a primary necessity to a world where many of the people you know only have it for the kids.
This woman is a lawyer working for the music division of Sony, I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that in her professional and social live she doesn't hang out with many geeks/engineers/students etc etc. She hangs out with other lawyers working for the music industry. That is what shapes her vision and it better do because how long do you think she would last at Sony-BMG if she started to listen to other opinions on copyright?
She ain't stupid, she is doing exactly what she has to do to get paid and keep her job and her boss will tell her good job, and all her underlings will tell her she did great and that is how things are done in any organisation.
It ain't about stupid, it is about social climbing.
There has been a movement to INCREASE the amount of logging going and to force ISP's to maintain detailed records for long periods of their users actions. That is WAY more intrusive then a website logging your ip. You do NOT have to go to a website, you are bound to use an ISP.
Before all the privacy loonies wake up, remember that it is perfectly normal for ALL your phone calls to be logged and it is standard practive for the police to check them, with court order, if they suspect something.
The most common example of this is a bomb threath. The police will have a record of where the call was made from.
This ruling makes this impossible to do the same with a bomb threath send over the internet. Wouldn't this ruling make even the most basic web policing, the blocking of ip adresses, impossible?
This seems like an overly broad ruling that leaves a lot of web admins in trouble because they can no longer effectively manage their servers.
Yes it is a nice counter to the european wide move to log EVERYTHING but there is such a thing as balance. Logging everything is wrong, but not being able to log anything can lead to just as much trouble.
For all the slashdot privacy nutters I ask you this. How often have you sniggered when some scumbag was traced by online activists and had his private information published on slashdot?
With say PCWorld. Rememeber them from a while back? They refused to service a broken hinge on a laptop because it had Linux installed. Ooh they were BAAAAD people who did not know anything about computers and deserved all the bad press etc etc.
Now it is Apple, who refuses to service a piece of hardware because of installed software. Well obviously Apple must therefore be in the the right and shame on those people who think they can do what they want with their own hardware.
This is nothing new, people get emotional about companies. If we feel good about a company, they can do no evil, and if we feel bad about a company, they can do no good. Sony could give away puppies and "we" would find something bad about it and Apple can announce that iPods are powered by slaughtering kittens and "we" would all applaud them.
Apple has a very long history off very poor customer relations, the amount of stories about them refusing to service things for the most idiotic reasons is endless. Most stupid one that keeps cropping up, refusing to service machines entire new because people bought a different configuration made by choices on Apples own website then the default.
In this aspect they are really not any worse then any other PC builder, but Apple got this amazing amount of goodwill that makes lots of fanboys ignore everything and loudly proclaim Apple is best.
They are not, they are just another company seeking the maximum amount of profit, that often means going against the best interests of their customers.
Sometimes people do social experiments with news stories, I propose the following, one of the slashdot editors take a story like this but replace all mentions of Apple with say Dell or Microsoft (depending on hardware/software issue) and posts it. Then a day later reveals the truth. I think a lot of posters would suddenly be faced with having to explain why they flipflopped on their opinion.
In a way Apple is more evil then say MS. We KNOW MS is evil so we are aware and analyze everything they do for the amount of evil in it. That is "healthy". Paranoia is an essential part of staying free in this world. Apple is "trusted" by a lot and so can get away with a lot by people simply trusting them to not be evil.
Just read the posts above and check some of the defenders posting history, you can see that a lot of them talk a lot differently when other companies are involved in similar stories. In Apples history a lot of names pass by to explain its greatness, but the truly great one is the person at marketting/public relations that managed to create this amount of goodwill without doing anything particulairly good (what has Apple really done to benefit the world?)
In case you don't know Holland like Belgium is a coalition goverment, that means we do NOT have a single party who wins the election, unlike say Britain, France and the US.
For a long time now it has taken ages to get this coalition together, it is usually done by the largest party (but not a majority) exploring what other parties are close to its ideas and are willing to work together so they can have a majority. The problem is that this ALWAYS takes a lot of time, sometimes months. So who cares about the speed of counting, what does 1 day spend counting mean if the goverment then needs 2-3 months to get together?
We are so obssesed with instant results that perhaps we fail to realize that we add speed as a requirement when it isn't needed. "We need the election results as soon as possible". Why? "... just because". Drop the speed requirement and then see what kind of system you can come up with.
On a side note, the belgium goverment at the moment is taking a long time to form a new goverment, whole months have gone by without a party in charge (in the dutch system the current goverment has to stop and this leaves an effective power vacuum during formation) and yet the world keeps on turning. What about an experiment, we put all politicians in jail for a year, and see what happens. My bet is the same as usual, nothing at all, but at a greatly reduced cost.
The vendor trash MIGHT be just his way of getting rid of inventory while giving some free cash to another player.
Ages ago in SWG I played a fat wookie, very fat, very male, very wookie. I was relativly new and was spotted by a high level on tantooine hunting rats. He basically gave me a starter package to get going, money, some resources, some weapons, a speeder bike. The works, it really helped and managed to get me to the planet where all the action was and get going.
That helper package was pretty standard, it cost a experienced player almost nothing but really helped new players.
I myself helped new SWG players that way several times, but even the nicest player will want to pick people who he thinks are nice as well. A decent name is one of the first choices. Someone with an intresting bio I read while I was bored. A player who does not INSTANTLY ask me for more money the moment I come close.
Is it possible that you were just the first character he spotted when he needed to get rid of some loot and that was all?
Women to often assume that X happens because they are female.
Sometimes men treat you as stupid, because, well you are.
Sometimes men don't listen to you, because they are not intrested in what you are saying.
Sometimes men stare at your tits, because... oh okay sometimes it is because you are female.
The guy didn't cyber you, didn't ask for anything in return, why make more off it? Typical female, always over-analyzing stuff.
I recently upgraded my computers, my windows xp game machine from a P4HT and my linux dual P3 machine both to Core 2 Duos and 2gigs of ram. The windows machine used to have 1 gig of ddr and the P3 had 512mb of that ram that failed.
Both were okay machines in their own right, I am currently playing a lot of LOTRO and the frame rates weren't too bad with pretty decent settings. The problem was lack of memory, ddr is expensive compared to ddr2 and I had all full slots.
So, with two new machines, am I experiencing what you claim? HELL NO. For one thing, bios boot time (before the OS starts loading) have dropped to mere seconds, often so fast I can't even hit del fast enough. While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work.
BRING OUT THE CAR ANOLOGY
If you drive you car one hour a day at 240 miles per hour (lets keep the math simple) then you claim that a car with a top speed over 10 miles per hour is wastefull since obviously on average your car only drives 10 miles per hour in a day period.
Computer speed is not just about total capacity, it is about how fast it can do the tasks you ask it to do. If I boot my computer, I wanted to work on it NOW, every milisecond it is not ready is wasted time. If I open a document I want to work on it. Don't matter that a 10 second load time ain't that long, it is time I spend waiting.
That is the secret of why powerfull computers make for better productivity, NOT because we need them to constantly be performing heavy workloads, but because we want them to do what we want them to do quickly so we can do our work in the flow we want it too.
I remember the days when if you wanted to print a document you went and got a cup of coffee while the computer got ready, and then you went an hour later to the printer room to get your document from the pile. It worked, but your workflow was being dictated by the hardware/software. Not a good thing.
BRING OUT THE SECOND CAR ANOLOGY
Old diesels had to warmup before they could be driven. Not too much of a problem, just make it part of your getting ready routine to go outside and start the car before you actually leave. But god, those petrol cars with their instant usuable engines were handy, and we curse when we have to scape the windows when there is frost. We want the car to be ready when we want it to be ready, not when its hardware is ready.
I agree that getting a new powerfull computer and then wasting all its cycles on crap is not progress, but just because a new powerfull computer spends most of its time idling does NOT mean it is useless. Same as your car that spends most of its times doing 0 miles per hour is NOT wasting all that horse power.
So what you are basically saying, this is like a doctor calling the police because his drug cabinet was smashed.
Granted, this is also like a slave owner reporting a runaway slave to the police or the citizen who turned in Anne Frank just doing his civic responsibility (Oh hi godwin, how you doing.)
The simple fact is that the law isn't always "right". Some big media do not like swedish law, just as some hard drug users do not like swedish law, or as same slaves did not like eh slave laws etc etc. The problem is that if you then fight that law by disobeying it, you run the risk of the police coming around and talk sternly to you (or if you are black gun you down as you reach for your wallet, somethings never change).
You are talking about ricers, people who put neon-lighting in their PC and call it overclocking. Sorry, no.
These are the kinda people who cut the suspension on their car and think it turns it into a racing machine and if they ever had access to a real race car would put a radio in it, to drown out the engine noise. (If you see a ferrari with a radio, it is legal to shoot the owner in Italy).
A real gamer/overclocker cares about performance, they want their games to run as fast and smooth as possible. The simplest and easiest way to do this is to switch every unneeded bit of Windows OFF and the most unneeded thing is themes. Unless you play your game windowed (The horror) what use is a theme? Samething with wallpapers. Hell most gamers I know don't even want anything on the desktop, every icon shown costs resources.
Same thing with a large unorganized HD. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that the simpler the filetree, the less time spend by the OS looking for a file. SMALL is BETTER!
Now think of this, how would a person obsessed with getting every last FPS out of their latest hardware configure their machine. Oh might they want to keep their windows/gaming box as clean as possible? Not install anything unneeded, not run any programs except the game?
But where to browse and download and look at porn eh trailers? Why, we are talking about gamers, owners of lots of obsolete hardware. Hardware that could easily be put together to run a second PC?
But what oh what to run on that second machine? Not linux you say because gamers don't know nothing about that? Where and how do you think all those linux counterstrike and other FPS servers come from?
In fact, as you spend time overclocking and tuning your windows machine you are FAR more likely then an average windows to get totally dissatisfied with windows, and to anyone who has managed to tame the beast from redmond and actually make it run stable and fast, linux holds very few secrets. If you think compiling a kernel is hard you never had to clean out a copyprotection driver from XP.
No, their are people like you describe, who know just enough of windows to press the right button, as long as it in request for the dialog (press any key) and fear having to learn anything new.
But their are also plenty of gamers to whom linux holds no fear, they long since embraced it as their salvation from having to mess up their gaming machines and use it to run their game servers, host their guild sites and use it as their main desktop while gaming.
I almost find it insulting that you say that people who mod closed source, no documentation games, can't make their way around an opensource open-documented OS. Not all gamers as the same.
Do they too fall under this ruling? After all, they do "store" information, for a while, and then it gets wiped. Do you think that companies should preserve ALL whiteboard writings.
What about errors, if I write something and make a spelling error, I erase it and retype it. Should that too be recorded?
What about the information of time. A whiteboard is changed over time as you add new data to it, this timeline could be important, WHEN was the information on the whiteboard added, the time the line "Make sure the brakes work" is added to a car design discussion is important if it turns out the brakes failed on the production version.
So to truly and fully comply with discovery rules EVERY tiny bit of data, now matter how fleeting, has to be recorded, that means video cameras everywhere. Not exactly practical is it?
Torrentspy doesn't log IP's for a reason, there are too many and it just doesn't need them. So their entire setup just uses the IP information as temperory data, like a scrawl on a whiteboard or even a mental note, and discards it when it doesn't need them.
In theory they could offcourse log it, but because something is possible in theory, doesn't mean it is possible in practice.
Lets turn it around, the MPAA is a business and therefore all its business discussions should be recorded, but who is to say they do not talk business at home with their spouses? I say the only way to be sure is to video-tape them 24/7, just to be sure EVERY business related data is recorded as required by law.
Yeah yeah, commercial sitcom, we are above that. Sure but in that show plenty of jokes are made about jews. No problem. Other entertainment makes fun of religion as well, and apart from a few protests and boycots it just goes by. Life of Brain made fun of jesus, how many people were killed in the following riots?
In "the west" in modern times we have more or less come to an understanding that it is NOT okay to inflict your believes upon everyone else. It is also acceptable to be made fun off, even if you do not like it because freedom of speech is more important then your hurt feelings. Because sooner or later everything is going to hurt someone.
And suddenly the west finds itself with a group that seeks to go back to the dark ages. I am NOT talking about islam here, I am talking about religous fundementalists who once again seek to enforce their worldview upon everyone else, through force if need be. These fundies exist among ALL religions right now, jews in Israel voicing opions that would make hitler blush, christian fundies seeking to censor all media, india got its share of religious extremist and offcourse there is a sub-group of muslims seeking to make sharia the law worldwide.
Yet something really dangerous is occuring. The jews are far too small a group to be noticed, the christians are too corrupt, the hindoes barely matter in the western world but the muslims, now they seem to have gained a lot of control.
For instance, holland does not like the pope (catholic), not even the dutch catholic do. Any attempt by the pope to say that holland should do this or that is just laughed off. Yet if muslims speak, well, then the dutch quake in their boots. How come the catholic religous leader is safe to ignore but muslim religous leaders are not?
Offcourse there are differences, the pope doesn't even control his own country Italy much (see gay marriage and abortion laws), while entire countries are controlled by Islam. It is safe to make fun of a old guy in a silly dress, not so safe of the leaders who control your oil supply.
Your question is wether it would have been the same if this comic made fun of jews (why this religion and not say christianity, the majority religon in the US), then tell me this. When was the last time such a comic was banned? A movie? A play? A book? A song?
Judge the banned material on its own merits, then ask yourselve if the same reaction would have occured has another religion een involved.
You can either have freedom of speech or you can try to appease one group with long toes. But be aware, the first time you do that, another group will take notice, and will want to be protected as well. If you had your way, pretty soon you would no longer be able to publish anything anyone disapproved off.
That might suit you, afterall you call Opus, about as harmless a comic as you can get, tasteless. What next, censor garfield for walking around without pants?
What you are talking about is actually the hardest thing of all to do, and the people who can do it, have no need of it.
So apart from the enormous technical difficulties, you are faced with the human problem of getting people to do something for free that does not benefit them.
First, the technical problem.
Getting a piece of software to install on a piece of hardware without the user knowing anything about either requires someone, somewhere to predict ALL possible situations. This is impossible, there will always be some odd piece of hardware that the hardware detection team never heard about, some combo nobody has tested. Even if by some herculian effort you managed to do it, some company will release a new piece of hardware and you can start all over again testing every combination and its effects.
This is extremely noticable with "brandname" PC's be they laptops or even simple desktops, every time a new model launches by Dell/HP/Lenevo you find that they added a new piece of hardware but changed it subtly and the linux community can now try to figure out what it was they did. I never have problems building linux machines with white-boxes that I put together myself, but dread having to put it on a laptop or small-form factor pc.
Then there is the matter of choice, I could easily give you a piece with MY choice of hardware and MY choice of software and MY configuration choices and you wouldn't have any problems with it. But who am I to say how large your home partition should be? How you should log things.
Linux already is much better then windows in this respect as most installers are proper GUI's with proper help, explaining everything that the user is asked to do but at some point there just isn't anything that can be done to make things easier. The user has got to engage his brain, and think for himself.
If you want to see just how easy linux can be, just try a livecd. That is something windows or OS/X doesn't do, and it is very good indeed BUT it cannot account for every situation, livecd's will fail and the user will be left in the dark.
The second problem:
The people that could write the distro that could do all the hardware detection itself, don't need it. That is the eternal volunteer projects problem, the people of SAMBA don't need a simple way to configure it, they KNOW it and to them the configuration files hold no secrets. Why should they spend their (free) time on something they don't need? Hint, documentation and writing configuration tools is the most boring part of development.
Yes it is a problem, BUT linux is not a company or even a movement, it is a bunch of people who do things they like and share them. If I am singing in the shower and you happen to like it, that is fine, but I won't do requests. If you want that, pay me, except I got a good job, and I like singing the songs I like so you would have to pay me a LOT especially since I hate the song you requested.
That is one of the weaknesses of linux, it can't be helped. MS and Apple can just pay some developed to do boring work, linux by and large cannot.
It doesn't even help that much if somebody volunteers to do say the documentation, the developer still would need to spend time talking to this person, time he isn't spending on something he likes.
This is the nature of linux, it is made by people who LIKE what they are doing, but it misses those bits people don't like doing. Only money can change that, so how much did you pay for your linux box?
This excuse has been used before, countless times. The simple fact is that if you are not actively working against your goverment, you are supporting them. This goes for any country.
The US population supports the bush administrations war on terror by not acting against it, I support the dutch goverments actions in afghanistan and irag, by not acting against it, and you support your countries hatred of every non-muslim country, by not acting against it.
All the evil needs to flourish is the in-action of some good men.
It don't matter of most people from Iran do not see the USA as the enemy, it matters wether they will pay their taxes to fund the anti-western anti-democracy anti-freedom goverment and will serve its military.
IF Iran launched a war against say Israel, how many of the people you know would refuse military duty, would outcast family members that went to war?
Note that this is NOT just against you, it goes for the entire human race. It sadly is just too easy to just sit back, say "I am against", and then let it happen. From slavery, to the holocaust, to animal cruelty, to child labor. "Good" men have sat back, said they disapproved and then do nothing.
The problem with dreamers is that the world is ruled by those who ACT on their dreams. You and I might share a dream, but it will never happen, unless we act.
This problem is nothing new, did you know that when they first introduced the 4 color cga monitors (well 16) they had to rescan all the porn from the green/amber version into the new 16 color format?
There was even a time in the VGA era when you had black&white monitors (I had one), every porn website I visited I had to append B&W to the url (?monitorowner=cheapbastard), so I would get the black&white scans and not the colors ones. Once I forgot and my monitor blew up.
What are you? STUPID?
What you seem to be talking about is the RGB method of storing color information. Simple put, a bmp stores for each pixel the intensity of red, green and blue. Keep two of them at zero and raise the other and you will create that color, zero all of them and you got black and raise them all and you get white. Pretty simple.
BUT this is just a way to do it, and it just so happens that most tech does it this way, scanners are RGB, the imageformat is RGB and the display tech is RGB, but that is just coincedence. It doesn't have to be that way and in fact in for instance the printing industry it isn't.
If you suddenly attached a monitor that no longer needed three seperate color values but one, then all you would need to do is get a new graphics card that could output the new signal. If you are lazy, it would be trivial to put this tech into the monitor itself.
Offcourse it would be best if the whole chain of color information dropped the RGB but that would take time.
But the idea that this tech faces a barrier because the current method of displaying color is RGB is so silly I am at a loss to explain just how idiotic your idea is.
You really should look into proffesional image handling. They had to deal with the limits of RGB for far longer and have come up with plenty of solutions. Even humble photoshop allows you to store images in richer formats.
Well, that won't be problem. Everyone knows that when the shit has hit the fan and the crunch is on, the MS coders get their act together and just stamp out all the errors and publish a completly fixed solution.
Any of you buying this? Anyone? I don't think even a slashdot editor would fall for that line.
MS has worked on OOXML for a long time, and it still is a mess. Remind you of anything? Like say, everything else ever released by MS?
Maybe MS hopes that the ISO vote will be postponed until MS can release OOXML SP1. After all, that has always worked before. People delayed buying OS/2 because MS promised to release a new windows that would fix everything. People waited with finding alternatives to every single windows release with promise of better things to come.
You will see if MS gets their way if news emerges of the vote being delayed. If that happens, then MS has it in the bag. Then it no longer matters if they ever fix it, if you delayed to wait for a product, you gotta buy that product or admit you were wrong in waiting.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista is just as much affected, the bug is there, just that Vista by default with UAC ON it can't do much more then write to the tmp folder. IF UAC is turned off, you are vulnerable to whatever somebody can cook up.
Since UAC is one of the more hated elements of Vista I would guess that a lot of people got it switched off. So the bug is still there, just that it can do less direct harm (do you really want a malicious coder to be able to write anything at all to your HD?)
Apparently there is a fault in the design, you can't underclock it anymore without flatlining when you watch reality tv and still peoples brain heat up. Mostly from its fevered attempts to crawl out your ear hole.
But hey, think of it like this, with proper cooling we can really start poring in the juice and all be geniusses. It will be brilliant, we grow so intelligent cooling our brain and powering it up, we might suddenly realize how stupid that is.
Now that is irony, overclocking your brain to become smart enough to realize it is going to kill you.
I keep hearing about these things but so far I have yet to spot them. I wonder what they are like...
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Gee, might that have something to do with the article? Not just people like me blocking ads (privoxy and squid) but including people like you with their notsafeforwork attitude.
IF you write an article in playboy (yes they do have them) then you can include ads to pay for that that are slightly more risky. IF you write a very similar piece but publish it on the net, well then it better be safe for work and kids and right wingers.
This all ads up to less revenue to pay the writers.
So less money, means less writing obviously, so shorter articles, less time to attract eyeballs, less time to get them watch ads, fewer ads, less money. Voila downwards spiral of doom leading to articles with no contents spanning 20 pages to which somekind slashdotter posts the print link meaning that NOT just do they not get ads views from me, but not even any pageviews.
I could almost feel sorry for them... Well not really.
Everytime you tell a story you have to set a certain limit where you just have to assume the person you are talking too understands your words. For instance, you just seem to assume that I know what an acronym is. That I get your use of the word "drift" what does your racing style have to do with slashdot editors?
This is slashdot, we do NOT explain words like RAM or CPU. If you don't understand those acronyms, you do not belong here. This is furthermore the game section of slashdot and Real Time Strategy is a well known genre of games. Do we have to explain FPS as well? (First Person Shooter) How about 3D?
At a certain point you just have to decide, allright my audience just knows this, and if they don't they are not my audience. If you don't, you end up like mainstream publications that have to dumb down everything to such an extent that EVERYONE feels insulted.
One of the more intresting approaches I have seen is/was (not sure if it still exists) is the dutch childerens news. It leaves out some stories but uses the extra time to more deeply explain the rest so that a person with limited world knowledge (like a kid or an american) can still follow what is happening in the world. You can also clearly see the problem there, they need a lot more time to cover the same event.
So unless you want slashdot stories to run several pages and be linked to hell to wikipedia, you are just going to have to use your own brain. This is the internet, the answer is only a few clicks away.
This may confuse many an american who live in a country that isn't free but they think it is. In europe we know we ain't got many of the supposed freedoms of the US of A and more or less, we like it that way. In for instance Holland the rules about banned books is VERY clear, it is the goverment that has banned them and those books are banned and ONLY those books. NO OTHER BOOKS CAN BE BANNED BY ANYONE ELSE!
No withholding funding from libraries that stock books somebody doesn't like. No pressure on printers, no self-censorship. IF the goverment wants to ban something, they got to come out and do it openly.
The US is very different, in theory every book is free, just that libraries that stock the wrong ones get no funding. An even greater evil exists in self-censorship. It allows the politicians to wash their hands off any anti-freedom policy while still having censorship.
Freespeech does not exist (shout fire in a crowded room to see just how free you are) so why even pretend it does exist? Far better to have extremely clear rules about what can and what cannot be said and make it very clear WHO wants it to be that way.
IF the british goverment wants to get rid of the page 3 girl, they would have to do it themselves, directly and show it to the public. In the US, the goverment would just hint at regulation, then the industry would self-regulate and nobody would be any the wiser.
Do I agree with the cookbook being under the terrorism law? No, but at least it is clear who is responsible for it (Labour party/Blair), it is clearly banned, not just not in stock at the local library. You go and live in lala land screaming to yourselve that you got freespeech. I prefer to live in the real world and KNOW what is forbidden and who forbids it. At least that gives me a target.
Just kidding (kid-ding get it?)
Lets be honest here, this is MICROSOFT we are talking about here warning us that Google doesn't respect our privacy. Well they should know shouldn't they? The creators of the least secure OS ever made, the OS that updates itself when we don't want it too, that has a EULA that gives MS the right to snoop around on your system, read whatever it wants and alter whatever it wants and if it destroys anything, too bad. The OS that has been known to phone home until someone found out and then they disable it saying that they couldn't identify you from just your IP and credit card number and every other bit of personal information they could find.
Sure google reads your gmail, we know this. It is how it works, they are very clear about it and if you don't like it, don't use it. It is not like google has a monopoly or anything they have been found guilty of abusing on several continents, that forces you to use their services.
Sometimes I think MS needs to hire a person to increase their public relations. The task would not be complex. He just stands next to the microphone at MS press-release center, and whenever an MS employee walks up to it, he zaps them.
Or put more simple? MS if you want to improve your image, SHUT UP. Do NOT say a single thing for the next year and your image will go through the roof, because you just keep saying these insane things that everyone with a brain can see for the complete and utter lying bullshit it really is.
FUD only works when you got a shred of believability left. If Steve Ballmer proclaimed that the sky was blue, I would doubt that.
What next, Bush calling Blair a bit of thicky who lied to his voters about Iraq? Britney Spears calling the Spice Girls a bad act? Germany commenting on the US tendency to start wars?
Really, MS needs to hire a public relation officer who knows that less is more. The only thing Steve Ballmer should be allowed to say in a year is, Hi, these are the profit figures for last year. Thank you, goodbye.
I wonder if the shareholders can demand he keeps his mouth shut because he is damaging the value of the company.
I am not, but even I heard of a small case that happened on your shores when a company went to far. Ever heard of the British East India Company? It had to do with some added tax/levy or something being added to tea. I think it caused a bit of a riot in boston, local affair, easy to miss but some people were upset about it.
Offcourse, this involved goverments but since back then the lines between goverment and business was often very blurred (unlike today when we see absolutly no blurring of any kind *cough*) this might be considered a case of a very succesfull (if you are an american) embargo against a company that pushed its customers too far.
Does it work in other cases? Well, note the difference in genetically engineered products in the US of A and europe, the europeans have long since been against any such crap and so companies make it very clear that they don't put it in their products.
More or less any normal business listens to its customers, the problems start to occur when a business becomes more then just trying to sell you a product and becomes a power. Your local supermarket is a business, Walmart is close to being a Power, the RIAA is a power. What do I mean by that? You can easily shop somewhere else then your local supermarket, it has no control over you, if the local manager does something you don't like, it is easy to boycot him. It is far harder to get around Walmart. Or for the dutch, AH. If AH does something bad, you are soon faced with the problem that they own many other chain of supermarkets as well.
The RIAA is even worse, in many cases they ARE music. The have become almost a legal power like the tax offices, they can collect their music tax for any music they like even if the original owner doesn't want them too. This would be roughly the same as the police ticketing people for driving to fast on private property (they can't and don't do this, this is why racetracks can operate).
It is very hard to get around the various music copyright groups because no matter what music you listen too, they have been given control over it.
But succesfull embargo's are legion, blacks boycotting businesses in america, the India rebellion against british rule etc etc.
On a much small scale, there were temporary success against the fur trade. Against whaling and sealing.
Embargo's work, even against semi-goverment organisations, but the "people" need a lot of will power to pull it off. Often the answer is that somebody equally powerfull takes up the fight, in recent years that have been popstars, who through their fame could pull the people into a single group to raise a voice. Bit of a pity that popstars and the RIAA are in the same bed eh?
Who re-elected him OR by not voting did nothing to oppose him? There is a saying, in the land of the blind, one-eyed is king. Think about this and see what it means to those ruled by Bush.
That you also lobby for Ron Paul suggests to me that you are not just a blind person ruled by a one-eyed freak but have lost all sensory capacities as well, rounded off with frontal lobotomy.
What I think is wrong with the world (Bush is far from the only "how the fuck did we elect him" leader) is television. Not the violence, or the sex but in how on tv solutions always come easy. Every problem is always one-dimensional and always gets solved before the end credits. Even "deep" series like Law & Order always only have ONE problem at the time. If the recent RIAA court cases were is TV land they would either just have the problem of how you indentify someone on the net, OR the moral problem of prosecuting someone for millions when they are pisspoor OR the issue of the morality of copyright BUT NEVER all at once, as in the real world.
You can even see this in the Oprah type shows, when she still had "difficult" shows, they still were about one thing and one thing only. The persons in trouble would abuse drugs OR have gambling problems OR come from broken homes OR have mental issues. The reason real world people are often so difficult to help is because they got ALL these problems at once and very few places are fit to deal with their combination.
But that is to difficult for tv, so everything is simplified and dumbed down till the point that perhaps many of us start to believe that simple solutions do exist.
Take the issue of that famous 300 dollar tax break, it is a pathetic amount of money based on even a low yearly income but what was the cost to society because of the numerous spending cuts that had to be made to pay for it?
Even if you believe those spending cuts were a good thing, then the US would still have been far better served if that money had been invested, if it had simple been put into a simple bank account, it could have been used to balance out any future required spending, like the disaster in new orleans or the war.
But no, people felt the effect of a down economy, so we get a simple one liner solution of being given a small amount of money and voila, guy gets elected.
But hey, what am I bothering for, you think Ron Paul is a good candidate. He has a lot of one-liner solutions, but if you actually would implement them then you would be hit with a ton of problems once the side effects kick in.
Get out of the various defence pacts like NATO? Where would the US base its operations out of that help secure the trade routes it needs for its economy? No the guy speak simple solutions for a simple audience who can't handle thinking about complex problems and reasoning out what any action might mean in the long term.
That is why really good leaders never do anything, because any change no matter how simple upsets everything else. Only once you have analyzed completely what each change might result in can you act. Do this for me, go to Ron Pauls wikipedia page, scroll down and read what he wants to do, then try to write down the total impact of each of his decisions. Can you even begin to imagine the chaos?
You are spouting bullshit, very fine, very fresh and very pure bullshit.
Why? The city/state of New York and other such places in the US easily have a similar population density as Tokyo. Nobody is claiming that the many remote regions in Japan are as well serviced as its major cities.
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
You don't have to cover the US in fiber anymore then any other country has, just the places were lots of people live. In between these major cities you can KEEP the existing fiber that is already in place. So please tell me again what is so different about japanese cities compared to american cities that the japanese have rolled out that LAST mile of fiber and the americans are still on copper?
Because again if you weren't a dumb american you would know that the US has a fiber network, this story is about the last mile.
I am currently play LOTRO and that game is becoming more and more like a direct WoW clone (not a good thing) so if there is anything that can avoid being a WoW/EQ clone I would welcome it.
So to any who have played it in the trials can you answer me this.
Does it have quests to gather X from Y and then X does not drop in a clear logical pattern?
Does it have items looted for crafting that drop from X that only spawns once in a blue moon if your avatar wears purple?
Is it impossible to craft to your own level (Lotro is very guilty of this) so that by the time you have harvested everything that is needed for a level 12 item, your are level 20?
Is there a reputation grind (we couldn't think of more story quests so now just go kill) that if you calculate the number of kills needed you realize you ain't getting out of the house this year?
Do the game makers put grinders and questers in the same place? (Lotro with its deeds (kill X Y for bonuss stats) often has people at very high levels killing X in low levels areas to get their deed and damned be any players at the right level questing there)
For that matter, does that crafting/loot system encourage, even enforce, farming?
Is there any system in place to deal with gold spammers (SWG has introduced player killing of gold sellers, WoW has finally introduced limits on spam messages, turbine... nothing).
In short, is this any different from the default EQ clone with all the same crap that really should have been elimenated since the days of EQ2? SWG tried, it really did but failed because of bugs ans was then turned into an EQ clone itself.
Don't mention Eve Online to me, I played it.
I once worked (note that past tense) for a large mobile phone company. At the time they were pushing two devices, one division was trying to sell the blackberry, the other a branded PDA/Phone, both of them to the same coorperate business customer. So I dared to ask, isn't there a conflict? I asked this during a large meeting/brain storming session and quickly learned why I should not work in these kind of enviroments. The room literally went quiet. It was not because I had pointed out the fatal flaw nobody else had spotted, it was because everyone else knew this and also knew that this stuff is just the way things are and you don't bring attention to it. You don't bring attention to ANYTHING because doing ANYTHING might get you noticed.
I got noticed alright and didn't last long, especially since I didn't learn my lesson and kept pointing out these stupid conflicts, for instance if we were to sell lots of data why did we limit the mobile web to just our own pathetic sites and not the web as a whole?
You get ahead in business by supporting the bosses decision, that includes NOT making a decision that goes against his previous decision not matter how wrong, after all if you improve the situation, you just shown that YOUR boss is an idiot.
The bigger the company/organization and the older it gets, the worse this becomes. It is even true in your own live. Take a challenge and change your job completly and then try to notice how quickly your world changes, go from IT to say construction and you will move from a world where the internet is a primary necessity to a world where many of the people you know only have it for the kids.
This woman is a lawyer working for the music division of Sony, I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that in her professional and social live she doesn't hang out with many geeks/engineers/students etc etc. She hangs out with other lawyers working for the music industry. That is what shapes her vision and it better do because how long do you think she would last at Sony-BMG if she started to listen to other opinions on copyright?
She ain't stupid, she is doing exactly what she has to do to get paid and keep her job and her boss will tell her good job, and all her underlings will tell her she did great and that is how things are done in any organisation.
It ain't about stupid, it is about social climbing.
There has been a movement to INCREASE the amount of logging going and to force ISP's to maintain detailed records for long periods of their users actions. That is WAY more intrusive then a website logging your ip. You do NOT have to go to a website, you are bound to use an ISP.
Before all the privacy loonies wake up, remember that it is perfectly normal for ALL your phone calls to be logged and it is standard practive for the police to check them, with court order, if they suspect something.
The most common example of this is a bomb threath. The police will have a record of where the call was made from.
This ruling makes this impossible to do the same with a bomb threath send over the internet. Wouldn't this ruling make even the most basic web policing, the blocking of ip adresses, impossible?
This seems like an overly broad ruling that leaves a lot of web admins in trouble because they can no longer effectively manage their servers.
Yes it is a nice counter to the european wide move to log EVERYTHING but there is such a thing as balance. Logging everything is wrong, but not being able to log anything can lead to just as much trouble.
For all the slashdot privacy nutters I ask you this. How often have you sniggered when some scumbag was traced by online activists and had his private information published on slashdot?
With say PCWorld. Rememeber them from a while back? They refused to service a broken hinge on a laptop because it had Linux installed. Ooh they were BAAAAD people who did not know anything about computers and deserved all the bad press etc etc.
Now it is Apple, who refuses to service a piece of hardware because of installed software. Well obviously Apple must therefore be in the the right and shame on those people who think they can do what they want with their own hardware.
This is nothing new, people get emotional about companies. If we feel good about a company, they can do no evil, and if we feel bad about a company, they can do no good. Sony could give away puppies and "we" would find something bad about it and Apple can announce that iPods are powered by slaughtering kittens and "we" would all applaud them.
Apple has a very long history off very poor customer relations, the amount of stories about them refusing to service things for the most idiotic reasons is endless. Most stupid one that keeps cropping up, refusing to service machines entire new because people bought a different configuration made by choices on Apples own website then the default.
In this aspect they are really not any worse then any other PC builder, but Apple got this amazing amount of goodwill that makes lots of fanboys ignore everything and loudly proclaim Apple is best.
They are not, they are just another company seeking the maximum amount of profit, that often means going against the best interests of their customers.
Sometimes people do social experiments with news stories, I propose the following, one of the slashdot editors take a story like this but replace all mentions of Apple with say Dell or Microsoft (depending on hardware/software issue) and posts it. Then a day later reveals the truth. I think a lot of posters would suddenly be faced with having to explain why they flipflopped on their opinion.
In a way Apple is more evil then say MS. We KNOW MS is evil so we are aware and analyze everything they do for the amount of evil in it. That is "healthy". Paranoia is an essential part of staying free in this world. Apple is "trusted" by a lot and so can get away with a lot by people simply trusting them to not be evil.
Just read the posts above and check some of the defenders posting history, you can see that a lot of them talk a lot differently when other companies are involved in similar stories. In Apples history a lot of names pass by to explain its greatness, but the truly great one is the person at marketting/public relations that managed to create this amount of goodwill without doing anything particulairly good (what has Apple really done to benefit the world?)
In case you don't know Holland like Belgium is a coalition goverment, that means we do NOT have a single party who wins the election, unlike say Britain, France and the US.
For a long time now it has taken ages to get this coalition together, it is usually done by the largest party (but not a majority) exploring what other parties are close to its ideas and are willing to work together so they can have a majority. The problem is that this ALWAYS takes a lot of time, sometimes months. So who cares about the speed of counting, what does 1 day spend counting mean if the goverment then needs 2-3 months to get together?
We are so obssesed with instant results that perhaps we fail to realize that we add speed as a requirement when it isn't needed. "We need the election results as soon as possible". Why? "... just because". Drop the speed requirement and then see what kind of system you can come up with.
On a side note, the belgium goverment at the moment is taking a long time to form a new goverment, whole months have gone by without a party in charge (in the dutch system the current goverment has to stop and this leaves an effective power vacuum during formation) and yet the world keeps on turning. What about an experiment, we put all politicians in jail for a year, and see what happens. My bet is the same as usual, nothing at all, but at a greatly reduced cost.
The vendor trash MIGHT be just his way of getting rid of inventory while giving some free cash to another player.
Ages ago in SWG I played a fat wookie, very fat, very male, very wookie. I was relativly new and was spotted by a high level on tantooine hunting rats. He basically gave me a starter package to get going, money, some resources, some weapons, a speeder bike. The works, it really helped and managed to get me to the planet where all the action was and get going.
That helper package was pretty standard, it cost a experienced player almost nothing but really helped new players.
I myself helped new SWG players that way several times, but even the nicest player will want to pick people who he thinks are nice as well. A decent name is one of the first choices. Someone with an intresting bio I read while I was bored. A player who does not INSTANTLY ask me for more money the moment I come close.
Is it possible that you were just the first character he spotted when he needed to get rid of some loot and that was all?
Women to often assume that X happens because they are female.
Sometimes men treat you as stupid, because, well you are.
Sometimes men don't listen to you, because they are not intrested in what you are saying.
Sometimes men stare at your tits, because ... oh okay sometimes it is because you are female.
The guy didn't cyber you, didn't ask for anything in return, why make more off it? Typical female, always over-analyzing stuff.
I recently upgraded my computers, my windows xp game machine from a P4HT and my linux dual P3 machine both to Core 2 Duos and 2gigs of ram. The windows machine used to have 1 gig of ddr and the P3 had 512mb of that ram that failed.
Both were okay machines in their own right, I am currently playing a lot of LOTRO and the frame rates weren't too bad with pretty decent settings. The problem was lack of memory, ddr is expensive compared to ddr2 and I had all full slots.
So, with two new machines, am I experiencing what you claim? HELL NO. For one thing, bios boot time (before the OS starts loading) have dropped to mere seconds, often so fast I can't even hit del fast enough. While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work.
BRING OUT THE CAR ANOLOGY
If you drive you car one hour a day at 240 miles per hour (lets keep the math simple) then you claim that a car with a top speed over 10 miles per hour is wastefull since obviously on average your car only drives 10 miles per hour in a day period.
Computer speed is not just about total capacity, it is about how fast it can do the tasks you ask it to do. If I boot my computer, I wanted to work on it NOW, every milisecond it is not ready is wasted time. If I open a document I want to work on it. Don't matter that a 10 second load time ain't that long, it is time I spend waiting.
That is the secret of why powerfull computers make for better productivity, NOT because we need them to constantly be performing heavy workloads, but because we want them to do what we want them to do quickly so we can do our work in the flow we want it too.
I remember the days when if you wanted to print a document you went and got a cup of coffee while the computer got ready, and then you went an hour later to the printer room to get your document from the pile. It worked, but your workflow was being dictated by the hardware/software. Not a good thing.
BRING OUT THE SECOND CAR ANOLOGY
Old diesels had to warmup before they could be driven. Not too much of a problem, just make it part of your getting ready routine to go outside and start the car before you actually leave. But god, those petrol cars with their instant usuable engines were handy, and we curse when we have to scape the windows when there is frost. We want the car to be ready when we want it to be ready, not when its hardware is ready.
I agree that getting a new powerfull computer and then wasting all its cycles on crap is not progress, but just because a new powerfull computer spends most of its time idling does NOT mean it is useless. Same as your car that spends most of its times doing 0 miles per hour is NOT wasting all that horse power.
So what you are basically saying, this is like a doctor calling the police because his drug cabinet was smashed.
Granted, this is also like a slave owner reporting a runaway slave to the police or the citizen who turned in Anne Frank just doing his civic responsibility (Oh hi godwin, how you doing.)
The simple fact is that the law isn't always "right". Some big media do not like swedish law, just as some hard drug users do not like swedish law, or as same slaves did not like eh slave laws etc etc. The problem is that if you then fight that law by disobeying it, you run the risk of the police coming around and talk sternly to you (or if you are black gun you down as you reach for your wallet, somethings never change).
You are talking about ricers, people who put neon-lighting in their PC and call it overclocking. Sorry, no.
These are the kinda people who cut the suspension on their car and think it turns it into a racing machine and if they ever had access to a real race car would put a radio in it, to drown out the engine noise. (If you see a ferrari with a radio, it is legal to shoot the owner in Italy).
A real gamer/overclocker cares about performance, they want their games to run as fast and smooth as possible. The simplest and easiest way to do this is to switch every unneeded bit of Windows OFF and the most unneeded thing is themes. Unless you play your game windowed (The horror) what use is a theme? Samething with wallpapers. Hell most gamers I know don't even want anything on the desktop, every icon shown costs resources.
Same thing with a large unorganized HD. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that the simpler the filetree, the less time spend by the OS looking for a file. SMALL is BETTER!
Now think of this, how would a person obsessed with getting every last FPS out of their latest hardware configure their machine. Oh might they want to keep their windows/gaming box as clean as possible? Not install anything unneeded, not run any programs except the game?
But where to browse and download and look at porn eh trailers? Why, we are talking about gamers, owners of lots of obsolete hardware. Hardware that could easily be put together to run a second PC?
But what oh what to run on that second machine? Not linux you say because gamers don't know nothing about that? Where and how do you think all those linux counterstrike and other FPS servers come from?
In fact, as you spend time overclocking and tuning your windows machine you are FAR more likely then an average windows to get totally dissatisfied with windows, and to anyone who has managed to tame the beast from redmond and actually make it run stable and fast, linux holds very few secrets. If you think compiling a kernel is hard you never had to clean out a copyprotection driver from XP.
No, their are people like you describe, who know just enough of windows to press the right button, as long as it in request for the dialog (press any key) and fear having to learn anything new.
But their are also plenty of gamers to whom linux holds no fear, they long since embraced it as their salvation from having to mess up their gaming machines and use it to run their game servers, host their guild sites and use it as their main desktop while gaming.
I almost find it insulting that you say that people who mod closed source, no documentation games, can't make their way around an opensource open-documented OS. Not all gamers as the same.
Do they too fall under this ruling? After all, they do "store" information, for a while, and then it gets wiped. Do you think that companies should preserve ALL whiteboard writings.
What about errors, if I write something and make a spelling error, I erase it and retype it. Should that too be recorded?
What about the information of time. A whiteboard is changed over time as you add new data to it, this timeline could be important, WHEN was the information on the whiteboard added, the time the line "Make sure the brakes work" is added to a car design discussion is important if it turns out the brakes failed on the production version.
So to truly and fully comply with discovery rules EVERY tiny bit of data, now matter how fleeting, has to be recorded, that means video cameras everywhere. Not exactly practical is it?
Torrentspy doesn't log IP's for a reason, there are too many and it just doesn't need them. So their entire setup just uses the IP information as temperory data, like a scrawl on a whiteboard or even a mental note, and discards it when it doesn't need them.
In theory they could offcourse log it, but because something is possible in theory, doesn't mean it is possible in practice.
Lets turn it around, the MPAA is a business and therefore all its business discussions should be recorded, but who is to say they do not talk business at home with their spouses? I say the only way to be sure is to video-tape them 24/7, just to be sure EVERY business related data is recorded as required by law.
Your Post-Its would be closer to a tmp file.
Yeah yeah, commercial sitcom, we are above that. Sure but in that show plenty of jokes are made about jews. No problem. Other entertainment makes fun of religion as well, and apart from a few protests and boycots it just goes by. Life of Brain made fun of jesus, how many people were killed in the following riots?
In "the west" in modern times we have more or less come to an understanding that it is NOT okay to inflict your believes upon everyone else. It is also acceptable to be made fun off, even if you do not like it because freedom of speech is more important then your hurt feelings. Because sooner or later everything is going to hurt someone.
And suddenly the west finds itself with a group that seeks to go back to the dark ages. I am NOT talking about islam here, I am talking about religous fundementalists who once again seek to enforce their worldview upon everyone else, through force if need be. These fundies exist among ALL religions right now, jews in Israel voicing opions that would make hitler blush, christian fundies seeking to censor all media, india got its share of religious extremist and offcourse there is a sub-group of muslims seeking to make sharia the law worldwide.
Yet something really dangerous is occuring. The jews are far too small a group to be noticed, the christians are too corrupt, the hindoes barely matter in the western world but the muslims, now they seem to have gained a lot of control.
For instance, holland does not like the pope (catholic), not even the dutch catholic do. Any attempt by the pope to say that holland should do this or that is just laughed off. Yet if muslims speak, well, then the dutch quake in their boots. How come the catholic religous leader is safe to ignore but muslim religous leaders are not?
Offcourse there are differences, the pope doesn't even control his own country Italy much (see gay marriage and abortion laws), while entire countries are controlled by Islam. It is safe to make fun of a old guy in a silly dress, not so safe of the leaders who control your oil supply.
Your question is wether it would have been the same if this comic made fun of jews (why this religion and not say christianity, the majority religon in the US), then tell me this. When was the last time such a comic was banned? A movie? A play? A book? A song?
Judge the banned material on its own merits, then ask yourselve if the same reaction would have occured has another religion een involved.
You can either have freedom of speech or you can try to appease one group with long toes. But be aware, the first time you do that, another group will take notice, and will want to be protected as well. If you had your way, pretty soon you would no longer be able to publish anything anyone disapproved off.
That might suit you, afterall you call Opus, about as harmless a comic as you can get, tasteless. What next, censor garfield for walking around without pants?
What you are talking about is actually the hardest thing of all to do, and the people who can do it, have no need of it.
So apart from the enormous technical difficulties, you are faced with the human problem of getting people to do something for free that does not benefit them.
First, the technical problem.
Getting a piece of software to install on a piece of hardware without the user knowing anything about either requires someone, somewhere to predict ALL possible situations. This is impossible, there will always be some odd piece of hardware that the hardware detection team never heard about, some combo nobody has tested. Even if by some herculian effort you managed to do it, some company will release a new piece of hardware and you can start all over again testing every combination and its effects.
This is extremely noticable with "brandname" PC's be they laptops or even simple desktops, every time a new model launches by Dell/HP/Lenevo you find that they added a new piece of hardware but changed it subtly and the linux community can now try to figure out what it was they did. I never have problems building linux machines with white-boxes that I put together myself, but dread having to put it on a laptop or small-form factor pc.
Then there is the matter of choice, I could easily give you a piece with MY choice of hardware and MY choice of software and MY configuration choices and you wouldn't have any problems with it. But who am I to say how large your home partition should be? How you should log things.
Linux already is much better then windows in this respect as most installers are proper GUI's with proper help, explaining everything that the user is asked to do but at some point there just isn't anything that can be done to make things easier. The user has got to engage his brain, and think for himself.
If you want to see just how easy linux can be, just try a livecd. That is something windows or OS/X doesn't do, and it is very good indeed BUT it cannot account for every situation, livecd's will fail and the user will be left in the dark.
The second problem:
The people that could write the distro that could do all the hardware detection itself, don't need it. That is the eternal volunteer projects problem, the people of SAMBA don't need a simple way to configure it, they KNOW it and to them the configuration files hold no secrets. Why should they spend their (free) time on something they don't need? Hint, documentation and writing configuration tools is the most boring part of development.
Yes it is a problem, BUT linux is not a company or even a movement, it is a bunch of people who do things they like and share them. If I am singing in the shower and you happen to like it, that is fine, but I won't do requests. If you want that, pay me, except I got a good job, and I like singing the songs I like so you would have to pay me a LOT especially since I hate the song you requested.
That is one of the weaknesses of linux, it can't be helped. MS and Apple can just pay some developed to do boring work, linux by and large cannot.
It doesn't even help that much if somebody volunteers to do say the documentation, the developer still would need to spend time talking to this person, time he isn't spending on something he likes.
This is the nature of linux, it is made by people who LIKE what they are doing, but it misses those bits people don't like doing. Only money can change that, so how much did you pay for your linux box?
This excuse has been used before, countless times. The simple fact is that if you are not actively working against your goverment, you are supporting them. This goes for any country.
The US population supports the bush administrations war on terror by not acting against it, I support the dutch goverments actions in afghanistan and irag, by not acting against it, and you support your countries hatred of every non-muslim country, by not acting against it.
All the evil needs to flourish is the in-action of some good men.
It don't matter of most people from Iran do not see the USA as the enemy, it matters wether they will pay their taxes to fund the anti-western anti-democracy anti-freedom goverment and will serve its military.
IF Iran launched a war against say Israel, how many of the people you know would refuse military duty, would outcast family members that went to war?
Note that this is NOT just against you, it goes for the entire human race. It sadly is just too easy to just sit back, say "I am against", and then let it happen. From slavery, to the holocaust, to animal cruelty, to child labor. "Good" men have sat back, said they disapproved and then do nothing.
The problem with dreamers is that the world is ruled by those who ACT on their dreams. You and I might share a dream, but it will never happen, unless we act.
This problem is nothing new, did you know that when they first introduced the 4 color cga monitors (well 16) they had to rescan all the porn from the green/amber version into the new 16 color format?
There was even a time in the VGA era when you had black&white monitors (I had one), every porn website I visited I had to append B&W to the url (?monitorowner=cheapbastard), so I would get the black&white scans and not the colors ones. Once I forgot and my monitor blew up.
What are you? STUPID?
What you seem to be talking about is the RGB method of storing color information. Simple put, a bmp stores for each pixel the intensity of red, green and blue. Keep two of them at zero and raise the other and you will create that color, zero all of them and you got black and raise them all and you get white. Pretty simple.
BUT this is just a way to do it, and it just so happens that most tech does it this way, scanners are RGB, the imageformat is RGB and the display tech is RGB, but that is just coincedence. It doesn't have to be that way and in fact in for instance the printing industry it isn't.
If you suddenly attached a monitor that no longer needed three seperate color values but one, then all you would need to do is get a new graphics card that could output the new signal. If you are lazy, it would be trivial to put this tech into the monitor itself.
Offcourse it would be best if the whole chain of color information dropped the RGB but that would take time.
But the idea that this tech faces a barrier because the current method of displaying color is RGB is so silly I am at a loss to explain just how idiotic your idea is.
You really should look into proffesional image handling. They had to deal with the limits of RGB for far longer and have come up with plenty of solutions. Even humble photoshop allows you to store images in richer formats.
Well, that won't be problem. Everyone knows that when the shit has hit the fan and the crunch is on, the MS coders get their act together and just stamp out all the errors and publish a completly fixed solution.
Any of you buying this? Anyone? I don't think even a slashdot editor would fall for that line.
MS has worked on OOXML for a long time, and it still is a mess. Remind you of anything? Like say, everything else ever released by MS?
Maybe MS hopes that the ISO vote will be postponed until MS can release OOXML SP1. After all, that has always worked before. People delayed buying OS/2 because MS promised to release a new windows that would fix everything. People waited with finding alternatives to every single windows release with promise of better things to come.
You will see if MS gets their way if news emerges of the vote being delayed. If that happens, then MS has it in the bag. Then it no longer matters if they ever fix it, if you delayed to wait for a product, you gotta buy that product or admit you were wrong in waiting.