If you don't want to buy all your old games again, a computer (think mini-ITX or Mac mini) with a set of emulators and ROMs is definitely the way to go. I haven't tried it myself, but Google for MythGame.
Conspiracy? Nah. For once, MS doesn't really need strongarm tactics to sell a product. Office 2007, with the first UI overhaul since the days of Windows 3.1, is genuinely worth the upgrade. And it's not even publicly for sale yet. So while you're free to rightly accuse them of incompetence for failing to patch their older (and current) products in a timely fashion, they're probably not being evil.
Sun and others have been predicting this ("the network is the computer") for about a decade. Nothing significant has changed, except for the presence of broadband. It remains a stupid idea.
Let's say we have Person A, Person B, and Person C. They have all committed a murder, hidden the body, and the police have them in custody, but without enough evidence to prove the case. Person A has that information only in his head. Person B wrote it down and hid it somewhere. Person C put it in his computer in an encrypted file.
Are you now seriously suggesting that the authorities are allowed to force Person C to turn over evidence, but not A or B?
Irrelevant. Read the damn Constitution. It only protects you from being forced to testify against YOURSELF. Skelton is in jail for refusing to give information about SOMEONE ELSE.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Sorry. The government CANNOT compel you to give any kind of evidence that would implicate yourself. If your encrypted data contains evidence against you, forcing you to turn over your encryption keys is a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights.
The "essay" is nothing but speculation with a few facts, no references, and no actual testing or experience. I'm sure this is an amusing blog entry, but why is it on Slashdot? There's nothing to discuss.
Another pathetic thing is the number of articles on $foo that end with a section on "$foo in Popular Culture," with that section taking up 25% of the article.
Thank you for mentioning this. I can't tell you how many short articles on serious subjects I've seen that include references to every stupid joke in Family Guy, computer games, and obscure web comics. You've inspired me to start cleaning it up, starting with Pyromancy.
Exactly. The de facto minimum RAM is really 1GB. And considering that most older machines with 512 are really 2x256, you're talking $100 per computer just to upgrade the RAM. While I did like using Vista, it's just not a usable OS for computers that are more than a couple years old.
Pretty much. It's not particularly interesting when such projects are confined to the research lab. Do you really think Singularity is going to be the basis of the next Microsoft OS? Is there any reason to pay attention to it, aside from reading the occasional paper that the team produces? If it were an open-source project, that would be interesting.
I know more than a few people who have played a lot of MMORPGs and still think that UO was the best...myself included. What happened to player housing? Clothing? Skill-based systems? The holiday gifts (Guild Wars does this very well)? Player-owned NPC vendors? And a thousand other things that fostered a great social environment. Almost every MMORPG released, especially WoW, has been little more than "EverQuest Improved". People obviously loved being able to own and decorate a house/castle. The only problem was the urban sprawl, which is easy to fix if you only sell certain plots of land.
I just want another game where the CRPC, that huge group of roleplayers on Catskills, could live again. Horizons was going to be something great before internal politics killed it. It's been six years; MMORPGs should be so much more by now.
Nope, that's sleep and lock. They've cleverly decided to use the shutdown icon for sleep. So you can't even shut down or restart your computer without clicking that arrow.
I'm sorry, but what the hell does this have to do with "environmentalists"? You seem to have picked a group you don't like and ascribed some entirely irrelevant stupid belief to them.
I finished high school a little over three years ago, and your blanket statement is laughably absurd. Inner-city high schools are bad. Well-funded suburban ones are often far better than private schools.
That's the point; they broadcast on a frequency that can be picked up by your car radio. But the power is so low that it's unlikely to travel far outside your car.
Yes. Assuming the router hardware isn't saturated, more bandwidth = lower latency, because packets will move through the queue faster. Considering the amount of dark fiber in the ground already, ISPs aren't running out of bandwidth any time soon.
The cost of developing a new drug is approximately $1 billion. The cost of "reverse-engineering" an unknown substance and developing your own synthesis: maybe a few million. While it's true that pharmaceutical companies have sometimes been guilty of abusing their patents, they do legitimately need patents just to recoup their R&D costs.
I think you have it backwards. The concept of IP (Intellectual Property) includes copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The software would be covered under copyright, the process of creating an alloy can be patented, and the sauce would be a trade secret (and possibly patentable). Copyright only applies to information.
I don't know anything about Bill O'Reilly's origins
Long Island suburbia. Wikipedia indicates that the only job outside of journalism he's ever held was high school teacher for two years. He went to Marist and Boston University, and has an M.A. in Broadcast Journalism. What a real, blue-collar working man he is.
I posted a similar comment when the video got mentioned on DailyKos. I suggested that one might be able to avoid the charge of assaulting a police officer by pulling the guy who was tased away from the wannabe-fascist cops -- by using the common civil disobedience protest tactic of "de-arresting" someone. You get everyone in the immediate area to put their arms around his body and don't let go, and just drag him away. Make two cops try to arrest a dozen people all holding on to eachother. Oh, and then get the hell out of there.
To make the facile assumption that everyone needs to be able to do both is to miss the point of hiring specialists in the first place.
Well, no. Have you ever worked on a software engineering team of any significant size? Communication skills are crucial if you want to be anything but a minimum-wage code monkey. The people who really know what's going on, who have a strong grasp of the technical issues and the ability to effectively communicate with different audiences, are the ones who are in lead/senior/designer roles and get paid well. I know a lot of people here love coding, but I really doubt that anyone wants to be stuck doing it and nothing else forever.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to buy all your old games again, a computer (think mini-ITX or Mac mini) with a set of emulators and ROMs is definitely the way to go. I haven't tried it myself, but Google for MythGame.
Conspiracy? Nah. For once, MS doesn't really need strongarm tactics to sell a product. Office 2007, with the first UI overhaul since the days of Windows 3.1, is genuinely worth the upgrade. And it's not even publicly for sale yet. So while you're free to rightly accuse them of incompetence for failing to patch their older (and current) products in a timely fashion, they're probably not being evil.
Sun and others have been predicting this ("the network is the computer") for about a decade. Nothing significant has changed, except for the presence of broadband. It remains a stupid idea.
Let's say we have Person A, Person B, and Person C. They have all committed a murder, hidden the body, and the police have them in custody, but without enough evidence to prove the case. Person A has that information only in his head. Person B wrote it down and hid it somewhere. Person C put it in his computer in an encrypted file.
Are you now seriously suggesting that the authorities are allowed to force Person C to turn over evidence, but not A or B?
Irrelevant. Read the damn Constitution. It only protects you from being forced to testify against YOURSELF. Skelton is in jail for refusing to give information about SOMEONE ELSE.
Maybe the notion of writing all my papers in HTML wasn't so insane after all
You want LaTeX. If you're running KDE, you can't beat Kile as an editor.
Contact your local power company. Many (such as LIPA) will pay for a large percentage of your costs.
If file size is a concern, XML compresses easily. The OpenOffice file formats are zipped XML.
The "essay" is nothing but speculation with a few facts, no references, and no actual testing or experience. I'm sure this is an amusing blog entry, but why is it on Slashdot? There's nothing to discuss.
Another pathetic thing is the number of articles on $foo that end with a section on "$foo in Popular Culture," with that section taking up 25% of the article.
Thank you for mentioning this. I can't tell you how many short articles on serious subjects I've seen that include references to every stupid joke in Family Guy, computer games, and obscure web comics. You've inspired me to start cleaning it up, starting with Pyromancy.
Exactly. The de facto minimum RAM is really 1GB. And considering that most older machines with 512 are really 2x256, you're talking $100 per computer just to upgrade the RAM. While I did like using Vista, it's just not a usable OS for computers that are more than a couple years old.
I've tried running Vista (with the Classic interface) on a P4 with 512MB of RAM. It runs like absolute crap. XP is at LEAST twice as fast.
Pretty much. It's not particularly interesting when such projects are confined to the research lab. Do you really think Singularity is going to be the basis of the next Microsoft OS? Is there any reason to pay attention to it, aside from reading the occasional paper that the team produces? If it were an open-source project, that would be interesting.
I know more than a few people who have played a lot of MMORPGs and still think that UO was the best...myself included. What happened to player housing? Clothing? Skill-based systems? The holiday gifts (Guild Wars does this very well)? Player-owned NPC vendors? And a thousand other things that fostered a great social environment. Almost every MMORPG released, especially WoW, has been little more than "EverQuest Improved". People obviously loved being able to own and decorate a house/castle. The only problem was the urban sprawl, which is easy to fix if you only sell certain plots of land.
I just want another game where the CRPC, that huge group of roleplayers on Catskills, could live again. Horizons was going to be something great before internal politics killed it. It's been six years; MMORPGs should be so much more by now.
Nope, that's sleep and lock. They've cleverly decided to use the shutdown icon for sleep. So you can't even shut down or restart your computer without clicking that arrow.
I'm sorry, but what the hell does this have to do with "environmentalists"? You seem to have picked a group you don't like and ascribed some entirely irrelevant stupid belief to them.
I finished high school a little over three years ago, and your blanket statement is laughably absurd. Inner-city high schools are bad. Well-funded suburban ones are often far better than private schools.
That's the point; they broadcast on a frequency that can be picked up by your car radio. But the power is so low that it's unlikely to travel far outside your car.
Yes. Assuming the router hardware isn't saturated, more bandwidth = lower latency, because packets will move through the queue faster. Considering the amount of dark fiber in the ground already, ISPs aren't running out of bandwidth any time soon.
The cost of developing a new drug is approximately $1 billion. The cost of "reverse-engineering" an unknown substance and developing your own synthesis: maybe a few million. While it's true that pharmaceutical companies have sometimes been guilty of abusing their patents, they do legitimately need patents just to recoup their R&D costs.
I think you have it backwards. The concept of IP (Intellectual Property) includes copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The software would be covered under copyright, the process of creating an alloy can be patented, and the sauce would be a trade secret (and possibly patentable). Copyright only applies to information.
I posted a similar comment when the video got mentioned on DailyKos. I suggested that one might be able to avoid the charge of assaulting a police officer by pulling the guy who was tased away from the wannabe-fascist cops -- by using the common civil disobedience protest tactic of "de-arresting" someone. You get everyone in the immediate area to put their arms around his body and don't let go, and just drag him away. Make two cops try to arrest a dozen people all holding on to eachother. Oh, and then get the hell out of there.