An example? I bought what amounts to a Nano-knockoff for a friend a whle back. Cost me 60 bucks, including shipping, for 8 GB of storage. Looks identical to a Nano on the outside, except that it's a hell of a lot cheaper, plays all sorts of video, and has a radio tuner in it, too. The interface had a learning curve of about thirty seconds. Comparing it hand to hand with a nano, one really couldn't tell the difference in interface use or outside appearance- the non-apple one was just a lot cheaper and had more features.
I don't know what street corner you bought that from, but if you bought an 8GB flash mp3 player for $60, something is obviously fishy. The cheapest you can buy a flash USB drive on pricwatch.com is $100. And you're telling me that a ipod nano like device is cheaper? Give me a break. The cheapest one (with features comparable to a nano) that I found on a quick search is a Sandisk 8GB mp3 player for ~$212. Now while this is cheaper than a ~$250 8GB ipod nano it is not a hell of a lot cheaper than a nano.
Besides, I think you miss the reason people get ipods: They're simple and easy to use. Pretty much anyone can pick up an ipod and within 5 minutes know how to operate the device. Few consumer electronic devices are that simple. The iPhone looks like it followed much of the same style, and made an intuitive interface. If you don't think having something easy to use is important, than don't buy it. But just because you don't think that simplicity adds value doesn't mean others don't. To most people the price/performance ratio of the ipod is far superior to every other device on the market.
Now I welcome you to tell me more about this $60 8GB mp3 player, as it sounds like an incredible deal. However, I don't really want to buy an mp3 player that's fallen off a truck.
I mean politicians aren't exactly skilled laborers, and should be judged as such. Anyone can do there job, and it's really easy to do, so they should be paid the average wage in this country. it would encourage people from all walks of life to do it... Wait, but aren't most people who run for office slightly older, at a point in life where they're making more money than the average person? Don't we generally tend to elect more successful people into office, because if someone has failed to be successful with their own life, people generally don't trust them to run others. But, I guess that's not really a problem. People just have to make a bigger sacrifice to run for office. I mean who care if they put away a nest egg for later in life, or save money to put their kids through college etc. it's not important compared with running for office, people are so blindly loyal they'll sacrifice these things in an instant to be a politician.
Or maybe paying them this poorly will mean only the truly wealthy will run for office. If you don't have millions saved up, you can't really afford to be in congress for more than a few years, just the way it works. Sounds like a great way to get more people involved, souns like a brilliant plan.
Wow... what a troll! Nothing of what you say seems to make much sense. I don't know of any difference between cp/mv etc on my OSX boxes and my linux boxes, so not an issue. Wanting a recent emacs... I generally use aquaemacs, or whatever is currently in fink. Not a big deal, why do I need bleeding edge emacs for christsake? As far as GDB segfaulting when you debug something apple doesn't want you to... so what? Why are you trying to debug the OSX kernel anyhow. You act like the linux kernel is so great and wonderful. Except of course no one wants to make real drivers for an OS that requires supporting a billion versions of their ABI, and oh... we're going to change the ABI every few months to make things "better". I think the every year or two changes are much more sane.
As far as broadcom wireless drivers... Seriously, don't try to compare wireless on OSX and linux. First, most every OSX box made in the past 4 years already has built in wireless, so why do you need a broadcom one? Second... have you ever tried getting wireless working in linux? It's a disaster. Oh wait, if you use a wrapper around the windows drivers they work. As for the driver giving the kernel a security hole, let me tell you about this awesome kernel driver I wrote for linux, want the module?
iTunes is also a wonderful music application. Quite frankly it just works. Plays mp3s out of the box, plays m4a out of the box etc. It doesn't support oggs, but than again aside from a handful of linux geeks most people go oggs.... what are those? I've never had a problem with itunes screwing up my ipod. If it's talking about authorized stuff, it must be dealing with itunes downloaded songs, which as far as I know don't work in linux at all (in fact most legal music download services won't work there).
Linux's big problem is it's openness. Because it can be easily changed, there are a million variants of it, and all the core interfaces (the kernel, X11, gtk,qt, gnome, kde, various other libs) change constantly. This works fine for a linux distribution, where everything is available as source, but for real applications, developers don't want to spend the time and money supporting their application on a million different variants. Additionally that requires backporting their changes too. It's just a real mess to work with.
Calling OSX a toy is just a laugh. It's a real OS, and lets people get real work done. It runs many different FOSS applications (and much better than windows does), and additionally it runs professional software as well. Additionally it's unix (for a better term try iTerm... the default one is like saying xterm sucks... linux doesn't have any good terminals). Sounds like a toy OS to me.
uh; I hate to break it to you, but they aren't pushing these to 2nd world countries. Second world was a phrase used during the cold war to refer to the communist block of countries. The first world was the free developed world, the 2nd world was the commies, and the 3rd world was everyone else. Since then there has been an expansion of the terms referring to fourth world countries as the absolutely poorest countries.
Please don't use terms when you don't know what they mean.
What about when the core of the algorithm isn't the software? What if they spend 100s of millions of dollars doing research on a particular phenomenon in order to figure out how some geological processes work. Then after understanding the basics of these processes, they obtain tons of data points, and then generate an algorithm that can be used to simulate this same phenomenon. This process can be very expensive, and the end result may be less than a few hundred lines of code (sure it may be wrapped around tens of thousands of wrapper lines of code to make it easier to use, but that software is cheap and written by monkeys).
The work was not spent in writing the code, the work was spent in analyzing physical processes, obtaining a ton of data, doing the research etc. Don't they have a right to protect this investment in something beyond a simple copyright? Anyone could disassemble the code, figure out the basics of their algorithm, and rewrite it. The code isn't important, the algorithm could be written completely differently, what is important is the time spent developing the model for the process.
While I agree some basic software things shouldn't be patentable, some stuff such as the above example are a reason they should be, or at least ideas and models for analyzing data should be.
one of the ways around this problem is through building in heat pipes into the silicon. 3-D chips will have metal vias between the chip layers for the transfer of data, but additionally they will include metal vias at strategic points to handle heat transfer. Additionally it is unlikely 3-D chips will get beyond a couple of layers anytime soon, the problem is just that it's so expensive to produce mask sets for those chips. Assuming each chip layer has the same number of metal layers, having a mask set for a 3D chip with just 2 layers of silicon will cost twice as much as single layer devices. However, this could allow for some extremely fast FPGA-like circuits, as they can be reused for many many different usages, but that's a different story altogether.
"I wish that we could devote half of what we spend on defense to study of environmental science but I don't see that happening anytime soon."
Ah yes, because the effects of global warming that may or may not occur in the next 100-500 years are so much more important than working to prevent thermonuclear war that could occur anytime. Of course the environmental impact of thermonuclear war is nothing compared to global warming, so we shouldn't worry about that.
If you don't believe thermonuclear war is a very real possibility, you really need to examine the world better. When groups are hell-bent on killing other people for religious or ideological differences, and the same groups seek weapons to kill in the largest quantities, there's obviously nothing to worry about. Especially because no group would purposefully sacrifice themselves to kill others (mutually assured destruction). It's not like anyone's willing to strap a bomb to their chest and walk into a building just to kill other people . . . Oh wait.
Yes, defense, and the survival of our species 20-50 years into the future is a bit more important than global warming.
I had made the move to Linux 4 or 5 years ago, and also have used an OSX laptop for the last few years. The real beauty of this move isn't that Linux is that much easier to use (although I find it easier) but that I can use the excuse "i haven't used windows in years" when someone has a computer problem. I honestly don't know or really care how to fix those machines. It's a wonderful thing after years of being tech support for people. I still can and do on occasions fix windows issues, but I have to figure out what the hell I'm doing whenever I have to fix a problem.
Basically my time is too valuable to be spent fixing windows computers. Most people's time is, but they don't realize it. My advice is to get a Mac. They just work, and while they may eventually start getting viruses and spyware the infection rate won't be nearly as bad, and unless the users an idiot will be confined to one users logon.
I think the survey missed one of the key selling features of the iPod: iTunes integration. iTunes is a great media playback application and many people who use it love it, and find it convenient to get an iPod simply because they integrate so well. All you naysayers can talk about how it's not fair and every player should be able to sync up with iTunes, as it's only fair, but those companies are allowed to attempt to build a killer app that beats iTunes.
One of the zune's biggest weaknesses will be that it will sync with what... your windows media player? Ugh, windows media player is just hideous in my opinion, and much slower than iTunes. My G3 300MHz box handles iTunes alright, I doubt a P-II 500 (with the same amount of RAM( could even handle a WMP install with 5000+ songs in it well.
iPods are far more than a status symbol. I always thought I wouldn't be one of those guys, and I am. I broke down and bought a 60GB one. Let me put this in perspective though. I am a huge music fan. I buy 2-3 cds a month on average and generally goto a concert every month if there's anyone around worth seeing. I love it a lot, and listen to music all day in lab. I never liked using the all in one digital jukebox thing itunes was, and used xmms for years. I had my music organized by artist and just put on the directory I wanted to hear.
Then I bought a mac. I started using iTunes, I went through and reencoded my music as I realized oggs were a waste of my time. iTunes just made all the things I did easy. After a while i thought about getting an iPod too. however I had already ripped over 20GB of music to my hdd and I had gotten nowhere near done with my music collection. I looked around at audio players, and I looked at integrating one with my car. I may have been able to save $20-$30 by getting some no name brand, however most of the other major players at the time weren't offering 60GB players. Kind of sold me on an iPod. The fact that I could hook it up to my car ($95 stereo, $75 adapter and done) made it even better.
The question to me isn't "do i need 60 GB of music with me at all times?" The answer is obviously no. That would take me a month to listen to. It's not that I need it, however when I'm about to go somewhere or whatever I don't want to go "oh shit what do I want to listen to... let me throw this on my mp3 player". Instead I grab my ipod and choose something I want to hear. Or I go on a car trip, and decide to listen to a different band.. no problem, I have it loaded on here. When you have a music collection of over 300 cds it's wonderful to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. You might call me lazy for not being willing to reload it every time. Sure I am. I also value my time, and don't want to waste it.
Now with that all said, one of the biggest motivaters for getting an iPod was so I wouldn't have to keep so much music on my laptop (instead I kept it on my file server) so I could listen to music in lab. I know it's an expensive external hard drive, but when I'm driving anywhere, or walking or biking, or whatever I definately don't regret it.
Was my iPod expensive? Sure I paid a good chunk of change for it. Do i worry about my battery? no, if it dies I order a kit online for $40 to replace it. Is an iPod for you? No, you obviously don't find it worthwhile, however for those of us who do, it is naive of you to think we buy them only as a status symbol. Maybe some people buy the nanos or shuffles just to have an apple ipod, but most of us who buy the big ones are doing it for ease of use and convenience
All the magic is out of CPU design. Lots of people know how to do it, and do it well. The hard part these days is in the manufacturing process, and you can buy that.
My bullshit detector is going wild here. The magic is not all out of cpu designs. If you believe that, well you can go the way of the alpha.
The magic is not out of it. Most of the basics have been covered, that is true, and manufacturing process matters a lot; also true. But the manufacturing process is also not just a matter of "throwing a lot of money at it". However as I'm not as familiar with the manufacturing side of things, I'll stick to the areas I know, like processor design.
If the magic were gone in CPU design, and it was all about manufacturing, why do both ATI and Nvidia compete so heavily, and why can one produce chips faster than the others (although it switches too often for me to care). Sure they may not be general purpose processors, but they're highly important, and they are processors. Additionally while the changes in intels designs may be more on the level of incremental improvements (doubling cores etc) it doesn't mean there's not a lot of research going into it.
Now if you take the narrow mind that the magic in single core superscalare processor architecture is gone, sure. I'll agree with you there. That's a well studied problem. The research community moved on years ago. Simplescalar results no longer mean anything. However their is a large amount of research and development being done in the system design (the system level being restricted to a single chip). Cache-processor(s) interaction, efforts to improve programmability of chips etc etc.
Designing your own chip is a very very risky endeavor, even if you have multiple billions of dollars in the bank like microsoft does. If they manage to pull this off; more power to them. It's a very challenging process, and will not be done by grunts (i.e. it will require roomfuls of PhDs working on various parts of the project. Your comment about being reasonable to design your own... well I tend to disagree. Building the chip used in the xbox360 from scratch would have cost far more money than leveraging the design and knowledge expertise that IBM already had. Plus the chips needed for consoles have nowhere near the volume required to build their own fab. So in that case, that means they would contract out the fab work, and so the whole point is in their design. Sure looks like design is dead to me.
Did I say that american copyright law makes allofmp3.com illegal (I don't know the answer to that personally)? What is illegal is when you personally download a song from allofmp3.com.
I just find it amusing how everyone swarms on this issue. I make one little joke about the RIAA suing users of a service that people in the USA can't legally use, and everyone jumps on me. Downloading a song from allofmp3.com is no different than if you were downloading a song off kazaa (or whatever filesharing people use now) when the person uploading the song to you is located in russia. Just because something might be legal in another country does not make it legal here.
I think it would be fitting if the RIAA got a subpoena issued against VISA to give a listing of everyone who has purchased music from allofmp3.com and than sued them. While I'm normally not a supporter of those harsh tactics, I'm sick of everyone talking about allofmp3 as if it were a great thing. It's illegal, and unlike normal filesharing, you're making some russian mafia rich while you steal other people's music. I think it would be within their rights to do this, and possibly easier to track who purchased these songs then it is to go after other online music pirates. A real quick way to get a listing of thousands of people who have been directly stealing from them.
Oh yes, I forgot that it is wrong to let a company better someone elses economy besides our own. Are we that egocentric that we think that we have the right to prevent a company from building a development center in a developing economy? Should India not be allowed to prosper and grow? Do we have the right to make sure that they don't have jobs that actually require brains. Oh right, we obviously have the monopoly on brains in this country.
It's called capitalism people. Sometimes things happen that hurt people, but in the long run it helps. India was one of those countries where the evil capitalists exploited for so many years, taking advantage of their cheap labor etc. Oh, what's that? They're no longer the poor country they once were? They're not really 3rd world any more, and their economy is rapidly expanding. Oh the horror. Capitalism has been so bad to these people.
Do we really believe that these jobs are going to take away jobs from highly qualified US applicants? I hate to break the news to you, but if you know your shit, and work hard (and not the 14+ hour days or whatever) there are plenty of jobs available in the US. Plus maybe eventually more of the tech industry jobs go overseas, is that really so horrible? It's often considered progress. While right now tech jobs are toward the top of the curve, in 10-20 years many of the jobs will become mundane. Running tests on processors is not fun.
Is it so bad that most americans now don't work long days in factories in dangerous conditions? Many people lost jobs when factories here moved overseas, or mechanized and removed the need for manual labor. Sure some hardships occurred because of it, but it's the cost of progress. The capitalist system has created enormous wealth and is continuing to do so. Just because some jobs go overseas does not mean capitalism is failing, in fact I think that shows its success.
Right now the US is experiencing extremely low unemployment, not to say it doesn't suck for those who are unemployed, but for the most part if you are highly reliable and know how to use your brain, there are countless jobs available to you. You just have to work hard and try. It may not always pay 6 figures, it may only pay 20-30k/year, but there are many places where that's more wealth than people obtain in their lifetime. Slashdotters really need to get a clue when it comes to economics.
if the iPod/iTunes sensed higher played songs and played them more, it would actually cause a huge disaster, depending on how it was implemented. A simple implementation would increase the likelihood that a song gets played again by a fixed percentage. Under a situation like this, no matter how small of a percentage the song increases it's likelihood of being played by, and regardless of how many songs you have on the device, over enough time it will reach the point where it will effectively only play one song over and over 99.9999999% of the time. It's the problem with positive reinforcement as the song will become more likely to be played the more it's played, and once one song gets "lucky enough" it will be promoted just high enough to start dominating, and from there it quickly runs away. I ran a simulation similar to this not too long ago as I was thinking about it.
Now, if you scale the likelihood of a song being played by a fixed scalar value, this runaway effect won't happen, but that isn't as much fun to do, and would mean overtime the scaling would be meaningless as each song has a high enough value that the scalar/value is effectively zero (or on a floating point number could be zero).
I have a kenwood system, and overall it isn't too bad. The player was nothing special, just a couple year old head unit that supported the cd changer interface (and track names etc) as well as they're ipod interface that plugs into it.
The setup has a couple different modes where you can browse through artists, playlists, and albums (i think). The downside is that the system is slow. scrolling through artists took a couple seconds to do, so obviously looking through a long list is not practical. I have set up a couple playlists of stuff I wanted (set on random) for long trips before, although I've found the option of unplugging the ipod, browsing to the album I want to listen to, hitting play and plugging it back in works great. Doing this I can easily select an album once before driving, or every 45 mins or so, and still have full control of previous, next, play/pause, random on/off, and repeat. It's not as useful as an ipod interface, but it's very much nicer than having to do that on the ipod manually while driving (especially turning random on/off). Also displaying the current track name during playback is great. I just wish it would easily show the artist and album name as well. Even if it just scrolled Artist-Song Name across the screen.
The interfaces need a couple more years before they can be as easy to use as the ipod, but what is to be expected from early adopters? For the money I spent (less than $100 to upgrade my head unit, and $75 for the ipod interface) I can't really complain. Especially the coolness factor. The method is 10x better than trying to use an FM adapter, and cassette adapters require a cassette player which most cars don't have any more. The rca jacks work, but then you need a high end stereo anyhow. The $75 upgrade is worth it just to have the track names displayed and ipod charging. I think it's partially just the coolness factor of it all.
and this would be akin to you working for a company, writing a killer code module for an application they're developing, and then write in your own copyright into it because you don't want the company to have it. You can not just change the copyright from a pre-agreed upon form to give yourself the copyright. What people on here don't seem to understand is that granting a comany (or anyone) usage of your work does not grant them exclusive copyright control of it. They have the right to use it for that one and only one use (assuming their user agreement is written properly, but even if it's not, it's assumed that they don't retain full control, and if turnitin republished your work, legal recourse would be an option).
First, graphics won't work on an FPGA. I mean technically it's feasible, but the demand for graphics is great enough to make it economical to produce graphic ASICs such as those Nvidia and ATI produce.
However the FPGA idea is a good one, and is being researched. Actually, what is even more interesting is to utilize transistors on the CPU die to integrate reconfigurable hardware accelerators. The research is being done currently, and will allow for CMP + reconfigurable systems so that custom processors can be integrated at runtime. Additionally these systems will allow dynamic reconfigurations, so that the hardware can be time-multiplexed between different configurations (although the configuration time can often be on the order of miliseconds). Additionally, this allows for straightforward upgrades to your processors. Want to run games faster? Throw more hardware, double the size of the reconfigurable area. This will allow the game to do more in parallel, or to cache configurations etc (causing more routines to run in hardware rather than software). And everything is compatible as the user just needs to download the synthesized version of the hardware for their reconfigurable arrays.
Of course this scenario is quite a ways in the future, and it must be remembered that hardware designs are much harder to create than software designs, and hardware/software design is a very difficult problem. The future is there, it just may take a while for reality to catch up with the research.
first, create softlinks of all the files and put them into a directory called backup or something.
then, just use a simple script, something like
mkdir/tmp/somerandomdir cd/tmp/somerandomdir tar -c/backup > files.tar split files.tar -b DVDSIZE
opendir(DIR, ".") || die "can't opendir $directory: $!";
while ($current_file = readdir(DIR)) {
#print "file is $current_file";
mkdir $current_file+"dir"
mv $current_file $current_file+"dir/"+$current_file
mkisofs -o $current_file+".iso" $current_file+"dir"
(can't remember how to burn isos on the commandline) }
of course, use a real language for the script, pretty it up etc, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Seems to me the pirates have lots of marketing here on/. Anytime an article on DRM is brought our we get hoards of people talking up how great allofmp3.com is.
And buying the bands cd may not really directly help the band. Very little money goes to the band for each sale. However, the kicker is the band is often given living money by the label while they produce the cd. If the record label wasn't making anything of the band because their cd sales sucked then they'd drop them. Period. By not giving the label your money to purchase the cd you don't hurt the band right now as they're not getting much from cd sales, but you may cause them to get dropped by their label and possibly decide to break up or stop making new music.
The whole key is to be honest. Many of the true music lovers out there still pay for CDs or to buy music. Some of the casual listeners will stop buying, and so what. Less of the crap that's on the radio today. I personally own hundreds of CDs, and yes much of this money has gone to bands on major labels. Much has also gone to smaller labels, etc. I also download music, and listen to stuff, and download live shows of bands I like. Do I feel this is wrong? Not really, as I have a set budget, and can't really afford buying more than maybe 3 or 4 cds a month. Also much of that stuff I listen to once or twice, and if I do like it I end up buying at some point anyhow.
The label wants a hit, and we dont give a shit - Phil
This is definitely true. I live up north where the savings due to using CFLs aren't as great, but in the summer it really does make a difference. Right now my house doesn't have AC, and god, I really wouldn't want to heat up my room with light bulbs. If you want to take the advantage of heat savings just buy a couple space heaters, they'll accomplish the same thing, and can be used when you don't want light (such as when you're sleeping). Additionally, gas heating is far more efficient in most instances (in places where electricity is really cheap due to nuclear or hydroelectric power plants houses are more likely to use electric heating anyhow).
I have been trying to convince my mom to throw out her bulbs and replace them with CFLs for a few years now, and having a hard time convincing her. As my parents live in Florida it just makes sense to use them. Considering a 20 watt CFL is going to save over 110 watts of power when you take into account the need to run the air conditioner to remove the bulbs heat (the AC is run more than 6 months out of the year there). While the savings on a monthly power bill may not be huge, $5-$10/month adds up after enough years. For myself, I just try and avoid heating my room unneccesarily as it's generally too hot anyhow due to all those computers.
logarithmic number systems (LNS) for computers were first proposed by Marasa and Matula in 1973, as a "better" approximation of numbers than floating point units. This paper compared the cumulative error from different floating point standards with LNS standards. LNS offers some advantages over floating point, however it's performance degrades significantly as you add more bits of precision.
LNS can be effective to around 24bits of precision, and then the hardware requirements for the LNS unit's adder/subtracter become too overwhelming. This is because multiplications and divisions are fast on LNS units (with minimal hardware) as just require an adder, however handling subtraction is much more difficult. The simplest (naive) methods of making an adder and subtractor involve using large ROM lookup tables. Fancier, more efficient units using smaller roms and small multipliers to help get better values (I don't remember all the details offhand). Sometimes they'll even trade precision for faster performance. This can result in chips with single cycle multiplies and divides, but multi-cycle additions and subtractions. For low precision calculations requiring many divides and multiplies LNS processors can often achieve the best performance. However for many applications an efficient LNS unit with sufficient precision just isn't practical.
If the US took the money spent on war, and used it to build up these parts of the world give the people hope and futures, it would do more to reduce the treat of terrorism than all the bombs and tanks and bullets combined. But alas that would put a dent in the mighty profit.
Yeah, that would work really well. Just like the billions in financial aid have really helped all those poor starving african countries. You have to be a moron to believe that money used to build up a country is the answer to every problem. In fact it often creates more problems. Giving food and money to African countries has helped people eat for a day, but at what cost? Now the farmers of those countries can't make money, and grow less food for the next year. Additionally governmental groups, and thugs tend to like getting money, and find a way to help themselves to as much as they can. Next thing you know the country is in anarchy. Oh wait, that's true with many of the countries that are everyones favorite poor card.
The whole "he without sin should cast the first stone" argument is silly. Obviously no one is completely in the clear, we have made mistakes, and we have hurt some of these people (however not always out of mistake). It's hard to follow foreign politics when you're a moron, but there are many factors involved. Sometimes the best solution to a problem still sucks. Sometimes a brutal dictator is the best choice of someone to put in power because everyone else would either make the government fall apart, or be an even more brutal dictator. In reality, many chioces just plain suck! What we have done is tried to prevent a nuclear holocaust. As expensive as this war is, it's cheaper than if we had let sadam build up an arsenal of biological weapons (and the reports have proved that he was building up the infrastructure necessary to do this). Arguably we should be bombing Iran back to the stone age to prevent them from getting the nuke as well. These are countries with a history of instability. As much as it looks good to pretend they're reformed, or they're not going to hurt us, that is not a good idea.
In the history of the world one of the biggest pacifism movements almost led to the nazification of most of Europe. After WWI peaceful people moved into power, no one wanted to fight, no one wanted to worry about the problems of the world. Therefore nazi power grew in germany, and the prevailing attitude was that the best way to deal with them is to appease them. If we let the monster grow out of control, and give it what it needs, it will obviously choose not to hurt us. After all we're a peaceful people. Obviously plans did not turn out well for the pacifists of that age.
War is never fun, war is never profitable, war is best summed up in "war is hell". War is not a good alternative, but at the same time it is often the best alternative. In a perfect world it wouldn't exist, but idealism has caused far more problems than it's ever solved. It's easy to say that fighting is bad, it's easy to say that we shouldn't do this, or that, and to blame ourselves. It's also easy to get yourself killed that way. But obviously you know best, because you can claim when the terrorists shoot you that you have the high moral ground. Good for you, personally I choose life.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what street corner you bought that from, but if you bought an 8GB flash mp3 player for $60, something is obviously fishy. The cheapest you can buy a flash USB drive on pricwatch.com is $100. And you're telling me that a ipod nano like device is cheaper? Give me a break. The cheapest one (with features comparable to a nano) that I found on a quick search is a Sandisk 8GB mp3 player for ~$212. Now while this is cheaper than a ~$250 8GB ipod nano it is not a hell of a lot cheaper than a nano.
Besides, I think you miss the reason people get ipods: They're simple and easy to use. Pretty much anyone can pick up an ipod and within 5 minutes know how to operate the device. Few consumer electronic devices are that simple. The iPhone looks like it followed much of the same style, and made an intuitive interface. If you don't think having something easy to use is important, than don't buy it. But just because you don't think that simplicity adds value doesn't mean others don't. To most people the price/performance ratio of the ipod is far superior to every other device on the market.
Now I welcome you to tell me more about this $60 8GB mp3 player, as it sounds like an incredible deal. However, I don't really want to buy an mp3 player that's fallen off a truck.
Phil
Brilliant idea!!!
I mean politicians aren't exactly skilled laborers, and should be judged as such. Anyone can do there job, and it's really easy to do, so they should be paid the average wage in this country. it would encourage people from all walks of life to do it... Wait, but aren't most people who run for office slightly older, at a point in life where they're making more money than the average person? Don't we generally tend to elect more successful people into office, because if someone has failed to be successful with their own life, people generally don't trust them to run others. But, I guess that's not really a problem. People just have to make a bigger sacrifice to run for office. I mean who care if they put away a nest egg for later in life, or save money to put their kids through college etc. it's not important compared with running for office, people are so blindly loyal they'll sacrifice these things in an instant to be a politician.
Or maybe paying them this poorly will mean only the truly wealthy will run for office. If you don't have millions saved up, you can't really afford to be in congress for more than a few years, just the way it works. Sounds like a great way to get more people involved, souns like a brilliant plan.
next time think before you open your mouth.
Wow... what a troll! Nothing of what you say seems to make much sense. I don't know of any difference between cp/mv etc on my OSX boxes and my linux boxes, so not an issue. Wanting a recent emacs... I generally use aquaemacs, or whatever is currently in fink. Not a big deal, why do I need bleeding edge emacs for christsake? As far as GDB segfaulting when you debug something apple doesn't want you to... so what? Why are you trying to debug the OSX kernel anyhow. You act like the linux kernel is so great and wonderful. Except of course no one wants to make real drivers for an OS that requires supporting a billion versions of their ABI, and oh ... we're going to change the ABI every few months to make things "better". I think the every year or two changes are much more sane.
As far as broadcom wireless drivers... Seriously, don't try to compare wireless on OSX and linux. First, most every OSX box made in the past 4 years already has built in wireless, so why do you need a broadcom one? Second... have you ever tried getting wireless working in linux? It's a disaster. Oh wait, if you use a wrapper around the windows drivers they work. As for the driver giving the kernel a security hole, let me tell you about this awesome kernel driver I wrote for linux, want the module?
iTunes is also a wonderful music application. Quite frankly it just works. Plays mp3s out of the box, plays m4a out of the box etc. It doesn't support oggs, but than again aside from a handful of linux geeks most people go oggs.... what are those? I've never had a problem with itunes screwing up my ipod. If it's talking about authorized stuff, it must be dealing with itunes downloaded songs, which as far as I know don't work in linux at all (in fact most legal music download services won't work there).
Linux's big problem is it's openness. Because it can be easily changed, there are a million variants of it, and all the core interfaces (the kernel, X11, gtk,qt, gnome, kde, various other libs) change constantly. This works fine for a linux distribution, where everything is available as source, but for real applications, developers don't want to spend the time and money supporting their application on a million different variants. Additionally that requires backporting their changes too. It's just a real mess to work with.
Calling OSX a toy is just a laugh. It's a real OS, and lets people get real work done. It runs many different FOSS applications (and much better than windows does), and additionally it runs professional software as well. Additionally it's unix (for a better term try iTerm... the default one is like saying xterm sucks... linux doesn't have any good terminals). Sounds like a toy OS to me.
Phil
uh; I hate to break it to you, but they aren't pushing these to 2nd world countries. Second world was a phrase used during the cold war to refer to the communist block of countries. The first world was the free developed world, the 2nd world was the commies, and the 3rd world was everyone else. Since then there has been an expansion of the terms referring to fourth world countries as the absolutely poorest countries.
Please don't use terms when you don't know what they mean.
Phil
What about when the core of the algorithm isn't the software? What if they spend 100s of millions of dollars doing research on a particular phenomenon in order to figure out how some geological processes work. Then after understanding the basics of these processes, they obtain tons of data points, and then generate an algorithm that can be used to simulate this same phenomenon. This process can be very expensive, and the end result may be less than a few hundred lines of code (sure it may be wrapped around tens of thousands of wrapper lines of code to make it easier to use, but that software is cheap and written by monkeys).
The work was not spent in writing the code, the work was spent in analyzing physical processes, obtaining a ton of data, doing the research etc. Don't they have a right to protect this investment in something beyond a simple copyright? Anyone could disassemble the code, figure out the basics of their algorithm, and rewrite it. The code isn't important, the algorithm could be written completely differently, what is important is the time spent developing the model for the process.
While I agree some basic software things shouldn't be patentable, some stuff such as the above example are a reason they should be, or at least ideas and models for analyzing data should be.
Phil
almost a terabyte.
Each frame is 1080*1920*3 bytes
* 29.97 frames/sec
* 60 sec/min
*90 min
=937GB
one of the ways around this problem is through building in heat pipes into the silicon. 3-D chips will have metal vias between the chip layers for the transfer of data, but additionally they will include metal vias at strategic points to handle heat transfer. Additionally it is unlikely 3-D chips will get beyond a couple of layers anytime soon, the problem is just that it's so expensive to produce mask sets for those chips. Assuming each chip layer has the same number of metal layers, having a mask set for a 3D chip with just 2 layers of silicon will cost twice as much as single layer devices. However, this could allow for some extremely fast FPGA-like circuits, as they can be reused for many many different usages, but that's a different story altogether.
phil
"I wish that we could devote half of what we spend on defense to study of environmental science but I don't see that happening anytime soon."
Ah yes, because the effects of global warming that may or may not occur in the next 100-500 years are so much more important than working to prevent thermonuclear war that could occur anytime. Of course the environmental impact of thermonuclear war is nothing compared to global warming, so we shouldn't worry about that.
If you don't believe thermonuclear war is a very real possibility, you really need to examine the world better. When groups are hell-bent on killing other people for religious or ideological differences, and the same groups seek weapons to kill in the largest quantities, there's obviously nothing to worry about. Especially because no group would purposefully sacrifice themselves to kill others (mutually assured destruction). It's not like anyone's willing to strap a bomb to their chest and walk into a building just to kill other people . . . Oh wait.
Yes, defense, and the survival of our species 20-50 years into the future is a bit more important than global warming.
Phil
I had made the move to Linux 4 or 5 years ago, and also have used an OSX laptop for the last few years. The real beauty of this move isn't that Linux is that much easier to use (although I find it easier) but that I can use the excuse "i haven't used windows in years" when someone has a computer problem. I honestly don't know or really care how to fix those machines. It's a wonderful thing after years of being tech support for people. I still can and do on occasions fix windows issues, but I have to figure out what the hell I'm doing whenever I have to fix a problem.
Basically my time is too valuable to be spent fixing windows computers. Most people's time is, but they don't realize it. My advice is to get a Mac. They just work, and while they may eventually start getting viruses and spyware the infection rate won't be nearly as bad, and unless the users an idiot will be confined to one users logon.
Phil
I think the survey missed one of the key selling features of the iPod: iTunes integration. iTunes is a great media playback application and many people who use it love it, and find it convenient to get an iPod simply because they integrate so well. All you naysayers can talk about how it's not fair and every player should be able to sync up with iTunes, as it's only fair, but those companies are allowed to attempt to build a killer app that beats iTunes.
One of the zune's biggest weaknesses will be that it will sync with what... your windows media player? Ugh, windows media player is just hideous in my opinion, and much slower than iTunes. My G3 300MHz box handles iTunes alright, I doubt a P-II 500 (with the same amount of RAM( could even handle a WMP install with 5000+ songs in it well.
Phil
iPods are far more than a status symbol. I always thought I wouldn't be one of those guys, and I am. I broke down and bought a 60GB one. Let me put this in perspective though. I am a huge music fan. I buy 2-3 cds a month on average and generally goto a concert every month if there's anyone around worth seeing. I love it a lot, and listen to music all day in lab. I never liked using the all in one digital jukebox thing itunes was, and used xmms for years. I had my music organized by artist and just put on the directory I wanted to hear.
Then I bought a mac. I started using iTunes, I went through and reencoded my music as I realized oggs were a waste of my time. iTunes just made all the things I did easy. After a while i thought about getting an iPod too. however I had already ripped over 20GB of music to my hdd and I had gotten nowhere near done with my music collection. I looked around at audio players, and I looked at integrating one with my car. I may have been able to save $20-$30 by getting some no name brand, however most of the other major players at the time weren't offering 60GB players. Kind of sold me on an iPod. The fact that I could hook it up to my car ($95 stereo, $75 adapter and done) made it even better.
The question to me isn't "do i need 60 GB of music with me at all times?" The answer is obviously no. That would take me a month to listen to. It's not that I need it, however when I'm about to go somewhere or whatever I don't want to go "oh shit what do I want to listen to... let me throw this on my mp3 player". Instead I grab my ipod and choose something I want to hear. Or I go on a car trip, and decide to listen to a different band.. no problem, I have it loaded on here. When you have a music collection of over 300 cds it's wonderful to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. You might call me lazy for not being willing to reload it every time. Sure I am. I also value my time, and don't want to waste it.
Now with that all said, one of the biggest motivaters for getting an iPod was so I wouldn't have to keep so much music on my laptop (instead I kept it on my file server) so I could listen to music in lab. I know it's an expensive external hard drive, but when I'm driving anywhere, or walking or biking, or whatever I definately don't regret it.
Was my iPod expensive? Sure I paid a good chunk of change for it. Do i worry about my battery? no, if it dies I order a kit online for $40 to replace it. Is an iPod for you? No, you obviously don't find it worthwhile, however for those of us who do, it is naive of you to think we buy them only as a status symbol. Maybe some people buy the nanos or shuffles just to have an apple ipod, but most of us who buy the big ones are doing it for ease of use and convenience
Phil
My bullshit detector is going wild here. The magic is not all out of cpu designs. If you believe that, well you can go the way of the alpha.
The magic is not out of it. Most of the basics have been covered, that is true, and manufacturing process matters a lot; also true. But the manufacturing process is also not just a matter of "throwing a lot of money at it". However as I'm not as familiar with the manufacturing side of things, I'll stick to the areas I know, like processor design.
If the magic were gone in CPU design, and it was all about manufacturing, why do both ATI and Nvidia compete so heavily, and why can one produce chips faster than the others (although it switches too often for me to care). Sure they may not be general purpose processors, but they're highly important, and they are processors. Additionally while the changes in intels designs may be more on the level of incremental improvements (doubling cores etc) it doesn't mean there's not a lot of research going into it.
Now if you take the narrow mind that the magic in single core superscalare processor architecture is gone, sure. I'll agree with you there. That's a well studied problem. The research community moved on years ago. Simplescalar results no longer mean anything. However their is a large amount of research and development being done in the system design (the system level being restricted to a single chip). Cache-processor(s) interaction, efforts to improve programmability of chips etc etc.
Designing your own chip is a very very risky endeavor, even if you have multiple billions of dollars in the bank like microsoft does. If they manage to pull this off; more power to them. It's a very challenging process, and will not be done by grunts (i.e. it will require roomfuls of PhDs working on various parts of the project. Your comment about being reasonable to design your own... well I tend to disagree. Building the chip used in the xbox360 from scratch would have cost far more money than leveraging the design and knowledge expertise that IBM already had. Plus the chips needed for consoles have nowhere near the volume required to build their own fab. So in that case, that means they would contract out the fab work, and so the whole point is in their design. Sure looks like design is dead to me.
Phil
Did I say that american copyright law makes allofmp3.com illegal (I don't know the answer to that personally)? What is illegal is when you personally download a song from allofmp3.com.
I just find it amusing how everyone swarms on this issue. I make one little joke about the RIAA suing users of a service that people in the USA can't legally use, and everyone jumps on me. Downloading a song from allofmp3.com is no different than if you were downloading a song off kazaa (or whatever filesharing people use now) when the person uploading the song to you is located in russia. Just because something might be legal in another country does not make it legal here.
Phil
I think it would be fitting if the RIAA got a subpoena issued against VISA to give a listing of everyone who has purchased music from allofmp3.com and than sued them. While I'm normally not a supporter of those harsh tactics, I'm sick of everyone talking about allofmp3 as if it were a great thing. It's illegal, and unlike normal filesharing, you're making some russian mafia rich while you steal other people's music. I think it would be within their rights to do this, and possibly easier to track who purchased these songs then it is to go after other online music pirates. A real quick way to get a listing of thousands of people who have been directly stealing from them.
Sounds fitting to me.
Phil
Oh yes, I forgot that it is wrong to let a company better someone elses economy besides our own. Are we that egocentric that we think that we have the right to prevent a company from building a development center in a developing economy? Should India not be allowed to prosper and grow? Do we have the right to make sure that they don't have jobs that actually require brains. Oh right, we obviously have the monopoly on brains in this country.
It's called capitalism people. Sometimes things happen that hurt people, but in the long run it helps. India was one of those countries where the evil capitalists exploited for so many years, taking advantage of their cheap labor etc. Oh, what's that? They're no longer the poor country they once were? They're not really 3rd world any more, and their economy is rapidly expanding. Oh the horror. Capitalism has been so bad to these people.
Do we really believe that these jobs are going to take away jobs from highly qualified US applicants? I hate to break the news to you, but if you know your shit, and work hard (and not the 14+ hour days or whatever) there are plenty of jobs available in the US. Plus maybe eventually more of the tech industry jobs go overseas, is that really so horrible? It's often considered progress. While right now tech jobs are toward the top of the curve, in 10-20 years many of the jobs will become mundane. Running tests on processors is not fun.
Is it so bad that most americans now don't work long days in factories in dangerous conditions? Many people lost jobs when factories here moved overseas, or mechanized and removed the need for manual labor. Sure some hardships occurred because of it, but it's the cost of progress. The capitalist system has created enormous wealth and is continuing to do so. Just because some jobs go overseas does not mean capitalism is failing, in fact I think that shows its success.
Right now the US is experiencing extremely low unemployment, not to say it doesn't suck for those who are unemployed, but for the most part if you are highly reliable and know how to use your brain, there are countless jobs available to you. You just have to work hard and try. It may not always pay 6 figures, it may only pay 20-30k/year, but there are many places where that's more wealth than people obtain in their lifetime. Slashdotters really need to get a clue when it comes to economics.
Phil
if the iPod/iTunes sensed higher played songs and played them more, it would actually cause a huge disaster, depending on how it was implemented. A simple implementation would increase the likelihood that a song gets played again by a fixed percentage. Under a situation like this, no matter how small of a percentage the song increases it's likelihood of being played by, and regardless of how many songs you have on the device, over enough time it will reach the point where it will effectively only play one song over and over 99.9999999% of the time. It's the problem with positive reinforcement as the song will become more likely to be played the more it's played, and once one song gets "lucky enough" it will be promoted just high enough to start dominating, and from there it quickly runs away. I ran a simulation similar to this not too long ago as I was thinking about it.
Now, if you scale the likelihood of a song being played by a fixed scalar value, this runaway effect won't happen, but that isn't as much fun to do, and would mean overtime the scaling would be meaningless as each song has a high enough value that the scalar/value is effectively zero (or on a floating point number could be zero).
Phil
I have a kenwood system, and overall it isn't too bad. The player was nothing special, just a couple year old head unit that supported the cd changer interface (and track names etc) as well as they're ipod interface that plugs into it.
The setup has a couple different modes where you can browse through artists, playlists, and albums (i think). The downside is that the system is slow. scrolling through artists took a couple seconds to do, so obviously looking through a long list is not practical. I have set up a couple playlists of stuff I wanted (set on random) for long trips before, although I've found the option of unplugging the ipod, browsing to the album I want to listen to, hitting play and plugging it back in works great. Doing this I can easily select an album once before driving, or every 45 mins or so, and still have full control of previous, next, play/pause, random on/off, and repeat. It's not as useful as an ipod interface, but it's very much nicer than having to do that on the ipod manually while driving (especially turning random on/off). Also displaying the current track name during playback is great. I just wish it would easily show the artist and album name as well. Even if it just scrolled Artist-Song Name across the screen.
The interfaces need a couple more years before they can be as easy to use as the ipod, but what is to be expected from early adopters? For the money I spent (less than $100 to upgrade my head unit, and $75 for the ipod interface) I can't really complain. Especially the coolness factor. The method is 10x better than trying to use an FM adapter, and cassette adapters require a cassette player which most cars don't have any more. The rca jacks work, but then you need a high end stereo anyhow. The $75 upgrade is worth it just to have the track names displayed and ipod charging. I think it's partially just the coolness factor of it all.
Phil
and this would be akin to you working for a company, writing a killer code module for an application they're developing, and then write in your own copyright into it because you don't want the company to have it. You can not just change the copyright from a pre-agreed upon form to give yourself the copyright. What people on here don't seem to understand is that granting a comany (or anyone) usage of your work does not grant them exclusive copyright control of it. They have the right to use it for that one and only one use (assuming their user agreement is written properly, but even if it's not, it's assumed that they don't retain full control, and if turnitin republished your work, legal recourse would be an option).
phil
First, graphics won't work on an FPGA. I mean technically it's feasible, but the demand for graphics is great enough to make it economical to produce graphic ASICs such as those Nvidia and ATI produce.
However the FPGA idea is a good one, and is being researched. Actually, what is even more interesting is to utilize transistors on the CPU die to integrate reconfigurable hardware accelerators. The research is being done currently, and will allow for CMP + reconfigurable systems so that custom processors can be integrated at runtime. Additionally these systems will allow dynamic reconfigurations, so that the hardware can be time-multiplexed between different configurations (although the configuration time can often be on the order of miliseconds). Additionally, this allows for straightforward upgrades to your processors. Want to run games faster? Throw more hardware, double the size of the reconfigurable area. This will allow the game to do more in parallel, or to cache configurations etc (causing more routines to run in hardware rather than software). And everything is compatible as the user just needs to download the synthesized version of the hardware for their reconfigurable arrays.
Of course this scenario is quite a ways in the future, and it must be remembered that hardware designs are much harder to create than software designs, and hardware/software design is a very difficult problem. The future is there, it just may take a while for reality to catch up with the research.
Phil
first, create softlinks of all the files and put them into a directory called backup or something.
/tmp/somerandomdir /tmp/somerandomdir /backup > files.tar
then, just use a simple script, something like
mkdir
cd
tar -c
split files.tar -b DVDSIZE
opendir(DIR, ".") || die "can't opendir $directory: $!";
while ($current_file = readdir(DIR))
{
#print "file is $current_file";
mkdir $current_file+"dir"
mv $current_file $current_file+"dir/"+$current_file
mkisofs -o $current_file+".iso" $current_file+"dir"
(can't remember how to burn isos on the commandline)
}
of course, use a real language for the script, pretty it up etc, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Phil
Seems to me the pirates have lots of marketing here on /. Anytime an article on DRM is brought our we get hoards of people talking up how great allofmp3.com is.
Phil
And buying the bands cd may not really directly help the band. Very little money goes to the band for each sale. However, the kicker is the band is often given living money by the label while they produce the cd. If the record label wasn't making anything of the band because their cd sales sucked then they'd drop them. Period. By not giving the label your money to purchase the cd you don't hurt the band right now as they're not getting much from cd sales, but you may cause them to get dropped by their label and possibly decide to break up or stop making new music.
The whole key is to be honest. Many of the true music lovers out there still pay for CDs or to buy music. Some of the casual listeners will stop buying, and so what. Less of the crap that's on the radio today. I personally own hundreds of CDs, and yes much of this money has gone to bands on major labels. Much has also gone to smaller labels, etc. I also download music, and listen to stuff, and download live shows of bands I like. Do I feel this is wrong? Not really, as I have a set budget, and can't really afford buying more than maybe 3 or 4 cds a month. Also much of that stuff I listen to once or twice, and if I do like it I end up buying at some point anyhow.
The label wants a hit, and we dont give a shit -
Phil
This is definitely true. I live up north where the savings due to using CFLs aren't as great, but in the summer it really does make a difference. Right now my house doesn't have AC, and god, I really wouldn't want to heat up my room with light bulbs. If you want to take the advantage of heat savings just buy a couple space heaters, they'll accomplish the same thing, and can be used when you don't want light (such as when you're sleeping). Additionally, gas heating is far more efficient in most instances (in places where electricity is really cheap due to nuclear or hydroelectric power plants houses are more likely to use electric heating anyhow).
I have been trying to convince my mom to throw out her bulbs and replace them with CFLs for a few years now, and having a hard time convincing her. As my parents live in Florida it just makes sense to use them. Considering a 20 watt CFL is going to save over 110 watts of power when you take into account the need to run the air conditioner to remove the bulbs heat (the AC is run more than 6 months out of the year there). While the savings on a monthly power bill may not be huge, $5-$10/month adds up after enough years. For myself, I just try and avoid heating my room unneccesarily as it's generally too hot anyhow due to all those computers.
Phil
logarithmic number systems (LNS) for computers were first proposed by Marasa and Matula in 1973, as a "better" approximation of numbers than floating point units. This paper compared the cumulative error from different floating point standards with LNS standards. LNS offers some advantages over floating point, however it's performance degrades significantly as you add more bits of precision.
LNS can be effective to around 24bits of precision, and then the hardware requirements for the LNS unit's adder/subtracter become too overwhelming. This is because multiplications and divisions are fast on LNS units (with minimal hardware) as just require an adder, however handling subtraction is much more difficult. The simplest (naive) methods of making an adder and subtractor involve using large ROM lookup tables. Fancier, more efficient units using smaller roms and small multipliers to help get better values (I don't remember all the details offhand). Sometimes they'll even trade precision for faster performance. This can result in chips with single cycle multiplies and divides, but multi-cycle additions and subtractions. For low precision calculations requiring many divides and multiplies LNS processors can often achieve the best performance. However for many applications an efficient LNS unit with sufficient precision just isn't practical.
Phil
Yeah, that would work really well. Just like the billions in financial aid have really helped all those poor starving african countries. You have to be a moron to believe that money used to build up a country is the answer to every problem. In fact it often creates more problems. Giving food and money to African countries has helped people eat for a day, but at what cost? Now the farmers of those countries can't make money, and grow less food for the next year. Additionally governmental groups, and thugs tend to like getting money, and find a way to help themselves to as much as they can. Next thing you know the country is in anarchy. Oh wait, that's true with many of the countries that are everyones favorite poor card.
The whole "he without sin should cast the first stone" argument is silly. Obviously no one is completely in the clear, we have made mistakes, and we have hurt some of these people (however not always out of mistake). It's hard to follow foreign politics when you're a moron, but there are many factors involved. Sometimes the best solution to a problem still sucks. Sometimes a brutal dictator is the best choice of someone to put in power because everyone else would either make the government fall apart, or be an even more brutal dictator. In reality, many chioces just plain suck! What we have done is tried to prevent a nuclear holocaust. As expensive as this war is, it's cheaper than if we had let sadam build up an arsenal of biological weapons (and the reports have proved that he was building up the infrastructure necessary to do this). Arguably we should be bombing Iran back to the stone age to prevent them from getting the nuke as well. These are countries with a history of instability. As much as it looks good to pretend they're reformed, or they're not going to hurt us, that is not a good idea.
In the history of the world one of the biggest pacifism movements almost led to the nazification of most of Europe. After WWI peaceful people moved into power, no one wanted to fight, no one wanted to worry about the problems of the world. Therefore nazi power grew in germany, and the prevailing attitude was that the best way to deal with them is to appease them. If we let the monster grow out of control, and give it what it needs, it will obviously choose not to hurt us. After all we're a peaceful people. Obviously plans did not turn out well for the pacifists of that age.
War is never fun, war is never profitable, war is best summed up in "war is hell". War is not a good alternative, but at the same time it is often the best alternative. In a perfect world it wouldn't exist, but idealism has caused far more problems than it's ever solved. It's easy to say that fighting is bad, it's easy to say that we shouldn't do this, or that, and to blame ourselves. It's also easy to get yourself killed that way. But obviously you know best, because you can claim when the terrorists shoot you that you have the high moral ground. Good for you, personally I choose life.
Phil