I want a 10" fanless & no moving parts sub-100$ netbook, not 2nd hand and preferably x86. I'll run GNU/Linux on it of course.
An "Intel" RaspberryPi (different processor, different pcb layout, real memory, tiny SSD, battery, keyboard and screen) in a netbook format should be doable in volumes for less than 100$ right? Think of it as a portable modern pseudo-terminal.
It was almost doable (except no fan cooling) at 4x the price a computer generation ago, i.e. 2 years ago.
Fail traps: pushing it with Windows or Android. Not interested in garbage like that.
Spot on apart from it being sub $100, that is a pipe dream as the OS costs more than that on its own. I think it is realistic for $300 (ie, the price of a normal laptop) though and that is exactly what MS are moaning nobody tried to create.
I think the reason is that it would kill the market for most budget and high end laptops. I know most of us geeks here on slashdot would not agree with this though, we are all to wedded to our keyboards. I could not live without things like alt-tab and other key shortcuts but if you watch non-geeks use a computer you realise that unless they are typing long essays or whatever they keyboard is mostly unused. If all you did was type the occasional short email you could make do with an on screen keyboard.
As for me, I code for a living so for me to be productive I NEED a keyboard, but most people do not and that is why ipads are used frequently, even in the home. I do not think most people out there have the same demands of a portable device as me though.
I see touch screen computers all the time at best buy, so the PC manufacturers are definitely making them. The problem is, they don't market them very well. All of the PCs and laptops are lined up in a row and you could walk right by one and not know it is a touch screen.
I think Microsoft is trying to create a market of PCs that act like tablets, when that market doesn't really exist. If people wanted touch screens, they could get them today. Most users either want a tablet or a traditional computer. The users who want both usually want them as separate devices.
Microsoft screwed the pooch on this one and it will probably mean the end for Ballmer. Hopefully the next OS corrects the issues and slashdot can find something else M$ to bash.
Actually I do think you see any touch screen systems in best buy that are anything like MS is talking about. They are talking about touch screen laptops with detachable screens (basically, like the surface pro).
To be honest I have been looking at stuff like this for a while and the only device I thought was up to scratch is the surface pro. What i want is a high end, high spec laptop that I can use as a touchscreen tablet when I am on the train or bus or whatever but can put on a desk and use as a decent high end worskstation (with external keyboard, mouse and screen). If every company tried making these the costs of all of them would come down in a competetive market (also driven by increased demand for components meaning they could be made cheaper).
Unfortunately not many companies have done this, probably because they know it will kill the market for all the current unsold high end laptops they have in stock thanks to intels ultrabook push. They will probably fold and do what MS wants in the end though if the Surface Pro gains any traction in a year or so once it becomes more affordable.
In terms of the next MS OS that is an easy prediction: it will be a server / desktop cross over so they will start to have on product for mobile devices and one for servers and desktops. It makes sense since when you do connect to a windows server to do stuff currently you use remote desktop so why not keep it the same as the desktop you are using.
The pro versions of windows 7 have most of the server stuff so why not just throw it all in and be done with it. MS are starting to realise that they need to keep the OS dominant or they risk losing everything so I expect them to make more and more gambles like Windows 8. Some will certainly fail, but they know if they do not try and innovate then they risk losing everything the have built up.
That's the way the Marxist scum media in the U.K. try to fool the public into thinking that criminals are getting longer sentences. Stuff like "Jewellery gang get a total of 25 years" and then you find out there are five of them, so the average sentence they got was only five years.
If the government wanted to get rid of crime, they could do it in a couple of months tops - just massively increase the length of sentences, and put all the new criminals into prison camps. Tent cities. The bare minimum of food, no heating, no T.V., just selected books and that's it. Twenty years for burglary, twenty years for mugging, execution for murder, etc. Crime would drop by 99% as soon as the criminal scum realised they couldn't get away with it any more.
Didn't the victorians try that before? I think I seem to remember from history class it didn't turn out so well.
Get your head down, stay out of everyone's way, do your time,......watch Sky Sports and play the PS3 or 360 [in low category gaols before anyone gets on their high horse]
I'm no expert, but I think you're on the right track. Slackware lost its appeal to me a loooong time ago, Ubuntu was never really as good as I wanted it to be, and Fedora has fallen apart as of late. Tried out SUSE, CentOS and Scientific, Mandrake/Mandriva/Connectiva, Debian, and some others over the years, and I'd honestly say Mint is the best thing out there right now, at least for personal use and smaller networks. Mint's is essentially what Ubuntu was supposed to be: it works and isn't ridiculous to setup and maintain.
If you like Ubuntu okay and are frustrated with other distros, you will probably love Mint. I've moved on to Mint's Debian Edition, which still has some unfortunate flaws, but I keep hoping they'll change their focus to the Debian base and just forget Ubuntu. I keep testing new releases when they become available, thinking maybe I'm missing something. Invariably I wipe the test partitions and sleep well knowing Mint works for me, looks how I like, does everything I ask of it, and is reliable. Of course I call this sort of testing "fun," but it reaffirms my OS choice. And BTW, I had high hopes for Fedora 18, but it is a joke.
I just moved to Mint on my new laptop and I mostly agree with this. I have had a few issues with it but generally speaking it seems brilliant.
I chose Cinnamon as I wanted to maintain some semblance of compatibility with Gnome (ie, gnome shell) but with a proper desktop orientated OS. I bought a laptop with a 1600*900 screen for a reason: I like smaller icons. I do not want everything to be made artificially huge so I can use a thumb instead of a mouse pointer as I did not get a touchscreen laptop.
I used Ubuntu before and didn't hate Unity, especially now it has got pretty stable and usable. I might even jump back to it in a few years time when I can afford a shit hot combined touch screen tablet ultrabook type thing (If you can hear this Mr Shuttleworth, just dig deep in your pocket for some loose change and I'll be back to Ubuntu in a jiffy).
Until then though I figured sticking with a desktop OS made sense and Mint seems to be the best fit for that at the moment.
Show them this lousy website and tell them that is what happens when your company propagates lousy code - your existence goes to pot and your company is sold for very little money to a larger company who also doesn't care.
That should scare them straight.
Maybe instead of just bitching about it uselessly you could actually do something useful. Go here and help fix the awful slashdot code: http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/
After all, it is an open source project like any other.
The jury doesn't get to decide the sentence, which is really key to the whole thing.
Prosecutor: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are only to decide on whether the law was broken, not if you don't like the law, not what you think the sentence should be. The only question is, did or did not the defendant steal a paper clip."
Jury (with no option): "Yes"
Judge: "20 years with no chance of parole!"
Sorry you miss an important point of a jury in most systems: They also decide if the person should be punished in the case at hand. They are free to decide that a guilty person is innocent if they do not think what they did should be against the law.
This is actually the case in the US too, although in the US the defence lawyer is not allowed to mention this in court. Here in the UK they are, and frequently it has been used to get people off even though they actually admitted to what they are accused of.
I believe it used to be mentioned in the US frequently in trials of people accused of possession of weed so mentioning it was clamped down on although this is only a vague memory of mine from when I studied law decades ago. I just searched now and can't find any references on the web.
That is utterly moronic. The prosecutors just did their job. It is not their job to decide if the law is just, or decide if people the police (or anyone else who has gathered enough evidence) accuse of a crime is innocent. It is their job to go do their very best to get people the police accuse of a crime found guilty at any cost (even if their personal opinion is that they are innocent). It is the defence teams job to get their client off at any cost (even if he is guilty as hell).
The only thing the prosecutor can say to drop a case is that there is insufficient evidence to support a prosecution (they of course may try to get you to plead guilty first to save face but that is fair game).
None of this is to say I think what happened to Aaron Swartz is fair. But the points above are the principles under which a adversarial legal system operates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system
In this case someone wanted to prosecute Aaron Swartz. The prosecutor looked at this and decided their was a realistic chance of a successful prosecution. Aaron chose not to wait for a jury to decide his guilt and killed himself. If he was innocent of any crime a jury would hopefully have found him so, but he lacked enough faith in the system I guess but I nor anybody else can be 100% about his reasons, especially since he left no explanation. We can make an educated guess, but that is very different from certainty.
I find the idea of blaming any one part of the system in this case to be wrong, especially as the part everyone blames was only doing what they were supposed to. When a guilty person gets off it is not the fault of their defence lawyer for doing their job too well, it is a breakdown of the system as a whole. I think the same applies in this case, blame the entire system not a single cog within it.
This is just one further example of a shortcoming within the US legal system but every legal system has short comings, inquisitorial legal systems have their downfalls too.
The big issue here though is actually particular to the US system in that in order to drive down costs, more and more cases are now settled without a jury being involved by the prosecution doing its damnedest to scare the defendant into a pragmatic guilty plea to save the cost of a trial. This happens in millions of cases and probably does save lots of money and most of time gets the right outcome, in this case some poor guy who was out of his depth was literally scared to death by it.
Maybe the solution here is to make jury trials the norm instead of the exception whatever the cost. Since juries were designed to prevent shit like this they have to be available to all, not just the few who can afford them.
You did not provide any actual argument but I infer from the link that you think any system where they do not elect judges and prosecutors must be likely to have these sorts of problems?
I suppose it comes down to whether you think it is better than a system err's on the side of caution or heavy handedness (since you are never going to create a "perfect" justice system with no miscarriages of justice). So you would rather an innocent person was sent to prison or in this case extradited to another country and lose their child (I know in this case she was probably not innocent) rather than a guilty person possibly get off because the process failed?
The reality is that you can find a myriad of cases in any justice system where the process has failed to produce the correct outcome with hindsight. Since they will always happen it really does come down to the question of whether it is better to wrongly punish an innocent or that a guilty person escapes justice.
Most other countries tend now to view that criminal acts should be punished by the legal system or even recorded on the persons record if the guilt of the person in question can be established beyond all reasonable doubt. This means the in all cases the due process must be followed to the letter to as much as possible ensure that innocent people are not punished by the state or are punished in as few a cases is possible.
Interestingly but slightly off topic, if the mother in the case you post had come to the UK where I live we may never have sent back to the US to face justice as we will not extradite to countries where there is a possibility they will be killed as punishment for their crimes.
what stress? when it's certain you're going to get a teleport(or opening door) scare it's no longer a scare. it's just certain, it's just how the game works. you go into rooms and every third corner on the hallways something is going to teleport behind you and long enough dark portions always have enemies, because otherwise why add the hallway at all, right? to add beliviability to the stations layout, to make it into an adventure? why the fuck bother when we can just add closets full of zombies!
it was just too good at making you not want to play it at all. doom1 did the teleport enemies behind back trick couple of times too but it was never used so cheaply.
what do I want from a space station fps with PDA's as per story?? system shock. they would have done well to study the use of light/shadows in shock too.
The stress I meant was the generally confined spaces, but your right as well that they did seem to overuse the teleporting in monster trick.
I never understood why this was a conflict for programmers. If the white space isn't syntactic, can't your editor just rearrange the code the way you want it? Just run it through a pretty printer before you work on it.
Someone else has told you why this is stupid idea but only in 7 words, so I wanted to elaborate: Your approach means that when you check the code back into your chosen versioning system every single line will come back as changed rather than just the lines you changed. That means you have to spend more time figuring out what was actually being changed.
You might as well change every line to have a different carriage return format while your in there just for kicks. Ok, it is trivial in both cases to work around, but why cause your co-workers any extra hassle what so ever. Instead try and make things as easy for them as you possibly can.
Daikatana and Alice were far from perfect, but they're still more enjoyable than Doom 3.
I think you hit the nail on the head there, but possibly not in the way you mean.
Doom3 was an absolute masterpiece of atmospheric gaming, but it was just too much. It set your nerves on edge in a way that meant playing for more than an hour or so was just too stressful. I love the levels, the monsters, the story (ok, its basic but what do you want from a FPS) but I just find playing it burns me out too quickly. It is just too good at making you feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic without any respite.
I was just thinking back to Doom as I type this and from memory the big difference is that Doom had more variety with some levels set outside or in huge cavernous high ceilinged spaces. This variety is what made it great as it certainly had plenty of claustrophobia inducing levels too.
Not quite. Kim Dot Com is already planning on creating a replacement.
I am 100% sure that the feds would very much also like to leave him rotting in jail for a few years in the US and also claw back all his assets as proceeds of crime to leave him destitute when he was released.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs in this case the reality is that if DoJ just wanted to seize his domain name and shut down his site they could have done that far more easily without going to the lengths they did. Nope, they wanted him in prison at the very least too, and if he had been extradited he would be as the right US judge and jury would have quite happily turned a blind eye to all the Fed's misdeeds in getting him in front of them.
Actually, we are the Casino, since we are the ones paying out their bets.
THe problem is the game is rigged for the players.
The only way we can fix this is through law.
That would involve government passing a law that was meddling in the affairs of the free market. All the people saying how bad big government is would be up in arms about this.
I actually agree with you that laws preventing price speculation can be a good thing but the reality is that tea party types seem to think any increased regulation of business is tantamount to communism.
As soon as this idea runs up against gun-industry profits, it dies.
Not necessarily. By adding all this crap to guns it would make them more expensive and the higher value they would retail for would support greater profits. Just because something becomes more expensive does mean the company who produces it makes less money, look at oil companies.
With the weapons and training that a large fraction of the population has access to in the US, suppressing a rebellion here would be nearly impossible, even for the US Armed Forces.
Actually it would be easy since long before it could develop CNN and the like would brainwash most of the population into the idea that the rebels were actually communists.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
It's funny because a very noisy, home invasion type crime such is this is the only scenario to my mind where the right to keep a gun in your home is any use.
The problem is that it hardly ever happens in the manner you describe. What actually happens is that the guy knocks on the door, old lady answers it and is then taken by surprise and subdued. As she was surprised a gun would only help if she was carrying it in her hand and only if she could keep some distance between her and her attacker which is unlikely.
This to my mind is always the problem with the idea of guns as a method of preventing crime: criminals generally prefer to rob you on the quiet when you are out or to ambush you in such a way that nothing you can do (even if you are carrying a gun) will help you or put them at any risk.
Guns are not really much of an advantage in a hand to hand combat scenario. They only really come into their own when at ranges greater than a few feet.
I would be interested to know whether the amount of crimes they prevent actually balance the number of car jackings they make much easier (without a gun in your hand convincing someone not to just run you over would strike me as difficult) .
Incorrect. Steam is a DRM and distribution scheme, in that it binds your purchase to your account, and you need to be authenticated to access that account. Your non-DRM games are inaccessible unless you are logged in to Steam, either Online or Offline. I know, from personal experience, that Offline Mode isn't for when your connection fails, as it requires you to cache your credentials prior to going Offline to work. You're SOOL if your router craps out and you can't tether your smartphone to enable Offline Mode. It's for when you're taking your library away from your network connection in a planned fashion, e.g. your laptop on holiday.
Yup, and of course the real problem is not steam. Its that most people producing games that require payment hate people ripping them off so much they insist on some sort of DRM to try and prevent this (even if it doesn't work they still want it to try).
Saying this, I am going to go home now and close Steam, then try and browse to Braid in the file structure of my Steam installation. If I can run it without logging in to Steam, I will take all I've said about it back. I don't think that will be the case, though.
I dont either, they guy who created Braid used their online savegame feature so at the very least you will lose your progress. It is probably possible to develop a game and publish it on steam with no DRM but that nobody uses it. The question is do developers ever want to leave it all to trust after they have decided to charge people for the game in the first place?
Fuck you, it used to be cheap. We want it back that way. The rest of the world agreed to fund social programs and public transport through high fuel taxes. We did not.
Isn't it getting harder to find now though? I thought that was a large part of expensive price tag on the states where you guys don't tax it as much as us in Europe.
Canada has the same problem but compounded. Outside of major cities (and inside some) you can not expect to go anywhere after it snows unless the plow has been by OR you have all wheel drive/4x4 and a high ground clearance. Unfortunately you don't find those features on many high MPG cars and the plows don't hit residential or side streets until some time after noon. You'll also be hard pressed to find a boss in Canada that lets you take snow days;)
In my very limited experience a 4*4 makes far less difference to driving in snow than keeping a set of snow chains in the boot / trunk providing you can stick to main roads. Ice is far more of a problem than snow since it hangs around for far longer.
The only time the high ground clearance of a 4*4 is useful is if you need it for driving over stuff (ie: off road) or if the snow is a foot deep every day. Even if the snow is deep generally once someone has driven down a road in a 4*4 (and snow chains) they clear the worst of the deep snow for drivers behind them in any vehicle so it is the ice and hill combo that is the worst hazard in cold weather, snow chains make that a doddle. Also, most places I know of where it snows heavily on main roads just get snow ploughs out to clear the worst of it pretty quickly.
P.S.=> Take a read - be VERY "enlightened" on many fronts...
... apk
More like being owned by pointless and gratuitous use of bold tags. I thought using too many exclamation marks was bad enough but those posts both take the biscuit.
Maybe if you concentrated on posting stuff that wasn't so annoying to read people might not down mod you so much and you would be fine having an account like the rest of us. As it is your posts look like the demented ramblings of someone overly obsessed with markup.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a 10" fanless & no moving parts sub-100$ netbook, not 2nd hand and preferably x86. I'll run GNU/Linux on it of course.
An "Intel" RaspberryPi (different processor, different pcb layout, real memory, tiny SSD, battery, keyboard and screen) in a netbook format should be doable in volumes for less than 100$ right? Think of it as a portable modern pseudo-terminal.
It was almost doable (except no fan cooling) at 4x the price a computer generation ago, i.e. 2 years ago.
Fail traps: pushing it with Windows or Android. Not interested in garbage like that.
Spot on apart from it being sub $100, that is a pipe dream as the OS costs more than that on its own. I think it is realistic for $300 (ie, the price of a normal laptop) though and that is exactly what MS are moaning nobody tried to create.
I think the reason is that it would kill the market for most budget and high end laptops. I know most of us geeks here on slashdot would not agree with this though, we are all to wedded to our keyboards. I could not live without things like alt-tab and other key shortcuts but if you watch non-geeks use a computer you realise that unless they are typing long essays or whatever they keyboard is mostly unused. If all you did was type the occasional short email you could make do with an on screen keyboard.
As for me, I code for a living so for me to be productive I NEED a keyboard, but most people do not and that is why ipads are used frequently, even in the home. I do not think most people out there have the same demands of a portable device as me though.
I see touch screen computers all the time at best buy, so the PC manufacturers are definitely making them. The problem is, they don't market them very well. All of the PCs and laptops are lined up in a row and you could walk right by one and not know it is a touch screen.
I think Microsoft is trying to create a market of PCs that act like tablets, when that market doesn't really exist. If people wanted touch screens, they could get them today. Most users either want a tablet or a traditional computer. The users who want both usually want them as separate devices.
Microsoft screwed the pooch on this one and it will probably mean the end for Ballmer. Hopefully the next OS corrects the issues and slashdot can find something else M$ to bash.
Actually I do think you see any touch screen systems in best buy that are anything like MS is talking about. They are talking about touch screen laptops with detachable screens (basically, like the surface pro).
To be honest I have been looking at stuff like this for a while and the only device I thought was up to scratch is the surface pro. What i want is a high end, high spec laptop that I can use as a touchscreen tablet when I am on the train or bus or whatever but can put on a desk and use as a decent high end worskstation (with external keyboard, mouse and screen). If every company tried making these the costs of all of them would come down in a competetive market (also driven by increased demand for components meaning they could be made cheaper).
Unfortunately not many companies have done this, probably because they know it will kill the market for all the current unsold high end laptops they have in stock thanks to intels ultrabook push. They will probably fold and do what MS wants in the end though if the Surface Pro gains any traction in a year or so once it becomes more affordable.
In terms of the next MS OS that is an easy prediction: it will be a server / desktop cross over so they will start to have on product for mobile devices and one for servers and desktops. It makes sense since when you do connect to a windows server to do stuff currently you use remote desktop so why not keep it the same as the desktop you are using.
The pro versions of windows 7 have most of the server stuff so why not just throw it all in and be done with it. MS are starting to realise that they need to keep the OS dominant or they risk losing everything so I expect them to make more and more gambles like Windows 8. Some will certainly fail, but they know if they do not try and innovate then they risk losing everything the have built up.
That's the way the Marxist scum media in the U.K. try to fool the public into thinking that criminals are getting longer sentences.
Stuff like "Jewellery gang get a total of 25 years" and then you find out there are five of them, so the average sentence they got was only five years.
If the government wanted to get rid of crime, they could do it in a couple of months tops - just massively increase the length of sentences, and put all the new criminals into prison camps. Tent cities. The bare minimum of food, no heating, no T.V., just selected books and that's it. Twenty years for burglary, twenty years for mugging, execution for murder, etc. Crime would drop by 99% as soon as the criminal scum realised they couldn't get away with it any more.
Didn't the victorians try that before? I think I seem to remember from history class it didn't turn out so well.
Arse. It translates to arse.
And like the AC says, that doesn't happen here.
Get your head down, stay out of everyone's way, do your time,... ...watch Sky Sports and play the PS3 or 360 [in low category gaols before anyone gets on their high horse]
Die someone say horse? There's plenty of that behind bars: http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8174000/8174870.stm
I'm no expert, but I think you're on the right track. Slackware lost its appeal to me a loooong time ago, Ubuntu was never really as good as I wanted it to be, and Fedora has fallen apart as of late. Tried out SUSE, CentOS and Scientific, Mandrake/Mandriva/Connectiva, Debian, and some others over the years, and I'd honestly say Mint is the best thing out there right now, at least for personal use and smaller networks. Mint's is essentially what Ubuntu was supposed to be: it works and isn't ridiculous to setup and maintain.
If you like Ubuntu okay and are frustrated with other distros, you will probably love Mint. I've moved on to Mint's Debian Edition, which still has some unfortunate flaws, but I keep hoping they'll change their focus to the Debian base and just forget Ubuntu. I keep testing new releases when they become available, thinking maybe I'm missing something. Invariably I wipe the test partitions and sleep well knowing Mint works for me, looks how I like, does everything I ask of it, and is reliable. Of course I call this sort of testing "fun," but it reaffirms my OS choice. And BTW, I had high hopes for Fedora 18, but it is a joke.
I just moved to Mint on my new laptop and I mostly agree with this. I have had a few issues with it but generally speaking it seems brilliant.
I chose Cinnamon as I wanted to maintain some semblance of compatibility with Gnome (ie, gnome shell) but with a proper desktop orientated OS. I bought a laptop with a 1600*900 screen for a reason: I like smaller icons. I do not want everything to be made artificially huge so I can use a thumb instead of a mouse pointer as I did not get a touchscreen laptop.
I used Ubuntu before and didn't hate Unity, especially now it has got pretty stable and usable. I might even jump back to it in a few years time when I can afford a shit hot combined touch screen tablet ultrabook type thing (If you can hear this Mr Shuttleworth, just dig deep in your pocket for some loose change and I'll be back to Ubuntu in a jiffy).
Until then though I figured sticking with a desktop OS made sense and Mint seems to be the best fit for that at the moment.
To be fair, we're not hiding bin laden at west point.
That you know of. ;-)
If they were you would know from the smell by now :)
Show them this lousy website and tell them that is what happens when your company propagates lousy code - your existence goes to pot and your company is sold for very little money to a larger company who also doesn't care.
That should scare them straight.
Maybe instead of just bitching about it uselessly you could actually do something useful. Go here and help fix the awful slashdot code: http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/
After all, it is an open source project like any other.
The jury doesn't get to decide the sentence, which is really key to the whole thing.
Prosecutor:
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are only to decide on whether the law was broken, not if you don't like the law, not what you think the sentence should be. The only question is, did or did not the defendant steal a paper clip."
Jury (with no option): "Yes"
Judge: "20 years with no chance of parole!"
Sorry you miss an important point of a jury in most systems: They also decide if the person should be punished in the case at hand. They are free to decide that a guilty person is innocent if they do not think what they did should be against the law.
This is actually the case in the US too, although in the US the defence lawyer is not allowed to mention this in court. Here in the UK they are, and frequently it has been used to get people off even though they actually admitted to what they are accused of.
See the section here about the Official Secrets Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Ponting
I believe it used to be mentioned in the US frequently in trials of people accused of possession of weed so mentioning it was clamped down on although this is only a vague memory of mine from when I studied law decades ago. I just searched now and can't find any references on the web.
And, statistically speaking, his chances of acquittal were dim, to say the least.
Is that a problem with the prosecutor or a problem with the jury who should actually be doing the acquitting?
The prosecutors killed Swartz.
That is utterly moronic. The prosecutors just did their job. It is not their job to decide if the law is just, or decide if people the police (or anyone else who has gathered enough evidence) accuse of a crime is innocent. It is their job to go do their very best to get people the police accuse of a crime found guilty at any cost (even if their personal opinion is that they are innocent). It is the defence teams job to get their client off at any cost (even if he is guilty as hell).
The only people who get to decide guilt or whether a law is just (ie - fair) are the jury. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury
The only thing the prosecutor can say to drop a case is that there is insufficient evidence to support a prosecution (they of course may try to get you to plead guilty first to save face but that is fair game).
None of this is to say I think what happened to Aaron Swartz is fair. But the points above are the principles under which a adversarial legal system operates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system
In this case someone wanted to prosecute Aaron Swartz. The prosecutor looked at this and decided their was a realistic chance of a successful prosecution. Aaron chose not to wait for a jury to decide his guilt and killed himself. If he was innocent of any crime a jury would hopefully have found him so, but he lacked enough faith in the system I guess but I nor anybody else can be 100% about his reasons, especially since he left no explanation. We can make an educated guess, but that is very different from certainty.
I find the idea of blaming any one part of the system in this case to be wrong, especially as the part everyone blames was only doing what they were supposed to. When a guilty person gets off it is not the fault of their defence lawyer for doing their job too well, it is a breakdown of the system as a whole. I think the same applies in this case, blame the entire system not a single cog within it.
This is just one further example of a shortcoming within the US legal system but every legal system has short comings, inquisitorial legal systems have their downfalls too.
The big issue here though is actually particular to the US system in that in order to drive down costs, more and more cases are now settled without a jury being involved by the prosecution doing its damnedest to scare the defendant into a pragmatic guilty plea to save the cost of a trial. This happens in millions of cases and probably does save lots of money and most of time gets the right outcome, in this case some poor guy who was out of his depth was literally scared to death by it.
Maybe the solution here is to make jury trials the norm instead of the exception whatever the cost. Since juries were designed to prevent shit like this they have to be available to all, not just the few who can afford them.
Ubisoft can thank me later.
They will, the subpoena for the illegal copy you downloaded is in the post :)
Those are the actions of a compassion-less psychopath, and I for one don't think anyone like that deserves to be a Federal prosecutor.
But with the furore that certain right wing shock jocks whip the public into at times these are exactly the qualities you need to be elected.
Canadian prosecutor and judges release fugitive murder suspect to murder again
You did not provide any actual argument but I infer from the link that you think any system where they do not elect judges and prosecutors must be likely to have these sorts of problems?
I suppose it comes down to whether you think it is better than a system err's on the side of caution or heavy handedness (since you are never going to create a "perfect" justice system with no miscarriages of justice). So you would rather an innocent person was sent to prison or in this case extradited to another country and lose their child (I know in this case she was probably not innocent) rather than a guilty person possibly get off because the process failed?
The reality is that you can find a myriad of cases in any justice system where the process has failed to produce the correct outcome with hindsight. Since they will always happen it really does come down to the question of whether it is better to wrongly punish an innocent or that a guilty person escapes justice.
Most other countries tend now to view that criminal acts should be punished by the legal system or even recorded on the persons record if the guilt of the person in question can be established beyond all reasonable doubt. This means the in all cases the due process must be followed to the letter to as much as possible ensure that innocent people are not punished by the state or are punished in as few a cases is possible.
Interestingly but slightly off topic, if the mother in the case you post had come to the UK where I live we may never have sent back to the US to face justice as we will not extradite to countries where there is a possibility they will be killed as punishment for their crimes.
what stress? when it's certain you're going to get a teleport(or opening door) scare it's no longer a scare. it's just certain, it's just how the game works. you go into rooms and every third corner on the hallways something is going to teleport behind you and long enough dark portions always have enemies, because otherwise why add the hallway at all, right? to add beliviability to the stations layout, to make it into an adventure? why the fuck bother when we can just add closets full of zombies!
it was just too good at making you not want to play it at all. doom1 did the teleport enemies behind back trick couple of times too but it was never used so cheaply.
what do I want from a space station fps with PDA's as per story?? system shock. they would have done well to study the use of light/shadows in shock too.
The stress I meant was the generally confined spaces, but your right as well that they did seem to overuse the teleporting in monster trick.
I never understood why this was a conflict for programmers. If the white space isn't syntactic, can't your editor just rearrange the code the way you want it? Just run it through a pretty printer before you work on it.
Someone else has told you why this is stupid idea but only in 7 words, so I wanted to elaborate: Your approach means that when you check the code back into your chosen versioning system every single line will come back as changed rather than just the lines you changed. That means you have to spend more time figuring out what was actually being changed.
You might as well change every line to have a different carriage return format while your in there just for kicks. Ok, it is trivial in both cases to work around, but why cause your co-workers any extra hassle what so ever. Instead try and make things as easy for them as you possibly can.
Daikatana and Alice were far from perfect, but they're still more enjoyable than Doom 3.
I think you hit the nail on the head there, but possibly not in the way you mean.
Doom3 was an absolute masterpiece of atmospheric gaming, but it was just too much. It set your nerves on edge in a way that meant playing for more than an hour or so was just too stressful. I love the levels, the monsters, the story (ok, its basic but what do you want from a FPS) but I just find playing it burns me out too quickly. It is just too good at making you feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic without any respite.
I was just thinking back to Doom as I type this and from memory the big difference is that Doom had more variety with some levels set outside or in huge cavernous high ceilinged spaces. This variety is what made it great as it certainly had plenty of claustrophobia inducing levels too.
No need for courts.
Megaupload is down; mission accomplished.
Not quite. Kim Dot Com is already planning on creating a replacement.
I am 100% sure that the feds would very much also like to leave him rotting in jail for a few years in the US and also claw back all his assets as proceeds of crime to leave him destitute when he was released.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs in this case the reality is that if DoJ just wanted to seize his domain name and shut down his site they could have done that far more easily without going to the lengths they did. Nope, they wanted him in prison at the very least too, and if he had been extradited he would be as the right US judge and jury would have quite happily turned a blind eye to all the Fed's misdeeds in getting him in front of them.
Also, the FBI has a long history of trying to entrap people into commiting crimes (read the section on the case from during prohibition):
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/january-2012/avoiding-the-entrapment-defense-in-a-post-9-11-world
Actually, we are the Casino, since we are the ones paying out their bets.
THe problem is the game is rigged for the players.
The only way we can fix this is through law.
That would involve government passing a law that was meddling in the affairs of the free market. All the people saying how bad big government is would be up in arms about this.
I actually agree with you that laws preventing price speculation can be a good thing but the reality is that tea party types seem to think any increased regulation of business is tantamount to communism.
As soon as this idea runs up against gun-industry profits, it dies.
Not necessarily. By adding all this crap to guns it would make them more expensive and the higher value they would retail for would support greater profits. Just because something becomes more expensive does mean the company who produces it makes less money, look at oil companies.
With the weapons and training that a large fraction of the population has access to in the US, suppressing a rebellion here would be nearly impossible, even for the US Armed Forces.
Actually it would be easy since long before it could develop CNN and the like would brainwash most of the population into the idea that the rebels were actually communists.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
It's funny because a very noisy, home invasion type crime such is this is the only scenario to my mind where the right to keep a gun in your home is any use.
The problem is that it hardly ever happens in the manner you describe. What actually happens is that the guy knocks on the door, old lady answers it and is then taken by surprise and subdued. As she was surprised a gun would only help if she was carrying it in her hand and only if she could keep some distance between her and her attacker which is unlikely.
This to my mind is always the problem with the idea of guns as a method of preventing crime: criminals generally prefer to rob you on the quiet when you are out or to ambush you in such a way that nothing you can do (even if you are carrying a gun) will help you or put them at any risk.
Guns are not really much of an advantage in a hand to hand combat scenario. They only really come into their own when at ranges greater than a few feet.
I would be interested to know whether the amount of crimes they prevent actually balance the number of car jackings they make much easier (without a gun in your hand convincing someone not to just run you over would strike me as difficult) .
Incorrect. Steam is a DRM and distribution scheme, in that it binds your purchase to your account, and you need to be authenticated to access that account. Your non-DRM games are inaccessible unless you are logged in to Steam, either Online or Offline. I know, from personal experience, that Offline Mode isn't for when your connection fails, as it requires you to cache your credentials prior to going Offline to work. You're SOOL if your router craps out and you can't tether your smartphone to enable Offline Mode. It's for when you're taking your library away from your network connection in a planned fashion, e.g. your laptop on holiday.
Yup, and of course the real problem is not steam. Its that most people producing games that require payment hate people ripping them off so much they insist on some sort of DRM to try and prevent this (even if it doesn't work they still want it to try).
Saying this, I am going to go home now and close Steam, then try and browse to Braid in the file structure of my Steam installation. If I can run it without logging in to Steam, I will take all I've said about it back. I don't think that will be the case, though.
I dont either, they guy who created Braid used their online savegame feature so at the very least you will lose your progress. It is probably possible to develop a game and publish it on steam with no DRM but that nobody uses it. The question is do developers ever want to leave it all to trust after they have decided to charge people for the game in the first place?
Fuck you, it used to be cheap. We want it back that way. The rest of the world agreed to fund social programs and public transport through high fuel taxes. We did not.
Isn't it getting harder to find now though? I thought that was a large part of expensive price tag on the states where you guys don't tax it as much as us in Europe.
Canada has the same problem but compounded. Outside of major cities (and inside some) you can not expect to go anywhere after it snows unless the plow has been by OR you have all wheel drive/4x4 and a high ground clearance. Unfortunately you don't find those features on many high MPG cars and the plows don't hit residential or side streets until some time after noon. You'll also be hard pressed to find a boss in Canada that lets you take snow days ;)
In my very limited experience a 4*4 makes far less difference to driving in snow than keeping a set of snow chains in the boot / trunk providing you can stick to main roads. Ice is far more of a problem than snow since it hangs around for far longer.
The only time the high ground clearance of a 4*4 is useful is if you need it for driving over stuff (ie: off road) or if the snow is a foot deep every day. Even if the snow is deep generally once someone has driven down a road in a 4*4 (and snow chains) they clear the worst of the deep snow for drivers behind them in any vehicle so it is the ice and hill combo that is the worst hazard in cold weather, snow chains make that a doddle. Also, most places I know of where it snows heavily on main roads just get snow ploughs out to clear the worst of it pretty quickly.
Yes http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3344205&cid=42407663 and yes http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3344205&cid=42407763
APK
P.S.=> Take a read - be VERY "enlightened" on many fronts...
... apk
More like being owned by pointless and gratuitous use of bold tags. I thought using too many exclamation marks was bad enough but those posts both take the biscuit.
Maybe if you concentrated on posting stuff that wasn't so annoying to read people might not down mod you so much and you would be fine having an account like the rest of us. As it is your posts look like the demented ramblings of someone overly obsessed with markup.