Exactly! I've had a hard time finding any real details beyond hyperbole. So many people are screaming guilty and scum, but I can't find many specific details to conclude anything. Can anyone enlighten?
The only details anyone apart from him knows is that his neighbour was shot dead. McAfee seems to believe that his neighbour was killed by a government death squad that was looking for him but got the wrong house so refused to even talk to the police investigating the shooting. The police view hiding from them as suspicious (lol, name a police officer who wouldn't) so are becoming more and more keen to talk to him.
The only way we will ever find out anything close to the truth is if the cops catch the killer without his help and he is proved innocent or if he gets extradited back to Belize and decides to plead guilty. Neither are that likely to my mind.
Was running with this service disabled for a long time and didn't notice any ill effects except for missing NV Control panel - switching it to Manual or Automatic makes it work again.
Services.msc management console calls it "NVidia Display Driver Service". Just try stopping it first, if you're doubting an AC's word, and check how everything runs for you, then switch it to Disabled.
Just to second this from a real slashdot user:)
I disabled this as it was taking up valuable CPU time on my old gaming laptop. I never saw any ill effects at all. I am sure it must have some purpose but I never figured out what it was disabling it stopped me doing and I ran my PC like that for years.
Depending on how many years ago it was it might well have changed. In my experience, they're pretty quick to stop paying JSA now. The latest rules for sanctions came into force October 22 2012 and they can stop your benefit for up to three years.
I think it probably depends on where you sign on though. I don't see that being used much in Moss Side to be honest. When I did the occasional sign on in a dole office near where my parents were they were more pushy but in areas of the country where there is massive unemployment and deprivation these new abilities will hardly ever be used I reckon.
I would go so far as to say that it is absolutely your human right to die homeless if you are unwilling to work to support yourself. Welfare is great for those who are faced with a bad situation and need help to get out of it, but it's not meant to be a lifestyle choice.
It's nice to have a system where the least fortunate can afford basic living most of the time, but I wouldn't have a problem if it became much harder to claim benefits in the UK.
Have you ever actually claimed jobseekers allowance yourself?
Many years ago I did when I first left university, I signed on in Moss Side dole office, Manchester (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Side) before the area was redeveloped.
The funny thing is that even back then the dole were entitled to withhold your money if you were not actively looking for work, but they never did. The main reason seemed to me to be that the people working behind the counter had no great incentive to withhold your money, and every incentive not to in that if you take someone with no job, no money and then tell them they are not getting any dole that week they may react in a very violent manor. It is much easier for them to just let you sign on then go back to nattering to their colleague.
The only way it would work is if you gave the people in the dole office a real incentive to withhold peoples dole but this would bring about a completely different set of problems. The main one would be the people in the dole trying to take money away from people who were looking for work just so they guy in the dole could earn a bonus.
There are some people signing on who would see straight through this though and just break a chair over the guy in the dole offices head. That way they get fed for a week or so in prison instead. The problem with trying to take anything away from people on the dole is they don't have much to begin with so don't have a lot to lose if they break the law.
And two years ago, this would have been good advice. Now, it's pretty much "Don't buy games," full stop, since even boxed games off retail shelves require this malware to be installed these days[0]. They've managed to get themselves injected as a third-party into transactions that used to be a way to avoid them.
[0]Skyrim, Deus Ex, Darksiders 2, Borderlands 2 to name the ones I've, personally, passed on despite wanting to buy, because of this.
The problem here is not Steam. The problem is that the companies that produce those games refuse to make them available without some form of DRM as they do not trust people not to pirate them. If Steam did not exist then chances are the games on that list would be console only or would simply have some form of custom DRM included to limit the number of installs you could do or prevent you playing without being online or something instead.
Like it or not the people who produce most games were all set abandon the PC in favour of consoles a few years ago because they hate the idea of losing a single sale to piracy. They think we would go out and buy a console just to play their game on the platform they chose to develop it for, and it the case of the vast majority of their customers they are right.
People who care about open source or PCs or DRM are a minority as many games with shit DRM still sell by the bucketload. GTA4 used Games for windows for christ sake and people still bought it by the millions. Most people simply don't take the principle stance that you do so the companies just accept losing your business as a cost of making it harder for kids to pirate so making them pester their parents more for a legitimate copy.
God knows it this works or not, but I get the impression that the companies publishing games are wedded to DRM even if it nevers prevents a single piece of piracy or gains them a single sale. I also think that most people will never adopt the principled approach you take so you are fighting a losing battle.
Or it someone philosophically opposed to the idea of closed source software running on an open source OS?
People with that view do exist, and dismissing their point of view as a troll is a nice easy way of ignoring it without taking the time to think about it.
There is also the fact that the console they produce is going to be a legal mind field as it will invariably involve lots of closed source software running on top of an open source OS. Surely this is going to have the same issues around it that Tivo had as the people who produce the games are going to demand that the steam layer remains closed source, including its limited DRM that prevents people selling games second hand after the bought them?
Personally I have no trouble with closed source software be it running on linux or not. I also think Steam is great and would never sell games on to someone else after I finished with it even if I could so I think it is great that Steam is coming to linux.
I bet if you went and asked RMS he would strongly disagree though and would have very valid and heartfelt reasons why he though this was a step in the wrong direction.
Some people object to the mere idea of intellectual property existing at all so they would only be happy with Steam coming to linux if it was entirely open source and the only games available were also open source only. These people often frequent slashdot in case you hadn't noticed:)
The human eye can percieve far beyond 30fps. There are studies which show pilots picking out single frames from 500fps.
I was a hardcore gamer when I was younger, with some LAN achievements under my belt, and I dislike playing under 120hz, and prefered my CRT to be sitting at 140hz.
Nowadays most decent sized (26 inch+) LCD displays don't go above 60hz so your graphics card might tell you it is rendering at 200fps but everything above 60fps is being thrown away.
You certainly never get anything as high as 120hz anymore unfortunately. I just checked and the best I could find was 75hz vertical at 27inch. You might be able to go better than this if you stay small but you really need a screen size of 26inch for FPS gaming to pick people up at long distance if they are hiding behind stuff and only the top part of their head is visible.
Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video..
Apart from in the case of vinyl and cd's you can actually express it easily in physical terms: Due to the CD low frequency cut off being 20hz but record not having one as they store vibrations directly without digitising them. Humans can hear the difference because we can hear frequencies as low as 12hz in ideal conditions and a decent pair of speakers going down to 15hz or so.
"This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, " First of all the article only tests 2 cards accross Win7 and Win8. Considering that Win8 is basically just Win7 SP2, it's hardly fair to make that statement. Micro-stuttering an issue that mainly affects multi-GPU cards. Both Nvidia and ATI have had issues with this in their SLI and Crossfire cards. You can read more about it here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1317582
But if you avoid SLI then nvidia cards are fine, only ATI really suffers from this issue badly. See the link I posted above.
Anyone that actually knows anything about the GPU industry knows that both AMD and NVIDIA graphics suffer from these latency spikes, but it's not with all their SKUs. NVIDIA's 660 Ti works well in this case, but their 670 and 680 has more latency spikes than the competitive AMD cards do. The 7850 demonstrated here is an anomaly for AMD. None of their other cards do this. Look at past reviews from Techreport and you will see what I mean.
Sorry, but ATI suffer from this far more than Nvidia as apparently it is something nvidia actively try to improve:
I just went over to the Radeon because of the multimonitor support given off of one card. I have 5 monitors attached to my current video card and I like it that way. Before then I bought nVidia because they worked so well without issues. I have had multiple issues from radeon since purchasing it, but oh well I finally got it to work.
5 monitors is a bit of a weird setup for gaming though. I suppose their may be some games that use that many, but do they really require a super high frame rate an no latency spikes like we are discussing here though?
Personally I am an online FPS nut and dont think I would find 5 monitors that useful since most games do not let you up the viewing angle to 360 degrees. If games do start allowing a 180 degree viewing angle might up to 3 monitors though, but I can't see how 5 is useful.
Any serious gamer uses nVidia. Radeon has been behind for years and I am sure this issue isn't going to help.
Yup. Despite some slashdot mod trying to conduct an anti-nvidia reign of terror this is pretty much spot on (every post not slagging off nvidia in this thread is down modded at present, anything pro-ati is +5 insightful for no good reason).
I used to buy ATI due to the cheaper cost but since I moved to nvidia for a GTX6800 I have never looked back. Since then I have bought a couple of GTX280's (for different PC's) and more recently a GTX480 which is still going strong. I am sure nvidia have produced some bad cards over the years I just have not bought any.
The latency issue is not new though, I remember reading an article about this a year or so where the author had noticed that FPS number simply did not tell the whole story (http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking). The interesting thing about the article was that when he asked nvidia about this they seemed to be aware of the issue and actually did stuff to try and deal with it already which is why their cards came out better. The same article also said confirmed much of what I though about SLI in saying that SLI rigs suffer from it more than single card setups.
It will be interesting in future if reviewers can find a way of include the number of outlying frames in future FPS numbers. Maybe something like a error you record when taking a measurement in physics (ie: 12+/-0.2ms). It may need to be slightly more complicated than this though to show how many frames out of the averaging period came in at high numbers.
Simple. Kill the attack vector and the attack will stop.
Exactly.
The solution here is some sort of call home every time the app is used to get the data in question from central servers rather then store it locally. Now all we need is some catchy 3 letter acronym to call this amazing new technology.
As Kennedy said, it only takes one person willing to exchange his life for that of the President. You can make 99% of the population of the USA happy, and that still leaves you with 3 million dissatisfied people, one of whom may be a potential assassin.
And that does not even include the 6 or so billion foreigners who you might also annoy keeping the US citizens happy. What with the US being tourist destination you can never be 100% sure of keeping a disgruntled foreigner out at the border.
I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.
1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.
A blind trust and offshore account are two entirely different things.
A blind trust is designed to prevent you from being exposed to charges of insider trading by buying or selling stock in companies you have insider knowledge about. You can do that without having to hide it overseas in countries where the US tax man does not know how much is in there or what interest is being paid on it.
RMS is not being childish in regard to Ubuntu's recent play. He is just being RMS. Monetizing open source software by crippling it is like charging for slide rides on a public playground. It's wrong. (Even if you fix and wax the slide.) Buy an empty lot. Build your own slide. Sell all the rides you want.
Most of your post is pretty spot on but saying that adding ads is crippling something is a bit much.
Also, if companies were not allowed to use open source software to build products then open source would still be back in the stone age and utterly unusable by anyone who wanted an easy life. Ubuntu has done more to make linux useable as a desktop OS then anyone else has, sooner or later he should be able to a return on this although I very much doubt ubuntu will ever get a return covering the amount they have invested.
Ubuntu is ultimately there for Canonical's profit. We thought we could work with folks like that, but obviously we were too optimistic. The goals of the Free Software community are important, and will only be achieved if people like you devote your free time to making the non-profits work as the direct path to users.
Do you think it has reached brake even point yet? Do you think it ever will?
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.
When I just got emailed the moderation for this post it looked more like I had posted somethign about religon than about gun ownership. No doubt anyone posting anything about gun ownership being bad for society must be a troll in most readers minds not making a serious point.
Either that or the vast majority of slashdot readers can't grasp the moderation system not including "-1 disagree" for a reason.
Yes this makes perfect sense. Look at all the places that ban handguns like Chicago, DC, and London. No murders going on there, that's for sure.
There are far fewer murders in London than similar sized cities in the US. This quote has lots of stats that all seem fairly accurate even though it is a shit source: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100128231404AAGurXl (I would find a better one but my lunch break is nearly over, so don't really have time)
Not sure about Chicago but the difference is that in Chicago you can just bring a gun into the city from outside as there is no border to speak of so it is probably still pretty easy for a criminal to get a gun if they want one. In the UK we do still have a border that is policed by customs who do their best to stop weapons being smuggled in. That does not mean we have no guns in criminal hands but it does make it harder to get hold of one, even if only marginally.
We also have a law that means if you are caught with a firearm it is almost a certainty you will spend the next couple of years in prison. That seriously discourages gun ownership amongst all but the most hardened of criminals. In the US the social acceptability of gun ownership even in the cities you mention where it is ilegal is still a factor that you have to consider. Would a pot dealer in Chicago get an extra 5 years on his sentence just because the police found a unloaded gun in the back of a drawer somewhere when the raided him like in the UK?
Rugby tackling is much more head friendly. The ball carrier drops the ball almost immediately upon being touched by the defender.
Only if he wants to lose possesion and give it to the other team (which he does not). The aim is actually hold on to the ball when you are tackled then give it to one of your team mates behind you so they can try and score. Ideally you storm though tackle and keep running if you can by not going to ground.
By the way though, many rugby players do wear head protection that consists of a bit of padding designed to limit head trauma. Also, this study seems to indicate that a good concussion is just as common in a game of rugby: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155428/
It is illegal to tackle above the shoulders in rugby. You must also perform a tackle using your arms, not shoulder a player. We have very few cases of head trauma.
Pay particular attention to the bit about leading with your shoulder into their gut. You only grab them after you have slowed them sufficiently to hold on easily, first step is to dump their forward momentum as much as possible.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I've had a hard time finding any real details beyond hyperbole. So many people are screaming guilty and scum, but I can't find many specific details to conclude anything. Can anyone enlighten?
The only details anyone apart from him knows is that his neighbour was shot dead. McAfee seems to believe that his neighbour was killed by a government death squad that was looking for him but got the wrong house so refused to even talk to the police investigating the shooting. The police view hiding from them as suspicious (lol, name a police officer who wouldn't) so are becoming more and more keen to talk to him.
The only way we will ever find out anything close to the truth is if the cops catch the killer without his help and he is proved innocent or if he gets extradited back to Belize and decides to plead guilty. Neither are that likely to my mind.
Was running with this service disabled for a long time and didn't notice any ill effects except for missing NV Control panel - switching it to Manual or Automatic makes it work again.
Services.msc management console calls it "NVidia Display Driver Service". Just try stopping it first, if you're doubting an AC's word, and check how everything runs for you, then switch it to Disabled.
Just to second this from a real slashdot user :)
I disabled this as it was taking up valuable CPU time on my old gaming laptop. I never saw any ill effects at all. I am sure it must have some purpose but I never figured out what it was disabling it stopped me doing and I ran my PC like that for years.
Depending on how many years ago it was it might well have changed. In my experience, they're pretty quick to stop paying JSA now. The latest rules for sanctions came into force October 22 2012 and they can stop your benefit for up to three years.
I think it probably depends on where you sign on though. I don't see that being used much in Moss Side to be honest. When I did the occasional sign on in a dole office near where my parents were they were more pushy but in areas of the country where there is massive unemployment and deprivation these new abilities will hardly ever be used I reckon.
You don't get money for no labor on any job, why should a guaranteed safety net be labor-free?
Because it is cheaper to pay them a pittance to keep them out of trouble than it is to lock them in prison if they start trying to steal food.
I would go so far as to say that it is absolutely your human right to die homeless if you are unwilling to work to support yourself. Welfare is great for those who are faced with a bad situation and need help to get out of it, but it's not meant to be a lifestyle choice.
It's nice to have a system where the least fortunate can afford basic living most of the time, but I wouldn't have a problem if it became much harder to claim benefits in the UK.
Have you ever actually claimed jobseekers allowance yourself?
Many years ago I did when I first left university, I signed on in Moss Side dole office, Manchester (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Side) before the area was redeveloped.
The funny thing is that even back then the dole were entitled to withhold your money if you were not actively looking for work, but they never did. The main reason seemed to me to be that the people working behind the counter had no great incentive to withhold your money, and every incentive not to in that if you take someone with no job, no money and then tell them they are not getting any dole that week they may react in a very violent manor. It is much easier for them to just let you sign on then go back to nattering to their colleague.
The only way it would work is if you gave the people in the dole office a real incentive to withhold peoples dole but this would bring about a completely different set of problems. The main one would be the people in the dole trying to take money away from people who were looking for work just so they guy in the dole could earn a bonus.
There are some people signing on who would see straight through this though and just break a chair over the guy in the dole offices head. That way they get fed for a week or so in prison instead. The problem with trying to take anything away from people on the dole is they don't have much to begin with so don't have a lot to lose if they break the law.
Have you considered that, perhaps, some of us have already thoroughly reviewed that point, and found it to be nonsensical?
Yup, I have done the same. I still recognise it as a valid point of view rather than someone trolling though.
Not anymore so than Android.
Good point, I had not thought about that as a similar example.
And two years ago, this would have been good advice. Now, it's pretty much "Don't buy games," full stop, since even boxed games off retail shelves require this malware to be installed these days[0]. They've managed to get themselves injected as a third-party into transactions that used to be a way to avoid them.
[0]Skyrim, Deus Ex, Darksiders 2, Borderlands 2 to name the ones I've, personally, passed on despite wanting to buy, because of this.
The problem here is not Steam. The problem is that the companies that produce those games refuse to make them available without some form of DRM as they do not trust people not to pirate them. If Steam did not exist then chances are the games on that list would be console only or would simply have some form of custom DRM included to limit the number of installs you could do or prevent you playing without being online or something instead.
Like it or not the people who produce most games were all set abandon the PC in favour of consoles a few years ago because they hate the idea of losing a single sale to piracy. They think we would go out and buy a console just to play their game on the platform they chose to develop it for, and it the case of the vast majority of their customers they are right.
People who care about open source or PCs or DRM are a minority as many games with shit DRM still sell by the bucketload. GTA4 used Games for windows for christ sake and people still bought it by the millions. Most people simply don't take the principle stance that you do so the companies just accept losing your business as a cost of making it harder for kids to pirate so making them pester their parents more for a legitimate copy.
God knows it this works or not, but I get the impression that the companies publishing games are wedded to DRM even if it nevers prevents a single piece of piracy or gains them a single sale. I also think that most people will never adopt the principled approach you take so you are fighting a losing battle.
Time to do some Q/A ? :)
Or get rid of that stupid pedantic flag and tell us if it works?
It's called trolling. Ask for it by name.
Or it someone philosophically opposed to the idea of closed source software running on an open source OS?
People with that view do exist, and dismissing their point of view as a troll is a nice easy way of ignoring it without taking the time to think about it.
There is also the fact that the console they produce is going to be a legal mind field as it will invariably involve lots of closed source software running on top of an open source OS. Surely this is going to have the same issues around it that Tivo had as the people who produce the games are going to demand that the steam layer remains closed source, including its limited DRM that prevents people selling games second hand after the bought them?
Personally I have no trouble with closed source software be it running on linux or not. I also think Steam is great and would never sell games on to someone else after I finished with it even if I could so I think it is great that Steam is coming to linux.
I bet if you went and asked RMS he would strongly disagree though and would have very valid and heartfelt reasons why he though this was a step in the wrong direction.
Some people object to the mere idea of intellectual property existing at all so they would only be happy with Steam coming to linux if it was entirely open source and the only games available were also open source only. These people often frequent slashdot in case you hadn't noticed :)
The human eye can percieve far beyond 30fps. There are studies which show pilots picking out single frames from 500fps.
I was a hardcore gamer when I was younger, with some LAN achievements under my belt, and I dislike playing under 120hz, and prefered my CRT to be sitting at 140hz.
Nowadays most decent sized (26 inch+) LCD displays don't go above 60hz so your graphics card might tell you it is rendering at 200fps but everything above 60fps is being thrown away.
You certainly never get anything as high as 120hz anymore unfortunately. I just checked and the best I could find was 75hz vertical at 27inch. You might be able to go better than this if you stay small but you really need a screen size of 26inch for FPS gaming to pick people up at long distance if they are hiding behind stuff and only the top part of their head is visible.
Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video..
Apart from in the case of vinyl and cd's you can actually express it easily in physical terms: Due to the CD low frequency cut off being 20hz but record not having one as they store vibrations directly without digitising them. Humans can hear the difference because we can hear frequencies as low as 12hz in ideal conditions and a decent pair of speakers going down to 15hz or so.
"This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, "
First of all the article only tests 2 cards accross Win7 and Win8. Considering that Win8 is basically just Win7 SP2, it's hardly fair to make that statement. Micro-stuttering an issue that mainly affects multi-GPU cards. Both Nvidia and ATI have had issues with this in their SLI and Crossfire cards. You can read more about it here:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1317582
But if you avoid SLI then nvidia cards are fine, only ATI really suffers from this issue badly. See the link I posted above.
Anyone that actually knows anything about the GPU industry knows that both AMD and NVIDIA graphics suffer from these latency spikes, but it's not with all their SKUs. NVIDIA's 660 Ti works well in this case, but their 670 and 680 has more latency spikes than the competitive AMD cards do. The 7850 demonstrated here is an anomaly for AMD. None of their other cards do this. Look at past reviews from Techreport and you will see what I mean.
Sorry, but ATI suffer from this far more than Nvidia as apparently it is something nvidia actively try to improve:
http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking
You have to read the full article, but even though it is old now it sound like it is still relevant.
I just went over to the Radeon because of the multimonitor support given off of one card. I have 5 monitors attached to my current video card and I like it that way. Before then I bought nVidia because they worked so well without issues. I have had multiple issues from radeon since purchasing it, but oh well I finally got it to work.
5 monitors is a bit of a weird setup for gaming though. I suppose their may be some games that use that many, but do they really require a super high frame rate an no latency spikes like we are discussing here though?
Personally I am an online FPS nut and dont think I would find 5 monitors that useful since most games do not let you up the viewing angle to 360 degrees. If games do start allowing a 180 degree viewing angle might up to 3 monitors though, but I can't see how 5 is useful.
Any serious gamer uses nVidia. Radeon has been behind for years and I am sure this issue isn't going to help.
Yup. Despite some slashdot mod trying to conduct an anti-nvidia reign of terror this is pretty much spot on (every post not slagging off nvidia in this thread is down modded at present, anything pro-ati is +5 insightful for no good reason).
I used to buy ATI due to the cheaper cost but since I moved to nvidia for a GTX6800 I have never looked back. Since then I have bought a couple of GTX280's (for different PC's) and more recently a GTX480 which is still going strong. I am sure nvidia have produced some bad cards over the years I just have not bought any.
The latency issue is not new though, I remember reading an article about this a year or so where the author had noticed that FPS number simply did not tell the whole story (http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking). The interesting thing about the article was that when he asked nvidia about this they seemed to be aware of the issue and actually did stuff to try and deal with it already which is why their cards came out better. The same article also said confirmed much of what I though about SLI in saying that SLI rigs suffer from it more than single card setups.
It will be interesting in future if reviewers can find a way of include the number of outlying frames in future FPS numbers. Maybe something like a error you record when taking a measurement in physics (ie: 12+/-0.2ms). It may need to be slightly more complicated than this though to show how many frames out of the averaging period came in at high numbers.
Simple. Kill the attack vector and the attack will stop.
Exactly.
The solution here is some sort of call home every time the app is used to get the data in question from central servers rather then store it locally. Now all we need is some catchy 3 letter acronym to call this amazing new technology.
As Kennedy said, it only takes one person willing to exchange his life for that of the President. You can make 99% of the population of the USA happy, and that still leaves you with 3 million dissatisfied people, one of whom may be a potential assassin.
And that does not even include the 6 or so billion foreigners who you might also annoy keeping the US citizens happy. What with the US being tourist destination you can never be 100% sure of keeping a disgruntled foreigner out at the border.
Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.
1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.
A blind trust and offshore account are two entirely different things.
A blind trust is designed to prevent you from being exposed to charges of insider trading by buying or selling stock in companies you have insider knowledge about. You can do that without having to hide it overseas in countries where the US tax man does not know how much is in there or what interest is being paid on it.
RMS is not being childish in regard to Ubuntu's recent play. He is just being RMS. Monetizing open source software by crippling it is like charging for slide rides on a public playground. It's wrong. (Even if you fix and wax the slide.) Buy an empty lot. Build your own slide. Sell all the rides you want.
Most of your post is pretty spot on but saying that adding ads is crippling something is a bit much.
Also, if companies were not allowed to use open source software to build products then open source would still be back in the stone age and utterly unusable by anyone who wanted an easy life. Ubuntu has done more to make linux useable as a desktop OS then anyone else has, sooner or later he should be able to a return on this although I very much doubt ubuntu will ever get a return covering the amount they have invested.
Ubuntu is ultimately there for Canonical's profit. We thought we could work with folks like that, but obviously we were too optimistic. The goals of the Free Software community are important, and will only be achieved if people like you devote your free time to making the non-profits work as the direct path to users.
Do you think it has reached brake even point yet? Do you think it ever will?
Of MSNBC's race card.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.
When I just got emailed the moderation for this post it looked more like I had posted somethign about religon than about gun ownership. No doubt anyone posting anything about gun ownership being bad for society must be a troll in most readers minds not making a serious point.
Either that or the vast majority of slashdot readers can't grasp the moderation system not including "-1 disagree" for a reason.
Yes this makes perfect sense. Look at all the places that ban handguns like Chicago, DC, and London. No murders going on there, that's for sure.
There are far fewer murders in London than similar sized cities in the US. This quote has lots of stats that all seem fairly accurate even though it is a shit source:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100128231404AAGurXl (I would find a better one but my lunch break is nearly over, so don't really have time)
Not sure about Chicago but the difference is that in Chicago you can just bring a gun into the city from outside as there is no border to speak of so it is probably still pretty easy for a criminal to get a gun if they want one. In the UK we do still have a border that is policed by customs who do their best to stop weapons being smuggled in. That does not mean we have no guns in criminal hands but it does make it harder to get hold of one, even if only marginally.
We also have a law that means if you are caught with a firearm it is almost a certainty you will spend the next couple of years in prison. That seriously discourages gun ownership amongst all but the most hardened of criminals. In the US the social acceptability of gun ownership even in the cities you mention where it is ilegal is still a factor that you have to consider. Would a pot dealer in Chicago get an extra 5 years on his sentence just because the police found a unloaded gun in the back of a drawer somewhere when the raided him like in the UK?
Rugby tackling is much more head friendly. The ball carrier drops the ball almost immediately upon being touched by the defender.
Only if he wants to lose possesion and give it to the other team (which he does not). The aim is actually hold on to the ball when you are tackled then give it to one of your team mates behind you so they can try and score. Ideally you storm though tackle and keep running if you can by not going to ground.
By the way though, many rugby players do wear head protection that consists of a bit of padding designed to limit head trauma. Also, this study seems to indicate that a good concussion is just as common in a game of rugby: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155428/
It is illegal to tackle above the shoulders in rugby. You must also perform a tackle using your arms, not shoulder a player. We have very few cases of head trauma.
Read this:
http://www.wikihow.com/Rugby-Tackle-Everyone-That-Runs-at-You
Pay particular attention to the bit about leading with your shoulder into their gut. You only grab them after you have slowed them sufficiently to hold on easily, first step is to dump their forward momentum as much as possible.
Of MSNBC's race card.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.