The point is that it sounds like they untimately want to be an "independent" nation.
If you read their site, it might help. Their goal is to concentrate enough liberty-minded people in one place, that they would be able to make a difference in the government and secure electoral votes.
The reason it is happening is because some Libertarians are getting fed up with how sparsely distributed they are, and they realize that they could better serve the cause of freedom if they concentrated their efforts. They are not proposing secession.
As bad as I think it is here sometimes, I then step back and try and think what is it like for those who don't have the freedom's we do.
I have to agree with this, but I also have to put forth that anything can be improved on, including our existing freedoms (that are being attacked day by day). One day, you might thank these people for creating a place where you can escape some particular oppression that ends up haunting you. Who knows?
In my (biased) opinion, if some people are dissatisfied with the state or direction of the current system, rather than begrudge them into compliance, I applaud them for peacefully taking the matter into their own hands. Finding an innovative solution to political problems of the day was one of the first triumphs of the American spirit, and I'm glad to see it being carried forth.
I think you replied out of context. My reply was to someone who was claiming that there was no rational reason to use SCSI under any but the rarest circumstances. My claim was that there are some very good reasons that SCSI should be used in various situations, not that everyone should use it for everything!
With UDMA CPU ussage for IDE has been cut down to the point where it doesn't noticably slow down the system.
Yep, though the CPU usage is still higher than an intelligent SCSI controller, you won't see drag when copying a file on your ATA system anymore. Now, try opening multiple programs and doing multiple simultaneous data transfers, while swapping to the same disk. Hint: Just because YOU haven't been disappointed with IDE, doesn't mean that it doesn't have its shortcomings.
Also IDE drives are NOT "throwaway" quality. IDE drive manufacturers have to maintain very low failure rates because of the razor thin margins they live on (as low as $1 a drive).
Note that this discussion is about DVD drives, not hard drives. In any case, ATA drives do fail in volumes more than SCSI disks, due to at least 2 common reasons: stress due to desktop power management, and more recently electrical anomalies caused by the popular use of rounded ATA cables. ATA disks are also rushed to market compared to SCSI disks, and occasionally suffer from severe issues, like the Deskstar 75GXP series, the WDC 20AA series, and the recent Fujitsu problem. Because of the "razor-thin" margins that you quote, these manufacturers are also quite unwilling to service their customers besides what is absolutely required of them. I'm not saying the support for SCSI disks is any better, but IDE disks aren't the utopia you present them to be.
As for price, last I checked the price per GB of SCSI drives was 4-5x that of IDE.
Yep. If the point that you're trying to prove is that IDE drives are more cost-effective for mass storage, then this is a good point. However, it still does not address reliability and performance concerns.
No power user who isn't either sunning a server or a flaming elitist (hint) would use SCSI on the desktop.
Nice jab, but this is again another broad and baseless statement. Why would someone who would derive a benefit in the work from the strengths of SCSI decide not to use it? That would not be a rational decision. SCSI is an important component of my (mixed) system, because I was being limited by the drawbacks of IDE in personal media production. Does this really qualify as grounds for an ad-hominem attack to label me an elitist?
I've never had any such hassles with IDE.
Personal anecdotes don't count for a whole lot. There are plenty of people on tons of newsgroups and web forums that would disagree with you. If we really want to gauge which is the more useful interface, a poll is the correct option.
If they're unhappy with the power of corporations, there are appropriate forums to express their angst.
They are not expressing angst over the power of corporations. They are making a statement that there is a large group of individuals for whom the federal goverment invoking fascist policies to protect corporate profits will not be tolerated.
You also haven't shown that angsty whining on web forums ever had any significant effect on policy. If it's not effecting change, then what's the point? you may as well be talking to a hole in the wall.
The FSP, seeing that current strategies for dealing with government power, and government-sponsored corporate power, are getting precisely nowhere, decided to take a radical new approach to solving the problem. For that, they should be ridiculed?
Family. I can't convince my parents, and my wife's parents to pick up and move. I don't want to seperate my children from their grandparents.
Where's the problem? It's not like the Free State is going to have a big stone wall built between it and the rest of the US.
You can still visit your parents anytime, and heck, they might move eventually too. They are targeting mostly young people without families and with a political axe to grind (like yours truly), or older idealists who haven't been compromised by life's jagged edges. They are not necessarily assuming that Joe America with a 4-person family and a home in Suburbia, IL is going to up and move to Vermont.
Also, a misunderstanding of the project is not that it's secessionist, more than it is about building a place where individual freedom is held in the highest regard (like it was when the US was founded). A goal is interoperability with the US, at least as far as it is compatible with what the US federal government has become. so, it's not like participants are going to have this invisible barrier between them and the outside world.
After opting out of everything, I bet they'll still want protecting by the US Army, Navy and Air Force.
What is the federal government supposed to be, if not to defend the land from outside forces and to defend people from destroying each other's individual freedoms?
I think that it would be perfectly consistent of their Libertarian viewpoint to accept military protection from the federal government. They just won't accept abridgement of individual freedom in trade for it.
The only place SCSI is marginally useful is in RAID systems on your server, and even there it's only cost effective if you are running a system with thousands of users.
A pretty bold claim to make.
SCSI is designed for efficiency, and produces less CPU load than IDE for the majority of tasks.
SCSI can disconnect busy devices from the channel, not locking it out from use by other devices, and thus not practically requiring a whole bus for every device you use.
SCSI command structure is well-documented, consistent, simple to program, and generic enough to support almost any device that is capable of transfering data.
SCSI has had built-in data integrity features for years, which were only recently introduced with Ultra ATA.
Many SCSI devices are hotswappable in the case of a failure.
The SCSI hostadapter/target relationship is a more flexible relationship than the IDE interface/device relationship, and can be more useful where unique solutions are required (such as accessing a device from two machines simultaneously).
SCSI equipment tends to be more expensive, but the difference is that it is not throwaway, consumer-quality equipment. Many people appreciate having this choice.
No, you're not magically going to burn a sincle CD faster with a SCSI drive. But using speed as the only rationale is not looking at the whole picture. It's sort of like saying that the dual 600MHz Origin server is less worthwhile than my PC, because my PC crunches numbers faster and is cheaper.
If the extra $100 I pay for a SCSI drive means that I will enjoy never having to replace the drive; never having to deal with a software compatibility hassle; never having to deal with an interoperability hassle with another device in my loaded system; and never having less than the best performance that I expect from the equipment, then that's an extra fee that I will be happy to pay and not look back.
The choice is up to the individual, but all these people bemoaning those who have preferred, and still prefer, SCSI drives is sort of ridiculous. Isn't a diverse marketplace supposed to be a good thing?
Very frequently, ISPs and core traffic folks filter these nuisance ports at their routers, so it's not as widespread of a problem anymore (e.g., you're not very likely to be exploited via NetBIOS from some kid in Romania).
However, this does not mitigate or even lessen the need for a firewall, especially on a cable network. All of your neighbours, who are presumably behind the same router as you, have unfettered access to each other's nodes, as well as yours, and it only takes one motivated chap to ruin your day through an exploit or an insecure service.
A problem that has been increasing lately is electrical failure in ATA drives, due to the increased use of rounded ribbon cables.
Rounded ribbon cables do not cancel out the crosstalk that 80-conductor cables were designed to addresses, and thus allow a lot more "fuzz" and voltage spikes to be induced on the cable. Eventually, a voltage high enough to damage a semiconductor is induced on the cable through variable environmental factors, and the drive stops working.
I've had to work on enough machines with commercial rounded-ribbon cables, and dead hard drives, that I'd never consider putting one in my own system, no matter how k-rad or kewl they make the inside of the system look, or how much they help cooling. Risking my data for a few degrees ambient just isn't worth it.
Unfortunately, even though user-defined style sheets as well as proxies are perfectly legal, Gator substituting its ads for competitors' ads somehow earned it a court injunction. Figure that one out.
MS Rep: Wait a minute...alternatives?? Alternatives???.... MUHAHAHAHA!!! All your alternatives are belong to...(cough), wait, please excuse me for a moment.
This is not correct... PSX/PS2 modchips have never used Sony BIOS to accomplish protection defeating; they modify the protection data as it is transmitted across the system bus.
The gamecube mod that exists is also a microcontroller mod.
Xbox is only a copyright infringement case because they are using a cracked BIOS to defeat the copy protection. Not that anyone is selling the chips with the code on it, but because they are apparently marketing the blank flash devices for that purpose.
I'm all ears, but "MHZ Myth" "MHZ Myth" just gets stupider every time you say it.
Take a computer architecture class, and you'll find that the clock speed of a processor is not a measure of the performance of that processor. It's the efficiency of the processor that matters, which is measured in IPC, the "instructions per cycle" that it can execute.
A 2.8GHz CPU that can only get 1 IPC on average is no better than a 700MHz CPU that averages 4 IPC.
And we all know exactly how flawed the reasoning processes of zealots are, don't we?
Not really. Please provide examples that clearly back up your claims:
1) that the "onerous" GPL "obviously" destroyed *BSD development.
2) that the "only developers who are willing to develop GPLed code are religious zealots".
I think you're just making excuses for yourself, Mr. Crock.
Why do these warez arguments always turn into counter-productive ad-hominem attacks? Because I defend the idea that having access to this software without paying the entry fee is not necessarily universally bad for the company providing it, that automatically makes me a warez-leeching freak?
Check your logic please before you start spouting off rhetoric, pal. What about peeking through a knothole, and watching a baseball game that you didn't pay the entry fee for? After all, those players are being paid X amount of dollars to provide the game for paying viewers, and therefore you are stealing from them by watching the game without paying. So is it wrong to do so, even though the facilities exist to do so with ease? If it's wrong, is it wrong enough to sentence them to years in prison over it?
IRC channels and P2P are just a more modern form of the sandlot knothole. And I saw plenty of kids getting chased away from knotholes, but I never saw them tossed in prison for years over it. I also would put forth that some professional players of today never would have been interested in baseball in the first, if they hadn't watched a game through the knothole.
Of course, the piracy == stealing crowd isn't a big fan of analogies anyway, as they tend to prefer spewing the corporate drivel they've been fed all their lives, without stopping to examine the real effects of piracy. I think if people would quit being self-righteous zealots for a moment, and stop and examine the facts, they might find that the facts don't really match up with what the corporate party line claims.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason it is happening is because some Libertarians are getting fed up with how sparsely distributed they are, and they realize that they could better serve the cause of freedom if they concentrated their efforts. They are not proposing secession.
Best and Worst List
It is a summary of the opinion of a data recovery house in which types, brands, and models of HDD's are the best and worst.
The Worst list is pretty out of date, but the general comments seem to be accurate.
In my (biased) opinion, if some people are dissatisfied with the state or direction of the current system, rather than begrudge them into compliance, I applaud them for peacefully taking the matter into their own hands. Finding an innovative solution to political problems of the day was one of the first triumphs of the American spirit, and I'm glad to see it being carried forth.
You also haven't shown that angsty whining on web forums ever had any significant effect on policy. If it's not effecting change, then what's the point? you may as well be talking to a hole in the wall.
The FSP, seeing that current strategies for dealing with government power, and government-sponsored corporate power, are getting precisely nowhere, decided to take a radical new approach to solving the problem. For that, they should be ridiculed?
You can still visit your parents anytime, and heck, they might move eventually too. They are targeting mostly young people without families and with a political axe to grind (like yours truly), or older idealists who haven't been compromised by life's jagged edges. They are not necessarily assuming that Joe America with a 4-person family and a home in Suburbia, IL is going to up and move to Vermont.
Also, a misunderstanding of the project is not that it's secessionist, more than it is about building a place where individual freedom is held in the highest regard (like it was when the US was founded). A goal is interoperability with the US, at least as far as it is compatible with what the US federal government has become. so, it's not like participants are going to have this invisible barrier between them and the outside world.
At least as far as I understand it 8)
I think that it would be perfectly consistent of their Libertarian viewpoint to accept military protection from the federal government. They just won't accept abridgement of individual freedom in trade for it.
It's already been merged. ALSA 0.9 API is supposedly the final API that will be released as 1.0, so no applications will break between now and then.
No, you're not magically going to burn a sincle CD faster with a SCSI drive. But using speed as the only rationale is not looking at the whole picture. It's sort of like saying that the dual 600MHz Origin server is less worthwhile than my PC, because my PC crunches numbers faster and is cheaper.
If the extra $100 I pay for a SCSI drive means that I will enjoy never having to replace the drive; never having to deal with a software compatibility hassle; never having to deal with an interoperability hassle with another device in my loaded system; and never having less than the best performance that I expect from the equipment, then that's an extra fee that I will be happy to pay and not look back.
The choice is up to the individual, but all these people bemoaning those who have preferred, and still prefer, SCSI drives is sort of ridiculous. Isn't a diverse marketplace supposed to be a good thing?
However, this does not mitigate or even lessen the need for a firewall, especially on a cable network. All of your neighbours, who are presumably behind the same router as you, have unfettered access to each other's nodes, as well as yours, and it only takes one motivated chap to ruin your day through an exploit or an insecure service.
Rounded ribbon cables do not cancel out the crosstalk that 80-conductor cables were designed to addresses, and thus allow a lot more "fuzz" and voltage spikes to be induced on the cable. Eventually, a voltage high enough to damage a semiconductor is induced on the cable through variable environmental factors, and the drive stops working.
I've had to work on enough machines with commercial rounded-ribbon cables, and dead hard drives, that I'd never consider putting one in my own system, no matter how k-rad or kewl they make the inside of the system look, or how much they help cooling. Risking my data for a few degrees ambient just isn't worth it.
Communism is mandated economic equity. This is a much different idea from social equity, which is commonly believed to be a natural equity these days.
Unfortunately, even though user-defined style sheets as well as proxies are perfectly legal, Gator substituting its ads for competitors' ads somehow earned it a court injunction. Figure that one out.
I (apt-get install blender)'d, and it took all of ten seconds to be ready to use.
And if these things don't sell, the RIAA will blame it on piracy... nevermind that they are supposedly un-copyable.
This is not correct... PSX/PS2 modchips have never used Sony BIOS to accomplish protection defeating; they modify the protection data as it is transmitted across the system bus.
The gamecube mod that exists is also a microcontroller mod.
Xbox is only a copyright infringement case because they are using a cracked BIOS to defeat the copy protection. Not that anyone is selling the chips with the code on it, but because they are apparently marketing the blank flash devices for that purpose.
Take a computer architecture class, and you'll find that the clock speed of a processor is not a measure of the performance of that processor. It's the efficiency of the processor that matters, which is measured in IPC, the "instructions per cycle" that it can execute.
A 2.8GHz CPU that can only get 1 IPC on average is no better than a 700MHz CPU that averages 4 IPC.
1) that the "onerous" GPL "obviously" destroyed *BSD development.
2) that the "only developers who are willing to develop GPLed code are religious zealots".
Thanks!
Why do these warez arguments always turn into counter-productive ad-hominem attacks? Because I defend the idea that having access to this software without paying the entry fee is not necessarily universally bad for the company providing it, that automatically makes me a warez-leeching freak?
Check your logic please before you start spouting off rhetoric, pal. What about peeking through a knothole, and watching a baseball game that you didn't pay the entry fee for? After all, those players are being paid X amount of dollars to provide the game for paying viewers, and therefore you are stealing from them by watching the game without paying. So is it wrong to do so, even though the facilities exist to do so with ease? If it's wrong, is it wrong enough to sentence them to years in prison over it?
IRC channels and P2P are just a more modern form of the sandlot knothole. And I saw plenty of kids getting chased away from knotholes, but I never saw them tossed in prison for years over it. I also would put forth that some professional players of today never would have been interested in baseball in the first, if they hadn't watched a game through the knothole.
Of course, the piracy == stealing crowd isn't a big fan of analogies anyway, as they tend to prefer spewing the corporate drivel they've been fed all their lives, without stopping to examine the real effects of piracy. I think if people would quit being self-righteous zealots for a moment, and stop and examine the facts, they might find that the facts don't really match up with what the corporate party line claims.
Uh, name those exploits, and I'll let you know where Slashdot posted them. KTHX