I also said the gameplay was agonizing and boring.
Ha! I didn't see that or thought you were saying the bad graphics made it seem boring. Okay, in my reply I was only considering those games that you can go back to that were actually classics, not the ones that really do suck.:)
While my father is STILL in denial, I have accepted the truth. My fond memories of that game are gone forever.
So... your fond memories of the game were tied entirely to the quality of the graphics? From your description, it sounded like you were enjoying the gameplay and all the interesting things you could do, like rob money from the bank.
I gotta say, I find that perspective kinda odd. Did you really think a game from the early 80s would really stand the test of time graphically speaking? If you really only enjoyed it for the graphics, then you should have probably realized that, much like a modern game that gets by based solely on its high-poly-count models and shiny pixel shaders that it would hold up badly.
I have plenty of games that tweak my sense of nostalgia, but they're always ones that stand up due to the gameplay, not the graphics. I know the graphics of C64 Archon, King's Bounty, Legend of Zelda, and Bard's Tale are all pretty much hideous to look at, even if at the time I thought they were beautiful. But it's the underlying game that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I've replayed all of those games and not felt that they had truly lost anything of value.
Because a supervillain's ultimate weakness is always their arrogance. "Ha ha ha! There is no way a puny mortal like you could defeat me, even with all the nuke-blaster ammo in the world! Here, have a truck load! And I'll heal you to maximum health first! And I'll stand above pits of the only substance that can harm me, with levers that drop the floor into the substance! Ha ha ha-- What? Impossible!!!! I cannot be defea---"
Okay, so their ultimate weakness is that they are stupid.
So on one hand we have memory manufacturers who have colluded to maintain high prices of memory, on the other hand, we have Rambus which has used submarine patents to gain humongous royalties subverting JEDEC process.
Yeah, I think a lot of people -- investors in particular -- were fooled into thinking that either Rambus was clean or that they were going to come away with the appearance of cleanliness due to them winning quite a few lawsuits vs the RAM manufacturers. I'll admit I was rather taken aback by the amount of nasty behavior on the part of the Dramurai that was revealed in the course of these lawsuits. However I do not subscribe to the philosophy that if you have discovered the bad guy, then anyone who opposes them must be a good guy. In fact it's more likely that they too are bad guys, and in Rambus' case I have maintained the belief that they are bad guys all along. But only someone completely divorced from the actual market being affected -- like an investor -- would so easily forgive and forget Rambus' attempt to force us into the devil's bargain of either paying too much for RDRAM or paying way, way too much for DDR.
But I'm not holding my breath on actual substantive punishment.
regardless of whether the U.S. has 3 or 300 million inhabitants who have a relevant opinion, 3000 is enough to form confidence intervals of very good accuracy.
Central Limit Theorem notwithstanding, I'd say you have a severe accuracy problem if you're taking a sample set of size 3000 from a population of size 3.:)
You certainly don't give up as easily if a valuable card is drawn for your ante.
But thinking about that is exactly why I never played ante.
The valuable cards were usually the more powerful cards, since even the rarest of cards wasn't worth much if it was crap. Often these valuable cards would form the foundation of a deck. So not only did you turn over a valuable card for your ante, you are now deprived of that powerful, pivotal card in the game that follows, increasing the odds that you'll lose, and potentially weakening the deck forever. No way was I going to lose a card I may have spent weeks up-trading for only to lose it due to random chance.
If I want to play a card game with real stakes, I play poker. At least if I lose at poker, I haven't hurt my odds at the next poker match. Every poker deck has four aces.
That's just me though. I mostly played in high school and based on my part-time job could justify buying boosters every week, but not replacing lost cards. My friends were all in the same boat, so at least we were all of like mind.
They have no statistics on how many pedophiles find their next victim on myspace.
No, they don't. However they certainly do have statistics that show that the majority of pedophiles find their next victim by walking down the hallway to the victim's room.
Of course the idea that some kid may be going to the library to use myspace.com so they can talk to someone about what's going on at home, and now that will be cut off, doesn't occur to them. Think of the Children! But don't actually think...
Yeah, whether the government should have the right to 'ban' websites nationally doesn't even enter into the equation.
Haven't you been paying attention? Freedom of Speech is still Free even if you have to ask permission from the authorities before saying it, and then only within specially designated areas. So the First Ammendment doesn't apply, you crazy pinko nutjob!
Our tendency to look at everything in a legalistic way (meaning using the minutiae of terminology to construe something in your favor) has resulted in us lawyering away our own freedoms, since we can argue that we haven't technically lost the freedom of speech even if practically we have. Sadly it's not just politicians but every day people who are arguing for why its okay, just so they can support some silly Save the Children initiative without going against their Patriotic Beliefs.
Yeah, it's pretty sad how this solely affects public web access, which seems to me to be the least likely place for anyone to do the kinds of things they are worried about, whether victim or predator. If they tried, wouldn't the possibility of someone looking over their shoulder and seeing it be a good thing? Instead we're actually going to force them to go into their rooms (with the door shut of course) where nobody (certainly not the parents) is watching. Now obviously the public library/school web terminals are the only thing they really have the power to restrict, so the fact that it is utterly stupid and detrimental and as you note discriminatory is really only a sad side effect of the typical politician's desire to be seen doing SOMETHING, no matter how idiotic.
Yet it does make me worry about what's next, when they stop just worrying about "virtual" hunting grounds.
Sorry kid, no public parks and playgrounds for you, a sexual predator might find you! Sorry kid, no public pools, kids in bathing suits are like chum in shark infested waters! You know, public libraries have dark corners, so no more free books for you!
The conspiratorial part of me could even see at being part of the larger assault against public services in general.
Oh, but wait, I just realized, I need to THINK OF THE CHILDREN, and so all my objections are moot. And you, you cad, don't you care about the children?
I mostly read the Inquirer these days, since Mike Magee was one of my favorite authors in the Register. Now they have the same style, but different problems, mostly I think suffering from a few bad authors and also being a bit too high on their success at being the corporate leak venue of choice.
Heh, no. That was just my sad attempt to mimic a Reg headline. I'm just an American who finds their style refreshing rather than off-puting. Of course I was a little thrown off at first, being used to the style of journalism that assumes that most likely you'll read nothing but the headline, and at most the first paragraph.
To expand on the above a bit, the point is that the Reg has little ability or interest in the area of gathering news.
Um, no. They do more actual news-gathering than most IT publications, who are content to take whatever is fed to them by corporate PR. Actual story investigation is one of the things that the Reg does better than most. Their style just happens to be part of their overall package.
Despite a lot of "hype" and cyberpunk novels glorifying the Internet as somehow "more than the sum of its parts" - it really boils down to being a really big wide-area network.
The "value" of the Internet can shift from "incredibly useful" to "nothing but junk" or anyplace in between, and that has to do with the quality and amount of content people choose to hang off of the ends of the network.
I think sometimes, we get too caught up in treating the "Internet" as a single entity filled with information and shared by the whole world. In reality, it's just a "grid" that allows everyone's computer equipment to interconnect (or not, as they so desire).
But it's the "shared by the whole world" aspect that really does make the difference between "incredibly useful" and "nothing but junk".
You're right it isn't the content that defines the usefulness of the Internet. Like any communication network, it's the number of connections. The usefulness grows with the number of connections, which grows with the square of the number of connected points, meaning it is quite literally and mathematically more than the sum of its parts. If you were to cut the Internet in half, each half would be a fourth as useful as the whole was -- practically, much less than that.
So I think it is quite good that we are so caught up in the Internet as a single entity. If it weren't a single entity, it would really be just a number of WANs that are of no more interest than any other WAN, or a BBS with modems in multiple area codes, or any other lesser network that failed to have the same impact on the world that the Internet has. The Internet is the Internet because it is THE Internet.
It posts all sorts of vague and misleading titles of stories. Try reading the articles and you'll see what I mean.
Oh, yeah, if you actually read the articles, then you find out what the story is actually about! Craziness. I'm used to just reading the headlines and then convincing myself I fully understand the situation and pontificating about it and why the author of the story I didn't read is wrong! That's what I learned here on/. anyway.
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was. If you really want to be able to just scan the front page of their website and feel like you've gotten a good summary of the day's IT news, then you are at the wrong website.
As far as the content of their stories, these vary quite a bit in quality, but when they're on, they're on. One of the other things that bothers a lot of Register and Inquirer detractors is that they publish rumors based on non-official non-PR-Newswire conversations they have with industry contacts. They do a good job of explaining where they got their information and how realible it may be, but again this requires reading the article. Also this means they can be wrong, but when they're right they get information out that doesn't show up on other sites that only consume official corporate press releases for months.
If these things bother you, then these are probably not the IT news sources for you. That's fine if you don't like them, but don't go around calling them the IT equivalent of the Enquirer. As news organizations that actually attempt to investigate things that you can't learn just by reading press releases, they're a step above most other IT rags, which I guess makes all of them the Weekly World News.
That's because he got more popular votes than any other candidate:
Clinton 43% Bush Sr. 38% Perot 19%
I would like to point out something implied by these numbers that also speaks against the electoral college.
Roughly 1/5th of the total votes were for a 3rd party candidate. One fifth. It's been a long time since that happened, and never in recent times has a 3rd party candidate looked stronger. And yet, on the only scoreboard that matters, the electoral votes, Perot got zero. He didn't even show up. What does that say about the viability of 3rd parties? A party that received 1/5th of the vote should be considered a major force. Instead, with zero percent of the electoral vote, the entire concept of third parties was seen as defeated.
The winner-take-all electoral college is a major reason why we are so strongly locked into a two-party system. Nobody -- especially in a closely contested state -- dares to throw their vote away on a third party, because the way the system is set up says they not only can't succeed, they can't even show up on the scoreboard.
Well, he's probably right. File sharing allowed people to actually play the game before they bought it, and once they realized how shitty it was and told their friends nobody bought it.
The US are turning faster and faster into everything I hated about the communist system.
Here's what really pisses me off about it:
When I was in grade school, I was taught about how great and free the USA was, and how horrible the USSR was, and the reasons were that over there people had to show their papers everywhere they went, the government was constantly spying on them, and they could be locked away without due process of law based solely on the accusation of treasonous acts.
Now those same things that made the USSR so bad are starting to happen here, and I'm told that this is okay because we're the USA, and we're inherently better.
It used to be that the USA was great and free because we didn't do those things. Now we're great and free because we're the USA, and therefore its okay for us to do these things. Greatness is now an inherent property of the USA, not the result of our actions.
The sad part is that I really believed what I was taught as a kid, that the USA was great because it did great things, and seeing what's going on now, even if it isn't nearly as bad as the USSR, strikes deeply at that childish part of me that still believes in honor, freedom, and greatness.
I am on that list. I don't know why; I have never been arrested or convicted or tried or anything else. I served honorably in the US Army. I fly all the time.
Hmm, a perfect record. Perhaps too perfect. You seem suspiciously unsuspicious, citizen, and this raises our suspicions.
The only states where their people would feel they have something to gain would be those that are consistantly "too close to call". Otherwise, it's betting too much state power on something that could only have a downside.
Right, except then they also think about what they could lose: Roughly half the states electoral votes if they should win. If it's a swing state, then with the winner-take-all system the winner gets all the votes. If it was proportional, then the votes would be split evenly. This would actually make the state less important because the result of the election would be that both* candidates electoral votes increase by the same amount, effectively a no-op.
Colorado, a swing state in 2004, actually had an initiative on the ballot to change the electoral college to be proportional, and to have it take effect for the 2004 election. The initiative failed, and I can't say for certain but I'd be willing to wager the above logic played a big part in why.
* The fact that we practically have to assume only two choices is sad, and frankly I think is another reason why the winner-takes-all electoral college is very bad.
No, you miss the point completely. The reason the the NYers vote counts 'less' is so that rancher out in the midwest doesn't have HIS rights trampled by the majority.
Don't forget that NY state consists of more than just NY city.
So what about the rancher in rural NY? His vote doesn't just count less, it doesn't count at all, because however the people in the city vote decides how the electoral votes of the entire state will be assigned. A NY city citizen has a vote worth 1/300,000th of an elector, a Wyoming citizen has a vote worth 1/160,000th of an elector, and a rural NY citizen has a vote worth 0/300,000th of an elector. Sure sounds to me like someone is having their rights trampled.
I can agree with giving each state a fixed number of extra electors, even if this doesn't really do much to balance the number of electors or make the small states more important. NY and CA are still vastly more important than Alaska or Rhode Island. However this somewhat anemic attempt to prevent mob rule at the State vs State level actually creates a worse situation within each state, where those who are in the minority have their vote completely eliminated.
P.S. Our government is a Republic or Representative Democracy and is a form of Democracy (saying it's not is like saying some shape is a square, NOT a quadrilateral), which irrelevent semantic arguments aside means we have the same problems with Mob Rule as all democracies, and the electoral college does nothing to address any form of mob rule that isn't Big State A vs Little State B, and how many issues truly fall along these lines? This is why we have to have Constitutional ammendments preventing discriminatory laws that favor the majority. There is no system of voting that eliminates the problem of mob rule, and the electoral college demonstrates this failing.
Or, rather, it could do the opposite. A voter could be in a state with a small population where his vote would count more. Perhaps he would be in a state that is nearly split down the middle, and his vote may matter more with the electoral college than with the gross sum voting system. The electoral college is there to give each region (state) as much power as the next region in the federation, creating a balance of power in the federal level.
Except it doesn't, because the higher population states still dominate the national election. Granting each state two additional electoral votes does nothing to create balance when California gets 53 votes based on its population alone and Alaska gets 1. 53 v 1 or 55 v 3, what's the difference? It's not like the Senate, which is a separate body from the House and is thus a place where each state has equal representation. It's like the House and Senate were combined, in which case who would care about the grossly outnumbered Senators?
Now in aggregate across many states the extra two electoral votes does help balance, creating the argument that the electoral college helps balance the low population rural states from the high population urban states. Which I think creates some bitter irony -- what about rural California, or rural New York? Shouldn't they get equal representation? Instead the votes of these regions are insignificant, in fact made irrelevent, by the urban centers of these states.
However there is some truth to what you say about a citizen's vote counting more in a small contested state. Which is the really sad part about the electoral college and the winner-take-all system most states use: How much your vote counts is dependent entirely on how closely contested that state is. If you live in a highly contested "swing" state, then your vote has a chance of counting. If you live in a non-contested state, your vote doesn't count at all. If you're a Democrat living in Texas, or a Republican living in New York, or a third-party supporter living anywhere at all, your vote is 100% completely irrelevent and will not sway the national election by the tiniest bit in favor of your candidate.
To me the definition of "having your vote count" is that when you vote, the election is swayed towards your candidate by 1/population. The only way to actually do this is by having a direct election. A proportional system where electoral votes were assigned according to the ratios of votes for each candidate would be close, but with less granularity. Our current system doesn't utterly fails to provide this. I pulled the lever for the Libertarian candidate last election, and the national election was not affected at all, not even by 1/300mil.
When that nigerian whats a $50 to free his $10 million property, do I have to assume he is innocent until proven guily by taking my money?
Well what we're really dealing with is someone claiming that some nigerian is a scammer, in which case yes you should assume that he is innocent, but that doesn't mean you have to give him your money either.
In other words, assuming someone is innocent is not the same as allowing them to take advantage of your assumption. An example slanted the other way: I have no reason to think my next door neighbors have any larcenous intent towards me at all, and in fact I assume they are innocent of such things. I have also not given them a copy of my house keys. See how that works?
Even the justice system, which as you note does have to assume innocence, takes some straightforward precautions (like bail, or flat-out incarceration until trial) to account for the possibility that they are guilty.
And when I pull into that hispanic neighborhood in Tucson with the highest property crime rate in the city, I am going to assume they are all guilty of planning to steal my property, and secure it the best way I can, I don't care how incorrect the P.C. police think that is.
Again, there's a difference between keeping your property safe in case someone tries to steal it, and simply assuming that every poor hispanic is out to rob you. One is rational behavior, the other is racist, and you can accuse me of being part of the P.C. police if you want.
That only really applies to the chipset market, though. The standalone graphics cards are processor agnostic, being on one end of a standardized bus interface. I expect the GPU/graphics card battle to continue unabated for the forseeable future. Remember that the customer of ATI and NVidia are OEMs and retail purchasers who would be happy to pair an AMD processor with an NVidia card.
Now as far as chipsets are concerned, it is probably true that NVidia will not support AMD as strongly as it has. However this is not a foregone conclusion. NVidia wants to sell chipsets, and if they make the best AMD chipset then OEMs will use it just like they'd use NVidia graphics cards in an AMD system. If NVidia refused to make a high-performance AMD chipset, then OEMs would just buy the ATI/AMD chipset or some other one. In other words, unless they thought that the OEM would stop using AMD so that they could use an NVidia chipset, then all they're doing is preventing themselves from making a sale, essentially giving up chipset marketshare.
The key here being that AMD continue to support open standards like Hyper Transport, and not erect artificial barriers like Intel -- e.g. locking out chipset competitors with IP as in the case of Via and the P4 bus, or requiring OEMs to purchase Intel chipsets along with CPUs as in the case of Centrino. As long as that holds true, then the OEMs are going to pick what they consider the best chipset for their product, and NVidia thus has an incentive to grab as much of that marketshare as they can.
Ah, but that doesn't really solve the problem. Proto-humans with bad eyesight existed before societies large enough to carry the weight of non-functioning members, and not all such genes are recessive. Individuals expressing bad eyesight genes -- not merely carriers -- managed to survive and reproduce based on their own "fitness".
The answer is that bad eyesight by itself may not make one incapable of surviving. Survival is all that matters.
becasue 'fittest' does not mean healthiest, or strongest, or smartest.
Yeah, I only spent two paragraphs talking about how fitness in nature is not based around human notions of what makes someone more fit.
it means adapting to a given situation, and that the tools one develops to deal with it is either passed on genetically, or through society.
And yet bad eyesight is clearly not an advantageous adaptation, and existed before the development of tools. Obviously "fitness" is talking about adaptation, but it is in that context that humans developed eyesight with the particular strengths that it does. Those who lack those traits are, as evidenced by the very development of those features, less well adapted, yet they survived.
Survival ot the fittest is a perfect description, unfortunatly people like you have no clue what it mean, or bother to look up the context.
Funny you should bring up context, since I clearly talking about pop-culture interpretations and misconecptions about evolution and it was in that context that "Survival of the Sufficiently Fit" makes more sense, since the superlative implies a strict ordering that simply doesn't exist. Since most of what you say actually agrees with the points I was making in my post, and if you read it you would have understood this, you were obviously just skimming for whatever phrase you could pick out and try to contradict. Nice try, but you're now just like the ones I was deriding who try to understand a complex subject based on a single catchy phrase that they picked out from a larger text. A.k.a. the clueless.
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I also said the gameplay was agonizing and boring.
:)
Ha! I didn't see that or thought you were saying the bad graphics made it seem boring. Okay, in my reply I was only considering those games that you can go back to that were actually classics, not the ones that really do suck.
While my father is STILL in denial, I have accepted the truth. My fond memories of that game are gone forever.
So... your fond memories of the game were tied entirely to the quality of the graphics? From your description, it sounded like you were enjoying the gameplay and all the interesting things you could do, like rob money from the bank.
I gotta say, I find that perspective kinda odd. Did you really think a game from the early 80s would really stand the test of time graphically speaking? If you really only enjoyed it for the graphics, then you should have probably realized that, much like a modern game that gets by based solely on its high-poly-count models and shiny pixel shaders that it would hold up badly.
I have plenty of games that tweak my sense of nostalgia, but they're always ones that stand up due to the gameplay, not the graphics. I know the graphics of C64 Archon, King's Bounty, Legend of Zelda, and Bard's Tale are all pretty much hideous to look at, even if at the time I thought they were beautiful. But it's the underlying game that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I've replayed all of those games and not felt that they had truly lost anything of value.
Because a supervillain's ultimate weakness is always their arrogance. "Ha ha ha! There is no way a puny mortal like you could defeat me, even with all the nuke-blaster ammo in the world! Here, have a truck load! And I'll heal you to maximum health first! And I'll stand above pits of the only substance that can harm me, with levers that drop the floor into the substance! Ha ha ha-- What? Impossible!!!! I cannot be defea---"
Okay, so their ultimate weakness is that they are stupid.
So on one hand we have memory manufacturers who have colluded to maintain high prices of memory, on the other hand, we have Rambus which has used submarine patents to gain humongous royalties subverting JEDEC process.
Yeah, I think a lot of people -- investors in particular -- were fooled into thinking that either Rambus was clean or that they were going to come away with the appearance of cleanliness due to them winning quite a few lawsuits vs the RAM manufacturers. I'll admit I was rather taken aback by the amount of nasty behavior on the part of the Dramurai that was revealed in the course of these lawsuits. However I do not subscribe to the philosophy that if you have discovered the bad guy, then anyone who opposes them must be a good guy. In fact it's more likely that they too are bad guys, and in Rambus' case I have maintained the belief that they are bad guys all along. But only someone completely divorced from the actual market being affected -- like an investor -- would so easily forgive and forget Rambus' attempt to force us into the devil's bargain of either paying too much for RDRAM or paying way, way too much for DDR.
But I'm not holding my breath on actual substantive punishment.
regardless of whether the U.S. has 3 or 300 million inhabitants who have a relevant opinion, 3000 is enough to form confidence intervals of very good accuracy.
:)
Central Limit Theorem notwithstanding, I'd say you have a severe accuracy problem if you're taking a sample set of size 3000 from a population of size 3.
You certainly don't give up as easily if a valuable card is drawn for your ante.
But thinking about that is exactly why I never played ante.
The valuable cards were usually the more powerful cards, since even the rarest of cards wasn't worth much if it was crap. Often these valuable cards would form the foundation of a deck. So not only did you turn over a valuable card for your ante, you are now deprived of that powerful, pivotal card in the game that follows, increasing the odds that you'll lose, and potentially weakening the deck forever. No way was I going to lose a card I may have spent weeks up-trading for only to lose it due to random chance.
If I want to play a card game with real stakes, I play poker. At least if I lose at poker, I haven't hurt my odds at the next poker match. Every poker deck has four aces.
That's just me though. I mostly played in high school and based on my part-time job could justify buying boosters every week, but not replacing lost cards. My friends were all in the same boat, so at least we were all of like mind.
They have no statistics on how many pedophiles find their next victim on myspace.
No, they don't. However they certainly do have statistics that show that the majority of pedophiles find their next victim by walking down the hallway to the victim's room.
Of course the idea that some kid may be going to the library to use myspace.com so they can talk to someone about what's going on at home, and now that will be cut off, doesn't occur to them. Think of the Children! But don't actually think...
Yeah, whether the government should have the right to 'ban' websites nationally doesn't even enter into the equation.
Haven't you been paying attention? Freedom of Speech is still Free even if you have to ask permission from the authorities before saying it, and then only within specially designated areas. So the First Ammendment doesn't apply, you crazy pinko nutjob!
Our tendency to look at everything in a legalistic way (meaning using the minutiae of terminology to construe something in your favor) has resulted in us lawyering away our own freedoms, since we can argue that we haven't technically lost the freedom of speech even if practically we have. Sadly it's not just politicians but every day people who are arguing for why its okay, just so they can support some silly Save the Children initiative without going against their Patriotic Beliefs.
Yeah, it's pretty sad how this solely affects public web access, which seems to me to be the least likely place for anyone to do the kinds of things they are worried about, whether victim or predator. If they tried, wouldn't the possibility of someone looking over their shoulder and seeing it be a good thing? Instead we're actually going to force them to go into their rooms (with the door shut of course) where nobody (certainly not the parents) is watching. Now obviously the public library/school web terminals are the only thing they really have the power to restrict, so the fact that it is utterly stupid and detrimental and as you note discriminatory is really only a sad side effect of the typical politician's desire to be seen doing SOMETHING, no matter how idiotic.
Yet it does make me worry about what's next, when they stop just worrying about "virtual" hunting grounds.
Sorry kid, no public parks and playgrounds for you, a sexual predator might find you!
Sorry kid, no public pools, kids in bathing suits are like chum in shark infested waters!
You know, public libraries have dark corners, so no more free books for you!
The conspiratorial part of me could even see at being part of the larger assault against public services in general.
Oh, but wait, I just realized, I need to THINK OF THE CHILDREN, and so all my objections are moot. And you, you cad, don't you care about the children?
I mostly read the Inquirer these days, since Mike Magee was one of my favorite authors in the Register. Now they have the same style, but different problems, mostly I think suffering from a few bad authors and also being a bit too high on their success at being the corporate leak venue of choice.
Heh, no. That was just my sad attempt to mimic a Reg headline. I'm just an American who finds their style refreshing rather than off-puting. Of course I was a little thrown off at first, being used to the style of journalism that assumes that most likely you'll read nothing but the headline, and at most the first paragraph.
To expand on the above a bit, the point is that the Reg has little ability or interest in the area of gathering news.
Um, no. They do more actual news-gathering than most IT publications, who are content to take whatever is fed to them by corporate PR. Actual story investigation is one of the things that the Reg does better than most. Their style just happens to be part of their overall package.
Despite a lot of "hype" and cyberpunk novels glorifying the Internet as somehow "more than the sum of its parts" - it really boils down to being a really big wide-area network.
The "value" of the Internet can shift from "incredibly useful" to "nothing but junk" or anyplace in between, and that has to do with the quality and amount of content people choose to hang off of the ends of the network.
I think sometimes, we get too caught up in treating the "Internet" as a single entity filled with information and shared by the whole world. In reality, it's just a "grid" that allows everyone's computer equipment to interconnect (or not, as they so desire).
But it's the "shared by the whole world" aspect that really does make the difference between "incredibly useful" and "nothing but junk".
You're right it isn't the content that defines the usefulness of the Internet. Like any communication network, it's the number of connections. The usefulness grows with the number of connections, which grows with the square of the number of connected points, meaning it is quite literally and mathematically more than the sum of its parts. If you were to cut the Internet in half, each half would be a fourth as useful as the whole was -- practically, much less than that.
So I think it is quite good that we are so caught up in the Internet as a single entity. If it weren't a single entity, it would really be just a number of WANs that are of no more interest than any other WAN, or a BBS with modems in multiple area codes, or any other lesser network that failed to have the same impact on the world that the Internet has. The Internet is the Internet because it is THE Internet.
It posts all sorts of vague and misleading titles of stories. Try reading the articles and you'll see what I mean.
/. anyway.
Oh, yeah, if you actually read the articles, then you find out what the story is actually about! Craziness. I'm used to just reading the headlines and then convincing myself I fully understand the situation and pontificating about it and why the author of the story I didn't read is wrong! That's what I learned here on
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was. If you really want to be able to just scan the front page of their website and feel like you've gotten a good summary of the day's IT news, then you are at the wrong website.
As far as the content of their stories, these vary quite a bit in quality, but when they're on, they're on. One of the other things that bothers a lot of Register and Inquirer detractors is that they publish rumors based on non-official non-PR-Newswire conversations they have with industry contacts. They do a good job of explaining where they got their information and how realible it may be, but again this requires reading the article. Also this means they can be wrong, but when they're right they get information out that doesn't show up on other sites that only consume official corporate press releases for months.
If these things bother you, then these are probably not the IT news sources for you. That's fine if you don't like them, but don't go around calling them the IT equivalent of the Enquirer. As news organizations that actually attempt to investigate things that you can't learn just by reading press releases, they're a step above most other IT rags, which I guess makes all of them the Weekly World News.
That's because he got more popular votes than any other candidate:
Clinton 43%
Bush Sr. 38%
Perot 19%
I would like to point out something implied by these numbers that also speaks against the electoral college.
Roughly 1/5th of the total votes were for a 3rd party candidate. One fifth. It's been a long time since that happened, and never in recent times has a 3rd party candidate looked stronger. And yet, on the only scoreboard that matters, the electoral votes, Perot got zero. He didn't even show up. What does that say about the viability of 3rd parties? A party that received 1/5th of the vote should be considered a major force. Instead, with zero percent of the electoral vote, the entire concept of third parties was seen as defeated.
The winner-take-all electoral college is a major reason why we are so strongly locked into a two-party system. Nobody -- especially in a closely contested state -- dares to throw their vote away on a third party, because the way the system is set up says they not only can't succeed, they can't even show up on the scoreboard.
Yeah, he acts like the "media personification of John Romero" is anything but his own creation.
Well, he's probably right. File sharing allowed people to actually play the game before they bought it, and once they realized how shitty it was and told their friends nobody bought it.
Damned file shares!
And game reviewers!
And their own free demo!
The US are turning faster and faster into everything I hated about the communist system.
Here's what really pisses me off about it:
When I was in grade school, I was taught about how great and free the USA was, and how horrible the USSR was, and the reasons were that over there people had to show their papers everywhere they went, the government was constantly spying on them, and they could be locked away without due process of law based solely on the accusation of treasonous acts.
Now those same things that made the USSR so bad are starting to happen here, and I'm told that this is okay because we're the USA, and we're inherently better.
It used to be that the USA was great and free because we didn't do those things. Now we're great and free because we're the USA, and therefore its okay for us to do these things. Greatness is now an inherent property of the USA, not the result of our actions.
The sad part is that I really believed what I was taught as a kid, that the USA was great because it did great things, and seeing what's going on now, even if it isn't nearly as bad as the USSR, strikes deeply at that childish part of me that still believes in honor, freedom, and greatness.
I am on that list. I don't know why; I have never been arrested or convicted or tried or anything else. I served honorably in the US Army. I fly all the time.
Hmm, a perfect record. Perhaps too perfect. You seem suspiciously unsuspicious, citizen, and this raises our suspicions.
The only states where their people would feel they have something to gain would be those that are consistantly "too close to call". Otherwise, it's betting too much state power on something that could only have a downside.
Right, except then they also think about what they could lose: Roughly half the states electoral votes if they should win. If it's a swing state, then with the winner-take-all system the winner gets all the votes. If it was proportional, then the votes would be split evenly. This would actually make the state less important because the result of the election would be that both* candidates electoral votes increase by the same amount, effectively a no-op.
Colorado, a swing state in 2004, actually had an initiative on the ballot to change the electoral college to be proportional, and to have it take effect for the 2004 election. The initiative failed, and I can't say for certain but I'd be willing to wager the above logic played a big part in why.
* The fact that we practically have to assume only two choices is sad, and frankly I think is another reason why the winner-takes-all electoral college is very bad.
No, you miss the point completely. The reason the the NYers vote counts 'less' is so that rancher out in the midwest doesn't have HIS rights trampled by the majority.
Don't forget that NY state consists of more than just NY city.
So what about the rancher in rural NY? His vote doesn't just count less, it doesn't count at all, because however the people in the city vote decides how the electoral votes of the entire state will be assigned. A NY city citizen has a vote worth 1/300,000th of an elector, a Wyoming citizen has a vote worth 1/160,000th of an elector, and a rural NY citizen has a vote worth 0/300,000th of an elector. Sure sounds to me like someone is having their rights trampled.
I can agree with giving each state a fixed number of extra electors, even if this doesn't really do much to balance the number of electors or make the small states more important. NY and CA are still vastly more important than Alaska or Rhode Island. However this somewhat anemic attempt to prevent mob rule at the State vs State level actually creates a worse situation within each state, where those who are in the minority have their vote completely eliminated.
P.S. Our government is a Republic or Representative Democracy and is a form of Democracy (saying it's not is like saying some shape is a square, NOT a quadrilateral), which irrelevent semantic arguments aside means we have the same problems with Mob Rule as all democracies, and the electoral college does nothing to address any form of mob rule that isn't Big State A vs Little State B, and how many issues truly fall along these lines? This is why we have to have Constitutional ammendments preventing discriminatory laws that favor the majority. There is no system of voting that eliminates the problem of mob rule, and the electoral college demonstrates this failing.
Or, rather, it could do the opposite. A voter could be in a state with a small population where his vote would count more. Perhaps he would be in a state that is nearly split down the middle, and his vote may matter more with the electoral college than with the gross sum voting system. The electoral college is there to give each region (state) as much power as the next region in the federation, creating a balance of power in the federal level.
Except it doesn't, because the higher population states still dominate the national election. Granting each state two additional electoral votes does nothing to create balance when California gets 53 votes based on its population alone and Alaska gets 1. 53 v 1 or 55 v 3, what's the difference? It's not like the Senate, which is a separate body from the House and is thus a place where each state has equal representation. It's like the House and Senate were combined, in which case who would care about the grossly outnumbered Senators?
Now in aggregate across many states the extra two electoral votes does help balance, creating the argument that the electoral college helps balance the low population rural states from the high population urban states. Which I think creates some bitter irony -- what about rural California, or rural New York? Shouldn't they get equal representation? Instead the votes of these regions are insignificant, in fact made irrelevent, by the urban centers of these states.
However there is some truth to what you say about a citizen's vote counting more in a small contested state. Which is the really sad part about the electoral college and the winner-take-all system most states use: How much your vote counts is dependent entirely on how closely contested that state is. If you live in a highly contested "swing" state, then your vote has a chance of counting. If you live in a non-contested state, your vote doesn't count at all. If you're a Democrat living in Texas, or a Republican living in New York, or a third-party supporter living anywhere at all, your vote is 100% completely irrelevent and will not sway the national election by the tiniest bit in favor of your candidate.
To me the definition of "having your vote count" is that when you vote, the election is swayed towards your candidate by 1/population. The only way to actually do this is by having a direct election. A proportional system where electoral votes were assigned according to the ratios of votes for each candidate would be close, but with less granularity. Our current system doesn't utterly fails to provide this. I pulled the lever for the Libertarian candidate last election, and the national election was not affected at all, not even by 1/300mil.
When that nigerian whats a $50 to free his $10 million property, do I have to assume he is innocent until proven guily by taking my money?
Well what we're really dealing with is someone claiming that some nigerian is a scammer, in which case yes you should assume that he is innocent, but that doesn't mean you have to give him your money either.
In other words, assuming someone is innocent is not the same as allowing them to take advantage of your assumption. An example slanted the other way: I have no reason to think my next door neighbors have any larcenous intent towards me at all, and in fact I assume they are innocent of such things. I have also not given them a copy of my house keys. See how that works?
Even the justice system, which as you note does have to assume innocence, takes some straightforward precautions (like bail, or flat-out incarceration until trial) to account for the possibility that they are guilty.
And when I pull into that hispanic neighborhood in Tucson with the highest property crime rate in the city, I am going to assume they are all guilty of planning to steal my property, and secure it the best way I can, I don't care how incorrect the P.C. police think that is.
Again, there's a difference between keeping your property safe in case someone tries to steal it, and simply assuming that every poor hispanic is out to rob you. One is rational behavior, the other is racist, and you can accuse me of being part of the P.C. police if you want.
That only really applies to the chipset market, though. The standalone graphics cards are processor agnostic, being on one end of a standardized bus interface. I expect the GPU/graphics card battle to continue unabated for the forseeable future. Remember that the customer of ATI and NVidia are OEMs and retail purchasers who would be happy to pair an AMD processor with an NVidia card.
Now as far as chipsets are concerned, it is probably true that NVidia will not support AMD as strongly as it has. However this is not a foregone conclusion. NVidia wants to sell chipsets, and if they make the best AMD chipset then OEMs will use it just like they'd use NVidia graphics cards in an AMD system. If NVidia refused to make a high-performance AMD chipset, then OEMs would just buy the ATI/AMD chipset or some other one. In other words, unless they thought that the OEM would stop using AMD so that they could use an NVidia chipset, then all they're doing is preventing themselves from making a sale, essentially giving up chipset marketshare.
The key here being that AMD continue to support open standards like Hyper Transport, and not erect artificial barriers like Intel -- e.g. locking out chipset competitors with IP as in the case of Via and the P4 bus, or requiring OEMs to purchase Intel chipsets along with CPUs as in the case of Centrino. As long as that holds true, then the OEMs are going to pick what they consider the best chipset for their product, and NVidia thus has an incentive to grab as much of that marketshare as they can.
because society tries to take care of people.
regressive genes.
Ah, but that doesn't really solve the problem. Proto-humans with bad eyesight existed before societies large enough to carry the weight of non-functioning members, and not all such genes are recessive. Individuals expressing bad eyesight genes -- not merely carriers -- managed to survive and reproduce based on their own "fitness".
The answer is that bad eyesight by itself may not make one incapable of surviving. Survival is all that matters.
becasue 'fittest' does not mean healthiest, or strongest, or smartest.
Yeah, I only spent two paragraphs talking about how fitness in nature is not based around human notions of what makes someone more fit.
it means adapting to a given situation, and that the tools one develops to deal with it is either passed on genetically, or through society.
And yet bad eyesight is clearly not an advantageous adaptation, and existed before the development of tools. Obviously "fitness" is talking about adaptation, but it is in that context that humans developed eyesight with the particular strengths that it does. Those who lack those traits are, as evidenced by the very development of those features, less well adapted, yet they survived.
Survival ot the fittest is a perfect description, unfortunatly people like you have no clue what it mean, or bother to look up the context.
Funny you should bring up context, since I clearly talking about pop-culture interpretations and misconecptions about evolution and it was in that context that "Survival of the Sufficiently Fit" makes more sense, since the superlative implies a strict ordering that simply doesn't exist. Since most of what you say actually agrees with the points I was making in my post, and if you read it you would have understood this, you were obviously just skimming for whatever phrase you could pick out and try to contradict. Nice try, but you're now just like the ones I was deriding who try to understand a complex subject based on a single catchy phrase that they picked out from a larger text. A.k.a. the clueless.