Internet Explorer defined the web non-standards and held things back. People wrote to the IE specific features and things borke on standards based browsers. Flash currently lets you do more than open standards do particularly in the area of DRM, advertising, paid content and feedback to the server. As a result people who need that will write for it. People for whom it is the easiest way to implement something, say bank security, will use it. It will be has hard to get rid of as IE.
Turn back the clock fifteen years.
Tell me what the standards were, how useful they were and how well they were implemented on the alternative browsers.
Set the clock forward to tomorrow.
H.264 evolved and became deeply entrenched outside the browser.
Theatrical production. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. How do you keep that sort of thing from happening again?
The entrepreneur boards the hyper-jet out of L.A.
The standards committee the local out of Hampstead.
The entrepreneur doesn't need to build a political consensus - he only needs an architecture that supports his plug-in.
Terry Childs is going to have career problems for life, no need to waste money holding him in a cage as if he was a wild animal threatening the peace - or even put an invisible fence around his house is not worth it.
The problem here is that the geek is always surprised when one of his own gets raked across the coals when the jury issues its verdict.
The prison sentence is an object lesson, an often necessary reminder that white collar crime is still crime.
How did the economy function before there was a steel industry?
Not very well.
Without steel you can't farm the great plains.
Your primary agricultural export - your primary source of hard currency, period - is cotton raised and harvested by 2.5 million slave laborers. (ca1840)
The infant U.S. steel industry had a central planner - in Andrew Carnegie.
In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig iron, steel rails, and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig iron per day. In 1888, he bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a 425-mile (685 km) long railway, and a line of lake steamships. A consolidation of Carnegie's assets and those of his associates occurred in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company.
By 1889, the U.S. output of steel exceeded that of Britain, and Andrew Carnegie owned a large part of it. By 1900, the profits of Carnegie Bros. & Company alone stood at $40,000,000 with $25,000,000 being Carnegie's share. Carnegie's empire grew to include the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works (named for John Edgar Thomson, Carnegie's former boss and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill (Wilson, Walker & County), the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company, and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri (completed 1874). This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology which marked the opening of a new steel market.
"The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance." (Le Corbusier, "When the Cathedrals were White")
Seriously, you think sexual harassment (an entirely civil matter) is worse than embezzlement (a criminal matter)? How does that make a lick of sense?
It's dangerous to assume that sexual harassment can't escalate to a criminal charge:
Is Sexual Harassment A Crime?
While there is no specific criminal charge called "sexual harassment," [in Kentucky] behavior that constitutes sexual harassment may violate other criminal laws. Possible criminal charges include:
Stalking Assault Harassing communications
Thus, in addition bringing a civil action against an employer, school, and/or individual, targets of sexual harassment may also find it helpful to file reports with law enforcement officials and assist with prosecutions.Understanding Sexual Harassment
Show me FIRST the Windows where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue.
Your Dad buys the OEM Windows system bundle.
He can choose from 94 desktops and 187 laptops shopping Walmart.com alone.
It works out of the box or is returned to the vendor.
He may chance the free upgrade-in-place from 64 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7, as I did, and discover that the geek's horror stories are mostly pure fantasy.
Show me ANY Linux where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue, and then we'll talk.
The installer appeared to hang on an indecipherable hard drive error. It could not be closed or canceled short of killing the process in Task Manager.
The Ubuntu site and forums were no help - so on to Google.
A half hour or so later I found a solution. It seems that the installer treats any internal or external, occupied or unoccupied, flash card slot as a hard drive.
The work around is to click "Cancel" as often as necessary to get the job done.
65 clicks later I began to see daylight.
25 clicks later I had 32 bit Unbuntu dual-booting with 64 bit Windows 7.
2) Having been convicted, I would have run away. There are a lot of decent IT jobs in the Northeast..... almost 3000 miles away from the SF Government's reach. No different than running from Spain to Poland to start a new life.
US Constitution, Article 4, Section II, Clause 2:
"A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime."
You achieve nothing in your interstate flight but a quarantee of conviction on a new and stiffer felony charge.
You will be doing hard time even if your prior conviction is overturned.
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
The origins of the microwave oven can be traced back to 1945 - and the desire to commercialize wartime radar technology.
It can take a hell of a lot of time, talent, money and manpower to translate an idea into a marketable product. Things the start-up doesn't always have.
THE FIRST PRODUCTION MICROWAVE OVEN WEIGHED IN at 670 pounds, stood 62 inches tall, and measured nearly 2 feet deep and wide. To install it, an electrician had to put in a 220-volt line and a plumber had to install a water pipe to cool the oven's radar tube. This first oven sold shortly after the war ended for more than $2,000, the equivalent of about $20,000 today. Obviously, this was not an appliance for home use.
In 1952 Raytheon licensed its oven technology to Tappan, which three years later came out with the first home microwave oven, a builtin wall unit. Its magnetron was aircooled, eliminating the need for a water line, but it still required 220 volts and took 75 seconds to warm up. At around $1,200, it was a bit cheaper than the Radarange, but not cheap enough.
In the mid sixties, after Raytheon's acquisition of Amana:
"I don't understand that Foerstner guy," said one engineer, "he's always nickel-and-diming everything." Yet that was Foerstner's key contribution--a deep knowledge of how to design an appliance so that it could be manufactured cheaply.
The new Japanese tube magnetron tube [a model for Amana] cost less than $25.
Raytheon worried that this was too cheap. But the New Japan Radio Company (NJRC) had aimed for just good enough. The Raytheon tube had 13 separate metal parts, including 10 cooling fins, which had to be carefully put together. The Japanese made their tube body in a single unit, punching a big slug of metal in a die and shaping it into finished form complete with cooling fins.
The Japanese further reduced the cost by using a cheap ceramic magnet instead of the alnico magnet used by Raytheon, which was 10 times as expensive. The ceramic magnet didn't work as well; its properties changed with temperature, so that after the first minute or two of operation, the magnetic field dropped and the tube's power output to the oven decreased. But it was good enough for kitchen use.
Finally, the NJRC tube brought a critical benefit to the oven. As Ironfield recalls, it had "a very modest heater power, 65 watts.... And it was about 65 percent efficient, which made it fit into a 15-amp household circuit." No special wiring had to be installed; a consumer could bring the oven home, plug it in, and use it right away.
I still don't get it - why cars need so much software? Older cars worked quite well with just mechanical controls, so why there are so many computers in new cars?
From SAE's "Automotive Engineering International:"
Consumer radios and military communication devices were the mainstay of electronics usage prior to the late 1950s. When diodes, transistors, analog integrated circuits, and digital integrated circuits gained a vehicle applications foothold in the 1960s and 1970s, the initial development phase of automotive electronic products included the proliferation of electronic fuel ignition, a technology that was sparked by government regulations aimed at reducing exhaust emissions and improving fuel economy.
Engine controls, also an emissions and fuel economy-motivated pursuit, gained momentum in the late 1970s through the 1980s. For example, the 1975 Cadillac Seville used a 7 x 10 x 3 in (180 x 255 x 85 mm) analog engine control unit with 275 components. Its discrete components included 145 resistors, 38 capacitors, 41 transistors, and 36 diodes along with four linear integrated circuits (standard), custom components including five linear integrated circuits and one thick-film signal module, and five thick-film resistor modules.
As integrated circuit technology evolved, it became possible to design many of the functions into the integrated circuits, thus eliminating a lot of discreet components. Today's digital engine control unit has 90 or fewer components packaged in a box about 4 x 5 x 1 in (100 x 125 x 25 mm) {and] the downward trend in package size and number of components continues.
The second development wave added microprocessors and other enablers to the electronics bin, facilitating the addition of such vehicle features as anti-lock braking, electronic engine controls, and climate control during the 1980s. Electronic engine controls were representative of how the industry evolved vehicle subsystems.
With the addition of intelligent power, intelligent sensors, and large electrical erasable PROMs (essentially memory technology), integrated systems flourished in the 1990s. Integrated powertrain/traction control, integrated braking, steering and suspension, multiplexing, communication and navigation, as well as onboard diagnostics represent the broad array of smart systems.
The present development phase of automotive electronics includes such enablers as digital signal processing and 32-bit microprocessors. Computing power is now 40 times greater than what is was in 1975, and since that time the industry has experienced 300-fold growth in the number of transistors on a chip.
To defeat any kind of snooping, all bad people have to do is to communicate in code. That is: "Let's have dinner tonight." to mean "The materials will arrive next week Tuesday."
The first problem is the code book.
There are only so many words and phrases you can keep in your head before you have to write them down.
The second is weaving the key words and phrases into a message that doesn't come across as stilted and unnatural - or worse.
"Let's have dinner tonight" implies an intimacy that can be easily tested.
The most frustrated man in New York at 4 P.M. Saturday, July 24, 1915, was a very proper German lawyer named Heinrich Friedrich Albert who stood helplessly in the middle of Sixth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, watching a streetcar glide uptown with his briefcase and the details of the $40,000,000 spy, propaganda, and sabotage ring he operated. Dr. Albert...had saved a taxi fare of perhaps $1.25.
The graphics capabilities of the PS3 and XBox 360 are superior. The fact that the Wii outsold them is a testament to the fact that gameplay does indeed matter.
PS3 and XBox 360 graphics are superior on the sets which can display them.
Nintendo gambled that the Wii would be well established before HDTV became the dominant video platform - and that 480p would be acceptable to the first generation of HD gamers -
particularly given the cartoon-like animation of Nintendo's family-oriented franchise games.
That was probably the right decision to make in 2006. But in 2010 it seems fair to argue that the Wii is aging much faster than its competitors.
Why shouldn't it swing both ways? Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that there's actually a dead person? Or say instead, I told a policeman that you just stabbed me in the face. Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that actually happened before he arrests you?
The police need nothing more than a clearly intelligible reason to make an arrest.
An arrest doesn't always end in a conviction - but it does take a serious contender for the rope off the street until you can sort things out.
There's no money in solving actual crimes. On the other hand, doing the dirty work of the MafiAA is a way to collect some kick-ass bribes.
The entertainment industry is worth billions of domestic spending and export dollars. It is a labor-intensive and generates a lot of high wage - high skilled - jobs.
It is important to the economies of states like New York, California, Florida and so on. The Senator from Nebraska votes wheat and corn. The Texan cattle and oil.
The FBI exists to protect profits. In fact the government exists to protect commerce, the very basis of our society
In the American federal system, tracking down missing persons is traditionally a local and state responsibility, prosecuting economic and property crimes that have a national and constitutiobal dimension a federal responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer defined the web non-standards and held things back. People wrote to the IE specific features and things borke on standards based browsers. Flash currently lets you do more than open standards do particularly in the area of DRM, advertising, paid content and feedback to the server. As a result people who need that will write for it. People for whom it is the easiest way to implement something, say bank security, will use it. It will be has hard to get rid of as IE.
Turn back the clock fifteen years.
Tell me what the standards were, how useful they were and how well they were implemented on the alternative browsers.
Set the clock forward to tomorrow.
H.264 evolved and became deeply entrenched outside the browser.
Theatrical production. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. How do you keep that sort of thing from happening again?
The entrepreneur boards the hyper-jet out of L.A.
The standards committee the local out of Hampstead.
The entrepreneur doesn't need to build a political consensus - he only needs an architecture that supports his plug-in.
Not a particularly attractive name overall, but I decided to search the web to see if it's in common usage
The wall wart conjures up something that is hot, bulky, won't fit on my UPS or power strip - or takes up a socket I need for something else.
Terry Childs is going to have career problems for life, no need to waste money holding him in a cage as if he was a wild animal threatening the peace - or even put an invisible fence around his house is not worth it.
The problem here is that the geek is always surprised when one of his own gets raked across the coals when the jury issues its verdict.
The prison sentence is an object lesson, an often necessary reminder that white collar crime is still crime.
How did the economy function before there was a steel industry?
Not very well.
Without steel you can't farm the great plains.
Your primary agricultural export - your primary source of hard currency, period - is cotton raised and harvested by 2.5 million slave laborers. (ca1840)
The infant U.S. steel industry had a central planner - in Andrew Carnegie.
In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig iron, steel rails, and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig iron per day. In 1888, he bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a 425-mile (685 km) long railway, and a line of lake steamships. A consolidation of Carnegie's assets and those of his associates occurred in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company.
By 1889, the U.S. output of steel exceeded that of Britain, and Andrew Carnegie owned a large part of it. By 1900, the profits of Carnegie Bros. & Company alone stood at $40,000,000 with $25,000,000 being Carnegie's share. Carnegie's empire grew to include the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works (named for John Edgar Thomson, Carnegie's former boss and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill (Wilson, Walker & County), the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company, and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri (completed 1874). This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology which marked the opening of a new steel market.
History of the modern steel industry
The towers of the George Washington Bridge were originally to be given a faux masonry facing.
To our great good fortune that never happened:
"The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance." (Le Corbusier, "When the Cathedrals were White")
Seriously, you think sexual harassment (an entirely civil matter) is worse than embezzlement (a criminal matter)? How does that make a lick of sense?
It's dangerous to assume that sexual harassment can't escalate to a criminal charge:
Is Sexual Harassment A Crime?
While there is no specific criminal charge called "sexual harassment," [in Kentucky] behavior that constitutes sexual harassment may violate other criminal laws. Possible criminal charges include:
Stalking
Assault
Harassing communications
Thus, in addition bringing a civil action against an employer, school, and/or individual, targets of sexual harassment may also find it helpful to file reports with law enforcement officials and assist with prosecutions. Understanding Sexual Harassment
Show me FIRST the Windows where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue.
Your Dad buys the OEM Windows system bundle.
He can choose from 94 desktops and 187 laptops shopping Walmart.com alone.
It works out of the box or is returned to the vendor.
He may chance the free upgrade-in-place from 64 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7, as I did, and discover that the geek's horror stories are mostly pure fantasy.
You mean, like Civilization 4?
Civilization 4 is played at a high level of abstraction.
Games like Medal of Honor are more or less plausible - I would not say realistic - simulations of small unit combat.
There is a difference - and it is a difference that matters, if you are going to make your case for these war game honestly.
Show me ANY Linux where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue, and then we'll talk.
True story.
Not long back I tried the Ubuntu Windows Installer
The installer appeared to hang on an indecipherable hard drive error. It could not be closed or canceled short of killing the process in Task Manager.
The Ubuntu site and forums were no help - so on to Google.
A half hour or so later I found a solution. It seems that the installer treats any internal or external, occupied or unoccupied, flash card slot as a hard drive.
The work around is to click "Cancel" as often as necessary to get the job done.
65 clicks later I began to see daylight.
25 clicks later I had 32 bit Unbuntu dual-booting with 64 bit Windows 7.
It did not make a good first impression.
What's to stop someone from "blowing clean" by using a dust buster plugged into the cigarette lighter?
Your next DUI arrest.
If the machine tests clean and you don't, expect the charge to take you up a notch or two on the felony charts.
2) Having been convicted, I would have run away. There are a lot of decent IT jobs in the Northeast..... almost 3000 miles away from the SF Government's reach. No different than running from Spain to Poland to start a new life.
US Constitution, Article 4, Section II, Clause 2:
"A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime."
You achieve nothing in your interstate flight but a quarantee of conviction on a new and stiffer felony charge.
You will be doing hard time even if your prior conviction is overturned.
Browsers need to clearly show WHO is authenticating and some measure of "reputation" of each authenticator in the chain.
Who guards the guards?
Who gets to say who is reputable - and - just as importantly - why should I believe them?
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
The origins of the microwave oven can be traced back to 1945 - and the desire to commercialize wartime radar technology.
It can take a hell of a lot of time, talent, money and manpower to translate an idea into a marketable product. Things the start-up doesn't always have.
THE FIRST PRODUCTION MICROWAVE OVEN WEIGHED IN at 670 pounds, stood 62 inches tall, and measured nearly 2 feet deep and wide. To install it, an electrician had to put in a 220-volt line and a plumber had to install a water pipe to cool the oven's radar tube. This first oven sold shortly after the war ended for more than $2,000, the equivalent of about $20,000 today. Obviously, this was not an appliance for home use.
In 1952 Raytheon licensed its oven technology to Tappan, which three years later came out with the first home microwave oven, a builtin wall unit. Its magnetron was aircooled, eliminating the need for a water line, but it still required 220 volts and took 75 seconds to warm up. At around $1,200, it was a bit cheaper than the Radarange, but not cheap enough.
In the mid sixties, after Raytheon's acquisition of Amana:
"I don't understand that Foerstner guy," said one engineer, "he's always nickel-and-diming everything." Yet that was Foerstner's key contribution--a deep knowledge of how to design an appliance so that it could be manufactured cheaply.
The new Japanese tube magnetron tube [a model for Amana] cost less than $25.
Raytheon worried that this was too cheap. But the New Japan Radio Company (NJRC) had aimed for just good enough. The Raytheon tube had 13 separate metal parts, including 10 cooling fins, which had to be carefully put together. The Japanese made their tube body in a single unit, punching a big slug of metal in a die and shaping it into finished form complete with cooling fins.
The Japanese further reduced the cost by using a cheap ceramic magnet instead of the alnico magnet used by Raytheon, which was 10 times as expensive. The ceramic magnet didn't work as well; its properties changed with temperature, so that after the first minute or two of operation, the magnetic field dropped and the tube's power output to the oven decreased. But it was good enough for kitchen use.
Finally, the NJRC tube brought a critical benefit to the oven. As Ironfield recalls, it had "a very modest heater power, 65 watts.... And it was about 65 percent efficient, which made it fit into a 15-amp household circuit." No special wiring had to be installed; a consumer could bring the oven home, plug it in, and use it right away.
"The Greatest Discovery Since Fire"
I still don't get it - why cars need so much software? Older cars worked quite well with just mechanical controls, so why there are so many computers in new cars?
From SAE's "Automotive Engineering International:"
Consumer radios and military communication devices were the mainstay of electronics usage prior to the late 1950s. When diodes, transistors, analog integrated circuits, and digital integrated circuits gained a vehicle applications foothold in the 1960s and 1970s, the initial development phase of automotive electronic products included the proliferation of electronic fuel ignition, a technology that was sparked by government regulations aimed at reducing exhaust emissions and improving fuel economy.
Engine controls, also an emissions and fuel economy-motivated pursuit, gained momentum in the late 1970s through the 1980s. For example, the 1975 Cadillac Seville used a 7 x 10 x 3 in (180 x 255 x 85 mm) analog engine control unit with 275 components. Its discrete components included 145 resistors, 38 capacitors, 41 transistors, and 36 diodes along with four linear integrated circuits (standard), custom components including five linear integrated circuits and one thick-film signal module, and five thick-film resistor modules.
As integrated circuit technology evolved, it became possible to design many of the functions into the integrated circuits, thus eliminating a lot of discreet components. Today's digital engine control unit has 90 or fewer components packaged in a box about 4 x 5 x 1 in (100 x 125 x 25 mm) {and] the downward trend in package size and number of components continues.
The second development wave added microprocessors and other enablers to the electronics bin, facilitating the addition of such vehicle features as anti-lock braking, electronic engine controls, and climate control during the 1980s. Electronic engine controls were representative of how the industry evolved vehicle subsystems.
With the addition of intelligent power, intelligent sensors, and large electrical erasable PROMs (essentially memory technology), integrated systems flourished in the 1990s. Integrated powertrain/traction control, integrated braking, steering and suspension, multiplexing, communication and navigation, as well as onboard diagnostics represent the broad array of smart systems.
The present development phase of automotive electronics includes such enablers as digital signal processing and 32-bit microprocessors. Computing power is now 40 times greater than what is was in 1975, and since that time the industry has experienced 300-fold growth in the number of transistors on a chip.
Electronics History Lesson [September 2002]
To defeat any kind of snooping, all bad people have to do is to communicate in code.
That is: "Let's have dinner tonight." to mean "The materials will arrive next week Tuesday."
The first problem is the code book.
There are only so many words and phrases you can keep in your head before you have to write them down.
The second is weaving the key words and phrases into a message that doesn't come across as stilted and unnatural - or worse.
"Let's have dinner tonight" implies an intimacy that can be easily tested.
The Thrifty Spy on the Sixth Avenue El
The most frustrated man in New York at 4 P.M. Saturday, July 24, 1915, was a very proper German lawyer named Heinrich Friedrich Albert who stood helplessly in the middle of Sixth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, watching a streetcar glide uptown with his briefcase and the details of the $40,000,000 spy, propaganda, and sabotage ring he operated. Dr. Albert...had saved a taxi fare of perhaps $1.25.
All he really needs it for is hunting and camping (no navigation)
Hunting and camping without navigation?
National Geographic - for one - sells Magellan-compatible topographical maps. Topo! Explorer
Tell the next guy to write us a sound driver.
Sound in Windows hasn't been a problem for at least fifteen years. Can the same be said for Linux?
The graphics capabilities of the PS3 and XBox 360 are superior. The fact that the Wii outsold them is a testament to the fact that gameplay does indeed matter.
PS3 and XBox 360 graphics are superior on the sets which can display them.
Nintendo gambled that the Wii would be well established before HDTV became the dominant video platform - and that 480p would be acceptable to the first generation of HD gamers -
particularly given the cartoon-like animation of Nintendo's family-oriented franchise games.
That was probably the right decision to make in 2006. But in 2010 it seems fair to argue that the Wii is aging much faster than its competitors.
Convince someone on the inside to leak 15,000 verifiable documents on any of those situations, and I bet WikiLeaks would jump on it.
The Saudi, the Israeli, the North Korean, the Arab on the West Bank, would - quite rightly - regard any contact with Wikileaks as a death sentence.
Why shouldn't it swing both ways? Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that there's actually a dead person? Or say instead, I told a policeman that you just stabbed me in the face. Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that actually happened before he arrests you?
The police need nothing more than a clearly intelligible reason to make an arrest.
An arrest doesn't always end in a conviction - but it does take a serious contender for the rope off the street until you can sort things out.
There's no money in solving actual crimes. On the other hand, doing the dirty work of the MafiAA is a way to collect some kick-ass bribes.
The entertainment industry is worth billions of domestic spending and export dollars. It is a labor-intensive and generates a lot of high wage - high skilled - jobs.
It is important to the economies of states like New York, California, Florida and so on. The Senator from Nebraska votes wheat and corn. The Texan cattle and oil.
Think interests not bribes.
Every dollar not spent on bad movies and pop music is one more dollar that can be spent on productive industry.
and what industry would that be?
You aren't working the mines and mills 12 and 14 hour days - and a half day on Saturday.
You have free time and quite a bit of discretionary income, a substantial potion of which you are going to spend on services not product.
How does finding rapists and prosecuting them help corporate profits and the economy at large?
Rape is almost never prosecuted in the federal courts.
It is extraordinarilly rare for any crime of violence to be prosecuted in the federal courts.
What you are really asking for is a national forensic lab and a massive DNA database managed by the FBI.
The FBI exists to protect profits. In fact the government exists to protect commerce, the very basis of our society
In the American federal system, tracking down missing persons is traditionally a local and state responsibility, prosecuting economic and property crimes that have a national and constitutiobal dimension a federal responsibility.
The FBI has 60 active Kidnapping and Missing Persons Investigations
This may give a clearer idea of how small the FBI role in such cases really is.
Even multiple truecrypt partitions could offer something similar. They can't tell how many levels deep something like that goes.
But it just might be possible to capture your interaction with files on hidden partitions.