Police walking the beat ready to arrest people who commit crimes is a deterrent. Police sitting in rooms eating donuts and oggling cute girls on a CCTV camera is not a deterrent.
Robberies in the town near where I work have gone _UP_ since police patrols were replaced with CCTV, since the robbers just use sophisticated 'ski mask' stealth technology to avoid being identified. Crooks care about the high risk of being caught by a cop on patrol when they commit a crime, not the minimal risk of being caught from a CCTV tape.
On the other hand, I hear that there's been a reduction in important crimes, like people pissing in the street on the way home from the pub.
"Is this just not considered important over there?"
a) we have fsckwits in government and there's nothing we can do about it. Even 1-2 million people marching through the streets of London didn't stop Bliar from sending our troops to Iraq, so short of rioting in the streets and setting up a guillotine outside Parliament, what can we do?
b) we can still emigrate. A few days back one of the newspapers reported a poll that 1/3 of the British people want to do so, and I'm now looking seriously at doing so myself before it becomes a total police state.
"I had a picture of Aki in a bikini from the Final Fantasy movie on my computer. My girlfriend found it and wanted to know why I had it."
LOL... yeah, I forgot to turn off that Aki desktop image when my GF came to visit. Fortunately she noticed that Aki actually looks a lot like she does, so I got away with it:).
"I couldn't imagine pilots relying on themselves to fly airplanes amid the thousands of others without the aid of traffic controllers and their computers."
Then I'm afraid you lack imagination: the idea that aircraft need to be controlled by people on the ground is a large part of the problem... not only is there no real need for such a system now that technologies like GPS can allow aircraft to communicate and ensure they're not going to collide with any other aircraft nearby, but 'air traffic control' increases the risk of collisions when something goes wrong by forcing all aircraft into narrow corridors in the sky.
The whole concept of 'air traffic control' is outdated and should be overhauled. You need control around airports since you don't want multiple planes trying to land on the same runway at the same time, but it's causing more trouble than it's worth in the rest of the sky.
"Office (specifically Word) is a complex tool. It can do a lot, but with that level of flexibility comes a certain level of complexity and obfuscation."
Which is exactly the problem: how many people really need even 10% of the 'complex and obfuscated' features in Office these days? Personally I've yet to find anything I want to do that OpenOffice doesn't do, and doesn't do in an easily understood manner... so what's the point of Office?
No. In the future everyone entering a cinema will be forced to check their eyes in at the door, so that they can't watch the movie and then post on the Internet to tell people what it was about.
That, I think, is what the studios are really afraid of. Most recent movies have sucked big-time, and the last thing they want is for the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers to find that out before they hand over their money...
Getting a gun in London is hardly a problem, provided you don't mind breaking the law. Of course if you shoot a mugger, you'd better be ready to go to jail for years...
But he didn't have them: as has been clearly demonstrated since the invasion, and as inspectors claimed before the invasion.
"all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war."
How exactly do you prove a negative? The mere fact that Bush expected Saddam Hussein to do so shows that his goal was not to disarm Iraq, but to find any justification to invade.
Also, since we Israel is the only Middle Eastern nations which we know definitely has WMDs, when is Bush going to be imposing sanctions and demanding disarmament and inspections there?
Ah, but I forgot, some Middle Eastern WMDs are good, some Middle Eastern WMDs are bad, it all depends on which countries have oil and who brings the most votes at the next election.
"In the average case code and data _do_ tend to be accessed more than once."
The vast majority of data I access on my PC will not need to be accessed again for minutes, if that, or is in files so large that they're impossible to cache. And the vast majority of files are either small text files (e.g. cached web pages) which can be loaded in a split second or huge video files which the video editing application can cache far more efficiently than the kernel can.
"So, frankly, the default kernel behavior is right."
I'm not sure about Linux, since I haven't reinstalled it after loading XP onto this machine, but it sounds like it's now doing precisely the same braindead things that XP loves to do. Only a moron would swap out running applications to try to cache a 2GB file when I'm copying it from one drive to another, and that's precisely what XP does.
The simple fact is that the time taken to swap in Mozilla when a braindead operating system has swapped it out to disk in order to cache another 100MB of a file I'm not going to access again for hours, if that, is huge, while the time saved by having a huge disk cache is tiny. I really don't understand why kernel developers (XP or Linux) can't see this.
"If the porno industry no longer has to expend their own money or effort to crack down on copyright violators, don't you think they'd start?"
Uh, no. The porno people seem to understand that downloaded porn is one of the best and cheapest advertising media they have... if people watch downloaded porn that they like, they may well visit your web site and pay money for more.
Small, smart companies understand that downloading is free advertising, and the losses are minimal. It's only bloated, oppressive bureaucracies like the RIAA and MPAA middlemen who think otherwise.
"Right there, way before the first ammendment, is the delegation of power to the federal government to enforce copyrights."
For a limited time. It's very clear that the founders only included that clause in order to encourage people to produce stuff that would soon go into the public domain, and they would barf if they could see the perpetual extensions of copyright which have happened since precisely to prevent that from happening.
The sad fact is that with the utter corruption of democracy today, the only thing which can eliminate bad laws is widespread civil disobedience.
"I think this makes the punishment far closer fit the crime."
In what sense, exactly? What exactly should the punishment be for uploading a Britney Spears.mp3?
(Remember when responding that the average sentence served in America these days for _MURDER_ is only about six years).
"It will be a long long time before its cheaper to put a satalite in space then it is to stick a antenna on the water tower."
But one satellite can replace an awful lot of cell towers: AFAIR Iridium planned to cover the entire planet with only 77 satellites. If the cost of launching them was to drop to a few dollars a pound, it's quite possible it would be cheaper than building cell towers on Earth.
A fusion reactor will only have a tiny amount of fuel in it: if it leaked you probably wouldn't want to go sniffing for escaping fusion fuel at 100,000,000 degrees, but it will rapidly cool to ambient temperature and produce only a small safety risk.
"Let's harness the nature's powers instead of raping it's resources."
Indeed. Rather than digging up oil in the desert, let's build huge, expensive wind-farms that destroy the landscape and massacre birds.
Odd, isn't it, that if oil refineries were slaughtering birds as a normal part of their operations the greenists would be all over them, yet when windmills do it, it's quietly ignored.
"A CEO can not determine the actions of a corporation, he could only advise the board."
ROTLFMAO. Maybe you should try life in the real world sometime.
The plain fact is that Moore knew a year ago that Eisner would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, yet acted as though he only discovered it very recently. That's a publicity stunt, nothing to do with censorship.
Perhaps you should have spent more time in reading comprehension at school, then you'd realise that that is no restriction on the rest of the amendment.
Equally, you might want to explain why the founders implicitly assume the private ownership of warships in the constitution, but wouldn't have tolerated the ownership of evil baby-killing 'assault weapons'?
"You don't have to agree with him, but you should be fighting to allow it to be seen."
And how exactly is the government preventing it from being seen? Are they threatening to send Moore to Cuba and burn all the negatives if the movie is shown?
Indeed. You'd think that after Moore had admitted that he knew a year ago that Disney wouldn't distribute his movie, that people would no longer be arguing over this very blatant publicity ploy.
Personally, as much as I despise Bush, I place little value on a 'documentary' by someone like Moore. PR is one thing, claiming that you've only just found out something you actually knew a year ago is something completely different.
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Police walking the beat ready to arrest people who commit crimes is a deterrent. Police sitting in rooms eating donuts and oggling cute girls on a CCTV camera is not a deterrent.
Robberies in the town near where I work have gone _UP_ since police patrols were replaced with CCTV, since the robbers just use sophisticated 'ski mask' stealth technology to avoid being identified. Crooks care about the high risk of being caught by a cop on patrol when they commit a crime, not the minimal risk of being caught from a CCTV tape.
On the other hand, I hear that there's been a reduction in important crimes, like people pissing in the street on the way home from the pub.
"Is this just not considered important over there?"
a) we have fsckwits in government and there's nothing we can do about it. Even 1-2 million people marching through the streets of London didn't stop Bliar from sending our troops to Iraq, so short of rioting in the streets and setting up a guillotine outside Parliament, what can we do?
b) we can still emigrate. A few days back one of the newspapers reported a poll that 1/3 of the British people want to do so, and I'm now looking seriously at doing so myself before it becomes a total police state.
"the much more lifelike CGI Neo, in the Matrix Reloaded, was stiff and zombielike"
:).
A realistic portrayal of Keanu Reeves then
"I had a picture of Aki in a bikini from the Final Fantasy movie on my computer. My girlfriend found it and wanted to know why I had it."
:).
LOL... yeah, I forgot to turn off that Aki desktop image when my GF came to visit. Fortunately she noticed that Aki actually looks a lot like she does, so I got away with it
"The key to the constitution is you can't make a law that goes against it without amending it"
So how did they make the roughly 98% of Federal laws that quite clearly violate the Constitution?
"I couldn't imagine pilots relying on themselves to fly airplanes amid the thousands of others without the aid of traffic controllers and their computers."
Then I'm afraid you lack imagination: the idea that aircraft need to be controlled by people on the ground is a large part of the problem... not only is there no real need for such a system now that technologies like GPS can allow aircraft to communicate and ensure they're not going to collide with any other aircraft nearby, but 'air traffic control' increases the risk of collisions when something goes wrong by forcing all aircraft into narrow corridors in the sky.
The whole concept of 'air traffic control' is outdated and should be overhauled. You need control around airports since you don't want multiple planes trying to land on the same runway at the same time, but it's causing more trouble than it's worth in the rest of the sky.
"Office (specifically Word) is a complex tool. It can do a lot, but with that level of flexibility comes a certain level of complexity and obfuscation."
Which is exactly the problem: how many people really need even 10% of the 'complex and obfuscated' features in Office these days? Personally I've yet to find anything I want to do that OpenOffice doesn't do, and doesn't do in an easily understood manner... so what's the point of Office?
"I'd love to be on anti-pirate duty if it meant being able to walk around in night vision goggles."
Me too. But I'd just spend the time oggling the hot chicks while they couldn't see me, screw looking for pirates...
Too damn much... when you include all the costs, it's a lot cheaper for me to buy a DVD than watch a movie in a cinema in London.
No. In the future everyone entering a cinema will be forced to check their eyes in at the door, so that they can't watch the movie and then post on the Internet to tell people what it was about.
That, I think, is what the studios are really afraid of. Most recent movies have sucked big-time, and the last thing they want is for the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers to find that out before they hand over their money...
Getting a gun in London is hardly a problem, provided you don't mind breaking the law. Of course if you shoot a mugger, you'd better be ready to go to jail for years...
"If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs,"
But he didn't have them: as has been clearly demonstrated since the invasion, and as inspectors claimed before the invasion.
"all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war."
How exactly do you prove a negative? The mere fact that Bush expected Saddam Hussein to do so shows that his goal was not to disarm Iraq, but to find any justification to invade.
Also, since we Israel is the only Middle Eastern nations which we know definitely has WMDs, when is Bush going to be imposing sanctions and demanding disarmament and inspections there?
Ah, but I forgot, some Middle Eastern WMDs are good, some Middle Eastern WMDs are bad, it all depends on which countries have oil and who brings the most votes at the next election.
"In the average case code and data _do_ tend to be accessed more than once."
The vast majority of data I access on my PC will not need to be accessed again for minutes, if that, or is in files so large that they're impossible to cache. And the vast majority of files are either small text files (e.g. cached web pages) which can be loaded in a split second or huge video files which the video editing application can cache far more efficiently than the kernel can.
"So, frankly, the default kernel behavior is right."
I'm not sure about Linux, since I haven't reinstalled it after loading XP onto this machine, but it sounds like it's now doing precisely the same braindead things that XP loves to do. Only a moron would swap out running applications to try to cache a 2GB file when I'm copying it from one drive to another, and that's precisely what XP does.
The simple fact is that the time taken to swap in Mozilla when a braindead operating system has swapped it out to disk in order to cache another 100MB of a file I'm not going to access again for hours, if that, is huge, while the time saved by having a huge disk cache is tiny. I really don't understand why kernel developers (XP or Linux) can't see this.
"If the porno industry no longer has to expend their own money or effort to crack down on copyright violators, don't you think they'd start?"
Uh, no. The porno people seem to understand that downloaded porn is one of the best and cheapest advertising media they have... if people watch downloaded porn that they like, they may well visit your web site and pay money for more.
Small, smart companies understand that downloading is free advertising, and the losses are minimal. It's only bloated, oppressive bureaucracies like the RIAA and MPAA middlemen who think otherwise.
"Right there, way before the first ammendment, is the delegation of power to the federal government to enforce copyrights."
.mp3?
For a limited time. It's very clear that the founders only included that clause in order to encourage people to produce stuff that would soon go into the public domain, and they would barf if they could see the perpetual extensions of copyright which have happened since precisely to prevent that from happening.
The sad fact is that with the utter corruption of democracy today, the only thing which can eliminate bad laws is widespread civil disobedience.
"I think this makes the punishment far closer fit the crime."
In what sense, exactly? What exactly should the punishment be for uploading a Britney Spears
(Remember when responding that the average sentence served in America these days for _MURDER_ is only about six years).
"It will be a long long time before its cheaper to put a satalite in space then it is to stick a antenna on the water tower."
But one satellite can replace an awful lot of cell towers: AFAIR Iridium planned to cover the entire planet with only 77 satellites. If the cost of launching them was to drop to a few dollars a pound, it's quite possible it would be cheaper than building cell towers on Earth.
"When ever you made contact you would begin to float away."
:).
Simple answers: bungie cords or gaffer tape
"Would it be enough to cause the atmosphere to go poof like the trick paper used by magicians to make a flame appear out of nowhere?"
Uh, no.
A fusion reactor will only have a tiny amount of fuel in it: if it leaked you probably wouldn't want to go sniffing for escaping fusion fuel at 100,000,000 degrees, but it will rapidly cool to ambient temperature and produce only a small safety risk.
"Let's harness the nature's powers instead of raping it's resources."
Indeed. Rather than digging up oil in the desert, let's build huge, expensive wind-farms that destroy the landscape and massacre birds.
Odd, isn't it, that if oil refineries were slaughtering birds as a normal part of their operations the greenists would be all over them, yet when windmills do it, it's quietly ignored.
"A CEO can not determine the actions of a corporation, he could only advise the board."
ROTLFMAO. Maybe you should try life in the real world sometime.
The plain fact is that Moore knew a year ago that Eisner would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, yet acted as though he only discovered it very recently. That's a publicity stunt, nothing to do with censorship.
Perhaps you should have spent more time in reading comprehension at school, then you'd realise that that is no restriction on the rest of the amendment.
Equally, you might want to explain why the founders implicitly assume the private ownership of warships in the constitution, but wouldn't have tolerated the ownership of evil baby-killing 'assault weapons'?
"You don't have to agree with him, but you should be fighting to allow it to be seen."
And how exactly is the government preventing it from being seen? Are they threatening to send Moore to Cuba and burn all the negatives if the movie is shown?
Indeed. You'd think that after Moore had admitted that he knew a year ago that Disney wouldn't distribute his movie, that people would no longer be arguing over this very blatant publicity ploy.
Personally, as much as I despise Bush, I place little value on a 'documentary' by someone like Moore. PR is one thing, claiming that you've only just found out something you actually knew a year ago is something completely different.