You think the future of video programming involves something as archaic as TV tuners and DVR software? You might as well be asking where the buggy-whip-holder is in your new car.
But of course! DVR Shmee-vee-rrr! Bah! They will pipe the TV directly to you via the two large bolts sticking out of your neck. You will pause the programming by hitting your forehead against a solid object (hit twice to resume). Pulling left ear rewinds, right ear to skip forward. Volume controlled by a finger up the left nostril.
That's one very expensive piece of computer gear with "AOL" installed on./sarcasm
I think the lawyer who wrote this was "subtly" reffering to the settlement money he will beat out of the RIAA for his client because of what's on that HDD. Therefore the HDD is "worth" "six to low seven figure".
In 2000, government passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, better known as RIPA...
The fact that the government chose not to activate some provisions at the time, which the Home Office wants to acivate
now (with modifications), has little bearing on the affair. The broad authorization to do these things has been given already once.
Evidence suggests that perhaps you should inform yourself better about these issues.
Evidence suggests that you have great difficulties in comprehension of relationships of things. Perheaps you should stay away from places where people are not likely to put up with your bullshit assertions.
You have clearly not read either the bill or the links regarding the bill in the submission. From the FAQ from those links:...
This would be an excellent opportunity for you to RTFA and STFU until you know what you're talking about. (Unless spreading disinformation is your goal, of course.)
Have you gone barking mad? The FAQ refers to the long defeated Bill C-74, not the bill C-416, which is what this whole Slashdot post is all about. Bill C-416 requires only the request by an "authorized person"...
... The Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Commissioner of Competition and the chief or head of a police service constituted under the laws of a province may designate for the purposes of this section any employee of his or her agency, or a class of such employees, whose duties are related to protecting national security or to law enforcement.
... or the Minister of Public Safety to be activated. Hence the Slashdot submission mentioning the "no warrant" part.
INDEPTH: TORONTO BOMB PLOT... Panic now!!... jihadists are upon us... NEWSFLASH! We caught Jihadists in YOUR CLOSET! We are proceeding carefuly to look under your bed... Wish us luck!...
etc and so on
So you posted links to loads of hysteria brimming with "alleged" plots and scary jihadists behind every corner, none of whom actually assasinated anyone or blew up any bombs whatsoever on Canadian soil. Exactly the sort of "pre-emptive" nonsense a Psychotic Authoritarian would use to "prove" his point that we all need to give up our freedoms to be "protected" from these horrible boogeymen whose guilt is so obvious because... you and your ilk tell us so. And we should trust you unconditionally because you are "protecting" us poor sods.
Come up with something else then this bullshit if you want me to cede the absolute certainty of violation of my freedom by the likes of you in exchange for astronomically remote possibility of being attacked by jihadists.
... a man... allegedly... molesting the four children younger than 12...
1243 million people charged in child porn sting!!!.... child molesters everywhere!!! Next on the news: is there enough room under your bead for BOTH the jihadists and child molesters!?! Stay tuned...
And of course not so long ago there were scores of people charged for "satanic abuse" of children in certain daycare... but then you would not remember how that turned out --- too inconvenient, I am sure.
Note Mr. Raving Authoritarian that I am not opposed to police conducting investigations of child abuse after actual abuse was commited (as opposed to imaginary abuse via drawing cartoons) and with warrants and all due process, only to your kind's inane fear mongering in order to disabuse us of all of our privacy in your breathlessly stupid effort to pre-emptively spy and prosecute people, all in order to attain "safety" via creation of a police state.
Yes really. It has been effectively outlawed from the hands of citizens in France by a set of laws culminating in the 1996 "july 26" bill which demands (in Article 17) that:
all encryption keys are managed by an authorised "trusted third party". The trusted third party will be a government licensed organisation which manages encoding keys for users. The licenses will be conditional upon the trusted third party submitting encoding keys to the appropriate authorities according to the law so that the State can, if necessary, access the information. Cryptographic products remain subject to authorisation even if they are used in conjunction with a trusted third party.
For that reason many products (such as for example the Linux RDP terminal services client "rdesktop") have special "French" mode which disables encryption.
Then I'm sure you'll be able to provide cites and references, 'cuz I can't find anything as extreme as what you're claiming.
Google better.
The most recent complaints I've found regarding the UK have been that the government is planning to allow police to compel suspects to decrypt data or divulge encryption keys.
That's (a) not "already existing" (as of today, the government's website regarding the legislation indicates that it has not yet become law)
Actually the RIPA act passed already, but it was not renewed in 2005, following which the Home Office demanded that RIPA Part 3 be reinstated with modifications. This is the current debate you are referring to.
, and (b) rather questionably the outlawing of crypto.
The French 1990s laws actually did outlaw cruypto from the hands of citizens but the rules were "relaxed" in 1996 to "only" require escrow keys from everyone. Which of course is what the Home Office wants now. And which is what the Canadian bill -- which prompted this whole lovely chat of ours -- effectively demands as well. Which you would know had you actually read it.
You haven't provided a shred of independent justification for the claim that "requiring ISPs to provide the name of the owner of an IP address will inevitably lead to a police state akin to Nazi Germany"
That is of course a strawman assertion which you fabricated, since you cannot find this particular passage in my post. What I actually said is that attempts at "pre-emptive" crime fighting such as wholesale, warrantless monitoring of all electronic communications -- which is what this bill actually permits (complete with ridiculous demands for an ability to decrypt any transmissions) -- coupled with the patently obvious expansion of authoritarian behaviour of our governments in recent years is synonymous with activities of the fascists (and other similiar tyrannies) of the world and thus we have no reason to believe that these same activities, conducted for the same reasons, by the same types of personalities will not lead to very similar results.
History is replendent with examples of "pre-emptive" campaigns conducted against this or that bogeyman, or "pre-emptive" wars against whole countries and all of them were conducted by one set of power-mad tyrants or another. That is my "independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A.". The pattern is rock solid and has been repeated countless times throughout history. I can point out to any set of "pre-emptive" activities all the way from burning "witches" and "heretics" to "solving the Jewish question" or "hunting down the counter-revolutionaries" to "pre-emptive" war on Iraq. Provide a single counter example which demonstrates that "pre-emption" ever works (and for that you have to demonstrate a real-life case whereby you could absolutely guarantee that some great crime would be commited were it not for the "pre-emptive" action).
, meaning that - according to the above definition, your argument is particularly confusing, fallacious, illogical and/or insincere.
You just described your entire effort at "proving" the slippery slope argument. Having not even bothered to read the bill in question you then presented purposefuly false "quotes", which you promptly demolished in order to "demonstrate" your "superior" intelect. Talk about dishonesty.
(That's not a jab at Americans; it's simply pointing out that the vicious government-vs-people dynamic that exists in the US simply does not exist in many other countries, and it's a mistake to try to apply it.)
I am not by any means a libertarian of any stripe. However the recent activities of both the US and Canadian governments are beginning to worry me greatly. It appears that the social contract which our societies are supposed to have with those who govern us is being torn by various authoritarian assholes who somehow managed to infiltrate all levels of governance. We are supposed to have a number of checks and balances to prevent the very such thing and these psychopaths are systematically dismantling those, aided by their mega-corporate and media (which are these days one and the same) accomplices and indiffirent public who for the most part was turned into slackjawed lumps vegetating in front of American (or Canadian) Idol showing TV sets.
These are of course the "perfect storm" conditions for nascent fascism.
As to "other countries" though, please don't be too self-congratulatory because similiar forces exist there and I can point to Tony Blair as an excellent example.
"Psychopatic Authoritarians" I am decrying to are not "a government" per se, these are mentally unstable individuals who have always existed in any society, who always gravitate towards any position of power, who always insist on "defending" the rest of us from some sort of "enemy" (whom they will fabricate if absent) so that they can thrive in a climate of fear and draconian "laws" which they will promptly try to establish. They were and are the core members of any secret state police of any tyrant out there throughout history, be it in a fascist, communist or religious wacko tyranny. Of course before that they were the "royalists" and "pious men" who enforced the rule of kings and feudal lords (or the Holy Inquisition). And so on and on.
The whole notion of Enlightenment, constitiutional democracy and the contractual relationship of those governed with those who govern was meant to thwart the Authoritarians. Unfortunately the system is not perfect and under certain conditions our Republics can be mortally wounded from within by the Mussolinis, Hitlers and Francos of our world.
So what I am talking about is not any "vicious government-vs-people dynamic" but a vicious freedom-loving-people vs psychopathic-authoritarians dynamic which existed since times immemorial.
Yes I did. Your sarcastic one (I assume it was sarcasm referring to things Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and other wingnuts had said over the years) was so close in appearance to the original that somehow I ended up clicking on the wrong reply link. Sigh.
You don't agree that someone writing "fictional works" about the bombing of government offices, for pleasure, is someone who deserves to be, at the very least, monitored? That isn't exactly a healthy behaviour. Come on man, use common fucking sense. I think we can tell the difference between a serious literary work and a nut job's fantasy literature.
Sentiments like these are of course the wet dream of every would-be-fascist out there. Because there is really no way to tell if someone who expressed violent thoughts about some politician or business-feudal-lord actually means it or is just venting. Not until an act of violence is commited, which is the actual crime. Any attempts at "pre-emption" inevietably lead to persecutions of all of those who express "sufficiently extreme" thoughts against the ruling elites. Following which everyone becomes "careful" (read: terrorized) about what they say and write. Following which the rulers announce that they know that the "extremists" (who hide under every bed by now) are "secretly" communicating and thinking their "violent desires". And after that comes Gestapo, Stasi, KGB etc.
You see the problem with your thinking is that you missed the fact that "fictional works" are simply recordings of thought. And once they become subject to monitoring and abuse by the authorities (who after all only want to protect us poor sods from the evil terrorists who hide in every closet) so do the thoughts in your head. As Orwell predicted with frightening foresight.
These are the very states producing and arming terrorists and I find it ironic that you claim that "bad things will happen" if we allow wiretapping when in fact historically they never happened this way. How many democratic countries have slipped into a totalitianism as a result of wiretapping?... I count zero.
You mean you will actually wait until the Liebenstandarte Richard Perle SS Division is marching down the 5th Avenue to concede the point? Because there is at least one formerly-democratic country which already ceased to be the shining city on the hill for the rest of us and now features routine torture while it does no longer feature quaint little things like habeas corpus. In that country its "intelligence" agencies and "police" conduct mass surveilance of the citizenry based on its political views, with no warrants or oversight, going as far as to send unercover agents to infiltrate opposition groups from Quakers to peace organisations in Canada in Europe. But then again, the Republican National Conventions do not yet boast marches with torches. I guess we should therefore slumber contently. Nothing to worry about whatsoever here. Right?
Why the hell should they be allowed to read my internet packets without a warrant?
Because the Internet is today the one truly democratic medium of choice of the citizenry. The Authoritarians' inability to read you mail comes from the fact that in the day where letters were the democratic medium of the citizenry, those citizens were willing to fight and die in the battle with the Psychopathic Authoritarians who have always desired to monitor and spy on everyone. This battle has to be re-fought each time the progress of technology changes our modes of communication just as each new generation of these Sociopaths will try again and again to enslave us.
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)?
Then of course this dumb bitch or some other Psycho Authoritarian (at the urging of ever-power-hungry Socopathic Authoritarians who inhabit "police" and "intelligence" communities) will introduce bills outlawing encryption and steganography in possesion of those nasty, unruly peons, otherwise known as sheep-citizens. Or introduce some other brain dead scheme involving escrow keys or presumption-of-guilty-until-proven-innocent if a stream of random bytes longer then 10 is found anywhere on your computer.
These people are simply sick in the head. They must have some sort of boogey-man against which they "protect" us by demanding that we give them absolute power over us and meekly accept their fascist rule. All the while exclaiming how grateful we are for the "freedom" this will grant us.
Believe me, I don't want to live in Nazi Germany, but I don't want to die in a subway bombing either. Let's stop the partisan stuff and find a balanced solution.
While I agree that the sick-in-the-head "Sociopathic Authoritarian" syndrome is by no means confined to the Conservative Party, there is no such thing as a "balanced solution" when an ability to conduct automated mass surveilance of citizens is concerned. And let's not kid ourselves here, this is precisely the Holy Grail of both police forces and the "intelligence" communities.
All of course in the effort to "protect" us from that hypothetical "ticking bomb" which blows few of us up every... well.... a few decades or so. But it will certainly stop all those fat old geezers looking at their hand-drawn child-porn cartoons, otherwise they would go right out and abduct all of our children. Think of the children!!!
I believe that the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 134, specifically forbids adultery -- regardless of the rank of the offenders -- with a maximum penalty of "Dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year".
I do not think he will do time, but "dishonorable discharge" or at least a demotion is definitely coming.
Again, none of the above changes my original objection. Your statement was absolute, i.e. did not allow for exceptions. I presented an exception, thus invalidating it. That is all I was intending to point out.
The subject of behaviour of mentally ill and their responsibilities to society -- or their ability to even be "responsible" -- is a whole different, extremely complicated field, awash with subjective, unscientific judgement calls and I do not think it is possible to introduce firm rules there as you appear to be attempting to. One way or the other, it is beyond the scope of my original, rather concise argument.
The fact that the US Government condones such beha vior betrays one of the reasons I find them so contemptuous. Torture isn't what I learned in civics class.
I find no fault with your position on this.
However, my response was meant to illustrate that your original assertion of humans being responsible for being in control of their emotions at all times was faulty. I simply presented an example where such control is purposefuly made impossible via efforts of other people, thus invalidating your premise.
I think he is done too. This will bring all the attention of NASA evaluators on him. Not to mention that them both being Navy officers renders their activities in direct violation of all the various rules of professional conduct which officers must adhere to. I am quite certain that adultery is frowned upon in those.
So I would expect his/her court martials and/or dishonorable discharges to be just around the corner. It just so happens that her truly outre ways are hogging all the news at the moment. His moment in the spotlight is coming.
People are responsible for their own emotions; they are indeed in charge of them.
Really? I was under an impression that a whole gamut of methods exists precisely to effectively destroy that control (although with rather unpredicable results). Some recently popularized by the US Government go under such names as "waterboarding" or "prolonged stress positions".
Debian is very widely used on servers because of this very security/stability over "latest greatest shiny thingie" attitude. In my case the kernels are the only "non-standard" part of my system. That way I only have to worry about security patches to the kernels themselves and let Debian handle the rest. Amongst many philosophical disagreements I have with the design of RedHat/SUSE, the security update scenarios there are rather cumbersome compared to Debian (and in the case of RedHat involve yearly fees).
The newest kernel on Debian stable is 2.6.8. The mptsas driver does not even exist on that one (it is the SAS-specific component of the "mpt" driver stack which is controlled by the mptctl module). Never you mind being able to handle the 1068 chipset.
I am sure similar things are occuring to any distro which does not have very recent kernel revs.
Mind you, you have to have kernel rev 2.6.19.2 or some such whereby Linus is still typing it out while you are downloading it to get one of the recent Dells with the SAS arrays working. So that pretty much rules out any of the "stable" server distros out there and you are pretty much forced to roll your own.
I am a Debian user and therefore I am used to such kernel surgery but most other newbish Linux users would rather have "out of the box" support on their "corporate" RedHats or SUSEs.
So Dell actually makes some wacky back-ported RPMs for some of those, which is where from (plus the telephone support centre guys complete unfamiliarity with all things Linux) I suspect the "proprietary binary driver" silliness came (they do not put their source with the RPMs on their website).
We were discussing on-board GPU RAM which is usually a custom arrangement wholly different from the dynamic RAM types used as main system memory. Some GPUs even use static RAM.
So essentially you are comparing apples and oranges.
Needless to say, all of these numbers are theoretical, and doesn't take into account latencies and other realities. But nonetheless, your "much much wider bandwidth" statement wasn't true. I'm a nitpicker.:)
Well, you might have picked an imaginary nit this time....
Vista maps the GPU and system RAM used for 'video' together, so by using the new WDDM model and a AGP or PCI/e bus, there is no need for Vista to shove the System used RAM for video back into the GPU RAM space in order to let the GPU use it or draw with it. It can stay in System RAM, and the GPU sees it as native GPU RAM.
Except of course that this is impossible with any GPU using dedicated on-board RAM. The whole point of on-board RAM is that its bandwidth is much, much wider then that of even the PCI/e bus. Also because system buses are prone to being bottlenecks hampering application performance when large numbers of large textures are involved, most higher end GPUs use texture compression algorithms coupled with GPU-bound hardware decompression schemes, thus effectively precluding any attempts at using system RAM for such activities. In other words what you are describing is only possible on cheesy, sub-$100 "GPU"s with laughable 3D performance.
I think this is the bigger point you are missing
See above.
99.9% of desktop users that have 128MB on their Video card will not see this effect, the chance that you have enough active Windows open to eat into system RAM is not as likely as you might think.
This assumes that no other 3D apps/applets/what-not are in use (thus no virtualisation of any kind is in effect) and also that some of the textures used are not duplicated in system RAM, as it is usually the case with complex 3D scenes since textures tend to expand rapidly after decompression in hardware. The moment even one non-DirectX-10 3D app in use, the whole scheme blows apart and up to 128MB has to be virtualised per application in addition to the OS.
Now with games, this WILL happen; however, in gaming what is more beneficial to you in terms of performance? Loading the game textures off the Hard Drive continuously, or letting the system pretend you have more GPU RAM so the textures are 'virtualized' in system RAM?
This of course is completely irrelevant from the point of view of analysis of Vista since all current games optimise texture loading by caching them in system RAM. They also set up complicated, fine-tuned rendering pipelines and what not. If anything, the virtualisation will screw them up (as is the case with most games now) since the designers were not expecting to be sharing the GPU and subsquently optimised for that case. Vista is introducing unexpected timing and memory/disk access behaviour which causes most of these games to malfunction. Just check out the various gaming forums for all the moaning that is coming from Vista users. Turning off Aero is pretty much a pre-requisite to getting most of the current games to run with any reasonable stability.
If you know anything about gaming, yanking crap off the hard drive compared to being able to use another small chunk of system RAM to hold them is going to yield a far better experience. And this is also superior to just caching them, as the Game is not having to load/request the textures continously. Instead the Game sees the textures as already loaded in GPU space and can use them as if they were sitting on the Video card itself.
See above
Vista will move textures to the GPU RAM if they are in high performance use. So some of the initial calls to a texture will be virtualized and used from System RAM, but if the texture is frequently used and another texture is not being used, Vista will flip them out so the higher priority texture will then be sitting in GPU RAM, which is faster.
This, naturally, is complete nonsense.
As I pointed out, swapping textures into the GPU RAM from system RAM is anything but "high performance".
Also, Vista has no business messing with "optimising" per-application textures since it is impossible for an OS to estimate the usage patterns an
Slashdot Mirror
But of course! DVR Shmee-vee-rrr! Bah! They will pipe the TV directly to you via the two large bolts sticking out of your neck. You will pause the programming by hitting your forehead against a solid object (hit twice to resume). Pulling left ear rewinds, right ear to skip forward. Volume controlled by a finger up the left nostril.
Really? Let's see...
Me:
The Register (your link):
The fact that the government chose not to activate some provisions at the time, which the Home Office wants to acivate now (with modifications), has little bearing on the affair. The broad authorization to do these things has been given already once.Evidence suggests that you have great difficulties in comprehension of relationships of things. Perheaps you should stay away from places where people are not likely to put up with your bullshit assertions.
Have you gone barking mad? The FAQ refers to the long defeated Bill C-74, not the bill C-416, which is what this whole Slashdot post is all about. Bill C-416 requires only the request by an "authorized person" ...
Go read the damn bill C-416 before bloviating!
So you posted links to loads of hysteria brimming with "alleged" plots and scary jihadists behind every corner, none of whom actually assasinated anyone or blew up any bombs whatsoever on Canadian soil. Exactly the sort of "pre-emptive" nonsense a Psychotic Authoritarian would use to "prove" his point that we all need to give up our freedoms to be "protected" from these horrible boogeymen whose guilt is so obvious because ... you and your ilk tell us so. And we should trust you unconditionally because you are "protecting" us poor sods.
Come up with something else then this bullshit if you want me to cede the absolute certainty of violation of my freedom by the likes of you in exchange for astronomically remote possibility of being attacked by jihadists.
And of course not so long ago there were scores of people charged for "satanic abuse" of children in certain daycare ... but then you would not remember how that turned out --- too inconvenient, I am sure.
Note Mr. Raving Authoritarian that I am not opposed to police conducting investigations of child abuse after actual abuse was commited (as opposed to imaginary abuse via drawing cartoons) and with warrants and all due process, only to your kind's inane fear mongering in order to disabuse us of all of our privacy in your breathlessly stupid effort to pre-emptively spy and prosecute people, all in order to attain "safety" via creation of a police state.
You better believe it.
Yes really. It has been effectively outlawed from the hands of citizens in France by a set of laws culminating in the 1996 "july 26" bill which demands (in Article 17) that:
For that reason many products (such as for example the Linux RDP terminal services client "rdesktop") have special "French" mode which disables encryption.
Google better.
Actually the RIPA act passed already, but it was not renewed in 2005, following which the Home Office demanded that RIPA Part 3 be reinstated with modifications. This is the current debate you are referring to.
The French 1990s laws actually did outlaw cruypto from the hands of citizens but the rules were "relaxed" in 1996 to "only" require escrow keys from everyone. Which of course is what the Home Office wants now. And which is what the Canadian bill -- which prompted this whole lovely chat of ours -- effectively demands as well. Which you would know had you actually read it.
That is of course a strawman assertion which you fabricated, since you cannot find this particular passage in my post. What I actually said is that attempts at "pre-emptive" crime fighting such as wholesale, warrantless monitoring of all electronic communications -- which is what this bill actually permits (complete with ridiculous demands for an ability to decrypt any transmissions) -- coupled with the patently obvious expansion of authoritarian behaviour of our governments in recent years is synonymous with activities of the fascists (and other similiar tyrannies) of the world and thus we have no reason to believe that these same activities, conducted for the same reasons, by the same types of personalities will not lead to very similar results.
History is replendent with examples of "pre-emptive" campaigns conducted against this or that bogeyman, or "pre-emptive" wars against whole countries and all of them were conducted by one set of power-mad tyrants or another. That is my "independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A.". The pattern is rock solid and has been repeated countless times throughout history. I can point out to any set of "pre-emptive" activities all the way from burning "witches" and "heretics" to "solving the Jewish question" or "hunting down the counter-revolutionaries" to "pre-emptive" war on Iraq. Provide a single counter example which demonstrates that "pre-emption" ever works (and for that you have to demonstrate a real-life case whereby you could absolutely guarantee that some great crime would be commited were it not for the "pre-emptive" action).
You just described your entire effort at "proving" the slippery slope argument. Having not even bothered to read the bill in question you then presented purposefuly false "quotes", which you promptly demolished in order to "demonstrate" your "superior" intelect. Talk about dishonesty.
Canadian actually.
I am not by any means a libertarian of any stripe. However the recent activities of both the US and Canadian governments are beginning to worry me greatly. It appears that the social contract which our societies are supposed to have with those who govern us is being torn by various authoritarian assholes who somehow managed to infiltrate all levels of governance. We are supposed to have a number of checks and balances to prevent the very such thing and these psychopaths are systematically dismantling those, aided by their mega-corporate and media (which are these days one and the same) accomplices and indiffirent public who for the most part was turned into slackjawed lumps vegetating in front of American (or Canadian) Idol showing TV sets.
These are of course the "perfect storm" conditions for nascent fascism.
As to "other countries" though, please don't be too self-congratulatory because similiar forces exist there and I can point to Tony Blair as an excellent example.
"Psychopatic Authoritarians" I am decrying to are not "a government" per se, these are mentally unstable individuals who have always existed in any society, who always gravitate towards any position of power, who always insist on "defending" the rest of us from some sort of "enemy" (whom they will fabricate if absent) so that they can thrive in a climate of fear and draconian "laws" which they will promptly try to establish. They were and are the core members of any secret state police of any tyrant out there throughout history, be it in a fascist, communist or religious wacko tyranny. Of course before that they were the "royalists" and "pious men" who enforced the rule of kings and feudal lords (or the Holy Inquisition). And so on and on.
The whole notion of Enlightenment, constitiutional democracy and the contractual relationship of those governed with those who govern was meant to thwart the Authoritarians. Unfortunately the system is not perfect and under certain conditions our Republics can be mortally wounded from within by the Mussolinis, Hitlers and Francos of our world.
So what I am talking about is not any "vicious government-vs-people dynamic" but a vicious freedom-loving-people vs psychopathic-authoritarians dynamic which existed since times immemorial.
Yes I did. Your sarcastic one (I assume it was sarcasm referring to things Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and other wingnuts had said over the years) was so close in appearance to the original that somehow I ended up clicking on the wrong reply link. Sigh.
No. But history much. These regulations already exist in Britain and France.
Sentiments like these are of course the wet dream of every would-be-fascist out there. Because there is really no way to tell if someone who expressed violent thoughts about some politician or business-feudal-lord actually means it or is just venting. Not until an act of violence is commited, which is the actual crime. Any attempts at "pre-emption" inevietably lead to persecutions of all of those who express "sufficiently extreme" thoughts against the ruling elites. Following which everyone becomes "careful" (read: terrorized) about what they say and write. Following which the rulers announce that they know that the "extremists" (who hide under every bed by now) are "secretly" communicating and thinking their "violent desires". And after that comes Gestapo, Stasi, KGB etc.
You see the problem with your thinking is that you missed the fact that "fictional works" are simply recordings of thought. And once they become subject to monitoring and abuse by the authorities (who after all only want to protect us poor sods from the evil terrorists who hide in every closet) so do the thoughts in your head. As Orwell predicted with frightening foresight.
You mean you will actually wait until the Liebenstandarte Richard Perle SS Division is marching down the 5th Avenue to concede the point? Because there is at least one formerly-democratic country which already ceased to be the shining city on the hill for the rest of us and now features routine torture while it does no longer feature quaint little things like habeas corpus. In that country its "intelligence" agencies and "police" conduct mass surveilance of the citizenry based on its political views, with no warrants or oversight, going as far as to send unercover agents to infiltrate opposition groups from Quakers to peace organisations in Canada in Europe. But then again, the Republican National Conventions do not yet boast marches with torches. I guess we should therefore slumber contently. Nothing to worry about whatsoever here. Right?
Because the Internet is today the one truly democratic medium of choice of the citizenry. The Authoritarians' inability to read you mail comes from the fact that in the day where letters were the democratic medium of the citizenry, those citizens were willing to fight and die in the battle with the Psychopathic Authoritarians who have always desired to monitor and spy on everyone. This battle has to be re-fought each time the progress of technology changes our modes of communication just as each new generation of these Sociopaths will try again and again to enslave us.
Then of course this dumb bitch or some other Psycho Authoritarian (at the urging of ever-power-hungry Socopathic Authoritarians who inhabit "police" and "intelligence" communities) will introduce bills outlawing encryption and steganography in possesion of those nasty, unruly peons, otherwise known as sheep-citizens. Or introduce some other brain dead scheme involving escrow keys or presumption-of-guilty-until-proven-innocent if a stream of random bytes longer then 10 is found anywhere on your computer.
These people are simply sick in the head. They must have some sort of boogey-man against which they "protect" us by demanding that we give them absolute power over us and meekly accept their fascist rule. All the while exclaiming how grateful we are for the "freedom" this will grant us.
While I agree that the sick-in-the-head "Sociopathic Authoritarian" syndrome is by no means confined to the Conservative Party, there is no such thing as a "balanced solution" when an ability to conduct automated mass surveilance of citizens is concerned. And let's not kid ourselves here, this is precisely the Holy Grail of both police forces and the "intelligence" communities.
All of course in the effort to "protect" us from that hypothetical "ticking bomb" which blows few of us up every ... well .... a few decades or so. But it will certainly stop all those fat old geezers looking at their hand-drawn child-porn cartoons, otherwise they would go right out and abduct all of our children. Think of the children!!!
I believe that the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 134, specifically forbids adultery -- regardless of the rank of the offenders -- with a maximum penalty of "Dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year".
I do not think he will do time, but "dishonorable discharge" or at least a demotion is definitely coming.
Again, none of the above changes my original objection. Your statement was absolute, i.e. did not allow for exceptions. I presented an exception, thus invalidating it. That is all I was intending to point out.
The subject of behaviour of mentally ill and their responsibilities to society -- or their ability to even be "responsible" -- is a whole different, extremely complicated field, awash with subjective, unscientific judgement calls and I do not think it is possible to introduce firm rules there as you appear to be attempting to. One way or the other, it is beyond the scope of my original, rather concise argument.
I find no fault with your position on this.
However, my response was meant to illustrate that your original assertion of humans being responsible for being in control of their emotions at all times was faulty. I simply presented an example where such control is purposefuly made impossible via efforts of other people, thus invalidating your premise.
I think he is done too. This will bring all the attention of NASA evaluators on him. Not to mention that them both being Navy officers renders their activities in direct violation of all the various rules of professional conduct which officers must adhere to. I am quite certain that adultery is frowned upon in those.
So I would expect his/her court martials and/or dishonorable discharges to be just around the corner. It just so happens that her truly outre ways are hogging all the news at the moment. His moment in the spotlight is coming.
Define "mainstream".
Debian is very widely used on servers because of this very security/stability over "latest greatest shiny thingie" attitude. In my case the kernels are the only "non-standard" part of my system. That way I only have to worry about security patches to the kernels themselves and let Debian handle the rest. Amongst many philosophical disagreements I have with the design of RedHat/SUSE, the security update scenarios there are rather cumbersome compared to Debian (and in the case of RedHat involve yearly fees).
The newest kernel on Debian stable is 2.6.8. The mptsas driver does not even exist on that one (it is the SAS-specific component of the "mpt" driver stack which is controlled by the mptctl module). Never you mind being able to handle the 1068 chipset.
I am sure similar things are occuring to any distro which does not have very recent kernel revs.
Mind you, you have to have kernel rev 2.6.19.2 or some such whereby Linus is still typing it out while you are downloading it to get one of the recent Dells with the SAS arrays working. So that pretty much rules out any of the "stable" server distros out there and you are pretty much forced to roll your own.
I am a Debian user and therefore I am used to such kernel surgery but most other newbish Linux users would rather have "out of the box" support on their "corporate" RedHats or SUSEs.
So Dell actually makes some wacky back-ported RPMs for some of those, which is where from (plus the telephone support centre guys complete unfamiliarity with all things Linux) I suspect the "proprietary binary driver" silliness came (they do not put their source with the RPMs on their website).
We were discussing on-board GPU RAM which is usually a custom arrangement wholly different from the dynamic RAM types used as main system memory. Some GPUs even use static RAM.
So essentially you are comparing apples and oranges.
Well, you might have picked an imaginary nit this time....
Except of course that this is impossible with any GPU using dedicated on-board RAM. The whole point of on-board RAM is that its bandwidth is much, much wider then that of even the PCI/e bus. Also because system buses are prone to being bottlenecks hampering application performance when large numbers of large textures are involved, most higher end GPUs use texture compression algorithms coupled with GPU-bound hardware decompression schemes, thus effectively precluding any attempts at using system RAM for such activities. In other words what you are describing is only possible on cheesy, sub-$100 "GPU"s with laughable 3D performance.
See above.
This assumes that no other 3D apps/applets/what-not are in use (thus no virtualisation of any kind is in effect) and also that some of the textures used are not duplicated in system RAM, as it is usually the case with complex 3D scenes since textures tend to expand rapidly after decompression in hardware. The moment even one non-DirectX-10 3D app in use, the whole scheme blows apart and up to 128MB has to be virtualised per application in addition to the OS.
This of course is completely irrelevant from the point of view of analysis of Vista since all current games optimise texture loading by caching them in system RAM. They also set up complicated, fine-tuned rendering pipelines and what not. If anything, the virtualisation will screw them up (as is the case with most games now) since the designers were not expecting to be sharing the GPU and subsquently optimised for that case. Vista is introducing unexpected timing and memory/disk access behaviour which causes most of these games to malfunction. Just check out the various gaming forums for all the moaning that is coming from Vista users. Turning off Aero is pretty much a pre-requisite to getting most of the current games to run with any reasonable stability.
See above
This, naturally, is complete nonsense.
As I pointed out, swapping textures into the GPU RAM from system RAM is anything but "high performance".
Also, Vista has no business messing with "optimising" per-application textures since it is impossible for an OS to estimate the usage patterns an