Generally great post, but I think your view of demography is wrong. Unless "middle aged" means something different when you say it here, I think the delineation has more to do with education and economic status in my age group. I have about a bazillion friends that are in the 35 to 45 age bracket, and nearly without exception they use RSS readers and online 'clipping services' to track the news they are interested in. I know that when I hang with my cousins who inhabit a lower economic rung in the ladder and who are possessed of a lower level of (self)education, even the younger ones are not using the internet in the way that you are describing.
Before the US Congress is passing a resolution to refuse to co-operate with Australia unless they change their laws to protect American IP again, as they were -
because we all know that this is *exactly* what the RIAA wants here Stateside, right? To make you buy the CD, buy the MP3, and then buy it again when the license expires.
You know, I can't really make factual observations about the relative crappiness of the Raptor vs. some Russian Jets; it might in fact be true. But I do know that I've heard all this before, about how superior the Russian Military Equipment was. We heard how the T70 would make mincemeat of the M1A1 Abrams, and how the Migs would cut our birds to pieces, and in the end it turned out that it was all hype. I hope we never have to find out outside of military excercises, frankly, but neither possibility would surprise me.
Actually, I think the GP was referring to the confluence between mobile telephony and various positioning systems that use GPS or tower triangulation to locate the handset/module/whatever (think OnStar and similar). My Handset can be tracked by tower triangulation - actually, much more accurately than a standard GPS system can provide.
I can't believe that this thread is treating this stupidity as if it were a good thing. The piles of red tape and bullshit that people have to go through to buy scheduled drugs are not because of the abusers, it's because of the War On Drugs. How can someone consider themself free if they don't have basic sovereignty over their own body? Good god, people, the only difference between abuse and use is whether or not a Doctor wrote you a prescription. As long as you don't get stupid, there are a million doctors who will prescribe basically whatever you're smart enough to request and provide basic, rudimentary symptom support and insurance for.
The real technological advance would be a free society, not newer and better ways to fuck up people's days.
Microsoft never had an 'absolute monopoly' on 'computers'; I mean, mainframes, servers, and workstations were MS free for a long time. OTOH, the legal view of antitrust has to do with activities designed to create a barrier of entry and manipulation of the marketplace via control of a key market share; ie, I could be in violation of antitrust laws if I own a steel company and the only railroad into a given area, and refuse to transport steel for other companies. The legal antitrust laws have never been pointed only at textbook, dictionary 'monopolies'.
Even though I am not a Microsoft fanboy, I don't want to see them *destroyed*; I would be extremely happy to see them knocked down to the 65% desktop market share. As much as I like OSX, I don't want to see Apple in sole possession of the desktop market, and as much as I like Linux, I wouldn't want to see it become a monoculture either.
Either way, the answer is not to treat the market leader differently; if we feel that the antitrust laws perform a valuable function (which *I* do) then the laws should be designed so that it's impossible to achieve that market share, rather than change the laws for those who do achieve the neccessary market share.
Oh, my god; they're treading on the holy ground of the Almighty, and he will smite them with Furious Vengeance. The Lord knows that we know not what we do, but sometimes we gotta pay anyway. Look for disasters of biblical proportions to follow this research.
If God had meant us to write the code of life, he'd have given us scanning electron microscopic eyes and nanomanipulator fingers, dammit!
With the information on NSA data mining still ringing in my ears, i'm forced to consider the possibility - no , the near certainty - that all data will eventually be cataloged, whether legally, illegally, or otherwise. Answer a few of these seemingly innocuous questionaires... well, it's not deterministic, but I'm still wagering that, given enough of these simple, 'safe' answers, someone can build a fairly accurate demographic of a huge percentage of internet users.
Trees are storage devices for solar energy. Every inch a tree grows represents a huge amount of sunlight converted to solids in the form of the materials of the tree. When we burn wood, we're releasing that energy - tanstaafl, you know.
Anyone who has been downhill from a forested hill in Missouri during high summer knows that trees store energy; you can detect a significant temperature gradient from the concrete to the trees - even though concrete has a much higher albedo than the leaves and needles of most of our indigenous trees. I would wager only actually replacing snow with trees would increase temperature.
Oh, come on. Let's hear some more about the poor, poor **AA client corporations, that want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell licenses to music, but would make it illegal for me to download an mp3 of a song that's on an album that I own. The vast majority (in fact, I can't think of an exception offhand) of my 'illegal downloads' have been in service of my album collection from my youth. But when we talk about this kind of stuff, the **AA client corps want to change their tune and act as if their sale is related to the media, rather than the content. They want it both ways, they want control of the physical media and the 'intellectual properties'.
So let's look at this again:
Winners:People who don't want to pay the ''media change tax" that the record companies have depended on for back catalog sales. Losers:Average consumer who has to deal with attempts to FORCE back catalog sales and draconian abridgement of Fair Use rights. Whiners:**AA client corporations.
Either I purchase the right to listen to a given song - in which case keeping me from moving it from one media to another is a violation of the license granted, or I am sold a piece of media - with which I can do what I choose. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The corporations whose incomes depend on IP want you to think of IP as equivalent to physical items when it suits their purposes, but as copyright/intellectual rights when it suits their purposes as well.
You can whine about it all you want, but copyright infringement *is not stealing*. Even as the DMCA attempts to make copyright infringement a felony, it still can't make it *stealing*, only illegal. There are very good reasons that infringements of Intellectual Properties have been civil torts for the entire history of the United States until IP-dependent corporations started big-money-lobbying. The Framers of the Constitution would be appalled, as I am.
If your team is going to have fun, it's going to have fun. An employer will have to get draconian to stop it. However, if your team lacks that particular chemistry necessary, nothing the employer can do will create it. As other posts have had it, employers should work to maintain an open, un-oppressive environment, with good pay and benefits, and a work-life balance that's not too skewed; the fun will take care of itself.
There's a lot of legalistic horseshit flowing back and forth over this entire brouhaha, but it's a fairly simple thing to analyze. Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, et al, would have supported a strong personal right to privacy if they were alive today to discuss it for the same reason that they supported the second amendment. The second amendment was written in so that the people would be able to defend themselves from their own government. Private communication would be protected *for the same reason*, and no other.
Well, on standard lines? A modem at both ends capable of 33.6 minimum; a low-bandwidth audio protocol, and ssh. That's the trivial solution - you dial the number, ssh across, forwarding the appropriate port, then connect from one to the other with any tcp VIOP solution. Any laptop with a modem and linux is ready for this. Full duplex might get choppy, though.
Over the internet you could use something like openvpn to automate the secure tunnel for VIOP.
Analog scrambling, if I remember those days properly, sucks ass (from an audio standpoint). You gotta go digital.
Heh, good point. Vegetarianism only makes sense from a position of higher-mammal arrogance. Grass are living beings, too! Just cause you can't communicate with it doesn't mean it's not aware that you're cutting it down and masticating it. I mean, come on, we eat the *young* of various plants (think alfalfa sprouts, bean sprouts) talk about callous!
Ah, no, no Hondas here. Sorry if the construct was too complex for you; I meant that you get, for $1700, a machine that's roughly equivalent to a single processor 2 Ghz Opteron *and* the added bonus of a 20" LCD display; Pick a 20" DVI LCD display that does 1680x1050, and add a single processor 64 bit machine at 2Ghz or better to discover price comparison. Simple enough, i thought.
And you're absolutely right, you can build a faster X86 machine yourself. But if you build one as silent as the Macs, you won't save any money; of course, if you don't mind a jet engine on your desk, go for it - for audio recording, it's simply not acceptable. And in the end, no matter how much money you save, you still have to use Windows to run the software that I use every day, and for my money, that's a huge hit in value. YMMV. Unfortunately, there is nothing comparable for Linux or I'd be running it, hands down.
No question the Pentium M's (this gen) are faster than the G4s, hands down. The DDR2 in the newest pbooks improves memory bandwidth and overall system performance, but lots of the x86 laptops really kick serious ass. Still, if you wanna run a lot of the apps I use on a daily basis, you gotta run Windows on those intel laptops...:D
I'm not sure where you get that the G5 is 'slightly slower than a top of the line PentiumIV', but I'll take your word for it. Mhz for Mhz there's no contest, with the G5 coming out clearly on top; but the fastest G5 is 2.7 Ghz, so it's possible that a really fast PIV might beat 'em.
The $2500 PowerMac is a dual 2.3ghz G5; I've not looked in a couple of months, but last time I checked it was easily comparable to the dual core 64 bit Athlons in the comparable price range. And nothing I found for $2500 was even in the ball park in construction quality. These G5s are damn near dead silent, with 9 fans turning at low speed keeping the system cool on a whisper. The case is aircraft aluminum, and feels like it was designed by Lear or Boeing. I do a lot of audio work, and the Intel chips are smokin for that application, but you pay a LOT more for an x86 system that's as quiet and well built as the PowerMacs.
I know someone already pointed out that your objection about the powerBOOKS is at least reasonable, although "smoke" is subjective and, actually, blatantly inaccurate as stated - A $2500 X86 laptop is probably faster than my 17" Powerbook. However, I have to point out that there is nothing in the X86 worldview that will beat the Powermacs, dollar-for-MIP. Particularly the $3200 Quad (dual dual core) 64 bit G5 PowerMac. It's also fairly difficult to beat the iMac (although it can be matched) G5's dollar-for-mip, at $1700 for a 64 bit machine with a 20" wide-screen LCD included.
I, for one, can't wait to see what Apple might offer to compete with the existing G5 machines. I also can't wait to see what they're going to do with the PowerBook. On the other hand, I'm saving now to get another G5 before they switch the desktops. I dont' want an Intel Mac until all of the software I use on a daily basis has been rebuilt as "Fat" binaries.
I expect the Yonah based laptops to be fairly impressive with native binaries, although I expect that Rosetta will remain an emergency-only Kludge, like VirtualPC. Regardless, I'll also be interested to see apples-and-apples type comparisons of Mac apps vs their Windows versions... will Photoshop on Mac Intel be slower or faster than Photoshop on Windows on the *same hardware*?
That comment might make sense if there was any evidence of the 'hit in sales due to widespread distribution without compensation'. The fact is that American media outlet's economic downturn that they attribute to file sharing was equivalent to or in many cases less than 99% of the other industries in the US faced during the same time.
For years I've used a very high quality analog video camera and a capture card to make DVDs of our family videos. So when my cap card dies, I won't be able to replace it. Thus I'll have to replace the camera, too, and all of the sundry equipment that goes with it. *sigh*.
The more that I think about it... Riddle me this, Batman. Is the 'signal' that the CCD in a digital camera recieves *analog*?
"Personally, I have no moral problem with people modding their Xboxes, but I do have moral issues with what these guys did. They deserve to be prosecuted and to go to jail, and more to the point, they deserve to be criticized by communities like the/. crowd for taking something clever and exciting (modding Xboxes) and deliberately turning it into something evil (mass copyright infringement for profit)."
Holy crap! you sound like they were raping children or burning puppies alive! This is a civil action, has been for literally hundreds of years. Copyright owners should recover damages from these guys - historically, treble the actual damages + punitive damages. If they represented them as legal distribution, then it's fraud, and it is a crime.
Regardless, I think we should reserve dramatic monikers like "evil" for people who kill, torture, blow people up, etc. These guys were naughty. Ted Bundy was evil. These guys were shady. Richard Speck was evil. These guys were bad boys. Pol Pot was evil.
Not to pick nits, but this is such a stunningly innacurate statement that I have to interject. In fact, *most* religions (by count) in the world have little or no written doctrine; take for instance nearly all shamanic religions such as the varied religions of the various Native American tribes, most of the religions of Africa, South America, Australia, and Asia.
Many of the 'great religions' (meaning lots of people believe them) *do* have written books. However, there is a semantic gap between 'based on' and 'relevant to'... Most of the christians I know have hardly cracked the book their belief is 'based on', and cannot quote the most rudimentary content of it. A plurality of Americans think 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness' is in the book. Same with "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop".
Religions are largely social phenomena, not intellectual ones.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, Anyone who will surrender essential liberties for temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.
There are lots of people every year who fail to survive because they can't shoot someone who is trying to hurt them. There are some who do survive because they do. I'm no "Cold dead hands" nra-head, but I understand why the second amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, and agree. Regardless, it's a fact of reality, of life, from amoeba on up, that it's always possible for every creature to be faced with the need to defend itself with deadly force. I hope you're never in that situation - I have been before, and hope I am never again.
On average, cities with a high percentage of concealed carry licenses have a lower violent crime rate than cities that prohibit said concealed carry. Not exactly conclusive, of course, just indicative.
Your assertions about Missouri are true, but I would note that until just recently, the leading county in those murder statistics you mentioned was excluded from the concealed carry law because it was declared an unfunded mandate, so you couldn't get said permit in that county.
Even though I agree with your sentiments, it doesn't in any way address the (for me) primary issue, which is, the bad guys *already carry weapons*; I find it irritating that I *can't*, without breaking the law. People are rarely murdered with legally carried weapons. No gun laws will stop thugs from getting and carrying them; they'll only keep me from being able to defend myself.
The problem that most people in this thread are missing is a critical point in the Libertarian platform: Timmy the meth head *already has advanced assault weapons* in our current judicial incarnation. He's a criminal now, and the ticket for possessing a full auto weapon is considerably less than the ticket for making Crystal Meth. Ask the cops; the drug dealers have better weapons in many cases. The arguments about bad guys getting their hands on guns are moot; they already have them.
The arguments about idiots having guns are not moot, but I would note that there are many, many idiots that already own them; I do not see a significant increase in public danger from concealed carry.
There is considerable evidence that cities where concealed carry is common experience less violent crime, period. Empirical evidence should mediate philosophical objections, I think.
That said, my big problem with the Libertarian Platform is that the party has been hijacked by business interests that spew millions of reasons why corporations should be able to do as they damned well please without government restriction for such pesky things as, oh, dioxin pollution, product liability, decent wages, or any others.
Again I'm amazed that people who oppose social anarchy would encourage financial/fiscal anarchy ( free-wheeling Capitalism - unmediated free-market )
Tubochargers do, in fact, increase gasoline consumption. The way turbochargers and superchargers increase HP is by increasing the pressure of the gas/air mix inside the cylinder; more air means more gas needed, means more horsepower. The turbocharger is 'more efficient' in a general sense, because it doesn't start compressing air much until well up in the RPM band, so 'gentle driving' won't invoke the compression and increased gasoline consumption. OTOH, the supercharger does not suffer from 'turbo lag'.
To get more horsepower out, you have to put more gas and air in, all else being the same.
At some point, in order to be useful, this data must traverse the network driver, the network device, and the network itself. So my machine may indeed have a TPM chip; what good will it do if one of those elements refuses to traffic in such nefarious data? What if the OS doesn't have a driver for the TPM device itself? I mean, can you see Alan Cox hacking out a quick kernel module to enable revelation of your private data to random internet sites?
The true commercial value of TPM is targeted at DRM. Google the OSx86 websites for TPM, and find out how useful the technology really is. As I understand it, the OSx86 'hackers' disabled the TPM protection by deleting a file...
Slashdot Mirror
Generally great post, but I think your view of demography is wrong. Unless "middle aged" means something different when you say it here, I think the delineation has more to do with education and economic status in my age group. I have about a bazillion friends that are in the 35 to 45 age bracket, and nearly without exception they use RSS readers and online 'clipping services' to track the news they are interested in. I know that when I hang with my cousins who inhabit a lower economic rung in the ladder and who are possessed of a lower level of (self)education, even the younger ones are not using the internet in the way that you are describing.
Before the US Congress is passing a resolution to refuse to co-operate with Australia unless they change their laws to protect American IP again, as they were -
because we all know that this is *exactly* what the RIAA wants here Stateside, right? To make you buy the CD, buy the MP3, and then buy it again when the license expires.
You know, I can't really make factual observations about the relative crappiness of the Raptor vs. some Russian Jets; it might in fact be true. But I do know that I've heard all this before, about how superior the Russian Military Equipment was. We heard how the T70 would make mincemeat of the M1A1 Abrams, and how the Migs would cut our birds to pieces, and in the end it turned out that it was all hype. I hope we never have to find out outside of military excercises, frankly, but neither possibility would surprise me.
Actually, I think the GP was referring to the confluence between mobile telephony and various positioning systems that use GPS or tower triangulation to locate the handset/module/whatever (think OnStar and similar). My Handset can be tracked by tower triangulation - actually, much more accurately than a standard GPS system can provide.
I can't believe that this thread is treating this stupidity as if it were a good thing. The piles of red tape and bullshit that people have to go through to buy scheduled drugs are not because of the abusers, it's because of the War On Drugs. How can someone consider themself free if they don't have basic sovereignty over their own body? Good god, people, the only difference between abuse and use is whether or not a Doctor wrote you a prescription. As long as you don't get stupid, there are a million doctors who will prescribe basically whatever you're smart enough to request and provide basic, rudimentary symptom support and insurance for.
The real technological advance would be a free society, not newer and better ways to fuck up people's days.
Microsoft never had an 'absolute monopoly' on 'computers'; I mean, mainframes, servers, and workstations were MS free for a long time. OTOH, the legal view of antitrust has to do with activities designed to create a barrier of entry and manipulation of the marketplace via control of a key market share; ie, I could be in violation of antitrust laws if I own a steel company and the only railroad into a given area, and refuse to transport steel for other companies. The legal antitrust laws have never been pointed only at textbook, dictionary 'monopolies'.
Even though I am not a Microsoft fanboy, I don't want to see them *destroyed*; I would be extremely happy to see them knocked down to the 65% desktop market share. As much as I like OSX, I don't want to see Apple in sole possession of the desktop market, and as much as I like Linux, I wouldn't want to see it become a monoculture either.
Either way, the answer is not to treat the market leader differently; if we feel that the antitrust laws perform a valuable function (which *I* do) then the laws should be designed so that it's impossible to achieve that market share, rather than change the laws for those who do achieve the neccessary market share.
Oh, my god; they're treading on the holy ground of the Almighty, and he will smite them with Furious Vengeance. The Lord knows that we know not what we do, but sometimes we gotta pay anyway. Look for disasters of biblical proportions to follow this research.
If God had meant us to write the code of life, he'd have given us scanning electron microscopic eyes and nanomanipulator fingers, dammit!
Run away now, you righteous before God!
With the information on NSA data mining still ringing in my ears, i'm forced to consider the possibility - no , the near certainty - that all data will eventually be cataloged, whether legally, illegally, or otherwise. Answer a few of these seemingly innocuous questionaires... well, it's not deterministic, but I'm still wagering that, given enough of these simple, 'safe' answers, someone can build a fairly accurate demographic of a huge percentage of internet users.
Trees are storage devices for solar energy. Every inch a tree grows represents a huge amount of sunlight converted to solids in the form of the materials of the tree. When we burn wood, we're releasing that energy - tanstaafl, you know.
Anyone who has been downhill from a forested hill in Missouri during high summer knows that trees store energy; you can detect a significant temperature gradient from the concrete to the trees - even though concrete has a much higher albedo than the leaves and needles of most of our indigenous trees. I would wager only actually replacing snow with trees would increase temperature.
Oh, come on. Let's hear some more about the poor, poor **AA client corporations, that want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell licenses to music, but would make it illegal for me to download an mp3 of a song that's on an album that I own. The vast majority (in fact, I can't think of an exception offhand) of my 'illegal downloads' have been in service of my album collection from my youth. But when we talk about this kind of stuff, the **AA client corps want to change their tune and act as if their sale is related to the media, rather than the content. They want it both ways, they want control of the physical media and the 'intellectual properties'.
So let's look at this again:
Winners:People who don't want to pay the ''media change tax" that the record companies have depended on for back catalog sales.
Losers:Average consumer who has to deal with attempts to FORCE back catalog sales and draconian abridgement of Fair Use rights.
Whiners:**AA client corporations.
Either I purchase the right to listen to a given song - in which case keeping me from moving it from one media to another is a violation of the license granted, or I am sold a piece of media - with which I can do what I choose. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The corporations whose incomes depend on IP want you to think of IP as equivalent to physical items when it suits their purposes, but as copyright/intellectual rights when it suits their purposes as well.
You can whine about it all you want, but copyright infringement *is not stealing*. Even as the DMCA attempts to make copyright infringement a felony, it still can't make it *stealing*, only illegal. There are very good reasons that infringements of Intellectual Properties have been civil torts for the entire history of the United States until IP-dependent corporations started big-money-lobbying. The Framers of the Constitution would be appalled, as I am.
If your team is going to have fun, it's going to have fun. An employer will have to get draconian to stop it. However, if your team lacks that particular chemistry necessary, nothing the employer can do will create it. As other posts have had it, employers should work to maintain an open, un-oppressive environment, with good pay and benefits, and a work-life balance that's not too skewed; the fun will take care of itself.
There's a lot of legalistic horseshit flowing back and forth over this entire brouhaha, but it's a fairly simple thing to analyze. Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, et al, would have supported a strong personal right to privacy if they were alive today to discuss it for the same reason that they supported the second amendment. The second amendment was written in so that the people would be able to defend themselves from their own government. Private communication would be protected *for the same reason*, and no other.
Well, on standard lines? A modem at both ends capable of 33.6 minimum; a low-bandwidth audio protocol, and ssh. That's the trivial solution - you dial the number, ssh across, forwarding the appropriate port, then connect from one to the other with any tcp VIOP solution. Any laptop with a modem and linux is ready for this. Full duplex might get choppy, though.
Over the internet you could use something like openvpn to automate the secure tunnel for VIOP.
Analog scrambling, if I remember those days properly, sucks ass (from an audio standpoint). You gotta go digital.
Heh, good point. Vegetarianism only makes sense from a position of higher-mammal arrogance. Grass are living beings, too! Just cause you can't communicate with it doesn't mean it's not aware that you're cutting it down and masticating it. I mean, come on, we eat the *young* of various plants (think alfalfa sprouts, bean sprouts) talk about callous!
Ah, no, no Hondas here. Sorry if the construct was too complex for you; I meant that you get, for $1700, a machine that's roughly equivalent to a single processor 2 Ghz Opteron *and* the added bonus of a 20" LCD display; Pick a 20" DVI LCD display that does 1680x1050, and add a single processor 64 bit machine at 2Ghz or better to discover price comparison. Simple enough, i thought.
And you're absolutely right, you can build a faster X86 machine yourself. But if you build one as silent as the Macs, you won't save any money; of course, if you don't mind a jet engine on your desk, go for it - for audio recording, it's simply not acceptable. And in the end, no matter how much money you save, you still have to use Windows to run the software that I use every day, and for my money, that's a huge hit in value. YMMV. Unfortunately, there is nothing comparable for Linux or I'd be running it, hands down.
No question the Pentium M's (this gen) are faster than the G4s, hands down. The DDR2 in the newest pbooks improves memory bandwidth and overall system performance, but lots of the x86 laptops really kick serious ass. Still, if you wanna run a lot of the apps I use on a daily basis, you gotta run Windows on those intel laptops... :D
I'm not sure where you get that the G5 is 'slightly slower than a top of the line PentiumIV', but I'll take your word for it. Mhz for Mhz there's no contest, with the G5 coming out clearly on top; but the fastest G5 is 2.7 Ghz, so it's possible that a really fast PIV might beat 'em.
The $2500 PowerMac is a dual 2.3ghz G5; I've not looked in a couple of months, but last time I checked it was easily comparable to the dual core 64 bit Athlons in the comparable price range. And nothing I found for $2500 was even in the ball park in construction quality. These G5s are damn near dead silent, with 9 fans turning at low speed keeping the system cool on a whisper. The case is aircraft aluminum, and feels like it was designed by Lear or Boeing. I do a lot of audio work, and the Intel chips are smokin for that application, but you pay a LOT more for an x86 system that's as quiet and well built as the PowerMacs.
I know someone already pointed out that your objection about the powerBOOKS is at least reasonable, although "smoke" is subjective and, actually, blatantly inaccurate as stated - A $2500 X86 laptop is probably faster than my 17" Powerbook. However, I have to point out that there is nothing in the X86 worldview that will beat the Powermacs, dollar-for-MIP. Particularly the $3200 Quad (dual dual core) 64 bit G5 PowerMac. It's also fairly difficult to beat the iMac (although it can be matched) G5's dollar-for-mip, at $1700 for a 64 bit machine with a 20" wide-screen LCD included.
I, for one, can't wait to see what Apple might offer to compete with the existing G5 machines. I also can't wait to see what they're going to do with the PowerBook. On the other hand, I'm saving now to get another G5 before they switch the desktops. I dont' want an Intel Mac until all of the software I use on a daily basis has been rebuilt as "Fat" binaries.
I expect the Yonah based laptops to be fairly impressive with native binaries, although I expect that Rosetta will remain an emergency-only Kludge, like VirtualPC. Regardless, I'll also be interested to see apples-and-apples type comparisons of Mac apps vs their Windows versions... will Photoshop on Mac Intel be slower or faster than Photoshop on Windows on the *same hardware*?
That comment might make sense if there was any evidence of the 'hit in sales due to widespread distribution without compensation'. The fact is that American media outlet's economic downturn that they attribute to file sharing was equivalent to or in many cases less than 99% of the other industries in the US faced during the same time.
For years I've used a very high quality analog video camera and a capture card to make DVDs of our family videos. So when my cap card dies, I won't be able to replace it. Thus I'll have to replace the camera, too, and all of the sundry equipment that goes with it. *sigh*.
The more that I think about it... Riddle me this, Batman. Is the 'signal' that the CCD in a digital camera recieves *analog*?
"Personally, I have no moral problem with people modding their Xboxes, but I do have moral issues with what these guys did. They deserve to be prosecuted and to go to jail, and more to the point, they deserve to be criticized by communities like the /. crowd for taking something clever and exciting (modding Xboxes) and deliberately turning it into something evil (mass copyright infringement for profit)."
Holy crap! you sound like they were raping children or burning puppies alive! This is a civil action, has been for literally hundreds of years. Copyright owners should recover damages from these guys - historically, treble the actual damages + punitive damages. If they represented them as legal distribution, then it's fraud, and it is a crime.
Regardless, I think we should reserve dramatic monikers like "evil" for people who kill, torture, blow people up, etc. These guys were naughty. Ted Bundy was evil. These guys were shady. Richard Speck was evil. These guys were bad boys. Pol Pot was evil.
Not to pick nits, but this is such a stunningly innacurate statement that I have to interject. In fact, *most* religions (by count) in the world have little or no written doctrine; take for instance nearly all shamanic religions such as the varied religions of the various Native American tribes, most of the religions of Africa, South America, Australia, and Asia.
Many of the 'great religions' (meaning lots of people believe them) *do* have written books. However, there is a semantic gap between 'based on' and 'relevant to'... Most of the christians I know have hardly cracked the book their belief is 'based on', and cannot quote the most rudimentary content of it. A plurality of Americans think 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness' is in the book. Same with "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop".
Religions are largely social phenomena, not intellectual ones.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, Anyone who will surrender essential liberties for temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.
There are lots of people every year who fail to survive because they can't shoot someone who is trying to hurt them. There are some who do survive because they do. I'm no "Cold dead hands" nra-head, but I understand why the second amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, and agree. Regardless, it's a fact of reality, of life, from amoeba on up, that it's always possible for every creature to be faced with the need to defend itself with deadly force. I hope you're never in that situation - I have been before, and hope I am never again.
On average, cities with a high percentage of concealed carry licenses have a lower violent crime rate than cities that prohibit said concealed carry. Not exactly conclusive, of course, just indicative.
Your assertions about Missouri are true, but I would note that until just recently, the leading county in those murder statistics you mentioned was excluded from the concealed carry law because it was declared an unfunded mandate, so you couldn't get said permit in that county.
Even though I agree with your sentiments, it doesn't in any way address the (for me) primary issue, which is, the bad guys *already carry weapons*; I find it irritating that I *can't*, without breaking the law. People are rarely murdered with legally carried weapons. No gun laws will stop thugs from getting and carrying them; they'll only keep me from being able to defend myself.
The problem that most people in this thread are missing is a critical point in the Libertarian platform: Timmy the meth head *already has advanced assault weapons* in our current judicial incarnation. He's a criminal now, and the ticket for possessing a full auto weapon is considerably less than the ticket for making Crystal Meth. Ask the cops; the drug dealers have better weapons in many cases. The arguments about bad guys getting their hands on guns are moot; they already have them.
The arguments about idiots having guns are not moot, but I would note that there are many, many idiots that already own them; I do not see a significant increase in public danger from concealed carry.
There is considerable evidence that cities where concealed carry is common experience less violent crime, period. Empirical evidence should mediate philosophical objections, I think.
That said, my big problem with the Libertarian Platform is that the party has been hijacked by business interests that spew millions of reasons why corporations should be able to do as they damned well please without government restriction for such pesky things as, oh, dioxin pollution, product liability, decent wages, or any others.
Again I'm amazed that people who oppose social anarchy would encourage financial/fiscal anarchy ( free-wheeling Capitalism - unmediated free-market )
Tubochargers do, in fact, increase gasoline consumption. The way turbochargers and superchargers increase HP is by increasing the pressure of the gas/air mix inside the cylinder; more air means more gas needed, means more horsepower. The turbocharger is 'more efficient' in a general sense, because it doesn't start compressing air much until well up in the RPM band, so 'gentle driving' won't invoke the compression and increased gasoline consumption. OTOH, the supercharger does not suffer from 'turbo lag'.
To get more horsepower out, you have to put more gas and air in, all else being the same.
At some point, in order to be useful, this data must traverse the network driver, the network device, and the network itself. So my machine may indeed have a TPM chip; what good will it do if one of those elements refuses to traffic in such nefarious data? What if the OS doesn't have a driver for the TPM device itself? I mean, can you see Alan Cox hacking out a quick kernel module to enable revelation of your private data to random internet sites?
The true commercial value of TPM is targeted at DRM. Google the OSx86 websites for TPM, and find out how useful the technology really is. As I understand it, the OSx86 'hackers' disabled the TPM protection by deleting a file...