It's slow and heavy. It's grossly underpowered. It's nothing like a 'sports car' as the article ignorantly claims. Even if brought back, it's unlikely its styling would survive the major rehashing it would undergo to avoid offending the sensibilities of the modern automobile consumer. And then there are all the safety considerations which would likely change the chassis in significant ways.
No, whatever car is brought back, it won't be your father's DeLorean. That might be a good thing.
It's actually becoming more of a problem given the size of the HD TVs. FInding a proper place to place a 50" HDTV *and* having room next to it for an HD player can be tough. Many of these TVs are best hung on the wall and not always directly above the components. But for the smaller TVs it's true, 1m is usually sufficient. My last projector setup actually had about a 3m run of component and it did alright, but that was a 720p signal. I'm sure the tolerances are closer for 1080p.
Wow, you guys really ARE unimaginative and/or awash in your own anti-Microsoft zealotry. This isn't a technology which is likely to find it's way into ordinary, paying customer's computers. Something like this is almost certainly designed as a mechanism by which Microsoft can help hardware companies subsidize computers and through that get their advertising onto the desktop. Joe Six pack who cannot presently afford a computer, or who would simply like to pay less, can instead get a machine with this installed and his hardware will be subsidized by ad revenue. It's the same concept behind why you can get 'free' television over-the-air.
Because not only would they have to pay for the cost of the installation, but then they'd lose money due to the metering changes based on temperature. Then again, it's not like THEY pay for it. We do.
Well except that those games have been 'ported' to the computer, and will provide various levels of ass-whoopery on demand. They are equally single- and multi-player. I imagine if you ranked games by man-hours played, even on a computer, you'd end up with something like Solitaire on top. Honestly, this list assumes a very specific set of game players from a very specific era. It's meaningless without publishing the constraints (implied or otherwise) on the set of games being canvassed.
Visual Basic does, in fact, run on.Net, so if that is what you mean by drawing closer, then yes. I suspect that is not what you mean however:) Perhaps if you spent actual time writing C# code you'd be able to better understand the differences it has from Java and the benefits it has over C++ and C for those applications to which it is best suited. Having come from a C++/C background myself, I definitely appreciate how much more clean the language is.
And C# runs on Linux, supported by the Mono guys. And it's so proprietary it's a standard, see http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-334.htm. Nor is it byte-code interpreted. It's JITed which, if you don't know what that means, you certainly aren't qualified to discuss modern Java or C# implementations.
Try writing a significant program using ONLY POSIX APIs. Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like.
You have to remember that the Windows API does an awful lot more than the POSIX APIs do. Microsoft saw a lot of benefit in giving developers a broad range of high-level features in the standard API, and as a result there is probably a library call that will do just about anything you need in Windows. Also, the entire Microsoft.NET API doesn't use any binders at all, because it's all online, searchable and cross referenced, made freely available to anyone who cares to use it. Includes lots of sample code too. It's called MSDN. It's not the amount of information to be documented which matters, it's how accessible it is.
Speaking of Intellisense, it is one of the great features of our day, IMHO. Again, it is most useful because there are so many APIs to deal with which do so many things. The nice thing about Intellisense is that is also applies to your own code. If you do any.Net programming it's a wonderful thing, allowing you to even inspect an object for methods and properties without bothering to open up the source code or other documentation for it. Besides, it's easy enough to hit ESC to cancel Intellisense. Straw man if ever there was one. Oh, and Win32 is not.Net. It's not necessary to write directly to Win32 APIs any more except in limited circumstances.
As for debugging, any application of more than basic complexity will benefit from, if not demand, quality debugging tools. This says nothing about the API and everything about how hard it is to write good software, especially on the time constraints to which most of us must adhere.
The energy necessary to create those items required for an advanced civilization necessitate something better than steam boilers and windmills. It seems implausible to assume that a society would be able to skip the industrial revolution and jump directly to semiconductor-based electronics which don't use PCBs in their manufacture, and that in the process of doing so, they would also leave no clue whatsoever to their presence.
Essentially, in order to continue this reasoning means you'd have to conclude there are wholly different, undiscovered branches of technology which lead to space travel (or other event which leaves earth uninhabited) from agrarianism that allow the generation of the same or greater amounts of energy while using a wholly different set of resources which we, apparently, are not aware of. Power consumption goes up in proportion to technology advancement and there are only so many ways of generating power.
I'm no biologist, but it's not that quadratic configurations are superior to other forms, but rather than they are sufficiently adapted to allow propogation of the genes. It could be that there are several possible morphologies, but this one was the first one which evolved which was well-enough suited. WIth competition for resources, other kinds may have evolved later but could not compete. On a hypothetical alternate world, a different morphology may have been initially evolved which was suitable, and provided a different template for evolution there, beating out a late-coming quadratic configuration.
But generally it does seem to me we have, at least in gross physiology, pretty much just what we need and not much more, so your theory seems reasonable.
I love how people compare Canada to the US, as if there was really that much commonality to compare. Yes, they live on the same continent. Yes, many of them speak English. But they are a tenth our population with massive amounts of land too. They are far more socialist than we are, and don't have the same history of freedoms as we do.
Social justice, as most people seem to think of it, usually means that those who produce the most valuable commodities for society (being defined as that which society is willing to pay the most for) should instead continue to produce at the same level but receive less than market value for it. This is used to subsidize those who produce commodities which are less valuable to society (using the same definition.) The only people who are interested in this arrangement are those who would be subsidized by it (i.e. those who in the end don't have to pay for it.)
So is it any wonder that those of us who bust our asses providing what society deems valuable question the motives of those who wish to take it away to further their own aims, no matter how noble they cloak the propoganda? I am not productive so that my neighbor can dine on pizza all day every day knowing that my hard work will pay for his coronary bypass procedure. Sorry dude, I am NOT going to give up my good healthcare just because someone else wants a piece of it.
As for the 'fear' of being mugged, that doesn't wash with me either. I don't believe paying more to government solves crime. Opening up opportunities for people before they become criminals does. Our system isn't perfect at this - none are - but it's a damn sight better than a lot of places and we don't have to tear down the 'haves' in order to give the 'have not's' the opportunities they need. Think harder about solutions, don't go the easy route of taxing everyone to death.
All of my software works as well. In fact, everyone I know who runs 64-bit Vista has very few issues with software compatability. It mostly revolves around hardware/driver issues.
The original statement about the number of apps supporting 64-bit Windows being extremely small was extremely disingenuous if the person knew the actual compatability rates, or just ignorant if not. In either case, I wouldn't be defending it.
Bloggers are the equivalent to people standing on the sidewalk shouting whatever they want. There is no oversight, no journalistic professionalism (which itself is often absent even in so-called professional news organizations) and no way of really knowing why someone posts what they post.
Anyone who looks to blogs and expects, without researching the source of the blogs, to be told the truth is simply ignorant and deserves what they get, include advertising posing as something else. But what is NOT true is that bloggers can somehow be held to a standard where they aren't allowed to 'prostitute themselves' for money for whatever reason they like. They are just people standing on the street. They can do whatever the hell they like. And if people don't like it, then can wander the streets until they find people shouting things they like.
If you were working on a project in your spare time and can demonstrate deep knowledge of that, you'll have a good leg up in the interview. I've interviewed people for software positions for nearly 10 years now, and not once has the question of grades ever come up, nor have I ever cared about it. It may be the case that certain institutions use grades as a first-cut sort of thing, but none of the places I have worked at, including at least one very large software company, ever used it to my knowledge.
If, for some bizarre reason, you find yourself denied application based on grades, just look elsewhere. You *will* find a job if you are even half-competent. And once you have that first job on your resume, your education could read "G.W.B.'s School of Foreign Policy" and it won't matter.
Incidentally, I have personally found the reverse to be true as well. Graduating from some big name school with honors really doesn't mean that much either. Essentially no matter how smart you were in school, you will be low man on the totem pole - and with good reason - no matter where you step in (there are some rare exceptions mostly surrounding research.) Most of us who have been in the industry a while know better that to trust the contents of a resume. I'm more interested in if you've done things before which would apply to the job you are interviewing for. So make sure they know about your open source project, provide a link to the website for it, and even give a few bullet points about what you did on the project. That'll go a long way if a real human reads your sheet.
Unless I am mistaken, those people volunteered to let their work be used by others off of which to make a living, even if they did not choose to do so themselves. As long as he is not violating any contracts, and the people who originally wrote the base code upon which he is building did so knowing the implications of their licenses, then those people cannot possibly be offended unless they are also hypocrites.
Open source is a sort of lead-by-example system. You put your code out there for everyone to see, and they use it or not, and perhaps subscribe to your system of beliefs and turn around and do the same. It is not, however, a lead-by-the-sword system. If someone out there decides to use your code (within the confines of the license) without subscribing to your system of belief then that's ok too. Acknowledgement is not even required unless mandated by the license. You can't go around placing additional arbitrary and implicit clauses in the contract, even if they are so minor as 'acknowledgement.' If you wanted acknowledgement, you should have mandated it in the first place.
If by best you mean niche which don't produce what the consumer wants, yes, those will fold. If by best you mean those stations which are most popular, regardless of your personal views of the quality of their programming, then no. What I object to is paying for $80 worth of TV a month when I only want/need $10 worth. Whatever system arises which fulfills this desire gets my vote.
To be clear, I am perfectly willing to may more for quality programming. I am not willing to pay to subsidize other people's ideas of quality programming however.
Yes, the only new TV service of any type which will be at all interesting is the one which allows you to buy channels a-la carte. Until then, they are ALL rubbish. As other posters have pointed out, there are NO new features in this package that don't already exist virtually everywhere else. Wake me when something interesting actually happens.
Remind me why they would start with Linux? Modern Microsoft _APIs_ and _development tools_ are damn good AND that's where all of the customers are. This may make it easier for developers and consumers to 'come to Linux' but they don't have time for that. They want Linux to come to them.
Not SHOULD have, DO have. Those rights are currently being suppressed by various agencies, but we do still have them. It remains to be seen whether they will be outright stripped from us though as has been happening slowly but surely.
You have to remember that places like Costco and Wal-Mart are *huge*. Movie releases by Disney mean relatively little to them on a yearly basis because their product range is so diverse. Delaying the movies only delays the time until Disney makes money on the movies which these places are going to sell regardless.
So while that response might be fair, it is ultimately pointless and ends up hurting Disney more than those particular retailers.
This is only a problem if in the course of 'optimizing' for a particular use case they degrade performance in all of the other cases. There may be times, if the case is particularly widely used, that it might even be worth a small perf hit in one area to gain a large benefit in another.
You've got to remember, these guys live and die by sales. They *have* to look good in the numbers because that's what sells their cards at the top end. At the low end, no consumer cares either way as price dominates, but like automobiles, people assume that the tech from the top end trickles down to their lowly mass-market video hardware in some fashion, so it ends up still being relevant, if less directly so.
Also, if you have looked at most of these benchmarks, the difference between best and 2nd best is usually quite small, on the order of a couple percent. The bragging rights of being able to claim you can run your game at 150fps while other plebeans can only run at 140fps is just that - bragging rights. There is no practical effect on game play until framerates drop below 30fps. And the top end graphics hardware these days is not the bottleneck at resolutions of 1280x1024 and below, so really, these guys are chasing numbers in the rarified air of super high resolution monitors and games which use every trick in the book, which is an extremly small set of games actually played.
But that is what sells. And in any case, the competition between ATI and nVidia is good even if those of us who 'know' see their number-chasing as pointless. Let them do their thing, and reward or punish them at the counter as you see fit.
I don't have an issue with your statements above, except I would like to make one minor but very important correction: The government is not ever granted *rights*. It is granted *powers*. The reason I bring all of this up is that if people keep referring to the government as having rights, they will become confused and start to believe government has NATURAL rights equal to (or worse superior to) that of a natural person. This is a terribly dangerous concept and must be checked at every instance.
The way I think of it follows, and may differ from legal definition:
Natural Rights: Something you are born which and can never be taken away, for example the right to self defense. Legal entities can never actually have rights, though they are often claimed to be or referred to as such. These are usually actually government-granted priviledges. Some societies don't believe in natural rights, of course, and which rights are considered natural is itself up for debate.
Power: This is what a government is granted by those who have natural rights. By investing some of their rights into government, the government it then empowered to perform tasks on the behalf of the natural person. Powers may be taken away by those who gave it to them in the first place.
Priviledge: This is what the government grants to others. All created legal entities have priviledges, not rights, because they are conjured out of thin air by mutual agreement (i.e. the law.) Priviledges may be taken away by the government. (It is never this clear of course. The 1st Amendment can be seen applying to a corporation, even though a corporation does not have any rights and exists only at the pleasure of the State.)
There's no real reason to post these articles. Just post a heading which says:
"Linux vs. Windows Flamewar!"
People won't bother to read the article anyhow, so dispense with the pretense that informed discussion will follow. What's even better is that no one will actually read any of the comments in this thread either. They will briefly scan to see if the comment affirms or contradicts their views, then post a 'me too' or a 'you are an idiot' response.
An Eliza bot would undoubtedly produce a more informative discussion that what appears here.
Getting them removed from the index is NOT an appropriate solution. The purpose of Google Search (besides to sell ads) is to provide a suitable and complete index of the Web, which includes things some people would rather not have indexed. What you probably (hopefully) want is for them to figure out a way to not return paper-writing services in the result set when you are not looking for a paper-writing service. This is a distinctly different problem than simply removing them from the index altogether.
I wasn't aware that anyone had a HD player that also functioned as a display unit, audio processor, amplifier and speaker system. Man it would suck to be THAT person.
Slashdot Mirror
It's slow and heavy. It's grossly underpowered. It's nothing like a 'sports car' as the article ignorantly claims. Even if brought back, it's unlikely its styling would survive the major rehashing it would undergo to avoid offending the sensibilities of the modern automobile consumer. And then there are all the safety considerations which would likely change the chassis in significant ways. No, whatever car is brought back, it won't be your father's DeLorean. That might be a good thing.
It's actually becoming more of a problem given the size of the HD TVs. FInding a proper place to place a 50" HDTV *and* having room next to it for an HD player can be tough. Many of these TVs are best hung on the wall and not always directly above the components. But for the smaller TVs it's true, 1m is usually sufficient. My last projector setup actually had about a 3m run of component and it did alright, but that was a 720p signal. I'm sure the tolerances are closer for 1080p.
Wow, you guys really ARE unimaginative and/or awash in your own anti-Microsoft zealotry. This isn't a technology which is likely to find it's way into ordinary, paying customer's computers. Something like this is almost certainly designed as a mechanism by which Microsoft can help hardware companies subsidize computers and through that get their advertising onto the desktop. Joe Six pack who cannot presently afford a computer, or who would simply like to pay less, can instead get a machine with this installed and his hardware will be subsidized by ad revenue. It's the same concept behind why you can get 'free' television over-the-air.
Yeesh.
Because not only would they have to pay for the cost of the installation, but then they'd lose money due to the metering changes based on temperature. Then again, it's not like THEY pay for it. We do.
Well except that those games have been 'ported' to the computer, and will provide various levels of ass-whoopery on demand. They are equally single- and multi-player. I imagine if you ranked games by man-hours played, even on a computer, you'd end up with something like Solitaire on top. Honestly, this list assumes a very specific set of game players from a very specific era. It's meaningless without publishing the constraints (implied or otherwise) on the set of games being canvassed.
Visual Basic does, in fact, run on .Net, so if that is what you mean by drawing closer, then yes. I suspect that is not what you mean however :) Perhaps if you spent actual time writing C# code you'd be able to better understand the differences it has from Java and the benefits it has over C++ and C for those applications to which it is best suited. Having come from a C++/C background myself, I definitely appreciate how much more clean the language is.
a ndards/Ecma-334.htm. Nor is it byte-code interpreted. It's JITed which, if you don't know what that means, you certainly aren't qualified to discuss modern Java or C# implementations.
And C# runs on Linux, supported by the Mono guys. And it's so proprietary it's a standard, see http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/st
Try writing a significant program using ONLY POSIX APIs. Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like.
.NET API doesn't use any binders at all, because it's all online, searchable and cross referenced, made freely available to anyone who cares to use it. Includes lots of sample code too. It's called MSDN. It's not the amount of information to be documented which matters, it's how accessible it is.
.Net programming it's a wonderful thing, allowing you to even inspect an object for methods and properties without bothering to open up the source code or other documentation for it. Besides, it's easy enough to hit ESC to cancel Intellisense. Straw man if ever there was one. Oh, and Win32 is not .Net. It's not necessary to write directly to Win32 APIs any more except in limited circumstances.
You have to remember that the Windows API does an awful lot more than the POSIX APIs do. Microsoft saw a lot of benefit in giving developers a broad range of high-level features in the standard API, and as a result there is probably a library call that will do just about anything you need in Windows. Also, the entire Microsoft
Speaking of Intellisense, it is one of the great features of our day, IMHO. Again, it is most useful because there are so many APIs to deal with which do so many things. The nice thing about Intellisense is that is also applies to your own code. If you do any
As for debugging, any application of more than basic complexity will benefit from, if not demand, quality debugging tools. This says nothing about the API and everything about how hard it is to write good software, especially on the time constraints to which most of us must adhere.
The energy necessary to create those items required for an advanced civilization necessitate something better than steam boilers and windmills. It seems implausible to assume that a society would be able to skip the industrial revolution and jump directly to semiconductor-based electronics which don't use PCBs in their manufacture, and that in the process of doing so, they would also leave no clue whatsoever to their presence.
Essentially, in order to continue this reasoning means you'd have to conclude there are wholly different, undiscovered branches of technology which lead to space travel (or other event which leaves earth uninhabited) from agrarianism that allow the generation of the same or greater amounts of energy while using a wholly different set of resources which we, apparently, are not aware of. Power consumption goes up in proportion to technology advancement and there are only so many ways of generating power.
I'm no biologist, but it's not that quadratic configurations are superior to other forms, but rather than they are sufficiently adapted to allow propogation of the genes. It could be that there are several possible morphologies, but this one was the first one which evolved which was well-enough suited. WIth competition for resources, other kinds may have evolved later but could not compete. On a hypothetical alternate world, a different morphology may have been initially evolved which was suitable, and provided a different template for evolution there, beating out a late-coming quadratic configuration.
But generally it does seem to me we have, at least in gross physiology, pretty much just what we need and not much more, so your theory seems reasonable.
I love how people compare Canada to the US, as if there was really that much commonality to compare. Yes, they live on the same continent. Yes, many of them speak English. But they are a tenth our population with massive amounts of land too. They are far more socialist than we are, and don't have the same history of freedoms as we do.
Social justice, as most people seem to think of it, usually means that those who produce the most valuable commodities for society (being defined as that which society is willing to pay the most for) should instead continue to produce at the same level but receive less than market value for it. This is used to subsidize those who produce commodities which are less valuable to society (using the same definition.) The only people who are interested in this arrangement are those who would be subsidized by it (i.e. those who in the end don't have to pay for it.)
So is it any wonder that those of us who bust our asses providing what society deems valuable question the motives of those who wish to take it away to further their own aims, no matter how noble they cloak the propoganda? I am not productive so that my neighbor can dine on pizza all day every day knowing that my hard work will pay for his coronary bypass procedure. Sorry dude, I am NOT going to give up my good healthcare just because someone else wants a piece of it.
As for the 'fear' of being mugged, that doesn't wash with me either. I don't believe paying more to government solves crime. Opening up opportunities for people before they become criminals does. Our system isn't perfect at this - none are - but it's a damn sight better than a lot of places and we don't have to tear down the 'haves' in order to give the 'have not's' the opportunities they need. Think harder about solutions, don't go the easy route of taxing everyone to death.
All of my software works as well. In fact, everyone I know who runs 64-bit Vista has very few issues with software compatability. It mostly revolves around hardware/driver issues.
The original statement about the number of apps supporting 64-bit Windows being extremely small was extremely disingenuous if the person knew the actual compatability rates, or just ignorant if not. In either case, I wouldn't be defending it.
Bloggers are the equivalent to people standing on the sidewalk shouting whatever they want. There is no oversight, no journalistic professionalism (which itself is often absent even in so-called professional news organizations) and no way of really knowing why someone posts what they post.
Anyone who looks to blogs and expects, without researching the source of the blogs, to be told the truth is simply ignorant and deserves what they get, include advertising posing as something else. But what is NOT true is that bloggers can somehow be held to a standard where they aren't allowed to 'prostitute themselves' for money for whatever reason they like. They are just people standing on the street. They can do whatever the hell they like. And if people don't like it, then can wander the streets until they find people shouting things they like.
So you'd rather us spend 100% of our time dwelling on the realities of today and imagining the possibilities of tomorrow?
Sounds awfully droll to me.
As for comprehension, don't lump all of us in with you. Some people on here are quantum physicists, and some of us like it as a hobby.
If you were working on a project in your spare time and can demonstrate deep knowledge of that, you'll have a good leg up in the interview. I've interviewed people for software positions for nearly 10 years now, and not once has the question of grades ever come up, nor have I ever cared about it. It may be the case that certain institutions use grades as a first-cut sort of thing, but none of the places I have worked at, including at least one very large software company, ever used it to my knowledge. If, for some bizarre reason, you find yourself denied application based on grades, just look elsewhere. You *will* find a job if you are even half-competent. And once you have that first job on your resume, your education could read "G.W.B.'s School of Foreign Policy" and it won't matter. Incidentally, I have personally found the reverse to be true as well. Graduating from some big name school with honors really doesn't mean that much either. Essentially no matter how smart you were in school, you will be low man on the totem pole - and with good reason - no matter where you step in (there are some rare exceptions mostly surrounding research.) Most of us who have been in the industry a while know better that to trust the contents of a resume. I'm more interested in if you've done things before which would apply to the job you are interviewing for. So make sure they know about your open source project, provide a link to the website for it, and even give a few bullet points about what you did on the project. That'll go a long way if a real human reads your sheet.
Unless I am mistaken, those people volunteered to let their work be used by others off of which to make a living, even if they did not choose to do so themselves. As long as he is not violating any contracts, and the people who originally wrote the base code upon which he is building did so knowing the implications of their licenses, then those people cannot possibly be offended unless they are also hypocrites.
Open source is a sort of lead-by-example system. You put your code out there for everyone to see, and they use it or not, and perhaps subscribe to your system of beliefs and turn around and do the same. It is not, however, a lead-by-the-sword system. If someone out there decides to use your code (within the confines of the license) without subscribing to your system of belief then that's ok too. Acknowledgement is not even required unless mandated by the license. You can't go around placing additional arbitrary and implicit clauses in the contract, even if they are so minor as 'acknowledgement.' If you wanted acknowledgement, you should have mandated it in the first place.
If by best you mean niche which don't produce what the consumer wants, yes, those will fold. If by best you mean those stations which are most popular, regardless of your personal views of the quality of their programming, then no. What I object to is paying for $80 worth of TV a month when I only want/need $10 worth. Whatever system arises which fulfills this desire gets my vote.
To be clear, I am perfectly willing to may more for quality programming. I am not willing to pay to subsidize other people's ideas of quality programming however.
Yes, the only new TV service of any type which will be at all interesting is the one which allows you to buy channels a-la carte. Until then, they are ALL rubbish. As other posters have pointed out, there are NO new features in this package that don't already exist virtually everywhere else. Wake me when something interesting actually happens.
Remind me why they would start with Linux? Modern Microsoft _APIs_ and _development tools_ are damn good AND that's where all of the customers are. This may make it easier for developers and consumers to 'come to Linux' but they don't have time for that. They want Linux to come to them.
Not SHOULD have, DO have. Those rights are currently being suppressed by various agencies, but we do still have them. It remains to be seen whether they will be outright stripped from us though as has been happening slowly but surely.
You have to remember that places like Costco and Wal-Mart are *huge*. Movie releases by Disney mean relatively little to them on a yearly basis because their product range is so diverse. Delaying the movies only delays the time until Disney makes money on the movies which these places are going to sell regardless.
So while that response might be fair, it is ultimately pointless and ends up hurting Disney more than those particular retailers.
This is only a problem if in the course of 'optimizing' for a particular use case they degrade performance in all of the other cases. There may be times, if the case is particularly widely used, that it might even be worth a small perf hit in one area to gain a large benefit in another.
You've got to remember, these guys live and die by sales. They *have* to look good in the numbers because that's what sells their cards at the top end. At the low end, no consumer cares either way as price dominates, but like automobiles, people assume that the tech from the top end trickles down to their lowly mass-market video hardware in some fashion, so it ends up still being relevant, if less directly so.
Also, if you have looked at most of these benchmarks, the difference between best and 2nd best is usually quite small, on the order of a couple percent. The bragging rights of being able to claim you can run your game at 150fps while other plebeans can only run at 140fps is just that - bragging rights. There is no practical effect on game play until framerates drop below 30fps. And the top end graphics hardware these days is not the bottleneck at resolutions of 1280x1024 and below, so really, these guys are chasing numbers in the rarified air of super high resolution monitors and games which use every trick in the book, which is an extremly small set of games actually played.
But that is what sells. And in any case, the competition between ATI and nVidia is good even if those of us who 'know' see their number-chasing as pointless. Let them do their thing, and reward or punish them at the counter as you see fit.
I don't have an issue with your statements above, except I would like to make one minor but very important correction: The government is not ever granted *rights*. It is granted *powers*. The reason I bring all of this up is that if people keep referring to the government as having rights, they will become confused and start to believe government has NATURAL rights equal to (or worse superior to) that of a natural person. This is a terribly dangerous concept and must be checked at every instance.
The way I think of it follows, and may differ from legal definition:
Natural Rights: Something you are born which and can never be taken away, for example the right to self defense. Legal entities can never actually have rights, though they are often claimed to be or referred to as such. These are usually actually government-granted priviledges. Some societies don't believe in natural rights, of course, and which rights are considered natural is itself up for debate.
Power: This is what a government is granted by those who have natural rights. By investing some of their rights into government, the government it then empowered to perform tasks on the behalf of the natural person. Powers may be taken away by those who gave it to them in the first place.
Priviledge: This is what the government grants to others. All created legal entities have priviledges, not rights, because they are conjured out of thin air by mutual agreement (i.e. the law.) Priviledges may be taken away by the government. (It is never this clear of course. The 1st Amendment can be seen applying to a corporation, even though a corporation does not have any rights and exists only at the pleasure of the State.)
There's no real reason to post these articles. Just post a heading which says: "Linux vs. Windows Flamewar!" People won't bother to read the article anyhow, so dispense with the pretense that informed discussion will follow. What's even better is that no one will actually read any of the comments in this thread either. They will briefly scan to see if the comment affirms or contradicts their views, then post a 'me too' or a 'you are an idiot' response. An Eliza bot would undoubtedly produce a more informative discussion that what appears here.
Getting them removed from the index is NOT an appropriate solution. The purpose of Google Search (besides to sell ads) is to provide a suitable and complete index of the Web, which includes things some people would rather not have indexed. What you probably (hopefully) want is for them to figure out a way to not return paper-writing services in the result set when you are not looking for a paper-writing service. This is a distinctly different problem than simply removing them from the index altogether.
I wasn't aware that anyone had a HD player that also functioned as a display unit, audio processor, amplifier and speaker system. Man it would suck to be THAT person.