Blaming Microsoft for the poor code of others is disingenuous, much the same way that bashing MS new versionf of OS' for breaking backwards-compatibility was also disingenuous. In that case, it turned out that most of the time it was poor app code which was doing stuff it shouldn't have done (famously checking the OS version numbers and failing out if they didn't exactly match.) In this case, the applications are checking for privs which they often don't even need, but are checked for anyhow because the code for the install was copied from somewhere else. MS is often between a rock and a hard place when it comes to making other people's software work on their systems because other people seem to have their own ideas about how MS software should work, and that doesn't always jive with the reality of the design.
You would likely elevate the VS process to admin mode, as opposed to loggin in as admin. Of course, then you have VS itself as an attack vector, but this is much less likely to be the target of exploits if there exist reasonable exploits for Solitaire. And as other posters have pointed out, developers are more likely to be savvy about what is running on their systems.
Even if this were the case, it may not apply at the enterprise level, where customers (read IT departments) can demand that only certified drivers be installed on their network. This could create a demand for such drivers which might entice vendors to go through the extra trouble of having them certified. While this doesn't directly help Joe User in Consumer Land, such work tends to trickle over assuming it is not cost prohibitive. Essentially, the enterprise would subsidize the initial cost required for certification, and the process could then be more efficiently replicated at a later time (to the extent driver code and testing is shared.)
Who owns the.cm domain? Cameroon? So they can do with it as they please. If you don't like what they are doing with their own property, I recommend you stop using it (for instance, by petitioning to have them removed from the 'net, altering your DNS system to not return entries for Cameroon, etc.) It is no different that someone who squats on perfectly legitimate domains with useless or irrelevant information, such as domains for people's names. The purpose of this is simply to generate traffic and collect some ad revenue. Your complaint seems to be that Cameroon has done the unthinkable and *effectively* registered all non-registered domains enting in.cm. Had they actually created entries for all such domains (a nearly impossible task in reality) you'd have no actual complaint, but you'd probably still be very upset and the effect would be identical.
Cameroon's tactics are fine. It's our poor typing which has gotten us into this mess. Can't blame them for our inability to type.com properly before hitting enter.
Just remember, what is legal and what is right are often not the same things, especially in our litigous society. Do what is right, always. If it happens to also be legal, that just means people won't bother you for it. It sounds like this person is deliberately being annoying, and you should take specifically limited action to correct that, assuming you have exhausted less intrusive options like asking him nicely to remove it or offering to attempt to correct what he perceives to be the annoying things being done by the local teenagers.
This could be true, except the group of computer users to whom you refer already buy the low-tier computer offerings of the major computer companies. These machines are relatively light-weight for our time, much less in 5 years. As the GGPP points out, he'd be willing to pay 20% more for a computer which would still be viable then (i.e. has an upgrade path.) Would those who merely want email, printing and music downloads be willing to splurge now for upgradeability later? Doubtful. Upgrades are not something which crosses the minds of most computer owners, much like most people won't upgrade their cars even though the market for that is widely known to exist and has been active for about 70 years.
If we want to extend the life of our machines, we need to engineer our software more efficiently rather than engineering it in such a way as to drive the adoption of bigger, more powerful hardware. People wouldn't upgrade if their email programs didn't baloon in size from a meg to 31M (resident size for my Thunderbird instance) and take forever to launch (probably due to the sheer number of ancillary services which are demand-loaded.)
The problem never really was the hardware manufacturers. We've just convinced consumers that they need to have just one more feature and one more running application.
In 5 years?
*looks around*
I don't think I have piece of computer hardware in this house older than 2 years, except this Logitech QuickCam which still serves as an adequate microphone. Now I know some of you linux users only upgrade your computers when the size of the machine word changes, but for the rest of us having a five year old computer is about as useful as an ass**** on your elbow.
Like any other product in a capitalist society, it exists because there is a market for it. If people stopped paying for bad movies, bad movies would cease to plague us.
Unfortunately for most of us here, we are not the only people on the planet who pay for movies, and thus do not ourselves dictate what is and is not a movie worthy of viewing. Your only choice is to place your vote by supporting those films you do like, and not supporting those you do not.
Movie makers are doing what movie makers have always done and will always do - try to find a story which they believe people want to pay money to watch. Oh, sometimes there will be people who are making a film because they feel compelled to tell the story, but someone has to pay for the film, actors, catering (even if it's just pizza,) etc. The fact that people want to pay to see Dumb and Dumber[er] does not reflect on their inability/unwillingness to provide compelling matinee material so much as on our desire to see such drivel.
People need to remember that the ESRB opinions are not a substitution for actual thought. I'll make up my own damn mind about whether a game or movie is violent or not. I might use the ESRB rating to guide that decision (assuming I believe their methods yield rational results) and I might not. But I don't need the government to tell me that since they have zero expertise in that area.
Unfortunately, it's not so simple. The US gets its laws from the Constitution and English common law. Among other things in Common law is the concept of state secrets. Now, to a libertarian like me who happens to believe the Constitution was just fine as it was, Common law is a load of crap for things like this precisely because it does not recognize what the Founders recognized, namely that the purpose of government is to preserve the rights of individuals, and that the acquisition of power by government is anathema to doing so. State secrets are unchecked government power, pure and simple, when merely calling something a secret is enough to dismiss a case.
Of course, one might consider that government cannot actually defend my rights if it cannot keep some secrets, and perhaps that is the case. But what I think the Founders understood better than most today is that we have more to fear from our own government growing corrupt with power than we do from military invasion or other sorts of attacks. That being the case, I would rather our government have to conduct 'secret operations' the old fashioned way - by actually keeping them secret - and not hiding behind a 16th century English concept whose days have long passed us by.
What is the cost-benefit analysis for this? Why should they release anything or go to any extra trouble at all? An open-source driver provides essentially no benefit to them. Remember, these cards are (at release time) geared towards high-end gaming systems, not enterprise-class systems where a company might reasonably think open-sourcing the drivers could be useful (and where there is a significant market share.)
... or we don't know what we want, and just let it happen to us. Worse yet, some of us do know what we want but do nothing about it for fear of losing our precious jobs. Now, for those of you with kids or other serious obligations, there is a certain logic to this. For the rest of you, the simple fact is that you've let it become expected of you and your testicular fortitude is too weak to potentially risk your job over saying 'no.'
Several years back it finally dawned on me - I was not born to serve my boss' every stupid whim. So I don't. And you know what? It works. Be good at what you do, but don't tolerate the situations where you are making up for someone else's (planning/financing/hiring/designing/etc.) shortcomings unless there is a significant reward for you for doing so - more than just keeping your job. Eventually, they will learn and stop repeating their mistakes (or rather, having you clean up after them) or they will fail and exit your life (by quitting, suiciding, taking the company down with them, etc.) On the other hand, if you enjoy watching others use your superior talents (read "gullability") to cover for them, by all means, continue to remind everyone how much they are working while failing to do anything to correct the problem.
Re:This is called "the wheel of reincarnation"
on
The Future of Computing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Was that a revelation? This has been going on for years, although at the present time I do not see specialized graphics CPUs losing any ground to their general CPU bretheren, in large part because they are architected as part of a complete system which is designed entirely for massive data manipulation but no expansion, random peripherals or anything else. So long as that architectural decision remains, it's unlikely we will see the downward spiral of performance predicted. But that's just my opinion.
There are some excellent points here. People get all excited because some electric car is now faster that some car the author thinks is defined purely by its acceleration from 0-60. And most slashdotters, I would bargain, are persuaded by such arguments because they are similarly uneducated. Sports cars like the Porsche Carerra and the Bugatti Veyron (mentioned in a related article) are consummate sports cars - they exemplify not only speed but styling, handling and quality expected of a car with their price tag. Cars such as the Corvette, especially the most recent incarnation, do so relatively inexpensively. But regardless, 0-60 acceleration is not the most important statistic, and often isn't an important statistic at all EXCEPT to people who don't know better (I refer the undereducated to the more useful 0-100-0 or 0-150-0 tests, as well as relevant agility tests such as emergency lane change, slalom and skid pad.)
Electric cars will be desirable when they meet the following conditions met by existing cars - price (under 30k), features (styling, interior, gizmos), convenience (fueling in under 5 minutes.) This car does not appear to meet any of those.
"I certainly see that government will always push the limits of it's own power and understand that laws which grant power to the government should be written with a conservative (conservative, not right-wing) mindset. But I also can see that lawmakers have a different perspective than the general populous. They sometimes have a better historical perspective. They sometimes have access to information that the general public does not which factors into their decision making, and they sometimes have motivations completely unrelated to a particular bill that push them to vote one way or another. In the end, they have to live with their decisions just as much as we do. If their track record is so bad, then why is the re-election rate upwards of 90%? Surely it couldn't be pure apathy on the part of their detractors."
Power corrupts. As soon as I give someone power (for instance by electing them) I am duty bound to be skeptical of their motives and distrust virtually everything they say (because they have become corrupt by the power I just gave them,) and it probably behooves me to remove them as soon as I possibly can, before they gain even more power. The reason people keep getting re-elected is that politicians desperately avoid talking about power. They tell you what great things will happen when they are re-elected, but never say what it will cost, and we usually don't care to ask. But the answer to the unasked question is always the same.
I think people are often confused about what Constitutional authority the President actually has, perhaps in part because they have not read the Constitution. Or maybe they have read it but not understood it. The Constitution is written in fairly plain language however, and can be taken at face value.
From Article II (which defines the Executive and its powers):
"The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment."
This says that he is the leader of the armed forces, as well as the militia of the States when called into service. It also says he can require reports of other executive offices and grant reprieves and pardons. Nothing in here says that the president may declare the combatant status of anyone, conduct wiretapping at his pleasure, etc.
"He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments."
So he can make treaties with consent of the Senate, nominate and appoint diplomats and judges, again with consent of the Senate, and do the same for any other officers with certain exceptions made by Congress. Nothing about wiretaps, enemy combatant status or anything here...
"The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session."
Again, nothing here.
Some people may be confused by the Oath of Office the President is administered as required by the Constitution. It reads:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
One could interpret this to mean that the President has the power to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution'. This would be incorrect, for two reasons. One, the Constitution very specifically uses the word 'power' to denote when the People have granted power to some portion of the government - such is not the case here. Secondly, an oath is not customarily used to bestow power upon someone, rather it is a guide to how power bestowed through another means (in this case by the Constitution) should be used.
Unfortunately, the situation with Congress' authority is less clear simply because of the number of powers granted and their varying scope. Article I Section 8, which defines the powers of the Congress to legislate, contains some rather ambiguous phrasing (deliberate or not) which can and is misused often (regulating interstate commerce comes to mind.)
Even so, I find it hard to understand where Congress or the Executive gets the authority to wiretap or otherwise eavesdrop on communications of any form. No such power is provided by the Constitution (powers not explicitly provided for by the Constitution are explicitly denied to the Government and reserved for the States and the People by the 10th Amendment) and therefore Congress cannot legislate regulation of it, nor can the President exercise any power to do it.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. -- Thomas Jefferson
Yes, there is something we will do when we decide we have had enough. We will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights in the manner in which they were originally envisioned.
Eve is a social game. You gotta go find other people to play with to really get a lot of enjoyment out of it, unless you happen to enjoy mining and trading for their own sake. The most excitement in the game comes from PvP in my opinion. Until you've done real PvP, you've not really experienced the excitement the game can offer, and it's a shame the game doesn't lead you to that as a newbie because I know a lot of people get turned off for the same reason. If you played again, I'd concentrate on finding a player corporation that is willing to train you for PvP. My corporation ran an Academy to do that for some time, and it worked very well for us and them.
Actually, it turns out this is not true. While in a one-on-one battle using identical ships and loadouts you would be at a disadvantage against such a highly skilled person, such matchups are extremely rare. My 8 month old character can regularly destroy much older characters by virtue of having a more appropriately loaded ship for the situation in hand. Also, Eve strongly supports group operations, meaning that you can easily work with your friends to take down tough enemies, including players. A single 55M skillpoint player may be more than a match for you alone, but if you get him into combat and then have your friends show up at the right time (such ambushes are very popular) then the tide can turn very quickly. The PvP system in Eve in unmatched in the modern crop of MMOs, in my opinion.
And I suppose NASCAR shouldn't mandate vehicle weights, displacements, and everything else about the car either?
This is a racing series. It's par for the course for there to be various mandates to achieve whatever goals the series desires - in this case purported cost savings. If racing teams don't like it, they can go form their own series.
Yes, it was very anti-competitive of the FIA to grant Microsoft exclusive rights to provide products to their private racing series. *insert eyeroll here*
Slashdot Mirror
Blaming Microsoft for the poor code of others is disingenuous, much the same way that bashing MS new versionf of OS' for breaking backwards-compatibility was also disingenuous. In that case, it turned out that most of the time it was poor app code which was doing stuff it shouldn't have done (famously checking the OS version numbers and failing out if they didn't exactly match.) In this case, the applications are checking for privs which they often don't even need, but are checked for anyhow because the code for the install was copied from somewhere else. MS is often between a rock and a hard place when it comes to making other people's software work on their systems because other people seem to have their own ideas about how MS software should work, and that doesn't always jive with the reality of the design.
You would likely elevate the VS process to admin mode, as opposed to loggin in as admin. Of course, then you have VS itself as an attack vector, but this is much less likely to be the target of exploits if there exist reasonable exploits for Solitaire. And as other posters have pointed out, developers are more likely to be savvy about what is running on their systems.
Even if this were the case, it may not apply at the enterprise level, where customers (read IT departments) can demand that only certified drivers be installed on their network. This could create a demand for such drivers which might entice vendors to go through the extra trouble of having them certified. While this doesn't directly help Joe User in Consumer Land, such work tends to trickle over assuming it is not cost prohibitive. Essentially, the enterprise would subsidize the initial cost required for certification, and the process could then be more efficiently replicated at a later time (to the extent driver code and testing is shared.)
Who owns the .cm domain? Cameroon? So they can do with it as they please. If you don't like what they are doing with their own property, I recommend you stop using it (for instance, by petitioning to have them removed from the 'net, altering your DNS system to not return entries for Cameroon, etc.) It is no different that someone who squats on perfectly legitimate domains with useless or irrelevant information, such as domains for people's names. The purpose of this is simply to generate traffic and collect some ad revenue. Your complaint seems to be that Cameroon has done the unthinkable and *effectively* registered all non-registered domains enting in .cm. Had they actually created entries for all such domains (a nearly impossible task in reality) you'd have no actual complaint, but you'd probably still be very upset and the effect would be identical.
Cameroon's tactics are fine. It's our poor typing which has gotten us into this mess. Can't blame them for our inability to type .com properly before hitting enter.
Just remember, what is legal and what is right are often not the same things, especially in our litigous society. Do what is right, always. If it happens to also be legal, that just means people won't bother you for it. It sounds like this person is deliberately being annoying, and you should take specifically limited action to correct that, assuming you have exhausted less intrusive options like asking him nicely to remove it or offering to attempt to correct what he perceives to be the annoying things being done by the local teenagers.
This could be true, except the group of computer users to whom you refer already buy the low-tier computer offerings of the major computer companies. These machines are relatively light-weight for our time, much less in 5 years. As the GGPP points out, he'd be willing to pay 20% more for a computer which would still be viable then (i.e. has an upgrade path.) Would those who merely want email, printing and music downloads be willing to splurge now for upgradeability later? Doubtful. Upgrades are not something which crosses the minds of most computer owners, much like most people won't upgrade their cars even though the market for that is widely known to exist and has been active for about 70 years. If we want to extend the life of our machines, we need to engineer our software more efficiently rather than engineering it in such a way as to drive the adoption of bigger, more powerful hardware. People wouldn't upgrade if their email programs didn't baloon in size from a meg to 31M (resident size for my Thunderbird instance) and take forever to launch (probably due to the sheer number of ancillary services which are demand-loaded.) The problem never really was the hardware manufacturers. We've just convinced consumers that they need to have just one more feature and one more running application.
In 5 years? *looks around* I don't think I have piece of computer hardware in this house older than 2 years, except this Logitech QuickCam which still serves as an adequate microphone. Now I know some of you linux users only upgrade your computers when the size of the machine word changes, but for the rest of us having a five year old computer is about as useful as an ass**** on your elbow.
Like any other product in a capitalist society, it exists because there is a market for it. If people stopped paying for bad movies, bad movies would cease to plague us.
Unfortunately for most of us here, we are not the only people on the planet who pay for movies, and thus do not ourselves dictate what is and is not a movie worthy of viewing. Your only choice is to place your vote by supporting those films you do like, and not supporting those you do not.
Movie makers are doing what movie makers have always done and will always do - try to find a story which they believe people want to pay money to watch. Oh, sometimes there will be people who are making a film because they feel compelled to tell the story, but someone has to pay for the film, actors, catering (even if it's just pizza,) etc. The fact that people want to pay to see Dumb and Dumber[er] does not reflect on their inability/unwillingness to provide compelling matinee material so much as on our desire to see such drivel.
People need to remember that the ESRB opinions are not a substitution for actual thought. I'll make up my own damn mind about whether a game or movie is violent or not. I might use the ESRB rating to guide that decision (assuming I believe their methods yield rational results) and I might not. But I don't need the government to tell me that since they have zero expertise in that area.
Unfortunately, it's not so simple. The US gets its laws from the Constitution and English common law. Among other things in Common law is the concept of state secrets. Now, to a libertarian like me who happens to believe the Constitution was just fine as it was, Common law is a load of crap for things like this precisely because it does not recognize what the Founders recognized, namely that the purpose of government is to preserve the rights of individuals, and that the acquisition of power by government is anathema to doing so. State secrets are unchecked government power, pure and simple, when merely calling something a secret is enough to dismiss a case. Of course, one might consider that government cannot actually defend my rights if it cannot keep some secrets, and perhaps that is the case. But what I think the Founders understood better than most today is that we have more to fear from our own government growing corrupt with power than we do from military invasion or other sorts of attacks. That being the case, I would rather our government have to conduct 'secret operations' the old fashioned way - by actually keeping them secret - and not hiding behind a 16th century English concept whose days have long passed us by.
What is the cost-benefit analysis for this? Why should they release anything or go to any extra trouble at all? An open-source driver provides essentially no benefit to them. Remember, these cards are (at release time) geared towards high-end gaming systems, not enterprise-class systems where a company might reasonably think open-sourcing the drivers could be useful (and where there is a significant market share.)
Wow, awesome. Now when I want to upgrade my graphics processor, I have to get a whole new CPU. NOT.
... or we don't know what we want, and just let it happen to us. Worse yet, some of us do know what we want but do nothing about it for fear of losing our precious jobs. Now, for those of you with kids or other serious obligations, there is a certain logic to this. For the rest of you, the simple fact is that you've let it become expected of you and your testicular fortitude is too weak to potentially risk your job over saying 'no.' Several years back it finally dawned on me - I was not born to serve my boss' every stupid whim. So I don't. And you know what? It works. Be good at what you do, but don't tolerate the situations where you are making up for someone else's (planning/financing/hiring/designing/etc.) shortcomings unless there is a significant reward for you for doing so - more than just keeping your job. Eventually, they will learn and stop repeating their mistakes (or rather, having you clean up after them) or they will fail and exit your life (by quitting, suiciding, taking the company down with them, etc.) On the other hand, if you enjoy watching others use your superior talents (read "gullability") to cover for them, by all means, continue to remind everyone how much they are working while failing to do anything to correct the problem.
Was that a revelation? This has been going on for years, although at the present time I do not see specialized graphics CPUs losing any ground to their general CPU bretheren, in large part because they are architected as part of a complete system which is designed entirely for massive data manipulation but no expansion, random peripherals or anything else. So long as that architectural decision remains, it's unlikely we will see the downward spiral of performance predicted. But that's just my opinion.
Indeed. It's software development masturbation.
It may be a bad idea, but it is also a very popular one, and if you do it for a government, it's even legal.
There are some excellent points here. People get all excited because some electric car is now faster that some car the author thinks is defined purely by its acceleration from 0-60. And most slashdotters, I would bargain, are persuaded by such arguments because they are similarly uneducated. Sports cars like the Porsche Carerra and the Bugatti Veyron (mentioned in a related article) are consummate sports cars - they exemplify not only speed but styling, handling and quality expected of a car with their price tag. Cars such as the Corvette, especially the most recent incarnation, do so relatively inexpensively. But regardless, 0-60 acceleration is not the most important statistic, and often isn't an important statistic at all EXCEPT to people who don't know better (I refer the undereducated to the more useful 0-100-0 or 0-150-0 tests, as well as relevant agility tests such as emergency lane change, slalom and skid pad.) Electric cars will be desirable when they meet the following conditions met by existing cars - price (under 30k), features (styling, interior, gizmos), convenience (fueling in under 5 minutes.) This car does not appear to meet any of those.
"I certainly see that government will always push the limits of it's own power and understand that laws which grant power to the government should be written with a conservative (conservative, not right-wing) mindset. But I also can see that lawmakers have a different perspective than the general populous. They sometimes have a better historical perspective. They sometimes have access to information that the general public does not which factors into their decision making, and they sometimes have motivations completely unrelated to a particular bill that push them to vote one way or another. In the end, they have to live with their decisions just as much as we do. If their track record is so bad, then why is the re-election rate upwards of 90%? Surely it couldn't be pure apathy on the part of their detractors." Power corrupts. As soon as I give someone power (for instance by electing them) I am duty bound to be skeptical of their motives and distrust virtually everything they say (because they have become corrupt by the power I just gave them,) and it probably behooves me to remove them as soon as I possibly can, before they gain even more power. The reason people keep getting re-elected is that politicians desperately avoid talking about power. They tell you what great things will happen when they are re-elected, but never say what it will cost, and we usually don't care to ask. But the answer to the unasked question is always the same.
I think people are often confused about what Constitutional authority the President actually has, perhaps in part because they have not read the Constitution. Or maybe they have read it but not understood it. The Constitution is written in fairly plain language however, and can be taken at face value. From Article II (which defines the Executive and its powers): "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." This says that he is the leader of the armed forces, as well as the militia of the States when called into service. It also says he can require reports of other executive offices and grant reprieves and pardons. Nothing in here says that the president may declare the combatant status of anyone, conduct wiretapping at his pleasure, etc. "He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments." So he can make treaties with consent of the Senate, nominate and appoint diplomats and judges, again with consent of the Senate, and do the same for any other officers with certain exceptions made by Congress. Nothing about wiretaps, enemy combatant status or anything here... "The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session." Again, nothing here. Some people may be confused by the Oath of Office the President is administered as required by the Constitution. It reads: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." One could interpret this to mean that the President has the power to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution'. This would be incorrect, for two reasons. One, the Constitution very specifically uses the word 'power' to denote when the People have granted power to some portion of the government - such is not the case here. Secondly, an oath is not customarily used to bestow power upon someone, rather it is a guide to how power bestowed through another means (in this case by the Constitution) should be used. Unfortunately, the situation with Congress' authority is less clear simply because of the number of powers granted and their varying scope. Article I Section 8, which defines the powers of the Congress to legislate, contains some rather ambiguous phrasing (deliberate or not) which can and is misused often (regulating interstate commerce comes to mind.) Even so, I find it hard to understand where Congress or the Executive gets the authority to wiretap or otherwise eavesdrop on communications of any form. No such power is provided by the Constitution (powers not explicitly provided for by the Constitution are explicitly denied to the Government and reserved for the States and the People by the 10th Amendment) and therefore Congress cannot legislate regulation of it, nor can the President exercise any power to do it.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. -- Thomas Jefferson Yes, there is something we will do when we decide we have had enough. We will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights in the manner in which they were originally envisioned.
Eve is a social game. You gotta go find other people to play with to really get a lot of enjoyment out of it, unless you happen to enjoy mining and trading for their own sake. The most excitement in the game comes from PvP in my opinion. Until you've done real PvP, you've not really experienced the excitement the game can offer, and it's a shame the game doesn't lead you to that as a newbie because I know a lot of people get turned off for the same reason. If you played again, I'd concentrate on finding a player corporation that is willing to train you for PvP. My corporation ran an Academy to do that for some time, and it worked very well for us and them.
Actually, it turns out this is not true. While in a one-on-one battle using identical ships and loadouts you would be at a disadvantage against such a highly skilled person, such matchups are extremely rare. My 8 month old character can regularly destroy much older characters by virtue of having a more appropriately loaded ship for the situation in hand. Also, Eve strongly supports group operations, meaning that you can easily work with your friends to take down tough enemies, including players. A single 55M skillpoint player may be more than a match for you alone, but if you get him into combat and then have your friends show up at the right time (such ambushes are very popular) then the tide can turn very quickly. The PvP system in Eve in unmatched in the modern crop of MMOs, in my opinion.
And I suppose NASCAR shouldn't mandate vehicle weights, displacements, and everything else about the car either? This is a racing series. It's par for the course for there to be various mandates to achieve whatever goals the series desires - in this case purported cost savings. If racing teams don't like it, they can go form their own series.
Yes, it was very anti-competitive of the FIA to grant Microsoft exclusive rights to provide products to their private racing series. *insert eyeroll here*