If the wearer is about to pull the trigger on his M72 LAW when someone fires a rifle at him, do you think it's a Good Idea (TM) to jerk the person around?
You figure that being hit by a rifle bullet doesn't jerk him around?
Without the suit, you WILL be hit by a bullet.
WITH the suit, you MIGHT accidentally blow up your whole team.
And WITHOUT the suit you'll blow them up anyway, because you'll be hit by a bullet.
All this armour does is make the inevitable jerking happen a bit earlier. That's all.
I have a PowerPC processor, and I have Linux, and yet it does not work. They should advertise that it's only available for x86 users.
Yes. However, unless this thing uses assembly, which seems unlikely, it's probably just a matter of recompiling it on a PPC machine, or cross-compiling for it. Maybe you should ask the authors to do so?
Of course, the really smart thing to do would be to just offer a source tarball, and let users of exotic machines compile it for themselves. Since there's no DRM and apparently no proprietary third-party libraries in this thing, it shouldn't be a problem, and might even generate extra sales.
That's what I would do, anyway. After all, I wouldn't want to lose a sale just because someone wants to play the game on some platform I've never even heard of.
Unpaid overtime sounds pretty much like slavery to me. I don't understand how this can be acceptable to anyone.
Slave owners usually find slavery quite acceptable due to the profits it brings them, and have more power than their slaves. And, of course, libertarians and their ilk are all for total contractual freedom, which results in de factor slavery due to the inherent power difference between a single employer and a single employee; this could easily be solved by unionising, but such voluntary cooperation is communism even thought corporations aren't for some reason.
A real civilization doesn't make other people work as half-slaves (50% taxation), so they can extract the money to redistribute the wealth to others. A real civilization recognizes individual rights to labor, and protects the laborer from having his/her money stolen to be given to another.
Translation: "BAAWW! The evil government values people's lives over my ability to buy a HDTV! That means I'm a slave!"
You libertarians are just plain nuts. That's why no one votes for you.
I wonder what IDers claim neanderthals are supposed to be. Beta versions?
Actually, in creationism, you would be the beta version, with some bugs (sin, disease, old age...) still not worked out. Neanderthals would be alpha versions.
The problem would be that, like monkeys, Neanderthals are primates and would probably be the focus of animal rights groups seeking ways to stall the progress of science. Should appearance endow rights? Just because they may look structurally similar to humans, they aren't human.
Actually, yes they are/were. Neanderthals are a subspecies of humans, "Neanderthal Man" as opposed to "Wise Wise Man", that being us. That's the whole reason why any experimentation on them would be interesting, and also why it would be quite immoral.
During the time when both Modern Humans and Neanderthals coexisted, Modern Humans, by and large, showed evidence of the more sophisticated material culture (tools, art,etc.). Maybe you're thinking of the fact that, on average, Neanderthals had larger brains? Larger brain size does not = more intelligent.
You have more sophisticated material culture than any generation before you. Does this mean that you are smarter than all of your ancestors? Of course not. It simply means that you've inherited the intellectual output of who knows how many human generations. So, for all we know, the average Neanderthal could be smarter than the average modern-day human, just less likely to copy ideas from around it.
In any case, we seem to be unable to measure the intelligence of currently living humans in any but the most arbitrary way, or even come up with a workable definition for what intelligence actually is, so I kinda doubt we can say anything about that of humanlike beings long dead.
I'm starting to wonder if swap is just another obsolete solution to a problem that no longer exists for most real-world users.
I can't speak for most users, but I'm currently using a gigabyte of swap on a machine with a gigabyte of memory and a gigahertz processor. Not all of us underutilize our resources; some of us need to make do with what we have, since we can't afford more.
It's not dead which can forever lay, and with strange aeons even death may die.
Security cameras are a bit like porn for the government. If they're there, just waiting to be powered back up, there's always the temptation to look just this once. Removing them physically adds extra hoops between such desires and their fulfilment.
There is NO expectation of privacy when you are in public. Security cameras, when placed in common public areas are no problem. Heck, I can video tape you all I want on a street corner, as long as it is for my own private amusement.
There is an expectation of not being stalked even when you are in public. You following me around and video taping me constantly every time I'm in public would constitute stalking and get you a restraining order very fast. As this is exactly what a system with security cameras on every street corner in effect does, it is a problem.
Forcing your neighbors to pay YOUR health bills is not freedom. It's graft.
Actually, it's called civilization.
Coming to think of it, most barbarian tribes also help the weak amongst them. So I guess it's not civilization but basic humanity. No wait, dolphins help sick dolphins stay afloat, right? So I guess you fail to live up to moral standards of even animals.
I suppose we could categorize you with invertebrates, but they don't post bad analogies on Slashdot, so they're still better in the "less annoying" department than libertarians like you.
It's no different than if I bought a Lexus, and then demanded everybody contribute $1 to pay my bill & extracted the money from their wallets.
Actually, it's quite different. You don't die from lack of a car, but you do die from lack of medicine. You don't get a Lexus, and you're inconvenienced. You don't get medical attention, and you're dead. See the difference, sub-invertebrate?
Police and prosecutors are overworked, so give them a break. Anything that makes their job easier!
Switching over to "guilty until proven innocent" would make their job easier. So would eliminating trial altogether and simply throwing them to jail if accused. Not to mention all those search warrants and such.
No, I genuinely mean retarded. It's not a case of "I don't like them", it's a case of "most of the time it doesn't even make sense, nor make them look as smart as they seem to think." Some 90% of the uses of memes don't actually even have any meaning, and certainly don't convey any information in the context they're used.
"Retarded" means "below normal development for its age". Given that, saying that 90% of uses of memes is retarded is a contradiction in terms. The majority of people cannot be retarded, you insensitive clod, not even in Soviet Russia, even if the overlords there arguably were.
They bought it to print their own currency. By the time it's up an running, the US dollar will be worthless due to inflation. Prudent business decision I must say:-)
Buying a printing press might have been even more prudent, but oh well...
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and petty power corrupts all out of proportion to actual power. Given this, if you think that the Federal Government is bad, just wait until you see the small-town politicians, who are all too happy to play counts over their little kingdoms.
There's nothing to make someone a shithead like realizing that they're an insignificant leader leading an insignificant shithole in the middle of nowhere. Their subjects are going to pay - oh yes, are they ever.
How nifty! They put a **HUGE** data center where the law was changed to allow unprecedented spying upon e-mail traffic, **AND** through which Russia is mostly connected to.
Lex Nokia, which hasn't been passed yet, would allow the employer to monitor his employees email accounts located at company servers. It as absolutely nothing to do with Russia, unless we're talking about Russians who are employed by Google and use Gmail.
I repeat: this law, if it passes, would let the employer read emails sent to or from his own email servers by his employees. I'm pretty sure that's not "unprecedented", at least not outside Finland.
What are the Google connections with the CIA, again????
Probably the same as Google's connections with China: the company will do whatever it's told. What does that have to do with anything?
Funny thing? A hundred increments runs within 1% of the speed of 100 calls to a function to do the increment. And yes I unrolled those calls to isolate the cost of what I was measuring. So... rather surprisingly, the cost of these function calls is as close as doesn't matter, to exactly zero.
Not at all surprisingly, since 100 function calls and 100 integer additions will take so little time on a modern processor - and, I suspect, would even on an 8088 - that they amount to a rounding error. The machine's clock doesn't have sufficient resolution to measure them. You'd need a hundred million for a meaningful comparison.
You will never see, in your lifetime, successful emulation of the latest generation of consoles. The decryption keys, internal architecture and DRM protections are virtually impossible to reverse engineer.
And yet those consoles already have modchips or other cracks, which kinda implies that someone has managed to reverse engineer said protections.
No, the real problem is that current generation of PCs simply don't have the horsepower to emulate the latest generation consoles. Moore's law will take care of that problem in a decade or so. And even if console X would turn out to have a truly uncrackable security, given enough time it can be emulated at the level of individual transistors, given the chip blueprints; for a machine containing 1 billion transistors that would take about 30 Moore's cycles - or 40 if you want to do it in Python, 39 for a Bash script;).
Basically, yes... someone removed the resource silo link when the reactor was running, and the reactor continued to create material after the resources were cut.
No. The whole issue was that the reactor didn't create the material, the receiving silo did. All the reactor did was check that there were input materials available, remove them if there was, and then set a flag to show whether they were or not. It was an optimization to avoid having the reactor to have an inventory. And it worked just fine until someone else optimized with the assumption that the reactor was responsible for actually creating the material, when in reality it was just responsible for rechecking the conditions for continued production; once that check was removed, the flag never got reset, even when conditions changed.
Basically, someone optimized the code underlying the model, and then someone else optimized further with the assumption that the code still followed the model, which it at that point didn't. Add a misleading component name - "reactor" when the actual function is precondition checker - and there you have it.
If you eliminate scarcity, then why should anyone work? For the benefit of society? If you eliminate scarcity, the entire economic system collapses. I mean, really, good luck, but someone else already tried that.
If you eliminate scarcity, why should anyone work? Economy is about managing resources; if resources are infinite, why would they need to be managed? If something is as ubiquitous as the air you breath, why would there be economy around it? The purpose of work is to produce those resources in the first place, after all.
In any case, I personally find the whole post-scarcity world a very unlikely prospect. It would remove the elite's power over those less rich than themselves, after all, so if someone comes up with a universal replicator, they'll stop it... because it can be used to make bombs! Yes! That's it! It must be stopped to fight the terrorists!
Microsoft's investors have different priorities than you do. They want Microsoft's R&D to produce products that make money, not bad music.
Guess what kinds of products make money? The kinds people want. The kinds that, for example, make music.
Microsoft's investors are simply starting to wonder why they should pay for billions of dollars a year in research when they can keep Windows, MS Office, and the profitable server software divisions running with a much smaller investment.
They can't, actually. MS Office is facing competition from OpenOffice and Windows from Wine and Linux. As Vista showed, WinXP is already good enough for most people, so if Microsoft wants to sell new versions, then it better come up with something better; and that requires research. On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn't get people to upgrade, then Wine will eventually be good enough - or likely already is - to run the few legacy applications which Ubuntu doesn't have the equivalents of.
Of course you could maximize the profits short-term by stopping all research and basically looting the company for everything valuable, then selling the shares before anyone notices, and in fact the high liquidity of stock market encourages such short-sighted behaviour, which is IMHO one of the biggest problems in economy today. However, long-term viability of Microsoft depends on actual improvements and innovations, which are impossible without research.
You are welcome to your opinion, though not to the coercion required to act on it.
Naturally. That's why we have a government to use that coercive power on our behalf, rather than let every slashdot poster do it by himself.
Or are you one of those libertarians who argue that the rich should have the freedom to freely oppress the poor, and that any attempt to do anything about that is a horrible breach on their liberty? In that case, keep on wondering why the "sheep" don't vote for people who would let the wolves loose amongst them.
In my opinion, however, your "wealth redistribution mechanism" is far worse than what you call "an outright feudalism with a de facto slave class".
Ah, I guess you are a libertarian. But go on, tell me: how is taxation by government worse than having the local aristocrat have the power of life and death by starvation over me?
I also disagree that such an end result is likely; feudalism ended when land ownership (i.e. agriculture) was replaced by manufacturing as the primary source of wealth, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Get over it.
Simply because the aristocracy is based on owning factories rather than land doesn't make it any less of an aristocracy. If anything, it made it worse during the early days of Industrial Revolution, and still would if not the rules which force (coerce) the capitalists to behave.
The Fountainhead is fiction, as is Atlas Shrugged.Your ideology is based on silly superhero fantasies and is utterly unworkable in real life. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in early 20th century the patent office had Einstein. The people who work there today... are not Einsteins.
You figure that being hit by a rifle bullet doesn't jerk him around?
And WITHOUT the suit you'll blow them up anyway, because you'll be hit by a bullet.
All this armour does is make the inevitable jerking happen a bit earlier. That's all.
Yes. However, unless this thing uses assembly, which seems unlikely, it's probably just a matter of recompiling it on a PPC machine, or cross-compiling for it. Maybe you should ask the authors to do so?
Of course, the really smart thing to do would be to just offer a source tarball, and let users of exotic machines compile it for themselves. Since there's no DRM and apparently no proprietary third-party libraries in this thing, it shouldn't be a problem, and might even generate extra sales.
That's what I would do, anyway. After all, I wouldn't want to lose a sale just because someone wants to play the game on some platform I've never even heard of.
Slave owners usually find slavery quite acceptable due to the profits it brings them, and have more power than their slaves. And, of course, libertarians and their ilk are all for total contractual freedom, which results in de factor slavery due to the inherent power difference between a single employer and a single employee; this could easily be solved by unionising, but such voluntary cooperation is communism even thought corporations aren't for some reason.
In unregulated capitalism, slavery is freedom.
Translation: "BAAWW! The evil government values people's lives over my ability to buy a HDTV! That means I'm a slave!"
You libertarians are just plain nuts. That's why no one votes for you.
Actually, in creationism, you would be the beta version, with some bugs (sin, disease, old age...) still not worked out. Neanderthals would be alpha versions.
Actually, yes they are/were. Neanderthals are a subspecies of humans, "Neanderthal Man" as opposed to "Wise Wise Man", that being us. That's the whole reason why any experimentation on them would be interesting, and also why it would be quite immoral.
You have more sophisticated material culture than any generation before you. Does this mean that you are smarter than all of your ancestors? Of course not. It simply means that you've inherited the intellectual output of who knows how many human generations. So, for all we know, the average Neanderthal could be smarter than the average modern-day human, just less likely to copy ideas from around it.
In any case, we seem to be unable to measure the intelligence of currently living humans in any but the most arbitrary way, or even come up with a workable definition for what intelligence actually is, so I kinda doubt we can say anything about that of humanlike beings long dead.
I can't speak for most users, but I'm currently using a gigabyte of swap on a machine with a gigabyte of memory and a gigahertz processor. Not all of us underutilize our resources; some of us need to make do with what we have, since we can't afford more.
It's not dead which can forever lay, and with strange aeons even death may die.
Security cameras are a bit like porn for the government. If they're there, just waiting to be powered back up, there's always the temptation to look just this once. Removing them physically adds extra hoops between such desires and their fulfilment.
There is an expectation of not being stalked even when you are in public. You following me around and video taping me constantly every time I'm in public would constitute stalking and get you a restraining order very fast. As this is exactly what a system with security cameras on every street corner in effect does, it is a problem.
Actually, it's called civilization.
Coming to think of it, most barbarian tribes also help the weak amongst them. So I guess it's not civilization but basic humanity. No wait, dolphins help sick dolphins stay afloat, right? So I guess you fail to live up to moral standards of even animals.
I suppose we could categorize you with invertebrates, but they don't post bad analogies on Slashdot, so they're still better in the "less annoying" department than libertarians like you.
Actually, it's quite different. You don't die from lack of a car, but you do die from lack of medicine. You don't get a Lexus, and you're inconvenienced. You don't get medical attention, and you're dead. See the difference, sub-invertebrate?
Switching over to "guilty until proven innocent" would make their job easier. So would eliminating trial altogether and simply throwing them to jail if accused. Not to mention all those search warrants and such.
"Retarded" means "below normal development for its age". Given that, saying that 90% of uses of memes is retarded is a contradiction in terms. The majority of people cannot be retarded, you insensitive clod, not even in Soviet Russia, even if the overlords there arguably were.
Buying a printing press might have been even more prudent, but oh well...
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and petty power corrupts all out of proportion to actual power. Given this, if you think that the Federal Government is bad, just wait until you see the small-town politicians, who are all too happy to play counts over their little kingdoms.
There's nothing to make someone a shithead like realizing that they're an insignificant leader leading an insignificant shithole in the middle of nowhere. Their subjects are going to pay - oh yes, are they ever.
In Soviet Russia, you die of starvation!
I like mettwurst, especially Russian mettwurst. Salami is also good, and tuna covered with cheese which is melted in a microwave is a classic.
Lex Nokia, which hasn't been passed yet, would allow the employer to monitor his employees email accounts located at company servers. It as absolutely nothing to do with Russia, unless we're talking about Russians who are employed by Google and use Gmail.
I repeat: this law, if it passes, would let the employer read emails sent to or from his own email servers by his employees. I'm pretty sure that's not "unprecedented", at least not outside Finland.
Probably the same as Google's connections with China: the company will do whatever it's told. What does that have to do with anything?
Not at all surprisingly, since 100 function calls and 100 integer additions will take so little time on a modern processor - and, I suspect, would even on an 8088 - that they amount to a rounding error. The machine's clock doesn't have sufficient resolution to measure them. You'd need a hundred million for a meaningful comparison.
And yet those consoles already have modchips or other cracks, which kinda implies that someone has managed to reverse engineer said protections.
No, the real problem is that current generation of PCs simply don't have the horsepower to emulate the latest generation consoles. Moore's law will take care of that problem in a decade or so. And even if console X would turn out to have a truly uncrackable security, given enough time it can be emulated at the level of individual transistors, given the chip blueprints; for a machine containing 1 billion transistors that would take about 30 Moore's cycles - or 40 if you want to do it in Python, 39 for a Bash script ;).
No. The whole issue was that the reactor didn't create the material, the receiving silo did. All the reactor did was check that there were input materials available, remove them if there was, and then set a flag to show whether they were or not. It was an optimization to avoid having the reactor to have an inventory. And it worked just fine until someone else optimized with the assumption that the reactor was responsible for actually creating the material, when in reality it was just responsible for rechecking the conditions for continued production; once that check was removed, the flag never got reset, even when conditions changed.
Basically, someone optimized the code underlying the model, and then someone else optimized further with the assumption that the code still followed the model, which it at that point didn't. Add a misleading component name - "reactor" when the actual function is precondition checker - and there you have it.
If you eliminate scarcity, why should anyone work? Economy is about managing resources; if resources are infinite, why would they need to be managed? If something is as ubiquitous as the air you breath, why would there be economy around it? The purpose of work is to produce those resources in the first place, after all.
That said, even in a world with no material scarcity, people would still work, judging by the existence of websites like http://rule34.paheal.net/, http://www.fanfiction.net/ or http://www.wikipedia.org/. They'd simply do that for fun and prestige, rather than as a necessity of survival as currently.
In any case, I personally find the whole post-scarcity world a very unlikely prospect. It would remove the elite's power over those less rich than themselves, after all, so if someone comes up with a universal replicator, they'll stop it... because it can be used to make bombs! Yes! That's it! It must be stopped to fight the terrorists!
Guess what kinds of products make money? The kinds people want. The kinds that, for example, make music.
They can't, actually. MS Office is facing competition from OpenOffice and Windows from Wine and Linux. As Vista showed, WinXP is already good enough for most people, so if Microsoft wants to sell new versions, then it better come up with something better; and that requires research. On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn't get people to upgrade, then Wine will eventually be good enough - or likely already is - to run the few legacy applications which Ubuntu doesn't have the equivalents of.
Of course you could maximize the profits short-term by stopping all research and basically looting the company for everything valuable, then selling the shares before anyone notices, and in fact the high liquidity of stock market encourages such short-sighted behaviour, which is IMHO one of the biggest problems in economy today. However, long-term viability of Microsoft depends on actual improvements and innovations, which are impossible without research.
Naturally. That's why we have a government to use that coercive power on our behalf, rather than let every slashdot poster do it by himself.
Or are you one of those libertarians who argue that the rich should have the freedom to freely oppress the poor, and that any attempt to do anything about that is a horrible breach on their liberty? In that case, keep on wondering why the "sheep" don't vote for people who would let the wolves loose amongst them.
Ah, I guess you are a libertarian. But go on, tell me: how is taxation by government worse than having the local aristocrat have the power of life and death by starvation over me?
Simply because the aristocracy is based on owning factories rather than land doesn't make it any less of an aristocracy. If anything, it made it worse during the early days of Industrial Revolution, and still would if not the rules which force (coerce) the capitalists to behave.
The Fountainhead is fiction, as is Atlas Shrugged.Your ideology is based on silly superhero fantasies and is utterly unworkable in real life. Get over it.