I hardly think calling homeschooled children socially inept (or traditionally schooled children unintelligent) qualifies as prejudiced. It illustrates inherent bias, maybe. Unfortunately, kids are kids. Homeschooled children don't vary any more from the bell curve than traditionally schooled children in terms of intelligence (though they typically don't know it, since they have no basis for comparison) than traditionally schooled children. Both traditionally schooled children and homeschooled children have no idea how to behave in social situations.
You didn't go through traditional school, so you probably missed most of the clique, backstabby bullshit that happens all the time. However, that's a social norm at that age (through college, really), so it doesn't look unusual to outside observers. The homeschooled kids think they're capable of communicating with adults on a rational, intelligent level, and sometimes they are. Tried having a conversation with anybody who's not out in the "real world" (not to disparage college students, but for most of them, it's not the same thing as working 40 hours a week for an employer who doesn't really give a damn, with no reward other than a few weeks vacation and money which goes towards a mortgage/etc) lately?
They're all concerned with petty crap, are unrealistically idealistic, or flat-out don't understand the normal flow of adult conversation. Whether traditionally schooled or homeschooled, that remains a constant. As an adult, I consider all children socially inept, but it's expected naivete. For an apples-to-apples comparison (social interaction with peer groups), homeschooled children often fall far short. It seems to be getting better with the advent of more intramural sports leagues, but homeschooled children are in for a shock when they enter into relationships or the working world. One thing a traditional education teaches you at which homeschooling fails is how to deal with situations or people that you loathe, but have to abide for professional reasons.
I know people who homeschool their children. Whether it's because they're in DoD/State and they travel a lot, or they're stationed somewhere with a poor education system (Fort Steward, TN, and Fort Bragg, GA are both in the sticks, where a friend was called in to speak with the principal because her children aren't "saved"), it's an option that works for them. They do not for a second believe that a couple books and a license have given them more insight than centuries of educators, however.
I see the over-inflated sense of superiority hasn't faded.
While I don't necessarily begrudge pitying those who went through traditional primary education (whether public or private), the quality of homeschooling is hardly better on the average. You may quote statistics about likelihood to go to college (and yes, the ratio of homeschooled children admitted to college is higher than public education, though pretty much on par with private education -- which says more about the average income of homeschooled families versus traditional education), but the matriculation rate is comparable.
The lack of standardized curriculum is a sticking point. Beyond a doubt, traditional education offers opportunities which are nigh-impossible to get while home schooled (extracurricular, Johns Hopkins Math Program, et al), while home schooling provides a chance to tailor to individual students. Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, I guess. Certainly what I'm doing for a living now is not what I thought I'd want to do when I was younger.
What is certain (other than "for certain" being a grammatically incorrect construct) is that you get out of education what you put into it. It's also certain that a far higher proportion of home-schooled students are taught in religiously-charged environments which are hardly free from bias. There's a reason why home-schooled children, while often doing well at spelling bees (though it's hard to tell whether this is because those are skills autistic people -- who may have trouble with traditional education -- excel at), home-schooled children don't exactly dominate science competitions. "High-potential" students will excel no matter what situation they're thrown into, but the majority of people are average. Total range of vocabulary is pretty much the same between the two (journals of cognitive development and speech pathology cover this every few years), and having an "adult's capacity" for vocabulary (where I suspect you meant that home-schooled children tend to use allegories, metaphors, and figures of speech more prevalent in the adult population) isn't necessarily something to trumpet. Your phonotactic repetition is not representative of vocabulary size, and simply indicates that you (as collective home-schoolers) spent more time with adults than with peers in your age group.
Slashdot isn't the best place to debate the relative merits of schooling systems, but you'll find that reality is a lot more nuanced than the picture you have of it right now as you get older.
Uh, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle primarily applies to quantum mechanics. Beyond which, the polling rate on the controller hardly hits arbitrary precision, and can be thought of more as an extrapolation of vectors from known data points.
Read dictionaries much? Familiar with basic grammar? The "benefit" is explicitly financial the way that definition is phrased, else it would be "Property or another possession acquired for personal benefit or future financial return".
No idea who modded this 'underrated,' but those buses have nothing to do with this. The AGP bus never had any effect on storage performance (isolated), the PCIe bus is much faster than storage, etc. The IDE controller is on the Southbridge, and it's not bottlenecking. Storage is the bottleneck more often than not (seek times and raw speed). Will this cut down on seek times? Yes. Solid-state storage has nigh-instantaneous seek times, since there aren't any heads seeking.
Don't compare apples to oranges (no pun intended). The HD size on the iMacs is at least twice as large as the Dell, they have Core 2 Duos, PCI express slots. non-integrated graphics, etc.
The reason MacPros and Dells are compared is that they can be configured identically. You can't make a Dell an iMac no matter how hard you try.
In what shop were you in? Where I've been (granted, TS:SCI rather than just Classified, as this probably was) there were pieces superglued in the USB ports and speaker outputs so you knew you were not to take any sensitive information off this PC. None of the machines had CD burners or anything else.
Yes, hard drives are typically removable. From all accounts, however, these are flash drives, which should have never been allowed to touch a machine with sensitive information to begin with.
While that may be true, HD-DVD will ALSO have a HUGE market with the 360. The sales of the XBox weren't that far below the PS2, and the 360 should narrow that gap by a fair margin, if they don't surpass Sony's sales entirely.
I don't think people will go to buy the nextgen DVDs or DVDs players either. I don't see a consumer advantage given the current bitrate (and the HD crap is garbage. Even at 36MB/s (Blu-Ray's original spec), you can fit 3.96 hours of 1080 HD content and a dual-layer DVD. I don't see a reason to upgrade even if you DO have an HDTV, other than lockout from the vendors.
I don't really see how the $400 is cheaper in the long run. It has a shortstroked 20GB hard drive that won't be used for anything (if I wanted music, I'd turn on my HTPC or my stereo, thanks). It has a wireless controller that'll cost $20. The XBox live features are pretty much the same, except you have to pay a subscription instead of it being free for the first year. I don't play Live! anyway.
Again, no they don't. They have the future installbase of 360 customers. I'm glad it helps you justify, but consider what I said about nextgen DVDs not offering significantly more content than a standard DVD -could-. Also, the HD-DVD is just as much nextgen as Blu-Ray.
I can see you've thought it through from one perspective. Try considering from others. Blu-Ray is ready, but so is HD-DVD. Considering manufacturing costs and whatnot, HD-DVD will probably be cheaper. Cheaper wins. Even if it's not, it'll probably end up being like the DVD +/- fiasco, and you'll end up having to get a player that will do both, since half the vendors will release on Blu-Ray and half on HD-DVD. So the Blu-Ray in the PS3 likely won't help you there anyway.
By that logic, they already have to produce 2 versions of games. How do you expect the cross-platform titles to go there? Rev won't be Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. 360 will be HD later. They're not gonna make a ton of content just for PS3 (except for maybe the PS3 exclusives). Not to mention the burden of trying to keep 7 SPEs busy so it performs better than an Epia.
You really think people are justified about being pissed about the no HD version? Were people pissed about the PS2 HD not being sold here for more than a few months? Not really. 99% of consumers aren't going to use the hard drive for anything, it's only developers who don't like knowing whether or not they can use one for caching. Consumers know a hard drive is good, but I don't think they know what's it used for. If they did, they wouldn't care, and they probably don't care as is (I don't think you or I are representative of the general populace).
I'd also say that I haven't seen anything new or exciting about the PS3. Blu-Ray. Whee. If I want an HD player, I'll buy one, and preferably one that plays Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD. The new consoles are, IMO, a bust. I'll get a Rev so I can play Super Metroid, Contra, and the other oldies. I don't expect to get a PS3 or a 360 until price goes WAY down. This is from somebody that bought a PS2, XBox, and GC all at release. I just don't see anything to get excited about.
The 360 market, much like the PS3 market, will primarily be 15 year olds whose parents get them one. They want to play GTAHaloMGS25-r11 with Tekken's fighting system. I expect that 360 to play on the "cool image" to get sales. And it will. I don't expect to see the lack of an HD-DVD drive fragment the market, since most of the kids won't have HDTVs anyway, or any use for anything that's larger than a DVD.
Current speculation is that the 360 will be HD-DVD before the PS3 is released. That screws over the early adopters, but still beats Sony to market. In any case, it'll be HD-DVD in less than a year.
What the OP's post looked like to me was that Blu-Ray is better than HD-DVD (qualitywise) because Sony is making it, basically. If it's anything like DVD Consortium vs. DVD Alliance, I don't expect to see Sony push a lot of the manufacturers into Blu-Ray. Maybe HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but not much will be Blu-Ray exclusive.
Ok, let's look at this objectively (that might be hard for you). TFA says they're backing HD-DVD because it's producable NOW. Blu-Ray is really expensive and they haven't hit the expected storage. Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will play HD content fine. Difference is in DRM and backwards compatiblity. Considering the bitrate at 1080 is 25 Mbs, it allows for 20 HOURS of content on a 30GB HD-DVD producable TODAY. Even with special features/audio/whatever, there's more than enough space there. I fail to see an advantage of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD considering the restrictions on it.
Content will not "look better" on Blu-Ray than HD-DVD. It'll look the same.
XBox360 will be $300 bare. It will also be a nextgen DVD player (as HD-DVD is also nextgen). They're saving nothing on buying the $500 wannabe PC replacement. All the things Sony wants it to do (word processing/whatever) have been tried before, and they failed. They'll fail again. People won't be able to get their documents off to print them/whatever. That's a whole different rant.
Not sure if you're a Sony fanboy or an MS hater. Either way you've not considered it very well.
I believe you misunderstood what he meant, but he's still wrong.
What it looks like he meant (to me), is that you have a whole bunch of independent ways to find information, but there might be a lot of overlap or it might not be all that helpful. The Gentoo forums, gentoo wiki, google, usenet, mailing list archives, and advice from a LUG might not even be remotely similar, for instance, and none of them will necessarily solve your problem. For instance, my problem with OpenS/WAN's init script and gawk.
On the other hand, that doesn't exist in the Windows world, either. Even with Microsoft apps. Having problems getting MS-SQL to work with Visual Studio? Two different departments. Some 3rd party software? Same options as Linux, basically.
Those are deployment numbers for one year (2003, as per DoD's own PDFs). Deployments are 18 months. The numbers there right now are the same. That's the way it was planned. Actually, the percentage might be a little higher now, considering their inability to meet recruiting and retention goals.
Recruitment numbers have been bolstered by IRR (Inactive Reserve Recall). The DoD's charts clearly show a loss in manpower over the last 3 years, regardless of what recruiting quotas might say.
We have a Federal government. If the States don't request help in certain matters, the hands of the Feds are tied. The Mayor of New Orleans even resisted ordering a mandatory evacuation despite President Bush's urging.
Strawman argument. I clearly mentioned ALL levels of government. Here's my quote again, in case you misread it:
Yes, the bumbling by all levels of government was the deciding factor, not Iraq. Had the mayor/governor/president/FEMA done more, it would have made a world of difference.
The nation's business does not necessarily include nomination of a Chief Justice less than 48 hours after his death. check the timeline here. Not saying it will affect relief efforts, just that it's the wrong time. I doubt if there will be "an inevitable flood of lawsuits" that even make it to the High Court.
You're on all counts right, but way to turn my post into a strawman.
I agree that it would be better to build a port in another location, but it's not feasable, due to the cost of transporting workers and whatnot. Where would the workers from the tourist area come from? Who works the hotels? Where do they get their food? Where do the workers get their food? It's just not possible to do.
Good planning does not always agree with the circumstances. There is not another port location that can serve the same function without the floods.
And yes, like I said, the flood were not disasters, but they were damaging. There is plenty of historical record (particularly in China, India, and Sumeria) to support cities being completely abandoned due to it only to be rebuilt in 5 years.
Industrial scale fertilizer is very useful in the Midwest, the Ukraine, and other farming areas, but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans.
You fucktard. All of the forces in Iraq constitute roughly 10 percent of the total armed forces in the united states. There are still plenty of guard troops to be deployed to the disaster area. It was the fault of the state goverments for not bringing them in sooner. You are exactly the type of individual the GP was talking about.
That's the AC I was responding to. It's not "tap dancing and redirection." Those are deployment numbers for one year (2003, as per DoD's own PDFs). Deployments are 18 months. The numbers there right now are the same. That's the way it was planned. Actually, the percentage might be a little higher now, considering their inability to meet recruiting and retention goals.
Not trying to politicize it, I just don't like to see AC spouting bull modded as 'informative' when the numbers are available from the DoD.
Yes, the bumbling by all levels of government was the deciding factor, not Iraq. Had the mayor/governor/president/FEMA done more, it would have made a world of difference. That being said, now is not the time to nominate the asshat for Chief Justice. During a national disaster, and before Rehnquist is even buried.
I didn't say they were disasters, I just said they were destructive. The Nilometers show several extremely high floods that certainly destroyed many areas
955,609 (about 36%) of our total Active Duty/Reserve/National Guard forces of 2,656,300 have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during this period. 651,622 (24.5%) have one deployment during this period, and 303,987 (11.4%) have deployed more than once.
For active duty, 708,428 (48.2%) of the force has deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. 494,482 (33.6%) have deployed once, while 213.946 (14.6%) have deployed more than once.
For the National Guard and Reserves, 247,181 (20.8%) have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sound like 10% to you? No. We're at 40% commitment over the next 3 years (including rotations). Start using a more reliable source.
Many of them hate him entirely for past issues, and are eager to seize upon any excuse to bash him more? I mean, be realistic - for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist. This isn't meant as an apology or a defense of him - just that I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all. It's essentially sand-box name-taunting by three year olds.
Y'know, there are also social and economic conservatives who won't think we should be an Anarcho-capitalistic state where big campaign contributors get put in Undersecretary of (whatever) positions. The government needs to be seperated from the private sector, and it's not. Not every conservative is a Limbaugh/O'Reilly listening, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism preaching neocon. I take it by "Democratic-style leftist" you mean moderate who gets bought off just like the Republicans? The fact that the political center in the administration has shifted more and more to the right doesn't mean that moderates are liberal nutballs. For real leftism, see Sweden or Switzerland.
I also think that Europeans don't really "get" the dual federal/state government system that the US has. Calling out national guard is typically a state, not federal function, for instance. If the federal government has to call out the National Guard, it means the _state_ has screwed up. Many of the things Europeans are blaming the federal government for are typically _state_ functions. Evacuating the citizens is also a state function (or a city function). This is not to say that the federal government shouldn't assist - but we have separation of powers between state and federal governments over here, apparently to a much larger extent than in, say, Europe.
Calling out the national guard is a state function, but the federal government could have, and should have, declared a state of emergency. Before Ivan, they had readied the military. It took less than 48 hours. Why is it different now? The fact that the state didn't call in the Guard fast enough (and Ray Nagin was doing his best to get help there fast) doesn't mean that the Fed didn't fuck up as well.
There are also Americans blaming the Federal government. The federal reaction to this disaster has been worse than any other disaster. Ever. Worse than any hurricane. Worse than any flood. Worse than earthquake response. Worse than major fires. State's rights (which are largely nonexistent nowadays) don't absolve the federal government of their responsibility to help. If I were shot and you saw it, would you call it my responsibility to call 911?
I wish you'd understand the reason our government is here. When I see all these uninformed arguments, it just tells me how fast we're going downhill.
Contrary to what you imply, traffic on the Mississippi can get along just fine without the city of New Orleans. Reinforced port facilities could be built without surrounding them with a city that is below sea level. Ports are useful. Cities built without adaquate mitigation are not.
True, it can get along fine, but the next major river city is Saint Louis. What, praytell, should they do with the warehousing of the goods going from the river out to sea, and visa versa? The oil from the Gulf going to the refineries? There is not a port that can take up the slack in the meantime.
Reality's reality: Require improved building codes and effective fire fighting codes.
Require improved building codes for hurricane resistance. Don't allow people to build directly on flood plains. Don't drain hurricane-buffering wetlands for million dollar condos.
The fact that there's a disaster does not necessarily require improved codes. Improved building codes would not have prevented this any more than they'd prevent a major fire. If some slummy warehouse explodes, sure, but a major fire could just as easily start from any number of things.
So how much will refitting all the buildings in the entire hurricane zone for new (ineffective) codes cost us? How 'bout retraining every firefighter in the country? We haven't had a major fire in years. Do you think a better code in San Diego would have helped? Bad things happen, and it's a fact of life. More regulation won't help.
New Orleans is built on delta silt, notoriously unstable and has been documented for decades to be slowly sinking, eventually turning into Venice of the Gulf. For decades the artifically channeled river continues to silt up, raising the water level ever higher, faster than dredging or levy improvements can check.
Ok, that's true. I don't know about "notoriously unstable," but it's definitely not safe and sound. Guess what? Texas is sinking too. Most of the places on the Gulf are. People prevent flooding, and it sinks. We caused this problem, and it's not restricted to New Orleans.
Your claim: New Orleans is useful so continue to throw money at a losing proposition that is guaranteed to result in massive loss of life and an environmental disaster beyond imagination. (By the way... since all of those toxic chemicals are about to be pumped directly into the Gulf, I would advise against eating any shrimp or other seafood from that region for the next few years).
Do you absolutely need port facilities at that specific location? For the cost of a failed levy system with infinite maintenance and improvement requirements you can build a deep-water port on pilings to bedrock in the middle of the gulf itself, complete with ballast tanks to raise the entire infrastructure well above even 50' storm surges or simply made water-tight and let storm surges wash harmlessly over the entire facility. Multiple rail trestles (including light rail to easily and painlessly transport employees to/from their homes which are located safely inland) ensure efficient transportation of labor and goods.
Yes we need port facilites at that specific location. The nearest major port city on the river is Saint Louis. New Orleans is the only location where we can warehouse river good and goods from the Gulf for redistribution.
The cost of constructing a port on pilings in the Gulf would be extreme. Offshore derricks aren't safe, and the city wouldn't be either. What happens if there's tectonic movement? Do all the rail trestles break? Do you seriously expect the cost of such a feat of engineering to be less than rebuilding New Orleans 3 times? This isn't even mentioning the tourist economy, location of the airport, business travel, etc.
Don't abandon Florida, simply require everybody to be self-insured. Insurance subsidies of people who want to enjoy ocean views force people living in trailer parks in Des Moines chi
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I hardly think calling homeschooled children socially inept (or traditionally schooled children unintelligent) qualifies as prejudiced. It illustrates inherent bias, maybe. Unfortunately, kids are kids. Homeschooled children don't vary any more from the bell curve than traditionally schooled children in terms of intelligence (though they typically don't know it, since they have no basis for comparison) than traditionally schooled children. Both traditionally schooled children and homeschooled children have no idea how to behave in social situations.
You didn't go through traditional school, so you probably missed most of the clique, backstabby bullshit that happens all the time. However, that's a social norm at that age (through college, really), so it doesn't look unusual to outside observers. The homeschooled kids think they're capable of communicating with adults on a rational, intelligent level, and sometimes they are. Tried having a conversation with anybody who's not out in the "real world" (not to disparage college students, but for most of them, it's not the same thing as working 40 hours a week for an employer who doesn't really give a damn, with no reward other than a few weeks vacation and money which goes towards a mortgage/etc) lately?
They're all concerned with petty crap, are unrealistically idealistic, or flat-out don't understand the normal flow of adult conversation. Whether traditionally schooled or homeschooled, that remains a constant. As an adult, I consider all children socially inept, but it's expected naivete. For an apples-to-apples comparison (social interaction with peer groups), homeschooled children often fall far short. It seems to be getting better with the advent of more intramural sports leagues, but homeschooled children are in for a shock when they enter into relationships or the working world. One thing a traditional education teaches you at which homeschooling fails is how to deal with situations or people that you loathe, but have to abide for professional reasons.
I know people who homeschool their children. Whether it's because they're in DoD/State and they travel a lot, or they're stationed somewhere with a poor education system (Fort Steward, TN, and Fort Bragg, GA are both in the sticks, where a friend was called in to speak with the principal because her children aren't "saved"), it's an option that works for them. They do not for a second believe that a couple books and a license have given them more insight than centuries of educators, however.
I see the over-inflated sense of superiority hasn't faded.
While I don't necessarily begrudge pitying those who went through traditional primary education (whether public or private), the quality of homeschooling is hardly better on the average. You may quote statistics about likelihood to go to college (and yes, the ratio of homeschooled children admitted to college is higher than public education, though pretty much on par with private education -- which says more about the average income of homeschooled families versus traditional education), but the matriculation rate is comparable.
The lack of standardized curriculum is a sticking point. Beyond a doubt, traditional education offers opportunities which are nigh-impossible to get while home schooled (extracurricular, Johns Hopkins Math Program, et al), while home schooling provides a chance to tailor to individual students. Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, I guess. Certainly what I'm doing for a living now is not what I thought I'd want to do when I was younger.
What is certain (other than "for certain" being a grammatically incorrect construct) is that you get out of education what you put into it. It's also certain that a far higher proportion of home-schooled students are taught in religiously-charged environments which are hardly free from bias. There's a reason why home-schooled children, while often doing well at spelling bees (though it's hard to tell whether this is because those are skills autistic people -- who may have trouble with traditional education -- excel at), home-schooled children don't exactly dominate science competitions. "High-potential" students will excel no matter what situation they're thrown into, but the majority of people are average. Total range of vocabulary is pretty much the same between the two (journals of cognitive development and speech pathology cover this every few years), and having an "adult's capacity" for vocabulary (where I suspect you meant that home-schooled children tend to use allegories, metaphors, and figures of speech more prevalent in the adult population) isn't necessarily something to trumpet. Your phonotactic repetition is not representative of vocabulary size, and simply indicates that you (as collective home-schoolers) spent more time with adults than with peers in your age group.
Slashdot isn't the best place to debate the relative merits of schooling systems, but you'll find that reality is a lot more nuanced than the picture you have of it right now as you get older.
Uh, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle primarily applies to quantum mechanics. Beyond which, the polling rate on the controller hardly hits arbitrary precision, and can be thought of more as an extrapolation of vectors from known data points.
Read dictionaries much? Familiar with basic grammar? The "benefit" is explicitly financial the way that definition is phrased, else it would be "Property or another possession acquired for personal benefit or future financial return".
No, you did not. IA64 is not byte-compatible with EMT64/AMD64.
Yeah, because it's not like they sold any Core Duo Minis, iMacs, Macbooks, etc (which unlike Core2, were not 64 bit capable)...
Ahem. Care to rescind that statement?
No idea who modded this 'underrated,' but those buses have nothing to do with this. The AGP bus never had any effect on storage performance (isolated), the PCIe bus is much faster than storage, etc. The IDE controller is on the Southbridge, and it's not bottlenecking. Storage is the bottleneck more often than not (seek times and raw speed). Will this cut down on seek times? Yes. Solid-state storage has nigh-instantaneous seek times, since there aren't any heads seeking.
Don't compare apples to oranges (no pun intended). The HD size on the iMacs is at least twice as large as the Dell, they have Core 2 Duos, PCI express slots. non-integrated graphics, etc. The reason MacPros and Dells are compared is that they can be configured identically. You can't make a Dell an iMac no matter how hard you try.
In what shop were you in? Where I've been (granted, TS:SCI rather than just Classified, as this probably was) there were pieces superglued in the USB ports and speaker outputs so you knew you were not to take any sensitive information off this PC. None of the machines had CD burners or anything else.
Yes, hard drives are typically removable. From all accounts, however, these are flash drives, which should have never been allowed to touch a machine with sensitive information to begin with.
I really hope that was supposed to be a pun. OoO is acutally OoOE or Out of Order Execution. It helps with branch prediction on loops.
While that may be true, HD-DVD will ALSO have a HUGE market with the 360. The sales of the XBox weren't that far below the PS2, and the 360 should narrow that gap by a fair margin, if they don't surpass Sony's sales entirely.
I don't think people will go to buy the nextgen DVDs or DVDs players either. I don't see a consumer advantage given the current bitrate (and the HD crap is garbage. Even at 36MB/s (Blu-Ray's original spec), you can fit 3.96 hours of 1080 HD content and a dual-layer DVD. I don't see a reason to upgrade even if you DO have an HDTV, other than lockout from the vendors.
I don't really see how the $400 is cheaper in the long run. It has a shortstroked 20GB hard drive that won't be used for anything (if I wanted music, I'd turn on my HTPC or my stereo, thanks). It has a wireless controller that'll cost $20. The XBox live features are pretty much the same, except you have to pay a subscription instead of it being free for the first year. I don't play Live! anyway.
Again, no they don't. They have the future installbase of 360 customers. I'm glad it helps you justify, but consider what I said about nextgen DVDs not offering significantly more content than a standard DVD -could-. Also, the HD-DVD is just as much nextgen as Blu-Ray.
I can see you've thought it through from one perspective. Try considering from others. Blu-Ray is ready, but so is HD-DVD. Considering manufacturing costs and whatnot, HD-DVD will probably be cheaper. Cheaper wins. Even if it's not, it'll probably end up being like the DVD +/- fiasco, and you'll end up having to get a player that will do both, since half the vendors will release on Blu-Ray and half on HD-DVD. So the Blu-Ray in the PS3 likely won't help you there anyway.
By that logic, they already have to produce 2 versions of games. How do you expect the cross-platform titles to go there? Rev won't be Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. 360 will be HD later. They're not gonna make a ton of content just for PS3 (except for maybe the PS3 exclusives). Not to mention the burden of trying to keep 7 SPEs busy so it performs better than an Epia.
You really think people are justified about being pissed about the no HD version? Were people pissed about the PS2 HD not being sold here for more than a few months? Not really. 99% of consumers aren't going to use the hard drive for anything, it's only developers who don't like knowing whether or not they can use one for caching. Consumers know a hard drive is good, but I don't think they know what's it used for. If they did, they wouldn't care, and they probably don't care as is (I don't think you or I are representative of the general populace).
I'd also say that I haven't seen anything new or exciting about the PS3. Blu-Ray. Whee. If I want an HD player, I'll buy one, and preferably one that plays Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD. The new consoles are, IMO, a bust. I'll get a Rev so I can play Super Metroid, Contra, and the other oldies. I don't expect to get a PS3 or a 360 until price goes WAY down. This is from somebody that bought a PS2, XBox, and GC all at release. I just don't see anything to get excited about.
The 360 market, much like the PS3 market, will primarily be 15 year olds whose parents get them one. They want to play GTAHaloMGS25-r11 with Tekken's fighting system. I expect that 360 to play on the "cool image" to get sales. And it will. I don't expect to see the lack of an HD-DVD drive fragment the market, since most of the kids won't have HDTVs anyway, or any use for anything that's larger than a DVD.
Current speculation is that the 360 will be HD-DVD before the PS3 is released. That screws over the early adopters, but still beats Sony to market. In any case, it'll be HD-DVD in less than a year.
What the OP's post looked like to me was that Blu-Ray is better than HD-DVD (qualitywise) because Sony is making it, basically. If it's anything like DVD Consortium vs. DVD Alliance, I don't expect to see Sony push a lot of the manufacturers into Blu-Ray. Maybe HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but not much will be Blu-Ray exclusive.
Fanboy alert!
Ok, let's look at this objectively (that might be hard for you). TFA says they're backing HD-DVD because it's producable NOW. Blu-Ray is really expensive and they haven't hit the expected storage. Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will play HD content fine. Difference is in DRM and backwards compatiblity. Considering the bitrate at 1080 is 25 Mbs, it allows for 20 HOURS of content on a 30GB HD-DVD producable TODAY. Even with special features/audio/whatever, there's more than enough space there. I fail to see an advantage of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD considering the restrictions on it.
Content will not "look better" on Blu-Ray than HD-DVD. It'll look the same.
XBox360 will be $300 bare. It will also be a nextgen DVD player (as HD-DVD is also nextgen). They're saving nothing on buying the $500 wannabe PC replacement. All the things Sony wants it to do (word processing/whatever) have been tried before, and they failed. They'll fail again. People won't be able to get their documents off to print them/whatever. That's a whole different rant.
Not sure if you're a Sony fanboy or an MS hater. Either way you've not considered it very well.
I believe you misunderstood what he meant, but he's still wrong.
What it looks like he meant (to me), is that you have a whole bunch of independent ways to find information, but there might be a lot of overlap or it might not be all that helpful. The Gentoo forums, gentoo wiki, google, usenet, mailing list archives, and advice from a LUG might not even be remotely similar, for instance, and none of them will necessarily solve your problem. For instance, my problem with OpenS/WAN's init script and gawk.
On the other hand, that doesn't exist in the Windows world, either. Even with Microsoft apps. Having problems getting MS-SQL to work with Visual Studio? Two different departments. Some 3rd party software? Same options as Linux, basically.
We use Paragon switches.
We use http://www.raritan.com/products/kvm_switches/parag onII/prd_line.aspx?engine=adwords!36&keyword=%28Pa ragon+KVM%29 at work.
Those are deployment numbers for one year (2003, as per DoD's own PDFs). Deployments are 18 months. The numbers there right now are the same. That's the way it was planned. Actually, the percentage might be a little higher now, considering their inability to meet recruiting and retention goals.
Recruitment numbers have been bolstered by IRR (Inactive Reserve Recall). The DoD's charts clearly show a loss in manpower over the last 3 years, regardless of what recruiting quotas might say.
We have a Federal government. If the States don't request help in certain matters, the hands of the Feds are tied. The Mayor of New Orleans even resisted ordering a mandatory evacuation despite President Bush's urging.
Strawman argument. I clearly mentioned ALL levels of government. Here's my quote again, in case you misread it:
Yes, the bumbling by all levels of government was the deciding factor, not Iraq. Had the mayor/governor/president/FEMA done more, it would have made a world of difference.
The nation's business does not necessarily include nomination of a Chief Justice less than 48 hours after his death. check the timeline here. Not saying it will affect relief efforts, just that it's the wrong time. I doubt if there will be "an inevitable flood of lawsuits" that even make it to the High Court.
You're on all counts right, but way to turn my post into a strawman.
I agree that it would be better to build a port in another location, but it's not feasable, due to the cost of transporting workers and whatnot. Where would the workers from the tourist area come from? Who works the hotels? Where do they get their food? Where do the workers get their food? It's just not possible to do.
Good planning does not always agree with the circumstances. There is not another port location that can serve the same function without the floods.
And yes, like I said, the flood were not disasters, but they were damaging. There is plenty of historical record (particularly in China, India, and Sumeria) to support cities being completely abandoned due to it only to be rebuilt in 5 years.
Industrial scale fertilizer is very useful in the Midwest, the Ukraine, and other farming areas, but farming is simply not the reason they're on the floodplain in New Orleans.
You fucktard. All of the forces in Iraq constitute roughly 10 percent of the total armed forces in the united states. There are still plenty of guard troops to be deployed to the disaster area. It was the fault of the state goverments for not bringing them in sooner. You are exactly the type of individual the GP was talking about.
That's the AC I was responding to. It's not "tap dancing and redirection." Those are deployment numbers for one year (2003, as per DoD's own PDFs). Deployments are 18 months. The numbers there right now are the same. That's the way it was planned. Actually, the percentage might be a little higher now, considering their inability to meet recruiting and retention goals.
Not trying to politicize it, I just don't like to see AC spouting bull modded as 'informative' when the numbers are available from the DoD.
Yes, the bumbling by all levels of government was the deciding factor, not Iraq. Had the mayor/governor/president/FEMA done more, it would have made a world of difference. That being said, now is not the time to nominate the asshat for Chief Justice. During a national disaster, and before Rehnquist is even buried.
I didn't say they were disasters, I just said they were destructive. The Nilometers show several extremely high floods that certainly destroyed many areas
955,609 (about 36%) of our total Active Duty/Reserve/National Guard forces of 2,656,300 have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during this period. 651,622 (24.5%) have one deployment during this period, and 303,987 (11.4%) have deployed more than once.
For active duty, 708,428 (48.2%) of the force has deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. 494,482 (33.6%) have deployed once, while 213.946 (14.6%) have deployed more than once.
For the National Guard and Reserves, 247,181 (20.8%) have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sound like 10% to you? No. We're at 40% commitment over the next 3 years (including rotations). Start using a more reliable source.
Many of them hate him entirely for past issues, and are eager to seize upon any excuse to bash him more? I mean, be realistic - for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist. This isn't meant as an apology or a defense of him - just that I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all. It's essentially sand-box name-taunting by three year olds.
Y'know, there are also social and economic conservatives who won't think we should be an Anarcho-capitalistic state where big campaign contributors get put in Undersecretary of (whatever) positions. The government needs to be seperated from the private sector, and it's not. Not every conservative is a Limbaugh/O'Reilly listening, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism preaching neocon. I take it by "Democratic-style leftist" you mean moderate who gets bought off just like the Republicans? The fact that the political center in the administration has shifted more and more to the right doesn't mean that moderates are liberal nutballs. For real leftism, see Sweden or Switzerland.
I also think that Europeans don't really "get" the dual federal/state government system that the US has. Calling out national guard is typically a state, not federal function, for instance. If the federal government has to call out the National Guard, it means the _state_ has screwed up. Many of the things Europeans are blaming the federal government for are typically _state_ functions. Evacuating the citizens is also a state function (or a city function). This is not to say that the federal government shouldn't assist - but we have separation of powers between state and federal governments over here, apparently to a much larger extent than in, say, Europe.
Calling out the national guard is a state function, but the federal government could have, and should have, declared a state of emergency. Before Ivan, they had readied the military. It took less than 48 hours. Why is it different now? The fact that the state didn't call in the Guard fast enough (and Ray Nagin was doing his best to get help there fast) doesn't mean that the Fed didn't fuck up as well.
There are also Americans blaming the Federal government. The federal reaction to this disaster has been worse than any other disaster. Ever. Worse than any hurricane. Worse than any flood. Worse than earthquake response. Worse than major fires. State's rights (which are largely nonexistent nowadays) don't absolve the federal government of their responsibility to help. If I were shot and you saw it, would you call it my responsibility to call 911?
I wish you'd understand the reason our government is here. When I see all these uninformed arguments, it just tells me how fast we're going downhill.
Contrary to what you imply, traffic on the Mississippi can get along just fine without the city of New Orleans. Reinforced port facilities could be built without surrounding them with a city that is below sea level. Ports are useful. Cities built without adaquate mitigation are not.
True, it can get along fine, but the next major river city is Saint Louis. What, praytell, should they do with the warehousing of the goods going from the river out to sea, and visa versa? The oil from the Gulf going to the refineries? There is not a port that can take up the slack in the meantime.
Reality's reality: Require improved building codes and effective fire fighting codes.
Require improved building codes for hurricane resistance. Don't allow people to build directly on flood plains. Don't drain hurricane-buffering wetlands for million dollar condos.
The fact that there's a disaster does not necessarily require improved codes. Improved building codes would not have prevented this any more than they'd prevent a major fire. If some slummy warehouse explodes, sure, but a major fire could just as easily start from any number of things.
So how much will refitting all the buildings in the entire hurricane zone for new (ineffective) codes cost us? How 'bout retraining every firefighter in the country? We haven't had a major fire in years. Do you think a better code in San Diego would have helped? Bad things happen, and it's a fact of life. More regulation won't help.
New Orleans is built on delta silt, notoriously unstable and has been documented for decades to be slowly sinking, eventually turning into Venice of the Gulf. For decades the artifically channeled river continues to silt up, raising the water level ever higher, faster than dredging or levy improvements can check.
Ok, that's true. I don't know about "notoriously unstable," but it's definitely not safe and sound. Guess what? Texas is sinking too. Most of the places on the Gulf are. People prevent flooding, and it sinks. We caused this problem, and it's not restricted to New Orleans.
Your claim: New Orleans is useful so continue to throw money at a losing proposition that is guaranteed to result in massive loss of life and an environmental disaster beyond imagination. (By the way... since all of those toxic chemicals are about to be pumped directly into the Gulf, I would advise against eating any shrimp or other seafood from that region for the next few years).
Do you absolutely need port facilities at that specific location? For the cost of a failed levy system with infinite maintenance and improvement requirements you can build a deep-water port on pilings to bedrock in the middle of the gulf itself, complete with ballast tanks to raise the entire infrastructure well above even 50' storm surges or simply made water-tight and let storm surges wash harmlessly over the entire facility. Multiple rail trestles (including light rail to easily and painlessly transport employees to/from their homes which are located safely inland) ensure efficient transportation of labor and goods.
Yes we need port facilites at that specific location. The nearest major port city on the river is Saint Louis. New Orleans is the only location where we can warehouse river good and goods from the Gulf for redistribution.
The cost of constructing a port on pilings in the Gulf would be extreme. Offshore derricks aren't safe, and the city wouldn't be either. What happens if there's tectonic movement? Do all the rail trestles break? Do you seriously expect the cost of such a feat of engineering to be less than rebuilding New Orleans 3 times? This isn't even mentioning the tourist economy, location of the airport, business travel, etc.
Don't abandon Florida, simply require everybody to be self-insured. Insurance subsidies of people who want to enjoy ocean views force people living in trailer parks in Des Moines chi