low power consumption processor, delivering minimal heat
And, IIRC, low performance.
But I take your main point, there really is no reason for desktops to be so inefficient on power consumption. A lot of the features of laptops for power conservation arguably belong on the desktop as well, but that is unfortunately happening very slowly.
if you had chosen to release your software with the public's good in mind
Isn't that just a little naive? You imply that if he thought of the public's good they in turn would think of him in kind, but that is patently false and everyone knows it. Most people, even most people here on/. still think in terms of "free as in beer", the larger issue is completely lost on the typical "consumer", who just wants to get something for nothing.
Most articles degrade into Soviet Russia jokes, porn references, ridiculous alarmist conspiracy theories involving the DMCA, and generally cynical comments.
You do realize that this added qualifier renders your comparison utterly meaningless?
For someone with a 56k connection (which I had until 2 weeks ago) it doesn't take 2 minutes to download the kernel, it takes 12.
Isn't this whole issue about helping those with low-bandwidth connections? Heck, we would be helping everyone by reducing the amount of data being pushed around, right?
I wonder what a site like debian.org would save in bandwidth costs by converting dpkg and apt to using binary diffs on updates, rather than downloading the entire package every time? And no, micro-packaging (separating the binary executable from the program's "data" files) doesn't solve the problem (on Debian, besides kernel-source, look at the size of xemacs21-bin, or openoffice-bin). Think about it.....
I HAVE READ BOTH SIDES WHICH I STATED ABOVE AND I BELIEVE ONE SIDE OVER ANOTHER
Wonderful, you read both sides and see one thing and I see something else. Funny thing about my thick head, it sees you start out by admitting that atrocities did happen, but then you immediately go back to attacking Kerry and those other vets' credibility. So which is it? If the atrocities did happen, then a lot of these guys aren't lying. Yes, Kerry made a lot of allegations of his own, and many of them are either technically correct (but not as shocking as some others) or verified by others to have happened. Routine bombing of civilians, "free fire" zones, yes they did happen and they WERE widespread (but to some extent, many didn't and still don't see them as the same kind of major atrocities that we're talking about, bombing civilians for example has been virtually continouously occuring since the Wright Bros. created their toy, despite being outlawed in the Geneva Convention for most of this century), you can find them mentioned elsewhere by other vets, read up on the Phoenix "counter-terror" operation. I also didn't say that *every* one of the stories was right and true, only that a lot of them were (verified independently in the following years). And sure, I knew who had funded the meeting, but a) most of the vets there didn't know or simply didn't care - what many of them had to say, they had already said elsewhere (you think *all* of the atrocity accusations came out of that one meeting?). As for Kerry changing his tune, I don't see that, he says he was an angry man then and said some things he wish he didn't, but that did not change his core message at the time (that the reason a lot of atrocities happened was because the chain of command, the leadership, made it inevitable), and he still explicity says he continues to stand behind his core message. Besides, I can use the very same argument against the Swiftboat people since they are being subsidized by George Junior's rich Texas friends.
Kerry is being attacked for saying something that a lot of vets are still furious over: that numerous atrocities happened in Vietnam, and he's being ambushed by vets that don't believe they happened out of blind denial, inability to admit their own country could do these things, or simply because they themselves never saw any atrocities. The hard truth for some, which will probably be denied until all the vets have passed on, is that they did happen, lots of them (but "lots of them" doesn't imply that every vet, or even a significant minority of vets, is guilty!). 30 years after the war we're *still* finding out about atrocities that happened then (The Tiger Force atrocities didn't come out until 2003).
You wish to believe that one side is telling all the truth and the other side is saying nothing but lies, whereas because of the way I see human nature working, I see both truths and falshoods on both sides, there are reasons for some on both sides to lie, exaggerate, or remain silent, or even simply make mistakes because of failing memory (why do you think criminal prosecutors *always* prefer having physical evidence over eye-witnesses?), the question is which side has the preponderance of the important truths and a minimum of important falsehoods.
But why bother arguing anymore, since its pretty obvious you're not interested in nuanced reality, only the nice simple, clean, view where Bush is the best thing since Jesus Christ, Vietnam was fought honorably by all who were there, and Kerry is the Devil Incarnate. Whatever.
Bush is still a class A idiot, and damn near anyone with a brain, Republican or Democrat, male or female, aged 8 to 80, would be an improvement over him. AND THAT IS *MY* DETERMINATION AFTER VIEWING ALL THE EVIDENCE.
Wait a sec, isn't anyone using ATI's proprietary driver also tainting the kernel?
Look, the only difference is that ATI opened up with information about some of their *old* hardware, but their recent modern cards have 3D drivers that are just as proprietary as NVIDIA's drivers.
NVIDIA says they can't release the code for any of their 3D drivers for any of their cards (old or new) because they don't own all the code thats in the driver. Given that this sounds plausible to me, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until there is evidence that they are lying, if you want to automatically assume they're lying, fine, but without evidence, not many are going to take you seriously.
P.S.: I think a lot of people in this thread are seriously underestimating how complex those 3D drivers are. Those drivers aren't thin wrappers over a nice clean simple API. Since there aren't *any* standards whatsoever concerning 3D accelerating hardware, there effectively *is* no API, for all we know the software drivers may be doing just as much sophisticated processing as the hardware is, or perhaps because the technology continues to change so rapidly, a lot of the technology is still in software form and hasn't been moved yet to silicon on the card? You all do realize we are talking about *multi-megabyte* drivers don't you? So the references to a mythical, silver-bullet "spec sheet" I've seen, I suspect are an excellent example of grossly underestimating the situation.
First, my guess is that there isn't just one of these beasts (a spec sheet), but several *hundred*, and second, since these companies only have to document their hardware for their own programmers who may also be engineers, or at least have complete and dedicated access to the engineers that designed the hardware, why do you assume such a spec sheet(s) would be useful to someone without intimate knowledge of the hardware? And isn't that *exactly* what these companies do not want to publicize, the intimate details of their hardware?
The 3D drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA are closed source, equally.
Xfree86 has open source 2D drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA as well, and given relatively equal hardware performance, either will suit your needs admirably as long as you aren't playing 3D games.
I don't see any difference between the two, except that NVIDIA's (proprietary) 3D drivers are better than ATI's (proprietary) drivers.
Uhm, every time I play Q2, or Q3 (although I don't anymore because I now have...), or UT2004, or Descent 3, or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or Dominions 2, or... well, you get the idea.
Where did you get that astonishing notion that *all* Linux users are using Linux only for constructive work?:)
An example that I just read while googling on this:
The guys in the Manhatten Project could have gotten a second Nobel Prize for something else, but they were never able to duplicate their first experiment. They didn't realize at the time that they had done the first experiment on a *wooden* table, and their attempts to duplicate it were done on a *stone* table. They had absolutely no idea that wood would affect their experiment the way it actually did.
Of course, at least these guys tried to duplicate their successfull experiment first before telling anyone else...
My, my, you sound like a real reasonable open-minded person, ya know?
For the record, I don't have an opinon on CF, maybe its real, maybe its not, and I do believe P&F really screwed up going to the press first before having solid evidence and a consistently reproducible experiment (even if it was an administrator that set the press conference up, they should have known as any responsible scientist would, that it was *way* too early to be talking to the press). If this had been handled in a normal fashion, ie, the issue kept within scientific circles at this early stage things probably would have gone very differently. After 15 years, maybe there is now enough evidence to convince most of the skeptics that *something* weird is happening, but I suspect some of the critics will never be convinced....
I don't know what the outcome will be, but a) your "faith-based initiative" remark is utter bullshit, no one has shown evidence that P&F were trying to deliberately deceive anyone (sloppy, maybe even incompetent, but not evil), and b) there *is* an ulterior motive for some of those who are so pathologically hostile to the CF idea (hmm, like you are..).
Try reading this. This should be a real shocker, and no, the article isn't arguing about whether CF is real, it does however go into detail about the reactions to the idea. There are a number of fascinationg revelations here, like some of the early experiments that were done to prove CF wrong, were themselves flawed, and even worse, the data from the famous MIT experiment which really sank the CF ship before it got to sea, showed altered data that would be hard to explain as anything other than deliberate fraud. Why?, well, ask yourself why were the most vocal critics then (and perhaps still today), the hot-fusion scientists who stand to lose *big* if CF were shown to be real? Their entire career working on hot fusion would get thrown in the dustbin if CF was realized. Wouldn't it be really funny if you're last comment, that reference to a funding grab, turned out to be right but the guilty parties aren't in the CF community but in the "respected" community everyone currently assumes is correct?
Its a very interesting article, ironically the scientific process of debate and argument among scientists can sometimes look even worse than a political compromise worked out in a smoke-filled back room, and that is often compared unfavorably to watching certain meat products being made...
Anyway, unfortunately when it comes to human behavior, truth/reality is usually *far* more complicated, even insidiously complex, and often downright bizarre, compared to our quick *assumptions* about why something happened. When has *anything* turned out to be as simple and one-sided as you make it out to be? IMO, never. This ain't kindergarden, man, everybody out there aren't wearing just white or black hats, their hats are all shades of gray, and some are even in technicolor!
But hey, since this is/., we tend to get a lot of folks like you who never google to check their assumptions, and then return to the/. thread (assuming they actually RTFAd which is a rarity too) with their unfounded assumptions and simple-minded conclusions and start foully blathering on like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth, and making an absolute ass of themselves. No, nothing new here, just move along folks.
The obvious reason for this is that the hot-fusionists and the evolutionists have no valid or even internally consistent theories of their own,
What planet are you (and the guy that modded you up) from?
Fact: Hot fusion is *real*, it exists, the evidence for it is overwhelming.
Fact: Evolution is *real*, it exists, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The fact there are some religious lunatics who can't stand the current theory that tries to explain *why* evolution happens is immaterial, evolutionary change *has* been witnessed to occur in existing species on this planet in the last 30-40 years or so.
Fact: Cold fusion has *never* been shown to consistently occur. Most of the attempts to repeat the phenomena have *failed*, and scientists are still arguing about what those experiments that did "succeed" actually *showed or proved*. The evidence for it is still practically nonexistent.
When someone comes forward with an experiment that can consistently demonstrate the cold fusion phenomena, then it will instantly be out of the scientific cold, because the benefits of it are too overwhelming for those in the energy business to ignore it just because its been viciously controversial within the scientific community in the past.
In politics, you can win arguments with just charisma or force of character or simply yelling louder than your opponent, but in the scientific community you ultimately win arguments with *evidence* and nothing else. It is the *lack* of such evidence which has kept cold fusion in the cold all this time, not another one of the endless, bizarre conspiricy theories from the fringe.
You, Mr. AC, are an idiot, although not as bad as the one that modded you up.
And those old roads were nothing like the ones we have now...
Whatever...:)
Look, I can't see what the OP said, but the argument has not been about how much the tax should be and how to "fairly" calculate it, Europe's taxes on fuel are essentially arbitrary, the issue here is that Europe deliberately set their fuel costs very high to effect social change. The argument is if we had done the same, we wouldn't be nearly as dependent on oil as we are now. FWIW, when you look at the geography and distribution of population, the US != Europe anyway, so I'm not sure doing *exactly* the same thing as Europe did would work for us, but the complaint that we never seriously *tried* to get away from oil is still valid, IMO.
Decriminalizing it basically means the users (of marijuana) who are caught with small amounts (I can remember the exact amount) don't face charges and/or possibly jail time. It's the drug dealers who get hit.
Depends on the specifics of the local law. I read some time ago about the Dutch changing their stance on what they call "soft drugs" to the point where they will arrest users if they simply make themselves too conspicous. In other words, keep it out of sight and you're fine, but do it in public and you run a risk of being arrested for it.
In very general terms decriminalization can also mean the society in question will *barely* tolerate the drug use, but still be opposed and even hostile towards that activity.
Then google, dammit. There is another side to this story you know, and a lot of people, some vets, the government, the media, never told the whole truth from the beginning. Why do you think the Tiger Force atrocity didn't come out until 2003?
Go back to my original link and read the lower half about confirmed atrocities since Kerry's comments.
There's more out there if you bother to look, but since you're politically motivated to believe Bush's attack dogs over everyone else anyway, I'm just going to stop here. No one, including Kerry, is saying most or all vets were involved in these crimes, but the crimes did happen, a lot of them.
No, I would have chosen the UN partition plan rather than war.
Suppose you live in a big house.
Its not that simple. Some of the Jews had always been there, and a lot of the Jews who came in the '30s and '40s occupied deserted land, or expanded existing Jewish settlements (the Jews and Arabs were largely segregated from the very beginning). As for who "owns" Palestine, I'm sure you realize what kind of minefield that is, lord knows a google on this will give you several days of reading material, and thats not counting the flame wars.
Bruce Perens once even said it here on Slashdot (can't find the link at the moment) but open source development tends to favor software which can be developed incrementally. This isn't especially true of games.
Bingo. This also explains the success of NetHack, as that game has been a kind of "work-in-progress" effort for about 20 years (going back to Rogue), and I mean that in a good way, i.e, they hit on a fun game and continued to refine it over the years. Any game that leads to this kind of humor has got to be a classic!
Getting back on topic, while F/OS isn't likely to overthrow the game companies, I am hopeful that one day some company will risk trying a hybrid method. A game where the "engine"(1) is released as OS (but not Free as in the GPL, because the company has to be able to incorporate changes from the game's OS community back into their commercial offering), but the game's content, both graphics and audio and plot-line, characters, etc, etc, are still controlled by the company. The company sells it as a normal game, but because the engine is available as source, modders and tinkerers can get involved in a way they haven't yet been able to. The company benefits because it effectively has a lot of its customers doing bugfixing and improvements to the game, while the hackers benefit by being able to tinker to their hearts content, and trying different approaches/rules/algorithms if they don't like what the original developers did. Also if the engine is open-sourced, it is less likely that the game will end up "dying" on its customers (disappearing when the company that made it stops work on it). It depends on the nature of the game, of course, unlike a lot of this thread, I am not really talking about FPS games, so it probably won't work with all types of games, and established, ie, rich and industry-dominating, companies won't ever try it, but as someone mentioned, the small startups are finding it harder and harder to break into the industry. Maybe one of them will be the one to try a hybrid approach.
(1) the core functionality that many people want to have access to when it comes time to tinker with or mod a game. This may or may not include the AI or multiplayer sections of the game's code. It depends on the nature of the game.
Uhmm the whole point of the swift vets is to point out that Kerry did this when he came back. He backstabbed his fellow soldiers by saying they committed war crimes
I call bullshit.
Kerry wasn't making those specific accusations himself, he was reporting what was said by other vets at a VVAW meeting in Detroit earlier that year.
Go here and read his entire testimony (about halfway down the page), not just the excerpts that George Junior's attack dogs want you to hear. For example, the part about crimes being committed on a daily basis? Well, here is how Kerry's testimony starts:
Kerry Senate Testimony (1971): "I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command".
He was just relaying stories he had heard from others. The only backstabbing going on here, is the Vets who still haven't gotten over the fact that a lot of their own came back to the States from Vietnam, and became opponents of the war, Vets who were not afraid to talk about the uglier things that happened (many of the specific examples Kerry refers to did in fact happen, and we know plenty of other atrocities happened too - see the link above). This has less to do with current politics and more to do with an old wound. What is really happening here is that 30 years after we left, America is still fighting the War in Vietnam.
After reading a lot of the material there and elsewhere, I'm very intrigued. Its not like this is way outside the mainstream, its endorsed by many Republicans, and is a plank in the Texas GOP Party's platform. Do a Google, and you'll find a lot of talk about it (and support).
Unfortunately, one criticism of it that is true, is that there are too many entrenched interests that like the way things are now. And part of the plan includes repealing the Constitutional Amendment that allowed the federal government to tax individuals, and the process of repealing a Constitutional Amendment is not an easy one.
So as much as I like it, it would take an enormous grass-roots effort to make it happen, and I don't know if such a thing is possible in this country anymore.
If you went to that website and actually read about their proposal which is different from the typical consumption tax proposals you'd know your example is flawed. Their plan includes a refund at the end of the year for the equivalent of what is needed to stay at the "poverty line", which means Household A will get a refund at the end of the year which will offset much of the "incompressible" spending which was necessary.
P.S. Evasion will be a little difficult, since its the business that is selling you its product that collects the tax from you and passes it on. There are no income taxes, and therefore no IRS and no lawyers in this plan, since the plan has no exceptions or exemptions in it (although granted there will be politicians who'll try to add those things).
From the Palestinian point of view, they are an occupied people and have the right to resist. That only allows for fighting against the Israeli military, and not civilians.
I agree. Heck, I would even say that attacks on the armed Israeli settlers on Palestinian land are justified too. Believe it or not, I'm not pro-Israel, what I am is anti-religious extremism.
The Palestinians made a mistake believing that their Arab neighbors were going to win the war, as well as apparently assuming those Arab nations would support and/or take them in if they became refugees and the war was lost. That was long ago though, and doesn't really count against them now. However their decision to allow the Islamic fundamentalists to lead their cause against Israel is what is responsible for the chains they wear now. The Palestinians apparently do not understand the situatioon they are in. They need to look at Vietnam and what the Viet Cong did to realize what their strategy should be.
It goes like this: Militarily, Israel isn't vulnerable, short of an all-out war with all of the Middle East, in which case the US would intervene as well. The Palestinians need to realize they will not win this war on the ground in Palestine. Their war will be won on the battlefields of public opinion, but what they seem to not realize is that their primary public relations battlefield is in the US, *not* in Israel. Israel is too dependent on the US for its economic and military health to ignore the US's concerns. Israel can ignore just about everyone else, but not the US. The hardliners in Israel may try to avoid peace, but the US will not let them avoid it indefinitely.
Right now Israel doesn't have to worry, as long as the Palestinians rely almost exclusively on religiously motivated suicide bombings as their method of fighting back. Maybe its a cultural thing, but this method is not understood or respected in the West, because the West managed to effectively separate their religion from their day-to-day politics. Being willing to die for Allah, for what is essentially just another petty territorial dispute, something the world has had an abundance of over the millenia, strikes many in the US, especially devout Christians, as a sinful waste of precious human life. They simply don't "get" martyrdom. To them its bizarre and immoral. So all those martyrs going to their deaths inside Israel targeting civilians to take with them, may be heros to other Palestinians and other Muslims, but it does the Palestinians little good outside of the Middle East, and no good at all in the US (IMO). As long as that continues, US support for Israel will remain firm.
If the Palestinians want to change public opinion in the US, they must bring the argument back to the land. That means separating themselves from the religious extremists, who fundamentally have no desire for true peace, as their religious extremism demands the utter destruction of Israel. They have to revert to a more conventional form of guerilla warfare fought only on Palestinain territory against armed Israelis that returns the focus on to the land issue, and away from the religious issue. The short term goal is not the killing of Isrealis, especially unarmed non-combatants, but the wanton destruction of Isreali property built illegally on Palestinian land. The point is that everything they do must point back to the issue of the land.
If they did that, things would change. Not on the ground perhaps, the Isreali Army is very formidable, but the Viet Cong never won a set-piece engagement against the US during the entire war, yet still won the war in the end. The change in tactics would have a positive effect on public opinion in Israel and the US, and especially in Europe, as there seems to be some latent anti-Israeli sentiment there already.
Alas, I don't see the Palestinians doing this anytime soon, at least not until Arafat has passed on (unless the Israelis kill him)
It's just that if you ignore the needs of users, your software won't be widely adopted.
And you're still missing my point. Who are the F/OS developer's users? Answer: themselves. Let Red Hat and similar middle-men cater to the conventional customer, while the F/OS folks keep on doing what they've always done. If some of them cater to the users, great, if they don't, fine. When the latter group produces something that is valuable to the end-user community, someone, middle-men or user-oriented developers, will eventually step in and make the software usable for end-users. Indeed, that is exactly what Red Hat and the others are effectively doing for all the software that they include in their distribution (or at least the standard components). They are the interface between end users and the actual F/OS developers in charge of the software.
Slashdot Mirror
And, IIRC, low performance.
But I take your main point, there really is no reason for desktops to be so inefficient on power consumption. A lot of the features of laptops for power conservation arguably belong on the desktop as well, but that is unfortunately happening very slowly.
Isn't that just a little naive? You imply that if he thought of the public's good they in turn would think of him in kind, but that is patently false and everyone knows it. Most people, even most people here on
This surprises you? You must be new here.
You do realize that this added qualifier renders your comparison utterly meaningless?
For someone with a 56k connection (which I had until 2 weeks ago) it doesn't take 2 minutes to download the kernel, it takes 12.
Isn't this whole issue about helping those with low-bandwidth connections? Heck, we would be helping everyone by reducing the amount of data being pushed around, right?
I wonder what a site like debian.org would save in bandwidth costs by converting dpkg and apt to using binary diffs on updates, rather than downloading the entire package every time? And no, micro-packaging (separating the binary executable from the program's "data" files) doesn't solve the problem (on Debian, besides kernel-source, look at the size of xemacs21-bin, or openoffice-bin). Think about it.....
Wonderful, you read both sides and see one thing and I see something else. Funny thing about my thick head, it sees you start out by admitting that atrocities did happen, but then you immediately go back to attacking Kerry and those other vets' credibility. So which is it? If the atrocities did happen, then a lot of these guys aren't lying. Yes, Kerry made a lot of allegations of his own, and many of them are either technically correct (but not as shocking as some others) or verified by others to have happened. Routine bombing of civilians, "free fire" zones, yes they did happen and they WERE widespread (but to some extent, many didn't and still don't see them as the same kind of major atrocities that we're talking about, bombing civilians for example has been virtually continouously occuring since the Wright Bros. created their toy, despite being outlawed in the Geneva Convention for most of this century), you can find them mentioned elsewhere by other vets, read up on the Phoenix "counter-terror" operation. I also didn't say that *every* one of the stories was right and true, only that a lot of them were (verified independently in the following years). And sure, I knew who had funded the meeting, but a) most of the vets there didn't know or simply didn't care - what many of them had to say, they had already said elsewhere (you think *all* of the atrocity accusations came out of that one meeting?). As for Kerry changing his tune, I don't see that, he says he was an angry man then and said some things he wish he didn't, but that did not change his core message at the time (that the reason a lot of atrocities happened was because the chain of command, the leadership, made it inevitable), and he still explicity says he continues to stand behind his core message. Besides, I can use the very same argument against the Swiftboat people since they are being subsidized by George Junior's rich Texas friends.
Kerry is being attacked for saying something that a lot of vets are still furious over: that numerous atrocities happened in Vietnam, and he's being ambushed by vets that don't believe they happened out of blind denial, inability to admit their own country could do these things, or simply because they themselves never saw any atrocities. The hard truth for some, which will probably be denied until all the vets have passed on, is that they did happen, lots of them (but "lots of them" doesn't imply that every vet, or even a significant minority of vets, is guilty!). 30 years after the war we're *still* finding out about atrocities that happened then (The Tiger Force atrocities didn't come out until 2003).
You wish to believe that one side is telling all the truth and the other side is saying nothing but lies, whereas because of the way I see human nature working, I see both truths and falshoods on both sides, there are reasons for some on both sides to lie, exaggerate, or remain silent, or even simply make mistakes because of failing memory (why do you think criminal prosecutors *always* prefer having physical evidence over eye-witnesses?), the question is which side has the preponderance of the important truths and a minimum of important falsehoods.
But why bother arguing anymore, since its pretty obvious you're not interested in nuanced reality, only the nice simple, clean, view where Bush is the best thing since Jesus Christ, Vietnam was fought honorably by all who were there, and Kerry is the Devil Incarnate. Whatever.
Bush is still a class A idiot, and damn near anyone with a brain, Republican or Democrat, male or female, aged 8 to 80, would be an improvement over him. AND THAT IS *MY* DETERMINATION AFTER VIEWING ALL THE EVIDENCE.
Hmm, how about America's Army with oh, say 20,000 of your closest friends..... :]
Wait a sec, isn't anyone using ATI's proprietary driver also tainting the kernel?
Look, the only difference is that ATI opened up with information about some of their *old* hardware, but their recent modern cards have 3D drivers that are just as proprietary as NVIDIA's drivers.
NVIDIA says they can't release the code for any of their 3D drivers for any of their cards (old or new) because they don't own all the code thats in the driver. Given that this sounds plausible to me, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until there is evidence that they are lying, if you want to automatically assume they're lying, fine, but without evidence, not many are going to take you seriously.
P.S.: I think a lot of people in this thread are seriously underestimating how complex those 3D drivers are. Those drivers aren't thin wrappers over a nice clean simple API. Since there aren't *any* standards whatsoever concerning 3D accelerating hardware, there effectively *is* no API, for all we know the software drivers may be doing just as much sophisticated processing as the hardware is, or perhaps because the technology continues to change so rapidly, a lot of the technology is still in software form and hasn't been moved yet to silicon on the card? You all do realize we are talking about *multi-megabyte* drivers don't you? So the references to a mythical, silver-bullet "spec sheet" I've seen, I suspect are an excellent example of grossly underestimating the situation.
First, my guess is that there isn't just one of these beasts (a spec sheet), but several *hundred*, and second, since these companies only have to document their hardware for their own programmers who may also be engineers, or at least have complete and dedicated access to the engineers that designed the hardware, why do you assume such a spec sheet(s) would be useful to someone without intimate knowledge of the hardware? And isn't that *exactly* what these companies do not want to publicize, the intimate details of their hardware?
You're not making any sense at all.
The 3D drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA are closed source, equally.
Xfree86 has open source 2D drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA as well, and given relatively equal hardware performance, either will suit your needs admirably as long as you aren't playing 3D games.
I don't see any difference between the two, except that NVIDIA's (proprietary) 3D drivers are better than ATI's (proprietary) drivers.
Uhm, every time I play Q2, or Q3 (although I don't anymore because I now have...), or UT2004, or Descent 3, or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or Dominions 2, or
Where did you get that astonishing notion that *all* Linux users are using Linux only for constructive work?
An example that I just read while googling on this:
The guys in the Manhatten Project could have gotten a second Nobel Prize for something else, but they were never able to duplicate their first experiment. They didn't realize at the time that they had done the first experiment on a *wooden* table, and their attempts to duplicate it were done on a *stone* table. They had absolutely no idea that wood would affect their experiment the way it actually did.
Of course, at least these guys tried to duplicate their successfull experiment first before telling anyone else...
My, my, you sound like a real reasonable open-minded person, ya know?
For the record, I don't have an opinon on CF, maybe its real, maybe its not, and I do believe P&F really screwed up going to the press first before having solid evidence and a consistently reproducible experiment (even if it was an administrator that set the press conference up, they should have known as any responsible scientist would, that it was *way* too early to be talking to the press). If this had been handled in a normal fashion, ie, the issue kept within scientific circles at this early stage things probably would have gone very differently. After 15 years, maybe there is now enough evidence to convince most of the skeptics that *something* weird is happening, but I suspect some of the critics will never be convinced....
I don't know what the outcome will be, but a) your "faith-based initiative" remark is utter bullshit, no one has shown evidence that P&F were trying to deliberately deceive anyone (sloppy, maybe even incompetent, but not evil), and b) there *is* an ulterior motive for some of those who are so pathologically hostile to the CF idea (hmm, like you are..).
Try reading this. This should be a real shocker, and no, the article isn't arguing about whether CF is real, it does however go into detail about the reactions to the idea. There are a number of fascinationg revelations here, like some of the early experiments that were done to prove CF wrong, were themselves flawed, and even worse, the data from the famous MIT experiment which really sank the CF ship before it got to sea, showed altered data that would be hard to explain as anything other than deliberate fraud. Why?, well, ask yourself why were the most vocal critics then (and perhaps still today), the hot-fusion scientists who stand to lose *big* if CF were shown to be real? Their entire career working on hot fusion would get thrown in the dustbin if CF was realized. Wouldn't it be really funny if you're last comment, that reference to a funding grab, turned out to be right but the guilty parties aren't in the CF community but in the "respected" community everyone currently assumes is correct?
Its a very interesting article, ironically the scientific process of debate and argument among scientists can sometimes look even worse than a political compromise worked out in a smoke-filled back room, and that is often compared unfavorably to watching certain meat products being made...
Anyway, unfortunately when it comes to human behavior, truth/reality is usually *far* more complicated, even insidiously complex, and often downright bizarre, compared to our quick *assumptions* about why something happened. When has *anything* turned out to be as simple and one-sided as you make it out to be? IMO, never. This ain't kindergarden, man, everybody out there aren't wearing just white or black hats, their hats are all shades of gray, and some are even in technicolor!
But hey, since this is
What planet are you (and the guy that modded you up) from?
When someone comes forward with an experiment that can consistently demonstrate the cold fusion phenomena, then it will instantly be out of the scientific cold, because the benefits of it are too overwhelming for those in the energy business to ignore it just because its been viciously controversial within the scientific community in the past.
In politics, you can win arguments with just charisma or force of character or simply yelling louder than your opponent, but in the scientific community you ultimately win arguments with *evidence* and nothing else. It is the *lack* of such evidence which has kept cold fusion in the cold all this time, not another one of the endless, bizarre conspiricy theories from the fringe.
You, Mr. AC, are an idiot, although not as bad as the one that modded you up.
And those old roads were nothing like the ones we have now...
Whatever...
Look, I can't see what the OP said, but the argument has not been about how much the tax should be and how to "fairly" calculate it, Europe's taxes on fuel are essentially arbitrary, the issue here is that Europe deliberately set their fuel costs very high to effect social change. The argument is if we had done the same, we wouldn't be nearly as dependent on oil as we are now. FWIW, when you look at the geography and distribution of population, the US != Europe anyway, so I'm not sure doing *exactly* the same thing as Europe did would work for us, but the complaint that we never seriously *tried* to get away from oil is still valid, IMO.
Depends on the specifics of the local law. I read some time ago about the Dutch changing their stance on what they call "soft drugs" to the point where they will arrest users if they simply make themselves too conspicous. In other words, keep it out of sight and you're fine, but do it in public and you run a risk of being arrested for it.
In very general terms decriminalization can also mean the society in question will *barely* tolerate the drug use, but still be opposed and even hostile towards that activity.
Then google, dammit. There is another side to this story you know, and a lot of people, some vets, the government, the media, never told the whole truth from the beginning. Why do you think the Tiger Force atrocity didn't come out until 2003?
Go back to my original link and read the lower half about confirmed atrocities since Kerry's comments.
try this
or this
or this
or this
or this
why not listen to what the other side has to say? Read this if you're so sure that all of the VVAW testimony should be thrown out.
ditto
Are you ready for the rest of the My Lai massacre story, and what was behind it (it wasn't an "accident")?
Kerry wasn't the only one to speak at that congressional hearing...
There's more out there if you bother to look, but since you're politically motivated to believe Bush's attack dogs over everyone else anyway, I'm just going to stop here. No one, including Kerry, is saying most or all vets were involved in these crimes, but the crimes did happen, a lot of them.
No, I would have chosen the UN partition plan rather than war.
Its not that simple. Some of the Jews had always been there, and a lot of the Jews who came in the '30s and '40s occupied deserted land, or expanded existing Jewish settlements (the Jews and Arabs were largely segregated from the very beginning). As for who "owns" Palestine, I'm sure you realize what kind of minefield that is, lord knows a google on this will give you several days of reading material, and thats not counting the flame wars.
Bingo. This also explains the success of NetHack, as that game has been a kind of "work-in-progress" effort for about 20 years (going back to Rogue), and I mean that in a good way, i.e, they hit on a fun game and continued to refine it over the years. Any game that leads to this kind of humor has got to be a classic!
Getting back on topic, while F/OS isn't likely to overthrow the game companies, I am hopeful that one day some company will risk trying a hybrid method. A game where the "engine"(1) is released as OS (but not Free as in the GPL, because the company has to be able to incorporate changes from the game's OS community back into their commercial offering), but the game's content, both graphics and audio and plot-line, characters, etc, etc, are still controlled by the company. The company sells it as a normal game, but because the engine is available as source, modders and tinkerers can get involved in a way they haven't yet been able to. The company benefits because it effectively has a lot of its customers doing bugfixing and improvements to the game, while the hackers benefit by being able to tinker to their hearts content, and trying different approaches/rules/algorithms if they don't like what the original developers did. Also if the engine is open-sourced, it is less likely that the game will end up "dying" on its customers (disappearing when the company that made it stops work on it). It depends on the nature of the game, of course, unlike a lot of this thread, I am not really talking about FPS games, so it probably won't work with all types of games, and established, ie, rich and industry-dominating, companies won't ever try it, but as someone mentioned, the small startups are finding it harder and harder to break into the industry. Maybe one of them will be the one to try a hybrid approach.
(1) the core functionality that many people want to have access to when it comes time to tinker with or mod a game. This may or may not include the AI or multiplayer sections of the game's code. It depends on the nature of the game.
No, what's really scary here is that the grandparent gets "Insightful" and your reply doesn't.
But not nearly as synonymous as "old, malfunctioning piece of crap" is to Bu.... ehh... never mind. :)
I call bullshit.
Kerry wasn't making those specific accusations himself, he was reporting what was said by other vets at a VVAW meeting in Detroit earlier that year.
Go here and read his entire testimony (about halfway down the page), not just the excerpts that George Junior's attack dogs want you to hear. For example, the part about crimes being committed on a daily basis? Well, here is how Kerry's testimony starts:
He was just relaying stories he had heard from others. The only backstabbing going on here, is the Vets who still haven't gotten over the fact that a lot of their own came back to the States from Vietnam, and became opponents of the war, Vets who were not afraid to talk about the uglier things that happened (many of the specific examples Kerry refers to did in fact happen, and we know plenty of other atrocities happened too - see the link above). This has less to do with current politics and more to do with an old wound. What is really happening here is that 30 years after we left, America is still fighting the War in Vietnam.
Try this.
After reading a lot of the material there and elsewhere, I'm very intrigued. Its not like this is way outside the mainstream, its endorsed by many Republicans, and is a plank in the Texas GOP Party's platform. Do a Google, and you'll find a lot of talk about it (and support).
Unfortunately, one criticism of it that is true, is that there are too many entrenched interests that like the way things are now. And part of the plan includes repealing the Constitutional Amendment that allowed the federal government to tax individuals, and the process of repealing a Constitutional Amendment is not an easy one.
So as much as I like it, it would take an enormous grass-roots effort to make it happen, and I don't know if such a thing is possible in this country anymore.
Uhm, no.
If you went to that website and actually read about their proposal which is different from the typical consumption tax proposals you'd know your example is flawed. Their plan includes a refund at the end of the year for the equivalent of what is needed to stay at the "poverty line", which means Household A will get a refund at the end of the year which will offset much of the "incompressible" spending which was necessary.
P.S. Evasion will be a little difficult, since its the business that is selling you its product that collects the tax from you and passes it on. There are no income taxes, and therefore no IRS and no lawyers in this plan, since the plan has no exceptions or exemptions in it (although granted there will be politicians who'll try to add those things).
I agree. Heck, I would even say that attacks on the armed Israeli settlers on Palestinian land are justified too. Believe it or not, I'm not pro-Israel, what I am is anti-religious extremism.
The Palestinians made a mistake believing that their Arab neighbors were going to win the war, as well as apparently assuming those Arab nations would support and/or take them in if they became refugees and the war was lost. That was long ago though, and doesn't really count against them now. However their decision to allow the Islamic fundamentalists to lead their cause against Israel is what is responsible for the chains they wear now. The Palestinians apparently do not understand the situatioon they are in. They need to look at Vietnam and what the Viet Cong did to realize what their strategy should be.
It goes like this: Militarily, Israel isn't vulnerable, short of an all-out war with all of the Middle East, in which case the US would intervene as well. The Palestinians need to realize they will not win this war on the ground in Palestine. Their war will be won on the battlefields of public opinion, but what they seem to not realize is that their primary public relations battlefield is in the US, *not* in Israel. Israel is too dependent on the US for its economic and military health to ignore the US's concerns. Israel can ignore just about everyone else, but not the US. The hardliners in Israel may try to avoid peace, but the US will not let them avoid it indefinitely.
Right now Israel doesn't have to worry, as long as the Palestinians rely almost exclusively on religiously motivated suicide bombings as their method of fighting back. Maybe its a cultural thing, but this method is not understood or respected in the West, because the West managed to effectively separate their religion from their day-to-day politics. Being willing to die for Allah, for what is essentially just another petty territorial dispute, something the world has had an abundance of over the millenia, strikes many in the US, especially devout Christians, as a sinful waste of precious human life. They simply don't "get" martyrdom. To them its bizarre and immoral. So all those martyrs going to their deaths inside Israel targeting civilians to take with them, may be heros to other Palestinians and other Muslims, but it does the Palestinians little good outside of the Middle East, and no good at all in the US (IMO). As long as that continues, US support for Israel will remain firm.
If the Palestinians want to change public opinion in the US, they must bring the argument back to the land. That means separating themselves from the religious extremists, who fundamentally have no desire for true peace, as their religious extremism demands the utter destruction of Israel. They have to revert to a more conventional form of guerilla warfare fought only on Palestinain territory against armed Israelis that returns the focus on to the land issue, and away from the religious issue. The short term goal is not the killing of Isrealis, especially unarmed non-combatants, but the wanton destruction of Isreali property built illegally on Palestinian land. The point is that everything they do must point back to the issue of the land.
If they did that, things would change. Not on the ground perhaps, the Isreali Army is very formidable, but the Viet Cong never won a set-piece engagement against the US during the entire war, yet still won the war in the end. The change in tactics would have a positive effect on public opinion in Israel and the US, and especially in Europe, as there seems to be some latent anti-Israeli sentiment there already.
Alas, I don't see the Palestinians doing this anytime soon, at least not until Arafat has passed on (unless the Israelis kill him)
And you're still missing my point. Who are the F/OS developer's users? Answer: themselves. Let Red Hat and similar middle-men cater to the conventional customer, while the F/OS folks keep on doing what they've always done. If some of them cater to the users, great, if they don't, fine. When the latter group produces something that is valuable to the end-user community, someone, middle-men or user-oriented developers, will eventually step in and make the software usable for end-users. Indeed, that is exactly what Red Hat and the others are effectively doing for all the software that they include in their distribution (or at least the standard components). They are the interface between end users and the actual F/OS developers in charge of the software.
Huh? WTF?
Who in this thread pointed a gun at you? I looked hard for some cute ascii art of a gun, but couldn't find it anywhere.