I used ATI products for years, starting with a 2MB Graphics Xpression that let me run at 1152x900 (used OpenLook, so my Linux desktop at home mirrored the Sun at work), but my last card buy had to be nVidia, although I despise them for what they did to 3dfx.
I was just about to build a new system around the Asus M2N32 WS with yet another nVidia card, but not now. It will be an ATI again.
I really DO want to buy plastic discs, but not at the absurd cartel prices. $5-$6 USD is about what I'd pay, regularly, for a standard CD, and $9-$10 for losslessly compressed 56K+/20-bit+ material. Then I can convert them to OGG for my Samsung stick, or rip/recode throw-away backups for my car.
Right now, I buy 0 CDs per month. Change the prices and I'll be back to 4-5.
There's a study I'd really like to see: how, if at all, does the brain function differently in the significantly religious and schizophrenic? I've lived in close proximity with both and do not see any difference. In both, there's a point at which no amount of reason or evidence can penetrate the delusions. This is not a matter of intelligence otherwise, but at some point their ability to reason simply stops, and is replaced by "magic knowledge". My observations, however, are not a proper study. Brain imaging during a process of exposition that leads to a conclusion contrary to the subjects' beliefs might expose similarities (and differences) in regional usage.
Once the good sheeple are the only ones left, there won't be anything intelligent coming out of the organization anyway. Learning new things often involves thinking outside the current bounds, and people that can do that don't always restrict it their professional lives. Think about how few of the team at Los Alamos would have qualified to work for the new regime (for example, Dr. Feynman's admitted reaching beyond his "compartment" for information).
On top of which, many of the "pressure points" only exist because the thugs in the security services are perturbed about them. Homosexuality is one of the prime examples. It is only a "problem" because the asshats who invent the rules have made it one. If you weren't in danger of losing your job because you've "been there, done that", then it wouldn't be something that the "other guys" could threaten to expose.
Seriously, though. I will be more interested if the can "spec'" every component from the cell walls in, rather than just make a mash-up of existing bits, which is simply an extension of the existing GMOs. Even with all of the increase in "this DNA sequence codes that" knowledge, we still don't understand how functional proteins are constructed from the DNA-encoded fragments (which could be bypassed by explicitly coding for all proteins). There are at least two more layers of additional complexity (intrinsic gene regulation and homotropic inheritance) that need to be understood before a truly artificial organism can be designed, and I don't know that ten years ('specially if the world, or USofA, economy slumps during that period) are going to be enough. Doesn't mean some fools won't try it, though, well before they have enough information to understand their "creation".
I do not do business with any company that REQUIRES a GPS. Some may offer discounts, and then it is up to the customer whether, or not, they want to be tracked.
No, he had it correct. When you tend to identify, with the shorthand "US * site", those web sites either based in, or of particular interest to the citizens/residents of, the United States of America in order to differentiate them from others, you are showing an "un-American" bias to take into consideration a global audience. The OP, blithering idiot that he is, shows a completely "American" bias to denigrate, or at least ignore, the global audience and the accomplishments of those outside "America".
I quoted "American", BTW, since the USofA is only one of many countries in the American continents and "USA" could just as easily refer, for example, to the "Union of South Africa".
> (a) The dock (which sort of doubles as a taskbar) is hideable. No screen real-estate need be sacrificed.
Except that I now have to move the pointer farther to get to it. Like I said, I trade real estate for motion.
> b) The mouse-movement that the menu costs you is a lot easier than the mouse movement for menus attached to windows - that's the point of putting the menus at the top of the screen.
That's just nonsense, unless ALL windows are opened immediately below the menu bar, and, even then, the per-application menu might be more compact horizontally than the top-of-screen menu. Any window that opens mid-display still has to have its menu accessed at the top of the screen. On a 640x480 Amiga, that was too far, and it's still too far on an 1024x768, or larger, Mac or Linux box.
> (c) If I'm using multiple applications on the same screen (and I'm not using a virtual-desktop, which to be fair I usually do), then I use Exposé to switch between them. It's bound to my 5th mouse button so it works anywhere and it's very quick.
Haven't tried that (have to use the middle of a three-button, I suppose), but if Expose pops up close the current pointer, it would help.
> (d) There are other ways the Mac tries to speed workflow, but to be fair, other systems have extras too, so I'll stick to what you identified...
Could be, but I unless (c) helps, I can't find them.
> You don't have to like the Mac way of doing things, but you ought to try it with a fair mind before criticising it...
We have three in current use (all PPC: two iBooks, since Linux laptop support didn't used to be as good as it is now, and a Mini below the home theater monitor, for casual web browsing and streaming media), so I have tried them. I cannot get a Mac to multitask even as well as the Amiga used to, since the Amiga had fast paging through applications screens, and I cannot find that on the Mac, and it had a "lower window" feature on the windows that made togging through stacks faster since there was not even the need to move from the mouse to the keyboard. I'm not saying you can't do it, but that it takes more mouse or keyboard work to accomplish it. Could be worse, though.
It is VERY different. ALL scanned plates and locations are stored indefinitely.
There is a long history of law enforcement thugs blackmailing individuals whose activities are not illegal, but are negatively viewed by the stupid, malicious, and insane. For example, a record of a politician's car parked at a place that serves alcohol, when the politician's constituency is largely Christo-Nazis, might cost him an election, even if he was not drinking (picking up girls, whatever), simply based on the innuendo, and he can be coerced into "providing a bit of off-the-books help" for even more questionable activities by the cops.
This program provides exactly the type of covert pressure that has helped lead to the thugocracy that the US now "enjoys".
Even if the ACLU wins some sort of order requiring the erasure of the mis-matches, historically, law enforcement considers itself above the law and would obscure, but not delete the records, so the only safe course of action is to prevent the making of the records.
The task bars, docks, whatever you call them, cost me real estate; the "menu at the top" costs me mouse movement, unless I put every application at the very top of the screen. Since I multitask, I would have a lot of hidden windows, which then costs me work to sort through (without a task bar). I end up trading real estate (taskbar) for mouse, or keyboard, actions (sorting through active windows).
With Sawfish, I have neither of those downsides. The only thing that now bothers me with Sawfish is that is seems to have lost the ability to focus a window, without bringing it "front", which is common with other recent window managers/desktops. Again, since I multitask, it takes me longer to "copy and paste" from, for example, a log window in a corner of the screen to an email.
I dislike giving up screen real estate for a menu or task bar, and I resent the additional mouse movement to reach it. As near as I can tell, no one has improved on Sawfish/Sawmill in ease of use, since I could get a menu and task list at any point on the root window, allowing me to minimize mouse travel, and the task bar wasn't cluttering up the lower or upper edge of the display.
On a Mac, the best compromise I have found is to move the task bar to the right edge to free up that space (and what's with the "only put a resize gadget in one corner?), but the menu bar is still a pain.
> You don't claim to know anything about the air navigation system and I believe you.
That is a stupid lie, as I never said any such thing, and if you believe it, you are a moron. I extracted one commonly-voiced bit of nonsense from the OP, wherein he claimed that the aircraft owners would be paying for the electronics and pointed out how that would NOT be the case.
In fact at the end of my post, I said that there was some sense to the OP, and that the BS about who was paying for the system reduced the credibility of the post.
The "venom" is laregly due to the distortions of the US transportation system to fund what is nominally a private enterprise, combined with the habituation of significant portions of the US public to casual "thugocracy" at the hands of TSA.
As far as I am concerned, the airlines can all go out of business tomorrow, letting the corporations that rely on travel fly their own 'planes, or pool them, and smaller GA not have to worry so much about the wake of a 747 pushing them into the ground on approach. It won't happen, any more than truck sizes will be reduced to what the highways were built to handle, but in both cases, don't try to tell me that the owners/operators are the ones footing the bill.
I was not complaining, in principle, about paying for a portion of ATC. I specifically quoted just the one line nonsensical line for the OP that the aircraft owners would be paying for the electronics.
> The expensive electronics go in the plane (paid for by the owner of the plane) and not on the ground.
If you believe that, you're as looney as a flat-earther.
The airlines will be subsidized out of my pocket as they have been for decades. GA will all figure out how to take a tax deduction, and I'll still end up paying for at least part of it. I will not deal with a "service" as close to torture as a commercial airline flight and I don't travel enough to justify my own 'plane. On top of that, the "expensive electronics" are in orbit, and I have also paid into that, although I've never owned, nor intend to own, a GPS.
The rest of your post has some sense of reason to it, but the "religion" bit detracts makes the arguments suspect.
> There's nothing wrong with Flash itself, only how people use it. He then goes on to prove that at least 1 person did it well by his own standards, but he refuses to look at any other Flash. If we were talking about humans, this would commonly be called 'prejudice' and people would be up in arms.
NOT prejudice, experience. I want INFORMATION from the web. Flash add-ons do not provide more information, just eye-candy (like the Monster Configurator, which is a toy, oh, and I like the "bubble wrap" Flash toy, also off-line), that I have to either watch or stop before trying to get to the real data. What is worse is that many web sites are not even usable without Flash because the alleged "Web Developers" were so busy showing off their own "skills" that they forgot about their customers, and customers' customers. I can't even let the site owners know that they have lost my business due to the site design because there's not even a "contact" or "about" if/until you watch the Flash. I stopped doing business with a local hard drive dealer when their site changed to require Flash on entry, because it wasn't worth wading through the nonsense compared to using a different dealers' site.
No, I mean tabs. I've set every "tab"-related item I can find in "about:config" and the various preferences to off, but if I click a bookmark label that is a folder for other bookmarks (some of them have a lot of items) often all of the bookmarks in the folder are opened in tabs of the same browser window. This may even be a bug, but since I prefer each page to be in a separate window, I would rather have a browser that didn't have tabs in the first place. It's faster for me to use the window titles to find one of the many pages I have open than to wade through the tiny tab labels, and there's the "Window" toolbar item, plus I get more of the page into the window than if there's a tab bar cluttering it. Of the six available "bars" in Seamonkey, plus the sidebar, I only have two, Navigation and Status, so I could live without the code for all of the rest of them. On Firefox, when I use it, it also have a minimal set of toolbars and tools.
I have yet to find the "config" item that will absolutely prevent Firefox or Seamonkey from using tabs, which I despise. I will gladly do without the history list, which I never use, and am annoyed when it pops up. I haven't used a "customization" that doesn't involve turning "features" off.
The only plug-in I use is a JRE, and many mobile devices have that (I'd rather download PDFs, since I usually end up doing that anyway, and I HATE Flash, except for the Ducati Monster Configurator, which I downloaded for off-line use).
I do use "Bookmarks" (favorites, in IE-speak), but could do that nearly as easily from a text file in another desktop window, which would be much easier to manage.
this has always been is an incredibly brain-damaged concept on several bases.
drivers are hard to write for a reason. they require a detailed understanding of the physical actions of the device being driven (does it interrupt, and if so, under what circumstances, and how is the interrupt from the device mapped to the CPU(s), for example, or, if it does DMA/memory mastering, what are its limitations such as alignment) and what amounts to an embedded operating environment, with necessarily very different abilities and restrictions. while there are features in the kernel to map common features with different implementations, such as managed memory, to regularize the implementations, those features have little in common with the needs of user-space applications. devices are asynchronous from the CPU in ways that user-space applications can never be. the few people who write drivers well have a different view of the system than application programmers, regardless of their competence, and even many of the best of the latter are utterly incapable of the former (and vice-versa, sometimes).
the loss of security means that Linux is headed the way of M$-Windows, which can never be secured, short of unplugging the power lead. the blurring of boundaries in the cause of "ease of use" is completely contradictory to good security practice. remember the DX9 "bug" that allowed execution of properly crafted DirectMusic streams. welcome that to the Linux world when this idiocy spreads.
thirdly, this will mean even less ability to get information from device manufacturers that would enable us to create secure and fast drivers. Linux will become a bog-slow piece of junk burdened with crapware written by programmers who have every disincentive to craft good drivers (ones that don't do things like busy-wait for ridiculously long periods). after all, once Linux is bogged down worse than M$-Windows, all the companies have to say is "it's Linux' fault; our Windows drivers work just fine, so use that".
the comment about application programmers not making the transition to driver programming is based on extensive personal observation (decades across multiple companies). very few schools teach anything like the theory, much less require the practice, of understanding how hardware works, so they simply don't know how. most hardware companies don't charge for the device drivers, so they see that as purely a cost burden, and therefore don't have any incentive to have good in-house training. when I've watched application-trained programmers try to write drivers, they don't actually think in terms of the physical time and sequence in which device events occur, and then spend ridiculous amounts of effort trying to "tune" that improperly designed code, which of course breaks with every little change in the platform.
BTW, not all driver writers make good decisions all of the time, either. some idiot decided to piss away CPU cycles shifting the SCSI STATUS byte returned for every transaction, for example.
You missed the most frightening and relevant Section (B) (italics mine), wherein it is directed to also seize the property of anyone (lawyers are "persons", too) who assists a victim of this travesty. Once the police state has seized a victims property, anyone who assists them in any way is subject to the same seizure.
ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
Employers are requiring a medical procedure as a condition of employment. How about tattooing the employee ID, or neutering the staff to make them more docile, although that would be redundant for any employee that accepted the chip in the first place.
This is not primarily about the RFID security. It is about mutilating the staff to save the employer the cost of installing and using a less Nazi-slave-like security system. Seems to me that any doctors that perform the procedure should have their license removed. The tags are hardly justifiable as cosmetic surgery providing any self-image benefit, since the tags aren't supposed to be visible.
Obviously, the FBI has a large number of brain-dead bureaucrats that serve no purpose but to create busy-work for others. The FBI needs to have its budget cut severely and get rid of them, reducing the number of Treasury bonds that we sell to the Chinese to pay for them.
That entire list is untenable, and even proposing such a list is entirely out of touch with reality, as well as any oath to "support and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America".
"Unexplained affluence", for example, waiting tables to supplement the trust fund, or the "photo shoot", may be legal but socially unacceptable and, therefore, kept quiet.
To whom is a college student required to report "overseas travel", such as spring break in the islands or Mexico, skiing in Canada, and vacation trips, other, perhaps, than the parents funding their education?
"information outside the job scope" is called education and all students and faculty are supposed to be seeking that.
There are no usual work hours for students.
There are many foreign nationals legally studying and employed in the United States. There is no requirement, nor should there be, for anyone other than holders of certain security clearances to keep track of and report the nationality of the acquaintances, nor their possible position within a foreign government.
"attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know"? What is "need to know" other than an open-ended control trip? It is a bureaucratic tool most usually used to hide information that is embarrassing to some official or agency, not dangerous. The whole "Freedom of Information Act" is exactly the opposite of its name. Unless there is an immediate danger of physical harm to the citizens of the nation, the information should be published, and not hidden in layers of bureaucracy intended to prevent the citizens of the United States from making informed decisions (yeah, I know, as if they could tear themselves away from the celebrity du jour) about the actions of their government.
"unexplained absences"? Explain to whom? Besides, all any potential foreign agent would have to say is "I was: hung over; playing StarCraft(or WoW); picking up my clothes from...", and no one could be suspicious.
FLAC (or other lossless) studio- or CD-quality tracks from a store I can access from my Linux or BSD system. I'll pay more than the AAC stream price per track, and I want a discount for albums, which should include the cover art and text in a generally readable, like PDF, format. The album could be packed in a container file.
Yes, I CAN tell the difference between 256 kbit AAC and CDs on more than half of the streams I have tested, but I can also tell the difference between clean vinyl and CD, which could be related more to the dynamic range limitations of CDs than the sample rate. Fewer bits per sample lowers the data rate (information), just as sampling at a lower frequency does, which is why I requested studio-quality, since those files usually have more bits per sample as well as more samples per second.
With these files, I can use my home stereo system to good effect, plus down convert to something usable in a car or portable where the background is too noisy to hear much subtlety in music, and the number of tracks is a convenience.
When a store offers that, post to/. and I will check it out.
Ceres was a "planet", or, at least, called one (1802), long before Tombaugh found Pluto (1930). So were some of the other asteroids. When they figured out it was just one instance of a large class of similar objects (asteroids), they changed its designation. Pluto/Charon (with the twins) has now been demonstrated as an instance of another large class of similar objects (Kuiper Belt Objects - KBO) that just happens to orbit noticeably closer than its siblings.
To the ancient Greeks a "planet" was any apparent celestial object, other than Earth's moon, that moved noticeably against the background stars. Working with just the unaided eye, Pluto doesn't count, because it cannot be seen. Working with telescopes, we've got effectively uncountable numbers of asteroids, KBOs, and galaxies that move against a galactic star field that is itself composed of relatively moving objects.
Between the time of Neptune's discovery and the asteroids' reclassification there were more than 10 planets, then back to 8. Pluto was prematurely added so we called it 9, then reclassified it, so now we're back to 8. Many objects have been mistakenly and/or prematurely classified (humans as an intelligent species, as opposed to the small number of intelligent individual humans, for example), then the classifications adjusted upon reexamination of the evidence or discovery of new evidence.
We throw labels at things. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't. Get over it.
The legal profession used to one of the last holdouts for WordPerfect, because it allowed the decade-old files to be read in the latest version. How are you going to handle a 8- or 9-year-old deposition saved in Word 2005 format in 2013? Are you at least converting them to PDF?
Everyone who says that Word is an acceptable archive format for documents is a complete (fully trained) idiot.
I picked up a resume written in WP 4, on an Amiga, and imported it trivially (it did ask if I knew the format was WP 4) into WP 8 on X86 Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I used ATI products for years, starting with a 2MB Graphics Xpression that let me run at 1152x900 (used OpenLook, so my Linux desktop at home mirrored the Sun at work), but my last card buy had to be nVidia, although I despise them for what they did to 3dfx.
I was just about to build a new system around the Asus M2N32 WS with yet another nVidia card, but not now. It will be an ATI again.
Vote with your dollars AND ballots.
I really DO want to buy plastic discs, but not at the absurd cartel prices. $5-$6 USD is about what I'd pay, regularly, for a standard CD, and $9-$10 for losslessly compressed 56K+/20-bit+ material. Then I can convert them to OGG for my Samsung stick, or rip/recode throw-away backups for my car.
Right now, I buy 0 CDs per month. Change the prices and I'll be back to 4-5.
There's a study I'd really like to see: how, if at all, does the brain function differently in the significantly religious and schizophrenic? I've lived in close proximity with both and do not see any difference. In both, there's a point at which no amount of reason or evidence can penetrate the delusions. This is not a matter of intelligence otherwise, but at some point their ability to reason simply stops, and is replaced by "magic knowledge". My observations, however, are not a proper study. Brain imaging during a process of exposition that leads to a conclusion contrary to the subjects' beliefs might expose similarities (and differences) in regional usage.
Once the good sheeple are the only ones left, there won't be anything intelligent coming out of the organization anyway. Learning new things often involves thinking outside the current bounds, and people that can do that don't always restrict it their professional lives. Think about how few of the team at Los Alamos would have qualified to work for the new regime (for example, Dr. Feynman's admitted reaching beyond his "compartment" for information).
On top of which, many of the "pressure points" only exist because the thugs in the security services are perturbed about them. Homosexuality is one of the prime examples. It is only a "problem" because the asshats who invent the rules have made it one. If you weren't in danger of losing your job because you've "been there, done that", then it wouldn't be something that the "other guys" could threaten to expose.
Chainsaws?
Seriously, though. I will be more interested if the can "spec'" every component from the cell walls in, rather than just make a mash-up of existing bits, which is simply an extension of the existing GMOs. Even with all of the increase in "this DNA sequence codes that" knowledge, we still don't understand how functional proteins are constructed from the DNA-encoded fragments (which could be bypassed by explicitly coding for all proteins). There are at least two more layers of additional complexity (intrinsic gene regulation and homotropic inheritance) that need to be understood before a truly artificial organism can be designed, and I don't know that ten years ('specially if the world, or USofA, economy slumps during that period) are going to be enough. Doesn't mean some fools won't try it, though, well before they have enough information to understand their "creation".
I do not do business with any company that REQUIRES a GPS. Some may offer discounts, and then it is up to the customer whether, or not, they want to be tracked.
No, he had it correct. When you tend to identify, with the shorthand "US * site", those web sites either based in, or of particular interest to the citizens/residents of, the United States of America in order to differentiate them from others, you are showing an "un-American" bias to take into consideration a global audience. The OP, blithering idiot that he is, shows a completely "American" bias to denigrate, or at least ignore, the global audience and the accomplishments of those outside "America".
I quoted "American", BTW, since the USofA is only one of many countries in the American continents and "USA" could just as easily refer, for example, to the "Union of South Africa".
> (a) The dock (which sort of doubles as a taskbar) is hideable. No screen real-estate need be sacrificed.
Except that I now have to move the pointer farther to get to it. Like I said, I trade real estate for motion.
> b) The mouse-movement that the menu costs you is a lot easier than the mouse movement for menus attached to windows - that's the point of putting the menus at the top of the screen.
That's just nonsense, unless ALL windows are opened immediately below the menu bar, and, even then, the per-application menu might be more compact horizontally than the top-of-screen menu. Any window that opens mid-display still has to have its menu accessed at the top of the screen. On a 640x480 Amiga, that was too far, and it's still too far on an 1024x768, or larger, Mac or Linux box.
> (c) If I'm using multiple applications on the same screen (and I'm not using a virtual-desktop, which to be fair I usually do), then I use Exposé to switch between them. It's bound to my 5th mouse button so it works anywhere and it's very quick.
Haven't tried that (have to use the middle of a three-button, I suppose), but if Expose pops up close the current pointer, it would help.
> (d) There are other ways the Mac tries to speed workflow, but to be fair, other systems have extras too, so I'll stick to what you identified...
Could be, but I unless (c) helps, I can't find them.
> You don't have to like the Mac way of doing things, but you ought to try it with a fair mind before criticising it...
We have three in current use (all PPC: two iBooks, since Linux laptop support didn't used to be as good as it is now, and a Mini below the home theater monitor, for casual web browsing and streaming media), so I have tried them. I cannot get a Mac to multitask even as well as the Amiga used to, since the Amiga had fast paging through applications screens, and I cannot find that on the Mac, and it had a "lower window" feature on the windows that made togging through stacks faster since there was not even the need to move from the mouse to the keyboard. I'm not saying you can't do it, but that it takes more mouse or keyboard work to accomplish it. Could be worse, though.
It is VERY different. ALL scanned plates and locations are stored indefinitely.
There is a long history of law enforcement thugs blackmailing individuals whose activities are not illegal, but are negatively viewed by the stupid, malicious, and insane. For example, a record of a politician's car parked at a place that serves alcohol, when the politician's constituency is largely Christo-Nazis, might cost him an election, even if he was not drinking (picking up girls, whatever), simply based on the innuendo, and he can be coerced into "providing a bit of off-the-books help" for even more questionable activities by the cops.
This program provides exactly the type of covert pressure that has helped lead to the thugocracy that the US now "enjoys".
Even if the ACLU wins some sort of order requiring the erasure of the mis-matches, historically, law enforcement considers itself above the law and would obscure, but not delete the records, so the only safe course of action is to prevent the making of the records.
The task bars, docks, whatever you call them, cost me real estate; the "menu at the top" costs me mouse movement, unless I put every application at the very top of the screen. Since I multitask, I would have a lot of hidden windows, which then costs me work to sort through (without a task bar). I end up trading real estate (taskbar) for mouse, or keyboard, actions (sorting through active windows).
With Sawfish, I have neither of those downsides. The only thing that now bothers me with Sawfish is that is seems to have lost the ability to focus a window, without bringing it "front", which is common with other recent window managers/desktops. Again, since I multitask, it takes me longer to "copy and paste" from, for example, a log window in a corner of the screen to an email.
I dislike giving up screen real estate for a menu or task bar, and I resent the additional mouse movement to reach it. As near as I can tell, no one has improved on Sawfish/Sawmill in ease of use, since I could get a menu and task list at any point on the root window, allowing me to minimize mouse travel, and the task bar wasn't cluttering up the lower or upper edge of the display.
On a Mac, the best compromise I have found is to move the task bar to the right edge to free up that space (and what's with the "only put a resize gadget in one corner?), but the menu bar is still a pain.
> You don't claim to know anything about the air navigation system and I believe you.
That is a stupid lie, as I never said any such thing, and if you believe it, you are a moron. I extracted one commonly-voiced bit of nonsense from the OP, wherein he claimed that the aircraft owners would be paying for the electronics and pointed out how that would NOT be the case.
In fact at the end of my post, I said that there was some sense to the OP, and that the BS about who was paying for the system reduced the credibility of the post.
The "venom" is laregly due to the distortions of the US transportation system to fund what is nominally a private enterprise, combined with the habituation of significant portions of the US public to casual "thugocracy" at the hands of TSA.
As far as I am concerned, the airlines can all go out of business tomorrow, letting the corporations that rely on travel fly their own 'planes, or pool them, and smaller GA not have to worry so much about the wake of a 747 pushing them into the ground on approach. It won't happen, any more than truck sizes will be reduced to what the highways were built to handle, but in both cases, don't try to tell me that the owners/operators are the ones footing the bill.
I was not complaining, in principle, about paying for a portion of ATC. I specifically quoted just the one line nonsensical line for the OP that the aircraft owners would be paying for the electronics.
> The expensive electronics go in the plane (paid for by the owner of the plane) and not on the ground.
If you believe that, you're as looney as a flat-earther.
The airlines will be subsidized out of my pocket as they have been for decades. GA will all figure out how to take a tax deduction, and I'll still end up paying for at least part of it. I will not deal with a "service" as close to torture as a commercial airline flight and I don't travel enough to justify my own 'plane. On top of that, the "expensive electronics" are in orbit, and I have also paid into that, although I've never owned, nor intend to own, a GPS.
The rest of your post has some sense of reason to it, but the "religion" bit detracts makes the arguments suspect.
> There's nothing wrong with Flash itself, only how people use it. He then goes on to prove that at least 1 person did it well by his own standards, but he refuses to look at any other Flash. If we were talking about humans, this would commonly be called 'prejudice' and people would be up in arms.
NOT prejudice, experience. I want INFORMATION from the web. Flash add-ons do not provide more information, just eye-candy (like the Monster Configurator, which is a toy, oh, and I like the "bubble wrap" Flash toy, also off-line), that I have to either watch or stop before trying to get to the real data. What is worse is that many web sites are not even usable without Flash because the alleged "Web Developers" were so busy showing off their own "skills" that they forgot about their customers, and customers' customers. I can't even let the site owners know that they have lost my business due to the site design because there's not even a "contact" or "about" if/until you watch the Flash. I stopped doing business with a local hard drive dealer when their site changed to require Flash on entry, because it wasn't worth wading through the nonsense compared to using a different dealers' site.
No, I mean tabs. I've set every "tab"-related item I can find in "about:config" and the various preferences to off, but if I click a bookmark label that is a folder for other bookmarks (some of them have a lot of items) often all of the bookmarks in the folder are opened in tabs of the same browser window. This may even be a bug, but since I prefer each page to be in a separate window, I would rather have a browser that didn't have tabs in the first place. It's faster for me to use the window titles to find one of the many pages I have open than to wade through the tiny tab labels, and there's the "Window" toolbar item, plus I get more of the page into the window than if there's a tab bar cluttering it. Of the six available "bars" in Seamonkey, plus the sidebar, I only have two, Navigation and Status, so I could live without the code for all of the rest of them. On Firefox, when I use it, it also have a minimal set of toolbars and tools.
I have yet to find the "config" item that will absolutely prevent Firefox or Seamonkey from using tabs, which I despise. I will gladly do without the history list, which I never use, and am annoyed when it pops up. I haven't used a "customization" that doesn't involve turning "features" off.
The only plug-in I use is a JRE, and many mobile devices have that (I'd rather download PDFs, since I usually end up doing that anyway, and I HATE Flash, except for the Ducati Monster Configurator, which I downloaded for off-line use).
I do use "Bookmarks" (favorites, in IE-speak), but could do that nearly as easily from a text file in another desktop window, which would be much easier to manage.
this has always been is an incredibly brain-damaged concept on several bases.
drivers are hard to write for a reason. they require a detailed understanding of the physical actions of the device being driven (does it interrupt, and if so, under what circumstances, and how is the interrupt from the device mapped to the CPU(s), for example, or, if it does DMA/memory mastering, what are its limitations such as alignment) and what amounts to an embedded operating environment, with necessarily very different abilities and restrictions. while there are features in the kernel to map common features with different implementations, such as managed memory, to regularize the implementations, those features have little in common with the needs of user-space applications. devices are asynchronous from the CPU in ways that user-space applications can never be. the few people who write drivers well have a different view of the system than application programmers, regardless of their competence, and even many of the best of the latter are utterly incapable of the former (and vice-versa, sometimes).
the loss of security means that Linux is headed the way of M$-Windows, which can never be secured, short of unplugging the power lead. the blurring of boundaries in the cause of "ease of use" is completely contradictory to good security practice. remember the DX9 "bug" that allowed execution of properly crafted DirectMusic streams. welcome that to the Linux world when this idiocy spreads.
thirdly, this will mean even less ability to get information from device manufacturers that would enable us to create secure and fast drivers. Linux will become a bog-slow piece of junk burdened with crapware written by programmers who have every disincentive to craft good drivers (ones that don't do things like busy-wait for ridiculously long periods). after all, once Linux is bogged down worse than M$-Windows, all the companies have to say is "it's Linux' fault; our Windows drivers work just fine, so use that".
the comment about application programmers not making the transition to driver programming is based on extensive personal observation (decades across multiple companies). very few schools teach anything like the theory, much less require the practice, of understanding how hardware works, so they simply don't know how. most hardware companies don't charge for the device drivers, so they see that as purely a cost burden, and therefore don't have any incentive to have good in-house training. when I've watched application-trained programmers try to write drivers, they don't actually think in terms of the physical time and sequence in which device events occur, and then spend ridiculous amounts of effort trying to "tune" that improperly designed code, which of course breaks with every little change in the platform.
BTW, not all driver writers make good decisions all of the time, either. some idiot decided to piss away CPU cycles shifting the SCSI STATUS byte returned for every transaction, for example.
You missed the most frightening and relevant Section (B) (italics mine), wherein it is directed to also seize the property of anyone (lawyers are "persons", too) who assists a victim of this travesty. Once the police state has seized a victims property, anyone who assists them in any way is subject to the same seizure. ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or (iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order. (b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
Does anyone know if there is, or is going to be, at list of fixed-price manufacturers that we can use to boycott them?
Employers are requiring a medical procedure as a condition of employment. How about tattooing the employee ID, or neutering the staff to make them more docile, although that would be redundant for any employee that accepted the chip in the first place.
This is not primarily about the RFID security. It is about mutilating the staff to save the employer the cost of installing and using a less Nazi-slave-like security system. Seems to me that any doctors that perform the procedure should have their license removed. The tags are hardly justifiable as cosmetic surgery providing any self-image benefit, since the tags aren't supposed to be visible.
Obviously, the FBI has a large number of brain-dead bureaucrats that serve no purpose but to create busy-work for others. The FBI needs to have its budget cut severely and get rid of them, reducing the number of Treasury bonds that we sell to the Chinese to pay for them.
...", and no one could be suspicious.
That entire list is untenable, and even proposing such a list is entirely out of touch with reality, as well as any oath to "support and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America".
"Unexplained affluence", for example, waiting tables to supplement the trust fund, or the "photo shoot", may be legal but socially unacceptable and, therefore, kept quiet.
To whom is a college student required to report "overseas travel", such as spring break in the islands or Mexico, skiing in Canada, and vacation trips, other, perhaps, than the parents funding their education?
"information outside the job scope" is called education and all students and faculty are supposed to be seeking that.
There are no usual work hours for students.
There are many foreign nationals legally studying and employed in the United States. There is no requirement, nor should there be, for anyone other than holders of certain security clearances to keep track of and report the nationality of the acquaintances, nor their possible position within a foreign government.
"attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know"? What is "need to know" other than an open-ended control trip? It is a bureaucratic tool most usually used to hide information that is embarrassing to some official or agency, not dangerous. The whole "Freedom of Information Act" is exactly the opposite of its name. Unless there is an immediate danger of physical harm to the citizens of the nation, the information should be published, and not hidden in layers of bureaucracy intended to prevent the citizens of the United States from making informed decisions (yeah, I know, as if they could tear themselves away from the celebrity du jour) about the actions of their government.
"unexplained absences"? Explain to whom? Besides, all any potential foreign agent would have to say is "I was: hung over; playing StarCraft(or WoW); picking up my clothes from
FLAC (or other lossless) studio- or CD-quality tracks from a store I can access from my Linux or BSD system. I'll pay more than the AAC stream price per track, and I want a discount for albums, which should include the cover art and text in a generally readable, like PDF, format. The album could be packed in a container file.
/. and I will check it out.
Yes, I CAN tell the difference between 256 kbit AAC and CDs on more than half of the streams I have tested, but I can also tell the difference between clean vinyl and CD, which could be related more to the dynamic range limitations of CDs than the sample rate. Fewer bits per sample lowers the data rate (information), just as sampling at a lower frequency does, which is why I requested studio-quality, since those files usually have more bits per sample as well as more samples per second.
With these files, I can use my home stereo system to good effect, plus down convert to something usable in a car or portable where the background is too noisy to hear much subtlety in music, and the number of tracks is a convenience.
When a store offers that, post to
Ceres was a "planet", or, at least, called one (1802), long before Tombaugh found Pluto (1930). So were some of the other asteroids. When they figured out it was just one instance of a large class of similar objects (asteroids), they changed its designation. Pluto/Charon (with the twins) has now been demonstrated as an instance of another large class of similar objects (Kuiper Belt Objects - KBO) that just happens to orbit noticeably closer than its siblings.
To the ancient Greeks a "planet" was any apparent celestial object, other than Earth's moon, that moved noticeably against the background stars. Working with just the unaided eye, Pluto doesn't count, because it cannot be seen. Working with telescopes, we've got effectively uncountable numbers of asteroids, KBOs, and galaxies that move against a galactic star field that is itself composed of relatively moving objects.
Between the time of Neptune's discovery and the asteroids' reclassification there were more than 10 planets, then back to 8. Pluto was prematurely added so we called it 9, then reclassified it, so now we're back to 8. Many objects have been mistakenly and/or prematurely classified (humans as an intelligent species, as opposed to the small number of intelligent individual humans, for example), then the classifications adjusted upon reexamination of the evidence or discovery of new evidence.
We throw labels at things. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't. Get over it.
The legal profession used to one of the last holdouts for WordPerfect, because it allowed the decade-old files to be read in the latest version. How are you going to handle a 8- or 9-year-old deposition saved in Word 2005 format in 2013? Are you at least converting them to PDF?
Everyone who says that Word is an acceptable archive format for documents is a complete (fully trained) idiot.
I picked up a resume written in WP 4, on an Amiga, and imported it trivially (it did ask if I knew the format was WP 4) into WP 8 on X86 Linux.