I'm not a gamer - Nethack and Solitaire work just fine on my older machine, thanks:-)
But if I were a gamer with a 2-3-year-old machine and wanted better performance, would it make sense to by a whole new PC, or would adding a new graphics card be good enough? Or would I be in one of those traps where AGX just doesn't cut it and I'd need to buy a new motherboard with PCI-X, and oh, by the way, that motherboard needs faster RAM so I can't reuse my current stuff, in which case I should just buy a new machine and give the old one to my sister's kids? How long will it be before I should junk my 2x120GB IDE disks for SATA (SATA's probably a better choice for new machines, but I'm not running a big commercial web server here, I'm mostly browsing and playing MP3s.)
The first time I heard an Emergency Broadcast System announcement on a car radio at ~9 at night that said "This is not a test." it scared the crap out of me - after growing up during the Cold War, learning all through school that the EBS warning meant we should get down under our desks and kiss our asses goodbye, and working in a radio station where we did the EBS test at some regular weekly timeslot like Tuesdays at noon, it was really a surprise to find out that they were now using it for actual localized emergencies (this one was a flood warning) rather than Global Thermonuclear War. I think there was still a Soviet Union at the time, or at least large remnants of one, but there hadn't been any sabre-rattling going on in the news that would have made an attack likely.
It's easy to change rules, even if the rules say only the President can do something. If the rules are part of the law, it's a bit harder to change than if the rules are the general type where the detailed versions get written by executive branch bureaucracies. Under President Bush, all the President has to do is issue a "signing statement" about how he feels like interpreting the law and it doesn't even matter what the text of a law said, and the Congress is currently controlled by Republicans if they do want to change legislation.
Sometimes when rules get made by the Supreme Court they stick around for a while. Most other rules aren't very solid.
It's from the Department of Homeland Security, whose two main jobs are keeping the American public afraid while reassuring everybody that Big Daddy Government will take care of them if they just give up a bit more of their civil liberties and taking away our civil liberties. Of *course* it'll be used for propaganda - even if there's a real emergency. Even the fact that they want to deploy it in the first place is propaganda.
There's been a good bit of discussion about this on several of the telecom-related mailing lists. Sending an SMS to everybody in Podunk can work. Sending an SMS to everybody in a large city will overload the SMS system for a while, and as somebody here said, it'll do it just when the SMS system needs to be workable. Sending an SMS to everybody in Manhattan is impossible by an order of magnitude or two. And if you *could* get a message to everybody, telling everybody in Manhattan or LA to panic is unthinkably stupid. And of course, in the US, sending messages to people who get charged for receiving text messages is just asking for trouble:-)
If there's a broadcast channel that can be used for this application, that's at least technically realistic, if not socially.
Sure, I hate spam as much as you do - but at work, our corporate email admins keep it mostly under control, and I seldom get more than 1-2/day. The real problems I have, besides Outlook's overall clumsiness, are that I get way too much of the stuff, from a wide variety of people (I'm a systems engineer supporting a bunch of sales people, so I get mail from them and customers, as well as information sources, training, bosses, friends, technical/social mail lists, vendor mail of varying usefulness.) Sorting each thing into a mailbox doesn't work well enough - partly just my habits, but partly the difficulties of sorting it well. For instance, one of my sales people handles several customers, so I can't just dump everything to/from/cc him into one folder for that customer, and reps change accounts and cover for each other on vacation, so sorting by person isn't always enough. Outlook takes *way* too long to search email information, even if you only look at headers. Partly this is because I've got ~1.5GB of inbox for 2006, but mainly it seems to be because it doesn't store the headers in any usefully searchable format (seems odd that a binary bloatware data format wouldn't include that, but it appears to be the case.)
At home I don't have as much problem with complexity, though I'm on a number of occasionally-voluminous mailing lists, and spam is a lot more trouble. Part of that is because my ISPs aren't as aggressive, compared to my work mailadmins who have a much narrower set of recipients and common senders, but also that's because I manage a couple of small mailing lists, and even though we switched to subscribers-only a couple of years ago, as the admin I get to see all the bounces and deal with the occasional "Bob sent this from his work email instead of home, better add bob@work to the whitelist" mixed in with the hundreds of "Can't deliver mail to nonexistent user fakename@free-email.example.net" mailer-daemon responses to the "Hi, you've reached majordomo@example.com, here's how to subscribe" autoresponses and the dozens of bouncegrams a week when mail for somebody can't be delivered, or gets stalled too long by a greylister or whatever.
I was an Operations Researcher in college - amazing how much you can forget in 25+ years...
There are a wide range of problems for which Shortest Job First is optimal. This is not one of them. (There are also a wide range of problems for which Longest Whatever First is optimal, e.g. bin-packing, stock-cutting, etc.) If all the jobs have equal importance, and none of them have deadlines, and the jobs are independent of each other, then Shortest Job First is generally optimal for most objective functions.
But if Job J depends on Job H, then even if Job J is much shorter, you can't do it first.
Or if Job J is *more important* than Job K, depending on how you weight importance, it might make sense to do Job J first even if it's longer - or it might not.
Or if Job J *has* to be done by a certain deadline, and Job L has a later deadline, it might make sense to do Job J earlier even if it's longer, or it might not, and you might even need to bump Job B to make room for Job J, and sometimes this depends on whether your objective function measures only whether a job is late or also *how* late it is. Mechanical systems often have hard deadlines; economic ones usually don't.
If jobs are *preemptible*, then there's another whole raft of solutions like "Shortest remaining time left", and issues about what preemption costs, how granular it is, etc.
And of course, if there are multiple resources required (e.g. CPU time, disk I/O quantity, rotation and seek latency, etc., it gets a lot more complicated - Shortest Job for the CPU might not be Shortest Job for the disk, and there are different ways to balance such things.
In this case, "responsiveness" is a user-perception issue, and depends on some sets of tasks that the user cares about, like mouse motion and cursor jumping and pixels getting tweaked on the screen, and it tends to be more important than many other tasks like crunching numbers or looking up data in databases, though other external activities may require certain response times, e.g. network protocol timeouts.
I agree with you that a dual-core processor can often make up for a Bad Scheduler Algorithm (though it complicates the math significantly...) - but the right thing to do with bad schedulers is Don't Use Them - get a better scheduler (even if it means dumping Windows:-). I haven't tested the Preemptive Kernel mods that came in between 2.4.x and 2.6.x, but the general comments have been that responsiveness improved substantially, because interactive tasks can get done without having long waits for kernel activities to finish.
Back when I last needed it (mid-late 80s working on air-traffic control and NASA projects), it would have been really nice to have a Hard Real-time Unix version that was POSIX version N+1 compatible, POSIX real-time compatible, B1 or B2 secure, commercial-off-the-shelf, and ran Ada - even the parts that weren't pipe-dreams if you wanted them individually were definitely bogus if you wanted them all at once on the same platform. We're getting a lot closer, partly because if Moore's Law makes the computer 2-3 orders of magnitude faster with 1-2 orders of magnitude more RAM, even a bad scheduler gets a lot closer to the performance you need. But some things are still slow, like mechanical disk drives. Sure, they're a lot bigger, and the throughput rate is much faster, but even a 15000rpm drive still takes ~3ms to rotate once, and if you've only got 1ms to respond, that means you still can't use a disk except to fill and backup a memory cache.
Oh, come on, of course it's a whimper. It goes from YES to yeah to probably to maybe to no, I guess not. Leave aside the question of whether it really *was* the greatest thing since sliced bits, it's definitely done the Cosmic Wimpout.
Who should they have called? CNN, Star TV News, Reuters, AP, anything owned by Rupert Murdoch; after that you can think about calling governments. Your assessment of the usefulness of calling embassies is unfortunately spot on, but even with this system, relying on the government sector without first calling the useful satellite news services is a mistake.
Will this reach everybody? No - as other people have commented, there are lots of areas without much infrastructure, and small non-touristy islands are at high risk, but the number of places that have some kind of TV in a bar is huge, and in places with government-run TV, they probably monitor CNN and Star to know what else is happening even if they're not broadcasting it.
And by now, 90% of the world knows who won the World's Cup...
Sure, the Bush Administration's version of FEMA did an atrocious job of handling Katrina, but tsunami response and hurricane response are much different problems, and the tsunami response is designed with the goal of letting people know quickly so they can Run Away, rather than worrying about whose responsibility it is to clean up the damage afterwards.
My wife grew up in Hawaii and California, so while I was learning things in elementary school about "that's the local volunteer fire department siren" and "if the CONELRAD Alert says the Russians are attacking, hide under the desk and kiss your ass goodbye", she was learning things like "that's the tsunami warning siren, if it goes off Run Uphill", and "if there's an earthquake, go stand in the doorway where the ceiling won't fall on you." First decent-sized earthquake after we moved to California, she went over to the doorway and yelled at me for not knowing to do the same thing, but I was just as clueless about that as I was about what the Granny Goose commercials on TV were trying to sell.
When Hurricane Iniki trashed Kauai in 1992, about 6 people were killed, 1400 homes destroyed, and 5000 seriously damaged, but there was enough advance preparation that most people were safe; that's the sort of thing that happens when you've got useful local management, and back in those days FEMA had just been dealing with Hurricane Andrew so they had a warmup round, and they were much stronger politically as opposed to being a dumping ground for Bush the Younger's less competent friends.
I used to work in a large glass box with 6000 other people. We had four or five softball leagues (ranging from highly competitive to strongly beer-oriented), and during the summer each team would get in about 10 games. I miss it - virtual offices and commuter jobs don't give you the same opportunities. But if you live near a park somewhere, you'll probably find that there are people playing soccer on the weekends, either organized or not, and if you're in the burbs you'll probably find that _somebody_ is scheduling most of the local baseball fields every night during the season. You might have to go out and interact with real people to join in - there's this thing called "community" that used to exist before we all burned out during the 90s boom... Even small-medium startup companies can usually get pickup basketball going (not that I've ever had the speed to survive a game of basketball), or if nothing else you can play Frisbee with other people.
Some famous coach, probably Vince Lombardi, described the sport as "Up in the stands you've got 50000 people who are desperately in need of exercise, watching 22 players who are desperately in need of rest".
If you're not out on the field running around, you're not playing anything resembling the real game. Back when I was in college, I played intramural football - if you're playing offensive line, the big difference between touch football and tackle football is that you don't get to wear pads in touch football:-) That was sort of like the real thing, and my fairly geeky house always ended up playing against jocks who could stomp us into the ground, but it was still fun. A video game that doesn't involve running around out of breath, physically throwing and catching the ball with your actual arms and back, and banging into people might still let you have fun with your buddies and talk about strategy, but it's no more like the real thing than playing fantasy football while drinking beer with your buddies.
So Western Union is targeting people who have Arabic-sounding names. But they're sending money to Arab countries, where almost everybody has Arabic-sounding names! They're just catching the more popular Arabic names; if they were actually consistent about this stupid racist policy, they'd have to stop doing business in those countries entirely. Most of people there who *don't* have Arabic-sounding names are immigrants or people with non-Arabic ancestors - and it's the foreigners who are more likely to be terrorist.
If they want to be racist about who they send money to in non-Arabic countries, that's just the usual level of offensiveness and stupidity that goes with racism - but this is egregiously stupid racism.
Of course, if they start refusing to send money to people in the US with Muslim sounding names, they're going to find a Million Man March of Black Muslims in front of their headquarters.
Fair is fair - if she's going to plagiarize other people, then it's fair to plagiarize her, even if it's only to avoid admitting that you can read more than a paragraph of her obnoxious writing without screaming and throwing your book/newspaper/laptop/television at the wall. Think of it as Free Bitchware.
The real problem is that if you propagate her memes, she wins...
Attacking civilians is terrorism; fighting back against invading armies is not, even if you're using guerilla tactics like IEDs or suicide bombers.
There were almost _no_ terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion - Saddam Hussein didn't like anybody who might be a threat to his power. When the US invaded, lots of people started fighting back, but fighting against an invading army isn't terrorism, it's just resistance. After the US invaded, a number of foreign terrorists decided that helping the Iraqi resistance was a good way to fight their enemy, the US, and Saddam was no longer there to keep them away, so there are now some terrorists in Iraq, but not a lot.
There weren't a lot of terrorists in Afghanistan, either, though there were more than Iraq. The Taliban weren't terrorists - Afghanistan was a conflict zone between a bunch of warlords, and the Taliban were a warlord gang that were a bit more religiously ideological than some of their competition, and they mostly won the civil war and became what passed for a central government - the US even gave them ~$43million to thank them for their suppression of the opium growers. They did have some ideological alignment with the Al Qaeda terrorists, and allowed them to operate, but they weren't terrorists, just hardliners. And Afghanistan was also chaotic enough that it was easy for Al Qaeda to operate there, especially since bin Laden spent a lot of money on public infrastructure. The US attack on Al Qaeda may have been reasonable; the US attack on the Taliban was not very reasonable, and their continued attack against Taliban and holding of Taliban prisoners in Gitmo after the defeat of the Taliban government is extremely unreasonable. It's pretty much like the British not only bombing Massachusetts because the IRA raised funds there, but continuing to hunt down and kill any Democrats they can find after the fall of Kennedyism.
Some of the people that the US is attacking in Afghanistan are terrorists, but they're mostly Taliban holdouts, or other locals who aren't cooperating with Karzai's central government.
I agree that the conspiracy theories about turning in Bush or faking his death are highly unlikely. He's dead, Jim, and he didn't really have anything on Bush other than "sure, we're good old boys who like to spend Other People's Money and get political favors", which everybody already knew.
I no longer consider 64 to be that old, given both the progress of modern medicine and the fact that I'm now 50 (:-), but it's old enough that when you've spent a few years riding a high-risk company down the tubes and another few years of trials, been convicted, and you're about to be given a sentence of "Die in Jail, Loser", it's gotta be pretty stressful, and a heart attack is no surprise. Autopsy may tell us whether it was that or suicide, but either way the guy died from stress and fear, and that's a sad thing - even if he did deserve to die in jail from old age.
What does a DVD burner cost these days? $20 more than a DVD reader, or maybe less? On a $200 machine, maybe it should be optional, but on a $900 machine, it really should have been standard issue. Students need to do backups, and if they're doing much of anything with video, they need to burn DVDs, not just CD-ROMs.
Is this a lot cuter and more compact than a 17" LCD plus a $200 desktop? Sure, but for a school on a budget I'd probably still go with the desktop version, and maybe see about putting multiple graphics cards in it to support multiple users, and definitely evaluate using CRTs instead of LCDs just for the price difference.
If your working environment is clumsy and non-responsive, the problem isn't your hardware, it's your operating system - you need a decent scheduler, window system, and maybe kernel. You do obviously need enough RAM to run the applications that depend on RAM, but if you're needing to fix your responsiveness by throwing dual-core hardware at your problem, your real problem is the OS. Now, you may *like* the toys that your OS gives you and be willing to throw hardware and money into responsiveness rather than get a decent OS, but that's a personal preference thing.
Slowness is a different problem than non-responsiveness; if you're trying to do more work than you've got horsepower for, then throwing more horsepower at it should help. And that dual-core processor may be more cost-effective than buying the equivalent horsepower as a faster single-thread CPU, or may use less electricity (which is especially useful for laptops.) And of course your laptop or desktop was already a multi-processor machine, with a separate CPU for graphics (though PDAs mostly ran everything on the main CPU the last time I checked) - graphics is sufficiently specialized that it's a lot cheaper to buy horsepower tuned specifically for that than to use general-purpose CPUs.
So back when I was an undergrad at Cornell, we really did have to walk uphill both ways in the snow, and F0rtran was still only Watf0r...
Sure, it's nice to have a laptop instead of hauling a desktop, but back when I was an undergrad, even a low-end stereo system was bigger than most current desktop machines, but after first semester, books outweighed any electronics I might have owned.
The computer, of course, was a mainframe that lived off-campus and you negotiated with it with punchcards, or in later years paper terminals; instead of laptops we had programmable calculators (or non-programmable ones, or sliderules) and either portable or not-really-portable typewriters. I did have one housemate senior year who had a KIM-1 microcomputer. And some grad students or researchy undergrads, mainly physicists or chemists, had access to labs with PDP-11s in them, so they could do real work themselves.
So year, that laptop with the built-in CD player and the wireless access that lets you work anywhere on or near campus that has coffee or beer is a definite luxury. (Of course, we were allowed to have beer on campus, unlike kids these days...) [geezer-mode] You punk kids, get off my LAN.... [/geezer-mode]
This wouldn't be paying the Nigerians for new carvings - this would be paying Shiver MeTimbers for the carving he scammed out of the Nigerian scammer. Of course, it's hard to do that without some risk of having his name and location exposed to the scammer:-)
As other people have commented, there's no way to tell whether the real woodcarver was paid a standard local wage for his work, or paid less or nothing with a promise that he'd be paid when the mugu paid the scammer. If *I* were a local artist in Nigeria, I'd probably want to take cash upfront rather than trusting somebody in the 419 business to pay me later. Certainly the real wage would be a lot less than the scammer hoped to receive - it was probably less than the FedEx bill. You can't ask the real artist, because there's no way to know that the person you're talking to who _claims_ to be the real artist isn't the scammer, but there's some hope.
Many of us didn't notice that it was a different country because the articles is down, dead, slashdotted, digged, farked, and shuffled off this mortal coil, etc., so we haven't actually read it.
But the Nigerian scammers long ago realized that people had heard about Nigerian scams, so they started claiming to be from Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, South Africa, Benin, and a variety of other African countries, and that doesn't even count the ones pretending to be from Netherlands or UK. Some of them are operating from Nigeria, so they're probably Nigerians; many are from cybercafes in Netherlands or free email servers in ZA, so they might or might not be actual Nigerians, but it's still the Nigerian 419 scam even of they're not. Also, Cote d'Ivoire was a French colony and Nigeria was a British colony, so the Nigerians are more likely to have the language skills to scam English-speakers.
China even had a war with Britain over that kind of issue.... Both sides were wrong in that one, with governments trying to control people's lives and force or ban trade, rather like the US wars on politically-incorrect drugs. This time it's politically-incorrect speech that China's trying to ban.
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But if I were a gamer with a 2-3-year-old machine and wanted better performance, would it make sense to by a whole new PC, or would adding a new graphics card be good enough? Or would I be in one of those traps where AGX just doesn't cut it and I'd need to buy a new motherboard with PCI-X, and oh, by the way, that motherboard needs faster RAM so I can't reuse my current stuff, in which case I should just buy a new machine and give the old one to my sister's kids? How long will it be before I should junk my 2x120GB IDE disks for SATA (SATA's probably a better choice for new machines, but I'm not running a big commercial web server here, I'm mostly browsing and playing MP3s.)
The first time I heard an Emergency Broadcast System announcement on a car radio at ~9 at night that said "This is not a test." it scared the crap out of me - after growing up during the Cold War, learning all through school that the EBS warning meant we should get down under our desks and kiss our asses goodbye, and working in a radio station where we did the EBS test at some regular weekly timeslot like Tuesdays at noon, it was really a surprise to find out that they were now using it for actual localized emergencies (this one was a flood warning) rather than Global Thermonuclear War. I think there was still a Soviet Union at the time, or at least large remnants of one, but there hadn't been any sabre-rattling going on in the news that would have made an attack likely.
It's pretty straightforward - Yellow is "Wolf Wolf Wolf!", orange is "Wolf wolf wolf wolf!" .
Sometimes when rules get made by the Supreme Court they stick around for a while. Most other rules aren't very solid.
It's from the Department of Homeland Security, whose two main jobs are keeping the American public afraid while reassuring everybody that Big Daddy Government will take care of them if they just give up a bit more of their civil liberties and taking away our civil liberties. Of *course* it'll be used for propaganda - even if there's a real emergency. Even the fact that they want to deploy it in the first place is propaganda.
If there's a broadcast channel that can be used for this application, that's at least technically realistic, if not socially.
At home I don't have as much problem with complexity, though I'm on a number of occasionally-voluminous mailing lists, and spam is a lot more trouble. Part of that is because my ISPs aren't as aggressive, compared to my work mailadmins who have a much narrower set of recipients and common senders, but also that's because I manage a couple of small mailing lists, and even though we switched to subscribers-only a couple of years ago, as the admin I get to see all the bounces and deal with the occasional "Bob sent this from his work email instead of home, better add bob@work to the whitelist" mixed in with the hundreds of "Can't deliver mail to nonexistent user fakename@free-email.example.net" mailer-daemon responses to the "Hi, you've reached majordomo@example.com, here's how to subscribe" autoresponses and the dozens of bouncegrams a week when mail for somebody can't be delivered, or gets stalled too long by a greylister or whatever.
There are a wide range of problems for which Shortest Job First is optimal. This is not one of them. (There are also a wide range of problems for which Longest Whatever First is optimal, e.g. bin-packing, stock-cutting, etc.) If all the jobs have equal importance, and none of them have deadlines, and the jobs are independent of each other, then Shortest Job First is generally optimal for most objective functions.
- But if Job J depends on Job H, then even if Job J is much shorter, you can't do it first.
- Or if Job J is *more important* than Job K, depending on how you weight importance, it might make sense to do Job J first even if it's longer - or it might not.
- Or if Job J *has* to be done by a certain deadline, and Job L has a later deadline, it might make sense to do Job J earlier even if it's longer, or it might not, and you might even need to bump Job B to make room for Job J, and sometimes this depends on whether your objective function measures only whether a job is late or also *how* late it is. Mechanical systems often have hard deadlines; economic ones usually don't.
- If jobs are *preemptible*, then there's another whole raft of solutions like "Shortest remaining time left", and issues about what preemption costs, how granular it is, etc.
- And of course, if there are multiple resources required (e.g. CPU time, disk I/O quantity, rotation and seek latency, etc., it gets a lot more complicated - Shortest Job for the CPU might not be Shortest Job for the disk, and there are different ways to balance such things.
In this case, "responsiveness" is a user-perception issue, and depends on some sets of tasks that the user cares about, like mouse motion and cursor jumping and pixels getting tweaked on the screen, and it tends to be more important than many other tasks like crunching numbers or looking up data in databases, though other external activities may require certain response times, e.g. network protocol timeouts.I agree with you that a dual-core processor can often make up for a Bad Scheduler Algorithm (though it complicates the math significantly...) - but the right thing to do with bad schedulers is Don't Use Them - get a better scheduler (even if it means dumping Windows :-). I haven't tested the Preemptive Kernel mods that came in between 2.4.x and 2.6.x, but the general comments have been that responsiveness improved substantially, because interactive tasks can get done without having long waits for kernel activities to finish.
Back when I last needed it (mid-late 80s working on air-traffic control and NASA projects), it would have been really nice to have a Hard Real-time Unix version that was POSIX version N+1 compatible, POSIX real-time compatible, B1 or B2 secure, commercial-off-the-shelf, and ran Ada - even the parts that weren't pipe-dreams if you wanted them individually were definitely bogus if you wanted them all at once on the same platform. We're getting a lot closer, partly because if Moore's Law makes the computer 2-3 orders of magnitude faster with 1-2 orders of magnitude more RAM, even a bad scheduler gets a lot closer to the performance you need. But some things are still slow, like mechanical disk drives. Sure, they're a lot bigger, and the throughput rate is much faster, but even a 15000rpm drive still takes ~3ms to rotate once, and if you've only got 1ms to respond, that means you still can't use a disk except to fill and backup a memory cache.
Oh, come on, of course it's a whimper. It goes from YES to yeah to probably to maybe to no, I guess not. Leave aside the question of whether it really *was* the greatest thing since sliced bits, it's definitely done the Cosmic Wimpout.
Will this reach everybody? No - as other people have commented, there are lots of areas without much infrastructure, and small non-touristy islands are at high risk, but the number of places that have some kind of TV in a bar is huge, and in places with government-run TV, they probably monitor CNN and Star to know what else is happening even if they're not broadcasting it.
And by now, 90% of the world knows who won the World's Cup...
My wife grew up in Hawaii and California, so while I was learning things in elementary school about "that's the local volunteer fire department siren" and "if the CONELRAD Alert says the Russians are attacking, hide under the desk and kiss your ass goodbye", she was learning things like "that's the tsunami warning siren, if it goes off Run Uphill", and "if there's an earthquake, go stand in the doorway where the ceiling won't fall on you." First decent-sized earthquake after we moved to California, she went over to the doorway and yelled at me for not knowing to do the same thing, but I was just as clueless about that as I was about what the Granny Goose commercials on TV were trying to sell.
When Hurricane Iniki trashed Kauai in 1992, about 6 people were killed, 1400 homes destroyed, and 5000 seriously damaged, but there was enough advance preparation that most people were safe; that's the sort of thing that happens when you've got useful local management, and back in those days FEMA had just been dealing with Hurricane Andrew so they had a warmup round, and they were much stronger politically as opposed to being a dumping ground for Bush the Younger's less competent friends.
I used to work in a large glass box with 6000 other people. We had four or five softball leagues (ranging from highly competitive to strongly beer-oriented), and during the summer each team would get in about 10 games. I miss it - virtual offices and commuter jobs don't give you the same opportunities. But if you live near a park somewhere, you'll probably find that there are people playing soccer on the weekends, either organized or not, and if you're in the burbs you'll probably find that _somebody_ is scheduling most of the local baseball fields every night during the season. You might have to go out and interact with real people to join in - there's this thing called "community" that used to exist before we all burned out during the 90s boom... Even small-medium startup companies can usually get pickup basketball going (not that I've ever had the speed to survive a game of basketball), or if nothing else you can play Frisbee with other people.
If you're not out on the field running around, you're not playing anything resembling the real game. Back when I was in college, I played intramural football - if you're playing offensive line, the big difference between touch football and tackle football is that you don't get to wear pads in touch football :-) That was sort of like the real thing, and my fairly geeky house always ended up playing against jocks who could stomp us into the ground, but it was still fun. A video game that doesn't involve running around out of breath, physically throwing and catching the ball with your actual arms and back, and banging into people might still let you have fun with your buddies and talk about strategy, but it's no more like the real thing than playing fantasy football while drinking beer with your buddies.
If they want to be racist about who they send money to in non-Arabic countries, that's just the usual level of offensiveness and stupidity that goes with racism - but this is egregiously stupid racism.
Of course, if they start refusing to send money to people in the US with Muslim sounding names, they're going to find a Million Man March of Black Muslims in front of their headquarters.
The real problem is that if you propagate her memes, she wins...
There were almost _no_ terrorists in Iraq before the US invasion - Saddam Hussein didn't like anybody who might be a threat to his power. When the US invaded, lots of people started fighting back, but fighting against an invading army isn't terrorism, it's just resistance. After the US invaded, a number of foreign terrorists decided that helping the Iraqi resistance was a good way to fight their enemy, the US, and Saddam was no longer there to keep them away, so there are now some terrorists in Iraq, but not a lot.
There weren't a lot of terrorists in Afghanistan, either, though there were more than Iraq. The Taliban weren't terrorists - Afghanistan was a conflict zone between a bunch of warlords, and the Taliban were a warlord gang that were a bit more religiously ideological than some of their competition, and they mostly won the civil war and became what passed for a central government - the US even gave them ~$43million to thank them for their suppression of the opium growers. They did have some ideological alignment with the Al Qaeda terrorists, and allowed them to operate, but they weren't terrorists, just hardliners. And Afghanistan was also chaotic enough that it was easy for Al Qaeda to operate there, especially since bin Laden spent a lot of money on public infrastructure. The US attack on Al Qaeda may have been reasonable; the US attack on the Taliban was not very reasonable, and their continued attack against Taliban and holding of Taliban prisoners in Gitmo after the defeat of the Taliban government is extremely unreasonable. It's pretty much like the British not only bombing Massachusetts because the IRA raised funds there, but continuing to hunt down and kill any Democrats they can find after the fall of Kennedyism.
Some of the people that the US is attacking in Afghanistan are terrorists, but they're mostly Taliban holdouts, or other locals who aren't cooperating with Karzai's central government.
I no longer consider 64 to be that old, given both the progress of modern medicine and the fact that I'm now 50 (:-), but it's old enough that when you've spent a few years riding a high-risk company down the tubes and another few years of trials, been convicted, and you're about to be given a sentence of "Die in Jail, Loser", it's gotta be pretty stressful, and a heart attack is no surprise. Autopsy may tell us whether it was that or suicide, but either way the guy died from stress and fear, and that's a sad thing - even if he did deserve to die in jail from old age.
Is this a lot cuter and more compact than a 17" LCD plus a $200 desktop? Sure, but for a school on a budget I'd probably still go with the desktop version, and maybe see about putting multiple graphics cards in it to support multiple users, and definitely evaluate using CRTs instead of LCDs just for the price difference.
Slowness is a different problem than non-responsiveness; if you're trying to do more work than you've got horsepower for, then throwing more horsepower at it should help. And that dual-core processor may be more cost-effective than buying the equivalent horsepower as a faster single-thread CPU, or may use less electricity (which is especially useful for laptops.) And of course your laptop or desktop was already a multi-processor machine, with a separate CPU for graphics (though PDAs mostly ran everything on the main CPU the last time I checked) - graphics is sufficiently specialized that it's a lot cheaper to buy horsepower tuned specifically for that than to use general-purpose CPUs.
Sure, it's nice to have a laptop instead of hauling a desktop, but back when I was an undergrad, even a low-end stereo system was bigger than most current desktop machines, but after first semester, books outweighed any electronics I might have owned.
The computer, of course, was a mainframe that lived off-campus and you negotiated with it with punchcards, or in later years paper terminals; instead of laptops we had programmable calculators (or non-programmable ones, or sliderules) and either portable or not-really-portable typewriters. I did have one housemate senior year who had a KIM-1 microcomputer. And some grad students or researchy undergrads, mainly physicists or chemists, had access to labs with PDP-11s in them, so they could do real work themselves.
So year, that laptop with the built-in CD player and the wireless access that lets you work anywhere on or near campus that has coffee or beer is a definite luxury. (Of course, we were allowed to have beer on campus, unlike kids these days...) [geezer-mode] You punk kids, get off my LAN.... [/geezer-mode]
As other people have commented, there's no way to tell whether the real woodcarver was paid a standard local wage for his work, or paid less or nothing with a promise that he'd be paid when the mugu paid the scammer. If *I* were a local artist in Nigeria, I'd probably want to take cash upfront rather than trusting somebody in the 419 business to pay me later. Certainly the real wage would be a lot less than the scammer hoped to receive - it was probably less than the FedEx bill. You can't ask the real artist, because there's no way to know that the person you're talking to who _claims_ to be the real artist isn't the scammer, but there's some hope.
But the Nigerian scammers long ago realized that people had heard about Nigerian scams, so they started claiming to be from Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, South Africa, Benin, and a variety of other African countries, and that doesn't even count the ones pretending to be from Netherlands or UK. Some of them are operating from Nigeria, so they're probably Nigerians; many are from cybercafes in Netherlands or free email servers in ZA, so they might or might not be actual Nigerians, but it's still the Nigerian 419 scam even of they're not. Also, Cote d'Ivoire was a French colony and Nigeria was a British colony, so the Nigerians are more likely to have the language skills to scam English-speakers.
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Besides, even old people in Korea get gigabit access in their cybercafes these days :-)
Unless they're doing better than average, they'll be stuck with the stereotype that their coffee is as bad as American beer....
China even had a war with Britain over that kind of issue.... Both sides were wrong in that one, with governments trying to control people's lives and force or ban trade, rather like the US wars on politically-incorrect drugs. This time it's politically-incorrect speech that China's trying to ban.