... if AMD/ATI actually carries through. I plan to put together a high end box this summer, and was planning to get an Nvidia card as their closed source Linux drivers suck a little less than ATI's closed source drivers. But if AMD actually has open source drivers for their high end cards by then I'll buy AMD. I don't care if Nvidia's comparable card gets 15% higher FPS.
Windows users will whine and gripe about it, but they will eventually have to go through the same stuff the *nix crowd did along time ago when people were logged in with root 24/7.
When was this mythical time? In the elder days of Unix the users were hackers at places like Bell Labs and Berkeley and knew better than to run as root when they didn't need to. By the time others started using it, the convention was established -- you don't run as root. The only cases I can think of that made root the default were a few misguided attempts at "user friendliness" for Linux such as Lindows, and they were properly flamed for it.
Just put the mercury in your teeth.
We are assured by the American Dental Association that this is the one safe place to put what the EPA
says is a highly toxic metal.
Practical fusion power is always 20 years from the present. That was true 40 years ago, it is true today, and will be true 40 years from now. This is a little known consequence of general relativity.
Every time a news of shooting breaks out, I always wonder why the possession of firearms is not banned entirely in this country.
Well, first of all there's that pesky 2nd amendment. The people who signed off on it weren't
interested in duck hunting, they'd just won their independence from Great Britain because they had
guns. They saw firearm ownership as a bulwark against tyranny. Many Americans still think that way. If that seems foreign to you, you probably trust your government, an attitude that would seem peculiar to many Americans.
Washington D.C. has some of the country's strictest gun control laws, yet that city is pretty
much a free fire zone. There's nothing
like telling criminals that their victims don't have guns to encourage crime.
When people live in a country like Japan where it's almost impossible to get a gun, they resort to
other means of destruction, like
home made nerve gas.
Every time news of a poisoning breaks out, I wonder why chemicals aren't banned entirely in this country.
In all fairness the Democrats have been just as willing as the Republicans to annihilate the middle class.
Both parties believe that any job that can't be outsourced to Mexico, India, or China, should instead have its employees be insourced from Mexico, India, or China. Leaving any jobs for American citizens is so 1960s. The Democrats tax and spend, the Republicans borrow and spend. Both parties are eager to bankrupt this country. The Republicans deserve most of the blame for the Iraq War and the Orwellian named Patriot Act, but insufficiently many Democrats will take stands against them to reverse those policies. Both parties suck on the intellectual property issue, but frankly, that issue is well down on my list of concerns. I could live my life just fine without any Hollywood produced content at all.
I will be voting for Ron Paul, the last real American left in Congress.
It is obvious that those Doom9 guys are having loads of fun. If they get more enjoyment out of cracking the DRM than from watching the idiot movies, why shouldn't they just crack to their heart's content?
Will my pension fund go bust because my employer borrowed from it?
What pension fund? One of the major changes over the past 30 years is that it is no longer the norm
for middle class people in the private sector to get defined benefit pensions. They have damn good reasons to feel anxious about the future. And if you think your 401k plan is going to compensate for that you were either very lucky in your investments or are very naive in your expectations. The very reason companies were so eager to ditch pensions and replace them with 401k plans was because it saved them a lot of money. That savings had to come from somewhere. It came from what you'll have to live on in your 70s and 80s (and forget about retiring in your 60s).
As others have pointed out, no modern national currency is backed by gold, or any other tangible good.
Now that there is nothing at all constraining governments' ability to debauch their currencies,
everybody now thinks that constant, ongoing, year after year inflation is normal. The U.S.
dollar today is worth what 20 cents was worth in 1971, the year the United States went off the last
vestiges of the gold standard.
The dollar is only valuable because people think it's valuable. Of course the same is largely true for
gold. (Gold has some uses in industry due to its good conductivity and excellent corrosion
resistance, but those uses utilize a tiny fraction of the above ground stores.) The real difference is that dollars can be produced by the billions with the push
of a button (you don't even need dead trees any more, because most dollars are just bits on a hard drive) while gold supplies can only be
increased by mining with great effort and expense. I have no idea whether an ounce of gold will
buy more or fewer useful goods and services 20 years from now than it does today.
I am absolutely certain that the purchasing power of a dollar will be less, much less.
Ron Paul is a Republican. That is his party affiliation. Yes, he is very different from the
neocons, and that's a good thing. It is also probably fair to say that he chose the "Republican" label simply because it's almost impossible for independents or third party candidates to get elected to Congress. But then, that could probably be said about a lot of politicians. And he currently has a presidential exploratory committee, so you may well be able to vote for him in 2008, even if you're not in his district.
Plenty of Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. If you really care about the Constitution, you
should vote Republican -- so long as that Republican is Ron Paul.
Take an old, dusty patent that isn't doing anyone any harm, and then give it to an entrepreneur who now has an incentive to sue anyone else whose product violates the patent.
The only reason it's possible to do business in the United States at all is because 90% of patents are left lying in a drawer rather than being rigorously enforced.
This is just common sense -- there's no reason why Chinese, Greeks, and Russians should have to use a character set meant for the English language. But any given URL should have a language associated with it and any character in that URL not associated with its language should be color coded. So English language URLs would get "omicron" flagged while Greek URLs would get "O" flagged. The "default" language could be English so that existing URLs are unchanged, for other languages their ISO code could precede the URL.
Now this particular scheme might have some fatal flaw but something similar ought to be workable.
"The government, which says it has inherent constitutional powers to wiretap in the time of war..."
The government is saying that being in a war overrides the fourth amendment. But America is an empire now, and is always in a state of war. That is especially so when it's not a "War on Germany" or a "War on North Vietnam" but a "War on Terror". "Terror" is a tactic, and will never be defeated. So the government has given us notice that the fourth amendment is a dead letter.
Liberals never complained when the 9th and 10th amendments became dead letters. They eagerly seek the same fate for the 2nd. They see that as progress. Well now the amendments they like (the 1st, 4th, and 5th) are under attack. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Yes, but that dataflow isn't accessible at the programmer level. To a programmer, its just a sequential processor. I'm talking about parallel architectures that are visible to the programmer.
There are basically two models of parallelism that are used in practice. One is the Multiple Instruction Multiple Data model, in which you write threaded code with mutexes and and the like for synchronization. The other is Single Instruction Multiple Data, in which you write code that operates on vectors of data in parallel, doing pretty much the same thing on each piece of data. (There are other models of parallelism, like dataflow machines, but they don't have much traction in real life.) Multicore CPUs are MIMD machines, GPUs are SIMD machines. All those other processors -- physics processors, video processors, etc. are just SIMD machines too, which is why Nvidia and ATI could announce that their processors will do physics too, and why folding@home works so well on the new ATI cards. So I suspect that in real life there will be just two types of processors. At least I hope that is the case, because it will be a real mess if application A requires processors X, Y, and Z while application B requires processors X, Q, and T.
It's not the fact that the decryption key is known and distributed. It's the fact that muslix64's program is capable of decrypting a copyrighted work without permission. That's a violation of the DMCA.
In that case, any general purpose PC is in violation of the DMCA. muslix64's program can't decrypt a copyrighted work unless a player (or title) key is provided. So apparently you are saying it's a violation of the DMCA to have a device that could do the decryption provided that the
right key is provided. In that case let device = "general purpose PC", and let key = "player key + HDDVDBackup code". Thus a PC is a device that could do the decryption with the right key, so it illegal by your reasoning.
A super rich capitalist wants to increase his profits by importing more cheap labor.
It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire
American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with
the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."
Even if the judge never sent sensitive court material through e-mail, you can bet he types up his
snail mail letters on his computer. Nobody uses typewriters anymore. Those letters could still be
viewed by the hacker voyeur.
Slashdot Mirror
... if AMD/ATI actually carries through. I plan to put together a high end box this summer, and was planning to get an Nvidia card as their closed source Linux drivers suck a little less than ATI's closed source drivers. But if AMD actually has open source drivers for their high end cards by then I'll buy AMD. I don't care if Nvidia's comparable card gets 15% higher FPS.
Windows users will whine and gripe about it, but they will eventually have to go through the same stuff the *nix crowd did along time ago when people were logged in with root 24/7.
When was this mythical time? In the elder days of Unix the users were hackers at places like Bell Labs and Berkeley and knew better than to run as root when they didn't need to. By the time others started using it, the convention was established -- you don't run as root. The only cases I can think of that made root the default were a few misguided attempts at "user friendliness" for Linux such as Lindows, and they were properly flamed for it.
I hope there's not too much duplication with the Tree of Life.
Just put the mercury in your teeth. We are assured by the American Dental Association that this is the one safe place to put what the EPA says is a highly toxic metal.
Practical fusion power is always 20 years from the present. That was true 40 years ago, it is true today, and will be true 40 years from now. This is a little known consequence of general relativity.
Every time a news of shooting breaks out, I always wonder why the possession of firearms is not banned entirely in this country.
Well, first of all there's that pesky 2nd amendment. The people who signed off on it weren't interested in duck hunting, they'd just won their independence from Great Britain because they had guns. They saw firearm ownership as a bulwark against tyranny. Many Americans still think that way. If that seems foreign to you, you probably trust your government, an attitude that would seem peculiar to many Americans.
Washington D.C. has some of the country's strictest gun control laws, yet that city is pretty much a free fire zone. There's nothing like telling criminals that their victims don't have guns to encourage crime.
When people live in a country like Japan where it's almost impossible to get a gun, they resort to other means of destruction, like home made nerve gas. Every time news of a poisoning breaks out, I wonder why chemicals aren't banned entirely in this country.
In all fairness the Democrats have been just as willing as the Republicans to annihilate the middle class. Both parties believe that any job that can't be outsourced to Mexico, India, or China, should instead have its employees be insourced from Mexico, India, or China. Leaving any jobs for American citizens is so 1960s. The Democrats tax and spend, the Republicans borrow and spend. Both parties are eager to bankrupt this country. The Republicans deserve most of the blame for the Iraq War and the Orwellian named Patriot Act, but insufficiently many Democrats will take stands against them to reverse those policies. Both parties suck on the intellectual property issue, but frankly, that issue is well down on my list of concerns. I could live my life just fine without any Hollywood produced content at all.
I will be voting for Ron Paul, the last real American left in Congress.
PJ is really a lawyer working for AMD.
It is obvious that those Doom9 guys are having loads of fun. If they get more enjoyment out of cracking the DRM than from watching the idiot movies, why shouldn't they just crack to their heart's content?
Will my pension fund go bust because my employer borrowed from it?
What pension fund? One of the major changes over the past 30 years is that it is no longer the norm for middle class people in the private sector to get defined benefit pensions. They have damn good reasons to feel anxious about the future. And if you think your 401k plan is going to compensate for that you were either very lucky in your investments or are very naive in your expectations. The very reason companies were so eager to ditch pensions and replace them with 401k plans was because it saved them a lot of money. That savings had to come from somewhere. It came from what you'll have to live on in your 70s and 80s (and forget about retiring in your 60s).
I would still allow outsourcing, but just subject it to the following condition:
Before you can outsource any other job, you must first
1. Outsource the CEO.
2. Outsource the CFO.
3. Outsource the CTO.
4. Outsource the company president.
5. Outsource all vice presidents.
Because these tend to be the most overpaid people, this law would have the advantage of creating maximum value for share holders.
Thanks a lot, Congress. I hope your corporate masters paid you well, because they sure as heck aren't paying us.
The x86 instruction set will be retired in the same year as the QWERTY keyboard layout.
As others have pointed out, no modern national currency is backed by gold, or any other tangible good. Now that there is nothing at all constraining governments' ability to debauch their currencies, everybody now thinks that constant, ongoing, year after year inflation is normal. The U.S. dollar today is worth what 20 cents was worth in 1971, the year the United States went off the last vestiges of the gold standard.
The dollar is only valuable because people think it's valuable. Of course the same is largely true for gold. (Gold has some uses in industry due to its good conductivity and excellent corrosion resistance, but those uses utilize a tiny fraction of the above ground stores.) The real difference is that dollars can be produced by the billions with the push of a button (you don't even need dead trees any more, because most dollars are just bits on a hard drive) while gold supplies can only be increased by mining with great effort and expense. I have no idea whether an ounce of gold will buy more or fewer useful goods and services 20 years from now than it does today. I am absolutely certain that the purchasing power of a dollar will be less, much less.
Ron Paul is a Republican. That is his party affiliation. Yes, he is very different from the neocons, and that's a good thing. It is also probably fair to say that he chose the "Republican" label simply because it's almost impossible for independents or third party candidates to get elected to Congress. But then, that could probably be said about a lot of politicians. And he currently has a presidential exploratory committee, so you may well be able to vote for him in 2008, even if you're not in his district.
Plenty of Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. If you really care about the Constitution, you should vote Republican -- so long as that Republican is Ron Paul.
At last, America is a technical leader again!
Take an old, dusty patent that isn't doing anyone any harm, and then give it to an entrepreneur who now has an incentive to sue anyone else whose product violates the patent.
The only reason it's possible to do business in the United States at all is because 90% of patents are left lying in a drawer rather than being rigorously enforced.
This is just common sense -- there's no reason why Chinese, Greeks, and Russians should have to use a character set meant for the English language. But any given URL should have a language associated with it and any character in that URL not associated with its language should be color coded. So English language URLs would get "omicron" flagged while Greek URLs would get "O" flagged. The "default" language could be English so that existing URLs are unchanged, for other languages their ISO code could precede the URL. Now this particular scheme might have some fatal flaw but something similar ought to be workable.
"The government, which says it has inherent constitutional powers to wiretap in the time of war..."
The government is saying that being in a war overrides the fourth amendment. But America is an empire now, and is always in a state of war. That is especially so when it's not a "War on Germany" or a "War on North Vietnam" but a "War on Terror". "Terror" is a tactic, and will never be defeated. So the government has given us notice that the fourth amendment is a dead letter.
Liberals never complained when the 9th and 10th amendments became dead letters. They eagerly seek the same fate for the 2nd. They see that as progress. Well now the amendments they like (the 1st, 4th, and 5th) are under attack. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Yes, but that dataflow isn't accessible at the programmer level. To a programmer, its just a sequential processor. I'm talking about parallel architectures that are visible to the programmer.
There are basically two models of parallelism that are used in practice. One is the Multiple Instruction Multiple Data model, in which you write threaded code with mutexes and and the like for synchronization. The other is Single Instruction Multiple Data, in which you write code that operates on vectors of data in parallel, doing pretty much the same thing on each piece of data. (There are other models of parallelism, like dataflow machines, but they don't have much traction in real life.) Multicore CPUs are MIMD machines, GPUs are SIMD machines. All those other processors -- physics processors, video processors, etc. are just SIMD machines too, which is why Nvidia and ATI could announce that their processors will do physics too, and why folding@home works so well on the new ATI cards. So I suspect that in real life there will be just two types of processors. At least I hope that is the case, because it will be a real mess if application A requires processors X, Y, and Z while application B requires processors X, Q, and T.
In that case, any general purpose PC is in violation of the DMCA. muslix64's program can't decrypt a copyrighted work unless a player (or title) key is provided. So apparently you are saying it's a violation of the DMCA to have a device that could do the decryption provided that the right key is provided. In that case let device = "general purpose PC", and let key = "player key + HDDVDBackup code". Thus a PC is a device that could do the decryption with the right key, so it illegal by your reasoning.
A super rich capitalist wants to increase his profits by importing more cheap labor.
It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."
Even if the judge never sent sensitive court material through e-mail, you can bet he types up his snail mail letters on his computer. Nobody uses typewriters anymore. Those letters could still be viewed by the hacker voyeur.