I doubt these protestors have the sophistication or the awareness to see through the bullshit and understand what they're actually opposing. Unfortunately, they are likely to be useful idiots, pawns on someone's great chessboard. That's generally the problem when you have blind, stupid, unfocused rage that lacks understanding and a strong sense of constructive purpose.
Thank you, glad someone gets this concept. This is why revolutions fail. Even if a revolution should succeed in overthrowing the institution against which it revolted, and even if the old aristocracy is actually killed off, the fundamental ideas which gave rise to those very institutions, and allowed that very aristocracy to assume such power, are so deeply engrained in the psyches of the revolutionaries that they erect new institutions that share the same systemic flaws that allow the same type of scum to rise to the top. "Hurray, the government is no more! All hail the government!"
This can be seen more regularly, on a smaller scale, by simply observing regular elections. Every four years, the public is presented with a new handful of politicians, all promising to right the ills of the nation, to end the mistakes of the previous politician, and to lead us all to a fanciful utopian future. And every four years, millions go out and vote for one of these politicians, fervently believing that this time it will be different, this time the system will work. Despite all available historical evidence, they believe that by voting in the "right" candidate, all will be remedied. Rarely do they consider that the system itself could be not only flawed, but systemically unworkable, and that by agreeing to participate in the democratic process, they sanction the results of that process. "It's not the system that is flawed, it is the people running it" they think. The same holds true of revolutions. "It's not the concept of sovereign government that is flawed, it is the specific implementation." To use a technical analogy, it's like finding out that WPA is a flawed encryption protocol, and your solution is to switch from a Linksys AP to a DLink.
First mobster: Hey, they's throwin' robots!
Linguo: They are throwing robots.
Second mobster: It's disrespecting us. Shut up a'you face.
Linguo: Shut up your face.
Second mobster: Whatsa' matta you?
First mobster: You ain't so big.
Second mobster: Me an' him are gonna' whack you in the labonza.
Linguo: Mmmm... AAH!... bad grammar overload. Error. Error.
WhisperCore is nice, basically uses the same approach as honeycomb. On capable devices, it uses dm-crypt to encrypt the mmc block devices, and they also have WhisperYAFFS (now GPL'd, I believe) for use on other devices.
I'd like to add this functionality to other ROMs like CM, but time forbids lately. However, since Honeycomb supports full disk encryption, and the tablet/phone forks are supposed to merge in the next major version, full disk encryption should be available for both Android phones and tablets soon.
No thanks, I'd rather make out with my Monrobot...
They're giving out the minor technical awards. I think they're up to "writing".
That just leaves "Best Actor" and "Best Soft Drink Product Placement!"
Seriously, though, how many Futurama references can we come up with for this one? I can think of a half-dozen Calculon references off the top of my head.
PS2 emulation is coming right along. PCSX2 just released a new stable build at the beginning of the month, and something like 65% of games are supposed to be playable. Yes, it takes a bit beefier machine to run than an old N64 emulator, but it works well on any recent machine with a decent GPU. My Core2Duo E8400 with an 8800GTX has no problems, and it's hardly cutting edge these days.
Sony's a late entrant to a market for playing its own games on mobile. fpseCE has been available on WinMo forever, and has just been ported to android. Android already had psx4droid (even though it was slow, buggy, incompatible, the fps counter was bs, etc.) for quite some time. fpse plays all the original psx games (you know, the ones you already have, already paid for years ago, and don't feel like paying for again?), it's fast, compatible, looks great, and runs on ANY android phone. By releasing a specific phone to run Sony's "official" psx emulator, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Even the gamepad will soon have limited appeal, as there are already several projects out there to make a good universal bluetooth pad for smartphones (I myself am actually working on a slide-out gamepad to clip onto the back of my G2, and am currently just waiting to have spare cash to buy some parts).
So, Sony can go ahead and put out an entire phone for a niche market (that phone, by the way, has almost identical specs to the HTC Desire Z/G2 that has been out for many months, but with gamepad instead of keyboard), while independent devs continue to make universal apps that do the same thing on ANY reasonably powerful phone, with no DRM (not announced for the Sony system, but knowing Sony, you can bet your shiny metal ass it'll be in there). Guess which strategy will pay off?
Couple problems here. First, we're talking about mobile devices here. Yes, you can get a 32GB microSD for your phone, but it's expensive, and most people aren't going to have one yet. Fat binaries would take much more space on the memory card, and more bandwidth to download (watch those caps!), which makes it infeasible. As to having the app store give you a binary for a specific hardware setup, that would be asking thousands of tiny, independent app developers to try to maintain and compile their code for that same array of architectures, which would likely be sufficiently problematic that many of them would simply stop developing, or would only target their preferred architectures, further fragmenting the app market.
You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
If government is necessary to enforce private property rights, and those rights are essentially contractual arrangements to transfer property from one owner to another, then why is it not necessary to establish a meta-government to enforce the "social contract" which establishes the government? And, of course, the meta-meta-government to enforce the meta-government's social contract. And so on...
In what sense is an institution which systematically violates civil and property rights (civil and property rights, incidentally, are the same thing. Civil rights, also called natural rights, are derived from self-ownership of the individual, the same source as property rights) necessary for the protection of those rights?
And incidentally, there are plenty of libertarians who hold precisely the view that the government is not only not necessary, but actually detrimental to the defense of natural rights. Read a little Murray Rothbard for a prominent and particularly well-reasoned example. The minarchist view is readily summed up as follows: we cannot trust the government with aspects of life such as the production of a stable currency, but we can most certainly trust them with our lives and freedoms. How does that make sense?
So, suppose this "methodology" is used to predict a bubble in a particular industry. Suppose that it is wrong. It will still trigger a huge selloff. Suppose, again, that someone using this "methodology" is motivated by personal gain (turns out economists are human, too. Who knew?). Buy low, sell high, as the old adage goes. Well, how better to buy low than to trigger a massive selloff, then swoop in and buy, buy, buy when there is no actual bubble.
I cover this every time the "sweatshop" discussion rears its head, so here we go again. These companies build these "sweatshops" precisely because operating costs, including labor, are cheaper in countries such as China. You can go on and on about how they should pay their workers "fair" wages and provide better working conditions. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that a "fair" wage is whatever the company is offering that the worker is willing to accept. Instead, let's focus on what would happen if these companies were forced, presumably through legal action, to pay workers the same, and provide the same working conditions, as would be required in, say, the US. If that were to occur, there would be zero, absolutely zero, incentive for these companies to open up their "sweatshops" in these countries. Why bother to assemble parts in a poor country at the same cost as assembling them in a rich country, if on top of that cost you then have to export them for sale to places where people can afford them? If that happened, all those workers earning "unfair" wages would have no source of employment at all. Their bare subsistence wages would turn to no wages, and they would starve. So, all these misguided "humanitarians" who cry foul and demand that sweatshops be shut down are actually demanding that the workers in the sweatshops be put out of work and left to rot in the gutter. When the choice is a crappy job and some food in your belly, versus unemployment and destitution, the crappy job is clearly preferable (and to those who don't agree with that sentiment, they are always free to pursue destitution).
Yeah, they don't think much of us Earth-centric monkeys. Hell, the plans to doze Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass have been sitting in their offices for months, and we haven't even bothered to send someone to look them over!
Except that what is, to you, a few false reviews in an ocean of useful ones is, to the businesses impacted by them, everything. It's all fine and well to say that most of the reviews you see on Yelp are legit, and it's just a few unfortunate businesses being unfairly targeted by shady salesfolk, but to the targeted businesses, that's their entire reputation being flushed down the tubes. If Yelp, or rouge members of it's sales staff, are targeting businesses which don't buy advertising, those businesses have every right and reason in the world to seek redress of their grievances.
I can't be bothered to take responsibility for what I eat, and I want the government to do it for me, and everyone else can go along with it.
If you don't want to eat high salt processed foods, don't. If you don't want to eat a meal at a restaurant with an unknown salt content, don't. But don't presume to dictate other people's diets because you can't be bothered to take responsibility for yours. If you want to avoid a particular ingredient in your food, then you are responsible for reading ingredient lists. You are responsible for your own nutrition, and your desire to delegate that responsibility to a third party does not give you the right to delegate responsibility for everyone else.
I've been using 7 since the beta, and have seen absolutely no evidence to support this. I have 8GB RAM, and swap disabled. Running the OS, three VMs (1GB assigned to each), a couple firefox sessions with 20-40 tabs each, a game of Civ4, and an HD movie, I won't come close to maxing out my memory. Divide the available memory in half to 4GB, and assume that most people aren't running VMs with 3+GB memory usage, and the picture painted in TFA appears highly unlikely. Unless they're gauging systems running Win7 with 2GB memory, I call BS. And if they are gauging systems running Win7 with 2GB, then who the hell cares? You can't be surprised when you're running an OS on a machine that barely meets minimum specs and you start to max out the hardware.
Yes, except that means that EVERYONE in the district is forced to pay for the decisions of elected (and non-elected) officials who they did not support. Everyone, including those who voted in opposition, and including non-voting anarchists and anarcho-capitalists. You're not promoting the idea of responsible government, you're reinforcing the (correct, as it happens) notion that government screws you coming and going. That's a lesson I'm already intimately familiar with; I don't need a refresher course courtesy of the ignorant masses.
Fry: "Why's everyone wearing those rings?"
Amy: "Guh! Because nobody wears them anymore! Rings are stupid!"
Fry: "I think they look cool!"
Amy: "Shh, don't let anyone hear you say that!"
Man: "Hey, did that lad just say rings are cool?"
Amy: "No. He said they're stupid."
Man: "Cool!"
Easy way around this: use bannerbomb to install the homebrew channel, then install a cIOS, then install a USB Loader. Rip the Netflix disc to your USB hard drive, and you can load it from the drive (along with all your game backups). Works like a charm for everything else, takes no more time to load than any other channel.
Hell, I'd settle for getting my hands on a 1080p copy of IV, V, and VI without all the Special Edition crap. I'd even settle for getting them on a DVD with anamorphic encoding. Sucks that George Lucas was swapped for a pod person in 1995...
I used to feel the same way, but I'm leaning more and more to thanking those very dumbass execs who canceled it before its time. Everything else I have seen done by Whedon is utter shite. Buffy? About as engrossing as Twilight. Angel? As good as one would expect from a spinoff of a crappy teenage angsty vampire show. And don't get me started on Dollhouse. Four or Five good episodes surrounded by garbage, with an overall plot that seems more schizophrenic than the characters on the show.
Firefly may have been canceled somewhat before it's time, but it went out on a high note. Never a bad episode, no crappy acting or shoddy stories, and it finished up with what I consider to be one of the greats of SciFi cinema. I can't help but think that if Whedon had been allowed to continue for a few more seasons, it would have gone downhill like everything else he's done.
One of my biggest complaints with most shows (American in particular) is that they're never produced to be complete in themselves. Yes, they usually have a main story arc, but the producers tend to drag that arc out as many seasons as they can continue getting the show renewed, rather than planning the show out ahead of time, deciding how long they need to tell the story they came to tell, and creating the show with that in mind. With Firefly, they never had the chance to drag it out ad-nauseum. They had 13 amazing episodes, then instead of being forced to think of a way to drag it out until the ratings fell off, they were forced to think of a way to end it in a way that was just as gripping as the rest of the series.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt these protestors have the sophistication or the awareness to see through the bullshit and understand what they're actually opposing. Unfortunately, they are likely to be useful idiots, pawns on someone's great chessboard. That's generally the problem when you have blind, stupid, unfocused rage that lacks understanding and a strong sense of constructive purpose.
Thank you, glad someone gets this concept. This is why revolutions fail. Even if a revolution should succeed in overthrowing the institution against which it revolted, and even if the old aristocracy is actually killed off, the fundamental ideas which gave rise to those very institutions, and allowed that very aristocracy to assume such power, are so deeply engrained in the psyches of the revolutionaries that they erect new institutions that share the same systemic flaws that allow the same type of scum to rise to the top. "Hurray, the government is no more! All hail the government!"
This can be seen more regularly, on a smaller scale, by simply observing regular elections. Every four years, the public is presented with a new handful of politicians, all promising to right the ills of the nation, to end the mistakes of the previous politician, and to lead us all to a fanciful utopian future. And every four years, millions go out and vote for one of these politicians, fervently believing that this time it will be different, this time the system will work. Despite all available historical evidence, they believe that by voting in the "right" candidate, all will be remedied. Rarely do they consider that the system itself could be not only flawed, but systemically unworkable, and that by agreeing to participate in the democratic process, they sanction the results of that process. "It's not the system that is flawed, it is the people running it" they think. The same holds true of revolutions. "It's not the concept of sovereign government that is flawed, it is the specific implementation." To use a technical analogy, it's like finding out that WPA is a flawed encryption protocol, and your solution is to switch from a Linksys AP to a DLink.
First mobster: Hey, they's throwin' robots!
Linguo: They are throwing robots.
Second mobster: It's disrespecting us. Shut up a'you face.
Linguo: Shut up your face.
Second mobster: Whatsa' matta you?
First mobster: You ain't so big.
Second mobster: Me an' him are gonna' whack you in the labonza.
Linguo: Mmmm... AAH!... bad grammar overload. Error. Error.
Only if they're a virgin.
Remember remember the fifth of November...
WhisperCore is nice, basically uses the same approach as honeycomb. On capable devices, it uses dm-crypt to encrypt the mmc block devices, and they also have WhisperYAFFS (now GPL'd, I believe) for use on other devices.
I'd like to add this functionality to other ROMs like CM, but time forbids lately. However, since Honeycomb supports full disk encryption, and the tablet/phone forks are supposed to merge in the next major version, full disk encryption should be available for both Android phones and tablets soon.
No thanks, I'd rather make out with my Monrobot...
They're giving out the minor technical awards. I think they're up to "writing".
That just leaves "Best Actor" and "Best Soft Drink Product Placement!"
Seriously, though, how many Futurama references can we come up with for this one? I can think of a half-dozen Calculon references off the top of my head.
PS2 emulation is coming right along. PCSX2 just released a new stable build at the beginning of the month, and something like 65% of games are supposed to be playable. Yes, it takes a bit beefier machine to run than an old N64 emulator, but it works well on any recent machine with a decent GPU. My Core2Duo E8400 with an 8800GTX has no problems, and it's hardly cutting edge these days.
Sony's a late entrant to a market for playing its own games on mobile. fpseCE has been available on WinMo forever, and has just been ported to android. Android already had psx4droid (even though it was slow, buggy, incompatible, the fps counter was bs, etc.) for quite some time. fpse plays all the original psx games (you know, the ones you already have, already paid for years ago, and don't feel like paying for again?), it's fast, compatible, looks great, and runs on ANY android phone. By releasing a specific phone to run Sony's "official" psx emulator, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Even the gamepad will soon have limited appeal, as there are already several projects out there to make a good universal bluetooth pad for smartphones (I myself am actually working on a slide-out gamepad to clip onto the back of my G2, and am currently just waiting to have spare cash to buy some parts).
So, Sony can go ahead and put out an entire phone for a niche market (that phone, by the way, has almost identical specs to the HTC Desire Z/G2 that has been out for many months, but with gamepad instead of keyboard), while independent devs continue to make universal apps that do the same thing on ANY reasonably powerful phone, with no DRM (not announced for the Sony system, but knowing Sony, you can bet your shiny metal ass it'll be in there). Guess which strategy will pay off?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY4SU0c1eUk
Couple problems here. First, we're talking about mobile devices here. Yes, you can get a 32GB microSD for your phone, but it's expensive, and most people aren't going to have one yet. Fat binaries would take much more space on the memory card, and more bandwidth to download (watch those caps!), which makes it infeasible. As to having the app store give you a binary for a specific hardware setup, that would be asking thousands of tiny, independent app developers to try to maintain and compile their code for that same array of architectures, which would likely be sufficiently problematic that many of them would simply stop developing, or would only target their preferred architectures, further fragmenting the app market.
If government is necessary to enforce private property rights, and those rights are essentially contractual arrangements to transfer property from one owner to another, then why is it not necessary to establish a meta-government to enforce the "social contract" which establishes the government? And, of course, the meta-meta-government to enforce the meta-government's social contract. And so on...
In what sense is an institution which systematically violates civil and property rights (civil and property rights, incidentally, are the same thing. Civil rights, also called natural rights, are derived from self-ownership of the individual, the same source as property rights) necessary for the protection of those rights?
And incidentally, there are plenty of libertarians who hold precisely the view that the government is not only not necessary, but actually detrimental to the defense of natural rights. Read a little Murray Rothbard for a prominent and particularly well-reasoned example. The minarchist view is readily summed up as follows: we cannot trust the government with aspects of life such as the production of a stable currency, but we can most certainly trust them with our lives and freedoms. How does that make sense?
So, suppose this "methodology" is used to predict a bubble in a particular industry. Suppose that it is wrong. It will still trigger a huge selloff. Suppose, again, that someone using this "methodology" is motivated by personal gain (turns out economists are human, too. Who knew?). Buy low, sell high, as the old adage goes. Well, how better to buy low than to trigger a massive selloff, then swoop in and buy, buy, buy when there is no actual bubble.
Besides, this is all moot point if you abolish the Federal Reserve. See: The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
It's called the First Sale Doctrine
I cover this every time the "sweatshop" discussion rears its head, so here we go again. These companies build these "sweatshops" precisely because operating costs, including labor, are cheaper in countries such as China. You can go on and on about how they should pay their workers "fair" wages and provide better working conditions. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that a "fair" wage is whatever the company is offering that the worker is willing to accept. Instead, let's focus on what would happen if these companies were forced, presumably through legal action, to pay workers the same, and provide the same working conditions, as would be required in, say, the US. If that were to occur, there would be zero, absolutely zero, incentive for these companies to open up their "sweatshops" in these countries. Why bother to assemble parts in a poor country at the same cost as assembling them in a rich country, if on top of that cost you then have to export them for sale to places where people can afford them? If that happened, all those workers earning "unfair" wages would have no source of employment at all. Their bare subsistence wages would turn to no wages, and they would starve. So, all these misguided "humanitarians" who cry foul and demand that sweatshops be shut down are actually demanding that the workers in the sweatshops be put out of work and left to rot in the gutter. When the choice is a crappy job and some food in your belly, versus unemployment and destitution, the crappy job is clearly preferable (and to those who don't agree with that sentiment, they are always free to pursue destitution).
Yeah, they don't think much of us Earth-centric monkeys. Hell, the plans to doze Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass have been sitting in their offices for months, and we haven't even bothered to send someone to look them over!
Except that what is, to you, a few false reviews in an ocean of useful ones is, to the businesses impacted by them, everything. It's all fine and well to say that most of the reviews you see on Yelp are legit, and it's just a few unfortunate businesses being unfairly targeted by shady salesfolk, but to the targeted businesses, that's their entire reputation being flushed down the tubes. If Yelp, or rouge members of it's sales staff, are targeting businesses which don't buy advertising, those businesses have every right and reason in the world to seek redress of their grievances.
You, sir, are a GENIUS! Where do I preorder?
If you don't want to eat high salt processed foods, don't. If you don't want to eat a meal at a restaurant with an unknown salt content, don't. But don't presume to dictate other people's diets because you can't be bothered to take responsibility for yours. If you want to avoid a particular ingredient in your food, then you are responsible for reading ingredient lists. You are responsible for your own nutrition, and your desire to delegate that responsibility to a third party does not give you the right to delegate responsibility for everyone else.
I've been using 7 since the beta, and have seen absolutely no evidence to support this. I have 8GB RAM, and swap disabled. Running the OS, three VMs (1GB assigned to each), a couple firefox sessions with 20-40 tabs each, a game of Civ4, and an HD movie, I won't come close to maxing out my memory. Divide the available memory in half to 4GB, and assume that most people aren't running VMs with 3+GB memory usage, and the picture painted in TFA appears highly unlikely. Unless they're gauging systems running Win7 with 2GB memory, I call BS. And if they are gauging systems running Win7 with 2GB, then who the hell cares? You can't be surprised when you're running an OS on a machine that barely meets minimum specs and you start to max out the hardware.
Yes, except that means that EVERYONE in the district is forced to pay for the decisions of elected (and non-elected) officials who they did not support. Everyone, including those who voted in opposition, and including non-voting anarchists and anarcho-capitalists. You're not promoting the idea of responsible government, you're reinforcing the (correct, as it happens) notion that government screws you coming and going. That's a lesson I'm already intimately familiar with; I don't need a refresher course courtesy of the ignorant masses.
Fry: "Why's everyone wearing those rings?" Amy: "Guh! Because nobody wears them anymore! Rings are stupid!" Fry: "I think they look cool!" Amy: "Shh, don't let anyone hear you say that!" Man: "Hey, did that lad just say rings are cool?" Amy: "No. He said they're stupid." Man: "Cool!"
Easy way around this: use bannerbomb to install the homebrew channel, then install a cIOS, then install a USB Loader. Rip the Netflix disc to your USB hard drive, and you can load it from the drive (along with all your game backups). Works like a charm for everything else, takes no more time to load than any other channel.
Hell, I'd settle for getting my hands on a 1080p copy of IV, V, and VI without all the Special Edition crap. I'd even settle for getting them on a DVD with anamorphic encoding. Sucks that George Lucas was swapped for a pod person in 1995...
I used to feel the same way, but I'm leaning more and more to thanking those very dumbass execs who canceled it before its time. Everything else I have seen done by Whedon is utter shite. Buffy? About as engrossing as Twilight. Angel? As good as one would expect from a spinoff of a crappy teenage angsty vampire show. And don't get me started on Dollhouse. Four or Five good episodes surrounded by garbage, with an overall plot that seems more schizophrenic than the characters on the show.
Firefly may have been canceled somewhat before it's time, but it went out on a high note. Never a bad episode, no crappy acting or shoddy stories, and it finished up with what I consider to be one of the greats of SciFi cinema. I can't help but think that if Whedon had been allowed to continue for a few more seasons, it would have gone downhill like everything else he's done.
One of my biggest complaints with most shows (American in particular) is that they're never produced to be complete in themselves. Yes, they usually have a main story arc, but the producers tend to drag that arc out as many seasons as they can continue getting the show renewed, rather than planning the show out ahead of time, deciding how long they need to tell the story they came to tell, and creating the show with that in mind. With Firefly, they never had the chance to drag it out ad-nauseum. They had 13 amazing episodes, then instead of being forced to think of a way to drag it out until the ratings fell off, they were forced to think of a way to end it in a way that was just as gripping as the rest of the series.