DirectX 10 is just a thin wrapper over the WDM driver model.
So if you run a DirectX 10 game on Vista and it calls DrawPrimitive with a bunch of polygons, Windows can switch to kernel mode and make an call into a function in the graphics driver which knows how to set the hardware up to do the work. The key thing here is that all this stuff is highly integrated. There's competition between ATI and NVidia and so both have an incentive to make this as efficient as possible. Since Windows has an enormous market share it makes sense to optimize the hardware so that the device driver doesn't need to do anything time consuming. So the hardware is designed to be able to read DirectX datastructures.
Now consider on Wine. The game makes the call to DrawPrimitive. So far so good. But Linux doesn't have WDM. As far as I can tell Wine needs to emulate the function using OpenGL. All the DirectX datastructures need to be converted to OpenGL ones. Then the OpenGL driver needs to do another conversion back to the hardware format which was designed to be compatible with DirectX. And unless you have the closed source drive which is not included in most Linux distributions it won't even attempt to use hardware acceleration. And from what I can tell the ATI closed source driver isn't particularly good.
Now on Windows Halo 2 is somewhat scandalously tied to Vista or XBox 360 since Microsoft want to sell one of either to people that want to play Halo 2. But most games aren't going to be like that - they'll work on either DirectX 9 or 10.
And actually, I've got Vista here and DirectX 10 works very well, even on a laptop GPU. Looking at really high end benchmarks it's not as optimized as DirectX9 on XP yet, and it will take another six months to do so. Similarly on the Linux side ATI will document the hardware and allow people to write an optimized open source driver. But the Windows side has massive advantages here - market share for sure but also the technical one that in Windows the hardware was designed to be able to do what the game asks for directly. If the graphics companies know that they're doing they can make the driver a very thin layer that just passes a pointer from the user mode application to hardware and sets it going. Wine can't do that.
If you have a choice not to buy something, it seems like the people that sell it can offer it under any terms they like.
Lots of manufacturers sell unlocked phones that will work on any carrier. They also sell phones that are locked and you normally get them subsidized. It is your choice whether you buy a locked and subsidized phone or an unlocked one at full price. If you're not planning to switch operators a locked phone is no problem. If you are then it is up to you to make sure you get a unlocked one.
Now as I understand it the iPhone isn't subsidized but Apple does get a payment from AT&T so it is an odd case. I guess people buy it because the like the UI or whatever, but they are paying over the odds for what an unlocked phone. But it is still their choice to do it - they could have bought an unlocked phone if they wanted. And I suspect if you sign a contract to connect a locked phone to AT&T for some fixed period you are in breach of it if you unlock the phone and use another operator. But no one forced you to sign that contract - you chose it.
Now the government could do some sort of anti trust action against mobile phone operators and force them to offer all phones unlocked. But for the vast majority of people who don't know how to switch operators that would be a net loss since they would have to pay full price instead of the subsidized one they now pay for locked ones. For a small minority it would be better, but those people should know enough to buy a cheap unlocked phone now.
In practice of course there is no way any government would do this unless one manufacturer completely dominated the market and started to sell only locked phones at a high price.
I think most Taiwanese manufacturers could sell you a computer which was designed and assembled in Taiwan rather than the PRC if you asked them - they take the difference very seriously indeed. And nothing annoys the Chinese government more than Taiwan.
So 640GB should be about $4480. That's the spot price on the chips too, a device with them in will be more expensive. And it would need to be a hell of a device. 160*32Gigabit (4Gbyte) devices for example. That would be a hefty PCB. And the controller that performs the way they say is not going to be cheap either.
OK. How about this. There is no God and all the books were written by humans. Some were good people and some were bad. Most of the people that wrote the Old Testament were basically warlords and warlords want a religion which lets them do very evil things. Hence all the stuff about wiping out the Midianites, Canaanites and so on. Back then if you were King of Israel the best way to keep the Israelites in line was with slaves and booty from conquered neighbouring tribes and it's easier recruiting soldiers if you tell them that when they die they go to paradise. When Mohammed decided to deify himself with his own fork of Judaism many centuries later he obviously felt this was the important bit of the religion.
Now Jesus was a good person - he was actually religious rather than an murderous, amoral psychopath bent on conquest. But he couldn't criticize OT too openly because then the bastards that controlled the religion would execute him for heresy. So he had to say that he's following in their tradition, even if it doesn't really seem like the New Testament and the Old Testament describe the same religion. The New Testament seems to be about loving your neighbour, and the Old Testament is about killing or enslaving the inhabitants of neighbouring countries. The Quran is basically a rip of the Old Testament.
If you believe there's only one God as all those religions do then it seems like that is true by definition.
On the other hand Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in Satan too, so it's possible all the nasty bits in the Old Testament, and Quran came from him. And given that the majority of what goes on in them is absolutelystomach churning, it sort of makes you wonder.
I mean if you do believe in God and Satan, how do you know that some of the more obviously evil bits in religious books didn't come from him impersonating God? It's something the guy who wrote Prophet of Doom came up with respect to the Quran, but it seems like it could apply to most of the Old Testament too.
Vista seems to do something clever here. E.g. I'm pretty sure Media Player Classic is using an overlay but I can still see a thumbnail of video playing if I hover over the taskbar tab when the window is in the background. Same for any video.
Seems like in Vista WDM cards have a Direct3D surface per Window -
This is probably why you can't run Aero unless you have a card with a WDM driver - the old driver model didn't have a way for the OS to ask for this. Guess my Geforce 8600M GT isn't wasted after all.
Couple of my friends at work skipped work yesterday to play all day. Then came in for about six hours today and stood around and talked about it for five of those hours. Too bad there's a horrible support issue I have to deal with right now, I was still at work Monday night when it was released, and I'm still at work now when I'm supposed to be playing at a friend's house. Oh, woe is me and horrible timing.
Pretty selfish of you to be working like everything was normal, rather than fighting to liberate Earth from the Covenant - no one will care about the "support issue" if the planet is glassed.
With 3.4 billion years of evolution behind photosynthesis, plants have managed to do a bit better than that. According to this wiki plants are very efficient:
Fleming is the Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab, a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, and an internationally acclaimed leader in spectroscopic studies of the photosynthetic process. In a paper entitled, Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems, he and his collaborators report the detection of quantum beating signals, coherent electronic oscillations in both donor and acceptor molecules, generated by light-induced energy excitations, like the ripples formed when stones are tossed into a pond.
Electronic spectroscopy measurements made on a femtosecond (millionths of a billionth of a second) time-scale showed these oscillations meeting and interfering constructively, forming wavelike motions of energy (superposition states) that can explore all potential energy pathways simultaneously and reversibly, meaning they can retreat from wrong pathways with no penalty. This finding contradicts the classical description of the photosynthetic energy transfer process as one in which excitation energy hops from light-capturing pigment molecules to reaction center molecules step-by-step down the molecular energy ladder.
"The classical hopping description of the energy transfer process is both inadequate and inaccurate," said Fleming. "It gives the wrong picture of how the process actually works, and misses a crucial aspect of the reason for the wonderful efficiency."
You've got to admire the subtlety of evolved systems.
I don't understand people who insist that democratic representative republics aren't democracies. There should be a special term for what they mean - direct democracies, referendocracies...?
Yeah, I agree. It seems like pedantry to distinguish democratic representative republics from direct democracies.
When you say the ancient Greek laws were passed by the populace is that true in the modern sense? I'm pretty certain slaves couldn't vote, it's unlikely women could and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a property qualification too.
As far as I can tell decisions were taken by all the free, rich, men. So the electorate was rather small. But it was a direct democracry at least for them - government policy was whatever they voted that day. They had no representatives or political parties or permanent government.
Britain doesn't really have a tradition of referendums. Margaret Thatcher claimed they were "a device for dictators and demagogues" referring to the way Hitler misused them. They have been used, for example for European issues, but there is no constitutional way to force the government to have one. You can see it now with the European constitution. Public opinion would have forced a referendum which the government would probably have lost, but the French vote against it gave them an excuse to call it off and abandon the ratification process. Now they are going for a treaty with most of the same effects as the constitution which they claim doesn't need a referendum.
Other European countries do have a constitutional requirement to have them in some situations though.
Claiming a war on terror _does not count_. Terror is an abstract... it's like claiming a war on clarity, or hopelessness.
That's just a name. The war is on Islamic extremists, they just don't want to call it that because their enemies would deliberately misinterpret it as a War on Islam. And that is something they want to avoid.
Who use it routinely? Which governments use torture routinely on US soldiers?
The Japanese in WWII, the Korean and Vietnamese communists in the Cold War. Pretty much any Islamic government. The only real exception was the Germans in WWII who mostly treated American and English prisoners according to the Geneva Convention but occasionally summarily executed them. But neither the Germans or the Russians treated prisoners from other countries at all well. None of the non state actors the US has fought has treated US soldiers well.
So if the US is fighthing somebody the odds are is that US soldiers will be mistreated if they are captured. I think there are deep reasons for this - the US is more likely to fight wars with the sort of countries that torture people domestically. And if they do it domestically there is more chance they will do it to captured American soldiers.
But the rules on how we treat people _are_ governed by the Geneva convention, and the US has been flouting that
Actually, I do agree that the US should treat captured soldiers or even guerilla fighters according to the Geneva convention, even ones from countries or non state actors that don't follow it like the Taliban. But that won't stop them torturing Americans if they capture them.
But the non state actors you are fighting in the war on terror (not to mention most of the mostly Muslim states who are nominally allies of the US) do torture people routinely, and it's not realistic that the US will make them all behave in civilised way. E.g. if the US collaborates with Pakistani intelligence and gets them to arrest some Islamist, it's not really possible to get Pakistani intelligence to behave in a civilised way. Politics in the Islamic world is a violent business, and it's hard to meddle in it and stay completely clean. But the War on Terror pretty much implies you do meddle.
And if you capture Islamic terrorists, I don't think you should release them until the war is over, if ever. Which is why Gitmo is there.
No problems, I expected people to argue with my ideas.
This sort of comment is something I've seen a lot from people in America (and by that, I don't mean all Americans think that way, just that I've seen several say it!). However it's an attitude that I think is liable to get you in trouble. Freedom of expression and free speech are great things - but if they're the ONLY freedom you have left at the end of the day, you're in big trouble.
Americans can do more than just complain though. Congress virtually neutered the CIA in the 1970's and 1980's - 9/11 is just the pendulum swinging back.
I'm not an American and I don't live in America, nor do I have any interest in doing so. But I do care about America's future because it is a powerful country and what affects it also affects the rest of the world to a lesser extent. I want to see America become great again, instead of degenerating in to a fascist police state as it currently appears to be headed towards.
I'm not American either, and I do agree that America is important. But I don't agree that it will turn into a fascist state. I actually think that the limits placed on the CIA were excessive. I think left wingers tend to think that a free society is one where organisations like the CIA don't exist. The immune system analogy is meant to show that you do need this sort of organisation. And I'm talking generally about foreign spookery here - the CIA doesn't really seem to be particularly competent compared to its European equivalents, particularly MI6. I suspect that if you want to protect free societies against their opponents you need people to do this stuff.
In fact England has been doing this sort of skullduggery for literally hundreds of years without turning into a fascist state. In fact it has gradually liberalised because of it. If it hadn't of done so, I suspect far less liberal people would have been able to hijack the state.
As far as I can tell, a democratic republic means that representatives are elected and there is a constitution which imposes checks and balances on them. As opposed to ancient Athens where the laws were directly voted on by the populace and there wasn't really a concept of universal rights. It's still a democracy from my perspective though. Most modern democracies are democratic republics.
And if you live in th US
Actually, the UK is quite close to a real democracy. It's still indirect in the sense that we have representatives, but there aren't really any legal limits on their power, other than that they need to call and win an election every four years or so.
The BEST system for the people that I've seen is a socialist communism.
Umm no. That's a nightmare. There are no elections or checks on the elite and they are self selecting. Even worse they own all the companies too. And anyone who disagrees with the official state ideology is locked up.
The problem there though is that no-one has ever managed to set one up according to the principles of it, and almost every country that's tried it has ended up with something that seems more like fascism.
A dictatorship of the proletariat, censored press and no private enterprise is bound to end up with mass starvation and labour camps.
So we can probably rule that out as a good idea simply because there seem to be built-in flaws around the power given to the leaders. For now, I'd say true democracies and democratic republics are probably the "safest" and "most stable" systems for giving a fairly consistent good standard of life for people. But still far from perfect.
I can agree with this. There are deep structural reasons why communism ends up bad to do with concentrations of power.
Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst system apart from all the others.
This worries me so much... it seems to be a particularly US view.
Not really, I'm not American.
You should care how your government treats others because other's governments may treat you the same. World trade is a fact of life, and Americans are foreigners everywhere but America.
That's a rather vacuous point. My argument is simply that using force against foreign terrorists is different from using force against domestic opponents of the government. And that Anglo Saxon democracies have historically been able to differentiate between the two. In fact legally they are very different - Afghans in Afghanistan don't get any protection under the laws that protect US citizens.
And arguing that Americans will be treated worse because of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib is rather silly. US soldiers have been tortured whenever they are captured because the governments they have been fighting have no problem with torture - they use it routinely against their domestic opponents.
Who were the enemies of freedom to Russia? And who are the enemies of freedom?
I was referring to people that want to set up a theocracy - a system where only one ideology is legal. Communists, fascists, islamists and so on.
The major point of living in a modern democracy, as I see it, is that we treat people better. We have standards to live up to if we want to convert others to democracies.
The rules on how we treat people only apply to citizens, if the US captures Taliban in Afghanistan they aren't covered by the US Constitution.
We _cannot_ point fingers at extremists and say "they did it first", then do the same things.
That isn't my argument. My argument is that if the bad guys win there will be a whole lot more brutality going on, because of the fundamental nature of the systems they support. The current level of violence the CIA is using at them is a price worth paying to prevent that, so long as they don't start to do it inside the country. And that's just because I'm concerned about some sort of Roman scenario where the people that use violence against foreign enemies start to use it against domestic ones and bring the system down.
I like to at least think it was a software company like Microsoft who wrote the part about devices being required to report their max-power in milliamps. *forehead slap*
I must say the fact that bMaxPower is in the wrong units never occured to me - I just converted the 5W figure in the Samsung data sheet to mA by dividing by 5. Actually, measuring spin up power as opposed to current seems a bit unhelpful - since it's a spike it seems more natural to talke about peak current rather than peak power.
Slashdot Mirror
DirectX 10 is just a thin wrapper over the WDM driver model.
So if you run a DirectX 10 game on Vista and it calls DrawPrimitive with a bunch of polygons, Windows can switch to kernel mode and make an call into a function in the graphics driver which knows how to set the hardware up to do the work. The key thing here is that all this stuff is highly integrated. There's competition between ATI and NVidia and so both have an incentive to make this as efficient as possible. Since Windows has an enormous market share it makes sense to optimize the hardware so that the device driver doesn't need to do anything time consuming. So the hardware is designed to be able to read DirectX datastructures.
Now consider on Wine. The game makes the call to DrawPrimitive. So far so good. But Linux doesn't have WDM. As far as I can tell Wine needs to emulate the function using OpenGL. All the DirectX datastructures need to be converted to OpenGL ones. Then the OpenGL driver needs to do another conversion back to the hardware format which was designed to be compatible with DirectX. And unless you have the closed source drive which is not included in most Linux distributions it won't even attempt to use hardware acceleration. And from what I can tell the ATI closed source driver isn't particularly good.
Now on Windows Halo 2 is somewhat scandalously tied to Vista or XBox 360 since Microsoft want to sell one of either to people that want to play Halo 2. But most games aren't going to be like that - they'll work on either DirectX 9 or 10.
And actually, I've got Vista here and DirectX 10 works very well, even on a laptop GPU. Looking at really high end benchmarks it's not as optimized as DirectX9 on XP yet, and it will take another six months to do so. Similarly on the Linux side ATI will document the hardware and allow people to write an optimized open source driver. But the Windows side has massive advantages here - market share for sure but also the technical one that in Windows the hardware was designed to be able to do what the game asks for directly. If the graphics companies know that they're doing they can make the driver a very thin layer that just passes a pointer from the user mode application to hardware and sets it going. Wine can't do that.
If you have a choice not to buy something, it seems like the people that sell it can offer it under any terms they like.
Lots of manufacturers sell unlocked phones that will work on any carrier. They also sell phones that are locked and you normally get them subsidized. It is your choice whether you buy a locked and subsidized phone or an unlocked one at full price. If you're not planning to switch operators a locked phone is no problem. If you are then it is up to you to make sure you get a unlocked one.
Now as I understand it the iPhone isn't subsidized but Apple does get a payment from AT&T so it is an odd case. I guess people buy it because the like the UI or whatever, but they are paying over the odds for what an unlocked phone. But it is still their choice to do it - they could have bought an unlocked phone if they wanted. And I suspect if you sign a contract to connect a locked phone to AT&T for some fixed period you are in breach of it if you unlock the phone and use another operator. But no one forced you to sign that contract - you chose it.
Now the government could do some sort of anti trust action against mobile phone operators and force them to offer all phones unlocked. But for the vast majority of people who don't know how to switch operators that would be a net loss since they would have to pay full price instead of the subsidized one they now pay for locked ones. For a small minority it would be better, but those people should know enough to buy a cheap unlocked phone now.
In practice of course there is no way any government would do this unless one manufacturer completely dominated the market and started to sell only locked phones at a high price.
My Asus G1S says "Made in Taiwan" on the back.
I think most Taiwanese manufacturers could sell you a computer which was designed and assembled in Taiwan rather than the PRC if you asked them - they take the difference very seriously indeed. And nothing annoys the Chinese government more than Taiwan.
Nand flash is about $7 per GB
http://www.dramexchange.com/#fspot
So 640GB should be about $4480. That's the spot price on the chips too, a device with them in will be more expensive. And it would need to be a hell of a device. 160*32Gigabit (4Gbyte) devices for example. That would be a hefty PCB. And the controller that performs the way they say is not going to be cheap either.
OK. How about this. There is no God and all the books were written by humans. Some were good people and some were bad. Most of the people that wrote the Old Testament were basically warlords and warlords want a religion which lets them do very evil things. Hence all the stuff about wiping out the Midianites, Canaanites and so on. Back then if you were King of Israel the best way to keep the Israelites in line was with slaves and booty from conquered neighbouring tribes and it's easier recruiting soldiers if you tell them that when they die they go to paradise. When Mohammed decided to deify himself with his own fork of Judaism many centuries later he obviously felt this was the important bit of the religion.
Now Jesus was a good person - he was actually religious rather than an murderous, amoral psychopath bent on conquest. But he couldn't criticize OT too openly because then the bastards that controlled the religion would execute him for heresy. So he had to say that he's following in their tradition, even if it doesn't really seem like the New Testament and the Old Testament describe the same religion. The New Testament seems to be about loving your neighbour, and the Old Testament is about killing or enslaving the inhabitants of neighbouring countries. The Quran is basically a rip of the Old Testament.
He didn't seem too keen on stoning people to death though did he?
If you believe there's only one God as all those religions do then it seems like that is true by definition.
On the other hand Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in Satan too, so it's possible all the nasty bits in the Old Testament, and Quran came from him. And given that the majority of what goes on in them is absolutely stomach churning, it sort of makes you wonder.
I mean if you do believe in God and Satan, how do you know that some of the more obviously evil bits in religious books didn't come from him impersonating God? It's something the guy who wrote Prophet of Doom came up with respect to the Quran, but it seems like it could apply to most of the Old Testament too.
Vista seems to do something clever here. E.g. I'm pretty sure Media Player Classic is using an overlay but I can still see a thumbnail of video playing if I hover over the taskbar tab when the window is in the background. Same for any video.
Seems like in Vista WDM cards have a Direct3D surface per Window -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_overlay#Implementations_in_various_operating_systems
This is probably why you can't run Aero unless you have a card with a WDM driver - the old driver model didn't have a way for the OS to ask for this. Guess my Geforce 8600M GT isn't wasted after all.
I heard the voices start ... American teenage voices sounded like little girls...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEWIw-a0GJw
Couple of my friends at work skipped work yesterday to play all day. Then came in for about six hours today and stood around and talked about it for five of those hours. Too bad there's a horrible support issue I have to deal with right now, I was still at work Monday night when it was released, and I'm still at work now when I'm supposed to be playing at a friend's house. Oh, woe is me and horrible timing.
Pretty selfish of you to be working like everything was normal, rather than fighting to liberate Earth from the Covenant - no one will care about the "support issue" if the planet is glassed.
Freedom isn't free you know.
As a female geek
Prove it!
The leader of the Transformers?
http://www.physorg.com/news95605211.html
You've got to admire the subtlety of evolved systems.
People with lots of stocks will be allowed into a dome with an artificial air supply.
Translation: I want one for $188.
Not if you have a strong brand. Then people will rationalize your decisions, along the lines of "deh massuh only beats me when Is a bad slave".
Yeah, exactly. It's actually the Tu Quoque fallacy.
Read this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Or if you've spent a lot of time on the Internet read this.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/NO_U
It has funny pictures and it won't give you a nasty headache in your frontal lobes.
That Leah's the sexiest though. I'd tap that ass!
I don't understand people who insist that democratic representative republics aren't democracies. There should be a special term for what they mean - direct democracies, referendocracies...?
Yeah, I agree. It seems like pedantry to distinguish democratic representative republics from direct democracies.
When you say the ancient Greek laws were passed by the populace is that true in the modern sense? I'm pretty certain slaves couldn't vote, it's unlikely women could and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a property qualification too.
As far as I can tell decisions were taken by all the free, rich, men. So the electorate was rather small. But it was a direct democracry at least for them - government policy was whatever they voted that day. They had no representatives or political parties or permanent government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Assembly
Britain doesn't really have a tradition of referendums. Margaret Thatcher claimed they were "a device for dictators and demagogues" referring to the way Hitler misused them. They have been used, for example for European issues, but there is no constitutional way to force the government to have one. You can see it now with the European constitution. Public opinion would have forced a referendum which the government would probably have lost, but the French vote against it gave them an excuse to call it off and abandon the ratification process. Now they are going for a treaty with most of the same effects as the constitution which they claim doesn't need a referendum.
Other European countries do have a constitutional requirement to have them in some situations though.
Claiming a war on terror _does not count_. Terror is an abstract... it's like claiming a war on clarity, or hopelessness.
That's just a name. The war is on Islamic extremists, they just don't want to call it that because their enemies would deliberately misinterpret it as a War on Islam. And that is something they want to avoid.
Who use it routinely? Which governments use torture routinely on US soldiers?
The Japanese in WWII, the Korean and Vietnamese communists in the Cold War. Pretty much any Islamic government. The only real exception was the Germans in WWII who mostly treated American and English prisoners according to the Geneva Convention but occasionally summarily executed them. But neither the Germans or the Russians treated prisoners from other countries at all well. None of the non state actors the US has fought has treated US soldiers well.
So if the US is fighthing somebody the odds are is that US soldiers will be mistreated if they are captured. I think there are deep reasons for this - the US is more likely to fight wars with the sort of countries that torture people domestically. And if they do it domestically there is more chance they will do it to captured American soldiers.
But the rules on how we treat people _are_ governed by the Geneva convention, and the US has been flouting that
Actually, I do agree that the US should treat captured soldiers or even guerilla fighters according to the Geneva convention, even ones from countries or non state actors that don't follow it like the Taliban. But that won't stop them torturing Americans if they capture them.
But the non state actors you are fighting in the war on terror (not to mention most of the mostly Muslim states who are nominally allies of the US) do torture people routinely, and it's not realistic that the US will make them all behave in civilised way. E.g. if the US collaborates with Pakistani intelligence and gets them to arrest some Islamist, it's not really possible to get Pakistani intelligence to behave in a civilised way. Politics in the Islamic world is a violent business, and it's hard to meddle in it and stay completely clean. But the War on Terror pretty much implies you do meddle.
And if you capture Islamic terrorists, I don't think you should release them until the war is over, if ever. Which is why Gitmo is there.
Please don't take this as a personal attack...
No problems, I expected people to argue with my ideas.
This sort of comment is something I've seen a lot from people in America (and by that, I don't mean all Americans think that way, just that I've seen several say it!). However it's an attitude that I think is liable to get you in trouble. Freedom of expression and free speech are great things - but if they're the ONLY freedom you have left at the end of the day, you're in big trouble.
Americans can do more than just complain though. Congress virtually neutered the CIA in the 1970's and 1980's - 9/11 is just the pendulum swinging back.
I'm not an American and I don't live in America, nor do I have any interest in doing so. But I do care about America's future because it is a powerful country and what affects it also affects the rest of the world to a lesser extent. I want to see America become great again, instead of degenerating in to a fascist police state as it currently appears to be headed towards.
I'm not American either, and I do agree that America is important. But I don't agree that it will turn into a fascist state. I actually think that the limits placed on the CIA were excessive. I think left wingers tend to think that a free society is one where organisations like the CIA don't exist. The immune system analogy is meant to show that you do need this sort of organisation. And I'm talking generally about foreign spookery here - the CIA doesn't really seem to be particularly competent compared to its European equivalents, particularly MI6. I suspect that if you want to protect free societies against their opponents you need people to do this stuff.
In fact England has been doing this sort of skullduggery for literally hundreds of years without turning into a fascist state. In fact it has gradually liberalised because of it. If it hadn't of done so, I suspect far less liberal people would have been able to hijack the state.
I don't - I live in a democratic republic.
As far as I can tell, a democratic republic means that representatives are elected and there is a constitution which imposes checks and balances on them. As opposed to ancient Athens where the laws were directly voted on by the populace and there wasn't really a concept of universal rights. It's still a democracy from my perspective though. Most modern democracies are democratic republics.
And if you live in th US
Actually, the UK is quite close to a real democracy. It's still indirect in the sense that we have representatives, but there aren't really any legal limits on their power, other than that they need to call and win an election every four years or so.
The BEST system for the people that I've seen is a socialist communism.
Umm no. That's a nightmare. There are no elections or checks on the elite and they are self selecting. Even worse they own all the companies too. And anyone who disagrees with the official state ideology is locked up.
The problem there though is that no-one has ever managed to set one up according to the principles of it, and almost every country that's tried it has ended up with something that seems more like fascism.
A dictatorship of the proletariat, censored press and no private enterprise is bound to end up with mass starvation and labour camps.
So we can probably rule that out as a good idea simply because there seem to be built-in flaws around the power given to the leaders. For now, I'd say true democracies and democratic republics are probably the "safest" and "most stable" systems for giving a fairly consistent good standard of life for people. But still far from perfect.
I can agree with this. There are deep structural reasons why communism ends up bad to do with concentrations of power.
Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst system apart from all the others.
This worries me so much... it seems to be a particularly US view.
Not really, I'm not American.
You should care how your government treats others because other's governments may treat you the same. World trade is a fact of life, and Americans are foreigners everywhere but America.
That's a rather vacuous point. My argument is simply that using force against foreign terrorists is different from using force against domestic opponents of the government. And that Anglo Saxon democracies have historically been able to differentiate between the two. In fact legally they are very different - Afghans in Afghanistan don't get any protection under the laws that protect US citizens.
And arguing that Americans will be treated worse because of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib is rather silly. US soldiers have been tortured whenever they are captured because the governments they have been fighting have no problem with torture - they use it routinely against their domestic opponents.
Who were the enemies of freedom to Russia? And who are the enemies of freedom?
I was referring to people that want to set up a theocracy - a system where only one ideology is legal. Communists, fascists, islamists and so on.
The major point of living in a modern democracy, as I see it, is that we treat people better. We have standards to live up to if we want to convert others to democracies.
The rules on how we treat people only apply to citizens, if the US captures Taliban in Afghanistan they aren't covered by the US Constitution.
We _cannot_ point fingers at extremists and say "they did it first", then do the same things.
That isn't my argument. My argument is that if the bad guys win there will be a whole lot more brutality going on, because of the fundamental nature of the systems they support. The current level of violence the CIA is using at them is a price worth paying to prevent that, so long as they don't start to do it inside the country. And that's just because I'm concerned about some sort of Roman scenario where the people that use violence against foreign enemies start to use it against domestic ones and bring the system down.
I like to at least think it was a software company like Microsoft who wrote the part about devices being required to report their max-power in milliamps. *forehead slap*
http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb5.htm#ConfigurationDescriptors
bMaxPower. 1 byte. Current in 2mA units. The idea is they can code from 0ma to 510ma in 2mA steps using one byte.
It would have been nice to have specified a max current of 1A and used 4ma units so USB 2.5 inch hard disks could spin up powered by one USB connector. Which they can do with Firewire.
I must say the fact that bMaxPower is in the wrong units never occured to me - I just converted the 5W figure in the Samsung data sheet to mA by dividing by 5. Actually, measuring spin up power as opposed to current seems a bit unhelpful - since it's a spike it seems more natural to talke about peak current rather than peak power.