Almost every college kid is warned about this at freshmen orientation.
Wow, this is just weird. Why on earth would the college get involved in someone's personal life, much less give advice how adults should live their lives? I find this extremely weird. Everyone knows here that you're just as responsible for your actions when drunk and you also have all your rights when drunk, to make bad decisions is your choice.
What I ment by a different category is that they describe different things. Consider the analogy of: some poor men are tall and some are not. You can have a republic that is not a democracy and you can have a democracy that is not a republic. What you were talking about are the different kinds of democracy, direct vs. representative.
Democracy ultimately just means that the people rule. A better democracy seems to be the constitutional representative democracy where the constitution is put there as a safeguard against the tyranny of the majority (so that one man has certain rights guaranteed to him even if the majority opinion is against that).
A republic is not about who, but how, some group of people exercises power. It is about the structure of how power is exercised, not where that power comes from.
No it isn't. It's SUPPOSED to be a Constitutional Republic. Not that I'd call it one of those anymore, either.
Sorry, but this is a popular misconception. I thought about this when writing my original post, that I should include a sentence about democracy and a republic not being in the same category and that the USA is supposed to be both. I know from experience that it is a popular misconception on slashdot.
I run on unstable myself, for the past 5-6 years or so. I update once a week or something similar. The only time I had any problems was back in 2005(?) when an X lib update broke video playback for two weeks, but apart from that I had zero problems whatsoever.
Over the christmas holiday I had time to read quite a lot.
I've read two books: one from Greg Palast - "Armed Madhouse" and one from Anna Politkovskaya - "Putin's Russia".
People who are saying the USA is getting similar to the old Soviet Union are wrong, the situation is much much worse in Russia (they did slide back to Soviet times). This fact however, doesn't make the USA a good place. It is simply the case of comparing a bad place and a really bad place.
The USA is not going to be Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany. It is heading towards a different direction, however not a good one.
I would not say that the USA is a democracy (it is supposed to be one). In effect, there isn't an informed, educated public in the USA. This is due to distorted media ownership (which makes the press in the USA de facto NOT free), lack of education and overly religious people. Without information, people cannot vote according to their best interests. Due to religion, people forget what the main issues are. The corporate extremism that is present in the USA has a few fascist tones. Deregulation of monopolies is a really telling case. The two party system, where one is downright malicious and the other is so loosely coupled to not be a coherent whole and spends time infighting or doing nothing. To sum it up: unchecked corporate power, ignoring the US constitution and international treaties, unstable party system and media, leglislative chaos, xenophobic/imperialistic foreign policy, scaremongering with terrorism and using it as a tool to institute fascist policies. These are the main things that I think are wrong with the USA these days, and these are the reasons why I'm avoiding that country.
I would be scared if I were a citizen of the USA, given that the last two elections were rigged in favor of a certain party and the other party did nothing about the election anomalies. When I say rigged, I mean that in the last presidential election around 3 million votes were removed through racial or geographical profiling. Very convenient.
The authors have been working since the summer with Adobe, the developer of Flash, and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team to coordinate a remedy. But so far there is no estimate when patches may be released. A security update Adobe released this week for its Flash player doesn't fix the vulnerabilities, Stamos said. Adobe representatives didn't reply to emails seeking comment.
This is so irresponsible on so many levels! First of all Apple and their closed binary blob can go to hell with an attitude like this, second those security professionals should have really known better than to sit on a vulnerability like this for 6 months. 6 MONTHS. I can understand a month or two if we're talking about Oracle, but come on! There are always episodes like this to remind me not to use closed source programs.
Heh, it is usually sad to see another slashdotter ebay off his account to astroturfers, but why on earth did you sell your name aswell to the identity package?!?
I will not even comment about your description of this shit getting old years ago. Most of the concerns about Vista weren't fixed by MS yet and they're not planning to do so anytime soon, so I'd say the issue is pretty current.
Vista came out. It has some problems. Guess what. So did XP when it first came out. So did every version of OS X when it came out. So did every previous version of a Microsoft OS. So did every previous version of an Apple OS. So has pretty much every distribution of Linux when they have first come out.
What I hate, absolutely passionately fucking hate is binary thinking. Yes, everything has problems, but by that you didn't say anything at all! You have to look at the scale and seriousness of problems and even then you can't make a valid comparison between systems because they are just different! Linux is just the kernel (even if people mean linux + gnu + other tools packaged into distribution x), the model is differnent from OSX and different from Windows.
We've got to think on scales, see things in shades. The same stupid binary thinking manifests in a democratic society aswell. When statements are made like "every politician is just stealing money", it is totally utterly not helpful. Most likely every politician steals SOME amount. Everything depends on how much. I wish people would just learn math and compare numbers. Anyway, back to Vista - the problems Vista has are many orders of magnitude bigger than any of the other systems you've mentioned.
Raise your hand if you remember that in the 70s it was global cooling. You do remember? That is the same debunked revisionist history as the "everyone on slashdot told the same things about XP back then, than they are telling now about vista". It isn't remotely true.
...for me if I encounter a device like this, is to leave and come back with a baseball bat and trash the device into pieces. This measure is clearly an invasion of privacy if I'm generous and assault if not so generous. I do not want to be bombarded by forced mind control that is advertising.
Pretty fascinating right? Here is a good overview of memory, from a programmer's viewpoint. The 200 cpu cycles is an optimistic figure, it is realistically higher under normal usage. Check out page 15 and on, if you're interested in the raw timing data.
Of course, latency and throughput is a different matter. The cpu can fetch a lot of data at the same time, but not faster than 200 cycles. If you don't yet see the difference, think of the example of databases: When a database makes a guarantee that it completes 1 million transactions per second, it doesn't mean that one transaction completes faster than one second.
Besides, all search engine and high performance computing people know that a smaller memory footprint is not only beneficial if you don't have enough memory, but it is beneficial even if you DO have enough memory, apart from the fact that you can use the remaining memory for other purposes.
The reason is simple, a smaller memory footprint helps the CPU immensely. A lot of the tasks on today's PC are I/O bound, and by I/O I don't necessarily mean your network or harddrive, but I/O between the cpu and main memory aswell. For comparison in clock cycles, accessing the L1 cache takes around 3 cpu cycles, the L2 around 10-15 and memory over 200, but it can take much more than that depending on the access pattern. While the CPU uses clever tricks, it will never eliminate the need to access main memory. This is why, if you can reduce the size of your data enough so that it fits better into the cpu caches, then you can gain performance improvements of an order of magnitude or two. A reasonably new processor can have 4MB of L2 cache, which is more than enough for a lot of programs, and even if not, it is advisable to maintain temporal and spacial locality of data in order to speed up operations.
Search engine people know this, because the pecuilarity of memory can lead to situations where it's faster to store compressed data in memory, have it uncompressed on-the-fly by the cpu, perform whatever operation it wanted on it, than storing data uncompressed in memory. These kinds of optimizations will be more important in the future, as upcoming memory storage methods like DDR3 have increased in latency. In other words, tending towards bulk transfers of data.
This is not a dupe, it's merely your isp inserting outdated data in to your webpage because Slashdot didn't pay your ISP the brand new anti-crapification fee.
Maybe in 2003, or today in the USA. Not in 2007 AND in he Netherlands. Times change and MS is getting increasingly obsoleted for more economical, more open systems and formats.
Slashdot Mirror
The people behind it were Sergei Brin's and Larry Page's ancestors.
...and I'm currently connected to it.
The make is a lie.
In F/OSS environments we welcome alternatives and diversity.
What I ment by a different category is that they describe different things. Consider the analogy of: some poor men are tall and some are not. You can have a republic that is not a democracy and you can have a democracy that is not a republic. What you were talking about are the different kinds of democracy, direct vs. representative.
Democracy ultimately just means that the people rule. A better democracy seems to be the constitutional representative democracy where the constitution is put there as a safeguard against the tyranny of the majority (so that one man has certain rights guaranteed to him even if the majority opinion is against that).
A republic is not about who, but how, some group of people exercises power. It is about the structure of how power is exercised, not where that power comes from.
I run on unstable myself, for the past 5-6 years or so. I update once a week or something similar. The only time I had any problems was back in 2005(?) when an X lib update broke video playback for two weeks, but apart from that I had zero problems whatsoever.
Over the christmas holiday I had time to read quite a lot.
I've read two books: one from Greg Palast - "Armed Madhouse" and one from Anna Politkovskaya - "Putin's Russia".
People who are saying the USA is getting similar to the old Soviet Union are wrong, the situation is much much worse in Russia (they did slide back to Soviet times). This fact however, doesn't make the USA a good place. It is simply the case of comparing a bad place and a really bad place.
The USA is not going to be Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany. It is heading towards a different direction, however not a good one.
I would not say that the USA is a democracy (it is supposed to be one). In effect, there isn't an informed, educated public in the USA. This is due to distorted media ownership (which makes the press in the USA de facto NOT free), lack of education and overly religious people. Without information, people cannot vote according to their best interests. Due to religion, people forget what the main issues are. The corporate extremism that is present in the USA has a few fascist tones. Deregulation of monopolies is a really telling case. The two party system, where one is downright malicious and the other is so loosely coupled to not be a coherent whole and spends time infighting or doing nothing. To sum it up: unchecked corporate power, ignoring the US constitution and international treaties, unstable party system and media, leglislative chaos, xenophobic/imperialistic foreign policy, scaremongering with terrorism and using it as a tool to institute fascist policies. These are the main things that I think are wrong with the USA these days, and these are the reasons why I'm avoiding that country.
I would be scared if I were a citizen of the USA, given that the last two elections were rigged in favor of a certain party and the other party did nothing about the election anomalies. When I say rigged, I mean that in the last presidential election around 3 million votes were removed through racial or geographical profiling. Very convenient.
That was just a simple typo. I have no idea why I wrote Apple. Although I guess I should have previewed.
...that patents have jack all to do with innovation. Thanks for the great example!
Nice day SHINY! Are you how?
Not aggód^W wory much, speak englis I do. You, teacher? Company sent me for trainung. A/S/L?
It is "soon" DukeNukemically. Cosmologists started using it because they found "100 trillion years after the heatdeath of the universe" too long.
Programming languages are syntactic sugar. We could all be programming in lambda calculus if not for the convenience a higher level language provides.
Heh, it is usually sad to see another slashdotter ebay off his account to astroturfers, but why on earth did you sell your name aswell to the identity package?!?
We've got to think on scales, see things in shades. The same stupid binary thinking manifests in a democratic society aswell. When statements are made like "every politician is just stealing money", it is totally utterly not helpful. Most likely every politician steals SOME amount. Everything depends on how much. I wish people would just learn math and compare numbers. Anyway, back to Vista - the problems Vista has are many orders of magnitude bigger than any of the other systems you've mentioned.
Raise your hand if you remember that in the 70s it was global cooling. You do remember? That is the same debunked revisionist history as the "everyone on slashdot told the same things about XP back then, than they are telling now about vista". It isn't remotely true.
...for me if I encounter a device like this, is to leave and come back with a baseball bat and trash the device into pieces. This measure is clearly an invasion of privacy if I'm generous and assault if not so generous. I do not want to be bombarded by forced mind control that is advertising.
Pretty fascinating right? Here is a good overview of memory, from a programmer's viewpoint. The 200 cpu cycles is an optimistic figure, it is realistically higher under normal usage. Check out page 15 and on, if you're interested in the raw timing data.
Of course, latency and throughput is a different matter. The cpu can fetch a lot of data at the same time, but not faster than 200 cycles. If you don't yet see the difference, think of the example of databases: When a database makes a guarantee that it completes 1 million transactions per second, it doesn't mean that one transaction completes faster than one second.
Besides, all search engine and high performance computing people know that a smaller memory footprint is not only beneficial if you don't have enough memory, but it is beneficial even if you DO have enough memory, apart from the fact that you can use the remaining memory for other purposes.
The reason is simple, a smaller memory footprint helps the CPU immensely. A lot of the tasks on today's PC are I/O bound, and by I/O I don't necessarily mean your network or harddrive, but I/O between the cpu and main memory aswell. For comparison in clock cycles, accessing the L1 cache takes around 3 cpu cycles, the L2 around 10-15 and memory over 200, but it can take much more than that depending on the access pattern. While the CPU uses clever tricks, it will never eliminate the need to access main memory. This is why, if you can reduce the size of your data enough so that it fits better into the cpu caches, then you can gain performance improvements of an order of magnitude or two. A reasonably new processor can have 4MB of L2 cache, which is more than enough for a lot of programs, and even if not, it is advisable to maintain temporal and spacial locality of data in order to speed up operations.
Search engine people know this, because the pecuilarity of memory can lead to situations where it's faster to store compressed data in memory, have it uncompressed on-the-fly by the cpu, perform whatever operation it wanted on it, than storing data uncompressed in memory. These kinds of optimizations will be more important in the future, as upcoming memory storage methods like DDR3 have increased in latency. In other words, tending towards bulk transfers of data.
There is no need to talk about conspiracies and manipulation on both sides.
It might appear that the ip in question is an outgoing proxy or something. The ip address 143.231.249.141 appears to have made thousands of contributions and the editing pattern looks as though it would be multiple persons editing. For example there is a case where the contributor from the IP in question admits he's a staffer in Albert Wynn's office.
This is not a dupe, it's merely your isp inserting outdated data in to your webpage because Slashdot didn't pay your ISP the brand new anti-crapification fee.
Maybe in 2003, or today in the USA. Not in 2007 AND in he Netherlands. Times change and MS is getting increasingly obsoleted for more economical, more open systems and formats.