I normally don't respond to ACs but this is one thing I've noticed and found interesting....anybody notice how the Anti-BSD GPLers sound a HELL of a lot like the RIAA? Both act as if copying is stealing, both come up with these giant FUD scenarios of doom which never seem to happen, and both act as if THEIR way is the only 'right" choice and frankly you are an idiot or "one of THEM!" if your views don't stay in lock step with their own.
I just find it fascinating that those that constantly scream they are for "freedom" sound a hell of a lot like the most restrictive bunch out there.
Here is what I personally don't get, maybe someone can explain it to me, but WTF was it with RMS and the TiVo? It was ONE device that had NO choice but to be made the way it was. It wasn't like TiVo was being run by Cobra Commander here, they knew that if there was a way to get the content off the device (which is EXACTLY what running custom versions would have allowed) it would have been banhammered in the west quicker than you can say "copyright infringement".
Would he have been more happy if it had used WinCE? Because that is what it feels like to me, that RMS wants ONLY true followers of "the way' to use anything GPL. And since there is multiple other OSes out there including BSD and Windows Embedded it just seems stupid to attack one specific corp and make other businesses afraid of being next on RMS' shit list and all over a device that frankly could have been made no other way without only being sold at China Mart and other "pro piracy" hardware sites.
And despite all the insults posted above you, ya know what? For the vast majority it WORKS so why change? After playing with a customer's 12 inch netbook I decided THAT was what I needed, my 17 incher was too damned heavy, it was bulky, a PITA to balance on my lap and I was lucky to get 4 hours.
So I went out and bought one of the EEE netbooks with the E350 chip and frankly I love it! I don't give a damn if the res is only 1366x768 the picture is clear and crisp, it can play HD movies for 6 hours or surf for 8 and I can squeeze another hour to an hour and a half by using the built in ExpressGate OS. Hell it even took 8Gb of RAM and the Radeon chip lets me play some L4D or GTA:VC when I'm stuck somewhere and bored. Its easy to carry, can be easily hidden under the seat of my truck, its just the perfect size!
so all those snobs above you shitting on any non 1080P device as nothing but "poor people's crap" need to wake up and smell reality because thin and light and easy to carry is the way of the present not to mention the future and most folks like me would rather have excellent battery life than some huge ass screen, which is what desktops are for.
I think one of the heads of Red Hat nailed it when he was asked about RMS: "Richard treats his friends as his enemies". Whether the community wants to accept it or not when RMS specifically targeted a single company with GPL V3 he gave a pretty damned good reason for businesses to stay away from the GPL, fear of being the target of GPL V4. BTW I personally bet that if there is a GPL V4 the new buzzword will be "Androidization" since RMS hates Android even though it has put more Linux devices into users hands than anyone else in history.
What I do find interesting though is how many are having a shitfit when more and more move away from GPLed software when....isn't that the whole damned point of the FOSS model? that one man or one company can't dictate to the masses and the community can route around damage? Well that sure looks like what is going on to me, RMS made GPL V3 too nasty and won't come to the table and work with devs on a compromise so they are routing around the damage by choosing different licenses. Personally I figured the community would be happy as it shows that the FOSS model can't be broken or controlled by any one man and with so many licenses out there...BSD, Apache, MPL, AGPL,etc nobody has to "take it or leave it" like they do with the big two.
I have to say having a mic there really threw me as well. it isn't just musicians, nobody has gone to a karaoke bar? Seen American Idol? been to a concert? Seen an interview?
Maybe the guy had to stretch it for page views or something. Oh and radio buttons? only geeks and programmers call them that because dealing with average folks 6 days a week i can tell you they call those "single choice buttons", oh and the wrench they always call either the prefs button or the option button, nobody I've talked to calls it a wrench. But if he decides to write another one of these i suggest he talk to some actual folks and see what they say first as some of his choices are bizarre.
Uhhh...except for devices with an "i" in the front of them frankly i haven't seen very many "higher resolution" devices, in fact when it comes to laptops if anything they are going lower resolution with most sub 15 inchers being 1366x768.
And my boys were too young to remember floppies but that doesn't mean they don't know what the floppy icon means, they just don't call it a floppy but a "save icon". Just because the symbol BEHIND the icon doesn't mean anything to the younger generations does not mean the icon itself is bad.
I learned just recently how important those icons are when I took on the task of teaching a computer illiterate neighbor how to use a PC. He can now do basic tasks in most programs because the same icons are used in multiple programs so all he had to do was learn those basic icons to know how to do those functions, whether on his XP desktop or Win 7 netbook. again he doesn't know the meaning behind the symbols but frankly that doesn't matter, all that matters is the icons are easily recognizable and similar across platforms and applications.
So I wouldn't be so quick to just toss them aside, especially since i seriously doubt the majority of devices will have retina displays for quite awhile. Besides if we based it on modern devices there would probably be only 3 or 4 icons, an SD card, a laptop, a flash stick, and a smartphone. So many devices have consolidated that there really isn't enough relevant icons to go around IMHO.
But since they can't actually USE that 100 billion you are trapped in circular logic in that 1.-They have the money but 2.- If they were to actually use that money they would get a "barbarians at the gate" and no longer exist so 1 doesn't really matter.
So you see friend THAT is the problem with wall street in a nutshell, if you use your assets for anything OTHER than VERY short term gains the system will turn on you and destroy you, either through a takeover or by the street shorting your stock and sending your value into the toilet.
That is why I said we need to have taxation of capital gains based on how long they hold the stock to remove these leeches to the system. say 90% tax over 30 day, 85% over 60 days and so on until the tax is very little for those holding the stock long term like say 5 years or more. because as it is now it only rewards short term thinking while punishing those that think long term.
As i said your stock price will go up when you buy out other companies but go down when you invest in infrastructure or other things that will benefit the company long term. its stupid and frankly dangerous to tie so much of the wealth up into short term thinking simply because it ends up with a sort of "race to the bottom" where companies focus on shorter and shorter term gains strictly to pump the stock. A good example was Circuit City or even IBM now, both gutted experienced workers for short term stock gains and while it destroyed CC by leaving them unable to compete with rivals we'll have to see with IBM but I bet it'll seriously hurt them as their support suffers and corps go elsewhere.
I think a big problem with AGW is hypocrisy which royally pisses people off. take Al Gore telling people to take the bus while he farts around in a Lear jet and plays on an indoor ACed basketball court. i don't care if his ideas were right I'd tell him to go fuck himself because he is a giant hypocritical douche.
That is why we need to tell Al Gore and friends to fuck right off and if anyone is gonna talk to us it should be Ed Begley Jr. The man lives in a little house, drives an electric car to places he can't bike, the man walks the walk. Too many in the AGW camp are living like kings and telling us to eat cake.
Are you out of memory or something? because i have 8gb on my netbook and desktop and neither hardly hits the HDD at all unless i'm actually launching a program or searching for files and both are NTFS (Win 7 HP X64) so I just don't see where you are getting that. Looking down at the HDD indicator for the little 1.8GHz Sempron I have in the shop running XP it isn't seeing much disk activity either unless I am launching something, and its XP Home with only 1.5Gb of RAM.
So all i can think of is maybe your system is RAM starved or you are running something in the tray that is constantly hitting the drive for some reason. I would look at the tray apps as the only time i've seen that type of constant activity in a non RAM starved machine it turned out the tray app for a drawing pad he rarely used kept writing to the disc. When i killed that it was right as rain, so you might want to look into that.
Well i'd say it depends on WHAT data is being backed up via RAID 1. For example if its something that can be replaced but would be a PITA, like say media files? Then as long as the odds of them doing something really stupid are low then i'd say the risks are low.
The big thing I've found is it is VERY important to have offline discs images of the OS because that is the area one will have to worry about malware, bad patches, etc and that will not be protected in any way with RAID since whatever went wrong with the first will be simply copied before you know what is happening. for my customers i recommend a USB HDD for OS images and any important files because 1.-it is easy to take offsite and replace with another. 2.-It is cheap enough that having more than one isn't cost prohibitive, and 3.-if one has more than one and rotate them even if a bug were to somehow get in and infect both the system and the USB drive attached it would still leave them the offsite backup to restore from.
But as long as one has offline backups as well for critical files then i see no harm in having RAID 1 as simply another layer of defense. Of course i would recommend something like HDDTune to check the SMART to keep an eye on the drives since a good SMART tool will often let you know long before it is noticeable that there is something wrong with a drive. i personally like to install Kel's CPL Bonus Pack on a system as it gives me all the tools I could need right from the control panel, like HDDTune, CPU and GPU-Z,HW monitor, etc. oh a bit of advice, if one wishes to use kel's CPL Bonus in Vista or 7 remember to run as admin when installing.
So while I wouldn't recommend RAID 1 as any kind of backup strategy by itself i see no problem in using it as part of a defense in depth strategy along with offline and offsite backups.
While I agree with the nukes, especially the nuclear subs that make any attempt at a first strike knockout against the USA a suicide mission, the thing about nukes is we WILL end up with proxy wars because it would be MAD if say the USA and Russia or China went toe to toe so the only way is by picking some third world country and going proxy war.
And THAT is where i think we are seriously fucking up. all our weapons are designed to fight a country like Russia or China and not bumfuckistan where it is much more likely we will end up with another Korea. the one thing i have always given the Russians credit for is how they can build cheap and reliable weapons that can be cranked out en masse. THAT is what we truly need and why i say the teen series, F15, F16, F18, should be what we are cranking out instead of these quarter of a billion technoturkeys. Look at the warthogs, i bet those have logged more hours than any technoturkey because in a proxy war a plane with long loiter times that can take punishment and deliver devastating fire is a hell of a lot more valuable in a proxy war type battle than something like the F22.
That is why i think we need something like the Russian S25, its easy to deliver into position, hell you could slap them in C130s and drop them just about anywhere, its got a good gun and can suppress infantry as well as take on small armored vehicles. Like you I doubt seriously we'll be running into someone stupid enough to go after American soil, in fact I'd say the next big battle will be for Africa. watching the moves the Chinese have been making I'd say Africa is a MUCH more likely target, its got tons of resources and living space while the current armies there are mostly a bad joke.
But in any case i look at the path we are heading on and can only think of Germany in WWII, where all these fanciful superweapons that were a PITA were created and ultimately were crushed by cheap Shermans and T34s. It amazes me how we have forgotten the lessons of that war because as Stalin so rightly pointed out "Quantity has a quality all of its own".
BTW if you like weapon histories you should really check out Battlestations which is a most excellent British documentary series. just click on the uploaders name and you'll see he is uploading the entire series which covers just about every major plane as well as some of the ground weapons like the Sherman.A really great series with a lot of insight from the guys that actually manned those systems in combat. enjoy!
Beautiful poem but what i don't understand is why nobody calls them on it. its bad enough for the whites but you look at Indians or Latina (which the Plains people and the Latin Americans have some similar features, enough that my little Cherokee princess is often mistaken for Latina) unless they are mixed its damned near impossible for them to look ANYTHING like the images presented!
It would be like expecting all black men to look like a white guy in blackface when IRL every race has features that are dominant among those of their race. they picked on my princess because she was short (naturally plains are shorter than many races) had hair that wouldn't curl (ditto) and because of having larger breasts and buttocks on such a small frame (again a natural characteristic of their people) when the simple fact is there is no way in hell a Plains Indian is EVER gonna look like a white chick with brown skin! it would be as insane as expecting that a white Irish guy like me could look like Denzel Washington, it just ain't gonna happen!
so as someone who has seen what this can do to a female's self esteem when she is given images of an ideal that is physically impossible for those of her race to live up to if this law starts a real discussion or even better has normal representations of each race? ALL for it. Its time for the "Barbie doll" look to be dumped in the same Leave it To Beaver unreality dustbin of history.
Hey a fellow Ranger man! I got a 99 XT Ranger, great truck. lousy on gas but they ride smooth and can haul a hell of a load and those with the Vulcan V6 like mine? Can't hardly kill the thing.
And while I agree about the whole price and replacement issue i do think there is one side effect you are missing and that is this: It was simply easier back then to design a thicker board with thicker traces than it is now. With today's tech it will cost more to make the thicker board because of the materials where back then it wasn't the material cost that was the issue, it was making boards in quantity that wouldn't have high failure rates. It was MUCH harder then to make a thin crappy board simply because if you would have tried it so many of them would have come off the line duds that you'd end up binning more than you sold. if the rumors are true that is why its easier to find a Phenom I triple or dual than a quad, because their quads often had a failed core so very few passed muster, and according to the sites i hang out at its nearly impossible to OC a Phenom I without disabling Core 2 for that same reason, even if it worked Core 2 would be fragile and more prone to failure than the other 3, again because of manufacturing woes.
Now as for today? Frankly i'm seeing a LOT of older duals and better that are still going strong 6 or 7 years after being built and with software simply not keeping up with hardware for most jobs that half a decade old machine still does the job. i personally switched all my builds to using solid caps for just that reason because my customers are more likely to keep that triple or quad for a decade and with solid caps the boards will last that long easily. I have no doubt this hexacore i built for myself as well as the hexa and quad i built for the kids will be running when Win 7 goes EOL in 2020 simply because one can simply swap out the GPU and even the games are barely stressing duals, much less quads and hexas.
Anyway enjoy your Ranger, now that Ford has quit making them you're gonna find more and more guys hanging onto them as they really are great small trucks. My oldest has experienced the same as you online when he posted pics of his Midnight Blue 98 S10 extended cab, guys left and right were trying to get him to sell. I know that despite the lousy gas mileage i won't be getting rid of mine, those rangers are just too comfortable and fun to drive.
You might want to read the excellent "barbarians at the gate" to see how it really works friend. As the AC above you pointed out when your capital is much less than your assets it can make those that buy up the stock quite a bit of money to simply liquidate the assets. This is exactly what the corporate raiders did in the 80s which is what the above book is based on, specifically the RJR Nabisco takeover.
So if Apple were to withdraw that much money instantly their assets would be much more value than their actual capital or profits and would make them a prime target for liquidation. as i said wall street rewards short term thinking ONLY and long term thinking such as you are suggesting would destroy any publicly traded corp.
Wellll...that depends. is it for software they are still selling? Then yes they should have to support it. But I think we would all agree there has to be some sort of time limit on these things otherwise you end up in MSFT crazy support land.
Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the fact that computers i sold in 2004 are still getting updates or that the little 1.8GHz Sempron is still getting patches after all these years..but can you imagine what a gigantic PITA it must be to patch something like XP? i mean when that thing came out a 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM was the average office box and now you can get dual cores on CL for like $50. Trying to just do testing for patches on code that damned old with that much of a variable when it comes to CPU and RAM alone, not to mention the bazillion and one damned drivers has GOT to be an ulcer inducing job if there ever was one. Hell i doubt that any of the guys that actually originally designed XP are even at the company anymore.
So as long as they give you a set number of years so you know "This software will work for X number" then i see no problem with dropping support for old versions. hell if I was MSFT I would have dropped XP support 2 years ago when it was obvious Win 7 was a good OS, of course I would have offered a cheap upgrade path for those that wanted to keep their old hardware, say $50 Win 7 Home and $75 pro when you gave them the XP key off the side, but that is just me.
I don't know how old this software is since I'm not a Photoshop guy but if PS is as high as it was last i looked at it I'd say 5 years support should be about bare minimum for software that high. But if its just a year or two old at $500+ a license? yeah cough up the patch already. in the end its all about giving a reasonable level of support and for most places I'd say 3 to 5 years ought to be about right.
I still think he was some sort of bot. I mean you had every account being "his name plus incremental number" which is the kind of thing a bot does, most humans will at least through SOME variation in there, even if its calling him Mike instead of Michael, and then his posts were always "insert piece of text from original post" followed by as you pointed out a predictable insult which was usually the same ones over and over and sometimes didn't even fit with the sentence piece culled, again smelt like a bot to me.
At least with twitter, while he did have FOSSie disease complete with a minor case of Voldemort (which for those that don't know, its a condition where they can NEVER type Microsoft or MSFT or MS, it always has to be "That other OS" or "M$", for an example please see Robert Pogson over at Linux Insider who has a severe case of Voldemort) he would weave these elaborate delusions around the narrative, for example he once posted that I was "A secret M$ representative in a facility in Redmond dedicated to destroying FOSS and run by Gates" which of course while completely batshit did make for a nice goldeneye style image of a secret lair complete with map of the world and Gates with a white kitteh.
hell we don't even get inventive ASCII art trolls or even a good nigger troll anymore, its all just copypasta of shit that was old when it was first sent over dialup. Now like I said its all similar to those 14 year old Halo players just spamming their favorite curse words, only with shill and troll and astroturfer taking the place of nigger, fag, and cunt. Not only does it totally break flow but frankly its boring as hell, just no spark of creativity or flair at all, kinda sad really.
Well I have to agree it looked like the basic design was sound, just the barrel was crap, but a tank without a barrel really ain't much good.
If it were me I'd piss the living shit out of the MIC by buying some 2S25s from Russia and make it damned clear we wouldn't be paying for anymore billion dollar clusterfucks. Then I would go back to the pre WWII way of doing things where we put out a spec and they didn't get paid shit UNTIL we accepted the prototype and made the order. as it is now the more they stall and fuck around the more money they make and most have it in their contracts that even if we cancel they get paid a cancellation fee, no matter how shitty their work was.
In the end as long as they can get billion dollar paydays whether the damned thing works or not we'll probably be stuck in the same rut, with overpriced technoturkeys all the way. I agree about the Ontos though, that was a nice system and with a little work could have been made into a truly great system. Instead of the 6 barrels and going outside to change it I would have probably went 3 or 4 barrels with some sort of autoloader, after all with some good HESH round 3 of those babies would have been a world of hurt either way.
i think if the ME ends up another Vietnam we are gonna be royally fucked either way, our technoturkeys simply aren't built to fight a Vietnam style war, as you pointed out we still treat the tank as a tank killer instead of an infantry support unit and that's just stupid thinking. the Firefly was a good system though and yet again the Israelis took our stuff and made it even better. like I said maybe we ought to pick up the phone and see what they can sell us, can't be as bad as the technocrap the MIC is pushing.
But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.
The entire system IMHO has been taken over by leeches, you have corps that literally are doing NANOsecond trades, now how is that in ANY way helpful to innovation? The original intent of trading stock was like what kickstarter is now, you have an idea and need funding, others believe your idea will work and provide funding for a piece of the proceeds. I would argue that the lack of tech actually helped because one had to focus on the long term.
But now the entire system is completely short sighted because any other view is crucified by wall street, it is the reason why you have companies sitting on piles of money instead of investing it into more plants or better infrastructure, simply because anything that affects the bottom line in any way that isn't immediately positive is shat upon. in my own area neither DSL nor cable has moved a single foot in over a decade, even though the town has grown by over a third, why? Because they are both publicly traded companies and their stock goes down when they spend money on lines but goes up when they buy out some other company, so that is what they do instead.
Like I said looking at history i have to wonder if this is simply inevitable because in every empire you see the same progression, first growth and innovation followed by wealth concentration then finally stagnation and downfall. Just as once the sun never set on the British empire so too it appears our own day in the sun is setting, most likely to be replaced by China and India. lets just hope they find the answer before we are all out of time.
Exactly FPs don't mean shit, I've probably gotten a dozen in the past 2 years without even trying, just happened on a story that had something I wanted to talk about and got first totally by accident.
But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT is what I'm talking about. We USED to have some pretty interesting arguments over here on various subjects, everything from quantum theories to NTFS VS EXT 3 to what differences a compiler can make on code, quite interesting stuff.
But for those to happen there needs to be a flow and all the AC nigger faggot shill troll crap just turns everything into a flamewar and ruins any chance of a conversation. Now i find myself lurking more and more on other sites, which I shall not name because last time I did i had a FOSSie follow me around for half a year just so they could post "die you fat fucker die" over and over, simply because at those other sites, even when we disagree, there is a conversation on the topic at hand. Just the other day we had a nice one about "at which point does a feature in an OS cease to become helpful but instead becomes bling and fluff"? some believed that it should be judged by the majority, others believed that it didn't matter as long as there was SOME way to turn it off, and a few agreed with me that when it hampers the user or slows down their task it ceases to be helpful.
I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise. You had everything from the little PC shop guys like me to a nice fellow from CERN who was nice enough to explain in layman's terms what the finding of new particles would do to our understanding of physics and its real world value.
But the only way we are gonna have those kinds of conversations again is either everyone ignores the nigger faggot trolls or the system does something about them. Now considering how this Oracle article was so quickly derailed by a single AC I'd argue that we need the system to help in this regard. While my ideas are only a start and i'm sure others can think of more and better ways i think one thing we can ALL agree on is these flow breaking posts that spam this site frankly need to go.
Blame Wall Street friend. Myself and many others have said that long term research is essential for the very survival of our race and its pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that wars for resources will replace wars for territory in the future. the problem is on wall street if you don't say "Damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" then your stock is gonna take a big old dump and bye bye buddy.
Personally i believe in a broad approach, i think we should be building at the very least small scale test reactors for thorium and for reprocessing our nuclear waste into usable fuel, we should be investing in battery tech and fuel cells and every other possibility that has any real chance for success because frankly the one that trips over a viable replacement for gasoline is gonna make Gates and Buffet look poor and whatever country they are in will probably have a new golden age but sadly the USA is just too short sighted thanks to the government sucking the dicks on wall street to do anything that the money men don't approve of.
I bet the next big breakthrough will probably come from China, they are investing heavily in science and like Japan in the 50s they are learning and improving daily thanks to all the work we have given them. Remember when made in japan meant shit? In a decade i wouldn't doubt if the same change happens in China. Looking at history one has to wonder if this is not inevitable, if once an empire gets to a certain size the wealth becomes too concentrated and apathy and trying to hang onto what those at the top have becomes more important than innovation and stagnation simply can't be avoided.
I have to agree with Ars, its gotten this kind of political bent now that i find a turn off. I go to a geeky site to read about geeky things, the latest CPUs or GPUs or some cool project like the Pi, not to hear some mods thoughts on the politics of the day.
I'd say the only thing really wrong with/. is our crazys just aren't entertaining anymore...anybody remember Twitter? i miss twit, he could take ANY story and turn it into a convoluted plot involving Gates and the Illuminati, so even though he was batshit as hell he was damned entertaining. Now frankly the best we got is the crazies i call the "FOSSies" because of their Moonie like devotion to all things GPL but they have NO flair or entertainment value. Frankly they are like the trolls you'll get in DM that call everyone faggot or nigger, only they call everyone shill or astroturfer that dares not to believe in their "God". Hell look at this very thread, it wasn't three posts before someone screamed nigger or faggot, in this case the nigger or "shill" comment which was the second post.
So I say if you want to fix/. ban ACs completely. It takes less than 3 minutes to make an account and you can put down your are a member of the Swedish bikini team for all the system cares, so damned near all the ACs now are nigger faggot posts. of course with the fucked up mod system one has to surf in negative mode simply because a well thought out viewpoint will be buried for the first few hours of a post if it goes against groupthink, sure the metamods will eventually correct it but who goes back two or three days to look at stories?
So get rid of ACs, put a system in place that keeps up with who is modding who so we can get rid of "modbombs" by those with a chip on their shoulder, perhaps if they downmod the same person X number of times they are blocked from modpoints or maybe by IP address to keep sockpuppets down, I'm not a coder so I'll leave that to guys who know that stuff, all I know is frankly the nigger faggot shill astroturfer shit ruins flow and its nearly always ACs pulling the shit so a good place to start would be to get rid of them or at least have a setting where one can simply block ALL ACs from view if they are less than say a +2 rating.
And folks don't realize the damage that image causes, especially to non whites. My GF is a Cherokee and was in abusive relationships all her life because she was convinced she was "ugly" because she didn't look like a brown barbie doll when the simple fact is...she looked like a Cherokee, duh! Anyone who has been around Plains Indians knows their females have a dominant body type, they are shorter than white women, straight hair, and their bodies have more of a compact shape with larger breasts and buttocks than white women, that's just how their DNA evolved.
It has taken me years to slowly rebuild her self esteem and to this day if I raise my voice, even if it is not in any way directed at her but say bitching because i got pwned in a game she will instinctively flinch like I'm gonna hit her. all because she was told all her life off the rez that she didn't have "good" skin and "good" hair and a body shape that fit what these damned fashion designers pushed. Well fuck them damned fashion designers, not everyone can look like Barbie. The funny part is we guys don't put up with that shit, most guys are quite happy being who they are but then again we've got everyone from Jack Black to Vin Diesel on the screen so maybe it isn't fair to compare. But I think it sucks for them to push an "ideal" that frankly a hell of a lot of guys wouldn't even find attractive. Personally I'd take my Cherokee princess any day over a damned barbie doll, to me they look like plastic people and are a little too uncanny valley for my tastes.
Not to mention everyone seems to forget that in our race to the bottom frankly the new stuff sucks for longevity compared to the old stuff. those Pentium I boards I sold that lumber mill had been stored in my shed for a couple of years and fired right up and are now ass deep in all that flying woodchips and mess and just keep on taking abuse. the traces were thick, the caps were well made and easy to replace, they built those old boards like tanks.
The new stuff has teeny tiny traces, good luck changing caps on a lot of those designs because you have NO room to work, you look at it and the words "designed for the dump" might as well be stamped on it because the whole board was designed to be tossed instead of fixed at the slightest problem. That's fine if its just some office box but NOT something you are depending on for mission critical work. With those two machines I wouldn't be surprised if they last as long as that lathe does, another 10 to 20 years frankly wouldn't surprise me as they have no fans to get gummed up, the chips don't get hot, its just a damned solid design.
Sorry but your logic doesn't hold because frankly it wouldn't be hard to spot a pattern. if they go back day after day to sick site A then one can reasonably suggest that they wanted to go to sick site A where someone who was hit by clickjacker or get rickrolled could be easily spotted because their sites are average and boring and then suddenly their site count goes through the roof and is a bunch of weird sites that they normally don't go to.
You see working on everyday folk's PCs day after day you learn things, like folks are creatures of habit. I'll take myself for an example, if one were to look through my browser logs one would quickly notice patterns, like I check my email twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, I like documentaries, especially on WWII planes and tanks, I like Star Trek, I like video games. If one were to go looking for porn links they would see there is a couple of sites I go to and any links that aren't on those sites were referred from those sites.
So you see friend it really wouldn't be hard to spot the difference. I have a friend that works in the state crime lab catching pedos (he keeps trying to recruit me..HELL no, not enough brain bleach in the world!) and the first thing he'd tell you is pedos would NEVER "just stream" as they collect that shit like some collect Star Wars stuff. He says when they bust a pedo if they find less than 3 DVD spindles filled with CP crap he is frankly amazed, they would NEVER "just stream" because those kinds of sites naturally move often and are shut down so they would be afraid of losing their stash.
BTW you should go to Wikileaks and read the letter put up there by a CP dealer and read what he has to say, he LHAO at those that get busted for clickjacker style bugs, hell he will sometimes do that to an innocent person because he thinks its 'funny". he is the kind of guy that would throw rocks off an overpass just to see people crash and he lays out quite clearly how his customers get to his CP and it is NOT something once can just "stumble across". So again one could look at patterns and see the difference between say his customers and a normal schmuck looking for girls in cheerleader outfits and tripping over something else.
Exactly. Can you imagine if the civil rights movement would have followed the same advice? they would have been given 5 or 6 blocks in the middle of the black section of town with a nice barricade between them and the white sections. The local governments would have then shown the reporters the white sections and said "protest? What protest? See, everything is nice here" and that would have been the end of that.
To expect one to follow rules set up by the opposition (who wants them to fail and who is in bed with the very 1% they are protesting against) is the true height of insanity. As we have seen time and time again the rules they apply to the commoners don't apply to them, so if they don't follow their own rules and laws, why should the serfs?
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I normally don't respond to ACs but this is one thing I've noticed and found interesting....anybody notice how the Anti-BSD GPLers sound a HELL of a lot like the RIAA? Both act as if copying is stealing, both come up with these giant FUD scenarios of doom which never seem to happen, and both act as if THEIR way is the only 'right" choice and frankly you are an idiot or "one of THEM!" if your views don't stay in lock step with their own.
I just find it fascinating that those that constantly scream they are for "freedom" sound a hell of a lot like the most restrictive bunch out there.
Here is what I personally don't get, maybe someone can explain it to me, but WTF was it with RMS and the TiVo? It was ONE device that had NO choice but to be made the way it was. It wasn't like TiVo was being run by Cobra Commander here, they knew that if there was a way to get the content off the device (which is EXACTLY what running custom versions would have allowed) it would have been banhammered in the west quicker than you can say "copyright infringement".
Would he have been more happy if it had used WinCE? Because that is what it feels like to me, that RMS wants ONLY true followers of "the way' to use anything GPL. And since there is multiple other OSes out there including BSD and Windows Embedded it just seems stupid to attack one specific corp and make other businesses afraid of being next on RMS' shit list and all over a device that frankly could have been made no other way without only being sold at China Mart and other "pro piracy" hardware sites.
And despite all the insults posted above you, ya know what? For the vast majority it WORKS so why change? After playing with a customer's 12 inch netbook I decided THAT was what I needed, my 17 incher was too damned heavy, it was bulky, a PITA to balance on my lap and I was lucky to get 4 hours.
So I went out and bought one of the EEE netbooks with the E350 chip and frankly I love it! I don't give a damn if the res is only 1366x768 the picture is clear and crisp, it can play HD movies for 6 hours or surf for 8 and I can squeeze another hour to an hour and a half by using the built in ExpressGate OS. Hell it even took 8Gb of RAM and the Radeon chip lets me play some L4D or GTA:VC when I'm stuck somewhere and bored. Its easy to carry, can be easily hidden under the seat of my truck, its just the perfect size!
so all those snobs above you shitting on any non 1080P device as nothing but "poor people's crap" need to wake up and smell reality because thin and light and easy to carry is the way of the present not to mention the future and most folks like me would rather have excellent battery life than some huge ass screen, which is what desktops are for.
I think one of the heads of Red Hat nailed it when he was asked about RMS: "Richard treats his friends as his enemies". Whether the community wants to accept it or not when RMS specifically targeted a single company with GPL V3 he gave a pretty damned good reason for businesses to stay away from the GPL, fear of being the target of GPL V4. BTW I personally bet that if there is a GPL V4 the new buzzword will be "Androidization" since RMS hates Android even though it has put more Linux devices into users hands than anyone else in history.
What I do find interesting though is how many are having a shitfit when more and more move away from GPLed software when....isn't that the whole damned point of the FOSS model? that one man or one company can't dictate to the masses and the community can route around damage? Well that sure looks like what is going on to me, RMS made GPL V3 too nasty and won't come to the table and work with devs on a compromise so they are routing around the damage by choosing different licenses. Personally I figured the community would be happy as it shows that the FOSS model can't be broken or controlled by any one man and with so many licenses out there...BSD, Apache, MPL, AGPL,etc nobody has to "take it or leave it" like they do with the big two.
I have to say having a mic there really threw me as well. it isn't just musicians, nobody has gone to a karaoke bar? Seen American Idol? been to a concert? Seen an interview?
Maybe the guy had to stretch it for page views or something. Oh and radio buttons? only geeks and programmers call them that because dealing with average folks 6 days a week i can tell you they call those "single choice buttons", oh and the wrench they always call either the prefs button or the option button, nobody I've talked to calls it a wrench. But if he decides to write another one of these i suggest he talk to some actual folks and see what they say first as some of his choices are bizarre.
Uhhh...except for devices with an "i" in the front of them frankly i haven't seen very many "higher resolution" devices, in fact when it comes to laptops if anything they are going lower resolution with most sub 15 inchers being 1366x768.
And my boys were too young to remember floppies but that doesn't mean they don't know what the floppy icon means, they just don't call it a floppy but a "save icon". Just because the symbol BEHIND the icon doesn't mean anything to the younger generations does not mean the icon itself is bad.
I learned just recently how important those icons are when I took on the task of teaching a computer illiterate neighbor how to use a PC. He can now do basic tasks in most programs because the same icons are used in multiple programs so all he had to do was learn those basic icons to know how to do those functions, whether on his XP desktop or Win 7 netbook. again he doesn't know the meaning behind the symbols but frankly that doesn't matter, all that matters is the icons are easily recognizable and similar across platforms and applications.
So I wouldn't be so quick to just toss them aside, especially since i seriously doubt the majority of devices will have retina displays for quite awhile. Besides if we based it on modern devices there would probably be only 3 or 4 icons, an SD card, a laptop, a flash stick, and a smartphone. So many devices have consolidated that there really isn't enough relevant icons to go around IMHO.
But since they can't actually USE that 100 billion you are trapped in circular logic in that 1.-They have the money but 2.- If they were to actually use that money they would get a "barbarians at the gate" and no longer exist so 1 doesn't really matter.
So you see friend THAT is the problem with wall street in a nutshell, if you use your assets for anything OTHER than VERY short term gains the system will turn on you and destroy you, either through a takeover or by the street shorting your stock and sending your value into the toilet.
That is why I said we need to have taxation of capital gains based on how long they hold the stock to remove these leeches to the system. say 90% tax over 30 day, 85% over 60 days and so on until the tax is very little for those holding the stock long term like say 5 years or more. because as it is now it only rewards short term thinking while punishing those that think long term.
As i said your stock price will go up when you buy out other companies but go down when you invest in infrastructure or other things that will benefit the company long term. its stupid and frankly dangerous to tie so much of the wealth up into short term thinking simply because it ends up with a sort of "race to the bottom" where companies focus on shorter and shorter term gains strictly to pump the stock. A good example was Circuit City or even IBM now, both gutted experienced workers for short term stock gains and while it destroyed CC by leaving them unable to compete with rivals we'll have to see with IBM but I bet it'll seriously hurt them as their support suffers and corps go elsewhere.
I think a big problem with AGW is hypocrisy which royally pisses people off. take Al Gore telling people to take the bus while he farts around in a Lear jet and plays on an indoor ACed basketball court. i don't care if his ideas were right I'd tell him to go fuck himself because he is a giant hypocritical douche.
That is why we need to tell Al Gore and friends to fuck right off and if anyone is gonna talk to us it should be Ed Begley Jr. The man lives in a little house, drives an electric car to places he can't bike, the man walks the walk. Too many in the AGW camp are living like kings and telling us to eat cake.
Are you out of memory or something? because i have 8gb on my netbook and desktop and neither hardly hits the HDD at all unless i'm actually launching a program or searching for files and both are NTFS (Win 7 HP X64) so I just don't see where you are getting that. Looking down at the HDD indicator for the little 1.8GHz Sempron I have in the shop running XP it isn't seeing much disk activity either unless I am launching something, and its XP Home with only 1.5Gb of RAM.
So all i can think of is maybe your system is RAM starved or you are running something in the tray that is constantly hitting the drive for some reason. I would look at the tray apps as the only time i've seen that type of constant activity in a non RAM starved machine it turned out the tray app for a drawing pad he rarely used kept writing to the disc. When i killed that it was right as rain, so you might want to look into that.
Well i'd say it depends on WHAT data is being backed up via RAID 1. For example if its something that can be replaced but would be a PITA, like say media files? Then as long as the odds of them doing something really stupid are low then i'd say the risks are low.
The big thing I've found is it is VERY important to have offline discs images of the OS because that is the area one will have to worry about malware, bad patches, etc and that will not be protected in any way with RAID since whatever went wrong with the first will be simply copied before you know what is happening. for my customers i recommend a USB HDD for OS images and any important files because 1.-it is easy to take offsite and replace with another. 2.-It is cheap enough that having more than one isn't cost prohibitive, and 3.-if one has more than one and rotate them even if a bug were to somehow get in and infect both the system and the USB drive attached it would still leave them the offsite backup to restore from.
But as long as one has offline backups as well for critical files then i see no harm in having RAID 1 as simply another layer of defense. Of course i would recommend something like HDDTune to check the SMART to keep an eye on the drives since a good SMART tool will often let you know long before it is noticeable that there is something wrong with a drive. i personally like to install Kel's CPL Bonus Pack on a system as it gives me all the tools I could need right from the control panel, like HDDTune, CPU and GPU-Z,HW monitor, etc. oh a bit of advice, if one wishes to use kel's CPL Bonus in Vista or 7 remember to run as admin when installing.
So while I wouldn't recommend RAID 1 as any kind of backup strategy by itself i see no problem in using it as part of a defense in depth strategy along with offline and offsite backups.
While I agree with the nukes, especially the nuclear subs that make any attempt at a first strike knockout against the USA a suicide mission, the thing about nukes is we WILL end up with proxy wars because it would be MAD if say the USA and Russia or China went toe to toe so the only way is by picking some third world country and going proxy war.
And THAT is where i think we are seriously fucking up. all our weapons are designed to fight a country like Russia or China and not bumfuckistan where it is much more likely we will end up with another Korea. the one thing i have always given the Russians credit for is how they can build cheap and reliable weapons that can be cranked out en masse. THAT is what we truly need and why i say the teen series, F15, F16, F18, should be what we are cranking out instead of these quarter of a billion technoturkeys. Look at the warthogs, i bet those have logged more hours than any technoturkey because in a proxy war a plane with long loiter times that can take punishment and deliver devastating fire is a hell of a lot more valuable in a proxy war type battle than something like the F22.
That is why i think we need something like the Russian S25, its easy to deliver into position, hell you could slap them in C130s and drop them just about anywhere, its got a good gun and can suppress infantry as well as take on small armored vehicles. Like you I doubt seriously we'll be running into someone stupid enough to go after American soil, in fact I'd say the next big battle will be for Africa. watching the moves the Chinese have been making I'd say Africa is a MUCH more likely target, its got tons of resources and living space while the current armies there are mostly a bad joke.
But in any case i look at the path we are heading on and can only think of Germany in WWII, where all these fanciful superweapons that were a PITA were created and ultimately were crushed by cheap Shermans and T34s. It amazes me how we have forgotten the lessons of that war because as Stalin so rightly pointed out "Quantity has a quality all of its own".
BTW if you like weapon histories you should really check out Battlestations which is a most excellent British documentary series. just click on the uploaders name and you'll see he is uploading the entire series which covers just about every major plane as well as some of the ground weapons like the Sherman.A really great series with a lot of insight from the guys that actually manned those systems in combat. enjoy!
Beautiful poem but what i don't understand is why nobody calls them on it. its bad enough for the whites but you look at Indians or Latina (which the Plains people and the Latin Americans have some similar features, enough that my little Cherokee princess is often mistaken for Latina) unless they are mixed its damned near impossible for them to look ANYTHING like the images presented!
It would be like expecting all black men to look like a white guy in blackface when IRL every race has features that are dominant among those of their race. they picked on my princess because she was short (naturally plains are shorter than many races) had hair that wouldn't curl (ditto) and because of having larger breasts and buttocks on such a small frame (again a natural characteristic of their people) when the simple fact is there is no way in hell a Plains Indian is EVER gonna look like a white chick with brown skin! it would be as insane as expecting that a white Irish guy like me could look like Denzel Washington, it just ain't gonna happen!
so as someone who has seen what this can do to a female's self esteem when she is given images of an ideal that is physically impossible for those of her race to live up to if this law starts a real discussion or even better has normal representations of each race? ALL for it. Its time for the "Barbie doll" look to be dumped in the same Leave it To Beaver unreality dustbin of history.
Hey a fellow Ranger man! I got a 99 XT Ranger, great truck. lousy on gas but they ride smooth and can haul a hell of a load and those with the Vulcan V6 like mine? Can't hardly kill the thing.
And while I agree about the whole price and replacement issue i do think there is one side effect you are missing and that is this: It was simply easier back then to design a thicker board with thicker traces than it is now. With today's tech it will cost more to make the thicker board because of the materials where back then it wasn't the material cost that was the issue, it was making boards in quantity that wouldn't have high failure rates. It was MUCH harder then to make a thin crappy board simply because if you would have tried it so many of them would have come off the line duds that you'd end up binning more than you sold. if the rumors are true that is why its easier to find a Phenom I triple or dual than a quad, because their quads often had a failed core so very few passed muster, and according to the sites i hang out at its nearly impossible to OC a Phenom I without disabling Core 2 for that same reason, even if it worked Core 2 would be fragile and more prone to failure than the other 3, again because of manufacturing woes.
Now as for today? Frankly i'm seeing a LOT of older duals and better that are still going strong 6 or 7 years after being built and with software simply not keeping up with hardware for most jobs that half a decade old machine still does the job. i personally switched all my builds to using solid caps for just that reason because my customers are more likely to keep that triple or quad for a decade and with solid caps the boards will last that long easily. I have no doubt this hexacore i built for myself as well as the hexa and quad i built for the kids will be running when Win 7 goes EOL in 2020 simply because one can simply swap out the GPU and even the games are barely stressing duals, much less quads and hexas.
Anyway enjoy your Ranger, now that Ford has quit making them you're gonna find more and more guys hanging onto them as they really are great small trucks. My oldest has experienced the same as you online when he posted pics of his Midnight Blue 98 S10 extended cab, guys left and right were trying to get him to sell. I know that despite the lousy gas mileage i won't be getting rid of mine, those rangers are just too comfortable and fun to drive.
You might want to read the excellent "barbarians at the gate" to see how it really works friend. As the AC above you pointed out when your capital is much less than your assets it can make those that buy up the stock quite a bit of money to simply liquidate the assets. This is exactly what the corporate raiders did in the 80s which is what the above book is based on, specifically the RJR Nabisco takeover.
So if Apple were to withdraw that much money instantly their assets would be much more value than their actual capital or profits and would make them a prime target for liquidation. as i said wall street rewards short term thinking ONLY and long term thinking such as you are suggesting would destroy any publicly traded corp.
Wellll...that depends. is it for software they are still selling? Then yes they should have to support it. But I think we would all agree there has to be some sort of time limit on these things otherwise you end up in MSFT crazy support land.
Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the fact that computers i sold in 2004 are still getting updates or that the little 1.8GHz Sempron is still getting patches after all these years..but can you imagine what a gigantic PITA it must be to patch something like XP? i mean when that thing came out a 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM was the average office box and now you can get dual cores on CL for like $50. Trying to just do testing for patches on code that damned old with that much of a variable when it comes to CPU and RAM alone, not to mention the bazillion and one damned drivers has GOT to be an ulcer inducing job if there ever was one. Hell i doubt that any of the guys that actually originally designed XP are even at the company anymore.
So as long as they give you a set number of years so you know "This software will work for X number" then i see no problem with dropping support for old versions. hell if I was MSFT I would have dropped XP support 2 years ago when it was obvious Win 7 was a good OS, of course I would have offered a cheap upgrade path for those that wanted to keep their old hardware, say $50 Win 7 Home and $75 pro when you gave them the XP key off the side, but that is just me.
I don't know how old this software is since I'm not a Photoshop guy but if PS is as high as it was last i looked at it I'd say 5 years support should be about bare minimum for software that high. But if its just a year or two old at $500+ a license? yeah cough up the patch already. in the end its all about giving a reasonable level of support and for most places I'd say 3 to 5 years ought to be about right.
I still think he was some sort of bot. I mean you had every account being "his name plus incremental number" which is the kind of thing a bot does, most humans will at least through SOME variation in there, even if its calling him Mike instead of Michael, and then his posts were always "insert piece of text from original post" followed by as you pointed out a predictable insult which was usually the same ones over and over and sometimes didn't even fit with the sentence piece culled, again smelt like a bot to me.
At least with twitter, while he did have FOSSie disease complete with a minor case of Voldemort (which for those that don't know, its a condition where they can NEVER type Microsoft or MSFT or MS, it always has to be "That other OS" or "M$", for an example please see Robert Pogson over at Linux Insider who has a severe case of Voldemort) he would weave these elaborate delusions around the narrative, for example he once posted that I was "A secret M$ representative in a facility in Redmond dedicated to destroying FOSS and run by Gates" which of course while completely batshit did make for a nice goldeneye style image of a secret lair complete with map of the world and Gates with a white kitteh.
hell we don't even get inventive ASCII art trolls or even a good nigger troll anymore, its all just copypasta of shit that was old when it was first sent over dialup. Now like I said its all similar to those 14 year old Halo players just spamming their favorite curse words, only with shill and troll and astroturfer taking the place of nigger, fag, and cunt. Not only does it totally break flow but frankly its boring as hell, just no spark of creativity or flair at all, kinda sad really.
Well I have to agree it looked like the basic design was sound, just the barrel was crap, but a tank without a barrel really ain't much good.
If it were me I'd piss the living shit out of the MIC by buying some 2S25s from Russia and make it damned clear we wouldn't be paying for anymore billion dollar clusterfucks. Then I would go back to the pre WWII way of doing things where we put out a spec and they didn't get paid shit UNTIL we accepted the prototype and made the order. as it is now the more they stall and fuck around the more money they make and most have it in their contracts that even if we cancel they get paid a cancellation fee, no matter how shitty their work was.
In the end as long as they can get billion dollar paydays whether the damned thing works or not we'll probably be stuck in the same rut, with overpriced technoturkeys all the way. I agree about the Ontos though, that was a nice system and with a little work could have been made into a truly great system. Instead of the 6 barrels and going outside to change it I would have probably went 3 or 4 barrels with some sort of autoloader, after all with some good HESH round 3 of those babies would have been a world of hurt either way.
i think if the ME ends up another Vietnam we are gonna be royally fucked either way, our technoturkeys simply aren't built to fight a Vietnam style war, as you pointed out we still treat the tank as a tank killer instead of an infantry support unit and that's just stupid thinking. the Firefly was a good system though and yet again the Israelis took our stuff and made it even better. like I said maybe we ought to pick up the phone and see what they can sell us, can't be as bad as the technocrap the MIC is pushing.
But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.
The entire system IMHO has been taken over by leeches, you have corps that literally are doing NANOsecond trades, now how is that in ANY way helpful to innovation? The original intent of trading stock was like what kickstarter is now, you have an idea and need funding, others believe your idea will work and provide funding for a piece of the proceeds. I would argue that the lack of tech actually helped because one had to focus on the long term.
But now the entire system is completely short sighted because any other view is crucified by wall street, it is the reason why you have companies sitting on piles of money instead of investing it into more plants or better infrastructure, simply because anything that affects the bottom line in any way that isn't immediately positive is shat upon. in my own area neither DSL nor cable has moved a single foot in over a decade, even though the town has grown by over a third, why? Because they are both publicly traded companies and their stock goes down when they spend money on lines but goes up when they buy out some other company, so that is what they do instead.
Like I said looking at history i have to wonder if this is simply inevitable because in every empire you see the same progression, first growth and innovation followed by wealth concentration then finally stagnation and downfall. Just as once the sun never set on the British empire so too it appears our own day in the sun is setting, most likely to be replaced by China and India. lets just hope they find the answer before we are all out of time.
Exactly FPs don't mean shit, I've probably gotten a dozen in the past 2 years without even trying, just happened on a story that had something I wanted to talk about and got first totally by accident.
But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT is what I'm talking about. We USED to have some pretty interesting arguments over here on various subjects, everything from quantum theories to NTFS VS EXT 3 to what differences a compiler can make on code, quite interesting stuff.
But for those to happen there needs to be a flow and all the AC nigger faggot shill troll crap just turns everything into a flamewar and ruins any chance of a conversation. Now i find myself lurking more and more on other sites, which I shall not name because last time I did i had a FOSSie follow me around for half a year just so they could post "die you fat fucker die" over and over, simply because at those other sites, even when we disagree, there is a conversation on the topic at hand. Just the other day we had a nice one about "at which point does a feature in an OS cease to become helpful but instead becomes bling and fluff"? some believed that it should be judged by the majority, others believed that it didn't matter as long as there was SOME way to turn it off, and a few agreed with me that when it hampers the user or slows down their task it ceases to be helpful.
I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise. You had everything from the little PC shop guys like me to a nice fellow from CERN who was nice enough to explain in layman's terms what the finding of new particles would do to our understanding of physics and its real world value.
But the only way we are gonna have those kinds of conversations again is either everyone ignores the nigger faggot trolls or the system does something about them. Now considering how this Oracle article was so quickly derailed by a single AC I'd argue that we need the system to help in this regard. While my ideas are only a start and i'm sure others can think of more and better ways i think one thing we can ALL agree on is these flow breaking posts that spam this site frankly need to go.
Blame Wall Street friend. Myself and many others have said that long term research is essential for the very survival of our race and its pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that wars for resources will replace wars for territory in the future. the problem is on wall street if you don't say "Damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" then your stock is gonna take a big old dump and bye bye buddy.
Personally i believe in a broad approach, i think we should be building at the very least small scale test reactors for thorium and for reprocessing our nuclear waste into usable fuel, we should be investing in battery tech and fuel cells and every other possibility that has any real chance for success because frankly the one that trips over a viable replacement for gasoline is gonna make Gates and Buffet look poor and whatever country they are in will probably have a new golden age but sadly the USA is just too short sighted thanks to the government sucking the dicks on wall street to do anything that the money men don't approve of.
I bet the next big breakthrough will probably come from China, they are investing heavily in science and like Japan in the 50s they are learning and improving daily thanks to all the work we have given them. Remember when made in japan meant shit? In a decade i wouldn't doubt if the same change happens in China. Looking at history one has to wonder if this is not inevitable, if once an empire gets to a certain size the wealth becomes too concentrated and apathy and trying to hang onto what those at the top have becomes more important than innovation and stagnation simply can't be avoided.
I have to agree with Ars, its gotten this kind of political bent now that i find a turn off. I go to a geeky site to read about geeky things, the latest CPUs or GPUs or some cool project like the Pi, not to hear some mods thoughts on the politics of the day.
I'd say the only thing really wrong with /. is our crazys just aren't entertaining anymore...anybody remember Twitter? i miss twit, he could take ANY story and turn it into a convoluted plot involving Gates and the Illuminati, so even though he was batshit as hell he was damned entertaining. Now frankly the best we got is the crazies i call the "FOSSies" because of their Moonie like devotion to all things GPL but they have NO flair or entertainment value. Frankly they are like the trolls you'll get in DM that call everyone faggot or nigger, only they call everyone shill or astroturfer that dares not to believe in their "God". Hell look at this very thread, it wasn't three posts before someone screamed nigger or faggot, in this case the nigger or "shill" comment which was the second post.
So I say if you want to fix /. ban ACs completely. It takes less than 3 minutes to make an account and you can put down your are a member of the Swedish bikini team for all the system cares, so damned near all the ACs now are nigger faggot posts. of course with the fucked up mod system one has to surf in negative mode simply because a well thought out viewpoint will be buried for the first few hours of a post if it goes against groupthink, sure the metamods will eventually correct it but who goes back two or three days to look at stories?
So get rid of ACs, put a system in place that keeps up with who is modding who so we can get rid of "modbombs" by those with a chip on their shoulder, perhaps if they downmod the same person X number of times they are blocked from modpoints or maybe by IP address to keep sockpuppets down, I'm not a coder so I'll leave that to guys who know that stuff, all I know is frankly the nigger faggot shill astroturfer shit ruins flow and its nearly always ACs pulling the shit so a good place to start would be to get rid of them or at least have a setting where one can simply block ALL ACs from view if they are less than say a +2 rating.
And folks don't realize the damage that image causes, especially to non whites. My GF is a Cherokee and was in abusive relationships all her life because she was convinced she was "ugly" because she didn't look like a brown barbie doll when the simple fact is...she looked like a Cherokee, duh! Anyone who has been around Plains Indians knows their females have a dominant body type, they are shorter than white women, straight hair, and their bodies have more of a compact shape with larger breasts and buttocks than white women, that's just how their DNA evolved.
It has taken me years to slowly rebuild her self esteem and to this day if I raise my voice, even if it is not in any way directed at her but say bitching because i got pwned in a game she will instinctively flinch like I'm gonna hit her. all because she was told all her life off the rez that she didn't have "good" skin and "good" hair and a body shape that fit what these damned fashion designers pushed. Well fuck them damned fashion designers, not everyone can look like Barbie. The funny part is we guys don't put up with that shit, most guys are quite happy being who they are but then again we've got everyone from Jack Black to Vin Diesel on the screen so maybe it isn't fair to compare. But I think it sucks for them to push an "ideal" that frankly a hell of a lot of guys wouldn't even find attractive. Personally I'd take my Cherokee princess any day over a damned barbie doll, to me they look like plastic people and are a little too uncanny valley for my tastes.
Not to mention everyone seems to forget that in our race to the bottom frankly the new stuff sucks for longevity compared to the old stuff. those Pentium I boards I sold that lumber mill had been stored in my shed for a couple of years and fired right up and are now ass deep in all that flying woodchips and mess and just keep on taking abuse. the traces were thick, the caps were well made and easy to replace, they built those old boards like tanks.
The new stuff has teeny tiny traces, good luck changing caps on a lot of those designs because you have NO room to work, you look at it and the words "designed for the dump" might as well be stamped on it because the whole board was designed to be tossed instead of fixed at the slightest problem. That's fine if its just some office box but NOT something you are depending on for mission critical work. With those two machines I wouldn't be surprised if they last as long as that lathe does, another 10 to 20 years frankly wouldn't surprise me as they have no fans to get gummed up, the chips don't get hot, its just a damned solid design.
Sorry but your logic doesn't hold because frankly it wouldn't be hard to spot a pattern. if they go back day after day to sick site A then one can reasonably suggest that they wanted to go to sick site A where someone who was hit by clickjacker or get rickrolled could be easily spotted because their sites are average and boring and then suddenly their site count goes through the roof and is a bunch of weird sites that they normally don't go to.
You see working on everyday folk's PCs day after day you learn things, like folks are creatures of habit. I'll take myself for an example, if one were to look through my browser logs one would quickly notice patterns, like I check my email twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, I like documentaries, especially on WWII planes and tanks, I like Star Trek, I like video games. If one were to go looking for porn links they would see there is a couple of sites I go to and any links that aren't on those sites were referred from those sites.
So you see friend it really wouldn't be hard to spot the difference. I have a friend that works in the state crime lab catching pedos (he keeps trying to recruit me..HELL no, not enough brain bleach in the world!) and the first thing he'd tell you is pedos would NEVER "just stream" as they collect that shit like some collect Star Wars stuff. He says when they bust a pedo if they find less than 3 DVD spindles filled with CP crap he is frankly amazed, they would NEVER "just stream" because those kinds of sites naturally move often and are shut down so they would be afraid of losing their stash.
BTW you should go to Wikileaks and read the letter put up there by a CP dealer and read what he has to say, he LHAO at those that get busted for clickjacker style bugs, hell he will sometimes do that to an innocent person because he thinks its 'funny". he is the kind of guy that would throw rocks off an overpass just to see people crash and he lays out quite clearly how his customers get to his CP and it is NOT something once can just "stumble across". So again one could look at patterns and see the difference between say his customers and a normal schmuck looking for girls in cheerleader outfits and tripping over something else.
Exactly. Can you imagine if the civil rights movement would have followed the same advice? they would have been given 5 or 6 blocks in the middle of the black section of town with a nice barricade between them and the white sections. The local governments would have then shown the reporters the white sections and said "protest? What protest? See, everything is nice here" and that would have been the end of that.
To expect one to follow rules set up by the opposition (who wants them to fail and who is in bed with the very 1% they are protesting against) is the true height of insanity. As we have seen time and time again the rules they apply to the commoners don't apply to them, so if they don't follow their own rules and laws, why should the serfs?