The parent makes a good point. Flash cards are very slow when compared to hard drives. An 80x flash card (the highest I've seen) is only 12 Mbps! To contrast that, Western Digital's Caviar drive lists 602 Mbits/s (Max).
I'd only use one of those cards in special situations. Especially since flash also costs much more per megabyte.
I cannot help but wonder if there will be ethical problems 50 years from now. I mean, if we have rat brains flying fighter planes, is it really ethical to send them into battle, possibly killing them? Are they alive? Will the higher order ones be self-aware? Does that count as killing them? Would they have emotions? Would they fear dying? Would they feel sadness when they know they won't be coming back? Just things like that.
I mean, there's a difference between artifical intelligence (mere electricity) and a living brain. Isn't there?
>Oh I agree. The second the sick become cured they should have their liberties and freedom to make choices about what they do with their body be taken away.
Oh I agree. The millions of people it could save aren't with a few drops of blood. Those needles are really sharp! Golly! Surely someone can't be expected to be moderately inconviened for the sake of millions. That would be wrong.
>If you do not understand how such a system can enable extreme abuses of privacy, you must have been living in a cave for the last 200 years.
Do you honestly believe a company would allow it's employees to do something like that--or even worse, tell them to? They'd be sued out of existence!
This whole privacy thing is bunk. You use your social security number everywhere, and you hand your credit cards and checks to people you've never even met before (cashiers) without even thinking twice. And yet you worry about a car company attacking it's own consumer-base? That'd be the absolute stupidist business decision a huge company like GM could make.
>In the past week, a number of students found mistakes in their class schedules because of glitches in the computer system, which is called D.C. STARS and is designed to handle attendance, grading and the calculation of graduation and dropout rates, among other functions. School officials said at the time that the problem affected about 5 percent of secondary students.
This looks more like a problem with bad software than with the underlying operating system. The article doesn't list any actual problem they have with Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Windows is the best operating system of choice for every situation. But provide actual facts as to the problems. "Underlying infrastructure" is too abstract to be of any use to anyone.
As for Apache on Windows... it works fine for me. I can't provide technological sources to disprove what the article says but my personal experiences with it have always been fine.
> I don't go to church, so I don't know whether preachers speak out against violence executed in the name of religion
If you go to any church that isn't a corrupted mess, you will hear exactly that. As far as Christianity is concerned, you're never allowed to murder someone because they're "evil." Only the sinless can judge, and since everyone has sinned, none may.
>Do Christian priests teach their congregations that the killing in war is evil, that killers go to hell?
Your feeling about Iraq aside: War is sometimes necessary. As for whether or not it's "evil," I don't have the knowledge to discuss that.
>Like after someone shoots an abortion doctor in the name of "unborn children", or a gang beats a gay guy to death:
Only in absolutely insane churches, would someone ever condone that. If they do, they don't follow Christian doctrine, and are a religious sect, and shouldn't be considered an example of what Christians believe. If they do exist, please don't think that we are all as incredibly foolish as that.
> When torture is in the news, do preachers make it their business to teach their followers that torture is evil, that god punishes torturers?
Torture isn't exactly a Church subject, so they don't tend to speak about that. But torture is absolutely regarded as evil, and never encouraged.
>Do they teach people that doing evil in god's name is even worse evil?
It's not "worse than evil." It is evil. Christians are not called to condemn the world, because the world (according to Christain doctrine) is already condemned.
>But then, without going to church, and without much coverage of such preaching in the media,
I strongly recommend you find out for yourself whether or not Christians are the horrible people they're made out to be. Find a good church (ask around) and see for yourself. I say this NOT so that you will be evanglised or anything of that matter, but rather, so that you can get an honest unbiased opinion that isn't biased by spiteful people. There ARE bad churches, and how I wish it weren't so. But there are so many good ones that teach the Bible (as opposed to politics!).
If this was "funny", fine. But how is this insightful? How are people being forced to go to church? Not even radical Christians are demanding everyone go to church. Those radical Christians may be stupid, but this statement when used in a serious context is just lunacy.
>God knows what the security state is as XP stumbles around back there dragging in useless services and pumping out thousands of log entries that no customer actually ever asked for.
Security privilages are setup before the desktop is loaded...
>Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine.
I think the problem with most people is that as soon as they find a way to make something more efficient, they immediately try to do more. Instead of taking a step back and enjoying life, most people just do more, thinking it'll make them happy.
My only real complaint about that article is this:
>Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants.
Since when is it illegal to have coffee hotter than the other resturants? Apparently the fact that some people might prefer a drink that has more heat in it must have been on vacation or something.
>Watch out, this movies isn't exactly kid friendly. When they say its dark and violent, they mean its dark and violent for a movie, not just a star wars movie.
While I agree, just two points:
1. It's supposed to be dark and violent. All the Jedi didn't just settle their differences and agree to die.
2. It's PG-13. We do have rating systems for a reason. I mean, you probably shouldn't be seeing anyone getting their arms and legs chopped off when you're seven.
>Quite frankly, there are people who go out of their way for it as it's the ONLY way to get Dolby Digital encoding on a PC. Just try to tell them that it sounds like crap. You need to update your views on onboard audio.
Then update your views on Dolby Digital and PC soundcards. My (low-end) Audigy 2 supports Dolby Digital EX, and Extended DTS. The Audigy 1 supported it, and how old is that?
24-bit 192khz audio is amazing, but most people don't care. Most people don't watch or listen to DVDs on their computers. The SNR ratio and THD is still much better, but again, nobody cares. Nobody notices on their horrible freebie speakers. So for most people, AC97 is "good enough."
As for my views on onboard hardware: I don't like onboard for anything other than general (LAN, USB, etc) stuff. Namely because it means I'll never be able to replace or upgrade it. But that's just me and my uses. Obviously, onboard works well for hand-me-downs and new spawns.
>Public safety vs. personal freedoms. Just how many freedoms do you lose when you sexually assault someone... As someone who is NOT a felon, I see no problem in this tracking... But what if it was a wrong place, wrong time drunken haze kind of thing. I don't know what to think sometimes. You just have to be careful whose toes you step on.
Here's the thing though: Don't you think the courts and police would be qualified based on your testimoney and everyone elses whether or not you're some evil sex crazed lunatic, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Leave it to the courts (as opposed to the media) to decide whether or not someone is guilty. If they're guilty, they're guilty (excluding mistrials). And besides, this law only applies to sex offenders of children 11 or younger. It's pretty damn hard to mistake an 11 year old for 18.
>What makes homosexuals any less fit to provide that?
While I agree that discrimination for pretty much any reason is horrible and just plain stupid:
Children learn how to act from the parent of the same-sex. They learn how to interact with the opposite sex from the parent of the opposite sex. While this isn't a reason to ban homosexuals from raising children (at least SOMEONE cares enough to raise them, right?), it certainly makes it harder to raise them correctly.
>Another reason for all you Winblows users to switch a different os. If Mr. Reznor himself uses a mac....
And the Linux ones too... hmm...
By your logic, we should all use OpenGL because clearly our Soveriegn John Carmack uses it. While I prefer OpenGL, a celebrity is hardly a reason to do _anything_.
Lastly, you fail to take into account that he merely _dumped_ it to garage band. He said he downsampled it from Pro Tools. Not "Garage Band," an 8-track toy. Pro Tools is available for both PC and Mac. Garage Band is made by Apple. Pro Tools is not. Do I really need to continue?
Apples are nice. I would love to have an iBook. But _please_, don't resort to uninformed arguments to try convert people to your cause.
>Immersion's patents relate to giving developers very fine-grained control over the motors driving the "vibration units" in things such as pagers, mobile phones, and yes game controllers.
Could you please provide a source for this? I'd really like to know the details, as all you've essentially described, is Pulse Width Modulation. Hardly lawsuit worthy, and being used right now to control the speed of your CPU fan.
Of course, let's not take into account that all those buttons (that you can remove) actually do something useful, like edit your text. Bloated, definitely! Unless you want any real control whatsoever...
...about more support for FireFox. But perhaps they should have been standards compliant to begin with?
It's good news, sure. But they shouldn't have relied on IE to fix malformed metadata in the first place.
I'll let it slide (to an extent) if it's taking advantage of IE-specific APIs, considering years ago IE was more-or-less the only browser people used. When 95%+ of your userbase uses IE, you can usually get away with that if it means getting even more of a user base (a prettier easier to use website at the expense of support for other browsers). In the end, if you have even more users, the ends justify the means to a business.
That's fine, since you have the right to have a different opinion. But the majority certainly has a differing opinion which states "we like Google." And I have to agree. I use Google everyday.
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The parent makes a good point. Flash cards are very slow when compared to hard drives. An 80x flash card (the highest I've seen) is only 12 Mbps! To contrast that, Western Digital's Caviar drive lists 602 Mbits/s (Max).
I'd only use one of those cards in special situations. Especially since flash also costs much more per megabyte.
I cannot help but wonder if there will be ethical problems 50 years from now. I mean, if we have rat brains flying fighter planes, is it really ethical to send them into battle, possibly killing them? Are they alive? Will the higher order ones be self-aware? Does that count as killing them? Would they have emotions? Would they fear dying? Would they feel sadness when they know they won't be coming back? Just things like that.
I mean, there's a difference between artifical intelligence (mere electricity) and a living brain. Isn't there?
>Oh I agree. The second the sick become cured they should have their liberties and freedom to make choices about what they do with their body be taken away.
Oh I agree. The millions of people it could save aren't with a few drops of blood. Those needles are really sharp! Golly! Surely someone can't be expected to be moderately inconviened for the sake of millions. That would be wrong.
What the crap? This isn't "funny." This is an legit use for a laptop--a high quality soundcard.
>If you do not understand how such a system can enable extreme abuses of privacy, you must have been living in a cave for the last 200 years.
Do you honestly believe a company would allow it's employees to do something like that--or even worse, tell them to? They'd be sued out of existence!
This whole privacy thing is bunk. You use your social security number everywhere, and you hand your credit cards and checks to people you've never even met before (cashiers) without even thinking twice. And yet you worry about a car company attacking it's own consumer-base? That'd be the absolute stupidist business decision a huge company like GM could make.
>In the past week, a number of students found mistakes in their class schedules because of glitches in the computer system, which is called D.C. STARS and is designed to handle attendance, grading and the calculation of graduation and dropout rates, among other functions. School officials said at the time that the problem affected about 5 percent of secondary students.
This looks more like a problem with bad software than with the underlying operating system. The article doesn't list any actual problem they have with Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Windows is the best operating system of choice for every situation. But provide actual facts as to the problems. "Underlying infrastructure" is too abstract to be of any use to anyone.
As for Apache on Windows... it works fine for me. I can't provide technological sources to disprove what the article says but my personal experiences with it have always been fine.
> I don't go to church, so I don't know whether preachers speak out against violence executed in the name of religion
If you go to any church that isn't a corrupted mess, you will hear exactly that. As far as Christianity is concerned, you're never allowed to murder someone because they're "evil." Only the sinless can judge, and since everyone has sinned, none may.
>Do Christian priests teach their congregations that the killing in war is evil, that killers go to hell?
Your feeling about Iraq aside: War is sometimes necessary. As for whether or not it's "evil," I don't have the knowledge to discuss that.
>Like after someone shoots an abortion doctor in the name of "unborn children", or a gang beats a gay guy to death:
Only in absolutely insane churches, would someone ever condone that. If they do, they don't follow Christian doctrine, and are a religious sect, and shouldn't be considered an example of what Christians believe. If they do exist, please don't think that we are all as incredibly foolish as that.
> When torture is in the news, do preachers make it their business to teach their followers that torture is evil, that god punishes torturers?
Torture isn't exactly a Church subject, so they don't tend to speak about that. But torture is absolutely regarded as evil, and never encouraged.
>Do they teach people that doing evil in god's name is even worse evil?
It's not "worse than evil." It is evil. Christians are not called to condemn the world, because the world (according to Christain doctrine) is already condemned.
>But then, without going to church, and without much coverage of such preaching in the media,
I strongly recommend you find out for yourself whether or not Christians are the horrible people they're made out to be. Find a good church (ask around) and see for yourself. I say this NOT so that you will be evanglised or anything of that matter, but rather, so that you can get an honest unbiased opinion that isn't biased by spiteful people. There ARE bad churches, and how I wish it weren't so. But there are so many good ones that teach the Bible (as opposed to politics!).
>>Church is optional
>For the moment
If this was "funny", fine. But how is this insightful? How are people being forced to go to church? Not even radical Christians are demanding everyone go to church. Those radical Christians may be stupid, but this statement when used in a serious context is just lunacy.
>God knows what the security state is as XP stumbles around back there dragging in useless services and pumping out thousands of log entries that no customer actually ever asked for.
Security privilages are setup before the desktop is loaded...
>Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine.
I think the problem with most people is that as soon as they find a way to make something more efficient, they immediately try to do more. Instead of taking a step back and enjoying life, most people just do more, thinking it'll make them happy.
>we see any Micrsoft ad campaign promoting "XP N" ?
Did you see any ad campaign from any vender? Nobody wants a reduced copy of Windows. It's that simple. So why market it?
"Want Windows without the software? On sale for the same everyday low price at your local Wal-Mart."
>No doubt that MS Office is bloatware. My Office folder is 486 MB. Outrageous.
You know you can choose not to install all of this "bloat"... right?
My only real complaint about that article is this:
>Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants.
Since when is it illegal to have coffee hotter than the other resturants? Apparently the fact that some people might prefer a drink that has more heat in it must have been on vacation or something.
>Watch out, this movies isn't exactly kid friendly. When they say its dark and violent, they mean its dark and violent for a movie, not just a star wars movie.
While I agree, just two points:
1. It's supposed to be dark and violent. All the Jedi didn't just settle their differences and agree to die.
2. It's PG-13. We do have rating systems for a reason. I mean, you probably shouldn't be seeing anyone getting their arms and legs chopped off when you're seven.
>if you think the Audigy 2's are true 24-bit 192Khz, you're the one that needs to do their fact checking here.
Please show me the part where I said "the Audigy has true 24-bit audio" and I will eat my hat.
>Quite frankly, there are people who go out of their way for it as it's the ONLY way to get Dolby Digital encoding on a PC. Just try to tell them that it sounds like crap. You need to update your views on onboard audio.
Then update your views on Dolby Digital and PC soundcards. My (low-end) Audigy 2 supports Dolby Digital EX, and Extended DTS. The Audigy 1 supported it, and how old is that?
24-bit 192khz audio is amazing, but most people don't care. Most people don't watch or listen to DVDs on their computers. The SNR ratio and THD is still much better, but again, nobody cares. Nobody notices on their horrible freebie speakers. So for most people, AC97 is "good enough."
As for my views on onboard hardware: I don't like onboard for anything other than general (LAN, USB, etc) stuff. Namely because it means I'll never be able to replace or upgrade it. But that's just me and my uses. Obviously, onboard works well for hand-me-downs and new spawns.
>Public safety vs. personal freedoms. Just how many freedoms do you lose when you sexually assault someone... As someone who is NOT a felon, I see no problem in this tracking... But what if it was a wrong place, wrong time drunken haze kind of thing. I don't know what to think sometimes. You just have to be careful whose toes you step on.
Here's the thing though: Don't you think the courts and police would be qualified based on your testimoney and everyone elses whether or not you're some evil sex crazed lunatic, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Leave it to the courts (as opposed to the media) to decide whether or not someone is guilty. If they're guilty, they're guilty (excluding mistrials). And besides, this law only applies to sex offenders of children 11 or younger. It's pretty damn hard to mistake an 11 year old for 18.
>What makes homosexuals any less fit to provide that?
While I agree that discrimination for pretty much any reason is horrible and just plain stupid:
Children learn how to act from the parent of the same-sex. They learn how to interact with the opposite sex from the parent of the opposite sex. While this isn't a reason to ban homosexuals from raising children (at least SOMEONE cares enough to raise them, right?), it certainly makes it harder to raise them correctly.
>Another reason for all you Winblows users to switch a different os. If Mr. Reznor himself uses a mac....
And the Linux ones too... hmm...
By your logic, we should all use OpenGL because clearly our Soveriegn John Carmack uses it. While I prefer OpenGL, a celebrity is hardly a reason to do _anything_.
Lastly, you fail to take into account that he merely _dumped_ it to garage band. He said he downsampled it from Pro Tools. Not "Garage Band," an 8-track toy. Pro Tools is available for both PC and Mac. Garage Band is made by Apple. Pro Tools is not. Do I really need to continue?
Apples are nice. I would love to have an iBook. But _please_, don't resort to uninformed arguments to try convert people to your cause.
>Point is that the Bible is full of authorization to do violence to others.
I don't recall Jesus ever killing a hooker...
>Immersion's patents relate to giving developers very fine-grained control over the motors driving the "vibration units" in things such as pagers, mobile phones, and yes game controllers.
Could you please provide a source for this? I'd really like to know the details, as all you've essentially described, is Pulse Width Modulation. Hardly lawsuit worthy, and being used right now to control the speed of your CPU fan.
...programs that use the embedded media player API... won't work without the media player.
"Brilliant!"
This is like complaining about removing ActiveX and not being able to run ActiveX plugins. "I just wanted ActiveX gone! Not anything that USED it!"
Of course, let's not take into account that all those buttons (that you can remove) actually do something useful, like edit your text. Bloated, definitely! Unless you want any real control whatsoever...
...about more support for FireFox. But perhaps they should have been standards compliant to begin with?
It's good news, sure. But they shouldn't have relied on IE to fix malformed metadata in the first place.
I'll let it slide (to an extent) if it's taking advantage of IE-specific APIs, considering years ago IE was more-or-less the only browser people used. When 95%+ of your userbase uses IE, you can usually get away with that if it means getting even more of a user base (a prettier easier to use website at the expense of support for other browsers). In the end, if you have even more users, the ends justify the means to a business.
>I beg to differ.
That's fine, since you have the right to have a different opinion. But the majority certainly has a differing opinion which states "we like Google." And I have to agree. I use Google everyday.