You understand my point better then the other posters. (Hint, wal-mart doesn't have many folk disks, nor does Best Buy, at least not as I like my music. So I can only go to a small store)
the problem however is this little record store has several thousand CDs that I might be interested in. I don't have time to listen to 1000 CDs just to choose which one to buy. I can listen to about 6 CDs every day at work though, which will cover their entire inventory in a year and allow listening to the ones I really like more often.
As the subject says, I was at a record store last night. A couple thousand CDs, mostly folk and bluegrass. I looked at many, but in the end didn't buy one. I've bought bad folk records, and I've bought good ones. I love folk but the catagorie is large enough that some of it bores me. I wanted to buy anouther CD, but not knowing any of the artists I was not willing to take a chance on any.
There needs to be some way to sample music before I buy it.
I think I need more details, because I've come up with several obvious answers, and I would assume you are smart enough to have looked at them.
So, why will not a cell phone work? (perhaps one with a data connector) Why won't a wal-mart cordless phone work? Why can't you run underground phone wire to each parking space? (In the north they already run electric to parking spaces so that people can plug cars in in winter, and I would imangine trucks would like having 110 at their parking spots anyway. Toss some cat 5 in there too while your at it and you have a truck stop for geeks)
What are you trying to solve. I've seen several ask/. questions that on further examination shows the questioner asked the wrong questions, there was a better solution that his question prevented getting an answer to.
Whats the big deal? The main harddrive on my most important machine has had a capacity of 80 for years.
Oh, and whats with replacing the M with a G in there? Some new ISO thing?
Seriously though, I still boot my old 386 from a 80 meg drive, which cranks out about 3 rc5 blocks a day. Makes a good router though, and except for a little noise isn't a bad foot rest. Haven't had a monitor in a while.
which my company did. In particular me... However we had to write most of that code anyway for failover of our custom hardware so it was more a matter of porting to solaris. Course we also designed from the start for failover.
A hugh pain, overall. Many tricky problems. Many little things to come back to bite you. There are a couple special cases that bite me time and time again because I cannot tell the difference between the two. (ie is the other machine broke, or just the cable between us?)
We concluded that all HA got us was notification when to fail over (And disk mirroring I suppose). We still had to write the code to do the failovers. Soon after we decided that it wasn't worth the expense and wrote it our self.
At first this seems great. I often shift my attention between windows without shifting focus and end up typing in the wrong window. (This is a big problem when I have a window to gcc open and am writing a/. post - gcc finds a syntax error, so I fix it, and look back to lynx without shifting the focus)
On second thought though, there are problems. When I sit down for a long coding session I've been known to have 2 big windows on my screen, each with references for functions/error codes that I'll be working with, with just one line of my editor showing. (I hate the way windows makes the window with focus be on top)
I like the idea, if it is powerful enough to tell when I want to shift window focus, vs when I want to keep the window focus, while reading a references
And a big AOL style me too, to what ohters have said about filtering email from someone important vs a less important company newsletter (But don't mistake a emergency mesage from the sysadmin) vs spam.
Great idea, 70 mpg. I'd love to get that on my commute to work. However I live on a small lot, if I got one of these I wouldn't have room to park my boat unless I got rid of the truck. (Which must be 4wd to get out of some lakes) So I end up getting 23 mpg to work (I check often), just so I can pull the boat once in a while. Wastefull, and I don't like it either, but what else can I do?
In other words, everyone I know would love to get great milage when they can, even if money is no limit we don't have the space to keep all those cars.
Of course if USWorst would hurry up and get my ISDN line installed (or DSL if they ever bother to upgrade the switch) I could get infinatly better gas milage on my commute most days.
My dad was working for Controll Data Corporation back in the '70s, which was then a big comptuer company. (Cray designed their systems before starting his own company).
They had drum drives. Like a normal harddrive, but instead of a platter it was a drum (like a big tin can). The department of defense bought on of these units, which turned out to be defective. After a few days of operation it broke, and deformed the drum. There was now no machine that could read it. They DOD sent it back to the factory for replacement - with two armed gaurds. Those gaurds were with the machine at all times until technitions opened the case. Then they took rags, rubed the magnetic coating off the drum, and burned the rags.
didn't need to have a gas station w/ diesel on every block. All I needed was one place that I'd go to across town once a week.
Thats fine until you go on a vacation of more then 500 miles. With diesel that isn't a big deal since it is a popular fuel. Propane has some infrastructure, you have to refuel when you can find a station, but if you plan for it you can make trips on propane.
Most fuels are not that popular. Your car might have a 500 range on methanol, but I challange you to drive your car across several states running only methanol. You have to have someone ship your fuel to drops along the way.
My friend who saw me using unleaded shreiked at me, something about my valve guides not being brass and that I needed to add lead to keep from burning out my valve guides.
In theory your friend is right. In practice most cars ran just fine on unleaded. The ones that had problems were driven hard. Baby the engine and it often did just fine. Of course eventially you had to rebuild the engine and replace the valve seals, but in practice those engines were not designed to todays tolerances and so they wouldn't have gone as many miles before the next rebuild anyway.
is a minister at church. (Well, former now, but back when he started he was a minister) He was behind the iron curtian before it fell (Or maybe just after), so he had direct expirence with goverments. He kept telling those of us on the net to use pgp. Of course this was 5+ years ago, so gnupg didn't exist.
So use gnupg for God, use it for yourself, but use it.
I program embedded systems. We are switching our Os from vxWorks to linux, because linux has some features we need. (We are accually doing a hybred, some processors will still use vxWorks, where they do real time processing, but those that just control the box are going to linux.
X is a big advantage to us, and the biggest part of it is remote display. We don't have a display of any sort on the machine, nor a keyboard. If we want to run a program it has to display across the network. I can log into whichever processor I need, start a xgdb session back to my desk and debug. Sure there is remote debugging in gdb, but that doesn't work so nicely.
I think you will find more embedded systems devoplers going to X because is allows them to remotly display debugging back to the desktop. There are free implimentations of X, and plenty of libraries and expirence working with it. Drop that into the box, and once it works anyone can use it.
Sure, QNX is lighter then linux. It wasn't designed to be like linux either. Linux does more for the programer then QNX. Now for embedded systems (which QNX wants to play) this is bad, but for a general purpose OS, or server OS this is good.
The parts of X that make it slow are also the parts I use day to day. The machine I'm typing on now has a slow CPU (68030 if I remember right), but I don't care because the programing I'm typing into is running on a 300mhz sparc (maybe faster I don't know) Desptie sharing the sparc 10 other users all my programs run fast enough, and the boss finds one good machine to be cheeper then 10 cheaper not as good machines. I like not having a fan on my desk.
Perhaps we should start blasting telnet for being slower then sitting at the console.
I've only twice seen situations where X was slow. The first was when running my sun3, which has a slow X because of the slow framebuffer. The other was when running across a 14.4 dial-up. (Needs to further explinnation, though it could be speeded up, graphcis still take a lot of time to transfer at that speed)
Bloat is not a valid arguement, at least not where you site Fred Brooks. For thsoe who don't remember, Fred Brooks was the leader of a project that turned out something an order of magnatude more bloated then anything else. I know folks today who swear at unix because OS/390 is so much better. (I have no expirence with OS/390, but I know it is a direct decendant of what Fred Brooks did) The point, bloat isn't to be aimed for, but you need to balance features with bloat. Each time you add a feature you add a few lines of code. Sometimes it isn't worth it, and sometimes you should step back and find a better way, but in the end you cannot get a full functioned program without many lines of code.
Bloat is not a problem if the programed is well designed. Each person knows their part, and how it fits in with the whole. I don't know what George and Suzie are doing, but when they completely re-write their part of the code from scratch (to make it better) I don't care because in the well designed program it doesn't affect me.
ick, slashcode is slow. I often wait several seconds for a reply to load in/. At least I don't have to load each reply seperatly like most web forums, but even still the speed is unaccaptable. (For what/. does I don't see how you can make things better, but I still don't like it)
Mailing lists allow me to read one message while the next downloads. procmail give fairly good filtering on my end if I need it. I agree that I don't like them, but they do work.
Usenet is best, IMHO, but you need to deal with spam. (Private news servers are okay, but not much better then mail software for small groups.
As a mater of fact I have bought wrenchs that only worked on Fords. And others that only worked on GM, and others... Which means I now own some tools that are useless, I don't own the car they work with, and the newer cars need a different tool.
That doesn't mean I like it. I always waste a couple hours trying alternatives before I break down and spending $10-$50 on the right tool for the job.
Not in most states, if the business is offering walk-in "public accomodation." Just because you don't like someone, you can't ban him from your restaurant, and you certainly can't get the police to remove him.
When I ran a restaruant the police told me that once I warned someone to leave, if they didn't depart immeadiatly they were then tresspassing. Legally I had to tell them to be gone, but once I did, if they didn't leave I would call the police who would remove them. If the police had trouble I would press charges (I only considered it once, and we had continious trouble with non-customers blocking half out parking lot)
Restaraunts are on private property. We invite people to spend money in them, and try to be reasonable. When your presence is scaring/bothering other customers you are no longer welcome. Most "clean cut" people get scared when they see 75 high school kids in a parking lot, many smoking (Not legally), most with leather jackets, guys with long hair, nose rings, and so on. You could argue that the high school kid in a suit is just as likely to be a danger, but the custoemrs don't really buy it so it doesn't matter if the group is harmless of not. (This is one example, but it was real life several times while I ran the restaruant)
Probably. I can shoot my gun with reasonable accuracy, and I can walk (or row my boat, or drive) a couple miles with my gun.
Am I a good solider? No, of course not. But a good sargent in a pinch can gather up me and a few friends and make a reasonable defense. Losses will be higher then normal on our side, but if someone is invading my hometown I'm willing to take that risk. (Note that invading my home town means that the army has pretty well lost.
Also don't overlook gurrella warfare. I can talk the invaders up (anything they do better then the current goverment no matter how small) byn day, and then dig my gun out of hiding and night and kill a few of them. the US army had a hard time in vietnam. I can make sure invaders have just as difficult a time.
Like I said, I'm not as good as a well trained army. As a last ditch effort though, it might be enough.
Again, question your statitics statistcs. I personally own 2 guns, and plan on buying 5 more. Most hunters (which is why I own a gun) are the same. a 12 guage is not a 20 guage is not a.30-06 is not a.30-30 is not a 22 is not... And using the wrong gun is cruel and ineffective. I know many hunters with more then 10 guns. It isn't hard to collect that many. (even though many havn't been used in years they get sentimental value)
Guns are cheep and easy to buy now, so those who need/want them get them.
I have no idea how drug dealers and other criminals affect your statistic, but my expirence with hunts suggests that I can come up with a gun per person just from their ranks, and these folks don't kill each other. (accidents happen, but they are rare. And the drug dealer that hunts I factored out)
For starters, his arguments are a flawed. I don't have time to dig up all the facts though, so I'm just going to give you hints so you can.
Statistics are easy to manipulate. Few people kill strangers. Strangers are people you don't know, aquantences are people you do. Few people randomly kill strangers, most who kill, kill people who they know and feel have done harm to them. (drugs often influence ones thoughts of what/how someone has done wrong) In other words those statistcs may be accurate, but his interpitation is not.
There are more flaws. I don't feel like getting all the facts here, and besides the whole thing is off topic. Get them yourself.
If the government can figure out a way to easily account for and tax gambling nicome and losses, then the government will legalize it all,
Err, strike out the word losses there. Nobody in gambling wants to account for losses. Gains yes, but they don't want you to see losses.
A friend of mine discovered this reciently. When he goes fishing his wife goes to the casino. He got audited last year (for 97 taxes), and has to pay back taxes on $10,000 of unreported gambling earnings. Of course legally if he can account for all the money he spent on gambling he can offset those winning with the losses. Nobody is keeping those records (If he wants them, then his wife needs to go to the back office of the casino every time and get a recipt for every penny spent. They will do it, but not in public)
Your argument also overlooked religion. I for one do not belive in gambling for religious reasons, and I would consider restricting your freedom to gambol because it offends my religion. I do not know how I would accually vote on this issue if it came up, but don't ignore it.
While the legality of emulators has been questioned several times, I'm not aware of any court decisions against emulators in general.
For the play station emulator the court said there was no imfringement even though code from the playstation was used in devoplment, because that code was not shiped to customers, and they needed to use it to reverse engineer the product. This is a major victory, but who much presidence it will set needs to be seen.
Warning, attempts to pass new comsumor laws may change this. Put the Your Rights Online seciont of/. on the main page for you view and read the stories! The write your congressmen often.
I don't have a laptop, so I'm strctly wired in, but other here have wireless laptops and love it. While in a meeting I talk to my boss about some issue, that doesn't concern a third guy in my department. After we "solve" the issue the boss turns to the third guy about the next issue and he responds "While you two were talking I tested the fix I coded up last night" or some such. I then twiddle my thumbs on a fourth issue involving anouther person.
So I would not recomend anyone do without laptops and wireless networking. All the bosses have it (they go from meeting to meeting, with a cell phone they don't need to enter their office some days. Users love it and are more productive.
However, today I would put a fast network to all the desktops. Laptop only users will probably never plug into it, but let them know it is faster and they might. If wireless turns out to be too slow in 6 months when you suddenly have to roll out realtime video confrencing to everyone you will be glad for the wires. If you have any fixed location systems wire them in. (Fixed location I mean rarely moved, not nessicarly cemented in place)
Most troubling of all is that x86-64 may bring back segments. I cannot stress how horrible this would be; application programmers from the days of mixed 16/32-bit programming will agree with me.
Yeah, but kernel programers and other Unix heads will cry with joy. finially the phrase: segmentation fault: core dumped will make sense with regaurds to the underling hardware.
Not nessicarly. Maybe dad drove the entire family. Maybe it is cheaper to have a personal rocket in your backyard then a car. Maybe public transportation works for a change.
The large majority of the world's population has never driven in a car. If they can use their horse to get to the launch pad, they might still do that.
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You understand my point better then the other posters. (Hint, wal-mart doesn't have many folk disks, nor does Best Buy, at least not as I like my music. So I can only go to a small store)
the problem however is this little record store has several thousand CDs that I might be interested in. I don't have time to listen to 1000 CDs just to choose which one to buy. I can listen to about 6 CDs every day at work though, which will cover their entire inventory in a year and allow listening to the ones I really like more often.
As the subject says, I was at a record store last night. A couple thousand CDs, mostly folk and bluegrass. I looked at many, but in the end didn't buy one. I've bought bad folk records, and I've bought good ones. I love folk but the catagorie is large enough that some of it bores me. I wanted to buy anouther CD, but not knowing any of the artists I was not willing to take a chance on any.
There needs to be some way to sample music before I buy it.
I think I need more details, because I've come up with several obvious answers, and I would assume you are smart enough to have looked at them.
So, why will not a cell phone work? (perhaps one with a data connector) Why won't a wal-mart cordless phone work? Why can't you run underground phone wire to each parking space? (In the north they already run electric to parking spaces so that people can plug cars in in winter, and I would imangine trucks would like having 110 at their parking spots anyway. Toss some cat 5 in there too while your at it and you have a truck stop for geeks)
What are you trying to solve. I've seen several ask /. questions that on further examination shows the questioner asked the wrong questions, there was a better solution that his question prevented getting an answer to.
Because you want to release it to the public domain? Completely GPL and BSD compatable, and a true free as in everything license.
No, public domain isn't for everyone, and even those who do use it need no release everything under it. It pays to think of it though.
Whats the big deal? The main harddrive on my most important machine has had a capacity of 80 for years.
Oh, and whats with replacing the M with a G in there? Some new ISO thing?
Seriously though, I still boot my old 386 from a 80 meg drive, which cranks out about 3 rc5 blocks a day. Makes a good router though, and except for a little noise isn't a bad foot rest. Haven't had a monitor in a while.
which my company did. In particular me... However we had to write most of that code anyway for failover of our custom hardware so it was more a matter of porting to solaris. Course we also designed from the start for failover.
A hugh pain, overall. Many tricky problems. Many little things to come back to bite you. There are a couple special cases that bite me time and time again because I cannot tell the difference between the two. (ie is the other machine broke, or just the cable between us?)
We concluded that all HA got us was notification when to fail over (And disk mirroring I suppose). We still had to write the code to do the failovers. Soon after we decided that it wasn't worth the expense and wrote it our self.
At first this seems great. I often shift my attention between windows without shifting focus and end up typing in the wrong window. (This is a big problem when I have a window to gcc open and am writing a /. post - gcc finds a syntax error, so I fix it, and look back to lynx without shifting the focus)
On second thought though, there are problems. When I sit down for a long coding session I've been known to have 2 big windows on my screen, each with references for functions/error codes that I'll be working with, with just one line of my editor showing. (I hate the way windows makes the window with focus be on top)
I like the idea, if it is powerful enough to tell when I want to shift window focus, vs when I want to keep the window focus, while reading a references
And a big AOL style me too, to what ohters have said about filtering email from someone important vs a less important company newsletter (But don't mistake a emergency mesage from the sysadmin) vs spam.
Great idea, 70 mpg. I'd love to get that on my commute to work. However I live on a small lot, if I got one of these I wouldn't have room to park my boat unless I got rid of the truck. (Which must be 4wd to get out of some lakes) So I end up getting 23 mpg to work (I check often), just so I can pull the boat once in a while. Wastefull, and I don't like it either, but what else can I do?
In other words, everyone I know would love to get great milage when they can, even if money is no limit we don't have the space to keep all those cars.
Of course if USWorst would hurry up and get my ISDN line installed (or DSL if they ever bother to upgrade the switch) I could get infinatly better gas milage on my commute most days.
My dad was working for Controll Data Corporation back in the '70s, which was then a big comptuer company. (Cray designed their systems before starting his own company).
They had drum drives. Like a normal harddrive, but instead of a platter it was a drum (like a big tin can). The department of defense bought on of these units, which turned out to be defective. After a few days of operation it broke, and deformed the drum. There was now no machine that could read it. They DOD sent it back to the factory for replacement - with two armed gaurds. Those gaurds were with the machine at all times until technitions opened the case. Then they took rags, rubed the magnetic coating off the drum, and burned the rags.
didn't need to have a gas station w/ diesel on every block. All I needed was one place that I'd go to across town once a week.
Thats fine until you go on a vacation of more then 500 miles. With diesel that isn't a big deal since it is a popular fuel. Propane has some infrastructure, you have to refuel when you can find a station, but if you plan for it you can make trips on propane.
Most fuels are not that popular. Your car might have a 500 range on methanol, but I challange you to drive your car across several states running only methanol. You have to have someone ship your fuel to drops along the way.
My friend who saw me using unleaded shreiked at me, something about my valve guides not being brass and that I needed to add lead to keep from burning out my valve guides.
In theory your friend is right. In practice most cars ran just fine on unleaded. The ones that had problems were driven hard. Baby the engine and it often did just fine. Of course eventially you had to rebuild the engine and replace the valve seals, but in practice those engines were not designed to todays tolerances and so they wouldn't have gone as many miles before the next rebuild anyway.
is a minister at church. (Well, former now, but back when he started he was a minister) He was behind the iron curtian before it fell (Or maybe just after), so he had direct expirence with goverments. He kept telling those of us on the net to use pgp. Of course this was 5+ years ago, so gnupg didn't exist.
So use gnupg for God, use it for yourself, but use it.
I program embedded systems. We are switching our Os from vxWorks to linux, because linux has some features we need. (We are accually doing a hybred, some processors will still use vxWorks, where they do real time processing, but those that just control the box are going to linux.
X is a big advantage to us, and the biggest part of it is remote display. We don't have a display of any sort on the machine, nor a keyboard. If we want to run a program it has to display across the network. I can log into whichever processor I need, start a xgdb session back to my desk and debug. Sure there is remote debugging in gdb, but that doesn't work so nicely.
I think you will find more embedded systems devoplers going to X because is allows them to remotly display debugging back to the desktop. There are free implimentations of X, and plenty of libraries and expirence working with it. Drop that into the box, and once it works anyone can use it.
Sure, QNX is lighter then linux. It wasn't designed to be like linux either. Linux does more for the programer then QNX. Now for embedded systems (which QNX wants to play) this is bad, but for a general purpose OS, or server OS this is good.
The parts of X that make it slow are also the parts I use day to day. The machine I'm typing on now has a slow CPU (68030 if I remember right), but I don't care because the programing I'm typing into is running on a 300mhz sparc (maybe faster I don't know) Desptie sharing the sparc 10 other users all my programs run fast enough, and the boss finds one good machine to be cheeper then 10 cheaper not as good machines. I like not having a fan on my desk.
Perhaps we should start blasting telnet for being slower then sitting at the console.
I've only twice seen situations where X was slow. The first was when running my sun3, which has a slow X because of the slow framebuffer. The other was when running across a 14.4 dial-up. (Needs to further explinnation, though it could be speeded up, graphcis still take a lot of time to transfer at that speed)
Bloat is not a valid arguement, at least not where you site Fred Brooks. For thsoe who don't remember, Fred Brooks was the leader of a project that turned out something an order of magnatude more bloated then anything else. I know folks today who swear at unix because OS/390 is so much better. (I have no expirence with OS/390, but I know it is a direct decendant of what Fred Brooks did) The point, bloat isn't to be aimed for, but you need to balance features with bloat. Each time you add a feature you add a few lines of code. Sometimes it isn't worth it, and sometimes you should step back and find a better way, but in the end you cannot get a full functioned program without many lines of code.
Bloat is not a problem if the programed is well designed. Each person knows their part, and how it fits in with the whole. I don't know what George and Suzie are doing, but when they completely re-write their part of the code from scratch (to make it better) I don't care because in the well designed program it doesn't affect me.
ick, slashcode is slow. I often wait several seconds for a reply to load in /. At least I don't have to load each reply seperatly like most web forums, but even still the speed is unaccaptable. (For what /. does I don't see how you can make things better, but I still don't like it)
Mailing lists allow me to read one message while the next downloads. procmail give fairly good filtering on my end if I need it. I agree that I don't like them, but they do work.
Usenet is best, IMHO, but you need to deal with spam. (Private news servers are okay, but not much better then mail software for small groups.
As a mater of fact I have bought wrenchs that only worked on Fords. And others that only worked on GM, and others... Which means I now own some tools that are useless, I don't own the car they work with, and the newer cars need a different tool.
That doesn't mean I like it. I always waste a couple hours trying alternatives before I break down and spending $10-$50 on the right tool for the job.
Not in most states, if the business is offering walk-in "public accomodation." Just because you don't like someone, you can't ban him from your restaurant, and you certainly can't get the police to remove him.
When I ran a restaruant the police told me that once I warned someone to leave, if they didn't depart immeadiatly they were then tresspassing. Legally I had to tell them to be gone, but once I did, if they didn't leave I would call the police who would remove them. If the police had trouble I would press charges (I only considered it once, and we had continious trouble with non-customers blocking half out parking lot)
Restaraunts are on private property. We invite people to spend money in them, and try to be reasonable. When your presence is scaring/bothering other customers you are no longer welcome. Most "clean cut" people get scared when they see 75 high school kids in a parking lot, many smoking (Not legally), most with leather jackets, guys with long hair, nose rings, and so on. You could argue that the high school kid in a suit is just as likely to be a danger, but the custoemrs don't really buy it so it doesn't matter if the group is harmless of not. (This is one example, but it was real life several times while I ran the restaruant)
Probably. I can shoot my gun with reasonable accuracy, and I can walk (or row my boat, or drive) a couple miles with my gun.
Am I a good solider? No, of course not. But a good sargent in a pinch can gather up me and a few friends and make a reasonable defense. Losses will be higher then normal on our side, but if someone is invading my hometown I'm willing to take that risk. (Note that invading my home town means that the army has pretty well lost.
Also don't overlook gurrella warfare. I can talk the invaders up (anything they do better then the current goverment no matter how small) byn day, and then dig my gun out of hiding and night and kill a few of them. the US army had a hard time in vietnam. I can make sure invaders have just as difficult a time.
Like I said, I'm not as good as a well trained army. As a last ditch effort though, it might be enough.
Again, question your statitics statistcs. I personally own 2 guns, and plan on buying 5 more. Most hunters (which is why I own a gun) are the same. a 12 guage is not a 20 guage is not a .30-06 is not a .30-30 is not a 22 is not... And using the wrong gun is cruel and ineffective. I know many hunters with more then 10 guns. It isn't hard to collect that many. (even though many havn't been used in years they get sentimental value)
Guns are cheep and easy to buy now, so those who need/want them get them.
I have no idea how drug dealers and other criminals affect your statistic, but my expirence with hunts suggests that I can come up with a gun per person just from their ranks, and these folks don't kill each other. (accidents happen, but they are rare. And the drug dealer that hunts I factored out)
For starters, his arguments are a flawed. I don't have time to dig up all the facts though, so I'm just going to give you hints so you can.
Statistics are easy to manipulate. Few people kill strangers. Strangers are people you don't know, aquantences are people you do. Few people randomly kill strangers, most who kill, kill people who they know and feel have done harm to them. (drugs often influence ones thoughts of what/how someone has done wrong) In other words those statistcs may be accurate, but his interpitation is not.
There are more flaws. I don't feel like getting all the facts here, and besides the whole thing is off topic. Get them yourself.
If the government can figure out a way to easily account for and tax gambling nicome and losses, then the government will legalize it all,
Err, strike out the word losses there. Nobody in gambling wants to account for losses. Gains yes, but they don't want you to see losses.
A friend of mine discovered this reciently. When he goes fishing his wife goes to the casino. He got audited last year (for 97 taxes), and has to pay back taxes on $10,000 of unreported gambling earnings. Of course legally if he can account for all the money he spent on gambling he can offset those winning with the losses. Nobody is keeping those records (If he wants them, then his wife needs to go to the back office of the casino every time and get a recipt for every penny spent. They will do it, but not in public)
Your argument also overlooked religion. I for one do not belive in gambling for religious reasons, and I would consider restricting your freedom to gambol because it offends my religion. I do not know how I would accually vote on this issue if it came up, but don't ignore it.
While the legality of emulators has been questioned several times, I'm not aware of any court decisions against emulators in general.
For the play station emulator the court said there was no imfringement even though code from the playstation was used in devoplment, because that code was not shiped to customers, and they needed to use it to reverse engineer the product. This is a major victory, but who much presidence it will set needs to be seen.
Warning, attempts to pass new comsumor laws may change this. Put the Your Rights Online seciont of /. on the main page for you view and read the stories! The write your congressmen often.
I don't have a laptop, so I'm strctly wired in, but other here have wireless laptops and love it. While in a meeting I talk to my boss about some issue, that doesn't concern a third guy in my department. After we "solve" the issue the boss turns to the third guy about the next issue and he responds "While you two were talking I tested the fix I coded up last night" or some such. I then twiddle my thumbs on a fourth issue involving anouther person.
So I would not recomend anyone do without laptops and wireless networking. All the bosses have it (they go from meeting to meeting, with a cell phone they don't need to enter their office some days. Users love it and are more productive.
However, today I would put a fast network to all the desktops. Laptop only users will probably never plug into it, but let them know it is faster and they might. If wireless turns out to be too slow in 6 months when you suddenly have to roll out realtime video confrencing to everyone you will be glad for the wires. If you have any fixed location systems wire them in. (Fixed location I mean rarely moved, not nessicarly cemented in place)
Most troubling of all is that x86-64 may bring back segments. I cannot stress how horrible this would be; application programmers from the days of mixed 16/32-bit programming will agree with me.
Yeah, but kernel programers and other Unix heads will cry with joy. finially the phrase:
segmentation fault: core dumped
will make sense with regaurds to the underling hardware.
Not nessicarly. Maybe dad drove the entire family. Maybe it is cheaper to have a personal rocket in your backyard then a car. Maybe public transportation works for a change.
The large majority of the world's population has never driven in a car. If they can use their horse to get to the launch pad, they might still do that.