This is why transitioning to true communism is so difficult - in fact it has never yet been archived. Hopefully someday we can all as a society put aside our differences and make it work for the good of the world.
Communism won't work before we have machines doing all our labor. Of course, that doesn't mean the death of capitalism, just that people won't have to work for a living.
I'm pretty certain that if you were to put a baby in a soundproof environment for the first 6 months, then introduce a loud bang, they would jump and cry, that's if they weren't paralyzed with shock for the first few minutes.
If you introduce a loud bang to a baby, it would cause discomfort and might even cause physical harm to their ears, which usually leads to crying. Thus they would learn to fear loud bangs because they can strike suddenly and hurt your ears.
But when election time comes around, the politicians have to go running back to the people and promise to deliver on the issues that matter to them. Otherwise the other party's candidate will, and will win.
What happens when both parties agree on some issue, and the population doesn't? If the voter decides to stay home, both parties benefit. At least here in Europe I can vote for some of the nuttier far-right or far-left parties, which sometimes even end up in the cabinet thanks to dissatisfied voters.
So what? Our political "center" is further to the right than that of, say, the Netherlands or Germany or the UK.
The center of the two parties may well be more to the right of Europe, but I doubt it reflects the population accurately.
1. Create AI which contains all the knowledge of slashdot.
2. Watch as AI spends all day telling Soviet Russia jokes, and when you ask it to do something it says 'I, for one, welcome our new meatbag overlords.'
3. Build a beowulf cluster of the AIs
4. ???
5. Profit!
Myself, I need my servers to be stable and a release schedule that I can depend on
Then why upgrade your kernel? You should only need to upgrade the programs that expose open ports to the outside world, unless there's something I'm missing? Some kernel improvements might give more performance, but if you're running a server that close to the limit it would probably be better to upgrade the hardware.
No, but there isn't much else in the immediate vicinity. With the speeds the rover is moving, it will take literally years to get anywhere interesting.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but what I meant was that the reason people (who aren't on Windows) run Windows in a VM is because they need it for some app. Obviously people who already are on Windows have no need to run it in a VM.
Why not use a live-cd if one wants to test it without committing? The inherent slowness of VMs makes it difficult to ascertain how well Linux would run, and the lack of 3d-acceleration means that none of the shiny things that draw in new people will function.
Then what's the point? What special applications does Linux have that require you to run it in a VM on Windows?
Usually people run Windows in a VM because they have some app that just doesn't exist on Linux, but that can hardly be the problem as most Linux apps are OSS and thus portable to Windows.
Trident is a monument to the British inability to accept that Britain is now a small country with diminishing clout, and one whose citizens are not served by pathetic attempts to maintain "credibility". That money would be better spent on solving British social problems, or by giving it back to the taxpayers.
I don't actually disagree. What better way to save money than to replace parts of an expensive conventional army with more cost-effective nuclear weapons. After all, the purpose of a standing army is defense, which a nuclear deterrent is best at.
I was thinking more along the lines of "You want to take our resources? Well you can't, because we'll nuke you if you try.". Would the US have invaded Iraq if they really had WMDs? No way.
I have to admit, I guess I'm an advocate of the "Precautionary principle".:)
But it does have some merit. Would WW2 have happened if the Allies had a credible military deterrent?
I can't identify any threats to Britain at the moment, but would some appear if there was no nuclear deterrent? What about global warming, what if the changing environment causes wars over resources? Is there time to build up a nuclear deterrent if the political atmosphere changes for the worse?
You're right, spending a fortune on the military is not a good idea. But not replacing Trident would decrease security unless military spending is increased instead. Decrease the military budget and keep the nukes, that's much more cost-effective IMO.
I agree, military action is ineffective against terrorism. But having a nuclear deterrent is still important as a last resort, in case the world moves into more turbulent times again. The costs for replacing your nuclear forces are estimated to be ~£20 billion with running costs of roughly £1.5 billion per year. In comparison, the military budget was ~£39 billion in 2002.
You could probably cut military spending by £10 billion, put £2b on new nuclear weapons, £3b on new schools in Palestine and other goodwill efforts, pocket the £5b savings, and still have improved security. But if you completely dismantle the nuclear deterrent, then your conventional military would have to make up for the shortfall, which might even require increases in military spending. Even though nuclear weapons are pointless right now, it will be too late to start building them again if the situation suddenly changes.
This is assuming that we're talking about strategic nuclear weapons. Bunker busters and other tactical nuclear weapons are not so good. They have no use as a deterrent, and are only meant as force multipliers for the conventional army.
Is it as bad as what happened during World War II or the Cold War? Probably not.
You forget, this is a war for the very survival of western civilization itself! The commies only wanted to enslave everyone, but the terrorites want to KILL EVERYONE(tm)! The cold war was just warm-up, this is the real deal!
While I agree with the gist of your post, I have to mention that a nuclear deterrent is a cost-effective way of ensuring that you don't get invaded. The problem lies in having both nuclear weapons and a large army. Instead of scrapping the nukes, reduce the size of the army.
You make this assertion with absolutely no proof to back it up. If you haven't noticed, generally speaking Vista is noticeably slower than XP at doing the same tasks (surely you've heard of the differences in their hardware requirements?). Therefore, it is by no means certain that XP + some performance overhead will be slower than Vista with it's already increased performance overhead.
DX10 code is supposed to be faster than DX9 code that does the same thing, due to getting rid of legacy crud and reduction of overhead. I haven't yet installed Vista so I haven't been able to verify this, but I'm assuming that Microsoft isn't lying in this case. It would be interesting to have a real comparison of that.
These are provided by the card manufacturers, and from what I know are excellent.
I have been reading for years now that ATI cards suffer from much slower OpenGL drivers compared to their DX drivers. Maybe they've fixed that.
They do.
Ok, that's good to know.
XP has been around for six years, and has a massive installed base. Furthermore, the shift to Vista is not happening at all quickly. XP support will be around for a good long while. From what I've heard, Vista is the one with driver issues.
There were some complaints about NVIDIAs sluggishness in releasing Vista drivers at the beginning (from me included), but that has pretty much vanished. In my own experience, NVIDIA is using more resources to support the 8800 series on Vista than on XP. In the past half year the XP drivers have pretty much stood still with annoying bugs staying unfixed, while the Vista drivers have improved by leaps and bounds. I don't know if the Vista drivers are better than the XP counterparts yet, but I know for certain that the proportion of driver development resources will continue to tilt in Vista's favor. I wouldn't be surprised if the next card generation is the last to have official support on XP.
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I assure you, no bubbles have been burst. It seems like informing everyone that "the US is not a democracy" has become a new meme.
Communism won't work before we have machines doing all our labor. Of course, that doesn't mean the death of capitalism, just that people won't have to work for a living.
Yeah, they made a 2-part miniseries. It was pretty awful though, and no substitute for a real season. Too much action. :/
Or you could, I don't know, maybe just press the preview button?
In the old days, those two were the same thing.
If you introduce a loud bang to a baby, it would cause discomfort and might even cause physical harm to their ears, which usually leads to crying. Thus they would learn to fear loud bangs because they can strike suddenly and hurt your ears.
What happens when both parties agree on some issue, and the population doesn't? If the voter decides to stay home, both parties benefit. At least here in Europe I can vote for some of the nuttier far-right or far-left parties, which sometimes even end up in the cabinet thanks to dissatisfied voters.
The center of the two parties may well be more to the right of Europe, but I doubt it reflects the population accurately.
It's Caesium in metric, you insensitive clod!
1. Create AI which contains all the knowledge of slashdot.
2. Watch as AI spends all day telling Soviet Russia jokes, and when you ask it to do something it says 'I, for one, welcome our new meatbag overlords.'
3. Build a beowulf cluster of the AIs
4. ???
5. Profit!
Myself, I need my servers to be stable and a release schedule that I can depend on
Then why upgrade your kernel? You should only need to upgrade the programs that expose open ports to the outside world, unless there's something I'm missing? Some kernel improvements might give more performance, but if you're running a server that close to the limit it would probably be better to upgrade the hardware.
Mankind.
Why?
And to top it off, the software you speak of will eventually be ported to 32- and 64-bit windows. Screw itunes!
No, but there isn't much else in the immediate vicinity. With the speeds the rover is moving, it will take literally years to get anywhere interesting.
Does supporting Cuba mean you support Castro? Does supporting Bush mean you support the US?
Sorry to rain on your parade, but what I meant was that the reason people (who aren't on Windows) run Windows in a VM is because they need it for some app. Obviously people who already are on Windows have no need to run it in a VM.
Why not use a live-cd if one wants to test it without committing? The inherent slowness of VMs makes it difficult to ascertain how well Linux would run, and the lack of 3d-acceleration means that none of the shiny things that draw in new people will function.
Then what's the point? What special applications does Linux have that require you to run it in a VM on Windows?
Usually people run Windows in a VM because they have some app that just doesn't exist on Linux, but that can hardly be the problem as most Linux apps are OSS and thus portable to Windows.
I don't actually disagree. What better way to save money than to replace parts of an expensive conventional army with more cost-effective nuclear weapons. After all, the purpose of a standing army is defense, which a nuclear deterrent is best at.
I was thinking more along the lines of "You want to take our resources? Well you can't, because we'll nuke you if you try.". Would the US have invaded Iraq if they really had WMDs? No way.
I have to admit, I guess I'm an advocate of the "Precautionary principle". :)
But it does have some merit. Would WW2 have happened if the Allies had a credible military deterrent?
I can't identify any threats to Britain at the moment, but would some appear if there was no nuclear deterrent? What about global warming, what if the changing environment causes wars over resources? Is there time to build up a nuclear deterrent if the political atmosphere changes for the worse?
You're right, spending a fortune on the military is not a good idea. But not replacing Trident would decrease security unless military spending is increased instead. Decrease the military budget and keep the nukes, that's much more cost-effective IMO.
I agree, military action is ineffective against terrorism. But having a nuclear deterrent is still important as a last resort, in case the world moves into more turbulent times again. The costs for replacing your nuclear forces are estimated to be ~£20 billion with running costs of roughly £1.5 billion per year. In comparison, the military budget was ~£39 billion in 2002.
You could probably cut military spending by £10 billion, put £2b on new nuclear weapons, £3b on new schools in Palestine and other goodwill efforts, pocket the £5b savings, and still have improved security. But if you completely dismantle the nuclear deterrent, then your conventional military would have to make up for the shortfall, which might even require increases in military spending. Even though nuclear weapons are pointless right now, it will be too late to start building them again if the situation suddenly changes.
This is assuming that we're talking about strategic nuclear weapons. Bunker busters and other tactical nuclear weapons are not so good. They have no use as a deterrent, and are only meant as force multipliers for the conventional army.
You forget, this is a war for the very survival of western civilization itself! The commies only wanted to enslave everyone, but the terrorites want to KILL EVERYONE(tm)! The cold war was just warm-up, this is the real deal!
While I agree with the gist of your post, I have to mention that a nuclear deterrent is a cost-effective way of ensuring that you don't get invaded. The problem lies in having both nuclear weapons and a large army. Instead of scrapping the nukes, reduce the size of the army.
DX10 code is supposed to be faster than DX9 code that does the same thing, due to getting rid of legacy crud and reduction of overhead. I haven't yet installed Vista so I haven't been able to verify this, but I'm assuming that Microsoft isn't lying in this case. It would be interesting to have a real comparison of that.
I have been reading for years now that ATI cards suffer from much slower OpenGL drivers compared to their DX drivers. Maybe they've fixed that.
Ok, that's good to know.
There were some complaints about NVIDIAs sluggishness in releasing Vista drivers at the beginning (from me included), but that has pretty much vanished. In my own experience, NVIDIA is using more resources to support the 8800 series on Vista than on XP. In the past half year the XP drivers have pretty much stood still with annoying bugs staying unfixed, while the Vista drivers have improved by leaps and bounds. I don't know if the Vista drivers are better than the XP counterparts yet, but I know for certain that the proportion of driver development resources will continue to tilt in Vista's favor. I wouldn't be surprised if the next card generation is the last to have official support on XP.