So 99.9% of those captured are Iraqi. That tells us --- well, that 99.9% of those captured are Iraqis. That's it. It doesn't tell us one bit about the nationality of everyone fighting.
I see. So I guess you think that the Iraqi insurgents are all incompetent fools that get captured all the time, while the elite foreign insurgents run around killing people. Sure.
Why are you arguing for these pieces of scum? What do people have to do for you to denounce them? Considering the evil shit you refuse to notice, my guess is the ONLY thing needed for a denouncement is "American". Maybe also "Jew".
I've never bought into the nationalistic tribe mentality, so I don't denounce groups of people.
I bet I'm right. I bet you automatically assume the worse about Americans and American policy, and would tolerate mass murder from anyone else.
I've always been interested in history, and if there's something I've learned it's to never take the actions of countries at face value. I automatically assume the worst about the foreign policy of all countries, and consider information from governments with a vested interest propaganda.
There is no "Us" and "Them". There is literally thousands of different factions in the world working towards different goals, some of them cooperating, some of them fighting each other. Going around hating some of them will only give you high blood pressure.
If you're going to make outrageous claims like that, I would like some kind of source. And that source will have to be from outside of the US government, those jokers have zero credibility.
I agree, hardware physics needs a killer app. I was playing around with the idea of adding PhysX support to Quake 2 and modifying some maps to have real liquids instead of the fake water it normally had, but after making some tests apps I realized how incredibly slow the physics are on a CPU. I'm not holding my breath, but I hope the GPU is capable of at least playable frame rates.
"3D acceleration" is no longer a meaningful concept, as the majority of the "acceleration" happens on general purpose stream processors. A modern GPU is a parallel processor which just happens to have a rasterisation engine built-in. I'm guessing we'll eventually move the stream processors closer to the CPU, and integrate the graphics handling parts in the motherboard.
While I agree that the difference between "a solar system" and "The Solar System" is fairly obvious, there is some problems with using "solar system" to describe extrasolar star systems. Namely, words like "extrasolar". If one assumes that "star system" and "solar system" are interchangeable then the meaning of extrasolar becomes ambiguous, as it is hard to tell if the word means that something is outside a solar system, or outside The Solar System.
Foreign support for one or more of the factions is also a normal part of civil wars. As an example I present to you the Finnish civil war, which had everything from foreign military support to terrorism.
Every single soldier I know would be appalled at the very idea of attacking civilians. Every single one of them would refuse an order to do so.
I guess they're all just standing around doing nothing in Iraq then? Because there sure as hell aren't any soldiers to shoot at, as the Iraqi army is on the side of the US.
And cut it out with that Al Qaida bullshit, they haven't done squat in years. There's a civil war going on in Iraq, and the people there want freedom both from US occupation as well as from the Iraqi government. Civil wars where civilians don't get hurt are an exception, because usually one side of the conflict consists of a group of people who want freedom from the central government.
I had some bad experiences with x86 Vista when it was first released, but after recently installing the 64-bit version to get rid of Witcher crashes I must say that Vista has worked pretty well. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm now running the x64 version or if it is the 5 million Vista patches I immediately installed from Windows Update, but most of my gripes with Vista have been fixed. I still hate the new file explorer though (why the hell they changed the backspace from "one folder up" to "previous folder" I will never understand, but it pretty much means that it is now impossible to navigate in the file system without a mouse), and the idiotic "desktop" alternative when alt+tabbing is driving me insane (use windows button+d people, don't put useless shit in the alt+tabbing window!). It doesn't help that I always keep the taskbar hidden under the topmost window, and that a bug in Vista causes it to forget after a desktop alt+tab that the taskbar is supposed to stay under the topmost window... Ugh.
I was about to make a post on how the US considered water boarding a war crime in WW2, but then I realized that even debating it gives some legitimacy to water boarding. I refuse to debate the issue, and ask others to do the same. Just say "No" to torture.
The gold rush happened in 1849, not 2001. Comparing the quantity of gold discovered in the 1849 gold rush to the known gold reserves of 2001 is a completely bullshit metric.
I disagree. What's important is how a gold rush would affect currencies backed by gold today. Comparing the effects of an 1849 gold rush on the 1849 gold supply in 2008 is a "bullshit metric". There would have to be a gold rush relatively proportional in size to cause the same amount of inflation. The 1849 gold rush needs to be inflation-adjusted to the 2008 gold supply, so to speak.:)
No, the whole point of fiat currency is to stop distorting the value of real commodities, prevent deflation
I'm glad we agree, because the way central banks prevent deflation is by inflating the money supply i.e. through inflation caused by the magic interest rate button. What I disagree with is that we need to do that. Inflation is just a way of decreasing real wages and "creating" jobs in this manner, but it is in no way required for economic growth. I also think that while deflation causes lost jobs due to inflexible wages, it is as a whole much better for society. Just go into a computer shop and ask yourself if rising prices really would do any good.
and control the runaway inflation that occurs when a gold rush happens.
I just realized that you're the same guy I responded to in the other post, as you had that ridiculous claim that time as well. From my earlier post:
As of 2001, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 145 000 tonnes. According to wikipedia, about 370 tonnes were mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush, which equals 0.25% of the world's gold supply. Assuming a similar gold rush today, it would inflate a gold standard based currency by a yearly average of 0.05% for the first five years. To call that hyperinflation is absurd.
At least you didn't try to claim hyperinflation this time, perhaps the ways of the gold have made some headway into your world.;)
Fiat currency is a lot easier than gold to mismanage, but a properly-managed fiat currency beats gold any day.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
The problem is that fiat currencies always have, and always will be mismanaged. I realize that I'm slightly conflating fractional reserve banking and fiat currency, but in practice they're part of the same problem.
Gold is just another form of fiat currency, albeit one that requires more effort to mine and store.
You can say that again! The whole point of fiat currency is that you can press a button and voilá, the money supply quadrupled. Gold on the other hand, is so incredibly scarce, that even if we suddenly found a massive amount of it à la the California Gold Rush the amount of gold would in total grow by a few tenths of a percent. Compare that to the amount of inflation caused by the federal reserve, and you'll realize that comparing a gold-backed currency to fiat dollars is asinine.
As for the claim that there isn't enough gold to back up the dollar, I'll point the reader to a previous post of mine on the subject. To summarize, the dollar supply/gold price relation indicates that the dollar is massively overvalued, and it will come down regardless if the US moves to gold or not.
Even the most absolutely madly optimistic of projections say oil's going to run out before 2020.
I don't know what projections you have read, but not even the most pessimistic ones have claimed that oil would run out before 2020. Peak oil is near, it may have happened already or it might not happen until 2020, but it only means that half of the oil is gone. Of course after the peak demand will outstrip supply and the price of oil will go in a perpetual upwards climb, but the oil will not have run out by any measure.
-1, didn't read the question. He is NOT asking about how to eliminate the drive, since he acknowledges that ANY matter can be destroyed. Instead, he asks about recovery options when there are no other alternatives, such as extreme disasters or criminal cases where data was intentionally lost. This is a good question, I look forward to constructive answers and the discussion that follows. Yours, however, is a dead end.
Thank you for this short explanation of encrypted HTTP communication. Why you decided to post it in response to my post is one of life's little mysteries.
Seeing as you repeated the relevant part of my post within your own...;)
Precisely so. UAC is a stupid and useless hack, because when faced with the choice of running a piece of software with admin privileges or not running the software at all, the user will always choose the former. This eventually leads the less informed user to compulsively click allow on everything, and the more informed user to disable UAC completely.
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I've never bought into the nationalistic tribe mentality, so I don't denounce groups of people.
I've always been interested in history, and if there's something I've learned it's to never take the actions of countries at face value. I automatically assume the worst about the foreign policy of all countries, and consider information from governments with a vested interest propaganda.
There is no "Us" and "Them". There is literally thousands of different factions in the world working towards different goals, some of them cooperating, some of them fighting each other. Going around hating some of them will only give you high blood pressure.
If you're going to make outrageous claims like that, I would like some kind of source. And that source will have to be from outside of the US government, those jokers have zero credibility.
I agree, hardware physics needs a killer app. I was playing around with the idea of adding PhysX support to Quake 2 and modifying some maps to have real liquids instead of the fake water it normally had, but after making some tests apps I realized how incredibly slow the physics are on a CPU. I'm not holding my breath, but I hope the GPU is capable of at least playable frame rates.
"3D acceleration" is no longer a meaningful concept, as the majority of the "acceleration" happens on general purpose stream processors. A modern GPU is a parallel processor which just happens to have a rasterisation engine built-in. I'm guessing we'll eventually move the stream processors closer to the CPU, and integrate the graphics handling parts in the motherboard.
While I agree that the difference between "a solar system" and "The Solar System" is fairly obvious, there is some problems with using "solar system" to describe extrasolar star systems. Namely, words like "extrasolar". If one assumes that "star system" and "solar system" are interchangeable then the meaning of extrasolar becomes ambiguous, as it is hard to tell if the word means that something is outside a solar system, or outside The Solar System.
No, he's suggesting that women should expose their body to the light less often.
Foreign support for one or more of the factions is also a normal part of civil wars. As an example I present to you the Finnish civil war, which had everything from foreign military support to terrorism.
I guess you meant to post that somewhere else, as I wasn't advocating killing or nationalism as solutions. :)
And cut it out with that Al Qaida bullshit, they haven't done squat in years. There's a civil war going on in Iraq, and the people there want freedom both from US occupation as well as from the Iraqi government. Civil wars where civilians don't get hurt are an exception, because usually one side of the conflict consists of a group of people who want freedom from the central government.
I had some bad experiences with x86 Vista when it was first released, but after recently installing the 64-bit version to get rid of Witcher crashes I must say that Vista has worked pretty well. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm now running the x64 version or if it is the 5 million Vista patches I immediately installed from Windows Update, but most of my gripes with Vista have been fixed. I still hate the new file explorer though (why the hell they changed the backspace from "one folder up" to "previous folder" I will never understand, but it pretty much means that it is now impossible to navigate in the file system without a mouse), and the idiotic "desktop" alternative when alt+tabbing is driving me insane (use windows button+d people, don't put useless shit in the alt+tabbing window!). It doesn't help that I always keep the taskbar hidden under the topmost window, and that a bug in Vista causes it to forget after a desktop alt+tab that the taskbar is supposed to stay under the topmost window... Ugh.
I was about to make a post on how the US considered water boarding a war crime in WW2, but then I realized that even debating it gives some legitimacy to water boarding. I refuse to debate the issue, and ask others to do the same. Just say "No" to torture.
Nevermind that, they need to get it down to negative voltages, then all our energy problems would be solved!
I just realized that you're the same guy I responded to in the other post, as you had that ridiculous claim that time as well. From my earlier post:
As of 2001, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 145 000 tonnes. According to wikipedia, about 370 tonnes were mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush, which equals 0.25% of the world's gold supply. Assuming a similar gold rush today, it would inflate a gold standard based currency by a yearly average of 0.05% for the first five years. To call that hyperinflation is absurd.
At least you didn't try to claim hyperinflation this time, perhaps the ways of the gold have made some headway into your world.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
The problem is that fiat currencies always have, and always will be mismanaged. I realize that I'm slightly conflating fractional reserve banking and fiat currency, but in practice they're part of the same problem.
As for the claim that there isn't enough gold to back up the dollar, I'll point the reader to a previous post of mine on the subject. To summarize, the dollar supply/gold price relation indicates that the dollar is massively overvalued, and it will come down regardless if the US moves to gold or not.
-1, didn't read the question. He is NOT asking about how to eliminate the drive, since he acknowledges that ANY matter can be destroyed. Instead, he asks about recovery options when there are no other alternatives, such as extreme disasters or criminal cases where data was intentionally lost. This is a good question, I look forward to constructive answers and the discussion that follows. Yours, however, is a dead end.
Thank you for this short explanation of encrypted HTTP communication. Why you decided to post it in response to my post is one of life's little mysteries.
;)
Seeing as you repeated the relevant part of my post within your own...
Well SSL doesn't help against that, as the traffic still goes between the user and the wikileaks site.
It's nothing to worry about.
By the way, does your wife know where you went last night?
Just curious.
I'll have to test that. Using two applications to do the work of one feels wrong, but I'll have to suspend my prejudices in this case. :)
VLC is nice, but mplayer is better for video. :)
KTorrent sounds promising. Will have to check it out.
I use mplayer on both windows and linux for videos, but its lack of a playlist and global hotkeys make it a pain to use for music.
Precisely so. UAC is a stupid and useless hack, because when faced with the choice of running a piece of software with admin privileges or not running the software at all, the user will always choose the former. This eventually leads the less informed user to compulsively click allow on everything, and the more informed user to disable UAC completely.