I understand that, but just because it requires intervention doesn't mean that action shouldn't be taken to ensure that these two ingredients to humanity, while they exist, shouldn't be put to the highest possible potential to form as many new humans as possible, to give them the chance at life that the argument always talks about. Where a woman who is perpetually pregnant and having children could bring life to a great number of new humans, a woman who is abstinent will deny that potential for life to those human beings.
The philosophy is thus: A female has the potential to give life to human beings with the help of either artificial fertilization or sexual intercourse with a man. This potential could either bring life to many, or bring none. The point is, an embryo is just "potential", too, since it isn't quite a human being. It could either grow into a healthy person, or die before childbirth. The only difference is that the fertilization has already been made. What you have to look at is, every time a woman has a period, that's a potential human being sent to the sewers. Every time a man masturbates, that's a potential human being's lifeblood being soaked into his favourite shirt. If people truly believed the argument that potential life should be preserved, then they should truly believe what I'm saying here. Anything else is just parroting someone else's (flawed) viewpoint.
Of course, not even I do, though I argue it. It forces you to think about the bigger picture; Of course, if such a policy were ever instated, the world would be quickly overpopulated.
See, not that I disagree, but there's a very big flaw in that argument in that there isn't a clear line drawn - Same with the abortion debate.
So taking an embryo and using it for science is wrong, it's murder, etc, etc. Yes, I agree to some extent. What about all the potential humans flushed down the toilet by those dreadful female teens during their period? Shouldn't they be forced to mate at every opportunity to enable the ovum of the month the chance to become a human being? After all, women typically ovulate 400 to 450 times in their lifespan (if Wikipedia can be believed; Likely so in this case). How is an ovum any different than an embryo, save for its state of fertilization? It still has the potential for human life, just as the embryo does, and isn't that what should be protected? What of lesbians? For that matter, should it be an offense for a man to flush millions of potential keys to human life down the toilet on a Kleenex? To waste them on another man? To have them accomplish nothing but serve as a flush for the reproductive system via a wet dream?
These questions represent the path this sort of argument is taking, and how far it can go. I'm sure there are people out there that actually believe this, too (and I'm sure Slashdot users would like Mandatory Mating Hour).
You don't see Native Americans strapping explosives to their chests and screaming that, in the name of their god, they shall take back their homeland from the filthy paleskins that conquered them, do you? Israel was created generations ago, after World War II came to a close - It seems as though a fair amount of time has passed since then, over half a century. Have the Arab people (or at least their leaders) of those lands surrounding Israel been breeding nothing but unbridled hatred and fury over the past nearly sixty years? Do survivors of World War II teach hatred and distrust of Germans and Japanese, and vice versa? Why must the fighting continue as it is? Why is Israel's mere existence considered such a stain on the face of the Middle East?
But if that's the case, then America would be on guard. If the attack came from nowhere and had those materials included in whatever manner (Dirty Bomb(TM)), there would first off be the element of surprise, followed by hysteria, followed by an inquiry into where the materials came from, followed by more hysteria, followed by sweeping reforms and loss of liberties.
At least, that's how it all happened with 9/11. Surprise strike, hysteria, inquiry, hysteria, "reforms", decay of civil liberties.
Re:Why buy separate?
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This is true; However, XP was a major departure from what we had seen in the past, and it was scary - It was a true, user-oriented NT-based OS that was actually very solid and offered a few neat new features (one of the most prominent of which being the Windows Firewall of SP2), as well as having much better plug and play support. As I recall, the lack of DOS support and many Windows 3.1 to 95-era games and applications failing to work, coupled with relatively high system requirements for the time, caused most of the delay for the migration from 98/ME/2k and XP. As more applications came about to replace those of yesteryear that actually worked on XP, and as emulation such as DOSbox became popular, and as more powerful machines became cheaper, more people went with XP. All this and I haven't mentioned XP's crash rate was, and is, far lower than Win9x, which on modern hardware would require a reboot after 12 hours of uptime with anything of consequence running, due to massive memory leaks in the 9x kernel, all non-issues in XP.
Vista, however, when you look at it for what it is, is basically Windows XP with a hardware-accelerated GUI (which is cool), some parental controls, an idiot check, and even less compatibility with both software and hardware than I believe even XP had when it was first released (especially if you consider 16-bit apps). So many of the planned features were ripped completely from the OS, and its continued delays caused me to personally become quite skeptical of the necessity of Vista to begin with, not to mention another bout of the need for relatively powerful hardware that many OEMs aren't even providing (512MB of RAM on Vista? What are you guys thinking?). The security aspect of things really hasn't changed much, IE7 is still more insecure than any other browser, (early) video drivers can often crash or lock the system outright, and the installer takes forever just to get to the point where you can choose a destination drive and enter your serial - No disk activity is happening, just a long, drawn-out three minute pause between clicking "Next" and actually seeing the next screen. Vista takes forever and a day to install in comparison to other operating systems, even on systems that easily exceed the system requirements. XP's install was closer in completion time to 2k's (probably because it was pretty much the same installer), which was very reasonable. All this not to mention Windows Live OneCare, which, while a separate product, is very much related to Vista, and is one of the worst products in the security market.
Vista's cool, though. It has that flashy cool factor, but that's not really a selling point for an MS OS; I want something that's going to work, and something that's not going to bring my system to its knees just to boot the damned thing.
Re:Well tested?
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SLi is supported (and activated) on the chipset at boot time, not at the OS level; The driver does control it, however. A good few users have claimed a large increase in graphics speed going back to XP from Vista, mainly due to the fact that DX9 rendering in Vista is (supposedly) slower than DX10 rendering.
Not that SLi provides much of a performance increase for what you're spending, anyway. nVidia chips are faster per-card, but the truly great scalers are the ATi cards, whose Radeons (and Radeon HDs) offer more performance per extra card in Crossfire than the GeForces in SLi, though each card is less powerful.
No, you don't, and neither does anyone else. You have Draft-N (possibly Draft 2.0), which is different. The official N specification hasn't been released yet, and isn't expected to be standardized/finalized until around September of 2008 (see orange-highlighted column). It's entirely feasible that existing Draft-N products are N-compatible once the spec is final (and many advertise to this effect), but I wouldn't bank on that.
Yes, I know, this is a troll, and an AC. I'll bite anyway, since the stupidity here is astounding.
* Some pc developer crying about how he is completely lost and none of his x86 or directx code will work
Call of Duty 2 was considered by many to be at its finest on the X-Box 360, it being the overall best-looking, best-performing, and best-playing version of the game. The X-Box 360 uses in no way any sort of x86 code, and even its implementation of DirectX is different than that of the PC.
* Some pc game that was dumped on the Playstation by a pc developer who wishes they were off writing directx code making things shiny and not having to deal with a modern graphics system where they have no competence.
The PlayStation 2 is a modern graphics system now? A system released in 2000? Are you using a 486?
The PS2 and Xbox are very close in their overall graphics power.
No. You did NOT just say the PS2 was graphically equivalent to the X-Box. No freaking way, not unless you're playing on an old black & white TV from the 50's. When RE4 for the Gamecube looks very distinguishably better than the (very polished) PS2 variant, and when the X-Box is graphically superior (raw power, AA) to that, you're looking at the PS2 being somewhere off in the rhubarb patch, being largely incapable of AA in hardware, actual performance numbers being lower, since multitexturing and shading are something that has been very important in console graphics basically since the PS2's birth. Comparing numbers directly with the X-Box in similar conditions, the X-Box does it faster, at a higher resolution (PS2 supports only 480p as an alternative to 480i, and only with games specifically supporting it, while the X-Box supports not only 480p, but 720p and 1080i), and with AA. It is absolutely inarguable; the X-Box is simply more powerful than the PlayStation 2, even if its game library isn't exactly impressive.
I also seem to recall the PS2 version of Call of Duty 3 being rather lackluster (and with a TERRIBLE framerate for the graphics being presented), and I blame this on the hardware limitations of the PS2, being the least powerful of the prior-gen consoles, and having only the median in terms of disc space (4.7GB). I would hazard to guess that it was impossible to port directly what was seen on the X-Box (being the most powerful of the three) over to such hardware, as almost all games that were ported from the X-Box looked much uglier. However, I think it's easier to blame Ubisoft on that one. It seems to me, looking at it as an outsider who has never played GRAW in any of its forms, that a PS2 release may never have been in the initial planning phase of development.
What are you on about? The Dreamcast and the X-Box were the homebrew developer's and homebrew user's dream systems. The Dreamcast had no lockout chip, and played CD-R's just fine, which enables me to have an MP3 player, a really spiffy NES emulator, SNES, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, MSX, Commodore 64, JPEG slideshow, DivX player, SCUMMVM, Rise of the Triad, Another World, and a shitton of other stuff including original homebrew, all on the one CD (or multiple, in the case of extra ROM's, DivX movies, etc). The X-Box classic has even more potential once modded, and can actually act as a media center. While perhaps not the best of the game consoles of all time, the X-Box was an extremely versatile machine, and I have a lot of respect for it, if not much for its parent company.
I still use my Dreamcast all the time, and it's usually the number one thing that gets played during get-togethers; NES games rock muchly, and the system is portable to the extreme. Try again.
Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to build a high-res texture set, and a high-poly model set, use those for the high end and just scale down? What of compression? Even audio could be compressed down on the lower-end. What's there to worry about? Didn't they already do something very similar to this between the PSP and PS2 with the Liberty/Vice City Stories games?
Why are so many people saying that this move will result in a crappier game? It won't. There have always been different versions of the same game, and in this case the hardware/disc space limitations aren't as massive as, say, going from the X-Box classic to the Gamecube. It's relatively trivial to create lower-res textures from high-res ones and to tune down the polycount on a high-poly 3D model, and also relatively trivial to compress audio to (x) codec. So what's the big deal? That's all that's ever been in a GTA game, aside from the basic engine - Audio, 3D models, textures, and scripting.
Long story short, there will be no quality cutback across the board (or SHOULD NOT be) just because the 360 only has a DVD drive by default, or because its core system doesn't have a hard drive. If there IS a quality reduction, then it's solely the fault of Rockstar games. End of story.
You know, that's actually a very good idea, and I'd support it 100%. Unfortunately, it'll never happen, for the sole reason that if it took a few years longer to get to politics that's a few years' worth of illegitimate income they won't be taking in.
Though I hate to generalize; I don't mean to say there aren't any honest polit-Oh, wait.
I have two words that will blow this particular argument out of the water; Two words that explain exactly why proprietary and popular aren't always "better", and that even though free or cheaper alternatives exist, not everyone will flow to them, perhaps simply out of brand recognition. Those words?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that, but just because it requires intervention doesn't mean that action shouldn't be taken to ensure that these two ingredients to humanity, while they exist, shouldn't be put to the highest possible potential to form as many new humans as possible, to give them the chance at life that the argument always talks about. Where a woman who is perpetually pregnant and having children could bring life to a great number of new humans, a woman who is abstinent will deny that potential for life to those human beings.
The philosophy is thus: A female has the potential to give life to human beings with the help of either artificial fertilization or sexual intercourse with a man. This potential could either bring life to many, or bring none. The point is, an embryo is just "potential", too, since it isn't quite a human being. It could either grow into a healthy person, or die before childbirth. The only difference is that the fertilization has already been made. What you have to look at is, every time a woman has a period, that's a potential human being sent to the sewers. Every time a man masturbates, that's a potential human being's lifeblood being soaked into his favourite shirt. If people truly believed the argument that potential life should be preserved, then they should truly believe what I'm saying here. Anything else is just parroting someone else's (flawed) viewpoint.
Of course, not even I do, though I argue it. It forces you to think about the bigger picture; Of course, if such a policy were ever instated, the world would be quickly overpopulated.
See, not that I disagree, but there's a very big flaw in that argument in that there isn't a clear line drawn - Same with the abortion debate.
So taking an embryo and using it for science is wrong, it's murder, etc, etc. Yes, I agree to some extent. What about all the potential humans flushed down the toilet by those dreadful female teens during their period? Shouldn't they be forced to mate at every opportunity to enable the ovum of the month the chance to become a human being? After all, women typically ovulate 400 to 450 times in their lifespan (if Wikipedia can be believed; Likely so in this case). How is an ovum any different than an embryo, save for its state of fertilization? It still has the potential for human life, just as the embryo does, and isn't that what should be protected? What of lesbians? For that matter, should it be an offense for a man to flush millions of potential keys to human life down the toilet on a Kleenex? To waste them on another man? To have them accomplish nothing but serve as a flush for the reproductive system via a wet dream?
These questions represent the path this sort of argument is taking, and how far it can go. I'm sure there are people out there that actually believe this, too (and I'm sure Slashdot users would like Mandatory Mating Hour).
Offtopic, but actually, PDF isn't bad if you're using a decent (non-Adobe) reader. Foxit's quite good on the Windows front.
I'm pretty sure most of what Apple does qualifies as theft, but then again, same with Microsoft and most large corporations with market share.
... But in that case, you'd just increase the playback buffer in (x) MP3 playing program. In Winamp, it's quite easy to do.
You don't see Native Americans strapping explosives to their chests and screaming that, in the name of their god, they shall take back their homeland from the filthy paleskins that conquered them, do you? Israel was created generations ago, after World War II came to a close - It seems as though a fair amount of time has passed since then, over half a century. Have the Arab people (or at least their leaders) of those lands surrounding Israel been breeding nothing but unbridled hatred and fury over the past nearly sixty years? Do survivors of World War II teach hatred and distrust of Germans and Japanese, and vice versa? Why must the fighting continue as it is? Why is Israel's mere existence considered such a stain on the face of the Middle East?
Well, the Soviets tried that several decades ago, and, well... Yeah.
Well, if you live on an island like I do, you're looking at parallel backbones or one big single point of failure.
That's nice, but I don't want to waste any more than a syllable and a half on Apple. :P
Awsex is how I pronounce it. Oh-ess-ten is way more effort than deserved.
But if that's the case, then America would be on guard. If the attack came from nowhere and had those materials included in whatever manner (Dirty Bomb(TM)), there would first off be the element of surprise, followed by hysteria, followed by an inquiry into where the materials came from, followed by more hysteria, followed by sweeping reforms and loss of liberties.
At least, that's how it all happened with 9/11. Surprise strike, hysteria, inquiry, hysteria, "reforms", decay of civil liberties.
This is true; However, XP was a major departure from what we had seen in the past, and it was scary - It was a true, user-oriented NT-based OS that was actually very solid and offered a few neat new features (one of the most prominent of which being the Windows Firewall of SP2), as well as having much better plug and play support. As I recall, the lack of DOS support and many Windows 3.1 to 95-era games and applications failing to work, coupled with relatively high system requirements for the time, caused most of the delay for the migration from 98/ME/2k and XP. As more applications came about to replace those of yesteryear that actually worked on XP, and as emulation such as DOSbox became popular, and as more powerful machines became cheaper, more people went with XP. All this and I haven't mentioned XP's crash rate was, and is, far lower than Win9x, which on modern hardware would require a reboot after 12 hours of uptime with anything of consequence running, due to massive memory leaks in the 9x kernel, all non-issues in XP.
Vista, however, when you look at it for what it is, is basically Windows XP with a hardware-accelerated GUI (which is cool), some parental controls, an idiot check, and even less compatibility with both software and hardware than I believe even XP had when it was first released (especially if you consider 16-bit apps). So many of the planned features were ripped completely from the OS, and its continued delays caused me to personally become quite skeptical of the necessity of Vista to begin with, not to mention another bout of the need for relatively powerful hardware that many OEMs aren't even providing (512MB of RAM on Vista? What are you guys thinking?). The security aspect of things really hasn't changed much, IE7 is still more insecure than any other browser, (early) video drivers can often crash or lock the system outright, and the installer takes forever just to get to the point where you can choose a destination drive and enter your serial - No disk activity is happening, just a long, drawn-out three minute pause between clicking "Next" and actually seeing the next screen. Vista takes forever and a day to install in comparison to other operating systems, even on systems that easily exceed the system requirements. XP's install was closer in completion time to 2k's (probably because it was pretty much the same installer), which was very reasonable. All this not to mention Windows Live OneCare, which, while a separate product, is very much related to Vista, and is one of the worst products in the security market.
Vista's cool, though. It has that flashy cool factor, but that's not really a selling point for an MS OS; I want something that's going to work, and something that's not going to bring my system to its knees just to boot the damned thing.
SLi is supported (and activated) on the chipset at boot time, not at the OS level; The driver does control it, however. A good few users have claimed a large increase in graphics speed going back to XP from Vista, mainly due to the fact that DX9 rendering in Vista is (supposedly) slower than DX10 rendering.
Not that SLi provides much of a performance increase for what you're spending, anyway. nVidia chips are faster per-card, but the truly great scalers are the ATi cards, whose Radeons (and Radeon HDs) offer more performance per extra card in Crossfire than the GeForces in SLi, though each card is less powerful.
No, you don't, and neither does anyone else. You have Draft-N (possibly Draft 2.0), which is different. The official N specification hasn't been released yet, and isn't expected to be standardized/finalized until around September of 2008 (see orange-highlighted column). It's entirely feasible that existing Draft-N products are N-compatible once the spec is final (and many advertise to this effect), but I wouldn't bank on that.
Oh, god. It's a helpful AC.
Where's the bomb shelter?
Call of Duty 2 was considered by many to be at its finest on the X-Box 360, it being the overall best-looking, best-performing, and best-playing version of the game. The X-Box 360 uses in no way any sort of x86 code, and even its implementation of DirectX is different than that of the PC.
The PlayStation 2 is a modern graphics system now? A system released in 2000? Are you using a 486?
No. You did NOT just say the PS2 was graphically equivalent to the X-Box. No freaking way, not unless you're playing on an old black & white TV from the 50's. When RE4 for the Gamecube looks very distinguishably better than the (very polished) PS2 variant, and when the X-Box is graphically superior (raw power, AA) to that, you're looking at the PS2 being somewhere off in the rhubarb patch, being largely incapable of AA in hardware, actual performance numbers being lower, since multitexturing and shading are something that has been very important in console graphics basically since the PS2's birth. Comparing numbers directly with the X-Box in similar conditions, the X-Box does it faster, at a higher resolution (PS2 supports only 480p as an alternative to 480i, and only with games specifically supporting it, while the X-Box supports not only 480p, but 720p and 1080i), and with AA. It is absolutely inarguable; the X-Box is simply more powerful than the PlayStation 2, even if its game library isn't exactly impressive.
I also seem to recall the PS2 version of Call of Duty 3 being rather lackluster (and with a TERRIBLE framerate for the graphics being presented), and I blame this on the hardware limitations of the PS2, being the least powerful of the prior-gen consoles, and having only the median in terms of disc space (4.7GB). I would hazard to guess that it was impossible to port directly what was seen on the X-Box (being the most powerful of the three) over to such hardware, as almost all games that were ported from the X-Box looked much uglier. However, I think it's easier to blame Ubisoft on that one. It seems to me, looking at it as an outsider who has never played GRAW in any of its forms, that a PS2 release may never have been in the initial planning phase of development.
What are you on about? The Dreamcast and the X-Box were the homebrew developer's and homebrew user's dream systems. The Dreamcast had no lockout chip, and played CD-R's just fine, which enables me to have an MP3 player, a really spiffy NES emulator, SNES, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, MSX, Commodore 64, JPEG slideshow, DivX player, SCUMMVM, Rise of the Triad, Another World, and a shitton of other stuff including original homebrew, all on the one CD (or multiple, in the case of extra ROM's, DivX movies, etc). The X-Box classic has even more potential once modded, and can actually act as a media center. While perhaps not the best of the game consoles of all time, the X-Box was an extremely versatile machine, and I have a lot of respect for it, if not much for its parent company.
I still use my Dreamcast all the time, and it's usually the number one thing that gets played during get-togethers; NES games rock muchly, and the system is portable to the extreme. Try again.
Refresh my memory: Did Sony replace the whole 1st-gen PSX and slimline PS2 units (not the power adapters) when they were found to overheat?
Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to build a high-res texture set, and a high-poly model set, use those for the high end and just scale down? What of compression? Even audio could be compressed down on the lower-end. What's there to worry about? Didn't they already do something very similar to this between the PSP and PS2 with the Liberty/Vice City Stories games?
Why are so many people saying that this move will result in a crappier game? It won't. There have always been different versions of the same game, and in this case the hardware/disc space limitations aren't as massive as, say, going from the X-Box classic to the Gamecube. It's relatively trivial to create lower-res textures from high-res ones and to tune down the polycount on a high-poly 3D model, and also relatively trivial to compress audio to (x) codec. So what's the big deal? That's all that's ever been in a GTA game, aside from the basic engine - Audio, 3D models, textures, and scripting.
Long story short, there will be no quality cutback across the board (or SHOULD NOT be) just because the 360 only has a DVD drive by default, or because its core system doesn't have a hard drive. If there IS a quality reduction, then it's solely the fault of Rockstar games. End of story.
Oh, great. That's just what we need... Then we'd have Z0|\||<.
I wouldn't buy a Gateway computer before reading that/this article.
You know, that's actually a very good idea, and I'd support it 100%. Unfortunately, it'll never happen, for the sole reason that if it took a few years longer to get to politics that's a few years' worth of illegitimate income they won't be taking in.
Though I hate to generalize; I don't mean to say there aren't any honest polit-Oh, wait.
I have two words that will blow this particular argument out of the water; Two words that explain exactly why proprietary and popular aren't always "better", and that even though free or cheaper alternatives exist, not everyone will flow to them, perhaps simply out of brand recognition. Those words?
Norton Antivirus.
I think that speaks for itself, really.
Yeah, I get the point. :P I'm not saying I think this is without merit, I'm saying "here we go again".
And even more no good. Cold war, anyone? But there's no commies to fight!