I'd love the police to just be able to scan vehicles to see which are active, which plates do not match vehicles and which vehicles have insurance.
We are plagued by people who do not have valid registrations, borrow or steal plates and have no insurance.
Bust 'em on the spot.
Yeah... this works until people realise they can just clone numberplates. It's pretty easy to see a car identical to your own, copy the license plate, and get a new one made. You get to drive round with impunity, while the poor sap who you copied the numberplates off gets all your speed and red light camera tickets.
They introduced a new law in the UK to try to get around this... it's now illegal to make your own numberplates, and you must supply ID to people who make them for you. Of course, this only inconveniences people following the law. People cloning numberplates just buy perspex and do make their own, since they are so easy to make exactly the same as legal ones.
I look forward to the day when they ban yellow perspex.
The founding fathers knew this -- that's why they advocated jury trials in the first place. It was an attempt to remove this mob mentality from the judicial process, and as a balance against populism swaying the government and giving in to the transient emotional outbursts of the crowd, the mob, the public
The jury _is_ the crowd, the mob, the public. That's the entire point of the jury.
Yes... but when you go back to where you were, you change the rotation of the Earth back to how it was again. I'm more concerned with people doing round the world trips, who almost invariable see to go eastwards for some reason. They permanently change the rotation speed of the earth.
Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technolgy that is orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.
Getting to the moon requires technology orders of magnitude beyond what humanity had 500 years ago. 500 years is a blink of an eye in galactic terms.
We already have now ideas about how it would be possible to travel to other star systems... given enough impetus, we could start a project now. The likelihood of success would be near zero, it'd take hundreds or thousands of years, but we know it could be possible. 500 years ago, no one even had a clue how to get to the moon.
500 years is insignificant in terms of the timescale of the universe, galaxy, solar system, and even humanity.
You haven't checked for a while, have you. Third party developers started being Steam only in 2006. From the link:
"This is a list of games that require Steam authentication, regardless of whether they are purchased at retail or through other digital distribution services. An active Steam account is compulsory in order to authenticate and play these games on a personal computer. Games that also have a non-Steam version available separately are excluded from this list.
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."
I'm really confused by this... Europe is constantly being lambasted by some in America about the consumer protection laws restricting free capitalism. These kind of laws seem the antithesis of free capitalism - they're designed to keep the local rich rich. I don't see their purpose, at all.
This kind of law wouldn't last 5 minutes in the UK, let alone the rest of Europe. The salt tax on India is getting on for a century since it was repealed, prior to independence.
Nvidia is one of the few brands I have loyalty to. I think most of this loyalty comes from the ti4200 I bought back in the day, which was complete awesome, for many years.
I went to the 8800GT, then the 460gtx. Neither of these have impressed me as much, but they've been very good.
My next upgrade is a complete system - I'm still running a (quick) core 2 duo on an old motherboard, with that 460gtx. It was already about the quickest gfx card you could slot in the PCI express on the motherboard a few years ago.
I haven't hit a game which is a problem yet.... and I know my system is a hell of a lot better than most consumer systems sold today.
Plea bargains can help those who are 100% guilty of the offense but are being given a chance for a lighter sentence. This can lighten the caseload of the prosecutors office which in turn also saves the court money. If the person is innocent then by all means plead your case in front of a jury.
So... plea bargains only help the guilty, and those who are convicted in a court deserve more jail time than those who accept plea bargains?
The other side is of the traditional separate component PC is the tangle of cables cascading down the back of the desk onto the floor, which typically doesn't get touched by anyone who vacuums, resulting in a long standing pile of detritus and dust.
My PC has 3 cables out the back... DVI, Power, RJ45. You can lose one of those with wireless - if you want to use wireless all the time, I personally don't. Power is pretty essential. The DVI is the one cable you don't need on a laptop or tablet (my DVI is a faux HDMI which also does sound, too). It just plugs into any screen, and works.
Now... the fact my PC weighs about 20kg, has no sides and bits falling out of it, and refuses to boot for a few minutes after it has been moved... irrelevant, I still move it about the house relatively regularly.
It's a matter of statistics. Not all people following a modern western diet and lifestyle will develop cancer, as not all prehistoric people on a paleo diet would be cancer-free. But what is seen is that there is a substantial increase in cancer developing on certain aspects of modern "factory" diet and lifestyle.
The life expectancy of people in prehistoric times was about 30 on average. Not many people get cancer before they are 30. The one major thing that means we are more likely to get cancer than people in prehistoric times is the fact we live longer.
There's also evidence of very poor diets in prehistoric times, eg rickets and other vitamin deficiencies. I'll take my chances, to be honest... I've already lasted 5 years longer than the average prehistoric man.
GPUs need access to very fast memory, and that's not something that can be provided on memory modules.
Isn't that all onboard the graphics card now?
In my experience, and in just about all the benchmarks I've looked at ever, memory speed has absolutely 0 effect apart from some very specific situations. In many cases, lower latency, slower RAM will be quicker.
It's all a bit pointless, really, IMO, since RAM is RAM is RAM. I've never seen a system significantly (ie more than 10%) improve by adding different memory. More RAM, that's a different issue.... you can never have too much.
PC gaming is a niche, there are far more casual gamers out there using consoles or mobile devices.
Steam alone peaks at about 5 million users online concurrently every day, Dota2 peaked at over 300,000 players on Steam today. WoW has 8.3 million subscribers. Diablo III sold 12 million units, more than any game ever on the PS3, and as many as any non-bundled game ever on the Xbox360 (CoD black ops sold the same). The Sims 2 sold 20 million units.
These kind of numbers show the PC is not a niche market.
Tech-savy gamers are moving to wine or steam on linux.
What? The reason I run Windows is purely games.... I don't know whether you noticed, but even though it's improving, the catalogue of games on Linux is miniscule compared to Windows (or even Mac, for that matter).
The only Tech-savvy gamers that are moving to Linux are ones who don't care about playing games.
100%, whenever I play some games (Civ 5 being the obvious popular one)
less powerful video card: My phone's GPU is more powerful than the most common desktop one (Intel integrated).
Yeah... anyone who uses Intel integrated does not want decent graphics. Anyone who wants decent graphics does not use Intel, or a phone.
less control: I replaced my phone & tablet OS with a different userspace, kernel & all. Less savvy users get info on what an app will do before they install it.
Some phones have less control, some don't. I'm a lot happier with a system not designed to make it difficult to install another OS on it. How many dual booting phones are there about?
less Ram: My Phone has 2GB LPDDR3. Tablets have more. It resembles PCs 5 years ago.
My PC is 5 years old, and it has 16GB.
less drive space: 64gb micro-SD cards & first-class wireless-N to a fileserver. This problem is minor.
My Steam folder is almost 1/3 a terabyte alone - I think if I installed all my games, it'd be about a terabyte. Loading textures in game over a wireless link sounds a lot of fun. Currently I have striped SATA drives.
he got 34% of the vote, resulting in more than a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Sounds like some serious gerrymandering to me.
It's not necessarily gerrymandering - If you're from the US, you're used to a 2 party system. In many countries, there are 4 or 5 parties that get a significant share of the vote. With a representative system, this leads to very skewed results, in some cases. In the UK (and we've only had 3 parties with a decent share for a while), we've had majority governments with about 34% of the vote relatively recently - it's not because of gerrymandering, it's because of representative democracy.
Besides, the word "democracy" these days is more than just a term for ancient Greek democracy. It includes rule of law, fair treatment of minorities, rules of conduct, and so on.
Yeah... that's not actually what the word means, though. If you include all that, it becomes a social contract (rules of conduct), and that's not what democracy is about at all. I personally am for some kind of democracy almost universally, but completely against universal rules of conduct. Also, the only major country close to a true democracy is Switzerland - everyone else is representation. There's no technical reason why we all can't get more democratic now.
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I'd love the police to just be able to scan vehicles to see which are active, which plates do not match vehicles and which vehicles have insurance. We are plagued by people who do not have valid registrations, borrow or steal plates and have no insurance. Bust 'em on the spot.
Yeah... this works until people realise they can just clone numberplates. It's pretty easy to see a car identical to your own, copy the license plate, and get a new one made. You get to drive round with impunity, while the poor sap who you copied the numberplates off gets all your speed and red light camera tickets.
They introduced a new law in the UK to try to get around this... it's now illegal to make your own numberplates, and you must supply ID to people who make them for you. Of course, this only inconveniences people following the law. People cloning numberplates just buy perspex and do make their own, since they are so easy to make exactly the same as legal ones.
I look forward to the day when they ban yellow perspex.
The founding fathers knew this -- that's why they advocated jury trials in the first place. It was an attempt to remove this mob mentality from the judicial process, and as a balance against populism swaying the government and giving in to the transient emotional outbursts of the crowd, the mob, the public
The jury _is_ the crowd, the mob, the public. That's the entire point of the jury.
Anything lower than 100ms is illegal in athletics. You react faster than that, you get a false start, and are disqualified.
Yes... but when you go back to where you were, you change the rotation of the Earth back to how it was again. I'm more concerned with people doing round the world trips, who almost invariable see to go eastwards for some reason. They permanently change the rotation speed of the earth.
ps. I'm not really worried by this.
Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technolgy that is orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.
Getting to the moon requires technology orders of magnitude beyond what humanity had 500 years ago. 500 years is a blink of an eye in galactic terms.
We already have now ideas about how it would be possible to travel to other star systems... given enough impetus, we could start a project now. The likelihood of success would be near zero, it'd take hundreds or thousands of years, but we know it could be possible. 500 years ago, no one even had a clue how to get to the moon.
500 years is insignificant in terms of the timescale of the universe, galaxy, solar system, and even humanity.
You haven't checked for a while, have you. Third party developers started being Steam only in 2006. From the link :
"This is a list of games that require Steam authentication, regardless of whether they are purchased at retail or through other digital distribution services. An active Steam account is compulsory in order to authenticate and play these games on a personal computer. Games that also have a non-Steam version available separately are excluded from this list.
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."
or, looking at other subjects, molecules, DNA, bacteria [...] - I could pass around a life-size replica.
I'm not sure that will be quite as useful as you think it will be.
there's nothing funny about threatening violence against another human being.
That's the point - he didn't. He said he was kidding immediately afterwards. He explicitly said he was not going to shoot up a school.
I'm going to shoot up a school.... jk. Should I be arrested now? Because if the answer is no, you're applying the law differently.
Besides, threatening violence can be funny. There's loads of comedy based around violence.
I'm really confused by this... Europe is constantly being lambasted by some in America about the consumer protection laws restricting free capitalism. These kind of laws seem the antithesis of free capitalism - they're designed to keep the local rich rich. I don't see their purpose, at all.
This kind of law wouldn't last 5 minutes in the UK, let alone the rest of Europe. The salt tax on India is getting on for a century since it was repealed, prior to independence.
Making a video of your gameplay can be very useful for beta testing. Fraps is a little crap at doing things like that sometimes.
Nvidia is one of the few brands I have loyalty to. I think most of this loyalty comes from the ti4200 I bought back in the day, which was complete awesome, for many years.
I went to the 8800GT, then the 460gtx. Neither of these have impressed me as much, but they've been very good.
My next upgrade is a complete system - I'm still running a (quick) core 2 duo on an old motherboard, with that 460gtx. It was already about the quickest gfx card you could slot in the PCI express on the motherboard a few years ago.
I haven't hit a game which is a problem yet.... and I know my system is a hell of a lot better than most consumer systems sold today.
Amusingly Indians (from India, not native Americans) believe the exact same thing.
Proof here.
Plea bargains can help those who are 100% guilty of the offense but are being given a chance for a lighter sentence. This can lighten the caseload of the prosecutors office which in turn also saves the court money. If the person is innocent then by all means plead your case in front of a jury.
So... plea bargains only help the guilty, and those who are convicted in a court deserve more jail time than those who accept plea bargains?
However I also wanted some with more substance, for if I'm traveling or something like that.
You could try going for proper old school ports, like Angband and variants.
I've not actually tried these, but they look pretty faithful, and are free. Close to 1/4 a century old, now.
The other side is of the traditional separate component PC is the tangle of cables cascading down the back of the desk onto the floor, which typically doesn't get touched by anyone who vacuums, resulting in a long standing pile of detritus and dust.
My PC has 3 cables out the back... DVI, Power, RJ45. You can lose one of those with wireless - if you want to use wireless all the time, I personally don't. Power is pretty essential. The DVI is the one cable you don't need on a laptop or tablet (my DVI is a faux HDMI which also does sound, too). It just plugs into any screen, and works.
Now... the fact my PC weighs about 20kg, has no sides and bits falling out of it, and refuses to boot for a few minutes after it has been moved... irrelevant, I still move it about the house relatively regularly.
It's a matter of statistics. Not all people following a modern western diet and lifestyle will develop cancer, as not all prehistoric people on a paleo diet would be cancer-free. But what is seen is that there is a substantial increase in cancer developing on certain aspects of modern "factory" diet and lifestyle.
The life expectancy of people in prehistoric times was about 30 on average. Not many people get cancer before they are 30. The one major thing that means we are more likely to get cancer than people in prehistoric times is the fact we live longer.
There's also evidence of very poor diets in prehistoric times, eg rickets and other vitamin deficiencies. I'll take my chances, to be honest... I've already lasted 5 years longer than the average prehistoric man.
A different standard is applied to Israel than to everyone else.
Yup, like nuclear weapon arming, and massive military investment from the US. The soviet union is long dead.
Firstly... never, ever source the daily mail. It is always wrong.
OK, I exaggerate... it gets the weather right one time out of ten.
The Mail is not a reliable news source, by any standard. You might as well be listening to your neighbour's chicken's cat's banker's lawyer.
GPUs need access to very fast memory, and that's not something that can be provided on memory modules.
Isn't that all onboard the graphics card now?
In my experience, and in just about all the benchmarks I've looked at ever, memory speed has absolutely 0 effect apart from some very specific situations. In many cases, lower latency, slower RAM will be quicker.
It's all a bit pointless, really, IMO, since RAM is RAM is RAM. I've never seen a system significantly (ie more than 10%) improve by adding different memory. More RAM, that's a different issue.... you can never have too much.
PC gaming is a niche, there are far more casual gamers out there using consoles or mobile devices.
Steam alone peaks at about 5 million users online concurrently every day, Dota2 peaked at over 300,000 players on Steam today. WoW has 8.3 million subscribers. Diablo III sold 12 million units, more than any game ever on the PS3, and as many as any non-bundled game ever on the Xbox360 (CoD black ops sold the same). The Sims 2 sold 20 million units.
These kind of numbers show the PC is not a niche market.
Tech-savy gamers are moving to wine or steam on linux.
What? The reason I run Windows is purely games.... I don't know whether you noticed, but even though it's improving, the catalogue of games on Linux is miniscule compared to Windows (or even Mac, for that matter).
The only Tech-savvy gamers that are moving to Linux are ones who don't care about playing games.
weaker processor: What's your CPU usage right now? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung_exynos5_dual&num=4
100%, whenever I play some games (Civ 5 being the obvious popular one)
less powerful video card: My phone's GPU is more powerful than the most common desktop one (Intel integrated).
Yeah... anyone who uses Intel integrated does not want decent graphics. Anyone who wants decent graphics does not use Intel, or a phone.
less control: I replaced my phone & tablet OS with a different userspace, kernel & all. Less savvy users get info on what an app will do before they install it.
Some phones have less control, some don't. I'm a lot happier with a system not designed to make it difficult to install another OS on it. How many dual booting phones are there about?
less Ram: My Phone has 2GB LPDDR3. Tablets have more. It resembles PCs 5 years ago.
My PC is 5 years old, and it has 16GB.
less drive space: 64gb micro-SD cards & first-class wireless-N to a fileserver. This problem is minor.
My Steam folder is almost 1/3 a terabyte alone - I think if I installed all my games, it'd be about a terabyte. Loading textures in game over a wireless link sounds a lot of fun. Currently I have striped SATA drives.
he got 34% of the vote, resulting in more than a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Sounds like some serious gerrymandering to me.
It's not necessarily gerrymandering - If you're from the US, you're used to a 2 party system. In many countries, there are 4 or 5 parties that get a significant share of the vote. With a representative system, this leads to very skewed results, in some cases. In the UK (and we've only had 3 parties with a decent share for a while), we've had majority governments with about 34% of the vote relatively recently - it's not because of gerrymandering, it's because of representative democracy.
Besides, the word "democracy" these days is more than just a term for ancient Greek democracy. It includes rule of law, fair treatment of minorities, rules of conduct, and so on.
Yeah... that's not actually what the word means, though. If you include all that, it becomes a social contract (rules of conduct), and that's not what democracy is about at all. I personally am for some kind of democracy almost universally, but completely against universal rules of conduct. Also, the only major country close to a true democracy is Switzerland - everyone else is representation. There's no technical reason why we all can't get more democratic now.
That's not the difference.