Energy balance and efficiency are different things.
Having a "positive" (>1) energy balance means it is physically possible to use it as a fuel, that you get more energy out of it than it took to produce it in the first place.
You know that; you went to that conference thingy. Petroleum ranks at around 10 on the energy balance (or EROEI) charts, in case you're curious.
But, my point was that gasoline is a more efficient fuel because of its greater energy content - that, independent of "Energy Balance" or "Expected Return on Energy Investment" scores, that your car will go further on gasoline than on ethanol or any mixture of gas and ethanol. More kJ/gallon, more miles/gallon.
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned.
I don't think anyone believes that ethanol should be banned - but this is what happens when you tinker with a perfectly functioning market for something stupid like political gain.
The government doesn't "support" the oil industry - unless you call repeated congressional investigations, fuel taxes, and attempts to confiscate those "windfall profits" from Exxon's 10-15% margins "support."
There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty
A few problems with that:
"Good ethanol crops" could compete with corn and reduce the profits of the average midwest corporate farm. (Don't worry - corn is subsidized, you'll never see any other crop compete with it.
Those plots of land are paid to sit empty in a misguided attempt by our government to raise crop prices from historic lows. Guess it's working.
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't most third world countries depend on agriculture products as exports? So if agriculture products become more expensive, the food they buy is more expensive, but they will also have more money with which they can buy the expensive food.
Most third world countries can't export agriculture products because there's no-one to export to. First world countries, (read: the US and EU) have very powerful agriculture lobbyists. Our government subsidizes agriculture production - our farmers can produce the same crop cheaper than the African farmer because the government pays most of his costs. Even if the African farmer could produce a bushel of corn or cotton or whatnot cheaper than a domestic producer, tariffs and quotas prevent him from selling there.
If food becomes more expensive, the third-world countries are SOL. The vast majority of people in the world (first or third) are not commercial farmers who sell the food they grow, so the price increase benefits very few people.
In the meantime, starving people have to pay more for the same inadequate rations.
by having more energetic mollecules -so while its true that each biofuel ton produces three times more CO2 than fossil, it will move your car three times longer too
Are you kidding me? Ethanol doesn't have more "energetic molecules." I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean - are you referring to temperature? Maybe net energy content?
Regular ol' gasoline is a more efficient fuel than ethanol - 1 gallon of gasoline contains 118,690 kJ of energy, whereas 1 gallon of ethanol contains only 82,958 kJ. You car will travel almost one and a half times (1.43x) further on a gallon of gas than on a gallon of ethanol. Maybe gasoline has more "energetic molecules"?
The problem is *big* bussiness know it's profitable... for someone else.
Still waiting for the punchline. In the United States, Big Agriculture, especially the midwest corn belt absolutely loves biofuel in general, and ethanol in particular. A few reasons why:
The government pays them to grow (or not grow!) corn.
The government pays you more for growing more - this results in the largest, most profitable 10% of farms receiving 65% of subsidies.
The government "encouragement" of ethanol increases demand for corn, the key ingredient in making ethanol. This results in higher prices for corn, and more $$$ for big ag.
The government taxes and restricts the imports of corn, sugar, and ethanol. There are very few practical ways to make ethanol in the US apart from competing for attention from the midwest's corporate farms.
"Big Business" makes a ton of money from this. Difference is that "Big Oil" survives despite repeated, baseless congressional investigations and windfall taxes, while "Big Agriculture" flourishes because of subsidies and protections.
Government manded corn demand (ethanol requirements) + no other way to get corn or ethanol (tariffs and protectionism) = $$$
That's like saying if I fix a guy's car and he sells it for a million bucks, I should get a piece of that action
Not quite. That's like saying you designed a car, and another guy built and sold it for a million bucks. Intellectual Property is merely a way of saying the intangible design can have just as much (if not more) value as the car.
And If you think that I use my ten year MMX only for slashdotting, well, that's just another error on your part. It also happens to run my local network experimental web/ftp/MySQL server
That's nice; I'm happy for you. But you're missing my point - retooling hundreds of factories to produce a new (and very incompatible) processor architecture, rewriting compilers and retraining programmers to produce software for the new architecture, and developing new operating systems and applications would be rather expensive, in $money and man-hours. Even if all this happened, the end result would be the same slashdot post.
In this one particular example, the "superior" processor is used where it truly is superior - environments that favor super-fast number crunching and parallelism, such as servers and mainframes. Technology doesn't "rot on the shelf" - it's used where its benefits justify the costs.
I'm just saying that IP law is limiting our choices
This argument makes logical sense, but follow it to its conclusion. If I could do whatever I wanted to "my" copy of a music CD, including give all of my friends or all the pipes in the internets a copy, people might have more "choices" available when it comes to CDs. Except there is no longer any incentive to create that CD in the first place.
Is that to say that human progress will end without IP law? No - as others have pointed out, humanity got along "just fine" before its invention. Although IP may restrict what you can do with a specific item, it is also an efficient system of ensuring the inventor of something is compensated.
Another example: Suppose you invent some revolutionary new car engine that runs only on water and produces no pollution. Somebody sees your engine design and starts churning them out by the thousands, becoming quite rich in the process. Which is more valuable: one particular engine, or the design the engines were built from? Copyright/Patent/IP laws simply recognize that the producer of the creative work - the engine design - is just as worthy of compensation as the industrialist who mass-produces the physical, tangible engine.
Would we still have this magic engine without IP laws? Possibly - but would an individual inventor, an automotive giant, or whomever be willing to spend years and $billions in developing the engine design if their competitors could then produce the same engine without paying for the research?
Without IP law, innovators are penalized - they can sell the engine, but must pay $billions to research the design. Copycats are rewarded - they can sell the same engine after someone else has researched the design. If it is cheaper, easier, and better business sense to copy rather than invent, will we really see as much invention? If we don't see as much invention, will we really have less limited choice?
Check way back in my history for any clarification to the statement that I make right here, *You are wrong*. I have stated why many times. If you don't want to accept it, fine, but I know that you're wrong
The appropriate thing to do when confronted with a bully is to either a) ignore them, or b) make everyone else see how wrong they are
Dude, I totally agreed with that one kid when he said being drowned in a toilet at the wrong end of a swirlie was, well, wrong. Too bad a) ignoring things rarely fixes them and b) having everyone agree with you that getting beat up every day after school is wrong won't keep you from getting beat up after school.
Violence is rarely a "good" solution to a problem, but that's not to say it can't solve problems, or that it never is a good solution to a problem. I guess I'm one of those silly folk who believe self-defense can be justified.
Copyright simply screws everybody who didn't think of it first. It's nothing but a holdover from 19th century industrialists who wish to control everything.
Noooo, sorry, we were looking for patent. PATENTS let you screw over everyone who didn't think of it first. (For 20 years, at least - then everyone gets to use the technology you described publicly and in great detail on your patent application.)
Copyrights are necessary and important, moreso for the layman than the Evil Corporation(TM). The classical example is "You write a song and someone performed it and makes millions off of your work." Copyrights are what make that illegal, and what make the GPL and other "copyleft" schemes possible.
You might be tempted to say that without coypyright, the GPL wouldn't be necessary - everyone could use everything because there'd be no licenses of any kind to stop you. Let me knock down a straw-man for a minute and point out that the GPL and other F/OSS licenses do more than allow public-domain-style copying. The GPL, for example, requries someone who uses GPL-licensed code to release his code under the GPL, also.
Copyright laws require $big-evil-19th-century-industrialist-man to release the source code of his $program if his program uses GPL'd code. Without copyrights, he is free to take F/OSS and use them in his own $program, without giving the source code back to the community.
It's why we still burn petroleum and use lame, kludgy x86 processors while better existing technology rots on the shelf waiting for a higher price
Did somebody "copyright" (or are you still talking about "patents"?) the dark matter reactor, or the Magic Battery, or something? We use petroleum because it's a cheap (yes, it's still cheap relative to other fuels), efficient, and easily obtained fuel.
We use 8086 clones because of the insane amount of software produced for that architecture. An insane amount of software was produced for that architecture because Microsoft licensed their OS to Tandy and the like (something Apple wouldn't do), which brought cheap computing to the masses.
Better technology doesn't "wait for a higher price." If it's not worth buying, it's obviously that hot. Consumers wait for lower prices as technology improves.
Yes, I'm sure there are "better" processor architectures out there - and they're being used where the differences are actually worth the cost. Servers use all sorts of interesting procs and arrangements, where a faster server is worth dealing with the idiosyncrasies and higher costs of a more exotic chip. But, I'm sorry to say that your $359 Dell machine is not going to see a I've written machine language for x86, Z80, and 68K derivatives, and the x86 isn't all that bad - and with compilers and programming languages, how kludgey the underlying architecture is doesn't matter as long as it runs efficiently enough. Our Intel and AMD chips run fast enough, and they're cheap. The DEC Alpha was expensive, had complicated instruction set, and provided no advantages over the x86 for programmers or desktop users - so it's used on many-CPU servers and processor farms.
You managed to post to slashdot despite using an x86 machine, didn't you? I'm happy you suffered through the ordeal. The DEC Alpha "rotting on the shelf" will not help you one bit unless you start writing and posting a billion posts every second. The Itanium-series chips succeeded in the marketplace because they play nice with existing software, are cheaper, and provide the same benefits.
I'd love to see some specific examples of "better existing technology rotting on the shelf" due to patents or "19th century industrials" or whatnot.
(Score:0, Flamebait)
There ya go! Send in the drones [stlyrics.com]... to fight for what they think is theirs...even when it's not. Stamp out the rabble rouser and his
The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.
Why is this a troll? My AP US history text listed pretty much the same things (minus the military cancellations and "religious right" discussions).
Wikipedia lists most of the same stuff, too. (Scroll down, it's a long article.)
And to further the GP's point: "Bush=Bad" with no reasoning whatsoever is modded up, while "Carter=Bad" with many reasons is modded down. Never mind ye that Carter finally managed to mach Bush's lowest approval rating by the end of his presidency. link and link
The other thing is that options backdating (giving you the right to buy/sell some stock at a better, earlier price for higher profit) is legal, but you have to properly report it - it counts as income, and the feds want to tax it.
the 2nd amendment also favours the rich, they can afford to arm themselves better than the poor.
You spelled "favors" with a "u". I know what side of the Revolutionary War you were on.:P
Anyway, you don't need a nuke or a laser gun or an aircraft carrier to effectively arm yourself. You can get a shiny new pistol for under $200, an arguably more useful hunting rifle for $500, or any other arsenal of weapons you could imagine (in the US, at least.) These prices are well within a month's paycheck for most people - heck, I work part time and make minimum wage, and none of this would be a stretch for me.
And this is if you do it legally. Remember that many of the founding fathers saw the second amendment as a "do-over" or reset switch for the government - if things got out of hand, the citizens could always overthrow it. Think Thomas Jefferson's "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing" mixed with Shay's Rebellion, and you've got the idea.
Guns are affordable, and they're another check on the balance of power within our government.
Further democracy. Exercise your rights. Buy a gun and start shooting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H democratizing our government! (Well, not at people, ya moron. That's dangerous.)
Only difference is - they don't have to tell you any of these things! The manufacturers of these supplements are raking in $dough hand over fist, yet can't be troubled to warn about little things like profuse hemorrhaging or coughing up a kidney or two.
I would love to talk to a real professional web developer - I'm sure this profession you're berating exists out there somewhere - and find out The Sacred Truth why pages are still designed for IE. But I have a few suspicions:
Supporting multiple browsers is harder and costlier, especially if you consider a site's target audience. Take the guy whining about his stock website above - how much of the 16-year-old nerd demographic trades futures? Firefox has definitely been gaining ground - but if your website sees only 2.2% firefox traffic because it caters to stodgy old people, why spend $money to support it?
Internet Explorer doesn't support extensions. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX. With either browser, you can't assume that someone's running.NET nor the version of the Java VM that your applet looks good in. Are you going to write and maintain 5 separate programs, or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors? (Also remember that Microsoft provides extensive help and makes supporting the 95% very easy.
Internet Explorer has had security holes; so has Firefox. Just as IE holes showed up more and more often as IEs popularity increased, so will it be (and has it been) with Firefox. You have to deal with security either way; business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has, and I'll bet it's a lot easier to hire people experienced with IE programming. Why look for an obtuse skill if it won't affect most of the people who visit your site?
I am not a webmonkey, but webmonkeys I've talked to say these are the biggest reasons. You can bet that whever a site sees or has seen a significant amount of Firefox traffic, they'll support that browser. However, if you find yourself in the "less than five percent demographic" of a website, have some empathy for the webmonkeys:
Put up with IE for the five minutes it will take you and stop wondering why nobody paid for a thousand man-hours of labor on your behalf.
Find a website that will cater to your needs.
Actually contribute something to the F/OSS movement and write your own ecommerce/banking/whatever tools or develop for the site in question.
Anyone have first-person experience with this? "I-run-a-blog-off-of-my-dynamic-IP-DSL-line-and-of -my-five-friends-80%-use-Firefox"-esque statistics don't count.
Considering the Win32 API permits code injection as a function it's not secure
It sounds like you don't quite know what you're talking about. Code injection can happen with any poorly-written binary in memory - it's not a "feature" of the Windows API, or like it exports some DoCodeInjectionAPIFunc32Blargh() function.
2 browsers, while windows has one
Hmm, then maybe the OSS community should get on that... oh wait, there are dozens of browsers for Windows. And comparing anything to the bug-riddled history of Internet Explorer is just a little bit unfair, isn't it?
Ignorance can be depressing, especially when five minutes on Wikipedia's article on the Federal Reserve has the potential to change your entire worldview.
The Fed isn't just a bunch of private banks scamming the government. It's composed of:
A board of governors, appointed by the president
The Federal Open Market Committee
The aforementioned 12 private banks
The small, local banks that actually own the aforementioned 12 private banks
Bank's don't "create money from nothing." The way it usually works is simple:
Banks take deposits. Savings, checking accounts, etc. Besides providing a better place to store money than a mattress, they entice people to give them their money by paying them interest on the money they give the bank the privilege of holding - think a 3% bribe on whatever you let the bank hold on to.
Banks loan a portion of their deposits. They'll give someone a small, federally regulated portion of their deposits in exachange for a larger interest rate (call it 6%). They give you 3% for your money, but they take a part of it and loan it for 6%. This is only a problem if everyone tries to withdraw all their money at once - think the Great Depression and "It's a Wonderful Life" - except that now the FDIC takes care of that.
Providing funds to people who need it (small businesses, governments that like deficit spending) is a legitimate service. In the meantime, they pay their depositors (you with the savings account) interest for use of their money. People who need money get loans, and the savings account guy gets something for nothing. Win-win.
Why is it _still_ so common for function parameters/data to be pushed onto stacks that are also used for program counters (return addresses)? It's a stupid idea for modern computers - bad hygiene (poorly controlled mixing of code and data).
First of all, the program counter (or instruction pointer) is the register where the address of the next instruction is stored. The return address is where your program was before it called your function.
Unless you write your program in one giant function, you will always have a return address and every langauge that supports recursion passes parameters via the stack.
Perhaps they should also allow quick tamper checks of function parameters. A function expecting parameters A and B of length X and Y could do a "startpop " and then "pop+sum" parameters off the parameter stack and then pop the checksum and halt if things don't match up.
Visual Studio 2005 has a scheme like this enabled by default. If stack corruption is detected, it kills your program. It's some compiler switch, I'm sure anyone interested can find it.
As for your CPU architecture comments, even the Pentium 4 today is almost fully backwards compatible with the 8086. Neither Intel nor AMD are going to drastically change their processors in the ways you suggest - this would break every computer and every program on the face of the earth.
As for the dangers of pointers - how do you feel about reference parameters? Again, a feature every sophisticated programming language has.
Uh if that happens then the language used is obviously unsafe.
The language isn't "unsafe" - it just lets you do some very, very nifty stuff that noobtard programmers are better off leaving alone.
C++ has perfectly "safe" features - the Standard Template Library has container classes like strings and vectors that won't overflow no matter how careless you are.
For those who insist on going down to the byte level and concatenating their strings themselves, Microsoft included "safe" versions of these functions in Visual Studio 2005, and will compile with warnings if you use the dangerous, buffer-overrun-producing variants.
Why should potentially arbitrary code be executed because a program tries to put data somewhere it won't fit?
Because a hacker's input and a programmer's overconfidence in his manual input validation (or lack thereof) put the hacker's code over the program itself. It fit just fine where the still-running program used to be.
This can happen in any language - C++ programmers are simply notoriously bad at input validation.
People should switch to programming languages and frameworks that just won't run "arbitrary code of an attacker's choice" when something exceptional occurs.
No matter how many different levels of indirection you have, eventually your code turns into instructions and raw bytes that get crunched by the CPU.
All that changing to a slower and inferior (but easier to program!) language does is add another point of weakness: you can exploit program code or the framework code.
[goofymetaphor]Languages like Java, C# +.NET, and Visual Basic are like squirt guns. C++ is a machine gun.[/goofymetaphor] Which one do you think people afraid of loud noises are going to avoid?
This is something that bothers me, somewhat, with many Christians. In order for someone to disagree with you, you expect someone else to be an expert on your religion.
This is something that bothers me, somewhat, with many atheists and non-Christians. They assume they have enough knowledge about the Bible to find and pick apart stunning contradictions and flaws without even reading it, or without even being able to cite who they're parroting.
Parent's post:
"The Bible is full of plot holes!"
Oh, really? Golly gee, wow, where?
"I don't know!"
Would you say that one has to know all of Scientology's or Islam's or Hindu's sacred texts to disagree with points made by that religion?
Nope. I think scientology is "wrong" in that it links spiritual progress to money, that Islam's sharia law creates brutal and unfree states, and that I don't know enough about Hinduism to even begin to pick it apart.
Notice how I don't have to recite the legend of Xenu to know buying church levels is insipid, or have memorized the Quran to think amputation is a bit severe for petty theft.
Notice how this is different than "some" part of the Quran is wrong, and since I don't know, never knew, and can't find which part, you should take it as fact. I'm sure that the Wikipedia on logical fallacies has some entry there, but linking that gets annoying.
Its help system seemed incomplete! Then help to complete it! [...] Your {Dad's} complaints ring hollow.
I wonder what would happen if Microsoft expected it's users to write their own help files.
Especially when a user who needs the help file will not be able to write it. (If he already knew what he was looking for, why would he be looking it up in help to begin with?)
Your Dad needs to choose between paying for MS Office and all that comes with it or accepting the free OpenOffice without impotent complaints about its "ugliness".
He did. He chose Microsoft Office. Do you seriously expect everyone who just wants to use a word processor to join the OSS community and start churning out bug reports?
Thanks for the corrections on UMDF. I also found out that 32-bit versions of Windows will load unsigned kernel-mode drivers, but only on an administrator account. (64-bit versions still won't load any.
However, the drivers have to be signed by Microsoft, which only happens after you pass their Windows Logo Program testing thingy, which involves you paying $dough to their software engineers to thoroughly check out the quality of your code. (Kinda ironic in a way, right?)
Companies can sign their own drivers (and other programs) to verify that the program came from the company it says it does - you see these screens when you run a program you download from the Internet in XP. But, the signing I was talking about is the stuff Microsoft will sign only after you pass (and pay for) their Windows Logo quality testing.
"published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them"
fuck them! Mozart's music is a universal cultural hallmark of mankind.
Arranging and formatting music is extremely difficult and complex. How many people would I have killed for sheet music with better typesetting?
Granted, not quite as difficult or awe-inspiring as composing a masterpiece. But, typesetters and arrangers do the world a great service by making the music playable - and if you want to photocopy the version they spent hours arranging, fuck you. Go get your own - Mozart's original manuscripts are free.
You're not taking advantage of a long-dead composer, but the people who spend time arranging and publishing the music. They're still alive, and deserve compensation if you use their work - but you don't have to. So relax.
So, what is Jesus's problem? Inferiority complex? I must beg for his forgiveness or he will damn me to hell?
You damn yourself to hell.
By His Grace are we saved, although all of humanity falls short in the eyes of God.
man invented religion, not the other way around
Hmm. Were you there at the time?
There area lot of things that science simply cannot prove - the existence of an Almighty, for example. However, there are many things that science cannot disprove - such as the existence of an Almighty. Those who say that one does not exist are no more rational than those who say that He does.
but since the bible tells us that god pretty much stopped talking to people after moses,
Who do you think Jesus is?
Also some of the books in the new testament were written to "clarify" books of the old testament [...] those people were just making some shit up
Jesus used the religious documents of the Old Testament to try to prove that he was indeed the prophesied Messiah.
Now, go pick out some specific books. I'm sure that in a book that you say is nothing but centuries of compounded mistranslations, you could be prepared to discuss one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Energy balance and efficiency are different things.
Having a "positive" (>1) energy balance means it is physically possible to use it as a fuel, that you get more energy out of it than it took to produce it in the first place.
You know that; you went to that conference thingy. Petroleum ranks at around 10 on the energy balance (or EROEI) charts, in case you're curious.
But, my point was that gasoline is a more efficient fuel because of its greater energy content - that, independent of "Energy Balance" or "Expected Return on Energy Investment" scores, that your car will go further on gasoline than on ethanol or any mixture of gas and ethanol. More kJ/gallon, more miles/gallon.
That demand for ethanol is raising food prices only goes to show that US sponsorship of the oil industry has to end, not that ethanol should be banned.
I don't think anyone believes that ethanol should be banned - but this is what happens when you tinker with a perfectly functioning market for something stupid like political gain.
The government doesn't "support" the oil industry - unless you call repeated congressional investigations, fuel taxes, and attempts to confiscate those "windfall profits" from Exxon's 10-15% margins "support."
There are huge tracts of land in the US that could easily be used to grow good ethanol crops (i.e. not corn) that are currently paid to sit empty
A few problems with that:
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't most third world countries depend on agriculture products as exports? So if agriculture products become more expensive, the food they buy is more expensive, but they will also have more money with which they can buy the expensive food.
Most third world countries can't export agriculture products because there's no-one to export to. First world countries, (read: the US and EU) have very powerful agriculture lobbyists. Our government subsidizes agriculture production - our farmers can produce the same crop cheaper than the African farmer because the government pays most of his costs. Even if the African farmer could produce a bushel of corn or cotton or whatnot cheaper than a domestic producer, tariffs and quotas prevent him from selling there.
If food becomes more expensive, the third-world countries are SOL. The vast majority of people in the world (first or third) are not commercial farmers who sell the food they grow, so the price increase benefits very few people.
In the meantime, starving people have to pay more for the same inadequate rations.
by having more energetic mollecules -so while its true that each biofuel ton produces three times more CO2 than fossil, it will move your car three times longer too
Are you kidding me? Ethanol doesn't have more "energetic molecules." I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean - are you referring to temperature? Maybe net energy content?
Regular ol' gasoline is a more efficient fuel than ethanol - 1 gallon of gasoline contains 118,690 kJ of energy, whereas 1 gallon of ethanol contains only 82,958 kJ. You car will travel almost one and a half times (1.43x) further on a gallon of gas than on a gallon of ethanol. Maybe gasoline has more "energetic molecules"?
The problem is *big* bussiness know it's profitable... for someone else.
Still waiting for the punchline. In the United States, Big Agriculture, especially the midwest corn belt absolutely loves biofuel in general, and ethanol in particular. A few reasons why:
"Big Business" makes a ton of money from this. Difference is that "Big Oil" survives despite repeated, baseless congressional investigations and windfall taxes, while "Big Agriculture" flourishes because of subsidies and protections.
Government manded corn demand (ethanol requirements) + no other way to get corn or ethanol (tariffs and protectionism) = $$$
*Si tu fumas, yo puedo fumar tanbien*
Si tú fumaras, yo podría fumar también.
That's like saying if I fix a guy's car and he sells it for a million bucks, I should get a piece of that action
Not quite. That's like saying you designed a car, and another guy built and sold it for a million bucks. Intellectual Property is merely a way of saying the intangible design can have just as much (if not more) value as the car.
And If you think that I use my ten year MMX only for slashdotting, well, that's just another error on your part. It also happens to run my local network experimental web/ftp/MySQL server
That's nice; I'm happy for you. But you're missing my point - retooling hundreds of factories to produce a new (and very incompatible) processor architecture, rewriting compilers and retraining programmers to produce software for the new architecture, and developing new operating systems and applications would be rather expensive, in $money and man-hours. Even if all this happened, the end result would be the same slashdot post.
In this one particular example, the "superior" processor is used where it truly is superior - environments that favor super-fast number crunching and parallelism, such as servers and mainframes. Technology doesn't "rot on the shelf" - it's used where its benefits justify the costs.
I'm just saying that IP law is limiting our choices
This argument makes logical sense, but follow it to its conclusion. If I could do whatever I wanted to "my" copy of a music CD, including give all of my friends or all the pipes in the internets a copy, people might have more "choices" available when it comes to CDs. Except there is no longer any incentive to create that CD in the first place.
Is that to say that human progress will end without IP law? No - as others have pointed out, humanity got along "just fine" before its invention. Although IP may restrict what you can do with a specific item, it is also an efficient system of ensuring the inventor of something is compensated.
Another example: Suppose you invent some revolutionary new car engine that runs only on water and produces no pollution. Somebody sees your engine design and starts churning them out by the thousands, becoming quite rich in the process. Which is more valuable: one particular engine, or the design the engines were built from? Copyright/Patent/IP laws simply recognize that the producer of the creative work - the engine design - is just as worthy of compensation as the industrialist who mass-produces the physical, tangible engine.
Would we still have this magic engine without IP laws? Possibly - but would an individual inventor, an automotive giant, or whomever be willing to spend years and $billions in developing the engine design if their competitors could then produce the same engine without paying for the research?
Without IP law, innovators are penalized - they can sell the engine, but must pay $billions to research the design. Copycats are rewarded - they can sell the same engine after someone else has researched the design. If it is cheaper, easier, and better business sense to copy rather than invent, will we really see as much invention? If we don't see as much invention, will we really have less limited choice?
Check way back in my history for any clarification to the statement that I make right here, *You are wrong*. I have stated why many times. If you don't want to accept it, fine, but I know that you're wrong
I'm happy for you.
The appropriate thing to do when confronted with a bully is to either a) ignore them, or b) make everyone else see how wrong they are
Dude, I totally agreed with that one kid when he said being drowned in a toilet at the wrong end of a swirlie was, well, wrong. Too bad a) ignoring things rarely fixes them and b) having everyone agree with you that getting beat up every day after school is wrong won't keep you from getting beat up after school.
Violence is rarely a "good" solution to a problem, but that's not to say it can't solve problems, or that it never is a good solution to a problem. I guess I'm one of those silly folk who believe self-defense can be justified.
Copyright simply screws everybody who didn't think of it first. It's nothing but a holdover from 19th century industrialists who wish to control everything.
Noooo, sorry, we were looking for patent. PATENTS let you screw over everyone who didn't think of it first. (For 20 years, at least - then everyone gets to use the technology you described publicly and in great detail on your patent application.)
Copyrights are necessary and important, moreso for the layman than the Evil Corporation(TM). The classical example is "You write a song and someone performed it and makes millions off of your work." Copyrights are what make that illegal, and what make the GPL and other "copyleft" schemes possible.
You might be tempted to say that without coypyright, the GPL wouldn't be necessary - everyone could use everything because there'd be no licenses of any kind to stop you. Let me knock down a straw-man for a minute and point out that the GPL and other F/OSS licenses do more than allow public-domain-style copying. The GPL, for example, requries someone who uses GPL-licensed code to release his code under the GPL, also.
Copyright laws require $big-evil-19th-century-industrialist-man to release the source code of his $program if his program uses GPL'd code. Without copyrights, he is free to take F/OSS and use them in his own $program, without giving the source code back to the community.
It's why we still burn petroleum and use lame, kludgy x86 processors while better existing technology rots on the shelf waiting for a higher price
Did somebody "copyright" (or are you still talking about "patents"?) the dark matter reactor, or the Magic Battery, or something? We use petroleum because it's a cheap (yes, it's still cheap relative to other fuels), efficient, and easily obtained fuel.
We use 8086 clones because of the insane amount of software produced for that architecture. An insane amount of software was produced for that architecture because Microsoft licensed their OS to Tandy and the like (something Apple wouldn't do), which brought cheap computing to the masses.
Better technology doesn't "wait for a higher price." If it's not worth buying, it's obviously that hot. Consumers wait for lower prices as technology improves.
Yes, I'm sure there are "better" processor architectures out there - and they're being used where the differences are actually worth the cost. Servers use all sorts of interesting procs and arrangements, where a faster server is worth dealing with the idiosyncrasies and higher costs of a more exotic chip. But, I'm sorry to say that your $359 Dell machine is not going to see a I've written machine language for x86, Z80, and 68K derivatives, and the x86 isn't all that bad - and with compilers and programming languages, how kludgey the underlying architecture is doesn't matter as long as it runs efficiently enough. Our Intel and AMD chips run fast enough, and they're cheap. The DEC Alpha was expensive, had complicated instruction set, and provided no advantages over the x86 for programmers or desktop users - so it's used on many-CPU servers and processor farms.
You managed to post to slashdot despite using an x86 machine, didn't you? I'm happy you suffered through the ordeal. The DEC Alpha "rotting on the shelf" will not help you one bit unless you start writing and posting a billion posts every second. The Itanium-series chips succeeded in the marketplace because they play nice with existing software, are cheaper, and provide the same benefits.
I'd love to see some specific examples of "better existing technology rotting on the shelf" due to patents or "19th century industrials" or whatnot.
(Score:0, Flamebait) There ya go! Send in the drones [stlyrics.com]... to fight for what they think is theirs...even when it's not. Stamp out the rabble rouser and his
The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.
It's the margarine of the 'torrent world.
Why is this a troll? My AP US history text listed pretty much the same things (minus the military cancellations and "religious right" discussions).
Wikipedia lists most of the same stuff, too. (Scroll down, it's a long article.)
And to further the GP's point: "Bush=Bad" with no reasoning whatsoever is modded up, while "Carter=Bad" with many reasons is modded down. Never mind ye that Carter finally managed to mach Bush's lowest approval rating by the end of his presidency. link and link
The other thing is that options backdating (giving you the right to buy/sell some stock at a better, earlier price for higher profit) is legal, but you have to properly report it - it counts as income, and the feds want to tax it.
the 2nd amendment also favours the rich, they can afford to arm themselves better than the poor.
You spelled "favors" with a "u". I know what side of the Revolutionary War you were on. :P
Anyway, you don't need a nuke or a laser gun or an aircraft carrier to effectively arm yourself. You can get a shiny new pistol for under $200, an arguably more useful hunting rifle for $500, or any other arsenal of weapons you could imagine (in the US, at least.) These prices are well within a month's paycheck for most people - heck, I work part time and make minimum wage, and none of this would be a stretch for me.
And this is if you do it legally. Remember that many of the founding fathers saw the second amendment as a "do-over" or reset switch for the government - if things got out of hand, the citizens could always overthrow it. Think Thomas Jefferson's "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing" mixed with Shay's Rebellion, and you've got the idea.
Guns are affordable, and they're another check on the balance of power within our government.
Further democracy. Exercise your rights. Buy a gun and start shooting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H democratizing our government! (Well, not at people, ya moron. That's dangerous.)
What are the warnings on herbs and vitamins? None!
Looky here.
A few of my favorites:
Only difference is - they don't have to tell you any of these things! The manufacturers of these supplements are raking in $dough hand over fist, yet can't be troubled to warn about little things like profuse hemorrhaging or coughing up a kidney or two.
I would love to talk to a real professional web developer - I'm sure this profession you're berating exists out there somewhere - and find out The Sacred Truth why pages are still designed for IE. But I have a few suspicions:
Supporting multiple browsers is harder and costlier, especially if you consider a site's target audience. Take the guy whining about his stock website above - how much of the 16-year-old nerd demographic trades futures? Firefox has definitely been gaining ground - but if your website sees only 2.2% firefox traffic because it caters to stodgy old people, why spend $money to support it?
Internet Explorer doesn't support extensions. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX. With either browser, you can't assume that someone's running .NET nor the version of the Java VM that your applet looks good in. Are you going to write and maintain 5 separate programs, or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors? (Also remember that Microsoft provides extensive help and makes supporting the 95% very easy.
Internet Explorer has had security holes; so has Firefox. Just as IE holes showed up more and more often as IEs popularity increased, so will it be (and has it been) with Firefox. You have to deal with security either way; business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has, and I'll bet it's a lot easier to hire people experienced with IE programming. Why look for an obtuse skill if it won't affect most of the people who visit your site?
I am not a webmonkey, but webmonkeys I've talked to say these are the biggest reasons. You can bet that whever a site sees or has seen a significant amount of Firefox traffic, they'll support that browser. However, if you find yourself in the "less than five percent demographic" of a website, have some empathy for the webmonkeys:
Anyone have first-person experience with this? "I-run-a-blog-off-of-my-dynamic-IP-DSL-line-and-of -my-five-friends-80%-use-Firefox"-esque statistics don't count.
Considering the Win32 API permits code injection as a function it's not secure
It sounds like you don't quite know what you're talking about. Code injection can happen with any poorly-written binary in memory - it's not a "feature" of the Windows API, or like it exports some DoCodeInjectionAPIFunc32Blargh() function.
2 browsers, while windows has one
Hmm, then maybe the OSS community should get on that... oh wait, there are dozens of browsers for Windows. And comparing anything to the bug-riddled history of Internet Explorer is just a little bit unfair, isn't it?
Ignorance can be depressing, especially when five minutes on Wikipedia's article on the Federal Reserve has the potential to change your entire worldview.
The Fed isn't just a bunch of private banks scamming the government. It's composed of:
Bank's don't "create money from nothing." The way it usually works is simple:
Providing funds to people who need it (small businesses, governments that like deficit spending) is a legitimate service. In the meantime, they pay their depositors (you with the savings account) interest for use of their money. People who need money get loans, and the savings account guy gets something for nothing. Win-win.
Why is it _still_ so common for function parameters/data to be pushed onto stacks that are also used for program counters (return addresses)? It's a stupid idea for modern computers - bad hygiene (poorly controlled mixing of code and data).
First of all, the program counter (or instruction pointer) is the register where the address of the next instruction is stored. The return address is where your program was before it called your function.
Unless you write your program in one giant function, you will always have a return address and every langauge that supports recursion passes parameters via the stack.
Perhaps they should also allow quick tamper checks of function parameters. A function expecting parameters A and B of length X and Y could do a "startpop " and then "pop+sum" parameters off the parameter stack and then pop the checksum and halt if things don't match up.
Visual Studio 2005 has a scheme like this enabled by default. If stack corruption is detected, it kills your program. It's some compiler switch, I'm sure anyone interested can find it.
As for your CPU architecture comments, even the Pentium 4 today is almost fully backwards compatible with the 8086. Neither Intel nor AMD are going to drastically change their processors in the ways you suggest - this would break every computer and every program on the face of the earth.
As for the dangers of pointers - how do you feel about reference parameters? Again, a feature every sophisticated programming language has.
Uh if that happens then the language used is obviously unsafe.
The language isn't "unsafe" - it just lets you do some very, very nifty stuff that noobtard programmers are better off leaving alone.
C++ has perfectly "safe" features - the Standard Template Library has container classes like strings and vectors that won't overflow no matter how careless you are.
For those who insist on going down to the byte level and concatenating their strings themselves, Microsoft included "safe" versions of these functions in Visual Studio 2005, and will compile with warnings if you use the dangerous, buffer-overrun-producing variants.
Why should potentially arbitrary code be executed because a program tries to put data somewhere it won't fit?
Because a hacker's input and a programmer's overconfidence in his manual input validation (or lack thereof) put the hacker's code over the program itself. It fit just fine where the still-running program used to be.
This can happen in any language - C++ programmers are simply notoriously bad at input validation.
People should switch to programming languages and frameworks that just won't run "arbitrary code of an attacker's choice" when something exceptional occurs.
No matter how many different levels of indirection you have, eventually your code turns into instructions and raw bytes that get crunched by the CPU.
All that changing to a slower and inferior (but easier to program!) language does is add another point of weakness: you can exploit program code or the framework code.
[goofymetaphor]Languages like Java, C# + .NET, and Visual Basic are like squirt guns. C++ is a machine gun.[/goofymetaphor] Which one do you think people afraid of loud noises are going to avoid?
This is something that bothers me, somewhat, with many Christians. In order for someone to disagree with you, you expect someone else to be an expert on your religion.
This is something that bothers me, somewhat, with many atheists and non-Christians. They assume they have enough knowledge about the Bible to find and pick apart stunning contradictions and flaws without even reading it, or without even being able to cite who they're parroting.
Parent's post:
Would you say that one has to know all of Scientology's or Islam's or Hindu's sacred texts to disagree with points made by that religion?
Nope. I think scientology is "wrong" in that it links spiritual progress to money, that Islam's sharia law creates brutal and unfree states, and that I don't know enough about Hinduism to even begin to pick it apart.
Notice how I don't have to recite the legend of Xenu to know buying church levels is insipid, or have memorized the Quran to think amputation is a bit severe for petty theft.
Notice how this is different than "some" part of the Quran is wrong, and since I don't know, never knew, and can't find which part, you should take it as fact. I'm sure that the Wikipedia on logical fallacies has some entry there, but linking that gets annoying.
Its help system seemed incomplete! Then help to complete it! [...] Your {Dad's} complaints ring hollow.
I wonder what would happen if Microsoft expected it's users to write their own help files.
Especially when a user who needs the help file will not be able to write it. (If he already knew what he was looking for, why would he be looking it up in help to begin with?)
Your Dad needs to choose between paying for MS Office and all that comes with it or accepting the free OpenOffice without impotent complaints about its "ugliness".
He did. He chose Microsoft Office. Do you seriously expect everyone who just wants to use a word processor to join the OSS community and start churning out bug reports?
Thanks for the corrections on UMDF. I also found out that 32-bit versions of Windows will load unsigned kernel-mode drivers, but only on an administrator account. (64-bit versions still won't load any.
However, the drivers have to be signed by Microsoft, which only happens after you pass their Windows Logo Program testing thingy, which involves you paying $dough to their software engineers to thoroughly check out the quality of your code. (Kinda ironic in a way, right?)
Companies can sign their own drivers (and other programs) to verify that the program came from the company it says it does - you see these screens when you run a program you download from the Internet in XP. But, the signing I was talking about is the stuff Microsoft will sign only after you pass (and pay for) their Windows Logo quality testing.
"published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them" fuck them! Mozart's music is a universal cultural hallmark of mankind.
Arranging and formatting music is extremely difficult and complex. How many people would I have killed for sheet music with better typesetting?
Granted, not quite as difficult or awe-inspiring as composing a masterpiece. But, typesetters and arrangers do the world a great service by making the music playable - and if you want to photocopy the version they spent hours arranging, fuck you. Go get your own - Mozart's original manuscripts are free.
You're not taking advantage of a long-dead composer, but the people who spend time arranging and publishing the music. They're still alive, and deserve compensation if you use their work - but you don't have to. So relax.
So, what is Jesus's problem? Inferiority complex? I must beg for his forgiveness or he will damn me to hell?
You damn yourself to hell.
By His Grace are we saved, although all of humanity falls short in the eyes of God.
man invented religion, not the other way around
Hmm. Were you there at the time?
There area lot of things that science simply cannot prove - the existence of an Almighty, for example. However, there are many things that science cannot disprove - such as the existence of an Almighty. Those who say that one does not exist are no more rational than those who say that He does.
but since the bible tells us that god pretty much stopped talking to people after moses,
Who do you think Jesus is?
Also some of the books in the new testament were written to "clarify" books of the old testament [...] those people were just making some shit up
Jesus used the religious documents of the Old Testament to try to prove that he was indeed the prophesied Messiah.
Now, go pick out some specific books. I'm sure that in a book that you say is nothing but centuries of compounded mistranslations, you could be prepared to discuss one of them.