Take a look at a map of North America, we share a huge boarder
Yeah, and he's late with his rent every week.
On a serious note, most Americans who live in (solidly blue or red) border states would agree with you. Its the swing-state yokels in the centre of the country who are afraid of terrorists from outside Fortress America bombing their cornfields who vote for this kind of stuff, and is further enabled by the "We Hate Wetbacks Society" that forgets Canada exists when developing a border policy that concerns itself with Mexico alone.
Incidentally, this is a view shared by people who ought to know better. Such as the erstwhile Secretary for Homeland Security, who was under the impression that the 9/11 perpetrators came from Canada.
Truthfully, most of the harassment at the American border is due to Canada's somewhat more "What, me worry?" drug policy, especially surrounding marijuana and methamphetamines. In turn, of course, Canada confiscates an awful lot of guns, mostly from truckers who don't seem to understand that in a civilized nation they don't need a sawed-off shotgun to defend themselves from road pirates.
Doesn't matter. The problem is that, with many combinations of card and driver, there's no accelerated video support, and that video tears like a sonofabitch even in non-HD forms.
I'm not a fan of the man's work or his politics, but he's not really to blame for this. The idea that journalism is objective is false, and it's a recent self-delusion at that. Prior to WW2, newspapers were unabashedly subjective and only adopted pretenses of objectivity recently because pretenses of objectivity sell: people like to think that their opinion is the right one, and advertisers like the credibility it gives.
The problem with false objectivity is that it results in homogeneity of reporting. Everyone reports the same material, with the same bias. Everyone feels the need to give two points of view on every story, no matter how baseless and divorced from facts one is. Murdoch, if nothing else, bought the mainstream media a little more breathing room by introducing blatant subjectivity back into the equation, stirring up interest and creating markets, though his continued claims of objectivity subsequently weakened that.
So this is different from how you can't get paid apps from the Android Market in Canada, Sweden and such? Or are the restrictions in those markets the result of malice, too, instead of incompetence or laziness?
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science? It's really irritating, much like trying to talk to a Creationist about evolution. No, actually, it's worse, because at least Creationism isn't getting a leg up by way of the media's gross oversimplification. If I were a climate scientist, faced with "Well, how come it's colder in Podunk?" for the umpteenth time and subsuqently forced to try and get across concepts like global average temperatures, precipitation changes, the difference between "weather" and "climate", etc, etc, I'd want to at least start the discussion from a position that's not automatically handicapped.
Naturally the federal government will get to define "previously-unlocked." I am sure it will be a sensible definition that is logical, true to the science, and fair in every way, one that won't favor any particular interest groups or large financial interests. Because everything else government regulates has turned out this way, right?
No. Previously-locked carbon is really easy to define: oil and coal. Trying to extend it to "the building blocks of all life" because that dovetails into a paranoid fantasy about government taxing your body is fearmongering. No, it's worse, it's fearmongering in the service of some of the most powerful economic entities on the planet.
Saying that this will extend into a tax and, thusly, into a control of your precious bodily carbon is pure, unmitigated FUD. Water is also a taxed substance and has been for much longer: have we proxied water bills into mind control yet?
When government sees a new excuse for the levy of a tax or the exercise of power, it is not concerned with whether that excuse accurately reflects the actual science. The excuse need not even have a basis in reality, it only needs to be something that average people will believe. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?
Are you really trying to proxy concern about the stability of the biosphere among scientists into the New World Order? This fails the "follow the money" test on so many levels: not only is politically unpalatable to tax something so ephemeral that governments are being dragged kicking and screaming to it, and not only is the economic incentive more of a disincentive, but the opposing interests have billions of dollars staked in it not happening at all.
You're working from a flawed premise: that everything government does is inherently flawed, wrong and immoral. Even assuming that's the case, who would even be looking at this (or past issues, like ozone depletion, acid rain, mercury toxicity in the food chain, etc)? Our oh-so-altriustic corporations that caused and make money off the problem in the first place? And yes, you can make the "well, government enabled it" standard argument and say the the solution is to sprinkle magic Libertarian pixie dust and make everyone into Randian supermen, but in the real world where we have billions of people who need to coexist in a functioning society with legacy social structures we need solutions that work, not philosophical wankery.
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
Phosphates are also plant food. Flush them in bulk---not toxic levels, just in bulk---into the environment and watch what happens. Pay particular attention to the fish stocks in any nearby lake, for example.
Climate change is not destructive in the way that, say, irradiation is. No one is saying that we're pumping out toxic amounts of CO2, but that we're risking knocking climate patterns and/or the biosphere out of balance, which could have other effects, like dramatic changes in local weather and/or local flora/fauna, or the lack thereof. We don't quite know how drastic the changes would be, how long they'd go on for, or if they'd harm us or some brown people halfway around the world.
For example: there's credible evidence that climate change from excessive carbon unlocking is causing ocean acidification, which could cause shifts in the gulf streams and/or dramatically screw up ocean life. It wouldn' t kill you on the spot, but it would cause a lot of people go go without food, either because of fish die-offs or because previously-fertile land is getting no rain. This results in a lot of pissed off hungry people (remember the prarie dustbowls of the Great Depression?).
Of course it's not so simple as CO2 is teh B4dzorZ. What's funny (or awful) is watching the anti-AGCC skeptics deliberately mischaracterize or outright pervert the science in such a way in order to muddy the waters. Which, I might add, they've been doing more often, longer, and in much nastier ways than this CRU incident.
In the 80's they were getting us all apeshit over a hole in the ozone layer.
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
Liberty has a very low calorie content and you can't burn individuality to keep you warm during cold winter nights.
I'm not saying they're not valuable, but they're also pretty far down the hierarchy of needs. There's a lesson to be learned here: if you keep people well-fed, sheltered, clothed and socially stable you can actually foster liberty and individuality (and innovation, creativity, etc) because the base needs are met. If you want to oppress people, make sure they don't have enough food to get up off their knees.
It's very interesting that, throughout history, periods where the middle class grows coincide with leaps in "social betterment", while strife and stagnation are lockstep with polarization of rich and poor. You'd think we'd have figured this out after the first few cycles, huh?
I'm not surprised: on the Canadian app store you can't actually buy anything. At all. As in "there's no way for them to take your money, so all you can pick a free apps." I wonder how many other countries are in this state.
There's a difference between prosperous in terms of GDP and prosperous in terms of having an empowered middle class. You can have a country with a staggering GDP yet a massive, poverty-stricken underclass and serious quality-of-life problems simply by balancing it with a few obscenely rich folks.
Put it this way: if Google didn't piggyback on things like Acrobat or Java, they'd be wiped out by Microsoft. Most MSIE updates (and more than a few non-MSIE installs) over the past few years have switched users to MSN/Live/Bing/Whatever-its-called-this-year, and it's not at all easy to straightforward to change MSIE's search provider to Google. Heck, Bing is designed to look enough like Google that users aren't alerted sufficiently to the change
If Google wasn't pushing back, that 10% gain for Bing would be a lot higher.
They never officially supported it in the first place. It'll also be, oh, about a day and a half until someone builds a new kernel and allows this to work again.
Because, you know, the kernel is open source and you can actually do this kind of stuff.
I managed to haul down a Honda Civic going 80km/h. Consumer Reports was able to stop a VW and a Mercedes because of their throttle management system, and was able to bring a Toyota Venza (a four thousand pound vehicle with a honey of a an engine; the same as in the Lexus in question) down to ~15km/h and would likely have eventually stopped it.
I'd try the experiment with our own Toyota Sienna (same engine as the Venza and the Lexus) except that I don't want to damage my own car.
It's very easy to apply 225 pounds of pressure to a brake pedal, unless you're very small. Most people can approach or exceed it by standing on one leg and jumping. The IEEE is not correct in this.
While what you said makes sense (and I believed the same myself until I started looking into it), it unfortunately is not the reality. You lose your power brakes at full throttle, and it seems that people are paying with their lives in these circumstances.
No, you don't. You lose braking force after one or two presses at full throttle, just as you would if the car lost power entirely. Pumping or repeatedly stabbing the brakes will use up that assist and/or boil the brake fluid and/or heat the pads and rotors. Stomping on it will just heat the rotors and pads, and will slow you down.
I'm not saying this isn't a tragedy, because it is. What I am saying is that it was entirely unavoidable:
The dealer laid down the wrong mats for the car (winter mats for a truck, FWIW)
The dealer put those mats on top of the existing, clipped-down mats, and didn't secure them.
The accelerator pedal is mounted as such that the mats could snag it (lots of cars are like this)
The driver, despite being a trained CHP officer, panicked and did the wrong things. You can slap a Lexus ES into neutral easily---even if it's in the manumatic gate, you can move it over and up. He likely pumped, rather than stood, on the brakes. He also didn't hold down the engine stop button to halt the car, or use the emergency/parking brake
People tend to think about driver training as the cure-all or panacea, but training, especially in an emergency, is not a given. People---even cops---panic, especially in an unfamiliar or out-of-context setting and do the wrong thing despite training to the contrary. Never mind that what you do in a controlled, high-speed chase as a highway patrol officer is not the same thing as being in the car that's speeding.
The only people with "training" in this are drifters, rally-racers and stunt drivers.
The current Toyota Camry is designed more or less with the North American market in mind. Honest to god, have you seen this car? It's huge, soft and simple: there's no way it was designed for Japan or Europe.
One, brake fade happens after multiple, repeated stops (eg, after you've been autocrossing). Just standing on the brake pedal---once and hard---will slow down any car. Most people don't or won't press the brakes hard enough. Try it, it's easy, though perhaps in a rental.
Two, automatic transmissions do not lock you out of neutral ever. At any engine speed you can slap the shifter into neutral, though not into lower gears or reverse. This is by design, and exists for this very reason. Again, you can do this test yourself, but would be wise to do it in a rental because you'll bounce off the rev limiter repeatedly.
What's happened, in each case, is that the dealer or driver put winter floor mats, either OEM or aftermarket, on top of the regular carpeted mats. What this means is that, unlike the normal mats, they're not pinned down in any way and will slide forward. In the case of the CHP officer in the rental Lexus, the dealer slapped truck mats down on top of the "normal" Lexus mats
What happens next is easy: the mat jams the accelerator pedal. What happens after that is that people panic, do the wrong things, and plow into people in front of them.
And what happens after that is lawyers.
There's no car you can buy today where you cannot overpower the engine with full braking force. Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake. Push both down as hard as you can; your car will slow down and stop. It won't be happy about it, but it will. The drivers in this case didn't do that: they panicked and didn't press the brakes hard enough.
Nor did the slap the car into neutral or stop the car. And yes, the car could have a gated shifter or a Prius-style stick. You can also turn the car off: even with an engine-stop button, all you need to do is holdit down. Again, in both cases it requires the driver to not panic.
There's no real way around the human factor in this. I've seen drivers who two-foot drive. I've seen drivers who, when they're presented with a scary situation, take their hands off the wheel and cover their eyes. I've been in the car when a driver's panic reaction was to flail madly at the pedals with her feet and see-saw the wheel---in that case, the car rolled. While the floor mats can create a problem, and while Toyota could fix it by mounting them a little bit higher, you'll never truly idiot-proof a car until the car drives itself.
The solution to the likes of this are systems like stability control, ABS, Volvo or Nissan's Lane Departure Control and Mercedes' and Lexus' Pre-Safe crash mitigation systems: keep the car on-course and stable, allow the driver to maintain control and, if a crash is imminent, apply full braking force, tighten the seatbelts and pre-charge the airbags. Oh, and call 911.
I think we said that: if you use Compiz or KWin, you don't get rub-out because all this is composited off-screen. (you might get tearing, if you don't have the right card and/or haven't precisely set up sync-to-blank). That's great.
Now, if you turn on Compiz/KWin, you break tear-free video playback on some cards/drivers/versions. You might also break display of accelerated 3D in a window. That's not so great.
Those of us who are complaining about tearing have probably forsaken Compiz/KWin+Compositing because we can stand a little rub-out versus video playback being shot. That you have to do this at all is kind of problematic, and the WORKSFORME (or, "get an nVidia card") attitude doesn't help. Even casual perusing of, say, Phoronix should tell you that this is a problem for a lot of people.
No, he wants it to evolve into something like Citrix XenApp, where high-latency doesn't completely screw the experience and, if you lose connection, you can reconnect at a later time.
Rootless remote applications are a nifty X feature, but for most people, they're not helpful, not when the death of your connections takes your running apps with it.
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
I'd have expected TWM to evolve, much like the window managers of Windows and the Mac OS have evolved.
The reason we didn't do any of that years ago is because every vendor had to have their little fiefdom. HP, IBM and SGI would never have used Sun's window manager or display server extensions, and anything coming out of the open-source community just wouldn't get considered.
Now that all that's been pushed to the side I'd hope things would improve. They might, too, if the driver and window manager wars settle down and all the disparate projects get finished.
You can run OS X on non-Apple hardware. Google "hackintosh" for a start.
I have, and it often works better than X on the same hardware. Sure, the raw performance might not be quite there, but even on hardware that Apple would spit on I get a cleaner experience. That should tell you something about the relative design strength of X.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and he's late with his rent every week.
On a serious note, most Americans who live in (solidly blue or red) border states would agree with you. Its the swing-state yokels in the centre of the country who are afraid of terrorists from outside Fortress America bombing their cornfields who vote for this kind of stuff, and is further enabled by the "We Hate Wetbacks Society" that forgets Canada exists when developing a border policy that concerns itself with Mexico alone.
Incidentally, this is a view shared by people who ought to know better. Such as the erstwhile Secretary for Homeland Security, who was under the impression that the 9/11 perpetrators came from Canada.
Truthfully, most of the harassment at the American border is due to Canada's somewhat more "What, me worry?" drug policy, especially surrounding marijuana and methamphetamines. In turn, of course, Canada confiscates an awful lot of guns, mostly from truckers who don't seem to understand that in a civilized nation they don't need a sawed-off shotgun to defend themselves from road pirates.
Doesn't matter. The problem is that, with many combinations of card and driver, there's no accelerated video support, and that video tears like a sonofabitch even in non-HD forms.
I'm not a fan of the man's work or his politics, but he's not really to blame for this. The idea that journalism is objective is false, and it's a recent self-delusion at that. Prior to WW2, newspapers were unabashedly subjective and only adopted pretenses of objectivity recently because pretenses of objectivity sell: people like to think that their opinion is the right one, and advertisers like the credibility it gives.
The problem with false objectivity is that it results in homogeneity of reporting. Everyone reports the same material, with the same bias. Everyone feels the need to give two points of view on every story, no matter how baseless and divorced from facts one is. Murdoch, if nothing else, bought the mainstream media a little more breathing room by introducing blatant subjectivity back into the equation, stirring up interest and creating markets, though his continued claims of objectivity subsequently weakened that.
But he's still a dick.
So this is different from how you can't get paid apps from the Android Market in Canada, Sweden and such? Or are the restrictions in those markets the result of malice, too, instead of incompetence or laziness?
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science? It's really irritating, much like trying to talk to a Creationist about evolution. No, actually, it's worse, because at least Creationism isn't getting a leg up by way of the media's gross oversimplification. If I were a climate scientist, faced with "Well, how come it's colder in Podunk?" for the umpteenth time and subsuqently forced to try and get across concepts like global average temperatures, precipitation changes, the difference between "weather" and "climate", etc, etc, I'd want to at least start the discussion from a position that's not automatically handicapped.
No. Previously-locked carbon is really easy to define: oil and coal. Trying to extend it to "the building blocks of all life" because that dovetails into a paranoid fantasy about government taxing your body is fearmongering. No, it's worse, it's fearmongering in the service of some of the most powerful economic entities on the planet.
Saying that this will extend into a tax and, thusly, into a control of your precious bodily carbon is pure, unmitigated FUD. Water is also a taxed substance and has been for much longer: have we proxied water bills into mind control yet?
Are you really trying to proxy concern about the stability of the biosphere among scientists into the New World Order? This fails the "follow the money" test on so many levels: not only is politically unpalatable to tax something so ephemeral that governments are being dragged kicking and screaming to it, and not only is the economic incentive more of a disincentive, but the opposing interests have billions of dollars staked in it not happening at all.
You're working from a flawed premise: that everything government does is inherently flawed, wrong and immoral. Even assuming that's the case, who would even be looking at this (or past issues, like ozone depletion, acid rain, mercury toxicity in the food chain, etc)? Our oh-so-altriustic corporations that caused and make money off the problem in the first place? And yes, you can make the "well, government enabled it" standard argument and say the the solution is to sprinkle magic Libertarian pixie dust and make everyone into Randian supermen, but in the real world where we have billions of people who need to coexist in a functioning society with legacy social structures we need solutions that work, not philosophical wankery.
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
Phosphates are also plant food. Flush them in bulk---not toxic levels, just in bulk---into the environment and watch what happens. Pay particular attention to the fish stocks in any nearby lake, for example.
Climate change is not destructive in the way that, say, irradiation is. No one is saying that we're pumping out toxic amounts of CO2, but that we're risking knocking climate patterns and/or the biosphere out of balance, which could have other effects, like dramatic changes in local weather and/or local flora/fauna, or the lack thereof. We don't quite know how drastic the changes would be, how long they'd go on for, or if they'd harm us or some brown people halfway around the world.
For example: there's credible evidence that climate change from excessive carbon unlocking is causing ocean acidification, which could cause shifts in the gulf streams and/or dramatically screw up ocean life. It wouldn' t kill you on the spot, but it would cause a lot of people go go without food, either because of fish die-offs or because previously-fertile land is getting no rain. This results in a lot of pissed off hungry people (remember the prarie dustbowls of the Great Depression?).
Of course it's not so simple as CO2 is teh B4dzorZ. What's funny (or awful) is watching the anti-AGCC skeptics deliberately mischaracterize or outright pervert the science in such a way in order to muddy the waters. Which, I might add, they've been doing more often, longer, and in much nastier ways than this CRU incident.
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
Liberty has a very low calorie content and you can't burn individuality to keep you warm during cold winter nights.
I'm not saying they're not valuable, but they're also pretty far down the hierarchy of needs. There's a lesson to be learned here: if you keep people well-fed, sheltered, clothed and socially stable you can actually foster liberty and individuality (and innovation, creativity, etc) because the base needs are met. If you want to oppress people, make sure they don't have enough food to get up off their knees.
It's very interesting that, throughout history, periods where the middle class grows coincide with leaps in "social betterment", while strife and stagnation are lockstep with polarization of rich and poor. You'd think we'd have figured this out after the first few cycles, huh?
I'm not surprised: on the Canadian app store you can't actually buy anything. At all. As in "there's no way for them to take your money, so all you can pick a free apps." I wonder how many other countries are in this state.
There's a difference between prosperous in terms of GDP and prosperous in terms of having an empowered middle class. You can have a country with a staggering GDP yet a massive, poverty-stricken underclass and serious quality-of-life problems simply by balancing it with a few obscenely rich folks.
It's a very different tactic: a defensive one.
Put it this way: if Google didn't piggyback on things like Acrobat or Java, they'd be wiped out by Microsoft. Most MSIE updates (and more than a few non-MSIE installs) over the past few years have switched users to MSN/Live/Bing/Whatever-its-called-this-year, and it's not at all easy to straightforward to change MSIE's search provider to Google. Heck, Bing is designed to look enough like Google that users aren't alerted sufficiently to the change
If Google wasn't pushing back, that 10% gain for Bing would be a lot higher.
Go play.
They never officially supported it in the first place. It'll also be, oh, about a day and a half until someone builds a new kernel and allows this to work again.
Because, you know, the kernel is open source and you can actually do this kind of stuff.
The core system is open-source, up to and including the kernel, much of the drivers and the UNIX userland tools.
The display server, window manager, audio manager and other userland tools are closed-source. Not all of them (Safari/WebKit, for example) but most.
I managed to haul down a Honda Civic going 80km/h. Consumer Reports was able to stop a VW and a Mercedes because of their throttle management system, and was able to bring a Toyota Venza (a four thousand pound vehicle with a honey of a an engine; the same as in the Lexus in question) down to ~15km/h and would likely have eventually stopped it.
I'd try the experiment with our own Toyota Sienna (same engine as the Venza and the Lexus) except that I don't want to damage my own car.
It's very easy to apply 225 pounds of pressure to a brake pedal, unless you're very small. Most people can approach or exceed it by standing on one leg and jumping. The IEEE is not correct in this.
No, you don't. You lose braking force after one or two presses at full throttle, just as you would if the car lost power entirely. Pumping or repeatedly stabbing the brakes will use up that assist and/or boil the brake fluid and/or heat the pads and rotors. Stomping on it will just heat the rotors and pads, and will slow you down.
I'm not saying this isn't a tragedy, because it is. What I am saying is that it was entirely unavoidable:
People tend to think about driver training as the cure-all or panacea, but training, especially in an emergency, is not a given. People---even cops---panic, especially in an unfamiliar or out-of-context setting and do the wrong thing despite training to the contrary. Never mind that what you do in a controlled, high-speed chase as a highway patrol officer is not the same thing as being in the car that's speeding.
The only people with "training" in this are drifters, rally-racers and stunt drivers.
Oops. My bad.
What I'd meant was this:
The current Toyota Camry is designed more or less with the North American market in mind. Honest to god, have you seen this car? It's huge, soft and simple: there's no way it was designed for Japan or Europe.
One, brake fade happens after multiple, repeated stops (eg, after you've been autocrossing). Just standing on the brake pedal---once and hard---will slow down any car. Most people don't or won't press the brakes hard enough. Try it, it's easy, though perhaps in a rental.
Two, automatic transmissions do not lock you out of neutral ever. At any engine speed you can slap the shifter into neutral, though not into lower gears or reverse. This is by design, and exists for this very reason. Again, you can do this test yourself, but would be wise to do it in a rental because you'll bounce off the rev limiter repeatedly.
What's happened, in each case, is that the dealer or driver put winter floor mats, either OEM or aftermarket, on top of the regular carpeted mats. What this means is that, unlike the normal mats, they're not pinned down in any way and will slide forward. In the case of the CHP officer in the rental Lexus, the dealer slapped truck mats down on top of the "normal" Lexus mats
What happens next is easy: the mat jams the accelerator pedal. What happens after that is that people panic, do the wrong things, and plow into people in front of them.
And what happens after that is lawyers.
There's no car you can buy today where you cannot overpower the engine with full braking force. Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake. Push both down as hard as you can; your car will slow down and stop. It won't be happy about it, but it will. The drivers in this case didn't do that: they panicked and didn't press the brakes hard enough.
Nor did the slap the car into neutral or stop the car. And yes, the car could have a gated shifter or a Prius-style stick. You can also turn the car off: even with an engine-stop button, all you need to do is holdit down. Again, in both cases it requires the driver to not panic.
There's no real way around the human factor in this. I've seen drivers who two-foot drive. I've seen drivers who, when they're presented with a scary situation, take their hands off the wheel and cover their eyes. I've been in the car when a driver's panic reaction was to flail madly at the pedals with her feet and see-saw the wheel---in that case, the car rolled. While the floor mats can create a problem, and while Toyota could fix it by mounting them a little bit higher, you'll never truly idiot-proof a car until the car drives itself.
The solution to the likes of this are systems like stability control, ABS, Volvo or Nissan's Lane Departure Control and Mercedes' and Lexus' Pre-Safe crash mitigation systems: keep the car on-course and stable, allow the driver to maintain control and, if a crash is imminent, apply full braking force, tighten the seatbelts and pre-charge the airbags. Oh, and call 911.
I think we said that: if you use Compiz or KWin, you don't get rub-out because all this is composited off-screen. (you might get tearing, if you don't have the right card and/or haven't precisely set up sync-to-blank). That's great.
Now, if you turn on Compiz/KWin, you break tear-free video playback on some cards/drivers/versions. You might also break display of accelerated 3D in a window. That's not so great.
Those of us who are complaining about tearing have probably forsaken Compiz/KWin+Compositing because we can stand a little rub-out versus video playback being shot. That you have to do this at all is kind of problematic, and the WORKSFORME (or, "get an nVidia card") attitude doesn't help. Even casual perusing of, say, Phoronix should tell you that this is a problem for a lot of people.
No, he wants it to evolve into something like Citrix XenApp, where high-latency doesn't completely screw the experience and, if you lose connection, you can reconnect at a later time.
Rootless remote applications are a nifty X feature, but for most people, they're not helpful, not when the death of your connections takes your running apps with it.
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
I'd have expected TWM to evolve, much like the window managers of Windows and the Mac OS have evolved.
The reason we didn't do any of that years ago is because every vendor had to have their little fiefdom. HP, IBM and SGI would never have used Sun's window manager or display server extensions, and anything coming out of the open-source community just wouldn't get considered.
Now that all that's been pushed to the side I'd hope things would improve. They might, too, if the driver and window manager wars settle down and all the disparate projects get finished.
You can run OS X on non-Apple hardware. Google "hackintosh" for a start.
I have, and it often works better than X on the same hardware. Sure, the raw performance might not be quite there, but even on hardware that Apple would spit on I get a cleaner experience. That should tell you something about the relative design strength of X.