Wow so if you can't afford to keep an embassy in finland they treat your citizens like shit? I think we should immediately close that embassy and issue a travel advisory against canadians travelling there. Seems to me like those scandanvians are being the assholes in this case.
You are right, Peace is a long term solution, not a short term solution
But the current airport security paranoia is a joke. It doesn't provide any security, its only there so if something does go wrong the politicians can shrug and say "well we did everything we could."
Has their been any terrorist plot foiled by airport security? But there has been terrorist plots foiled. How? By good intelligence. By muslims doing the right thing and tipping off authorities.
Better intelligence = better security. And to get intelligence we need to engage the muslim community. Show them that we are not their enemies, the whackjob extremists are their enemies. We need to work with moderate muslims to prevent the extremists from doing crazy shit.
But intelligence gathering goes on behind the scenes and doesn't make people feel safer. Making people take off their shoes somehow does make the idiots out there feel safer. But I'd feel safer if we diverted money from airport security to finding the terrorists before they even get to the airport.
In my experience installing new hardware is now much more difficult in Windows than in linux. I recently added a TV capture card, an SATA controller and a SATA HDD to my system. In linux it just worked (although setting up myth tv and the remote control was a PITA). Windows is no longer able to boot.
I got a wireless card for my laptop. Even though D-Link says it won't work under linux, I just shoved the card in the slot and it just worked. Well the LEDs on the card aren't working properly, but I'm able to connect to the network. A windows laptop had its wireless stop working because the Intel wireless utility, the toshiba wireless utility and the XP wireless utility were fighting over who should be the one to control the card.
And I've never had Linux lock me out because of product activiation or genuine advantage or whatever.
Yes this is all anecdotal, but I don't think there's any denying that things are getting harder on windows and getting easier on linux. You may disagree, but I'd say things they've already crossed and Linux is now easier than Windows. The real issue is all those apps that are windows only.
Microsofts great advantage isn't that their OS is easier to support than linux. Their advantage is that they are a monopoly. Companies have to support windows no matter how difficult it is. Their isn't a choice between supporting windows OR supporting linux. The choice is (support windows only) OR (support windows AND support linux). Even though supporting linux us easier than supporting windows, supporting linux AND supporting windows will always be more difficult than supporting windows alone.
I would argue the exact opposite of your point. MS CANNOT be challenged by bringing a competitive supportable OS to manufacturers. Their monopoly prevents this. Dell isn't going to install Linux, MacOS or anything other than Windows no matter how easy they are to support. Its always going to cost them more to support multiple OS's than to support just windows. And they have to support windows.
Now if a sizable percentage of their customers wanted linux then they would support it. But a sizable percentage won't want linux unless its supported. Its the old chicken and the egg problem.
You would be right if the OS market was competitive. But its a monopoly. And with a monopoly the rules are different. And unfortunately MS is making most of the rules.
What advantages does MacOS have over BSD? If we're talking servers here a GUI is actually a negative not a positive ince it takes up resources and has more stuff running which could have security holes. Maybe it will be easier to install and configure. But Debian/Ubuntu is pretty damn easy now.
Yeah refilling cartridges can work but be prepared for a mess. If you can get some syringes (which may be difficult in War on Drugs America), they make it much easier. You are going to lose quality, but if quality was an issue you probably wouldn't be using a disposable inkjet. You can get about 5 to 10 refills before the cartridge clogs up. At that point toss the printer and get a new one.
Its also a good idea to wait until you have to do a fair amount of printing before you get a new printer. Put it under stress when you first get it, if it breaks then just take it back to the store and get a different model.
Printer manufacturers aren't making any money off me. I'd feel guilty if they had honest prices for their printers and cartridges. But since they're playing games with me, I play games with them.
Ah, but if you aren't printing very often, likely your ink will dry up before it runs out. If you are only using half a cartridge worth of ink per year then you are better off buying a new printer every year.
That works great when you're only using one app at a time, but if you want to have more than one app running, they're going to have to share resources.
Ah, but what if I have a story with a long story arc that would span multiple books, lets say a trilogy? Once completed my trilogy would be the greatest works of literature evar. Only after I released part one some asshole comes along and makes a second part in which key characters are killed off, and controversial things happen. End result is that readers are turned against my trilogy through no fault of my own. I work long and hard to develop and interesting characters and setting only to have someone else come along and hijack these for their own mediocre story. Now the publisher isn't interested in the second or third parts of my trilogy because the market for it is totally gone. Net result parts 2 and 3 of the greatest trilogy ever don't get made.
Yeah things have gotten out of hand with copyrights, but copyrights aren't totally evil. Not only do they protect bring an artist's income but they can also protect the integrity of their work. I'd say the best solution would be to have copyrights, but have them only last for about 15 years. It would give artists enough time to finish their work and make some money off of it, but would still free up stuff in a reasonable amount of time.
Likely it was stolen in Boston since they would inspect the luggage before it got on the plane, wouldn't they? They probably wouldn't bother inspecting it in Toronto because (hopefully) if they are hauling a bag off a plane they would just conclude its already been inspected, and if it weren't, its already gone one flight without blowing up, so its probably safe for another one.
And the baking powder idea wouldn't fly because OH NOES!!! Mysterious white powder!!!
The problem with that is that you're changing someone else's characters and stories. If I wrote a book where Lestat became a vegetarian and it became popular, people would think that Lestat was a vegetarian nazi. Then when Anne Rice writes another book with Lestat doing the regular vampire things, people would be confused and complain of continuity problems and everything else. Or maybe people won't buy the next Anne Rice book because they aren't interested in vegetarian nazis. Of course it wasn't Anne Rice that writes about vegetarian nazis, it was someone else, but everyone now automatically associates the Lestat character with vegetarianism and nazism.
Interesting logic there. He is smart, Hitler was smart. He is the leader of a foreign country, Hitler was the leader of a foriegn country. OMG!! He is teh Hitlar!!!
How about this logic. US says to the world that its planning on invading Iran (remember that axis of evil thing?). Everyone knows the US won't attack a country that has nukes. So the logical thing for Iran to do is develop nuclear weapons. Its simple cause and effect. US says it will eventually attack Iran -> Iran develops nuclear weapons. It's not ahmadinejad who's responsible for Iran's nuclear weapons programme. The man responsible for that can't even pronounce nuclear.
Back in the middle ages european crusaders created a Kingdom of Jerusalem. This kingdom was purged from the Islamic world without the use of genocide.
You have to remember that we think of Jews in terms of the Nazis and the holocaust. People in the middle east think of them in terms of western crusaders invading the holy land.
Then Tom will get sent to gitmo for being on bin Laden's friends list. Then everyone else on myspace will be carted off for having Tom on their friends list. Then we will finally be safe from the emo terrorists.
Ummmm... I was under the impression that a straight-talker would be someone who speaks plainly, without any kind of subtlety or word games or flip-flopping or hidden agendas or anything like that. If you aren't trying to conceal your opinion, you're straight talking.
Well the raw data that's being processed by seti@home is incredivly boring too, but a lot of people are helping out with that project. Why not and archive@home project, where instead of donating CPU cycles, you donate some hard disk space. You'd find a lot of people willing to donate a couple of GBs of disk space.
well google is in the best position to determine if a third party is click frauding you. If you think google is click frauding you themselves, then what's to stop them from providing false information in your detailed bill? It's one thing to want a detailed bill from a mechanic, because then you can check to make sure the parts he billed you for are actually there and you can ask around to find out if the amount of labour he charged you for is reasonable. But what does a detailed bill from google do for you?
Every month you get a list of say 100,000 IP addresses and timestamps. What does that tell you? Ok you think google is frauding you so you sue. You subpoena their database records and sure enough the 100,000 IPs on your bill match whats in their database. Did they just make up those IP addresses, put them in the database and on your bill? Well maybe they did maybe they didn't. But the detailed bill does absolutely nothing to prove it either way. All the detailed bill is telling you is that google claims that 100,000 people clicked on your ad, which is exactly the the same information they're giving you now, just that they're being a little more concise.
What it all comes down to is that sites just have to monitor their server logs and analyse how much traffic adsense is generating for them. Compare that to how much money they are spending on the ads. Its a simple cost benefit analysis. Google's stats are totally useless for that, all the useful information is in your own server's logs.
But don't the consultants have an interest in proving google is doing something wrong? If they spend a lot of money and come up with a study that basically says "there is some click fraud but its not really that big of a problem, adsense works pretty good" do you think they'll get allkinds of articles written about that? Do you think anyone is going to hire the consultants to commission further studies, or fire them to devise systems to detect click fraud or whatever?
You remember Y2K, right? Consultants said the world was going to end unless people spent a lot of money hiring consultants to fix the problem.
Now I'm not saying we should trust google completely, just that its in the consultant's interest to sex up reports so they can get more work in the future. So you really can't trust anyone on this.
But I doubt click fraud would bein the 80% range since sites will notice from their logs that they aren't getting any traffic from adsense, and if adsense is charging for more than twice as many click than their logs are showing they'll know something is up.
Yeah if a you get 100 clicks on an ad from the same IP its obviously click fraud. But then google bans them for that now anyway. And google is better able to detect this than the advertiser because they can analyse all clicks over their entire adsense system whereas the advertiser can only analyse the clicks for just their ad.
The difficult thing to detect is when open proxies and zombie networks are used. How does and advertiser know going to know if those 100 distinct IP addresses are a zombie network or actual real live user? There is no way to tell the difference, so sending that kind of information is useless.
Besides which shouldn't the advertiser already be able to get that information? Can't they check their site logs for everyone refered to thier site by adsense and get the IPs of the ad clickers from that?
hmmm... way off topic now... But yeah that sort of thing is what I'd like to see from a massively multiplayer game too. As it is now WOW isn't much different from Diablo II only it allows bigger teams and meeting up with people is all in a 3d environment instead of in a irc-like room like in diablo. It's just teams of around 30 people playing in parallel, not massive armies having epic battles. A shame really. Maybe that's all current networking technology allows.
I don't see why it couldn't end though. If one side wins, just start the whole thing over again. Or better yet, balance the game so that there is a limit on how large an empire on side can build. Make the world big enough that the losing team always has enough space that they can build hidden bases from which they can launch guerilla attacks on the the winning team. If you balance the game right you can ensure that both sides alternate between gaining power and then losing it without ever being completely destroyed.
The problem with that is that no one ends up completely satisfied. Take warcraft III. I like RTS games and was expecting it to belike starcraft except with orcs and humans instead of zergs and terrans. But instead I got something halfway between starcraft and diablo II. I like starcraft and I like Diablo, but warcraft III didn't work. I could only level up my character two or 3 times so it didn't make a good RPG, but my armies were limited to a couple dozen soldiers so it wasn't much of a RTS game.
A game can't go in too many directions at once and without losing focus. You have to decide whether you want a player to builid a huge army or build a single hero.
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Wow so if you can't afford to keep an embassy in finland they treat your citizens like shit? I think we should immediately close that embassy and issue a travel advisory against canadians travelling there. Seems to me like those scandanvians are being the assholes in this case.
You are right, Peace is a long term solution, not a short term solution
But the current airport security paranoia is a joke. It doesn't provide any security, its only there so if something does go wrong the politicians can shrug and say "well we did everything we could."
Has their been any terrorist plot foiled by airport security? But there has been terrorist plots foiled. How? By good intelligence. By muslims doing the right thing and tipping off authorities.
Better intelligence = better security. And to get intelligence we need to engage the muslim community. Show them that we are not their enemies, the whackjob extremists are their enemies. We need to work with moderate muslims to prevent the extremists from doing crazy shit.
But intelligence gathering goes on behind the scenes and doesn't make people feel safer. Making people take off their shoes somehow does make the idiots out there feel safer. But I'd feel safer if we diverted money from airport security to finding the terrorists before they even get to the airport.
In my experience installing new hardware is now much more difficult in Windows than in linux. I recently added a TV capture card, an SATA controller and a SATA HDD to my system. In linux it just worked (although setting up myth tv and the remote control was a PITA). Windows is no longer able to boot.
I got a wireless card for my laptop. Even though D-Link says it won't work under linux, I just shoved the card in the slot and it just worked. Well the LEDs on the card aren't working properly, but I'm able to connect to the network. A windows laptop had its wireless stop working because the Intel wireless utility, the toshiba wireless utility and the XP wireless utility were fighting over who should be the one to control the card.
And I've never had Linux lock me out because of product activiation or genuine advantage or whatever.
Yes this is all anecdotal, but I don't think there's any denying that things are getting harder on windows and getting easier on linux. You may disagree, but I'd say things they've already crossed and Linux is now easier than Windows. The real issue is all those apps that are windows only.
Microsofts great advantage isn't that their OS is easier to support than linux. Their advantage is that they are a monopoly. Companies have to support windows no matter how difficult it is. Their isn't a choice between supporting windows OR supporting linux. The choice is (support windows only) OR (support windows AND support linux). Even though supporting linux us easier than supporting windows, supporting linux AND supporting windows will always be more difficult than supporting windows alone.
I would argue the exact opposite of your point. MS CANNOT be challenged by bringing a competitive supportable OS to manufacturers. Their monopoly prevents this. Dell isn't going to install Linux, MacOS or anything other than Windows no matter how easy they are to support. Its always going to cost them more to support multiple OS's than to support just windows. And they have to support windows.
Now if a sizable percentage of their customers wanted linux then they would support it. But a sizable percentage won't want linux unless its supported. Its the old chicken and the egg problem.
You would be right if the OS market was competitive. But its a monopoly. And with a monopoly the rules are different. And unfortunately MS is making most of the rules.
What advantages does MacOS have over BSD? If we're talking servers here a GUI is actually a negative not a positive ince it takes up resources and has more stuff running which could have security holes. Maybe it will be easier to install and configure. But Debian/Ubuntu is pretty damn easy now.
This guy is obviously talking out of his ass.
Yeah refilling cartridges can work but be prepared for a mess. If you can get some syringes (which may be difficult in War on Drugs America), they make it much easier. You are going to lose quality, but if quality was an issue you probably wouldn't be using a disposable inkjet. You can get about 5 to 10 refills before the cartridge clogs up. At that point toss the printer and get a new one.
Its also a good idea to wait until you have to do a fair amount of printing before you get a new printer. Put it under stress when you first get it, if it breaks then just take it back to the store and get a different model.
Printer manufacturers aren't making any money off me. I'd feel guilty if they had honest prices for their printers and cartridges. But since they're playing games with me, I play games with them.
Ah, but if you aren't printing very often, likely your ink will dry up before it runs out. If you are only using half a cartridge worth of ink per year then you are better off buying a new printer every year.
That works great when you're only using one app at a time, but if you want to have more than one app running, they're going to have to share resources.
Ah, but what if I have a story with a long story arc that would span multiple books, lets say a trilogy? Once completed my trilogy would be the greatest works of literature evar. Only after I released part one some asshole comes along and makes a second part in which key characters are killed off, and controversial things happen. End result is that readers are turned against my trilogy through no fault of my own. I work long and hard to develop and interesting characters and setting only to have someone else come along and hijack these for their own mediocre story. Now the publisher isn't interested in the second or third parts of my trilogy because the market for it is totally gone. Net result parts 2 and 3 of the greatest trilogy ever don't get made.
Yeah things have gotten out of hand with copyrights, but copyrights aren't totally evil. Not only do they protect bring an artist's income but they can also protect the integrity of their work. I'd say the best solution would be to have copyrights, but have them only last for about 15 years. It would give artists enough time to finish their work and make some money off of it, but would still free up stuff in a reasonable amount of time.
Likely it was stolen in Boston since they would inspect the luggage before it got on the plane, wouldn't they? They probably wouldn't bother inspecting it in Toronto because (hopefully) if they are hauling a bag off a plane they would just conclude its already been inspected, and if it weren't, its already gone one flight without blowing up, so its probably safe for another one.
And the baking powder idea wouldn't fly because OH NOES!!! Mysterious white powder!!!
The problem with that is that you're changing someone else's characters and stories. If I wrote a book where Lestat became a vegetarian and it became popular, people would think that Lestat was a vegetarian nazi. Then when Anne Rice writes another book with Lestat doing the regular vampire things, people would be confused and complain of continuity problems and everything else. Or maybe people won't buy the next Anne Rice book because they aren't interested in vegetarian nazis. Of course it wasn't Anne Rice that writes about vegetarian nazis, it was someone else, but everyone now automatically associates the Lestat character with vegetarianism and nazism.
Interesting logic there. He is smart, Hitler was smart. He is the leader of a foreign country, Hitler was the leader of a foriegn country. OMG!! He is teh Hitlar!!!
How about this logic. US says to the world that its planning on invading Iran (remember that axis of evil thing?). Everyone knows the US won't attack a country that has nukes. So the logical thing for Iran to do is develop nuclear weapons. Its simple cause and effect. US says it will eventually attack Iran -> Iran develops nuclear weapons. It's not ahmadinejad who's responsible for Iran's nuclear weapons programme. The man responsible for that can't even pronounce nuclear.
google would only ever read his mail so they can serve him ads for enriched uranium.
Yeah, then he'd go write a poem about how much he hates his life even more than he hates the infidel.
Back in the middle ages european crusaders created a Kingdom of Jerusalem. This kingdom was purged from the Islamic world without the use of genocide.
You have to remember that we think of Jews in terms of the Nazis and the holocaust. People in the middle east think of them in terms of western crusaders invading the holy land.
Then Tom will get sent to gitmo for being on bin Laden's friends list. Then everyone else on myspace will be carted off for having Tom on their friends list. Then we will finally be safe from the emo terrorists.
Ummmm... I was under the impression that a straight-talker would be someone who speaks plainly, without any kind of subtlety or word games or flip-flopping or hidden agendas or anything like that. If you aren't trying to conceal your opinion, you're straight talking.
Also Montana is already named after a football player.
Well the raw data that's being processed by seti@home is incredivly boring too, but a lot of people are helping out with that project. Why not and archive@home project, where instead of donating CPU cycles, you donate some hard disk space. You'd find a lot of people willing to donate a couple of GBs of disk space.
Especially since they implemented exactly that in Diablo II.
So you're a pedophile then?
well google is in the best position to determine if a third party is click frauding you. If you think google is click frauding you themselves, then what's to stop them from providing false information in your detailed bill? It's one thing to want a detailed bill from a mechanic, because then you can check to make sure the parts he billed you for are actually there and you can ask around to find out if the amount of labour he charged you for is reasonable. But what does a detailed bill from google do for you?
Every month you get a list of say 100,000 IP addresses and timestamps. What does that tell you? Ok you think google is frauding you so you sue. You subpoena their database records and sure enough the 100,000 IPs on your bill match whats in their database. Did they just make up those IP addresses, put them in the database and on your bill? Well maybe they did maybe they didn't. But the detailed bill does absolutely nothing to prove it either way. All the detailed bill is telling you is that google claims that 100,000 people clicked on your ad, which is exactly the the same information they're giving you now, just that they're being a little more concise.
What it all comes down to is that sites just have to monitor their server logs and analyse how much traffic adsense is generating for them. Compare that to how much money they are spending on the ads. Its a simple cost benefit analysis. Google's stats are totally useless for that, all the useful information is in your own server's logs.
But don't the consultants have an interest in proving google is doing something wrong? If they spend a lot of money and come up with a study that basically says "there is some click fraud but its not really that big of a problem, adsense works pretty good" do you think they'll get allkinds of articles written about that? Do you think anyone is going to hire the consultants to commission further studies, or fire them to devise systems to detect click fraud or whatever?
You remember Y2K, right? Consultants said the world was going to end unless people spent a lot of money hiring consultants to fix the problem.
Now I'm not saying we should trust google completely, just that its in the consultant's interest to sex up reports so they can get more work in the future. So you really can't trust anyone on this.
But I doubt click fraud would bein the 80% range since sites will notice from their logs that they aren't getting any traffic from adsense, and if adsense is charging for more than twice as many click than their logs are showing they'll know something is up.
Yeah if a you get 100 clicks on an ad from the same IP its obviously click fraud. But then google bans them for that now anyway. And google is better able to detect this than the advertiser because they can analyse all clicks over their entire adsense system whereas the advertiser can only analyse the clicks for just their ad.
The difficult thing to detect is when open proxies and zombie networks are used. How does and advertiser know going to know if those 100 distinct IP addresses are a zombie network or actual real live user? There is no way to tell the difference, so sending that kind of information is useless.
Besides which shouldn't the advertiser already be able to get that information? Can't they check their site logs for everyone refered to thier site by adsense and get the IPs of the ad clickers from that?
hmmm... way off topic now... But yeah that sort of thing is what I'd like to see from a massively multiplayer game too. As it is now WOW isn't much different from Diablo II only it allows bigger teams and meeting up with people is all in a 3d environment instead of in a irc-like room like in diablo. It's just teams of around 30 people playing in parallel, not massive armies having epic battles. A shame really. Maybe that's all current networking technology allows.
I don't see why it couldn't end though. If one side wins, just start the whole thing over again. Or better yet, balance the game so that there is a limit on how large an empire on side can build. Make the world big enough that the losing team always has enough space that they can build hidden bases from which they can launch guerilla attacks on the the winning team. If you balance the game right you can ensure that both sides alternate between gaining power and then losing it without ever being completely destroyed.
The problem with that is that no one ends up completely satisfied. Take warcraft III. I like RTS games and was expecting it to belike starcraft except with orcs and humans instead of zergs and terrans. But instead I got something halfway between starcraft and diablo II. I like starcraft and I like Diablo, but warcraft III didn't work. I could only level up my character two or 3 times so it didn't make a good RPG, but my armies were limited to a couple dozen soldiers so it wasn't much of a RTS game.
A game can't go in too many directions at once and without losing focus. You have to decide whether you want a player to builid a huge army or build a single hero.