And your proof of this assertion is...what, exactly?

And your proof to the contrary is... what, exactly?

Regarding the tech specs you were given: Do you have whitepapers showing differently? I work with these technologies and they all behave the way Mory said. Thermal degradation (cells losing power when they are outside their "optimal" operating temperature range) is a particularly vexing problem of every single battery and capacitor technology in use today.

Or, the engineers that designed the car had half a brain, and built in a reserve with a governor. Once the main cells are depleted, a reserve set of cells kicks in, with a governor that limits speed to, say, 25mph.

In other words, the car is carrying weight it (theoretically) is not intended to dip into. Brilliant! I can see that getting dropped REALLY QUICK.

And that's not counting the damage to the "reserve battery" of holding a full charge indefinitely "until needed." There is indeed nothing in the world quite like finding out your "failsafe" device has failed.

Before you ask: the "reserve" in a normal car isn't a separate tank. It's simply a level below which the fuel gauge reads "Empty" deliberately early, so that the user knows "better get gas right quick." The gas in the "reserve" doesn't go stale because it mixes with the new fuel on a fill-up and gets replaced over the normal course of a few fill-ups.

Or, the engineers that designed the car built it so the battery packs are replaceable on the fly.

I'd just like to note that nobody has yet designed an electric car to do either of the things you suggest.

If she's that loud, her vocalizations could probably power other "battery operated" devices she may use...

just a reality resulting from the demographics the parties draw from... poor non-english speaking people trend as democrats

In other words, the Democrat party and their policies are defined by getting the votes of the stupid, uninformed, and clueless.

Glad to know they're being guided by an informed electorate as George Washington warned us we needed... uhm whoops!

Really? What voting system requires you to have a majority of the POSSIBLE votes?

The electoral college.

All that I've ever seen have required you to have the majority of CAST votes.

See above re: democrats voted for primarily by the uninformed and the stupid. Which are you, merely uninformed or stupid?

Its pretty lousy policy at the -federal- level that you can even have swing states that decide elections.

No, it's great policy for a country consisting of states themselves. The US presidential election is decided not by one "national" election, but by 51 (50 states plus DC) simultaneous STATE elections.

Of course you would know this were you not a democrat and therefore at very least uninformed if not worse by your own admission.

Bullshit.

All voting machines have a margin of error - accounting for the likelihood of a misread, a data entry error (someone hitting the wrong button), or other malfunctions.

The voting machines used across the USA have an average margin of error of at least 1.5%, sometimes more depending on whose analysis you are using.

Al Gore "won" the popular vote by less than 1% nationwide. That means that all you can say is he had a statistical dead heat in the popular vote. If you wanted to have a national recount, there were plenty of states with margins that could easily have swung the other way around and not gone for Gore in a recount, it's just that Florida (and in particular, a couple of Florida counties) got focused on.

Of course, the OTHER option would have been to throw Florida's votes out, and then turn it over to the constitutional option when nobody has a majority... which means... oh, yeah, a vote by Congress with one vote apportioned to each state delegation. And the Republicans handily controlled that particular vote method at the time.

Frankly, given Florida was as close as it was, and a recount effort was not possible, and a federal deadline was looming, the fairest thing for Florida to have done, would have been to allocate its electoral votes evenly ... say 13 for Bush, 12 for Gore. (Given that Bush had won the initial count.) And the election would have gone to Gore (278 to 259). Of course that would probably violate the Florida constitution/rules/whatever...

You're right, it would have violated the Florida statutes on electoral apportionment. And frankly, setting it up that way would be pretty lousy policy regardless, since it would give Florida that much less clout overall (ever noticed that nobody, political campaigning/advertising-wise, gives a crap about the couple of states that DO send in a "roughly proportional" number of electors?)

Allow me to point you to something that explains much of the disagreement you are having:

People who hold the same views as you are morons.

In perspective:
- I saw the signature Moryath had before he put it on hiatus during the election. It wasn't provocative and had been there long before Obama was even nominated (or won enough votes to be the "presumptive nominee"), yet Obamatons were routinely verbally attacking Moryath and downmodding incredibly insightful, well-thought-out and sourced posts for the mere presence of the signature.

- For some reason, the same downmodding on slashdot does NOT happen to people for having some pretty disgusting anti-Bush/"antiwar" hippie signatures.

- For anyone who is a fan of the movie Idiocracy, or who has paid attention to their Civics and History courses, there comes a time when they realize that the current form of "Democracy" is having problems because the vote is not an informed choice.

Seriously, I want you to think about this. Not just in America, but everywhere, what percentage of voters do you think are actually of decent IQ and possessing enough knowledge to understand what they are voting on?

This is the point of the Mencken quote that Moryath posts, and whether or not you like it or not, I think it's a valid insight into the problems we are facing today. Far too many "votes" are cast, from the Presidency on downwards, with the people pulling the lever having absolutely no fucking clue what they are doing except that "that guy has X skin color", "I ain't voting for no ticket with a wimmin on it", or other reasons that have no place in the ballot box.

In short, the "right to vote" and "responsibility to vote" are bad ideas. Citizens should carry the responsibility to educate themselves on the issues and candidates and then, only when educated, cast an informed ballot so as not to fuck the rest of us over with their cluelessly random "choice."

As for the other things you write:
His generalization that the left needs to do "homework" because they lack an understanding of the Geneva Conventions has no basis. Many people on the left have studied the Geneva Conventions quite thoroughly.

And many more have absolutely no fucking clue what the Geneva Conventions say , but shout about "war crimes" in between taking bong hits anyways. see above: YOU may have studied the Geneva Conventions thoroughly. I guarantee that most of your fellow travelers have not, because there are people who hold the same views as you who are morons.

Those statements are faulty generalizations on which he seems to have built at least part of his argument.

No, those statements are pretty accurate generalizations of the course of history surrounding Islamic society in warfare, both in wars between competing Islamic factions and between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, as they refer to societies of Muslims and exterior non-Islamic societies (and please note, dar al-harb literally means "domain of WAR", which is another point against your theory).

Many Islamic groups adhere quite strictly to a moral code, and, in fact, many of the Islamic militants fighting in Iraq are acting on the conviction that our culture and our invasion of Iraq go against that code.

If you insist on claiming that the Koran's "moral code" is in any way compatible with the Geneva Conventions, how about I start going through the list of things the Koran lists that are completely contradictory to them, starting with the taking of slaves from the battlefield or the killing of prisoners who fail to convert to Islam (unless they're valuable in which case they are to be ransomed for tribute)? I warn you now, I'll have a field day with this one.

Wow, seriously, you want to know what makes you a troll?

First off, you attacked someone for their signature. That's at least four kinds of lame.

Then you go off attacking a perfectly valid statement without any proof to the contrary.

I think Mory is right, you're nothing but a wingnut troll.

"It is better to stay quiet and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

Regarding you, sir, there remains no doubt.

No shit.

The left-wing kook crowd (all too prevalent on Slashdot) seems to think that it's perfectly OK that someone broke into Palin's email, AND that un-warranted illegal checks were run countless times on anyone who had an actual critical question about Obama, and yet thinks it's not okay that someone wanted to find out who Obama was talking to on the phone?

What if it turns out that long after he'd supposedly "cut off" certain people (Wright, Ayers, the various members of his campaign committee who had to be booted for connections to Hamas fundraising or lobbyist scandals, etc) he was still talking to them five times a week? Wouldn't that be a little "suspicious"?

And shouldn't we, to use the same argument the left-wing kooks used to justify invading the privacy of Palin, "have the right to know"?

If you read the post, the following things were pretty clear:

(A) The hardware was designated LONG before he even considered trying Linux.
(B) The cost to purchase other hardware is prohibitive at this point in time.

My problem is the user tried MythTV with hardware that was documented would not work very well and then blamed MythTV and Linux that they didn't work very well.

As long as Linux's community is more content to groan and whine and point fingers rather than fixing problems, Linux is in trouble. Whether or not they particularly like ATi, Linux will not grow by insisting on only certain hardware - first because it needs as much compatibility as possible, and second because it causes just such bad experiences like this when linux zealots are overenthusiastic and tell people that their system will run find and be ultra-happy with Linux when it quite possibly won't be.

The other problem I see here is the sheer number of linux zealots outright flaming the guy for telling what his problems were.

Let's face it, the LAST thing you want to do is tell someone who eventually you'd like to become a linux user (and they claim they want everyone to use Linux) "you suck", "you shouldn't be allowed to have a computer", "you should just get a Tivo", "you're stupid for buying hardware X", or anything else of the sort. You only contribute to their negative impression of Linux by doing so.

Anyone with any marketing sense will at this point remind you: one upset customer is worth 100 happy customers. People may tell one or two friends about their good experience at Restaurant X, but they will tell EVERYONE about Restaurant Y where the food was burned, the waitress was rude and late and caught making out with the busboy rather than checking her tables, and the check came back with a 20% gratuity already added on despite the crappy service. The same holds true for this: instead of this guy having one experience and saying "oh well, I guess it didn't work out" he's tried again and again, each time being told "ok they fixed it now, it'll work", each time it doesn't, AND he gets flamed by idiots and linux zealots for even bringing his bad experience up.

In the long run, this kind of behavior has only hurt the Linux community, and Linux zealots really need to realize this. You've driven away a ton of potential users.

Downmodding someone who's had a bad experience with a Linux distribution or a piece of Linux software isn't going to help, and neither is badmouthing them.

Now for my personal issue:

The documentation I've found, for any flavor of Linux, is (in descending order of maddening potential)

(A) poorly written
(B) contradictory
(C) arcane (as in, has a bunch of steps and scripts that would work fine... as long as NONE of them has a problem, in which case good luck finding out how the problem occurred or how to fix it)
(D) written for the wrong version (instructions for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn no longer worked correctly on Gutsy Gibbon, no longer worked correctly on Hardy Heron, etc)
(E) simply not present.

That's a problem. That's at least as big a barrier to entry as insisting people build a new box for their Linux purpose, rather than being able to use existing hardware that they probably purchased long before anyone even asked them to try Linux out.

And just to be perfectly clear, and at the risk of repeating myself: you can't go around badmouthing people for having the "wrong" hardware when you are the ones trying to get them to use your software.

No wonder people don't take Linux seriously on the big market. I'm starting, based on the behavior of writers in this thread, to wonder if they actually want people to use Linux or not.

All the responses posted to this one - especially those labeled "insightful" have themselves been either flamebait or ridiculous, while this one got the bad break of an early mod-down by a linux partisan who can't face the real problems within Linux.

Linux, at its core, is NOT user friendly. You can whine and complain all you like, but when normal hardware requires a ton of command-line stuff to push through and a script from a wiki site that may or may not work on YOUR particular distribution (and there's no standard between the distros) it is a LINUX problem that doesn't go away just because Linux people shout "we hate Micro$oft" really loudly.

The Linux community HAS to get beyond the idea that people ought to be building boxes specifically to run Linux. Parent post is a GREAT example of this: someone who's run a windows-based PVR for years, who gives Linux and MythTV a try, and finds out it doesn't work right.

This is the kind of person the Linux crowd is trying to convert to their cause, and yet what do they do when he gives them a shot? When he comes for help, does the Linux community help? Do they deal honestly and openly and say "yeah, we're having some trouble with this hardware right now, we're working on it and sorry it didn't work right"?

No.

He gets an insulting and completely undeserved "-1 Flamebait" moderation, he gets a dick posting a bunch of wiki links to old instructions that don't work on the latest distribution any more, and he gets spat on by a bunch of jerks who insult him for "buying the wrong hardware."

One actually insinuates that he's part of some giant DRM cabal simply for making a purchase of certain hardware years ago.

THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE LINUX COMMUNITY. Instead of being honest and open, instead of working on solutions, instead of having the simple integrity necessary to admit that their stuff didn't work and may need to be improved, they shout "heretic" and "burn it at the stake" whenever someone from "the outside" comes in... and these are exactly the kind of people they will one day need to win over if Linux is to succeed and get out of being a niche thing.

You got that?