I thought torture was against the Geneva Convention.

I'm not sure if "PowerPoint makes us stupid" or if stupid people use PowerPoint to make themselves look smart. Do buzz words make us stupid?

Actually litigation is a desirable function of a free market. Similarly, if Verizon is breaking contracts they should be sued.

Yup, valid points and I agree, the situation is paralyzing; I'm a heavy user myself. The point I'm trying to make is that by involving government intervention, you will more often than not make the situation worse and not better.

The historic economic data, in almost all cases states explicitly that if you want more production then you need more competition, and not less. More government regulation has a tendency, as you have pointed out, to decrease competitive pressures.

Here's an absurd example to illustrate my point. Lets say that all across the US, people like to knit. Naturally, the prices of yarn start to go up and the hardcore knitters get mad. The get the government to pass a law saying that the providers of yarn can't charge more than $X.

It no longer becomes profitable for the small yarn produces to stay in business because losses to profit affect them more and the larger companies are all that remain. Of the companies that remain, none of them have any incentive to change what they're doing because the price is fixed; the result isn't more yarn being produced.

Lets say that the hardcore yarn makers instead get the government to subsidize yarn production. Now you have a situation where everyone in the United States is paying for a hobby that few people have. The cost of that subsidy would in turn would be the loss of productive effort elsewhere.

A valid point can be made for legal intervention however. If Verizon submits a contract to provide a certain amount of bandwidth and subsequently forfeits that contract, it is in the interest of all citizens to see Verizon held accountable. That recourse is a desirable function of the marketplace.

I'm an aforementioned moron. The argument is very simple; it's much more effective to let Verizon shoot itself in the foot than to pass a law with potentially harmful side effects.

Didn't go over so well. Just ask newegg.

I'm putting on my black hat. Consider your system hacked!

...on how to get your rendering context setup in Linux. Here are a few:

http://www.wxwidgets.org/docs/tutorials/opengl.htm
http://projects.gnome.org/gtkglext/

Beyond these, NeHe still applies. The exception are operating system specific APIs like playing sound, but those have nothing to do with OpenGL. After NeHe, you may want to consider using shaders, which are covered in the Orange Book:

http://www.3dshaders.com/home/

I think he's a witch!

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

Yes, 5 Monty Python.

Actually, the impression I get from web developers is that IE6 is a witch. Maybe we should build a bridge out of it?

A live code base and a retired code base have the same number of lines.

I'm still fairly inexperienced, but here's my two cents. Whenever confronted with a collaboration project, I ask myself: Will it solve a problem or create one? A common fallacy I've seen assumed is; local optimizations will directly translate into global gains in efficiency. This result is often not the case unless you affect a bottleneck in production. This is called the theory of constraints (proposed by Goldratt; see "The Goal"). My post is no substitute for the actual material, so go and read the book.

If your new tool doesn't affect a bottleneck, it is more likely that you will make production worse. Here's an example of how this effect works in manufacturing. Assume part X and Y are required to make a final product. Product Y is currently produced at the same rate as X. It is very easy to make part Y twice as fast as X, but X's rate can't change. Should you make Y faster? If you do, you will end up continuously building up piles of inventories of Y that won't yield actual sales. Building inventory costs you a lot more money, so optimizing Y is a bad idea.

Here's how it works in service industries (this is a contrived example). As a sales manager you decide, since CRM optimizations are making your competitors money, you need a CRM solution. Your company makes widgets that are top of the line and require three times as much time to complete as your competitor. You deploy CRM, expecting to increase customer satisfaction, but your end of year reports indicate a decrease. What happened? It might be that the CRM tool made your sales force operate twice as fast. Taking more orders means that you now have twice as many people waiting on a production line that was barely meeting demand to begin with. So by using CRM, you have twice as many people breathing down your neck :(

Back to my question. If your solution doesn't address a bottleneck one of two things could happen. The best case is, it won't be used because people can meet demand with the tools they have; the cost of switching will prevent change. The worst case is, the solution gets adopted and you start building unwanted inventory or tickets in your system increasing your cost. In either case, you should adopt the empirical method; start with a hypothesis and prove it with measured data. That's really the only way of determining if your tool is a solution or a problem.