Don't worry. There'll be a very long list of perfectly acceptable pages that get blocked because the filter is badly configured that you can point to as your reason for opting out of filtering.

Actually, the kind of question I was talking about was the kind GGP was talking about, which related specifically to remote purchases of downloadable material that is hosted in a foreign country. Sorry if that was misleading. :)

Unfortunately, people are likely to respond to this warning by doing what the repository maintainer suggests on the repository's home page:

apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring

Since Squeeze you can install this package with apt-get but you need to presse Y when the package ask what to do and do not press return.

Or, worse still: apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring as is recommended on the archive's home page.

More accurately: Linux security - if a change you made to the system turns out to be insecure, you have to remove it yourself later. It's not like debian is distributed with such third-party update sites listed in apt.sources.

A typical flash chip has a read latency of around 50us (MLC) or 25us (SLC) and can operate one transfer per cycle at about 50-100MHz. A typical DRAM chip has a read latency of around 15ns and can operate two transfers per cycle at about 266-333MHz. A typical SRAM chip has a latency of about 10ns and can operate two transfers per cycle at similar rates to the DRAM.

Depending on the measure you use, Flash is between 7 and 3,000 times slower at reading than DRAM, and up to 5,000 times slower than SRAM.

Ah, I see.

Yes, in that case, they just don't like debian. Just like Oracle don't, which is why if you want to run most Oracle server products you really need RHEL or at the very least centos. Same with many other commercial vendors who support Linux (random example, which just happens to be the latest commercial software I acquired).

Your argument makes good logical sense. Unfortunately, it is not the approach courts have taken to deciding questions of this kind. The courts have instead asked where the was customer when he made the purchase, and used this as the basis of deciding what laws apply to the sale. The original reason for this was to make things easier for consumers, who shouldn't be expected to have to know the laws of the countries of sellers they deal with (particularly as they may not even have any way of knowing where the seller is), but it has been extended since then into areas where this justification makes no sense.

It all depends on the task, I guess. Until I got a TV that could play media files, I used to regularly prepare DVDs of stuff I wanted to watch. If you're familiar with the process for writing a DVD using free software, you know that the last step is to run "dvdauthor", which does two things: it prepares the menu & index files for the DVD, and copies your MPEG2 input files into the correct "VOB" formatted output files. This latter step amounts to basically copying 4GB of data with a trivial transformation applied. It used to take about 20 minutes when I started doing it, IIRC.

(At least things improved when I moved off Windows 2000 as my OS -- it left the entire system unusable while it was running, for some reason.)

I don't see how you could control for such an effect. When you sample from a self-selected group (i.e. gamers) you always risk sampling bias based on something that may cause people to select themselves into the group, which in this case is actually quite likely to be "being good at action-oriented video games" which translates largely to "having fast reflexes". AFAIK, there is no way to counteract this effect.

See discussion on debian.legal here for detail, but the general gist is that Adobe recently changed their terms; the package you link was released after that change, but debian tends to value stability more than most other Linux distros and therefore does not yet include a version of flash that dates from after the change in licensing terms.

Adobe also grant redistribution permission to named organisations, which may have allowed some Linux distros to include it previously, but debian is unable/reluctant to do so primarily due to its distributed nature (unlike, say, red hat or ubuntu, debian is not released by a corporation that could enter into a contract with Adobe).

If you're working in C# or Java you're much less likely to need to, and if you need to be productive you should avoid working in C or C++ at any cost -- Java programmers have been shown to be up to 200% more productive than C++ programmers working on the same task, and C++ is a somewhat more productive environment than C. C/C++ solutions also have significantly more bugs in them (up to 50% more, depending on the type of task).

The ability to drop to C is fine, but if you're planning on using it for more than occasional small functions you'd probably be much better off finding an environment with performance that's good enough that you don't need to.

No. The point of computer science is to teach methods of reasoning about the behaviour of computers. Yes, this involves knowing those basic principles, stuff like what pointers are, how memory can be divided and allocated between different tasks, how it can be reused after it is no longer required, and so on. But much more fundamentally it involves understanding the principles of what a program is, how data structures can be built up from individual stored items, and so on, and this is much easier to teach in a higher-level language than a lower-level one.

A computer science program should teach students at least four languages:

- A high level language, suitable for building complex data structures. It should have garbage collection, and would typically be object-oriented.
- A low level language, suitable for describing memory management tasks
- An assembly language, to show how machines work at the register level
- An additional high level language. If the first high-level language was object-oriented, this language should be functional. If the first was functional (there are a handful of programs that teach a functional language first, and it may be a reasonably good idea) this should be object-oriented.

Additionally, at least one of the two high level languages needs to have good support for parallel operations (e.g., a good library of communication and synchronization primitives), or a third high level language will be required to cover this.

My course, back in the 90s, went a little overboard. I learned:

Pascal (first high level language, used for data structure courses)
C (used both for low level computer architecture stuff and for compiler design course, due to interface with flex/bison)
PERL
68k and 32000 assembly language (two different hardware level projects using two different development kits)
C++ (only OO language)
A non-standard and peculiar language with integrated primitives for concurrent programming
Miranda (a functional language somewhat similar to ML)
Prolog

I think disorganisation led to there being too many languages on the list. Java could have replaced 3 of those items with a single language, and a few years after I graduated it did.

And there are games like that. My understanding (although I've never played it myself) is that Meridian 59 would be a good example.

Those players are still there. Just because (some) modern games have been designed with the intent of excluding them doesn't make them stop existing, and knowing that they exist is important for future game designers.

I'm a long way from convinced. If this were true, why do people complain every time an MMO's cash shop offers an item that gives the players who buy it an "advantage" (scare quotes because it's not entirely clear that items that make a game easier are actually advantageous to the players who purchase them, as doing so actually reduces the amount of fun they get from the game)?

Yes. And if you want to start understanding it yourself, read that article. Then read it again. This is at least part of the key to why WoW is still the most popular subscription-based game in the world, all these years later.