I live in Finland which has about 5 million persons at a population density of 15.6 per sq.km, while the US has about 300 million at 31 per sq.km, or double Finland's population density. Actually, about half of Finland's population is near the south coast (especially around Helsinki and Turku), while I'm in a rural area 300km north of Helsinki, so our regional population density is a bit lower. The largest town within 200km has about 80,000 people.
I have fiber to the house with 100/10 service available. The service is eur55 per month, including IP TV. If it's possible in the countryside in Finland, then it should be possible in most of US, where local populations and population densities are higher.
In fact, there are substantial areas of the U.S. with quite high population densities and local populations greater than all of Finland. Example: New Jersey, with 8 million persons at 438 per sq.km, and many millions more in adjacent areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_jersey
Your argument based on population density is a load of bollocks. You're just screwed by your ISPs.
I have a few WD 1TB drives, all problem-free (so far, not in use very long). My handful of Samsung 500GB, Samsung 400GB, and Maxtor 320GB drives are also problem-free. The 500GB drives are running a couple of years in a server, while the 320GB and 400GB drives are in desktops a few years and get power cycled probably daily. The last disk failure I had was a Maxtor 400GB a couple of years ago.
Interestingly, the WD 1TB disks were only euro100 each, while the Samsung 500GB disks were euro120 each two years ago, and I think the smaller disks cost even more when purchased earlier.
Toss out those who are too young, old, lazy, socially inept, ill, incarcerated, or comatose to hold down a job and you probably have about 7 employable one-in-a-million geniuses in the US, and you can be pretty sure that they already have jobs.
...and one of them is employed as the garbage truck guy in Dilbert. The other 6 presumably have similar prospects.
They are also quite common in Finland. Usually, a network of pipes is laid about 2 meters below ground level in the garden as the thermal reservoir (in less extreme climates, one meter deep may be enough). They have higher capital cost than the air-to-air heat pumps, but generate less noise and continue to operate even in very cold weather - unlike most air-to-air units, which get into trouble below -20C.
i also agree it is fun to turn off the dial-home on software that doesn't need to talk to it's mommy. HP printer drivers, i am looking at you.
Which is why our router/firewall does not allow either the HP printer or the Synology diskstation to access internet or to be accessed from internet. They can't call home, and nobody outside our home LAN can access them. What clown in HP thought that a network printer should be able to accept print jobs (photos, etc.) from the internet?
Do the actual HP drivers call home on windows boxes? We're all Linux at home, so the drivers for our HP device only access the printer/fax/scanner.
The state of Nevada in the US has an option for none of the above on every ballot. (sometimes 'none' wins).
I'm impressed. That's how it should be, everywhere. Somehow I just can't imagine it being introduced here in Europe (the list system undermines it, anyway). There would be quite a few empty seats if the option were available.
The house is less than 2 years old so it should be decently insulated though the windows are only single paned.
Well, there's your problem, or a good part of it. Single-paned windows provide rotten insulation, and are major heat conduits. Our 2-year-old house is triple-paned, and even our cottage (50+ years old) is double-paned. In our case, we worry about heating more than air-conditioning, but the need for insulation is the same, if there is a real temperature difference between inside and outside.
There were a large number of mis-spellings in your post. As a service to the community, the corrected version is given here:
This is a concerning development for those who have been following the advancement of science (Bananas Technology). One of the undocumented effects (intentional) of MRI is "direct banana insertion" where the resonance of strong bananas can be used to transport banana particles as energy through short distances and reassembled within confines of enclosed bananas (skull or chest). This is DOCUMENTED BANANAS as established by Dr. Paul C. Lauterbanana in 1971 through research papers (suppressed as bananas). With current levels of bananas there is too much diffusion by banana waves to take advantage of banana effects due to low resolution. Experiments are performed DAILY to eliminate high levels of bananas (government frequencies) but none could prove beyond a doubt a way to perfect a technique for changing bananas due to the small size (can be seen with the strongest bananas only). Having mapped a human brain (bananas) with fine resolution permits modification of banana waves to CREATE AND DESTROY bananas. This banana was five years to deployment but has been accelerated for widespread bananas (planned by bananas).
Watch the definition of Open Source getting brutally molested if there's government money available to subsidize its development.
I would not be surprised to see a Microsoft "Open Source" license which requires use of Microsoft APIs or development tools, and/or restricts use to specific versions of Windows, and/or forbids building for or porting to non-Windows platforms, and/or forbids use of code excerpts under any other type of license. In other words, an OSS license which is the very antithesis of Apache or BSD or GPL or MIT, and is open only in name.
Indeed, if your income is adequate and you have a high marginal tax rate, it's quite attractive to trade some pay for extra vacation. Living in Europe, my average deduction rate is about 45% (I get 55%), but the marginal deduction rate is about 65% (I get 35%). The deductions include income taxes, social taxes, UI contributions, etc. I usually trade a few weeks of pay for extra vacation every year.
Due to the difference between average and marginal rates, each week of extra vacation costs me 0.636 average weeks of after tax pay (ratio is 0.35/0.55). That's a bargain, for those who can afford it. It may also help to explain to Americans why high taxes go hand-in-hand with long vacations in Europe.
Last year, I took 7 weeks of vacation in total (paid and unpaid), and still had a 6-digit pre-tax income.
Do not equate it as rigorously tested science or medicine though.
Actually, chiropractics has been tested for a number of complaints. The medical consensus is that it "may be a useful approach in alleviating pain for a very limited set of disorders associated with the back or spine". It is known to be utterly useless for a great many others, such as arthritis, high blood pressure, or ear infections.
Nevertheless, chiropractors routinely claim to be able to treat such conditions. For example, 75% of those approached in one survey claimed to be able to treat arthritis and/or high blood pressure. In another survey, 80% of chiropractors claimed to be able to treat ear infections in children.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2008-01/thyer.html
This is quite disturbing, as it suggests that only 20-25% of chiropractors were aware of the limits of their therapies. The vast majority were willing to misapply chiropractics in potentially harmful ways.
Labview is utterly non-deterministic in its execution. The execution order of blocks does NOT follow the data flow of the lines joining them if there are more than a handful of blocks present. In fact, the execution sequence becomes random, and changes randomly when block positions are changed (even without changing the data connectivity). This forces the use of explicit sequence structures in any non-trivial function, increasing its complexity and opacity. Just try synchronizing shared data between asynchronous loops. Even their Knowledgebase admits that there's no way to do it properly.
And let's not get started on the crappy content of Labview's documentation. It's organized and formatted tolerably well, but the content is vacuous. Hardly any functions have any suggestion of their behaviour when faulty data arrives (e.g. a NaN), for example.
Hah! I also stopped visiting the U.S.A. completely a couple of years ago. I was getting the extra 30 minutes processing in every airport in the U.S., even when going on a domestic flight. I was pulled out of every check-in line for extra questions, then pulled out of the departure lounge for extra questions, and often taken to a small room while my passport was taken elsewhere, before finally being allowed on the plane. No reason was ever given, but it happened more than 20 times; every flight, in fact. FYI, I'm middle-aged with typical north european features, as English a name as you could imagine, an EU passport, and an utterly clean record.
I have a beard (neatly trimmed, usually), but it can't have been just that...
I dunno about you but I feel a lot more safer crossing 5th Ave than being out in the wild where I might get mauled by a bear or some sort of big cat.
Perhaps you should recalibrate your risk perceptions, which appear to be influenced by fairy tales.
Where I used to live (it's now our cottage), there are both bears and wolves. I've never seen them, but I've found bear scat in our forest several times - it's quite different from that of the elk, deer, lynx, and so forth which also live there. Wolf scat is less distinctive, but a pack of wolves has been sighted in the area. Predators are much less numerous and more predictable than the prey animals; you're likelier to be attacked by a horny elk in rutting season than by a bear.
Crossing a city street is more dangerous than wandering in a wild forest, even a forest known to have bears and wolves. Even staying "safely" on the sidewalk, you are at a significant risk of being hit by a vehicle (drunk/distracted/demented driver, mechanical malfunction, etc.).
Humans evolved to be in communities, but not in cities. My opinion, having lived in large and small cities, and in the countryside: cities suck; big cities suck a lot more than small cities.
It's probably a better place to live than Pyongyang or Harare, and possibly nicer than a few other squalid third world cities. Compared to almost any other city in Europe or North America, New York is an appalling hell-hole, unfit for human habitation. (Yes, it has been my misfortune to be there numerous times over the past 30 years).
I'd rather be able to easily install any drivers I choose on my own system then have Microsoft protecting me against myself and causing me all kinds of grief.
But what if Microsoft is not protecting you against your actions, but trying to protect the rest of the world against easy installation of potentially rootkitted drivers? I just wish they had shown such spine earlier in the tragi-comic saga of Windows "security".
The top tax rate is also reached on relatively modest incomes in Europe. For instance, the top rate (53%) is reached in Finland at below euro100000 income. The top rate in the U.S.A is lower, and is not reached until almost double that income level. Also, allowable deductions from income are pretty miserly in many European countries.
Oh, and there's also a few percent taken from income as social contributions. This is in addition to the actual tax rate mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Every other first world country has immensely higher population density.
Wrong, unless you're saying that Finland, Sweden, and Norway are not in the first world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
I live in Finland which has about 5 million persons at a population density of 15.6 per sq.km, while the US has about 300 million at 31 per sq.km, or double Finland's population density. Actually, about half of Finland's population is near the south coast (especially around Helsinki and Turku), while I'm in a rural area 300km north of Helsinki, so our regional population density is a bit lower. The largest town within 200km has about 80,000 people.
I have fiber to the house with 100/10 service available. The service is eur55 per month, including IP TV. If it's possible in the countryside in Finland, then it should be possible in most of US, where local populations and population densities are higher.
In fact, there are substantial areas of the U.S. with quite high population densities and local populations greater than all of Finland. Example: New Jersey, with 8 million persons at 438 per sq.km, and many millions more in adjacent areas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_jersey
Your argument based on population density is a load of bollocks. You're just screwed by your ISPs.
Interestingly, the WD 1TB disks were only euro100 each, while the Samsung 500GB disks were euro120 each two years ago, and I think the smaller disks cost even more when purchased earlier.
Toss out those who are too young, old, lazy, socially inept, ill, incarcerated, or comatose to hold down a job and you probably have about 7 employable one-in-a-million geniuses in the US, and you can be pretty sure that they already have jobs.
...and one of them is employed as the garbage truck guy in Dilbert. The other 6 presumably have similar prospects.
They also were the worst colonizers
That title belongs unequivocally to the Belgians. Just look at all their achievements in Congo.
They are also quite common in Finland. Usually, a network of pipes is laid about 2 meters below ground level in the garden as the thermal reservoir (in less extreme climates, one meter deep may be enough). They have higher capital cost than the air-to-air heat pumps, but generate less noise and continue to operate even in very cold weather - unlike most air-to-air units, which get into trouble below -20C.
Would it have killed someone to write it as "Soyuz 4 and 5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"?
...Soyuz 4 and/or 5...
i also agree it is fun to turn off the dial-home on software that doesn't need to talk to it's mommy. HP printer drivers, i am looking at you.
Which is why our router/firewall does not allow either the HP printer or the Synology diskstation to access internet or to be accessed from internet. They can't call home, and nobody outside our home LAN can access them. What clown in HP thought that a network printer should be able to accept print jobs (photos, etc.) from the internet?
Do the actual HP drivers call home on windows boxes? We're all Linux at home, so the drivers for our HP device only access the printer/fax/scanner.
The state of Nevada in the US has an option for none of the above on every ballot. (sometimes 'none' wins).
I'm impressed. That's how it should be, everywhere. Somehow I just can't imagine it being introduced here in Europe (the list system undermines it, anyway). There would be quite a few empty seats if the option were available.
This time make sure you go to vote the MEP that will truly represent you and your views.
I don't recall seeing a box labelled "None of the above" on any ballot.
The house is less than 2 years old so it should be decently insulated though the windows are only single paned.
Well, there's your problem, or a good part of it. Single-paned windows provide rotten insulation, and are major heat conduits. Our 2-year-old house is triple-paned, and even our cottage (50+ years old) is double-paned. In our case, we worry about heating more than air-conditioning, but the need for insulation is the same, if there is a real temperature difference between inside and outside.
There were a large number of mis-spellings in your post. As a service to the community, the corrected version is given here:
This is a concerning development for those who have been following the advancement of science (Bananas Technology). One of the undocumented effects (intentional) of MRI is "direct banana insertion" where the resonance of strong bananas can be used to transport banana particles as energy through short distances and reassembled within confines of enclosed bananas (skull or chest). This is DOCUMENTED BANANAS as established by Dr. Paul C. Lauterbanana in 1971 through research papers (suppressed as bananas). With current levels of bananas there is too much diffusion by banana waves to take advantage of banana effects due to low resolution. Experiments are performed DAILY to eliminate high levels of bananas (government frequencies) but none could prove beyond a doubt a way to perfect a technique for changing bananas due to the small size (can be seen with the strongest bananas only). Having mapped a human brain (bananas) with fine resolution permits modification of banana waves to CREATE AND DESTROY bananas. This banana was five years to deployment but has been accelerated for widespread bananas (planned by bananas).
As you can see, it makes much more sense now!
Watch the definition of Open Source getting brutally molested if there's government money available to subsidize its development.
I would not be surprised to see a Microsoft "Open Source" license which requires use of Microsoft APIs or development tools, and/or restricts use to specific versions of Windows, and/or forbids building for or porting to non-Windows platforms, and/or forbids use of code excerpts under any other type of license. In other words, an OSS license which is the very antithesis of Apache or BSD or GPL or MIT, and is open only in name.
Indeed, if your income is adequate and you have a high marginal tax rate, it's quite attractive to trade some pay for extra vacation. Living in Europe, my average deduction rate is about 45% (I get 55%), but the marginal deduction rate is about 65% (I get 35%). The deductions include income taxes, social taxes, UI contributions, etc. I usually trade a few weeks of pay for extra vacation every year.
Due to the difference between average and marginal rates, each week of extra vacation costs me 0.636 average weeks of after tax pay (ratio is 0.35/0.55). That's a bargain, for those who can afford it. It may also help to explain to Americans why high taxes go hand-in-hand with long vacations in Europe.
Last year, I took 7 weeks of vacation in total (paid and unpaid), and still had a 6-digit pre-tax income.
Hmm... IBM, HP, and Sun are not on the list (nor is SCO, curiously enough).
They must be scared of SCO's proven legal prowess in these IP matters...
Do not equate it as rigorously tested science or medicine though.
Actually, chiropractics has been tested for a number of complaints. The medical consensus is that it "may be a useful approach in alleviating pain for a very limited set of disorders associated with the back or spine". It is known to be utterly useless for a great many others, such as arthritis, high blood pressure, or ear infections.
Nevertheless, chiropractors routinely claim to be able to treat such conditions. For example, 75% of those approached in one survey claimed to be able to treat arthritis and/or high blood pressure. In another survey, 80% of chiropractors claimed to be able to treat ear infections in children.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2008-01/thyer.html
This is quite disturbing, as it suggests that only 20-25% of chiropractors were aware of the limits of their therapies. The vast majority were willing to misapply chiropractics in potentially harmful ways.
Shall we bend over with our upturned hinds towards the morning sun now?
Point goatse at the sun? Do you want to cause an ice age or something?
Is the Universe smaller than we thought because a black hole bigger than our own galaxy keeps us from seeing a lot?
What.. a goatse bigger than a galaxy? Eeewww! I do not want to follow that thought...
Labview is utterly non-deterministic in its execution. The execution order of blocks does NOT follow the data flow of the lines joining them if there are more than a handful of blocks present. In fact, the execution sequence becomes random, and changes randomly when block positions are changed (even without changing the data connectivity). This forces the use of explicit sequence structures in any non-trivial function, increasing its complexity and opacity. Just try synchronizing shared data between asynchronous loops. Even their Knowledgebase admits that there's no way to do it properly.
And let's not get started on the crappy content of Labview's documentation. It's organized and formatted tolerably well, but the content is vacuous. Hardly any functions have any suggestion of their behaviour when faulty data arrives (e.g. a NaN), for example.
Hah! I also stopped visiting the U.S.A. completely a couple of years ago. I was getting the extra 30 minutes processing in every airport in the U.S., even when going on a domestic flight. I was pulled out of every check-in line for extra questions, then pulled out of the departure lounge for extra questions, and often taken to a small room while my passport was taken elsewhere, before finally being allowed on the plane. No reason was ever given, but it happened more than 20 times; every flight, in fact. FYI, I'm middle-aged with typical north european features, as English a name as you could imagine, an EU passport, and an utterly clean record.
I have a beard (neatly trimmed, usually), but it can't have been just that...
"When you vote, the choice is always between a douche and a turd" [South Park series 8, episode 8]
I dunno about you but I feel a lot more safer crossing 5th Ave than being out in the wild where I might get mauled by a bear or some sort of big cat.
Perhaps you should recalibrate your risk perceptions, which appear to be influenced by fairy tales.
Where I used to live (it's now our cottage), there are both bears and wolves. I've never seen them, but I've found bear scat in our forest several times - it's quite different from that of the elk, deer, lynx, and so forth which also live there. Wolf scat is less distinctive, but a pack of wolves has been sighted in the area. Predators are much less numerous and more predictable than the prey animals; you're likelier to be attacked by a horny elk in rutting season than by a bear.
Crossing a city street is more dangerous than wandering in a wild forest, even a forest known to have bears and wolves. Even staying "safely" on the sidewalk, you are at a significant risk of being hit by a vehicle (drunk/distracted/demented driver, mechanical malfunction, etc.).
Humans evolved to be in communities, but not in cities. My opinion, having lived in large and small cities, and in the countryside: cities suck; big cities suck a lot more than small cities.
New York has some things going for it
And a hell of a lot going against it.
It's probably a better place to live than Pyongyang or Harare, and possibly nicer than a few other squalid third world cities. Compared to almost any other city in Europe or North America, New York is an appalling hell-hole, unfit for human habitation. (Yes, it has been my misfortune to be there numerous times over the past 30 years).
I have taught business law for ten years, so I am not totally talking out of my arse.
That may be acceptable for teaching, but if you want to practise in business law, you'd better start with the sphincter vocalizing exercises.
I'd rather be able to easily install any drivers I choose on my own system then have Microsoft protecting me against myself and causing me all kinds of grief.
But what if Microsoft is not protecting you against your actions, but trying to protect the rest of the world against easy installation of potentially rootkitted drivers? I just wish they had shown such spine earlier in the tragi-comic saga of Windows "security".
The top tax rate is also reached on relatively modest incomes in Europe. For instance, the top rate (53%) is reached in Finland at below euro100000 income. The top rate in the U.S.A is lower, and is not reached until almost double that income level. Also, allowable deductions from income are pretty miserly in many European countries.
Oh, and there's also a few percent taken from income as social contributions. This is in addition to the actual tax rate mentioned.