> The sentence is correct. "the better" is singular, hence the use of "is". The fact that the object is plural doesn't matter.
Wow, your level of confusion is indeed quite high. "The better" is singular?! It's an adjective describing the skills, and as such has no number. Adjectives such as "greener" or "warmer" don't convey any singular or plural information, so how on earth would "better"? Never mind, though, I don't really know why I bother with this...
What the frack does the term "season" mean anymore nowadays, when a show goes off the air for the better part of a year, and new "seasons" can start pretty much randomly at any time of the year? I'm lost...
Since I've started using Gmail spam has been mostly a non-issue. Their spam filter is INCREDIBLY good, I maybe receive unfiltered spam a couple of times a month or so. I've pretty much given up on "heavy client" email apps, such as Thunderbird which I used before then. Now if they provided IMAP access to Gmail and mobile push access like Windows Live it would be perfect.
Consider that it was written by Gas-person, who may have sprung a leak. Which reminds me of her daughter, Mackenzie Gasperson. Poor girl, will she turn out OK anyway?!
> [...] Ramji, the executive tasked with the difficult job of straddling > Microsoft's growing support for open source in server and tools, > and aggressive and unpredictable statements from management on patents [...]
They should hire Tony Snow, he can do that on mere brain stem functionality.
Well, two different motivators for the same behavior--ideology vs. gambling. I'm not sure he or his cronies ever fully considered the risks of any particular action to the country as a whole, or even to their own persons. During his final days he got angry at Germany and its people for letting him down and never really giving him a chance to fulfill his grand vision, so I'm having a hard time seeing how risk aversion fits into this kind of sick thinking at all.
Well, even as a German myself, I'm glad none of the alternatives happened, because given the inherent instability and self-destructiveness of the regime any alternatives would eventually still have resulted in the Nazi demise and would have merely extended everyone's suffering that much longer. I know, what a boring thing to say from a war buff's point of view, but hey;-)
> Had they done the opposite, and behaved as the liberators from Russian oppression that > there were first hailed as, the outcome could have been drastically different
Of course, but then there would have been some rational pragmatic basis to the entire campaign, and given that the entire war may very well not have taken place, since no rational person would take on the rest of the world and expect to win. The course of WWII was pretty much predicated on the irrational ideological fantasies of a few individuals, and cooperating with some eastern European sub-humans on an equal basis did not figure anywhere in those fantasies.
LOL, that's a good one, let me write it down! The crime rate in Switzerland is not statistically different from neighboring Germany, Italy, France or Austria, or the rest of western Europe. The majority of the crime occurring in these counties tends to be street crime in the form of mugging or such, where that assault rifle at home does you preciously little good. The low crime in western Europe is more a result of a significantly different societal structure and value system than any particular weapons fetishes.
Personally, my feeling of safety at home is mostly derived from statistics, not because of any defensive prowess I may think I possess. I'm statistically unlikely to be assaulted, and I take comfort in those numbers. Should that change someday, I sure hope that the perp accidentally shoots himself or something, because I sure as hell don't have any particular confidence in myself defending my family and myself successfully.
> So you think the Croatians and others shouldn't have defended themselves? That's rather warped.
Wow, that's quite a segue into a strawman there. The issue was how people would behave if everyone was armed, and as you will hardly ever find that situation in a regular "law-abiding" society, you have to go fishing for more extreme cases. While it probably rarely ends up being a Mad Max world, or perhaps some Wild West scenario, armed victims who might put up a fight don't often seem to be much of a deterrent to the more determined criminal elements in these fringe societies. Modern day Iraq may be another good example of the futility of having most people armed--the bad guys with slightly more experience and in larger numbers will usually win, and the good guys don't gain much by having themselves killed while shooting back. But whatever, if owning a gun makes you feel more in control of your random existence, so be it.
> If more people had that mindset and willingness to stand up for themselves and their property, we'd have a lot less crime.
That's debatable, we could just as well have more violence, like in parts of Africa or the Balkans of the late 90s. You may have a stand-down when there is a large differential of arms, but when everyone is more or less equally armed, people could be more likely to take their chances and think they will come out on top--sort of the "my car is faster than yours" mentality, except with guns.
> However, I do believe we're going to see some massive social upheavals and violence [...]
That unfortunately true, but it certainly isn't isolated to the EU. If I remember correctly the US led the world into a fresh round of urban warfare with the whole OJ debacle in the early 90s. That is something modern society will have to come to grips with everywhere, particularly given this whole new flash mob phenomenon which will probably only get worse with increasing communications sophistication.
Unfortunately one cannot make any generalization from WWII because WWI and WWII had quite different causes. While WWI can be considered a "classic" war for resources, WWII was pretty much an irrational war of retribution. While there certainly was a lot of Lebensraum talk and all that--which does sound like resource issues--deep down Hitler just wanted payback for the Treaty Of Versailles and to implement his Aryan supremacy fantasies. Thus WWII was driven much more by one individual's megalomania than any bottom-line considerations. This can be seen time and again as his advisers recommended against this or that campaign for purely pragmatic reasons yet he always forged ahead with a bet-the-house mentality. Anyway, we're deep in Godwin territory now, so I'll stop.
He was marked a troll because he presented a lot of the same old FUD re the Iraq war as "fact" and feigned surprise about everyone else's reluctance to eat it up just like he did.
Will, will, will. Yeah, the grass is always greener on the other side, and every new programming language or platform will be better than anything before. Especially WRT anything coming from Sun I would be very leery of a product with great promise and a deeply flawed implementation. You know what's cool about JS and AJAX? They're here right now and they work, and people can keep writing apps with them provided they have a modicum of know-how and experience without having to wait for anybody's promised golden calf or what have you. But you know what's even cooler? You and anybody else is more than welcome to forgo JS and AJAX and wait for that next programmatic savior if you so choose.
> The general public has basically no need for this sort of information
As was pointed out by other posters, you could take this argument to the extreme and argue that the general public has essentially no "need" for just about any kind of information other than where to get their next meal from. This was the stance of many totalitarian regimes, including all the communist and fascist ones of the 20th century. Is that the kind of society you want to live in? A truly free society should take the opposite approach: the government should have to have extremely strong justification for keeping ANY information from the population that finances it and that it represents. How about this: if something is truly sensitive and must be kept secret, how about doing everything humanly possible to actually KEEP it secret and invisible, like a lot of things governments have managed to keep secret over time even under public scrutiny. The strategy of placing a proverbial elephant in the living room and then posting signs to move along because there's nothing to see, and making it illegal to look at that hard-to-miss elephant smacks too much of Soviet Union methodology.
Incidentally, there's still very little reason to believe that any credible threat will come in the form of highly sophisticated aerial weapons that require the kind of satellite imagery available on Google. Soviet technology has been leaking for almost twenty years now, and if anything the leaks are being plugged by the Putin administration. In terms of bang-for-the buck and reasonably available expertise, it's hard to beat what we see in Iraq on an almost daily basis: pack a huge truck that can provide a lot of momentum full of explosives and accelerate it at full tack towards the intended target, hoping that it will break through enough physical barriers to still create significant damage. This approach is cheap and benefits little from satellite imagery, but suffers from the significant downside of being immune to official hand waving and fear mongering regarding high tech terrorist weapons.
That's exactly right, set the fax to the 9600 rate and leave it there. Additionally, some VoIP providers let you configure the sound quality, which affects the compression rate. Use the highest quality available, and faxing should work. There's a lot of crap floating in this thread about modems/faxes and some inherent incompatibility with VoIP. VoIP has generally been designed to emulate at least traditional POTS quality, which has a bandwidth of about 3000 Hz. Modems and faxes were made to work through this narrow pipe, and to cope with sometimes unbelievably crappy line conditions. Up to 9600 baud modems can work reasonably well over pretty bad lines. Later and higher speeds took advantage of on average better line conditions and digital switching equipment, but those often only work in more developed countries with high quality switching equipment and lines. Good luck ever getting 56K connections in Eastern Europe or Africa, where even 14.4K connections can be a luxury. If you keep the modulation schemes down to something that would work over a less than perfect POTS line, it should usually work over VoIP as well. We fax from home all the time over our VoicePulse VoIP line.
The "fair thing" to me would be to have a standard base "content price" since you're licensing the same show and IP regardless which resolution you watch it at, and then add a bandwidth surcharge based on the resolution and thus file size you download. Coming back later and downloading a different resolution of the same show should then only cost you the bandwidth surcharge of that resolution. Kind of like allofmp3 was doing it, except with an actual "artist remuneration" base cost built-in. I think this would be the fair thing to do because the industry has always harped on how consumers are just licensing content, not actually purchasing an "ownable" product. Therefore consumers should NEVER have to re-license the same content again and again just to have it available in a different format.
At my company most of IS has standardized on dual displays. I know very few developers that are still slugging it out with a single display. Here the trick is just to justify 1600x1200 versus 1280x1024 panels. I'm happy to say I have two of the former, and I pity the fools who don't. In fact, I could easily see a use for a third, but perhaps that's just getting greedy...
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> The sentence is correct. "the better" is singular, hence the use of "is". The fact that the object is plural doesn't matter.
Wow, your level of confusion is indeed quite high. "The better" is singular?! It's an adjective describing the skills, and as such has no number. Adjectives such as "greener" or "warmer" don't convey any singular or plural information, so how on earth would "better"? Never mind, though, I don't really know why I bother with this...
> In girls, the shorter the ring finger to index finger ratio, the better is their verbal skills.
Well, this obviously was written by a boy with an extremely long ring finger then.
What the frack does the term "season" mean anymore nowadays, when a show goes off the air for the better part of a year, and new "seasons" can start pretty much randomly at any time of the year? I'm lost...
Wow, it's not the duck that needs to die, but the humorless git wielding the stick.
I guess the word looked "about right" to them, just like all those guns. Perhaps it's a steampunk expression?!
Since I've started using Gmail spam has been mostly a non-issue. Their spam filter is INCREDIBLY good, I maybe receive unfiltered spam a couple of times a month or so. I've pretty much given up on "heavy client" email apps, such as Thunderbird which I used before then. Now if they provided IMAP access to Gmail and mobile push access like Windows Live it would be perfect.
Consider that it was written by Gas-person, who may have sprung a leak. Which reminds me of her daughter, Mackenzie Gasperson. Poor girl, will she turn out OK anyway?!
> [...] Ramji, the executive tasked with the difficult job of straddling
> Microsoft's growing support for open source in server and tools,
> and aggressive and unpredictable statements from management on patents [...]
They should hire Tony Snow, he can do that on mere brain stem functionality.
Well, two different motivators for the same behavior--ideology vs. gambling. I'm not sure he or his cronies ever fully considered the risks of any particular action to the country as a whole, or even to their own persons. During his final days he got angry at Germany and its people for letting him down and never really giving him a chance to fulfill his grand vision, so I'm having a hard time seeing how risk aversion fits into this kind of sick thinking at all.
Well, even as a German myself, I'm glad none of the alternatives happened, because given the inherent instability and self-destructiveness of the regime any alternatives would eventually still have resulted in the Nazi demise and would have merely extended everyone's suffering that much longer. I know, what a boring thing to say from a war buff's point of view, but hey ;-)
> Had they done the opposite, and behaved as the liberators from Russian oppression that
> there were first hailed as, the outcome could have been drastically different
Of course, but then there would have been some rational pragmatic basis to the entire campaign, and given that the entire war may very well not have taken place, since no rational person would take on the rest of the world and expect to win. The course of WWII was pretty much predicated on the irrational ideological fantasies of a few individuals, and cooperating with some eastern European sub-humans on an equal basis did not figure anywhere in those fantasies.
Until regular old read-only drives become cheap and plentiful--nay, let's just even say available for now--my enthusiasm is somewhat dampened.
Let's not forget to also give them credit for getting the planet and general quadrant of the galaxy right. Kudos!
> difficulties the proposed database could pose to valid people seeking employment
I'm curious to see what invalid people look like. Perhaps something from the Island of Dr. Moreau?
LOL, that's a good one, let me write it down! The crime rate in Switzerland is not statistically different from neighboring Germany, Italy, France or Austria, or the rest of western Europe. The majority of the crime occurring in these counties tends to be street crime in the form of mugging or such, where that assault rifle at home does you preciously little good. The low crime in western Europe is more a result of a significantly different societal structure and value system than any particular weapons fetishes.
Personally, my feeling of safety at home is mostly derived from statistics, not because of any defensive prowess I may think I possess. I'm statistically unlikely to be assaulted, and I take comfort in those numbers. Should that change someday, I sure hope that the perp accidentally shoots himself or something, because I sure as hell don't have any particular confidence in myself defending my family and myself successfully.
> So you think the Croatians and others shouldn't have defended themselves? That's rather warped.
Wow, that's quite a segue into a strawman there. The issue was how people would behave if everyone was armed, and as you will hardly ever find that situation in a regular "law-abiding" society, you have to go fishing for more extreme cases. While it probably rarely ends up being a Mad Max world, or perhaps some Wild West scenario, armed victims who might put up a fight don't often seem to be much of a deterrent to the more determined criminal elements in these fringe societies. Modern day Iraq may be another good example of the futility of having most people armed--the bad guys with slightly more experience and in larger numbers will usually win, and the good guys don't gain much by having themselves killed while shooting back. But whatever, if owning a gun makes you feel more in control of your random existence, so be it.
> If more people had that mindset and willingness to stand up for themselves and their property, we'd have a lot less crime.
That's debatable, we could just as well have more violence, like in parts of Africa or the Balkans of the late 90s. You may have a stand-down when there is a large differential of arms, but when everyone is more or less equally armed, people could be more likely to take their chances and think they will come out on top--sort of the "my car is faster than yours" mentality, except with guns.
> However, I do believe we're going to see some massive social upheavals and violence [...]
That unfortunately true, but it certainly isn't isolated to the EU. If I remember correctly the US led the world into a fresh round of urban warfare with the whole OJ debacle in the early 90s. That is something modern society will have to come to grips with everywhere, particularly given this whole new flash mob phenomenon which will probably only get worse with increasing communications sophistication.
Unfortunately one cannot make any generalization from WWII because WWI and WWII had quite different causes. While WWI can be considered a "classic" war for resources, WWII was pretty much an irrational war of retribution. While there certainly was a lot of Lebensraum talk and all that--which does sound like resource issues--deep down Hitler just wanted payback for the Treaty Of Versailles and to implement his Aryan supremacy fantasies. Thus WWII was driven much more by one individual's megalomania than any bottom-line considerations. This can be seen time and again as his advisers recommended against this or that campaign for purely pragmatic reasons yet he always forged ahead with a bet-the-house mentality. Anyway, we're deep in Godwin territory now, so I'll stop.
He was marked a troll because he presented a lot of the same old FUD re the Iraq war as "fact" and feigned surprise about everyone else's reluctance to eat it up just like he did.
> that will have a good reference implementation
Will, will, will. Yeah, the grass is always greener on the other side, and every new programming language or platform will be better than anything before. Especially WRT anything coming from Sun I would be very leery of a product with great promise and a deeply flawed implementation. You know what's cool about JS and AJAX? They're here right now and they work, and people can keep writing apps with them provided they have a modicum of know-how and experience without having to wait for anybody's promised golden calf or what have you. But you know what's even cooler? You and anybody else is more than welcome to forgo JS and AJAX and wait for that next programmatic savior if you so choose.
> The general public has basically no need for this sort of information
As was pointed out by other posters, you could take this argument to the extreme and argue that the general public has essentially no "need" for just about any kind of information other than where to get their next meal from. This was the stance of many totalitarian regimes, including all the communist and fascist ones of the 20th century. Is that the kind of society you want to live in? A truly free society should take the opposite approach: the government should have to have extremely strong justification for keeping ANY information from the population that finances it and that it represents. How about this: if something is truly sensitive and must be kept secret, how about doing everything humanly possible to actually KEEP it secret and invisible, like a lot of things governments have managed to keep secret over time even under public scrutiny. The strategy of placing a proverbial elephant in the living room and then posting signs to move along because there's nothing to see, and making it illegal to look at that hard-to-miss elephant smacks too much of Soviet Union methodology.
Incidentally, there's still very little reason to believe that any credible threat will come in the form of highly sophisticated aerial weapons that require the kind of satellite imagery available on Google. Soviet technology has been leaking for almost twenty years now, and if anything the leaks are being plugged by the Putin administration. In terms of bang-for-the buck and reasonably available expertise, it's hard to beat what we see in Iraq on an almost daily basis: pack a huge truck that can provide a lot of momentum full of explosives and accelerate it at full tack towards the intended target, hoping that it will break through enough physical barriers to still create significant damage. This approach is cheap and benefits little from satellite imagery, but suffers from the significant downside of being immune to official hand waving and fear mongering regarding high tech terrorist weapons.
That's exactly right, set the fax to the 9600 rate and leave it there. Additionally, some VoIP providers let you configure the sound quality, which affects the compression rate. Use the highest quality available, and faxing should work. There's a lot of crap floating in this thread about modems/faxes and some inherent incompatibility with VoIP. VoIP has generally been designed to emulate at least traditional POTS quality, which has a bandwidth of about 3000 Hz. Modems and faxes were made to work through this narrow pipe, and to cope with sometimes unbelievably crappy line conditions. Up to 9600 baud modems can work reasonably well over pretty bad lines. Later and higher speeds took advantage of on average better line conditions and digital switching equipment, but those often only work in more developed countries with high quality switching equipment and lines. Good luck ever getting 56K connections in Eastern Europe or Africa, where even 14.4K connections can be a luxury. If you keep the modulation schemes down to something that would work over a less than perfect POTS line, it should usually work over VoIP as well. We fax from home all the time over our VoicePulse VoIP line.
The "fair thing" to me would be to have a standard base "content price" since you're licensing the same show and IP regardless which resolution you watch it at, and then add a bandwidth surcharge based on the resolution and thus file size you download. Coming back later and downloading a different resolution of the same show should then only cost you the bandwidth surcharge of that resolution. Kind of like allofmp3 was doing it, except with an actual "artist remuneration" base cost built-in. I think this would be the fair thing to do because the industry has always harped on how consumers are just licensing content, not actually purchasing an "ownable" product. Therefore consumers should NEVER have to re-license the same content again and again just to have it available in a different format.
At my company most of IS has standardized on dual displays. I know very few developers that are still slugging it out with a single display. Here the trick is just to justify 1600x1200 versus 1280x1024 panels. I'm happy to say I have two of the former, and I pity the fools who don't. In fact, I could easily see a use for a third, but perhaps that's just getting greedy...