But if you had such a bad experience just trying to install Ubuntu, I can only suggest that something about your hardware was bleeding edge new,
FWIW, last time I installed Linux (around July of last year), the Gentoo minimal CD (nightly build) wouldn't even boot on my machine with an MSI X58 Platinum motherboard, but the then-latest Ubuntu LiveCD worked just fine. (So of course I used that to install Gentoo, which now runs perfectly.)
"Bleeding edge new" would have to be bleeding edge indeed for Ubuntu to not work... but if he's running a machine that bleeding edge, I don't know how he could expect XP to work any better than Ubuntu. XP has enough trouble with regular components as it is. (Who else loves hunting down NIC drivers to stick on a flash drive so you can get your fresh XP install online?)
I have a laptop that bluescreens with regularity under Windows. The error codes it gives me in the brief seconds before rebooting point to glitches in the hardware (sometimes the RAM, sometimes the video card, sometimes a generic error).
The same laptop runs Linux without issues.
I'd say Linux is more forgiving of hardware glitches - or rather, the Linux kernel doesn't panic at the first sign of a ripple in the pond, like Windows' does.
I don't know that I've ever had Windows recognize my network card on a fresh install from a non-OEM CD. Makes it hard to get an internet connection, let alone run Windows Update.
I've also never had Windows actually locate drivers on Windows Update when installing a new device (and I usually have it try, because I'm too lazy to actually dig out the driver CD if I don't have to).
The few times Windows Update does show me a device driver update during the course of normal Windows updates, the "updated" driver is rarely the same version as the latest one on the manufacturer's website (e.g. nVidia's graphics drivers).
In my experience, your description is much more accurate when applied to Ubuntu. (Perhaps not entirely accurate, but more accurate than with Windows.)
My point was, if you read the ToS, you'll probably find language permitting the ISP to block any content for essentially any reason - or even for no reason at all.
Unfortunately that's not the only clause in the ToS with that sort of vague language. I don't think it's a matter of "how did that get past legal", I think it's a matter of "legal made it that way". See, if it's vague, they can later argue in court that whatever they do abides by the ToS their customers agreed to (never mind that they can change the ToS at any time, and they would argue that customers are automatically bound by the new ToS).
Basically, their ideal situation would be "we can shut off service (or part of the service) for any customer at any time for any reason (or no reason at all)" and not have to worry about consequences.
I have serious issues with the practice (which is yet another reason I hate Comcast), but thus far I doubt anyone has really tried to challenge it in a legal setting.
It has a bunch of parenthetic phrases and a bucket's worth of commas, but as far as I can tell it's valid grammar...
- Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post -- and to remove or block - any information or materials -- in whole or in part - that it -- in its sole discretion - deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy -- or otherwise harmful to Comcast's network or customers using the Service - regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
If you read it with just the parts I've marked with a single dash, it makes perfect sense and you still get the main point:
Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post any information or materials that it deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
Comcast has simply added clarifying comments all over the place set off by commas in order to add more conditions under which it may refuse transmission of data over its network. It's not pretty, but as far as I can tell it's proper grammar. I welcome corrections.
It occurs to me that the final phrase could use an additional comma just before "so long as it violates this Policy", but I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, and even if it is necessary it's not surprising that it slipped past a legal team... adding it in doesn't change the meaning of the sentence.
Please note that my defense of the grammar of this clause of Comcast's ToS should not be construed as defense in any way of the actual terms of service.
Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post, and to remove or block, any information or materials, in whole or in part, that it, in its sole discretion, deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy, or otherwise harmful to Comcast's network or customers using the Service, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
You're right. However, I picked tv remote because of its low power usage. Can this method be used to transfer enough power to use a remote control, regardless of cost? If not, then obviously, powering a satellite won't work either.
note "classical communication" (i.e. a telephone call from one place to another) to tell the recipient what to do to extract the energy is needed.
Yeah, but that doesn't make it useless. For example, imagine your television came with an entangled remote control, and it communciates the necessary information "classically" with one of any available low-power wireless transmission methods. The remote can then use whatever power it needs through its "entanglement battery". There you go, a remote control that never needs new batteries.
I'm just extrapolating, assuming that you actually can "teleport" useful amounts of energy wirelessly through this process, so I have no idea whether it would actually work, but the need to communicate information through classical channels does not mean the whole concept is worthless.
So if I have the sending station at point A, and the receiving station at point B, and I want to transmit power, all I need to do is send point A's measurement to the people at point B so they know how to measure it to get the power out at their end. Is that right?
My question would be, is the energy required to do this more than what you'd lose just sending the power over the same distance using more traditional methods (e.g. power lines)? I'm assuming measuring, capturing, and converting the energy into some usable form at point B is a process which itself requires some energy...
Could this be used to transfer useful amounts of energy, to e.g. power a television's remote control without ever needing batteries?
Particularly, since as you pointed out, since ethyl mercury is expelled from the body pretty quickly compared to methyl mercury which tends to accumulate.
The quickly-expelled one is the one found in the influenza vaccine.
The one that accumulates is the one found in breast milk.
What, exactly, was your point?
Given the doubts and some conflicting data, it's safer to be conservative.
That's exactly what they did 9 years ago;) And as the CDC's website says, there has been no measurable decrease in autism rates since the use of thimerasol was discontinued. That would indicate that thimerasol does not cause autism.
Whether it has other unrelated side effects in some tiny percentage of the population isn't really relevant to the autism/vaccine debate... you can always find someone allergic to something.
But the large volume of anecdotal evidence should be enough to get the vaccine manufacturers to consider stopping the use of thimerasol as the preservative.
According to the CDC, "Since 2001, no new vaccine licensed by FDA for use in children has contained thimerosal as a preservative, and all vaccines routinely recommended by CDC for children under six years of age have been thimerosal-free, or contain only trace amounts, except for multi-dose formulations of influenza vaccine."
And even better, from later down on that page:
"Unfortunately, we have not seen reductions in the numbers of children identified with autism indicating that the cause of autism is not related to a single exposure such as thimerosal."
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."
And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."
Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?
And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.
It's quite likely that some small percentage of people are unusually sensitive to mercury, and a large dose can trigger autism in them.
What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only.025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.
And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.
It only takes one person with a side effect LINKED to the MMR vaccine to prove that they're all potentially dangerous.
Well, the trouble here is, how do you prove that the MMR vaccine "caused" or even influenced the development of autism? Thus far, scientists have been unable to show any causative factor, and the only "evidence" anyone really has is anecdotal. That's not to say we should simply dismiss anecdotal evidence, it's just to say that anecdotal evidence by itself isn't enough, and until we have more than that we shouldn't make decisions based on it.
Has anyone considered that maybe the age we start vaccinating and the age some kids start to develop autism are the same, so there are bound to be cases where the two happen close together? It would be interesting to see statistics comparing average age (in days or weeks) when autism begins to develop with average age when various vaccines are received in various demographic groups.
There are also other things to consider. To those who advocate banning vaccines in an attempt to lower the rate of people developing autism, have you considered whether the rate of autism development might be much lower than the death rate from the diseases against which we vaccinate? Is it really worth allowing X children to die of $DISEASE in order to spare Y children from autism, if X is much larger than Y?
I don't know if X > Y, but I rarely see anyone bring up the idea at all in discussions on this topic.
There's no emulation layer for Win9x games. The only way to run them *almost* properly, without fixing the code, is to run the game in Win9x compatibility mode - something that Steam explicitly prevents you from doing. (Go ahead, try it with any game - Steam will stop the game from running.)
Yes, DOS-era games work properly when bundled with Dosbox. Unfortunately there's not a similar solution for Win9x games.
The solution? Buy from gog.com. Good Old Games actually fixes the code to let the game run properly, and they're cheap.
On standby, sure. But start gaming (3-d games, anyway) on them and you'll get 3-5 *hours* of battery life. And no phone that I'm aware of can last 3-5 days on a single charge if you're making five or six hours of calls every day, not to mention if you're an avid texter like my sister.
My iPhone loses half its battery idling overnight, because I have push e-mail enabled. Until that situation is remedied - until I can have push e-mail enabled for 3-5 days without a recharge and still be able to make regular calls during those 3-5 days - phones will not be an ideal platform for gaming.
Note that I merely mean they won't be ideal, not that we shouldn't try:)
I won't argue with you on that point, as I think the law is a bad idea even if it is only what TFA states and nothing more, but TFA can't be used to prove that failure to *intervene* is being criminalized, as so many other posters have done, because TFA only mentions failure to *report* a witnessed crime.
Even if it is nothing more than that, it is a law with the potential to be grossly abused.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. I've had this situation with every version of XP I've ever installed from non-OEM CDs - plain, SP1, SP2, and SP3.
That's what I'd do, but my wife's using it now, and she is being very stubborn about moving to Linux. The biggest roadblock right now is Netflix.
You win 1 Internets for telling me that. :)
But if you had such a bad experience just trying to install Ubuntu, I can only suggest that something about your hardware was bleeding edge new,
FWIW, last time I installed Linux (around July of last year), the Gentoo minimal CD (nightly build) wouldn't even boot on my machine with an MSI X58 Platinum motherboard, but the then-latest Ubuntu LiveCD worked just fine. (So of course I used that to install Gentoo, which now runs perfectly.)
"Bleeding edge new" would have to be bleeding edge indeed for Ubuntu to not work... but if he's running a machine that bleeding edge, I don't know how he could expect XP to work any better than Ubuntu. XP has enough trouble with regular components as it is. (Who else loves hunting down NIC drivers to stick on a flash drive so you can get your fresh XP install online?)
Windows is just more forgiving with the hardware.
Uh... what?
I have a laptop that bluescreens with regularity under Windows. The error codes it gives me in the brief seconds before rebooting point to glitches in the hardware (sometimes the RAM, sometimes the video card, sometimes a generic error).
The same laptop runs Linux without issues.
I'd say Linux is more forgiving of hardware glitches - or rather, the Linux kernel doesn't panic at the first sign of a ripple in the pond, like Windows' does.
This is anecdotal evidence, YMMV, XYZPDQ, etc.
I don't know that I've ever had Windows recognize my network card on a fresh install from a non-OEM CD. Makes it hard to get an internet connection, let alone run Windows Update.
I've also never had Windows actually locate drivers on Windows Update when installing a new device (and I usually have it try, because I'm too lazy to actually dig out the driver CD if I don't have to).
The few times Windows Update does show me a device driver update during the course of normal Windows updates, the "updated" driver is rarely the same version as the latest one on the manufacturer's website (e.g. nVidia's graphics drivers).
In my experience, your description is much more accurate when applied to Ubuntu. (Perhaps not entirely accurate, but more accurate than with Windows.)
My point was, if you read the ToS, you'll probably find language permitting the ISP to block any content for essentially any reason - or even for no reason at all.
Unfortunately that's not the only clause in the ToS with that sort of vague language. I don't think it's a matter of "how did that get past legal", I think it's a matter of "legal made it that way". See, if it's vague, they can later argue in court that whatever they do abides by the ToS their customers agreed to (never mind that they can change the ToS at any time, and they would argue that customers are automatically bound by the new ToS).
Basically, their ideal situation would be "we can shut off service (or part of the service) for any customer at any time for any reason (or no reason at all)" and not have to worry about consequences.
I have serious issues with the practice (which is yet another reason I hate Comcast), but thus far I doubt anyone has really tried to challenge it in a legal setting.
It has a bunch of parenthetic phrases and a bucket's worth of commas, but as far as I can tell it's valid grammar...
- Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post
-- and to remove or block
- any information or materials
-- in whole or in part
- that it
-- in its sole discretion
- deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy
-- or otherwise harmful to Comcast's network or customers using the Service
- regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
If you read it with just the parts I've marked with a single dash, it makes perfect sense and you still get the main point:
Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post any information or materials that it deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
Comcast has simply added clarifying comments all over the place set off by commas in order to add more conditions under which it may refuse transmission of data over its network. It's not pretty, but as far as I can tell it's proper grammar. I welcome corrections.
It occurs to me that the final phrase could use an additional comma just before "so long as it violates this Policy", but I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, and even if it is necessary it's not surprising that it slipped past a legal team... adding it in doesn't change the meaning of the sentence.
Please note that my defense of the grammar of this clause of Comcast's ToS should not be construed as defense in any way of the actual terms of service.
Implicit in that is service to all internet hosts.
I bet if you read the terms of service - which you agreed to - you'll find that it doesn't support that assumption.
For example, from Comcast's terms of service:
Comcast reserves the right to refuse to transmit or post, and to remove or block, any information or materials, in whole or in part, that it, in its sole discretion, deems to be in violation of Sections I or II of this Policy, or otherwise harmful to Comcast's network or customers using the Service, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful so long as it violates this Policy.
It's praises are sung by the same group that think MySQL is the ultimate enterprise database.
Everyone knows the real ultimate enterprise database is Access.
You're right. However, I picked tv remote because of its low power usage. Can this method be used to transfer enough power to use a remote control, regardless of cost? If not, then obviously, powering a satellite won't work either.
That was my question :)
note "classical communication" (i.e. a telephone call from one place to another) to tell the recipient what to do to extract the energy is needed.
Yeah, but that doesn't make it useless. For example, imagine your television came with an entangled remote control, and it communciates the necessary information "classically" with one of any available low-power wireless transmission methods. The remote can then use whatever power it needs through its "entanglement battery". There you go, a remote control that never needs new batteries.
I'm just extrapolating, assuming that you actually can "teleport" useful amounts of energy wirelessly through this process, so I have no idea whether it would actually work, but the need to communicate information through classical channels does not mean the whole concept is worthless.
So if I have the sending station at point A, and the receiving station at point B, and I want to transmit power, all I need to do is send point A's measurement to the people at point B so they know how to measure it to get the power out at their end. Is that right?
My question would be, is the energy required to do this more than what you'd lose just sending the power over the same distance using more traditional methods (e.g. power lines)? I'm assuming measuring, capturing, and converting the energy into some usable form at point B is a process which itself requires some energy...
Could this be used to transfer useful amounts of energy, to e.g. power a television's remote control without ever needing batteries?
Particularly, since as you pointed out, since ethyl mercury is expelled from the body pretty quickly compared to methyl mercury which tends to accumulate.
The quickly-expelled one is the one found in the influenza vaccine.
The one that accumulates is the one found in breast milk.
What, exactly, was your point?
Given the doubts and some conflicting data, it's safer to be conservative.
That's exactly what they did 9 years ago ;) And as the CDC's website says, there has been no measurable decrease in autism rates since the use of thimerasol was discontinued. That would indicate that thimerasol does not cause autism.
Whether it has other unrelated side effects in some tiny percentage of the population isn't really relevant to the autism/vaccine debate... you can always find someone allergic to something.
But the large volume of anecdotal evidence should be enough to get the vaccine manufacturers to consider stopping the use of thimerasol as the preservative.
According to the CDC, "Since 2001, no new vaccine licensed by FDA for use in children has contained thimerosal as a preservative, and all vaccines routinely recommended by CDC for children under six years of age have been thimerosal-free, or contain only trace amounts, except for multi-dose formulations of influenza vaccine."
And even better, from later down on that page:
"Unfortunately, we have not seen reductions in the numbers of children identified with autism indicating that the cause of autism is not related to a single exposure such as thimerosal."
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."
And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."
Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?
And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.
It's quite likely that some small percentage of people are unusually sensitive to mercury, and a large dose can trigger autism in them.
What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only .025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.
And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.
So much for your point ;)
It only takes one person with a side effect LINKED to the MMR vaccine to prove that they're all potentially dangerous.
Well, the trouble here is, how do you prove that the MMR vaccine "caused" or even influenced the development of autism? Thus far, scientists have been unable to show any causative factor, and the only "evidence" anyone really has is anecdotal. That's not to say we should simply dismiss anecdotal evidence, it's just to say that anecdotal evidence by itself isn't enough, and until we have more than that we shouldn't make decisions based on it.
Has anyone considered that maybe the age we start vaccinating and the age some kids start to develop autism are the same, so there are bound to be cases where the two happen close together? It would be interesting to see statistics comparing average age (in days or weeks) when autism begins to develop with average age when various vaccines are received in various demographic groups.
There are also other things to consider. To those who advocate banning vaccines in an attempt to lower the rate of people developing autism, have you considered whether the rate of autism development might be much lower than the death rate from the diseases against which we vaccinate? Is it really worth allowing X children to die of $DISEASE in order to spare Y children from autism, if X is much larger than Y?
I don't know if X > Y, but I rarely see anyone bring up the idea at all in discussions on this topic.
There's no emulation layer for Win9x games. The only way to run them *almost* properly, without fixing the code, is to run the game in Win9x compatibility mode - something that Steam explicitly prevents you from doing. (Go ahead, try it with any game - Steam will stop the game from running.)
Yes, DOS-era games work properly when bundled with Dosbox. Unfortunately there's not a similar solution for Win9x games.
The solution? Buy from gog.com. Good Old Games actually fixes the code to let the game run properly, and they're cheap.
Phones work perfectly fine for 3-5 days battery
On standby, sure. But start gaming (3-d games, anyway) on them and you'll get 3-5 *hours* of battery life. And no phone that I'm aware of can last 3-5 days on a single charge if you're making five or six hours of calls every day, not to mention if you're an avid texter like my sister.
My iPhone loses half its battery idling overnight, because I have push e-mail enabled. Until that situation is remedied - until I can have push e-mail enabled for 3-5 days without a recharge and still be able to make regular calls during those 3-5 days - phones will not be an ideal platform for gaming.
Note that I merely mean they won't be ideal, not that we shouldn't try :)
If such a planet was found, I'd consider it proof of god.
Tonight, on CNN: Disparate religions have suddenly voiced a unanimous desire to fund space exploration.
I won't argue with you on that point, as I think the law is a bad idea even if it is only what TFA states and nothing more, but TFA can't be used to prove that failure to *intervene* is being criminalized, as so many other posters have done, because TFA only mentions failure to *report* a witnessed crime.
Even if it is nothing more than that, it is a law with the potential to be grossly abused.
It's intent is
Wow. I meant either "Its intent is" or "It is intended".
Either not enough caffeine or too much...
Its intent is obviously to criminalize witnesses who do not intervene... and a poorly-thought-out law it is.
No, not at all. It's intent is to criminalize failure to report crimes you witness, not failure to intervene in crimes you witness.
There's a very large difference.
(My intent is not to defend the proposed law, only to correct your misinformation.)
That's only half the picture. Maximizing windows only filling one physical monitor is easy - that's what Xinerama does.
The hard part is making each physical monitor end up with its own independent set of virtual desktops.
Compiz is just displaying the existing multiple workspace concept in a different way. It's still not moving windows between X screens.