The train has a lot of inertia. Those magnets would have to be insanely strong to keep the train in the center if there was a shift in the tunnel.
Even then, imagine going 4,000mph and then getting shifted say, four inches to the right all of a sudden. You'd have a hard time keeping your internal organs, well, internal.
The bulk of cargo doesn't need to be fast. That's why rail in the U.S. is generally not suitable for high speed - freight doesn't need it.
There's a few "expedited freight" companies out there in the trucking world (they generally run teams and don't stop much when they're on a run). Then you're got air freight like FedEX and UPS. There's little demand for faster service for cargo.
Other than the fuel tax, you pay all that reguardless of whether or not you're taking the train.
Police and Ambulance services aren't tied to highway funds (in most states, anyway). Highway maintenance is theoretically paid by fuel taxes, but in many cases they both feed into and out of a general fund. Trucking companies pay for a good chunk of the highway taxes, and you pay those any time you buy pretty much anything, since the cost rolls downhill to the consumer.
If you eliminated the highway system altogether and rode the train, then you'd be right. Without that, you're paying for the highways anyway.
Road congestion is a problem, sure, but you can factor that into your trip time estimates. I do, and I do it for a living.
The majority, if not all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. It makes sense for the time - Greek was the language of scholars.
The books of Moses (i.e. the first five of the Old Testament) were written in Hebrew, which requires more than just a font change to display. There are special libraries for dealing with it, since it's read right to left and has some funky indention rules (IIRC, I'm no expert).
I used to listen to some christian rock when I was a kid.
There was some good stuff out there. Whitecross had a couple albums I really liked - they fit into the glam rock scene that was popular before the grunge bus ran everyone over. Petra had some good stuff if you like keyboard-heavy REO Speedwagon type stuff. Mortification was a christian band, although I could never make out the lyrics - growling death metal wasn't my thing. A lot of people liked Stryper, but I never got into them. There was more, but it's been twenty years.
My parents bought me a DC Talk CD once, but since I wasn't into rap I can't really comment on the quality. Kinda Run-DMCish, IIRC, but I'm no expert.
There's a christian station in our town, and it plays "comtemporary christian" music. Easy listening type stuff, generally. I couldn't stand it then, and I can't stand it now.
I imagine there's still a market for christian rock groups, and if nothing's changed, there's probably some good stuff out there. It's a good niche for the right group. You probably won't find any Jimi Hendrixes or Randy Rhoads in there, but you might find a Joe Perry or a Kip Winger.
You don't know his situation. You don't know if he can afford it. You assume he can't because you're conditioned to think spending money on hobbies you don't understand is pointless. You assume he's the type to bitch about being broke because you're a douchebag.
Fixing up classic cars is a perfectly acceptable hobby. Tricking them out is a hardware hacker's project, and it makes perfect sense for him to ask about it on a website for geeks.
The pedal brake, dash-mounted hand brake, and floor lever brake I mentioned were all obviously not designed for emergency use. Yes, a skilled driver could use them for such, but they were not designed with this use in mind.
That makes them parking brakes. My original post was refuting someone who claimed that the brakes were invented for emergency use instead of for parking.
As an aside, as far as the air brake thing goes, yes, you can use the spring brakes. No, they won't automatically come on when your secondary air system fails - they're held back by the primary system. Your service brakes (what you get when you press the brake pedal) run off the secondary system.
What this means is that you have seconds until your brake pedal stops working. At 70mph, that's not nearly enough time to come to a complete stop. Fortunately, when it happened to me, I was on an open highway and was able to slow down and then use the jake brake to shift down to a slow enough speed (about 3mph) that the spring brakes could safely be used (they're on or off - there's no middle ground). It took between a quarter and half a mile to stop.
The jake brake doesn't have much braking power - it's meant to help you keep control while going down hills, not replace the service brakes. You can't put the truck into a gear it's not ready to go into (no syncronizer in the transmission), so using your gears to slow down isn't as effective as it would be in a car. It works (the jake brake helps), but it takes a long time. I'm not sure how controlled slippage in the clutch would work in a non-synchronized transmission - I've used the technique in cars and pickups though.
If your primary air system fails, you're just screwed. Your spring brakes engage and only your steering ability will save you from jackknifing and rolling your truck. Fortunately, this is extremely rare, and most drivers go their entire career without having it happen to them. I hope I turn out to be one of them.
The only thing that keeps the secondary brake locked in place is lack of driver skill. It can be modulated very easily if one is aware of its correct operation.
Well, let's see here. On my old '64 F250, you'd be right - the hand brake moves freely as long as the handle is turned 90 degrees. Too bad it's difficult to steer a non-power-steering vehicle with one hand while you lean forward and to the right to work the hand brake with the other.
On my '65 VW Kombi, the brake lever was designed to either be on or off. You could modulate it to some degree, but you were fighting it to do it - and you still have the problem of trying to steer a horizontal 24" steering wheel with one hand while leaning over to reach the brake lever.
On my '65 Galaxie and my 2000 Ranger, the hand brake is actually a foot brake, all the way over on the left. On both, you have to lean forward and hold a handle at the same time you work the foot pedal in order to keep it from locking. Both have power steering, but it's not exactly handy in case of emergency.
On my Hondas, my Toyota Sprinter, and (IIRC) my Nissan Bluebird, the brake was a handle in the middle with a push button. This actually could be used, and believe me, I used it a lot when I was young, reckless, and (unintentionally in the way of teenagers everywhere) tearing the crap out of my '82 Honda Accord. Yes, I developed the skill, and could do all kinds of neat tricks on corners and whatnot. You could not perform the same feats safely (relatively speaking) on any of the vehicles I mentioned in earlier paragraphs.
(Been there, done that. You should try it sometime. It's good to learn new things, especially when it comes to understanding how to most safely stop a vehicle in the face of mechanical failure.)
Yes, you should try learning new things, by perhaps driving some cars that don't have the parking brake in the middle. I've performed emergency stops with some, and it's dangerous.
You might also try performing an emergency stop with an air brake system when your secondary tank line bursts. I've done it, and believe me, stopping an 80,000lb vehicle with your air pressure gauge dropping like mad is something you'll never forget.
The hand brake was invented so you didn't have to chock your wheels when you parked. You couldn't leave your car in gear when you were crank-starting the engine (well, you could, but it would be stupid).
It also functioned as a second brake system in case of brake failure, but that wasn't its primary purpose. You can tell by the fact that it's meant to lock in place, which is dangerous for a moving vehicle. With the advent of automatic transmissions, some manufacturers started calling it an emergency brake and the name caught on among people who learned to drive around that time.
If you had been born about twenty years earlier, you'd probably call it the parking brake or the hand brake - unless you learned the term from your parents, in which case make that 40 years earlier.
Here's one. It was actually fairly popular back when I first started using Linux. Redhat defaulted to it at one point, I think (not sure on that - I've never taken to redhat).
Besides, who are we kidding? The GNOME launcher and the K button are essentially the same thing. XFCE on Debian has a button that does the same thing. Windows 95 might have been a horrible, broken piece of crap, but they got the start button right, and it's been copied all over the place.
Products do not appear magically on the shelves at stores. Scientific advances do not immediately turn into things you can buy. They have to go through a research and design phase, which is what DARPA promotes. There's an engineering and application phase that follows, which DARPA isn't generally involved in. After that, there's marketing and commercialization, which is completely out of the realm of DARPA.
In the case of self-driving cars, you probably won't be able to buy one for personal use on the highway for a long, long time. In the shorter term, you may be able to ride in an automated taxi at a resort. You might see automated trucks that follow a human-driven truck on the interstate. You might see cars that can park themselves. It'll likely be a long time before you can buy a personal automated car for use on the public streets.
Saying black holes invalidates maths that are applied to them is like saying the same thing about Mercury (the planet) in a Newtonian framework.
Black holes give us bad math when we fit them into our understanding of physics. This isn't because our math is bad, but because our model is incomplete.
I personally view math as a science because it's a tool used for science. There's nothing "sciency" about a vent hood or an Erlynmeyer flask, but you learn to use them in the pursuit of chemistry. Studying the system of math and how it works opens up understanding in the sciences.
But hey, it's just terminology. It doesn't make a difference what you call it, it's still just as necessary.
You'd punish the guy for coding and doing non-job related things on your watch (his question is about not breaking policy, so you don't have him there)? Why? If his assigned tasks are getting completed, and his job performance isn't suffering, then why would you fire an employee for trying to improve himself?
I know why. You're a lousy boss.
I've met people like you. I've worked (briefly) for people like you. I walk out - a bad boss is not worth any amount of money to me. On the other hand, I'll work three times as hard for a good boss. You're trading loyalty for paranoia and resentment, and the only benefit you get from it is the employee performing busywork just to maintain the false perception of "professionalism." You're treating your employees as machines instead of humans.
Performance and meeting job expectations is the only relevant factor in an employee's worth. Does the employee do the job acceptably and on time? Does he/she do so in a manner that benefits the department/company/unit? If yes, then leave him/her alone. If no, replace them. It's as simple as that. Any micromanaging will only cause trouble for both the company and the employee.
That's not the problem. Unix libraries are versioned using a standard system that's worked well for ages.
Updating libraries is rarely an issue because of the way Unix filesystems work - nothing on the disk is deleted until there are no references to it. This not only includes hard links (directory entries) but also open files (which is why Unix will happily let you delete an open file - you're just removing the hard link). There are a few services you should always restart when updating certain libraries, but very rarely will you gain any advantage by rebooting the system.
The problem with Firefox and GNOME is that they don't necessarily keep all files open that they might use. If you run an update to replace something GNOME or FF expects to be there, it throws up on you.
Fedora is in an awkward position in that they get the blame when this happens, but it's really not their fault. The GNOME and Firefox teams should fix it - it's a bug, after all. Fedora is using this as a workaround.
Debian's a lot more sensible about the whole thing - I dunno about GNOME (since I use FVWM), but as far as Firefox is concerned, you get a message that says you need to restart Firefox. Services that need restarted (ssh, apache, etc.) get restarted in the background. There's a prompt so it doesn't happen automatically unless you're running unattended updates.
Calling them assholes doesn't affect anything, one way or another.
Seriously, this is basically a tech forum. The people that make the decisions at AMD don't read it and wouldn't care if they heard that/. readers were bashing them. AMD is used to being bashed - they've been at war with Intel for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, the intelligent companies will support Linux when it makes financial sense to do so. Most hardware does not have the legal and technical hassles that video cards have, and companies can throw a bit of documentation at some kernel developers and forget about it. Video cards are going to continue to have issues with open source because it's a catch-22 for everyone involved. XBMC calling out AMD on not supporting features in their binary driver is the right thing to do - AMD very well might listen to them, whereas they certainly won't listen (or even notice) us.
It's not that we haven't grown up. We know we can bitch and moan on/. and AMD won't care. And what's the point of being in IT if you can't bitch and moan?
Video drivers on Linux (for hardware accelerated devices, anyway) have a kernel component and a driver for the X Window System (which isn't a window manager, it's the graphical system). Things like GNOME, KDE, etc. run on top of X and don't care what the underlying driver is, although of course certain features won't work well if you don't have accelerated hardware coupled with a driver that supports it.
OSX doesn't use the X Window System for its main GUI. It also isn't based on Linux (it's a highly customized BSD derivative). OSX drivers would be as useless as Windows drivers on a Linux system.
I've run just about everything else back in the day, and I've settled into FVWM.
People hate using my setup because I've customized the hell out of the controls, but I keep xfce around for them if they need it. I like being able to mouse around my 3x3 desktop setup without resorting to the pager - it's productive as hell for me. I like being able to type in windows that aren't raised.
My biggest issue is that no one seems to write standalone X apps anymore. For example, I don't have a battery meter on my laptop because the only ones I've seen out there are outdated (i.e. don't talk to the current sysfs acpi tree) or are plugins for a desktop environment that expect the desktop environment to be there. There used to be a ton of free gadget programs using Athena and Motif, but no one writes them anymore.
We wouldn't go in a Saturn V. What would be the point? It's obsolete. There were already a lot of changes planned for the second manufacturing run that was cancelled, and we've learned a thing or two about rocketry in the last forty years.
(Oh, and there's one on display at the Davidson Space Center in Huntsville, AL, including the electronic components and engines - check it out if you're ever in that area, because it's definitely worth it.)
The Saturn V was an awesome piece of engineering that has earned its place in the history of space exploration, but its day is done.
I drive highways and cross bridges that I helped pay for. I use public parks - I've got a four year old who loves the outdoors, and we've got a number of public recreation areas around that he just loves. I pay $25 a year to fish on public waters, and the state makes sure the lakes are stocked and the fish aren't diseased.
I've got a pickup truck that sits in my driveway all week while I'm away, and lo and behold, it's always there when I get home - no one steals it while I'm gone. I don't have to pay an armed guard to sit on it while I'm away from home. There's no one living in my house that's not supposed to be there.
I go to the store with absolute faith that I won't be buying poisoned food. I don't worry that my kid's toys will be painted with lead paint. I trust my water.
To me, that's real wealth, not some technical definition out of a first year economics textbook. The government creates it. They use my tax money to do so.
Now, am I forced to pay taxes? Sure. And you know, I really, really wish there was a third option besides "pay or get your wages garnished". I'm thinking something like a reservation - an area in New Mexico or something where people can go live without government. Inside the fence, you're on your own - what you have is what you can keep.
That third option isn't for me, by the way. It's so people who think they're better off without government can see what it's like. I think Locke described that sort of life best - nasty, brusish, and short.
Slashdot Mirror
The train has a lot of inertia. Those magnets would have to be insanely strong to keep the train in the center if there was a shift in the tunnel.
Even then, imagine going 4,000mph and then getting shifted say, four inches to the right all of a sudden. You'd have a hard time keeping your internal organs, well, internal.
The bulk of cargo doesn't need to be fast. That's why rail in the U.S. is generally not suitable for high speed - freight doesn't need it.
There's a few "expedited freight" companies out there in the trucking world (they generally run teams and don't stop much when they're on a run). Then you're got air freight like FedEX and UPS. There's little demand for faster service for cargo.
Their trains do not work.
Of course, I was in Okinawa, and it's not exactly rail central there.
Other than the fuel tax, you pay all that reguardless of whether or not you're taking the train.
Police and Ambulance services aren't tied to highway funds (in most states, anyway). Highway maintenance is theoretically paid by fuel taxes, but in many cases they both feed into and out of a general fund. Trucking companies pay for a good chunk of the highway taxes, and you pay those any time you buy pretty much anything, since the cost rolls downhill to the consumer.
If you eliminated the highway system altogether and rode the train, then you'd be right. Without that, you're paying for the highways anyway.
Road congestion is a problem, sure, but you can factor that into your trip time estimates. I do, and I do it for a living.
The majority, if not all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. It makes sense for the time - Greek was the language of scholars.
The books of Moses (i.e. the first five of the Old Testament) were written in Hebrew, which requires more than just a font change to display. There are special libraries for dealing with it, since it's read right to left and has some funky indention rules (IIRC, I'm no expert).
I used to listen to some christian rock when I was a kid.
There was some good stuff out there. Whitecross had a couple albums I really liked - they fit into the glam rock scene that was popular before the grunge bus ran everyone over. Petra had some good stuff if you like keyboard-heavy REO Speedwagon type stuff. Mortification was a christian band, although I could never make out the lyrics - growling death metal wasn't my thing. A lot of people liked Stryper, but I never got into them. There was more, but it's been twenty years.
My parents bought me a DC Talk CD once, but since I wasn't into rap I can't really comment on the quality. Kinda Run-DMCish, IIRC, but I'm no expert.
There's a christian station in our town, and it plays "comtemporary christian" music. Easy listening type stuff, generally. I couldn't stand it then, and I can't stand it now.
I imagine there's still a market for christian rock groups, and if nothing's changed, there's probably some good stuff out there. It's a good niche for the right group. You probably won't find any Jimi Hendrixes or Randy Rhoads in there, but you might find a Joe Perry or a Kip Winger.
You don't know his situation. You don't know if he can afford it. You assume he can't because you're conditioned to think spending money on hobbies you don't understand is pointless. You assume he's the type to bitch about being broke because you're a douchebag.
Fixing up classic cars is a perfectly acceptable hobby. Tricking them out is a hardware hacker's project, and it makes perfect sense for him to ask about it on a website for geeks.
My main point is that it's still applicable to emergency situations, even if it's not designed for that.
Agreed. I've used it myself when I had to; usually in that old pickup, which was a total bitch.
You're missing the point of my post.
The pedal brake, dash-mounted hand brake, and floor lever brake I mentioned were all obviously not designed for emergency use. Yes, a skilled driver could use them for such, but they were not designed with this use in mind.
That makes them parking brakes. My original post was refuting someone who claimed that the brakes were invented for emergency use instead of for parking.
As an aside, as far as the air brake thing goes, yes, you can use the spring brakes. No, they won't automatically come on when your secondary air system fails - they're held back by the primary system. Your service brakes (what you get when you press the brake pedal) run off the secondary system.
What this means is that you have seconds until your brake pedal stops working. At 70mph, that's not nearly enough time to come to a complete stop. Fortunately, when it happened to me, I was on an open highway and was able to slow down and then use the jake brake to shift down to a slow enough speed (about 3mph) that the spring brakes could safely be used (they're on or off - there's no middle ground). It took between a quarter and half a mile to stop.
The jake brake doesn't have much braking power - it's meant to help you keep control while going down hills, not replace the service brakes. You can't put the truck into a gear it's not ready to go into (no syncronizer in the transmission), so using your gears to slow down isn't as effective as it would be in a car. It works (the jake brake helps), but it takes a long time. I'm not sure how controlled slippage in the clutch would work in a non-synchronized transmission - I've used the technique in cars and pickups though.
If your primary air system fails, you're just screwed. Your spring brakes engage and only your steering ability will save you from jackknifing and rolling your truck. Fortunately, this is extremely rare, and most drivers go their entire career without having it happen to them. I hope I turn out to be one of them.
The only thing that keeps the secondary brake locked in place is lack of driver skill. It can be modulated very easily if one is aware of its correct operation.
Well, let's see here. On my old '64 F250, you'd be right - the hand brake moves freely as long as the handle is turned 90 degrees. Too bad it's difficult to steer a non-power-steering vehicle with one hand while you lean forward and to the right to work the hand brake with the other.
On my '65 VW Kombi, the brake lever was designed to either be on or off. You could modulate it to some degree, but you were fighting it to do it - and you still have the problem of trying to steer a horizontal 24" steering wheel with one hand while leaning over to reach the brake lever.
On my '65 Galaxie and my 2000 Ranger, the hand brake is actually a foot brake, all the way over on the left. On both, you have to lean forward and hold a handle at the same time you work the foot pedal in order to keep it from locking. Both have power steering, but it's not exactly handy in case of emergency.
On my Hondas, my Toyota Sprinter, and (IIRC) my Nissan Bluebird, the brake was a handle in the middle with a push button. This actually could be used, and believe me, I used it a lot when I was young, reckless, and (unintentionally in the way of teenagers everywhere) tearing the crap out of my '82 Honda Accord. Yes, I developed the skill, and could do all kinds of neat tricks on corners and whatnot. You could not perform the same feats safely (relatively speaking) on any of the vehicles I mentioned in earlier paragraphs.
(Been there, done that. You should try it sometime. It's good to learn new things, especially when it comes to understanding how to most safely stop a vehicle in the face of mechanical failure.)
Yes, you should try learning new things, by perhaps driving some cars that don't have the parking brake in the middle. I've performed emergency stops with some, and it's dangerous.
You might also try performing an emergency stop with an air brake system when your secondary tank line bursts. I've done it, and believe me, stopping an 80,000lb vehicle with your air pressure gauge dropping like mad is something you'll never forget.
Somehow I doubt that.
The hand brake was invented so you didn't have to chock your wheels when you parked. You couldn't leave your car in gear when you were crank-starting the engine (well, you could, but it would be stupid).
It also functioned as a second brake system in case of brake failure, but that wasn't its primary purpose. You can tell by the fact that it's meant to lock in place, which is dangerous for a moving vehicle. With the advent of automatic transmissions, some manufacturers started calling it an emergency brake and the name caught on among people who learned to drive around that time.
If you had been born about twenty years earlier, you'd probably call it the parking brake or the hand brake - unless you learned the term from your parents, in which case make that 40 years earlier.
Sure it does.
Here's one. It was actually fairly popular back when I first started using Linux. Redhat defaulted to it at one point, I think (not sure on that - I've never taken to redhat).
Besides, who are we kidding? The GNOME launcher and the K button are essentially the same thing. XFCE on Debian has a button that does the same thing. Windows 95 might have been a horrible, broken piece of crap, but they got the start button right, and it's been copied all over the place.
DARPA promotes research. That's what it's for.
Products do not appear magically on the shelves at stores. Scientific advances do not immediately turn into things you can buy. They have to go through a research and design phase, which is what DARPA promotes. There's an engineering and application phase that follows, which DARPA isn't generally involved in. After that, there's marketing and commercialization, which is completely out of the realm of DARPA.
In the case of self-driving cars, you probably won't be able to buy one for personal use on the highway for a long, long time. In the shorter term, you may be able to ride in an automated taxi at a resort. You might see automated trucks that follow a human-driven truck on the interstate. You might see cars that can park themselves. It'll likely be a long time before you can buy a personal automated car for use on the public streets.
Saying black holes invalidates maths that are applied to them is like saying the same thing about Mercury (the planet) in a Newtonian framework.
Black holes give us bad math when we fit them into our understanding of physics. This isn't because our math is bad, but because our model is incomplete.
I personally view math as a science because it's a tool used for science. There's nothing "sciency" about a vent hood or an Erlynmeyer flask, but you learn to use them in the pursuit of chemistry. Studying the system of math and how it works opens up understanding in the sciences.
But hey, it's just terminology. It doesn't make a difference what you call it, it's still just as necessary.
You'd punish the guy for coding and doing non-job related things on your watch (his question is about not breaking policy, so you don't have him there)? Why? If his assigned tasks are getting completed, and his job performance isn't suffering, then why would you fire an employee for trying to improve himself?
I know why. You're a lousy boss.
I've met people like you. I've worked (briefly) for people like you. I walk out - a bad boss is not worth any amount of money to me. On the other hand, I'll work three times as hard for a good boss. You're trading loyalty for paranoia and resentment, and the only benefit you get from it is the employee performing busywork just to maintain the false perception of "professionalism." You're treating your employees as machines instead of humans.
Performance and meeting job expectations is the only relevant factor in an employee's worth. Does the employee do the job acceptably and on time? Does he/she do so in a manner that benefits the department/company/unit? If yes, then leave him/her alone. If no, replace them. It's as simple as that. Any micromanaging will only cause trouble for both the company and the employee.
That's not the problem. Unix libraries are versioned using a standard system that's worked well for ages.
Updating libraries is rarely an issue because of the way Unix filesystems work - nothing on the disk is deleted until there are no references to it. This not only includes hard links (directory entries) but also open files (which is why Unix will happily let you delete an open file - you're just removing the hard link). There are a few services you should always restart when updating certain libraries, but very rarely will you gain any advantage by rebooting the system.
The problem with Firefox and GNOME is that they don't necessarily keep all files open that they might use. If you run an update to replace something GNOME or FF expects to be there, it throws up on you.
Fedora is in an awkward position in that they get the blame when this happens, but it's really not their fault. The GNOME and Firefox teams should fix it - it's a bug, after all. Fedora is using this as a workaround.
Debian's a lot more sensible about the whole thing - I dunno about GNOME (since I use FVWM), but as far as Firefox is concerned, you get a message that says you need to restart Firefox. Services that need restarted (ssh, apache, etc.) get restarted in the background. There's a prompt so it doesn't happen automatically unless you're running unattended updates.
KDE developers?
(Just kidding, just kidding, sheesh)
Calling them assholes doesn't affect anything, one way or another.
Seriously, this is basically a tech forum. The people that make the decisions at AMD don't read it and wouldn't care if they heard that /. readers were bashing them. AMD is used to being bashed - they've been at war with Intel for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, the intelligent companies will support Linux when it makes financial sense to do so. Most hardware does not have the legal and technical hassles that video cards have, and companies can throw a bit of documentation at some kernel developers and forget about it. Video cards are going to continue to have issues with open source because it's a catch-22 for everyone involved. XBMC calling out AMD on not supporting features in their binary driver is the right thing to do - AMD very well might listen to them, whereas they certainly won't listen (or even notice) us.
It's not that we haven't grown up. We know we can bitch and moan on /. and AMD won't care. And what's the point of being in IT if you can't bitch and moan?
Window managers have nothing to do with drivers.
Video drivers on Linux (for hardware accelerated devices, anyway) have a kernel component and a driver for the X Window System (which isn't a window manager, it's the graphical system). Things like GNOME, KDE, etc. run on top of X and don't care what the underlying driver is, although of course certain features won't work well if you don't have accelerated hardware coupled with a driver that supports it.
OSX doesn't use the X Window System for its main GUI. It also isn't based on Linux (it's a highly customized BSD derivative). OSX drivers would be as useless as Windows drivers on a Linux system.
Ah, thanks. I can never keep my victorian philosophers straight.
I've run just about everything else back in the day, and I've settled into FVWM.
People hate using my setup because I've customized the hell out of the controls, but I keep xfce around for them if they need it. I like being able to mouse around my 3x3 desktop setup without resorting to the pager - it's productive as hell for me. I like being able to type in windows that aren't raised.
My biggest issue is that no one seems to write standalone X apps anymore. For example, I don't have a battery meter on my laptop because the only ones I've seen out there are outdated (i.e. don't talk to the current sysfs acpi tree) or are plugins for a desktop environment that expect the desktop environment to be there. There used to be a ton of free gadget programs using Athena and Motif, but no one writes them anymore.
That's OK. They're into you.
We wouldn't go in a Saturn V. What would be the point? It's obsolete. There were already a lot of changes planned for the second manufacturing run that was cancelled, and we've learned a thing or two about rocketry in the last forty years.
(Oh, and there's one on display at the Davidson Space Center in Huntsville, AL, including the electronic components and engines - check it out if you're ever in that area, because it's definitely worth it.)
The Saturn V was an awesome piece of engineering that has earned its place in the history of space exploration, but its day is done.
What is your definition of wealth?
I drive highways and cross bridges that I helped pay for. I use public parks - I've got a four year old who loves the outdoors, and we've got a number of public recreation areas around that he just loves. I pay $25 a year to fish on public waters, and the state makes sure the lakes are stocked and the fish aren't diseased.
I've got a pickup truck that sits in my driveway all week while I'm away, and lo and behold, it's always there when I get home - no one steals it while I'm gone. I don't have to pay an armed guard to sit on it while I'm away from home. There's no one living in my house that's not supposed to be there.
I go to the store with absolute faith that I won't be buying poisoned food. I don't worry that my kid's toys will be painted with lead paint. I trust my water.
To me, that's real wealth, not some technical definition out of a first year economics textbook. The government creates it. They use my tax money to do so.
Now, am I forced to pay taxes? Sure. And you know, I really, really wish there was a third option besides "pay or get your wages garnished". I'm thinking something like a reservation - an area in New Mexico or something where people can go live without government. Inside the fence, you're on your own - what you have is what you can keep.
That third option isn't for me, by the way. It's so people who think they're better off without government can see what it's like. I think Locke described that sort of life best - nasty, brusish, and short.
Well, we could throw their photons in the sea by cutting the undersea cables. It would get their (and everyone else's) attention.
I'd imagine you'd get labelled a terrorist and shipped off somewhere nasty if you tried it, though.