Wow, it's like you've not paid any attention to the last twenty years. Way to keep up.
AIDS being common in the gay community has more to do with a particular subset of gay culture of the time, where communal bathhouses were a common meeting place for gays in places like San Francisco. Most gay men didn't frequent them anyway, and you don't see those any more specifically because of the AIDS problem. Today the vast majority of AIDS patients are heterosexuals.
Where do you get the idea there wasn't marriage in the bible?
There wasn't _legal_ marriage in the bible like we have today (unless you count the tax registration required by the romans), but it was most certainly there. The semitic cultures all had their various dowry and inheritance laws. Actual wedding ceremonies aren't laid down in the bible, but I've always assumed that's because it's unnecessary; everyone knew marriage rituals, since weddings were a major social event.
People who didn't own property were not barred from becoming landownders; it was hard, but not impossible, for the poor to rise to the level of the rich. This is unlike the feudal system, where the landowners were the nobility and one could not rise to their level without special appointment from the king.
The rules about landowners were put in there because the founding fathers felt the average American wouldn't understand politics and voting would be meaningless. At the time, most Americans read at what today would be a third grade level, if at all, and communication between the colonies was slow and error-prone. It was assumed the landowner class would be better informed and able to make proper judgments when voting.
The landowning requirements were removed once it was realized that by only allowing the rich to vote, the laws would be bent to only helping the rich at the expense of the poor. We still suffer from the problem of uninformed voting.
I wondered why every time an officer wanted to make an announcement he'd send a powerpoint presentation via email.
I started to ignore them eventually. Do you really need a powerpoint presentation embedded in email to say "Our football team is playing against 18MSS today at 5, come support our team"?
Powerpoint has a purpose and is useful, but for some reason USAF officers go overboard with it.
The difference here being that I have more pentium III boxes than I need, whereas I have no sheevas. It sounds interesting though.
My other option, if I can ever find my sbus cards, is to use a sparcstation 10 for the firewall. I'd prefer that route - it's dead simple to netboot openbsd on a sparc - but most of my old hardware is unorganized and piled in a spare bedroom and for the life of me I can't find any spare nics.
The effect of the sun on tides is small, but it's there. It's not because the energy is coming from the sun, however - tidal energy (as far as earth-sun tides) comes mostly from the earth's rotation. Using that energy slows the rotation of the earth, although the effect is so small as to not really be measurable.
Most tidal energy comes from the interaction of the earth and the moon, although still there it's mostly from the earth's rotation.
Tidal energy isn't technically renewable, but then again neither is solar in the long term. If we used all the tidal energy, the earth would rotate at the same rate as the moon's revolution (the earth would slow down and the moon would speed up, I'm sure someone can work out the details of exactly how fast that would be). That's the breaks for living in a universe with entropy - eventually, all the energy runs out.
Debian used to work well on older systems, but I wouldn't say that these days. Two years ago, Debian on a Pentium 75 was usable with a minimal install, and would fit on a 400MB hard drive. Those days are long gone. I'm about to replace my two Pentium systems with Pentium III, which rankles my sensibilities since I see that as major overkill for a simple firewall and a DNS/DHCP/IRC server.
OpenBSD might be a better choice, actually. It runs on minimal systems and uses very little disk space, so he would be able to only add the stuff he wanted.
If he had unlimited time to work on it, Linux from Scratch would work well, but unless he cross compiled it on a modern machine it would take forever to actually assemble.
It's been my observation as a non-trucker that the majority of truckers treat the rest of us like shit. Where I live, they camp the passing lanes WAY more than could be justified by stupidity or desperation -- we're well into "malice" territory now. They also love to take their sweet time on freeway entrance ramps. I know they're accelerating a greater mass, but I know they can clear 35 mph more easily than they're letting on. In my experience, the days of courteous, professional truck drivers ended years ago. Today I look in the cab and see mostly young don't-care types.
Going up a ramp, I can go from 0-35 in about thirty seconds to a minute fully loaded. Yeah, I've got a big engine, but my truck (with freight) weighs eighty thousand pounds.
But, of course, there's asshole truck drivers just like there's asshole car drivers. I try not to hold it against all car drivers (except Texans and Kansans) - maybe you should try doing the same?
The truckers' lobby also fights firmly against any infringement on their inalienable right not to pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads, or their right to use dirty engines.
We already pay extra taxes for the roads. You should see the taxes we pay - it's insane. Just fuel tax alone is crazy in some states - just think, how much do you pay per gallon of gas? What's your fuel economy? Mine's usually in the 5-6 mile per gallon range. Divide your fuel economy by mine and that's how many times more I'm paying than you in fuel tax. Then there's a ton of other taxes and fees piled on top of that. But like another poster said, in the end, you end up paying for it when you buy things.
And our right to use dirty engines? Tell me, what's the alternative? You hiding a solar powered engine under your bed with enough power to pull a fully loaded trailer up a mountain? Does it work at night? If so, then you'll be a billionaire because every trucking company in the world would buy them.
If you're just talking about older engines, then yes - the ATA and others lobby to defeat laws preventing us from driving older trucks. Trucking companies almost universally buy new trucks every two or three years, but smaller construction companies and heavy equipment companies don't. Pass those laws and they won't hurt Werner or Swift or even smaller carriers like the one I drive for - you'll be hurting Bob's Excavation and Tree Trimming in your own home town.
The US doesn't sign every bridge, unfortunately. It's either a state thing (which usually are placarded if they're shorter than 15' or so) or a local thing (which is mix and match).
Either way, when you're dealing with very high loads, even the taller bridges can be hazards - hence the escort car with the pole.
Maybe you need to learn basic geometry and reading comprehension.
Underpasses are often at a dip in the road - when you have a long vehicle, you won't have both front and rear tires in the dip at the same time. When the bus is halfway through the bridge, the distance between the dip and the bridge is irrelevant.
And no, they don't necessarily measure the bridge from the lowest point, or highest point, or any point. They measure it wherever they feel like measuring it that particular day. There's no standard. You can't trust the signs, period.
Actually, not every bridge posts its clearance. Pay attention sometime, you'll see quite a few that don't.
Add to the the fact that the signs are rarely accurate. Overpass says 13'9"? Better go slow - if they've put another layer of asphalt on since they put up the sign, it's probably more like 13'6", which is the height of a standard box trailer.
Where was the escort driver? You know, the guy driving the little crappy car with the pole strapped to its bumper? The guy that's supposed to be warning the trucker of low bridges? The guy the trucker has to trust implicitly in order to go down the road?
And while yes, trucker quality did go down somewhat a few years back when the big carriers started putting people through two week trucking schools, the reason we hang out in the passing lane is because of all the slow assholes in cars in the other lanes. They can accelerate from 55 to 65 in a couple seconds. It takes us up to a minute or so, depending on conditions. Get rid of the people who think 40mph is an appropriate freeway driving speed and we'll be more than happy to return to the righthand lane - all we want to do is maintain a constant speed.
I dunno, if it was played by the Romans during the Roman empire, that would have it being produced and used sometime before around 400AD or so. Bach lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I doubt if the instrument was as horrible as you say it would have lasted (at least) 1200 years, or that someone of Bach's status would have bothered writing a piece for it.
Other rare/disused musical instruments:
The lute - a very pretty sounding stringed instrument that almost no one plays anymore due to the popularity of the guitar.
The harp - extremely versatile instrument that also happens to be very expensive and difficult to learn
The mandola - you never see these outside folk (think celtic, not John Denver) music or the occasional bluegrass band
The banjo - this used to be the number one selling instrument in America. How many people do you know personally who can play one today?
Granted, the harp probably won't completely disappear for quite some time, but it was once considered a mainstream instrument whereas now it's an oddity. I doubt the banjo will be around for another century - fewer and fewer people listen to bluegrass music as time goes on (pity, but there ya go). The lute is pretty much already gone outside of ren faires and SCA events, and the mandola will probably share the same fate eventually.
It's got transactions, and has had for quite some time, depending which backend you use. Integrity validations can mean a lot of different things, but it's got quite a few of them, especially since 5.x. It also supports several different backends, not just the old table formats it did ten years ago.
None of these things are part of the definitions of an RDBMS anyway (except perhaps the table thing, but even that is splitting hairs) - they're just standard features most RDBMS's have. It does manage relational databases, and (to most of us) that makes it an RDBMS.
That's a great book, written by a fellow who worked with ARPANET development from the beginning. He starts out the book talking about attending a conference where his goal was to debunk the myth that the ARPANET was created for communication in the wake of a nuclear attack - he says that yes, packet switching was originally proposed for that purpose, but the ARPANET was a separate project and wasn't designed for that sort of fault tolerance.
If you're ever curious about how things worked at BBN, why the IMPs were created to survive bomb blasts, or why a lot of the decisions in the early history of the internet were made, this is the book for you.
Oracle is what you use if you have hundreds of millions of dollars, a team of DBAs, and your need for data storage is such that downtime is measured in thousands of dollars lost per minute.
MySQL is what you use if you've got ten employees (one of which knows a bit of PHP) and sell motorcycle parts over the internet and you don't feel like an ebay store would quite meet your need.
They're both great products (I assume, I'm not a DBA and haven't messed with oracle). They're both RDBMS's. They both run on just about any modern platform. They're not used for the same stuff.
a) you have tracks connecting the shipper and receiver
b) you are sending a lot of stuff regularly
It works well for bulk commodities, like oil, coal, etc. but doesn't work so well for the vast majority of freight out there. I deliver garage doors from a factory - my customers are mostly mom-and-pop garage door installers. I deliver to small businesses in towns, storage units, rural areas where the site is only accessible by dirt road, and even a chicken coop that someone uses as their shop. The factory is in Oklahoma, and its customers are everywhere in the country.
My dad mostly delivers Albertsons grocery. He doesn't go out as far as I do, but 800 miles is not uncommon. He has between four and fifteen stops on a run - all grocery stores, which generally aren't placed next to rail.
The company I work for mostly delivers flour to bakeries. It's bulk tank work. There are bakeries out there that do use enough flour to have it shipped by train, but the vast majority do not. You have to use a _lot_ of flour to make it worth the money.
Trucking's greatest advantage is that it goes to your location. It's like the last mile problem with telephony. Your freight would have to be loaded once onto a truck to go to a warehouse with rail access, unloaded there, loaded onto the train, then back off the train to the warehouse near the destination, then back onto another truck, then unloaded at the destination. I can pick up a load of doors in Oklahoma and deliver it in Atlanta in two days. How long would they have to wait if they shipped it via the method I outlined above? I'm not sure, but it would be considerably longer and a great deal more expensive.
There is an alternative - companies like Triple Crown attach train axles to their trailers and ship them by rail. There's several companies that send container units or even full size trailers on flatbed train cars. This stuff works for middle-range stuff, when you don't send enough to bring rail to your business (or your customers) but you send enough to warrant sending it on a train. This does solve the last mile problem, but it still won't get your freight to you the next day.
As far as subsidies go, the government subsidizes the railroads because they can't compete with trucking price-wise. Trucks get to ride the interstate, but they pay quite a bit in taxes (quite a large chunk more than noncommercial vehicles) for that privilege. If the government owned the tracks and maintained them, then charged the rail companies for access, things might even out, but as it stands now the subsidies are the only things keeping the railroads alive.
Freight rail is damn useful, don't get me wrong, but trucking won't be going away any time soon.
The problem with ferrying cars is that you can't fit nearly as many cars on the train as you can people (even less if you want the cars to be loaded and unloaded quickly). Rail is expensive, and even a train full of passengers requires subsidies to break even. Moving your car by train would cost more than renting a car at your destination.
What I could see is this working well with those little electric "commuter cars". You could get off the train, rent one of those for much less than a regular car rental, and use that to drive around around. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already available at car rentals near airports.
How about "Commissioner Gordon of the Internets"? Then vigilante justice on those spammer assholes would be only a phone call away. The Batcomputer could probably use an upgrade.
'Course, while fighting LOLCATwoman might be worthwhile, Batman's distrust of the Penguin might make him a bit biased...
That's my main complaint about California: they strong-arm too much stuff that is in the realm of personal choice or requires money that a lot of people just don't have.
I'm a smoker (practically a capital crime over there), my house is horribly out of date as far as insulation and whatnot, I have five computers that run constantly (I'm a hobbyist these days), my pickup truck has a blown head gasket that drags the gas mileage down like mad (yes, I'll get it fixed, I'm waiting on parts), I'm working on restoring a '65 Galaxie 500 (big block 352 V8), and I drive a 2005 Freightliner with no APU (wish I had one, but my company doesn't go for them for some reason).
If I lived in California, I'd be shot. Here, as long as I pay my taxes and don't go out committing major crimes, I can pretty much do as I like (Oklahoma, if anyone cares).
Wouldn't have been francium - that stuff's got such a short half life that no one has been able to study it. The total amount of francium on earth at any one time is measured in grams.
Pity, 'cause I'd love to see some dropped into a bathtub... through binoculars.
In Oklahoma (where I live) firing squad is option #3, used if both lethal injection (the method we currently use) and electrocution are both found unconstitutional.
It's similar in Idaho; A firing squad is used if lethal injection is "impractical". I'm not sure what that means, and I'm not curious enough to look it up.
In Utah, if you chose to be executed by firing squad before May 3rd, 2004, you can be executed that way - otherwise, it's lethal injection. Firing squad is the backup if lethal injection is found unconstitutional.
Personally, I'd rather get the firing squad than electrocution. Someone is bound to hit your heart, and you die pretty quickly. It's more humane than hanging (which is difficult to do - a hangman has to get it just right for it to be humane) which was legal in Delaware until 1986, can be requested in Washington, and is the backup to lethal injection in New Hampshire.
So really, Utah isn't that backward compared to several other states when it comes to the death penalty. It's a backup method, used only if lethal injection becomes infeasible. Their primary method of execution is usually considered more humane than electrocution, which is an option in a few states.
I feel that way about emacs; it does all kinds of stuff that sounds really interesting, but I could never make myself use it long enough to learn it. I don't like using the control key for everything. I'd hate to think of what it would be like on my laptop, since it has the Fn key where my pinky insists the CTRL key should be.
mc was never a priority for me; I had access to XTree Gold and DOSSHELL back in the day, and never cared for either of them. When I moved to UNIX, I didn't bother with it because after reteaching my fingers to type 'ls' instead of 'dir' and whatnot, I pretty much had all I needed.
vi and vim are a different story. Like you, I used to use pico (which, IIRC, is what nano is a clone of - it came with the pine email program) for editing. Then I had to work on a Solaris box and realized that I needed vi skills quick. I forced myself to use it and nowdays I can't imagine being without it.
My advice: vim is great and all, but it's not everywhere, so if you decide to learn it I'd suggest using nvi or elvis (or plain old vi if you have access to it) first. Once you have the basics down and learn the weird stuff, then switch to vim and take advantage of all the cool stuff. vim is much more forgiving than vi, and you can learn bad habits if you start out with it. There is a vi compatibility mode for vim, but I'm not sure how good it is. Also, try to use the key commands instead of special keys - i.e. h for 'left' instead of the left arrow. Those keys work the same in quite a few other programs as well, and work fine no matter what your terminal setup.
It shouldn't take more than about a week to get used to vi, but it will be a painful week. After that, you'll be much more productive with it than you'd ever be with nano. If you do a lot of editing, it's definitely worth it. After all, another cert might help you find another job, but learning vim (or emacs, if that's your thing) will help you be happier working that job.
I guess it could be best put that KDE includes a "shell". That word tends to mean different things in UNIX, but with respect to "Win 3.x is a shell" and "Explorer is a shell", KDE does include one.
KDE is a suite of related libraries and programs that work together, more like Windows 3.x than Explorer. A major difference is that you can use the "shell" if you want, or you use the programs and libraries without the shell.
KDE is not a window manager, although it does include one that you can use if you wish. Quite a few features of KDE run on the assumption that you are using said window manager, but if you just want to run a regular KDE program (like kwrite, for example) you don't need it. Note that while GNOME includes a window manager (metacity) it's a bit more agnotstic about the whole deal than KDE, although it requires the window manager support extended window manager hints. (This might have changed - I haven't used KDE regularly since the 1.x days, so it might be more lenient on the window manager front nowdays.)
In my case, I use very few KDE programs and quite a few GNOME ones, but I don't use any sort of panel or the default window manager from either. They all still work fine, although there are certain features and benefits that I miss out on.
Of course, the "doesn't piss me off constantly" feature I get from using FVWM more than makes up for those lost features:)
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Wow, it's like you've not paid any attention to the last twenty years. Way to keep up.
AIDS being common in the gay community has more to do with a particular subset of gay culture of the time, where communal bathhouses were a common meeting place for gays in places like San Francisco. Most gay men didn't frequent them anyway, and you don't see those any more specifically because of the AIDS problem. Today the vast majority of AIDS patients are heterosexuals.
Where do you get the idea there wasn't marriage in the bible?
There wasn't _legal_ marriage in the bible like we have today (unless you count the tax registration required by the romans), but it was most certainly there. The semitic cultures all had their various dowry and inheritance laws. Actual wedding ceremonies aren't laid down in the bible, but I've always assumed that's because it's unnecessary; everyone knew marriage rituals, since weddings were a major social event.
A few specific cases:
Jacob, Leah, and Rachel
Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines
The wedding at Cana
People who didn't own property were not barred from becoming landownders; it was hard, but not impossible, for the poor to rise to the level of the rich. This is unlike the feudal system, where the landowners were the nobility and one could not rise to their level without special appointment from the king.
The rules about landowners were put in there because the founding fathers felt the average American wouldn't understand politics and voting would be meaningless. At the time, most Americans read at what today would be a third grade level, if at all, and communication between the colonies was slow and error-prone. It was assumed the landowner class would be better informed and able to make proper judgments when voting.
The landowning requirements were removed once it was realized that by only allowing the rich to vote, the laws would be bent to only helping the rich at the expense of the poor. We still suffer from the problem of uninformed voting.
I wondered why every time an officer wanted to make an announcement he'd send a powerpoint presentation via email.
I started to ignore them eventually. Do you really need a powerpoint presentation embedded in email to say "Our football team is playing against 18MSS today at 5, come support our team"?
Powerpoint has a purpose and is useful, but for some reason USAF officers go overboard with it.
If children never stick their fingers in a plug and get shocked, how will they learn to respect electricity?
It sure worked for me, when I was kid. 110 volts won't (in the vast majority of cases) harm you, but it gets your attention.
The difference here being that I have more pentium III boxes than I need, whereas I have no sheevas. It sounds interesting though.
My other option, if I can ever find my sbus cards, is to use a sparcstation 10 for the firewall. I'd prefer that route - it's dead simple to netboot openbsd on a sparc - but most of my old hardware is unorganized and piled in a spare bedroom and for the life of me I can't find any spare nics.
The effect of the sun on tides is small, but it's there. It's not because the energy is coming from the sun, however - tidal energy (as far as earth-sun tides) comes mostly from the earth's rotation. Using that energy slows the rotation of the earth, although the effect is so small as to not really be measurable.
Most tidal energy comes from the interaction of the earth and the moon, although still there it's mostly from the earth's rotation.
Tidal energy isn't technically renewable, but then again neither is solar in the long term. If we used all the tidal energy, the earth would rotate at the same rate as the moon's revolution (the earth would slow down and the moon would speed up, I'm sure someone can work out the details of exactly how fast that would be). That's the breaks for living in a universe with entropy - eventually, all the energy runs out.
Debian used to work well on older systems, but I wouldn't say that these days. Two years ago, Debian on a Pentium 75 was usable with a minimal install, and would fit on a 400MB hard drive. Those days are long gone. I'm about to replace my two Pentium systems with Pentium III, which rankles my sensibilities since I see that as major overkill for a simple firewall and a DNS/DHCP/IRC server.
OpenBSD might be a better choice, actually. It runs on minimal systems and uses very little disk space, so he would be able to only add the stuff he wanted.
If he had unlimited time to work on it, Linux from Scratch would work well, but unless he cross compiled it on a modern machine it would take forever to actually assemble.
It's been my observation as a non-trucker that the majority of truckers treat the rest of us like shit. Where I live, they camp the passing lanes WAY more than could be justified by stupidity or desperation -- we're well into "malice" territory now. They also love to take their sweet time on freeway entrance ramps. I know they're accelerating a greater mass, but I know they can clear 35 mph more easily than they're letting on. In my experience, the days of courteous, professional truck drivers ended years ago. Today I look in the cab and see mostly young don't-care types.
Going up a ramp, I can go from 0-35 in about thirty seconds to a minute fully loaded. Yeah, I've got a big engine, but my truck (with freight) weighs eighty thousand pounds.
But, of course, there's asshole truck drivers just like there's asshole car drivers. I try not to hold it against all car drivers (except Texans and Kansans) - maybe you should try doing the same?
The truckers' lobby also fights firmly against any infringement on their inalienable right not to pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads, or their right to use dirty engines.
We already pay extra taxes for the roads. You should see the taxes we pay - it's insane. Just fuel tax alone is crazy in some states - just think, how much do you pay per gallon of gas? What's your fuel economy? Mine's usually in the 5-6 mile per gallon range. Divide your fuel economy by mine and that's how many times more I'm paying than you in fuel tax. Then there's a ton of other taxes and fees piled on top of that. But like another poster said, in the end, you end up paying for it when you buy things.
And our right to use dirty engines? Tell me, what's the alternative? You hiding a solar powered engine under your bed with enough power to pull a fully loaded trailer up a mountain? Does it work at night? If so, then you'll be a billionaire because every trucking company in the world would buy them.
If you're just talking about older engines, then yes - the ATA and others lobby to defeat laws preventing us from driving older trucks. Trucking companies almost universally buy new trucks every two or three years, but smaller construction companies and heavy equipment companies don't. Pass those laws and they won't hurt Werner or Swift or even smaller carriers like the one I drive for - you'll be hurting Bob's Excavation and Tree Trimming in your own home town.
The US doesn't sign every bridge, unfortunately. It's either a state thing (which usually are placarded if they're shorter than 15' or so) or a local thing (which is mix and match).
Either way, when you're dealing with very high loads, even the taller bridges can be hazards - hence the escort car with the pole.
Maybe you need to learn basic geometry and reading comprehension.
Underpasses are often at a dip in the road - when you have a long vehicle, you won't have both front and rear tires in the dip at the same time. When the bus is halfway through the bridge, the distance between the dip and the bridge is irrelevant.
And no, they don't necessarily measure the bridge from the lowest point, or highest point, or any point. They measure it wherever they feel like measuring it that particular day. There's no standard. You can't trust the signs, period.
Actually, not every bridge posts its clearance. Pay attention sometime, you'll see quite a few that don't.
Add to the the fact that the signs are rarely accurate. Overpass says 13'9"? Better go slow - if they've put another layer of asphalt on since they put up the sign, it's probably more like 13'6", which is the height of a standard box trailer.
Where was the escort driver? You know, the guy driving the little crappy car with the pole strapped to its bumper? The guy that's supposed to be warning the trucker of low bridges? The guy the trucker has to trust implicitly in order to go down the road?
And while yes, trucker quality did go down somewhat a few years back when the big carriers started putting people through two week trucking schools, the reason we hang out in the passing lane is because of all the slow assholes in cars in the other lanes. They can accelerate from 55 to 65 in a couple seconds. It takes us up to a minute or so, depending on conditions. Get rid of the people who think 40mph is an appropriate freeway driving speed and we'll be more than happy to return to the righthand lane - all we want to do is maintain a constant speed.
I dunno, if it was played by the Romans during the Roman empire, that would have it being produced and used sometime before around 400AD or so. Bach lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I doubt if the instrument was as horrible as you say it would have lasted (at least) 1200 years, or that someone of Bach's status would have bothered writing a piece for it.
Other rare/disused musical instruments:
The lute - a very pretty sounding stringed instrument that almost no one plays anymore due to the popularity of the guitar.
The harp - extremely versatile instrument that also happens to be very expensive and difficult to learn
The mandola - you never see these outside folk (think celtic, not John Denver) music or the occasional bluegrass band
The banjo - this used to be the number one selling instrument in America. How many people do you know personally who can play one today?
Granted, the harp probably won't completely disappear for quite some time, but it was once considered a mainstream instrument whereas now it's an oddity. I doubt the banjo will be around for another century - fewer and fewer people listen to bluegrass music as time goes on (pity, but there ya go). The lute is pretty much already gone outside of ren faires and SCA events, and the mandola will probably share the same fate eventually.
Looked at it since the 3.x days?
It's got transactions, and has had for quite some time, depending which backend you use. Integrity validations can mean a lot of different things, but it's got quite a few of them, especially since 5.x. It also supports several different backends, not just the old table formats it did ten years ago.
None of these things are part of the definitions of an RDBMS anyway (except perhaps the table thing, but even that is splitting hairs) - they're just standard features most RDBMS's have. It does manage relational databases, and (to most of us) that makes it an RDBMS.
Seconded.
That's a great book, written by a fellow who worked with ARPANET development from the beginning. He starts out the book talking about attending a conference where his goal was to debunk the myth that the ARPANET was created for communication in the wake of a nuclear attack - he says that yes, packet switching was originally proposed for that purpose, but the ARPANET was a separate project and wasn't designed for that sort of fault tolerance.
If you're ever curious about how things worked at BBN, why the IMPs were created to survive bomb blasts, or why a lot of the decisions in the early history of the internet were made, this is the book for you.
Freightliners and Vespas are both vehicles.
Oracle is what you use if you have hundreds of millions of dollars, a team of DBAs, and your need for data storage is such that downtime is measured in thousands of dollars lost per minute.
MySQL is what you use if you've got ten employees (one of which knows a bit of PHP) and sell motorcycle parts over the internet and you don't feel like an ebay store would quite meet your need.
They're both great products (I assume, I'm not a DBA and haven't messed with oracle). They're both RDBMS's. They both run on just about any modern platform. They're not used for the same stuff.
Freight rail is great if:
a) you have tracks connecting the shipper and receiver
b) you are sending a lot of stuff regularly
It works well for bulk commodities, like oil, coal, etc. but doesn't work so well for the vast majority of freight out there. I deliver garage doors from a factory - my customers are mostly mom-and-pop garage door installers. I deliver to small businesses in towns, storage units, rural areas where the site is only accessible by dirt road, and even a chicken coop that someone uses as their shop. The factory is in Oklahoma, and its customers are everywhere in the country.
My dad mostly delivers Albertsons grocery. He doesn't go out as far as I do, but 800 miles is not uncommon. He has between four and fifteen stops on a run - all grocery stores, which generally aren't placed next to rail.
The company I work for mostly delivers flour to bakeries. It's bulk tank work. There are bakeries out there that do use enough flour to have it shipped by train, but the vast majority do not. You have to use a _lot_ of flour to make it worth the money.
Trucking's greatest advantage is that it goes to your location. It's like the last mile problem with telephony. Your freight would have to be loaded once onto a truck to go to a warehouse with rail access, unloaded there, loaded onto the train, then back off the train to the warehouse near the destination, then back onto another truck, then unloaded at the destination. I can pick up a load of doors in Oklahoma and deliver it in Atlanta in two days. How long would they have to wait if they shipped it via the method I outlined above? I'm not sure, but it would be considerably longer and a great deal more expensive.
There is an alternative - companies like Triple Crown attach train axles to their trailers and ship them by rail. There's several companies that send container units or even full size trailers on flatbed train cars. This stuff works for middle-range stuff, when you don't send enough to bring rail to your business (or your customers) but you send enough to warrant sending it on a train. This does solve the last mile problem, but it still won't get your freight to you the next day.
As far as subsidies go, the government subsidizes the railroads because they can't compete with trucking price-wise. Trucks get to ride the interstate, but they pay quite a bit in taxes (quite a large chunk more than noncommercial vehicles) for that privilege. If the government owned the tracks and maintained them, then charged the rail companies for access, things might even out, but as it stands now the subsidies are the only things keeping the railroads alive.
Freight rail is damn useful, don't get me wrong, but trucking won't be going away any time soon.
The problem with ferrying cars is that you can't fit nearly as many cars on the train as you can people (even less if you want the cars to be loaded and unloaded quickly). Rail is expensive, and even a train full of passengers requires subsidies to break even. Moving your car by train would cost more than renting a car at your destination.
What I could see is this working well with those little electric "commuter cars". You could get off the train, rent one of those for much less than a regular car rental, and use that to drive around around. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already available at car rentals near airports.
As a citizen of Oklahoma I strongly support this plan.
How about "Commissioner Gordon of the Internets"? Then vigilante justice on those spammer assholes would be only a phone call away. The Batcomputer could probably use an upgrade.
'Course, while fighting LOLCATwoman might be worthwhile, Batman's distrust of the Penguin might make him a bit biased...
That's my main complaint about California: they strong-arm too much stuff that is in the realm of personal choice or requires money that a lot of people just don't have.
I'm a smoker (practically a capital crime over there), my house is horribly out of date as far as insulation and whatnot, I have five computers that run constantly (I'm a hobbyist these days), my pickup truck has a blown head gasket that drags the gas mileage down like mad (yes, I'll get it fixed, I'm waiting on parts), I'm working on restoring a '65 Galaxie 500 (big block 352 V8), and I drive a 2005 Freightliner with no APU (wish I had one, but my company doesn't go for them for some reason).
If I lived in California, I'd be shot. Here, as long as I pay my taxes and don't go out committing major crimes, I can pretty much do as I like (Oklahoma, if anyone cares).
Wouldn't have been francium - that stuff's got such a short half life that no one has been able to study it. The total amount of francium on earth at any one time is measured in grams.
Pity, 'cause I'd love to see some dropped into a bathtub... through binoculars.
In Oklahoma (where I live) firing squad is option #3, used if both lethal injection (the method we currently use) and electrocution are both found unconstitutional.
It's similar in Idaho; A firing squad is used if lethal injection is "impractical". I'm not sure what that means, and I'm not curious enough to look it up.
In Utah, if you chose to be executed by firing squad before May 3rd, 2004, you can be executed that way - otherwise, it's lethal injection. Firing squad is the backup if lethal injection is found unconstitutional.
Personally, I'd rather get the firing squad than electrocution. Someone is bound to hit your heart, and you die pretty quickly. It's more humane than hanging (which is difficult to do - a hangman has to get it just right for it to be humane) which was legal in Delaware until 1986, can be requested in Washington, and is the backup to lethal injection in New Hampshire.
So really, Utah isn't that backward compared to several other states when it comes to the death penalty. It's a backup method, used only if lethal injection becomes infeasible. Their primary method of execution is usually considered more humane than electrocution, which is an option in a few states.
(data from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/methods-execution)
I feel that way about emacs; it does all kinds of stuff that sounds really interesting, but I could never make myself use it long enough to learn it. I don't like using the control key for everything. I'd hate to think of what it would be like on my laptop, since it has the Fn key where my pinky insists the CTRL key should be.
mc was never a priority for me; I had access to XTree Gold and DOSSHELL back in the day, and never cared for either of them. When I moved to UNIX, I didn't bother with it because after reteaching my fingers to type 'ls' instead of 'dir' and whatnot, I pretty much had all I needed.
vi and vim are a different story. Like you, I used to use pico (which, IIRC, is what nano is a clone of - it came with the pine email program) for editing. Then I had to work on a Solaris box and realized that I needed vi skills quick. I forced myself to use it and nowdays I can't imagine being without it.
My advice: vim is great and all, but it's not everywhere, so if you decide to learn it I'd suggest using nvi or elvis (or plain old vi if you have access to it) first. Once you have the basics down and learn the weird stuff, then switch to vim and take advantage of all the cool stuff. vim is much more forgiving than vi, and you can learn bad habits if you start out with it. There is a vi compatibility mode for vim, but I'm not sure how good it is. Also, try to use the key commands instead of special keys - i.e. h for 'left' instead of the left arrow. Those keys work the same in quite a few other programs as well, and work fine no matter what your terminal setup.
It shouldn't take more than about a week to get used to vi, but it will be a painful week. After that, you'll be much more productive with it than you'd ever be with nano. If you do a lot of editing, it's definitely worth it. After all, another cert might help you find another job, but learning vim (or emacs, if that's your thing) will help you be happier working that job.
I guess it could be best put that KDE includes a "shell". That word tends to mean different things in UNIX, but with respect to "Win 3.x is a shell" and "Explorer is a shell", KDE does include one.
KDE is a suite of related libraries and programs that work together, more like Windows 3.x than Explorer. A major difference is that you can use the "shell" if you want, or you use the programs and libraries without the shell.
KDE is not a window manager, although it does include one that you can use if you wish. Quite a few features of KDE run on the assumption that you are using said window manager, but if you just want to run a regular KDE program (like kwrite, for example) you don't need it. Note that while GNOME includes a window manager (metacity) it's a bit more agnotstic about the whole deal than KDE, although it requires the window manager support extended window manager hints. (This might have changed - I haven't used KDE regularly since the 1.x days, so it might be more lenient on the window manager front nowdays.)
In my case, I use very few KDE programs and quite a few GNOME ones, but I don't use any sort of panel or the default window manager from either. They all still work fine, although there are certain features and benefits that I miss out on.
Of course, the "doesn't piss me off constantly" feature I get from using FVWM more than makes up for those lost features :)