Wish I had mod points. Well said. Truth matters. Accuracy matters. The law matters. I am horrified by the acceptance of anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, anti-fact liars as legitimate candidates for public office. It brings me near tears that so many Americans, including my own parents, have seemingly fallen for this ridiculous idea that poorly educated people are fit to lead. We don't want mediocre doctors to treat us, mediocre engineers to build our buildings and bridges and dams, mediocre pilots to fly our planes, but for running the country mediocrity isn't an immediate disqualification because so many voters are sloppy thinkers and there is an entire industry set up with a focused goal to confuse them.
Terrorists are not what scare me. They can't harm the country like politicians without critical thinking skills can.
No it isn't. It's childish. You are simply calling names, names that have nothing whatsoever to do with the disputed facts or so called "reprehensible behavior". That isn't debate, it isn't acceptable by anyone with manners, and the fact that you are apparently unable or unwilling to recognize the difference is indicative of immaturity of both thought and behavior.
The GPL definitely limits what you can do with your software, and you've outlined this at the end of your post.
No, it doesn't. You have misread the OP. You can do anything at all you want with it while it is in your possession. Alter, reverse engineer, run on 1000 or 1 machine. Burn it and dance naked around the fire.
There is no license involved with your possession or use of GPL software. There is no license to agree to when you install Linux. The GPL is not a use license.
You need explicit permission from the copyright holder due to federal copyright law to make COPIES of a copyrighted work, and the GPL grants permission with some restrictions applied. But what you do with your copy (singular) of the software is utterly unrestricted. This is an important distinction. In particular you are free to alter it and hoard your changes. (GPL3 does have some impact on this with respect to hosted services)
Employees should not be subject to known unsafe conditions that can be reasonably mitigated. Particularly conditions known to the employer that are not known to the uneducated employee. This is why companies buy safety glasses, hearing protection, vapor collection systems, spill kits, training, etc. Removing the smoke is one mitigation, providing fume protection could be another. Not mitigating is putting people at risk willfully, and even a rabid libertarian would agree hurting other people willfully should not be legal.
Emitting smoke into the atmosphere is polluting something you do not own. That is an infringement on others, and again harmful emissions are quite reasonably regulated.
Stinky decay is not hazardous (garbage collectors that deal with hazardous waste have protective gear so they are not exposed to it). Copy are taken care of if they got shot, and it is inherently a hazard of the job, along with car chases - which is where a lot more of them get injured. Furthermore, the people shooting cops are criminals. They still have protective gear supplied to mitigate the hazard, as do fireman. Your examples don't really relate. Employers can't kill their employees through negligence, even with a waiver, nor should they be able to. Arguing that private property rights somehow override this is silly.
Why are you so angry? Why such violent language? It's just a computer. Not worth calling people names over. Seriously.
You need to take (or retake) an economics class, your market analysis is incorrect. Perhaps your anger comes from your misunderstanding of fungibility and how supply, demand and price interact in a free market.
The world doesn't work like you think it should. Here's the key thing: you get to choose whether to buy things.
Apple wants too much for their iphone? Sony wants too much for their HD player? SO DON'T BUY IT. This is called "voting with your wallet". It's not something to be mad about, the money is worth more to you than the product, so you have the better deal for you.
Life's too short to get upset about prices of luxuries. These are all luxuries.
There are a lot of problems with your reasoning, and I'm not sure you do have a basic grasp of how evolution works. A mouse "generation" is about 4 months, (fertilization to reproduction) but we aren't talking about a mouse anyway, we're talking about something not a mouse that has descendants which evolved into a mouse and has descendants which evolved into an elephant.
You are making two completely bogus assumptions - the first is that because we have an observable mouse line the last 2000 years, therefore detectable changes take more than 2000 years. That conclusion simply isn't supported by the data. An ancestral mouse which has many modern mouse like characters may still have spun off descendants which don't and have become extinct, or have spun off descendants which don't and are currently considered distinct mouse species. Do you have any idea how many mouse species there are? (around 1100) Which one is closest to your 2000 year old sample? Detectable changes in a species can occur within only a few generations - examples are easy to find with google if you are genuinely seeking answers. Breeding experiments by the soviets over 50 years demonstrated that the silver fox could be domesticated in 9 generations, with significant character changes (google "Tame silver fox"). There isn't anything materially different between natural and artificial selection, just the selection mechanism (and absence of a goal in the case of natural selection). It's selection pressure that drives the rate of adaptation, not the mechanism of the pressure.
So that gets you back most of the 65million generations which you wanted to throw out and that should provide enough time.
Your second bogus assumption is due to misunderstanding of evolution: You can't pick two species and say one evolved from the other. All species are continuously evolving. The rates vary based on selection pressure. You can say they have a common descendant, and with some basic assumptions about mutation rates of DNA date approximately when that common descendant lived. The common descendant may have looked a lot more like one descendant than the other, but that's simply because it was well adapted for its environment and the similar modern descendants are continuing to live in that environment whereas the divergent ones are adapted (or adapting to) different conditions. There is a ton of evidence of modern speciation and evolution, look up "ring species" on google if you want some readily accessible info.
You make the assertion that evolution from a mouse into an elephant "can not happen gradually" and I'm puzzled by why you think that. It seems improbable to me that a mouse sized animal would give birth to an elephant sized animal, and then another mouse sized animal would be able to mate with it to produce a second elephant sized animal. It seems utterly obvious to me that it must have happened gradually, just due to uterus sizes and milk production capacity. Do you want to rethink that assertion?
So the answers to your questions are "Yes, there was enough time." and "Because some of us choose to cover our eyes, plug our ears and say 'Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon' when shown the evidence that surrounds us"
I really like the look of NexentaStor, which is OpenSolaris + ZFS (http://www.nexenta.com) It's got a few downsides for a roll-your-own solution (limited to 1TB for the free version, no turnkey hardware config)
I'd really like to see a productized low-power x86 system with battery backup and pluggable SATA trays in a small footprint running NexentaStor. I think it could be produced very cheaply and blow anything currently out there away from a usability perspective.
Microsoft could have settled back in 2000, before they were ever a convicted monopolist by agreeing to split the company into two or three parts. I think it was a combination of arrogance and blindness by Gates and the senior leadership.
They knew they could "beat" the DOJ, and this is the result. Completely flat stock price for 7+ years. Senior management distractions. Inability to compete in Internet properties, hamstrung eating their own dogfood.
In my opinion Microsoft + Microsoft Applications + Microsoft Services could have been much bigger and more profitable than it currently is as one entity, since the divisions would have been free to take their independent projects where their customers were best served, rather than what the Microsoft bundling dictated. They probably wouldn't have wasted billions on the Xbox foray either. Vista wouldn't be such a complete mess and wouldn't have taken so long to deliver.
I would suggest you take a long hard look at the recent outbreak of measles in San Diego, where the virus was imported via one vector (unvaccinated child) who traveled in europe, infected a bunch of unvaccinated kids in his school (which had a lot of parents that used the philosophical exemption waivers), who then put at risk many infants that could not be vaccinated because they were too young. Nobody vaccinated caught the disease. The unvaccinated kids all got sent home for a couple weeks so that they could only infect their own siblings. Fortunately I don't think any of the infected had any serious side effects.
Not intending as harassment, but your choices for your children don't just put them at risk, it puts other children at risk who cannot be vaccinated. If there weren't well-documented serious potential risks for these diseases, it wouldn't matter.
It boggles my mind that people don't trust their own doctor, don't trust the public health system, but do trust some guy the read about on the internet. You are also trusting that every other parent will choose to vaccinate, so that you can get away with not doing it. Seems like misplaced trust to me.
I have ranted a couple times that any AMD quad core purchases on my part will depend upon availability of open source drivers for the chipsets. AMD had been fairly open about their chipsets in the past, so I was hopeful they would make this decision when they purchased ATI, but it has been a long time coming. I think they may have been a bit overly focused on Vista. Now that it is apparent to everybody what the real rate of Vista adoption is, AMD/ATI is madly fishing for sales elsewhere.
I will be buying a quad core in the next 3 months. It won't be AMD if the ATI chipsets don't have open source drivers, like the competition has. It doesn't hurt to let them know if you feel similarly.
That's my position exactly - but I'm looking at the chipsets, not the video cards. I don't 3d game, so embedded video is perfectly adequate for me as long as I can get solid drivers for it. I'm in the market for a new quad core machine in the next couple months - I run AMD machines nearly exclusively now, but Intel is my top choice for the next system primarily based on the solid open source support for their on board video chipsets.
Funny, but also pretty much a dead end, since arguing that God is a liar is essentially a Satanist position and incompatible with Christianity. I do find it amusing that some biblical literalists prefer outright blatant heresy to accepting that the Genesis may in fact be a parable, given that seems to have been Jesus well documented preferred teaching method.
Why do you think they are so secure? Losses at ATM's are not generally publicly reported so we have no data on how secure they actually are. Pretty much like the voting machines.
The difference is that ATM's are auditable (unlike the voting machines) and fraudulent transactions can be reversed in favor of the customer. Banks don't break out those losses publicly except in unusual circumstances.
Yep, Dell is smart to be sourcing from both now. Any large company ought to spend at least 10% on the currently unfavored processor, since they save far more than 10% by having a competitor exist. Similarly, they ought to spend about 10% on the unfavored software component. Having a "Linux Desktop Development Team" and a "PostgreSQL implementation group" easily pays for itself come license renewal time, provided the competitor is plausible.
The lack of support from AMD for free software has made me switch to being an intel customer for my next build though. The price/performance of the alternatives isn't different enough to be compelling, but the lack of drivers for ATI chipsets and the good drivers for Intels chipsets make it a no brainer as to which is better. If you want to run Linux, want to try out linux, want to resell your machine to somebody who might want to use Linux - you're way better off with intel today. AMD could fix that easily, but they don't seem to be interested. Intel has a whole team of people churning out free source code for people who want to use their hardware - I'm going to support that with my wallet.
If you don't like it, sell it on ebay and get your money back. Better be quick too - They are still going for a premium but at some point that will change with all the wii owners being so disillusioned with their system. Then you can pick up a PS3 at discount and enjoy that HDTV resolution goodness while you watch all the great blueray movies and play whatever game it is that PS3 gamers like. Or pick up an XBox360 and watch HD-DVD movies and play whatever game it is that XBox360 gamers like.
What I don't understand is why you are complaining here about how you stupidly spent your money and trying to make it be that you were victimized by Nintendo marketing. Fix it and move on. At WORST you will be out about $10.
I would suggest that you take a hard look at what kind of lifestyle you are chasing before you get too deep into HDTV accessories, since being upset about a $250 purchase demonstrates a bit of a disconnect with your strategy.
The proper way to handle this issue is to send an email to your procurement people telling them that their preferred vendor is failing to provide the contracted service and you would like them to escalate it with their contacts and request a hold on future business with the vendor until they are performing per their contract. CC your dell salesrep if you know them. My 40000 person company would never put a hold on a contract on my say so, but the request always seems to get the desired result. Dell is one of the vendors I have used this tactic with successfully.
I don't understand why mods are marking this insightful, unless they aren't reading it...
>I would have voted for Bush over Kerry. >I'm of the mindset that you don't play sides against one another
So you see Bush/Rove strategy as not doing this? Where do you get your news from?
>I think that once your country is involved in the war, the only option you have is to win it, and win it quickly
But you prefer an administration who has incompetently engaged in war for longer than we fought WWII? That doesn't commit sufficient resources to actually winning quickly because (I assume) it might jeopardize tax breaks? I am furious that Bush can get away with making the claim that winning is important but not fund it like it matters. It is reprehensible that we are still using emergency appropriations of borrowed money to pay for war expenses. (The borrowing isn't the main problem, the lack of any realistic strategy to repay it is)
>Once the country entered the war, our choice was no longer to be in a war or not -- that choice was made and could not be revisited. Our choice was to win decisively and leave the country moderately stable, or leave Iraq in a state of chaos and civil war.
I'm not sure we have the choices you claim we do. What you list as a choice sounds like fantasy to me. We don't get to choose the outcome. We get to choose how much resources we invest.
>The time to question whether the war was a good idea is after the war is over.
I think you have this totally backwards. The right time for questioning was BEFORE the war is begun. The next good time to question is before the next casualty.
>They can't let a bad policy fail and be evaluated on its own terms, because their egos are too big not to make a scene.
It appears to me that the Bush administration is engaging in exactly this behavior (that you criticize IMO falsely in Kerry) with respect to the war.
>This is why the Dems in congress now will never vote to cut off funding for it, it's political suicide, because it's stupid. >I'd have more respect for someone who actually voted against the war, and to cut off funding for it,
You'd have more respect for someone who (in your view) committed stupid political suicide than didn't? That's... interesting.
I think you are way too focused on Kerry. He was a lousy candidate, but really the worst part of Bush's administration is his choice of incompetent, ideologically driven political hacks at every level in the government. This has caused the failures in Iraq, the inability to correct failed policies in Iraq, the poor performance after Katrina, the torture fiasco in Guantanamo and Abu Graib, and the ridiculous tempest-in-a-teapot in the Justice Department.
A president doesn't have to be smart or competent or likable or even all that moral. His job is primarily to appoint competent people to run the government, and to hold a strong vision for the country. In my opinion Bush largely succeeded in the latter, but failed on the former like no modern president ever has.
>...then does a complete 180 once in office >You can at least say Bush has convictions, as wrong as they may be.
You are talking about the same guy here right? I don't really think it is a fair criticism of Bush to fault his change of world view after 9-11. Not that I agree with either his before or after views, but the event was significant enough to change opinions without being subject to criticism for flip flopping.
In my view though, someone with wrong convictions can do far more harm than one who lacks convictions. After all, which group do terrorists come from? Bush's convictions are not based on facts, they are based on feelings. (I say that based on his reported lack of curiosity) That has proven to be incredibly dangerous in positions of power and for that alone he should never have been reelected. Far safer to have a curious president that switches positions to ones that appear correct as information amasses than an incurious one with wrong convictions, IMHO. I will never understand why people think intransigence is a good quality for a president.
This discovery doesn't refute anything. Sex has never been a requirement for diversification. That's just silly. Single celled organisms reproduce clonally, and there are millions of species. (they do utilize gene transfer, but that isn't the same as sexual reproduction)
Inheritable differences and selection are sufficient. Mutation is a fine source of inheritable differences. Sex allows greater rates of diversity and retention in the population of undesirable traits that are not dominant for longer, allowing them time to mutate into something useful or show up when environmental factors make them useful. Sexual reproduction is far and away the most common mode in multicellular organisms, probably because it helps the species be resilient to environmental changes. But it isn't required.
That pattern would be observed if the studies are accurately confirming a real effect, would it not?
That pattern would be observed if climate change dissenters were mostly a bunch of crackpots, undeserving of any funding due to their poor science, would it not?
There are other reasons than bias to have skewed funding after the fact.
The E521N configured identically to the E521 is $20 more without Windows, between the warranty difference and the "free" 320GB hard drive upgrade they hide the pricing differences.
You can configure a E521 cheaper, since the monitor isn't required and you don't have to buy a video card. Doesn't really seem like such a great deal to me when you compare apples with apples.
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The only thing is: It's the wealthy who give me my job.
Why do you think of your job as a gift from someone wealthy?
Aren't you earning you salary?
Wish I had mod points. Well said. Truth matters. Accuracy matters. The law matters. I am horrified by the acceptance of anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, anti-fact liars as legitimate candidates for public office. It brings me near tears that so many Americans, including my own parents, have seemingly fallen for this ridiculous idea that poorly educated people are fit to lead. We don't want mediocre doctors to treat us, mediocre engineers to build our buildings and bridges and dams, mediocre pilots to fly our planes, but for running the country mediocrity isn't an immediate disqualification because so many voters are sloppy thinkers and there is an entire industry set up with a focused goal to confuse them.
Terrorists are not what scare me. They can't harm the country like politicians without critical thinking skills can.
No it isn't. It's childish. You are simply calling names, names that have nothing whatsoever to do with the disputed facts or so called "reprehensible behavior". That isn't debate, it isn't acceptable by anyone with manners, and the fact that you are apparently unable or unwilling to recognize the difference is indicative of immaturity of both thought and behavior.
The GPL definitely limits what you can do with your software, and you've outlined this at the end of your post.
No, it doesn't. You have misread the OP. You can do anything at all you want with it while it is in your possession.
Alter, reverse engineer, run on 1000 or 1 machine. Burn it and dance naked around the fire.
There is no license involved with your possession or use of GPL software. There is no license to agree to when you install Linux. The GPL is not a use license.
You need explicit permission from the copyright holder due to federal copyright law to make COPIES of a copyrighted work, and the GPL grants permission with some restrictions applied. But what you do with your copy (singular) of the software is utterly unrestricted. This is an important distinction. In particular you are free to alter it and hoard your changes. (GPL3 does have some impact on this with respect to hosted services)
You've got two issues to fight -
Employees should not be subject to known unsafe conditions that can be reasonably mitigated. Particularly conditions known to the employer that are not known to the uneducated employee. This is why companies buy safety glasses, hearing protection, vapor collection systems, spill kits, training, etc. Removing the smoke is one mitigation, providing fume protection could be another.
Not mitigating is putting people at risk willfully, and even a rabid libertarian would agree hurting other people willfully should not be legal.
Emitting smoke into the atmosphere is polluting something you do not own. That is an infringement on others, and again harmful emissions are quite reasonably regulated.
Stinky decay is not hazardous (garbage collectors that deal with hazardous waste have protective gear so they are not exposed to it). Copy are taken care of if they got shot, and it is inherently a hazard of the job, along with car chases - which is where a lot more of them get injured. Furthermore, the people shooting cops are criminals. They still have protective gear supplied to mitigate the hazard, as do fireman. Your examples don't really relate. Employers can't kill their employees through negligence, even with a waiver, nor should they be able to. Arguing that private property rights somehow override this is silly.
Why are you so angry? Why such violent language? It's just a computer. Not worth calling people names over. Seriously.
You need to take (or retake) an economics class, your market analysis is incorrect. Perhaps your anger comes from your misunderstanding of fungibility and how supply, demand and price interact in a free market.
The world doesn't work like you think it should. Here's the key thing: you get to choose whether to buy things.
Apple wants too much for their iphone? Sony wants too much for their HD player? SO DON'T BUY IT. This is called "voting with your wallet". It's not something to be mad about, the money is worth more to you than the product, so you have the better deal for you.
Life's too short to get upset about prices of luxuries. These are all luxuries.
There are a lot of problems with your reasoning, and I'm not sure you do have a basic grasp of how evolution works. A mouse "generation" is about 4 months, (fertilization to reproduction) but we aren't talking about a mouse anyway, we're talking about something not a mouse that has descendants which evolved into a mouse and has descendants which evolved into an elephant.
You are making two completely bogus assumptions - the first is that because we have an observable mouse line the last 2000 years, therefore detectable changes take more than 2000 years. That conclusion simply isn't supported by the data. An ancestral mouse which has many modern mouse like characters may still have spun off descendants which don't and have become extinct, or have spun off descendants which don't and are currently considered distinct mouse species. Do you have any idea how many mouse species there are? (around 1100) Which one is closest to your 2000 year old sample? Detectable changes in a species can occur within only a few generations - examples are easy to find with google if you are genuinely seeking answers. Breeding experiments by the soviets over 50 years demonstrated that the silver fox could be domesticated in 9 generations, with significant character changes (google "Tame silver fox"). There isn't anything materially different between natural and artificial selection, just the selection mechanism (and absence of a goal in the case of natural selection). It's selection pressure that drives the rate of adaptation, not the mechanism of the pressure.
So that gets you back most of the 65million generations which you wanted to throw out and that should provide enough time.
Your second bogus assumption is due to misunderstanding of evolution: You can't pick two species and say one evolved from the other. All species are continuously evolving. The rates vary based on selection pressure. You can say they have a common descendant, and with some basic assumptions about mutation rates of DNA date approximately when that common descendant lived. The common descendant may have looked a lot more like one descendant than the other, but that's simply because it was well adapted for its environment and the similar modern descendants are continuing to live in that environment whereas the divergent ones are adapted (or adapting to) different conditions. There is a ton of evidence of modern speciation and evolution, look up "ring species" on google if you want some readily accessible info.
You make the assertion that evolution from a mouse into an elephant "can not happen gradually" and I'm puzzled by why you think that. It seems improbable to me that a mouse sized animal would give birth to an elephant sized animal, and then another mouse sized animal would be able to mate with it to produce a second elephant sized animal. It seems utterly obvious to me that it must have happened gradually, just due to uterus sizes and milk production capacity. Do you want to rethink that assertion?
So the answers to your questions are "Yes, there was enough time." and "Because some of us choose to cover our eyes, plug our ears and say 'Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon' when shown the evidence that surrounds us"
Wish I had a mod point to give you... well said.
I really like the look of NexentaStor, which is OpenSolaris + ZFS (http://www.nexenta.com) It's got a few downsides for a roll-your-own solution (limited to 1TB for the free version, no turnkey hardware config)
I'd really like to see a productized low-power x86 system with battery backup and pluggable SATA trays in a small footprint running NexentaStor. I think it could be produced very cheaply and blow anything currently out there away from a usability perspective.
Microsoft could have settled back in 2000, before they were ever a convicted monopolist by agreeing to split the company into two or three parts. I think it was a combination of arrogance and blindness by Gates and the senior leadership.
They knew they could "beat" the DOJ, and this is the result. Completely flat stock price for 7+ years. Senior management distractions. Inability to compete in Internet properties, hamstrung eating their own dogfood.
In my opinion Microsoft + Microsoft Applications + Microsoft Services could have been much bigger and more profitable than it currently is as one entity, since the divisions would have been free to take their independent projects where their customers were best served, rather than what the Microsoft bundling dictated. They probably wouldn't have wasted billions on the Xbox foray either. Vista wouldn't be such a complete mess and wouldn't have taken so long to deliver.
You don't get that choice lately, it's either tax-and-spend and spend-and-tax-more-later
Given that choice, I guess I'm happier with the former since at least it is honest and I'm not paying interest.
I would suggest you take a long hard look at the recent outbreak of measles in San Diego, where the virus was imported via one vector (unvaccinated child) who traveled in europe, infected a bunch of unvaccinated kids in his school (which had a lot of parents that used the philosophical exemption waivers), who then put at risk many infants that could not be vaccinated because they were too young. Nobody vaccinated caught the disease. The unvaccinated kids all got sent home for a couple weeks so that they could only infect their own siblings. Fortunately I don't think any of the infected had any serious side effects.
Not intending as harassment, but your choices for your children don't just put them at risk, it puts other children at risk who cannot be vaccinated. If there weren't well-documented serious potential risks for these diseases, it wouldn't matter.
It boggles my mind that people don't trust their own doctor, don't trust the public health system, but do trust some guy the read about on the internet. You are also trusting that every other parent will choose to vaccinate, so that you can get away with not doing it. Seems like misplaced trust to me.
I was expecting some mention of ZFS - did it get removed from the features for leopard? I thought it warranted a mention if it was there, Dtrace did.
I have ranted a couple times that any AMD quad core purchases on my part will depend upon availability of open source drivers for the chipsets. AMD had been fairly open about their chipsets in the past, so I was hopeful they would make this decision when they purchased ATI, but it has been a long time coming. I think they may have been a bit overly focused on Vista. Now that it is apparent to everybody what the real rate of Vista adoption is, AMD/ATI is madly fishing for sales elsewhere.
I will be buying a quad core in the next 3 months. It won't be AMD if the ATI chipsets don't have open source drivers, like the competition has. It doesn't hurt to let them know if you feel similarly.
That's my position exactly - but I'm looking at the chipsets, not the video cards. I don't 3d game, so embedded video is perfectly adequate for me as long as I can get solid drivers for it. I'm in the market for a new quad core machine in the next couple months - I run AMD machines nearly exclusively now, but Intel is my top choice for the next system primarily based on the solid open source support for their on board video chipsets.
Funny, but also pretty much a dead end, since arguing that God is a liar is essentially a Satanist position and incompatible with Christianity. I do find it amusing that some biblical literalists prefer outright blatant heresy to accepting that the Genesis may in fact be a parable, given that seems to have been Jesus well documented preferred teaching method.
Why do you think they are so secure? Losses at ATM's are not generally publicly reported so we have no data on how secure they actually are. Pretty much like the voting machines.
The difference is that ATM's are auditable (unlike the voting machines) and fraudulent transactions can be reversed in favor of the customer. Banks don't break out those losses publicly except in unusual circumstances.
With an annual crop, (which soybeans, wheat, canola, cotton and corn all are) it is exactly and precisely equivalent.
Is that not obvious to everyone else?
Yep, Dell is smart to be sourcing from both now. Any large company ought to spend at least 10% on the currently unfavored processor, since they save far more than 10% by having a competitor exist. Similarly, they ought to spend about 10% on the unfavored software component. Having a "Linux Desktop Development Team" and a "PostgreSQL implementation group" easily pays for itself come license renewal time, provided the competitor is plausible.
The lack of support from AMD for free software has made me switch to being an intel customer for my next build though. The price/performance of the alternatives isn't different enough to be compelling, but the lack of drivers for ATI chipsets and the good drivers for Intels chipsets make it a no brainer as to which is better. If you want to run Linux, want to try out linux, want to resell your machine to somebody who might want to use Linux - you're way better off with intel today. AMD could fix that easily, but they don't seem to be interested. Intel has a whole team of people churning out free source code for people who want to use their hardware - I'm going to support that with my wallet.
If you don't like it, sell it on ebay and get your money back. Better be quick too - They are still going for a premium but at some point that will change with all the wii owners being so disillusioned with their system. Then you can pick up a PS3 at discount and enjoy that HDTV resolution goodness while you watch all the great blueray movies and play whatever game it is that PS3 gamers like. Or pick up an XBox360 and watch HD-DVD movies and play whatever game it is that XBox360 gamers like.
What I don't understand is why you are complaining here about how you stupidly spent your money and trying to make it be that you were victimized by Nintendo marketing. Fix it and move on. At WORST you will be out about $10.
I would suggest that you take a hard look at what kind of lifestyle you are chasing before you get too deep into HDTV accessories, since being upset about a $250 purchase demonstrates a bit of a disconnect with your strategy.
The proper way to handle this issue is to send an email to your procurement people telling them that their preferred vendor is failing to provide the contracted service and you would like them to escalate it with their contacts and request a hold on future business with the vendor until they are performing per their contract. CC your dell salesrep if you know them. My 40000 person company would never put a hold on a contract on my say so, but the request always seems to get the desired result. Dell is one of the vendors I have used this tactic with successfully.
I don't understand why mods are marking this insightful, unless they aren't reading it...
>I would have voted for Bush over Kerry.
>I'm of the mindset that you don't play sides against one another
So you see Bush/Rove strategy as not doing this? Where do you get your news from?
>I think that once your country is involved in the war, the only option you have is to win it, and win it quickly
But you prefer an administration who has incompetently engaged in war for longer than we fought WWII? That doesn't commit sufficient resources to actually winning quickly because (I assume) it might jeopardize tax breaks? I am furious that Bush can get away with making the claim that winning is important but not fund it like it matters. It is reprehensible that we are still using emergency appropriations of borrowed money to pay for war expenses. (The borrowing isn't the main problem, the lack of any realistic strategy to repay it is)
>Once the country entered the war, our choice was no longer to be in a war or not -- that choice was made and could not be revisited. Our choice was to win decisively and leave the country moderately stable, or leave Iraq in a state of chaos and civil war.
I'm not sure we have the choices you claim we do. What you list as a choice sounds like fantasy to me. We don't get to choose the outcome. We get to choose how much resources we invest.
>The time to question whether the war was a good idea is after the war is over.
I think you have this totally backwards. The right time for questioning was BEFORE the war is begun. The next good time to question is before the next casualty.
>They can't let a bad policy fail and be evaluated on its own terms, because their egos are too big not to make a scene.
It appears to me that the Bush administration is engaging in exactly this behavior (that you criticize IMO falsely in Kerry) with respect to the war.
>This is why the Dems in congress now will never vote to cut off funding for it, it's political suicide, because it's stupid.
>I'd have more respect for someone who actually voted against the war, and to cut off funding for it,
You'd have more respect for someone who (in your view) committed stupid political suicide than didn't? That's... interesting.
I think you are way too focused on Kerry. He was a lousy candidate, but really the worst part of Bush's administration is his choice of incompetent, ideologically driven political hacks at every level in the government. This has caused the failures in Iraq, the inability to correct failed policies in Iraq, the poor performance after Katrina, the torture fiasco in Guantanamo and Abu Graib, and the ridiculous tempest-in-a-teapot in the Justice Department.
A president doesn't have to be smart or competent or likable or even all that moral. His job is primarily to appoint competent people to run the government, and to hold a strong vision for the country. In my opinion Bush largely succeeded in the latter, but failed on the former like no modern president ever has.
>...then does a complete 180 once in office
>You can at least say Bush has convictions, as wrong as they may be.
You are talking about the same guy here right? I don't really think it is a fair criticism of Bush to fault his change of world view after 9-11. Not that I agree with either his before or after views, but the event was significant enough to change opinions without being subject to criticism for flip flopping.
In my view though, someone with wrong convictions can do far more harm than one who lacks convictions. After all, which group do terrorists come from? Bush's convictions are not based on facts, they are based on feelings. (I say that based on his reported lack of curiosity) That has proven to be incredibly dangerous in positions of power and for that alone he should never have been reelected. Far safer to have a curious president that switches positions to ones that appear correct as information amasses than an incurious one with wrong convictions, IMHO. I will never understand why people think intransigence is a good quality for a president.
This discovery doesn't refute anything. Sex has never been a requirement for diversification. That's just silly. Single celled organisms reproduce clonally, and there are millions of species. (they do utilize gene transfer, but that isn't the same as sexual reproduction)
Inheritable differences and selection are sufficient. Mutation is a fine source of inheritable differences. Sex allows greater rates of diversity and retention in the population of undesirable traits that are not dominant for longer, allowing them time to mutate into something useful or show up when environmental factors make them useful. Sexual reproduction is far and away the most common mode in multicellular organisms, probably because it helps the species be resilient to environmental changes. But it isn't required.
That pattern would be observed if the studies are accurately confirming a real effect, would it not?
That pattern would be observed if climate change dissenters were mostly a bunch of crackpots, undeserving of any funding due to their poor science, would it not?
There are other reasons than bias to have skewed funding after the fact.
The E521N configured identically to the E521 is $20 more without Windows, between the warranty difference and the "free" 320GB hard drive upgrade they hide the pricing differences.
You can configure a E521 cheaper, since the monitor isn't required and you don't have to buy a video card. Doesn't really seem like such a great deal to me when you compare apples with apples.