You must not have had to deal with both types of phones for an extended period of time - I said the same thing you did until I got a phone with a real keyboard, and now I will never go back. The novelty of a touch keyboard wears off very quickly when you have to do real work sending emails, managing servers, etc. It's just really nice not to have to actually look at the keyboard.
I agree and don't really understand the NN argument myself, and generally find myself opposing it. The main net neutrality argument is that ISPs *could* throttle this, or *could* filter that to force people to use their preferred services. I see a couple problems with this argument:
-There are no instances of this actually happening. Creating laws before there is actually a need is not healthy for a free society. As a libertarian-leaning individual myself, I feel it is best to keep laws to only where they promote the maximum benefit to society while minimizing the impact on the rights of others. Creating such a law now would not benefit anyone, while it would infringe on the property rights of a few - if this changes, then, and only then, should such laws be considered
-If ISPs start filtering traffic to force you to use their services, that would fall under existing anti-trust laws. These laws are there for a reason, and this is a perfect example of such a reason. ISPs as they stand now pretty much hold Monopolies/Duopolies on their markets and they stand on a very fine line of being tolerated. Raising their rates or filtering traffic just because they can will certainly put them under anti-trust investigation and they know this. The point is that abusing your position as a monopoly is already against the law, and these are the laws that should be enforced in such a scenario.
-As much as I hate and distrust my ISP (Comcrap), I distrust my government more. Our government is corrupt at all levels as politicians easily give in to whichever lobbyist throw them the most cash and prostitutes. Granted, the executives at these companies have the same priorities, but at least they're honest about it. My biggest fear is this - NN giving the government control of what is or is not filtered and we live in a world of what content we get depends on who lobbies the most. ISP's with plenty of cash to spend still get to have a say in what you get, without fear of anti-trust investigation, while 3rd parties like the RIAA/MPAA make sure technologies like bit torrent are blocked regardless of what content it is used for. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I've lived in NJ most of my life and this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that goes on.
-Finally, and I think most importantly, NN laws simply address a symptom, and not the actual problem - lack of competition amongst ISPs. This is like treating bronchitis with Robotussin - it may make the cough better, but the underlying infection is still there, except now it is easier to ignore while it only gets worse. If any laws need to be passed, it should be to address the limited number of available broadband providers - NN legislation is just a feel-good band-aid solution that fixes nothing while expanding government control over the greatest free-speech forum of all time.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products.
You do realize that the gross majority of the technology we have today came from US military R&D don't you? If it weren't for the huge amounts of money and effort dumped into military research during and after WWII, the world would be a significantly different place - no computers, no internet, no CD/DVD players, no microwave ovens, no satellites, no cell phones, no jet aircraft, etc. You can go on and on with a list of today's common technologies the originated from military tech. It should be noted that these same technologies are largely what lead to the economic boom during the Clinton administration (not trying to imply any correlation between the two, but rather suggest there is little to no correlation)
Oh please, you have a serious case of revisionist history there Dwight. There were just as many votes along party lines when the Republicans were in power and that will always be the case; this is just the nature of a two party system. Personally, I see it more as a feature than a bug - a government going full steam ahead on every issue is not what you want if you value your rights and freedoms.
So quit being a partisan hack and accept the fact that the Republicans actually voted correctly for a change. There is absolutely no rational reason for the Democrats to vote the way they did other than to support President Obama because of his huge popularity. And don't try to tell me it was to help the poor masses get their TV - that is just crap and the numbers show it. Any logical person can see that moving this date back isn't helping anyone (other than maybe corporate interests) and is only going to add to the confusion.
You need to accept the fact that your guys are no better than their guys. They're just terrible in different ways.
Actually the conspiracy (aka government business as usual) is that an executive VP at Clearwire named Gerry Salemme just so happens to be Obama's unofficial advisor on the DTV transition. Furthermore, he has personally thrown huge amounts of money at the Obama campaign, arguably more than allowed by campaign finance laws. Seeing as Clearwire and Sprint (Verizon and AT&T's competitor) are partners in the WiMAX roll out, it would help Sprint get a head start over the competition who are waiting on the freed up spectrum. The argument on AT&T and Verizon's side is they are worried that a 4 month delay will turn into an 8 month delay which will turn into a 12 month delay - this would definitely hurt their business while helping their competitor.
I just tried this with OO 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10 and it was pretty quick - certainly no slower than MS Office in XP. Granted, I remember it being much slower in the past, but it seems to have improved quite a bit.
Now I have no real opinion on the embryonic stem cell research topic, but I think this mindset of dismissing these concerns misses a very valid point. You see, you can use embryos that would otherwise be discarded for research and perhaps come to some very interesting discoveries without needing to expand your source of embryos. That is not the problem. The problem is when you find the cure to a number of illnesses and there are no longer enough discarded embryos to meet the demand. This will create a very questionable market and that is the concern these people have.
A) Verizon Wireless is not the same company as Verizon - it is partially owned by Verizon, but it's not the same company and they operate completely differently. Her issue was with Verizon, not Verizon Wireless.
B) Both Verizon internet services and Verizon Wireless phones work just fine in Linux. In fact, Network-Manager in Ubuntu 8.10 supports mobile internet devices out of the box - I have no problem tethering with my Verizon Wireless phone and had to do zero configuration to get it working.
C) This woman is idiotic - there is no need for her to use any non-Linux software for what she is trying to do - Ubuntu does it all out of the box. If she rubbed a couple braincells together and RTFM she wouldn't have had a problem. Honestly though, I think this is just an excuse for her dropping out of school, and not the actual cause.
If you're using the IM client that came on your dumb phone, it's because it uses text messages for not only sending and receiving IMs, but also for IM controls like logging on and off. This is nothing new - you have been able to IM this way long before data plans and email were common things to phones. Back in the day this was uber convenient that you could log in to AIM from any phone that had text messaging. More recently, many phones now include a client front end that wraps the text messaging interface to appear like a regular IM client - on the back end though, it's still sending and receiving texts.
If you get a WiMo phone with a proper IM client, it will behave like a regular IM client and use your data plan.
I don't know, but installing software with Synaptic is much much easier than trying to purchase and install software for Windows. Almost any software package you could want can be download and installed using Synaptic in exactly the same way (search, mark for installation, apply). Once it's done doing all of the work for you, you can be fairly certain it will work as expected.
Installing stuff in Windows requires either going to the store and purchasing the right software package or searching through the internet, while trying to avoid all of the malware and porn. Once you actually have the software in hand, it is then installed in some non-standard way depending on the deployment tools that particular developer decided to employ. Once it is installed, you have no guarantee that it will even work because some other non-standard installer may have botched up some dependency. In which case Windows will surely report to you a meaningless and utterly useless error message.
No, the method of installing software in Windows is definitely not one of its stronger points in terms of ease of use.
I disagree - it's easier than in Windows. In Windows you actually have to go to Adobe's web site and manually download the appropriate version and install it. At least that has been my experience.
I worked at a hotel near a US hospital when I was in college - the gross majority of our guests were Canadian patients, or families of patients, reiterating the same story as you. It really says something when such a large number of people are willing to travel and pay out of pocket for services they could have gotten for free at home.
The experience has really made me question the idea of free health care - I'd rather get my health care and owe a huge pile of cash than not receive health care at all.
In theory you are correct, in practice you are not. You see, with a mesh network, the greater the density of nodes, the greater the available bandwidth between those nodes becomes. The thing is, in this situation you're going to also want to access hosts outside of the mesh, meaning data is going to need to be routed over the mesh to a gateway. This is where the bottleneck lies - the actual performance of the internet will depend on the throughput provided by a relatively fixed number gateways. And I would bet, in typical government fashion, the rate at which users join the mesh would out pace the rate of added gateway capacity.
Most user oriented apps do have GUI configuration functionality, and that is ever increasingly the case. I use Ubuntu on my home machines and just about everything a desktop user would ever need is configured through a GUI. It's the not-so-user oriented apps (ie server apps) that require editing text files.
Personally I prefer this for two reasons - I can change my system's configuration through a CLI and thus allowing me to easily tweak my system on the go through SSH. And two, I find most configuration files are well documented with comments, and by being forced to read through those comments and attached documentation I am forced to understand what the hell I'm doing typically resulting in a better end result. With pretty little GUIs, I tend to be lazy and just click my way through not fully understanding what it is that I'm doing, often resulting in me spending a lot more time in the end getting things to work properly. (this, IMO, is why Linux systems are often considered more secure than Windows systems - excited, yet lazy, admins)
Also, IMO, once you do know what the hell it is that you are doing, configuring via a text editor is much easier, and quicker, than using a GUI.
All of my development work is done in Windows - at work, I have my cute little XP box with VS and all the other MS goodies. At home, I run nothing but Linux on all of my hardware, and when I need to do work from home, I use XP in VMWare.
I'm not alone, I've turn a couple of my developer buddies onto the same path - general computing is done in Linux or OSX while any needed Windows apps are run in a nice little emulated window. Granted, it's not a majority, but there is definitely a trend in the developer community moving away from Windows systems.
In fact, I've been amazed by how many of my fellow Computer engineering and computer science types have switched to Macs over the past few years - back in my day Macs were for the hippie artsy types, but now it almost seems anyone who can afford a Mac, has a Mac. When I go to meetings anymore and everyone whips out their MacBooks, I think I'm in the wrong building.
You, my friend, obviously have no idea what libertarianism is, or what the libertarian ideals are. So you think it's wrong to be forced to have individual rights and freedoms? I fail to see how wanting the government to follow the democratic process outlined in the constitution makes libertarians against democracy. The complete opposite of the libertarian ideal is letting the government do whatever it wants, without any type of democratic process - that is totalitarianism. When the government starts creating loop holes for itself to get around the democratic process you are heading down that path and the rights of individuals will suffer - this is exactly what the libertarians are against.
I strongly suggest you read up on US government and the various political schools of thought before commenting on such things because you are quite clearly ignorant to the topic.
Support a motherboard RAID setup? Desktop motherboard 'RAID' is for Windows lusers. Be a man, get a real RAID controller and forget that soft-RAID crap. You can get a used Perc5i SAS RAID controller for ~$100 - it'll support all of your standard desktop SATA drives and can do RAID level 5 with zero overhead on the host. A SAS RAID controller and 4 - 15k Seagate Cheetah SAS hard disks was the best investment for my home desktop I've ever made - beats the pants off of software RAID and was cheaper than 2 WD Raptor SATA drives.
How is that any different than me saying 'you are paid to do a given job description'? Unless your job description is 'corporate servant' I fail to see how you could come to that conclusion. Obviously if your employer expects more of you than what you feel is worth your salary you can ask for a raise or quit.
Although if your job description is 'software developer' and a customer in Europe finds a show stopping bug at some inconvenient hour, it is perfectly reasonable for your employer to try to contact you at an inconvenient hour. You are paid to deliver a product - not just to be in the office from 9-5 - and the fact is the world doesn't stop at 5PM EST. This is the point I was replying to.
Contractors/hourly employees on the other hand, are paid to be in the office from 9-5.
And the last time I had to worry about 'write ups' or 'warnings' for being late or constraining my lunch time was when I flipped hamburgers at Wendys. None of my corporate jobs - salaried or contracted - have ever given two shits. If that is supposed to be a benefit of a salaried job then I'm either lucky or you've had douche bag employers.
Ummm, when you're a salaried employee, you are effectively owned by the company 24/7. You are paid to do a given job description, regardless of what hours you need to do them. If you don't like it, you can spend your life as a contractor and get paid by the hour - you'll make more, but you can be fired at a moments notice with no recourse. It's all a matter of what's more important to you - job security or not being owned by 'the man'?
They could get around that by only outlawing encryption systems that didn't have a government approved back door. Then the companies could be safe from the hackers while the government kept the population safe from the child porn. It wouldn't be the first country to pass such requirements...
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You must not have had to deal with both types of phones for an extended period of time - I said the same thing you did until I got a phone with a real keyboard, and now I will never go back. The novelty of a touch keyboard wears off very quickly when you have to do real work sending emails, managing servers, etc. It's just really nice not to have to actually look at the keyboard.
I agree and don't really understand the NN argument myself, and generally find myself opposing it. The main net neutrality argument is that ISPs *could* throttle this, or *could* filter that to force people to use their preferred services. I see a couple problems with this argument:
-There are no instances of this actually happening. Creating laws before there is actually a need is not healthy for a free society. As a libertarian-leaning individual myself, I feel it is best to keep laws to only where they promote the maximum benefit to society while minimizing the impact on the rights of others. Creating such a law now would not benefit anyone, while it would infringe on the property rights of a few - if this changes, then, and only then, should such laws be considered
-If ISPs start filtering traffic to force you to use their services, that would fall under existing anti-trust laws. These laws are there for a reason, and this is a perfect example of such a reason. ISPs as they stand now pretty much hold Monopolies/Duopolies on their markets and they stand on a very fine line of being tolerated. Raising their rates or filtering traffic just because they can will certainly put them under anti-trust investigation and they know this. The point is that abusing your position as a monopoly is already against the law, and these are the laws that should be enforced in such a scenario.
-As much as I hate and distrust my ISP (Comcrap), I distrust my government more. Our government is corrupt at all levels as politicians easily give in to whichever lobbyist throw them the most cash and prostitutes. Granted, the executives at these companies have the same priorities, but at least they're honest about it. My biggest fear is this - NN giving the government control of what is or is not filtered and we live in a world of what content we get depends on who lobbies the most. ISP's with plenty of cash to spend still get to have a say in what you get, without fear of anti-trust investigation, while 3rd parties like the RIAA/MPAA make sure technologies like bit torrent are blocked regardless of what content it is used for. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I've lived in NJ most of my life and this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that goes on.
-Finally, and I think most importantly, NN laws simply address a symptom, and not the actual problem - lack of competition amongst ISPs. This is like treating bronchitis with Robotussin - it may make the cough better, but the underlying infection is still there, except now it is easier to ignore while it only gets worse. If any laws need to be passed, it should be to address the limited number of available broadband providers - NN legislation is just a feel-good band-aid solution that fixes nothing while expanding government control over the greatest free-speech forum of all time.
Sorry for the rant.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products.
You do realize that the gross majority of the technology we have today came from US military R&D don't you? If it weren't for the huge amounts of money and effort dumped into military research during and after WWII, the world would be a significantly different place - no computers, no internet, no CD/DVD players, no microwave ovens, no satellites, no cell phones, no jet aircraft, etc. You can go on and on with a list of today's common technologies the originated from military tech. It should be noted that these same technologies are largely what lead to the economic boom during the Clinton administration (not trying to imply any correlation between the two, but rather suggest there is little to no correlation)
Oh please, you have a serious case of revisionist history there Dwight. There were just as many votes along party lines when the Republicans were in power and that will always be the case; this is just the nature of a two party system. Personally, I see it more as a feature than a bug - a government going full steam ahead on every issue is not what you want if you value your rights and freedoms.
So quit being a partisan hack and accept the fact that the Republicans actually voted correctly for a change. There is absolutely no rational reason for the Democrats to vote the way they did other than to support President Obama because of his huge popularity. And don't try to tell me it was to help the poor masses get their TV - that is just crap and the numbers show it. Any logical person can see that moving this date back isn't helping anyone (other than maybe corporate interests) and is only going to add to the confusion.
You need to accept the fact that your guys are no better than their guys. They're just terrible in different ways.
Actually the conspiracy (aka government business as usual) is that an executive VP at Clearwire named Gerry Salemme just so happens to be Obama's unofficial advisor on the DTV transition. Furthermore, he has personally thrown huge amounts of money at the Obama campaign, arguably more than allowed by campaign finance laws. Seeing as Clearwire and Sprint (Verizon and AT&T's competitor) are partners in the WiMAX roll out, it would help Sprint get a head start over the competition who are waiting on the freed up spectrum. The argument on AT&T and Verizon's side is they are worried that a 4 month delay will turn into an 8 month delay which will turn into a 12 month delay - this would definitely hurt their business while helping their competitor.
You are correct - sound suppressors are perfectly legal in most states, just as long as you pay the BATFE their damned $200
I just tried this with OO 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10 and it was pretty quick - certainly no slower than MS Office in XP. Granted, I remember it being much slower in the past, but it seems to have improved quite a bit.
Now I have no real opinion on the embryonic stem cell research topic, but I think this mindset of dismissing these concerns misses a very valid point. You see, you can use embryos that would otherwise be discarded for research and perhaps come to some very interesting discoveries without needing to expand your source of embryos. That is not the problem. The problem is when you find the cure to a number of illnesses and there are no longer enough discarded embryos to meet the demand. This will create a very questionable market and that is the concern these people have.
A couple things:
A) Verizon Wireless is not the same company as Verizon - it is partially owned by Verizon, but it's not the same company and they operate completely differently. Her issue was with Verizon, not Verizon Wireless.
B) Both Verizon internet services and Verizon Wireless phones work just fine in Linux. In fact, Network-Manager in Ubuntu 8.10 supports mobile internet devices out of the box - I have no problem tethering with my Verizon Wireless phone and had to do zero configuration to get it working.
C) This woman is idiotic - there is no need for her to use any non-Linux software for what she is trying to do - Ubuntu does it all out of the box. If she rubbed a couple braincells together and RTFM she wouldn't have had a problem. Honestly though, I think this is just an excuse for her dropping out of school, and not the actual cause.
My Dish Network ViP 622 also has a digital OTA tuner
If you're using the IM client that came on your dumb phone, it's because it uses text messages for not only sending and receiving IMs, but also for IM controls like logging on and off. This is nothing new - you have been able to IM this way long before data plans and email were common things to phones. Back in the day this was uber convenient that you could log in to AIM from any phone that had text messaging. More recently, many phones now include a client front end that wraps the text messaging interface to appear like a regular IM client - on the back end though, it's still sending and receiving texts.
If you get a WiMo phone with a proper IM client, it will behave like a regular IM client and use your data plan.
I don't know, but installing software with Synaptic is much much easier than trying to purchase and install software for Windows. Almost any software package you could want can be download and installed using Synaptic in exactly the same way (search, mark for installation, apply). Once it's done doing all of the work for you, you can be fairly certain it will work as expected.
Installing stuff in Windows requires either going to the store and purchasing the right software package or searching through the internet, while trying to avoid all of the malware and porn. Once you actually have the software in hand, it is then installed in some non-standard way depending on the deployment tools that particular developer decided to employ. Once it is installed, you have no guarantee that it will even work because some other non-standard installer may have botched up some dependency. In which case Windows will surely report to you a meaningless and utterly useless error message.
No, the method of installing software in Windows is definitely not one of its stronger points in terms of ease of use.
It's no harder than installing it on Windows.
I disagree - it's easier than in Windows. In Windows you actually have to go to Adobe's web site and manually download the appropriate version and install it. At least that has been my experience.
You're thinking of an inductor - ideally, capacitors store their energy in an electric field while inductors store their energy in a magnetic field
SHHH you'll pop their utopian bubbles!
I worked at a hotel near a US hospital when I was in college - the gross majority of our guests were Canadian patients, or families of patients, reiterating the same story as you. It really says something when such a large number of people are willing to travel and pay out of pocket for services they could have gotten for free at home.
The experience has really made me question the idea of free health care - I'd rather get my health care and owe a huge pile of cash than not receive health care at all.
In theory you are correct, in practice you are not. You see, with a mesh network, the greater the density of nodes, the greater the available bandwidth between those nodes becomes. The thing is, in this situation you're going to also want to access hosts outside of the mesh, meaning data is going to need to be routed over the mesh to a gateway. This is where the bottleneck lies - the actual performance of the internet will depend on the throughput provided by a relatively fixed number gateways. And I would bet, in typical government fashion, the rate at which users join the mesh would out pace the rate of added gateway capacity.
Most user oriented apps do have GUI configuration functionality, and that is ever increasingly the case. I use Ubuntu on my home machines and just about everything a desktop user would ever need is configured through a GUI. It's the not-so-user oriented apps (ie server apps) that require editing text files.
Personally I prefer this for two reasons - I can change my system's configuration through a CLI and thus allowing me to easily tweak my system on the go through SSH. And two, I find most configuration files are well documented with comments, and by being forced to read through those comments and attached documentation I am forced to understand what the hell I'm doing typically resulting in a better end result. With pretty little GUIs, I tend to be lazy and just click my way through not fully understanding what it is that I'm doing, often resulting in me spending a lot more time in the end getting things to work properly. (this, IMO, is why Linux systems are often considered more secure than Windows systems - excited, yet lazy, admins)
Also, IMO, once you do know what the hell it is that you are doing, configuring via a text editor is much easier, and quicker, than using a GUI.
Hi, Nice to meet you!
All of my development work is done in Windows - at work, I have my cute little XP box with VS and all the other MS goodies. At home, I run nothing but Linux on all of my hardware, and when I need to do work from home, I use XP in VMWare.
I'm not alone, I've turn a couple of my developer buddies onto the same path - general computing is done in Linux or OSX while any needed Windows apps are run in a nice little emulated window. Granted, it's not a majority, but there is definitely a trend in the developer community moving away from Windows systems.
In fact, I've been amazed by how many of my fellow Computer engineering and computer science types have switched to Macs over the past few years - back in my day Macs were for the hippie artsy types, but now it almost seems anyone who can afford a Mac, has a Mac. When I go to meetings anymore and everyone whips out their MacBooks, I think I'm in the wrong building.
You, my friend, obviously have no idea what libertarianism is, or what the libertarian ideals are. So you think it's wrong to be forced to have individual rights and freedoms? I fail to see how wanting the government to follow the democratic process outlined in the constitution makes libertarians against democracy. The complete opposite of the libertarian ideal is letting the government do whatever it wants, without any type of democratic process - that is totalitarianism. When the government starts creating loop holes for itself to get around the democratic process you are heading down that path and the rights of individuals will suffer - this is exactly what the libertarians are against.
I strongly suggest you read up on US government and the various political schools of thought before commenting on such things because you are quite clearly ignorant to the topic.
The PS3 and 360 have a 10" cooling fan?!
Support a motherboard RAID setup? Desktop motherboard 'RAID' is for Windows lusers. Be a man, get a real RAID controller and forget that soft-RAID crap. You can get a used Perc5i SAS RAID controller for ~$100 - it'll support all of your standard desktop SATA drives and can do RAID level 5 with zero overhead on the host. A SAS RAID controller and 4 - 15k Seagate Cheetah SAS hard disks was the best investment for my home desktop I've ever made - beats the pants off of software RAID and was cheaper than 2 WD Raptor SATA drives.
How is that any different than me saying 'you are paid to do a given job description'? Unless your job description is 'corporate servant' I fail to see how you could come to that conclusion. Obviously if your employer expects more of you than what you feel is worth your salary you can ask for a raise or quit.
Although if your job description is 'software developer' and a customer in Europe finds a show stopping bug at some inconvenient hour, it is perfectly reasonable for your employer to try to contact you at an inconvenient hour. You are paid to deliver a product - not just to be in the office from 9-5 - and the fact is the world doesn't stop at 5PM EST. This is the point I was replying to.
Contractors/hourly employees on the other hand, are paid to be in the office from 9-5.
And the last time I had to worry about 'write ups' or 'warnings' for being late or constraining my lunch time was when I flipped hamburgers at Wendys. None of my corporate jobs - salaried or contracted - have ever given two shits. If that is supposed to be a benefit of a salaried job then I'm either lucky or you've had douche bag employers.
Ummm, when you're a salaried employee, you are effectively owned by the company 24/7. You are paid to do a given job description, regardless of what hours you need to do them. If you don't like it, you can spend your life as a contractor and get paid by the hour - you'll make more, but you can be fired at a moments notice with no recourse. It's all a matter of what's more important to you - job security or not being owned by 'the man'?
I must be cursed. I've bought less than 10 hard drives in the past 5 years, and have had 2 fail within the first year.
They could get around that by only outlawing encryption systems that didn't have a government approved back door. Then the companies could be safe from the hackers while the government kept the population safe from the child porn. It wouldn't be the first country to pass such requirements...