I would make sure that noone can get their hands on the actual cure, the administration of cure would be done in high security facilities, everyone would be locked down until the moment they can leave.
You make it sound like there are no other scientists in the world...
As soon as you treat your first patient, he'll be walking over to the nearest lab, and giving a blood sample. In a few weeks, someone else will know what your "cure" is made of, and since you haven't secured a patent, will be free to sell it, while paying you nothing.
Which is pretty much what I said in the first place.
Yeah. Except for the fact that it's exactly the opposite of what you said.
I've really never been able to understand the motivation for compulsive liars to claim with a straight face something that everyone already knows is a complete lie.
So you are less dead if you happen to be killed in a car that gets run over by a plane, than in the aircraft itself?
No, but when flying that airline, you're less dead. On the ground, you have no choice as to which aircraft slides off the runway, into the street, and kills you.
It wasn't caused by the design of the airfield - it was caused mostly by an error by the flight crew
That's completely wrong. Sliding off the end of runway was the fault of a a combination of weather and human errors. The fact that somebody was killed, and several were injured, is 100% the fault of the layout of Midway, and the fact that the FCC doesn't retroactively apply regulations to airports. Basically all other airports newer than Midway have a significantly larger margin of safety around the runway.
How can you justify a P/E of 47 when your basic business, search, is a mature industry?
Search was a mature industry BEFORE Google was even invented. Guess what? "Mature" industries can be revolutionized at any time.
Perhaps more importantly, Google's basic business isn't search, it's advertising, which NEVER can, and never will mature. Advertising has to constantly change, or else it quickly becomes worthless. Google (adwords) was the most recent change to web advertising, and it's certainly causing a boom.
That said, I certainly believe Google is massively over-valued due to the current insanity of the stock market, but that's hardly unique to them. Like the years before good old depression, stocks are being sold like a massive pyramid scheme, and the whole thing is headed for one extremely massive correction, when any one tiny little hick-up suddenly causes a large number of people to wake-up to the reality of their nearly-worthless investments.
Is any product line other than search making money?
Adwords, of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if several others, like Google Earth are at least turning a small profit.
Before you embark on this plan, make sure to first shoot down all the satellites that communicate with more than one earth station at a time, callously spraying their radio waves across wide swathes of our fair planet.
Nope, doesn't matter. Satellite dishes are so highly directional, and satellite signals are so weak, that even another satellite on the same frequency, just a couple degrees from the first, would register as only the tiniest amount of background noise.
If you don't know anything about radio communications, consider something like signal lights...
At night, look at the headlights of two cars, a mile (or more) away. At that distance, their lights aren't strong enough to really make it any brighter, where you are located. However, if (and only if) you are looking directly at the lights, you can very clearly see that they are on (or not), and can distinguish between each of them. The headlights, though their signals are overlapping, don't block each other out in the slightest. Satellites are quite the same, except far further out, with a far weaker signal.
note that the extreme limits of the distribution are 0 - 7 and the vast majority are either 0 or 1.
Way to bullshit with statistics!
The #5 airline had 6 fatal accidents. That's right, it's at the extreme end of the accident range, and it's still in the very top.
One or two accidents would make a huge difference to the rating of most of these airlines,
That's pure bullshit. You don't know a thing about statistics, and didn't bother to educate yourself by even running a few numbers through the listed formula. It would take a very serious number of deaths to change the statistics appreciably, and the top airlines are so far ahead of the curve that it still wouldn't put them behind smaller airlines like Qantas.
The reality is, it's only those airlines with the fewest flights, like Qantas, whose rating would be dramatically impacted by a single accident, and are likely surviving on the float.
Ignoring your idiotic and nonsensical rant on statistics...
The safest airline is the one with the most qualified and attentive staff on the best equipment. This is true even if the airline in question hasn't flown ANY flights before and the other guy has flown 10,000. That is the difference between reality and statistics.
There's no magic way to know who is the most skilled technician.
There's no way to know which bit of equipment is most likely to catch here-to-fore unknown (potentially fatal) defects.
Of course you could examine records of failures, but statistics are evil and stupid, so we won't do that... right?
The airline which puts safety over all else, and hires the highest-paid mechanics around, can still end up with a poor safety record. And the airline with a more relaxed attitude, and lower paid technicians who handle more planes, can have extremely good safety records. There's no magic to it. Appearances are all too often the opposite of reality.
Several pointed out that their fingers were too large to fit on keys that small and that close together.
To which I pointed out that the keys are 3/4ths normal size. Scaling it up to 9" wide would accommodate anyone who can type on a standard keyboard.
I can keep my fingers on the home keys with just enough room to clear properly as I type on my laptop keyboard. [...] I can't imagine that I'd be happy with a keyboard that was crammed into a form factor that was four inches shorter.
Existing laptop keyboards are horribly designed, as I already explained. Bigger, smaller, they'll still be horribly difficult to use, for no good reason.
The "four inches shorter" bit is nonsense. With a different arrangement, you can easily have larger keys, in far less space. Existing laptop keyboards suck. Period.
So, I should be resting my wrists on either my legs or a thin sheet of pull out plastic instead of on the relatively sturdy surface of the laptop cover?
If you'd ever tried it with a flat keyboard, you'd see that it's really quite comfortable to have no wrist rest, even when your keyboard is resting on your lap.
Also "thin" doesn't mean weak or flimsy, by any stretch of the imagination.
A higher DPI display would be nice, no doubt. However, I'm having trouble reading 8 or 9 point fonts on paper these days.:(
Backlighting, sub-pixel rendering, high contrast, and other tricks could make a screen easier to read than paper.
The point is that all laptops represent a set of design compromises.
No, they don't. They represent an utter and total lack of any design at all. No effort was made to make them usable in the slightest. Key placement is practically random. Screen size, type, and placement is just "whatever" costs less, looks good in the specs of the unit, and where ever there is spare room. Disc placement is where ever it fits. Port placement is absolutely random, and based on the layout of the motherboard.
Absolutely no thought is ever put into ergonomics of laptops. Nobody does, so nobody feels they'll lose any customers if they also don't bother. PDAs have ergonomic design, because the tighter constraints absolutely require it, and in turn, you get tiny PDAs that are easier to use than far larger notebooks. Size isn't remotely as important as design.
The current form factor is one that I find very useful.
Of course it works, for loose definitions of the word. You've simply never tried anything smaller, and better designed, so you don't know that it could be much, much better, in even less space.
Personell or do you have to refuel them or something?
There's no way to refuel satellites, as of yet.
Satellites aren't very smart, these days at least. For various reasons, they don't calculate their own flight paths, orientate or otherwise position themselves where they need to be, or anything of the sort. It all has to be calculated on the ground, and transmitted to the satellite around the clock, at a fully manned operation center, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to operate.
"In an article on the ZDNet site 'chief culture officer' and HR boss Stacy Savides Sullivan describes the kind of traits that she's looking for in potential Google employees.
Do those traits include reading Slashdot at 03:24AM, Monday morning?
I assume everyone understood I was referring to fatal crashes.
They've had at least two runway overruns in the last three or four years (one of them with fatalities
Nope, just one, 2 years ago. Those "fatalities" were in fact one death, in a car, not on the aircraft. Quite a tragic accident, but doesn't figure into airline crash (fatality) statistics. And further, those injuries are entirely the fault of the design of the airport, with no margin of safety between the runway and the road, unlike every other modern airport.
and the other was just a few yards from being fatal since the aircraft nearly hit a gas station).
That was over 7 years ago. Your assertion that it "nearly hit" that nearby gas station is baseless. It's beyond ridiculous to claim that hitting a gas station would have guaranteed deaths (this isn't the movies we're talking about). And like all else, "nearly fatal" really means "NOT FATAL". In fact, nobody was injured.
I have no doubt, other airlines (such as Qantas and Delta) have had several of their own "close calls" that may or may not have publicized, or perhaps even recognized.
A significant number of Qantas flights are 24 hours long.
Southwest in nice enough to list their average flight time on their website [1], and that figure is 1.5 hours+.
Delta and Qantas have no such nice figures for public scrutiny. However (circa 2000) multiple sources say[2] Qantas has a ratio of 3150 domestic to every 540 international flights weekly, which is 17%. So (unless Australia is a MUCH larger country than I've been led to believe--or Qantas always flies in circles) none of those (83%) domestic flights could possibly be 24 hours long.
Going out on a limb, and even assuming EVERY single domestic Qantas flight goes completely across Australia at the furthest possible points, the most that could reasonably average is only 2.5 hours. I'll go even further out on a limb, and assume that Qantas doesn't fly to any of the countries remotely nearby, and so ALL international flights are 24 hours long (which is ridiculous in itself, considering just the size of the planet and the speed of a commercial jet). With all of those hugely over-generous assumptions, it still isn't even close to overcoming the factor of 6.56 (number of flights) disadvantage Qantas is at, compared to Southwest.
In the past 20 years: Southwest flew approx. 21.24 million hours Qantas (at worst) flew 13.30 million hours
So, even in the most ridiculously, unbelievably, impossibly generous case, Qantas has still only flown half as many hours as Southwest.
Well, by far, most accidents occur during take-off and landing, so number of "flights" isn't a bad statistic to use. If you've got a better source for accident statistics by airline, by all means, cite it.
A significant number of Qantas flights are 24 hours long.
If there's anything to learn from this thread, it should be that most people's impressions and opinions are simply baseless and wrong... I strongly suggest finding hard numbers (as to average flight lengths) before jumping to such conclusions. You may well find the actual figures to be quite the opposite of what you believe they should be...
you are going by their rating system, which frankly is shit.
Your understanding of statistics is shit.
the only thing that matters is how long since their last accident and how many people died.
That's complete nonsense.
How about if I opened up a tiny little airline, that few a handful of flights every year, but hasn't had any crashes in the past 100 years? That wouldn't say they're safe, just that they don't fly enough to be statistically significant, and are not yet due for an accident. They could still be the crappiest airline around, with lousy maintenance, and the odds just haven't caught up with them. THAT is why accidents/flights are the most important metric.
point in case is qantas which last had an accident in 1951, vs delta which had one in 1996.
Delta has probably flown MANY, MANY, more flights in that 10 year span, than Qantas has in the past 50+. THAT is the far more important statistic.
And, of course, Southwest, which is ranked #2, has never had any at all, ever.
If you go to the bottom of that page, and click the link for "No Accidents" you'll see numerous small airlines that have gone without a crash for far longer than Qantas. That doesn't mean Hawaiian Airlines or PLUNA is safer than Qantas. But by your metric, they are.
Crashes are infrequent enough that individual airlines can easily drift way off the average.
Congratulations! Way to show your ignorance...
Those stats are based on the past 20 years of statistics, and the number of flights are so extremely, overwhelmingly in favor of the top ~5 or so airlines, that even multiple accidents wouldn't knock them out of their spots at the top. Qantas is so far down, they'd all need to have a dozen crashes for the numbers to change...
Satellites == restricted bandwidth since it has to go by some frequency on the radio band.
No. Satellites are line-of-sight, so you can theoretically have every satellite in the sky broadcasting across the entire GHz spectrum, and all of them will work just fine.
Satellites have limited bandwidth because of the expense of putting up a satellite, power requirements, equipment weight, etc. Satellites really have a lot of bandwidth, but it's not free.
Satellites == susceptible to solar storms, debris, and (soon) attack from ground/air based lasers and high inertia weapons.
Solar storms tend to shorten the life of satellites, but rarely just knock one out, unexpectedly.
And if you think it's easy to destroy a satellite in orbit, you should see how easy it is to cut a trans-oceanic cable.
The rest of the issues are latency, which is certainly a major concern. And you didn't mention on-going cost of operating satellites, vs a cable which generally just sits where you left it, and behaves itself.
It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.
Not even remotely true. There are at least a dozen airlines with better records. Qantas benefits from it's small number of flights, and as soon as there's one crash, their safety record will instantly go through the floor.
I think I'd give the honor of best safety record to Southwest, who has flown 6-7 times more flights than Qantas, while still having zero accidents.
So a web site has a problem with their ISP. So friggin' what? Pick a different ISP.
You are a loud-mouthed idiot who clearly has no idea what Cryptome is, and didn't bother reading the fucking article to find out.
With the tremendous pressure from the US Government, it's amazing Cryptome has been online this long. There are very few ISPs that will stick their necks out to support such a project, despite numerous visits from the FBI, and it was believed Verio/NTT was one of the great ones for supporting Cryptome... until now.
It would be very interesting to know what leverage the feds might have used on Verio/NTT.
Crashing is the one thing it won't do, unless they seriously fuck things up.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
When I first tried linux, I ignorantly installed RH9 on a system with 64M of ram and 32M of swap. It ran *unbelievably* slowly. But it never crashed.
That "*unbelievably* slowly" is a distinct sign that it was constantly swapping out. If you didn't have any swap partition at all, it wouldn't slow down one bit, and presumably, it would have been usable long enough for you to start-up several apps, and watch them just crash when they couldn't allocate the memory they need.
I imagine you'd end up playing strange games with filesystem compression, removing all the headers, stripping out Xorg, and so on.
Filesystem compression would make it perform like a dog.
And yes, it should be able to compile itself. Anything else would defeat the purpose of using OSS. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu.
Don't just blame Ubuntu. With the exception of Slackware, I don't know of any package-based Linux distro that include dev headers with the normal binary packages. And it's certainly not because they take up a non-trivial amount of space...
Somehow, I doubt anyone will go for buying a new box and ariel just for the lucky minority to have HDTV.
You aren't being forced to switch all frequencies to MIMO. You could just as well leave half the spectrum in-place for standard definition, and just broadcast MIMO on the other half.
Anyway, if you are going to have a new box, why not move to MPEG4 as well?
Microsoft was the first company to really get the PDA right - the original Palm OS sucked because the interface was annoying,
PalmOS was a panacea compared to the horrific WinCE, which was the competition at the time.
However, Windows was not the first, by a hell of a long shot. Psion was there in the earliest days, with an operating system that Windows Mobile still can't match, to this day. Hell, I would be willing to use Psion's operating system on my desktop if I could... Palm and Microsoft are both still putting out crap that needs a desktop system to accomplish anything... A decade ago, it was even worse. Yet back then on my handheld Psion, I was doing research via the web, typing entire research papers, inserting graphics, spreadsheets, charts/tables/graphs, and printing it out directly to any available printer via IR, etc.
It worked wonderfully, despite the fact that it had over a month of battery life on 2AA batteries (rechargeables in my case), and with a mere 25MHz CPU it was still far more responsive than any of the 200MHz+ systems with WinCE (or later PalmOS machines).
I still have a 1999 vintage Sony Vaio laptop with 64Mb RAM and 333MHz Pentium II running Linux with Kde version 2.
Yes, but you, no doubt, have a swap partition when RAM gets full. If you were running off of a small amount of Flash storage instead, you'd have real problems.
Not to mention that the power requirements for your laptop is more than an order of magnitude higher than the OLPC, and yet you probably don't have a WiFi router card in your notebook.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound like there are no other scientists in the world...
As soon as you treat your first patient, he'll be walking over to the nearest lab, and giving a blood sample. In a few weeks, someone else will know what your "cure" is made of, and since you haven't secured a patent, will be free to sell it, while paying you nothing.
Sounds like you're quoting numbers completely out-of-context and jumping to baseless conclusions.
Yeah. Except for the fact that it's exactly the opposite of what you said.
I've really never been able to understand the motivation for compulsive liars to claim with a straight face something that everyone already knows is a complete lie.
"FCC" == FAA
No, but when flying that airline, you're less dead. On the ground, you have no choice as to which aircraft slides off the runway, into the street, and kills you.
That's completely wrong. Sliding off the end of runway was the fault of a a combination of weather and human errors. The fact that somebody was killed, and several were injured, is 100% the fault of the layout of Midway, and the fact that the FCC doesn't retroactively apply regulations to airports. Basically all other airports newer than Midway have a significantly larger margin of safety around the runway.
Search was a mature industry BEFORE Google was even invented. Guess what? "Mature" industries can be revolutionized at any time.
Perhaps more importantly, Google's basic business isn't search, it's advertising, which NEVER can, and never will mature. Advertising has to constantly change, or else it quickly becomes worthless. Google (adwords) was the most recent change to web advertising, and it's certainly causing a boom.
That said, I certainly believe Google is massively over-valued due to the current insanity of the stock market, but that's hardly unique to them. Like the years before good old depression, stocks are being sold like a massive pyramid scheme, and the whole thing is headed for one extremely massive correction, when any one tiny little hick-up suddenly causes a large number of people to wake-up to the reality of their nearly-worthless investments.
Adwords, of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if several others, like Google Earth are at least turning a small profit.
Nope, doesn't matter. Satellite dishes are so highly directional, and satellite signals are so weak, that even another satellite on the same frequency, just a couple degrees from the first, would register as only the tiniest amount of background noise.
If you don't know anything about radio communications, consider something like signal lights...
At night, look at the headlights of two cars, a mile (or more) away. At that distance, their lights aren't strong enough to really make it any brighter, where you are located. However, if (and only if) you are looking directly at the lights, you can very clearly see that they are on (or not), and can distinguish between each of them. The headlights, though their signals are overlapping, don't block each other out in the slightest. Satellites are quite the same, except far further out, with a far weaker signal.
Way to bullshit with statistics!
The #5 airline had 6 fatal accidents. That's right, it's at the extreme end of the accident range, and it's still in the very top.
That's pure bullshit. You don't know a thing about statistics, and didn't bother to educate yourself by even running a few numbers through the listed formula. It would take a very serious number of deaths to change the statistics appreciably, and the top airlines are so far ahead of the curve that it still wouldn't put them behind smaller airlines like Qantas.
The reality is, it's only those airlines with the fewest flights, like Qantas, whose rating would be dramatically impacted by a single accident, and are likely surviving on the float.
There's no magic way to know who is the most skilled technician.
There's no way to know which bit of equipment is most likely to catch here-to-fore unknown (potentially fatal) defects.
Of course you could examine records of failures, but statistics are evil and stupid, so we won't do that... right?
The airline which puts safety over all else, and hires the highest-paid mechanics around, can still end up with a poor safety record. And the airline with a more relaxed attitude, and lower paid technicians who handle more planes, can have extremely good safety records. There's no magic to it. Appearances are all too often the opposite of reality.
Statistics are much harder to fool.
To which I pointed out that the keys are 3/4ths normal size. Scaling it up to 9" wide would accommodate anyone who can type on a standard keyboard.
Existing laptop keyboards are horribly designed, as I already explained. Bigger, smaller, they'll still be horribly difficult to use, for no good reason.
The "four inches shorter" bit is nonsense. With a different arrangement, you can easily have larger keys, in far less space. Existing laptop keyboards suck. Period.
If you'd ever tried it with a flat keyboard, you'd see that it's really quite comfortable to have no wrist rest, even when your keyboard is resting on your lap.
Also "thin" doesn't mean weak or flimsy, by any stretch of the imagination.
Backlighting, sub-pixel rendering, high contrast, and other tricks could make a screen easier to read than paper.
No, they don't. They represent an utter and total lack of any design at all. No effort was made to make them usable in the slightest. Key placement is practically random. Screen size, type, and placement is just "whatever" costs less, looks good in the specs of the unit, and where ever there is spare room. Disc placement is where ever it fits. Port placement is absolutely random, and based on the layout of the motherboard.
Absolutely no thought is ever put into ergonomics of laptops. Nobody does, so nobody feels they'll lose any customers if they also don't bother. PDAs have ergonomic design, because the tighter constraints absolutely require it, and in turn, you get tiny PDAs that are easier to use than far larger notebooks. Size isn't remotely as important as design.
Of course it works, for loose definitions of the word. You've simply never tried anything smaller, and better designed, so you don't know that it could be much, much better, in even less space.
There's no way to refuel satellites, as of yet.
Satellites aren't very smart, these days at least. For various reasons, they don't calculate their own flight paths, orientate or otherwise position themselves where they need to be, or anything of the sort. It all has to be calculated on the ground, and transmitted to the satellite around the clock, at a fully manned operation center, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to operate.
Do those traits include reading Slashdot at 03:24AM, Monday morning?
*crosses fingers*
I assume everyone understood I was referring to fatal crashes.
Nope, just one, 2 years ago. Those "fatalities" were in fact one death, in a car, not on the aircraft. Quite a tragic accident, but doesn't figure into airline crash (fatality) statistics. And further, those injuries are entirely the fault of the design of the airport, with no margin of safety between the runway and the road, unlike every other modern airport.
That was over 7 years ago. Your assertion that it "nearly hit" that nearby gas station is baseless. It's beyond ridiculous to claim that hitting a gas station would have guaranteed deaths (this isn't the movies we're talking about). And like all else, "nearly fatal" really means "NOT FATAL". In fact, nobody was injured.
I have no doubt, other airlines (such as Qantas and Delta) have had several of their own "close calls" that may or may not have publicized, or perhaps even recognized.
Southwest in nice enough to list their average flight time on their website [1], and that figure is 1.5 hours+.
Delta and Qantas have no such nice figures for public scrutiny. However (circa 2000) multiple sources say[2] Qantas has a ratio of 3150 domestic to every 540 international flights weekly, which is 17%. So (unless Australia is a MUCH larger country than I've been led to believe--or Qantas always flies in circles) none of those (83%) domestic flights could possibly be 24 hours long.
Going out on a limb, and even assuming EVERY single domestic Qantas flight goes completely across Australia at the furthest possible points, the most that could reasonably average is only 2.5 hours. I'll go even further out on a limb, and assume that Qantas doesn't fly to any of the countries remotely nearby, and so ALL international flights are 24 hours long (which is ridiculous in itself, considering just the size of the planet and the speed of a commercial jet). With all of those hugely over-generous assumptions, it still isn't even close to overcoming the factor of 6.56 (number of flights) disadvantage Qantas is at, compared to Southwest.
In the past 20 years:
Southwest flew approx. 21.24 million hours
Qantas (at worst) flew 13.30 million hours
So, even in the most ridiculously, unbelievably, impossibly generous case, Qantas has still only flown half as many hours as Southwest.
[1] http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/press/factshee
[2] http://www.interwoven.com/news/press/2000/0815qan
http://www.shanaberger.com/airlines/qantas.htm
Well, by far, most accidents occur during take-off and landing, so number of "flights" isn't a bad statistic to use. If you've got a better source for accident statistics by airline, by all means, cite it.
If there's anything to learn from this thread, it should be that most people's impressions and opinions are simply baseless and wrong... I strongly suggest finding hard numbers (as to average flight lengths) before jumping to such conclusions. You may well find the actual figures to be quite the opposite of what you believe they should be...
Your understanding of statistics is shit.
That's complete nonsense.
How about if I opened up a tiny little airline, that few a handful of flights every year, but hasn't had any crashes in the past 100 years? That wouldn't say they're safe, just that they don't fly enough to be statistically significant, and are not yet due for an accident. They could still be the crappiest airline around, with lousy maintenance, and the odds just haven't caught up with them. THAT is why accidents/flights are the most important metric.
Delta has probably flown MANY, MANY, more flights in that 10 year span, than Qantas has in the past 50+. THAT is the far more important statistic.
And, of course, Southwest, which is ranked #2, has never had any at all, ever.
If you go to the bottom of that page, and click the link for "No Accidents" you'll see numerous small airlines that have gone without a crash for far longer than Qantas. That doesn't mean Hawaiian Airlines or PLUNA is safer than Qantas. But by your metric, they are.
Congratulations! Way to show your ignorance...
Those stats are based on the past 20 years of statistics, and the number of flights are so extremely, overwhelmingly in favor of the top ~5 or so airlines, that even multiple accidents wouldn't knock them out of their spots at the top. Qantas is so far down, they'd all need to have a dozen crashes for the numbers to change...
And I'm completely sure you're wrong.
Singapore Airlines/SilkAir is rated 78th in the world. Very few flights, and multiple crashes don't make for a good safety record.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
No. Satellites are line-of-sight, so you can theoretically have every satellite in the sky broadcasting across the entire GHz spectrum, and all of them will work just fine.
Satellites have limited bandwidth because of the expense of putting up a satellite, power requirements, equipment weight, etc. Satellites really have a lot of bandwidth, but it's not free.
Solar storms tend to shorten the life of satellites, but rarely just knock one out, unexpectedly.
And if you think it's easy to destroy a satellite in orbit, you should see how easy it is to cut a trans-oceanic cable.
The rest of the issues are latency, which is certainly a major concern. And you didn't mention on-going cost of operating satellites, vs a cable which generally just sits where you left it, and behaves itself.
Not even remotely true. There are at least a dozen airlines with better records. Qantas benefits from it's small number of flights, and as soon as there's one crash, their safety record will instantly go through the floor.
I think I'd give the honor of best safety record to Southwest, who has flown 6-7 times more flights than Qantas, while still having zero accidents.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
You are a loud-mouthed idiot who clearly has no idea what Cryptome is, and didn't bother reading the fucking article to find out.
With the tremendous pressure from the US Government, it's amazing Cryptome has been online this long. There are very few ISPs that will stick their necks out to support such a project, despite numerous visits from the FBI, and it was believed Verio/NTT was one of the great ones for supporting Cryptome... until now.
It would be very interesting to know what leverage the feds might have used on Verio/NTT.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
That "*unbelievably* slowly" is a distinct sign that it was constantly swapping out. If you didn't have any swap partition at all, it wouldn't slow down one bit, and presumably, it would have been usable long enough for you to start-up several apps, and watch them just crash when they couldn't allocate the memory they need.
Filesystem compression would make it perform like a dog.
Don't just blame Ubuntu. With the exception of Slackware, I don't know of any package-based Linux distro that include dev headers with the normal binary packages. And it's certainly not because they take up a non-trivial amount of space...
On the BSD side, though, they all do.
You aren't being forced to switch all frequencies to MIMO. You could just as well leave half the spectrum in-place for standard definition, and just broadcast MIMO on the other half.
The PDF mentioned this test was done using h.264.
PalmOS was a panacea compared to the horrific WinCE, which was the competition at the time.
However, Windows was not the first, by a hell of a long shot. Psion was there in the earliest days, with an operating system that Windows Mobile still can't match, to this day. Hell, I would be willing to use Psion's operating system on my desktop if I could... Palm and Microsoft are both still putting out crap that needs a desktop system to accomplish anything... A decade ago, it was even worse. Yet back then on my handheld Psion, I was doing research via the web, typing entire research papers, inserting graphics, spreadsheets, charts/tables/graphs, and printing it out directly to any available printer via IR, etc.
It worked wonderfully, despite the fact that it had over a month of battery life on 2AA batteries (rechargeables in my case), and with a mere 25MHz CPU it was still far more responsive than any of the 200MHz+ systems with WinCE (or later PalmOS machines).
Yes, but you, no doubt, have a swap partition when RAM gets full. If you were running off of a small amount of Flash storage instead, you'd have real problems.
Not to mention that the power requirements for your laptop is more than an order of magnitude higher than the OLPC, and yet you probably don't have a WiFi router card in your notebook.