Considering what you're describing, I'd have to think that the US is by far the most corrupt industrialised country in the western world.
When private companies (looking to make a profit) can provide cheaper health care than the government (who isn't looking to make a profit), something is very wrong, and the answer to that is usually corruption.
While we tend to complain about our hospitals (usually because of staffing issues), at least we don't face interesting questions such as "would I rather lose the house or the leg. The leg costs 100 grand, isn't covered by insurance, and I'd have to sell the house. And if I sell the house, where will we live? Maybe the wife'll leave me, or maybe child services will take the kids away."
And we don't have to worry about our doctor finding out that we have some kind of underlying but undiscovered illness. Or if we get one that takes forever to fight, to the extent that we lose our job over it and have to go on welfare for a while, at least we won't be fucked when we finally get back on our feet, just because we have a pre-existing condition that requires expensive medicine to cure.
Sure, if you can afford the insurance and weather a few years of really bad luck, I don't doubt that the US can provide some of the very best health service in the world. But I'm yet to hear of anyone in Denmark or Sweden who had to declare bankruptcy because they couldn't pay hospital costs.
As an example, I spent four days in a mental institution (checked myself in). That did cost me. A staggering 320 Swedish Kronar or 46 US$. Sure, that's more than it'd cost to feed myself for four days, but not by much. And considering I have a suicide attempt in my medical history, I think I'd be excluded over a pre-existing mental condition by most US HMOs if not all of them.
So again, if the private for profit companies can do a better job than your non-profit government, you have a massive problem with corruption. Not just in government, but also in the companies that provides these bribes and get away with it. But I don't think I've ever seen any mention of this in the mainstream US media, but considering none of them seem to be providing any kind of critical thinking and instead settle for either being cheerleaders or hecklers, I can't say I'm surprised.
It's not a security fix. Security fixes are only for high impact threats, and remote code execution is a low impact threat according to Microsoft. That means it's not a security fix but a simple bug fix. Or removal of a feature if you will.
In this case it's probably more a matter of just doing the math.
They know their cells can handle 100,000 writes in their lifetime, they know the maximum number of writes they'll see (180,000/s for 5 years for the 3½ inch model), and they can merely do the math to figure out how many cells they need to have in their product to survive.
I did the math elsewhere, and to do it with 4 kB/write they'd only need 136 GB. Even when looking at the 320 MB/s write rate, you're only averaging 1.9 kB/write if you're writing 180,000 times a second.
They didn't say "unlimited writes forever" they said "unlimited writes for 5 years", and that's obviously limited to what the drive can do, i.e. 180,000 operations per second for their 3½ inch drive.
At 180,000 IOPS * 5 years you're looking at 28,401,233,400,000 write operations. At 320 MB/s * 5 years you're looking at writing 47 petabytes worth of data.
Now, obviously none of those figures are realistic, as there is no way you would be writing 100% and never ever reading your data again. But they are claiming that their drives can handle those loads without failing. In order for their device to handle that many writes, they'll need a minimum of 284,012,334 cells. That's assuming 1 bit/write of course. The more realistic thought is 4 kB/operation. Now you're looking at 9,306,516,160,512 cells or 136 GB, and I think it's safe to assume that their 3½ inch drive will store more than 136 GB of data.
It's not unlimited forever, it's unlimited within a timespan and capabilities of the device. And just doing the math makes this seem entirely plausible.
The 12 independent channels can be accessed as RAID-0 if needed, giving upwards of 12x the speed of a single channel, but this is done by the onboard controller, not by anything else.
Intel uses 10 independent channels to achieve their speeds, also in a "RAID-0" like setup.
Plumber's day? That'd never come around. They might plan for it to be on the 17th of August, but you just know, that come midnight August 16, August 18 will just tick in instead, and IF you're lucky, someone will call you and tell you that it's been rescheduled.
Then you'd expect better memory management and ECMA to really fly, right?
Like I said, I'd love to see Haiku on a netbook with fully supported hardware. I'd suspect that the power saving options aren't as mature on Haiku though.
South America has about 7 million km^2 of forest, but not that many people (386 million), so they wouldn't need to clear that much forest.
Africa has about 1 billion people but only about 3 million km^2 forest. Asia has about 3.9 billion people and they about 4 million km^2 forest.
So, even if we completely levelled every single forest in Asia and Africa, we'd still be about 3 million km^2 short. We could take that from South America of course, but I don't think that's a realistic option.
Look at it another way. He saved one billion people from starvation and saved 10 million km^2 of forest at the same time. That means you can feed 100 people per km^2 forest. But this is only useful for localized food distribution, so we need to know how many people need to be fed locally:
South America: 386 million people, 37% starvation: 143 million people meaning about 1,4 million km^2 forest cleared. Africa: 1 billion people, 37% starvation, 370 million people, meaning about 3,7 million km^2 forest cleared. That's more than available, so either 70 million Africans would die or move elsewhere, and the former is more likely. Asia: 3.9 billion people, 37% starvation, 1.4 billion people starving, giving us 14 million km^2 forest cleared. Asia only has about 4 million km^2 forest (12 including Russia's 8 million km^2), leaving us with 2 million km^2 missing or 200 million dead people.
Now, that's assuming perfectly stable, altruistic governments. But, do you really think Russia and China would agree to deforest their 10 million km^2 of forest to help the people outside their countries? I really doubt it. And not only would they have to deforest their entire forested areas, but they would also need to move those starving people into their countries as well. That'd be an extra 200 million for the Chinese and 800 million for the Russians.
This all assumes that you could manage to go from forest to harvest by snapping a finger, that none of the countries that would have to turn their forests into farmland would mind, that everything went peacefully and perfect infrastructure. None of these things are even close to being realistic.
Now, do I doubt that Borlaug's work has provided food for an extra billion people who would otherwise have starved to death? No. Do I doubt that if you wanted to provide food for this billion people without the work he did, you would have needed an extra 10 million km^2 of farmland? No, that sounds perfectly reasonable.
Do I doubt that these 10 million km^2 of forests would have actually been turned into farmland? Yes, very much so.
Yes, I am very much aware that humans completely screwed themselves over on the Easter Island. And with the figures I pulled out of my ass, it makes perfect sense as 1) They'd only have space for about 16,000 people (compare to the now 3,800) and that's with modern techniques. A few hundred years ago, I doubt you could feed that many people on the land.
You said it yourself:
you can bet starving people would have cut down every tree they could lay their hands on
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes:)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
And that falls apart as soon as you aren't visiting your local branch. Like when you're in another city.
And while you could just bring cash with you, that's not always an option, like when you're leaving before pay day and not getting back until after pay day. Are you supposed to starve, should you spend eight hours in a car driving back home just to get money and then drive another eight hours to get back to where you were?
At some point convenience needs to play a role.
And keep in mind that the first banks weren't about meeting your local teller. It was about giving your money to a local banker who would then, for a fee of course, give you a writ explaining his partners at your destination that you were entitled to a certain amount of money. This writ could easily be hidden on your body, allowing you to bring a large fortune with you without needing a large entourage to guard it.
Since you seem to feel so strongly about this issue I STRONGLY recommend that you do your personal best to reduce the overpopulation problem immediately.
While I realise you want to suggest that he kills himself, his personal best isn't killing one person, it's killing off a few dozen. Nothing like a trailer park or high school massacre to reduce the local populace.
I wasn't doubting what he did was a good thing, nor am I questioning the "billion lives saved". I'm just questioning the billion hectares/10 million km^2 figures. I'm questioning the figure which is quoted from someone's speech to congress.
The billion lives I can believe with the amount of people living in 3rd world countries and the population growth they have. But preventing deforestation of 20% of the world's forests? That figure I doubt.
That page mentions this: The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 km2 (57,510,000 sq mi)[3] (about 29.1% of the Earth's surface area).. In other words, what he did prevented the clearing of 6.7 percent of the Earth's surface for agriculture.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has. I did find this bit on forests though:
These plant communities presently cover approximately 9.4% of the Earth's surface (or 30% of total land area)
So what he did saved about 20% of the total forested areas from clearing.
I'm yet to hear a decent explanation on how day trading isn't gambling while poker is.
Both are working on limited information Both involve you making money off of other people's mistakes Neither creates wealth and merely shifts it around Both can cost you fortunes even though you did nothing wrong
Well, the operative word there is "idiots" and has nothing to do with radar.
What might happen is the people with all these radar speed detectors, who are very likely to be the group that does the most speeding anyway, will find that they're constantly being targeted and either slow down to to the legal speed limit or get so distracted that they drive into a ditch instead. Either way I don't see that as a bad thing.
The insurance company would never use any information obtained to consider changes in insurance rates
Well, there is a difference between changing the insurance rate (lowering it) and issuing new rates (raising it). So, they would never use any information obtained to consider changing the insurance rate.
The safety record of the Ford Pinto has become a landmark narrative on the evils of amoral companies putting profit ahead of customer safety. The articles and news stories about the Pinto released at the time generally portray the car as more prone to fire than other cars of the time. They also portray Ford as callous for knowingly and willfully ignoring safety concerns. [...] Through early production of the model, it became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank, meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcing) allegedly made the car less safe than its contemporaries.
Ford allegedly was aware of this design flaw but refused to pay what was characterized as the minimal expense of a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 ($56 today, allowing for inflation) repair against the monetary value of a human life, in what became known as the Ford Pinto memo.[6][7][8] The characterization of Ford's design decision as gross disregard for human lives in favor of profits led to significant lawsuits. While Ford was acquitted of criminal charges, it lost several million dollars and gained a reputation for manufacturing "the barbecue that seats four."[9] Nevertheless, as a result of this identified problem, Ford initiated a callback which provided a dealer installable "safety kit" that installed some plastic protective material over the offending sharp objects, negating the risk of tank puncture."[10]
I'm not an expert on cars, car safety, car history, nor was the car in question ever sold in Denmark, yet I still know that using the Pino as an example of a "safe" car is rather silly.
Which is why you should be looking at grams of CO2/km. You know how much energy the batteries can contain, you know how much energy the fuel tank can contain, making it very easy to do these calculation.
CO2 isn't the only interesting pollutant though, but that doesn't make it any more difficult to figure out.
Fill up entirely on solar or wind power, and your battery energy is pollutant free. And for those who then want to factor in the pollutants released in building those plants: You now have to factor in every single bit of fossil fuel used in building the platforms, moving the people there, feeding them, building the pipe lines, wars fought over fossil fuels, refining the fuel, writing legislation against conservation and so on and so forth.
It's the same reason I drop most types of applications, proprietary or not.
As an example, I'm currently trying to get an application moved to PostgreSQL. Now, I'm not exactly a database guru, so I'm expecting to hit a few rough spots as I would with any database.
First I figured I'd install it on Ubuntu (not a Linux-guru either). Add through Synaptic, but which of the four score PostgreSQL hits should I install? Well, fuck it, I've space and time, install all of them.
So... now I have it running, but I'm unable to connect to the damn thing. Kind of strange, so I look through the documentation. Ah, needs a user "postgres". Fair enough. Add that, now I can connect with the client from localhost. Time to change pg_hba.conf. Thankfully I installed PGAdmin along with Postgres, but does that know where the conf-files are?
Nope. I have to find them on my own. Ah,/etc/bin/postgres/8.x/bin. Excelent. Ahh, I don't have permissions. Close the open file dialog, and chmod. Wait, probably works if I run PGAdmin with sudo. In Windows I'd expect to right click and 'run as'. Not so in Ubuntu - can only affect where the icon is shown. Hrmm... terminal, sudo pgadmin. Edit pg_hba.conf. Wtf, the program doesn't remember the last directory I was in. Well, that might be because I didn't open the file. Find the file, open it, edit it, save it. Open again - back to the default directory. Okay, that pisses me off. Maybe it's an option in preferences or something. Nope, not at all. Same with the other conf-files. Damn program always defaults to ~. That's just stupid.
Wait... where the hell are the changes I made? I added three ip-address that needed access. Maybe sudo didn't work like I expected and I don't have the proper permissions anyway. Sudo 666 on the conf-file, done. Edit the file, save it, reopen. Still no changes shown. What the hell? Cat the file. That's odd, all my changes are in there, and I can't really see any difference between the lines I added through PGAdmin and the ones that are there already.
Okay, this is probably something odd in Linux that I'm just not used to. Install Postgres on Windows instead. Interesting, this installer explicitly mentions the extra user account and gives me the option of creating it during the installation. Plus point for usability. Even mentions that I'm using a weak password, and warns against reusing the Windows user password for the superuser password for the database. Extra plus point. Oh, and PGAdmin now remembers what directory I found the conf-files in. Still doesn't save changes for pg_hba.conf (which I had to find through Windows search - really bad usability point). Check permissions on the file - I have full permissions. Hrmm. Check with Notepad++. Nothing saved in the file. Add an empty line, save file - "file is in use". Ahhh.... a silently discarded error in PGAdmin. I thought that was one of the biggest detractors from databases like MySQL? Discarding errors silently is REALLY bad. Especially those kinds of errors.
Now, getting an ODBC driver for Postgres installed on Windows is an entirely different can of worms that I'll refrain from ranting on about.
Why do people think that Linux is magically going to do things that they would never expect Windows or Mac OS to do?
Why is expecting your wireless nic to work "magic"? Why is not expecting an update for Windows or OS X to break a functioning nic "magic"?
That's all he was expecting - that it works. For him it "just work" on Windows. With Ubuntu he had to do a little bit of work, which he was okay with. Then it broke because of an update. So he fixed it again - he was okay with that. Then it broke because of another update.
Why is that him expecting "magic" from the OS? What kind of odd world do you live in, where you expect to get your socks ruined just because you change the laces in your shoes?
Generally speaking vehicular theft is seen as high priority in the police. When's the last time you saw footage of six police cars chasing down a pick pocket?
In this case it's not even about someone picking someone else's pockets - it's the crew noticing something left behind on the plane and thinking "I'm having that".
Slashdot Mirror
Considering what you're describing, I'd have to think that the US is by far the most corrupt industrialised country in the western world.
When private companies (looking to make a profit) can provide cheaper health care than the government (who isn't looking to make a profit), something is very wrong, and the answer to that is usually corruption.
While we tend to complain about our hospitals (usually because of staffing issues), at least we don't face interesting questions such as "would I rather lose the house or the leg. The leg costs 100 grand, isn't covered by insurance, and I'd have to sell the house. And if I sell the house, where will we live? Maybe the wife'll leave me, or maybe child services will take the kids away."
And we don't have to worry about our doctor finding out that we have some kind of underlying but undiscovered illness. Or if we get one that takes forever to fight, to the extent that we lose our job over it and have to go on welfare for a while, at least we won't be fucked when we finally get back on our feet, just because we have a pre-existing condition that requires expensive medicine to cure.
Sure, if you can afford the insurance and weather a few years of really bad luck, I don't doubt that the US can provide some of the very best health service in the world. But I'm yet to hear of anyone in Denmark or Sweden who had to declare bankruptcy because they couldn't pay hospital costs.
As an example, I spent four days in a mental institution (checked myself in). That did cost me. A staggering 320 Swedish Kronar or 46 US$. Sure, that's more than it'd cost to feed myself for four days, but not by much. And considering I have a suicide attempt in my medical history, I think I'd be excluded over a pre-existing mental condition by most US HMOs if not all of them.
So again, if the private for profit companies can do a better job than your non-profit government, you have a massive problem with corruption. Not just in government, but also in the companies that provides these bribes and get away with it. But I don't think I've ever seen any mention of this in the mainstream US media, but considering none of them seem to be providing any kind of critical thinking and instead settle for either being cheerleaders or hecklers, I can't say I'm surprised.
It's not a security fix. Security fixes are only for high impact threats, and remote code execution is a low impact threat according to Microsoft. That means it's not a security fix but a simple bug fix. Or removal of a feature if you will.
Where are the money going on memory? You can't buy a Windows equipped netbook with more than 1 GB of memory.
Some of us would like a netbook with a lot more memory than that.
In this case it's probably more a matter of just doing the math.
They know their cells can handle 100,000 writes in their lifetime, they know the maximum number of writes they'll see (180,000/s for 5 years for the 3½ inch model), and they can merely do the math to figure out how many cells they need to have in their product to survive.
I did the math elsewhere, and to do it with 4 kB/write they'd only need 136 GB. Even when looking at the 320 MB/s write rate, you're only averaging 1.9 kB/write if you're writing 180,000 times a second.
They didn't say "unlimited writes forever" they said "unlimited writes for 5 years", and that's obviously limited to what the drive can do, i.e. 180,000 operations per second for their 3½ inch drive.
At 180,000 IOPS * 5 years you're looking at 28,401,233,400,000 write operations.
At 320 MB/s * 5 years you're looking at writing 47 petabytes worth of data.
Now, obviously none of those figures are realistic, as there is no way you would be writing 100% and never ever reading your data again. But they are claiming that their drives can handle those loads without failing. In order for their device to handle that many writes, they'll need a minimum of 284,012,334 cells. That's assuming 1 bit/write of course. The more realistic thought is 4 kB/operation. Now you're looking at 9,306,516,160,512 cells or 136 GB, and I think it's safe to assume that their 3½ inch drive will store more than 136 GB of data.
It's not unlimited forever, it's unlimited within a timespan and capabilities of the device. And just doing the math makes this seem entirely plausible.
The 12 independent channels can be accessed as RAID-0 if needed, giving upwards of 12x the speed of a single channel, but this is done by the onboard controller, not by anything else.
Intel uses 10 independent channels to achieve their speeds, also in a "RAID-0" like setup.
Plumber's day? That'd never come around. They might plan for it to be on the 17th of August, but you just know, that come midnight August 16, August 18 will just tick in instead, and IF you're lucky, someone will call you and tell you that it's been rescheduled.
You got that the wrong way around. Programmers in the US will be clamouring to get this day recognized, so they can get down to an 8 hour workday.
Then you'd expect better memory management and ECMA to really fly, right?
Like I said, I'd love to see Haiku on a netbook with fully supported hardware. I'd suspect that the power saving options aren't as mature on Haiku though.
Where are they supposed to get those 10 million square kilometres of forest?
Annoyingly I can't find any other sources for the size of forests than this: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html
South America has about 7 million km^2 of forest, but not that many people (386 million), so they wouldn't need to clear that much forest.
Africa has about 1 billion people but only about 3 million km^2 forest.
Asia has about 3.9 billion people and they about 4 million km^2 forest.
So, even if we completely levelled every single forest in Asia and Africa, we'd still be about 3 million km^2 short. We could take that from South America of course, but I don't think that's a realistic option.
Look at it another way. He saved one billion people from starvation and saved 10 million km^2 of forest at the same time. That means you can feed 100 people per km^2 forest. But this is only useful for localized food distribution, so we need to know how many people need to be fed locally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation#Hunger_statistics
1970s statistics applied to new population figures. And I'm assuming every single country on a continent is a 3rd world country:
South America: 386 million people, 37% starvation: 143 million people meaning about 1,4 million km^2 forest cleared.
Africa: 1 billion people, 37% starvation, 370 million people, meaning about 3,7 million km^2 forest cleared. That's more than available, so either 70 million Africans would die or move elsewhere, and the former is more likely.
Asia: 3.9 billion people, 37% starvation, 1.4 billion people starving, giving us 14 million km^2 forest cleared. Asia only has about 4 million km^2 forest (12 including Russia's 8 million km^2), leaving us with 2 million km^2 missing or 200 million dead people.
Now, that's assuming perfectly stable, altruistic governments. But, do you really think Russia and China would agree to deforest their 10 million km^2 of forest to help the people outside their countries? I really doubt it. And not only would they have to deforest their entire forested areas, but they would also need to move those starving people into their countries as well. That'd be an extra 200 million for the Chinese and 800 million for the Russians.
This all assumes that you could manage to go from forest to harvest by snapping a finger, that none of the countries that would have to turn their forests into farmland would mind, that everything went peacefully and perfect infrastructure. None of these things are even close to being realistic.
Now, do I doubt that Borlaug's work has provided food for an extra billion people who would otherwise have starved to death? No. Do I doubt that if you wanted to provide food for this billion people without the work he did, you would have needed an extra 10 million km^2 of farmland? No, that sounds perfectly reasonable.
Do I doubt that these 10 million km^2 of forests would have actually been turned into farmland? Yes, very much so.
Yes, I am very much aware that humans completely screwed themselves over on the Easter Island. And with the figures I pulled out of my ass, it makes perfect sense as 1) They'd only have space for about 16,000 people (compare to the now 3,800) and that's with modern techniques. A few hundred years ago, I doubt you could feed that many people on the land.
You said it yourself:
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes :)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either ;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
And that falls apart as soon as you aren't visiting your local branch. Like when you're in another city.
And while you could just bring cash with you, that's not always an option, like when you're leaving before pay day and not getting back until after pay day. Are you supposed to starve, should you spend eight hours in a car driving back home just to get money and then drive another eight hours to get back to where you were?
At some point convenience needs to play a role.
And keep in mind that the first banks weren't about meeting your local teller. It was about giving your money to a local banker who would then, for a fee of course, give you a writ explaining his partners at your destination that you were entitled to a certain amount of money. This writ could easily be hidden on your body, allowing you to bring a large fortune with you without needing a large entourage to guard it.
While I realise you want to suggest that he kills himself, his personal best isn't killing one person, it's killing off a few dozen. Nothing like a trailer park or high school massacre to reduce the local populace.
Next time, choose your words wisely.
I wasn't doubting what he did was a good thing, nor am I questioning the "billion lives saved". I'm just questioning the billion hectares/10 million km^2 figures. I'm questioning the figure which is quoted from someone's speech to congress.
The billion lives I can believe with the amount of people living in 3rd world countries and the population growth they have. But preventing deforestation of 20% of the world's forests? That figure I doubt.
That's 10,000,000 km^2 or larger than Canada, only Russia is larger.
That page mentions this: The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 km2 (57,510,000 sq mi)[3] (about 29.1% of the Earth's surface area).. In other words, what he did prevented the clearing of 6.7 percent of the Earth's surface for agriculture.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has. I did find this bit on forests though:
So what he did saved about 20% of the total forested areas from clearing.
Again, a bit difficult to believe, but whatever.
I'm yet to hear a decent explanation on how day trading isn't gambling while poker is.
Both are working on limited information
Both involve you making money off of other people's mistakes
Neither creates wealth and merely shifts it around
Both can cost you fortunes even though you did nothing wrong
Well, the operative word there is "idiots" and has nothing to do with radar.
What might happen is the people with all these radar speed detectors, who are very likely to be the group that does the most speeding anyway, will find that they're constantly being targeted and either slow down to to the legal speed limit or get so distracted that they drive into a ditch instead. Either way I don't see that as a bad thing.
On the side of the road, next to the one belonging to the person he just ran over.
Well, there is a difference between changing the insurance rate (lowering it) and issuing new rates (raising it). So, they would never use any information obtained to consider changing the insurance rate.
From Wikipedia:
I'm not an expert on cars, car safety, car history, nor was the car in question ever sold in Denmark, yet I still know that using the Pino as an example of a "safe" car is rather silly.
Which is why you should be looking at grams of CO2/km. You know how much energy the batteries can contain, you know how much energy the fuel tank can contain, making it very easy to do these calculation.
CO2 isn't the only interesting pollutant though, but that doesn't make it any more difficult to figure out.
Fill up entirely on solar or wind power, and your battery energy is pollutant free. And for those who then want to factor in the pollutants released in building those plants: You now have to factor in every single bit of fossil fuel used in building the platforms, moving the people there, feeding them, building the pipe lines, wars fought over fossil fuels, refining the fuel, writing legislation against conservation and so on and so forth.
Obviously he leads a complicated lifestyle.
He looks a bit freaky (have you seen the way he smiles?), and that one blind eye is bound to be caused by someone emptying a can of maze into it.
He has no friends and is less popular than Neville Chamberlain was at the beginning of World War 2.
It's the same reason I drop most types of applications, proprietary or not.
As an example, I'm currently trying to get an application moved to PostgreSQL. Now, I'm not exactly a database guru, so I'm expecting to hit a few rough spots as I would with any database.
First I figured I'd install it on Ubuntu (not a Linux-guru either). Add through Synaptic, but which of the four score PostgreSQL hits should I install? Well, fuck it, I've space and time, install all of them.
So ... now I have it running, but I'm unable to connect to the damn thing. Kind of strange, so I look through the documentation. Ah, needs a user "postgres". Fair enough. Add that, now I can connect with the client from localhost. Time to change pg_hba.conf. Thankfully I installed PGAdmin along with Postgres, but does that know where the conf-files are?
Nope. I have to find them on my own. Ah, /etc/bin/postgres/8.x/bin. Excelent. Ahh, I don't have permissions. Close the open file dialog, and chmod. Wait, probably works if I run PGAdmin with sudo. In Windows I'd expect to right click and 'run as'. Not so in Ubuntu - can only affect where the icon is shown. Hrmm ... terminal, sudo pgadmin. Edit pg_hba.conf. Wtf, the program doesn't remember the last directory I was in. Well, that might be because I didn't open the file. Find the file, open it, edit it, save it. Open again - back to the default directory. Okay, that pisses me off. Maybe it's an option in preferences or something. Nope, not at all. Same with the other conf-files. Damn program always defaults to ~. That's just stupid.
Wait ... where the hell are the changes I made? I added three ip-address that needed access. Maybe sudo didn't work like I expected and I don't have the proper permissions anyway. Sudo 666 on the conf-file, done. Edit the file, save it, reopen. Still no changes shown. What the hell? Cat the file. That's odd, all my changes are in there, and I can't really see any difference between the lines I added through PGAdmin and the ones that are there already.
Okay, this is probably something odd in Linux that I'm just not used to. Install Postgres on Windows instead. Interesting, this installer explicitly mentions the extra user account and gives me the option of creating it during the installation. Plus point for usability. Even mentions that I'm using a weak password, and warns against reusing the Windows user password for the superuser password for the database. Extra plus point. Oh, and PGAdmin now remembers what directory I found the conf-files in. Still doesn't save changes for pg_hba.conf (which I had to find through Windows search - really bad usability point). Check permissions on the file - I have full permissions. Hrmm. Check with Notepad++. Nothing saved in the file. Add an empty line, save file - "file is in use". Ahhh .... a silently discarded error in PGAdmin. I thought that was one of the biggest detractors from databases like MySQL? Discarding errors silently is REALLY bad. Especially those kinds of errors.
Now, getting an ODBC driver for Postgres installed on Windows is an entirely different can of worms that I'll refrain from ranting on about.
Why is expecting your wireless nic to work "magic"? Why is not expecting an update for Windows or OS X to break a functioning nic "magic"?
That's all he was expecting - that it works. For him it "just work" on Windows. With Ubuntu he had to do a little bit of work, which he was okay with. Then it broke because of an update. So he fixed it again - he was okay with that. Then it broke because of another update.
Why is that him expecting "magic" from the OS? What kind of odd world do you live in, where you expect to get your socks ruined just because you change the laces in your shoes?
Generally speaking vehicular theft is seen as high priority in the police. When's the last time you saw footage of six police cars chasing down a pick pocket?
In this case it's not even about someone picking someone else's pockets - it's the crew noticing something left behind on the plane and thinking "I'm having that".