I dunno, I knew a guy in college you ate pretty much continuously, and mostly the "worst" foods possible (He had a real thing for Spam that I will NEVER understand, and no he wasn't from Hawaii), and was skinny as a rail. Not unhealthy, clearly not absorbing calories skinny, but skinny "I'm a waif" skinny. He didn't exercise much either, unless drinking beer counts. I don't know if he had a less efficient digestive system or just burned more calories doing less work, but his weight did NOT reflect his diet.
I ate (slightly, it WAS college) better, worked out way more (I was teaching martial art professionally at the time) and was comparatively heavier (not fat by any stretch, but heavier).
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
True, but immaterial. A calorie is a unit of heat, and calories consumed are what they are, but a calorie consumed and not absorbed is the same as a calorie not consumed for purposes of this discussion. The same is true of calories consumed through protein. They are absorbed very inefficiently and won't affect fat loss or gain as much as simple carbohydrates or fat.
Lowering your caloric intake and increasing your caloric output is the best way to lose weight, but consuming more difficult to process calories helps too.
I dunno. When we bought my wife's laptop two years or so ago it came pre-installed with Vista. It was a barely functional dog and I reinstalled with a personal copy of XP. Recently she asked me to reimage the laptop (it was starting to slow down and wasn't as responsive as it had been) and for a lark I decided to try Vista again. After a few hours of updating drivers and getting it current to SP2, I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite usable. Same hardware and I used the HP quick restore function, so it had all the same crapware as it had the first time (I removed it all in both cases at any rate.) I dunno if it was the drivers or the Service Packs or what, but sometime in the last two years Vista has improved its performance noticeably (at least for this particular machine).
Lots of things were much better; but I particularly noticed that World of Warcraft, which had been unplayable at even the most modest settings during our earlier Vista experience, now runs quite acceptably with reasonable quality settings. I'm seriously considering installing Win7 RC1 on it to see what we get, but it's her main machine, and I don't think she'll appreciate me making it a testbed box. I'd have to give over my Mac in exchange, and I'm not quite willing to do that:-)
I think the problem is that none of this is intuitive, and unless you obsessively read "Tips and Tricks" articles you're not going to know how do a lot of it. People develop work flows around tools, and when the tools change ti can be a pain to adjust habits. Change isn't always bad, but it can be difficult and it isn't always good either. Add to this the fact that Microsoft produces little in the way of "how-tos" and you reach a point where the old way doesn't work any more and you haven't figured out what the new way is yet.
I also agree with GP, if you're going to go through the trouble of making a "Classic Mode" for something why not try to keep it as close to the last version as possible. That's the point after all, to make it easier for people who are used to the old interface. Why create a "Classic Mode" that moves half the stuff around and renames the other half. It neither accomplishes the goal of getting people used to the new interface, nor the goal of making it easier for people who are used to the old interface.
Statement: Linux is less virus prone than Windows, thus affecting the TCO of Windows negatively. THis has not been considered in most TCO calculations.
Counter Statement: The only reason Linux is less virus prone than Windows is that Linux is less popular than Windows and less of a target.
Counter to the Counter: I don't care WHY Linux has fewer viruses, it has fewer viruses. I live in a world where Microsoft is likely to continue to be far more popular than Linux for quite some time. Therefore it's likely to stay a smaller target and a lower virus OS for some time.
I think you're confusing two related, but separate issues. I am a terrible visual artist and can't carry a tune in a bucket, but I am an excellent creative problem solver (other people's opinion, not mine), and I can make reasonable stabs at creative writing (I'm sure I'd be better if I practiced). Creativity CAN be expressed as visual art or musical talent, but having those talents is not the end of creativity. People are creative in different ways (which is not to say that ALL people are creative, many aren't). Teaching creativity is not the same as teaching drawing, though many people who draw well are creative. Look at XKCD, it's very creative despite being drawn in the style of a careless 6 year old (Yes, I know he CAN draw much better, but he usually doesn't so it illustrates the point).
Has anything innovative EVER been done with full process control?
Probably a good chunk of everything NASA has ever done, and a large percentage of anything done here in the States that involves either the words "nuclear" or "missile". Those are special situations though where tight processes are needed because being slightly out of the very tight working constraints will be nearly invariably fatal. I think process is like security. It's a big overhead, but it's necessary. The question becomes how important is it to the type of work you do and how many resources do you want to devote to it. To ignore it totally is to invite chaos that accomplishes nothing, but most likely it doesn't need to be perfect or even close to perfect in every industry. Submarines, air planes and rockets are places where it does.
See my post above about how many tanks we lost in the year I spent in Iraq. Hint: it was a very small number, and it involved more explosive than you are ever likely to see in one place unless you're in the Air Force. Even the more lightly armored vehicles survived attacks more often than not. We've lost troops to improvised explosive sure, but a military that had gone totally rogue would almost certainly consider those to be "acceptable". the military would HAVE to have gone totally rogue for this scenario to play out.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
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I already mention the reluctance of the soldiers as one of the main factors keeping us safe. We're assuming that went away somehow in the "military kills protesters" scenario.
You're going to get all those 200+ million armed civilians in one place supporting the protest? How are they all armed?
Yes, if the military turned against us and EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN who is not otherwise a soldier took up arms in the defense of liberty and ALL of them could competently use their weapons (which you're assuming all of them have, in fact most people I know don't own a gun) they could certainly have a good chance against even our military. You'd have the support of at best a small percentage of the population (many would support the government even in the face of Draconian policies, hoping to be in the elite; more would be too scared; more still would be apathetic as long as American Idol continued to play; etc). Of those a fraction (maybe a large fraction, given the type of people you're talking about, but still a fraction) would actually HAVE guns, and a much smaller fraction would have any training in using them. Of the guns available to you most would be hand guns or hunting rifles, the first are all but useless against even body armor, let alone vehicles, the second only useful in the hands of real marksmen.
Then there's the lack of training and fire discipline. Unless your 'troops' are former police or military themselves, they've never fired guns as part of a formation. This means that they are quite as likely to shoot each other as they are to shoot the soldiers that they are supposed to be aiming at. Cops and soldiers spend all that time training for a reason. It's because it is really hard to shoot, move and communicate in a group without lots and lots of practice.
I said it above and I'll say it again, what keeps us safe is the rule of law and respect the military has for the rule of law; not the second amendment. That, at best, keeps you safe from muggers and home invaders.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
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Srsly? You think that would work? First of all you'd have to get the people skilled enough to build a proper explosive charge. Then you gotta find the people to set it, and detonate it (pretty much a suicide mission, especially if they're expected to part of the ambush too). Then there's the fact that the tank would be shooting back with explosive rounds that are like the size of your head and can take out BUILDINGS. You didn't think taking out the treads would actually stop the turret working did you? So it will still be shooting the a fore mentioned rounds at you while you try to "pick off" the soldier trying to repair the treads. Then the soldiers themselves are ALSO armed with small arms (Oh, and the tank has a.50 cal machine gun also mounted on it's turret with minimum exposure to enemy fire for the gunner, in case you happen to be too close for the big gun), and have body armor on that will allow them to take a direct hit to either head or body with 7.62 long rifle ammunition without being killed (It'll hurt like a bastard though, but it really can stop AK-47 rounds, I've seen it happen. Dude's whole body was a bruise afterward, but he walked away from being shot in the chest with an assault rife). They're pretty well trained, they don't keep trying to change the tire when people shoot at them. Assuming you can deal with ALL of that, you can also deal with the three OTHER tanks in the platoon and THEIR crews at the same time. You didn't think they traveled by themselves did you?
Wanna know how many tank crews we lost during the year I was in Iraq? One. They drove over an explosive device that was literally constructed of three 500 pound AIRCRAFT bombs wired together. Short of that, there's about three ways to stop a tank:
1) Another tank. 2) A wire guided missile with a shape charge attached that no civilian would have, and even if they did, takes a few months of training to learn to use. 3) Assault aircraft.
Otherwise the tank pretty much wins.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
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Indeed practically nothing short of another tank can stop a tank. A perfectly positioned and deployed shape charge can, but I doubt many civilians in any country have the training necessary to use such a thing even if they were legal. I don't disagree with the second amendment per se, but implying that it holds the government in check has always seemed silly to me. What holds the government in check is a combination of the rule of law and a culture in the military that makes them nearly unusable in domestic situations. You'd never see a Tienanmen Square in this country because the military would simply refuse the order.
If politicians and (more importantly) the military ever totally abandon the Constitution and impose some sort of martial law, no amount of small arms is going to stop them. As it stands right now, small arms can only kill dismounted infantry if it is extremely well aimed, let alone anyone in any sort of vehicle. Modern body armor doesn't make soldiers invulnerable robo-cops, but it protects most of their vitals from even assault weapons. Put the armored soldiers in an even a lightly armored vehicle and nothing short of high explosives can do much damage to them.
The biggest problem for KDE4 was when some distro's like Kubuntu installed KDE4.0 by default even though it was far from ready, that wasn't KDE's doing.
I've seen this claim before and I am curious. I'm primarily a Gnome user when I use Linux desktops, so I don't really follow this beyond what I see on/. but I can't understand how you release a "4.0" and claim that it wasn't ready yet. It's release software, right? It has version number, and not an alpha or beta version number. If it wasn't ready yet, why didn't they release it as beta, or a developer release, or a release candidate? normally speaking this is how software releases work. I mean, isn't this exactly what everyone bitches about Microsoft doing?
"Har, har, I'll wait for the first SP on Windows $version, Microsoft stuff is never ready on release. Har, har, stupid M$ making its early adopters into it's beta testers! Good thing I use Linux."
Now we have KDE 4 which is apparently not "ready" until its second "Service Pack". It's almost like the dev team decided to use their early adopters as beta testers.
Plus the trackpad can two finger and three finger clicks for right and middle click. And two finger drag for scroll. Apple's trackpad is the best non-external mouse solution on any laptop period. Don't get me wrong,an external mouse or trackball is often better (unless it's a really crappy mouse), but for a built in solution the MacBook trackpad is the best. Call me a fanboi if you want, but i challenge you to try it and not like it. Apple hardware has its problems, but this is definitely NOT one of them at this point in time.
That's the exact reason. On MacOS "preferences" are on the "Firefox" menu, which doesn't even exist on the other two version. Mac Menus always include a "Program Name" menu that has stuff like application preferences, the "about" dialog, and other application related items. Personally I like that convention best, but I use all three version regularly and can switch paradigms almost without thinking about it.
What am I doing wrong that I've been using Linux as my main OS since 1997-8? Everyone else seems to agree that it's not possible.
Impossible? Not at all. Difficult? Sometimes. Impossible under some circumstances? Yes. It all depends on what you need to do.
If you need to create basic office documents, browse the web, develop software (assuming not MacOS or Windows specific software), administer Unix servers or other high end Unix machines, even, to some extent, edit and produce multimedia products, Linux may well work fine for you as a desktop. There are lots of things it can do well, and more that it can do adequately. I'd rather use a Mac or Windows (but mostly a Mac) for high end multimedia work (It CAN be done on Linux, but the software is more primitive and in the end lacks some functionality) or office document work (Let's face it OpenOffice.org is adequate, but not much more), but I could use Linux and might even get so used to it that I think it's easier than the alternatives. If on the other hand I need to use Massive, or AutoCAD or any of thousand other Windows only programs (some of them silly and trivial to replace, some silly but impossible to replace, others still major players in a large market) it may well be impossible to switch to Linux.
I'm basing this purely on conversations with German natives, but I've been told that the only thing you need to do to get German Residency (as a US citizen) is find someone willing to hire you. As long as a company sponsors you, you;re more or less guaranteed immigration. Of course, finding a company to hire you is no doubt the trick (since you'll have to move 6 or 7 thousand miles before you start work), but as legal barriers go, that's pretty flimsy.
Okay, let's give somebody else all of our data (and then trust them that they're going to play nicely with the encryption keys)
I see this a lot, but I can't figure out what's so hard to believe. Big companies do stuff like this all the time. I work for a Fortune 50 company. All of our (non-classified) trash is collected and destroyed by Iron Mountain. A couple of guys come in, collect all of our paper trash (regular boring fax cover sheets, "company confidential" information, even federal government "For Official Use Only" paper, all of it), and load it into a truck to be hauled off for destruction. I'm sure we audit them and all, but essentially once a week someone from another company wanders out with all of our proprietary data, because we pay them too. To my knowledge lots of other very large companies do the same. You're protected by your contract and your audits of the contractor's practices.
For that matter, Dell handles all of our internal tech support on non-classified workstation class machines. A Dell employee has administrator access to my laptop and could theoretically suck all the proprietary information off of it.
Similarly, a good chunk of our work is stored on network attached devices not hosted locally on our site. This isn't a lot different from relying on the "cloud" to provide applications. Hell a lot of our work is done on an internal version of the "cloud", with web apps hosted outside of our local LAN (though inside the company WAN) providing business critical functions. If our external pipe goes down, we literally can't work. Hasn't happened in the year I've been here.
There are several factors keeping big business away from the cloud, but I don't think the these two are in the mix. Mainly I think big business isn't on board yet for the following reasons:
1) No "cloud" services have been around long enough to prove themselves reliable to the point big business wants to see.
2) Relatedly, few "cloud" companies have been around long enough to earn a reputation for circumspection needed for big business to trust them with proprietary data (notable exception like Google and MS exist in this case).
3) Let's face it, cloud apps are rarely as polished as either native code or internally produced intranet tools (yet).
4) There isn't a perceived need. Companies have spent a large amount of money on their own internal intranet apps over the last several years, and don't want that money "wasted" by scrapping internally developed (or purchased but internally hosted) tools in favor of something new from unproven vendors.
The last one is the big one. I suspect that the "sink or swim" moment for business applications in the cloud will come when Microsoft really and truly discontinues support for IE6. Lots of corporate internal apps really on the "unique" features and functions of IE6, and I think a lot of CIOs and CTOs are looking at what they're going to have do when it inevitably disappears. If a few of the bigger cloud vendors can get at least some of this work shuffled onto their companies, they have a good chance of being around for a while.
I don't think it's so much that mainframes are bad at small repetitive tasks as they are simply the wrong tool for the job. If you're Little Guy, Inc and you need a box to handle the simple repetitive database tasks that your small company uses daily, it's silly to spend the kind of money you would have to for a mainframe. A cheap server with some good backup and a RAID is all the power and reliability you can justify. It's not that the mainframe couldn't have done it, it's just that there's no point in spending the money on the mainframe.
If, on the other hand, you're Middle Man, Inc. and you need a machine(s) that does the same simple repetitive database tasks; but for 100 or 1000 or 10000 Little Guys... Then you might consider a mainframe (or more than one) that has virtualized instances of what Little Guy was running on their server before. The mainframe is perfectly capable of handling the trivial task, but now it might be worth the money to invest in that kind of power. That's why the cloud computing trend is helping mainframe sales. Middle Man companies all over are spending the extra bucks for a mainframe to run staggering numbers of generally simple tasks.
Not to mention that AFTER the 17,000 mph wind it then gets to be the only thing between my pressurized life support environment and the infinite vacuum of space for the next 2-3 weeks. Given that, I think NASA should pay extra for the triple glazed windows.
The main reason they give for not doing this (and conspiracy theories aside, it makes sense) is that the cost of supporting the OS on any random hardware config would be greater than the potential profit. Part of the reason OSX works as well as it does is because Apple cherry picks hardware (not that they always use the best hardware, witness Intel video in the plastic MacBooks, but they know what it is and how to integrate it), tweaks firmware and drivers, and make sure their configurations work before they ship. Stick the same OS on any old hardware and you'll see less stability and functionality unless consumers are careful about compatibility. You'd see a lot of the same hardware issues that dog Linux, but unlike with Linux, Apple represents a big and easy target for people to complain to when $cheapowirelesscard doesn't work or $obscureprintingdevice can't be found.
With tons of untested configurations waiting to be built, and tons of probably unsupported hardware waiting to be installed, and without the dominant Microsoft market share to make sure that hardware vendors test for compatibility with you rather than you having to test for compatibility with them, Apple is understandably nervous about opening the flood gates. Then top of that is the fact that Apple are notorious control freaks and probably really want to control every aspect of your "Apple Experience".
Knoxville, TN and Huntsville, AL may be along the lines of what you want. I currently live in Huntsville. They're both big DOE, NASA, and DoD contracting centers and have a really large number of IT and computing jobs, but the towns are medium sized (Huntsville is about a 200K metro area, Knoxville a bit bigger I think). Near to the Appalachian Mountains, plenty of outdoor stuff to do, reasonably inexpensive living (though not as cheap as you are talking), really decent "small town' living, but a much larger (and better paid) than natural IT sector.
Personally I'm not hugely happy here. I'm a city boy at heart; and find the lack of public transportation, lack of cute little restaurants and shops in walking distance of home, generally socially conservative outlook of the populace and such a bit unfortunate. You sound like you're looking for something like this though. Might be worth your time to check out. And please don't get me wrong... I don't hate it here (I was afraid I would), and I like the ready availability of both outdoor activities and even a pretty good cultural event calendar. It's not my first choice, but it's not bad at all.
Definitely unfair moderation. You are neither troll nor off-topic. I remember my insane joy when i got my first 1541 disk drive. It was SOOO much better than the cassette tapes. Granted it still took like 10 minutes to get "Pool of Radiance" loaded and ready to play, but that was still a HUGE improvement over taking ten minutes to get a 15 line BASIC program loaded.
The sad and unfortunate fact is that good design requires more than skills. It requires talent. I can (and have) designed websites. Whenever I compare my work with that of real web designers I cringe. I can make you something that gets your information across without (hopefully) raping anyone's eyes, but even a mediocre artist can make something more attractive with their mouse tied behind their back... In general programmers make poor designers and vice versa. Not always, there are exceptions, but in general the skill sets don't seem to overlap much.
Actually, it's more like "Well, even the FBI, which not the most "privacy conscious" of organizations, thinks that accessing someone's personal accounts without their permission (or a warrant, or special PATRIOT act permission) is a crime."
Lots and lots of companies are still standardized on IE6. They spent a ton of money on building IE6 specific web apps for their intranets and now they're stuck. It's a big problem. The company I work for still has IE6 as the default browser on all systems for precisely this reason. Luckily we're allowed to optionally install Firefox 3.x if we want, as long as we keep IE6 around for the apps that need it. I browse exclusively in FF, but once in a while have to open IE to do some specific task.
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I dunno, I knew a guy in college you ate pretty much continuously, and mostly the "worst" foods possible (He had a real thing for Spam that I will NEVER understand, and no he wasn't from Hawaii), and was skinny as a rail. Not unhealthy, clearly not absorbing calories skinny, but skinny "I'm a waif" skinny. He didn't exercise much either, unless drinking beer counts. I don't know if he had a less efficient digestive system or just burned more calories doing less work, but his weight did NOT reflect his diet.
I ate (slightly, it WAS college) better, worked out way more (I was teaching martial art professionally at the time) and was comparatively heavier (not fat by any stretch, but heavier).
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
True, but immaterial. A calorie is a unit of heat, and calories consumed are what they are, but a calorie consumed and not absorbed is the same as a calorie not consumed for purposes of this discussion. The same is true of calories consumed through protein. They are absorbed very inefficiently and won't affect fat loss or gain as much as simple carbohydrates or fat.
Lowering your caloric intake and increasing your caloric output is the best way to lose weight, but consuming more difficult to process calories helps too.
I dunno. When we bought my wife's laptop two years or so ago it came pre-installed with Vista. It was a barely functional dog and I reinstalled with a personal copy of XP. Recently she asked me to reimage the laptop (it was starting to slow down and wasn't as responsive as it had been) and for a lark I decided to try Vista again. After a few hours of updating drivers and getting it current to SP2, I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite usable. Same hardware and I used the HP quick restore function, so it had all the same crapware as it had the first time (I removed it all in both cases at any rate.) I dunno if it was the drivers or the Service Packs or what, but sometime in the last two years Vista has improved its performance noticeably (at least for this particular machine).
Lots of things were much better; but I particularly noticed that World of Warcraft, which had been unplayable at even the most modest settings during our earlier Vista experience, now runs quite acceptably with reasonable quality settings. I'm seriously considering installing Win7 RC1 on it to see what we get, but it's her main machine, and I don't think she'll appreciate me making it a testbed box. I'd have to give over my Mac in exchange, and I'm not quite willing to do that :-)
I think the problem is that none of this is intuitive, and unless you obsessively read "Tips and Tricks" articles you're not going to know how do a lot of it. People develop work flows around tools, and when the tools change ti can be a pain to adjust habits. Change isn't always bad, but it can be difficult and it isn't always good either. Add to this the fact that Microsoft produces little in the way of "how-tos" and you reach a point where the old way doesn't work any more and you haven't figured out what the new way is yet.
I also agree with GP, if you're going to go through the trouble of making a "Classic Mode" for something why not try to keep it as close to the last version as possible. That's the point after all, to make it easier for people who are used to the old interface. Why create a "Classic Mode" that moves half the stuff around and renames the other half. It neither accomplishes the goal of getting people used to the new interface, nor the goal of making it easier for people who are used to the old interface.
It makes perfect sense:
Statement: Linux is less virus prone than Windows, thus affecting the TCO of Windows negatively. THis has not been considered in most TCO calculations.
Counter Statement: The only reason Linux is less virus prone than Windows is that Linux is less popular than Windows and less of a target.
Counter to the Counter: I don't care WHY Linux has fewer viruses, it has fewer viruses. I live in a world where Microsoft is likely to continue to be far more popular than Linux for quite some time. Therefore it's likely to stay a smaller target and a lower virus OS for some time.
I think you're confusing two related, but separate issues. I am a terrible visual artist and can't carry a tune in a bucket, but I am an excellent creative problem solver (other people's opinion, not mine), and I can make reasonable stabs at creative writing (I'm sure I'd be better if I practiced). Creativity CAN be expressed as visual art or musical talent, but having those talents is not the end of creativity. People are creative in different ways (which is not to say that ALL people are creative, many aren't). Teaching creativity is not the same as teaching drawing, though many people who draw well are creative. Look at XKCD, it's very creative despite being drawn in the style of a careless 6 year old (Yes, I know he CAN draw much better, but he usually doesn't so it illustrates the point).
Has anything innovative EVER been done with full process control?
Probably a good chunk of everything NASA has ever done, and a large percentage of anything done here in the States that involves either the words "nuclear" or "missile". Those are special situations though where tight processes are needed because being slightly out of the very tight working constraints will be nearly invariably fatal. I think process is like security. It's a big overhead, but it's necessary. The question becomes how important is it to the type of work you do and how many resources do you want to devote to it. To ignore it totally is to invite chaos that accomplishes nothing, but most likely it doesn't need to be perfect or even close to perfect in every industry. Submarines, air planes and rockets are places where it does.
See my post above about how many tanks we lost in the year I spent in Iraq. Hint: it was a very small number, and it involved more explosive than you are ever likely to see in one place unless you're in the Air Force. Even the more lightly armored vehicles survived attacks more often than not. We've lost troops to improvised explosive sure, but a military that had gone totally rogue would almost certainly consider those to be "acceptable". the military would HAVE to have gone totally rogue for this scenario to play out.
I already mention the reluctance of the soldiers as one of the main factors keeping us safe. We're assuming that went away somehow in the "military kills protesters" scenario.
You're going to get all those 200+ million armed civilians in one place supporting the protest? How are they all armed?
Yes, if the military turned against us and EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN who is not otherwise a soldier took up arms in the defense of liberty and ALL of them could competently use their weapons (which you're assuming all of them have, in fact most people I know don't own a gun) they could certainly have a good chance against even our military. You'd have the support of at best a small percentage of the population (many would support the government even in the face of Draconian policies, hoping to be in the elite; more would be too scared; more still would be apathetic as long as American Idol continued to play; etc). Of those a fraction (maybe a large fraction, given the type of people you're talking about, but still a fraction) would actually HAVE guns, and a much smaller fraction would have any training in using them. Of the guns available to you most would be hand guns or hunting rifles, the first are all but useless against even body armor, let alone vehicles, the second only useful in the hands of real marksmen.
Then there's the lack of training and fire discipline. Unless your 'troops' are former police or military themselves, they've never fired guns as part of a formation. This means that they are quite as likely to shoot each other as they are to shoot the soldiers that they are supposed to be aiming at. Cops and soldiers spend all that time training for a reason. It's because it is really hard to shoot, move and communicate in a group without lots and lots of practice.
I said it above and I'll say it again, what keeps us safe is the rule of law and respect the military has for the rule of law; not the second amendment. That, at best, keeps you safe from muggers and home invaders.
Srsly? You think that would work? First of all you'd have to get the people skilled enough to build a proper explosive charge. Then you gotta find the people to set it, and detonate it (pretty much a suicide mission, especially if they're expected to part of the ambush too). Then there's the fact that the tank would be shooting back with explosive rounds that are like the size of your head and can take out BUILDINGS. You didn't think taking out the treads would actually stop the turret working did you? So it will still be shooting the a fore mentioned rounds at you while you try to "pick off" the soldier trying to repair the treads. Then the soldiers themselves are ALSO armed with small arms (Oh, and the tank has a .50 cal machine gun also mounted on it's turret with minimum exposure to enemy fire for the gunner, in case you happen to be too close for the big gun), and have body armor on that will allow them to take a direct hit to either head or body with 7.62 long rifle ammunition without being killed (It'll hurt like a bastard though, but it really can stop AK-47 rounds, I've seen it happen. Dude's whole body was a bruise afterward, but he walked away from being shot in the chest with an assault rife). They're pretty well trained, they don't keep trying to change the tire when people shoot at them. Assuming you can deal with ALL of that, you can also deal with the three OTHER tanks in the platoon and THEIR crews at the same time. You didn't think they traveled by themselves did you?
Wanna know how many tank crews we lost during the year I was in Iraq? One. They drove over an explosive device that was literally constructed of three 500 pound AIRCRAFT bombs wired together. Short of that, there's about three ways to stop a tank:
1) Another tank.
2) A wire guided missile with a shape charge attached that no civilian would have, and even if they did, takes a few months of training to learn to use.
3) Assault aircraft.
Otherwise the tank pretty much wins.
Indeed practically nothing short of another tank can stop a tank. A perfectly positioned and deployed shape charge can, but I doubt many civilians in any country have the training necessary to use such a thing even if they were legal. I don't disagree with the second amendment per se, but implying that it holds the government in check has always seemed silly to me. What holds the government in check is a combination of the rule of law and a culture in the military that makes them nearly unusable in domestic situations. You'd never see a Tienanmen Square in this country because the military would simply refuse the order.
If politicians and (more importantly) the military ever totally abandon the Constitution and impose some sort of martial law, no amount of small arms is going to stop them. As it stands right now, small arms can only kill dismounted infantry if it is extremely well aimed, let alone anyone in any sort of vehicle. Modern body armor doesn't make soldiers invulnerable robo-cops, but it protects most of their vitals from even assault weapons. Put the armored soldiers in an even a lightly armored vehicle and nothing short of high explosives can do much damage to them.
The biggest problem for KDE4 was when some distro's like Kubuntu installed KDE4.0 by default even though it was far from ready, that wasn't KDE's doing.
I've seen this claim before and I am curious. I'm primarily a Gnome user when I use Linux desktops, so I don't really follow this beyond what I see on /. but I can't understand how you release a "4.0" and claim that it wasn't ready yet. It's release software, right? It has version number, and not an alpha or beta version number. If it wasn't ready yet, why didn't they release it as beta, or a developer release, or a release candidate? normally speaking this is how software releases work. I mean, isn't this exactly what everyone bitches about Microsoft doing?
"Har, har, I'll wait for the first SP on Windows $version, Microsoft stuff is never ready on release. Har, har, stupid M$ making its early adopters into it's beta testers! Good thing I use Linux."
Now we have KDE 4 which is apparently not "ready" until its second "Service Pack". It's almost like the dev team decided to use their early adopters as beta testers.
Plus the trackpad can two finger and three finger clicks for right and middle click. And two finger drag for scroll. Apple's trackpad is the best non-external mouse solution on any laptop period. Don't get me wrong,an external mouse or trackball is often better (unless it's a really crappy mouse), but for a built in solution the MacBook trackpad is the best. Call me a fanboi if you want, but i challenge you to try it and not like it. Apple hardware has its problems, but this is definitely NOT one of them at this point in time.
That's the exact reason. On MacOS "preferences" are on the "Firefox" menu, which doesn't even exist on the other two version. Mac Menus always include a "Program Name" menu that has stuff like application preferences, the "about" dialog, and other application related items. Personally I like that convention best, but I use all three version regularly and can switch paradigms almost without thinking about it.
What am I doing wrong that I've been using Linux as my main OS since 1997-8? Everyone else seems to agree that it's not possible.
Impossible? Not at all. Difficult? Sometimes. Impossible under some circumstances? Yes. It all depends on what you need to do.
If you need to create basic office documents, browse the web, develop software (assuming not MacOS or Windows specific software), administer Unix servers or other high end Unix machines, even, to some extent, edit and produce multimedia products, Linux may well work fine for you as a desktop. There are lots of things it can do well, and more that it can do adequately. I'd rather use a Mac or Windows (but mostly a Mac) for high end multimedia work (It CAN be done on Linux, but the software is more primitive and in the end lacks some functionality) or office document work (Let's face it OpenOffice.org is adequate, but not much more), but I could use Linux and might even get so used to it that I think it's easier than the alternatives. If on the other hand I need to use Massive, or AutoCAD or any of thousand other Windows only programs (some of them silly and trivial to replace, some silly but impossible to replace, others still major players in a large market) it may well be impossible to switch to Linux.
I'm basing this purely on conversations with German natives, but I've been told that the only thing you need to do to get German Residency (as a US citizen) is find someone willing to hire you. As long as a company sponsors you, you;re more or less guaranteed immigration. Of course, finding a company to hire you is no doubt the trick (since you'll have to move 6 or 7 thousand miles before you start work), but as legal barriers go, that's pretty flimsy.
Don't know anything about the rest of the EU.
Okay, let's give somebody else all of our data (and then trust them that they're going to play nicely with the encryption keys)
I see this a lot, but I can't figure out what's so hard to believe. Big companies do stuff like this all the time. I work for a Fortune 50 company. All of our (non-classified) trash is collected and destroyed by Iron Mountain. A couple of guys come in, collect all of our paper trash (regular boring fax cover sheets, "company confidential" information, even federal government "For Official Use Only" paper, all of it), and load it into a truck to be hauled off for destruction. I'm sure we audit them and all, but essentially once a week someone from another company wanders out with all of our proprietary data, because we pay them too. To my knowledge lots of other very large companies do the same. You're protected by your contract and your audits of the contractor's practices.
For that matter, Dell handles all of our internal tech support on non-classified workstation class machines. A Dell employee has administrator access to my laptop and could theoretically suck all the proprietary information off of it.
Similarly, a good chunk of our work is stored on network attached devices not hosted locally on our site. This isn't a lot different from relying on the "cloud" to provide applications. Hell a lot of our work is done on an internal version of the "cloud", with web apps hosted outside of our local LAN (though inside the company WAN) providing business critical functions. If our external pipe goes down, we literally can't work. Hasn't happened in the year I've been here.
There are several factors keeping big business away from the cloud, but I don't think the these two are in the mix. Mainly I think big business isn't on board yet for the following reasons:
1) No "cloud" services have been around long enough to prove themselves reliable to the point big business wants to see.
2) Relatedly, few "cloud" companies have been around long enough to earn a reputation for circumspection needed for big business to trust them with proprietary data (notable exception like Google and MS exist in this case).
3) Let's face it, cloud apps are rarely as polished as either native code or internally produced intranet tools (yet).
4) There isn't a perceived need. Companies have spent a large amount of money on their own internal intranet apps over the last several years, and don't want that money "wasted" by scrapping internally developed (or purchased but internally hosted) tools in favor of something new from unproven vendors.
The last one is the big one. I suspect that the "sink or swim" moment for business applications in the cloud will come when Microsoft really and truly discontinues support for IE6. Lots of corporate internal apps really on the "unique" features and functions of IE6, and I think a lot of CIOs and CTOs are looking at what they're going to have do when it inevitably disappears. If a few of the bigger cloud vendors can get at least some of this work shuffled onto their companies, they have a good chance of being around for a while.
I don't think it's so much that mainframes are bad at small repetitive tasks as they are simply the wrong tool for the job. If you're Little Guy, Inc and you need a box to handle the simple repetitive database tasks that your small company uses daily, it's silly to spend the kind of money you would have to for a mainframe. A cheap server with some good backup and a RAID is all the power and reliability you can justify. It's not that the mainframe couldn't have done it, it's just that there's no point in spending the money on the mainframe.
If, on the other hand, you're Middle Man, Inc. and you need a machine(s) that does the same simple repetitive database tasks; but for 100 or 1000 or 10000 Little Guys... Then you might consider a mainframe (or more than one) that has virtualized instances of what Little Guy was running on their server before. The mainframe is perfectly capable of handling the trivial task, but now it might be worth the money to invest in that kind of power. That's why the cloud computing trend is helping mainframe sales. Middle Man companies all over are spending the extra bucks for a mainframe to run staggering numbers of generally simple tasks.
Not to mention that AFTER the 17,000 mph wind it then gets to be the only thing between my pressurized life support environment and the infinite vacuum of space for the next 2-3 weeks. Given that, I think NASA should pay extra for the triple glazed windows.
The main reason they give for not doing this (and conspiracy theories aside, it makes sense) is that the cost of supporting the OS on any random hardware config would be greater than the potential profit. Part of the reason OSX works as well as it does is because Apple cherry picks hardware (not that they always use the best hardware, witness Intel video in the plastic MacBooks, but they know what it is and how to integrate it), tweaks firmware and drivers, and make sure their configurations work before they ship. Stick the same OS on any old hardware and you'll see less stability and functionality unless consumers are careful about compatibility. You'd see a lot of the same hardware issues that dog Linux, but unlike with Linux, Apple represents a big and easy target for people to complain to when $cheapowirelesscard doesn't work or $obscureprintingdevice can't be found.
With tons of untested configurations waiting to be built, and tons of probably unsupported hardware waiting to be installed, and without the dominant Microsoft market share to make sure that hardware vendors test for compatibility with you rather than you having to test for compatibility with them, Apple is understandably nervous about opening the flood gates. Then top of that is the fact that Apple are notorious control freaks and probably really want to control every aspect of your "Apple Experience".
Knoxville, TN and Huntsville, AL may be along the lines of what you want. I currently live in Huntsville. They're both big DOE, NASA, and DoD contracting centers and have a really large number of IT and computing jobs, but the towns are medium sized (Huntsville is about a 200K metro area, Knoxville a bit bigger I think). Near to the Appalachian Mountains, plenty of outdoor stuff to do, reasonably inexpensive living (though not as cheap as you are talking), really decent "small town' living, but a much larger (and better paid) than natural IT sector.
Personally I'm not hugely happy here. I'm a city boy at heart; and find the lack of public transportation, lack of cute little restaurants and shops in walking distance of home, generally socially conservative outlook of the populace and such a bit unfortunate. You sound like you're looking for something like this though. Might be worth your time to check out. And please don't get me wrong... I don't hate it here (I was afraid I would), and I like the ready availability of both outdoor activities and even a pretty good cultural event calendar. It's not my first choice, but it's not bad at all.
Definitely unfair moderation. You are neither troll nor off-topic. I remember my insane joy when i got my first 1541 disk drive. It was SOOO much better than the cassette tapes. Granted it still took like 10 minutes to get "Pool of Radiance" loaded and ready to play, but that was still a HUGE improvement over taking ten minutes to get a 15 line BASIC program loaded.
The sad and unfortunate fact is that good design requires more than skills. It requires talent. I can (and have) designed websites. Whenever I compare my work with that of real web designers I cringe. I can make you something that gets your information across without (hopefully) raping anyone's eyes, but even a mediocre artist can make something more attractive with their mouse tied behind their back... In general programmers make poor designers and vice versa. Not always, there are exceptions, but in general the skill sets don't seem to overlap much.
Actually, it's more like "Well, even the FBI, which not the most "privacy conscious" of organizations, thinks that accessing someone's personal accounts without their permission (or a warrant, or special PATRIOT act permission) is a crime."
Heh.
Lots and lots of companies are still standardized on IE6. They spent a ton of money on building IE6 specific web apps for their intranets and now they're stuck. It's a big problem. The company I work for still has IE6 as the default browser on all systems for precisely this reason. Luckily we're allowed to optionally install Firefox 3.x if we want, as long as we keep IE6 around for the apps that need it. I browse exclusively in FF, but once in a while have to open IE to do some specific task.