If I look at the GnuPG AUTHORS file, I count exactly ten (10) people who have contributed to the code outside of people doing text translations.
Exactly how many people coded PGP? Do you even know? Can you say it was *less than or equal to 10?* is 10 "lots" in your view?
Your point would be valid if it were not for the now-well-known fact that most opensource projects *do* have a core development team of only a few people - as discussed in the recent Mozilla Roadmap.
I submit my belief that GnuPG is authored by *less* people than PGP, and by your own theory, given that more eyes *see* the code, though less people actually *touch* it, it would be *more* secure than the closed-source PGP.
Well, they can tell by following weather patterns. This isn't new technology - this kind of monitoring has been going on since before the US/Canada acid rain proposals.
Local, individual testing is done by individual governments, and obviously done only where something can be done to correct an issue - it doesn't make sense to measure methane output of cattle unless you actually can *do* something about it, for example.
A buch of people far smarter than you or I sat down and came up with excellent ways to guage, address, and monitor these emissions. The US didn't join for one reason, which was plainly stated - they weren't prepared to deal with the potential economic impact. It's their perogative to do so, but at no time was it suggested this process would be too difficult to "track".
The point is the gassess and emissions in question remain in the atmosphere for some time. No one needs to "meter" your vehicles or lawnmower because they are able to detect these emissions in aggregate.
Local metering may or may not be conducted by individual agencies to help identify local sources of pollution, but this is no different than the process several US states undergo to detect vehicles with unusually high emissions today.
So the answer is, the meterologists know how to enfoce it, and measure compliance, and that the US is already "in this mess" via the road and factory emissions compliance they already have in place.
The only difference is, those who signed Kyoto now have a deterrent to increase pollution. The US is free to continue to pollute itself as it wishes.
while this is true to a point, a big part of what happened with season 5 was not the result of TNT directly, but of the uncertainties surrounding if there would *be* a season 5.
JMS always indicated the events of the end of season 4 were supposed to take place in the first half of season 5. That compression left a lot of space for "non-arc" episodes. Which made the fifth season much worse.
As to TNT's involvement, I know they played a critical role in the destruction of Crusade (JMS walked away because they wanted him to "sex up" the show).
Season 5 felt anticlimactic to me, at least for the first half, as well. But I don't think anything but a firm comittment on the existence of season 5 could have changed that.
1. Any Klingon interaction with TNG was done haphazardly. B5 was a show where at least several of the years were designed to pe watched as a big "mega-movie". Less than 20% of the episodes could be considered "non-arc" and having nothing to do with the overall plot. No one has done that before in TV, unless we're suddenly going to call soap opera's "cohesive".
2. B5's contribution to CG is well known - they convinced everyone it was possible to have a CG-based TV show and not go insane in budget. I fully believe this would have happened anyway, but there's no doubt it happened sooner because of it.
3. As for the parallels to Crusade, Crusade was a sci-fi show where a ship, initially designed for one purpose, was instead repurposed to prevent the earth from destruction. The ship was a prototype, and the technologies involved were not fully understood. I can virtually guarantee the retrofitting done to Enterprise to facilitate its' new "mission" will be the same.
4. Hair is hair. But I do believe, more than any other TV show, B5 really tried to have unique aliens. TV Budgets notwithstanding, the Narn, Minbari, Vorlons and Shadows were certianly distinct.
Then the fraud was perpatrated by the SYSTEM OWNER, not by the person selling the instructions!
Failure to disclose is somehow the fault of the person providing the info? You want to register all communication to prove that this information was dissimated to the system owner somehow?
If I have instructions on how to replace a dead CD-ROM drive, I'm *not* comitting a fraud, *even if* I sell my info, provided I developed the "method" myself and am not violating patents. If someone messes up and breaks their system, It's not my responsibility if my info was correct. Further, what they *do* with that system is *definately* not my responsibility, whether or not they try to pretend they didn't do it.
Otherwise you're saying that if I buy an AMD CPU, go to a site for info on how to overclock it, that site has to report to AMD that I went there so if I try to return a broken processor they'll have a record of it. And if the site refuses to comply, it's *their* fault?!?
Prior to my Qcast, I use the video out from my Geforce4 to view various forms of video on my TV. I wasn't always happy with the quality of the output, so I picked this thing up, in the belief that my PS2 can do a better job.
And it can.
The interface is some sort of whacked-out neo-70's style thing, that aside from looking odd as hell is reasonably functional - you can navigate directories fairly easily, L2/R2 provide page up/down, and L1/R1 provide movement between "functions" (that is, between the filelist, playlist, and settings).
You can save your playlists for later playback, so oftimes you need only setup your initial playlist and run with it.
Sound: For just playing audio, the system is great - the current version does not use the 5.1 digital capabilities of the PS2, but this is forthcoming. However, it did handle my mp3/ogg collection with little difficulty, and allowed me the standard options one would expect (random play, shuffled playlist, etc.),
About the only features missing are the ability to add to a playing playlist (apparently never going to happen - technical limitiation of the PS/2 they say), and the ability to have the timer show time remaining, rather than elapsed.
Images:
The image viewer is excellent. You can control the scaling of the images, speed of the slideshow (or run it manually from the controller) as well as thr transitions between each image. Supposedly upcoming is the ability to run an image slideshow while playing music - a very cool addon.
Video:
This is what most people care about. This thing handles all the codecs they say they do - but they currently have some size limitations (It can't play a full-res DVD Rip currently, for example). Taken from their own support site, here is the amount they have to do to have the player handle larger streams (taken from their own forums):
===
Our first, immediate goal is to get SVCD resolution files (480x480) working.
Here's a quick table of the target resolutions, and how much additional performance we will need to achieve to get each level:
For MPEG2 performance, we will likely have to rely more heavily on the IPU (built-in MPEG2 hardware).
For MPEG4 performance, we will have to implement aggressive VU optimizations.
===
Perhaps the coolest feature of the software is the great customer support and free updates via the web, handled automatically - the PC software (which runs on Win/Lin/Mac I might add) checks for updates and downloads it to the PC, for the PS2 to install the next time it is used.
About the only missing Video feature I *really* want is FF/REW, and that is going to be pushed to us clients within the week, by the sound of things.
All in all, I haven't looked back since switching from video-out to the QCast Tuner.
That's a review? You complain about a feature that exists (page up/page down in the interface), but don't comment on the technical capability of the thing itself?
I know you're a mac guy and all, but seriously - the interface doesn't make the app - especially when the app's purpose is to obfuscate the interface in the case of video/images, which is the primary purpose of the tuner.
I'm usually very supportive of what you write, but there's no "review" of the technical capabilities of the Tuner at all - no attempt to run videos of different sizes, no attempt to test the codecs, no mention that the company provides free and automatic updates of the software online, nothing.
What, exactly, makes this a review of anything more than the interface??
Untrue. I took by VIA 133-based mobo w/256 Megs of RAM, which was originally an AMD 750, and, over the period of two years, did the following:
- Upgraded to a 900Mhz Duron - added 256MB RAM - Upgraded to a 1.3Ghz Athlon - Upgraded to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP
Try doing that with any Intel chip. The socket changed *twice* during the comperable speeds I've listed here. An no new Mobo was purchased, nor was RAM changed (just more bought, for $60 I believe, but it was plain ol' SDRAM, *not* the insanely expensive RAMBUS I'd have been buying at the time if I had been using a P4).
From the excerpt of the link I posted in my earlier comment: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES $349 (Basic Edition). Subtract the $120 for enterprise RHN and you get my numbers.
This isn't new info - Redhat 8.0 was always planned to EOL at December 31. This was announced at the same time they were planning to EOL RH6.2/7.0.
What it means is, starting with RH9, you have 12 months of errata. You'll be able to use RH9 until March 31st, 2004, a year after release.
This *is* inconvenient, because it means, at minimum, taking a machine down to kickstart it every year. THAT is annoying as hell, especially since you aren't going to deploy RH9 site-wide for at least 2-3 months (shortening the releases "lifetime" by 3 months).
I thought this was a huge problem until I looked at their ES level enterprise solution. Since enterprise entitlements are $120 anway, paying $230 for an OS that doesn't expire for 3-5 years seems perfectly reasonable.
If your systems are mission-critical enough to NEED to be left stable for *years*, then going with Advanced Server makes more sense than any other distro - they stabalize the platform for 18 months between releases, minimizing your QA and upgrade time significantly.
Not a problem. Advanced server offers a five-year minimum timeline for updates, and that's what they have certified - the three new flavours of Advanced server.
Um, they weren't the *same computer* they sold 5 years ago I'm afraid. I count
20 revisions made to that machine in 5 years. That gives each system a shelf life of about three months!
Firstly, reducing the amount of data is crap. What if you have 10 million records? Should the answer from *tech support* be "well, don't!"?? That's what you advocate.
Oracle dropped the ball here. First, because the database *crashed* on the query. If you're telling me that *any* query I run should be able to outright *crash* the database then go work for Microsoft on MS-SQL. Worst case, the database should thrash incessantly (and accept a kill) or consume too much RAM and kill itself off, but certainly not HANG. I can't believe you suggest that's the fault of the person running the query and not the developer.
But secondly, and most importantly, Oracle should definately offer tips on what to do. I mean, regardless of the situation, the thing ran, and *died*. Not slow. Not exceeding resources. Died. If it's a bug, fine. Then you offer a bloody workaround, *especially* if you have no intention of fixing the bug!
I mean since when is *crashing* an app not a reason to call tech support? Is it because you run Windows and are *used* to the tech support response of "Reboot, try again"??
What I meant was, if someone *does* use your address, by having multimple addresses, one per source, you mitigate the damage. You just disable that one address and change to another. It's far easier to change your email on, say, slashdot, rather than changing it *Everywhere*, dont-ya think?
What people don't realize is that the major issue wasn't with the rebroadcasting of the signal, it was that the signal (on the internet) could reach *foreign markets*. If someone came up with a surefire way to keep the broadcast signal *within* the canadian internet topography, it would have been legal.
When you signup for something, use -@. for example, I could use:
ksnider-slashdot@flarn.com as an email address. That way, if spam starts coming to this address, I just blackhole *that* address entirely, and either change my address on slashdot (ksnider-slashdot2), or leave it as-is if I don't care about the registration in question.
There is an issue with spambots trying any address at your domain, since you'll get tons of mail in your mailbox if you just allow, by default, *@your-domain.tld to deliver to your mailbox. But in my experience, they tend to hit the same addresses - sales, info, webmaster, etc.. and once you explicitly blacklist those, you'll find your world blissfully spam-free.:)
Oh, and as a final note, don't use any combination of your name as your *primary* email address! Instead, use something like me@my-domain.tld or somesuch, to make it more difficult to "guess" your email address.
What your missing is this key element: *you* have your criteria as to what is, and is not spam, *not* the spammer.
The spammer cannot adapr to you because s/he does not know the ruleset you are using to detect spam. Even a spammer running 1,000,000 valid emails through a filter would not work, because the filter adapts to the email you actually *receive*. Sure, it may make the filter have to guess more (and subsequently classify more spam as legit mail) at first, but the more email you feed your filter, the better it gets at knowing the difference.
I really don't think spammers can defeat this without knowing the characteristics of *legitimate* email a person receives.
It was some years ago, but I recall that some public employees in the Vancouver area actually negotiated that into their contracts at one point, even covering retirees. I believe you'll find it's a common Medical Insurance benefit for public employees in places in Canada where US medical care is conveniently available.
Not Quite.
Canadians wish to be able to use US medicial facilities to have procedures performed when Canadian ones are full. Not the same as saying we want the US health care system, just access to additional facilities when ours become full (which tends to happen seasonally). In most cases, the cost is slightly more to the taxpayer to use US services, but not significantly so, so it saves our health care system money in terms of capital for new equipment.
In Ontario, I can happily travel to the US for a government-paid procedure if there are no locations in Ontario which can accomodate me at the time.
Since about Mozilla 0.8 or so, Mozilla has rendered faster than any version of IE. The startup times left a little to be desired, but a lot of that is fixed by Mozilla's Quicklaunch option.
Sure it uses RAM, but so does IE, and not in "IEXPLORE.EXE" either - most of that code is integrated right into the Windows Explorer code.
A lot of people who have claimed Mozilla is "too big and slow" have never used a 1.0+ build I would assume, or are trying to compare Moz for Linux (which is =much= slower than it's Windows counterpart), with Moz for Windows.
I can virtually guarantee this is the reason, coupled with the fact that people are now able to find things *signifigantly* faster than before. Think about the level of difficulty you had finding and accessing content a few years ago, compared to our broadband, post-google era.. People need to surf for shorter periods of time to accomplish the same tasks.
In essence, it is that the web is now more efficient than it was a few years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
If I look at the GnuPG AUTHORS file, I count exactly ten (10) people who have contributed to the code outside of people doing text translations.
Exactly how many people coded PGP? Do you even know? Can you say it was *less than or equal to 10?* is 10 "lots" in your view?
Your point would be valid if it were not for the now-well-known fact that most opensource projects *do* have a core development team of only a few people - as discussed in the recent Mozilla Roadmap.
I submit my belief that GnuPG is authored by *less* people than PGP, and by your own theory, given that more eyes *see* the code, though less people actually *touch* it, it would be *more* secure than the closed-source PGP.
Well, they can tell by following weather patterns. This isn't new technology - this kind of monitoring has been going on since before the US/Canada acid rain proposals.
Local, individual testing is done by individual governments, and obviously done only where something can be done to correct an issue - it doesn't make sense to measure methane output of cattle unless you actually can *do* something about it, for example.
A buch of people far smarter than you or I sat down and came up with excellent ways to guage, address, and monitor these emissions. The US didn't join for one reason, which was plainly stated - they weren't prepared to deal with the potential economic impact. It's their perogative to do so, but at no time was it suggested this process would be too difficult to "track".
The point is the gassess and emissions in question remain in the atmosphere for some time. No one needs to "meter" your vehicles or lawnmower because they are able to detect these emissions in aggregate.
Local metering may or may not be conducted by individual agencies to help identify local sources of pollution, but this is no different than the process several US states undergo to detect vehicles with unusually high emissions today.
So the answer is, the meterologists know how to enfoce it, and measure compliance, and that the US is already "in this mess" via the road and factory emissions compliance they already have in place.
The only difference is, those who signed Kyoto now have a deterrent to increase pollution. The US is free to continue to pollute itself as it wishes.
while this is true to a point, a big part of what happened with season 5 was not the result of TNT directly, but of the uncertainties surrounding if there would *be* a season 5.
JMS always indicated the events of the end of season 4 were supposed to take place in the first half of season 5. That compression left a lot of space for "non-arc" episodes. Which made the fifth season much worse.
As to TNT's involvement, I know they played a critical role in the destruction of Crusade (JMS walked away because they wanted him to "sex up" the show).
Season 5 felt anticlimactic to me, at least for the first half, as well. But I don't think anything but a firm comittment on the existence of season 5 could have changed that.
*blink*.
1. Any Klingon interaction with TNG was done haphazardly. B5 was a show where at least several of the years were designed to pe watched as a big "mega-movie". Less than 20% of the episodes could be considered "non-arc" and having nothing to do with the overall plot. No one has done that before in TV, unless we're suddenly going to call soap opera's "cohesive".
2. B5's contribution to CG is well known - they convinced everyone it was possible to have a CG-based TV show and not go insane in budget. I fully believe this would have happened anyway, but there's no doubt it happened sooner because of it.
3. As for the parallels to Crusade, Crusade was a sci-fi show where a ship, initially designed for one purpose, was instead repurposed to prevent the earth from destruction. The ship was a prototype, and the technologies involved were not fully understood. I can virtually guarantee the retrofitting done to Enterprise to facilitate its' new "mission" will be the same.
4. Hair is hair. But I do believe, more than any other TV show, B5 really tried to have unique aliens. TV Budgets notwithstanding, the Narn, Minbari, Vorlons and Shadows were certianly distinct.
Babylon 5 didn't die, It ended.
It had always been inteded for it to be a 5 year story.
?!
Then the fraud was perpatrated by the SYSTEM OWNER, not by the person selling the instructions!
Failure to disclose is somehow the fault of the person providing the info? You want to register all communication to prove that this information was dissimated to the system owner somehow?
If I have instructions on how to replace a dead CD-ROM drive, I'm *not* comitting a fraud, *even if* I sell my info, provided I developed the "method" myself and am not violating patents. If someone messes up and breaks their system, It's not my responsibility if my info was correct. Further, what they *do* with that system is *definately* not my responsibility, whether or not they try to pretend they didn't do it.
Otherwise you're saying that if I buy an AMD CPU, go to a site for info on how to overclock it, that site has to report to AMD that I went there so if I try to return a broken processor they'll have a record of it. And if the site refuses to comply, it's *their* fault?!?
Holy police state batman.
Prior to my Qcast, I use the video out from my Geforce4 to view various forms of video on my TV. I wasn't always happy with the quality of the output, so I picked this thing up, in the belief that my PS2 can do a better job.
And it can.
The interface is some sort of whacked-out neo-70's style thing, that aside from looking odd as hell is reasonably functional - you can navigate directories fairly easily, L2/R2 provide page up/down, and L1/R1 provide movement between "functions" (that is, between the filelist, playlist, and settings).
You can save your playlists for later playback, so oftimes you need only setup your initial playlist and run with it.
Sound: For just playing audio, the system is great - the current version does not use the 5.1 digital capabilities of the PS2, but this is forthcoming. However, it did handle my mp3/ogg collection with little difficulty, and allowed me the standard options one would expect (random play, shuffled playlist, etc.),
About the only features missing are the ability to add to a playing playlist (apparently never going to happen - technical limitiation of the PS/2 they say), and the ability to have the timer show time remaining, rather than elapsed.
Images:
The image viewer is excellent. You can control the scaling of the images, speed of the slideshow (or run it manually from the controller) as well as thr transitions between each image. Supposedly upcoming is the ability to run an image slideshow while playing music - a very cool addon.
Video:
This is what most people care about. This thing handles all the codecs they say they do - but they currently have some size limitations (It can't play a full-res DVD Rip currently, for example). Taken from their own support site, here is the amount they have to do to have the player handle larger streams (taken from their own forums):
===
Our first, immediate goal is to get SVCD resolution files (480x480) working.
Here's a quick table of the target resolutions, and how much additional performance we will need to achieve to get each level:
512x384: 1.0 (this works today).
480x480: 17% performance increase
640x480: 56% performance increase
720x480: 75% performance increase
720x576: 110% performance increase
For MPEG2 performance, we will likely have to rely more heavily on the IPU (built-in MPEG2 hardware).
For MPEG4 performance, we will have to implement aggressive VU optimizations.
===
Perhaps the coolest feature of the software is the great customer support and free updates via the web, handled automatically - the PC software (which runs on Win/Lin/Mac I might add) checks for updates and downloads it to the PC, for the PS2 to install the next time it is used.
About the only missing Video feature I *really* want is FF/REW, and that is going to be pushed to us clients within the week, by the sound of things.
All in all, I haven't looked back since switching from video-out to the QCast Tuner.
Pudge! What is *that*?
That's a review? You complain about a feature that exists (page up/page down in the interface), but don't comment on the technical capability of the thing itself?
I know you're a mac guy and all, but seriously - the interface doesn't make the app - especially when the app's purpose is to obfuscate the interface in the case of video/images, which is the primary purpose of the tuner.
I'm usually very supportive of what you write, but there's no "review" of the technical capabilities of the Tuner at all - no attempt to run videos of different sizes, no attempt to test the codecs, no mention that the company provides free and automatic updates of the software online, nothing.
What, exactly, makes this a review of anything more than the interface??
Untrue. I took by VIA 133-based mobo w/256 Megs of RAM, which was originally an AMD 750, and, over the period of two years, did the following:
- Upgraded to a 900Mhz Duron
- added 256MB RAM
- Upgraded to a 1.3Ghz Athlon
- Upgraded to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP
Try doing that with any Intel chip. The socket changed *twice* during the comperable speeds I've listed here. An no new Mobo was purchased, nor was RAM changed (just more bought, for $60 I believe, but it was plain ol' SDRAM, *not* the insanely expensive RAMBUS I'd have been buying at the time if I had been using a P4).
You have that totally wrong.
SCSI Drives are more expensive because they are tested individually, because of VOLUME ISSUES, not because the tests are any more robust!
Makes no sense for a company to build a 100-drive-wide testing array for SCSI drives, because so many fewer are produced.
This drives up costs considerably.
Nope. Our organization buys them in singles..
RTFL (Read the freakin link).
From the excerpt of the link I posted in my earlier comment: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES $349 (Basic Edition). Subtract the $120 for enterprise RHN and you get my numbers.
What it means is, starting with RH9, you have 12 months of errata. You'll be able to use RH9 until March 31st, 2004, a year after release.
This *is* inconvenient, because it means, at minimum, taking a machine down to kickstart it every year. THAT is annoying as hell, especially since you aren't going to deploy RH9 site-wide for at least 2-3 months (shortening the releases "lifetime" by 3 months).
I thought this was a huge problem until I looked at their ES level enterprise solution. Since enterprise entitlements are $120 anway, paying $230 for an OS that doesn't expire for 3-5 years seems perfectly reasonable.
If your systems are mission-critical enough to NEED to be left stable for *years*, then going with Advanced Server makes more sense than any other distro - they stabalize the platform for 18 months between releases, minimizing your QA and upgrade time significantly.
Not a problem. Advanced server offers a five-year minimum timeline for updates, and that's what they have certified - the three new flavours of Advanced server.
I'm not refuting that.
I am, however, refuting the claim that the iMac was unchanged for five years, as the Parent claimed.
Um, they weren't the *same computer* they sold 5 years ago I'm afraid. I count 20 revisions made to that machine in 5 years. That gives each system a shelf life of about three months!
My god.
Go crawl up your database and hide in a cell.
Firstly, reducing the amount of data is crap. What if you have 10 million records? Should the answer from *tech support* be "well, don't!"?? That's what you advocate.
Oracle dropped the ball here. First, because the database *crashed* on the query. If you're telling me that *any* query I run should be able to outright *crash* the database then go work for Microsoft on MS-SQL. Worst case, the database should thrash incessantly (and accept a kill) or consume too much RAM and kill itself off, but certainly not HANG. I can't believe you suggest that's the fault of the person running the query and not the developer.
But secondly, and most importantly, Oracle should definately offer tips on what to do. I mean, regardless of the situation, the thing ran, and *died*. Not slow. Not exceeding resources. Died. If it's a bug, fine. Then you offer a bloody workaround, *especially* if you have no intention of fixing the bug!
I mean since when is *crashing* an app not a reason to call tech support? Is it because you run Windows and are *used* to the tech support response of "Reboot, try again"??
Geez.
Um, no. Read it again.
What I meant was, if someone *does* use your address, by having multimple addresses, one per source, you mitigate the damage. You just disable that one address and change to another. It's far easier to change your email on, say, slashdot, rather than changing it *Everywhere*, dont-ya think?
Dead right.
What people don't realize is that the major issue wasn't with the rebroadcasting of the signal, it was that the signal (on the internet) could reach *foreign markets*. If someone came up with a surefire way to keep the broadcast signal *within* the canadian internet topography, it would have been legal.
Simple.
:)
When you signup for something, use -@. for example, I could use:
ksnider-slashdot@flarn.com as an email address. That way, if spam starts coming to this address, I just blackhole *that* address entirely, and either change my address on slashdot (ksnider-slashdot2), or leave it as-is if I don't care about the registration in question.
There is an issue with spambots trying any address at your domain, since you'll get tons of mail in your mailbox if you just allow, by default, *@your-domain.tld to deliver to your mailbox. But in my experience, they tend to hit the same addresses - sales, info, webmaster, etc.. and once you explicitly blacklist those, you'll find your world blissfully spam-free.
Oh, and as a final note, don't use any combination of your name as your *primary* email address! Instead, use something like me@my-domain.tld or somesuch, to make it more difficult to "guess" your email address.
What your missing is this key element: *you* have your criteria as to what is, and is not spam, *not* the spammer.
The spammer cannot adapr to you because s/he does not know the ruleset you are using to detect spam. Even a spammer running 1,000,000 valid emails through a filter would not work, because the filter adapts to the email you actually *receive*. Sure, it may make the filter have to guess more (and subsequently classify more spam as legit mail) at first, but the more email you feed your filter, the better it gets at knowing the difference.
I really don't think spammers can defeat this without knowing the characteristics of *legitimate* email a person receives.
Not Quite.
Canadians wish to be able to use US medicial facilities to have procedures performed when Canadian ones are full. Not the same as saying we want the US health care system, just access to additional facilities when ours become full (which tends to happen seasonally). In most cases, the cost is slightly more to the taxpayer to use US services, but not significantly so, so it saves our health care system money in terms of capital for new equipment.
In Ontario, I can happily travel to the US for a government-paid procedure if there are no locations in Ontario which can accomodate me at the time.
Since about Mozilla 0.8 or so, Mozilla has rendered faster than any version of IE. The startup times left a little to be desired, but a lot of that is fixed by Mozilla's Quicklaunch option.
Sure it uses RAM, but so does IE, and not in "IEXPLORE.EXE" either - most of that code is integrated right into the Windows Explorer code.
A lot of people who have claimed Mozilla is "too big and slow" have never used a 1.0+ build I would assume, or are trying to compare Moz for Linux (which is =much= slower than it's Windows counterpart), with Moz for Windows.
I can virtually guarantee this is the reason, coupled with the fact that people are now able to find things *signifigantly* faster than before. Think about the level of difficulty you had finding and accessing content a few years ago, compared to our broadband, post-google era.. People need to surf for shorter periods of time to accomplish the same tasks.
In essence, it is that the web is now more efficient than it was a few years ago.