If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
My virtual beings in my virtual world could make exactly the same argument. Since I know they would be factually wrong, I have to conclude that the argument is bad (even should it happened to be correct in this case).
I'm not sure that the argument that things therefore can not "just exist" is any better though.
I am talking about the possibility of something not needing a creator.
Well K. S. Kyosuke wasn't, and I wasn't in my response to him. That's why your arguments make no sense to me: they're nothing to do with the conversation we were having.
That is a universe you defined by saying you created it. By definition the stuff in it was created by you.
Well, yes, of course. I'm defining what I'm saying. Why do you think this strange?
At the very least, we'd have to imagine a universe you didn't create, perhaps that has always existed.
Why would I have to do this? Is this a reference to something I said, or something K. S. Kyosuke said? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
I'm saying that you yourself aren't bound by the rules of your virtual world. And that would be an error for someone inside your virtual world to think that you were.
This at least seems to touch on the point I was making, but you seem to be missing it.
but you can't argue that a country could do without a military. Without that we'd be an Islamic state by now
How would that work? Say the USA decided that it couldn't afford a military anymore and basically just shut the whole thing down. In that hypothetical, what are the steps by which the USA would become an Islamic state?
So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.
Random choice of the second biggest city in the UK, huh? About 10 miles of coastline is the answer.
In distance, this works. Not so much with heat. Put two pots on the stove, one on high for 10 minutes and another on low for two hours. Sure, the pot on high will boil, but it will eventually cool down to a temperature lower than the pot on low.
It does work with heat, in fact you've got it with your analogy, you've just left the pot too long. Put one on high for 10 minutes and one on low for 20 minutes and you might well have the one on high being hotter than the one on low!
Eventually is the key word. If methane just disappeared out of the atmosphere when it broke down then give it long enough and it would have had less of an effect than CO2 in the atmosphere would. It just takes longer than 100 years to do that. Well, it's complicated by that fact that methane breaks down to CO2 anyway, so that's like turning the pot on high down to low rather than off, but you get the drift.
Space is a poor insulator.
Actually, this is incorrect. The only way things can lose heat in space is through radiation. It insulates quite well. Your biggest problem with electronics in space is cooling them without convection.
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?
I've already explained this to you, using a very simple analogy with a hare and a tortoise. Did you not understand?
It makes no difference if the vast majority of the effect from the methane happens over 9-15 years. We can still say how much effect it had over any length of time we choose. Over 15 years, say, it might have 70 times the effect of CO2. Over 50 years it might have 45 times the effect of CO2. Over 100 years it might have 20 times. Over 500 years it might have 4 times the effect. [These figures are not meant to be exact, they are purely to illustrate the concept]
I agree 2000 is pretty small, but a lot of the words at the end of your list aren't even words and many others are not at all easy to remember. Kms, lta, meps, mhz, mics, nsc, owd, pac?
You exaggerate. The last 10 words are: lever
lacuna
lacked
kosovo
knock
kms
kenyon
keenan
jovian
jeans
Of those, only kms isn't a word. mhz as short for megahertz and mics short for microphones are hardly unknown. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken the "all" list, but all those words are used. I'm not going to take the time to cut out all the acronyms just to prove a point. Assume 20% of my list is "wrong". That still leaves 16,000 words.
You actually want to use not short words but extremely common words, since they are more likely to be easily remembered. 2000 was chosen because of the XKCD about this password generation method,
Well, yes, of course, I was just being lazy. So I downloaded a list of the most common words in English (about 200,000) and cleaned it up, removing all those with any punctuation and then narrowed it down to only words between 3-7 letters. Then I took the first 20,000 of those.
You can download the file here. They're sorted by frequency, so look at the last 10 with tail. See, 2000 is just ridiculous. I do appreciate the xkcd since it mirrors what I'd been arguing for a while. More people listen to comics than to me:-) But I wish he hadn't chosen such a small dictionary as an example, since it makes the concept so easy to criticise unjustifiably...
You could certainly find a dictionary of over 50,000 words without much trouble.
In fact, I just realised that right next to it was the Unabridged dictionary which is 213,557 words. Mind you, you get passphrases like: "unrealmed hagiocracy viverridae heterodoxal" (actually really got that with "shuf -n 4 Unabr.dict") but I guess it would be good for your vocabulary.;-)
Four words out of a 2k-word dictionary (which is small),
That isn't small...it's *tiny*. For fun, I downloaded a word list from ox.ac.uk. It's 26,800 words. And that's just English words, and probably not very many. You could certainly find a dictionary of over 50,000 words without much trouble.
I tried to cut it down to around 2000 words, and succeeded by cutting out all words beginning with capitals, any that contained an apostrophe and all those that were *over four letters long*. That gave me a dictionary of about 2,400 words. All four letters or less and all lowercase.
I'm afraid the Daily Mail was mistaken (it's a terrible paper; seriously, it's a celeb gossip rag -- don't quote from it). What the columnist was referring to was this
See in 2007 when there was a record low? The article you link to was written in 2010, so all they had was 2008 and 2009 data. See how those are both higher than 2007?
Now, those are the data that columnist is referring to. Look at it yourself. Do you think that it was honestly interpreted by the Daily Mail? Would *you* have presented those data as a trend of increasing ice?
"Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period" and "Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years".
Am I the only one who sees a huge logic flaw in that 100-year figure given the 9-15 year figure? How do the intelligent people here on Slashdot keep their bullshit meter from flying off the handle?
Imagine a retelling of Ach^W the Hare and the Tortoise. They decide to see who can run the furthest in 1 minute. At the off, the Hare sprints away but 10 seconds later he's completely exhausted and lies down to have a rest, having covered 100m in that time. Meanwhile, the tortoise plods along steadily and at the end of the minute....well, this is no fairy tale -- he's only managed 5 metres.
So, the Hare has covered 20 times the distance that the Tortoise has, even though he's only run for 10 seconds. No surprise, frankly.
Methane is actually about 70 times better as a greenhouse gas as CO2 in the short term, but we don't really care about the short term: long term effects are what are important. So, we can average it out over 100 years instead. Of course, methane doesn't just disappear when it breaks down; it ends up leaving CO2 in the atmosphere, so it has long term effects anyway. It's why, even though water is such a potent greenhouse gas, it doesn't matter as a temperature forcing mechanism because it drops out of the atmosphere within *days*. The amount the atmosphere can hold is dependant on the temperature.
However, what's bad about water, is that if something else causes the atmospheric temperature to rise, the overall effect won't just be from *that thing*. The warmer atmosphere will also hold more water which will cause an *additional* temperature rise.
Because it's a lot cheaper to destroy than to build. I can pick up a rock, for free, and throw it through an expensive plate glass window.
Are you joking? Do you honestly think that Apple are a defenseless entity? What the hell is wrong with you people; have you lost all sense of reality?!
Firstly, my reply will no doubt come across as a little harsh, so I'd like to thank you for taking the time to put together an intelligent and reasoned response to my post.
Apple is a corporation. Douchery is expected from time to time. No, they don't deserve sympathy and no one asked you to give them any, but don't piss on them undeservedly.
Sympathy was exactly what I was asked to give them. They can stand a little piss.
Suing other companies? To turn your words around... poor little Samsung. Poor little Google and Motorola. Why are those multi-billion revenue, multi-national corporations getting any sympathy from you at all over the fact they're being sued?
They're not. I don't give any of them sympathy. I'd be saying "poor little Samsung" if they were the topic of conversation. Any company suing over patents deserves contempt as far as I'm concerned.
And FYI the Chinese workers of their contractor (i.e. they're not Apple employees)
Bollocks. You don't get away with crapping on your workers by claiming they're contractors. Oh, wait, you do legally and in some people's minds...
ARE being paid living wages. For China.
No they're not. If they were getting paid a living wage for China, no-one would have a problem. Contrary to your belief, the people who complain about worker wages in developing countries have usually lived there and have a pretty good idea of what a living wage for that country actually is.
I do wonder how it is that an organisation that "rakes in" about 1% *annually* of what Apple raked in last *quarter* is somehow bullying Apple? Poor little Apple.
You don't see how a smaller organization can bully or attack a much larger one? Money is irrelevant.
Hahahahaha....
I assume you're an adult male. Now imagine a 10-year old girl falsely accuses you of... well, use your imagination.
Wow! It's like a walking cliche. If I can't be scared by the "Greenpeace are terrorists" crap, then bring in "what about the paedophiles"!
I think Apple are perfectly capable of defending themselves against Greenpeace. They seem to be winning the propaganda war quite comfortably. Just look at the comments here. Or just analyse your own reaction. What damage, exactly, have Greenpeace ever done to you that you feel the need to attack them so strongly?
Apple makes the greenest computers at of pretty much all home computers. Has for a very long while....Why did [Greenpeace] say that? because Apple kept the efforts for cleaner system to them selves
Why on earth would they do that? With the amount of money Apple spends on PR, why wouldn't they be publicising what a wonderful job they were doing?
If the media would stop giving the yahoos the time of day, then they wouldn't be able to bully anyone.
I say again: poor little Apple. Maybe if they spent less money suing other companies, I'd have some sympathy for the little angels. Or perhaps if they could be bothered paying their Chinese employees a living wage? Oh no; that might cut down their profits a bit!
It's always interesting to see the American reaction to a Greenpeace story. We have comments criticising them for being such a massive organisation, "raking in over a quarter of a billions a year worldwide"! And explaining that it's because of Greenpeace that the nuclear industry in the USA has been stifled.
I do wonder how it is that an organisation that "rakes in" about 1% *annually* of what Apple raked in last *quarter* is somehow bullying Apple? Poor little Apple.
And this same organisation, who again pull in less than 0.5% of just Valero's turnover, are dictating US energy policy? How did that happen? Presumably it has something to do with the huge number of Green Party Congressmen you currently have...
A friend from Britian developed a cold that refused to go away, but the "free" health system made him wait 3 weeks just to see a general practitioner.
No they didn't. The problem with your imaginary friend story is that you can't make an appointment to see an NHS GP three weeks in advance. Nearly all practises now only allow you to make an appointment up to 2 days in advance, though you can get same day for urgent cases. Your friend could also have changed practise if he wasn't happy with the one he was with.
Once he got there they said, "Oh allergies," without any kind of tests, and handed him some pills. So he asked to get a second opinion from a private physician, in hopes of finding-out what was really wrong. The UK Government's hospital said "no". The end.
Nope, this didn't happen either. Why would he need a referral? If he wanted to go see a private doctor, there's nothing stopping him. They're not even very expensive!
(U.S. wait time is typically 1 day.)
Nope, US typical wait time for someone without private insurance is indefinitely. For a public healthcare system that you pay *more* for, per-capita, than we pay for the NHS in the UK. Meanwhile, if I wanted private insurance with all the perks and zero excess in the UK, it would cost me about 80 GBP, or about $130, a month. What would *you* get for that?
My mistake, then. I'd heard they'd gone the same route as OS X (incorrectly, it appears). Apologies to all.
Nope, you heard correctly. The bit you're mistaken about is that OS X also has a root user. In both cases, the account is "locked" (no matchable password is set). Set a password for the root user and it works as normal.
Well, this: http://news.softpedia.com/news/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-196538.shtml..says that SSDs do better overall than HDDs, though it depends on the model exactly how much better and there's some overlap (avoid OCZ I guess!)
Yeah, of course you should backup anything that's important (though a while back, I abandoned data I'd accumulated for many years and frankly I don't miss it at all...)
Slashdot Mirror
If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
My virtual beings in my virtual world could make exactly the same argument. Since I know they would be factually wrong, I have to conclude that the argument is bad (even should it happened to be correct in this case).
I'm not sure that the argument that things therefore can not "just exist" is any better though.
I am talking about the possibility of something not needing a creator.
Well K. S. Kyosuke wasn't, and I wasn't in my response to him. That's why your arguments make no sense to me: they're nothing to do with the conversation we were having.
That is a universe you defined by saying you created it. By definition the stuff in it was created by you.
Well, yes, of course. I'm defining what I'm saying. Why do you think this strange?
At the very least, we'd have to imagine a universe you didn't create, perhaps that has always existed.
Why would I have to do this? Is this a reference to something I said, or something K. S. Kyosuke said? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
I'm saying that you yourself aren't bound by the rules of your virtual world. And that would be an error for someone inside your virtual world to think that you were.
This at least seems to touch on the point I was making, but you seem to be missing it.
So here things can't "just exist" and "somewhere else" (where the "creator" was before his alleged act of creation) they can?
So, I program a virtual world on a computer. In that world things can't "just exist". I have to create them.
However, where the "creator" (that's me!) is...well, what do you say?
You say I can't "just exist" and need a creator too? Or in my "somewhere else" am I allowed to "just exist"?
but you can't argue that a country could do without a military. Without that we'd be an Islamic state by now
How would that work? Say the USA decided that it couldn't afford a military anymore and basically just shut the whole thing down. In that hypothetical, what are the steps by which the USA would become an Islamic state?
So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.
Random choice of the second biggest city in the UK, huh? About 10 miles of coastline is the answer.
even if it happens to orbit another star or simply orbits the center of the galaxy.
Hmm...
In distance, this works. Not so much with heat. Put two pots on the stove, one on high for 10 minutes and another on low for two hours. Sure, the pot on high will boil, but it will eventually cool down to a temperature lower than the pot on low.
It does work with heat, in fact you've got it with your analogy, you've just left the pot too long. Put one on high for 10 minutes and one on low for 20 minutes and you might well have the one on high being hotter than the one on low!
Eventually is the key word. If methane just disappeared out of the atmosphere when it broke down then give it long enough and it would have had less of an effect than CO2 in the atmosphere would. It just takes longer than 100 years to do that. Well, it's complicated by that fact that methane breaks down to CO2 anyway, so that's like turning the pot on high down to low rather than off, but you get the drift.
Space is a poor insulator.
Actually, this is incorrect. The only way things can lose heat in space is through radiation. It insulates quite well. Your biggest problem with electronics in space is cooling them without convection.
Take this gem, from the EPA itself:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?
I've already explained this to you, using a very simple analogy with a hare and a tortoise. Did you not understand?
It makes no difference if the vast majority of the effect from the methane happens over 9-15 years. We can still say how much effect it had over any length of time we choose. Over 15 years, say, it might have 70 times the effect of CO2. Over 50 years it might have 45 times the effect of CO2. Over 100 years it might have 20 times. Over 500 years it might have 4 times the effect. [These figures are not meant to be exact, they are purely to illustrate the concept]
Do you understand it now?
I agree 2000 is pretty small, but a lot of the words at the end of your list aren't even words and many others are not at all easy to remember. Kms, lta, meps, mhz, mics, nsc, owd, pac?
You exaggerate. The last 10 words are: lever lacuna lacked kosovo knock kms kenyon keenan jovian jeans
Of those, only kms isn't a word. mhz as short for megahertz and mics short for microphones are hardly unknown. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken the "all" list, but all those words are used. I'm not going to take the time to cut out all the acronyms just to prove a point. Assume 20% of my list is "wrong". That still leaves 16,000 words.
You actually want to use not short words but extremely common words, since they are more likely to be easily remembered. 2000 was chosen because of the XKCD about this password generation method,
Well, yes, of course, I was just being lazy. So I downloaded a list of the most common words in English (about 200,000) and cleaned it up, removing all those with any punctuation and then narrowed it down to only words between 3-7 letters. Then I took the first 20,000 of those.
You can download the file here. They're sorted by frequency, so look at the last 10 with tail. See, 2000 is just ridiculous. I do appreciate the xkcd since it mirrors what I'd been arguing for a while. More people listen to comics than to me :-) But I wish he hadn't chosen such a small dictionary as an example, since it makes the concept so easy to criticise unjustifiably...
You could certainly find a dictionary of over 50,000 words without much trouble.
In fact, I just realised that right next to it was the Unabridged dictionary which is 213,557 words. Mind you, you get passphrases like: "unrealmed hagiocracy viverridae heterodoxal" (actually really got that with "shuf -n 4 Unabr.dict") but I guess it would be good for your vocabulary. ;-)
Four words out of a 2k-word dictionary (which is small),
That isn't small...it's *tiny*. For fun, I downloaded a word list from ox.ac.uk. It's 26,800 words. And that's just English words, and probably not very many. You could certainly find a dictionary of over 50,000 words without much trouble.
I tried to cut it down to around 2000 words, and succeeded by cutting out all words beginning with capitals, any that contained an apostrophe and all those that were *over four letters long*. That gave me a dictionary of about 2,400 words. All four letters or less and all lowercase.
"According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 â" and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
I'm afraid the Daily Mail was mistaken (it's a terrible paper; seriously, it's a celeb gossip rag -- don't quote from it). What the columnist was referring to was this
See in 2007 when there was a record low? The article you link to was written in 2010, so all they had was 2008 and 2009 data. See how those are both higher than 2007?
Now, those are the data that columnist is referring to. Look at it yourself. Do you think that it was honestly interpreted by the Daily Mail? Would *you* have presented those data as a trend of increasing ice?
"Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period" and "Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years".
Am I the only one who sees a huge logic flaw in that 100-year figure given the 9-15 year figure? How do the intelligent people here on Slashdot keep their bullshit meter from flying off the handle?
Imagine a retelling of Ach^W the Hare and the Tortoise. They decide to see who can run the furthest in 1 minute. At the off, the Hare sprints away but 10 seconds later he's completely exhausted and lies down to have a rest, having covered 100m in that time. Meanwhile, the tortoise plods along steadily and at the end of the minute....well, this is no fairy tale -- he's only managed 5 metres.
So, the Hare has covered 20 times the distance that the Tortoise has, even though he's only run for 10 seconds. No surprise, frankly.
Methane is actually about 70 times better as a greenhouse gas as CO2 in the short term, but we don't really care about the short term: long term effects are what are important. So, we can average it out over 100 years instead. Of course, methane doesn't just disappear when it breaks down; it ends up leaving CO2 in the atmosphere, so it has long term effects anyway. It's why, even though water is such a potent greenhouse gas, it doesn't matter as a temperature forcing mechanism because it drops out of the atmosphere within *days*. The amount the atmosphere can hold is dependant on the temperature.
However, what's bad about water, is that if something else causes the atmospheric temperature to rise, the overall effect won't just be from *that thing*. The warmer atmosphere will also hold more water which will cause an *additional* temperature rise.
Because it's a lot cheaper to destroy than to build. I can pick up a rock, for free, and throw it through an expensive plate glass window.
Are you joking? Do you honestly think that Apple are a defenseless entity? What the hell is wrong with you people; have you lost all sense of reality?!
Firstly, my reply will no doubt come across as a little harsh, so I'd like to thank you for taking the time to put together an intelligent and reasoned response to my post.
Apple is a corporation. Douchery is expected from time to time. No, they don't deserve sympathy and no one asked you to give them any, but don't piss on them undeservedly.
Sympathy was exactly what I was asked to give them. They can stand a little piss.
Suing other companies? To turn your words around... poor little Samsung. Poor little Google and Motorola. Why are those multi-billion revenue, multi-national corporations getting any sympathy from you at all over the fact they're being sued?
They're not. I don't give any of them sympathy. I'd be saying "poor little Samsung" if they were the topic of conversation. Any company suing over patents deserves contempt as far as I'm concerned.
And FYI the Chinese workers of their contractor (i.e. they're not Apple employees)
Bollocks. You don't get away with crapping on your workers by claiming they're contractors. Oh, wait, you do legally and in some people's minds...
ARE being paid living wages. For China.
No they're not. If they were getting paid a living wage for China, no-one would have a problem. Contrary to your belief, the people who complain about worker wages in developing countries have usually lived there and have a pretty good idea of what a living wage for that country actually is.
I do wonder how it is that an organisation that "rakes in" about 1% *annually* of what Apple raked in last *quarter* is somehow bullying Apple? Poor little Apple.
You don't see how a smaller organization can bully or attack a much larger one? Money is irrelevant.
Hahahahaha....
I assume you're an adult male. Now imagine a 10-year old girl falsely accuses you of... well, use your imagination.
Wow! It's like a walking cliche. If I can't be scared by the "Greenpeace are terrorists" crap, then bring in "what about the paedophiles"!
I think Apple are perfectly capable of defending themselves against Greenpeace. They seem to be winning the propaganda war quite comfortably. Just look at the comments here. Or just analyse your own reaction. What damage, exactly, have Greenpeace ever done to you that you feel the need to attack them so strongly?
Apple makes the greenest computers at of pretty much all home computers. Has for a very long while....Why did [Greenpeace] say that? because Apple kept the efforts for cleaner system to them selves
Why on earth would they do that? With the amount of money Apple spends on PR, why wouldn't they be publicising what a wonderful job they were doing?
If the media would stop giving the yahoos the time of day, then they wouldn't be able to bully anyone.
I say again: poor little Apple. Maybe if they spent less money suing other companies, I'd have some sympathy for the little angels. Or perhaps if they could be bothered paying their Chinese employees a living wage? Oh no; that might cut down their profits a bit!
It's always interesting to see the American reaction to a Greenpeace story. We have comments criticising them for being such a massive organisation, "raking in over a quarter of a billions a year worldwide"! And explaining that it's because of Greenpeace that the nuclear industry in the USA has been stifled.
I do wonder how it is that an organisation that "rakes in" about 1% *annually* of what Apple raked in last *quarter* is somehow bullying Apple? Poor little Apple.
And this same organisation, who again pull in less than 0.5% of just Valero's turnover, are dictating US energy policy? How did that happen? Presumably it has something to do with the huge number of Green Party Congressmen you currently have...
You know, except for all the other animals that are picky too... Ex. Orcas, as widely described
I'm no paleontologist, but I'm pretty sure this mammoth wasn't eaten by Orcas. Could have been a Great White, I suppose...
Nowhere, if he's interested in actual market research, rather than a publicity stunt.
Heh, that's it...go for "market research" when you don't like what the real world figures say!
A friend from Britian developed a cold that refused to go away, but the "free" health system made him wait 3 weeks just to see a general practitioner.
No they didn't. The problem with your imaginary friend story is that you can't make an appointment to see an NHS GP three weeks in advance. Nearly all practises now only allow you to make an appointment up to 2 days in advance, though you can get same day for urgent cases. Your friend could also have changed practise if he wasn't happy with the one he was with.
Once he got there they said, "Oh allergies," without any kind of tests, and handed him some pills. So he asked to get a second opinion from a private physician, in hopes of finding-out what was really wrong. The UK Government's hospital said "no". The end.
Nope, this didn't happen either. Why would he need a referral? If he wanted to go see a private doctor, there's nothing stopping him. They're not even very expensive!
(U.S. wait time is typically 1 day.)
Nope, US typical wait time for someone without private insurance is indefinitely. For a public healthcare system that you pay *more* for, per-capita, than we pay for the NHS in the UK. Meanwhile, if I wanted private insurance with all the perks and zero excess in the UK, it would cost me about 80 GBP, or about $130, a month. What would *you* get for that?
My mistake, then. I'd heard they'd gone the same route as OS X (incorrectly, it appears). Apologies to all.
Nope, you heard correctly. The bit you're mistaken about is that OS X also has a root user. In both cases, the account is "locked" (no matchable password is set). Set a password for the root user and it works as normal.
You should have updated to IPv6, where is no such checksum in TCP.
You were wrong: there is a checksum in TCP on IPv6.
Phs2501 was correct: there is no checksum in IP in IPv6.
Well, this: http://news.softpedia.com/news/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-196538.shtml ..says that SSDs do better overall than HDDs, though it depends on the model exactly how much better and there's some overlap (avoid OCZ I guess!)
Yeah, of course you should backup anything that's important (though a while back, I abandoned data I'd accumulated for many years and frankly I don't miss it at all...)