You miss the point that the proximate cause of killing is a desire to slay, not merely the availability of the tool to do so.
You miss my point, which was that the likelihood of successfully killing somebody is much greater with a weapon like a firearm than it is with a knife, because with a gun you can point, click, and the person's dead before your brain has really wrapped itself around the idea that you're killing somebody. With a knife, it requires much more physical force, and takes more time in general... those two combine to make it a much more visceral experience, and one which will take long enough for your brain to figure out what's happening. Most people don't have the stomach to actually kill somebody in a manner like that, which is why the murder rate is lower in areas where gun control exists, even if the attempted murder rate is about the same.
The murder rate in the USA is more than 3x as high as Canada, 4x as high as the UK or Australia, and even more than that for most of Europe. The numbers from Japan included attempted (unsuccessful murders), and the rate in the US is still 5x as high as it is there.
Russia is the only G8 country with a higher murder rate than the US, and there's no gun control there, either. Of the other 6 countries in the G8, all of them have gun control.
Because in the US multiple efforts at gun control have done nothing to impact homicide rates involving firearms. Not the NFA in 1934, not the FFA in 38, not the CGA in 68, not the creation of the ATF, neither the Brady bill nor the 1994 Crime Bill. Looking at correlation in the other direction, what scant major court decision there are that have upheld more progressive readings of the 2nd Amendement, have not caused an upward swing in the statistics either. Didn't see it when SCOTUS said firearms needed military applications to qualify. Didn't see it when the AWB section of the above 1994 Crime Bill expired. Didn't see it when the DC handgun ban was repealed.
Once the weapons are in peoples' hands, controlling who can buy them doesn't really do a lot of good, now, does it? They're already out there. No phrase in human history has been more misinterpreted than "the right to keep and bear arms", btw.
That still has nothing to do with my point, which was quite plainly that it takes a more vested effort to kill somebody with a knife than it does a gun. With a knife you have to really mean it. With a gun, you can point and click, and the person is dead before you've really realized what's happening. How is this lost on you?
Answer: people, the gun is just something they use to shoot with and without a gun they'd just use a knife instead.
Actually, that's a false analogy. Not because of the "people kill people" thing, but the "they'd just use a knife instead". There's a very large degree of separation between using a knife (which is a very visceral tool, and requires an investment from its user) and using a gun (which is essentially point and click, and can be done from hundreds of feet away with the right weapon).
There is a reason that murder rates are lower in countries with gun control, and it's not because people are less violent. It's because it's harder to actually *kill* somebody with a knife or a baseball bat, and most people aren't able to actually complete the task.
An unlimited texting plan on AT&T is $20/mo, and on Verizon, the $5/mo tier only gets you 250 messages. The $10/mo plan gets you mostly unlimited texting. So, people are deciding "hey, everyone I text is on FB, and I can ping them on their phone the same way. Plus I can ping people who don't even have phones and are sitting at home."
Depends on the carrier, I suppose. There are some US carriers (think Boost, for example) who offer unlimited texting included in the base package.
In the rest of the world, it's almost a given that your texting will be that low. I pay $5/mo for unlimited international texting on my plan. And I have European friends who think that I'm being gouged at that rate.
Symbols made up of 26 basic building blocks which I already recognize, and which can be unambiguously interpreted when I don't recognize the symbol as a whole?
That's nice... now try porting your software to a language other than English, where the word for "save" may be more than twice the number of letters. While you're at it, try having it look generally the same so that your online documentation doesn't need different pictures for every language on the planet. Try, also, working in a differently localized version of the software, when muscle memory becomes a large part of your using the function buttons. Oops... you meant to click Undo, but instead clicked Save, because the button is 3x the size that it was in the English version.
There's a reason that software developers use icons with text descriptions on mouseover. It's not just about saving space, it's about portability, not having to redesign the UI completely for every translation, and because *normal* people don't have a hard time learning what an icon does, and once they've learned that, it's much faster than having to read the text on a button.
There's your instructions on how to do it. I would be very surprised if other office software doesn't have the same ability, but since you capitalized the O in Office, I presume it was a proper noun.
In Canada, we... have to read "Government Recovery Fee" which is not even a government mandated fee but a misnamed extra fee pocketed by the Big Three wireless carriers in Canada.
Actually in Ontario it is mandated by the government on the purchase of all electronics. If you're on a contract for a subsidized phone, that's akin to a rental of said phone and it's permitted for them to pro-rate the recovery fee over the term of the contract. Once the contract is up and you're no longer paying for the subsidy of your phone, that fee should disappear. I'd have to look it up, but it's usually a fixed percentage of the original purchase price of the device (that'd be the full unsubsidized price in the case of a cell phone). Other provinces have similar rules, though it's not nationwide yet.
That fee doesn't exist with all carriers, though... my phone through Koodo (which isn't on a contract at all) actually had that fee rolled into the quoted price of the phone, detailed in the fine print on the purchase contract. There's nothing on my bill at all about that fee, 911 access fee, or any of the other crap you see on some bills, and the monthly price I pay is exactly the price you come up with when building my plan through their website.
Flex data plan, you pay for what you actually use. (within predefined tiers). $20 gets you 1GB, and $30 gets you 3GB. The big three expect you to take it without a lube, but all three of them have fight brands which are much more reasonably priced... Koodo (linked), for example, is owned by Telus. As it's owned by Telus, it's on the Bellus network, and has the same coverage as either Bell/Telus. They also offer nationwide long distance at no extra cost on all of their plans (except the City plan, which is $35/mo for unlimited local calling... same with nationwide LD is $50/mo), and no calling zones (nationwide roaming).
I'm paying $40/mo for my smartphone plan, and that's including all the data I use, nationwide LD, unlimited evenings/weekends, and unlimited global texting. I don't use a lot of data, but even if I did it'd still be significantly less expensive than Bell or Telus, and you couldn't pay me enough to do business with Rogers, as I've had far too many bad experiences with them in the past. (the unlimited global texting and unlimited nationwide long distance, both of which I do actually use, are what make it so).
Once you reach capacity, you've reached capacity, you can't go any higher than that
Yeah, but the US carriers are doing it wrong. How is it that with the same or less bandwidth available, carriers in Europe and Canada are able to deal with the same or higher subscriber density?
No, really. Look at the cellular spectrum situation in a country like Germany or France, and look at the number of complaints you hear about dropped calls or not enough speed available in Berlin or Paris. You don't hear about it at all.
Canada may have a smaller population, but there's really only four cellular networks in Toronto, which is in the top five biggest cities in North America, and probably 90% of the subscribers are using one of two networks: Rogers and Bell. And those two networks are using the same frequencies and technologies. (well, the Bell network has sympathetic CDMA/HSPA, but they're 3 years into a switch over to 100% HSPA, and most of their customers already have HSPA devices). We're talking more than 2 million cell phones in a geographic area not much bigger than the city of Washington, DC, not to mention the commuters who aren't actually counted as part of Toronto's population, and they're *all* using 850/1900 HPSA, and yet somehow the carriers aren't complaining that there's not enough bandwidth.
No. It's not that there's not enough bandwidth available in the US, it's that the carriers are doing it wrong.
(and my apologies to our European friends, but I live in Canada, and work in the telecomm industry, so I speak about what I know).
Sure.... you *can* use Firefox or Opera if you want to... but if you do, then you'll only get 5h of battery life instead of 10. Use our product instead.
And say what you will, I frankly don't care. My BMI puts me in the "obese" category. My body fat percentage, along with my doctor, say my weight is exactly where it should be, and that I'm quite healthy. My resting heart rate is actually slightly bradycardic depending on my mood and how much sleep I got (it's been measured between 52-60bpm), and I run a 10k 3x a week as part of my normal training regimen. I don't get winded going up the stairs to work, either, and take the 7th floor walk-up daily. Yup. That sure sounds like somebody who's obese to me. Yay 200 year old kluge, you're absolutely correct about your estimation of my health!
No reason it can't be applied to men... though as others do point out, there seems to be less risk in showing men an ideal who's muscular, versus showing a woman an ideal that's impossibly skinny.
Personally, I have no problem with the idea in promoting realism in our depiction of men as well. But I do think it needs to be tackled as a separate issue, not because it *is* a separate issue, but because I'm cynical about the way the political system works, and think that if the two were put together in the same basket, we'd never get anything done.
If you truly believe that BMI is an accurate measure of somebody's overall health, you have some learning to do. It's simply a ratio of a person's weight to their height. It does not take into account the fact that muscle mass is denser than fat mass, nor does it consider other factors like bone density (which can be an indicator of good health, even though it will increase your BMI).
This isn't about encouraging "fat fucks", this is about realizing that a size 0 is unhealthy, especially on a woman who's 5'11". Magazines have been promoting an impossible image of what the ideal woman actually looks like for decades, and any attempts at self-policing have largely failed. Photoshop just makes it worse, because they can take somebody who's actually really beautiful in real life, and make her "better"... It's airbrushing for the 21st century.
By the standards of the fashion industry, I'm morbidly obese... *gasp* she wears a size 12?!?! By any rational standard, however, my weight is exactly where it should be for a woman of my size. I'm fit and healthy, and that's all that matters. Women come in different shapes and sizes, and they need to promote that realism. It's a sad state of affairs that porn is the only place you can find realistically proportioned women in print, and that's because their buyers are usually interested in different... attributes....
Could have surprised me. My laptop is the predecessor to that model, the Vostro V130n, which came with Ubuntu LTS installed on it. They're still selling them, you just have to look for it. The V130n features a Celeron U3600, 2GB of RAM, 13.3" screen (1366x768), and came originally with a 250GB hard drive. The battery life isn't that great (about 2.5h with the factory configuration), but that's because the battery is very small (slightly less than the volume of a CD jewel case). I was able to increase the battery life to 4h by swapping the hard drive with an Intel 320-series SSD. 3.2lbs with the stock configuration, and slightly lighter than that with the hard drive swapped. Total cost (including the hard drive replacement) was under $500. If they can price this ultraportable under $1000 like they're doing with the XPS 13, I would seriously consider it when it comes time to replace my current laptop. (though that'll probably be a few years, it's plenty powerful enough for everything I throw at it).
It's nice that they're doing this, and more power to them, but it's misleading to claim that they aren't supporting Linux, when you can, today, buy a reasonably nice system with Ubuntu preinstalled on it.
Buffering is a way of speeding servers up immensely. Memory is orders of magnitude faster than disk, and piling RAM on and creating huge caches can only help performance. I call bullshit on your entire claim
What a coincidence.... try setting your cache to 10GB and surf for a few weeks, let it fill up. Then try turning off cache in your browser, and see how much faster things load.... if you're on a remotely broadband connection (more than about 1mbit), the difference will be enormous. With a broadband connection, it's faster to fetch the page than it is to search through your cache to see if you have a copy of the page locally and then load it.
When it's so noticeable at an individual browser level, what makes you think it would be any different with your subjective browsing experience to move the cache/buffer off your LAN?
Not really... Tim Horton's has been doing it for years... they just have the queue line up parallel to the banks of cash registers, and can loop it back on itself. I think they can actually have more people in queue than you would with straight lines like the grocery checkout.
Additionally, when one person does take longer to process (say they're paying for their $15 order with pennies), they don't hold up the people in line behind them, because the queue just routes around them.
It uses ubiquity as its installer, and it would depend on which ubuntu specific packages you're talking about. There's an LTS base, and anything that's in the LTS repos can be installed through Synaptic, but there's usually newer versions of popular software available in their own repos.
Also, Ubuntu's package maintainers sometimes have insane ideas of what's actually required as a dependancy for some things. There's some packages in the Ubuntu repos that basically require installing the whole of kubuntu, even though it actually only needs a couple of libs from KDE to run, for example.
Perhaps the first time I've ever had a chance to reference that show on this site. Yes, I haven't been paying attention.:) Good show, that... and a good point.
That wasn't my first thought... though in response to your question, LED lights usually last a long time, because they're composed of hundreds of LED's, and an individual diode can burn out without drastically affecting the usability of the bulb itself.
That being said... my first thought was of the CFL in a lamp sitting next to my computer. 8 years old, and it cost about $15. It's a full-spectrum 100W equivalent bulb that I call my "artificial sun" (and there have been many late-night gaming sessions which turned into early morning sessions with its help), and it draws 27W equivalent. Costs of CFLs have gone down significantly in the last 8 years... is a $30 LED bulb that would save 4W (which is less than some DVD players draw at idle) really enough of an upgrade to be worth the cost?
In Canada, it'd be Quebec. Literally. There are towns in rural Quebec with one surname. Something like 2/3 of Quebec's population is related as 2nd cousin or closer.
This is one of the reasons I rip a DVD immediately on buying it [*]. All the unskippable trash can be removed and we just get the movie from the media server.
That's the great irony of it... the pirates never see the FBI warning and "don't steal this" crap, because it's not part of the main film.
Of course, you do miss out on some of the "unskippable" content that, on rare occasions, can be quite funny. They put an ad for Windex at the start of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, for example... and the ad for Head & Shoulders at the end of Evolution. Shameless marketing, but in both cases, it's pertinent to the movie in question, and actually pretty funny...:) 99.9999999999% of the time it's just annoying crap, but from time to time it's actually worth watching at least some of it.
On this system, completely stable. It hasn't crashed for me ever.
Now... the Ubuntu e17 builds, which are taken from Debian, are not that stable, in my experience. Bodhi rolls their own packages, and usually comes out with new e builds every couple of weeks from the SVN nightly.
Essentially, Ubuntu LTS, with all the kitchen sink crap removed, and with an e17 desktop, and many newer packages backported from Debian Sid and more recent Ubuntu's into their own repos. They're building 2.0 right now, which will be based on 12.04 and have a 64-bit build as well.
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You miss the point that the proximate cause of killing is a desire to slay, not merely the availability of the tool to do so.
You miss my point, which was that the likelihood of successfully killing somebody is much greater with a weapon like a firearm than it is with a knife, because with a gun you can point, click, and the person's dead before your brain has really wrapped itself around the idea that you're killing somebody. With a knife, it requires much more physical force, and takes more time in general... those two combine to make it a much more visceral experience, and one which will take long enough for your brain to figure out what's happening. Most people don't have the stomach to actually kill somebody in a manner like that, which is why the murder rate is lower in areas where gun control exists, even if the attempted murder rate is about the same.
Really? Where are those data?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#2010s
Are you being intentionally oblivious?
The murder rate in the USA is more than 3x as high as Canada, 4x as high as the UK or Australia, and even more than that for most of Europe. The numbers from Japan included attempted (unsuccessful murders), and the rate in the US is still 5x as high as it is there.
Russia is the only G8 country with a higher murder rate than the US, and there's no gun control there, either. Of the other 6 countries in the G8, all of them have gun control.
Because in the US multiple efforts at gun control have done nothing to impact homicide rates involving firearms. Not the NFA in 1934, not the FFA in 38, not the CGA in 68, not the creation of the ATF, neither the Brady bill nor the 1994 Crime Bill. Looking at correlation in the other direction, what scant major court decision there are that have upheld more progressive readings of the 2nd Amendement, have not caused an upward swing in the statistics either. Didn't see it when SCOTUS said firearms needed military applications to qualify. Didn't see it when the AWB section of the above 1994 Crime Bill expired. Didn't see it when the DC handgun ban was repealed.
Once the weapons are in peoples' hands, controlling who can buy them doesn't really do a lot of good, now, does it? They're already out there. No phrase in human history has been more misinterpreted than "the right to keep and bear arms", btw.
That still has nothing to do with my point, which was quite plainly that it takes a more vested effort to kill somebody with a knife than it does a gun. With a knife you have to really mean it. With a gun, you can point and click, and the person is dead before you've really realized what's happening. How is this lost on you?
Answer: people, the gun is just something they use to shoot with and without a gun they'd just use a knife instead.
Actually, that's a false analogy. Not because of the "people kill people" thing, but the "they'd just use a knife instead". There's a very large degree of separation between using a knife (which is a very visceral tool, and requires an investment from its user) and using a gun (which is essentially point and click, and can be done from hundreds of feet away with the right weapon).
There is a reason that murder rates are lower in countries with gun control, and it's not because people are less violent. It's because it's harder to actually *kill* somebody with a knife or a baseball bat, and most people aren't able to actually complete the task.
An unlimited texting plan on AT&T is $20/mo, and on Verizon, the $5/mo tier only gets you 250 messages. The $10/mo plan gets you mostly unlimited texting. So, people are deciding "hey, everyone I text is on FB, and I can ping them on their phone the same way. Plus I can ping people who don't even have phones and are sitting at home."
Depends on the carrier, I suppose. There are some US carriers (think Boost, for example) who offer unlimited texting included in the base package.
In the rest of the world, it's almost a given that your texting will be that low. I pay $5/mo for unlimited international texting on my plan. And I have European friends who think that I'm being gouged at that rate.
Symbols made up of 26 basic building blocks which I already recognize, and which can be unambiguously interpreted when I don't recognize the symbol as a whole?
That's nice... now try porting your software to a language other than English, where the word for "save" may be more than twice the number of letters. While you're at it, try having it look generally the same so that your online documentation doesn't need different pictures for every language on the planet. Try, also, working in a differently localized version of the software, when muscle memory becomes a large part of your using the function buttons. Oops... you meant to click Undo, but instead clicked Save, because the button is 3x the size that it was in the English version.
There's a reason that software developers use icons with text descriptions on mouseover. It's not just about saving space, it's about portability, not having to redesign the UI completely for every translation, and because *normal* people don't have a hard time learning what an icon does, and once they've learned that, it's much faster than having to read the text on a button.
Microsoft Office has had that ability since at least 2003.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-while-you-edit-HP005188855.aspx
There's your instructions on how to do it. I would be very surprised if other office software doesn't have the same ability, but since you capitalized the O in Office, I presume it was a proper noun.
In Canada, we ... have to read "Government Recovery Fee" which is not even a government mandated fee but a misnamed extra fee pocketed by the Big Three wireless carriers in Canada.
Actually in Ontario it is mandated by the government on the purchase of all electronics. If you're on a contract for a subsidized phone, that's akin to a rental of said phone and it's permitted for them to pro-rate the recovery fee over the term of the contract. Once the contract is up and you're no longer paying for the subsidy of your phone, that fee should disappear. I'd have to look it up, but it's usually a fixed percentage of the original purchase price of the device (that'd be the full unsubsidized price in the case of a cell phone). Other provinces have similar rules, though it's not nationwide yet.
That fee doesn't exist with all carriers, though... my phone through Koodo (which isn't on a contract at all) actually had that fee rolled into the quoted price of the phone, detailed in the fine print on the purchase contract. There's nothing on my bill at all about that fee, 911 access fee, or any of the other crap you see on some bills, and the monthly price I pay is exactly the price you come up with when building my plan through their website.
http://koodomobile.com/en/on/datasaver.shtml
Flex data plan, you pay for what you actually use. (within predefined tiers). $20 gets you 1GB, and $30 gets you 3GB. The big three expect you to take it without a lube, but all three of them have fight brands which are much more reasonably priced... Koodo (linked), for example, is owned by Telus. As it's owned by Telus, it's on the Bellus network, and has the same coverage as either Bell/Telus. They also offer nationwide long distance at no extra cost on all of their plans (except the City plan, which is $35/mo for unlimited local calling... same with nationwide LD is $50/mo), and no calling zones (nationwide roaming).
I'm paying $40/mo for my smartphone plan, and that's including all the data I use, nationwide LD, unlimited evenings/weekends, and unlimited global texting. I don't use a lot of data, but even if I did it'd still be significantly less expensive than Bell or Telus, and you couldn't pay me enough to do business with Rogers, as I've had far too many bad experiences with them in the past. (the unlimited global texting and unlimited nationwide long distance, both of which I do actually use, are what make it so).
Once you reach capacity, you've reached capacity, you can't go any higher than that
Yeah, but the US carriers are doing it wrong. How is it that with the same or less bandwidth available, carriers in Europe and Canada are able to deal with the same or higher subscriber density?
No, really. Look at the cellular spectrum situation in a country like Germany or France, and look at the number of complaints you hear about dropped calls or not enough speed available in Berlin or Paris. You don't hear about it at all.
Canada may have a smaller population, but there's really only four cellular networks in Toronto, which is in the top five biggest cities in North America, and probably 90% of the subscribers are using one of two networks: Rogers and Bell. And those two networks are using the same frequencies and technologies. (well, the Bell network has sympathetic CDMA/HSPA, but they're 3 years into a switch over to 100% HSPA, and most of their customers already have HSPA devices). We're talking more than 2 million cell phones in a geographic area not much bigger than the city of Washington, DC, not to mention the commuters who aren't actually counted as part of Toronto's population, and they're *all* using 850/1900 HPSA, and yet somehow the carriers aren't complaining that there's not enough bandwidth.
No. It's not that there's not enough bandwidth available in the US, it's that the carriers are doing it wrong.
(and my apologies to our European friends, but I live in Canada, and work in the telecomm industry, so I speak about what I know).
and more people didn't bother to vote at all, because they didn't think it would change anything, than actually voted for the cons.
Don't you love a first-past-the-pole multi-party system? ugh.
competitive advantage?
Sure.... you *can* use Firefox or Opera if you want to... but if you do, then you'll only get 5h of battery life instead of 10. Use our product instead.
Just the thought of my weight on a woman being "normal" is ridiculous.
It's not the weight you need to worry about, it's the body fat content.
http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/library/blbodyfatcharts.htm
There's other factors, such as heart health. There's also mental health factors that tie in to an overall well-being. BMI is simply wrong.
Take a look through this gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77367764@N00/sets/72157602199008819/ ... You might be surprised at some of the women who come up as "overweight" "obese" or "morbidly obese" according to BMI.
And say what you will, I frankly don't care. My BMI puts me in the "obese" category. My body fat percentage, along with my doctor, say my weight is exactly where it should be, and that I'm quite healthy. My resting heart rate is actually slightly bradycardic depending on my mood and how much sleep I got (it's been measured between 52-60bpm), and I run a 10k 3x a week as part of my normal training regimen. I don't get winded going up the stairs to work, either, and take the 7th floor walk-up daily. Yup. That sure sounds like somebody who's obese to me. Yay 200 year old kluge, you're absolutely correct about your estimation of my health!
No reason it can't be applied to men... though as others do point out, there seems to be less risk in showing men an ideal who's muscular, versus showing a woman an ideal that's impossibly skinny.
Personally, I have no problem with the idea in promoting realism in our depiction of men as well. But I do think it needs to be tackled as a separate issue, not because it *is* a separate issue, but because I'm cynical about the way the political system works, and think that if the two were put together in the same basket, we'd never get anything done.
What BMI range will be acceptable for models?
If you truly believe that BMI is an accurate measure of somebody's overall health, you have some learning to do. It's simply a ratio of a person's weight to their height. It does not take into account the fact that muscle mass is denser than fat mass, nor does it consider other factors like bone density (which can be an indicator of good health, even though it will increase your BMI).
This isn't about encouraging "fat fucks", this is about realizing that a size 0 is unhealthy, especially on a woman who's 5'11". Magazines have been promoting an impossible image of what the ideal woman actually looks like for decades, and any attempts at self-policing have largely failed. Photoshop just makes it worse, because they can take somebody who's actually really beautiful in real life, and make her "better"... It's airbrushing for the 21st century.
By the standards of the fashion industry, I'm morbidly obese... *gasp* she wears a size 12?!?! By any rational standard, however, my weight is exactly where it should be for a woman of my size. I'm fit and healthy, and that's all that matters. Women come in different shapes and sizes, and they need to promote that realism. It's a sad state of affairs that porn is the only place you can find realistically proportioned women in print, and that's because their buyers are usually interested in different... attributes....
As opposed to the necessary ones?
http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/laptops?~ck=mn#!facets=16260~0~195640&p=1
Could have surprised me. My laptop is the predecessor to that model, the Vostro V130n, which came with Ubuntu LTS installed on it. They're still selling them, you just have to look for it. The V130n features a Celeron U3600, 2GB of RAM, 13.3" screen (1366x768), and came originally with a 250GB hard drive. The battery life isn't that great (about 2.5h with the factory configuration), but that's because the battery is very small (slightly less than the volume of a CD jewel case). I was able to increase the battery life to 4h by swapping the hard drive with an Intel 320-series SSD. 3.2lbs with the stock configuration, and slightly lighter than that with the hard drive swapped. Total cost (including the hard drive replacement) was under $500. If they can price this ultraportable under $1000 like they're doing with the XPS 13, I would seriously consider it when it comes time to replace my current laptop. (though that'll probably be a few years, it's plenty powerful enough for everything I throw at it).
It's nice that they're doing this, and more power to them, but it's misleading to claim that they aren't supporting Linux, when you can, today, buy a reasonably nice system with Ubuntu preinstalled on it.
Buffering is a way of speeding servers up immensely. Memory is orders of magnitude faster than disk, and piling RAM on and creating huge caches can only help performance. I call bullshit on your entire claim
What a coincidence.... try setting your cache to 10GB and surf for a few weeks, let it fill up. Then try turning off cache in your browser, and see how much faster things load.... if you're on a remotely broadband connection (more than about 1mbit), the difference will be enormous. With a broadband connection, it's faster to fetch the page than it is to search through your cache to see if you have a copy of the page locally and then load it.
When it's so noticeable at an individual browser level, what makes you think it would be any different with your subjective browsing experience to move the cache/buffer off your LAN?
Not really... Tim Horton's has been doing it for years... they just have the queue line up parallel to the banks of cash registers, and can loop it back on itself. I think they can actually have more people in queue than you would with straight lines like the grocery checkout.
Additionally, when one person does take longer to process (say they're paying for their $15 order with pennies), they don't hold up the people in line behind them, because the queue just routes around them.
It uses ubiquity as its installer, and it would depend on which ubuntu specific packages you're talking about. There's an LTS base, and anything that's in the LTS repos can be installed through Synaptic, but there's usually newer versions of popular software available in their own repos.
Also, Ubuntu's package maintainers sometimes have insane ideas of what's actually required as a dependancy for some things. There's some packages in the Ubuntu repos that basically require installing the whole of kubuntu, even though it actually only needs a couple of libs from KDE to run, for example.
Sorry chickenhawks, but America and China won't go to war. Our economies are far too interdependent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U7QJu_Wsbk
Perhaps the first time I've ever had a chance to reference that show on this site. Yes, I haven't been paying attention. :) Good show, that... and a good point.
That wasn't my first thought... though in response to your question, LED lights usually last a long time, because they're composed of hundreds of LED's, and an individual diode can burn out without drastically affecting the usability of the bulb itself.
That being said... my first thought was of the CFL in a lamp sitting next to my computer. 8 years old, and it cost about $15. It's a full-spectrum 100W equivalent bulb that I call my "artificial sun" (and there have been many late-night gaming sessions which turned into early morning sessions with its help), and it draws 27W equivalent. Costs of CFLs have gone down significantly in the last 8 years... is a $30 LED bulb that would save 4W (which is less than some DVD players draw at idle) really enough of an upgrade to be worth the cost?
In Canada, it'd be Quebec. Literally. There are towns in rural Quebec with one surname. Something like 2/3 of Quebec's population is related as 2nd cousin or closer.
This is one of the reasons I rip a DVD immediately on buying it [*]. All the unskippable trash can be removed and we just get the movie from the media server.
That's the great irony of it... the pirates never see the FBI warning and "don't steal this" crap, because it's not part of the main film.
Of course, you do miss out on some of the "unskippable" content that, on rare occasions, can be quite funny. They put an ad for Windex at the start of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, for example... and the ad for Head & Shoulders at the end of Evolution. Shameless marketing, but in both cases, it's pertinent to the movie in question, and actually pretty funny... :) 99.9999999999% of the time it's just annoying crap, but from time to time it's actually worth watching at least some of it.
On this system, completely stable. It hasn't crashed for me ever.
Now... the Ubuntu e17 builds, which are taken from Debian, are not that stable, in my experience. Bodhi rolls their own packages, and usually comes out with new e builds every couple of weeks from the SVN nightly.
Bodhi Linux.
Essentially, Ubuntu LTS, with all the kitchen sink crap removed, and with an e17 desktop, and many newer packages backported from Debian Sid and more recent Ubuntu's into their own repos. They're building 2.0 right now, which will be based on 12.04 and have a 64-bit build as well.