Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?
[sarcasm]No, we should pay 5 times![/sarcasm]
The last time I seriously counted on weather.com for a 'prediction' it turned out totally wrong and I got rained on. I can't think of many other industries where I would still have a job if I were wrong as often as the weather forecasters are. (Insert Microsoft jab here)
I've got an S602Z. It's a nice camera but there are some downsides.
It eats AA batteries like candy. I've got 2 sets of rechargeable NiMH for it (it takes 4 batteries at a time) and it's still not enough to get me through a heavy day of shooting. I've gone out and bought a large, rechargeable lithium battery pack that screws into the tripod socket and has a cable that runs to the DC power socket. It seems to give me a lot more shooting time on a single charge. It does add a good bit of weight to the camera though.
As for movie mode, it's AVI and the resulting video clips are huge. You can't zoom while shooting a movie, but you can set the zoom before you start recording.
Fuji has the S5000Z now that is pretty nice. It doesn't include all the professional photography bells & whistles that the S602Z does, but it has a better zoom (10X in the S5000, 6X in the S602) and I believe it comes with the external lens attachment barrel (I had to buy it separately with the S602 and you definitely want it so you can keep a filter on the front of your camera to protect the built-in lens). On the downside it doesn't support the microdrive like you've said you wanted. It only takes xD cards which are relatively new.
As for me, my next digital camera will be one of the palmsize digital camcorders that has built in still picture functionality as well as digital video.
The 4 x 4 cube and other shapes and sizes has been available for some time from Meffert's Puzzles.
I ordered a Pyraminx from them a few years back. I always like it better than the cube.
since the US virtually created Bin Laden during the 1980s - I guess we should be bombing Washington DC right now.
In the early 1980s funding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan was the right thing to do at that time as part of the cold war. There is no way the US government could know what would come of that twenty years later and to blame the US government for Bin Laden turning into a murderous terrorist is inane.
things aren't so black and white - one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
That's a cop-out. You can be a freedom fighter without targeting non-combatant civilians. Bin Laden and company have no problem targeting civilians; that's why they're considered terrorists. Bin Laden standing against Soviet military troops in Afghanistan was a good thing. Bin Laden sending planes full of civilians into a civilian-occupied building is not.
He wasn't picked up for being a criminal. He was picked up as a material witness against the others he was involved with.
He was held in custody because the court considered him a flight risk. Perhaps you disagree with the material witness laws (as many do) but the FBI did not act illegally.
He was considered a material witness, not necessarily a criminal, therefore they had reason to charge him at the time.
The reason he was held in custody is because he was considered a flight risk.
There's nothing illegal or unusual about how he was handled. If you chose to disagree on whether he was a flight risk or not, that's a separate matter.
If you can produce enough of your widgets to stock Walmart's shelves I'm guessing your widget is a large demand item and Underwriters won't dally in testing it.
Iraq claims they didn't fire it. I don't think we'll never know who did what.
I'm not overly trusting of our government, but I'll readily take their word over Saddam's.
The majority of lawyes and law experts will agree that the attack of the US on Iraq was indeed illegal, the Security Council did not approve of it as such.
From http://www.boortz.com/march20-03.htm
Resolution 678 was passed on November 29, 1990, soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Resolution 678 "Authorizes Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait.. to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area."
Resolution 687, passed after the liberation of Kuwait, requires disarmament of Saddam Hussein and reaffirms resolution 678. Since resolution 687 reaffirms 678, and since 678 allows Member States to use "all necessary means" to implement "subsequent relevant resolutions", it follows that resolution 678 allows the United States (a Member State) to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein.
Resolution 1441, yet another resolution requiring Saddam to disarm, also reaffirms resolutions 678 and 687. So.. same logic applies.
As I said, I'm sure there's plenty of lawyers who would say the war is legal - the above is one such example.
Why do you or the US Government actually care about the worlds opinion? In the last couple of months it seemed quite clear that you don't care, so why now? Why all of the sudden do you feel (as a nation) the need to justify your actions after all?
I can't speak for the U.S. government, but frankly I don't care about the world's opinion. I would like to see the U.S. pull out of the U.N. and tell them to take their headquarters out of New York. I think they've shown themselves to be a bunch of talkers who do not back up their words with meaningful action. It's ludicrous to me that countries that have long sat in the protection of the U.S. can then sit in judgement of how the U.S. provides that protection. This discussion is not meant in any way to justify my opinion of the matter. If people who share my opinion do not speak out though, it would give the impression that the anti-war crowd is larger than it in fact is.
No Weapons of Mass Destruction, he was still allowed to have his tanks and other "toys". And so far there has been no proof that he has them, now is there?
The missiles he's fired at the U.S. were of the type that he was prohibited from having. It was not only weapons of mass destruction that he was forbidden from using.
Also according to several international lawyers, the two resolutions Bush is refering to have expired the moment they kicked Saddam out of Kuweit, which makes the current war an attack on Iraq and as such it is illegal.
I'm sure we could find a bunch of lawyers that would say it was illegal. We could find a bunch that would say it's not illegal as well.
See it this way: "Give me your gun or I shoot you." Would you give the gun? I doubt it.
You seem to be forgetting that in order to stop the U.S. and the rest of the world from de-throning him 12 years ago, Saddam agreed not to amass 'guns' anymore. It's not blackmail when he's expected to honor his part of the bargain. I'm not sure why you think I would write that Saddam was a nice guy.
Yes, after the US administration had made clear that they would push for war no matter what.
The U.S. gave Saddam every opportunity to first disarm and then to remove himself from power and prevent war. Saddam was interested in doing neither. No amount of U.N. Inspectors was going to make it would have changed a thing.
If France, Germany, China, and Russia really thought what the U.S. was doing was so evil and wrong they'd send troops to oppose us. They have no convictions.
Why shoudl they? Chirac (as opposed to Bush) wasn't ruling out a war, he was just against the timetable and the way the war was forced by Bush.
Wrong. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,1 2674,913239,00.html
statement by President Jacques Chirac, who said France would veto any resolution authorising war. "Whatever happens, France will vote 'no'," President Chirac said
That's a noble idea but is it practical? I certainly haven't tried every virus scanner/detector on the market, but of the various ones I've tried I've found Symantec/Norton's to be the best. Simply put, it has found and protected me from infections that other systems let through (yes, I've run multiple detectors at the same time in the past).
Do we have to compromise our systems to keep from compromising our values? If there's better protection than Symantec offers for Windows (don't say "Use Linux" - I would if I could) I'm all ears.
I never played the second one much, but I remember in the first one if you were whipping up on a race and had them down to 1 or 2 planets early in the game, they'd suddenly whip out a stack of 32,000 ships and attack you. There was no way they had the resources to legitimately build that many ships and they'd wipe out planets that you had worked diligently to build up. Very frustrating.
SABRE [sabre.com] being the company and computer system that handles an insane number of daily travel-related reservations and other similar date/time/person related events for *thousands* of companies (including Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, the airlines, etc). And yep, you guessed it, SABRE is based on mainframes.
Sabre does handle the majority of travel agencies and they are the back end for Travelocity, but Worldspan is the back end for Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, and many other online sites. Worldspan's presence in the E-Commerce travel arena is the biggest of any of the GDSs (Global Distribution Systems; a fancy name for online reservations companies).
By now every travel reservation system is ditching mainframes as fast as they possibly can and replacing them with racks of PCs or medium-end Unix workstations. By spending 1/50th as much money they get orders of magnitude more useful computation: those nice low-fare-searches you see on Orbitz and Expedia run on PCs, not mainframes. I've been in all the other travel reservation systems complexes since my 1998 visit and more and more you find little stacks of cheap "low end" machines doing the heavy lifting.
This is simply not true. I work at a company that uses 390 mainframes and TPF to handle travel reservations for airlines. When you use Obitz or Expedia you are using a pretty front end that gets all of its data from the mainframe.
There have been some systems that offload stuff from the mainframe. Notably, Orbitz stores fares because it can apply its own search algorithms and find fares for more esoteric travel iterneraries than can be done on the mainframe and it can do fare searches faster and cheaper. Where does Orbitz get their fare data? From the mainframe where it is still generated and updated. Orbitz simply caches that data and updates their cache on a regular basis. From everything I've seen there have been more new applications and sub-systems hooked to the mainframe for data than have been moved off the mainframe.
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Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?
[sarcasm]No, we should pay 5 times![/sarcasm]
The last time I seriously counted on weather.com for a 'prediction' it turned out totally wrong and I got rained on. I can't think of many other industries where I would still have a job if I were wrong as often as the weather forecasters are. (Insert Microsoft jab here)
Girls offering favors for homework...it was a nightmare.
Sounds like a good time to me.
Why just Bangor? Why not Portland or Augusta or any of Maine's other cities? :)
I take it you've never had to work with EDIFACT formatted data? XML is a joy to use after dealing with EDIFACT.
I've got an S602Z. It's a nice camera but there are some downsides.
It eats AA batteries like candy. I've got 2 sets of rechargeable NiMH for it (it takes 4 batteries at a time) and it's still not enough to get me through a heavy day of shooting. I've gone out and bought a large, rechargeable lithium battery pack that screws into the tripod socket and has a cable that runs to the DC power socket. It seems to give me a lot more shooting time on a single charge. It does add a good bit of weight to the camera though.
As for movie mode, it's AVI and the resulting video clips are huge. You can't zoom while shooting a movie, but you can set the zoom before you start recording.
Fuji has the S5000Z now that is pretty nice. It doesn't include all the professional photography bells & whistles that the S602Z does, but it has a better zoom (10X in the S5000, 6X in the S602) and I believe it comes with the external lens attachment barrel (I had to buy it separately with the S602 and you definitely want it so you can keep a filter on the front of your camera to protect the built-in lens). On the downside it doesn't support the microdrive like you've said you wanted. It only takes xD cards which are relatively new.
As for me, my next digital camera will be one of the palmsize digital camcorders that has built in still picture functionality as well as digital video.
The 4 x 4 cube and other shapes and sizes has been available for some time from Meffert's Puzzles. I ordered a Pyraminx from them a few years back. I always like it better than the cube.
It's not a popularity contest. That 'everyone hates our guts' is irrelevant.
Which law is it that says once you are considered a material witness that the government can not decide you are in fact part of the crime?
since the US virtually created Bin Laden during the 1980s - I guess we should be bombing Washington DC right now.
In the early 1980s funding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan was the right thing to do at that time as part of the cold war. There is no way the US government could know what would come of that twenty years later and to blame the US government for Bin Laden turning into a murderous terrorist is inane.
things aren't so black and white - one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
That's a cop-out. You can be a freedom fighter without targeting non-combatant civilians. Bin Laden and company have no problem targeting civilians; that's why they're considered terrorists. Bin Laden standing against Soviet military troops in Afghanistan was a good thing. Bin Laden sending planes full of civilians into a civilian-occupied building is not.
He wasn't picked up for being a criminal. He was picked up as a material witness against the others he was involved with.
He was held in custody because the court considered him a flight risk. Perhaps you disagree with the material witness laws (as many do) but the FBI did not act illegally.
He was considered a material witness, not necessarily a criminal, therefore they had reason to charge him at the time.
The reason he was held in custody is because he was considered a flight risk.
There's nothing illegal or unusual about how he was handled. If you chose to disagree on whether he was a flight risk or not, that's a separate matter.
If you can produce enough of your widgets to stock Walmart's shelves I'm guessing your widget is a large demand item and Underwriters won't dally in testing it.
First he says:
I'm new to the world of programming...
Then he says:
I've read countless books and online tutorials on QBASIC, C++, PHP, and other various languages.
If he's read "countless books and online tutorials", especially C++ stuff, he's not "new to the world of programming" is he?
If you want, I can come throw dirt at him.
I'm not overly trusting of our government, but I'll readily take their word over Saddam's.
The majority of lawyes and law experts will agree that the attack of the US on Iraq was indeed illegal, the Security Council did not approve of it as such.
From http://www.boortz.com/march20-03.htm
As I said, I'm sure there's plenty of lawyers who would say the war is legal - the above is one such example.
Why do you or the US Government actually care about the worlds opinion? In the last couple of months it seemed quite clear that you don't care, so why now? Why all of the sudden do you feel (as a nation) the need to justify your actions after all?
I can't speak for the U.S. government, but frankly I don't care about the world's opinion. I would like to see the U.S. pull out of the U.N. and tell them to take their headquarters out of New York. I think they've shown themselves to be a bunch of talkers who do not back up their words with meaningful action. It's ludicrous to me that countries that have long sat in the protection of the U.S. can then sit in judgement of how the U.S. provides that protection. This discussion is not meant in any way to justify my opinion of the matter. If people who share my opinion do not speak out though, it would give the impression that the anti-war crowd is larger than it in fact is.
No Weapons of Mass Destruction, he was still allowed to have his tanks and other "toys". And so far there has been no proof that he has them, now is there?
The missiles he's fired at the U.S. were of the type that he was prohibited from having. It was not only weapons of mass destruction that he was forbidden from using.
Also according to several international lawyers, the two resolutions Bush is refering to have expired the moment they kicked Saddam out of Kuweit, which makes the current war an attack on Iraq and as such it is illegal.
I'm sure we could find a bunch of lawyers that would say it was illegal. We could find a bunch that would say it's not illegal as well.
See it this way: "Give me your gun or I shoot you." Would you give the gun? I doubt it.
You seem to be forgetting that in order to stop the U.S. and the rest of the world from de-throning him 12 years ago, Saddam agreed not to amass 'guns' anymore. It's not blackmail when he's expected to honor his part of the bargain.
I'm not sure why you think I would write that Saddam was a nice guy.
Yes, after the US administration had made clear that they would push for war no matter what.
The U.S. gave Saddam every opportunity to first disarm and then to remove himself from power and prevent war. Saddam was interested in doing neither. No amount of U.N. Inspectors was going to make it would have changed a thing.
If France, Germany, China, and Russia really thought what the U.S. was doing was so evil and wrong they'd send troops to oppose us. They have no convictions.
Why shoudl they? Chirac (as opposed to Bush) wasn't ruling out a war, he was just against the timetable and the way the war was forced by Bush.
1 2674,913239,00.html
Wrong. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,
statement by President Jacques Chirac, who said France would veto any resolution authorising war. "Whatever happens, France will vote 'no'," President Chirac said
That's a noble idea but is it practical? I certainly haven't tried every virus scanner/detector on the market, but of the various ones I've tried I've found Symantec/Norton's to be the best. Simply put, it has found and protected me from infections that other systems let through (yes, I've run multiple detectors at the same time in the past).
Do we have to compromise our systems to keep from compromising our values? If there's better protection than Symantec offers for Windows (don't say "Use Linux" - I would if I could) I'm all ears.
I never played the second one much, but I remember in the first one if you were whipping up on a race and had them down to 1 or 2 planets early in the game, they'd suddenly whip out a stack of 32,000 ships and attack you. There was no way they had the resources to legitimately build that many ships and they'd wipe out planets that you had worked diligently to build up. Very frustrating.
asdf@asdf.com is Not a real address
SABRE [sabre.com] being the company and computer system that handles an insane number of daily travel-related reservations and other similar date/time/person related events for *thousands* of companies (including Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, the airlines, etc). And yep, you guessed it, SABRE is based on mainframes.
Sabre does handle the majority of travel agencies and they are the back end for Travelocity, but Worldspan is the back end for Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, and many other online sites. Worldspan's presence in the E-Commerce travel arena is the biggest of any of the GDSs (Global Distribution Systems; a fancy name for online reservations companies).
By now every travel reservation system is ditching mainframes as fast as they possibly can and replacing them with racks of PCs or medium-end Unix workstations. By spending 1/50th as much money they get orders of magnitude more useful computation: those nice low-fare-searches you see on Orbitz and Expedia run on PCs, not mainframes. I've been in all the other travel reservation systems complexes since my 1998 visit and more and more you find little stacks of cheap "low end" machines doing the heavy lifting.
This is simply not true. I work at a company that uses 390 mainframes and TPF
to handle travel reservations for airlines. When you use Obitz or Expedia you are using a pretty front end that gets all of its data from the mainframe.
There have been some systems that offload stuff from the mainframe. Notably, Orbitz stores fares because it can apply its own search algorithms and find fares for more esoteric travel iterneraries than can be done on the mainframe and it can do fare searches faster and cheaper. Where does Orbitz get their fare data? From the mainframe where it is still generated and updated. Orbitz simply caches that data and updates their cache on a regular basis. From everything I've seen there have been more new applications and sub-systems hooked to the mainframe for data than have been moved off the mainframe.
Yes, there's a CAPS 1 and it's been in use for quite some time. Here's one mention of it from late 1997: http://www.faa.gov/apa/pr16897.htm