"Example: most people don't think that brutally raping a young girl (say, 8 years old) and then slaughtering her is particularly good. What would people say to a video game where you play a protagonist that brutally rapes a young girl and then slaughters her. One is doing it in real life, one is doing it virtually; both in order to do it virtually, there must be some desire to "do it," right?"
I suppose that might come up some day, but it is not in the same realm as the game being discussed. Sure, someone out there might play the game and get off on the killing. But its purpose is to make you sick/uncomfortable/mad and make you want to take out the terrorist cell that you are infiltrating.
In other words, there is some 'greater good' that a player can attempt to accomplish in the game. In order to do so, they might have to do distasteful things along the way, much like a real war.
Your example above, of a game that perhaps has no purpose other than violence, is already on the market. Any first person shooter, Grand Theft, etc.. can all be played just to kill/be violent. Most have story lines that you can pretend to be good, or you can ignore them and just kill.
Aggression/Dominance and its resulting violence is pretty much a natural tendency in most mammals. People have varying degrees of aggression, most of which result in legal outcomes (being passive aggressive, yelling, storming off, etc..). Having that aggression built in though, like any other human tendency (sexual attraction for example), is a valid area of fantasy.
Just like someone might fantasize about being with a super model due to an innate desire for sex, I can see it being perfectly healthy to explore a level of aggression that you'd never conceive of carrying out in real life. Various people enjoy more or less extreme exploration of fantasy though, and I'd care to wager that very very few people would play your fictional rape game as described. It would just be too extreme, whereas, "killing the bad guy" or even "killing some good guys to get to a bunch of bad guys" is more in line with most peoples aggressive fantasies.
Are there any long term studies that show what affects there are on humans from repeated, yearly flu vaccinations? Just claiming it is "common sense" --without any data or facts to support your claim-- doesn't make it so. Don't confuse my query with other types of vaccines that have long established saftey record."
Prove to me that there isn't an invisible tiger in the room....... All the known data suggests that the risk of catching the flu, and the possible consequences from the illness, far outweigh the known risks of the vaccine.
As a health care worker, you need to multiple the risk of the possible consequences from flu, by all the people you lay your hands on, breath near, or otherwise come into contact with. Then compare that to the possible side effects of the vaccine.
This is exactly why it should be mandated for health care workers. Some of them don't understand how to analyze risk, and are selfish bastards to boot. Lets see, you are willing to increase the risk of infecting yourself, and every sick person you come into contact with, versus an unproven, hypothetical "hunch" that this vaccine might be bad for you. Great reasoning.
"Full disclosure: I'm a songwriter and a member of a PRS. The money I make a year on songwriting could maybe buy a nice dinner. Without someone looking out for my interests, I'd make nothing."
Is there any way of knowing how much they actually collected for your songs versus what they handed to you?
I just bought warhammer 40,000: dawn of war. It is so frustrating. Multiple times in a short 20-30 minute mission you are locked out of moving your character in the middle of shooting to be told a snippet related to the story.
The right way to do that would have been a small tv/com window that told you while you continued to play. Instead it is like playing a video game and pausing it every 5 minutes, changing your focus to a TV, and watching 45 seconds of a movie related to the game, but in no way required to actually play it.
"Also, Wine has made an enormous amount of progress in the last 4 years. It helped a lot that the Win32 API pretty much stopped dead between XP and Vista, as it gave the Wine team a huge amount of time to catch up instead of having to chase a moving target. "
---------------------
And the second the api moves again, wine will be playing catch up. Wine is not a winning strategy for linux adoption.
If, at best, wine'd (I just invented a new verb) software equals that software in windows, and that equality is based on the whim of Microsoft making an api change or not, it will be an overall poor experience for Linux users over time.
I don't know if it has gotten better, but I tried wine with many games and Macromedia products (fireworks, dreamweaver, etc..) and none of it worked well.
Relying on the wine developers keeping pace with products designed for windows, and keeping pace with Microsoft api/quirks isn't a winning strategy for Linux adoption.
I was curious about the differences. It looks like linux-vserver and openvz use the container method (same as zfs zones). Meaning, there is only one kernel shared by all the virtualized servers.
KVM and Vmware on the other hand, use full virtualization, meaning the virtual machine is a complete operating system.
None of that probably matters much if it is just drupal instances or something like that. It would come down to what management tools are available.
Is linux-vserver or openvz comparable in its ease of management with Vmware or zfs zones? I've never used them.
The simple answer? Virtual Machines. If you have to stay with linux, go with vmware or for a free solution, KVM. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
If you want to run LAMP on open solaris/solaris, ZFS has very robust and easy to manage virtual machines called zones. Sun also provides enterprise ops center software that can be used to manage the zones via a gui. Copy/create/rollback, etc..
After that, smart system administration is required to keep things easy to manage.
How you choose to separate data, apps, and the OS will depend on your requirements, but in general, keeping them separate is a good idea.
Another good idea, is a/mnt/safe or area mounted inside the prod/test/dev boxes that is nfs shared between them. Often times, I'll make a request of my sys admin "Please refresh test and dev with prod". So I copy changes or other work to/mnt/safe and then he overwrites dev and test with a recent zfs snapshot (virtual machine snapshot) of production.
I see you use the word check-in/out. I'm assuming you have subversion or something similar running that you use to check in/out to a new location. Do your developers need access to a CVS? If so, I'd just build it into the virtual machine, so each developer has their own subversion installation.
The only thing you need to do when using zones/virtual machines (at least in zfs) is change the hostname and IP, but that is easily scripted.
I don't think that the lack of 1950's 'noble' fighting is what leaves things "to fester long enough to get to Columbine-proportions"
Rather, it is a much greater disparity in wealth between rich and poor, and a consumer culture that has nearly destroyed the core family unit.
In the 50's, a single working father could buy a house, a car, and support his family. That is possible now, if you chose to live as simply as a 50's household did. Smaller house, no cable, no internet, chop your own firewood, get your own xmas tree, cook from scratch, etc..
But society has changed. Massive advertising, mega corps, have convinced us that we need more. More to the point that now 2 parents must work full time, and even when the family comes home, they often watch TV instead of talk.
This results in kids with less respect for each other, less respect for authority, etc...
The inner city is the worst example of this, and that poverty culture radiates out into society, affecting music, games, styles, attitudes, etc.. And while it is not as bad as in inner cities, a suburban kid is also being raised with far less parental guidance than in the past, while being fed the extremist attitudes resulting from inner city poverty through pop culture, tv, radio, news reports, etc..
Instead of attempting to prevent modding (losing fight), Ti should create a device that test makers can use to quickly check if a calculator is not standard. Plug it in, and it analyzes the calculator as it boots up, etc...
I agree. After years of doing turbo tax myself, and messing up once due to not understanding tax law, I decided to pay "the professionals" to do it for me.
I payed H&R something like 175 dollars to do the taxes, and then got a bill from the state saying it was messed up and I owed 250 dollars more..... jerks.
Oh, and the original "mess up" that happened is just as odd imo. I was working in a state with no state income tax. Through that job, I had a 401k (or 403b, I forget). At any rate, I got a new job in a state with income tax. Before I left the old state, I received a cash payout of all the money in my 401k. Just a check in my hand, earned in a state with no state income tax.
I took that check with me to the new state, and the day I moved into my new apartment, I cased the check to help cover my first/last month rent/moving expenses.
Come tax time, the new state decided they wanted something like 20% of that check because it was income deposited into my account while living in their state..... nevermind it was earned and already taxed under the the old states tax laws. If I cashed the check one day earlier in the old state, I would have saved 7,000 dollars.....
At work, I had to take the standard Dell purchase. It came with vista. Dealing with unix servers all day, I much prefer a linux desktop. However, try making ubuntu work with this:
I can't upgrade to 9.04 because there is no driver for radeon that works well without tinkering in 9.04, and my sound goes out every other day and requires a restart. Try spanning monitors also. Things in the secondary monitory, when minimized, won't come back up. (eclipse mostly).
Absolutely standard install. Things do not work.
Vista, everything worked (although it lacked the tools I wanted).
Neither linux or windows is rock solid if you can't control every aspect of the install. Which is a situation that many people find themselves in. If I were able to build my work machine from parts that I knew had good linux support, I probably would have had less problems. The same could be said of a vista install.
Would I get less "its broken" calls if I installed Linux on my parents computers? Maybe. But I'd get a ton more calls saying my new printer won't work, I can't play this movie, my sound goes out.. my camera won't attach, etc..
Now if I could control everything they bought, to guarantee compatibility, sure... it would "just work".
"There is a flip-side, though, that the original poster may have neglected to consider. F/L/OSS developers ARE amongst the brightest and the best, but they also have extraordinarily high levels of autistic behaviours, anti-social disorders, emotional instability and alienation."
I think that is a much more likely explanation than attributing the low numbers of woman in foss with sexism. Not so much because of a 1 on 1 interaction where an anti-social male said something inappropriate to a female code contributor, but because a group of anti-social/autistic people are far less likely to form any sort of community.
A group of people working together on something isn't 'community' in its true sense. As foss coding is very much a hobby for most people, I would imagine that a woman would be more interested in participating in a hobby that has a sense of community.
Look at the numbers of women mmorpg players versus the numbers of say.. women counter-strike players. The game with the most community tends to have the most women. The same could be said of the coding game.
"I don't get how anyone can claim they have the right to being cured of any sickness they get. Doctors work their asses off to get where they are. How fair is it for those doctors to have to treat bums off the street who haven't contributed anything to society."
At least that is logically consistent when being opposed to health care reform, (and I'm assuming the public option).
If you are against health care reform, you should be for hospitals and doctors only treating those that can pay for it. That is much closer to a free market, and health care will be MUCH cheaper over time with that system. The cost of doing business in the US will fall, companies will be less likely to move overseas, profits will soar!
However, I'd care to wager that a vast majority of people would not like to see a child die outside of an emergency room, just because his parents are poor. Because this isn't all about money, and morals play a factor, you have to ask yourself, what is the cheapest, most effective way, of driving down costs, while meeting that moral obligation?
It has been shown time and time again that preventative health care is much cheaper than waiting until something becomes an emergency, visiting the emergency room, and then passing that cost along to all of us in the form of higher health care insurance costs.
That means, if you agree we have a moral obligation to help that sick child with poor parents, you agree that everyone should be covered. The simplest solution is a public option.
You're happy paying more for your health insurance than anywhere else in the world would charge, while receiving lower quality outcomes?
Regardless of that, reform and a competing public option will drive costs down. You can keep the insurance you have, but it will be cheaper.
Just remember, you are already paying a tax to support a public plan. It is called "emergency rooms", and it drives the cost of every insurance plan up.
The few relatives I know with Macs need a PC to run proprietary software for their work. That software might work in a virtual machine on the mac, but their work place IT will not support it.
Others I know want to game and so buy a PC, but prefer the mac for web/email/etc..
So, either not supported, not running the software you want, not being able to play a particular game, there are numerous reasons a Mac owner would want a PC. The reverse would never be true if you have the above issues to deal with.
Your already at the mercy of the air conditioning vendor, fire suppression vendor, electricity, internet, etc...
And if a hardware failure occurs, you are at the mercy of whatever support contract (1 hr, 4 hr, whatever.). And just like a remote vendor, you are at the mercy of your other vendors if they go out of business. I worked for a hospital with all Alpha VMS servers. Compaq bought them and phased vms out. Not much I could do about that either. Being remote doesn't make you any more or less in control.
But like you, our institution is largely hosted in house. Hundreds of servers. I think over time, we'll see many of our more standardized services being remotely hosted though. A webserver with static public content for instance. Or a mysql server being used as a backend to a company confluence wiki, etc..
What will tend to stay in house, is sensitive data, until such time as remote hosting vendors become legally obligated to protect the data. We can contract with some of them to establish trust chains, and consequences, etc.. but we've all witnessed remote host screw ups with literal or no consequences. Take gmail mixing up all those email accounts.
Until CEO/CIO's are confident that the data will be well protected, and that said vendor can be locked into privacy contracts, and that the vendor will take the fall if the data gets out... until then, most private data is going to stay on location.
I'm a little unclear about fuel. It says it uses a light gas, like hydrogen, radio waves to excite the gas and magnets to direct the thrust out?
what powers the magnets and radio waves? A small nuclear reactor or something? And then how much gas must one carry? Is it feasible to travel to the end of the solar system with this thing with just 1 large tank of gas? (like say a space shuttle fuel tank, the one used for lift off).
I don't think its uncommon for any government, especially democratic ones, to "build a case for war" against "the enemy".
If "the enemy" thinks that the will of the people is behind war, then the threat is that much more real, and real negotiations can begin.
The difference most former presidents (and the current president) with the prior administration, was that Bush and company actually went ahead and waged war. The vast majority of the time, its just rhetoric. Take the entire cold war for example.
I don't pretend to know all the history of Israel that well, but many of the recent aggressions were reactions to continued rocket attacks. And before that, continued suicide bombings. So I don't really blame them for striking back.
I wonder what Iran would do if rockets were continually shot over its border onto its civilians from a neighboring country, and that country's leaders refused to crackdown on the radicals?
That said, Israels consistent policy of striking back is what worries me the most about Iran having a nuclear bomb. I think if Iran gets too close to having a nuclear missile, Israel is going attack, and probably do so way out of proportion to the threat.
The best way to deal with Iran, and the middle east as a whole, is with economics. Help Iran build gasoline refineries, solar power, trade agreements, improved farming, life the sanctions. In return, no nukes, no military build up of any kind.
A strong, well educated middle class, is the best counter to radical ideas.
Two anecdotal stories doesn't outweigh all the evidence that flu shots save many more lives than they take.
H1N1, unlike other flu strains, has shown signs of attacking healthier immune systems, producing cytokine storms. The CDC didn't recommend that 19-24 year olds get the vaccine just for the heck of it.
H1N1 is predicted to have a 0.05 to 0.08 percent chance of death. Multiple that by the number of people that normally get the flu each year, and you can see why the medical community is worried.
Do me a favor if your in the "flu vaccines are bad" crowd. Please be extra careful to not catch the flu (hand washing often, don't touch your eyes, nose, etc..), and if you do catch it, at the very first sniffle, please stay home.
"Flu shots are for people with weak immune systems and old people that are at higher risk to "die" from it. Never get one done if you don't _need it_. I've see more people almost die due to allergic reactions to shots than i have due to a bad case of the flu."
Everything I've heard about H1N1 is that healthier immune systems are actually more at risk. This particular flu makes your immune system go into over drive. http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2009/05/06/H1N1-flu-may-induce-a-cytokine-storm/UPI-50901241584708/
That is why the cdc recommends this set of people for the vaccine.
The groups recommended to receive the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine include:
* Pregnant women because they are at higher risk of complications and can potentially provide protection to infants who cannot be vaccinated;
* Household contacts and caregivers for children younger than 6 months of age because younger infants are at higher risk of influenza-related complications and cannot be vaccinated. Vaccination of those in close contact with infants younger than 6 months old might help protect infants by âoecocooningâ them from the virus;
* Healthcare and emergency medical services personnel because infections among healthcare workers have been reported and this can be a potential source of infection for vulnerable patients. Also, increased absenteeism in this population could reduce healthcare system capacity;
* All people from 6 months through 24 years of age
o Children from 6 months through 18 years of age because cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza have been seen in children who are in close contact with each other in school and day care settings, which increases the likelihood of disease spread, and
o Young adults 19 through 24 years of age because many cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza have been seen in these healthy young adults and they often live, work, and study in close proximity, and they are a frequently mobile population; and,
* Persons aged 25 through 64 years who have health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza.
"Never get one done if you don't _need it"
You should modify that to say, never get one if you are 100% sure you won't get the flu and 100% sure that you won't come into contact with a person that can't handle the flu you infect them with.
Rather than having to worry about charging overnight or charging stations in parking lots, I'd like to see the battery pack be durable and standardized, so instead of charging it, you just swap it out. It'd be nice if self charging was still an option though.
I imagine that most batteries are under the floor of the trunk? So maybe the sides of the car near the trunk can have a sliding panel. Open it, and all your batteries are bundled and sitting on a sturdy rack that slides out.
Either some 'car wash-like' automated process where your car rides along a track and a robotic arm swaps the batteries out, or maybe just a hydraulic assisted but manually controlled arm that an attended could use to give you a new set.
What if I'm at zero battery power but need to drive 200 miles? Swapping them out would 'fill them up' instantly. It would also allow for some central quality control and testing of the batteries that the 'swapping station' could do.
Slashdot Mirror
"Example: most people don't think that brutally raping a young girl (say, 8 years old) and then slaughtering her is particularly good. What would people say to a video game where you play a protagonist that brutally rapes a young girl and then slaughters her. One is doing it in real life, one is doing it virtually; both in order to do it virtually, there must be some desire to "do it," right?"
I suppose that might come up some day, but it is not in the same realm as the game being discussed. Sure, someone out there might play the game and get off on the killing. But its purpose is to make you sick/uncomfortable/mad and make you want to take out the terrorist cell that you are infiltrating.
In other words, there is some 'greater good' that a player can attempt to accomplish in the game. In order to do so, they might have to do distasteful things along the way, much like a real war.
Your example above, of a game that perhaps has no purpose other than violence, is already on the market. Any first person shooter, Grand Theft, etc.. can all be played just to kill/be violent. Most have story lines that you can pretend to be good, or you can ignore them and just kill.
Aggression/Dominance and its resulting violence is pretty much a natural tendency in most mammals. People have varying degrees of aggression, most of which result in legal outcomes (being passive aggressive, yelling, storming off, etc..). Having that aggression built in though, like any other human tendency (sexual attraction for example), is a valid area of fantasy.
Just like someone might fantasize about being with a super model due to an innate desire for sex, I can see it being perfectly healthy to explore a level of aggression that you'd never conceive of carrying out in real life. Various people enjoy more or less extreme exploration of fantasy though, and I'd care to wager that very very few people would play your fictional rape game as described. It would just be too extreme, whereas, "killing the bad guy" or even "killing some good guys to get to a bunch of bad guys" is more in line with most peoples aggressive fantasies.
"Prove it.
Are there any long term studies that show what affects there are on humans from repeated, yearly flu vaccinations? Just claiming it is "common sense" --without any data or facts to support your claim-- doesn't make it so. Don't confuse my query with other types of vaccines that have long established saftey record."
Prove to me that there isn't an invisible tiger in the room.......
All the known data suggests that the risk of catching the flu, and the possible consequences from the illness, far outweigh the known risks of the vaccine.
As a health care worker, you need to multiple the risk of the possible consequences from flu, by all the people you lay your hands on, breath near, or otherwise come into contact with. Then compare that to the possible side effects of the vaccine.
This is exactly why it should be mandated for health care workers. Some of them don't understand how to analyze risk, and are selfish bastards to boot. Lets see, you are willing to increase the risk of infecting yourself, and every sick person you come into contact with, versus an unproven, hypothetical "hunch" that this vaccine might be bad for you. Great reasoning.
"Full disclosure: I'm a songwriter and a member of a PRS. The money I make a year on songwriting could maybe buy a nice dinner. Without someone looking out for my interests, I'd make nothing."
Is there any way of knowing how much they actually collected for your songs versus what they handed to you?
Exactly. "interrupt the game in order to tell"
I just bought warhammer 40,000: dawn of war. It is so frustrating. Multiple times in a short 20-30 minute mission you are locked out of moving your character in the middle of shooting to be told a snippet related to the story.
The right way to do that would have been a small tv/com window that told you while you continued to play. Instead it is like playing a video game and pausing it every 5 minutes, changing your focus to a TV, and watching 45 seconds of a movie related to the game, but in no way required to actually play it.
"Also, Wine has made an enormous amount of progress in the last 4 years. It helped a lot that the Win32 API pretty much stopped dead between XP and Vista, as it gave the Wine team a huge amount of time to catch up instead of having to chase a moving target. "
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And the second the api moves again, wine will be playing catch up.
Wine is not a winning strategy for linux adoption.
If, at best, wine'd (I just invented a new verb) software equals that software in windows, and that equality is based on the whim of Microsoft making an api change or not, it will be an overall poor experience for Linux users over time.
I don't know if it has gotten better, but I tried wine with many games and Macromedia products (fireworks, dreamweaver, etc..) and none of it worked well.
Relying on the wine developers keeping pace with products designed for windows, and keeping pace with Microsoft api/quirks isn't a winning strategy for Linux adoption.
http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/TechComparison
I was curious about the differences. It looks like linux-vserver and openvz use the container method (same as zfs zones). Meaning, there is only one kernel shared by all the virtualized servers.
KVM and Vmware on the other hand, use full virtualization, meaning the virtual machine is a complete operating system.
None of that probably matters much if it is just drupal instances or something like that. It would come down to what management tools are available.
Is linux-vserver or openvz comparable in its ease of management with Vmware or zfs zones? I've never used them.
The simple answer? Virtual Machines. If you have to stay with linux, go with vmware or for a free solution, KVM. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
If you want to run LAMP on open solaris/solaris, ZFS has very robust and easy to manage virtual machines called zones. Sun also provides enterprise ops center software that can be used to manage the zones via a gui. Copy/create/rollback, etc..
After that, smart system administration is required to keep things easy to manage.
How you choose to separate data, apps, and the OS will depend on your requirements, but in general, keeping them separate is a good idea.
Another good idea, is a /mnt/safe or area mounted inside the prod/test/dev boxes that is nfs shared between them. Often times, I'll make a request of my sys admin "Please refresh test and dev with prod". So I copy changes or other work to /mnt/safe and then he overwrites dev and test with a recent zfs snapshot (virtual machine snapshot) of production.
I see you use the word check-in/out. I'm assuming you have subversion or something similar running that you use to check in/out to a new location. Do your developers need access to a CVS? If so, I'd just build it into the virtual machine, so each developer has their own subversion installation.
The only thing you need to do when using zones/virtual machines (at least in zfs) is change the hostname and IP, but that is easily scripted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/health/03flu.html
I don't think that the lack of 1950's 'noble' fighting is what leaves things "to fester long enough to get to Columbine-proportions"
Rather, it is a much greater disparity in wealth between rich and poor, and a consumer culture that has nearly destroyed the core family unit.
In the 50's, a single working father could buy a house, a car, and support his family. That is possible now, if you chose to live as simply as a 50's household did. Smaller house, no cable, no internet, chop your own firewood, get your own xmas tree, cook from scratch, etc..
But society has changed. Massive advertising, mega corps, have convinced us that we need more. More to the point that now 2 parents must work full time, and even when the family comes home, they often watch TV instead of talk.
This results in kids with less respect for each other, less respect for authority, etc...
The inner city is the worst example of this, and that poverty culture radiates out into society, affecting music, games, styles, attitudes, etc.. And while it is not as bad as in inner cities, a suburban kid is also being raised with far less parental guidance than in the past, while being fed the extremist attitudes resulting from inner city poverty through pop culture, tv, radio, news reports, etc..
Instead of attempting to prevent modding (losing fight), Ti should create a device that test makers can use to quickly check if a calculator is not standard. Plug it in, and it analyzes the calculator as it boots up, etc...
I agree. After years of doing turbo tax myself, and messing up once due to not understanding tax law, I decided to pay "the professionals" to do it for me.
I payed H&R something like 175 dollars to do the taxes, and then got a bill from the state saying it was messed up and I owed 250 dollars more..... jerks.
Oh, and the original "mess up" that happened is just as odd imo. I was working in a state with no state income tax. Through that job, I had a 401k (or 403b, I forget). At any rate, I got a new job in a state with income tax. Before I left the old state, I received a cash payout of all the money in my 401k. Just a check in my hand, earned in a state with no state income tax.
I took that check with me to the new state, and the day I moved into my new apartment, I cased the check to help cover my first/last month rent/moving expenses.
Come tax time, the new state decided they wanted something like 20% of that check because it was income deposited into my account while living in their state..... nevermind it was earned and already taxed under the the old states tax laws. If I cashed the check one day earlier in the old state, I would have saved 7,000 dollars.....
At work, I had to take the standard Dell purchase. It came with vista. Dealing with unix servers all day, I much prefer a linux desktop. However, try making ubuntu work with this:
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV516 [Radeon X1300/X1550 Series]
I can't upgrade to 9.04 because there is no driver for radeon that works well without tinkering in 9.04, and my sound goes out every other day and requires a restart. Try spanning monitors also. Things in the secondary monitory, when minimized, won't come back up. (eclipse mostly).
Absolutely standard install. Things do not work.
Vista, everything worked (although it lacked the tools I wanted).
Neither linux or windows is rock solid if you can't control every aspect of the install. Which is a situation that many people find themselves in. If I were able to build my work machine from parts that I knew had good linux support, I probably would have had less problems. The same could be said of a vista install.
Would I get less "its broken" calls if I installed Linux on my parents computers? Maybe. But I'd get a ton more calls saying my new printer won't work, I can't play this movie, my sound goes out.. my camera won't attach, etc..
Now if I could control everything they bought, to guarantee compatibility, sure... it would "just work".
"There is a flip-side, though, that the original poster may have neglected to consider. F/L/OSS developers ARE amongst the brightest and the best, but they also have extraordinarily high levels of autistic behaviours, anti-social disorders, emotional instability and alienation."
I think that is a much more likely explanation than attributing the low numbers of woman in foss with sexism. Not so much because of a 1 on 1 interaction where an anti-social male said something inappropriate to a female code contributor, but because a group of anti-social/autistic people are far less likely to form any sort of community.
A group of people working together on something isn't 'community' in its true sense. As foss coding is very much a hobby for most people, I would imagine that a woman would be more interested in participating in a hobby that has a sense of community.
Look at the numbers of women mmorpg players versus the numbers of say.. women counter-strike players. The game with the most community tends to have the most women. The same could be said of the coding game.
"I don't get how anyone can claim they have the right to being cured of any sickness they get. Doctors work their asses off to get where they are. How fair is it for those doctors to have to treat bums off the street who haven't contributed anything to society."
At least that is logically consistent when being opposed to health care reform, (and I'm assuming the public option).
If you are against health care reform, you should be for hospitals and doctors only treating those that can pay for it. That is much closer to a free market, and health care will be MUCH cheaper over time with that system. The cost of doing business in the US will fall, companies will be less likely to move overseas, profits will soar!
However, I'd care to wager that a vast majority of people would not like to see a child die outside of an emergency room, just because his parents are poor. Because this isn't all about money, and morals play a factor, you have to ask yourself, what is the cheapest, most effective way, of driving down costs, while meeting that moral obligation?
It has been shown time and time again that preventative health care is much cheaper than waiting until something becomes an emergency, visiting the emergency room, and then passing that cost along to all of us in the form of higher health care insurance costs.
That means, if you agree we have a moral obligation to help that sick child with poor parents, you agree that everyone should be covered. The simplest solution is a public option.
You're happy paying more for your health insurance than anywhere else in the world would charge, while receiving lower quality outcomes?
Regardless of that, reform and a competing public option will drive costs down. You can keep the insurance you have, but it will be cheaper.
Just remember, you are already paying a tax to support a public plan. It is called "emergency rooms", and it drives the cost of every insurance plan up.
The few relatives I know with Macs need a PC to run proprietary software for their work. That software might work in a virtual machine on the mac, but their work place IT will not support it.
Others I know want to game and so buy a PC, but prefer the mac for web/email/etc..
So, either not supported, not running the software you want, not being able to play a particular game, there are numerous reasons a Mac owner would want a PC. The reverse would never be true if you have the above issues to deal with.
Your already at the mercy of the air conditioning vendor, fire suppression vendor, electricity, internet, etc...
And if a hardware failure occurs, you are at the mercy of whatever support contract (1 hr, 4 hr, whatever.). And just like a remote vendor, you are at the mercy of your other vendors if they go out of business. I worked for a hospital with all Alpha VMS servers. Compaq bought them and phased vms out. Not much I could do about that either. Being remote doesn't make you any more or less in control.
But like you, our institution is largely hosted in house. Hundreds of servers. I think over time, we'll see many of our more standardized services being remotely hosted though. A webserver with static public content for instance. Or a mysql server being used as a backend to a company confluence wiki, etc..
What will tend to stay in house, is sensitive data, until such time as remote hosting vendors become legally obligated to protect the data. We can contract with some of them to establish trust chains, and consequences, etc.. but we've all witnessed remote host screw ups with literal or no consequences. Take gmail mixing up all those email accounts.
Until CEO/CIO's are confident that the data will be well protected, and that said vendor can be locked into privacy contracts, and that the vendor will take the fall if the data gets out... until then, most private data is going to stay on location.
I'm a little unclear about fuel. It says it uses a light gas, like hydrogen, radio waves to excite the gas and magnets to direct the thrust out?
what powers the magnets and radio waves? A small nuclear reactor or something?
And then how much gas must one carry? Is it feasible to travel to the end of the solar system with this thing with just 1 large tank of gas? (like say a space shuttle fuel tank, the one used for lift off).
I don't think its uncommon for any government, especially democratic ones, to "build a case for war" against "the enemy".
If "the enemy" thinks that the will of the people is behind war, then the threat is that much more real, and real negotiations can begin.
The difference most former presidents (and the current president) with the prior administration, was that Bush and company actually went ahead and waged war. The vast majority of the time, its just rhetoric. Take the entire cold war for example.
I don't pretend to know all the history of Israel that well, but many of the recent aggressions were reactions to continued rocket attacks. And before that, continued suicide bombings. So I don't really blame them for striking back.
I wonder what Iran would do if rockets were continually shot over its border onto its civilians from a neighboring country, and that country's leaders refused to crackdown on the radicals?
That said, Israels consistent policy of striking back is what worries me the most about Iran having a nuclear bomb. I think if Iran gets too close to having a nuclear missile, Israel is going attack, and probably do so way out of proportion to the threat.
The best way to deal with Iran, and the middle east as a whole, is with economics. Help Iran build gasoline refineries, solar power, trade agreements, improved farming, life the sanctions. In return, no nukes, no military build up of any kind.
A strong, well educated middle class, is the best counter to radical ideas.
Two anecdotal stories doesn't outweigh all the evidence that flu shots save many more lives than they take.
H1N1, unlike other flu strains, has shown signs of attacking healthier immune systems, producing cytokine storms. The CDC didn't recommend that 19-24 year olds get the vaccine just for the heck of it.
H1N1 is predicted to have a 0.05 to 0.08 percent chance of death. Multiple that by the number of people that normally get the flu each year, and you can see why the medical community is worried.
Do me a favor if your in the "flu vaccines are bad" crowd. Please be extra careful to not catch the flu (hand washing often, don't touch your eyes, nose, etc..), and if you do catch it, at the very first sniffle, please stay home.
I'm not sure why this was modded interesting:
"Flu shots are for people with weak immune systems and old people that are at higher risk to "die" from it. Never get one done if you don't _need it_. I've see more people almost die due to allergic reactions to shots than i have due to a bad case of the flu."
Everything I've heard about H1N1 is that healthier immune systems are actually more at risk. This particular flu makes your immune system go into over drive.
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2009/05/06/H1N1-flu-may-induce-a-cytokine-storm/UPI-50901241584708/
That is why the cdc recommends this set of people for the vaccine.
The groups recommended to receive the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine include:
* Pregnant women because they are at higher risk of complications and can potentially provide protection to infants who cannot be vaccinated;
* Household contacts and caregivers for children younger than 6 months of age because younger infants are at higher risk of influenza-related complications and cannot be vaccinated. Vaccination of those in close contact with infants younger than 6 months old might help protect infants by âoecocooningâ them from the virus;
* Healthcare and emergency medical services personnel because infections among healthcare workers have been reported and this can be a potential source of infection for vulnerable patients. Also, increased absenteeism in this population could reduce healthcare system capacity;
* All people from 6 months through 24 years of age
o Children from 6 months through 18 years of age because cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza have been seen in children who are in close contact with each other in school and day care settings, which increases the likelihood of disease spread, and
o Young adults 19 through 24 years of age because many cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza have been seen in these healthy young adults and they often live, work, and study in close proximity, and they are a frequently mobile population; and,
* Persons aged 25 through 64 years who have health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza.
"Never get one done if you don't _need it"
You should modify that to say, never get one if you are 100% sure you won't get the flu and 100% sure that you won't come into contact with a person that can't handle the flu you infect them with.
Rather than having to worry about charging overnight or charging stations in parking lots, I'd like to see the battery pack be durable and standardized, so instead of charging it, you just swap it out. It'd be nice if self charging was still an option though.
I imagine that most batteries are under the floor of the trunk? So maybe the sides of the car near the trunk can have a sliding panel. Open it, and all your batteries are bundled and sitting on a sturdy rack that slides out.
Either some 'car wash-like' automated process where your car rides along a track and a robotic arm swaps the batteries out, or maybe just a hydraulic assisted but manually controlled arm that an attended could use to give you a new set.
What if I'm at zero battery power but need to drive 200 miles? Swapping them out would 'fill them up' instantly. It would also allow for some central quality control and testing of the batteries that the 'swapping station' could do.
"For example, some authors argue
that genetically modified food could lead to a loss of genetic diversity within a particular food
crop, leaving that food crop vulnerable to extinction (see, e.g., Lappé and Baily 2002)."
from http://www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu/millstein/papers/Millstein_on_Kingsolver2.pdf
Has something changed since 2002 or are people like Lappe and Baily wrong?
Thanks for clarifying that they are not cloned though. I assumed that and was incorrect.