Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
Same IP address at the same time...
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something about the nature of networking, but isn't anyone behind a NAT gateway or proxy going to be coming from the "same IP address at the same time"? I do believe that's one of the reasons they came up with cookies in the first place, to differentiate multiple users originating from the same IP address.
So, as the grandparent suggests, if you use one web browser for Google queries and either reject all cookies in that browser or at the very least never log in to any Google service in that browser, your Google searching will be semi-anonymous even though you are simultaneously logged in to a Gmail account in another browser from the same machine.
On the other hand, unless you do automatically reject all cookies in your "anonymous" browser, the moment that you accidentally log into any Google service everything that it has been tracking for your unknown "anonymous" user during that browser session will immediately be attached to your real profile, rendering your attempt to escape tracking moot.
Truly anonymized long-term web browsing is extremely difficult due to all the different methods they have for attempting to identify you despite your best efforts. It's made worse by the amazing level of cooperation and information sharing that goes on throughout the web. Once one web site or advertising server figures out who you are, they are happy to pass that information along to help target everyone else's efforts to sell you things. Of course each link in the chain only passes on a little bit of "not personally identifiable" information, but the end result is that the online ecosystem aggregates so much information that it becomes impossible to NOT identify exactly who you are, where you've been, what you've purchased, what you've ever searched for, etc.
If you're open-minded enough to consider "anything" to help you control your weight, here's a tip: Carbohydrates cause the release of insulin and the storage of fatty acids in fat cells. Without carbohydrates, two things happen: A) it is much more difficult for the body to store fatty acids (which originate from anything you eat, not just carbs) as fat because a certain component of the fat storage cycle is only present when you consume carbohydrates, and B) there is a much lower level of insulin released into the bloodstream at any given time, which makes the body much less apt to even attempt to store fatty acids as fat.
In other words, the low-carb crazies are correct and have been all along. You can keep your weight down without increasing exercise or starving yourself, just by changing your diet to reduce the amount of high-glycemic-load carbohydrates you ingest. Note that glycemic load is not necessarily the same as glycemic index. You have to pay close attention to exactly how each type of food will end up affecting your blood sugar, regardless of whether the nutrition label indicates it to be low-carb or not. It's the specific kind of carb and what you combine it with at any particular meal that makes the difference between losing weight and gaining weight.
Google Gary Taubes for his very informative and well-researched video about the science behind all this, and find some good low-carb instruction books on Amazon to help you understand exactly how to proceed without inadvertently eating the wrong thing or taking any supplements which might stall your progress. And good luck.
Or you could ignore this advice completely, keep following the flawed "food pyramid" recommendations and wonder why you keep gaining more and more weight as you get older, while you simultaneously develop diabetes for some "unknown" reason. Your doctor will help you out by putting you on drugs that make you more sensitive to insulin (!) which will cause you to gain weight even more easily, and then he'll recommend a "low fat, low cholesterol" diet as if fat and cholesterol CAUSED the diabetes or reducing them has some chance of reversing it. Oh, and he might say, offhand, "Try to stay away from sugar."
Thunderbird 2 had a fairly useful quick search bar. Type a word, hit enter, and your email list was filtered for just the search term. The list could be multi-selected, moved around and general managed in a normal fashion. The feature was handy for bulk operations since it was fast.
Thunderbird 3 still has the search bar but results appear in a new tab. This tab does not show results as a list but in a fancy HTML based summary view. That's great if you were searching for a particular message but utterly useless for bulk operations. What if I want to drag and drop a few files around, or delete them or flag them as junk? Even as a summary view it is stupid since it only shows 10 results at a time with a More button at the bottom. FFS, stop mimicking an AJAX web application - the results are RIGHT THERE on the disk and you can certainly show more than 10 results at a time.
The workaround is to create a saved search but that's even more hassle for something that could be achieved in seconds in v2.0. So much for progress. I suggest if Thunderbird 3.1 turns up, they put an option or two in to control this behaviour and remember what the user has chosen. There is even a "save search as virtual folder" option in the quick search menu suggesting someone was thinking of doing something like this, it just appears to be inexplicably greyed out.
Thunderbird 3 has potential but it really feels like a regression in several important respects. It also inexplicably lacks things I would have expected to be improved. For example, you still can't select an email, and right mouse and create a filter from it. This is something that Outlook has had for donkey's years.
You have GOT to be KIDDING me. Why does it always seem like "one step forward, two steps back" with software these days? Is Thunderbird the new GNOME? How can such an idiotic idea survive the entire development cycle from concept to release?
I'm constantly doing a search-drag-drop kind of operation to sort mail into subfolders that I don't necessarily want to sort automatically with a filter. Looks like TB3 will be, well, fairly useless for this task. Even Outlook can handle finding messages without creating a separate link-based view. Thanks, Mozilla. Way to create an Outlook-killer.
Am I the only one that just wants to put down my head and cry every time I see stuff like this?
Desktop email clients, even if they are just accessing large hosted IMAP accounts that are also available through webmail, still have distinct advantages over webmail.
As has been brought up by others, if you have more than one email account it is trivial to monitor them all from the same email application using the same interface versus having different tabs open in a browser to different webmail interfaces.
Another advantage is speed, if the desktop client is set up to download body and attachments any email that shows up in your inbox will quickly open up and the attachment will be available for viewing and automatically gets stored in a temporary cache folder when opened. With webmail you usually have to do the whole Save-As bit to download the attachment separately.
I side benefit of downloading body and attachments automatically is that all of your mail is available even when your computer is offline. I know, scary concept, but a lot of people need access to their email for reference even when disconnected from the Internet. It also serves as a backup for times when the email server might go down temporarily, or Heaven forbid lose your mail in a server crash. A business could be down for days in some cases if they had to wait for a webmail provider to restore from backups.
Students, who are often going from one machine to another, will naturally gravitate to the portability of webmail interfaces. I use them myself quite often but still have Thunderbird set up on my personal/work computer simply because it's easier to have a single place to go to monitor several accounts. As you said, staff and faculty are still sticking with desktop email, probably because they tend to use a single computer and don't see enough benefit to webmail to move away from what they have been using forever.
Searching often works better/faster or has more options in a desktop client versus webmail interfaces. I've seen a lot of webmail with not just clunky search interfaces but clunky interfaces overall. I've seen a lot of webmail that is abysmally slow even on a fast connection, also. Not to mention the fact that pretty much every email service that provides webmail uses a different interface.
In other words, just because in your specific situation there are a lot of people who don't prefer a desktop email client anymore doesn't mean there is no longer a reason for them to exist. People have been predicting the death of things like local computer storage and desktop-based applications for a decade or longer but there will always be a subset of people for whom web-based stuff just doesn't do the job. Thinking otherwise is just short-sighted. We're all glad that you are happy with Gmail, but Google does not encompass the needs of the entire world. Yet.
Re:Is the word for "leopard" really "tree"?
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Monkeys With Syntax
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That is really quite a brilliant deduction. If I were writing a science fiction story about beings who spend most of their lives in trees, it would make perfect sense that their language, primitive or otherwise, would be largely based on constructs that communicate various aspects of their interaction with trees.
For a monkey, trees are life, home, bed, protector, transportation, food provider, play room, birthplace, battleground, and many other things. There would be almost no need to communicate any idea in their world that would require talking about anything but trees. It would be so intrinsic to their communication that even if they were sentient they probably would never think about the fact that their language was based on talking about trees. The ground would be "not-tree-place". Everything that doesn't live in a tree would be a "not-tree-person". A falling tree would be "tree-bad". And so on.
If this is the case, and if they were sentient or even semi-sentient, it would be dastardly difficult to communicate any new ideas to them about the existence of any object or concept that can't be related to a tree in some way. It would make translating between such vastly different languages as Chinese and English, which often requires very loose translations on both sides, seem like child's play in comparison. Simple concepts that in English might only require a single word would have to be translated into long strings of tree-related phrases that would only roughly approximate the English meaning. Anything that couldn't be somehow related to a tree-phrase at all would be completely incomprehensible to them and totally untranslatable.
Fascinating to think about. Extending it in the opposite direction, would a species much more advanced than us have difficulty translating some of their more advanced concepts into our languages in a way that we could understand, or are our brains advanced enough that our communication mechanisms approach a theoretical communication complexity limit, such that any possible concept remaining in the universe could be easily translated for us?
Surely some linguistic mathematicians have already attempted to figure this out. Are there higher "dimensions" of communication that can be easily represented by semantic or syntactic calculations but which our brains would not be capable of comprehending in language form, in the same way that our brains can't natively comprehend physical dimensions beyond the third dimension while our mathematics can clearly represent hundreds? Are these higher semantic dimensions, if they exist, only theoretical or could they exist in nature?
Last time I looked into OpenSolaris I was very disappointed by the very short and mostly unverified hardware compatibility list. The BSDs are much better off in that department and aren't very far behind Linux. In addition, tools like dtrace have already been ported over to BSD (and Mac OS X, which was originally largely based on FreeBSD). The new FreeBSD 8.0 has just taken ZFS support from experimental to official (which in the BSD world I would consider to mean "production ready even in server environments").
Going beyond that, I would personally class OpenSolaris as much further toward the arcane, confusing world of the original Unixen, with Linux being the least confusing for newcomers and the BSDs somewhere in the middle. Honestly, I've had extensive command-line experience with Linux and the BSDs, and I was utterly lost when I tried to get into OpenSolaris. I couldn't grasp the underlying structure of the Solaris-based system at all. It just didn't seem to "make sense" the way most other operating systems have for me. This "friendliness" is probably largely why Linux is more popular than the BSDs and the BSDs are in turn more popular than things like OpenSolaris. If it's easy for new users and new developers to get a handle on how the system works, you will attract more users and more developers.
I'd rate the three similarly in terms of developmental flexibility, which I believe is one of the main reasons they are creating this fork of FreeNAS with Linux. As an ecosystem, Linux development seems to move more rapidly and be more open to new code than anything else out there. Again, with the differing structure of the BSD development ecosystem, the BSDs seem to move at a much more deliberate pace and new code has to go through a fairly stringent vetting process before it is allowed into the core of the system. Let us not forget that while Linux is merely a kernel, the BSDs are largely complete operating systems being developed under the supervision of a central authority, which I think helps add to the stability of the overall operating system. OpenSolaris as usual would fall on the far end of this scale (in my opinion), where it is still somewhat controlled by the people who allowed it to be branched from the commercial version of Solaris, and has numerous restrictions that reduce the speed and openness with which it is developed.
Again, this is just my subjective personal opinion based on years of experience and observation, but I would use this experience to respectfully disagree with your claim that FreeBSD (or Linux) is "[sadly] the wrong tool for the job". Based on FreeBSD's relatively flexible development cycle combined with its observed code quality over the last couple of decades, I'd venture to say that it is the perfect middle ground on which to base a focused-purpose network file server operating system. Such a system needs to be able to stay compatible with a large set of current storage, networking and video hardware and yet be created from highly stable, quality code that changes slowly enough that there is time for a bit of polish before each release.
Everyone who is even considering spouting the letters "ZFS" in response to this article should really just STFU. Seriously.
Allow me to explain. Yes, ZFS is a very nice and very robust filesystem with great data protection and recovery features (although still subject to failure and data loss under some conditions, don't even try to deny it, it isn't perfect).
But all the ZFS zealots need to stop and think about all the other filesystems currently in use, and realize that ZFS will NEVER replace most of those filesystems in most situations. There needs to be a solution to bit rot that does not entail switching the entire world to a new filesystem. NTFS, FAT12/FAT16/FAT32, HFS+, Ext3/4, ReiserFS, UDF, all of these and more will continue to be in use in millions of computers and on billions of devices using removable or embedded media for many decades, and more filesystems will be invented in the future. You will never see a digital camera with built-in ZFS support, for instance. ZFS is totally unfeasible for that kind of application. It takes far too much processing power and memory to run ZFS for it to ever become anything resembling a universal filesystem. Filesystems like ZFS are not a panacea, there needs to be a solution (like PAR2) that is portable between ALL different filesystems that are now or ever will be in use.
Basically, things like the PAR2 parity archiving format already solve this type of problem, but in a way that is too limited. It needs to be better integrated into the filesystem or operating system level so that it works automatically on all kinds of different filesystems. Right now, the parity information is something that you have to manually create with a separate software tool like Parchive when you are interested in "archiving" something. This kind of functionality needs to be somehow tacked on to the file storage process so that the parity data is created, updated and continuously checked by whatever is reading and writing to the file, no matter where that file is stored. It needs to be part of the file itself, so that when a file is copied or moved, the parity data is not lost.
As usual, to any particular problem there is an answer that is straightforward, simple and WRONG (I forget what smart person said that first). For this problem, ZFS is not the ultimate answer. It's great for specific situations like file servers, but that's about it. As soon as you remove a file from that file server, poof, you lose access to that parity information. That's just dumb. For important data that needs to be self-repairing, the only real solution is to include the parity information alongside the data, in a portable format.
Personally I've been quite surprised over the years that almost no modern filesystem in use anywhere has the kind of parity information built-in that ZFS has. So much data could be easily recovered if filesystems were robust enough to handle simple things like bit errors or unreadable sectors. Why should my 2GB file be ruined just because a single 512-bit sector became unreadable in a critical location in the file? It's idiotic to need to have multiple complete duplicate copies of every single type of data we ever store in order to be sure we can recover from simple forms of data degredation like bit rot.
To be pedantic, I believe you meant "equate", meaning roughly "evaluates to the same as".
"Equivocate" means to use waffling words to give ambiguous or partial answers, as in saying, "not that I know of" rather than "no".
Also, I'm no special relativity expert but I'm not sure where you got the idea that the particles will be observable for a longer period of time simply because they are going faster. Things either get faster or slow down, you can't have both at the same time.
Perhaps if you took the entire LHC facility, put it on a spaceship and accelerated the ship to close to the speed of light and then performed your experiments and observations on the ship and beamed the information back to Earth, then you would find that the experiments and observations on the ship were happening in a slower time frame. But these particles are being accelerated within the same gravity well in which we are observing them. The particles, the facility and the observers are all traveling through space-time at the same speed from the same location (Earth).
It's always been my understanding that the main purpose of working toward higher-energy collisions is because the more energy there is in a particle collision, the more energy will be released and the more basic fundamental particles will be observed. Basically, the particles get broken into smaller pieces, and the pieces break into even smaller pieces. As the energy level goes up, we get closer to replicating the energy conditions during the initial stages of the Big Bang when all matter in the universe was created, and we discover more about the subatomic building-blocks of matter and how they behave.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who realized this particular implication of this technology.
You will probably never see that happening (in any country with established religion), although you are far too conservative in your estimation of the market size, which would be huge even if we're just talking about the novelty foods market. The God-ites (doesn't matter what kind) will all be dead set against this sort of "unnatural" food source ever coming into general use, whether human-based or animal-based.
Growing and eating human-originated muscle tissue, while theoretically absent of the immorality of killing a human being, is still cannibalism whether the flesh was ever attached to a living person or not. If you thought the God-ites were extreme when it comes to dealing with abortion clinics, you probably haven't seen anything yet. They'll latch onto the cannibalism aspect and completely ignore the fact that no human life is being lost.
Even though they are slightly weakened in the current political climate, the God-ites are still extremely strong politically in this country and most others. Thus, you will probably soon see the same bans on human tissue cloning that there are on human cloning in general. The only exception might be creating replacement muscles for medical purposes (under tightly controlled conditions, of course).
Even outside the God-ite communities there is an extremely strong natural stigma that goes along with even the merest suggestion of cannibalism, so popular society would never look kindly on it either.
Which is all kind of sad, in a way, if (and only if) it is true that human proteins really are the most readily absorbable and nutritious proteins that a human could be eating. Would the Soylent Green idea have had such an impact on the psyche if it were revealed that, while the product really was made of human meat proteins, it was made of artificial human meat and the dead were merely incinerated to save space? The horror was not that everyone was being fed a particular kind of protein, it was that they were literally being fed their own dead because there was nothing suitably nutritious left on the planet to feed that many people.
It is possible to envision a future, sometime far away, where human-based proteins are an accepted and efficient food source for humans. Hell, people could all someday be eating artificial meat created from a few of their own cells using a cell replicator machine in the pantry. What could be wrong with that? You've probably ingested several billion sloughed-off cells from your tongue and the inside of your mouth in the time you've been alive, all without even trying. Ever accidentally take a bite out of your cheek and swallow it? OMG, you cannibal!
Anyway, I'm sure a dozen or more sci-fi visionaries have been writing about these exact possibilities for the last century or more. There is nothing new under the sun...
To add to that, one of the most important things to remember:
5. There is no way in hell that 50% of the employed population, even if you're just looking at the corporate office lackey population, are smart enough to even get the idea that they might benefit from copying some sort of corporate business information. Most people are just struggling to make it through every day while getting an acceptable level of work done to avoid getting fired. It is ludicrous to think that one out of every two employees has a access, knowledge and skills to steal any significant amount of company information that would have even the remotest chance of benefiting them personally.
Now, one in six to one in ten, something in that range would be believable and still should be a trigger for added security levels. After all, it only takes one in a thousand being in the right position at the right time to do damage.
In the places in China where parents are likely to send their children to one of these types of camps, we are usually talking about a large concentrated population. I doubt the people in such areas feel any particular need to maintain the local population growth since the local population is already straining the carrying capacity of the area. In the many outlying village areas of China which are still mostly low density agriculture-based communities, I'm sure the mentality toward protecting children is decidedly different. However, the importance in Asian cultures of family honor or social ranking even in such low population areas should not be underestimated.
Even looking toward other western countries the US is still the odd man out in terms of our treatment of children. Sure, they are all protective of their children, but if you closely compare their daily interactions with children most countries don't come anywhere close to the almost worshipful attitude that is so common with Americans. Callousness and casual forms of cruelty are very prevalent in many other countries. Many consider the American attitude unhealthy, actually, and hold up American youth as evidence that sparing the rod really does spoil the child.
Because so many Americans think of children as irreplaceable perfect gifts from God that must be protected at all costs, it is hard to imagine how easy it is for many other cultures to discard children without even thinking about it. Ever wonder why you only see bloated, starving babies and very young children on those TV shows about Ethiopian starvation? It's because the father and the older children always get fed before the youngest, so the youngest child starves. The aid workers are constantly faced with the problem of trying to explain to the mothers that they need to feed the youngest child first if they don't want it to die. Too often, the mental disconnect that allows this behavior in the parents in the first place means the mothers simply cannot put two and two together, and the child ends up dying.
Human nature, and the human brain, is a very strange, very complex thing. Once you study it objectively for long enough, you will never be surprised by even the most atrocious and bizarre human behavior. After all, we are still just relatives of the chimpanzee who happen to be better at using tools and communicating.
One thing you may notice however (which makes all anecdotal evidence worthless in terms of exposing actual human nature) is that the more educated families tend to gravitate more toward the western type philosophy of caring for children. Therefore anyone who was well-off enough to somehow travel to the US from any country for any reason will naturally be more similar to us than different. It's only the anthropologists who take the time to study other cultures in their native environments that have been able to document the true range of human behaviors in the treatment of children. Assuming that the behavior of other cultures will make some sort of logical sense is usually the first mistake.
Although the behavior of all people on Earth is superficially similar, many cultures such as the Asians have decidedly different attitudes toward children than we do in the US. In Asian cultures the family name comes before the individual's name, emphasizing the fact that the individual is less important than the family. Any member of a family that causes the family to "lose face", or become dishonored in the eyes of others, is seen as a liability to the family. Protecting the family name is often put before the desire to protect one's offspring. It's really only a matter of degree.
The attitude we have in the US to the importance of children is actually abnormal compared to a large percentage of the rest of the world. In parts of Africa there are some truly horrible things done to children by their own parents. Due to lack of resources, there is a strange phenomena where the youngest child is often suddenly accused of witchcraft and either murdered or cast out on the street and usually drummed out of town, never to be allowed to return. Usually the accuser is the mother (although often a step-parent, not biological parent of the accused child). Africa is far from the only place where such things happen to children.
The universality of "humanity" as defined by the unconditional love and protection of children is vastly overestimated. If you don't believe what I've described because you can't imagine feeling that way toward children, well, you need to do more research. Unmodified human nature is really a lot uglier than most people realize.
Parent should be modded insightful, not funny. If things go in the wrong direction this is exactly the sort of thing we could be reading in the papers in just about any country in a few years.
You should have yourself tested for ADHD. It's not just "an excuse for lazy people", it's a real neurological disorder that can affect someone of any IQ. The symptoms you describe fit the pattern of ADHD. Notice how one of the posters replying to you accuses you of having "poor organizational skills and probably a bad work ethic", as if you could just easily learn to organize a little better and have a better attitude toward studying. In other words, you're stupid and lazy. Except, obviously you aren't stupid, and if laziness were the cause of your problems with studying, you would probably just say so. Despite being highly intelligent your brain just doesn't do certain things very well, like coming up with ways to organize physical objects and manage time. Seems pretty obvious that if it were that easy to change, you would have done so by now.
I have a similar experience. Early on I did quite well in school, although mostly because I was good at taking tests. Along about the start of high school I started falling behind because I could no longer just go through each glass doing the problems in my head and get away with not doing the mounds of homework that often seemed an insurmountable obstacle. Or, just like you I would forget important projects or find myself unable to begin a report until the night before it was due. Other students of average or even low intelligence somehow trudged through all the required work and passed classes where I often struggled even though I usually understood the material better than they did. The other people around me had the ability to sit down day after day and work through hours of homework and report writing and somehow get almost everything done on time. Sure, a lot of them got Bs, Cs and Ds, but they got the work done and passed the class. Myself, on the other hand, scored a relatively good 1400 on my SAT, yet barely managed to graduate high school. I always wanted to do the work, but I just never seemed capable of sitting down and concentrating long enough to get anything accomplished.
Like you, my organizational skills are almost non-existent. I can spend hours just trying to figure out how to clear the stuff off my desk, and then still only be halfway done by the end of the day. On the other hand, I know exactly what and where everything is, and why it's there, so technically I'm not as disorganized as I seem to be.
ADHD is a very subtle, very peculiar brain disorder that affects a lot more people than most folks realize. Anyone else out there with similar experiences should do themselves a favor and get a good book on ADHD like the classic "Driven to Distraction" or one of the newer books available on Amazon like the aptly named "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!", and see if it gives you some answers as to why you've always had trouble with certain things in life.
Why the hell is the parent modded as +5, Funny? I don't think it was meant as a joke and I was going to make the same comment myself.
Like it or not, most end users in the business world need to be able to open PDF files and use websites that have Flash interfaces, neither of which Windows will do on its own. Installing Acrobat Reader and updating Flash Player to the latest version is one of the main things I do on any office machine I hand out. Sure, they are minor security risks, but I don't understand why anyone would call them crapware, as opposed to all the bizarre manufacturer-specific pop-up control panels and buggy trial security software that is constantly running in the system tray. That's the stuff we're talking about as crapware, not common add-ons like PDF and Flash that are just applications that run when you need them. And like the parent said, PDF and Flash are pretty common things, regardless of anyone's opinions on the need for Flash for any specific purpose.
The modding of the parent as funny makes absolutely no sense to me.
Sadly, you have far too much faith in the ability of the general public and general business world to recognize a dead end, or care about living in an ideal world. For businesses especially there are far too many resources still invested in proprietary Windows-based business software for them to completely abandon Windows for a long time to come. Most businesses didn't jump on the Vista bandwagon only because Vista had such poor initial performance and would have required too much investment in new hardware. Now that Windows 7 (Vista SP3) has solved most of the initial Vista issues and now that hardware has caught up more to the performance levels required by Vista, and since XP and a lot of business hardware is getting really long in the tooth, most businesses will now evaluate Windows 7 positively and commence flocking.
Both Linux and Mac OS X are still too big of a leap for most businesses to take, even today. Even on the server side, the Windows server versions are gaining or at least not losing so much ground anymore to Linux. Until the Linux development world wakes up and realizes how important it is to cater to the lowest common denominator and make even server interfaces as simple to use as Windows does, Windows is still "good enough" to do the job, just like it was from the beginning.
You would think everyone would realize after a quarter century of almost unimpeded success despite all suckage that Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon. They don't even need to engage in abusive monopolistic behavior anymore. Unless something major completely changes the computing landscape, Windows has the momentum to keep haunting us for at least another decade or two. Hardware support and the availability of commercial applications will still have to get much better for Linux to really challenge Windows on the desktop. It will take another decade or longer for the Internet to evolve enough to become the main platform where most people run their applications. Only then will people cease to care about what operating system their computer is running, and Linux will finally be a serious threat to the dominance of Windows. But at that point, even though many people will be using Linux, most of them won't care enough to be aware of it. The web browser will be the new operating system.
The biggest threat from Microsoft for the future will be all the new idiotic proprietary web-based stuff they'll be inventing that will "work better" when running in Internet Explorer on Windows. They've known for a long time that eventually everything is heading for the Internet. But for now, very few individuals and businesses are simply going to abandon Windows because of the same mild suckage it has always had. Only the people who have used computers for a decade or more have the background to really get tired enough of Windows to make the jump. That, and the people who are new enough to computers that they haven't yet imprinted on Windows. Everyone else just doesn't care enough or doesn't encounter enough problems with Windows to even feel the need to get away from it. Sad, but true.
I have noticed that the 5GHz band has a much lower effective range than the 2.4GHz band due to the fact that penetration of physical objects goes down as frequency goes up. Recently I moved across the street and during the moving process I tried to use my router (Airport Extreme Base Station) from the new place while the Internet connection was still set up in the old apartment. Using the 5GHz band I couldn't even detect the router from across the street, while on the 2.4GHz band I was able to log on and get 1-2 bars of signal quality.
The poor performance you've seen is most likely attributable more to poor implementation of the draft 802.11n specs than to antenna issues. I pretty much gave up on most of the 802.11n products on the market because of such implementation and incompatibility issues and bought myself one of the new Apple Airport Extreme Base Stations which finally has gigabit ports. It has worked quite well.
If you only use wireless to surf the web, shut the hell up. I can't believe the number of people posting today who don't see any difference between "G" network speeds and "N" network speeds. With 802.11n, we're talking about a wireless connection that is finally about as fast as a wired 100Mb connection. Still nothing compared to a gigabit wired connection, but for anyone who needs to transfer any kind of large files or has the simplest of file servers set up at home or at the office, the speed of 802.11n makes a HUGE difference. Couple that with the gigabit ports on the router and you've got a router that is one of only a handful of 802.11n routers that isn't a bottleneck between a gigabit wired network and the 802.11n wireless clients.
Comparing a device like this to a dirt-cheap poor performing WRT54G or even a WRT54GL as "proof" that it is overpriced is absolutely ridiculous. This device has far more RAM, far more storage, gigabit ethernet ports, and a USB port that will allow you to add more custom applications and/or host a USB storage device for local file sharing. It's not even in the same sport as 802.11g routers, and it's $40 cheaper than an Airport Extreme Base Station.
Is everybody on crack today? What the hell is wrong with you people? Not only is this a pretty well-spec'd device, it comes from a company that is willingly cooperating with the community to get open source firmwares working on the device. And all you people can do is whine about it costing more than a cheapo router? I don't get it.
Besides which I have no idea what the speed of sound has to do with the theoretical upper limit of the speed of a spinning disk. It's not like an airplane wing with a trailing shock wave. I would think there would be much more pressing problems that are keeping us from seeing 30K RPM hard drives anytime soon, like:
- Shear strength of the platter material - Total mass of the platter, especially near the edge - Heat generated in the bearings - Energy necessary to spin the platter at that speed - Torsional forces from rotating the drive while it's spinning
And probably down near the bottom of the list of potential problems:
- Cavitation and/or shock waves from the air around the spinning platter.
You need to buy better CFLs, it's pretty much that simple. Recent years have seen significant improvements in CFLs in several areas, like warm-up time, temperature tolerance, color, etc.
Also, use the proper fixture type for cold or damp environments to avoid those problems. Some bulbs are designed specifically to work better in cold environments, but I'm sure a good outdoor sealed enclosure will help a lot. For in-ceiling fixtures, use a CFL specifically designed to work in those fixtures. Usually they are shaped just like the floodlight style incandescent they are replacing. Regular CFLs are not designed to be installed in that sort of enclosure and will get too hot.
I've seen CFLs with terrible warm-up times, but the good ones currently are pretty much instant-on. They may get slightly brighter after a couple of minutes but after the initial burn-in phase when they are brand new they should always come on at least 90% of total brightness or that brand is crap.
On the other hand, even with recent improvements CFLs still have some serious drawbacks. After as little as a year even CFLs with decent color quality when new will start exhibiting strong greenish hue as the phosphors change. Doesn't do much good to have a bulb that will supposedly last several years if after just a year or two the colors it throws off make you feel sick every time you turn it on. Unfortunately a lot of CFLs still have terrible color quality even when they're brand new, and it is very difficult to find a CFL that will even have a color temperature indicated on the packaging. I have found some nice ones made by a company called Satco at my local hardware store that come in a 5000K daylight balanced variation which is quite nice. There are also some expensive "full spectrum" CFLs available online. But bottom line the color quality of CFLs mostly sucks.
Another thing is the brightness slowly fades over the years, unlike an incandescent which will dutifully output close to the rated wattage until the moment it burns out. Doesn't do much good to have a 100-watt equivalent CFL bulb that supposedly lasts several years but turns into a 50-watt equivalent after just a couple of years. Same thing happens with LEDs, unfortunately. They don't just politely burn out at some defined moment in time. I'd say an LED bulb that will supposedly last for 20 years would be pretty much useless after 5 or 8 years due to the dimming effect. I would be very surprised if any of these LED bulbs last even half the rated time without having either half of the diodes die or having the total output of the bulb dimmed to about half of its original capacity. You know when to change an incandescent because it burns out. How will you know when to change out a sloooooowly fading LED bulb? After a few years you'll just have a house that's half as bright as it should be, but because it took years for the fading to occur you'll never notice the difference until you have a new bulb to compare to your old bulbs.
Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?
Do you seriously think you're so much smarter than everyone else that you're the only one who would notice an instrument sounding like crap? The Strads may not be perceptibly better than the best modern violins, but I'm pretty sure people didn't save them carefully for 300 years based on absolutely no positive attributes. And exactly why "must" they be squeaky just because they are old? Making statements like that might give others the idea that you have no idea what you're talking about.
You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate.
No, that's not what anyone said at all. Around the time when Stradivarius was making his violins there was a cold climate for a few years while the atmosphere was filled with volcanic dust from a very large volcanic eruption. The cold winters and cool summers caused the trees to grow denser wood in both winter and summer, and they were also attacked by more fungi than usual due to the cold climate, which probably slowed the tree growth even more, producing even denser wood. The theory is that the Stradivarius violins sound better than most others because of the difference in wood density.
Outside of that time period, the climate went back to normal and the trees used to make other violins since then have been less dense. In any particular time period in history I'm sure there have not been very many violin makers in the world, it is a rather specialized art. Therefore it is not that unbelievable that Stradivarius might have been the only violin maker during that time period who had access to this particularly dense wood and had the skills to make instruments of high enough quality in the first place for the wood density to make a noticeable difference to the quality of the sound.
This is not a difficult set of concepts to grasp if one is able to let go of one's self-assured ignorance for a moment and actually pay attention to what people are saying.
The mystery to me is only why they don't simply make some violins out of some other kind of wood that is already more dense. But, I know enough about wood to know that each tree even of the same species has unique qualities, so I'm going to assume that I don't know more than the people who make violins. I'm going to assume that they know more than I do and that they use this particular species because it has the best qualities for such an instrument.
You have a serious problem if you couldn't enjoy the LotR movies. I too noticed that the movies didn't perfectly follow the books (and I am very good at noticing such things), and I am always very put off by bad acting and bad scripts, more so than anyone else I know. I hold the books in high regard as some of the most significant stories ever written by a human being, yet despite the imperfections of the movies I was able to thoroughly enjoy all three. Because despite those imperfections I realized that Peter Jackson had to pull off something absolutely miraculous in bringing together all of the people, places and technologies that he did and still make something that held up that well and was that true to the books. Before those movies I can't even remember the last time I saw a movie that was even in the same ballpark as the book it was based on, in any genre. Normally they're doing good if about a third of the book comes through on the screen. In the LotR films I would say that at least 80% of the important parts of the story came through quite well, which is absolutely amazing when you take into account what goes into producing any film, least of all something so huge with hundreds of production people involved in its making.
No, the movies were not perfect, but they were very, very good, and brought the stories to an entire new generation that never would have read the books anyway, and a lot of people have gone on to read the books after seeing the movies. So, if you can't enjoy movies that are that close to the books, I really feel for you. It's highly improbable that any book-based film will ever meet your standards, I'm guessing.
And if you think you can do better, well, we're all waiting with bated breath, I'm sure. I'd love to see something with more "atmosphere". I can't even imagine what it would be like, but I'd love to see it.
The only reason you're able to type with any speed using the hunt-n-peck system is because you've managed to do what all touch-typists ultimately do and store a mental map of the entire keyboard so that you don't have to look at it while typing. You are using a keyboard the way a professional pianist plays a piano, without looking at the keys. However, most people will have major problems with learning to blindly hunt-n-peck the entire keyboard without looking, so hunt-n-peck causes even more serious ergonomic and efficiency problems since the typical hunt-n-peck user needs to continuously shift attention between the keyboard and the screen and/or any document they are typing from. Continuously, all day long, every day.
The only reason you had serious problems with touch-typing is that you didn't have time to train yourself to relax and find a good personal hand/wrist position that doesn't cause you undue stress. The key to avoiding RSI is doing exactly what you've done, finding a non-painful hand position and learning to relax. The actual typing method used is less relevant. I'm a touch-typist, but I don't always use the "proper" finger for each key because sometimes the prescribed finger just doesn't seem to reach that key very well. On the other hand, hunt-n-peck people often get the same sort of repetitive stress injuries because they don't learn to keep their wrists loose and relaxed like you have. So they end up with wrist problems and neck problems to boot.
Sticking dogmatically to the exact touch typing finger recommendations will probably be painful for a lot of people, since there are always variations in wrist angles and finger lengths among different people. But abandoning touch typing altogether as if it is a fatally flawed approach to the keyboard is also wrong. Don't pretend you're smarter than all the touch-typists in the world just because you had a bad experience with the brief time you spent touch typing. Once you find the proper hand position and learn your own tricks to modifying the fingering approach, there is no substitute for touch typing in terms of a typical user's efficiency.
BTW, I always bring this up whenever people are talking about keyboard or touch typing. I took a typing class in middle school, many years ago and had a very difficult time passing with the 28wpm minimum speed, even though I put in additional practice outside of class hours. I never seemed to get much better, either. Then, a few years afterward I was typing extensively late at night on one of those "clicky" keyboards and didn't want to bother other people with the noise. So I put a pillowcase over the keyboard to dampen the noise. It was a pain to type that way at first, but within a few hours I noticed my typing speed and accuracy had improved significantly. I finally realized that the biggest problem I had up until that point was that I still hadn't completely memorized the mental map of the keyboard, so my brain was still relying on my eyes as a crutch to avoid completely committing the keys to muscle memory.
I recommend that anyone learning to touch type, especially if you're having speed problems, either put some opaque fabric over their keyboard or find one of those "blackout" keyboard overlays with nothing printed on the keys. If you're like me you'll find it quite remarkable how much more quickly you'll be able to learn to touch type without ever looking at the keyboard again.
You completely and utterly missed the point that it doesn't matter how safe the super-super-giant airplane is compared to a car with two people inside. The super-super-giant airplanes might run safely for a hundred years, but when one finally goes down you lose 2,000,000 people simultaneously. Or, in the context of Google services, when 2,000,000 businesses around the world are relying on Google services and those services suddenly go down and stay down for a week, the business world is going to have a serious problem.
When dealing with this sort of globally scaled service used by millions of organizations, the risks no longer end at the front door of your local business. So, statistically, the service would need to be overall 100% reliable in the long term. Which, according to the laws of this universe, is a practical impossibility. It's OK if one of my suppliers is having a problem, but if ALL of my suppliers and my own business have a problem at the same time then it is very difficult to get business done.
With cloud services the size of Gmail, the risk evaluation MUST include the big picture of what percentage of the business world is all using the same service. To leave the assessment as just a per-business exercise is not wise. Local statistics can and will be meaningless as a way of determining total risk of going with cloud-based services. As the services get larger, this will be more and more true every day. It really doesn't matter how reliable the cloud-based services are, statistically. Get a high enough percentage of society on the cloud and all someone needs to do is nuke a few data centers to take down an entire country, a la "Fight Club".
That was my point. The big picture of the system as a whole actually matters with consolidated online services. Hope you didn't miss it this time.
You are so unbelievably wrong. War is quite horrible enough BY ITSELF even when each side follows established rules of combat without people like you DECIDING to be inhumane when it isn't necessary or wise to do so. There's no "should" or "supposed to be" about it. Acting like a non-monster during war time or having objections to atrocities while they are happening (instead of decades later) is not being "pussified". People like you have always used war as an excuse to become monsters and commit atrocities small and great, usually according to some mythical higher calling, but that doesn't make it right. You're still a monster if you do those things, and you're still wrong. Nobody told you to be a monster, and it wasn't necessary to win the war, you just decided it needed to be done.
Even more importantly, atrocities never serve to end the war any sooner, they normally just incense the other side into committing their own atrocities against your forces, if they haven't already. You may argue until you are blue in the face but you will never convince anyone with a brain that atrocities, and the abandonment of humanity, are a necessary or valid part of any level of conflict. Things like the Geneva Convention were created and ratified for a reason. Wars filled with the awful, purposefully committed atrocities that you seem to love so much were deemed by mankind as being not just horrible but TOO horrible and psychologically damaging to both sides of a conflict. Wars without behavioral boundaries made the world a much darker place to live, even long after the war was over. International conventions or not, atrocities will never, ever have a valid place in human warfare.
I'm sorry, but you... need help. The fact that you think there is some horrifying template that all warfare "should" look like is really, really sick. If your bizarre reasoning was true that wars must be as awful as possible so new wars will be less likely, we wouldn't have any more wars at this point. I believe that WW-I (the Great War, as it was called) was widely considered to be one of the most terrible wars in history, yet we've had plenty of new wars since then. Oddly enough, some of those wars were even started mainly based on cultural anger from remembered atrocities from previous wars. So how exactly are atrocities a good thing, again?
I truly hope I've given you something to make you pause and think for a few minutes. But don't worry, I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure your attitude is extremely well established and you believe you have logic behind you, even though you are really just basing your reasoning on the emotional context of "it's OK to do anything I want to the bad guys because they aren't really human if they are attacking my tribe of humans".
Slashdot Mirror
Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
Same IP address at the same time...
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something about the nature of networking, but isn't anyone behind a NAT gateway or proxy going to be coming from the "same IP address at the same time"? I do believe that's one of the reasons they came up with cookies in the first place, to differentiate multiple users originating from the same IP address.
So, as the grandparent suggests, if you use one web browser for Google queries and either reject all cookies in that browser or at the very least never log in to any Google service in that browser, your Google searching will be semi-anonymous even though you are simultaneously logged in to a Gmail account in another browser from the same machine.
On the other hand, unless you do automatically reject all cookies in your "anonymous" browser, the moment that you accidentally log into any Google service everything that it has been tracking for your unknown "anonymous" user during that browser session will immediately be attached to your real profile, rendering your attempt to escape tracking moot.
Truly anonymized long-term web browsing is extremely difficult due to all the different methods they have for attempting to identify you despite your best efforts. It's made worse by the amazing level of cooperation and information sharing that goes on throughout the web. Once one web site or advertising server figures out who you are, they are happy to pass that information along to help target everyone else's efforts to sell you things. Of course each link in the chain only passes on a little bit of "not personally identifiable" information, but the end result is that the online ecosystem aggregates so much information that it becomes impossible to NOT identify exactly who you are, where you've been, what you've purchased, what you've ever searched for, etc.
In short, to the original poster, good luck.
If you're open-minded enough to consider "anything" to help you control your weight, here's a tip: Carbohydrates cause the release of insulin and the storage of fatty acids in fat cells. Without carbohydrates, two things happen: A) it is much more difficult for the body to store fatty acids (which originate from anything you eat, not just carbs) as fat because a certain component of the fat storage cycle is only present when you consume carbohydrates, and B) there is a much lower level of insulin released into the bloodstream at any given time, which makes the body much less apt to even attempt to store fatty acids as fat.
In other words, the low-carb crazies are correct and have been all along. You can keep your weight down without increasing exercise or starving yourself, just by changing your diet to reduce the amount of high-glycemic-load carbohydrates you ingest. Note that glycemic load is not necessarily the same as glycemic index. You have to pay close attention to exactly how each type of food will end up affecting your blood sugar, regardless of whether the nutrition label indicates it to be low-carb or not. It's the specific kind of carb and what you combine it with at any particular meal that makes the difference between losing weight and gaining weight.
Google Gary Taubes for his very informative and well-researched video about the science behind all this, and find some good low-carb instruction books on Amazon to help you understand exactly how to proceed without inadvertently eating the wrong thing or taking any supplements which might stall your progress. And good luck.
Or you could ignore this advice completely, keep following the flawed "food pyramid" recommendations and wonder why you keep gaining more and more weight as you get older, while you simultaneously develop diabetes for some "unknown" reason. Your doctor will help you out by putting you on drugs that make you more sensitive to insulin (!) which will cause you to gain weight even more easily, and then he'll recommend a "low fat, low cholesterol" diet as if fat and cholesterol CAUSED the diabetes or reducing them has some chance of reversing it. Oh, and he might say, offhand, "Try to stay away from sugar."
Thunderbird 2 had a fairly useful quick search bar. Type a word, hit enter, and your email list was filtered for just the search term. The list could be multi-selected, moved around and general managed in a normal fashion. The feature was handy for bulk operations since it was fast.
Thunderbird 3 still has the search bar but results appear in a new tab. This tab does not show results as a list but in a fancy HTML based summary view. That's great if you were searching for a particular message but utterly useless for bulk operations. What if I want to drag and drop a few files around, or delete them or flag them as junk? Even as a summary view it is stupid since it only shows 10 results at a time with a More button at the bottom. FFS, stop mimicking an AJAX web application - the results are RIGHT THERE on the disk and you can certainly show more than 10 results at a time.
The workaround is to create a saved search but that's even more hassle for something that could be achieved in seconds in v2.0. So much for progress. I suggest if Thunderbird 3.1 turns up, they put an option or two in to control this behaviour and remember what the user has chosen. There is even a "save search as virtual folder" option in the quick search menu suggesting someone was thinking of doing something like this, it just appears to be inexplicably greyed out.
Thunderbird 3 has potential but it really feels like a regression in several important respects. It also inexplicably lacks things I would have expected to be improved. For example, you still can't select an email, and right mouse and create a filter from it. This is something that Outlook has had for donkey's years.
You have GOT to be KIDDING me. Why does it always seem like "one step forward, two steps back" with software these days? Is Thunderbird the new GNOME? How can such an idiotic idea survive the entire development cycle from concept to release?
I'm constantly doing a search-drag-drop kind of operation to sort mail into subfolders that I don't necessarily want to sort automatically with a filter. Looks like TB3 will be, well, fairly useless for this task. Even Outlook can handle finding messages without creating a separate link-based view. Thanks, Mozilla. Way to create an Outlook-killer.
Am I the only one that just wants to put down my head and cry every time I see stuff like this?
Desktop email clients, even if they are just accessing large hosted IMAP accounts that are also available through webmail, still have distinct advantages over webmail.
As has been brought up by others, if you have more than one email account it is trivial to monitor them all from the same email application using the same interface versus having different tabs open in a browser to different webmail interfaces.
Another advantage is speed, if the desktop client is set up to download body and attachments any email that shows up in your inbox will quickly open up and the attachment will be available for viewing and automatically gets stored in a temporary cache folder when opened. With webmail you usually have to do the whole Save-As bit to download the attachment separately.
I side benefit of downloading body and attachments automatically is that all of your mail is available even when your computer is offline. I know, scary concept, but a lot of people need access to their email for reference even when disconnected from the Internet. It also serves as a backup for times when the email server might go down temporarily, or Heaven forbid lose your mail in a server crash. A business could be down for days in some cases if they had to wait for a webmail provider to restore from backups.
Students, who are often going from one machine to another, will naturally gravitate to the portability of webmail interfaces. I use them myself quite often but still have Thunderbird set up on my personal/work computer simply because it's easier to have a single place to go to monitor several accounts. As you said, staff and faculty are still sticking with desktop email, probably because they tend to use a single computer and don't see enough benefit to webmail to move away from what they have been using forever.
Searching often works better/faster or has more options in a desktop client versus webmail interfaces. I've seen a lot of webmail with not just clunky search interfaces but clunky interfaces overall. I've seen a lot of webmail that is abysmally slow even on a fast connection, also. Not to mention the fact that pretty much every email service that provides webmail uses a different interface.
In other words, just because in your specific situation there are a lot of people who don't prefer a desktop email client anymore doesn't mean there is no longer a reason for them to exist. People have been predicting the death of things like local computer storage and desktop-based applications for a decade or longer but there will always be a subset of people for whom web-based stuff just doesn't do the job. Thinking otherwise is just short-sighted. We're all glad that you are happy with Gmail, but Google does not encompass the needs of the entire world. Yet.
That is really quite a brilliant deduction. If I were writing a science fiction story about beings who spend most of their lives in trees, it would make perfect sense that their language, primitive or otherwise, would be largely based on constructs that communicate various aspects of their interaction with trees.
For a monkey, trees are life, home, bed, protector, transportation, food provider, play room, birthplace, battleground, and many other things. There would be almost no need to communicate any idea in their world that would require talking about anything but trees. It would be so intrinsic to their communication that even if they were sentient they probably would never think about the fact that their language was based on talking about trees. The ground would be "not-tree-place". Everything that doesn't live in a tree would be a "not-tree-person". A falling tree would be "tree-bad". And so on.
If this is the case, and if they were sentient or even semi-sentient, it would be dastardly difficult to communicate any new ideas to them about the existence of any object or concept that can't be related to a tree in some way. It would make translating between such vastly different languages as Chinese and English, which often requires very loose translations on both sides, seem like child's play in comparison. Simple concepts that in English might only require a single word would have to be translated into long strings of tree-related phrases that would only roughly approximate the English meaning. Anything that couldn't be somehow related to a tree-phrase at all would be completely incomprehensible to them and totally untranslatable.
Fascinating to think about. Extending it in the opposite direction, would a species much more advanced than us have difficulty translating some of their more advanced concepts into our languages in a way that we could understand, or are our brains advanced enough that our communication mechanisms approach a theoretical communication complexity limit, such that any possible concept remaining in the universe could be easily translated for us?
Surely some linguistic mathematicians have already attempted to figure this out. Are there higher "dimensions" of communication that can be easily represented by semantic or syntactic calculations but which our brains would not be capable of comprehending in language form, in the same way that our brains can't natively comprehend physical dimensions beyond the third dimension while our mathematics can clearly represent hundreds? Are these higher semantic dimensions, if they exist, only theoretical or could they exist in nature?
Brain hurt. Must return to tree...
One reason: Hardware.
Last time I looked into OpenSolaris I was very disappointed by the very short and mostly unverified hardware compatibility list. The BSDs are much better off in that department and aren't very far behind Linux. In addition, tools like dtrace have already been ported over to BSD (and Mac OS X, which was originally largely based on FreeBSD). The new FreeBSD 8.0 has just taken ZFS support from experimental to official (which in the BSD world I would consider to mean "production ready even in server environments").
Going beyond that, I would personally class OpenSolaris as much further toward the arcane, confusing world of the original Unixen, with Linux being the least confusing for newcomers and the BSDs somewhere in the middle. Honestly, I've had extensive command-line experience with Linux and the BSDs, and I was utterly lost when I tried to get into OpenSolaris. I couldn't grasp the underlying structure of the Solaris-based system at all. It just didn't seem to "make sense" the way most other operating systems have for me. This "friendliness" is probably largely why Linux is more popular than the BSDs and the BSDs are in turn more popular than things like OpenSolaris. If it's easy for new users and new developers to get a handle on how the system works, you will attract more users and more developers.
I'd rate the three similarly in terms of developmental flexibility, which I believe is one of the main reasons they are creating this fork of FreeNAS with Linux. As an ecosystem, Linux development seems to move more rapidly and be more open to new code than anything else out there. Again, with the differing structure of the BSD development ecosystem, the BSDs seem to move at a much more deliberate pace and new code has to go through a fairly stringent vetting process before it is allowed into the core of the system. Let us not forget that while Linux is merely a kernel, the BSDs are largely complete operating systems being developed under the supervision of a central authority, which I think helps add to the stability of the overall operating system. OpenSolaris as usual would fall on the far end of this scale (in my opinion), where it is still somewhat controlled by the people who allowed it to be branched from the commercial version of Solaris, and has numerous restrictions that reduce the speed and openness with which it is developed.
Again, this is just my subjective personal opinion based on years of experience and observation, but I would use this experience to respectfully disagree with your claim that FreeBSD (or Linux) is "[sadly] the wrong tool for the job". Based on FreeBSD's relatively flexible development cycle combined with its observed code quality over the last couple of decades, I'd venture to say that it is the perfect middle ground on which to base a focused-purpose network file server operating system. Such a system needs to be able to stay compatible with a large set of current storage, networking and video hardware and yet be created from highly stable, quality code that changes slowly enough that there is time for a bit of polish before each release.
Everyone who is even considering spouting the letters "ZFS" in response to this article should really just STFU. Seriously.
Allow me to explain. Yes, ZFS is a very nice and very robust filesystem with great data protection and recovery features (although still subject to failure and data loss under some conditions, don't even try to deny it, it isn't perfect).
But all the ZFS zealots need to stop and think about all the other filesystems currently in use, and realize that ZFS will NEVER replace most of those filesystems in most situations. There needs to be a solution to bit rot that does not entail switching the entire world to a new filesystem. NTFS, FAT12/FAT16/FAT32, HFS+, Ext3/4, ReiserFS, UDF, all of these and more will continue to be in use in millions of computers and on billions of devices using removable or embedded media for many decades, and more filesystems will be invented in the future. You will never see a digital camera with built-in ZFS support, for instance. ZFS is totally unfeasible for that kind of application. It takes far too much processing power and memory to run ZFS for it to ever become anything resembling a universal filesystem. Filesystems like ZFS are not a panacea, there needs to be a solution (like PAR2) that is portable between ALL different filesystems that are now or ever will be in use.
Basically, things like the PAR2 parity archiving format already solve this type of problem, but in a way that is too limited. It needs to be better integrated into the filesystem or operating system level so that it works automatically on all kinds of different filesystems. Right now, the parity information is something that you have to manually create with a separate software tool like Parchive when you are interested in "archiving" something. This kind of functionality needs to be somehow tacked on to the file storage process so that the parity data is created, updated and continuously checked by whatever is reading and writing to the file, no matter where that file is stored. It needs to be part of the file itself, so that when a file is copied or moved, the parity data is not lost.
As usual, to any particular problem there is an answer that is straightforward, simple and WRONG (I forget what smart person said that first). For this problem, ZFS is not the ultimate answer. It's great for specific situations like file servers, but that's about it. As soon as you remove a file from that file server, poof, you lose access to that parity information. That's just dumb. For important data that needs to be self-repairing, the only real solution is to include the parity information alongside the data, in a portable format.
Personally I've been quite surprised over the years that almost no modern filesystem in use anywhere has the kind of parity information built-in that ZFS has. So much data could be easily recovered if filesystems were robust enough to handle simple things like bit errors or unreadable sectors. Why should my 2GB file be ruined just because a single 512-bit sector became unreadable in a critical location in the file? It's idiotic to need to have multiple complete duplicate copies of every single type of data we ever store in order to be sure we can recover from simple forms of data degredation like bit rot.
To be pedantic, I believe you meant "equate", meaning roughly "evaluates to the same as".
"Equivocate" means to use waffling words to give ambiguous or partial answers, as in saying, "not that I know of" rather than "no".
Also, I'm no special relativity expert but I'm not sure where you got the idea that the particles will be observable for a longer period of time simply because they are going faster. Things either get faster or slow down, you can't have both at the same time.
Perhaps if you took the entire LHC facility, put it on a spaceship and accelerated the ship to close to the speed of light and then performed your experiments and observations on the ship and beamed the information back to Earth, then you would find that the experiments and observations on the ship were happening in a slower time frame. But these particles are being accelerated within the same gravity well in which we are observing them. The particles, the facility and the observers are all traveling through space-time at the same speed from the same location (Earth).
It's always been my understanding that the main purpose of working toward higher-energy collisions is because the more energy there is in a particle collision, the more energy will be released and the more basic fundamental particles will be observed. Basically, the particles get broken into smaller pieces, and the pieces break into even smaller pieces. As the energy level goes up, we get closer to replicating the energy conditions during the initial stages of the Big Bang when all matter in the universe was created, and we discover more about the subatomic building-blocks of matter and how they behave.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who realized this particular implication of this technology.
You will probably never see that happening (in any country with established religion), although you are far too conservative in your estimation of the market size, which would be huge even if we're just talking about the novelty foods market. The God-ites (doesn't matter what kind) will all be dead set against this sort of "unnatural" food source ever coming into general use, whether human-based or animal-based.
Growing and eating human-originated muscle tissue, while theoretically absent of the immorality of killing a human being, is still cannibalism whether the flesh was ever attached to a living person or not. If you thought the God-ites were extreme when it comes to dealing with abortion clinics, you probably haven't seen anything yet. They'll latch onto the cannibalism aspect and completely ignore the fact that no human life is being lost.
Even though they are slightly weakened in the current political climate, the God-ites are still extremely strong politically in this country and most others. Thus, you will probably soon see the same bans on human tissue cloning that there are on human cloning in general. The only exception might be creating replacement muscles for medical purposes (under tightly controlled conditions, of course).
Even outside the God-ite communities there is an extremely strong natural stigma that goes along with even the merest suggestion of cannibalism, so popular society would never look kindly on it either.
Which is all kind of sad, in a way, if (and only if) it is true that human proteins really are the most readily absorbable and nutritious proteins that a human could be eating. Would the Soylent Green idea have had such an impact on the psyche if it were revealed that, while the product really was made of human meat proteins, it was made of artificial human meat and the dead were merely incinerated to save space? The horror was not that everyone was being fed a particular kind of protein, it was that they were literally being fed their own dead because there was nothing suitably nutritious left on the planet to feed that many people.
It is possible to envision a future, sometime far away, where human-based proteins are an accepted and efficient food source for humans. Hell, people could all someday be eating artificial meat created from a few of their own cells using a cell replicator machine in the pantry. What could be wrong with that? You've probably ingested several billion sloughed-off cells from your tongue and the inside of your mouth in the time you've been alive, all without even trying. Ever accidentally take a bite out of your cheek and swallow it? OMG, you cannibal!
Anyway, I'm sure a dozen or more sci-fi visionaries have been writing about these exact possibilities for the last century or more. There is nothing new under the sun...
To add to that, one of the most important things to remember:
5. There is no way in hell that 50% of the employed population, even if you're just looking at the corporate office lackey population, are smart enough to even get the idea that they might benefit from copying some sort of corporate business information. Most people are just struggling to make it through every day while getting an acceptable level of work done to avoid getting fired. It is ludicrous to think that one out of every two employees has a access, knowledge and skills to steal any significant amount of company information that would have even the remotest chance of benefiting them personally.
Now, one in six to one in ten, something in that range would be believable and still should be a trigger for added security levels. After all, it only takes one in a thousand being in the right position at the right time to do damage.
In the places in China where parents are likely to send their children to one of these types of camps, we are usually talking about a large concentrated population. I doubt the people in such areas feel any particular need to maintain the local population growth since the local population is already straining the carrying capacity of the area. In the many outlying village areas of China which are still mostly low density agriculture-based communities, I'm sure the mentality toward protecting children is decidedly different. However, the importance in Asian cultures of family honor or social ranking even in such low population areas should not be underestimated.
Even looking toward other western countries the US is still the odd man out in terms of our treatment of children. Sure, they are all protective of their children, but if you closely compare their daily interactions with children most countries don't come anywhere close to the almost worshipful attitude that is so common with Americans. Callousness and casual forms of cruelty are very prevalent in many other countries. Many consider the American attitude unhealthy, actually, and hold up American youth as evidence that sparing the rod really does spoil the child.
Because so many Americans think of children as irreplaceable perfect gifts from God that must be protected at all costs, it is hard to imagine how easy it is for many other cultures to discard children without even thinking about it. Ever wonder why you only see bloated, starving babies and very young children on those TV shows about Ethiopian starvation? It's because the father and the older children always get fed before the youngest, so the youngest child starves. The aid workers are constantly faced with the problem of trying to explain to the mothers that they need to feed the youngest child first if they don't want it to die. Too often, the mental disconnect that allows this behavior in the parents in the first place means the mothers simply cannot put two and two together, and the child ends up dying.
Human nature, and the human brain, is a very strange, very complex thing. Once you study it objectively for long enough, you will never be surprised by even the most atrocious and bizarre human behavior. After all, we are still just relatives of the chimpanzee who happen to be better at using tools and communicating.
One thing you may notice however (which makes all anecdotal evidence worthless in terms of exposing actual human nature) is that the more educated families tend to gravitate more toward the western type philosophy of caring for children. Therefore anyone who was well-off enough to somehow travel to the US from any country for any reason will naturally be more similar to us than different. It's only the anthropologists who take the time to study other cultures in their native environments that have been able to document the true range of human behaviors in the treatment of children. Assuming that the behavior of other cultures will make some sort of logical sense is usually the first mistake.
Although the behavior of all people on Earth is superficially similar, many cultures such as the Asians have decidedly different attitudes toward children than we do in the US. In Asian cultures the family name comes before the individual's name, emphasizing the fact that the individual is less important than the family. Any member of a family that causes the family to "lose face", or become dishonored in the eyes of others, is seen as a liability to the family. Protecting the family name is often put before the desire to protect one's offspring. It's really only a matter of degree.
The attitude we have in the US to the importance of children is actually abnormal compared to a large percentage of the rest of the world. In parts of Africa there are some truly horrible things done to children by their own parents. Due to lack of resources, there is a strange phenomena where the youngest child is often suddenly accused of witchcraft and either murdered or cast out on the street and usually drummed out of town, never to be allowed to return. Usually the accuser is the mother (although often a step-parent, not biological parent of the accused child). Africa is far from the only place where such things happen to children.
The universality of "humanity" as defined by the unconditional love and protection of children is vastly overestimated. If you don't believe what I've described because you can't imagine feeling that way toward children, well, you need to do more research. Unmodified human nature is really a lot uglier than most people realize.
Parent should be modded insightful, not funny. If things go in the wrong direction this is exactly the sort of thing we could be reading in the papers in just about any country in a few years.
You should have yourself tested for ADHD. It's not just "an excuse for lazy people", it's a real neurological disorder that can affect someone of any IQ. The symptoms you describe fit the pattern of ADHD. Notice how one of the posters replying to you accuses you of having "poor organizational skills and probably a bad work ethic", as if you could just easily learn to organize a little better and have a better attitude toward studying. In other words, you're stupid and lazy. Except, obviously you aren't stupid, and if laziness were the cause of your problems with studying, you would probably just say so. Despite being highly intelligent your brain just doesn't do certain things very well, like coming up with ways to organize physical objects and manage time. Seems pretty obvious that if it were that easy to change, you would have done so by now.
I have a similar experience. Early on I did quite well in school, although mostly because I was good at taking tests. Along about the start of high school I started falling behind because I could no longer just go through each glass doing the problems in my head and get away with not doing the mounds of homework that often seemed an insurmountable obstacle. Or, just like you I would forget important projects or find myself unable to begin a report until the night before it was due. Other students of average or even low intelligence somehow trudged through all the required work and passed classes where I often struggled even though I usually understood the material better than they did. The other people around me had the ability to sit down day after day and work through hours of homework and report writing and somehow get almost everything done on time. Sure, a lot of them got Bs, Cs and Ds, but they got the work done and passed the class. Myself, on the other hand, scored a relatively good 1400 on my SAT, yet barely managed to graduate high school. I always wanted to do the work, but I just never seemed capable of sitting down and concentrating long enough to get anything accomplished.
Like you, my organizational skills are almost non-existent. I can spend hours just trying to figure out how to clear the stuff off my desk, and then still only be halfway done by the end of the day. On the other hand, I know exactly what and where everything is, and why it's there, so technically I'm not as disorganized as I seem to be.
ADHD is a very subtle, very peculiar brain disorder that affects a lot more people than most folks realize. Anyone else out there with similar experiences should do themselves a favor and get a good book on ADHD like the classic "Driven to Distraction" or one of the newer books available on Amazon like the aptly named "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!", and see if it gives you some answers as to why you've always had trouble with certain things in life.
Why the hell is the parent modded as +5, Funny? I don't think it was meant as a joke and I was going to make the same comment myself.
Like it or not, most end users in the business world need to be able to open PDF files and use websites that have Flash interfaces, neither of which Windows will do on its own. Installing Acrobat Reader and updating Flash Player to the latest version is one of the main things I do on any office machine I hand out. Sure, they are minor security risks, but I don't understand why anyone would call them crapware, as opposed to all the bizarre manufacturer-specific pop-up control panels and buggy trial security software that is constantly running in the system tray. That's the stuff we're talking about as crapware, not common add-ons like PDF and Flash that are just applications that run when you need them. And like the parent said, PDF and Flash are pretty common things, regardless of anyone's opinions on the need for Flash for any specific purpose.
The modding of the parent as funny makes absolutely no sense to me.
Sadly, you have far too much faith in the ability of the general public and general business world to recognize a dead end, or care about living in an ideal world. For businesses especially there are far too many resources still invested in proprietary Windows-based business software for them to completely abandon Windows for a long time to come. Most businesses didn't jump on the Vista bandwagon only because Vista had such poor initial performance and would have required too much investment in new hardware. Now that Windows 7 (Vista SP3) has solved most of the initial Vista issues and now that hardware has caught up more to the performance levels required by Vista, and since XP and a lot of business hardware is getting really long in the tooth, most businesses will now evaluate Windows 7 positively and commence flocking.
Both Linux and Mac OS X are still too big of a leap for most businesses to take, even today. Even on the server side, the Windows server versions are gaining or at least not losing so much ground anymore to Linux. Until the Linux development world wakes up and realizes how important it is to cater to the lowest common denominator and make even server interfaces as simple to use as Windows does, Windows is still "good enough" to do the job, just like it was from the beginning.
You would think everyone would realize after a quarter century of almost unimpeded success despite all suckage that Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon. They don't even need to engage in abusive monopolistic behavior anymore. Unless something major completely changes the computing landscape, Windows has the momentum to keep haunting us for at least another decade or two. Hardware support and the availability of commercial applications will still have to get much better for Linux to really challenge Windows on the desktop. It will take another decade or longer for the Internet to evolve enough to become the main platform where most people run their applications. Only then will people cease to care about what operating system their computer is running, and Linux will finally be a serious threat to the dominance of Windows. But at that point, even though many people will be using Linux, most of them won't care enough to be aware of it. The web browser will be the new operating system.
The biggest threat from Microsoft for the future will be all the new idiotic proprietary web-based stuff they'll be inventing that will "work better" when running in Internet Explorer on Windows. They've known for a long time that eventually everything is heading for the Internet. But for now, very few individuals and businesses are simply going to abandon Windows because of the same mild suckage it has always had. Only the people who have used computers for a decade or more have the background to really get tired enough of Windows to make the jump. That, and the people who are new enough to computers that they haven't yet imprinted on Windows. Everyone else just doesn't care enough or doesn't encounter enough problems with Windows to even feel the need to get away from it. Sad, but true.
I have noticed that the 5GHz band has a much lower effective range than the 2.4GHz band due to the fact that penetration of physical objects goes down as frequency goes up. Recently I moved across the street and during the moving process I tried to use my router (Airport Extreme Base Station) from the new place while the Internet connection was still set up in the old apartment. Using the 5GHz band I couldn't even detect the router from across the street, while on the 2.4GHz band I was able to log on and get 1-2 bars of signal quality.
The poor performance you've seen is most likely attributable more to poor implementation of the draft 802.11n specs than to antenna issues. I pretty much gave up on most of the 802.11n products on the market because of such implementation and incompatibility issues and bought myself one of the new Apple Airport Extreme Base Stations which finally has gigabit ports. It has worked quite well.
If you only use wireless to surf the web, shut the hell up. I can't believe the number of people posting today who don't see any difference between "G" network speeds and "N" network speeds. With 802.11n, we're talking about a wireless connection that is finally about as fast as a wired 100Mb connection. Still nothing compared to a gigabit wired connection, but for anyone who needs to transfer any kind of large files or has the simplest of file servers set up at home or at the office, the speed of 802.11n makes a HUGE difference. Couple that with the gigabit ports on the router and you've got a router that is one of only a handful of 802.11n routers that isn't a bottleneck between a gigabit wired network and the 802.11n wireless clients.
Comparing a device like this to a dirt-cheap poor performing WRT54G or even a WRT54GL as "proof" that it is overpriced is absolutely ridiculous. This device has far more RAM, far more storage, gigabit ethernet ports, and a USB port that will allow you to add more custom applications and/or host a USB storage device for local file sharing. It's not even in the same sport as 802.11g routers, and it's $40 cheaper than an Airport Extreme Base Station.
Is everybody on crack today? What the hell is wrong with you people? Not only is this a pretty well-spec'd device, it comes from a company that is willingly cooperating with the community to get open source firmwares working on the device. And all you people can do is whine about it costing more than a cheapo router? I don't get it.
Besides which I have no idea what the speed of sound has to do with the theoretical upper limit of the speed of a spinning disk. It's not like an airplane wing with a trailing shock wave. I would think there would be much more pressing problems that are keeping us from seeing 30K RPM hard drives anytime soon, like:
- Shear strength of the platter material
- Total mass of the platter, especially near the edge
- Heat generated in the bearings
- Energy necessary to spin the platter at that speed
- Torsional forces from rotating the drive while it's spinning
And probably down near the bottom of the list of potential problems:
- Cavitation and/or shock waves from the air around the spinning platter.
You need to buy better CFLs, it's pretty much that simple. Recent years have seen significant improvements in CFLs in several areas, like warm-up time, temperature tolerance, color, etc.
Also, use the proper fixture type for cold or damp environments to avoid those problems. Some bulbs are designed specifically to work better in cold environments, but I'm sure a good outdoor sealed enclosure will help a lot. For in-ceiling fixtures, use a CFL specifically designed to work in those fixtures. Usually they are shaped just like the floodlight style incandescent they are replacing. Regular CFLs are not designed to be installed in that sort of enclosure and will get too hot.
I've seen CFLs with terrible warm-up times, but the good ones currently are pretty much instant-on. They may get slightly brighter after a couple of minutes but after the initial burn-in phase when they are brand new they should always come on at least 90% of total brightness or that brand is crap.
On the other hand, even with recent improvements CFLs still have some serious drawbacks. After as little as a year even CFLs with decent color quality when new will start exhibiting strong greenish hue as the phosphors change. Doesn't do much good to have a bulb that will supposedly last several years if after just a year or two the colors it throws off make you feel sick every time you turn it on. Unfortunately a lot of CFLs still have terrible color quality even when they're brand new, and it is very difficult to find a CFL that will even have a color temperature indicated on the packaging. I have found some nice ones made by a company called Satco at my local hardware store that come in a 5000K daylight balanced variation which is quite nice. There are also some expensive "full spectrum" CFLs available online. But bottom line the color quality of CFLs mostly sucks.
Another thing is the brightness slowly fades over the years, unlike an incandescent which will dutifully output close to the rated wattage until the moment it burns out. Doesn't do much good to have a 100-watt equivalent CFL bulb that supposedly lasts several years but turns into a 50-watt equivalent after just a couple of years. Same thing happens with LEDs, unfortunately. They don't just politely burn out at some defined moment in time. I'd say an LED bulb that will supposedly last for 20 years would be pretty much useless after 5 or 8 years due to the dimming effect. I would be very surprised if any of these LED bulbs last even half the rated time without having either half of the diodes die or having the total output of the bulb dimmed to about half of its original capacity. You know when to change an incandescent because it burns out. How will you know when to change out a sloooooowly fading LED bulb? After a few years you'll just have a house that's half as bright as it should be, but because it took years for the fading to occur you'll never notice the difference until you have a new bulb to compare to your old bulbs.
Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?
Do you seriously think you're so much smarter than everyone else that you're the only one who would notice an instrument sounding like crap? The Strads may not be perceptibly better than the best modern violins, but I'm pretty sure people didn't save them carefully for 300 years based on absolutely no positive attributes. And exactly why "must" they be squeaky just because they are old? Making statements like that might give others the idea that you have no idea what you're talking about.
You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate.
No, that's not what anyone said at all. Around the time when Stradivarius was making his violins there was a cold climate for a few years while the atmosphere was filled with volcanic dust from a very large volcanic eruption. The cold winters and cool summers caused the trees to grow denser wood in both winter and summer, and they were also attacked by more fungi than usual due to the cold climate, which probably slowed the tree growth even more, producing even denser wood. The theory is that the Stradivarius violins sound better than most others because of the difference in wood density.
Outside of that time period, the climate went back to normal and the trees used to make other violins since then have been less dense. In any particular time period in history I'm sure there have not been very many violin makers in the world, it is a rather specialized art. Therefore it is not that unbelievable that Stradivarius might have been the only violin maker during that time period who had access to this particularly dense wood and had the skills to make instruments of high enough quality in the first place for the wood density to make a noticeable difference to the quality of the sound.
This is not a difficult set of concepts to grasp if one is able to let go of one's self-assured ignorance for a moment and actually pay attention to what people are saying.
The mystery to me is only why they don't simply make some violins out of some other kind of wood that is already more dense. But, I know enough about wood to know that each tree even of the same species has unique qualities, so I'm going to assume that I don't know more than the people who make violins. I'm going to assume that they know more than I do and that they use this particular species because it has the best qualities for such an instrument.
You have a serious problem if you couldn't enjoy the LotR movies. I too noticed that the movies didn't perfectly follow the books (and I am very good at noticing such things), and I am always very put off by bad acting and bad scripts, more so than anyone else I know. I hold the books in high regard as some of the most significant stories ever written by a human being, yet despite the imperfections of the movies I was able to thoroughly enjoy all three. Because despite those imperfections I realized that Peter Jackson had to pull off something absolutely miraculous in bringing together all of the people, places and technologies that he did and still make something that held up that well and was that true to the books. Before those movies I can't even remember the last time I saw a movie that was even in the same ballpark as the book it was based on, in any genre. Normally they're doing good if about a third of the book comes through on the screen. In the LotR films I would say that at least 80% of the important parts of the story came through quite well, which is absolutely amazing when you take into account what goes into producing any film, least of all something so huge with hundreds of production people involved in its making.
No, the movies were not perfect, but they were very, very good, and brought the stories to an entire new generation that never would have read the books anyway, and a lot of people have gone on to read the books after seeing the movies. So, if you can't enjoy movies that are that close to the books, I really feel for you. It's highly improbable that any book-based film will ever meet your standards, I'm guessing.
And if you think you can do better, well, we're all waiting with bated breath, I'm sure. I'd love to see something with more "atmosphere". I can't even imagine what it would be like, but I'd love to see it.
The only reason you're able to type with any speed using the hunt-n-peck system is because you've managed to do what all touch-typists ultimately do and store a mental map of the entire keyboard so that you don't have to look at it while typing. You are using a keyboard the way a professional pianist plays a piano, without looking at the keys. However, most people will have major problems with learning to blindly hunt-n-peck the entire keyboard without looking, so hunt-n-peck causes even more serious ergonomic and efficiency problems since the typical hunt-n-peck user needs to continuously shift attention between the keyboard and the screen and/or any document they are typing from. Continuously, all day long, every day.
The only reason you had serious problems with touch-typing is that you didn't have time to train yourself to relax and find a good personal hand/wrist position that doesn't cause you undue stress. The key to avoiding RSI is doing exactly what you've done, finding a non-painful hand position and learning to relax. The actual typing method used is less relevant. I'm a touch-typist, but I don't always use the "proper" finger for each key because sometimes the prescribed finger just doesn't seem to reach that key very well. On the other hand, hunt-n-peck people often get the same sort of repetitive stress injuries because they don't learn to keep their wrists loose and relaxed like you have. So they end up with wrist problems and neck problems to boot.
Sticking dogmatically to the exact touch typing finger recommendations will probably be painful for a lot of people, since there are always variations in wrist angles and finger lengths among different people. But abandoning touch typing altogether as if it is a fatally flawed approach to the keyboard is also wrong. Don't pretend you're smarter than all the touch-typists in the world just because you had a bad experience with the brief time you spent touch typing. Once you find the proper hand position and learn your own tricks to modifying the fingering approach, there is no substitute for touch typing in terms of a typical user's efficiency.
BTW, I always bring this up whenever people are talking about keyboard or touch typing. I took a typing class in middle school, many years ago and had a very difficult time passing with the 28wpm minimum speed, even though I put in additional practice outside of class hours. I never seemed to get much better, either. Then, a few years afterward I was typing extensively late at night on one of those "clicky" keyboards and didn't want to bother other people with the noise. So I put a pillowcase over the keyboard to dampen the noise. It was a pain to type that way at first, but within a few hours I noticed my typing speed and accuracy had improved significantly. I finally realized that the biggest problem I had up until that point was that I still hadn't completely memorized the mental map of the keyboard, so my brain was still relying on my eyes as a crutch to avoid completely committing the keys to muscle memory.
I recommend that anyone learning to touch type, especially if you're having speed problems, either put some opaque fabric over their keyboard or find one of those "blackout" keyboard overlays with nothing printed on the keys. If you're like me you'll find it quite remarkable how much more quickly you'll be able to learn to touch type without ever looking at the keyboard again.
You completely and utterly missed the point that it doesn't matter how safe the super-super-giant airplane is compared to a car with two people inside. The super-super-giant airplanes might run safely for a hundred years, but when one finally goes down you lose 2,000,000 people simultaneously. Or, in the context of Google services, when 2,000,000 businesses around the world are relying on Google services and those services suddenly go down and stay down for a week, the business world is going to have a serious problem.
When dealing with this sort of globally scaled service used by millions of organizations, the risks no longer end at the front door of your local business. So, statistically, the service would need to be overall 100% reliable in the long term. Which, according to the laws of this universe, is a practical impossibility. It's OK if one of my suppliers is having a problem, but if ALL of my suppliers and my own business have a problem at the same time then it is very difficult to get business done.
With cloud services the size of Gmail, the risk evaluation MUST include the big picture of what percentage of the business world is all using the same service. To leave the assessment as just a per-business exercise is not wise. Local statistics can and will be meaningless as a way of determining total risk of going with cloud-based services. As the services get larger, this will be more and more true every day. It really doesn't matter how reliable the cloud-based services are, statistically. Get a high enough percentage of society on the cloud and all someone needs to do is nuke a few data centers to take down an entire country, a la "Fight Club".
That was my point. The big picture of the system as a whole actually matters with consolidated online services. Hope you didn't miss it this time.
You are so unbelievably wrong. War is quite horrible enough BY ITSELF even when each side follows established rules of combat without people like you DECIDING to be inhumane when it isn't necessary or wise to do so. There's no "should" or "supposed to be" about it. Acting like a non-monster during war time or having objections to atrocities while they are happening (instead of decades later) is not being "pussified". People like you have always used war as an excuse to become monsters and commit atrocities small and great, usually according to some mythical higher calling, but that doesn't make it right. You're still a monster if you do those things, and you're still wrong. Nobody told you to be a monster, and it wasn't necessary to win the war, you just decided it needed to be done.
Even more importantly, atrocities never serve to end the war any sooner, they normally just incense the other side into committing their own atrocities against your forces, if they haven't already. You may argue until you are blue in the face but you will never convince anyone with a brain that atrocities, and the abandonment of humanity, are a necessary or valid part of any level of conflict. Things like the Geneva Convention were created and ratified for a reason. Wars filled with the awful, purposefully committed atrocities that you seem to love so much were deemed by mankind as being not just horrible but TOO horrible and psychologically damaging to both sides of a conflict. Wars without behavioral boundaries made the world a much darker place to live, even long after the war was over. International conventions or not, atrocities will never, ever have a valid place in human warfare.
I'm sorry, but you... need help. The fact that you think there is some horrifying template that all warfare "should" look like is really, really sick. If your bizarre reasoning was true that wars must be as awful as possible so new wars will be less likely, we wouldn't have any more wars at this point. I believe that WW-I (the Great War, as it was called) was widely considered to be one of the most terrible wars in history, yet we've had plenty of new wars since then. Oddly enough, some of those wars were even started mainly based on cultural anger from remembered atrocities from previous wars. So how exactly are atrocities a good thing, again?
I truly hope I've given you something to make you pause and think for a few minutes. But don't worry, I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure your attitude is extremely well established and you believe you have logic behind you, even though you are really just basing your reasoning on the emotional context of "it's OK to do anything I want to the bad guys because they aren't really human if they are attacking my tribe of humans".