Sorry, I guess you deserve a little less ranty reply. You seem to be from Canada, so let me tell you what it's like south of the border, as it were.
What state? That's pretty important to what you're saying, for reasons I'll get into at the end of this post. The short version is you don't need to leave the US to be under the same standards of care that I am.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress.
To 99% of the population, a post-op transsexual is a man in a dress yet. You'll note I put crossdresser in quotes. There was a reason for that.
In the civilised world, that's absolutely not the reaction that I've seen. And that includes parts of the US.
People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper.
This is true. If I'm sufficiently tired to not carry on the macho charade, people will think I'm female even when clearly dressed as a boy.
Why put up the charade in the first place, if it makes you feel so uncomfortable? Just be yourself, and if people think you're too femmy, fuck 'em.
And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female.
That's not how it works down here. If I presented the letter from my psychologist, they'd be sure to keep the M on my license. The best way to do it down here is to make sure you're passing 110%, preview your license, and then suggest the worker somehow changed your sex from F to M, and then she'll "correct" it back to F. The system down here is designed to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy that transsexual women are "traps" and deceivers.
You really need to check up on some of what's come out of the US in the last little while, then... Last July, there was an edict that came out of the white house requiring that states follow the WPATH SOC. WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health. While the requirements for a D/L may be different from state to state, you can get a passport that identifies you as female with a letter from your doc.
I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female.
How do I emigrate to your utopia?
Learn French. Get a Master's degree. Or talk to the consulate about possibly applying as a refugee or discriminated class, but expect to be told no if you do that. The reason? I know for a fact that California, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Washington State, Washington DC, Oregon, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all follow the WPATH standards of care with regards to issuing you ID, as do all federal government institutions, including the military. Minnesota even goes beyond the WPATH SOC: you don't need surgery to get a birth certificate that identifies you as female, you just need to go before a judge with two witnesses who say you're female, and they'll issue an order... a friend of mine did that less than a year ago. In other words, you don't need to leave the US to get treated properly.
That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented across most of the US, and *is* implemented everywhere else in the English-speaking world (outside of parts of Africa), as well as all of the EU, most of South America, and most of southeast Asia.
It's been a while since I've tried to be a lawyer about this. Around here, people hate
I logged into an account I promised myself I would never use again, just to avoid undoing mod points to reply to this. I was sorely tempted to simply moderate you down, but I think that somebody needs to point out a few home truths to you instead.
And lord have mercy on any transsexual that gets clocked in one of those places. Females are far more sexist and closed-minded than any male I know.
Let me share my experience with both genders when caught as the other gender in a place I shouldn't be as that gender.
My experience has been the exact opposite of what you profess. Perhaps it's because I don't think of a place like the ladies' room as a "place I shouldn't be". I have as much right to be there as any other woman. And I have *never* been "caught" as you describe. Despite being 6' tall, and having been a former rugby player, and 250lbs of muscle when I began my transition, I have never once been confronted or challenged in the womens' bathroom, and it's been well over a year since the last time I set foot in the mens' room. The mens' room is the threatening (and dangerous) environment for me, not the ladies'.
I've been full time for over a year, and while the tits help, they're really not that important for your ability to pass: people look at your body language. They look at your dress. If you open your mouth, they listen to your voice. I transitionned on the job and still work for the same company I did before I went full time, and there are people I work with who have absolutely no idea that I'm anything other than a cisgendered female. People don't tend to consider your size or your build unless you give them a reason to, which brings me to my next point:
There's a reason I use the men's bathroom at bars, even if I'm passing. It's just not worth the drama to use the bathroom of the gender I'm presenting as.
If you're constantly worried about being "clocked", as you put it, then people are going to pick up on that. You may be unintentionally sending off signals which make things more difficult for you than it needs to be. If you are thinking about yourself in those terms, then that's all you'll ever be. You will never be the woman that you seem to want to be, because you are afraid to go into the correct bathroom with the confidence and conviction that it's where you're supposed to be.
A guy who sees someone apparently female in the men's room is sometimes surprised or shocked. Sometimes the man will become angry, especially if he's older. But yet, at the end of the day, I have not had a single serious problem with being apparently female, even fixing my hair or something, in the men's room. No police, not a ton of drama.
Now, I don't know myself what it's like to be a guy caught in the women's room, but from what I understand, it involves the police, drama, screaming, more drama, and signs that get posted at clubs saying that "crossdressers" must use the men's room. Then you have to show your papers and make sure you always have that letter from the psychologist that says you may use the women's room. Even though that really carries no legal weight and you're still getting your ass escorted out of the bar anyway.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress. People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper. And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female. I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female. That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented ac
mm... I would point out that most Euro race tracks have other hazards to worry about, though. Hills, sharp turns, left/right turns in a mix, and longer tracks than you find in NASCAR.
I'm not saying that NASCAR drivers aren't good drivers. They are. But I am saying that European Touring Car racing tends to be a better test of an individual driver's skill than a trip around most NASCAR tracks.
It's a good explanation of why Finns are disproportionally represented in motorsport. Certainly better than assuming that having k as a third of the letters in your name makes you good at driving.
I think it has more to do with the 3-year process that the Finns go through to get their license, which includes manditory skid school, snow driving school, and training on loose surfaces.
Not really that crazy, when you think about it.... If you're driving down the middle of a windy unpaved country road, then you have more space to react if you hit a pothole and veer off to the side. You've also got space to react on both sides in case some wayward wildlife steps out in front of you. In my driving experience, I've had to avoid small animals like cats/dogs/racoons, medium-sized animals like deer, and large animals like moose and one bear. (the joys of living in Ontario....)
Now, I'm not saying that the tristate area is exactly Moose Country, but there are certainly deer in KY, and there could be some logic to driving down the middle of the road. People do it up here, too.
Do what my parents did, then... the first time I had an accident, even though the cause was attributed to the weather, I was judged at fault and charged with careless driving (the cop said he had no choice, as I had admitted to hitting the other driver, but strongly recommended I fight it in court... I did and plea bargained to Pass On Right, Not In Safety). My parents told me that I'd have to get my own car insurance from then on. I paid $3000/year until I was 22, and haven't had a single accident or ticket since that one, when I was 17.
It's not a female thing. Some of us are bad drivers. Some are good drivers. The same could be said for people of the XY variant... There's a few guys whose driving terrified me so much I'll *never* get in a car with them again. It's an individual thing, and IMO, it has more to do with the amount of responsibility you accept when you get behind the wheel of the car. Teach your daughter the consequences for her actions, and she'll not grow up to be one of those idiots who puts on makeup while driving on the freeway.
(when I think about it, I did get away with murder... my parents didn't make me pay for the repairs on the car, so their insurance took a hit... when my older brother got a speeding ticket --admittedly, it was for going 160km/h in a 60 zone--, they cut him off their insurance and made him pay the fine)
The free version advertises at you (but it's non-intrusive, just a small box on the far end of the toolbar, no popups, no annoying sound, no shaking the screen).
The trial version of the pay-for version may have bundled stuff, but I've never bothered to install it.:)
They assume that you want them by default, but will charge you for the privilege if you lose them and need to reorder them at a later date. (unless you talk nicely to tech. support, who usually forget to check that box in their call tracking software to bill the end user for the OS discs, but will hit it every time if they hate you)
The outlet sells open box and returned systems, too. The way their system works, if a system is undeliverable or refused, and the client can't be contacted to arrange delivery, it also gets returned to the outlet for sale. Even though it's never been in the hands of an actual consumer, and you and I would both consider such a system "new", Dell can't actually sell it as a new built-to-order system legally.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for Dell Canada, and it was my job to manage those distressed shipments, ideally getting them to the customer, but if not, getting them to the DFS Direct folks for resale.
Dell's business computers can be ordered plain vanilla or without the OS loaded, if you wish. I always recommend their business line, whether the person asking is a business or home user.
Dell's consumer offerings also come with 3 discs for reinstall... Operating System (which is a clean, unbranded Windows disc), Drivers, and Applications and Utilities. If you want a clean system, stop after disc 2.
Compare the performance of something like FoxIt PDF Reader ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ ) against Adobe Reader, and then tell me with a straight face that Adobe's version is better. And if you leave Windows-land and get to Linux, then there's options like evince which are also significantly better than Adobe's offering.
And honestly, the only reason that Flash is installed on my computer at all is for YouTube. If I had a choice in the matter, I wouldn't have that load of crap at all... more often than not, it's used for intrusive ads on websites, not anything of actual value. (gawd, I hate surfing at work, where I am in serious hock if I'm caught using anything other than MSIE 6.0... *shudder*)
We're talking about a distance of 7.3 billion light years. Even if the expected difference in speed is 1m/s (absolutely miniscule difference against the speed of light), we're talking a difference significantly greater than 3.1s in travel time.
In the USA, an election is actually about 50 simultaneous voting opportunities. You may be voting for your congressman, your senator, the President, your town mayor, several state-level positions, the county sheriff, a few propositions, your local school board... the list seems endless. The ballot is so long and so complicated that they have to mail out booklets to voters ahead of time just to explain all of the choices.
That over-complication is what I was getting at. If there's multiple elections going on at the same time, great. Have a plebicite on every bill that passes before congress for all I care. But Don't put 50 different questions on the single ballot. The reason the Canadian system works is that it's so simple, and there's never more than one question on a ballot. If there's more than one question that needs to be asked, do it at multiple polling stations within the same building, with multiple different ballots. Or do a combined ballot, but stick with the large print, idiot-proof way of marking a ballot like we use. Crap like the whole dangling chads fiasco would never happen in the Canadian election system.
And as to your point about there being a lot more voters in the US... it's a fair point. But did you miss my point about each polling station being divided to have between 200-500 voters? 500 as the upper limit to keep it manageable for 2 people to count in a matter of hours, and 200 as a lower limit to preserve the anonymity of the vote... if a polling station only had 3 voters, it'd be too easy to tell who voted for what. There's no reason the same system couldn't be expanded to handle the size of the US electorate... our own election system was initially designed when the population of the country was significantly less than 1/10th what it is now.
It needs a firmware because the technology that controls read/write on the physical medium is not open source, and is probably not common across all drives. For SSD's, you have several different kinds of Flash that are in use, along with several different read/write controllers. The firmware is simply a low-level driver that translates between these read/write machine code and the standardised SATA interface. Some of the more intelligent firmware will also do some kinds of optimisation and load balancing on the flash chips.
You do realize that physical spinny platter-type drives also have firmware? As do optical devices? As does everything else you've got connected to your computer, even the keyboard/mouse and monitor? While some of those firmwares will probably never need to be updated (when was the list time performance on a keyboard was a major factor on a benchmark? The only time I've *ever* seen a problem with one of those, it was on an old iMac running System 9, and the issue was actually the os's input buffer which couldn't keep up with my typing rate that's in excess of 110wpm.), those devices still need and have a firmware.
But enthusiasts have had the ability to update the firmware on their CDROM drives and hard drives for a long time, as a code optimisation there can make a big difference to a benchmark that involves the device... on optical drives, it has even been done to upgrade a 32x drive to 40x or 48x with a firmware update, and there's also pirate firmwares available for DVD drives that reset the region change counter every time you power cycle the device.
Mmm.... you're right, I think. And sometimes you can pin down exactly who it is, too.... like, for example, if you suddenly have 5 posts modded as "troll" (that clearly aren't trolls) the day after you call somebody out for being a self-important twat with no clue what he's actually talking about... (look at my posting history for an example, you get a cookie if you can guess who it is)....
It happens. Some people are idiots. Theoretically the meta-mod system is in place to mitigate that kind of asshattery. Practically, though, Karma really doesn't serve a purpose at this place at all, except that when it gets high enough you have the option of turning off ads on the site without buying a subscription (as if you couldn't do the same thing with AdBlock Plus:P)
You're right that the screen is the biggest drain on power... on my laptop, it accounts for about 40-50% of the juice that the system uses. Most of that comes from the backlight... in fact, battery life goes up by almost an hour by turning the backlight down to respectable levels. The system in question gets very good battery life, though... it's a 15.4" display @ 1680x1050, with a GeForce 8600M GT 256MB. 4GB of RAM, T5450 processor, 120GB 7200rpm hard drive, running Windows 7 (RTM version, from MSDN). I was able to stay online for 3h during a power failure while raiding in WoW... ventrilo, wireless network (UPS to keep home server up), and all. (it's a Dell Inspiron 1520 with the 9-cell "high capacity" battery)
But if I can get that kind of battery life out of a system that's drawing its maximum, what do you suppose would happen to the battery life if I were to swap out the 25W Centrino processor with a 2W ARM? Ok, it probably wouldn't be powerful enough to run WoW, but for something like word processing/web surfing, and a few other power efficiency changes (video card, display resolution/brightness, hard drive for SSD), we could be building laptops with a full size keyboard and screen that's big enough to do actual *work* on that can pull off 8h on a charge.
Y'know, in Canada, we use this funky invention, called pen & paper for voting. You are given a ballot that clearly lists each candidate's name, their party affiliation, and has a white circle to the side. You make your mark in the circle of the candidate you want to vote for. If you mark more than one candidate, or if you mark outside of the circle, or make any kind of personally identifying mark on the ballot, your vote is considered spoiled and rejected. It's really idiot-proof, when you think about it... there's even a placard on display in the voting booths that shows examples of how to correctly mark the ballot, and what will cause your ballot to be rejected.
Each polling station has two members of staff, and will handle between 200-500 voters. At the end of polling day, those two will unseal the ballot box, and count the ballots. Each party has a right to have two representatives serve as scrutineers to make sure the count is done correctly. Once their count is completed, they report their count in to the returning officer for the electoral district. They then make arrangements to get the ballot box and its contents to the office of the RO. As the polling stations report in, their results are updated electronically with Elections, who can announce preliminary results. In cases where the count is close between candidates, a judicial recount is required, and candidats have the right to scrutinize the recount in order to make certain that it is done transparently and correctly. All the while, the anonymity of the vote is assured, because the ballot is rejected if it's personally identifiable. After the recount period, the returning officer will announce the official winner, which *usually* matches the preliminary results. It's an expensive way to do things (EC employs about 190,000 people during the average federal election), but we have our final and official results within days of polling day, not months.
Oh, and our elections are usually done in 36 days, not the year+ that American elections campaigns can take.
So yeah. If only there was a system where the vote could be verified efficiently, quickly, and while preserving the anonymity of the elector. Having a physical ballot where telling who the vote is for is idiot-proof, and where the candidates can oversee the ballot counting and have a right to contest a ballot that is invalid or miscounted... what a concept.
That's 7,776,000 chips/day. I find that more than hard to believe.
They're not building the chips themselves. ARM licenses their chip designs out to other fabricators. When you consider that most of the cell phones in the world have an ARM chip in them, as well as many embedded devices (ATMs, fridges, programmable coffee makers, DVD players, car stereos, iPods/portable MP3 players, programmable remote controls, telephones, etc.), it's really not hard to conceive that they're shipping 2 billion units a year. Actually, I'm a little surprised the number is so low.
But the parent is absolutely right, and whoever submitted TFS is either trolling or an idiot. I'm not surprised that the editors haven't read TFA or the law, but the submitter? That's a new low....
Yeah, 'blame Canada' - to put it in context, most Canadians west of Ontario, view Ontario in the same way most Americans view France - that is, hopelessly and utterly broken. So stuff like this isn't a surprise - I don't mean to troll, but those easterners are about as blissfully statist as you can get and still be called a democracy.
You do realize that this particular law is in place in Ontario and Quebec because we were following suit from Alberta and BC?
And actually, the way the law is worded, my iPhone would be exempt. It's docked into a charger/fm transmitter station.
It would be exempt. As long as you were not using it to text or write an e-mail. If you're using it as a hands-free cell phone, then you're fine. If you're using it as a media player, you're fine, as long as you aren't taking your attention from the road to browse through your collection and choose a CD. But in spite of that exemption, there are some things that are still illegal.
The law contains exceptions for EVERYONE to use a cell phone to call 911. So whether it's you calling the police, or the police calling the police, it's the same rules.
The law also contains a blanket exemption for *all* emergency vehicles. Fire/Ambulance as well as Police.
As for the why, it's because those emergency vehicles need to be able to use the radio to stay in touch with dispatch and be able to actually perform their emergency services. There's an exemption for professional uses as well... so that truck drivers and bus drivers can use their radios, too, but I don't think it applies to would-be "professionals" with a mobile office using the cell phone.
Irregardless, TFS is completely wrong and FUD. The law applies to hand-held devices. Cell phones, Nintendos, portable DVDs, GPS devices, etc.. It does not apply to drinking coffee, changing the radio station, or even people who like to drive with one arm hanging out the window.
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Sorry, I guess you deserve a little less ranty reply. You seem to be from Canada, so let me tell you what it's like south of the border, as it were.
What state? That's pretty important to what you're saying, for reasons I'll get into at the end of this post. The short version is you don't need to leave the US to be under the same standards of care that I am.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress.
To 99% of the population, a post-op transsexual is a man in a dress yet. You'll note I put crossdresser in quotes. There was a reason for that.
In the civilised world, that's absolutely not the reaction that I've seen. And that includes parts of the US.
People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper.
This is true. If I'm sufficiently tired to not carry on the macho charade, people will think I'm female even when clearly dressed as a boy.
Why put up the charade in the first place, if it makes you feel so uncomfortable? Just be yourself, and if people think you're too femmy, fuck 'em.
And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female.
That's not how it works down here. If I presented the letter from my psychologist, they'd be sure to keep the M on my license. The best way to do it down here is to make sure you're passing 110%, preview your license, and then suggest the worker somehow changed your sex from F to M, and then she'll "correct" it back to F. The system down here is designed to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy that transsexual women are "traps" and deceivers.
You really need to check up on some of what's come out of the US in the last little while, then... Last July, there was an edict that came out of the white house requiring that states follow the WPATH SOC. WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health. While the requirements for a D/L may be different from state to state, you can get a passport that identifies you as female with a letter from your doc.
I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female.
How do I emigrate to your utopia?
Learn French. Get a Master's degree. Or talk to the consulate about possibly applying as a refugee or discriminated class, but expect to be told no if you do that. The reason? I know for a fact that California, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Washington State, Washington DC, Oregon, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all follow the WPATH standards of care with regards to issuing you ID, as do all federal government institutions, including the military. Minnesota even goes beyond the WPATH SOC: you don't need surgery to get a birth certificate that identifies you as female, you just need to go before a judge with two witnesses who say you're female, and they'll issue an order... a friend of mine did that less than a year ago. In other words, you don't need to leave the US to get treated properly.
That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented across most of the US, and *is* implemented everywhere else in the English-speaking world (outside of parts of Africa), as well as all of the EU, most of South America, and most of southeast Asia.
It's been a while since I've tried to be a lawyer about this. Around here, people hate
I logged into an account I promised myself I would never use again, just to avoid undoing mod points to reply to this. I was sorely tempted to simply moderate you down, but I think that somebody needs to point out a few home truths to you instead.
My experience has been the exact opposite of what you profess. Perhaps it's because I don't think of a place like the ladies' room as a "place I shouldn't be". I have as much right to be there as any other woman. And I have *never* been "caught" as you describe. Despite being 6' tall, and having been a former rugby player, and 250lbs of muscle when I began my transition, I have never once been confronted or challenged in the womens' bathroom, and it's been well over a year since the last time I set foot in the mens' room. The mens' room is the threatening (and dangerous) environment for me, not the ladies'.
I've been full time for over a year, and while the tits help, they're really not that important for your ability to pass: people look at your body language. They look at your dress. If you open your mouth, they listen to your voice. I transitionned on the job and still work for the same company I did before I went full time, and there are people I work with who have absolutely no idea that I'm anything other than a cisgendered female. People don't tend to consider your size or your build unless you give them a reason to, which brings me to my next point:
If you're constantly worried about being "clocked", as you put it, then people are going to pick up on that. You may be unintentionally sending off signals which make things more difficult for you than it needs to be. If you are thinking about yourself in those terms, then that's all you'll ever be. You will never be the woman that you seem to want to be, because you are afraid to go into the correct bathroom with the confidence and conviction that it's where you're supposed to be.
Again, if you're a transsexual, you're not a crossdresser. Don't think about yourself in those terms, because if you do, you'll never be anything more than a guy in a dress. People will pick up on that self doubt, and they'll look a little deeper. And if you can get that paperwork from your psychologist that says you can use the womens' room, then you can quite easily get a driver's licence that identifies you as female. I didn't even need a letter from my psychologist for it, I simply went to the ministry of transport with a letter from my OB/GYN, who happens to be administering the hormones... that same letter was also good enough to get a passport that identifies me as female. That's in the WPATH standards of care, which is implemented ac
Either that or put in an author check that automatically spits out an A+ if it detects that the author of the code was himself....
mm... I would point out that most Euro race tracks have other hazards to worry about, though. Hills, sharp turns, left/right turns in a mix, and longer tracks than you find in NASCAR.
I'm not saying that NASCAR drivers aren't good drivers. They are. But I am saying that European Touring Car racing tends to be a better test of an individual driver's skill than a trip around most NASCAR tracks.
I think it has more to do with the 3-year process that the Finns go through to get their license, which includes manditory skid school, snow driving school, and training on loose surfaces.
Not really that crazy, when you think about it.... If you're driving down the middle of a windy unpaved country road, then you have more space to react if you hit a pothole and veer off to the side. You've also got space to react on both sides in case some wayward wildlife steps out in front of you. In my driving experience, I've had to avoid small animals like cats/dogs/racoons, medium-sized animals like deer, and large animals like moose and one bear. (the joys of living in Ontario....)
Now, I'm not saying that the tristate area is exactly Moose Country, but there are certainly deer in KY, and there could be some logic to driving down the middle of the road. People do it up here, too.
Do what my parents did, then... the first time I had an accident, even though the cause was attributed to the weather, I was judged at fault and charged with careless driving (the cop said he had no choice, as I had admitted to hitting the other driver, but strongly recommended I fight it in court... I did and plea bargained to Pass On Right, Not In Safety). My parents told me that I'd have to get my own car insurance from then on. I paid $3000/year until I was 22, and haven't had a single accident or ticket since that one, when I was 17.
It's not a female thing. Some of us are bad drivers. Some are good drivers. The same could be said for people of the XY variant... There's a few guys whose driving terrified me so much I'll *never* get in a car with them again. It's an individual thing, and IMO, it has more to do with the amount of responsibility you accept when you get behind the wheel of the car. Teach your daughter the consequences for her actions, and she'll not grow up to be one of those idiots who puts on makeup while driving on the freeway.
(when I think about it, I did get away with murder... my parents didn't make me pay for the repairs on the car, so their insurance took a hit... when my older brother got a speeding ticket --admittedly, it was for going 160km/h in a 60 zone--, they cut him off their insurance and made him pay the fine)
Why are you suggesting a Firefox addon for a complaint about MSIE 6.0 in an environment where you can be fired for using anything other than MSIE?
If I could use Firefox, I'd be using AdBlock Plus, which blocks flash ads, but doesn't block things like YT.
The free version advertises at you (but it's non-intrusive, just a small box on the far end of the toolbar, no popups, no annoying sound, no shaking the screen).
The trial version of the pay-for version may have bundled stuff, but I've never bothered to install it. :)
They assume that you want them by default, but will charge you for the privilege if you lose them and need to reorder them at a later date. (unless you talk nicely to tech. support, who usually forget to check that box in their call tracking software to bill the end user for the OS discs, but will hit it every time if they hate you)
You missed the part where he said:
right? That means that at some later point, after he blew away Vista (note, blew it away, not upgraded), the system booted to Windows 7.
The outlet sells open box and returned systems, too. The way their system works, if a system is undeliverable or refused, and the client can't be contacted to arrange delivery, it also gets returned to the outlet for sale. Even though it's never been in the hands of an actual consumer, and you and I would both consider such a system "new", Dell can't actually sell it as a new built-to-order system legally.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for Dell Canada, and it was my job to manage those distressed shipments, ideally getting them to the customer, but if not, getting them to the DFS Direct folks for resale.
Dell's consumer offerings also come with 3 discs for reinstall... Operating System (which is a clean, unbranded Windows disc), Drivers, and Applications and Utilities. If you want a clean system, stop after disc 2.
Compare the performance of something like FoxIt PDF Reader ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ ) against Adobe Reader, and then tell me with a straight face that Adobe's version is better. And if you leave Windows-land and get to Linux, then there's options like evince which are also significantly better than Adobe's offering.
And honestly, the only reason that Flash is installed on my computer at all is for YouTube. If I had a choice in the matter, I wouldn't have that load of crap at all... more often than not, it's used for intrusive ads on websites, not anything of actual value. (gawd, I hate surfing at work, where I am in serious hock if I'm caught using anything other than MSIE 6.0... *shudder*)
We're talking about a distance of 7.3 billion light years. Even if the expected difference in speed is 1m/s (absolutely miniscule difference against the speed of light), we're talking a difference significantly greater than 3.1s in travel time.
That over-complication is what I was getting at. If there's multiple elections going on at the same time, great. Have a plebicite on every bill that passes before congress for all I care. But Don't put 50 different questions on the single ballot. The reason the Canadian system works is that it's so simple, and there's never more than one question on a ballot. If there's more than one question that needs to be asked, do it at multiple polling stations within the same building, with multiple different ballots. Or do a combined ballot, but stick with the large print, idiot-proof way of marking a ballot like we use. Crap like the whole dangling chads fiasco would never happen in the Canadian election system.
And as to your point about there being a lot more voters in the US... it's a fair point. But did you miss my point about each polling station being divided to have between 200-500 voters? 500 as the upper limit to keep it manageable for 2 people to count in a matter of hours, and 200 as a lower limit to preserve the anonymity of the vote... if a polling station only had 3 voters, it'd be too easy to tell who voted for what. There's no reason the same system couldn't be expanded to handle the size of the US electorate... our own election system was initially designed when the population of the country was significantly less than 1/10th what it is now.
It needs a firmware because the technology that controls read/write on the physical medium is not open source, and is probably not common across all drives. For SSD's, you have several different kinds of Flash that are in use, along with several different read/write controllers. The firmware is simply a low-level driver that translates between these read/write machine code and the standardised SATA interface. Some of the more intelligent firmware will also do some kinds of optimisation and load balancing on the flash chips.
You do realize that physical spinny platter-type drives also have firmware? As do optical devices? As does everything else you've got connected to your computer, even the keyboard/mouse and monitor? While some of those firmwares will probably never need to be updated (when was the list time performance on a keyboard was a major factor on a benchmark? The only time I've *ever* seen a problem with one of those, it was on an old iMac running System 9, and the issue was actually the os's input buffer which couldn't keep up with my typing rate that's in excess of 110wpm.), those devices still need and have a firmware.
But enthusiasts have had the ability to update the firmware on their CDROM drives and hard drives for a long time, as a code optimisation there can make a big difference to a benchmark that involves the device... on optical drives, it has even been done to upgrade a 32x drive to 40x or 48x with a firmware update, and there's also pirate firmwares available for DVD drives that reset the region change counter every time you power cycle the device.
Mmm.... you're right, I think. And sometimes you can pin down exactly who it is, too.... like, for example, if you suddenly have 5 posts modded as "troll" (that clearly aren't trolls) the day after you call somebody out for being a self-important twat with no clue what he's actually talking about... (look at my posting history for an example, you get a cookie if you can guess who it is)....
It happens. Some people are idiots. Theoretically the meta-mod system is in place to mitigate that kind of asshattery. Practically, though, Karma really doesn't serve a purpose at this place at all, except that when it gets high enough you have the option of turning off ads on the site without buying a subscription (as if you couldn't do the same thing with AdBlock Plus :P)
You're right that the screen is the biggest drain on power... on my laptop, it accounts for about 40-50% of the juice that the system uses. Most of that comes from the backlight... in fact, battery life goes up by almost an hour by turning the backlight down to respectable levels. The system in question gets very good battery life, though... it's a 15.4" display @ 1680x1050, with a GeForce 8600M GT 256MB. 4GB of RAM, T5450 processor, 120GB 7200rpm hard drive, running Windows 7 (RTM version, from MSDN). I was able to stay online for 3h during a power failure while raiding in WoW... ventrilo, wireless network (UPS to keep home server up), and all. (it's a Dell Inspiron 1520 with the 9-cell "high capacity" battery)
But if I can get that kind of battery life out of a system that's drawing its maximum, what do you suppose would happen to the battery life if I were to swap out the 25W Centrino processor with a 2W ARM? Ok, it probably wouldn't be powerful enough to run WoW, but for something like word processing/web surfing, and a few other power efficiency changes (video card, display resolution/brightness, hard drive for SSD), we could be building laptops with a full size keyboard and screen that's big enough to do actual *work* on that can pull off 8h on a charge.
Y'know, in Canada, we use this funky invention, called pen & paper for voting. You are given a ballot that clearly lists each candidate's name, their party affiliation, and has a white circle to the side. You make your mark in the circle of the candidate you want to vote for. If you mark more than one candidate, or if you mark outside of the circle, or make any kind of personally identifying mark on the ballot, your vote is considered spoiled and rejected. It's really idiot-proof, when you think about it... there's even a placard on display in the voting booths that shows examples of how to correctly mark the ballot, and what will cause your ballot to be rejected.
Each polling station has two members of staff, and will handle between 200-500 voters. At the end of polling day, those two will unseal the ballot box, and count the ballots. Each party has a right to have two representatives serve as scrutineers to make sure the count is done correctly. Once their count is completed, they report their count in to the returning officer for the electoral district. They then make arrangements to get the ballot box and its contents to the office of the RO. As the polling stations report in, their results are updated electronically with Elections, who can announce preliminary results. In cases where the count is close between candidates, a judicial recount is required, and candidats have the right to scrutinize the recount in order to make certain that it is done transparently and correctly. All the while, the anonymity of the vote is assured, because the ballot is rejected if it's personally identifiable. After the recount period, the returning officer will announce the official winner, which *usually* matches the preliminary results. It's an expensive way to do things (EC employs about 190,000 people during the average federal election), but we have our final and official results within days of polling day, not months.
Oh, and our elections are usually done in 36 days, not the year+ that American elections campaigns can take.
So yeah. If only there was a system where the vote could be verified efficiently, quickly, and while preserving the anonymity of the elector. Having a physical ballot where telling who the vote is for is idiot-proof, and where the candidates can oversee the ballot counting and have a right to contest a ballot that is invalid or miscounted... what a concept.
They're not building the chips themselves. ARM licenses their chip designs out to other fabricators. When you consider that most of the cell phones in the world have an ARM chip in them, as well as many embedded devices (ATMs, fridges, programmable coffee makers, DVD players, car stereos, iPods/portable MP3 players, programmable remote controls, telephones, etc.), it's really not hard to conceive that they're shipping 2 billion units a year. Actually, I'm a little surprised the number is so low.
I do wish I had mod points...
But the parent is absolutely right, and whoever submitted TFS is either trolling or an idiot. I'm not surprised that the editors haven't read TFA or the law, but the submitter? That's a new low....
You do realize that this particular law is in place in Ontario and Quebec because we were following suit from Alberta and BC?
It would be exempt. As long as you were not using it to text or write an e-mail. If you're using it as a hands-free cell phone, then you're fine. If you're using it as a media player, you're fine, as long as you aren't taking your attention from the road to browse through your collection and choose a CD. But in spite of that exemption, there are some things that are still illegal.
The law also contains a blanket exemption for *all* emergency vehicles. Fire/Ambulance as well as Police.
As for the why, it's because those emergency vehicles need to be able to use the radio to stay in touch with dispatch and be able to actually perform their emergency services. There's an exemption for professional uses as well... so that truck drivers and bus drivers can use their radios, too, but I don't think it applies to would-be "professionals" with a mobile office using the cell phone.
Irregardless, TFS is completely wrong and FUD. The law applies to hand-held devices. Cell phones, Nintendos, portable DVDs, GPS devices, etc.. It does not apply to drinking coffee, changing the radio station, or even people who like to drive with one arm hanging out the window.