No, that isn't a better comparison. I wouldn't buy a Camry because I wanted low price for transportation. I'd buy an Echo.
It's cheaper and gets better gas milage.
This is the comparison you always have to make if you're worried about price: cheapest non-hybrid to cheapest hybrid. Otherwise, you're adding extra price and needlessly complicating the equation. I don't want those extra features. I take them because I have to with the hybrid, but I don't care. They just add extra to the cost that I would otherwise not be paying.
If they made a hybrid Echo, I'd use that as a basis for comparison. But they don't, so its much cheaper over the live of a vehicle to just buy an Echo. Once they make a budget hybrid, the people who are buying tiny to save money will flock to it.
Hmm...good point. But no reason to throw away the math entirely.
11,000 gallons at the standard 30MPG is going to take 330,000 miles. So it's not even close to economically viable either unless I'm greatly overestimating the cost of per-gallon-equivalent price of the electric.
On the other hand, if you go from a Hummer to this it is. But in general, back to the drawing board.
Toyota Prius used - $20k for a year old if you're really lucky.
Other car manufacturers have similar price differences. Where are you getting this measley $6k figure? I'd be all over that if that was the difference. As it is, the more than doubled prices mean that I'd have to put somewhere in the area of 100,000 miles on it for it to be cost-effective (because you only get slightly worst than halving your milage).
On the other hand, switching from gas to electric brings your bill WAY down. You go from somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 per gallon to $.25 or less (converted to gallons).
As a rough estimate, to save $30,000 at those rates you'd have to drive somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 miles (3*11000-.25*11000=30250).
Even if I'm off quite a bit and you have to drive 30,000, its a steal as long as it'll last. If the price of gas continues to rise, even the hybrids will start looking viable, though...
It can fetch and parse webpages, parse doc, pdf, powerpoint, rtf, and about 150 other file formats?
No. And there isn't anything near an expert system front-end on searching in MySQL. It doesn't know file systems, and all it can do is the equivalent of a fuzzy grep to search text. Fuzzy is a relative term, and in this case, I mean more when I say fuzzy than what MySQL does.
Don't get me wrong, though: I currently only use one app that needs Oracle. All the rest are much more highly suited for MySQL.
Umm...nobody who uses databases ever claims B). On the constrary: MySQL has less features than most of the database engines out there.
However, nobody cares about most of the extra features. So let's change B) to: supports all of the features of Oracle that most people care about
Did you know that Oracle comes with something to do a text search on almost any document type, including those accessible through URLs? And that you can do fuzzy searches based on that, and that the database can learn to give better results via an expert system? It's a pretty nice search engine. Does MySQL come with a search engine?
Also, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: don't exaggerate. The personal use version is free, and Oracle is $5k per copy for the one-processor, coarse-grained security model. The high-end one for clustering that you seem to be thinking of is $40k, not $200k.
My guess is that the market share of stupid people who buy Oracle when all they need is MySQL is dying. However, there really are people who want to do extremely sophisticated stuff that only Oracle is providing. Oracle's real up-and-coming competition for their real market is Google, I think.
If Google will do all the indexing and does a better job of managing your data without you having to even configure it, then why should you manage it with Oracle?
It rerenders the images at the present resolution, and text is vector graphics, so no problem there.
Some images obviously still come out looking rough. I use it to show our graphics designer why we shouldn't make fonts out of graphics. She still thinks it's worth it for some reason.
Opera is not light years ahead. Like Firefox and IE it has its limitations. So far, I've yet to find one from Firefox that I can't work around easily. My pet peeve with IE is that option elements don't send or recieve their own events - only their parent select boxes can do that. I really wish they did, because I'd like to make a combo box into a thing that you can use to reorder elements, and it can't be done without that.
My pet peeve with Opera is far worse - iframes are always on the top layer (so you can't have, for example, a menu system in one IFrame that shows the menu that runs into another). The "standards" don't matter - only those standards met by other browsers are real standards that need to be met. The fact that Opera doesn't meet this standard means that I either have to design sites differently, or not support Opera.
Where I work we do the latter because Opera's marketshare is so little.
In this day and age, there's no reason anybody should be using Netscape 4, or any version of IE below 5.5.
It is not unacceptable to require users to be able to view CSS2, HTML 4, Javascript 3, and DOM1. These things are all old tech at this point - with well established standards with many years to have evolved, and supported by almost all of the market.
This isn't even about IE versus NS. You support the standard of those things I said, and your stuff will work on anything that's 6 years old or newer.
What does this have to do with AJAX? Not much...except that it is possible to do AJAX using those techiques rather than the new ways (and many of the old ajax libraries will support those new ways).
No, constant is good. It's just that for very large or small values of the constant, it's sometimes different.
1!=2 is, for example, always true, except for with very small values of 2 or very large values of 1. Possibly you need both small values of 2 and large values of 1.
People aren't going to pay $29K for a tiny car. What they would do then is scream extortion and monopoly, and other such things until the car left the market or got cheaper. People play the lottery and generate deficits. We don't make wise decisions. Cheap now and expensive later will always extremely outsell expensive now and extremely cheap later.
They would see it as the oil company (who just recently began to sell cars) is doing the same thing in cars that they do in oil: try to extort every penny that they can. And they'd be right.
Further, there are a lot of parts in a car besides an engine. The oil company would have to go through an extremely extensive R&D to develop everything else, and they're already decades behind. They'd most likely end up with something that was technologically inferior in every way except one to current cars. The only way that they could ensure their dominance is if they just sold engines...which wouldn't give them nearly the profit you espouse, and probably wouldn't be enough to be worth it.
Finally, the industry of selling cars is a lot more risky than that of selling oil. You know people are going to need oil. They all believe they have to drive/make plastic/etc. And you know they're going to buy it from you, because you're chummy with all your "competitors" and you've got your territory worked out. You don't know that people are going to need to buy a car from you even if you make the most advanced vehicle ever. They could decide that the flashy new Car X is the one for them because it has a flamingo hood ornament.
So because of risk, risks of development, public perception, and the obvious one I didn't mention - the loss of oil sales - oil companies would never venture into the car industry, and it will continue to be in their best interest for gas-guzzlers to be produced, and for research into lower oil dependance to be supressed.
During WWII, German coders did things like not changing the daily cipher key or sending the same message at the same time every day but using a different cipher.
Close. They sent the same kind of message every day at the same time - namely, the list of wins and losses was sent every morning. This was far more valuable than using the same cipher twice.
Of course, we probably wouldn't have figured it out without an Enigma machine.
And the magical law fairies will guarantee that people don't start using the Linux kernel in their own proprietary products, as was the intent of the GPL?
This is a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too. Adding drivers=extending the functionality of an existing program, which the GPL says requires you to provide the source if you distribute. Take that bit out, or saying "it doesn't count for external modules" and it's not the GPL anymore. It's the LGPL. All the ways I know of that get around this are, IMHO violating the spirit of the GPL while not the letter.
I personally prefer the LGPL. It basically allows for "if you have to modify my code, then you have to release what you write, but you don't have to release anything that is 100% written by you." This guarantees that at the very least vendors will do bugfixes on LGPL code.
No. It boils down to who has the greatest capacity for threat of violence. The ones with that make the rules. That's why you're government makes the rules instead of you.:)
But we don't really need to boil it down. The ones who own the lines owe allegence to the one that owns the ground that the line is in. Since the majority of that is public land...
A similar thing is true for satellite. The airwaves are public property.
So if the people sticking their lines in the public ground or using the public airwaves aren't serving the public good as well as is possible, then they probably should be given the shaft.
You're using "classified" in a way that requires two different definitions of the word.
Under the first definition, "labeled a planet or not" the thing is unclassified. Under the second, "bearing a form of label" it is classified. You can have both, because they are not the same thing.
The fact that two contradictions relate never forms the basis of an argument. In cases where it seems so, you're always missing some classification.
It's kind of like that old argument: 1) Nothing is better than total happiness. 2) A ham sandwich is better than nothing. 3) Ergo, a ham sandwich is better than total happiness.
The problem is not a contradiction, it's that the two values of "nothing" have different meanings. Which brings us to why we end up classifying things: for the most part, classifications are used to identify logical fallacies caused by similar things being treated as the same thing.
I read a treaty by an eastern philosopher who correctly stated that the "both-and" arguement model necessarily contains the "either-or" model, though the opposite is not true. So...it doesn't help.
What that translates to in this case is that not classifying it to accept both conditions (planet and non-planet) is a classification in and of itself - as "unclassified". Either it's classified or its not. See how the either-or emerges?
This is a simplification of the argument, but the gist of it is that the Eastern mechanism is actually a cultural obscuring of naturally occuring logic - which is not Eastern or Western, but is rather the way the world works. The world is filled with objects which are classified, and with substances and relationships which are also chocked full of classifications in order to allow for reasoning.
I looked it up - found other places that the devices that I have have been used. I found the answer on the #linuxaudio mailing list. The design for the sound card never should have been certified. It doesn't conform to the spec.
When it doesn't get packets as fast as it wants them, it panics and stops playing sound entirely.
However, if Windows had caught this and not certified my card, I don't think it would have had that problem.
Windows on well made hardware, and with good drivers, is extremely stable....as long as you don't connect to the internet, or run any apps on it, or use any devices (even well made ones) that use the same portion of the kernelspace at once.
These aren't problems you see in Linux and OSX. The difference is that Windows doesn't do a good job of implementing levels of trust. What I don't expect is that they'll be able to bring down my OS, or any portion of it, when they do.
Further, I expect that drivers written by Microsoft or that are Microsoft certified shouldn't have any compatibility problems. Otherwise, why did they get certified?
When I plug my MS certified USB storage device into my computer while I also plug in my MS certified USB soundcard, I can expect my sound to stop working, and if I'm very unlucky it may also crash my computer.
Can I blame Windows for this? Absolutely. All of the devices involved are MS Certified and USB certified, so Windows shouldn't have any trouble sorting these things out. Even if it does, it shouldn't crash altogether. The USB subsystem shouldn't have the privileges to crash the rest of the OS. That's a design flaw.
This is just a single example that is typical of what you see in Windows, and the logic behind why I say that Windows itself is not stable. There are many, many others.
Perl is not needed for portage to work. It never has been. C is, though, which is a much bigger hassle, and more imporantly, you need a computer that can compile things in a reasonable period of time, which will certainly be missing. Strange that you didn't mention either of those. It's almost like you don't know what portage does. *Portage* is not needed for gentoo to work. Your system will run perfectly fine without it.
Ultimately, you're missing the point that the previous poster was making: Gentoo is very good for building a distribution with. If you're making it slim then you don't want a great many things - including, perhaps, a package management system - to be part of the final design. Gentoo's build tools that are part of the Gentoolkit make it quite easy to build your own distro with it. You can even make it apt or rpm based if you like.
This is why Gentoo is sometimes referred to as a metadistribution. It has gotten away from this approach over time, as people are quite willing to use it as a main system, but the functionality is still there.
Forget this "minimum levels" thing. That's totally unenforcable since because of the technicalities of routing quality of service varies considerably. They can provide you with lower bandwidth and still argue that they're giving you the same amount. There is more than one way to measure bandwidth, after all.
Keep in mind that at all times almost all bandwidth is used. This isn't a zero-opportunity cost thing that's being proposed. If I have 1.5Mb, and they do this, then I'll get 1.5Mb less often on certain sites because the bandwidth has been allocated away from me.
Further, if there is 5Mb available, companies will be more likely to give me 5Mb if they don't have tiered internet. Consider how this will work as speeds increase. Companies will provide untiered at the lowest possible level (like 1Mb for the next twenty years), and the extorted version at much, much higher until the untiered version is so slow by comparison to be worthless. The means that over, say, a ten year period, they'll slowly be phasing out the untiered internet for their new, much more restrictive and expensive model. The only people who will be able to afford it will be big entities that are chummy with ISPs.
Once this is accepted as the norm, more restrictive rules governing content providers might be accepted, as it will be widely accepted that internet=corporate content.
Finally, I want to respond to a few things that you're missing:
Erm, nope. It's about getting packets, it had nothing to do with content....and packets are my little information friends that are fun to be with? Packets are content. At least, most are. The ones that we are concerned about are.
what stops an ISP offering only a basic 256kbps service in an area, without offering better packages, knowing full well this is "fast enough" for basic web browsing, and that it immediately confers an advantage on those third parties that pay the ISP for better access?
Lawfully, the equipment must be rented out at a fair rate. Because of this, QoS is self-regulating. As the equipment and lines increase, they will be able to provide better service everywhere. While one ISP may be willing to severely cripple their bandwidth to a remote area, another might not if they thought that they could get more money if they sold faster access. This is why most of the bandwidth is being used most of the time. Of course, if Company A uses all of the bandwidth on a tiered model then Company B will not be able to provide that better service. Higher quality untiered internet will simply not be available.
Your comment also hints at some problems that Brittanica had.
Generally, this is a comparison of their website with Wikipedia's - with their search engine with Wikipedia's.
They complained about having results taken from their student edition. If they don't want people seeing their student edition for such judgements, then why is it part of the search engine?
Further, their conclusion seems a bit one-sided. It's not like they went through the Wikipedia articles to check to see which entries had errors that were based upon editorializing, or errors in the expert's analysis, or which were cut short.
Finally, that "cutting short" bit...why would they do that? It seems that either Britannica was too long on the subject, or in certain cases, didn't have the results in the area (only had them as subjects under other areas). Even still, that just seems like whining. It's not like that didn't also happen to Wikipedia entries.
In short I find Brittanica's rebuttle rather questionable. I don't see much indication that Nature has been biased, even if they were only as accurate as they could afford to be. Further, I don't really see any reason for them to have had a bias. Even if their study had Wikipedia as comparitively horribly dysfunctional it would have still been a good article.
The US is getting close to making sure all encrypted communication has back doors for the government.
No they're not, they won't, and they can't.
The age of purposefully building backdoors into software is long gone. If you built something that the FBI could get into, then so could anybody with enough programming knowledge to examine the binaries and deduce the functionality. All such attempts (such as, for instance, DVD encryption) has taken less than a week to reverse. It may suprise you to learn this, but that's a bit crippling for a software business.
Software companies won't stand for that, and AFAIK there aren't any governments making software who would.
AJAX techniques hardly compete with traditional development languages
AJAX is for communication. It's not a development language. You still use traditional development languages on the server side. That's the point: thanks to AJAX we can do that and just use the browser as a GUI.
But lets assume that you meant "web applications can hardly compete with desktop applications."
Doesn't it seem amazing to you that with so very little manpower (by comparison to the traditional approach), people have been able to make such apps at all? It seems clear to me that such development techniques rival, and might be superior to the traditional approaches to GUI development.
MS have a 15 (or so) year advantage...the pinnacle of which is their webbrowser. Making a GUI is arguably the hardest part of these kind of apps. Thanks to the VERY developer friendly languages associated with web development, GUI development is suddenly much, much easier. Its also more bug-free, as the webbrowsers have many, many more hours spent in bugfixes than probably any other GUI toolkit. The only real limitation is that its extremely difficult to create your own kinds of form widgets, but that difficulty is rapidly vanishing.
What about lack of official support by T-mobile? Seems like a pretty gigantinormous stumbling block to me.
If I can get a Blackberry for $100 with a new plan, or a Treo for $300 that's plan independant, and I only use it for e-mail, which do you think I'm going to get?
Scheduling with multiple complex calendars? Meeting invitations and e-mail reminders seemlessly included (and able to be sent from one outlook client to another)?
A lot of that is based on the fact that you're using outlook as an exchange client. I definitely believe that Exchange is a steaming pile. It crashes frequently and has severe problems when the data in it exceeds a certain size for no good reason. Occasionally it corrupts itself.
It takes an expert in Exchange to administer despite the fact that the tasks that it is designed to handle are relatively simple concepts. (In contrast, SQL Server, which does something far more complicated to understand is actually easier to administer, IMHO, because it mostly works right).
However, at a lot of places we're all stuck with it, and with Outlook, until we've got a complete scheduling and e-mail solution that has features that are close.
I think we differ in view is what to think when "best" is roughly equivalent to "wild speculation with a small number of highly questionable supporting facts."
My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.
Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.
When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.
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No, that isn't a better comparison. I wouldn't buy a Camry because I wanted low price for transportation. I'd buy an Echo.
It's cheaper and gets better gas milage.
This is the comparison you always have to make if you're worried about price: cheapest non-hybrid to cheapest hybrid.
Otherwise, you're adding extra price and needlessly complicating the equation. I don't want those extra features. I take them because I have to with the hybrid, but I don't care. They just add extra to the cost that I would otherwise not be paying.
If they made a hybrid Echo, I'd use that as a basis for comparison. But they don't, so its much cheaper over the live of a vehicle to just buy an Echo. Once they make a budget hybrid, the people who are buying tiny to save money will flock to it.
Hmm...good point. But no reason to throw away the math entirely.
11,000 gallons at the standard 30MPG is going to take 330,000 miles. So it's not even close to economically viable either unless I'm greatly overestimating the cost of per-gallon-equivalent price of the electric.
On the other hand, if you go from a Hummer to this it is. But in general, back to the drawing board.
Toyota Echo (lowest priced Toyota) - $10k
Toyota Echo used - $8K for a year old
Toyota Prius (lowest priced hybrid) - $22k
Toyota Prius used - $20k for a year old if you're really lucky.
Other car manufacturers have similar price differences. Where are you getting this measley $6k figure? I'd be all over that if that was the difference. As it is, the more than doubled prices mean that I'd have to put somewhere in the area of 100,000 miles on it for it to be cost-effective (because you only get slightly worst than halving your milage).
On the other hand, switching from gas to electric brings your bill WAY down. You go from somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 per gallon to $.25 or less (converted to gallons).
As a rough estimate, to save $30,000 at those rates you'd have to drive somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 miles (3*11000-.25*11000=30250).
Even if I'm off quite a bit and you have to drive 30,000, its a steal as long as it'll last. If the price of gas continues to rise, even the hybrids will start looking viable, though...
It can fetch and parse webpages, parse doc, pdf, powerpoint, rtf, and about 150 other file formats?
No. And there isn't anything near an expert system front-end on searching in MySQL. It doesn't know file systems, and all it can do is the equivalent of a fuzzy grep to search text. Fuzzy is a relative term, and in this case, I mean more when I say fuzzy than what MySQL does.
Don't get me wrong, though: I currently only use one app that needs Oracle. All the rest are much more highly suited for MySQL.
Umm...nobody who uses databases ever claims B). On the constrary: MySQL has less features than most of the database engines out there.
However, nobody cares about most of the extra features. So let's change B) to: supports all of the features of Oracle that most people care about
Did you know that Oracle comes with something to do a text search on almost any document type, including those accessible through URLs? And that you can do fuzzy searches based on that, and that the database can learn to give better results via an expert system? It's a pretty nice search engine. Does MySQL come with a search engine?
Also, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: don't exaggerate. The personal use version is free, and Oracle is $5k per copy for the one-processor, coarse-grained security model. The high-end one for clustering that you seem to be thinking of is $40k, not $200k.
My guess is that the market share of stupid people who buy Oracle when all they need is MySQL is dying. However, there really are people who want to do extremely sophisticated stuff that only Oracle is providing. Oracle's real up-and-coming competition for their real market is Google, I think.
If Google will do all the indexing and does a better job of managing your data without you having to even configure it, then why should you manage it with Oracle?
It rerenders the images at the present resolution, and text is vector graphics, so no problem there.
Some images obviously still come out looking rough. I use it to show our graphics designer why we shouldn't make fonts out of graphics. She still thinks it's worth it for some reason.
Opera is not light years ahead. Like Firefox and IE it has its limitations. So far, I've yet to find one from Firefox that I can't work around easily. My pet peeve with IE is that option elements don't send or recieve their own events - only their parent select boxes can do that. I really wish they did, because I'd like to make a combo box into a thing that you can use to reorder elements, and it can't be done without that.
My pet peeve with Opera is far worse - iframes are always on the top layer (so you can't have, for example, a menu system in one IFrame that shows the menu that runs into another). The "standards" don't matter - only those standards met by other browsers are real standards that need to be met. The fact that Opera doesn't meet this standard means that I either have to design sites differently, or not support Opera.
Where I work we do the latter because Opera's marketshare is so little.
In this day and age, there's no reason anybody should be using Netscape 4, or any version of IE below 5.5.
It is not unacceptable to require users to be able to view CSS2, HTML 4, Javascript 3, and DOM1. These things are all old tech at this point - with well established standards with many years to have evolved, and supported by almost all of the market.
This isn't even about IE versus NS. You support the standard of those things I said, and your stuff will work on anything that's 6 years old or newer.
What does this have to do with AJAX? Not much...except that it is possible to do AJAX using those techiques rather than the new ways (and many of the old ajax libraries will support those new ways).
No, constant is good. It's just that for very large or small values of the constant, it's sometimes different.
1!=2 is, for example, always true, except for with very small values of 2 or very large values of 1. Possibly you need both small values of 2 and large values of 1.
People aren't going to pay $29K for a tiny car. What they would do then is scream extortion and monopoly, and other such things until the car left the market or got cheaper. People play the lottery and generate deficits. We don't make wise decisions. Cheap now and expensive later will always extremely outsell expensive now and extremely cheap later.
They would see it as the oil company (who just recently began to sell cars) is doing the same thing in cars that they do in oil: try to extort every penny that they can. And they'd be right.
Further, there are a lot of parts in a car besides an engine. The oil company would have to go through an extremely extensive R&D to develop everything else, and they're already decades behind. They'd most likely end up with something that was technologically inferior in every way except one to current cars. The only way that they could ensure their dominance is if they just sold engines...which wouldn't give them nearly the profit you espouse, and probably wouldn't be enough to be worth it.
Finally, the industry of selling cars is a lot more risky than that of selling oil. You know people are going to need oil. They all believe they have to drive/make plastic/etc. And you know they're going to buy it from you, because you're chummy with all your "competitors" and you've got your territory worked out. You don't know that people are going to need to buy a car from you even if you make the most advanced vehicle ever. They could decide that the flashy new Car X is the one for them because it has a flamingo hood ornament.
So because of risk, risks of development, public perception, and the obvious one I didn't mention - the loss of oil sales - oil companies would never venture into the car industry, and it will continue to be in their best interest for gas-guzzlers to be produced, and for research into lower oil dependance to be supressed.
During WWII, German coders did things like not changing the daily cipher key or sending the same message at the same time every day but using a different cipher.
Close. They sent the same kind of message every day at the same time - namely, the list of wins and losses was sent every morning. This was far more valuable than using the same cipher twice.
Of course, we probably wouldn't have figured it out without an Enigma machine.
And the magical law fairies will guarantee that people don't start using the Linux kernel in their own proprietary products, as was the intent of the GPL?
This is a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too. Adding drivers=extending the functionality of an existing program, which the GPL says requires you to provide the source if you distribute. Take that bit out, or saying "it doesn't count for external modules" and it's not the GPL anymore. It's the LGPL. All the ways I know of that get around this are, IMHO violating the spirit of the GPL while not the letter.
I personally prefer the LGPL. It basically allows for "if you have to modify my code, then you have to release what you write, but you don't have to release anything that is 100% written by you." This guarantees that at the very least vendors will do bugfixes on LGPL code.
No. It boils down to who has the greatest capacity for threat of violence. The ones with that make the rules. That's why you're government makes the rules instead of you. :)
But we don't really need to boil it down. The ones who own the lines owe allegence to the one that owns the ground that the line is in. Since the majority of that is public land...
A similar thing is true for satellite. The airwaves are public property.
So if the people sticking their lines in the public ground or using the public airwaves aren't serving the public good as well as is possible, then they probably should be given the shaft.
Nice try, but it's not a contradiction.
You're using "classified" in a way that requires two different definitions of the word.
Under the first definition, "labeled a planet or not" the thing is unclassified. Under the second, "bearing a form of label" it is classified. You can have both, because they are not the same thing.
The fact that two contradictions relate never forms the basis of an argument. In cases where it seems so, you're always missing some classification.
It's kind of like that old argument:
1) Nothing is better than total happiness.
2) A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
3) Ergo, a ham sandwich is better than total happiness.
The problem is not a contradiction, it's that the two values of "nothing" have different meanings. Which brings us to why we end up classifying things: for the most part, classifications are used to identify logical fallacies caused by similar things being treated as the same thing.
I read a treaty by an eastern philosopher who correctly stated that the "both-and" arguement model necessarily contains the "either-or" model, though the opposite is not true. So...it doesn't help.
What that translates to in this case is that not classifying it to accept both conditions (planet and non-planet) is a classification in and of itself - as "unclassified". Either it's classified or its not. See how the either-or emerges?
This is a simplification of the argument, but the gist of it is that the Eastern mechanism is actually a cultural obscuring of naturally occuring logic - which is not Eastern or Western, but is rather the way the world works. The world is filled with objects which are classified, and with substances and relationships which are also chocked full of classifications in order to allow for reasoning.
I looked it up - found other places that the devices that I have have been used. I found the answer on the #linuxaudio mailing list. The design for the sound card never should have been certified. It doesn't conform to the spec.
When it doesn't get packets as fast as it wants them, it panics and stops playing sound entirely.
However, if Windows had caught this and not certified my card, I don't think it would have had that problem.
Windows on well made hardware, and with good drivers, is extremely stable. ...as long as you don't connect to the internet, or run any apps on it, or use any devices (even well made ones) that use the same portion of the kernelspace at once.
These aren't problems you see in Linux and OSX. The difference is that Windows doesn't do a good job of implementing levels of trust. What I don't expect is that they'll be able to bring down my OS, or any portion of it, when they do.
Further, I expect that drivers written by Microsoft or that are Microsoft certified shouldn't have any compatibility problems. Otherwise, why did they get certified?
When I plug my MS certified USB storage device into my computer while I also plug in my MS certified USB soundcard, I can expect my sound to stop working, and if I'm very unlucky it may also crash my computer.
Can I blame Windows for this? Absolutely. All of the devices involved are MS Certified and USB certified, so Windows shouldn't have any trouble sorting these things out. Even if it does, it shouldn't crash altogether. The USB subsystem shouldn't have the privileges to crash the rest of the OS. That's a design flaw.
This is just a single example that is typical of what you see in Windows, and the logic behind why I say that Windows itself is not stable. There are many, many others.
No, but remember you also have to consider the unreported stuff.
For every crime, 1 million versions of the same crime go unreported.
So over 30 million murders happened in Oakland, and over 18 million laptops were stolen.
Clearly the more important issue is the laptops, since there's no one left in Oakland.
Perl is not needed for portage to work. It never has been. C is, though, which is a much bigger hassle, and more imporantly, you need a computer that can compile things in a reasonable period of time, which will certainly be missing. Strange that you didn't mention either of those. It's almost like you don't know what portage does. *Portage* is not needed for gentoo to work. Your system will run perfectly fine without it.
Ultimately, you're missing the point that the previous poster was making: Gentoo is very good for building a distribution with. If you're making it slim then you don't want a great many things - including, perhaps, a package management system - to be part of the final design. Gentoo's build tools that are part of the Gentoolkit make it quite easy to build your own distro with it. You can even make it apt or rpm based if you like.
This is why Gentoo is sometimes referred to as a metadistribution. It has gotten away from this approach over time, as people are quite willing to use it as a main system, but the functionality is still there.
Forget this "minimum levels" thing. That's totally unenforcable since because of the technicalities of routing quality of service varies considerably. They can provide you with lower bandwidth and still argue that they're giving you the same amount. There is more than one way to measure bandwidth, after all.
...and packets are my little information friends that are fun to be with? Packets are content. At least, most are. The ones that we are concerned about are.
Keep in mind that at all times almost all bandwidth is used. This isn't a zero-opportunity cost thing that's being proposed. If I have 1.5Mb, and they do this, then I'll get 1.5Mb less often on certain sites because the bandwidth has been allocated away from me.
Further, if there is 5Mb available, companies will be more likely to give me 5Mb if they don't have tiered internet. Consider how this will work as speeds increase. Companies will provide untiered at the lowest possible level (like 1Mb for the next twenty years), and the extorted version at much, much higher until the untiered version is so slow by comparison to be worthless.
The means that over, say, a ten year period, they'll slowly be phasing out the untiered internet for their new, much more restrictive and expensive model. The only people who will be able to afford it will be big entities that are chummy with ISPs.
Once this is accepted as the norm, more restrictive rules governing content providers might be accepted, as it will be widely accepted that internet=corporate content.
Finally, I want to respond to a few things that you're missing:
Erm, nope. It's about getting packets, it had nothing to do with content.
what stops an ISP offering only a basic 256kbps service in an area, without offering better packages, knowing full well this is "fast enough" for basic web browsing, and that it immediately confers an advantage on those third parties that pay the ISP for better access?
Lawfully, the equipment must be rented out at a fair rate. Because of this, QoS is self-regulating. As the equipment and lines increase, they will be able to provide better service everywhere. While one ISP may be willing to severely cripple their bandwidth to a remote area, another might not if they thought that they could get more money if they sold faster access. This is why most of the bandwidth is being used most of the time. Of course, if Company A uses all of the bandwidth on a tiered model then Company B will not be able to provide that better service. Higher quality untiered internet will simply not be available.
Your comment also hints at some problems that Brittanica had.
Generally, this is a comparison of their website with Wikipedia's - with their search engine with Wikipedia's.
They complained about having results taken from their student edition.
If they don't want people seeing their student edition for such judgements, then why is it part of the search engine?
Further, their conclusion seems a bit one-sided. It's not like they went through the Wikipedia articles to check to see which entries had errors that were based upon editorializing, or errors in the expert's analysis, or which were cut short.
Finally, that "cutting short" bit...why would they do that? It seems that either Britannica was too long on the subject, or in certain cases, didn't have the results in the area (only had them as subjects under other areas). Even still, that just seems like whining. It's not like that didn't also happen to Wikipedia entries.
In short I find Brittanica's rebuttle rather questionable. I don't see much indication that Nature has been biased, even if they were only as accurate as they could afford to be. Further, I don't really see any reason for them to have had a bias. Even if their study had Wikipedia as comparitively horribly dysfunctional it would have still been a good article.
The US is getting close to making sure all encrypted communication has back doors for the government.
No they're not, they won't, and they can't.
The age of purposefully building backdoors into software is long gone. If you built something that the FBI could get into, then so could anybody with enough programming knowledge to examine the binaries and deduce the functionality. All such attempts (such as, for instance, DVD encryption) has taken less than a week to reverse. It may suprise you to learn this, but that's a bit crippling for a software business.
Software companies won't stand for that, and AFAIK there aren't any governments making software who would.
Spoken like a non-developer.
...the pinnacle of which is their webbrowser. Making a GUI is arguably the hardest part of these kind of apps. Thanks to the VERY developer friendly languages associated with web development, GUI development is suddenly much, much easier. Its also more bug-free, as the webbrowsers have many, many more hours spent in bugfixes than probably any other GUI toolkit. The only real limitation is that its extremely difficult to create your own kinds of form widgets, but that difficulty is rapidly vanishing.
AJAX techniques hardly compete with traditional development languages
AJAX is for communication. It's not a development language. You still use traditional development languages on the server side. That's the point: thanks to AJAX we can do that and just use the browser as a GUI.
But lets assume that you meant "web applications can hardly compete with desktop applications."
Doesn't it seem amazing to you that with so very little manpower (by comparison to the traditional approach), people have been able to make such apps at all? It seems clear to me that such development techniques rival, and might be superior to the traditional approaches to GUI development.
MS have a 15 (or so) year advantage
What about lack of official support by T-mobile? Seems like a pretty gigantinormous stumbling block to me.
If I can get a Blackberry for $100 with a new plan, or a Treo for $300 that's plan independant, and I only use it for e-mail, which do you think I'm going to get?
Group sharing of contacts, resources, etc?
Scheduling with multiple complex calendars? Meeting invitations and e-mail reminders seemlessly included (and able to be sent from one outlook client to another)?
A lot of that is based on the fact that you're using outlook as an exchange client.
I definitely believe that Exchange is a steaming pile. It crashes frequently and has severe problems when the data in it exceeds a certain size for no good reason. Occasionally it corrupts itself.
It takes an expert in Exchange to administer despite the fact that the tasks that it is designed to handle are relatively simple concepts. (In contrast, SQL Server, which does something far more complicated to understand is actually easier to administer, IMHO, because it mostly works right).
However, at a lot of places we're all stuck with it, and with Outlook, until we've got a complete scheduling and e-mail solution that has features that are close.
I think we differ in view is what to think when "best" is roughly equivalent to "wild speculation with a small number of highly questionable supporting facts."
My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.
Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.
When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.