Why is it that otherwise intelligent people can't get their heads round spelling simple words? Or are unable to differentiate between two similarly spelt (yes, spelt, not spelled) words that have different meanings?
If you don't know the difference between a "principle" and a "principal" then go find out. On principle, I won't spoonfeed you with relevant links; you can go do the legwork yourself for once.
The handsets aren't the issue. It's the companies providing you with the handsets (ie, the service providers) that are the issue.
When I said "More customers = lower prices. Fewer customers = higher prices" I was referring to the service providers from whom you have to buy your phone, not the manufacturer who makes it. The fact that I added the note "less overhead per customer" should have made that pretty obvious.
Then why does it do everything possible to destroy it? Lotus 1-2-3 for Dos, WordPerfect (countless times), DR-DOS, OS/2, OpenDoc, Go/pen computing, Netscape, Java - and those are only the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
In fact, there has never been a more monopolistic, closed technology advocate than Microsoft. If someone comes up with something original, or something that's superior to anything Microsoft can engineer, then they'll be driven into the ground by the full force of the Microsoft machine.
I use Microsoft products (eg, Windows 2000, Office) and I also use non-Microsoft products that compete directly with the company's offerings (eg, Opera, Winamp). I'm not pro- or anti-Microsoft. What I am is pro-choice. And, frankly, that's one thing Microsoft can accurately never claim to be.
I find it funny that xenophobes like you used the original Slashdot story to engage in bashing Russia, Japan and the other international partners involved in the ISS.
Isn't it amazing how, now that the leak has been shown to have come from a US-built module, none of those other morons have much to say about how "inferior" US standards have caused this problem whereas they were all so quick to jump on the foreigner-bashing bandwagon and condemn the "inferior" of Russia, etc as being the cause even before the leak was traced to its origin?
Please, this shit isn't even funny. So can we cut the "inept Russians" jokes now?
Why don't you tell that to the AC who chose to focus on one small part of my original post?
My point was that New Zealand's financial assistance to Niue in't that great (despite what the person I was originally replying to believed) and that other countries benefit from similar assistance to a much greater extent. Providing an example is hardly straying off-topic.
It wasn't me who decided to focus on that one example (and thus stray off-topic) but I'll defend my right to explain what I said (and the point that I was trying to make) to ACs and anyone else who can't read English.
If you want to bust somebody's balls about straying OT, why don't you go bust his instead?
The Israeli armed forces are almost as indifferent towards the taking of innocent Palestinean lives as Palestinean paramilitary organisations are towards innocent Israeli lives.
Next time you read a report about a Palestinean terrorist being taken out by Israel, be sure to read the bit about how many innocent bystanders were killed too. Or about Palestineans being buried alive by Israeli Army bulldozers demolishing their homes in the dead of the night while they're sleeping inside. Or of independent aide workers from countries such as the US and Britain that have been killed by Israeli snipers.
Your displayed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinean conflict is limited and/or rose-tinted if you refuse to acknowledge that Israel has killed innocents (and not always as accidentally as it would like to suggest) in its zest to take the conflict to Palestinean paramilitaries. And I haven't even mentioned the oppressive conditions the Palestineans in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are forced to live in.
Reread what I said: "...some of which is spent oppressing and killing innocent Palestinean civilians, as well as Western observers (including US and British aide workers)." If you can't agree that's an accurate statement - ie, that some of that US-provided firepower has played a pivotal role in keeping the Palestinean people in the occupied territories subjugated and that some of them have lost their lives as a result - then perhaps you could provide evidence to contrary. Good luck finding it though.
Oh, and while you're at it, try not posting as an AC. At least that way you might not come across as lacking the courage of your conviction.
Perhaps you should RTFA and use your brain before opening your mouth.
Let's start off showing you how far off-base you are by providing a quote from one of the articles linked to in the story summary:
Niue has been self-governing in free association with New Zealand since 1974, and New Zealand has an ongoing responsibility to provide necessary economic and administrative assistance.
In case you're too stupid to understand what "economic and administrative assistance" means, I'll translate it for you: it means that when they need help, New Zealand is obliged (morally, if not contractually) to provide it.
Secondly, let's point out the bloody obvious: in an environment that's subject to weather extremes, such as hurricanes and cyclones, putting up telegraph poles isn't the best way to provide connectivity because telegraph poles and lines tend not to stay standing for long in those conditions. And of the alternatives, wireless is by far the most practical (cheaper, easier to implement and upgrade), especially on such a small scale.
Thirdly, NZ$8 million equates to US$5.45 million. (NZ$1 = US$0.6815.) So that's US$4,500 per native Niuean. Contrast that with the US$3-4 billion pa in military aid alone that the US gives Israel (population, 6.5 million), which works out to be US$615 per Israeli.
Now, what's the more ethical:
A. New Zealand giving Niue $5.45 million of support, money that it would have to pay out anyway if Niue was to cease being an independent nation and return to being a part of New Zealand? or
B. The US provinding Israel with $3-4 billion of military aid every year, some of which is spent oppressing and killing innocent Palestinean civilians, as well as Western observers (including US and British aide workers)?
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.
The term was created when ISPs started to charge flat rate monthly prices instead of the traditional 'by the minute' model that the three big players, AOL, Compuserve, and Prodidy were using at the time.
I think hey could have chose a better term but they didn't.
Uh, I think the term "unlimited" existed elsewhere before ISPs dreamt up flat rate tarriffs. It's just that, in many cases, their definition of "unlimited" is actually the opposite of the one that you'll find in a dictionary.
My personal experiences with "unlimited" tarriffs has been mixed. British Telecom decided that unlimited didn't mean unlimited at all and cut me (and thousands of others like me) off without so much as a thank you, despite being happy to profit from me when I paid through the teeth for metered bandwidth (and by the teeth, I mean a phone bill that had in excess of 150 pounds, ~$250, of ISP related-calls every two months). However, when I switched to Freeserve, I had no such problems.
BT's definition of "unlimited" has changed at least twice while I was a subscriber, and no doubt it has changed even more since (always to the detriment of the paying customer). Freeserve's hasn't.
Currently, I don't use either company's services, because I'm a cable subscriber, but if I'm ever asked for an ISP recommendation I tell people to go to Freeserve (which is also one of the less expensive ISPs) and avoid BT like the plague. If they ask me why, I tell them why.
But I digress. "Unlimited" means "unlimited". If ISPs want to say "any time" they should use "any time", rather than trying to co-opt "unlimited" into meaning "any time". At best, this practice is misleading. At worst, it's decitful and fraudulent.
The problem with your suggestion is that the Euro notes are not geographically locked down: when a Irishman travels to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and elsewhere then his Euros travel with him.
Just imagine the nightmare everyone (shopkeepers, restauranteurs, banks, the average man in the street) would go through if there were over a dozen designs for each value of Euro note. Not only would it create chaos as people refused to accept perfectly legal tender because they were unfamiliar with some of the designs, it would also be a counterfeiter's dream come true. Just imagine a scenario where some a Parisian coffee shop refused to take anything but French Euro notes whilst the one next door to it was targetted by fraudsters who exploited the owner's inability to tell fake Portugese-design Euro notes from the real thing.
"Difficult to implement", is an understatement of epic proportions. "The most stupid thing ever in the history of paper money", would be more accurate.
Yes, the coins do differ in design from country to country, but only on one side. And for a given denomination of coin, the size, weight and material remain the same throughout the single currency zone, as does the "tails" side of each coin. And, yes, intially (and even today in a few, far-flung places, I suspect) coins with "heads" sides that weren't immediately recognisable were refused by some people. But there will always be teething troubles, and nowadays people barely glance at their coinage.
The bootleggers (ie, the people who make and selling lots of unauthorised copies of movies) are paying "the players" (ie, people in the movie industry who can get their hands on screeners and other preview copies) for preview copies of movies.
In other words, some of the people who are opening the door to the bootleggers (or pirates) are charging them for the priviledge.
What are you blathering on about? The Euro notes have far better anti-counterfeit measures on them than the uniqueness of the images on them. Perhaps you've not seen one, but they have metallic foil elements, watermarks, etc that would be impossible to fake without some serious hardware.
You might be able to pass off a fake US note easily enough in the right conditions (dim lighting in a busy, smokey bar) but you'd have to find a blind barman to be able to pass off your colour laser copies of a Euro note as the real thing: as far as I'm aware, nobody makes a laser printer that lets you emboss silver foil onto (and into) a piece of paper.
You're whole "unique arches to avoid confusion with holiday snaps" argument is ridiculous too. The reason why the Euro notes have images of various styles of European achitecture thoughout the ages on them (Gothic, etc) is because those styles are generic enough to be found across the continent. If you had specific pieces of achitecture on the notes, say a 10 Euro note with the Eiffel Tower on it and a 20 Euro note with the Leaning Tower of Pisa on it, then you'd find countries getting into pissing contests over whose monuments shoud appear on the highest value notes. You'd also run out of note values before you ran out of countries, and thereby alienate any countries that weren't represented.
OK, I'm not saying that Microsoft's totally without guilt here but just how far do people think they need to go with regards to securing passworded files? 48-bit encryption? 128-bit? 160-bit with triple DES? At what stage does the encryption become overkill?
And what about the consequences of selling Office (or even emailing a file) around the world with such strong encryption? It wasn't that long ago that the 128-bit encryption version of Internet Explorer couldn't be downloaded by anyone outside the US (even people in countries such as the UK) because that key length was longer than US export laws allowed at that time. So where do you draw the line between too weak (to be of any use to anyone at all) and too strong (to be of use to anyone who needs to deal with anyone based outside the US)?
...then go for Nexus's range of PSUs, heatsinks and fans.
Without a doubt they are amongst the best I've come across, and I'm including the likes of Zalman, Q-Technology, etc when I say that. You can see there range of products on their website. Definitely worth checking out.
Not everything freudian is about sex. But you seem to have a strong desire to talk about sex with dead men and/or sheep.
Tell me, when did this obsession with necrophilia and beastiality start, was it before or after you moved out of your mother's house?
(For those that can't tell, the previous two lines were a joke. The parent post probably was too. It's called sarcasm. I don't know what's worse: that people can't spot it themselves or that I have to qualify a joke to make sure that some people don't start flame wars.)
Microsoft will NEVER create anything better than Apple. Period. The only thing that Microsoft's got on their side is the general public, which is stupid anyway.
I wouldn't buy one of these "Personal Media Center"s, if for no other reason, because they're made by Microsoft.
Please, don't be so blinded by your faith. "Microsoft will NEVER create anything better than Apple."? That's a bold statement.
Lest we forget, Microsoft is mainly a software company, and Apple is mainly a hardware company. Why is it then that Microsoft's input devices are superior to Apple's? Ever used a Microsoft keyboard? Or a Microsoft mouse? Or even a Microsoft gaming device?
I'm typing this on a Microsoft Wireless Natural Multimedia Keyboard. Yeah, it's a stupid name that's over-descriptive but it's a fantastic piece of hardware, as it the Wireless Optical Mouse that partners it.
Now compare those two keyboards to Apple's equivalents. Does Apple have an ergonomically-friendly keyboard in its product range? Does it make a mouse that its users deserve? No and no. My mouse has two major buttons, a scroll wheel (which doubles as a third button too) and is cordless. Tell me, what does Apple do that compares to that?
Apple's love affair with the single button mouse is amusing. Yes, I know the reasons why Apple persists with it (for "simplicity"), but its one-mouse-fits-all approach is ridiculous: The first thing that 99 percent of serious Apple users do before installing new apps on their new machines is installing a third-party mouse that has more bells and whistles on it.
And don't get me started on the physical design of Apple's mice. Suffice to say that shipping G3s and G4s with the novelty round mouse that Apple inflicted on iMac users was a cruel joke. Yes, I know that Apple's latest mice have evolved (that's why I said G3s and G4s, not G5s) but they've hardly undergone a revolution, have they?
Will Microsoft's first generation of media players be "iPod killers"? No way. I'd bet my life on it. Who knows what will happen down the line, though? Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. One day it might well have an "iPod killer". Again, I doubt it, but it's possible.
In the meantime, stop being blinded by your religious fervour and acknowledge that, in some areas at least, Apple's products are inferior to Microsoft's. Otherwise, you'll just end up looking stupid, just like your "general public".
To help clarify the situation...
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One atmosphere at sea level equates to 760mm of mercury. So a 2mm drop is a 0.26 percent drop in atmospheric pressure, assuming the atmospheric pressure of the ISS is set to that of sea level.
(I have no data on the standard operating atmospheric pressure of the ISS. Perhaps someone else can supply that so we can make a more direct measurement of the percentage fall.)
God, your post is so ignorant that I have to wonder why you bothered composing it.
1. No "international" = no "space station".
If there hadn't been international cooperation, we wouldn't have a space station in orbit right now. Compared to the Russians, what NASA knew about space stations could be written on a postage stamp.
Lest you forget, Skylab wasn't exactly a screaming success (heck, one of its solar panels failed to deploy: you could hardly call that an auspicious start). Its longest period of occupancy was 84 days and it was deployed as one unit and nothing like as modular as the ISS.
On the other hand, Mir far outlived its operational life (and would have done so by an even greater margin if the bean counters hadn't tried to cut so many corners), and was occupied almost constantly for 15 years. During that time, docked with 31 spacecraft, 64 cargo vessels, 9 shuttle missions visited it and it was home to 125 cosmonauts/astronauts from 12 different countries. It was, of course, modular, like the ISS. Oh, and before Mir, the Russians also had the Salyut series of space stations up and running throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
When Russia came on board, the ISS gained a lot of expertise; the sort of expertise that money just can't buy. If you think you can find one person at NASA who thinks that putting up a space station as complex and as expensive as the ISS could have been done by the US alone then you're deluding yourself.
2. NASAs main partners in the ISS are Canada, ESA, Russia and Japan, but most of their modules have yet to be deployed.
There is no "British" space agency involvement in the ISS. However, there is ESA (European Space Agency, of which Britain plays a very small role) involvement in the ISS. This involvement includes the Columbus Laboratory, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, Nodes 2 and 3, the European Robotic Arm, and the Data Management System for the Russian Service Module. However, most (if not all) of these elements have yet to be deployed, so I fail to see how they can be responsible for a pressure leak when they're sitting on the ground.
The same is true for the Japanese involvement, the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) also known as Kibo, which is currently undergoing testing at the Kennedy Space Centre prior to launch. Sorry to break it to you, but if their module isn't up there, I can't see how you can hope to "share the blame for this latest debacle" with the Japanese either.
By the way, the single biggest contractor on the ISS is Boeing. Last time I checked, Boeing was an American company.
3. A "sole space agency" is in charge. It's name is NASA.
The ISS may be international, but NASA is its lead partner. All others play second fiddle to it and that's never been in doubt. If there's someone "in charge of making sure everything [runs] right" that someone is NASA.
So that's D'oh!, D'oh! and thrice D'oh!
Seriously, if you could get off your xenophobic high horse for a second (and get some basic facts right too) then perhaps you might have a point (ie, that someone screwed up, again) albeit a rather weak one. But trying to turn this story into a "USA rules, rest of you just suck" gloat is pathetic, particularly when you're so off-base.
Slashdot Mirror
Should I be worried that someone who can't differentiate between "site" and "sight" has a shoot first policy?
...or at least how to google.
Why is it that otherwise intelligent people can't get their heads round spelling simple words? Or are unable to differentiate between two similarly spelt (yes, spelt, not spelled) words that have different meanings?
If you don't know the difference between a "principle" and a "principal" then go find out. On principle, I won't spoonfeed you with relevant links; you can go do the legwork yourself for once.
They really need to lose the stupid name. News.com.com? It's like a geekier version of the "And then?" gag in Dude, Where's My Car?
The handsets aren't the issue. It's the companies providing you with the handsets (ie, the service providers) that are the issue.
When I said "More customers = lower prices. Fewer customers = higher prices" I was referring to the service providers from whom you have to buy your phone, not the manufacturer who makes it. The fact that I added the note "less overhead per customer" should have made that pretty obvious.
More competition = lower prices. Less competition = higher prices. (Duh.)
Also:
More customers = lower prices. Fewer customers = higher prices. (Less overhead per customer.)
Then why does it do everything possible to destroy it? Lotus 1-2-3 for Dos, WordPerfect (countless times), DR-DOS, OS/2, OpenDoc, Go/pen computing, Netscape, Java - and those are only the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
In fact, there has never been a more monopolistic, closed technology advocate than Microsoft. If someone comes up with something original, or something that's superior to anything Microsoft can engineer, then they'll be driven into the ground by the full force of the Microsoft machine.
I use Microsoft products (eg, Windows 2000, Office) and I also use non-Microsoft products that compete directly with the company's offerings (eg, Opera, Winamp). I'm not pro- or anti-Microsoft. What I am is pro-choice. And, frankly, that's one thing Microsoft can accurately never claim to be.
I find it funny that xenophobes like you used the original Slashdot story to engage in bashing Russia, Japan and the other international partners involved in the ISS.
Isn't it amazing how, now that the leak has been shown to have come from a US-built module, none of those other morons have much to say about how "inferior" US standards have caused this problem whereas they were all so quick to jump on the foreigner-bashing bandwagon and condemn the "inferior" of Russia, etc as being the cause even before the leak was traced to its origin?
Please, this shit isn't even funny. So can we cut the "inept Russians" jokes now?
Why don't you tell that to the AC who chose to focus on one small part of my original post?
My point was that New Zealand's financial assistance to Niue in't that great (despite what the person I was originally replying to believed) and that other countries benefit from similar assistance to a much greater extent. Providing an example is hardly straying off-topic.
It wasn't me who decided to focus on that one example (and thus stray off-topic) but I'll defend my right to explain what I said (and the point that I was trying to make) to ACs and anyone else who can't read English.
If you want to bust somebody's balls about straying OT, why don't you go bust his instead?
The Israeli armed forces are almost as indifferent towards the taking of innocent Palestinean lives as Palestinean paramilitary organisations are towards innocent Israeli lives.
Next time you read a report about a Palestinean terrorist being taken out by Israel, be sure to read the bit about how many innocent bystanders were killed too. Or about Palestineans being buried alive by Israeli Army bulldozers demolishing their homes in the dead of the night while they're sleeping inside. Or of independent aide workers from countries such as the US and Britain that have been killed by Israeli snipers.
Your displayed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinean conflict is limited and/or rose-tinted if you refuse to acknowledge that Israel has killed innocents (and not always as accidentally as it would like to suggest) in its zest to take the conflict to Palestinean paramilitaries. And I haven't even mentioned the oppressive conditions the Palestineans in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are forced to live in.
Reread what I said: "...some of which is spent oppressing and killing innocent Palestinean civilians, as well as Western observers (including US and British aide workers)." If you can't agree that's an accurate statement - ie, that some of that US-provided firepower has played a pivotal role in keeping the Palestinean people in the occupied territories subjugated and that some of them have lost their lives as a result - then perhaps you could provide evidence to contrary. Good luck finding it though.
Oh, and while you're at it, try not posting as an AC. At least that way you might not come across as lacking the courage of your conviction.
Perhaps you should RTFA and use your brain before opening your mouth.
Let's start off showing you how far off-base you are by providing a quote from one of the articles linked to in the story summary:In case you're too stupid to understand what "economic and administrative assistance" means, I'll translate it for you: it means that when they need help, New Zealand is obliged (morally, if not contractually) to provide it.
Secondly, let's point out the bloody obvious: in an environment that's subject to weather extremes, such as hurricanes and cyclones, putting up telegraph poles isn't the best way to provide connectivity because telegraph poles and lines tend not to stay standing for long in those conditions. And of the alternatives, wireless is by far the most practical (cheaper, easier to implement and upgrade), especially on such a small scale.
Thirdly, NZ$8 million equates to US$5.45 million. (NZ$1 = US$0.6815.) So that's US$4,500 per native Niuean. Contrast that with the US$3-4 billion pa in military aid alone that the US gives Israel (population, 6.5 million), which works out to be US$615 per Israeli.
Now, what's the more ethical:
A. New Zealand giving Niue $5.45 million of support, money that it would have to pay out anyway if Niue was to cease being an independent nation and return to being a part of New Zealand? or
B. The US provinding Israel with $3-4 billion of military aid every year, some of which is spent oppressing and killing innocent Palestinean civilians, as well as Western observers (including US and British aide workers)?
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.
The term was created when ISPs started to charge flat rate monthly prices instead of the traditional 'by the minute' model that the three big players, AOL, Compuserve, and Prodidy were using at the time.
I think hey could have chose a better term but they didn't.
Uh, I think the term "unlimited" existed elsewhere before ISPs dreamt up flat rate tarriffs. It's just that, in many cases, their definition of "unlimited" is actually the opposite of the one that you'll find in a dictionary.
My personal experiences with "unlimited" tarriffs has been mixed. British Telecom decided that unlimited didn't mean unlimited at all and cut me (and thousands of others like me) off without so much as a thank you, despite being happy to profit from me when I paid through the teeth for metered bandwidth (and by the teeth, I mean a phone bill that had in excess of 150 pounds, ~$250, of ISP related-calls every two months). However, when I switched to Freeserve, I had no such problems.
BT's definition of "unlimited" has changed at least twice while I was a subscriber, and no doubt it has changed even more since (always to the detriment of the paying customer). Freeserve's hasn't.
Currently, I don't use either company's services, because I'm a cable subscriber, but if I'm ever asked for an ISP recommendation I tell people to go to Freeserve (which is also one of the less expensive ISPs) and avoid BT like the plague. If they ask me why, I tell them why.
But I digress. "Unlimited" means "unlimited". If ISPs want to say "any time" they should use "any time", rather than trying to co-opt "unlimited" into meaning "any time". At best, this practice is misleading. At worst, it's decitful and fraudulent.
The problem with your suggestion is that the Euro notes are not geographically locked down: when a Irishman travels to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and elsewhere then his Euros travel with him.
Just imagine the nightmare everyone (shopkeepers, restauranteurs, banks, the average man in the street) would go through if there were over a dozen designs for each value of Euro note. Not only would it create chaos as people refused to accept perfectly legal tender because they were unfamiliar with some of the designs, it would also be a counterfeiter's dream come true. Just imagine a scenario where some a Parisian coffee shop refused to take anything but French Euro notes whilst the one next door to it was targetted by fraudsters who exploited the owner's inability to tell fake Portugese-design Euro notes from the real thing.
"Difficult to implement", is an understatement of epic proportions. "The most stupid thing ever in the history of paper money", would be more accurate.
Yes, the coins do differ in design from country to country, but only on one side. And for a given denomination of coin, the size, weight and material remain the same throughout the single currency zone, as does the "tails" side of each coin. And, yes, intially (and even today in a few, far-flung places, I suspect) coins with "heads" sides that weren't immediately recognisable were refused by some people. But there will always be teething troubles, and nowadays people barely glance at their coinage.
The bootleggers (ie, the people who make and selling lots of unauthorised copies of movies) are paying "the players" (ie, people in the movie industry who can get their hands on screeners and other preview copies) for preview copies of movies.
In other words, some of the people who are opening the door to the bootleggers (or pirates) are charging them for the priviledge.
What are you blathering on about? The Euro notes have far better anti-counterfeit measures on them than the uniqueness of the images on them. Perhaps you've not seen one, but they have metallic foil elements, watermarks, etc that would be impossible to fake without some serious hardware.
You might be able to pass off a fake US note easily enough in the right conditions (dim lighting in a busy, smokey bar) but you'd have to find a blind barman to be able to pass off your colour laser copies of a Euro note as the real thing: as far as I'm aware, nobody makes a laser printer that lets you emboss silver foil onto (and into) a piece of paper.
You're whole "unique arches to avoid confusion with holiday snaps" argument is ridiculous too. The reason why the Euro notes have images of various styles of European achitecture thoughout the ages on them (Gothic, etc) is because those styles are generic enough to be found across the continent. If you had specific pieces of achitecture on the notes, say a 10 Euro note with the Eiffel Tower on it and a 20 Euro note with the Leaning Tower of Pisa on it, then you'd find countries getting into pissing contests over whose monuments shoud appear on the highest value notes. You'd also run out of note values before you ran out of countries, and thereby alienate any countries that weren't represented.
OK, I'm not saying that Microsoft's totally without guilt here but just how far do people think they need to go with regards to securing passworded files? 48-bit encryption? 128-bit? 160-bit with triple DES? At what stage does the encryption become overkill?
And what about the consequences of selling Office (or even emailing a file) around the world with such strong encryption? It wasn't that long ago that the 128-bit encryption version of Internet Explorer couldn't be downloaded by anyone outside the US (even people in countries such as the UK) because that key length was longer than US export laws allowed at that time. So where do you draw the line between too weak (to be of any use to anyone at all) and too strong (to be of use to anyone who needs to deal with anyone based outside the US)?
...then go for Nexus's range of PSUs, heatsinks and fans.
Without a doubt they are amongst the best I've come across, and I'm including the likes of Zalman, Q-Technology, etc when I say that. You can see there range of products on their website. Definitely worth checking out.
Not everything freudian is about sex. But you seem to have a strong desire to talk about sex with dead men and/or sheep.
Tell me, when did this obsession with necrophilia and beastiality start, was it before or after you moved out of your mother's house?
(For those that can't tell, the previous two lines were a joke. The parent post probably was too. It's called sarcasm. I don't know what's worse: that people can't spot it themselves or that I have to qualify a joke to make sure that some people don't start flame wars.)
That should, of course, be "shepherd", not "shepard", although the connection with astronaut Alan Shepard is almost freudian.
...NASA's coveting the support of the farming caucus.
As the saying goes, "Red sky at night, shepard's delight."
Microsoft will NEVER create anything better than Apple. Period. The only thing that Microsoft's got on their side is the general public, which is stupid anyway.
I wouldn't buy one of these "Personal Media Center"s, if for no other reason, because they're made by Microsoft.
Please, don't be so blinded by your faith. "Microsoft will NEVER create anything better than Apple."? That's a bold statement.
Lest we forget, Microsoft is mainly a software company, and Apple is mainly a hardware company. Why is it then that Microsoft's input devices are superior to Apple's? Ever used a Microsoft keyboard? Or a Microsoft mouse? Or even a Microsoft gaming device?
I'm typing this on a Microsoft Wireless Natural Multimedia Keyboard. Yeah, it's a stupid name that's over-descriptive but it's a fantastic piece of hardware, as it the Wireless Optical Mouse that partners it.
Now compare those two keyboards to Apple's equivalents. Does Apple have an ergonomically-friendly keyboard in its product range? Does it make a mouse that its users deserve? No and no. My mouse has two major buttons, a scroll wheel (which doubles as a third button too) and is cordless. Tell me, what does Apple do that compares to that?
Apple's love affair with the single button mouse is amusing. Yes, I know the reasons why Apple persists with it (for "simplicity"), but its one-mouse-fits-all approach is ridiculous: The first thing that 99 percent of serious Apple users do before installing new apps on their new machines is installing a third-party mouse that has more bells and whistles on it.
And don't get me started on the physical design of Apple's mice. Suffice to say that shipping G3s and G4s with the novelty round mouse that Apple inflicted on iMac users was a cruel joke. Yes, I know that Apple's latest mice have evolved (that's why I said G3s and G4s, not G5s) but they've hardly undergone a revolution, have they?
Will Microsoft's first generation of media players be "iPod killers"? No way. I'd bet my life on it. Who knows what will happen down the line, though? Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. One day it might well have an "iPod killer". Again, I doubt it, but it's possible.
In the meantime, stop being blinded by your religious fervour and acknowledge that, in some areas at least, Apple's products are inferior to Microsoft's. Otherwise, you'll just end up looking stupid, just like your "general public".
One atmosphere at sea level equates to 760mm of mercury. So a 2mm drop is a 0.26 percent drop in atmospheric pressure, assuming the atmospheric pressure of the ISS is set to that of sea level.
(I have no data on the standard operating atmospheric pressure of the ISS. Perhaps someone else can supply that so we can make a more direct measurement of the percentage fall.)
God, your post is so ignorant that I have to wonder why you bothered composing it.
1. No "international" = no "space station".
If there hadn't been international cooperation, we wouldn't have a space station in orbit right now. Compared to the Russians, what NASA knew about space stations could be written on a postage stamp.
Lest you forget, Skylab wasn't exactly a screaming success (heck, one of its solar panels failed to deploy: you could hardly call that an auspicious start). Its longest period of occupancy was 84 days and it was deployed as one unit and nothing like as modular as the ISS.
On the other hand, Mir far outlived its operational life (and would have done so by an even greater margin if the bean counters hadn't tried to cut so many corners), and was occupied almost constantly for 15 years. During that time, docked with 31 spacecraft, 64 cargo vessels, 9 shuttle missions visited it and it was home to 125 cosmonauts/astronauts from 12 different countries. It was, of course, modular, like the ISS. Oh, and before Mir, the Russians also had the Salyut series of space stations up and running throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
When Russia came on board, the ISS gained a lot of expertise; the sort of expertise that money just can't buy. If you think you can find one person at NASA who thinks that putting up a space station as complex and as expensive as the ISS could have been done by the US alone then you're deluding yourself.
2. NASAs main partners in the ISS are Canada, ESA, Russia and Japan, but most of their modules have yet to be deployed.
There is no "British" space agency involvement in the ISS. However, there is ESA (European Space Agency, of which Britain plays a very small role) involvement in the ISS. This involvement includes the Columbus Laboratory, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, Nodes 2 and 3, the European Robotic Arm, and the Data Management System for the Russian Service Module. However, most (if not all) of these elements have yet to be deployed, so I fail to see how they can be responsible for a pressure leak when they're sitting on the ground.
The same is true for the Japanese involvement, the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) also known as Kibo, which is currently undergoing testing at the Kennedy Space Centre prior to launch. Sorry to break it to you, but if their module isn't up there, I can't see how you can hope to "share the blame for this latest debacle" with the Japanese either.
By the way, the single biggest contractor on the ISS is Boeing. Last time I checked, Boeing was an American company.
3. A "sole space agency" is in charge. It's name is NASA.
The ISS may be international, but NASA is its lead partner. All others play second fiddle to it and that's never been in doubt. If there's someone "in charge of making sure everything [runs] right" that someone is NASA.
So that's D'oh!, D'oh! and thrice D'oh!
Seriously, if you could get off your xenophobic high horse for a second (and get some basic facts right too) then perhaps you might have a point (ie, that someone screwed up, again) albeit a rather weak one. But trying to turn this story into a "USA rules, rest of you just suck" gloat is pathetic, particularly when you're so off-base.
WTF? IMHO most TLAs and ETLAs are a BOBS.
Well, I guess the answer to that question is "because the marketing men are so good at their jobs".
Ah, but they do say that ignorance is bliss...