What I want to know is if it's better than FF3 beta 2. Beta 2's javascript performance was atrocious, and memory leaks or fragmentation or whatever it is that's causing it to grow to 1GB+ within hours and never release the memory again, were far worse than with FF2 for me, to the point where I had to go back to 2.x because it simply became unbearable.
In my last job I never even once saw the servers I was responsible for. I was working from London with occasional visits to California and the 60+ servers we used were located in Houston and Dallas. "Smart hands" coupled with remote consoles and a bit of care means not needing site visits.
In my current job all new hardware is being deployed with IPMI, meaning I can do remote reboots, remote consoles etc. via ethernet remotely from any machine in our environment we choose to give access to with no extra cabling.
Conceptually, the DTD is there to define the data, and unless you know what is in the DTD, you cannot use it to validate, which is its purpose.
You completely miss the point. As long as the public identifier is the same, the DTD should not change, and so a well behaved implementation will retrieve them once and implement a catalog of public identifiers to DTD's. Most well behaved implementations DO.
If you'd actually bothered reading what you quoted you might've noticed the sentence "The system identifier may be changed to reflect local system conventions". Only the public identifier is required to be one of the strings provided. The system identifier (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd) can point wherever you want it to. But well behaved clients are expected to use a catalog anyway.
If you think London hasn't seen changes and reduced congestion, you need to look again. But even if you were right it would still be worth it, since now the people causing congestion are contributing massive amounts of extra money to the public coffers to help improve public transport and making life easier for the 70% or so of commuters that DO use public transport in London. The charge must keep increasing though, as one of the reasons it hasn't had a greater effect is, as you say, that there's been an influx of people who've seen that conditions have now improved enough to make it worthwhile commuting by car for them.
The "majority of city goers" go by public transport, and that's a major reason why the congestion charge has seen so widespread public support. Even many car owners support it, exactly because it makes driving in London more bearable.
No, you are(were - rules are being relaxed) limited to one piece of carry on through security. Your laptop must be out of your carry on when going through security, though. What I did last year when flying extensively out of Heathrow was to pack a very thin bag in my carry on, that I'd take out after security, fill and then put my laptop back in my main carry on. I've never been challenged about having an extra bag when boarding the plane.
You're right, it's usually business. Most decent airlines offer in seat power in business these days, but very few do in economy (if you do ever fly business, though, beware that unless you buy an adapter upfront you'll be stuck with buying a ridiculously overpriced adapter in flight in most cases - most in seat power use one of two "special" plugs)
I've travelled a lot with my 15" MacbookPro (90.000 miles last year) and airline seats wasn't a big problem. A 13" is certainly small enough. If you want smaller, there are plenty of (non-Mac) alternatives, but 13" is really the smallest I can comfortably use. Having something thinner and lighter would make far more difference to me, as it'd make it more comfortable to carry my laptop around with me to meetings while still remaining usable.
As for the limitations, they don't really bother me much apart from the battery limitations. But then, in business class most airlines offer in-seat power these days and adapters for the Macs are cheap enough, and if you fly economy there are always external portable laptop adapters you can buy (yes, they are not great, but if you're sitting in your seat on a plane it's not a big problem to have one in your carry on and put it in the pouch of the seat in front of you while working, and if the alternative is carrying around replacement laptop batteries you'd be carrying about the same weight anyway).
The problem is that if you take some parts of the Bible literally and some parts as metaphors, why should anyone take you seriously if you claim to know which parts are which?
Personally I consider the reliability of the Bible as a historical document as pretty much zero. I'm sure some of the people in it may have existed, and that some of the more mundane events are real, but at the same time it's near impossible to separate from fiction - especially since only miniscule portions of it has any support from other sources.
But then I'm an atheist.
You'll find many christians that DO think they know what is metaphor and what is "true", but how far they stretch is very personal. Do they believe in Jesus' miracles, for example? Why should/should not those be metaphors too? How do they handle the vast number of inconsistencies in the Bible? You could ignore it, or (like me) see it as one of the thing indicating how unreliable the Bible is as a source for anything, or you can just proclaim part of the story a metaphor.
I've not seen any convincing criteria for determining in a sound way what is supposedly fact and what is metaphor.
You're only saying that because current display technology is still hard on the eyes. Do you look around the "real world" and have your eyes "almost bugging out of your head" because your entire field of view is full? No, you don't. I'm not saying improving the resolution and refresh rates will fully solve that, but it certainly won't make it worse. I can sit much closer to my 42" plasma than I could to my old 32" CRT without straining my eyes, for example.
No, Ford doesn't have to do that. There's no legal requirements that stop Ford from telling them to either stop OR apply for a license, and tell them that a license may be granted free of charge. Trademark law only requires you to actively enforce your rights, not that you're an asshole about it.
And you completely missed that the post you replied to refer to trademarks, not copyright. I have no idea whether they have any basis for suing, but copyright law certainly does not say anything about whether they have a valid claim for trademark infringement.
Funny. When I was playing SimCity, my first reaction was what a right wing approach it took, especially with the ridiculously low limits on tax rates etc. compared to the level of taxation common in most of Europe for example.
The "fringe parties" would only gain power in a voting system like this if people support them. Your example of Tammany Hall is flawed, because swing votes rarely become a problem in systems where there are many parties. They become a problem in systems like the US when a small number of seats end up with a third party. In a system with fully proportional voting, if a party panders too much to a small party exploiting a swing position, you will tend to see splits and the swing party will soon find itself having lost power as the balances shift with more parties.
And it only becomes more visible in the US when there's a third party involved - it's always THERE: The most moderate in both parties always have disproportionate influence on issues that roughly divide people among the party lines.
Look at the difference between the US and almost ANY European country, even including countries like the UK and France that use single person circuit systems but that either have a reasonably powerful third party (UK) or where the parties have managed to mitigate the effects of the single person circuits (France, through election alliances). In the US, the fringes aren't represented at all, because no candidates supporting anything outside of the mainstream have any hope of getting elected, ever. In most European countries, the parliaments are actually reasonably representative of public opinion.
What we've seen is that single party majorities in parliament become more and more rare, since it's simply unlikely that so many people will agree with each other on so many issues.
The fringe parties in the US are fringe parties because of the flawed electoral system, not because their ideas are too far out to have a lot of public support.
The system you have describe is a system that massively favor the current mainstream, even if the fringes on both sides, or even the majority, actively hate the candidates that win.
As an example, if you're a socialist in the US, you'll almost certainly vote Democrat. You might not support the Democrats, or want them to win. In fact you might hate them bitterly. However, if a socialist candidate stand for election anywhere where they'd have a chance of winning a serious number of votes, those votes would serve the Republican Party, not our socialist voter who would presumably prefer the Democratic Party over a Republican any day.
The same is the case for right wing voters, or even centrist voters. In fact, such a system disenfranchises everyone that doesn't support one of the two largest parties but that considers one of them the lesser of two evils.
One property of such a system is that it slows down change, even when that change is wanted by the voters. In the UK, a poll in the early 90's shocked a lot of the establishment when the majority polled said they'd like the Liberal Democrats to win, while at the same time, only abou 20% said they'd vote for them. The reason was that at the time a vote for the Liberal Democrats was seen as a wasted vote in many circuits, because they were seen as a centre alternative and voting for them would mean whichever party of Labour or the Conservatives you didn't like would have a higher chance of winning. People were voting for the lesser of two evils because they thought their preferred choice had no chance.
The lesson from systems with proportional voting is that it causes a far wider spectrum of opinions to be represented in parliaments as well as in governments (frequent coalitions for example), and while such governments may seem less decisive, that is because they more closely represent the opinions of the people instead of at best a narrow majority, but also because the number of votes considered by voters to be wasted is far lower.
It's not unusual for parliamentary systems to have 10-15, or more, parties in parliament. Many European parliaments have parties ranging from communists to right wing nationalists in parliament, with most shades in between. They're composed that way because the parliaments actually reflect the range of opinions present in the population rather than a bland set of lesser evils.
Even with that level of flexibility, I can honestly say that nobody has been representing _my_ opinions in parliament in my native Norway for as long as I've lived, and even in a system like that I'd have to resort to voting for a party I don't directly support for my vote to matter. But at least my choice would be far closer to what I'd want than what it could ever be in a system like the US one, or any system based on simple majorities or single person circuits. I'd not have to vote for someone I actually considered to be useless bastards in order to prevent some even more useless bastards from winning.
There is no such thing as a neutral voting system - they all are designed to bias the result in the way that the designer happens to think is most fair. Sometimes they might seriously be looking for a fair solution, and other times they have an agenda. But all voting systems meets different criteria for how to satisfy some group of people. That group may or may not coincide with the population as a whole, and that group may or may not agree with the criteria.
That said, a simple majority is one of the worst alternatives I can think of unless there truly only are two alternatives.
Well. The UK is parliamentary, but with single person circuits for electing parliament. France is a republic where parliament only approves the prime minister (he/she is appointed by the president), but again parliament is elected through single person circuits, and the only reason there's something resembling proportional representation is an extensive tradition of election alliances. The PS (socialist party) and PCF (communist party) for example divide seats between them and support each-others candidates depending on how they expect to get the greatest total number of seats, and some negotiations on internal power distribution, and some of the parties on the right do the same thing.
So while I agree with you the systems you outline are better, there are enough other fucked up Western countries beyond the US too.
That has more to do with the conflict between the French speaking and Flemish speaking parts of Belgium than anything else. Of countries with a parliamentary system, Beligum is pretty much an aberration. Even then, the system reflects the disagreements in the people, and ensures that you don't get a government that the minority isn't willing to live with at all. Ultimately, if the country becomes ungovernable, it's probably time to split it up.
That's only halfway true. In the UK you vote for members of parliament. The queen asks someone to form government, but the cabinet needs the approval of parliament (vote on their "Speech from the throne"), and hence the prime minister is usually the candidate favored by the largest party.
But as in most countries with a prime minister, there's no guarantee that the largest party will be the one to form a cabinet - it all depends on who is willing AND can avoid being voted down by parliament. In the UK that usually mean the party leaders would be offered the opportunity starting with the largest party, going downwards.
Also worth noting is that once a UK prime minister has been appointed, he/she stays prime minister until he/she resigns, irrespective of election results. Parliament can force the cabinet, including the prime minister to resign, but there's not an automatic change. Edward Heath, for example, waited to resign until after he'd attempted to get support of the Liberals when the Conservatives lost their majority in the 1974 election.
When he finally resigned a few days after the election results were in and he couldn't get support, Harold Wilson formed a minority government under Labour.
If the skin burns, the ship goes down whether or not the gas inside is flammable, as the gas quickly escapes. I very much doubt whether the gas inside burns would make much difference. Especially as a lot of the fatalities with Hindenburg were people getting hit by falling debris (burning hydrogen would be escaping upwards - what they were hit with were either the skin or from the gondola) or jumping in desperation to avoid the fire.
Only to people who don't bother to read enough of it to realize that a major reason for the disaster was that the paint on the Hindenburg was more or less rocket fuel. Bringing up the Hindenburg is like using a disaster involving one of the earliest planes to discourage commercial flights with modern jets.
The storage part at least is not such a big deal anymore. Assuming an 8 hour operating period, it's about 1GB/second. I'm assuming you'd want to archive it for a while. Lets say you archive one weeks of data on disks before compressing/purging/moving it to tape, and you want some redundancy so you mirror. 7*30*2 = 420 1TB disks.
There are commercial storage arrays available that does at least 24TB per 4U (I'm sure you can get higher densities too), with transfer rates of at least 1.6GB/s, meaning you'd easily meet both the storage and IO demands with less than two racks and optionally properly striping the data over the units (if you want to keep IO load per array down to make parallel processing of the data easier). Many of them can be connected together so you can manage larger chunks as a single block device if you like.
That kind of storage is just not a particularly hard problem anymore, unless you're trying to really do it on the cheap. Even then, it's fairly easy if you don't mind setting aside space for a couple of extra racks or cabinets.
Partly alienated? I own 400+ DVDs. I've never pirated a movie in my life. I have an HD capable TV, but I won't buy a single HD product until I'm 100% sure I can continue to easily copy it to my media server. I'll happily admit I haven't kept up to date with whether or not BluRay DRM is definitively broken in a way the mafiaa can't stop again or not. DVD is good enough for me to not invest a lot of time in figuring it out.
If they stop releasing stuff on DVD before I'm sure, then I'll resort to torrents rather than jump onto a format thats too encumbered.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story where the newest fad was miniature worlds that people would control with the goal of nurturing them to intelligent "life", at which point many people would destroy their "worlds" and start over. It was meant to be a game, but at the end of the story it is strongly hinted that the world the entire story is set in is also one of these "games" when the world is shook by terrible disasters...
It goes on the presumption that things will always slide in one direction
No it doesn't. It goes on the presumption that a step by step move towards an undesirable situation is more likely to be accepted by the populace than a direct large change. Nothing in the idea of a "slippery slope" prevents a counter movement. The idea is simply that people get used to bad situations, and after a while they seem less bad, and the next step also seems less of a problem.
Whether it's right or not is one thing, but don't misrepresent it for what it is not.
It boils down to whether people as groups are more likely to accept the same end result if being eased into it step by step than being made to take all the steps at once, and whether as a result - all else being equal - moving the first step towards an end goal makes it more likely to eventually be able to get a group of people to accept the end goal or not.
Logic doesn't play into it - it's a question of sociology and psychology.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is if it's better than FF3 beta 2. Beta 2's javascript performance was atrocious, and memory leaks or fragmentation or whatever it is that's causing it to grow to 1GB+ within hours and never release the memory again, were far worse than with FF2 for me, to the point where I had to go back to 2.x because it simply became unbearable.
In my current job all new hardware is being deployed with IPMI, meaning I can do remote reboots, remote consoles etc. via ethernet remotely from any machine in our environment we choose to give access to with no extra cabling.
You completely miss the point. As long as the public identifier is the same, the DTD should not change, and so a well behaved implementation will retrieve them once and implement a catalog of public identifiers to DTD's. Most well behaved implementations DO.
If you'd actually bothered reading what you quoted you might've noticed the sentence "The system identifier may be changed to reflect local system conventions". Only the public identifier is required to be one of the strings provided. The system identifier (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd) can point wherever you want it to. But well behaved clients are expected to use a catalog anyway.
That's only a problem on Slashdot where people seems to have a mental block against remembering that Yahoo has far more services than search.
The "majority of city goers" go by public transport, and that's a major reason why the congestion charge has seen so widespread public support. Even many car owners support it, exactly because it makes driving in London more bearable.
No, you are(were - rules are being relaxed) limited to one piece of carry on through security. Your laptop must be out of your carry on when going through security, though. What I did last year when flying extensively out of Heathrow was to pack a very thin bag in my carry on, that I'd take out after security, fill and then put my laptop back in my main carry on. I've never been challenged about having an extra bag when boarding the plane.
You're right, it's usually business. Most decent airlines offer in seat power in business these days, but very few do in economy (if you do ever fly business, though, beware that unless you buy an adapter upfront you'll be stuck with buying a ridiculously overpriced adapter in flight in most cases - most in seat power use one of two "special" plugs)
As for the limitations, they don't really bother me much apart from the battery limitations. But then, in business class most airlines offer in-seat power these days and adapters for the Macs are cheap enough, and if you fly economy there are always external portable laptop adapters you can buy (yes, they are not great, but if you're sitting in your seat on a plane it's not a big problem to have one in your carry on and put it in the pouch of the seat in front of you while working, and if the alternative is carrying around replacement laptop batteries you'd be carrying about the same weight anyway).
Personally I consider the reliability of the Bible as a historical document as pretty much zero. I'm sure some of the people in it may have existed, and that some of the more mundane events are real, but at the same time it's near impossible to separate from fiction - especially since only miniscule portions of it has any support from other sources.
But then I'm an atheist.
You'll find many christians that DO think they know what is metaphor and what is "true", but how far they stretch is very personal. Do they believe in Jesus' miracles, for example? Why should/should not those be metaphors too? How do they handle the vast number of inconsistencies in the Bible? You could ignore it, or (like me) see it as one of the thing indicating how unreliable the Bible is as a source for anything, or you can just proclaim part of the story a metaphor.
I've not seen any convincing criteria for determining in a sound way what is supposedly fact and what is metaphor.
You're only saying that because current display technology is still hard on the eyes. Do you look around the "real world" and have your eyes "almost bugging out of your head" because your entire field of view is full? No, you don't. I'm not saying improving the resolution and refresh rates will fully solve that, but it certainly won't make it worse. I can sit much closer to my 42" plasma than I could to my old 32" CRT without straining my eyes, for example.
No, Ford doesn't have to do that. There's no legal requirements that stop Ford from telling them to either stop OR apply for a license, and tell them that a license may be granted free of charge. Trademark law only requires you to actively enforce your rights, not that you're an asshole about it.
And you completely missed that the post you replied to refer to trademarks, not copyright. I have no idea whether they have any basis for suing, but copyright law certainly does not say anything about whether they have a valid claim for trademark infringement.
Funny. When I was playing SimCity, my first reaction was what a right wing approach it took, especially with the ridiculously low limits on tax rates etc. compared to the level of taxation common in most of Europe for example.
And it only becomes more visible in the US when there's a third party involved - it's always THERE: The most moderate in both parties always have disproportionate influence on issues that roughly divide people among the party lines.
Look at the difference between the US and almost ANY European country, even including countries like the UK and France that use single person circuit systems but that either have a reasonably powerful third party (UK) or where the parties have managed to mitigate the effects of the single person circuits (France, through election alliances). In the US, the fringes aren't represented at all, because no candidates supporting anything outside of the mainstream have any hope of getting elected, ever. In most European countries, the parliaments are actually reasonably representative of public opinion.
What we've seen is that single party majorities in parliament become more and more rare, since it's simply unlikely that so many people will agree with each other on so many issues.
The fringe parties in the US are fringe parties because of the flawed electoral system, not because their ideas are too far out to have a lot of public support.
As an example, if you're a socialist in the US, you'll almost certainly vote Democrat. You might not support the Democrats, or want them to win. In fact you might hate them bitterly. However, if a socialist candidate stand for election anywhere where they'd have a chance of winning a serious number of votes, those votes would serve the Republican Party, not our socialist voter who would presumably prefer the Democratic Party over a Republican any day.
The same is the case for right wing voters, or even centrist voters. In fact, such a system disenfranchises everyone that doesn't support one of the two largest parties but that considers one of them the lesser of two evils.
One property of such a system is that it slows down change, even when that change is wanted by the voters. In the UK, a poll in the early 90's shocked a lot of the establishment when the majority polled said they'd like the Liberal Democrats to win, while at the same time, only abou 20% said they'd vote for them. The reason was that at the time a vote for the Liberal Democrats was seen as a wasted vote in many circuits, because they were seen as a centre alternative and voting for them would mean whichever party of Labour or the Conservatives you didn't like would have a higher chance of winning. People were voting for the lesser of two evils because they thought their preferred choice had no chance.
The lesson from systems with proportional voting is that it causes a far wider spectrum of opinions to be represented in parliaments as well as in governments (frequent coalitions for example), and while such governments may seem less decisive, that is because they more closely represent the opinions of the people instead of at best a narrow majority, but also because the number of votes considered by voters to be wasted is far lower.
It's not unusual for parliamentary systems to have 10-15, or more, parties in parliament. Many European parliaments have parties ranging from communists to right wing nationalists in parliament, with most shades in between. They're composed that way because the parliaments actually reflect the range of opinions present in the population rather than a bland set of lesser evils.
Even with that level of flexibility, I can honestly say that nobody has been representing _my_ opinions in parliament in my native Norway for as long as I've lived, and even in a system like that I'd have to resort to voting for a party I don't directly support for my vote to matter. But at least my choice would be far closer to what I'd want than what it could ever be in a system like the US one, or any system based on simple majorities or single person circuits. I'd not have to vote for someone I actually considered to be useless bastards in order to prevent some even more useless bastards from winning.
There is no such thing as a neutral voting system - they all are designed to bias the result in the way that the designer happens to think is most fair. Sometimes they might seriously be looking for a fair solution, and other times they have an agenda. But all voting systems meets different criteria for how to satisfy some group of people. That group may or may not coincide with the population as a whole, and that group may or may not agree with the criteria.
That said, a simple majority is one of the worst alternatives I can think of unless there truly only are two alternatives.
So while I agree with you the systems you outline are better, there are enough other fucked up Western countries beyond the US too.
That has more to do with the conflict between the French speaking and Flemish speaking parts of Belgium than anything else. Of countries with a parliamentary system, Beligum is pretty much an aberration. Even then, the system reflects the disagreements in the people, and ensures that you don't get a government that the minority isn't willing to live with at all. Ultimately, if the country becomes ungovernable, it's probably time to split it up.
But as in most countries with a prime minister, there's no guarantee that the largest party will be the one to form a cabinet - it all depends on who is willing AND can avoid being voted down by parliament. In the UK that usually mean the party leaders would be offered the opportunity starting with the largest party, going downwards.
Also worth noting is that once a UK prime minister has been appointed, he/she stays prime minister until he/she resigns, irrespective of election results. Parliament can force the cabinet, including the prime minister to resign, but there's not an automatic change. Edward Heath, for example, waited to resign until after he'd attempted to get support of the Liberals when the Conservatives lost their majority in the 1974 election.
When he finally resigned a few days after the election results were in and he couldn't get support, Harold Wilson formed a minority government under Labour.
If the skin burns, the ship goes down whether or not the gas inside is flammable, as the gas quickly escapes. I very much doubt whether the gas inside burns would make much difference. Especially as a lot of the fatalities with Hindenburg were people getting hit by falling debris (burning hydrogen would be escaping upwards - what they were hit with were either the skin or from the gondola) or jumping in desperation to avoid the fire.
Only to people who don't bother to read enough of it to realize that a major reason for the disaster was that the paint on the Hindenburg was more or less rocket fuel. Bringing up the Hindenburg is like using a disaster involving one of the earliest planes to discourage commercial flights with modern jets.
There are commercial storage arrays available that does at least 24TB per 4U (I'm sure you can get higher densities too), with transfer rates of at least 1.6GB/s, meaning you'd easily meet both the storage and IO demands with less than two racks and optionally properly striping the data over the units (if you want to keep IO load per array down to make parallel processing of the data easier). Many of them can be connected together so you can manage larger chunks as a single block device if you like.
That kind of storage is just not a particularly hard problem anymore, unless you're trying to really do it on the cheap. Even then, it's fairly easy if you don't mind setting aside space for a couple of extra racks or cabinets.
If they stop releasing stuff on DVD before I'm sure, then I'll resort to torrents rather than jump onto a format thats too encumbered.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story where the newest fad was miniature worlds that people would control with the goal of nurturing them to intelligent "life", at which point many people would destroy their "worlds" and start over. It was meant to be a game, but at the end of the story it is strongly hinted that the world the entire story is set in is also one of these "games" when the world is shook by terrible disasters...
No it doesn't. It goes on the presumption that a step by step move towards an undesirable situation is more likely to be accepted by the populace than a direct large change. Nothing in the idea of a "slippery slope" prevents a counter movement. The idea is simply that people get used to bad situations, and after a while they seem less bad, and the next step also seems less of a problem.
Whether it's right or not is one thing, but don't misrepresent it for what it is not.
It boils down to whether people as groups are more likely to accept the same end result if being eased into it step by step than being made to take all the steps at once, and whether as a result - all else being equal - moving the first step towards an end goal makes it more likely to eventually be able to get a group of people to accept the end goal or not.
Logic doesn't play into it - it's a question of sociology and psychology.