In my experience, this has nothing to do with the French being arrogant, and everything to do with dislike for the sterotypes of American tourists. As a Norwegian I've never experienced any arrogance from French people.
However I have witnessed how American tourists often gets treated both in the UK and in France, often because they are perceived as loud, obnoxious and entirely without manners. Sometimes it might be true, but just as often it is a case of cultural mismatches.
I think the main reasons Americans apparently don't see people in the UK as arrogant too is that the French are amazing at making their dislike for something extremely in your face, combined with larger cultural differences.
The British on the other hand will, when offended, either use insults that the average American don't quite "get", or will smear it on thick with dry sarcasm that tends to pass straight over the heads of the stereotypical obnoxious US tourist...
These kind of cultural mismatches have nothing to do with peoples real attitudes. For some other examples - when I started dealing with Americans and to some extent other English speaking people in conjunction with work years ago I realised that I would often be perceived as rude because of the way I was used to speak.
In Norwegian you would often be very direct and informal and you use very few phrases that would be considered normal courtesy in other languages. It's very easy to carry artefacts like that over when you speak a foreign language. When Norwegians are being taught French and German it's drilled into your head that you need to watch it because you can really piss some (particularly older people) off, but for English it's often considered a lot less important, possibly because the differences are a lot more subtle.
I still find it weird when people address me "sir" in shops in London for instance, while using the equivalent term in Norwegian would either get you a weird stare or people would possibly take it as an insult (as it could imply you were suggesting they were being snotty and arrogant).
In the same vein my fiance (who is Nigerian) finds it extremely awkward to address my mother and grandparents by first name, being used to having to use courtesy terms or at least last name, while again either would be considered at best weird, at worst rude in Norway (because you'd be indicating that you're distancing yourself from someone, which is a sign of respect many places but would these days more often be interpreted as dislike or disinterest in Norway where the norm is to use firstnames in almost all situations).
One of the other mismatches I often come across where I've both thought people were being rude and had people consider me rude is the (mostly US) thing with asking someone how things are going without expecting a response. Before I knew, I considered it extremely rude when I'd meet an American who'd ask me how things were going, and then keep walking past me without waiting for a response. At the same time, I soon realised that I'd sometimes be preceived as rude for starting to talk about how I was doing instead of answering by asking how they were doing.
There are plenty of countries with low population density (American suburbs "spread out" - don't make me laugh... There are plenty of very rural areas in the US but it's hardly the suburbs) that have no problem with GSM. The advantages of sharing a market with the rest of the world for cell phones as well as the roaming are both significant reasons.
As for roaming, it's not only access to any European country, but also most larger Asian and African countries as well as most larger cities in the US.
I never have to think worry about being unreachable when I travel unless I plan on going somewhere rural in the US.
Simply, technical differences at this point are small enough that they don't matter, and the US market is already heavily fragmented between providers - you can't even rely on being able to move your subscription without potentially having to switch phones, while that's something the rest of the world takes for granted.
RPM IS the standard, both defacto by being used by distro's making up the vast majority of Linux distributions, and enshrined as required by Linux Standard Base.
And apt-get is supported by more and more RPM based distro's, including Fedora. Dragging out apt at this point as an argument for Debian packages is a strawman - Apt haven't been tied exclusively to Debian for a long time.
Each time this discussion comes up I wait for arguments as to why Debian packages are supposedly superior, and why it matters, but so far I have yet to see any arguments presented with actual reasoning behind. I'd love to know what's so great about them... Somebody care to try to enlighten me?
I think the point about realism here is that it's not realistic to assume that a printed encyclopedia will be exact because knowledge isn't static, objective and free from change - very few things can be stated as absolute fact, and most of the content in an encyclopedia will represent a particular viewpoint favored when the encyclopedia was last published.
Thus an evolving, ever changing encyclopedia may better reflect reality than one which presents you with a static view of what some editor happened to think was the prevailing view at a specific instance in time possibly years ago.
You might be better off trusting a source that is constantly edited and where you have complete access to the discussions and every single revision so you can see how and why it has changed over time, and get a better picture of what should be questioned.
I call bullshit. Either a 10' segment can carry 500lbs or it can't. If it can, then no amount of "small flaws" will affect it by definition. Combining these 10' segments together don't affect the lifting capability of any 10' segment, nor does it affect the combined weight of the rope and any attached object that can be hung from the top of the rope.
Your example of a chain is flawed and doesn't match what you suggested for the rope - A chains strength doesn't weaken for each extra link because of "small flaws", it stays the strength of the weakest link regardless of number of links.
But the moment you start hanging it down you need to take into account the weight of the chain itself, and the chain, just as a rope, will be able to lift less additional weight the longer it is because the strain on any point of the chain/rope is equal to the weight attached PLUS the weight of all of the chain/rope below it.
What this is essentially saying is that the rope needs to be able to support it's own weight in addition to the weight attached to it, which means that the longer the "rope" you need the lighter it needs to be compared to it's strength for you to be able to lift any reasonable amount of mass, or for it not to be torn apart by it's own mass.
That's why you need a really strong material for a space elevator - if it wasn't for the weight of the "rope" itself you'd only have needed a material strong enough to handle the weight of whatever you wanted to transport up it, but that is a miniscule amount of the total strain on the elevator.
You're missing the point. Making Firefox available as an ActiveX control for displaying web content in other apps would NOT be a security hole. Allowing web pages to embed Active X components in the web pages is what is a potential security nightmare.
AND and multiplication is synonymous, yes, but you conveniently "forget" that this is only because boolean arithmetic only works on one bit quantities and multiplication of 1 bit quantities happen to give us AND: 0x0=0,0x1=0,1x0=0,1x1=1.
So 3 AND 2 is 2 because to apply boolean arithmetic you need to split each number into quantities that can be represented in boolean arithmetics - bits - and carry out two separate, unrelated, boolean multiplications 1x1 and 1x0 that gives 1 and 0 respectively.
EU is not a country. As a result the legislative process is complex because it needs to take into account the fact that no member state can be forced to accept a law, and so to make it palatable for the member states to accept EU law even when it is not in their national interest the process has a lot of extra checks and balances (I'm sure I've messed up parts of this description...):
Typically the EU commission (the commission is the closest thing to a EU cabinet) will propose a new law. The proposal will be considered by the EU Parliament (elected by popular vote), which will issue an opinion. In this specific case the Parliaments opinion included a wide number of changes to prevent software patents.
After the parliament decides on their opinion, the Council of Ministers (ministers of the governments of the member states) vote. In this case the council decided to disregard parliaments opinion and their changes.
However, since it is usually impractical to make official translations to all the official languages, the council needs to vote again on the officially sanctioned translated texts. Only this vote is binding. This is what gave the Dutch a chance to force their minister to change the vote.
Once the Council has voted, the law goes to the EU Parliament for a second reading. If the Parliament approves the legislation or does nothing, the law goes to the Council which can then approve the law by qualified majority. Once so approved, it is the duty of the member states to change their national laws to be consistent with the EU law where needed.
If the parliament REJECTS the law with absolute majority, the council can still adopt the law, but only with unanimity. So if the parliament rejects this law with absolute majority on the second reading it's dead.
If the parliament amends the law with absolute majority, the changes go to the commission. If the commission accepts the changes, the council is authorised to approve the law with a qualified majority. If the commission rejects the changes, the council can only approve the law with unaminity.
In this case the commission is likely to reject any significant changes suggested by the parliament on the second reading, since it wanted the law in the first place.
So it's not as if this change would have automatically become law if the Dutch hadn't changed their mind - it was only about halfway through the process.
No, if you add in that comma you change the meaning. The EU Parliament had made an effort to keep software patents out of Europe by modifying a proposed patent directive. The European Council of Ministers voted in favor of throwing out the modifications that the EU Parliament had made to the proposed directive.
In other words, the EU Parliament opposed software patents, and the Council trampled all over them and ignored all the parliaments concerns.
It's quite different, considering that Tolkien openly borrowed the elves and dwarves from assorted mythology (many of the names are lifted straight from Norse mythology for instance) while the Daleks was an original creation. But the rights to specific characters in Tolkiens works definitively belong to Tolkiens estate even if the general idea of elves and dwarves does not.
"Should have" does not mean they can patent it any more. In most countries patents must either be filed for prior to making the invention public, or within a year of publication. Seeing as it usually takes well above a year to get a patent granted it is highly unlikely that any prior art identified to invalidate a patent would still be new enough to be valid basis for a patent application.
Unfortunately it would also be trivial to create a program that "builds" believable random content by maintaining statistics and ensuring that the generated gibberish matches a statistical profile consistent with natural language.
Uh... Burt, being the guy responsible for SpaceShip One is raising the concerns he as a responsible engineer should take seriously into consideration to make sure his project succeeds. Maybe Burt's just got too much at stake in the right company to want to risk it by being sloppy?
Sigh. Yet again, the speed issue is brought up. How many times do people have to repeat that what ultimately matters is trust, not ascent velocity. Spaceship One has enough trust to reach Mach 3 safely during ascent through the atmosphere.
That is NOT the limiting factor for whether or not it would be able to reach orbital velocities - the issue would be whether or not it could carry enough fuel to maintain trust long enough (or whether the design can accomodate changes to allow it to). Once you're out of the gravity well, ANY sustained trust will eventually allow you to reach orbital velocities if you can carry enough fuel, and it is by no means given that low trust (and hence lower ascent speeds) wouldn't be more economical.
Discussing speed during ascent as some sort of indicator of whether or not the technology can bring us into orbit is meaningless.
I won't try to guess whether it would be fuel efficient or not, but you most certainly CAN enter orbit with a low trust craft by going further up, though I'd agree with you that trying to "fall" back towards earth and enter orbit doesn't sound feasible.
If your craft has enough trust to escape the gravity well, and has enough fuel to maintain trust over extended periods of time, you can get the right velocity by going far enough "up" (as in away from earth), turning and aiming for the right insertion vector so you'll be in the right position at the riht velocity to enter orbit. The lower trust, the longer you'll need to be able to keep burning to get the velocity you need.
Which still means you miss the point: If it can escape gravity and has enough fuel, it will eventually be able to reach the necessary "horizontal" speed as you call it, as once it's out of the gravity well any trust will go more or less entirely to acceleration.
The speed it can handle up through the athmosphere says NOTHING about whether the design can achieve orbit, or is suitable for achieving orbit, or is able to avoid burning up in the atmosphere.
More importantly: The speed it climbs at says NOTHING about whether or not it would be able to handle higher speeds if they were willing and ready to take the risk and use the extra fuel once they're up there.
Essentually you keep harping on things that have no relevance in determining the capability of the vehicle or the applicability of their technology to development of orbital capabilities.
The US ratified the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, and the treaty was proposed by the US and then Soviet Union, so it was more a matter of the UN listening to the US and the Soviets. Now, of course proposing a treaty haven't stopped the US from violating it later on previously, so I doubt it will this time (it contains annoying prohibitions on weapons in orbit, for instance).
You are a party pooper, and you don't know what you are talking about. You can reach orbit at 1 mph if you want to. The escape velocity you mention sound right, but you clearly don't understand what escape velocity means.
Escape velocity is the initial vertical speed needed to escape the earths gravity well with no further trust. If you catapulted someone upwards, or shot them out of a cannon or something, they would need to start out at that speed to reach orbit.
However, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone that as long as your upwards speed is positive, you are still climbing and will eventually get into orbit... Spaceship One will not exceed a speed of Mach 3, but as long as ANY of that speed is vertical climb it will keep on going upwards by definition.
Hardware fails. That it hasn't happened to you yet may mean you're great at maintaining it and swapping stuff out before it breaks and choosing quality components, but it also means you have been LUCKY. RAID with crappy components just means the likelihood of the frequent problems you'll be seeing will be less likely to cause data loss - it doesn't automatically solve quality problems.
RAID with good components means that when you suddenly run out of luck at exactly the wrong moment it doesn't really affect you that much, except for lowered performance while rebuilding the RAID.
And it's not always something you control - at one point a company I worked for had an entire RAID array of around 8-10 disks die one by one because it turned out manufacturing problems had affected the whole batch (so hot tip: Don't rely on one hardware manufacturer for all your disks). If it hadn't been for RAID we'd have lost hundreds of MB of customer data - backups doesn't help you that much when data turnover means a large percentage of the data is new each day, and the new data is most important (mail is a typical example).
No, RAID is for any application where losing data means potentially losing significant amounts of money or time. Under any kind of real stress, with any reasonable amount of disks, you WILL have disks failing on a regular basis. You WILL lose data unless you use RAID or another mechanism for ensuring redundancy. For some usage, that is fine, and you'll just recover last nights backup and move on. For other usage, such as storing mail for hundreds of thousands of users, it's not.
But yes, it DOES save IT managers asses when something does go wrong, because they won't have to explain to their bosses why your customers are talking about suing your company and/or taking their business elsewhere because they just lost MB worth of data that's too recent to have been backed up.
From your reboot numbers it appears you are saying RAID sucks because it doesn't suit you on a desktop... Not using it on a desktop if you don't mind losing a day or so's work is fine, but that's not what most people use RAID for. They use it when losing large amounts of data will be a significant problem.
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However I have witnessed how American tourists often gets treated both in the UK and in France, often because they are perceived as loud, obnoxious and entirely without manners. Sometimes it might be true, but just as often it is a case of cultural mismatches.
I think the main reasons Americans apparently don't see people in the UK as arrogant too is that the French are amazing at making their dislike for something extremely in your face, combined with larger cultural differences.
The British on the other hand will, when offended, either use insults that the average American don't quite "get", or will smear it on thick with dry sarcasm that tends to pass straight over the heads of the stereotypical obnoxious US tourist...
These kind of cultural mismatches have nothing to do with peoples real attitudes. For some other examples - when I started dealing with Americans and to some extent other English speaking people in conjunction with work years ago I realised that I would often be perceived as rude because of the way I was used to speak.
In Norwegian you would often be very direct and informal and you use very few phrases that would be considered normal courtesy in other languages. It's very easy to carry artefacts like that over when you speak a foreign language. When Norwegians are being taught French and German it's drilled into your head that you need to watch it because you can really piss some (particularly older people) off, but for English it's often considered a lot less important, possibly because the differences are a lot more subtle.
I still find it weird when people address me "sir" in shops in London for instance, while using the equivalent term in Norwegian would either get you a weird stare or people would possibly take it as an insult (as it could imply you were suggesting they were being snotty and arrogant).
In the same vein my fiance (who is Nigerian) finds it extremely awkward to address my mother and grandparents by first name, being used to having to use courtesy terms or at least last name, while again either would be considered at best weird, at worst rude in Norway (because you'd be indicating that you're distancing yourself from someone, which is a sign of respect many places but would these days more often be interpreted as dislike or disinterest in Norway where the norm is to use firstnames in almost all situations).
One of the other mismatches I often come across where I've both thought people were being rude and had people consider me rude is the (mostly US) thing with asking someone how things are going without expecting a response. Before I knew, I considered it extremely rude when I'd meet an American who'd ask me how things were going, and then keep walking past me without waiting for a response. At the same time, I soon realised that I'd sometimes be preceived as rude for starting to talk about how I was doing instead of answering by asking how they were doing.
It's more like 25 countries, and more than 50% greater population (hint: 10 more countries joined in May).
As for roaming, it's not only access to any European country, but also most larger Asian and African countries as well as most larger cities in the US.
I never have to think worry about being unreachable when I travel unless I plan on going somewhere rural in the US.
Simply, technical differences at this point are small enough that they don't matter, and the US market is already heavily fragmented between providers - you can't even rely on being able to move your subscription without potentially having to switch phones, while that's something the rest of the world takes for granted.
And apt-get is supported by more and more RPM based distro's, including Fedora. Dragging out apt at this point as an argument for Debian packages is a strawman - Apt haven't been tied exclusively to Debian for a long time.
Each time this discussion comes up I wait for arguments as to why Debian packages are supposedly superior, and why it matters, but so far I have yet to see any arguments presented with actual reasoning behind. I'd love to know what's so great about them... Somebody care to try to enlighten me?
Except that we're talking about hardware with an embedded software component.
Thus an evolving, ever changing encyclopedia may better reflect reality than one which presents you with a static view of what some editor happened to think was the prevailing view at a specific instance in time possibly years ago.
You might be better off trusting a source that is constantly edited and where you have complete access to the discussions and every single revision so you can see how and why it has changed over time, and get a better picture of what should be questioned.
(Yes, I do realise you made the assumption that the US was the only place worth talking about)
Your example of a chain is flawed and doesn't match what you suggested for the rope - A chains strength doesn't weaken for each extra link because of "small flaws", it stays the strength of the weakest link regardless of number of links.
But the moment you start hanging it down you need to take into account the weight of the chain itself, and the chain, just as a rope, will be able to lift less additional weight the longer it is because the strain on any point of the chain/rope is equal to the weight attached PLUS the weight of all of the chain/rope below it.
That's why you need a really strong material for a space elevator - if it wasn't for the weight of the "rope" itself you'd only have needed a material strong enough to handle the weight of whatever you wanted to transport up it, but that is a miniscule amount of the total strain on the elevator.
You're missing the point. Making Firefox available as an ActiveX control for displaying web content in other apps would NOT be a security hole. Allowing web pages to embed Active X components in the web pages is what is a potential security nightmare.
So 3 AND 2 is 2 because to apply boolean arithmetic you need to split each number into quantities that can be represented in boolean arithmetics - bits - and carry out two separate, unrelated, boolean multiplications 1x1 and 1x0 that gives 1 and 0 respectively.
Typically the EU commission (the commission is the closest thing to a EU cabinet) will propose a new law. The proposal will be considered by the EU Parliament (elected by popular vote), which will issue an opinion. In this specific case the Parliaments opinion included a wide number of changes to prevent software patents.
After the parliament decides on their opinion, the Council of Ministers (ministers of the governments of the member states) vote. In this case the council decided to disregard parliaments opinion and their changes.
However, since it is usually impractical to make official translations to all the official languages, the council needs to vote again on the officially sanctioned translated texts. Only this vote is binding. This is what gave the Dutch a chance to force their minister to change the vote.
Once the Council has voted, the law goes to the EU Parliament for a second reading. If the Parliament approves the legislation or does nothing, the law goes to the Council which can then approve the law by qualified majority. Once so approved, it is the duty of the member states to change their national laws to be consistent with the EU law where needed.
If the parliament REJECTS the law with absolute majority, the council can still adopt the law, but only with unanimity. So if the parliament rejects this law with absolute majority on the second reading it's dead.
If the parliament amends the law with absolute majority, the changes go to the commission. If the commission accepts the changes, the council is authorised to approve the law with a qualified majority. If the commission rejects the changes, the council can only approve the law with unaminity.
In this case the commission is likely to reject any significant changes suggested by the parliament on the second reading, since it wanted the law in the first place.
So it's not as if this change would have automatically become law if the Dutch hadn't changed their mind - it was only about halfway through the process.
In other words, the EU Parliament opposed software patents, and the Council trampled all over them and ignored all the parliaments concerns.
It's quite different, considering that Tolkien openly borrowed the elves and dwarves from assorted mythology (many of the names are lifted straight from Norse mythology for instance) while the Daleks was an original creation. But the rights to specific characters in Tolkiens works definitively belong to Tolkiens estate even if the general idea of elves and dwarves does not.
"Should have" does not mean they can patent it any more. In most countries patents must either be filed for prior to making the invention public, or within a year of publication. Seeing as it usually takes well above a year to get a patent granted it is highly unlikely that any prior art identified to invalidate a patent would still be new enough to be valid basis for a patent application.
Unfortunately it would also be trivial to create a program that "builds" believable random content by maintaining statistics and ensuring that the generated gibberish matches a statistical profile consistent with natural language.
Uh... Burt, being the guy responsible for SpaceShip One is raising the concerns he as a responsible engineer should take seriously into consideration to make sure his project succeeds. Maybe Burt's just got too much at stake in the right company to want to risk it by being sloppy?
That is NOT the limiting factor for whether or not it would be able to reach orbital velocities - the issue would be whether or not it could carry enough fuel to maintain trust long enough (or whether the design can accomodate changes to allow it to). Once you're out of the gravity well, ANY sustained trust will eventually allow you to reach orbital velocities if you can carry enough fuel, and it is by no means given that low trust (and hence lower ascent speeds) wouldn't be more economical.
Discussing speed during ascent as some sort of indicator of whether or not the technology can bring us into orbit is meaningless.
If your craft has enough trust to escape the gravity well, and has enough fuel to maintain trust over extended periods of time, you can get the right velocity by going far enough "up" (as in away from earth), turning and aiming for the right insertion vector so you'll be in the right position at the riht velocity to enter orbit. The lower trust, the longer you'll need to be able to keep burning to get the velocity you need.
The speed it can handle up through the athmosphere says NOTHING about whether the design can achieve orbit, or is suitable for achieving orbit, or is able to avoid burning up in the atmosphere.
More importantly: The speed it climbs at says NOTHING about whether or not it would be able to handle higher speeds if they were willing and ready to take the risk and use the extra fuel once they're up there.
Essentually you keep harping on things that have no relevance in determining the capability of the vehicle or the applicability of their technology to development of orbital capabilities.
The US ratified the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, and the treaty was proposed by the US and then Soviet Union, so it was more a matter of the UN listening to the US and the Soviets. Now, of course proposing a treaty haven't stopped the US from violating it later on previously, so I doubt it will this time (it contains annoying prohibitions on weapons in orbit, for instance).
Ehmm.. He talked about the X-33 program in the 90's, not X-15.
Escape velocity is the initial vertical speed needed to escape the earths gravity well with no further trust. If you catapulted someone upwards, or shot them out of a cannon or something, they would need to start out at that speed to reach orbit.
However, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone that as long as your upwards speed is positive, you are still climbing and will eventually get into orbit... Spaceship One will not exceed a speed of Mach 3, but as long as ANY of that speed is vertical climb it will keep on going upwards by definition.
RAID with good components means that when you suddenly run out of luck at exactly the wrong moment it doesn't really affect you that much, except for lowered performance while rebuilding the RAID.
And it's not always something you control - at one point a company I worked for had an entire RAID array of around 8-10 disks die one by one because it turned out manufacturing problems had affected the whole batch (so hot tip: Don't rely on one hardware manufacturer for all your disks). If it hadn't been for RAID we'd have lost hundreds of MB of customer data - backups doesn't help you that much when data turnover means a large percentage of the data is new each day, and the new data is most important (mail is a typical example).
But yes, it DOES save IT managers asses when something does go wrong, because they won't have to explain to their bosses why your customers are talking about suing your company and/or taking their business elsewhere because they just lost MB worth of data that's too recent to have been backed up.
From your reboot numbers it appears you are saying RAID sucks because it doesn't suit you on a desktop... Not using it on a desktop if you don't mind losing a day or so's work is fine, but that's not what most people use RAID for. They use it when losing large amounts of data will be a significant problem.