It's not just to combat interference. The twists are done in such a way to also limit crosstalk, and use the reflections in the pairs to speed up data flow, limit the effect of external interferance, and allowing higher line bandwidth and better SNRs. Shielding might even mess this up by reflecting signal back into the strands.
Home Depot, Lowes, sometimes places like Sam's Club, BJ's, Costco. Most DIY type places. Any decent internet hardware store. Sounds like you're not ordering bulk cable anyway, but pre-crimped cable. 1000' for around 70$ for cat5e. Price goes up/down depending on if you need plenum, cat5 or cat 6, etc.
So basically, you paid 60$ for 90' of wire, a markup of around 1000%, or closer to 500% after you buy a whole mess of RJ-45 connectors. Of course, then you don't have 3' cables, you have whatever you need.
Then make your own schema. It's really easy to do, you just have to watch on the numbering. Take a look at a schema file in OpenLDAP, for example, and you'll see what I mean. It's very straight-forward, and they're fairly self-documenting.
If you poke around you can find schema's for apps out here, like Netscape. There are keywords to mark compatible types too.
I would hope there wouldn't being legal ramafications. You can kill someone with most things out there, but why should you be responsible for someone else's actions? We're not even talking about someone that purposefully designed a weapon for concealment and quite good ranged kills here. This is just a good antenna that some guy decided to make look like a rifle.
The shape isn't too bad since it's easy to hold and aim that way if you want it to be portable and quick to use. The problem with it is that it does look like a lethal weapon, and that makes using it dangerous. Would've been a better idea to set it up like a telescope on a tripod. Then you still get good portability, but a more stable base.
It may be irresponsible to build a device intended to get you surreptitious access to others people's mistakely considered private data, but no more than that. Perhaps he'll catch some hell for designing an electronic surveillance/eavesdropping device, but I would hope not.
Someone would have to go through some lenghts to make that fatal, too. You would definitely have to pump out a *lot* more power. You'd need a fair bit more than 115VAC@20A(=2300W, 2000W radiant) to saturate a target to lethal exposure at 200m. Your components would all have to be replaced to handle the higher power. You could screw up someone's eyes quick, maybe their bladder over a little time, mess with some guys testes, etc., without much trouble, but near term death isn't likely.
Then again, anybody that can get their hands on a Magnetron can build a more dangerous version of this. Step one: buy a microwave oven. Step two: take it apart for the Magnetron.
That is generally true. Your viewpoint is also missing something, though. Unlike most other forms of life, humans can think past the instinct level. We saw that our involvement in making our environment safer to us by removing other predators caused many animals to overpopulate. In response, we allow people to hunt to a certain controlled degree. This both allows people to hunt without causing extinction, and prevents overpopulation. Since people want to hunt and overpopulation will occur, this isn't a big deal.
As far as leaving nature alone, like I already stated, one of humanity's evolutionary advancements was the ability to alter the environment. This enables humans to make the world more hospitable to them. That is quite an advancement. You're right that it stagnates evolution, but that is likely one reason that humanity evolved into the warring species that we have.
Overall I think people are silly with the "protect the animals" arguments, but everyone is entitled to have their own belief. Just remember that "prey" animals have had "predator" animals evolve to eat them for all time that animals have existed. Humans just ended up being more effective at it than any other animal. We figured out that we can raise herds of animals for our food without having to hunt. Some people just enjoy the hunt; that is also part of our instinct.
Honestly, if they really wanted to use Linux and didn't because of Nero, I'd say the people you know are idiots. The tools available on Linux and friends do all the same things that Nero does, but cost no money. Seriously though, how many people worry about burning a CD when switching OS'? Everything out there supports it, most of them come with software to do it. Windows is one of the few that didn't ship with mastering software, and XP even comes with something for it.
And for the record, Nero isn't a very high profile app at all. It's a good app, no question, but most people don't even know what it is. Plus, there's better apps out there for most of it's functions, Nero just has a rather good implementation of them all.
I think you're right, but you those types of positions are not developer positions. They're not system/network support, and they're not QA/Test.
If you haven't spent the time messing around with the system, tweaking the system, finding it's strengths and limitations, you're not going to be an expert. It's the same thing with cars, the better mechanic is almost always the one that screwed around with cars just for the hell of it.
The people who are passionate about a subject are better at it than those who are not. In the experience of many that post here, this seems to them to be male. In my experience, it's both, but usually in much different areas. Overall, more men went with math/science and more women went with creative/artistic. Perhaps that's just societal norms? It doesn't matter for this discussion.
So there's a large number of women leaving? Perhaps the industry just purged the slackers and the hangers-on that got in just for a quick buck. Regardless, get rid of the unqualified people and who's left will, overall, be more intelligent and more competent.
People sign because they want to have a chance at being famous. The record company comes and says you're good and you'll go somewhere, but you have to sign this paper first. Now those people could go and raise their own duplication costs, and their own advertising budget, and then hire people to go and do that, but most musicians don't have the time, patience, and certainly not the millions for it.
The indie labels don't sell as many CD's, so their costs are higher. They're also businesses, so they charge what they can get away with. Many people will buy the indie label just because it isn't an RIAA affiliate. But aside from that, most indie label don't charge that much for their CD's. Most store will mark up their CD's to the same prices as RIAA product albums and just make more money. Do some research of your own and you'll see that it's trivial to buy CD's for low prices on independant labels or self published artists.
Records companies also have the obligation to not violate the law, which they flaut regularly. The RIAA has been repeatedly found guilty of anti-compentitive monopoly practices, such as price fixing. They don't stop the behaviour, they just keep paying the fines. Then they take the money they illegally earned and use it to buy a few laws. If the system was working properly the RIAA cartel would've been dissolved due to repeated illegal practices.
Sometimes you have to do something that isn't nice to cause change. For reference and historical example on breaking laws/violating rights look to US Revolutionary War, US Civil War, WWI, WWII. There are lots of examples of rights being infringed, and sometimes it's necessary. Right now the US government has shown that they refuse to allow the system to fix the problem. Net result is that you cannot fix it from within the system.
As has been pointed out by quite a few others, "We The People" have repeatedly and forcefully said what is wanted. And "We The People" have been ignored by the government as they favor artificial entities and their collection of capital. So to answer you, two wrongs don't make a right, but paying off elected representatives does.
I'd say Flash is being used how it was intended. You can do cute and useful things with Flash, but it's not often used to do that; it's often used to reinvent the wheel by ignoring existing standards. I don't want to have to load a SWF interpreter as a plugin to my web browser because somebody wanted a glowing menu. It ends up making the site harder to use by departing from the interface standards and norms. There isn't any good reason to make a website inaccessible by coding your entire interface in Flash instead of HTML.
It's a similar argument to every program having skin/theme abilities. Often every app includes their own, and their own differently styled default. End result is a totally inconsistent UI that makes the system much more difficult to use. What does this get you? More bloated programs that render their UI slower than if they just wrote the program and let the OS do the work.
The WWW's intent was for user-agent inspecific pages. Flash makes the page dependant on a high resolution graphics display. By using Flash, you eliminate text browsers, people who don't want the plugin, people who can't use the plugin, people with poor vision, blind people, foreign languages, etc.
Overall, I'd love to see Flash die, not because it was a bad product, but because web designers seem to not understand how to design web pages. No Flash means a more accessible WWW.
Heh, I tried that on a 386 DX/40 with 4MB RAM. That sucked. The worst I ever did was a 486 SX/33 that was installed with 8MB, and then had 4MB pulled out. Significantly slower than if you had installed on the 4MB.
Amazingly enough, it is in fact quite possible to input this data yourself. Plus, you get to save your company potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because it is possible to have a calendar without having it tightly integrated with email.
Also quite interesting, is that I do run a network of a large number of machines, and nobody has ever seen the need to have this functionality. Everything that Outlook does can be done with seperate apps, and can often be done better. If the people you work with are so lazy/busy that they can't switch tasks to their calendar, then they likely aren't able to do their jobs anyway. Either that, or the IT department was completely inept in their implementation. Sounds to me like yet another case of it needing to be that way because that's the way it "always" was.
In all honesty, the calendar integration with Outlook, Notes, and so many others is just convenient. It isn't at all necessary, as you can do everything within the calendar system and only use email for notifications.
You only need the integration because Microsoft said so, and since Microsoft said so, it has to be that way. Of course, the Start menu is also the most efficient interface, and nothing could be better than Word for doing on-screen layout. *That* mentality is why software hasn't advanced much in so long.
I know someone that deals with the occasional week that he has over fifty meetings, sometimes more. He'll sometimes have fifteen in a day. He uses a paper calendar and an appointment schedule for the day. This is possible because people that have that many meetings also tend to have an administrative assistant.
The silly calendar integration has been a point to keep Microsoft entrenched for years, and the argument still is no better than when it started. There's a million reasons why it isn't necessary, and only one as to why it is.
People do have problems with diverting attention to the radio. This is because to use it, you have to shift attention away from driving to see what station you're on, etc.
Shifting, windows, turn indicators, et cetera are all function of the car. They also do not require you to stop paying attention to the road. I find that shifting makes you pay much more attention to the act of driving, incidentally.
I think you've missed it. TCPA will not make elections or banking any more secure. If you can't do it securely without trusting the client, then you can't do it securely. If I sit at the PC, or compromise it in the right way, I can get data off the TCPA enable machine. Just Like Now.
I don't want someone else being able to force their agenda on my equipment. I can modify my car, I can receive whatever I want with radio equipment, and I can do whatever I want to the computer. Some of the things I can do may be illegal as per government. But the point is that I should be able to use my property as I want, repurcussions aside, as they happen after the fact.
Yes, 10Base2 (ThinNet) has been around for probably 20 years. Nobody wants a 10Mb shared segment connection though. Tons of old 10Mb hubs have a coax ethernet port, as well as media converters being easily available.
Be aware that wire properties are different, for example, you terminate with 50 Ohm vs 75 Ohm and other such things. Also, you use BNC for the actual plug end.
Don't forget that in most areas you can get that service without having to deal with the cable monopoly at all, and only having to deal in passing with the local telco monopoly.
Verizon even managed to get my OneLink line installed first try, with is a first in my experience. A little over two weeks from time of order to installation.
Also you shouldn't leave out that.NET is immature, and has much higher system requirements than Java. Plus, when you develop an application for Java, at the very least it works across Sun's VMs, if not all vendors' Java VMs (as is often the case)..NET? No, sorry, you wanted a user interface. Can't forget how willing MS has been to port the.NET system to things that aren't Windows, as well.
I don't like Java all that much, but most of my objections have been fixed over the years..NET created all of them over again, and added a couple more:
-Small installed base with the.NET software
-.NET CLR is very large to download
-Very large memory requirements
-Noticable slower than native code
-Limited cross-platform support
-Non-ported components
-Windows OS has the only finished implementation
-Lack of need for system to exist
There's already some issues here because these are eight identical drives bought at the same time. They are very likely manufactured by the same machines in the same factory at the same time. This increases the liklihood of multiple disc failures for a variety of reasons. This is why many admins will replace discs on a regular schedule. For example, you buy your eight shiny new discs. Then you run them for a year, and replace one, a few months later you replace another, and so on. Then every two years from then you replace that disc again.
Also, any half-decent RAID implementation will have that hotspare in the machine with its spindle off until it is needed. So it won't have been spinning for months/years at all. Not quite as good as having it in a box as far as wear and tear, but very close.
Actually, RAID5 is faster than single disc. On writes you have a hit on whatever processor is doing your parity calculations. On reads, you get access to the data at faster than single spindle rates and don't need to use parity (but your implementation may). If you have CPU to spare, your write performance improves over single drive as well. You get the performance benefits of RAID0 on reads, and slightly slower than RAID0 write rates.
Farming is a special case, though. If you allow your agriculture to leave the country, then you are dependant on foreign countries to provide you with food. What happens if you enter a war-time situation that involves that country? Now you have no food supply and either have to overpower and take over that country, or surrender your war so that you get food again.
As much as farming is subsidized in the US, it is a vital industry to the US. It also is important to mention that the US is the largest producer of food in the world, which puts the country in a good position as a needed producer to many other countries.
Word starts in under two seconds on my machine, on anything from Windows 98 to Windows 2003. This has been true on my P-200MMX, Celeron 300, P3-800, and Athlon 2600. It is true for the machines of more than 15 people that I know.
I'm do not use the preload crap as I like to have free RAM and short boot times. The difference between 1.2 and 1.8 seconds doesn't concern me very much, and certainly isn't worth the memory usage.
MS puts out a huge amount of effort to make this the case. You don't need to preload a damned thing to make Office applications start fast, they're just written to make sure that it happens.
I've also tested this in Linux using Wine, and it takes slightly longer for Wine to load itself up, and then Word starts just as fast as on native Windows.
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It's not just to combat interference. The twists are done in such a way to also limit crosstalk, and use the reflections in the pairs to speed up data flow, limit the effect of external interferance, and allowing higher line bandwidth and better SNRs. Shielding might even mess this up by reflecting signal back into the strands.
Home Depot, Lowes, sometimes places like Sam's Club, BJ's, Costco. Most DIY type places. Any decent internet hardware store. Sounds like you're not ordering bulk cable anyway, but pre-crimped cable. 1000' for around 70$ for cat5e. Price goes up/down depending on if you need plenum, cat5 or cat 6, etc.
So basically, you paid 60$ for 90' of wire, a markup of around 1000%, or closer to 500% after you buy a whole mess of RJ-45 connectors. Of course, then you don't have 3' cables, you have whatever you need.
Then make your own schema. It's really easy to do, you just have to watch on the numbering. Take a look at a schema file in OpenLDAP, for example, and you'll see what I mean. It's very straight-forward, and they're fairly self-documenting.
If you poke around you can find schema's for apps out here, like Netscape. There are keywords to mark compatible types too.
Heh, well, there's Worcester, but well... it's Worcester. :(
I would hope there wouldn't being legal ramafications. You can kill someone with most things out there, but why should you be responsible for someone else's actions? We're not even talking about someone that purposefully designed a weapon for concealment and quite good ranged kills here. This is just a good antenna that some guy decided to make look like a rifle.
The shape isn't too bad since it's easy to hold and aim that way if you want it to be portable and quick to use. The problem with it is that it does look like a lethal weapon, and that makes using it dangerous. Would've been a better idea to set it up like a telescope on a tripod. Then you still get good portability, but a more stable base.
It may be irresponsible to build a device intended to get you surreptitious access to others people's mistakely considered private data, but no more than that. Perhaps he'll catch some hell for designing an electronic surveillance/eavesdropping device, but I would hope not.
Someone would have to go through some lenghts to make that fatal, too. You would definitely have to pump out a *lot* more power. You'd need a fair bit more than 115VAC@20A(=2300W, 2000W radiant) to saturate a target to lethal exposure at 200m. Your components would all have to be replaced to handle the higher power. You could screw up someone's eyes quick, maybe their bladder over a little time, mess with some guys testes, etc., without much trouble, but near term death isn't likely.
Then again, anybody that can get their hands on a Magnetron can build a more dangerous version of this. Step one: buy a microwave oven. Step two: take it apart for the Magnetron.
That is generally true. Your viewpoint is also missing something, though. Unlike most other forms of life, humans can think past the instinct level. We saw that our involvement in making our environment safer to us by removing other predators caused many animals to overpopulate. In response, we allow people to hunt to a certain controlled degree. This both allows people to hunt without causing extinction, and prevents overpopulation. Since people want to hunt and overpopulation will occur, this isn't a big deal.
As far as leaving nature alone, like I already stated, one of humanity's evolutionary advancements was the ability to alter the environment. This enables humans to make the world more hospitable to them. That is quite an advancement. You're right that it stagnates evolution, but that is likely one reason that humanity evolved into the warring species that we have.
Overall I think people are silly with the "protect the animals" arguments, but everyone is entitled to have their own belief. Just remember that "prey" animals have had "predator" animals evolve to eat them for all time that animals have existed. Humans just ended up being more effective at it than any other animal. We figured out that we can raise herds of animals for our food without having to hunt. Some people just enjoy the hunt; that is also part of our instinct.
Honestly, if they really wanted to use Linux and didn't because of Nero, I'd say the people you know are idiots. The tools available on Linux and friends do all the same things that Nero does, but cost no money. Seriously though, how many people worry about burning a CD when switching OS'? Everything out there supports it, most of them come with software to do it. Windows is one of the few that didn't ship with mastering software, and XP even comes with something for it.
And for the record, Nero isn't a very high profile app at all. It's a good app, no question, but most people don't even know what it is. Plus, there's better apps out there for most of it's functions, Nero just has a rather good implementation of them all.
I think you're right, but you those types of positions are not developer positions. They're not system/network support, and they're not QA/Test.
If you haven't spent the time messing around with the system, tweaking the system, finding it's strengths and limitations, you're not going to be an expert. It's the same thing with cars, the better mechanic is almost always the one that screwed around with cars just for the hell of it.
The people who are passionate about a subject are better at it than those who are not. In the experience of many that post here, this seems to them to be male. In my experience, it's both, but usually in much different areas. Overall, more men went with math/science and more women went with creative/artistic. Perhaps that's just societal norms? It doesn't matter for this discussion.
So there's a large number of women leaving? Perhaps the industry just purged the slackers and the hangers-on that got in just for a quick buck. Regardless, get rid of the unqualified people and who's left will, overall, be more intelligent and more competent.
People sign because they want to have a chance at being famous. The record company comes and says you're good and you'll go somewhere, but you have to sign this paper first. Now those people could go and raise their own duplication costs, and their own advertising budget, and then hire people to go and do that, but most musicians don't have the time, patience, and certainly not the millions for it.
The indie labels don't sell as many CD's, so their costs are higher. They're also businesses, so they charge what they can get away with. Many people will buy the indie label just because it isn't an RIAA affiliate. But aside from that, most indie label don't charge that much for their CD's. Most store will mark up their CD's to the same prices as RIAA product albums and just make more money. Do some research of your own and you'll see that it's trivial to buy CD's for low prices on independant labels or self published artists.
Records companies also have the obligation to not violate the law, which they flaut regularly. The RIAA has been repeatedly found guilty of anti-compentitive monopoly practices, such as price fixing. They don't stop the behaviour, they just keep paying the fines. Then they take the money they illegally earned and use it to buy a few laws. If the system was working properly the RIAA cartel would've been dissolved due to repeated illegal practices.
Sometimes you have to do something that isn't nice to cause change. For reference and historical example on breaking laws/violating rights look to US Revolutionary War, US Civil War, WWI, WWII. There are lots of examples of rights being infringed, and sometimes it's necessary. Right now the US government has shown that they refuse to allow the system to fix the problem. Net result is that you cannot fix it from within the system.
As has been pointed out by quite a few others, "We The People" have repeatedly and forcefully said what is wanted. And "We The People" have been ignored by the government as they favor artificial entities and their collection of capital. So to answer you, two wrongs don't make a right, but paying off elected representatives does.
I'd say Flash is being used how it was intended. You can do cute and useful things with Flash, but it's not often used to do that; it's often used to reinvent the wheel by ignoring existing standards. I don't want to have to load a SWF interpreter as a plugin to my web browser because somebody wanted a glowing menu. It ends up making the site harder to use by departing from the interface standards and norms. There isn't any good reason to make a website inaccessible by coding your entire interface in Flash instead of HTML.
It's a similar argument to every program having skin/theme abilities. Often every app includes their own, and their own differently styled default. End result is a totally inconsistent UI that makes the system much more difficult to use. What does this get you? More bloated programs that render their UI slower than if they just wrote the program and let the OS do the work.
The WWW's intent was for user-agent inspecific pages. Flash makes the page dependant on a high resolution graphics display. By using Flash, you eliminate text browsers, people who don't want the plugin, people who can't use the plugin, people with poor vision, blind people, foreign languages, etc.
Overall, I'd love to see Flash die, not because it was a bad product, but because web designers seem to not understand how to design web pages. No Flash means a more accessible WWW.
Yeah, like hiring smart people such as Alpha processor engineers...
Heh, I tried that on a 386 DX/40 with 4MB RAM. That sucked. The worst I ever did was a 486 SX/33 that was installed with 8MB, and then had 4MB pulled out. Significantly slower than if you had installed on the 4MB.
Amazingly enough, it is in fact quite possible to input this data yourself. Plus, you get to save your company potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because it is possible to have a calendar without having it tightly integrated with email.
Also quite interesting, is that I do run a network of a large number of machines, and nobody has ever seen the need to have this functionality. Everything that Outlook does can be done with seperate apps, and can often be done better. If the people you work with are so lazy/busy that they can't switch tasks to their calendar, then they likely aren't able to do their jobs anyway. Either that, or the IT department was completely inept in their implementation. Sounds to me like yet another case of it needing to be that way because that's the way it "always" was.
In all honesty, the calendar integration with Outlook, Notes, and so many others is just convenient. It isn't at all necessary, as you can do everything within the calendar system and only use email for notifications.
You only need the integration because Microsoft said so, and since Microsoft said so, it has to be that way. Of course, the Start menu is also the most efficient interface, and nothing could be better than Word for doing on-screen layout. *That* mentality is why software hasn't advanced much in so long.
I know someone that deals with the occasional week that he has over fifty meetings, sometimes more. He'll sometimes have fifteen in a day. He uses a paper calendar and an appointment schedule for the day. This is possible because people that have that many meetings also tend to have an administrative assistant.
The silly calendar integration has been a point to keep Microsoft entrenched for years, and the argument still is no better than when it started. There's a million reasons why it isn't necessary, and only one as to why it is.
You can run 100Mb over Cat-3 style four pair, but 100Base-T4 cards are uncommon.
People do have problems with diverting attention to the radio. This is because to use it, you have to shift attention away from driving to see what station you're on, etc.
Shifting, windows, turn indicators, et cetera are all function of the car. They also do not require you to stop paying attention to the road. I find that shifting makes you pay much more attention to the act of driving, incidentally.
I think you've missed it. TCPA will not make elections or banking any more secure. If you can't do it securely without trusting the client, then you can't do it securely. If I sit at the PC, or compromise it in the right way, I can get data off the TCPA enable machine. Just Like Now.
I don't want someone else being able to force their agenda on my equipment. I can modify my car, I can receive whatever I want with radio equipment, and I can do whatever I want to the computer. Some of the things I can do may be illegal as per government. But the point is that I should be able to use my property as I want, repurcussions aside, as they happen after the fact.
Yes, 10Base2 (ThinNet) has been around for probably 20 years. Nobody wants a 10Mb shared segment connection though. Tons of old 10Mb hubs have a coax ethernet port, as well as media converters being easily available.
Be aware that wire properties are different, for example, you terminate with 50 Ohm vs 75 Ohm and other such things. Also, you use BNC for the actual plug end.
Don't forget that in most areas you can get that service without having to deal with the cable monopoly at all, and only having to deal in passing with the local telco monopoly.
Verizon even managed to get my OneLink line installed first try, with is a first in my experience. A little over two weeks from time of order to installation.
Also you shouldn't leave out that .NET is immature, and has much higher system requirements than Java. Plus, when you develop an application for Java, at the very least it works across Sun's VMs, if not all vendors' Java VMs (as is often the case). .NET? No, sorry, you wanted a user interface. Can't forget how willing MS has been to port the .NET system to things that aren't Windows, as well.
.NET created all of them over again, and added a couple more: .NET software
I don't like Java all that much, but most of my objections have been fixed over the years.
-Small installed base with the
-.NET CLR is very large to download
-Very large memory requirements
-Noticable slower than native code
-Limited cross-platform support
-Non-ported components
-Windows OS has the only finished implementation
-Lack of need for system to exist
Try Shift+F10 - same as a right click. Similarly CTRL+ESC is the start menu, CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is Task Manager, Windows+Pause is System Properties, etc.
It can mount it as an ext2 filesystem just fine.
There's already some issues here because these are eight identical drives bought at the same time. They are very likely manufactured by the same machines in the same factory at the same time. This increases the liklihood of multiple disc failures for a variety of reasons. This is why many admins will replace discs on a regular schedule. For example, you buy your eight shiny new discs. Then you run them for a year, and replace one, a few months later you replace another, and so on. Then every two years from then you replace that disc again.
Also, any half-decent RAID implementation will have that hotspare in the machine with its spindle off until it is needed. So it won't have been spinning for months/years at all. Not quite as good as having it in a box as far as wear and tear, but very close.
Actually, RAID5 is faster than single disc. On writes you have a hit on whatever processor is doing your parity calculations. On reads, you get access to the data at faster than single spindle rates and don't need to use parity (but your implementation may). If you have CPU to spare, your write performance improves over single drive as well. You get the performance benefits of RAID0 on reads, and slightly slower than RAID0 write rates.
Farming is a special case, though. If you allow your agriculture to leave the country, then you are dependant on foreign countries to provide you with food. What happens if you enter a war-time situation that involves that country? Now you have no food supply and either have to overpower and take over that country, or surrender your war so that you get food again.
As much as farming is subsidized in the US, it is a vital industry to the US. It also is important to mention that the US is the largest producer of food in the world, which puts the country in a good position as a needed producer to many other countries.
Word starts in under two seconds on my machine, on anything from Windows 98 to Windows 2003. This has been true on my P-200MMX, Celeron 300, P3-800, and Athlon 2600. It is true for the machines of more than 15 people that I know.
I'm do not use the preload crap as I like to have free RAM and short boot times. The difference between 1.2 and 1.8 seconds doesn't concern me very much, and certainly isn't worth the memory usage.
MS puts out a huge amount of effort to make this the case. You don't need to preload a damned thing to make Office applications start fast, they're just written to make sure that it happens.
I've also tested this in Linux using Wine, and it takes slightly longer for Wine to load itself up, and then Word starts just as fast as on native Windows.