Can I have all your money and stuff and pull the plug now? Look she's breathing... that means "yes".
PROFIT!
Of course, only a dickhead would do that... Paging Dickhead Cheney... paging Dickhead Cheney. (oops... forgot, his preferred weapon is a few shots of booze and a shot to the head).
The original catastrophic failure statistics were supposed to be between one in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000. This is how the program was sold - a fleet of 8 shuttles with a launch a week, with a very low risk of loss during the life of the program. Real life is another story - total failure odds worse than 1 in 100, and turn-around times that are ludicrous and costly (nearly half a billion - disposables would be cheaper).
NASA also originally projected (1976) up to 75 flights a year... for 10 to 12 years. Here's what the program looked like back in 1980 - a financial disaster. Read about the problems with ice and the tiles, and all the other bugaboos. The Saturn 5 could have outdone the shuttle in every way - cost per mission, payload to LEO (5-1/2x as much). Heck, the Saturn V could put twice as much in orbit around the MOON than the shuttle can put into earth orbit.
Everyone in the space community admits that the shuttles were a waste of money, draining funding from all other areas.
"Now is not the time to experiment. They can certainly perform experiments of this type using unmanned vehicles and gain the information they need that way. That is how they tested heat shield materials in the olden, golden days."
A few points:
"Now is not the time to experiment."
Better to run an experiment now, when if the patch doesn't work, its not going to lead to a catastrophic failure.
"They can certainly perform experiments of this type using unmanned vehicles"
This will not give them information on how well humans can do the patching in a space suit, and on whether the procedures worked out are optimal, or even possible. Here they can call it off if reality doesn't conform to their expectations. You can't test this without humans.
"That is how they tested heat shield materials in the olden, golden days."
Riiiight... like god forbid they should actually conduct (gasp) an experiment (one that can be called off if things get wonky, perhaps unlike the next gouge) to see if the repair protocol works.
Better to find the bugs in the checklist now than when they can't call it off.
This isn't about risk mitigation. One day, this WILL have to be dealt with. Its like a hard drive crash - its not "if", its "when". So you prepare accordingly, so as to mitigate future risks.
Bullshit. They should attemt a repair, if only to get data on how efective and practical repairs are. They'll need this information for future missions, when they might have to deal with larger gouges. They ow have a chance to analyse the effectiveness of the patch procedure, and make any necessary changes. They also probably have a "motivated crew", if you know what I mean...
Or is the possibility of repair just the NASA equivalent of "security theatre"?
"Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto..."
Blame CANADA!
From the press statement:
The McKenzie Brothers explain Nimtz and Stahlhofen's observations by way of analogy with a 20-car train departing Chicago for New York with 100 cases of 24 Molsons Beer ("two-fours" in Kanuck-speak). The stopwatch starts when the centre of the train leaves the station, but the person holding the stopwatch drinks a case of 24 at each stop. So when the train arrives in New York, now comprising only two cases of beer, the person holding the stopwatch wakes up from his drunken stupor, doesn't remember a thing for the last 23 hours, can't find the stopwatch (he sold it to someone to stake him the last 2 cases) and now claims the trip was "instantaneous" although the train itself hasn't exceeded its reported speed.
And there you have it - The McKenzie Brothers' explanation... Beer DOES affect relativity, in a relative sort of way. I guess.
" looks like the end is near for SCO, which still owes Novell 95 percent of the SVRX UNIX royalties it collected from Microsoft and Sun through the SCOsource program."
Actually, the deal was that SCO remits 100% to Novell, then Novell pays them a 5% commission. Kimball ruled that SCO broke their fiduciary duty to Novell; SCO is no longer able to claim the 5% commission.
The only question left is how much of the Sun and Microsoft licenses were for Novell's stuff?
And its on such arguments that lawyers make their fortunes:-) The "like ourselves" was a restriction to a subset of all conscious things, like whales, dolphins, and eventually AI - which (AI) is why I thought you said "things" instead of "beings". Perhaps what you intended, and what you actually said, were two different things?
You have to open your passport to get it scanned, and already there are readers that can read it from several meters away (not the several inches the government first claimed). Theres as much, or more, chance of identity theft as with your debit or credit card at the local gas station or convenience store - more, actually, since you don't need to manually pass the passport through a second card reader to clone it.
So what's to prevent a rent-a-cop or another person in line from reading the info from a bunch of people's passports, then selling their identities, same as credit cards>
Part of the reason why it works is that if a party picks a leader that the rest of the country doesn't want, ALL the candidates will have lower poll numbers, punishing the whole party for making an unpopular choice for leader. This means that, while an unpopular leader could be elected in his or her riding, and be nominated to lead the country, the party that does that will not be elected.
Checks and balances...
In other words, pick someone as leader who won't harm your chances at the polls across the country, or you'll be sitting on the wrong side of the house, or on the unemployment lines.
Unfortunately, getting christians to actually READ the whole bible is a task in itself.
One prof. at Dallas Theological tried an experiment - the first year, he asked all his students (who all claimed they had been "called by god" to be pastors) how many of them had actually read the whole bible - none had.
4 years later, just before they graduated, he asked the same question, with the same results.
Excuses were easy enough - "Don't have the time", "concentrating on the most important parts", whatever... My favorite question is "How can you claim to believe the bible when you haven't even read all of it?"
Beaing able to say I've read through the whole thing somewhere between 12 and 20 times, (and then trolling them to no end about its' contents) this just pisses them off.
Energy costs... not just for the hardware, but for the additional cooling, etc. Then there's the problems of concurrency, etc., which get worse the more cpus you throw at a problem, which is why throwing more servers into the mix doesn't scale linearly.
A lot of that is scripts that load a lot of code that is parsed, loads a lot of other code that is also parsed, and then finally, after 50 to 100 or more files are loaded and parsed, it gets around to actually starting to DO something.
This is SO wasteful. And then there are the "templating solutions"; their "compiled templates" aren't - at least not in the true meaning of the word compiled. They're not even optimized by removing redundant spacing, variable name reduction, etc.
Blackwater will be quite happy to supply all the personel needed for monitoring your security, citizen.
However, your asking the question shows that you are attempting to subvert the security of the United States by calling into question the efficacy of our surveillance systems, inspiring insecurity in people's minds.
You are a terrorist!
.
.
.
Heck, under the new regime, singing a few bars of "Alice's Restaurant" is probably a life term...
"
I don't think many Americans carry their passports around - if they even have one. Even if they did, the passport is constructed so that you can't read the RFID chip when it is closed."
Maybe they can't read it today... but what about 5 years from now? 10 years from now? Tech changes. Look at your computer. Its probably running a cpu with a feature size that was supposedly impossible to reach outside a research lab, never mind in production quantities...
- - NOTE: Stevie is not representative of homeless people in general. For example, the fastest growing group of homeless people are women and children in dire straits, whose homelessness is caused by such events as seeking refuge from an abusive relative, death of a spouse, job loss, or illness. The comments below are specific to Stevie, not homeless people in general.
Stevie blathered:
"Mostly I just don't want to be homeless anymore but neither am I going to acquiesce to being shoveled back into the animal farm."
Why not do something radical, like get a job? Oh, right... you said you won't take a job except for one that meets your conditions. It has to be in exactly the field you claim to be so good in (though if you're that good, why don't you have a job?), at the pay you think you're worth, with the working conditions you think you deserve, that its the employers' responsibility to "give you a leg up", and that anything else is "dishonest."
Those are your words.
Take some meds, get a haircut, and start applying for a job more in line with your real qualifications, not your inflated delusion of self-worth.
The job rules are simple:
After one year out of work, a person with 5 years previous experience is only worth as much as a recent graduate with one or two year's current experience;
After two years out of work, a person with 5 years previous experience is worth less than a recent graduate with no experience;
After three to five years out of work, a person with 5 years experience is no longer a suitable job candidate in their field.
The other rules are also simple:
Think too highly of yourself, and others will compensate by thinking less of you;
Blame everyone else, and people will see you don't accept responsibility;
Demand that everyone agrees with you, and eventually nobody will.
You're your own worst enemy. You keep complaining, but you post here under multiple accounts, whine, whine, whine about how unfair employers are and how they owe you a job with specific conditions and pay because that's what you went to school for. Grow up - because with your crap attitude, you're not even qualified for a "do you want fries with that" McJob.
You say you don't want to go into any of the programs available for the homeless because you "don't want to be stereotyped with the alcoholics and the druggies". How is anyone who thinks they're "too good" any better? You're actually worse - they at least admit they have a problem, and aren't too full of false self-pride to take advantage of an opportunity for some help.
A lot of people end up homeless due to misfortune, divorce, job loss, medical bills, addictions, bad decisions, whatever. This doesn't make them "bad people" - but your claim that you don't want to be "stereotyped" as "one of them" shows how you think yourself so much better.
Stop thinking you're better than people who had the guts to take jobs that you would consider "beneath you." You're not. You can't even troll properly, FFS.
And stop complaining about anyone stalking you; remember how you pulled this BS a couple of weeks ago... if anyone was stalking, it was you, and this isn't the first time you've pulled this crap on someone. You're a hypocritical dickhead.
[ This has been a public service announcement. Thank you for your patience ]
Look at your cell phone. It probably has a video camera and the ability to upload video clips.
You can now buy cell phones that do real-time video conversations. Get used to everyone being under surveillance by everyone else. Its the real-world verison of "Specks" - a recurring idea from sci-fi where people wear glasses that constantly relay what they're watching to servers, and they can flag anything they see for attention, so don't piss off that old lady on the park benk looking at you funny!
Of course, you can always just carry a laser pointer to blind the camera. Or a high-output IR device, to saturate all the ccds in the area.
Well, for starters, the article anthropomorphized the universe. It belongs with religous writings, not science.
"Some ask: so what if humans pass into history? It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself".
Factual errors in the above statement:
"It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature"
There is no evidence that "nature" can "experience" a tragedy. There is no evidence that nature has more consciousness than a sack of rocks.
"Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty"
This presupposes not just a human-centered concept of beauty, but that we, as humans, are the only beings capable of witnessing anything. Never mind that the author posits (point #1) that "nature" can "experience" tragedy; if nature can "experience tragedy", then why would nature need us to be able to experience beauty?
"As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself"
Just because Sagan said it, doesn't make it true. We are undoubtably here, and yet there is no proof that the universe "knows itself" today, except in quasi-religious and religious belief systems that posit a god or other supernatural being.
The best reasons for going into space are because its there, we want to, and we can make good use of it. Not some claptrap about if we pass away its a tragedy for nature, when there's more than ample evidence that, if anything, we ourselves are a tragedy on a daily basis. Go into space, by all means. I'm 100% for that, but go because we can, because we want to, because we're curious, because we can find uses for the stuff we find out there, for the knowledge we'll acquire, for the insights we'll develop, because we want the elbow room, or a room with a spectacular view, or to do something different.
These are real reasons to go. Go because WE WANT TO, not because of some metaphysical bullshit argument. The latter just make it easier to stereotype those who see space as a place to expand as just wild-eyed dreamers. The article does us a disservice. I say put the writer out the next airlock:-)
"Because the php scripts are written by a C programmer. I spend at least 10% of my time at work trying to explain to compiled language programmers how to write in a scripted language. They are simply used to include everything and the kitchen sink and rely on compiler to sort it out."
Hey, I resemble that remark!:-)
Actually, I'm not a big fan of code bloat in c/c++ either. That's why I try to avoid the STL if I can, even though it does make life easier (TR1 brings regexes to the standard libraries, for example).
"If you apt-get, say, apache2, it automatically starts it. That's not cool."
I would assume that if someone goes to the effort to install apache, they want to run it, and that's probably what Ubuntu does. Having said that, the experience of a coworker was different. He didn't want to run the OpenSUSE disk I had handy, so he borrowed an Ubuntu disk. Of course, that meant that the machine absolutely sucked for development. Missing servers, development tools, libraries, files...
Each distro has its good and bad points, depending on what you want to do with it. I always install almost everything on teh DVD, then go through services and turn on only those I want, turn off all the others, and I'm happy. Its only an exra 10 minutes, and a lot quicker than continually having to pause to install some file that was available in a previous release but got "dropped on the floor."
lynx, links, wget, and curl are my friends. Plus, I have a half-decent connection (10mpbs - I don't want to pay for a 20mbps connection - 10/1 is good enough for sharing linux isos).
I use tree a fair amount of the time - its really handy for grepping only parts of a source tree, for example, or for when I want to save a quick snapshot of a directory layout to a plain-text file, before making any serious mods that I may live to regret:-)
Its also handy in shell scripts. I just like my older, simpler tools for some jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
"on a respirator"
Of course, only a dickhead would do that ... Paging Dickhead Cheney ... paging Dickhead Cheney. (oops ... forgot, his preferred weapon is a few shots of booze and a shot to the head).
The original catastrophic failure statistics were supposed to be between one in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000. This is how the program was sold - a fleet of 8 shuttles with a launch a week, with a very low risk of loss during the life of the program. Real life is another story - total failure odds worse than 1 in 100, and turn-around times that are ludicrous and costly (nearly half a billion - disposables would be cheaper).
NASA also originally projected (1976) up to 75 flights a year ... for 10 to 12 years. Here's what the program looked like back in 1980 - a financial disaster. Read about the problems with ice and the tiles, and all the other bugaboos. The Saturn 5 could have outdone the shuttle in every way - cost per mission, payload to LEO (5-1/2x as much). Heck, the Saturn V could put twice as much in orbit around the MOON than the shuttle can put into earth orbit.
Everyone in the space community admits that the shuttles were a waste of money, draining funding from all other areas.
"Now is not the time to experiment. They can certainly perform experiments of this type using unmanned vehicles and gain the information they need that way. That is how they tested heat shield materials in the olden, golden days."
A few points:
Better to run an experiment now, when if the patch doesn't work, its not going to lead to a catastrophic failure.
This will not give them information on how well humans can do the patching in a space suit, and on whether the procedures worked out are optimal, or even possible. Here they can call it off if reality doesn't conform to their expectations. You can't test this without humans.
And even in the olden, golden days, you needed people in the loop to make decisions and act on them. Remember the warning light that said Glenn's Mercury capsule's heat shield was loose?.
Even today, its too bad there's nobody around to wipe the dust of the Mars rovers' solar cells ... humans are the best general-purpose tool ever.
Riiiight ... like god forbid they should actually conduct (gasp) an experiment (one that can be called off if things get wonky, perhaps unlike the next gouge) to see if the repair protocol works.
Better to find the bugs in the checklist now than when they can't call it off.
This isn't about risk mitigation. One day, this WILL have to be dealt with. Its like a hard drive crash - its not "if", its "when". So you prepare accordingly, so as to mitigate future risks.
Bullshit. They should attemt a repair, if only to get data on how efective and practical repairs are. They'll need this information for future missions, when they might have to deal with larger gouges. They ow have a chance to analyse the effectiveness of the patch procedure, and make any necessary changes. They also probably have a "motivated crew", if you know what I mean ...
Or is the possibility of repair just the NASA equivalent of "security theatre"?
"Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto ..."
Blame CANADA!
From the press statement:
And there you have it - The McKenzie Brothers' explanation... Beer DOES affect relativity, in a relative sort of way. I guess.
"Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
Politicians want to know what they're buying when they buy an election. They KNOW Diebold can deliver the votes!
I LOVE IT!
" looks like the end is near for SCO, which still owes Novell 95 percent of the SVRX UNIX royalties it collected from Microsoft and Sun through the SCOsource program."
Actually, the deal was that SCO remits 100% to Novell, then Novell pays them a 5% commission. Kimball ruled that SCO broke their fiduciary duty to Novell; SCO is no longer able to claim the 5% commission.
The only question left is how much of the Sun and Microsoft licenses were for Novell's stuff?
And its on such arguments that lawyers make their fortunes :-) The "like ourselves" was a restriction to a subset of all conscious things, like whales, dolphins, and eventually AI - which (AI) is why I thought you said "things" instead of "beings". Perhaps what you intended, and what you actually said, were two different things?
You have to open your passport to get it scanned, and already there are readers that can read it from several meters away (not the several inches the government first claimed). Theres as much, or more, chance of identity theft as with your debit or credit card at the local gas station or convenience store - more, actually, since you don't need to manually pass the passport through a second card reader to clone it.
So what's to prevent a rent-a-cop or another person in line from reading the info from a bunch of people's passports, then selling their identities, same as credit cards>
Checks and balances ...
In other words, pick someone as leader who won't harm your chances at the polls across the country, or you'll be sitting on the wrong side of the house, or on the unemployment lines.
Unfortunately, getting christians to actually READ the whole bible is a task in itself.
One prof. at Dallas Theological tried an experiment - the first year, he asked all his students (who all claimed they had been "called by god" to be pastors) how many of them had actually read the whole bible - none had.
4 years later, just before they graduated, he asked the same question, with the same results.
Excuses were easy enough - "Don't have the time", "concentrating on the most important parts", whatever ... My favorite question is "How can you claim to believe the bible when you haven't even read all of it?"
Beaing able to say I've read through the whole thing somewhere between 12 and 20 times, (and then trolling them to no end about its' contents) this just pisses them off.
Energy costs ... not just for the hardware, but for the additional cooling, etc. Then there's the problems of concurrency, etc., which get worse the more cpus you throw at a problem, which is why throwing more servers into the mix doesn't scale linearly.
A lot of that is scripts that load a lot of code that is parsed, loads a lot of other code that is also parsed, and then finally, after 50 to 100 or more files are loaded and parsed, it gets around to actually starting to DO something.
This is SO wasteful. And then there are the "templating solutions"; their "compiled templates" aren't - at least not in the true meaning of the word compiled. They're not even optimized by removing redundant spacing, variable name reduction, etc.
Its sad.
Blackwater will be quite happy to supply all the personel needed for monitoring your security, citizen.
However, your asking the question shows that you are attempting to subvert the security of the United States by calling into question the efficacy of our surveillance systems, inspiring insecurity in people's minds.
You are a terrorist!
.
.
.
Heck, under the new regime, singing a few bars of "Alice's Restaurant" is probably a life term ...
" I don't think many Americans carry their passports around - if they even have one. Even if they did, the passport is constructed so that you can't read the RFID chip when it is closed."
That's what they want you to believe ...
other problems
Maybe they can't read it today ... but what about 5 years from now? 10 years from now? Tech changes. Look at your computer. Its probably running a cpu with a feature size that was supposedly impossible to reach outside a research lab, never mind in production quantities...
[ This post is a Public Service Announcement ]
- - NOTE: Stevie is not representative of homeless people in general. For example, the fastest growing group of homeless people are women and children in dire straits, whose homelessness is caused by such events as seeking refuge from an abusive relative, death of a spouse, job loss, or illness. The comments below are specific to Stevie, not homeless people in general.
Stevie blathered:
Why not do something radical, like get a job? Oh, right ... you said you won't take a job except for one that meets your conditions. It has to be in exactly the field you claim to be so good in (though if you're that good, why don't you have a job?), at the pay you think you're worth, with the working conditions you think you deserve, that its the employers' responsibility to "give you a leg up", and that anything else is "dishonest."
Those are your words.
Take some meds, get a haircut, and start applying for a job more in line with your real qualifications, not your inflated delusion of self-worth.
The job rules are simple:
The other rules are also simple:
You're your own worst enemy. You keep complaining, but you post here under multiple accounts, whine, whine, whine about how unfair employers are and how they owe you a job with specific conditions and pay because that's what you went to school for. Grow up - because with your crap attitude, you're not even qualified for a "do you want fries with that" McJob.
You say you don't want to go into any of the programs available for the homeless because you "don't want to be stereotyped with the alcoholics and the druggies". How is anyone who thinks they're "too good" any better? You're actually worse - they at least admit they have a problem, and aren't too full of false self-pride to take advantage of an opportunity for some help.
A lot of people end up homeless due to misfortune, divorce, job loss, medical bills, addictions, bad decisions, whatever. This doesn't make them "bad people" - but your claim that you don't want to be "stereotyped" as "one of them" shows how you think yourself so much better.
Stop thinking you're better than people who had the guts to take jobs that you would consider "beneath you." You're not. You can't even troll properly, FFS.
And stop complaining about anyone stalking you; remember how you pulled this BS a couple of weeks ago ... if anyone was stalking, it was you, and this isn't the first time you've pulled this crap on someone. You're a hypocritical dickhead.
[ This has been a public service announcement. Thank you for your patience ]
Look at your cell phone. It probably has a video camera and the ability to upload video clips.
You can now buy cell phones that do real-time video conversations. Get used to everyone being under surveillance by everyone else. Its the real-world verison of "Specks" - a recurring idea from sci-fi where people wear glasses that constantly relay what they're watching to servers, and they can flag anything they see for attention, so don't piss off that old lady on the park benk looking at you funny!
Of course, you can always just carry a laser pointer to blind the camera. Or a high-output IR device, to saturate all the ccds in the area.
Well, for starters, the article anthropomorphized the universe. It belongs with religous writings, not science.
"Some ask: so what if humans pass into history? It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself".
Factual errors in the above statement:
There is no evidence that "nature" can "experience" a tragedy. There is no evidence that nature has more consciousness than a sack of rocks.
This presupposes not just a human-centered concept of beauty, but that we, as humans, are the only beings capable of witnessing anything. Never mind that the author posits (point #1) that "nature" can "experience" tragedy; if nature can "experience tragedy", then why would nature need us to be able to experience beauty?
Just because Sagan said it, doesn't make it true. We are undoubtably here, and yet there is no proof that the universe "knows itself" today, except in quasi-religious and religious belief systems that posit a god or other supernatural being.
The best reasons for going into space are because its there, we want to, and we can make good use of it. Not some claptrap about if we pass away its a tragedy for nature, when there's more than ample evidence that, if anything, we ourselves are a tragedy on a daily basis. Go into space, by all means. I'm 100% for that, but go because we can, because we want to, because we're curious, because we can find uses for the stuff we find out there, for the knowledge we'll acquire, for the insights we'll develop, because we want the elbow room, or a room with a spectacular view, or to do something different.
These are real reasons to go. Go because WE WANT TO, not because of some metaphysical bullshit argument. The latter just make it easier to stereotype those who see space as a place to expand as just wild-eyed dreamers. The article does us a disservice. I say put the writer out the next airlock :-)
"China to Deploy World's Largest People Tracking Network"
- We can now avoid embarrasing mistakes, like calling Greenpeace to help remove a "beached whale" that's just a "Large Person" sunbathing
- They take up too much space in checkout aisles - if we can track them, we'll know when its safe to shop
- You want to track which "all-you-can-eat" they're hanging out at tonight - so you can avoid it
- Tracking them will avoid conflicts in lineups because "they smell funny"
- Once we track them, we can make sure they're wearing their backup alarms
- We can implement "no-fridge exclusionary zones" for their own good
- In an emergency, we can locate them quickly, and line them up to use them as a defensive shield against, say asteroids
- Knowing their history, we can avoid buying cars they once owned, with their associated suspension and steering problems
- We can enhance safety by making sure that any elevator refuses to take on more than one "Huge Person"
- Instead of charging everyone more for junk food, we can only tax "Huge People"
Go, China!"Because the php scripts are written by a C programmer. I spend at least 10% of my time at work trying to explain to compiled language programmers how to write in a scripted language. They are simply used to include everything and the kitchen sink and rely on compiler to sort it out."
Hey, I resemble that remark! :-)
Actually, I'm not a big fan of code bloat in c/c++ either. That's why I try to avoid the STL if I can, even though it does make life easier (TR1 brings regexes to the standard libraries, for example).
"If you apt-get, say, apache2, it automatically starts it. That's not cool."
I would assume that if someone goes to the effort to install apache, they want to run it, and that's probably what Ubuntu does. Having said that, the experience of a coworker was different. He didn't want to run the OpenSUSE disk I had handy, so he borrowed an Ubuntu disk. Of course, that meant that the machine absolutely sucked for development. Missing servers, development tools, libraries, files ...
Each distro has its good and bad points, depending on what you want to do with it. I always install almost everything on teh DVD, then go through services and turn on only those I want, turn off all the others, and I'm happy. Its only an exra 10 minutes, and a lot quicker than continually having to pause to install some file that was available in a previous release but got "dropped on the floor."
lynx, links, wget, and curl are my friends. Plus, I have a half-decent connection (10mpbs - I don't want to pay for a 20mbps connection - 10/1 is good enough for sharing linux isos).
I *was* going to include MB for megabytes, just to get all the case modders going "Its MotherBoard, you f%@#tard!", but its not Tuesday :-)
I use tree a fair amount of the time - its really handy for grepping only parts of a source tree, for example, or for when I want to save a quick snapshot of a directory layout to a plain-text file, before making any serious mods that I may live to regret :-)
Its also handy in shell scripts. I just like my older, simpler tools for some jobs.