Try installing Windows on a system that's got some linux on it, and you'll get really scared too. Many of the Linux installers I've tried (Caldera Suse, RHEL, Ubuntu 6.x) have been better than the Windows equivalent in terms of user-friendliness and tweakability.
The thing that really kills me about that is this: Suse or Red Hat are deemed Server-side Linux distros and are seen as overly complex by many. The installation procedure will allow you to pin point exactly which segments of which physical disk to use for certain things if you want to. People don't like it because it's too technically challenging.
Ubuntu doesn't ask that many questions from the get-go, because it's supposed to be a point 'n' click type of Linux distro, but then people turn around and don't like it because it doesn't present them with enough of a technical challenge.
But tell me, if you have a computer with physical disks 0 and 1, both of which have Linux Partitions on them, and you run the Windows installer to get it to dual boot, what will happen to: - at least one of those disks - the data on it - your boot loader or the MBR if you're not careful
Yet Windows doesn't get binned. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-windows. I'm writing it on a Windows XP laptop which works beautifully for me. My other box is a Windows XP dual core box too, and the only non-windows computer in my personal household is a Nintendo Wii. And for the moment I am not interested in changing that, because I am a gamer.
But the reason the market at large won't adopt Linux for the desktop is simple. It's just that Windows is entrenched, and Linux isn't. So flaws of Windows are absolved to a large degree, while flaws in Linux get made into poster children for not moving from Windows. Such is human nature. In Holland we say "Wat de boer niet kent, vreet ie niet" which means so much as "What the farmer don't know, he don't eat".
I'm not sure if I agree. To be honest, I prefer the "horny MILF" format, but it would not surprise me if most of/. ultimately will choose the "AsianTeenSluts" for their money, which means Sony is making inroads.
And I'm happy for it, because it's one of the ugliest cars I ever saw.
Back in the mid nineties, I owned a car. A Toyota Corolla from the mid-eighties. It was a good car, but boy was it ugly. The same squarish ugly straight lines and eighties bling as the delorean and many other cars of the time. And without the comfortable hydraulic suspension of the Citroen BX for example.
To ensure me getting modded down, I would also like to state that Americans just can't build cars anyway. There is a substitute for Cubic Inches, and it's called technology. Furthermore, the cornering of said vehicles leaves something to be desired.
I'll take a Volvo S60/V40 2.4T or a Saab 9-3 1.9 Common rail Turbo Diesel with a lowered chassis any day over any muscle car you people can trow at it.
I never said Video Games, Sports, Movies and Music were uncivilized. Really, I think movies and music can be the poster children for civilization in many ways. Video games and sports strike me as more base because most of them seem to cater to the reptile brain more than higher functions... Don't get me wrong, I like 'm that way too. Still, they are not uncivilized. Quite the contrary, good sportsmanship is also a behaviour I would call civil.
What I said was "as long as adults get unduly excited about these things" we can't claim civilization. In my eyes, this alludes to football fans who kill and maim for their team. It alludes to all kinds of misbehaviour associated with fan-dom which I find thouroughly lower class and uncivilized. This extends to the people that root for a certain view on life or religious faction and are willing to misbehave in the same manner to enforce their clan's views.
I guess it's just jolly bad sportsmanship that irks me.
> adults in the civilized world will get quite excited over at least one "professional" sport.
You do not disprove the notion that fantasy is childish by saying that sports are too. It is not a logical argument. Yet you did stumble upon an interesting chain of thought:
As long as most adults get unduly excited about some or other professional sport I don't feel we can call it a civilized world by any stretch of the imagination.
But your comment did remind me of Chris Rock saying "When I'm at the ATM in the middle of the night, I ain't lookin' over my shoulders for the media, I'm lookin' for Niggas"
Not all Arabs I know like fucking goats, no matter how much Khomeini really did approve of it, just like not all black people rob ATM users...:-D
You're lucky that comment was so damn funny, because otherwise I'd be complaining about your obvious bigotry, racism and your general putting down of an entire people you haven't met.:-D
It's a game. With a bit of luck, you managed to hussle some money out of it. Then others move in. Deal.
Did I mention it's a game? This second life is driving people in directions that are decidedly unhealthy, and I would almost vote to get rid of that game.
> An open question...why 44.1khz for the sampling rate?
In 1996 I started doing CD-R support for HP. Back then it was a Philips-OEM HP 4020i with an AdvanSys SCSI controller. The things were expensive as hell, and hard to use given the state of computers and FirmWare at the time. Buffer Underrun was the most dreaded message around as CD-R disks retailed for 25 Guilders (10 Euros, 13 USD) a pop.
Anyway, during my initial training on CD's I got a technology overview where it was explained that the typical human ear can "hear" a sampling rate of 20 Khz. There is a rule called the Nyquist Criterion that says that digital sampling must double that to not hurt audio quality for human consumption. Why exactly 44.1 was chosen and not, say, 42 or the more logical 48 had to do with the fact that the original CD mastering equipment was pseudo video equipment. I believe this page explains it nicely:
There is no ethical cut-off point. Firstly, ethics are arbitrary notions of what the general consensus would call "acceptable behavior", so ultimately they are moot.
With regards to the question you pose, there is only one answer: I would eat all of the animals mentioned above. Funnily enough you stick to mammals, but I would also include snails, frogs, seafood of all kinds and fish to the list. Insects I'm not too fond of, they don't look yummy. However, if my survival was at stake both you, your kids and any insect I can get my hands on are dead meat. And that goes for any edible plants I find along the way too.
Frankly, the notion that humans are intrinsically more valuable than other life-forms is folly. There's 7 billion of us, and we're quite the epidemic. Eating some of those specimens would be a minor collateral, 's all. Fortunately, we humans currently swing the biggest evolutionary sticks, so we are at the top of the food chain.
This is why in Holland, you pay road taxes rather than fuel taxes. Don't get me wrong, there are fuel-taxes as well (accijnzen) and they are HEFTY.
However, if you have a vehicle, you can legally drive it on any fuel you please as long as you pay the road tax. Road tax is determined by the sheer weight of the car and the type of engine (ie the expected emissions) respectively.
In Switzerland, for example, you have to purchase a sticker upon entry with a foreign car. This sticker will allow you to drive the car in Switzerland that year. It is also a form or road tax, but a flat rate.
Both systems seem more fair and less hypocritical than the NC one.
So does Brian Adams, but I don't see you bombing him. Although your government did formally apologize for him.
With regards to capability vs intent: The Dutch are 16 mio people right now. Before, when they were involved in global slave-trading, empire building, ripping off natives of various countries and killing innocent people left, right and center, they were many, many fewer than 16 million.
There's 30 million Canadians. Surely they can do *something* evil? Besides spawning Shania, Brian and Celine, that is.
Therefore, I postulate the Canadians don't have the intent to do evil. Gee. Rare condition.
I once worked for the HP-UX group of the Swedish Airspace Authority, and they had HP-UX Service Guard clusters set up with shared storage consisting of manually configured Extent-striped LVM sets on JBOD SCSI disks. Whenever one disk would fail, the whole team would grind to a halt because the only one who could judge the impact on the systems was the guy who built the LVM groups in the first place.
What I'm trying to say here is the following: Sure, you can employ a load of tricks to use all your space on those drives. Hell, if a third, 1.5 TB set of disks comes along, you can rinse and repeat with those. You'll end up with a logical disk structure that equals the gordian knot in complexity and which will become totally unmanageable. This in turn will mean that somewhere, sometime when something happens, you WILL fuck up trying to rebuild things in case of a disk crash.
OS based volume management should never, ever become more complex than RAID 1 with the simplest of mirror sets. Please. For performance' sake. For administration's sake. For your sake.
Raid 5: - Minimal 3 disks - 1 disk equivalent for parity, so 2/3 capacity for data in case of three disks - Better do it in Hardware. OS striping will cost a performance hit, if that's an important consideration. - There are two implementations... Block-striping meaning parity is also distributed per block over the whole array and single-disk parity. - Read speeds will generally be good, but write speeds can suffer due to extra parity information writes.
This makes RAID 5 good for file-sharing applications where the performance is not absolutely the biggest consideration. Please be aware that the larger you make your raid set, the larger the chance of losing data. If you have 10 disks in one raid five set, redundancy is one spindle. The chance that two disks fail and wipe out your data is there. Also note that in any raid set, the smallest disk will indeed determine the capacity. 2x500GB + 1x1TB will give you 1TB in raw space because the other half of the third disk cannot contain redundant information. Any RAID controller that doesn't stick to that rule will not offer you redundancy.
RAID 1: - One disk for data, one disk for the mirror. - Write speeds are somewhat impacted but less than RAID 5. - Read speeds tend (for some reason) to still equal RAID 5 or better them. - High cost, high redundancy.
RAID 0: - No redundancy - Excellent read/write performance due to striping across multiple spindles without any added operations. - Low cost
RAID 0 is higher risk than just a bunch of IDE disks on some buses because you lump it together on one volume, and if one disk fails the entire volume is gone.
Now in all of the above, it is *important* to realize you're only safe-guarding yourself against a *degree* of physical damage. Disks can fail. Failures to the controller that cause logical errors, software failures, attacks, virii and so on can still cause data loss. As soon as a piece of malware would fubar a file and commit it to the RAID, of course it's there in corrupted form.
Having said that, RAID 5, 1, 10, ADG and even sync/async off-site replication through IP, FC or iSCSI (FC encapsulated in IP, bad idea) won't safe-guard you from corruptions because of software of human error. Therefore, RAID is not and will never be a substitute for a good old-fashioned backup to tape. I say tape, because a 500 GB volume of data cannot economically be backed up manually to optical disks at present. You would need something like an LTO-3 tape drive to do that on a single tape, alternatively a smaller autoloader.
I'd recommend the following, assuming you're not running a hi-performance database with many random read/writes in 4KB block sizes, but rather a file-sharing or web-site environment:
- System disk: RAID 1 for easy recovery. - Data disk: smallish RAID 5 set (max 5) - Backup to tape.
Also note that SCSI disks are designed for an 80% duty cycle, typically, while SATA/IDE disks are designed for a 25% duty cycle. This means that if you're constantly fetching data from and writing data to your disks, 24/7/52, you would see your SATA/IDE disks die like flies around you. If your usage model is very strenuous, use SCSI.
> Iran is suspected in aiding subversive groups in Afghanistan (which is a NATO/EU effort as well as a US effort) and Iraq.
Which could be construed as a fairly level-headed reaction to the power mongering and invasiveness of the US, for that matter. You forget to mention Hizbollah which is being sponsored by Syria and Iran over the conflict for the '67 territories Israel captured from Syria and Lebanon. Still, this doesn't make Iran an immediate threat to the EU. Iran's beef seems to (rightfully or not, that is a debate) be with the US and Israel (in which I currently live, I must add).
> 3-8 years
Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that the watchdog is erring on the side of caution. Let's also assume the Iranians are working like mad on this. If they pull it off in 5-6 years, they'd be lucky. If their current government survives that long. Even in Tehran, there are more moderate forces at work in the form of non-fundamentalist ayatollahs and the women's lib movement. Now I'm not an expert on Iran, but I seriously doubt they will steer towards all-out nuclear conflict. Specifically since Israel is in their back yard, and has 300 nukes aimed at various targets in the middle east.
> As a parent poster noted,
That would have been me. And you're right. The US has no inherent interest in disrupting trade relations with the EU. It would kill the economy of both parties. However, I do feel that certain allowances are being made for the benefit of that relationship. If you don't water the plant, it'll shrivel up.
> do alienate the Russians, losing their economic support (and they have treasure-troves of natural gas and oil.)
First of all, a lot of the foreign capital that is keeping Russia afloat is coming from the EU. Precisely in the form of investments in their oil and gas infrastructure and other sectors. Russia can't afford to cut ties with the EU either, for that matter.
The EU however (as companies like Shell and Statoil prove) gets oil from the Norwegians, Arab countries (who doesn't?) and gas from reserves such as the one in the Netherlands. Furthermore, France gets more than 75% of its electricity from Nuclear sources while the rest of the EU is working on solar, wind and tidal alternatives. Not to mention the hydro-plants in Sweden. I feel that the Russians are benefiting from the energy deal in a bigger way than the EU, because I have the sneaky suspicion we would survive without the Russian's energy. We've done so for more than 40 years as the cold war was raging on.
>if the EU does not feel that the threat that the US suggests exists, they would not allow the missiles to be placed in EU member nation territory.
You have a point. I failed to address that. Let me take the time to do so.
I have a gut feeling one of the reasons the EU allows this is that the EU feels the relationship with the US would be damaged if they didn't. There's probably not a single nation in the EU at present that sees Iran as their Most Dangerous Enemy(tm). Everyone knows that Iran is at least 10 years away from any nuclear capabilities, including power stations, for crying out loud.
If we started saying "no" to the US, on the other hand, it could jeopardize trade and good-will with the US. In a big way, if you look at the US' track record of the last 7 years.
> The EU has played it close to Iran, Iraq and other questionable regimes. They have done business with them in the past. > (I believe the nuclear reactors built in Iraq were of French build). Now they have to deal with the reality of a potentially > nuclear-armed Terhan; They welcome any protection they can get from their shortsighted decision-making.
You seem to forget that the US has been very, very involved in weapons trading with Iraq during the wars there. Hell, they single-handedly installed Saddam Hussein's regime when they felt Khomeini had "undesirable" tendencies.
Could you point me to a developed nation that hasn't "played it close" to "other questionable regimes"? Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, other South- and Middle-American nations, Iraq, Indonesia, African regimes and suchlike have all been sponsored by EU member states, US and USSR in their time. However, I would argue that *most* of the damage done in these arenas hasn't been caused by the EU lately.
You're threading on thin ice if you're trying to white-wash the US foreign policy with regards to armaments. If you want to start a character-defamation or pie-throwing contest, you'd better do it on a topic everyone's squeaky clean on.
By the way, French-built "nucular" reactors would indicate that Iraq had a nuclear energy program. Not necessarily a WMD program. Lastly, I fail to see how "French-built" nuclear reactors in *IRAQ* would have *any* bearing on nuclear arms in Tehran. Not that Iran *has* any Nuclear Arms, but that's another discussion.
As I've stated here, the Russians might be geared up for a small world-destroying war, but they don't have the cash or manpower to make any claims to being a superpower anymore. Before you go on to say that the EU is not geared for war, WWI and WWII have shown us how much of a pain in the ass countries like Germany can become in no time whatsoever. Money can be re-routed faster than missiles, if you will.
Russian influence... Nowadays, that's just funny. What I don't understand is what they are thinking, Bush and Putin. Let's compare for a bit...
EU: Roughly 400 million people with a GDP of 14.5 trillion dollars. USA: Roughly 300 million people with a GDP of 13.2 trillion dollars. Russia: Roughly 140 million people with a GDP of.9 (!) trillion dollars. China: Roughly 1300 million people with a GDP of 2.6 trillion dollars India: Roughly 1100 million people with a GDP of.9 trillion dollars
Russia, by this comparison, is a piss in the pond in terms of both manpower and sheer economic productivity. Currently, the USA is producing more buckaroos per capita than the collective EU, but this might change as Poland, the Baltic nations, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech Republic scramble to reach Western European standards. As it is however, the US is still behind in terms of sheer manpower.
The EU (only member states) *does* have a rather significant financial club to swing. My employer's revenues are a good illustration of that. It is publicly well known that 42% of the global revenue for HP comes from the EMEA region. Second runner up the Americas (including Canada and South America) and lastly APJ. The majority of the EMEA revenue is coming the Core European countries.
Given the manpower and economic leverage the EU can muster, I really wonder why we idly stand by and let it appear that the US and Russia are fighting over scraps here. The EU ought to kick any US missile bases that do not serve our collective purposes off our territories, tell Russia to fuck off lest the EU quit investing in the country altogether (and therefore bankrupt them in spite of their oil) and whack some sense into these two nation's leaders.
On the bright side, the whole discussion seems pointless... If the Indians and Chinese properly ramp up their respective economies, the EU, US, Russia and all the rest will become moot. In my view, this ought to be inevitable somewhere down the line.
Lastly, while I was looking at the numbers for the GDP, it warmed my heart that my homeys in the Netherlands are ranked 16th in the world with a GDP of.6 trillion (2/3 the GDP of Russia/India, with only 16.2 million people... that ain't bad)
Content is not for websites. And Science Fiction is not for the movies.
Any decent Sci-Fi book I've ever read, be it Ender's Game, the Foundation or Dune, is an exercise in philosophical thinking. They either look long and hard at human behavior in extreme situations (The moon is a harsh mistress, anyone?) or they test socio-economical theories (Foundation) or it deals with Psychology (Ender's game), but it's never about the DF-Disruptor 2000 rifle with the twisty nobbies on it.
This is why I am a Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek fan. A phaser has always been a phaser, and looks somewhat like a techy remote control. No funky knobs, dials and other bollocks. You put the thing on Stun and watch 'm go rigid when they get hit. There.
For me to suspend disbelief, a couple of things are necessary. And one of those things must be that technological advancements look as such. I don't buy medieval looking ray guns. Unless there's a good, thorough explanation as to why they should look that way.
The one possible exception to all I just said (but really the only one I can think of) is Luc Besson's 5th Element. That was camp, kitsch and all that, and I loved it.
> much of the "payoff" of the recycled gag isn't humor, but reassurance and familiarity
In order to find something humourous, you need to be able to relate to it in some way or another. Even in comedy that hinges on absurdity such as the Monty Python skits you mentioned, all of the absurdities are precisely that because you recognize a situation (familiarity, reassurance) and then it develops a twist. To try to separate the spectrum of human emotions from humour is folly, as humour is built on precisely that spectrum. I didn't read any book on it, it's just my two cents.
Now, of course different people have different tastes. I can appreciate the more blunt and bumbling humour the Americans indulge in, I can appreciate the wit, sarcasm and subtleties of French humour, I can appreciate the self-deprecating humour Germans are prone to, the harshly critical cynicism the Dutch comedians use, and the under-stated witty dry English humour. I can even appreciate the dryer politically correct boo-hah-hah humour I've seen Swedes use. Just like I can appreciate a good running gag.
One such running gag, for instance, is "The Aristocrats". I've recently seen a documentary on that joke. The joke itself is abhorrently bad, but depending on who tells it, the twists that make the tale the teller's are hilarious. What I'm trying to say is that talking about "deep" humour versus "cheap" jokes is just the height of pretentious lack of humour. Every joke/gag/skit/satire has merits. Different people might appreciate them on different levels, but you won't ever hear me say something silly like "your humour doesn't count".
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Try installing Windows on a system that's got some linux on it, and you'll get really scared too. Many of the Linux installers I've tried (Caldera Suse, RHEL, Ubuntu 6.x) have been better than the Windows equivalent in terms of user-friendliness and tweakability.
The thing that really kills me about that is this: Suse or Red Hat are deemed Server-side Linux distros and are seen as overly complex by many. The installation procedure will allow you to pin point exactly which segments of which physical disk to use for certain things if you want to. People don't like it because it's too technically challenging.
Ubuntu doesn't ask that many questions from the get-go, because it's supposed to be a point 'n' click type of Linux distro, but then people turn around and don't like it because it doesn't present them with enough of a technical challenge.
But tell me, if you have a computer with physical disks 0 and 1, both of which have Linux Partitions on them, and you run the Windows installer to get it to dual boot, what will happen to:
- at least one of those disks
- the data on it
- your boot loader or the MBR if you're not careful
Yet Windows doesn't get binned. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-windows. I'm writing it on a Windows XP laptop which works beautifully for me. My other box is a Windows XP dual core box too, and the only non-windows computer in my personal household is a Nintendo Wii. And for the moment I am not interested in changing that, because I am a gamer.
But the reason the market at large won't adopt Linux for the desktop is simple. It's just that Windows is entrenched, and Linux isn't. So flaws of Windows are absolved to a large degree, while flaws in Linux get made into poster children for not moving from Windows. Such is human nature. In Holland we say "Wat de boer niet kent, vreet ie niet" which means so much as "What the farmer don't know, he don't eat".
I'm not sure if I agree. To be honest, I prefer the "horny MILF" format, but it would not surprise me if most of /. ultimately will choose the "AsianTeenSluts" for their money, which means Sony is making inroads.
And I'm happy for it, because it's one of the ugliest cars I ever saw.
Back in the mid nineties, I owned a car. A Toyota Corolla from the mid-eighties. It was a good car, but boy was it ugly. The same squarish ugly straight lines and eighties bling as the delorean and many other cars of the time. And without the comfortable hydraulic suspension of the Citroen BX for example.
To ensure me getting modded down, I would also like to state that Americans just can't build cars anyway. There is a substitute for Cubic Inches, and it's called technology. Furthermore, the cornering of said vehicles leaves something to be desired.
I'll take a Volvo S60/V40 2.4T or a Saab 9-3 1.9 Common rail Turbo Diesel with a lowered chassis any day over any muscle car you people can trow at it.
I never said Video Games, Sports, Movies and Music were uncivilized. Really, I think movies and music can be the poster children for civilization in many ways. Video games and sports strike me as more base because most of them seem to cater to the reptile brain more than higher functions... Don't get me wrong, I like 'm that way too. Still, they are not uncivilized. Quite the contrary, good sportsmanship is also a behaviour I would call civil.
What I said was "as long as adults get unduly excited about these things" we can't claim civilization. In my eyes, this alludes to football fans who kill and maim for their team. It alludes to all kinds of misbehaviour associated with fan-dom which I find thouroughly lower class and uncivilized. This extends to the people that root for a certain view on life or religious faction and are willing to misbehave in the same manner to enforce their clan's views.
I guess it's just jolly bad sportsmanship that irks me.
> adults in the civilized world will get quite excited over at least one "professional" sport.
You do not disprove the notion that fantasy is childish by saying that sports are too. It is not a logical argument. Yet you did stumble upon an interesting chain of thought:
As long as most adults get unduly excited about some or other professional sport I don't feel we can call it a civilized world by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, I *was* kidding.
:-D
But your comment did remind me of Chris Rock saying "When I'm at the ATM in the middle of the night, I ain't lookin' over my shoulders for the media, I'm lookin' for Niggas"
Not all Arabs I know like fucking goats, no matter how much Khomeini really did approve of it, just like not all black people rob ATM users...
Still is a funny comment.
You're lucky that comment was so damn funny, because otherwise I'd be complaining about your obvious bigotry, racism and your general putting down of an entire people you haven't met. :-D
Non-discussion.
It's a game. With a bit of luck, you managed to hussle some money out of it. Then others move in. Deal.
Did I mention it's a game? This second life is driving people in directions that are decidedly unhealthy, and I would almost vote to get rid of that game.
Please, how pathetic can you get?
> An open question...why 44.1khz for the sampling rate?
In 1996 I started doing CD-R support for HP. Back then it was a Philips-OEM HP 4020i with an AdvanSys SCSI controller. The things were expensive as hell, and hard to use given the state of computers and FirmWare at the time. Buffer Underrun was the most dreaded message around as CD-R disks retailed for 25 Guilders (10 Euros, 13 USD) a pop.
Anyway, during my initial training on CD's I got a technology overview where it was explained that the typical human ear can "hear" a sampling rate of 20 Khz. There is a rule called the Nyquist Criterion that says that digital sampling must double that to not hurt audio quality for human consumption. Why exactly 44.1 was chosen and not, say, 42 or the more logical 48 had to do with the fact that the original CD mastering equipment was pseudo video equipment. I believe this page explains it nicely:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/audio/44.1.html
I didn't know RuPaul was running for president.
But it's a stroke of genius... An experienced, seasoned black cross-dressing gay guy... Whooo!
Some months ago there was a story on /. in which it was found that when discussing politics, the centres of reason and logic were not in use at all.
The areas of the brain in use at the time of political debate seem to solely deal with emotions.
This might be an explanation why most political debates are so pointless.
There is no ethical cut-off point. Firstly, ethics are arbitrary notions of what the general consensus would call "acceptable behavior", so ultimately they are moot.
With regards to the question you pose, there is only one answer: I would eat all of the animals mentioned above. Funnily enough you stick to mammals, but I would also include snails, frogs, seafood of all kinds and fish to the list. Insects I'm not too fond of, they don't look yummy. However, if my survival was at stake both you, your kids and any insect I can get my hands on are dead meat. And that goes for any edible plants I find along the way too.
Frankly, the notion that humans are intrinsically more valuable than other life-forms is folly. There's 7 billion of us, and we're quite the epidemic. Eating some of those specimens would be a minor collateral, 's all. Fortunately, we humans currently swing the biggest evolutionary sticks, so we are at the top of the food chain.
As it was once said: It's great to be the king.
This is why in Holland, you pay road taxes rather than fuel taxes. Don't get me wrong, there are fuel-taxes as well (accijnzen) and they are HEFTY.
However, if you have a vehicle, you can legally drive it on any fuel you please as long as you pay the road tax. Road tax is determined by the sheer weight of the car and the type of engine (ie the expected emissions) respectively.
In Switzerland, for example, you have to purchase a sticker upon entry with a foreign car. This sticker will allow you to drive the car in Switzerland that year. It is also a form or road tax, but a flat rate.
Both systems seem more fair and less hypocritical than the NC one.
There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows
Who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall...
> they had it coming.
So does Brian Adams, but I don't see you bombing him. Although your government did formally apologize for him.
With regards to capability vs intent: The Dutch are 16 mio people right now. Before, when they were involved in global slave-trading, empire building, ripping off natives of various countries and killing innocent people left, right and center, they were many, many fewer than 16 million.
There's 30 million Canadians. Surely they can do *something* evil? Besides spawning Shania, Brian and Celine, that is.
Therefore, I postulate the Canadians don't have the intent to do evil. Gee. Rare condition.
Goddammit Kyle! Please, please ignore this post.
I once worked for the HP-UX group of the Swedish Airspace Authority, and they had HP-UX Service Guard clusters set up with shared storage consisting of manually configured Extent-striped LVM sets on JBOD SCSI disks. Whenever one disk would fail, the whole team would grind to a halt because the only one who could judge the impact on the systems was the guy who built the LVM groups in the first place.
What I'm trying to say here is the following: Sure, you can employ a load of tricks to use all your space on those drives. Hell, if a third, 1.5 TB set of disks comes along, you can rinse and repeat with those. You'll end up with a logical disk structure that equals the gordian knot in complexity and which will become totally unmanageable. This in turn will mean that somewhere, sometime when something happens, you WILL fuck up trying to rebuild things in case of a disk crash.
OS based volume management should never, ever become more complex than RAID 1 with the simplest of mirror sets. Please. For performance' sake. For administration's sake. For your sake.
Here's the deal:
Raid 5:
- Minimal 3 disks
- 1 disk equivalent for parity, so 2/3 capacity for data in case of three disks
- Better do it in Hardware. OS striping will cost a performance hit, if that's an important consideration.
- There are two implementations... Block-striping meaning parity is also distributed per block over the whole array and single-disk parity.
- Read speeds will generally be good, but write speeds can suffer due to extra parity information writes.
This makes RAID 5 good for file-sharing applications where the performance is not absolutely the biggest consideration. Please be aware that the larger you make your raid set, the larger the chance of losing data. If you have 10 disks in one raid five set, redundancy is one spindle. The chance that two disks fail and wipe out your data is there. Also note that in any raid set, the smallest disk will indeed determine the capacity. 2x500GB + 1x1TB will give you 1TB in raw space because the other half of the third disk cannot contain redundant information. Any RAID controller that doesn't stick to that rule will not offer you redundancy.
RAID 1:
- One disk for data, one disk for the mirror.
- Write speeds are somewhat impacted but less than RAID 5.
- Read speeds tend (for some reason) to still equal RAID 5 or better them.
- High cost, high redundancy.
RAID 0:
- No redundancy
- Excellent read/write performance due to striping across multiple spindles without any added operations.
- Low cost
RAID 0 is higher risk than just a bunch of IDE disks on some buses because you lump it together on one volume, and if one disk fails the entire volume is gone.
Now in all of the above, it is *important* to realize you're only safe-guarding yourself against a *degree* of physical damage. Disks can fail. Failures to the controller that cause logical errors, software failures, attacks, virii and so on can still cause data loss. As soon as a piece of malware would fubar a file and commit it to the RAID, of course it's there in corrupted form.
Having said that, RAID 5, 1, 10, ADG and even sync/async off-site replication through IP, FC or iSCSI (FC encapsulated in IP, bad idea) won't safe-guard you from corruptions because of software of human error. Therefore, RAID is not and will never be a substitute for a good old-fashioned backup to tape. I say tape, because a 500 GB volume of data cannot economically be backed up manually to optical disks at present. You would need something like an LTO-3 tape drive to do that on a single tape, alternatively a smaller autoloader.
I'd recommend the following, assuming you're not running a hi-performance database with many random read/writes in 4KB block sizes, but rather a file-sharing or web-site environment:
- System disk: RAID 1 for easy recovery.
- Data disk: smallish RAID 5 set (max 5)
- Backup to tape.
Also note that SCSI disks are designed for an 80% duty cycle, typically, while SATA/IDE disks are designed for a 25% duty cycle. This means that if you're constantly fetching data from and writing data to your disks, 24/7/52, you would see your SATA/IDE disks die like flies around you. If your usage model is very strenuous, use SCSI.
Hehehehe... Canada has Quebecoise and Newfies, and you call 'm developed?
All jokes aside, you do have me there. I can't think of any evil thing Canada has done.
Except bombing the Baldwins, of course.
> has denounced nations that support Israel?
Syria, to name one.
> Iran is suspected in aiding subversive groups in Afghanistan (which is a NATO/EU effort as well as a US effort) and Iraq.
Which could be construed as a fairly level-headed reaction to the power mongering and invasiveness of the US, for that matter. You forget to mention Hizbollah which is being sponsored by Syria and Iran over the conflict for the '67 territories Israel captured from Syria and Lebanon. Still, this doesn't make Iran an immediate threat to the EU. Iran's beef seems to (rightfully or not, that is a debate) be with the US and Israel (in which I currently live, I must add).
> 3-8 years
Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that the watchdog is erring on the side of caution. Let's also assume the Iranians are working like mad on this. If they pull it off in 5-6 years, they'd be lucky. If their current government survives that long. Even in Tehran, there are more moderate forces at work in the form of non-fundamentalist ayatollahs and the women's lib movement. Now I'm not an expert on Iran, but I seriously doubt they will steer towards all-out nuclear conflict. Specifically since Israel is in their back yard, and has 300 nukes aimed at various targets in the middle east.
> As a parent poster noted,
That would have been me. And you're right. The US has no inherent interest in disrupting trade relations with the EU. It would kill the economy of both parties. However, I do feel that certain allowances are being made for the benefit of that relationship. If you don't water the plant, it'll shrivel up.
> do alienate the Russians, losing their economic support (and they have treasure-troves of natural gas and oil.)
First of all, a lot of the foreign capital that is keeping Russia afloat is coming from the EU. Precisely in the form of investments in their oil and gas infrastructure and other sectors. Russia can't afford to cut ties with the EU either, for that matter.
The EU however (as companies like Shell and Statoil prove) gets oil from the Norwegians, Arab countries (who doesn't?) and gas from reserves such as the one in the Netherlands. Furthermore, France gets more than 75% of its electricity from Nuclear sources while the rest of the EU is working on solar, wind and tidal alternatives. Not to mention the hydro-plants in Sweden. I feel that the Russians are benefiting from the energy deal in a bigger way than the EU, because I have the sneaky suspicion we would survive without the Russian's energy. We've done so for more than 40 years as the cold war was raging on.
>if the EU does not feel that the threat that the US suggests exists, they would not allow the missiles to be placed in EU member nation territory.
You have a point. I failed to address that. Let me take the time to do so.
I have a gut feeling one of the reasons the EU allows this is that the EU feels the relationship with the US would be damaged if they didn't. There's probably not a single nation in the EU at present that sees Iran as their Most Dangerous Enemy(tm). Everyone knows that Iran is at least 10 years away from any nuclear capabilities, including power stations, for crying out loud.
If we started saying "no" to the US, on the other hand, it could jeopardize trade and good-will with the US. In a big way, if you look at the US' track record of the last 7 years.
> The EU has played it close to Iran, Iraq and other questionable regimes. They have done business with them in the past.
> (I believe the nuclear reactors built in Iraq were of French build). Now they have to deal with the reality of a potentially
> nuclear-armed Terhan; They welcome any protection they can get from their shortsighted decision-making.
You seem to forget that the US has been very, very involved in weapons trading with Iraq during the wars there. Hell, they single-handedly installed Saddam Hussein's regime when they felt Khomeini had "undesirable" tendencies.
Could you point me to a developed nation that hasn't "played it close" to "other questionable regimes"? Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, other South- and Middle-American nations, Iraq, Indonesia, African regimes and suchlike have all been sponsored by EU member states, US and USSR in their time. However, I would argue that *most* of the damage done in these arenas hasn't been caused by the EU lately.
You're threading on thin ice if you're trying to white-wash the US foreign policy with regards to armaments. If you want to start a character-defamation or pie-throwing contest, you'd better do it on a topic everyone's squeaky clean on.
By the way, French-built "nucular" reactors would indicate that Iraq had a nuclear energy program. Not necessarily a WMD program. Lastly, I fail to see how "French-built" nuclear reactors in *IRAQ* would have *any* bearing on nuclear arms in Tehran. Not that Iran *has* any Nuclear Arms, but that's another discussion.
As I've stated here, the Russians might be geared up for a small world-destroying war, but they don't have the cash or manpower to make any claims to being a superpower anymore. Before you go on to say that the EU is not geared for war, WWI and WWII have shown us how much of a pain in the ass countries like Germany can become in no time whatsoever. Money can be re-routed faster than missiles, if you will.
Russian influence... Nowadays, that's just funny. What I don't understand is what they are thinking, Bush and Putin. Let's compare for a bit...
.9 (!) trillion dollars. .9 trillion dollars
.6 trillion (2/3 the GDP of Russia/India, with only 16.2 million people... that ain't bad)
EU: Roughly 400 million people with a GDP of 14.5 trillion dollars.
USA: Roughly 300 million people with a GDP of 13.2 trillion dollars.
Russia: Roughly 140 million people with a GDP of
China: Roughly 1300 million people with a GDP of 2.6 trillion dollars
India: Roughly 1100 million people with a GDP of
Russia, by this comparison, is a piss in the pond in terms of both manpower and sheer economic productivity. Currently, the USA is producing more buckaroos per capita than the collective EU, but this might change as Poland, the Baltic nations, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech Republic scramble to reach Western European standards. As it is however, the US is still behind in terms of sheer manpower.
The EU (only member states) *does* have a rather significant financial club to swing. My employer's revenues are a good illustration of that. It is publicly well known that 42% of the global revenue for HP comes from the EMEA region. Second runner up the Americas (including Canada and South America) and lastly APJ. The majority of the EMEA revenue is coming the Core European countries.
Given the manpower and economic leverage the EU can muster, I really wonder why we idly stand by and let it appear that the US and Russia are fighting over scraps here. The EU ought to kick any US missile bases that do not serve our collective purposes off our territories, tell Russia to fuck off lest the EU quit investing in the country altogether (and therefore bankrupt them in spite of their oil) and whack some sense into these two nation's leaders.
On the bright side, the whole discussion seems pointless... If the Indians and Chinese properly ramp up their respective economies, the EU, US, Russia and all the rest will become moot. In my view, this ought to be inevitable somewhere down the line.
Lastly, while I was looking at the numbers for the GDP, it warmed my heart that my homeys in the Netherlands are ranked 16th in the world with a GDP of
Content is not for websites. And Science Fiction is not for the movies.
Any decent Sci-Fi book I've ever read, be it Ender's Game, the Foundation or Dune, is an exercise in philosophical thinking. They either look long and hard at human behavior in extreme situations (The moon is a harsh mistress, anyone?) or they test socio-economical theories (Foundation) or it deals with Psychology (Ender's game), but it's never about the DF-Disruptor 2000 rifle with the twisty nobbies on it.
This is why I am a Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek fan. A phaser has always been a phaser, and looks somewhat like a techy remote control. No funky knobs, dials and other bollocks. You put the thing on Stun and watch 'm go rigid when they get hit. There.
For me to suspend disbelief, a couple of things are necessary. And one of those things must be that technological advancements look as such. I don't buy medieval looking ray guns. Unless there's a good, thorough explanation as to why they should look that way.
The one possible exception to all I just said (but really the only one I can think of) is Luc Besson's 5th Element. That was camp, kitsch and all that, and I loved it.
> much of the "payoff" of the recycled gag isn't humor, but reassurance and familiarity
In order to find something humourous, you need to be able to relate to it in some way or another. Even in comedy that hinges on absurdity such as the Monty Python skits you mentioned, all of the absurdities are precisely that because you recognize a situation (familiarity, reassurance) and then it develops a twist. To try to separate the spectrum of human emotions from humour is folly, as humour is built on precisely that spectrum. I didn't read any book on it, it's just my two cents.
Now, of course different people have different tastes. I can appreciate the more blunt and bumbling humour the Americans indulge in, I can appreciate the wit, sarcasm and subtleties of French humour, I can appreciate the self-deprecating humour Germans are prone to, the harshly critical cynicism the Dutch comedians use, and the under-stated witty dry English humour. I can even appreciate the dryer politically correct boo-hah-hah humour I've seen Swedes use. Just like I can appreciate a good running gag.
One such running gag, for instance, is "The Aristocrats". I've recently seen a documentary on that joke. The joke itself is abhorrently bad, but depending on who tells it, the twists that make the tale the teller's are hilarious. What I'm trying to say is that talking about "deep" humour versus "cheap" jokes is just the height of pretentious lack of humour. Every joke/gag/skit/satire has merits. Different people might appreciate them on different levels, but you won't ever hear me say something silly like "your humour doesn't count".