There is exactly zero evidence that the US or EU played any part in the Maiden movement. If there is I challenge you to provide it.
There are two sides to this story: 1. The Russian side (what you're repeating, partially) 2. The truth
We in the west have a legitimate free press. It may be imperfect, it may be incompetent, but it's legitimately free to report what it wants and no single government has any controls to stop it. As long as *somebody* is paying attention the true story WILL get out eventually. Russia none of this is the case. The Russian government tolerates a domestic free press up until the point they do something they don't like. Then they make up some BS excuse to arr
Besides the obvious backup power, cooling, environmental stuff mentioned above....
1. Expandability.. how much rack/cage space is available nearby? Get a right of refusal on any empty space near your stuff if you can. 2. Power max per rack, can you get enough for SAN's, blades etc 3. Remote hands availability/skills/costs (really want to make a trip to the datacenter to replace dead hard drives? No. Do the employees know enough to do *limited* work for you) 4. 24/7 access, near employees if a physical presence is required 5. What sort of racks do they have? Can you buy your own? 6. Storage space. Need 100 servers shipped but don't have racks yet? Need to keep spare hardware on hand? Do they have room keep that for you? 7. How many/what carriers do they offer? How is access delivered? What does their network look like? 8. Do they have spare tools/network cables/misc parts. Can they order stuff for you, or is there some place nearby you can pick things up if needed in a hurry? 9. How many employees can you get access for? 10. Do they have a crash cart? Comfortable place to work? Wifi or other forms of internet access available?
First of all... almost nobody sells RAID 6 devices. I'm aware of only one company that does and it's not Promise. It's an odd ball configuration and I can't see where it would be all that useful. The common RAID configurations are 0, 1, 5, 0+1, 10, and 50.
Second Promise can never be considered a "nice" controller. It works, it's fairly cheap, but it's consumer grade stuff.
I wouldn't bother with a cheap RAID controller. Go with md raid in Linux. It's free, you never have to worry about finding the same controller again if the one you have dies, performance is decent (almost always better then cheap RAID cards), and it works really well all around. You might need a PATA or SATA controller to add more drives but those are cheap. High end stuff where performance is critical you get a high end RAID card.
Seeing how anti-tax this administration is I can't see this suriving the veto powers if it were to ever pass. It's doubtful it would ever get even that far... We're coming up on an election year (as always) and this isn't popular and it's not something they can sneak in without people noticing. Besides I'd think the majority of businesses, with the exception of the retail heavy companies, would be against this.
Besides that it's a bad idea to begin with. So they start charging tax.. what's to stop people from setting up shop Canada or overseas somewhere. You'd have customs to deal with and shipping would be slower but they could find a way around the law I'm certain. Just like with perscription drugs.
Intel is just afraid that people will come to realise that you dont need a $500+ processor to surf the web, and you can get by just fine with 4 year old technology.
Yeah but can you browse the web AND run all your spyware at the same time with a 4 year old processor? That's what your average home user does.
VOIP may very well make sense for you. I didn't say it couldn't. However, for the vast majority of companies out there it doesn't (yet). That's why nobody is buying it. (My best friend sells corporate phone systems and telecom equipment and I'm familiar with the market... they just aren't buying VOIP right now) The few companies that do are almost all very large with either call centers or multiple location they need to connect. The smaller guys, like this poster, it's just almost never cost effective.
As a network admin in almost identical situation (small but growing software company with a larger then normal IT department) I've tried to find a way to make VOIP work for us. I like the idea of what you can do with it and there's the "coolness" factor. I just can't find a practical reason to do it. Eventually the bandwidth and hardware costs will come down to the point I will be able to, but that's still a few years off. (At least here in the US)
VOIP is a buzz word right now but it usually doesn't make sense. A T1 will carry 16 VOIP calls (at ~POTS quality) and runs ~$400 a month. A PSTN line (T1 for voice) carrys 24 lines and costs ~$350. VOIP phones cost almost twice as much as digital POTS phones. Plus there will be a cost going from POTS Minutes are slightly more expensive with POTS but you'd have a use a whole hell of a lot of minutes before you'd hit the break even point. So unless you are a heavy user it doesn't make sense. If you had multiple locations and needed internal extensions etc that might work too. Site to site data lines are much cheaper.
Is it just me or does anyone else wonder what's up with the Japanese obsession with robots? Nothing they've come up with is even remotely practical. Buy a good alarm system. I'm sure it's a heck of a lot better and costs much less. These things are even too expensive as toys.... What's the point? Sure it's cool to watch them. They are little more then dancing calculators right now. Once someone manages to get an AI system up to the point of being as smart as say a dog... then these thing might actually be able to do something useful.
Because it's happened already. Not on 9/11 but in Dec of 99. US customs caught an Al-Queda member at the border who had plans to blow up the Seattle Space needle and more then enough explosives in the trunk of his car to do the job. Later on they found out there were others involved in the plot as well as plans to blow up Disneyland too. All of those 5 or 6 terrorists entered the US through Canada. You also have known terrorists living in your country right now!
The fact is it's easy to check our airports and docks for illegal entry. The border is much much harder. What kind of sense does it to stop you from landing in the US but you can just fly to Canada were you they are sure to let you in with their pre 9/11 liberal policies, and drive to the US? None.. you need to protect ALL points of entry. (Mexico too)
On a side note.. I know someone, an American, who owns land up in Canada. In the woods next to his property he's seen Arabs running around in the woods with real guns in what loked like war games. He called the Canadian authorities... nobody has even bothered to come check it out and it's still going on.
1. A supported Distro on the hardware you are running. You don't have time to workout issues with flakey drivers or unsupported hardware you might otherwise at home. It has to work, and work well. 2. Support for the software you are going to be using. Plan on using Oracle? What's going to happen when you run into a issue? Between your in-house people and Oracle support will you be able to troubleshoot any issues that might come up? There are going to issues that are distro specific. Same with any other complex software packages. 3. A RPM based package management system that doesn't suffer from dependancy issues. With a bunch of servers it's not practical to build from source. Even when you only have to do it with one server that greatly complicates the update process. You have to have the ability to install whatever it is you need, standard or custom, quickly and without hassle. 4. A wide selection of packages to chose from. Stay as close to standard as possible. It takes let time to config that way and less and it's easier to troubleshoot. Widely used Distros have more standard packages. 5. What do you your admins already know? Desktop distros don't really count here. 6. A brand name. Plan on hosting an application for someone else? Brand names help.
Given all that there are really only two choices, Redhat (Enterprise ) and Suse. You can buy servers from Dell/IBM etc... with these installed and fully supported already. You can get packages for nearly everything you need with either one. For less critical servers where you need more recent hardware support or can't avoid doing a lot of customization Fedora and Suse Pro work well too.
I agree that is act is a bad idea. Consumers/voters clearly don't want it. It only serves to protect an industry that has been ripping consumers and the majority of artists off with its sudo monopolistic behavior. At this point there is ZERO chance of going back to the old paradigm. We are better off embracing P2P as the tool that it is and let liaise fair capitalism find a way to adapt as it always has in the past.
However, as to this causing a mass exodus from the US, that's not going to happen. First of all, I think you are grossly over estimating the impact an act like this could have. Annoying sure, but business would survive just fine. Second, I don't think you understand the economics involved. Not that the UK or any other place in Europe is a bad place to live but the standard of living in the US is MUCH higher, provided you have an in-demand skill. You make more here, pay about half the taxes, and housing and other expenses are dramatically lower. Specifically speaking about the UK, I know people that have jobs based there, but live here in the US and just work remotely and travel back and forth all the time because that is actually cheaper to do it that way. Worst case scenario you just change job fields.
I'll second this. I interact with Europeans on a regular basis and I've heard a lot of opinions about Bush. The vast majority are either missinformed or uninformed about the issues here in the US. Having spent time in Germany in the days before the Iraq war started I can see why. Every news channel I watched was spouting the same line with an obvious bias. With the exception of maybe Sky news out of the UK I couldn't find anything like the counter balance we have here with Fox. Maybe that's that's the cause or maybe that's the symptom I don't know. What's clear is that Europeans really don't understand American culture (it's not like Hollywood) or the American perspective.
Well.. maybe. Physics has said for years that you couldn't exploit the relationship to send information. However, back in the mid 90's (I think) there was a German scientist who managed to send a Mozart symphony several times faster than light (And reproduce the results). The response was that "Mozart didn't qualify as information". I don't know what's happened since but the book on quantum physics is still being written.
We aren't not talking about light (and yes I do know what a photon is, thanks).
This is quantum entanglement, look it up. No RF, no microware, no visible light, or anything else on the electromagnetic spectrum. There's no mass involved hence no breaking relativity. Two particals with an identical quantum state effect each other at a distance. You put on earth and the other say on mars and if you can read/change their quantum state without directly observing them you have an instant faster then light communication device. Interestingly enough using relativity you could also establish direct two way communication with the future/past. You put one partical in spaceship travelling at a very high rate of speed and the other stays on earth. Relative to the partical on earth the partical on the ship ages slower. The difference might be very slight.. but get enough sets of particles and daisy chain them together....
One step closer to nearly unlimited bandwidth, faster then light transmission(instant), using no wires or electromagnetic medium.
It also means one step closer to computers powerful enough that we can, say for example, model the human body to test all possible drug combinations at the same time.
I'm sorry but if your business strategy requires collecting $0.005 per page visit you don't have a business strategy. Sure $0.005 is nothing but in order to play that you have to register, log in, etc... I'd rather spend those few seconds finding an alternative free site or if that doesn't exist flat out stealing your content from whatever on easily found source is hosting it. It's the principle of it. Offer something of real value and people will pay for it. Do nothing and try to skim off as much as possible without people noticing.. don't expect me to blink as I shoot that one down.
The metric system (SI now) is the only official unit of measurement the US government has ever adopted. It did so way back in 1893. (1866 it became a legal unit of measure). What they didn't do though, was require it's use. So since the older imperial system was still widely in use it lived on. (Some of it anyway.. nobody knows what a stone is for example) Congress went back and required the metric system's use for all goverment purposes in 1988 (unless the infomation is for public use where it can be either).
So really we use a mix of both here. In school they teach almost entirely in metric... makes the math easier to deal with when to have to convert to smaller/larger units. Common stuff like speed limits, weight, tempature, and long distances are measured in mph/pounds/fahrenheit/miles. If you go to the store, or use any tools though it's 50/50.. so smaller units like liters/grams/centimeters I think most people know pretty well.
Entanglement is going to change life on earth as we know it, it's going to happen all at once, and probably within the next 20 years. Besides quantum computers, which give you enough parallel processing power to say; model the human body and test new medical drugs/proceedures/DNA alteration instantly, it also make both wired and wireless a thing of the past. Perhaps you'll still need fiber between quantum nodes (for a backbone) but other then that every networked device could have zero lag, virtually unlimited bandwidth, and access from places like the the bottom of the ocean or mars. Those are realy kind of trivial compared to what could potentially happen; direct communication with the future and past (provided the past is in a time that quantum devices exist). Yo take two identical electrons, place one on a spaceship orbiting some nearby body at high rates of speed, and the other one here on Earth. If you then bring the ship back to Earth you've got two identical electrons with a time gap relative to each other. That might be a new millionths of a second... but that's enough. You can then chain them to together (via multiple electron pairs) and communicate with the future. You might not even need multiple electron pairs... since the people in the future can ask the people in their future the question as so on the answer might just appear. Very cool stuff.
Sure the odds suck and everyone with common sense knows that. But....
The lottery exists for the simple reason that people are going to do it anyway. Back in the days before state run lotteries you had the numbers racket, which was one of primary sources of income for the Mob. They were VERY popular and it wasn't uncommon for factories to shut down while the numbers were being sold/read. (That's back when factories were 10,000's of people too.) So you really couldn't enforce the law when it was that big a part of American life and expect to be successful. So that's why the States stepped in. They could offer a bigger jackpot and a certified fair game and the numbers game couldn't. Which meant that all that money going to organized crime anyway could now be put to some other, useful, purpose.
As to Online gambling... Governments should have the right to determine on their own what is and is not legal and what is and is not moral. As long as there is some form of true democratic process behind that decision making. (ie not excluding women from voting etc...) Besides this is the United States we are talking about. Boston tea party... don't tread on me... remember. If you ever want to start a fight mention anything remotely sounding like "World Government" to an American.
By law, unless you are Indian you can't legally work in India. It's not like here where anyone will get you a green card after you get in through school etc.
I did this yesterday except I used yum. All it took was "yum install mythtv-suite" to install. After that I loaded the database into MySQL, ran setup for the backend, and downloaded the program guide data... Then I started up MythTV configured it the way I wanted! The whole thing took 30 minutes and it works perfectly. I do have an issue/w mythbrowser crashing whenever I try to run it but that's a minor thing I'll get working in the next few days. Now I'm an experenced Linux user but I'd never done anything with Myth before. I should also mention that I already had ALSA setup from when I loaded the 2.6 kernel.
If you wanted a Phone that is also a PDA (not the other way around) you should have gone for the Samsung i600. I'm a big Linux guy and I love mine... much better then my old Palm based phone. (The only OS LESS stable then Windows) There's not as much software out there yet but everything I need is available. Plus it's just a regular phone size wise and a Verizon phone. (the Motorola MPx200/w AT&T/T-mobile didn't cut it for me.. no signal anywhere)
Let me start off by saying you really WON'T need your Windows apps after switching to Linux. That's old news. Now you can get Linux native apps that do that same things as their Windows counterparts and do it just as well. (Just as easy to install too) I run Linux on my laptop and XP on my desktop and there's nothing I can't do with my laptop and Linux native apps that I can do on my desktop. To get to that point took more work on my part, but far less then it would have a year ago. Plus... if you do find something that only works on Windows (say some MS Office feature) you can run most of the major Windows Apps painlessly on Linux with Codeweaver's Crossover Office and/or Plugin. I've not had a need to use it on my system BUT I have used it before and it's about as simple to use as you can get. The apps don't run as fast, and there are a few very minor bugs here and there for some apps, but it's still very usuable. Standard WINE is a MAJOR pain in the butt to use... unless someone written a very well detailed how-to already.
As far as games go... Linux is definitely not there yet. Particularly with DirectX games. WineX works pretty well for a lot older games (1-2 years old being considered "new") but still nowhere near well as Windows apps do. You will have to do some work to get them running too. Good thing is that most of the major games have Linux native versions. With the state of 3D and video card driver support, openGL, etc... they still don't run as well as on Windows systems but they are playable. So if you play a lot of games I'd say hold off with Linux OR dual boot because Linux isn't there (yet).
All and all Linux makes a very good desktop for something that's computer savvy. There's still a lot of work to go before it's as easy to use as Windows but at the rate things change in the Linux world I wouldn't be suprised it it was pretty close in the next 2-3 years. I think it will take commercial development to do it.. since consistency is not something the community does well.. but with IBM and others going to Linux on the Desktop that will happen.
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There is exactly zero evidence that the US or EU played any part in the Maiden movement. If there is I challenge you to provide it.
There are two sides to this story:
1. The Russian side (what you're repeating, partially)
2. The truth
We in the west have a legitimate free press. It may be imperfect, it may be incompetent, but it's legitimately free to report what it wants and no single government has any controls to stop it. As long as *somebody* is paying attention the true story WILL get out eventually. Russia none of this is the case. The Russian government tolerates a domestic free press up until the point they do something they don't like. Then they make up some BS excuse to arr
Besides the obvious backup power, cooling, environmental stuff mentioned above....
1. Expandability.. how much rack/cage space is available nearby? Get a right of refusal on any empty space near your stuff if you can.
2. Power max per rack, can you get enough for SAN's, blades etc
3. Remote hands availability/skills/costs (really want to make a trip to the datacenter to replace dead hard drives? No. Do the employees know enough to do *limited* work for you)
4. 24/7 access, near employees if a physical presence is required
5. What sort of racks do they have? Can you buy your own?
6. Storage space. Need 100 servers shipped but don't have racks yet? Need to keep spare hardware on hand? Do they have room keep that for you?
7. How many/what carriers do they offer? How is access delivered? What does their network look like?
8. Do they have spare tools/network cables/misc parts. Can they order stuff for you, or is there some place nearby you can pick things up if needed in a hurry?
9. How many employees can you get access for?
10. Do they have a crash cart? Comfortable place to work? Wifi or other forms of internet access available?
First of all... almost nobody sells RAID 6 devices. I'm aware of only one company that does and it's not Promise. It's an odd ball configuration and I can't see where it would be all that useful. The common RAID configurations are 0, 1, 5, 0+1, 10, and 50.
Second Promise can never be considered a "nice" controller. It works, it's fairly cheap, but it's consumer grade stuff.
I wouldn't bother with a cheap RAID controller. Go with md raid in Linux. It's free, you never have to worry about finding the same controller again if the one you have dies, performance is decent (almost always better then cheap RAID cards), and it works really well all around. You might need a PATA or SATA controller to add more drives but those are cheap. High end stuff where performance is critical you get a high end RAID card.
Seeing how anti-tax this administration is I can't see this suriving the veto powers if it were to ever pass. It's doubtful it would ever get even that far... We're coming up on an election year (as always) and this isn't popular and it's not something they can sneak in without people noticing. Besides I'd think the majority of businesses, with the exception of the retail heavy companies, would be against this.
Besides that it's a bad idea to begin with. So they start charging tax.. what's to stop people from setting up shop Canada or overseas somewhere. You'd have customs to deal with and shipping would be slower but they could find a way around the law I'm certain. Just like with perscription drugs.
VOIP may very well make sense for you. I didn't say it couldn't. However, for the vast majority of companies out there it doesn't (yet).
That's why nobody is buying it. (My best friend sells corporate phone systems and telecom equipment and I'm familiar with the market... they just aren't buying VOIP right now) The few companies that do are almost all very large with either call centers or multiple location they need to connect. The smaller guys, like this poster, it's just almost never cost effective.
As a network admin in almost identical situation (small but growing software company with a larger then normal IT department) I've tried to find a way to make VOIP work for us. I like the idea of what you can do with it and there's the "coolness" factor. I just can't find a practical reason to do it. Eventually the bandwidth and hardware costs will come down to the point I will be able to, but that's still a few years off. (At least here in the US)
VOIP is a buzz word right now but it usually doesn't make sense. A T1 will carry 16 VOIP calls (at ~POTS quality) and runs ~$400 a month. A PSTN line (T1 for voice) carrys 24 lines and costs ~$350. VOIP phones cost almost twice as much as digital POTS phones. Plus there will be a cost going from POTS Minutes are slightly more expensive with POTS but you'd have a use a whole hell of a lot of minutes before you'd hit the break even point. So unless you are a heavy user it doesn't make sense. If you had multiple locations and needed internal extensions etc that might work too. Site to site data lines are much cheaper.
Is it just me or does anyone else wonder what's up with the Japanese obsession with robots? Nothing they've come up with is even remotely practical. Buy a good alarm system. I'm sure it's a heck of a lot better and costs much less. These things are even too expensive as toys.... What's the point? Sure it's cool to watch them. They are little more then dancing calculators right now. Once someone manages to get an AI system up to the point of being as smart as say a dog... then these thing might actually be able to do something useful.
Because it's happened already. Not on 9/11 but in Dec of 99. US customs caught an Al-Queda member at the border who had plans to blow up the Seattle Space needle and more then enough explosives in the trunk of his car to do the job. Later on they found out there were others involved in the plot as well as plans to blow up Disneyland too. All of those 5 or 6 terrorists entered the US through Canada. You also have known terrorists living in your country right now!
The fact is it's easy to check our airports and docks for illegal entry. The border is much much harder. What kind of sense does it to stop you from landing in the US but you can just fly to Canada were you they are sure to let you in with their pre 9/11 liberal policies, and drive to the US? None.. you need to protect ALL points of entry. (Mexico too)
On a side note.. I know someone, an American, who owns land up in Canada. In the woods next to his property he's seen Arabs running around in the woods with real guns in what loked like war games. He called the Canadian authorities... nobody has even bothered to come check it out and it's still going on.
Tthis one is a no brainer. You have to have:
1. A supported Distro on the hardware you are running. You don't have time to workout issues with flakey drivers or unsupported hardware you might otherwise at home. It has to work, and work well.
2. Support for the software you are going to be using. Plan on using Oracle? What's going to happen when you run into a issue? Between your in-house people and Oracle support will you be able to troubleshoot any issues that might come up? There are going to issues that are distro specific. Same with any other complex software packages.
3. A RPM based package management system that doesn't suffer from dependancy issues. With a bunch of servers it's not practical to build from source. Even when you only have to do it with one server that greatly complicates the update process. You have to have the ability to install whatever it is you need, standard or custom, quickly and without hassle.
4. A wide selection of packages to chose from. Stay as close to standard as possible. It takes let time to config that way and less and it's easier to troubleshoot. Widely used Distros have more standard packages.
5. What do you your admins already know? Desktop distros don't really count here.
6. A brand name. Plan on hosting an application for someone else? Brand names help.
Given all that there are really only two choices, Redhat (Enterprise ) and Suse. You can buy servers from Dell/IBM etc... with these installed and fully supported already. You can get packages for nearly everything you need with either one. For less critical servers where you need more recent hardware support or can't avoid doing a lot of customization Fedora and Suse Pro work well too.
That's silly.
I agree that is act is a bad idea. Consumers/voters clearly don't want it. It only serves to protect an industry that has been ripping consumers and the majority of artists off with its sudo monopolistic behavior. At this point there is ZERO chance of going back to the old paradigm. We are better off embracing P2P as the tool that it is and let liaise fair capitalism find a way to adapt as it always has in the past.
However, as to this causing a mass exodus from the US, that's not going to happen. First of all, I think you are grossly over estimating the impact an act like this could have. Annoying sure, but business would survive just fine. Second, I don't think you understand the economics involved. Not that the UK or any other place in Europe is a bad place to live but the standard of living in the US is MUCH higher, provided you have an in-demand skill. You make more here, pay about half the taxes, and housing and other expenses are dramatically lower. Specifically speaking about the UK, I know people that have jobs based there, but live here in the US and just work remotely and travel back and forth all the time because that is actually cheaper to do it that way. Worst case scenario you just change job fields.
I'll second this. I interact with Europeans on a regular basis and I've heard a lot of opinions about Bush. The vast majority are either missinformed or uninformed about the issues here in the US. Having spent time in Germany in the days before the Iraq war started I can see why. Every news channel I watched was spouting the same line with an obvious bias. With the exception of maybe Sky news out of the UK I couldn't find anything like the counter balance we have here with Fox. Maybe that's that's the cause or maybe that's the symptom I don't know. What's clear is that Europeans really don't understand American culture (it's not like Hollywood) or the American perspective.
Because Gnome runs on BSD as well as Linux. They left out Solaris, HP-UX, and Darwin though.
Well.. maybe. Physics has said for years that you couldn't exploit the relationship to send information. However, back in the mid 90's (I think) there was a German scientist who managed to send a Mozart symphony several times faster than light (And reproduce the results). The response was that "Mozart didn't qualify as information". I don't know what's happened since but the book on quantum physics is still being written.
Teleportation yes...
You have say one photon and to destroy and recreate it someplace else.
Entanglement no...
"Spooky action at a distance" or nonlocality.. you have two particles in the same quantum state. No medium required.
We aren't not talking about light (and yes I do know what a photon is, thanks).
This is quantum entanglement, look it up. No RF, no microware, no visible light, or anything else on the electromagnetic spectrum. There's no mass involved hence no breaking relativity. Two particals with an identical quantum state effect each other at a distance. You put on earth and the other say on mars and if you can read/change their quantum state without directly observing them you have an instant faster then light communication device. Interestingly enough using relativity you could also establish direct two way communication with the future/past. You put one partical in spaceship travelling at a very high rate of speed and the other stays on earth. Relative to the partical on earth the partical on the ship ages slower. The difference might be very slight.. but get enough sets of particles and daisy chain them together....
It means...
One step closer to nearly unlimited bandwidth, faster then light transmission(instant), using no wires or electromagnetic medium.
It also means one step closer to computers powerful enough that we can, say for example, model the human body to test all possible drug combinations at the same time.
One step closer to the singularity...
Micropayments = Microvisits
I'm sorry but if your business strategy requires collecting $0.005 per page visit you don't have a business strategy. Sure $0.005 is nothing but in order to play that you have to register, log in, etc... I'd rather spend those few seconds finding an alternative free site or if that doesn't exist flat out stealing your content from whatever on easily found source is hosting it. It's the principle of it. Offer something of real value and people will pay for it. Do nothing and try to skim off as much as possible without people noticing.. don't expect me to blink as I shoot that one down.
The metric system (SI now) is the only official unit of measurement the US government has ever adopted. It did so way back in 1893. (1866 it became a legal unit of measure). What they didn't do though, was require it's use. So since the older imperial system was still widely in use it lived on. (Some of it anyway.. nobody knows what a stone is for example) Congress went back and required the metric system's use for all goverment purposes in 1988 (unless the infomation is for public use where it can be either).
So really we use a mix of both here. In school they teach almost entirely in metric... makes the math easier to deal with when to have to convert to smaller/larger units. Common stuff like speed limits, weight, tempature, and long distances are measured in mph/pounds/fahrenheit/miles. If you go to the store, or use any tools though it's 50/50.. so smaller units like liters/grams/centimeters I think most people know pretty well.
Entanglement is going to change life on earth as we know it, it's going to happen all at once, and probably within the next 20 years. Besides quantum computers, which give you enough parallel processing power to say; model the human body and test new medical drugs/proceedures/DNA alteration instantly, it also make both wired and wireless a thing of the past. Perhaps you'll still need fiber between quantum nodes (for a backbone) but other then that every networked device could have zero lag, virtually unlimited bandwidth, and access from places like the the bottom of the ocean or mars. Those are realy kind of trivial compared to what could potentially happen; direct communication with the future and past (provided the past is in a time that quantum devices exist). Yo take two identical electrons, place one on a spaceship orbiting some nearby body at high rates of speed, and the other one here on Earth. If you then bring the ship back to Earth you've got two identical electrons with a time gap relative to each other. That might be a new millionths of a second... but that's enough. You can then chain them to together (via multiple electron pairs) and communicate with the future. You might not even need multiple electron pairs... since the people in the future can ask the people in their future the question as so on the answer might just appear. Very cool stuff.
Sure the odds suck and everyone with common sense knows that. But....
The lottery exists for the simple reason that people are going to do it anyway. Back in the days before state run lotteries you had the numbers racket, which was one of primary sources of income for the Mob. They were VERY popular and it wasn't uncommon for factories to shut down while the numbers were being sold/read. (That's back when factories were 10,000's of people too.) So you really couldn't enforce the law when it was that big a part of American life and expect to be successful. So that's why the States stepped in. They could offer a bigger jackpot and a certified fair game and the numbers game couldn't. Which meant that all that money going to organized crime anyway could now be put to some other, useful, purpose.
As to Online gambling... Governments should have the right to determine on their own what is and is not legal and what is and is not moral. As long as there is some form of true democratic process behind that decision making. (ie not excluding women from voting etc...) Besides this is the United States we are talking about. Boston tea party... don't tread on me... remember. If you ever want to start a fight mention anything remotely sounding like "World Government" to an American.
By law, unless you are Indian you can't legally work in India. It's not like here where anyone will get you a green card after you get in through school etc.
I did this yesterday except I used yum. All it took was "yum install mythtv-suite" to install. After that I loaded the database into MySQL, ran setup for the backend, and downloaded the program guide data... Then I started up MythTV configured it the way I wanted! The whole thing took 30 minutes and it works perfectly. I do have an issue /w mythbrowser crashing whenever I try to run it but that's a minor thing I'll get working in the next few days. Now I'm an experenced Linux user but I'd never done anything with Myth before. I should also mention that I already had ALSA setup from when I loaded the 2.6 kernel.
If you wanted a Phone that is also a PDA (not the other way around) you should have gone for the Samsung i600. I'm a big Linux guy and I love mine... much better then my old Palm based phone. (The only OS LESS stable then Windows) There's not as much software out there yet but everything I need is available. Plus it's just a regular phone size wise and a Verizon phone. (the Motorola MPx200 /w AT&T/T-mobile didn't cut it for me.. no signal anywhere)
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Let me start off by saying you really WON'T need your Windows apps after switching to Linux. That's old news. Now you can get Linux native apps that do that same things as their Windows counterparts and do it just as well. (Just as easy to install too) I run Linux on my laptop and XP on my desktop and there's nothing I can't do with my laptop and Linux native apps that I can do on my desktop. To get to that point took more work on my part, but far less then it would have a year ago. Plus... if you do find something that only works on Windows (say some MS Office feature) you can run most of the major Windows Apps painlessly on Linux with Codeweaver's Crossover Office and/or Plugin. I've not had a need to use it on my system BUT I have used it before and it's about as simple to use as you can get. The apps don't run as fast, and there are a few very minor bugs here and there for some apps, but it's still very usuable. Standard WINE is a MAJOR pain in the butt to use... unless someone written a very well detailed how-to already.
As far as games go... Linux is definitely not there yet. Particularly with DirectX games. WineX works pretty well for a lot older games (1-2 years old being considered "new") but still nowhere near well as Windows apps do. You will have to do some work to get them running too. Good thing is that most of the major games have Linux native versions. With the state of 3D and video card driver support, openGL, etc... they still don't run as well as on Windows systems but they are playable. So if you play a lot of games I'd say hold off with Linux OR dual boot because Linux isn't there (yet).
All and all Linux makes a very good desktop for something that's computer savvy. There's still a lot of work to go before it's as easy to use as Windows but at the rate things change in the Linux world I wouldn't be suprised it it was pretty close in the next 2-3 years. I think it will take commercial development to do it.. since consistency is not something the community does well.. but with IBM and others going to Linux on the Desktop that will happen.