Paid time off is not a right. I get bewildered by people claiming all kinds of erroneous rights.
It seems that you would be quite bewildered in any other country than the glorious U.S of A, since paid maternity leave seems to be regarded as some kind of "right" in the rest of the world. From a quick glance through those tables it seems that you are residing in sole splendor at the very bottom of the list, as the only nation with zero days paid maternity leave by legislation. You are beat by such paragons of societal advance as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Myanmar. Congratulations.
#1 Sweden is the most socially advanced country in the world.
A "norrbagga" here, I feel that we're not too far behind you in that respect... yet, we don't seem to be part of that study. From a cursory glance at the paper the reason for omitting countries seems to be that data were not available, which I find hard to believe. Denmark, Iceland and Finland were also omitted. You do have cheaper and faster broadband, which might well tip the balance:)
Also remember that a policy like this creates a perverse incentive to favor employing a man instead of a woman-- he's less of a financial liability.
It's no secret that this happens - women, for whatever reasons, have significantly more sick leave than men, in addition to spending more time away after birth. A friend who worked for a short while as a middle manager was told outright by his boss to favour men when employing people for this exact reason. This is of course illegal, but a lot of discrimination in employment situations (and not only against women) is covered up by the employers ability to say "we just felt that she wouldn't have fit in here, no ulterior motives on our part". It's also a problem that's almost impossible to remedy by legislation in a good manner.
On a side note, another friend of mine suspects that he got a job at a startup because he was carrying his bag with the cover of "Whish you where here" on it to the interview. Both owners of the company were gay, and his bag had a "rainbow" on it:)
Meanwhile in sweden: 280 days per child. Of those, at least two months must be used by the father. All days are payed.
In Norway we have you beat:) 46 weeks (322 days) with full pay, or 56 weeks (392 days) with 80% pay, divided amongst the parents with the father having to use at least 3 months, all paid by the government. The keen reader will have noted that for some reason it pays off to choose the shorter duration and use unpaid leave for the remainder if you want the full duration.
I've recently become a father of twins, and we get 5 or 7 weeks on top of that. In addition the father gets at least two weeks of paid leave immediately after birth (my employer granted me four, since twins are "a bit" more hassle during the first weeks). In an average family both parents are working, stay-at-home moms are uncommon here because two incomes are generally needed, so this is virtually a necessity in order to not place your kid in kindergarten at 1 year.
Inb4: Yes, we pay our fair share of taxes to support this (but nothing like the 51.1% I see mentioned in a sibling post), but no-one I know doesn't see the value in that. Not even our most populist political parties argue that this should be changed, our society as a whole has arrived at the conclusion that it is beneficial in the end.
Except that chargers are not all over the place, and I'm sure there are plenty of places where you can go 1500 miles without having the opportunity to charge. What's more, even if you do have a charger available, due to the lengthy time it takes to charge, you might not have the luxury of plugging it in.
It's less of an issue for gasoline and diesel cars because of the ubiquitous gas stations and the short period of time it takes to refill the gas tank.
Yes, they are useless right now for that specific purpose, just as any car is quite useless for intercontinental travel or large-scale cargo hauling. For any vehicle you can think of there are a lot of purposes for which it is not suitable, your complaint just indicates that you shouldn't drive an electric on your road trips. Most people don't drive a moving truck for their local commute even if they need it every time they move to a new place. I'd also hazard a guess that most people have no need for driving 2414.02 km without resting, ever.
There are a lot of electric cars running in my city, used as company cars, for commuting, and other short transport purposes. They are cheap to run and charge sufficiently overnight. A huge bonus is that they don't release local pollution into the city, and as we are on 99% hydropower, the environmental footprint for usage is good as well. An endurance of "only" 150 km is a complete non-issue in those use cases.
Here's a question: To know which bits have changed, doesn't it need to compare the two files. How does this result in bandwidth savings?
It only needs to compare hashes. Rsync goes a step further and uses the ingenious concept of rolling checksums to determine if only parts of a file has changed.
It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre and Sigil. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.
In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.
The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.
If you subscribe to cellular voice and data service in one country, and you buy a prepaid SIM in another country for a business trip or vacation, your primary carrier is still getting your monthly payment and still recovering the phone subsidy.
It's perfectly sensible that this is all providers should be entitled to, and it's how it actually works in countries with sane consumer protection laws. I used several different sim cards in my contract phone three years ago, right out of the box. Some providers sim-lock their contract phones, they are still obliged to provide a reasonably cheap unlocking service from the date of purchase.
While your statement is true it missed the point. If I am looking through a telescope at an object that is 1,000,000 light years away, yes, that object is 9.4605284e21 m away from me. What you are missing though is that light I am seeing in the telescope was emitted from the planet 1,000,000 years ago. I am not seeing the object as it is today, I am seeing it as it was 1 million years ago.
You're actually observing photons that have travelled for a duration of exactly zero seconds from their own perspective:)
A physicist once explained this to me. If I understood correctly, the concept of n years ago is effectively meaningless when cosmic distances are involved, since simultaneity itself is very difficult to ponder. You simply can't define a unique point in time in our own frame of reference at which this light was emitted, thus you can't really say how long ago it happened (OK, I'm on thin ice here, clarification from a physicist would be welcome). In any case it's strange to use lightyear as a unit of time.
Whilst you're welcome to your own opinions, I personally won't be storing anything of any importance on an SSD until not only are they a viable option cost-wise cf. real disks, but also there's some hope of recovering data off them when they fail. Real disks are well-understood in terms of data-recovery, whereas all SSDs store data in extremely-proprietary ways.
A curious backup strategy indeed. I agree that an SSD is overkill for bulk storage of movies and similar data, but if you tried putting your OS partition on one you'd never go back. A drive crash will never catch you unaware unless you are computer illiterate. I would never trust or even bother with drive recovery, as it should never be necessary if you have any idea what you're doing.
You might be joking, but: there many relatively cheap or free solutions for both near-real-time backup and availability, which allows you to enjoy the speed of an SSD without worry. You could even go for two drives in a RAID 1 config if availability is very important to you. If you have a laptop with no extra internal bays insert a thumb drive and script periodic rsyncs (with --link-dest) of important documents to that. I'm happy with using Crashplan with ample redundancy (including cloud) for all important data, and doing a full dd of my OS drive regularly to save time in case of recovery. dd is a lot faster than re-installs, and since my OS drive is tiny in comparison to my bulk storage drives, space is not an issue.
My SSD with OS partitions on it has 17842 hours of operation on it now, it has perfect health according to SMART data. It will likely last longer than any other component in my main computer. On the other hand my tertiary drive (seagate 1TB) were retired two days ago after 24040 hours total, with a couple of weeks of illness at the end (wohoo, free rare earth magnets). I had plenty of time to synchronise the remaining content onto the secondary in advance, SMART is your friend. If the SSD suddenly dies tomorrow I'll be back in business in an hour after getting a new one from the LCS. The one component I will never forgo when building a box with a GUI is an SSD for the OS partitions.
A neat trick for gaming, btw, is to install your games to a regular HDD, and move the games you're playing at the moment to SSD (mklink or ln -s manually if you want full control). "Swapping in" a new game literally (yes, literally) takes something like three minutes, and a 120GB SSD will then suffice for your OS and a few games at a time. It truly works wonders for performance.
Woa. This post kept building itself up, and to boot it was a reply to AC who will probably never see it. I'll just leave it here:)
Have you actually driven a car with a modern Diesel engine?
I had a Diesel rental about 20 years ago, and was impressed how little difference there was to a gasoline engine.
Diesels are common where I live, and I prefer them to gasoline cars. IME a TDI with its high torque has a lot *more* oomph in the normal rpm range, which is where you typically spend most of your time driving. For instance even a modestly powered TDI has no problem accelerating quickly for overtaking without shifting down even when you go 100 kph in 5th, while you have to shift with a gas engine to get higher revs. I have driven both types a lot the last few weeks.
Other than that, modern Diesels drive just like gasoline cars, are a lot more fuel efficient, and are extremely clean. I have read (slightly tongue in cheek) research saying that tail pipe emissions tend to be cleaner than the intake air:-) It's pretty much just CO2 and water.
I'm actually planning to buy a car these days. Too bad that Diesels are likely to be taxed to death in the city I live in due to non-urban-friendly emissions, making them a bad choice for me. Apparently Diesel exhaust, while being better for the environment overall, have a higher tendency to "blanket" a city than gasoline emissions. This led to our government switching their stance on Diesel, going from strongly recommending them and giving tax incentives, to even considering banning Diesels altogether on certain days and times.
I see no problem with ticketing the owner of the car, if he is not driving let him collect the fine from the person he lent the car to.
Uh, what? The driver should be responsible for his actions, not the car owner. Should I be responsible for what another person does just because I happen to own the car? I could see that I might have some responsibility if for instance it was obvious that the person would drive while drunk, but normally not. I would also have a serious issue with acting as collector for the police.
You seem to be claiming that there is ample evidence of extraterrestrial life, but it's covered up. If I misinterpreted your post, my apologies. If I did not, it's futile to respond, but consider this:
There are tens of thousands of people working on various projects, in various capacities, that would have access to this evidence. *All of them* (and their wives) would have to keep their mouths shut in order for your conspiracy to work. I cannot even imagine which sets of different motivations must be necessary for a group of such disparate people to all keep quiet.
Furthermore all a conspiracy nut would have to to is to get training in some relevant capacity: Scientist, computer technician, IT technician, lab worker, data analyst, sub-contractor, etc etc, and get a job at one of the facilities operating this equipment. Hell, even an inquisitive janitor should be able to get at the covered-up evidence of reality shows from Alpha Centauri.
I'll leave it to you and Mr. William of Occham's shaving implement to conclude why such a conspiracy hasn't been uncovered.
You say "March 8th 2013" That exactly matches 3/8/2013
No, we don't, and it doesn't. Thanks for illustrating the problem. In a lot of countries that aren't the U.S. or Belize that means the 3rd of August, as you guys are the only ones exclusively doing it backwards. Please stop it already. Having to know whether a random Internet poster is American or for instance British is bound to lead to confusion. If you use YYYY-MM-DD there will be no mixing up between months and days, as no-one uses YDM. As for the countries using both DMY and MDY: I can't understand how anyone with a brain in their head could think that this is a good idea.
In Norway we've commonly used D.M.Y, but the national administration is increasingly using YYYYMMDD, as anything else is just stupid, and its use is increasing among the population at large as well. There is no confusion stemming from this change, as even people who'll normally give no thought whatsoever to date notations intuitively understand the latter.
A number of states now have databases of patients that doctors label as such for other doctors and pharmacies to watch out for.
A Norwegian MD told me that this is a common problem, in particular with persons who have strong addictions to illegal drugs. They are good actors, and can fake pain symptoms extremely convincingly in order to get medication which they can use to get high, for instance in combination with other drugs. Lower back pains are apparently a favourite, as they do occur legitimately without any detectable cause. Still, many doctors prefer to err on the side of caution and risk giving unmerited pain relief prescriptions rather than withholding medication from someone who actually needs it. Thus quite a few addicts get medication they don't really need. There have also been rare malpractice suits where complaints are filed by the same addicts, claiming that a doctor knowingly fueled their addiction with prescription drugs.
Unfortunately, doctors are generally woefully unequipped to treat pain, particularly long-term pain. Plenty of addicts are made by the medical profession, something they don't like to admit.
Yes, as I've understood it long-term pain treatment is very tricky, and in some cases it's impossible to effectively treat pain without risking addiction. Of course this is non-ideal, but I suppose that a risk of addiction can be preferable to the actual pain in some cases. I don't get the impression that the medical profession tries to hide that, and possibility of addiction is certainly an aspect which is very carefully considered both when testing new drugs and prescribing established ones. Things may be different across the pond, though:)
I do wish you'd stop using that. The correct term is "global market place." I don't want to be a grammar/spelling/usage nazi, but the way you mangle the term is getting to be positively painful.
Judging from his url he's Danish. The word exists in Danish and means the same, but it's spelled "marked". There are a few such mistakes that are very easy to make for us Nordic guys.
I don't want to be a grammar/spelling/usage nazi [...]
Please be, see my sig:) Many of us foreign people are happy when people politely point out our mistakes.
Does the House GOP caucus have a minimum stupidity requirement?
While it is scary that a politician who has anything to do with transportation taxes is so vastly ignorant, there is another aspect which I find even more disturbing, which is not mentioned:
Biking is a very efficient way of getting exercise, as you can do it while going places. I hear that you might have a slight problem with people not being in shape in the U.S.:)
I wager that most Americans would be able to use a bike for at least some of their daily trips, such as going to the store or visiting friends (cue posters who live 70 km from the nearest store, and/or have no friends...). These statistics claim that 29% of Americans have a commute of 1-5 miles for instance, if you have any problems biking that distance you *really* need the exercise...
Taxing such activities in any way seems incredibly short-sighted. I'm surprised that American politicians would even consider any taxes that discourage people getting off their asses. I seriously doubt that Rep. Orcutt has omitted this out of stupidity, which makes this tax proposal more than a tad cynical.
I know this sounds crazy, but why not push for UEFI to allow users to install whichever keys they want into their BIOS. Microsoft can work with OEMs to have their key installed by default, but Linux users will be free to install the keys of their chosen distro themselves...then distros can sign whatever they need to and just distribute their cert.
It's secure, puts users in control and only requires Linux users to make a configuration tweak when installing...which is good preparation for using Linux. And, most importantly, doesn't give Microsoft any control over the Linux community.
Exactly, something like Secure Boot is a good idea which would provide protection against unwanted changes. MS tried to hijack it by requiring it to be enabled for computers shipping with Windows 8, essentially making them unable to run anything not blessed by MS. When that backfired they changed their stance, allowing users to override Secure Boot in BIOS. I'm not sure what their position is on allowing users to use their own keys, thus benefiting from the security against changes without depending on Microsoft.
The question "Is there a creator?" is the relevant question.
Actually, no. The religious crowd already have their answer, but in most religions it's a given that you can't have evidence (you need faith). Others are more interested in investigating reality, and since there is no scientific evidence of a creator it's not useful to consider this option.
Any time you mention god, by definition outside of the universe and untestable, you aren't talking science.
I would actually take it a bit further. If you embrace the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient entity, all of science goes out the window. This entity could fudge experiments any way it wanted, and you could never trust that an experiment would give the same results twice. Saying that a god has no place in science is correct, furthermore the mere existence of a god would invalidate it all.
Here, it doesn't matter. If you hit the car travelling directly in front of you, you were, by legal definition, following too close or not paying attention, ergo your fault. No exceptions.
That is sensible, but where I live there is an exception if the car in front of you is backing up. In fact, you are always responsible for any accident if you're in reverse. After this nitpick we return to our regular schedule:)
"You have no right to drive a car on public roads"
This is a problem with your country. This SHOULD be a right. I find it disturbing that more people do not understand why.
Why? You are in command of a potentially lethal vehicle, you should demonstrate that you are capable of being responsible for it. No-one in their right mind would argue that all persons with intellectual disabilities (or whatever the PC term is now) should have a right to drive, for instance. Where I live, if you get caught drunk driving twice within five years you lose your licence for life. This is exactly as it should be, as you have clearly demonstrated an unfitness to drive on public roads. If driving had been regarded as a "right" those fuckers would still be endangering lives of others. Note that I have nothing against alcohol, but drunk driving is ridiculously easy to avoid, and if you don't even manage that, you and your judgment should not be in traffic. Ever.
No, not when I am sailing, caving, rock clumbing, bike riding, etc. But I always need a phone for safety reasons.
If you don't already have one, you should get a rugged phone. My brother speaks highly of his Samsung Extreme (or a very similar model). He doesn't rely on it for safety, but it has taken a lot of abuse and still works perfectly. You might still have connectivity issues in caves, though:)
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Paid time off is not a right. I get bewildered by people claiming all kinds of erroneous rights.
It seems that you would be quite bewildered in any other country than the glorious U.S of A, since paid maternity leave seems to be regarded as some kind of "right" in the rest of the world. From a quick glance through those tables it seems that you are residing in sole splendor at the very bottom of the list, as the only nation with zero days paid maternity leave by legislation. You are beat by such paragons of societal advance as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Myanmar. Congratulations.
#1 Sweden is the most socially advanced country in the world.
A "norrbagga" here, I feel that we're not too far behind you in that respect... yet, we don't seem to be part of that study. From a cursory glance at the paper the reason for omitting countries seems to be that data were not available, which I find hard to believe. Denmark, Iceland and Finland were also omitted. You do have cheaper and faster broadband, which might well tip the balance :)
Meanwhile in sweden: 280 days per child. Of those, at least two months must be used by the father. All days are payed.
In Norway we have you beat :)
46 weeks (322 days) with full pay, or 56 weeks (392 days) with 80% pay
Seems like I was mistaken about that, as it turns out you guys actually have 480 days. Oh well.
Also remember that a policy like this creates a perverse incentive to favor employing a man instead of a woman-- he's less of a financial liability.
It's no secret that this happens - women, for whatever reasons, have significantly more sick leave than men, in addition to spending more time away after birth. A friend who worked for a short while as a middle manager was told outright by his boss to favour men when employing people for this exact reason. This is of course illegal, but a lot of discrimination in employment situations (and not only against women) is covered up by the employers ability to say "we just felt that she wouldn't have fit in here, no ulterior motives on our part". It's also a problem that's almost impossible to remedy by legislation in a good manner.
On a side note, another friend of mine suspects that he got a job at a startup because he was carrying his bag with the cover of "Whish you where here" on it to the interview. Both owners of the company were gay, and his bag had a "rainbow" on it :)
Meanwhile in sweden: 280 days per child. Of those, at least two months must be used by the father. All days are payed.
In Norway we have you beat :)
46 weeks (322 days) with full pay, or 56 weeks (392 days) with 80% pay, divided amongst the parents with the father having to use at least 3 months, all paid by the government. The keen reader will have noted that for some reason it pays off to choose the shorter duration and use unpaid leave for the remainder if you want the full duration.
I've recently become a father of twins, and we get 5 or 7 weeks on top of that. In addition the father gets at least two weeks of paid leave immediately after birth (my employer granted me four, since twins are "a bit" more hassle during the first weeks). In an average family both parents are working, stay-at-home moms are uncommon here because two incomes are generally needed, so this is virtually a necessity in order to not place your kid in kindergarten at 1 year.
Inb4: Yes, we pay our fair share of taxes to support this (but nothing like the 51.1% I see mentioned in a sibling post), but no-one I know doesn't see the value in that. Not even our most populist political parties argue that this should be changed, our society as a whole has arrived at the conclusion that it is beneficial in the end.
Except that chargers are not all over the place, and I'm sure there are plenty of places where you can go 1500 miles without having the opportunity to charge. What's more, even if you do have a charger available, due to the lengthy time it takes to charge, you might not have the luxury of plugging it in.
It's less of an issue for gasoline and diesel cars because of the ubiquitous gas stations and the short period of time it takes to refill the gas tank.
Yes, they are useless right now for that specific purpose, just as any car is quite useless for intercontinental travel or large-scale cargo hauling. For any vehicle you can think of there are a lot of purposes for which it is not suitable, your complaint just indicates that you shouldn't drive an electric on your road trips. Most people don't drive a moving truck for their local commute even if they need it every time they move to a new place. I'd also hazard a guess that most people have no need for driving 2414.02 km without resting, ever.
There are a lot of electric cars running in my city, used as company cars, for commuting, and other short transport purposes. They are cheap to run and charge sufficiently overnight. A huge bonus is that they don't release local pollution into the city, and as we are on 99% hydropower, the environmental footprint for usage is good as well. An endurance of "only" 150 km is a complete non-issue in those use cases.
Here's a question:
To know which bits have changed, doesn't it need to compare the two files. How does this result in bandwidth savings?
It only needs to compare hashes. Rsync goes a step further and uses the ingenious concept of rolling checksums to determine if only parts of a file has changed.
<Something something> communism <something something>FOSS
<more communism>
It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre and Sigil. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.
In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.
The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.
If you subscribe to cellular voice and data service in one country, and you buy a prepaid SIM in another country for a business trip or vacation, your primary carrier is still getting your monthly payment and still recovering the phone subsidy.
It's perfectly sensible that this is all providers should be entitled to, and it's how it actually works in countries with sane consumer protection laws. I used several different sim cards in my contract phone three years ago, right out of the box. Some providers sim-lock their contract phones, they are still obliged to provide a reasonably cheap unlocking service from the date of purchase.
While your statement is true it missed the point. If I am looking through a telescope at an object that is 1,000,000 light years away, yes, that object is 9.4605284e21 m away from me. What you are missing though is that light I am seeing in the telescope was emitted from the planet 1,000,000 years ago. I am not seeing the object as it is today, I am seeing it as it was 1 million years ago.
You're actually observing photons that have travelled for a duration of exactly zero seconds from their own perspective :)
A physicist once explained this to me. If I understood correctly, the concept of n years ago is effectively meaningless when cosmic distances are involved, since simultaneity itself is very difficult to ponder. You simply can't define a unique point in time in our own frame of reference at which this light was emitted, thus you can't really say how long ago it happened (OK, I'm on thin ice here, clarification from a physicist would be welcome). In any case it's strange to use lightyear as a unit of time.
Whilst you're welcome to your own opinions, I personally won't be storing anything of any importance on an SSD until not only are they a viable option cost-wise cf. real disks, but also there's some hope of recovering data off them when they fail. Real disks are well-understood in terms of data-recovery, whereas all SSDs store data in extremely-proprietary ways.
A curious backup strategy indeed. I agree that an SSD is overkill for bulk storage of movies and similar data, but if you tried putting your OS partition on one you'd never go back. A drive crash will never catch you unaware unless you are computer illiterate. I would never trust or even bother with drive recovery, as it should never be necessary if you have any idea what you're doing.
You might be joking, but: there many relatively cheap or free solutions for both near-real-time backup and availability, which allows you to enjoy the speed of an SSD without worry. You could even go for two drives in a RAID 1 config if availability is very important to you. If you have a laptop with no extra internal bays insert a thumb drive and script periodic rsyncs (with --link-dest) of important documents to that. I'm happy with using Crashplan with ample redundancy (including cloud) for all important data, and doing a full dd of my OS drive regularly to save time in case of recovery. dd is a lot faster than re-installs, and since my OS drive is tiny in comparison to my bulk storage drives, space is not an issue.
My SSD with OS partitions on it has 17842 hours of operation on it now, it has perfect health according to SMART data. It will likely last longer than any other component in my main computer. On the other hand my tertiary drive (seagate 1TB) were retired two days ago after 24040 hours total, with a couple of weeks of illness at the end (wohoo, free rare earth magnets). I had plenty of time to synchronise the remaining content onto the secondary in advance, SMART is your friend. If the SSD suddenly dies tomorrow I'll be back in business in an hour after getting a new one from the LCS. The one component I will never forgo when building a box with a GUI is an SSD for the OS partitions.
A neat trick for gaming, btw, is to install your games to a regular HDD, and move the games you're playing at the moment to SSD (mklink or ln -s manually if you want full control). "Swapping in" a new game literally (yes, literally) takes something like three minutes, and a 120GB SSD will then suffice for your OS and a few games at a time. It truly works wonders for performance.
Woa. This post kept building itself up, and to boot it was a reply to AC who will probably never see it. I'll just leave it here :)
Have you actually driven a car with a modern Diesel engine?
I had a Diesel rental about 20 years ago, and was impressed how little difference there was to a gasoline engine.
Diesels are common where I live, and I prefer them to gasoline cars. IME a TDI with its high torque has a lot *more* oomph in the normal rpm range, which is where you typically spend most of your time driving. For instance even a modestly powered TDI has no problem accelerating quickly for overtaking without shifting down even when you go 100 kph in 5th, while you have to shift with a gas engine to get higher revs. I have driven both types a lot the last few weeks.
Other than that, modern Diesels drive just like gasoline cars, are a lot more fuel efficient, and are extremely clean. I have read (slightly tongue in cheek) research saying that tail pipe emissions tend to be cleaner than the intake air :-) It's pretty much just CO2 and water.
I'm actually planning to buy a car these days. Too bad that Diesels are likely to be taxed to death in the city I live in due to non-urban-friendly emissions, making them a bad choice for me. Apparently Diesel exhaust, while being better for the environment overall, have a higher tendency to "blanket" a city than gasoline emissions. This led to our government switching their stance on Diesel, going from strongly recommending them and giving tax incentives, to even considering banning Diesels altogether on certain days and times.
I see no problem with ticketing the owner of the car, if he is not driving let him collect the fine from the person he lent the car to.
Uh, what? The driver should be responsible for his actions, not the car owner. Should I be responsible for what another person does just because I happen to own the car? I could see that I might have some responsibility if for instance it was obvious that the person would drive while drunk, but normally not. I would also have a serious issue with acting as collector for the police.
You seem to be claiming that there is ample evidence of extraterrestrial life, but it's covered up. If I misinterpreted your post, my apologies. If I did not, it's futile to respond, but consider this:
There are tens of thousands of people working on various projects, in various capacities, that would have access to this evidence. *All of them* (and their wives) would have to keep their mouths shut in order for your conspiracy to work. I cannot even imagine which sets of different motivations must be necessary for a group of such disparate people to all keep quiet.
Furthermore all a conspiracy nut would have to to is to get training in some relevant capacity: Scientist, computer technician, IT technician, lab worker, data analyst, sub-contractor, etc etc, and get a job at one of the facilities operating this equipment. Hell, even an inquisitive janitor should be able to get at the covered-up evidence of reality shows from Alpha Centauri.
I'll leave it to you and Mr. William of Occham's shaving implement to conclude why such a conspiracy hasn't been uncovered.
You say "March 8th 2013"
That exactly matches 3/8/2013
No, we don't, and it doesn't. Thanks for illustrating the problem. In a lot of countries that aren't the U.S. or Belize that means the 3rd of August, as you guys are the only ones exclusively doing it backwards. Please stop it already. Having to know whether a random Internet poster is American or for instance British is bound to lead to confusion. If you use YYYY-MM-DD there will be no mixing up between months and days, as no-one uses YDM. As for the countries using both DMY and MDY: I can't understand how anyone with a brain in their head could think that this is a good idea.
In Norway we've commonly used D.M.Y, but the national administration is increasingly using YYYYMMDD, as anything else is just stupid, and its use is increasing among the population at large as well. There is no confusion stemming from this change, as even people who'll normally give no thought whatsoever to date notations intuitively understand the latter.
A number of states now have databases of patients that doctors label as such for other doctors and pharmacies to watch out for.
A Norwegian MD told me that this is a common problem, in particular with persons who have strong addictions to illegal drugs. They are good actors, and can fake pain symptoms extremely convincingly in order to get medication which they can use to get high, for instance in combination with other drugs. Lower back pains are apparently a favourite, as they do occur legitimately without any detectable cause. Still, many doctors prefer to err on the side of caution and risk giving unmerited pain relief prescriptions rather than withholding medication from someone who actually needs it. Thus quite a few addicts get medication they don't really need. There have also been rare malpractice suits where complaints are filed by the same addicts, claiming that a doctor knowingly fueled their addiction with prescription drugs.
Unfortunately, doctors are generally woefully unequipped to treat pain, particularly long-term pain. Plenty of addicts are made by the medical profession, something they don't like to admit.
Yes, as I've understood it long-term pain treatment is very tricky, and in some cases it's impossible to effectively treat pain without risking addiction. Of course this is non-ideal, but I suppose that a risk of addiction can be preferable to the actual pain in some cases. I don't get the impression that the medical profession tries to hide that, and possibility of addiction is certainly an aspect which is very carefully considered both when testing new drugs and prescribing established ones. Things may be different across the pond, though :)
I do wish you'd stop using that. The correct term is "global market place." I don't want to be a grammar/spelling/usage nazi, but the way you mangle the term is getting to be positively painful.
Judging from his url he's Danish. The word exists in Danish and means the same, but it's spelled "marked". There are a few such mistakes that are very easy to make for us Nordic guys.
I don't want to be a grammar/spelling/usage nazi [...]
Please be, see my sig :)
Many of us foreign people are happy when people politely point out our mistakes.
At least that's the "logic" used by social democrats in Norway.
Wat
Does the House GOP caucus have a minimum stupidity requirement?
While it is scary that a politician who has anything to do with transportation taxes is so vastly ignorant, there is another aspect which I find even more disturbing, which is not mentioned:
Biking is a very efficient way of getting exercise, as you can do it while going places. I hear that you might have a slight problem with people not being in shape in the U.S. :)
I wager that most Americans would be able to use a bike for at least some of their daily trips, such as going to the store or visiting friends (cue posters who live 70 km from the nearest store, and/or have no friends...). These statistics claim that 29% of Americans have a commute of 1-5 miles for instance, if you have any problems biking that distance you *really* need the exercise...
Taxing such activities in any way seems incredibly short-sighted. I'm surprised that American politicians would even consider any taxes that discourage people getting off their asses. I seriously doubt that Rep. Orcutt has omitted this out of stupidity, which makes this tax proposal more than a tad cynical.
I know this sounds crazy, but why not push for UEFI to allow users to install whichever keys they want into their BIOS. Microsoft can work with OEMs to have their key installed by default, but Linux users will be free to install the keys of their chosen distro themselves...then distros can sign whatever they need to and just distribute their cert.
It's secure, puts users in control and only requires Linux users to make a configuration tweak when installing...which is good preparation for using Linux. And, most importantly, doesn't give Microsoft any control over the Linux community.
Exactly, something like Secure Boot is a good idea which would provide protection against unwanted changes. MS tried to hijack it by requiring it to be enabled for computers shipping with Windows 8, essentially making them unable to run anything not blessed by MS. When that backfired they changed their stance, allowing users to override Secure Boot in BIOS. I'm not sure what their position is on allowing users to use their own keys, thus benefiting from the security against changes without depending on Microsoft.
The question "Is there a creator?" is the relevant question.
Actually, no. The religious crowd already have their answer, but in most religions it's a given that you can't have evidence (you need faith). Others are more interested in investigating reality, and since there is no scientific evidence of a creator it's not useful to consider this option.
Any time you mention god, by definition outside of the universe and untestable, you aren't talking science.
I would actually take it a bit further. If you embrace the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient entity, all of science goes out the window. This entity could fudge experiments any way it wanted, and you could never trust that an experiment would give the same results twice. Saying that a god has no place in science is correct, furthermore the mere existence of a god would invalidate it all.
Here, it doesn't matter. If you hit the car travelling directly in front of you, you were, by legal definition, following too close or not paying attention, ergo your fault. No exceptions.
That is sensible, but where I live there is an exception if the car in front of you is backing up. In fact, you are always responsible for any accident if you're in reverse. After this nitpick we return to our regular schedule :)
"You have no right to drive a car on public roads"
This is a problem with your country. This SHOULD be a right. I find it disturbing that more people do not understand why.
Why? You are in command of a potentially lethal vehicle, you should demonstrate that you are capable of being responsible for it. No-one in their right mind would argue that all persons with intellectual disabilities (or whatever the PC term is now) should have a right to drive, for instance. Where I live, if you get caught drunk driving twice within five years you lose your licence for life. This is exactly as it should be, as you have clearly demonstrated an unfitness to drive on public roads. If driving had been regarded as a "right" those fuckers would still be endangering lives of others. Note that I have nothing against alcohol, but drunk driving is ridiculously easy to avoid, and if you don't even manage that, you and your judgment should not be in traffic. Ever.
No, not when I am sailing, caving, rock clumbing, bike riding, etc. But I always need a phone for safety reasons.
If you don't already have one, you should get a rugged phone. My brother speaks highly of his Samsung Extreme (or a very similar model). He doesn't rely on it for safety, but it has taken a lot of abuse and still works perfectly. You might still have connectivity issues in caves, though :)