> I don't have any clue where to begin on which one to recommend.
Whichever one you like. I've kind of settled on Debian lately (since Sarge was released), so I recommend that. When I was using other distros, I recommended them. (Well, not all of them. I never recommended gentoo except to people who already had experience with Linux.)
I mean, really, it's not that complicated. If the one you recommend isn't the ideal best perfect one, it's still a several-thousand-percent improvement over the painful-to-use, feature-impoverished drossware that came pre-installed on the computer when they bought it at the store.
> At least with Windows, I can say "Use Home Premium at home, Professional at work."
I can't imagine ever *specifically* recommending Windows Home Premium for anything. For some users (especially, users who really only want to browse the web) I can imagine recommending that if that's what came on the computer they can go ahead and get by with it for now, but specifically recommending that they get that on purpose as opposed to anything else? I cannot imagine a scenario where I would make such a recommendation.
(For Windows Professional, yeah, I *can* imagine such situations. They are not in the majority, but such situations do exist.)
> With Linux, I guess I would recommend Ubuntu
If that's what you're comfortable with, sure. Ubuntu is, on the whole, a fine distribution. Sure, it's not perfect, but then, what is?
It's not necessary, or even desirable, for everyone to use (or for everyone to recommend) the same distribution. In fact, that would be rather bad. A large percentage of the problems associated with Windows are either directly or indirectly the result of everyone using essentially the same distribution.
> but a lot of Linux fans are even starting to bitch about that.
You're always going to have that. If you get a hundred Windows users together to talk about computers, do you think none of them will complain about Windows? Haha. You'll be doing well if three of them don't. Don't worry about random people complaining. Use what works for you, recommend what you like, and, if you support other users, install whatever will best meet their needs. If there are some people on the internet complaining about it, why should that bother you?
Also, 1000 meters of ocean level rise wouldn't really be enough to give you a Waterworld scenario. It would be a global catastrophy, certainly, but there would still be quite a bit of dry land -- in large continuous strips, some which would extend for more than a quarter of the earth's circumference in length. Dry land would certainly not be so difficult to locate as to approach mythical status. A lot of Asia would still be above water (not just the Himalayas, either), plus a good portion of Africa, a sizable chunk of North America (just for example, Denver would still be more than half a kilometer above the new elevated ocean level), a long strip of South America running from Columbia all the way to Tiera Del Fuego, and quite a bit of Antarctica (yes, even with all the ice melted off), as well as various mountains and islands scatter around every geopolitical region in the world.
They probably designed it to assume that all the water has to actually come from somewhere.
There simply isn't anywhere enough water available to raise the ocean levels by the kilometer you propose, not by a long shot -- not with the ocean basins being anywhere near as deep as they currently are. If you want to make it that deep, you have to raise the ocean floor and/or lower the continental plates. But, of course, if you start changing that stuff, the simplistic model NASA used to calculate the coastlines wouldn't work. Once you start raising and lowering whole large sections of the earth's crust, Florida might end up being at a higher elevation than Wisconsin, who knows? All bets would be off, and all our maps would be worthless.
Of course it's learned. We teach it in school, every year, from somewhere around second grade right on up through college. Obviously it's learned.
Is that supposed to have some kind of significance? I don't see it. Virtually everything we know is learned. Arithmetic is learned. Color is learned. Language is learned. Food preferences are learned, including even the ability to tell the difference between food and non-food. The notion that a stove burner is hot and you don't want to put your hand on it is learned.
> I'm not sure why [mutton is] not so much of a thing in the US.
Historically, when most of the settlers came here, the land hadn't been cleared yet. Everything was forest as far as the eye could see. They started clearing land right away, but they initially needed much of the cleared land for planting grain. Milk cows can be kept in a barn most of the time, as can pigs (which you can even feed on slops), and chickens do just fine where you haven't cleared the trees yet. What grazing land was available was needed for horses (important for transportation until the early twentieth century) and cows (which you *have* to have, for the milk). Sheep are rather hard on grazing land, because they eat the grass right down to the roots, instead of just clipping off the tops like most grazing animals, so you need a larger amount of cleared, fallow grassland if you're going to raise sheep, as compared to most other livestock. Land that's too hilly to farm efficiently is ideal for sheep (because you can afford to let them have quite a bit of it without feeling like you're missing the opportunity to grow five times their value in wheat), but there's not very much of that kind of land east of the Rockies, and almost all of it was covered with forest. Cows need a lot less grazing land than sheep, for the amount of food they produce. As the frontier advanced westward, this situation continued to obtain for a fair percentage of our history -- by which time a lot of our national cuisine was pretty well established, at least in basic terms. Sheep have always been around too (as well as goats and all manner of other livestock) but in rather smaller numbers. By the time an area had enough available cleared land to let it go to grass and use it for sheep, all our grandmothers' recipe books were focused on beef and pork and chicken as the major kinds of meat.
The other thing is, Virginia established a cotton economy rather early, so the market for wool was never particularly great over here. That made sheep less attractive to raise than they might have been otherwise.
> How is it difficult to eat "that way"? IMO it's very easy to have a diet which is primarily meat.
Some of us have taste buds. Meat by itself tastes absolutely wretched. You can eat it in an emergency, but pretty much only if you haven't had anything to eat in so long your stomach things your throat's been slit. Even then, you take a couple of bites and immediately go, "Uggh. Why am I eating this? Sure, I'm hungry, but am I really *this* hungry?"
Drown that same meat in ketchup and cheese, pile a whole bunch of lettuce and tomato and cucumber and stuff on top, and serve it between slices of multi-grain bread, and now you've got yourself a tasty sandwich. Or you can cut the meat up into small pieces and stir-fry it with vegetables and rice, and that's good. Or put it in soup, with a whole bunch of vegetables and some noodles and/or potatoes. Or grind it up and put it in baked pasta, or use it as a pizza topping. There are a lot of things you can do with meat that make a meal you *want* to eat.
But just plain meat by itself? Blech. You'd better just kill me now, if my other choice is to eat like that for the rest of my life.
Being a network administrator, I'm not sure I have any sympathy for the people who feel like they have to pay for those upgrades. Upgrades to commercial software cost money. When you plan your network infrastructure around a commercial operating system, you'd better plan to spend money on upgrades. It WILL be necessary. (If you're trying to avoid spending any money on software upgrades, you could always use Debian, or one of the various other options.)
Password hash salting is an important security feature. If you're using an old OS that doesn't support it, upgrading to one that does is important. It's worth the money -- assuming the network operating system you're using was worth the money in the first place, which I suppose depends mostly on whether you have mission-critical third-party line-of-business software that requires it. That seems to be the usual reason for running Windows on servers (I can't think of any OTHER reason to do so), and said third-party software typically has annual maintenance fees that make a couple of Windows licenses look like pocket change, so you should be able to afford the OS upgrade in that case. Factor the Windows upgrades into the budget as part of the cost of running the line-of-business software that requires Windows. In a very real way it *is* part of the cost of doing that.
> Hopefully they'll be very careful about bringing asteroids into Earth orbit.
There's no need to put them in Earth orbit directly. You can just plop them in orbit around the moon (or at one of the Earth's trojan points, I suppose, but that's rather farther away and so less accessible).
What will go wrong, obviously, is that the venture will spend more money than the US federal government and get even less value for that investment. Seriously, water and air? Do these people even *have* brains? The more water and air they can get out of the asteroid, the more money they'll lose bringing it down to the surface at a cost of many thousands of times its value per ounce (unless they just intend to mine it and leave it in orbit to be used later for, umm, actually I have no idea what for, and it would almost certainly cost more than sending water and air up from Earth, but it still makes more sense than mining water and air and bringing them down planetside). Precious metals (like, say, iridium) could potentially make some sense in theory, but only if they were found at a VERY unusually high purity. Any normal ore would be MUCH too bulky to be worth transporting from orbit, even if getting the asteroid here in the first place were free. The other possibility is the completely insane notion of smelting it in space, which would doubtless make transporting the ore to the surface look like a bargain in comparison.
However, as long as the people investing the money are doing so voluntarily, I guess that's not a very big deal (to the rest of us). I may think they're being silly, but hey, it's their money to spend. (It's not like money disappears permanently from the economy when spent.)
> My guess is that the features which were left out for either consuming > too many resources while running, too many threads or memory, or...
Very plausible, but also...
> Tablets are not very secure and easy to steal.
This.
On a Microsoft Active Directory network, information about *all* accounts on the system, including the domain administrator accounts, is stored on every device that is allowed to join the domain. That includes information about the passwords. (Why? Because if a domain controller goes down and suddenly every single computer in the department can't log in, people become very upset. A more sane approach, from a security perspective, would be to only give each local system account information for accounts that have recently been used to log into that local system; but AFAIK Active Directory doesn't do things that way. Certainly as of Windows XP it didn't, and if that has changed I missed it.)
The passwords are not stored in the clear, but the information that is stored would be a significant boon to an attacker if he could walk away with it and do some processing for a while (say, on a botnet) and come back to log in next week or next month. Joining the domain in the first place is a security barrier -- you need a domain administrator's permission to join any computer to the domain. Once the computer is joined to the domain, however, it gets domain information, including account information, including hashed passwords. If an attacker can compromise ANY of the computers on the domain -- by, for example, physically removing their hard drive and plugging it into another computer -- he can bypass such things as login retry timeouts and thus can test as many passwords per second as he pleases, limited only by computing resources (chiefly, CPU time).
(He might possibly even be able to use massive precalculated hash tables, if MSAD still doesn't use salt. I don't happen to know whether it does or not. It certainly SHOULD, but with backward compatibility being crucial to Microsoft's business, *especially* in the enterprise, I wouldn't be altogether shocked to the core if there were no salt, or if it were turned off by default and you had to deliberately disable compatibility with older OS versions to turn it on. Anybody who happens to know, feel free to chime in here.)
So yeah, laptops on a MSAD domain are probably a bad enough idea in most cases, but tablets would be worse. This doesn't mean Microsoft won't figure out a way to make tablets on the domain happen (I'm sure they will, eventually), but now that they're trying to take security (somewhat more) seriously, they may be trying to sort out these kinds of implications first. If so, that would be a good thing.
I had a case of (relatively mild) depression for a couple of years once, but it was mostly because I was in junior high. I got over it in ninth grade. (This is neither here nor there. A sample size of one is completely worthless for determining anything of this nature.)
However, it's not necessary to ever *have* depression to make observations about it, and about the effectiveness (or complete lack thereof) of any given treatment. In fact, I would tend to discount observations on the subject that come from people who have suffered from serious depression themselves or had a close friend or relative who suffered from it, as their objectivity on the subject is rather severely compromised. Conclusions drawn by counselors and most psychologists are unreliable for similar reasons.
It's a shame we can't do double-blind studies to settle the matter, but so far nobody has figured out how to prevent depression patients from figuring out whether they're receiving counseling or not.
No. Did you read the thing you quoted? In the first place, it does not proscribe threatening to inflict legal harm via prosecution, suit, or tort. It specifically says "physical" harm. Prosecution is decidedly non-physical in nature. (Yes, yes, stress can cause physical symptoms, but you just try getting the court to buy that a threat to take someone to trial constitutes a threat of physical harm. Even the obscenely warped US jury system isn't going to buy that.)
Additionally, the way the law is worded, just popping off at the mouth, saying the first thing that comes into your head, wouldn't qualify. The burden would be on the prosecution (or the plaintiff, I suppose) to show "intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend". Intent, as a rule, can be rather hard to prove, unless the defendant gets caught bragging about what he was doing to the victim.
The cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor is found on the fake bones pile on the "Rogue level" in NetHack, and sometimes also in real bones piles (when the former player died with either a cheap plastic amulet or the real AoY in his possession). The cheap plastic amulet is also what you get if you try to wish for the Amulet of Yendor. When not formally identified, it appears as "The Amulet of Yendor". Unlike the real Amulet, however, the cheap plastic one can be put into containers. It does not do anything useful when worn, carried, or invoked, so most players immediately stow it in their Bag of Holding until they can get it back to a stash. It makes excellent polyfodder if your armor-slot strategy allows you to take advantage of amulets of life saving, but if you are wearing GDSM and relying on your amulet slot for reflection (in order to keep your shield hand free for #twoweapon and/or to avoid getting things welded to both hands by a curse) the cheap plastic amulet is effectively worthless. The latter situation is particularly likely for chaotic characters (who cannot easily wish for slotless magic resistance) and neutrals who like to do early sacrificing for an artifact weapon. Lawfuls, who can #dip for Excalibur and thus do not need to sacrifice until much later in the game, can usually get slotless MR from the castle wand, provided they haven't found a bones pile full of junk artifacts. Although, I think there are some variants where only knights can #dip for Excalibur, which might put more lawful characters into the same position as neutrals.
Blu-Ray never had a chance, because it was released at completely the wrong time. The market had already settled on a successor to the then-most-popular video format: by the time most people first heard of "Blu-Ray", everyone already understood that the new video format that would replace VHS was definitely going to be DVD. In fact, a lot of people -- maybe even the majority -- already had DVD players.
If Blu-Ray had been released six or eight years sooner, when DVD hadn't really got anybody's attention yet (outside the extreme bleeding-edge crowd that also used LaserDisc and Betamax and LS120 SuperDisk), it might have been able to catch on and steal DVD's chance for dominance. But Blu-Ray wasn't ready at that time.
As for being the next format _after_ DVD, that's patently absurd: it's nowhere near time for that. The CD format for music is much older than DVD and hasn't been replaced yet. DVD is still so new, a lot of people still think the word "video" means VHS as opposed to DVD -- and VHS is still *significantly* more widely deployed than Blu-Ray will ever be, partly because people moved their old VCRs into the kids' rooms, and partly because a lot of people kept the VCR so they could continue watching their old collections. (The players for that format were also more robust and lasted longer.) There are almost as many working VCRs out there as there are working DVD players. The market doesn't have room for a third physical-media video format, and the second slot won't open up until VHS has had time to become nearly as obscure as Betamax was when DVD was introduced -- that's going to be another few years yet. By then, Blu-Ray will probably be edged out by something newer and better -- like what happened when iOmega Zip drives didn't replace floppies fast enough and got edged out by CD-R.
But, don't you see, those people are sort of famous, kind of, so therefore obviously they should be allowed to get away with it, you know, because, they're famous, so it's okay. Stupidity and wrongdoing shouldn't have any negative consequences if you're famous, because, umm, you know. Chewbaca lives on Endor, or something.
On average, maybe, but the standard deviation is rather high, which makes the probabilities you discuss difficult to calculate with (any meaningful precision and) much accuracy.
> The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens > can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea.
No, it doesn't.
Even the greatest benevolent dictators in history didn't consistently find the _best_ policy ideas for every single situation (and then they eventually died and had to be replaced, usually with someone worse). Democracy, or a Republic for that matter, has never been about finding the BEST option for everything. It's about preventing anyone from obtaining enough power to do the absolute worst.
Have you noticed that the US government does the least evil when the Presidency and the two houses of Congress are NOT all three controlled by the same political party? Yeah. If we could arrange for the senate to *always* be controlled by conservatives and the House to pretty much always be controlled by liberals, that would be a major improvement. Unfortunately, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" are impossible to define in legal terms, much less enforce, so I guess we'll have to settle for what we've got.
Actually, there are at least four possibilities: True, false, undefined, and non-existent. (Yes, I do use Perl, why do you ask? And yes, I've been known to write functions that sometimes return a true value that evaluates to 0 if used as a number.)
(e) Nobody was listening to a single word they were saying because hey, property values were rather obviously going up and up, and anybody who suggested otherwise was clearly just a naysayer foretelling doom and gloom.
I mean, it's also obvious that Social Security (not the basic idea of it, I mean, but the way it's currently implemented) is inherently flawed, and that inevitably some generation or another is eventually going to get caught holding the bag, paying in for thirty years or so only to collect nothing. It's obvious, but if you say it out loud people will look at you like you've threatened to tie them up and messily dismember everyone they care about while they watch. Then they will promptly go about the business of planning their lives around the ability to collect social security in their old age just as if you'd never mentioned anything.
> Interesting, this is the same strategy employed by economists. It seems > most of them won't recognize an economic bubble when they're in one
Sometimes the economists do recognize it, and say so, but the rest of the world ignores them. (For one example of this, look up the phrase "irrational exuberance". People paused for about one day and then went right back to buying at increasingly crazy-high prices. And that's Greenspan, who was consistently noted for his abnormally large influence on the market[1]. If anybody *else* had given the "irrational exuberance" speech, nobody would have even paused.)
[1] Way beyond hanging on his actual words, people used to go out of their way to be in position to photograph him on his way in so they could analyze the size of his briefcase for possible clues about his attitude -- if the briefcase was stuffed full, they figured, it might mean he was bringing in a lot of evidence to convince the board that a change was needed. Greenspan later revealed that the size of his briefcase mostly indicated whether he packed his lunch that day or not. In any case, even Greenspan's influence wasn't able to forestall a bubble, because bubbles are a naturally-occurring market force, a normal part of supply and demand -- and as every economist knows, you can't fight natural market forces. Well, you can, but the market forces will win every time.
What about students? When I was in college, I routinely got excited about the prospect of three hours' sleep, and I was one of those students who actually tried to go to bed at night (as in, while it was still dark out), especially if I had a 7:30 class. Many others didn't.
> No, in the 1980s, desktop computers took about 1 > second to boot up: Click, beep! and you are going.
Most of them took 15 seconds or more to do a RAM check, which was typically not possible to disable because the BIOS was stored on a ROM chip and usually didn't have writable storage for settings. (Some systems did let you skip the RAM check by pressing a key each time, though.)
But the operating system booted in less than a second, yeah, because it didn't really have much of anything to do until you typed a command.
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> I don't have any clue where to begin on which one to recommend.
Whichever one you like. I've kind of settled on Debian lately (since Sarge was released), so I recommend that. When I was using other distros, I recommended them. (Well, not all of them. I never recommended gentoo except to people who already had experience with Linux.)
I mean, really, it's not that complicated. If the one you recommend isn't the ideal best perfect one, it's still a several-thousand-percent improvement over the painful-to-use, feature-impoverished drossware that came pre-installed on the computer when they bought it at the store.
> At least with Windows, I can say "Use Home Premium at home, Professional at work."
I can't imagine ever *specifically* recommending Windows Home Premium for anything. For some users (especially, users who really only want to browse the web) I can imagine recommending that if that's what came on the computer they can go ahead and get by with it for now, but specifically recommending that they get that on purpose as opposed to anything else? I cannot imagine a scenario where I would make such a recommendation.
(For Windows Professional, yeah, I *can* imagine such situations. They are not in the majority, but such situations do exist.)
> With Linux, I guess I would recommend Ubuntu
If that's what you're comfortable with, sure. Ubuntu is, on the whole, a fine distribution. Sure, it's not perfect, but then, what is?
It's not necessary, or even desirable, for everyone to use (or for everyone to recommend) the same distribution. In fact, that would be rather bad. A large percentage of the problems associated with Windows are either directly or indirectly the result of everyone using essentially the same distribution.
> but a lot of Linux fans are even starting to bitch about that.
You're always going to have that. If you get a hundred Windows users together to talk about computers, do you think none of them will complain about Windows? Haha. You'll be doing well if three of them don't. Don't worry about random people complaining. Use what works for you, recommend what you like, and, if you support other users, install whatever will best meet their needs. If there are some people on the internet complaining about it, why should that bother you?
> By law, television stations offer political candidates advertising
> rates that are much lower than those offered to other advertisers.
But that's...
Aaaargh. If anything, political ads should have to pay *extra*. Triple, even.
The only kind of ad that should pay a higher rate than political ads is anything that talks about feeling "not so fresh".
Also, 1000 meters of ocean level rise wouldn't really be enough to give you a Waterworld scenario. It would be a global catastrophy, certainly, but there would still be quite a bit of dry land -- in large continuous strips, some which would extend for more than a quarter of the earth's circumference in length. Dry land would certainly not be so difficult to locate as to approach mythical status. A lot of Asia would still be above water (not just the Himalayas, either), plus a good portion of Africa, a sizable chunk of North America (just for example, Denver would still be more than half a kilometer above the new elevated ocean level), a long strip of South America running from Columbia all the way to Tiera Del Fuego, and quite a bit of Antarctica (yes, even with all the ice melted off), as well as various mountains and islands scatter around every geopolitical region in the world.
> This darn thing only allows for a 60M rise.
They probably designed it to assume that all the water has to actually come from somewhere.
There simply isn't anywhere enough water available to raise the ocean levels by the kilometer you propose, not by a long shot -- not with the ocean basins being anywhere near as deep as they currently are. If you want to make it that deep, you have to raise the ocean floor and/or lower the continental plates. But, of course, if you start changing that stuff, the simplistic model NASA used to calculate the coastlines wouldn't work. Once you start raising and lowering whole large sections of the earth's crust, Florida might end up being at a higher elevation than Wisconsin, who knows? All bets would be off, and all our maps would be worthless.
Of course it's learned. We teach it in school, every year, from somewhere around second grade right on up through college. Obviously it's learned.
Is that supposed to have some kind of significance? I don't see it. Virtually everything we know is learned. Arithmetic is learned. Color is learned. Language is learned. Food preferences are learned, including even the ability to tell the difference between food and non-food. The notion that a stove burner is hot and you don't want to put your hand on it is learned.
> I'm not sure why [mutton is] not so much of a thing in the US.
Historically, when most of the settlers came here, the land hadn't been cleared yet. Everything was forest as far as the eye could see. They started clearing land right away, but they initially needed much of the cleared land for planting grain. Milk cows can be kept in a barn most of the time, as can pigs (which you can even feed on slops), and chickens do just fine where you haven't cleared the trees yet. What grazing land was available was needed for horses (important for transportation until the early twentieth century) and cows (which you *have* to have, for the milk). Sheep are rather hard on grazing land, because they eat the grass right down to the roots, instead of just clipping off the tops like most grazing animals, so you need a larger amount of cleared, fallow grassland if you're going to raise sheep, as compared to most other livestock. Land that's too hilly to farm efficiently is ideal for sheep (because you can afford to let them have quite a bit of it without feeling like you're missing the opportunity to grow five times their value in wheat), but there's not very much of that kind of land east of the Rockies, and almost all of it was covered with forest. Cows need a lot less grazing land than sheep, for the amount of food they produce. As the frontier advanced westward, this situation continued to obtain for a fair percentage of our history -- by which time a lot of our national cuisine was pretty well established, at least in basic terms. Sheep have always been around too (as well as goats and all manner of other livestock) but in rather smaller numbers. By the time an area had enough available cleared land to let it go to grass and use it for sheep, all our grandmothers' recipe books were focused on beef and pork and chicken as the major kinds of meat.
The other thing is, Virginia established a cotton economy rather early, so the market for wool was never particularly great over here. That made sheep less attractive to raise than they might have been otherwise.
> How is it difficult to eat "that way"? IMO it's very easy to have a diet which is primarily meat.
Some of us have taste buds. Meat by itself tastes absolutely wretched. You can eat it in an emergency, but pretty much only if you haven't had anything to eat in so long your stomach things your throat's been slit. Even then, you take a couple of bites and immediately go, "Uggh. Why am I eating this? Sure, I'm hungry, but am I really *this* hungry?"
Drown that same meat in ketchup and cheese, pile a whole bunch of lettuce and tomato and cucumber and stuff on top, and serve it between slices of multi-grain bread, and now you've got yourself a tasty sandwich. Or you can cut the meat up into small pieces and stir-fry it with vegetables and rice, and that's good. Or put it in soup, with a whole bunch of vegetables and some noodles and/or potatoes. Or grind it up and put it in baked pasta, or use it as a pizza topping. There are a lot of things you can do with meat that make a meal you *want* to eat.
But just plain meat by itself? Blech. You'd better just kill me now, if my other choice is to eat like that for the rest of my life.
Interesting.
Being a network administrator, I'm not sure I have any sympathy for the people who feel like they have to pay for those upgrades. Upgrades to commercial software cost money. When you plan your network infrastructure around a commercial operating system, you'd better plan to spend money on upgrades. It WILL be necessary. (If you're trying to avoid spending any money on software upgrades, you could always use Debian, or one of the various other options.)
Password hash salting is an important security feature. If you're using an old OS that doesn't support it, upgrading to one that does is important. It's worth the money -- assuming the network operating system you're using was worth the money in the first place, which I suppose depends mostly on whether you have mission-critical third-party line-of-business software that requires it. That seems to be the usual reason for running Windows on servers (I can't think of any OTHER reason to do so), and said third-party software typically has annual maintenance fees that make a couple of Windows licenses look like pocket change, so you should be able to afford the OS upgrade in that case. Factor the Windows upgrades into the budget as part of the cost of running the line-of-business software that requires Windows. In a very real way it *is* part of the cost of doing that.
> Hopefully they'll be very careful about bringing asteroids into Earth orbit.
There's no need to put them in Earth orbit directly. You can just plop them in orbit around the moon (or at one of the Earth's trojan points, I suppose, but that's rather farther away and so less accessible).
What will go wrong, obviously, is that the venture will spend more money than the US federal government and get even less value for that investment. Seriously, water and air? Do these people even *have* brains? The more water and air they can get out of the asteroid, the more money they'll lose bringing it down to the surface at a cost of many thousands of times its value per ounce (unless they just intend to mine it and leave it in orbit to be used later for, umm, actually I have no idea what for, and it would almost certainly cost more than sending water and air up from Earth, but it still makes more sense than mining water and air and bringing them down planetside). Precious metals (like, say, iridium) could potentially make some sense in theory, but only if they were found at a VERY unusually high purity. Any normal ore would be MUCH too bulky to be worth transporting from orbit, even if getting the asteroid here in the first place were free. The other possibility is the completely insane notion of smelting it in space, which would doubtless make transporting the ore to the surface look like a bargain in comparison.
However, as long as the people investing the money are doing so voluntarily, I guess that's not a very big deal (to the rest of us). I may think they're being silly, but hey, it's their money to spend. (It's not like money disappears permanently from the economy when spent.)
> My guess is that the features which were left out for either consuming ...
> too many resources while running, too many threads or memory, or
Very plausible, but also...
> Tablets are not very secure and easy to steal.
This.
On a Microsoft Active Directory network, information about *all* accounts on the system, including the domain administrator accounts, is stored on every device that is allowed to join the domain. That includes information about the passwords. (Why? Because if a domain controller goes down and suddenly every single computer in the department can't log in, people become very upset. A more sane approach, from a security perspective, would be to only give each local system account information for accounts that have recently been used to log into that local system; but AFAIK Active Directory doesn't do things that way. Certainly as of Windows XP it didn't, and if that has changed I missed it.)
The passwords are not stored in the clear, but the information that is stored would be a significant boon to an attacker if he could walk away with it and do some processing for a while (say, on a botnet) and come back to log in next week or next month. Joining the domain in the first place is a security barrier -- you need a domain administrator's permission to join any computer to the domain. Once the computer is joined to the domain, however, it gets domain information, including account information, including hashed passwords. If an attacker can compromise ANY of the computers on the domain -- by, for example, physically removing their hard drive and plugging it into another computer -- he can bypass such things as login retry timeouts and thus can test as many passwords per second as he pleases, limited only by computing resources (chiefly, CPU time).
(He might possibly even be able to use massive precalculated hash tables, if MSAD still doesn't use salt. I don't happen to know whether it does or not. It certainly SHOULD, but with backward compatibility being crucial to Microsoft's business, *especially* in the enterprise, I wouldn't be altogether shocked to the core if there were no salt, or if it were turned off by default and you had to deliberately disable compatibility with older OS versions to turn it on. Anybody who happens to know, feel free to chime in here.)
So yeah, laptops on a MSAD domain are probably a bad enough idea in most cases, but tablets would be worse. This doesn't mean Microsoft won't figure out a way to make tablets on the domain happen (I'm sure they will, eventually), but now that they're trying to take security (somewhat more) seriously, they may be trying to sort out these kinds of implications first. If so, that would be a good thing.
They may not be not bad, but it isn't necessarily true that they're nothing other than ungood, either.
I had a case of (relatively mild) depression for a couple of years once, but it was mostly because I was in junior high. I got over it in ninth grade. (This is neither here nor there. A sample size of one is completely worthless for determining anything of this nature.)
However, it's not necessary to ever *have* depression to make observations about it, and about the effectiveness (or complete lack thereof) of any given treatment. In fact, I would tend to discount observations on the subject that come from people who have suffered from serious depression themselves or had a close friend or relative who suffered from it, as their objectivity on the subject is rather severely compromised. Conclusions drawn by counselors and most psychologists are unreliable for similar reasons.
It's a shame we can't do double-blind studies to settle the matter, but so far nobody has figured out how to prevent depression patients from figuring out whether they're receiving counseling or not.
No. Did you read the thing you quoted? In the first place, it does not proscribe threatening to inflict legal harm via prosecution, suit, or tort. It specifically says "physical" harm. Prosecution is decidedly non-physical in nature. (Yes, yes, stress can cause physical symptoms, but you just try getting the court to buy that a threat to take someone to trial constitutes a threat of physical harm. Even the obscenely warped US jury system isn't going to buy that.)
Additionally, the way the law is worded, just popping off at the mouth, saying the first thing that comes into your head, wouldn't qualify. The burden would be on the prosecution (or the plaintiff, I suppose) to show "intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend". Intent, as a rule, can be rather hard to prove, unless the defendant gets caught bragging about what he was doing to the victim.
I have no idea what a CoCo-nut is.
The cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor is found on the fake bones pile on the "Rogue level" in NetHack, and sometimes also in real bones piles (when the former player died with either a cheap plastic amulet or the real AoY in his possession). The cheap plastic amulet is also what you get if you try to wish for the Amulet of Yendor. When not formally identified, it appears as "The Amulet of Yendor". Unlike the real Amulet, however, the cheap plastic one can be put into containers. It does not do anything useful when worn, carried, or invoked, so most players immediately stow it in their Bag of Holding until they can get it back to a stash. It makes excellent polyfodder if your armor-slot strategy allows you to take advantage of amulets of life saving, but if you are wearing GDSM and relying on your amulet slot for reflection (in order to keep your shield hand free for #twoweapon and/or to avoid getting things welded to both hands by a curse) the cheap plastic amulet is effectively worthless. The latter situation is particularly likely for chaotic characters (who cannot easily wish for slotless magic resistance) and neutrals who like to do early sacrificing for an artifact weapon. Lawfuls, who can #dip for Excalibur and thus do not need to sacrifice until much later in the game, can usually get slotless MR from the castle wand, provided they haven't found a bones pile full of junk artifacts. Although, I think there are some variants where only knights can #dip for Excalibur, which might put more lawful characters into the same position as neutrals.
Does it have a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor? I'm not interested if it doesn't have a cheap plastic imitation Amulet.
Blu-Ray never had a chance, because it was released at completely the wrong time. The market had already settled on a successor to the then-most-popular video format: by the time most people first heard of "Blu-Ray", everyone already understood that the new video format that would replace VHS was definitely going to be DVD. In fact, a lot of people -- maybe even the majority -- already had DVD players.
If Blu-Ray had been released six or eight years sooner, when DVD hadn't really got anybody's attention yet (outside the extreme bleeding-edge crowd that also used LaserDisc and Betamax and LS120 SuperDisk), it might have been able to catch on and steal DVD's chance for dominance. But Blu-Ray wasn't ready at that time.
As for being the next format _after_ DVD, that's patently absurd: it's nowhere near time for that. The CD format for music is much older than DVD and hasn't been replaced yet. DVD is still so new, a lot of people still think the word "video" means VHS as opposed to DVD -- and VHS is still *significantly* more widely deployed than Blu-Ray will ever be, partly because people moved their old VCRs into the kids' rooms, and partly because a lot of people kept the VCR so they could continue watching their old collections. (The players for that format were also more robust and lasted longer.) There are almost as many working VCRs out there as there are working DVD players. The market doesn't have room for a third physical-media video format, and the second slot won't open up until VHS has had time to become nearly as obscure as Betamax was when DVD was introduced -- that's going to be another few years yet. By then, Blu-Ray will probably be edged out by something newer and better -- like what happened when iOmega Zip drives didn't replace floppies fast enough and got edged out by CD-R.
But, don't you see, those people are sort of famous, kind of, so therefore obviously they should be allowed to get away with it, you know, because, they're famous, so it's okay. Stupidity and wrongdoing shouldn't have any negative consequences if you're famous, because, umm, you know. Chewbaca lives on Endor, or something.
> Smoking takes about 50 years to give you cancer
On average, maybe, but the standard deviation is rather high, which makes the probabilities you discuss difficult to calculate with (any meaningful precision and) much accuracy.
> The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens
> can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea.
No, it doesn't.
Even the greatest benevolent dictators in history didn't consistently find the _best_ policy ideas for every single situation (and then they eventually died and had to be replaced, usually with someone worse). Democracy, or a Republic for that matter, has never been about finding the BEST option for everything. It's about preventing anyone from obtaining enough power to do the absolute worst.
Have you noticed that the US government does the least evil when the Presidency and the two houses of Congress are NOT all three controlled by the same political party? Yeah. If we could arrange for the senate to *always* be controlled by conservatives and the House to pretty much always be controlled by liberals, that would be a major improvement. Unfortunately, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" are impossible to define in legal terms, much less enforce, so I guess we'll have to settle for what we've got.
Actually, there are at least four possibilities: True, false, undefined, and non-existent. (Yes, I do use Perl, why do you ask? And yes, I've been known to write functions that sometimes return a true value that evaluates to 0 if used as a number.)
(e) Nobody was listening to a single word they were saying because hey, property values were rather obviously going up and up, and anybody who suggested otherwise was clearly just a naysayer foretelling doom and gloom.
I mean, it's also obvious that Social Security (not the basic idea of it, I mean, but the way it's currently implemented) is inherently flawed, and that inevitably some generation or another is eventually going to get caught holding the bag, paying in for thirty years or so only to collect nothing. It's obvious, but if you say it out loud people will look at you like you've threatened to tie them up and messily dismember everyone they care about while they watch. Then they will promptly go about the business of planning their lives around the ability to collect social security in their old age just as if you'd never mentioned anything.
> Interesting, this is the same strategy employed by economists. It seems
> most of them won't recognize an economic bubble when they're in one
Sometimes the economists do recognize it, and say so, but the rest of the world ignores them. (For one example of this, look up the phrase "irrational exuberance". People paused for about one day and then went right back to buying at increasingly crazy-high prices. And that's Greenspan, who was consistently noted for his abnormally large influence on the market[1]. If anybody *else* had given the "irrational exuberance" speech, nobody would have even paused.)
[1] Way beyond hanging on his actual words, people used to go out of their way to be in position to photograph him on his way in so they could analyze the size of his briefcase for possible clues about his attitude -- if the briefcase was stuffed full, they figured, it might mean he was bringing in a lot of evidence to convince the board that a change was needed. Greenspan later revealed that the size of his briefcase mostly indicated whether he packed his lunch that day or not. In any case, even Greenspan's influence wasn't able to forestall a bubble, because bubbles are a naturally-occurring market force, a normal part of supply and demand -- and as every economist knows, you can't fight natural market forces. Well, you can, but the market forces will win every time.
What about students? When I was in college, I routinely got excited about the prospect of three hours' sleep, and I was one of those students who actually tried to go to bed at night (as in, while it was still dark out), especially if I had a 7:30 class. Many others didn't.
> And coke was always too expensive for most people to do much of; coke was mostly a yuppie thing.
ISTR that Max Headroom fans all did Coke...
> No, in the 1980s, desktop computers took about 1
> second to boot up: Click, beep! and you are going.
Most of them took 15 seconds or more to do a RAM check, which was typically not possible to disable because the BIOS was stored on a ROM chip and usually didn't have writable storage for settings. (Some systems did let you skip the RAM check by pressing a key each time, though.)
But the operating system booted in less than a second, yeah, because it didn't really have much of anything to do until you typed a command.