Universal healthcare just means I'll pay my taxes so some dumbass can get a bunch of prescription drugs they don't need. This country is seriously over-medicated, and if people didn't have to pay for their own drugs, it'd be much much worse. People really like hearing that they have some sort of syndrome -- it excuses all sorts of behavior and they don't have to take responsibility for their actions. So much so that more than half the people are now "abnormal" in some way (a ridiculous statement of itself!) and take medicine to "correct" the problem.
That, and I don't think I should have to pay for someone else's Viagra just so old people can have sex. Or someone else's fertility medication so people can breed more kids, when there are thousands out there in need of adoption already.
Now if you're going to limit this healthcare to actual necessary medical care, then I might go along with it. But that seems highly unlikely.
Many European countries have unsustainable systems (even more unsustainable than the US's Social Security system). They've realized this, and so are cutting back and reforming them, particularly the pension systems. This has led, if you've been following the news, to widespread general strikes in several countries, notably Greece and France.
I've seen this several times, and based on court cases it seems this is true: any sampling is a copyright violation. But why is that so? Why isn't excerpting a 5-second portion of a song fair use, just like excerpting a 1-paragraph portion of a book is?
There was a challenge to civil rights legislation by some restaurant owners who wanted to run whites-only restaurants, and held that the federal government did not have the authority to regulate restaurant entry policies (as such authority was not granted anywhere in the constitution). They lost, with the federal courts holding that the interstate commerce clause applied. Why? The restaurant bought some of its supplies from out-of-state suppliers.
Now in this case the end was a good one (overturning of segregation), but that's still some pretty specious reasoning.
When DMA is off, hard drive accesses can block, especially with a stock 2.4.x (non-preemptible, non-low-latency-patched) kernel. In some brief measurements I did, running updatedb could cause blocks of up to 500ms, which leads to some pretty crappy interactive performance until it finishes.
Is that the 'locate' database updating itself? On Debian I think that happens by default every 24 hours, at some time in the middle of the night. Basically builds a list of all the files on your hard drive, so you can do "locate blah" and quickly find where files are without searching the hard drive each time.
Another possibility might be to check if DMA is on; sometimes the kernel won't turn it on, depending on your config and hardware. Try "hdparm -d/dev/hda" (or whatever your hard drive is). If it says off, do "hdparm -d1/dev/hda" to turn it on.
There will be an interval of at least four years before your Enlightenment can progress to the next level, and some even claim that the a higher level of Enlightenment than already attained will never come to fruition.
The point is that many of us would prefer an XML version. The argument against this was that ASCII is a longer-lasting archive format. My counter-argument was that an ASCII version can trivially be produced from the XML both for archival purposes and for those who would prefer such a version.
One of the advantages of XML is that it's very easily transformable. If Project Gutenberg were to produce XML texts, it'd be trivial for them to automatically convert them to plain ASCII and make that version available as well.
It'll be nice when it finally comes out, because I'll be able to point people doing audio work to Linux. Right now I have to say "well, Linux is better than Windows for this, but only if you apply the low-latency, pre-emptible kernel, and variable HZ (with HZ set to 1000) patches," which is a bit more involved than most people who are just doing audio work want to deal with. Once 2.6.x comes out I can just point them to the stock kernel.
You can buy whole-house filtration systems. Sort of like those filters you sometimes see people put on their kitchen faucets, only put on the house's main water supply. Not quite as good as distillation, but not bad either. But they're not particularly cheap.
A lot of people complaining about bad water are mainly complaining about the mineral content of their water. Water in some areas is naturally "harder" (contains more minerals) than others, and it'd be prohibitively expensive to distill it all. It's not dangerous, and many people don't mind the taste, but some people dislike it (and it tends to leave mineral deposits in your shower/bathtub).
Using files for this stuff is a very UNIX-y way of doing things. Putting them all in one bit formatting database is a very Microsoft-y way of doing things (a la the Windows Registry). Odd that with bookmarks they're backwards.
All you have to do is profess a belief in a "higher power." Many people get away without even doing this, but if you make a point of refusing to profess that belief, they may kick you out. Other than that, they don't actually go around trying to make sure you really do believe in God.
It's still kind of a silly rule, but it's promoted by some conservative elements within the organization who feel that being religious is a necessary component of being a good person.
One can usually discriminate however one wants, with the exception of certain sorts of discrimination that are prohibited. You can kick someone out of your restaurant because you think they're an ass and personally dislike them, but you can't kick someone out of your restaurant because they're black and you personally dislike black people. In some countries there are exceptions to this for private clubs (e.g. the Masters can prohibit women, and the Boy Scouts can prohibit atheists and homosexuals).
But in any case, this case is completely unrelated to that, as it's about restraint of trade and anti-competitive business practices (if it's about anything at all).
Other people have already mentioned testing and unstable, one of which is really what you should be using ('unstable' isn't very unstable, really), so I'll stick to a description of 'stable'. Stable is supposed to be really stable. Not just stable in the sense of "doesn't crash," but stable in the sense of "doesn't get upgraded every other week." It's what you install on a server and leave for a year. You don't want your webserver to be going through upgrades every other week. The only way to really get something that stable is to have fairly old software in it, so that you can ensure that all the major bugs have been worked out and you won't need to update for another six months at least, preferably a year. Of course, some always slip through, which is why there's security.debian.org for the security-critical ones, but for the most part you don't want intermittent upgrades. The upgrades will come all at once with the next release of 'stable', so you can schedule downtime to take the machine out of service and upgrade everything at once.
You should never, except in very rare cases, have to recompile your own kernel to get hardware working on Debian. The "stock" Debian kernel comes with zillions of modules for everything under the sun, and there are a few *-modules packages containing extras. There are plenty of reasons to recompile a kernel, but getting your network card working isn't one of them.
The biggest problem is finding out what the hell module to install. It's not exactly as simple as seeing "I have X network card, so I'll install the X module." Many network cards are based on other companies' chipsets, and you have to load the right driver for your chipset. So your card with some random brand name on it might internally be based on the Tulip chipset, in which case you need to load the 'tulip' module. This information isn't often very easy to find, especially if you're someone who doesn't even know that network cards are generally based on a few generic chipsets that get licensed and rebranded (which the majority of computer users don't know).
It's even more fun when you try to tell people it should've been intuitive that they need to load the 'emu10k1' module to get their Soundblaster Live! working.
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Take for example this BBC article about the French strikes, which calls them "nationwide strikes over pensions reform."
Universal healthcare is doable with some limits -- you can't just pay for everything people want. But reasonably done, it's doable.
What isn't doable is a very generous government pension system, since it's essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Universal healthcare just means I'll pay my taxes so some dumbass can get a bunch of prescription drugs they don't need. This country is seriously over-medicated, and if people didn't have to pay for their own drugs, it'd be much much worse. People really like hearing that they have some sort of syndrome -- it excuses all sorts of behavior and they don't have to take responsibility for their actions. So much so that more than half the people are now "abnormal" in some way (a ridiculous statement of itself!) and take medicine to "correct" the problem.
That, and I don't think I should have to pay for someone else's Viagra just so old people can have sex. Or someone else's fertility medication so people can breed more kids, when there are thousands out there in need of adoption already.
Now if you're going to limit this healthcare to actual necessary medical care, then I might go along with it. But that seems highly unlikely.
Many European countries have unsustainable systems (even more unsustainable than the US's Social Security system). They've realized this, and so are cutting back and reforming them, particularly the pension systems. This has led, if you've been following the news, to widespread general strikes in several countries, notably Greece and France.
If you listen for another 10 seconds or so you'll hear "the mighty steven hawking is a fucking quake master."
Around these parts that's a calm, rational comment.
I figure a fat penguin is too busy eating fish to do much damage to my precious hardware. A mischievous daemon, on the other hand...
I've seen this several times, and based on court cases it seems this is true: any sampling is a copyright violation. But why is that so? Why isn't excerpting a 5-second portion of a song fair use, just like excerpting a 1-paragraph portion of a book is?
There was a challenge to civil rights legislation by some restaurant owners who wanted to run whites-only restaurants, and held that the federal government did not have the authority to regulate restaurant entry policies (as such authority was not granted anywhere in the constitution). They lost, with the federal courts holding that the interstate commerce clause applied. Why? The restaurant bought some of its supplies from out-of-state suppliers.
Now in this case the end was a good one (overturning of segregation), but that's still some pretty specious reasoning.
When DMA is off, hard drive accesses can block, especially with a stock 2.4.x (non-preemptible, non-low-latency-patched) kernel. In some brief measurements I did, running updatedb could cause blocks of up to 500ms, which leads to some pretty crappy interactive performance until it finishes.
Is that the 'locate' database updating itself? On Debian I think that happens by default every 24 hours, at some time in the middle of the night. Basically builds a list of all the files on your hard drive, so you can do "locate blah" and quickly find where files are without searching the hard drive each time.
/dev/hda" (or whatever your hard drive is). If it says off, do "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" to turn it on.
Another possibility might be to check if DMA is on; sometimes the kernel won't turn it on, depending on your config and hardware. Try "hdparm -d
There will be an interval of at least four years before your Enlightenment can progress to the next level, and some even claim that the a higher level of Enlightenment than already attained will never come to fruition.
The point is that many of us would prefer an XML version. The argument against this was that ASCII is a longer-lasting archive format. My counter-argument was that an ASCII version can trivially be produced from the XML both for archival purposes and for those who would prefer such a version.
One of the advantages of XML is that it's very easily transformable. If Project Gutenberg were to produce XML texts, it'd be trivial for them to automatically convert them to plain ASCII and make that version available as well.
It'll be nice when it finally comes out, because I'll be able to point people doing audio work to Linux. Right now I have to say "well, Linux is better than Windows for this, but only if you apply the low-latency, pre-emptible kernel, and variable HZ (with HZ set to 1000) patches," which is a bit more involved than most people who are just doing audio work want to deal with. Once 2.6.x comes out I can just point them to the stock kernel.
You can buy whole-house filtration systems. Sort of like those filters you sometimes see people put on their kitchen faucets, only put on the house's main water supply. Not quite as good as distillation, but not bad either. But they're not particularly cheap.
A lot of people complaining about bad water are mainly complaining about the mineral content of their water. Water in some areas is naturally "harder" (contains more minerals) than others, and it'd be prohibitively expensive to distill it all. It's not dangerous, and many people don't mind the taste, but some people dislike it (and it tends to leave mineral deposits in your shower/bathtub).
I wouldn't call any of those good uses of Flash. Something like this, on the other hand...
He's already famous and rich, so he'd at least have a better chance of being somewhat independent from the lobbyists.
Using files for this stuff is a very UNIX-y way of doing things. Putting them all in one bit formatting database is a very Microsoft-y way of doing things (a la the Windows Registry). Odd that with bookmarks they're backwards.
Flash is currently the best format for animated content on the internet.
All you have to do is profess a belief in a "higher power." Many people get away without even doing this, but if you make a point of refusing to profess that belief, they may kick you out. Other than that, they don't actually go around trying to make sure you really do believe in God.
It's still kind of a silly rule, but it's promoted by some conservative elements within the organization who feel that being religious is a necessary component of being a good person.
One can usually discriminate however one wants, with the exception of certain sorts of discrimination that are prohibited. You can kick someone out of your restaurant because you think they're an ass and personally dislike them, but you can't kick someone out of your restaurant because they're black and you personally dislike black people. In some countries there are exceptions to this for private clubs (e.g. the Masters can prohibit women, and the Boy Scouts can prohibit atheists and homosexuals).
But in any case, this case is completely unrelated to that, as it's about restraint of trade and anti-competitive business practices (if it's about anything at all).
Other people have already mentioned testing and unstable, one of which is really what you should be using ('unstable' isn't very unstable, really), so I'll stick to a description of 'stable'. Stable is supposed to be really stable. Not just stable in the sense of "doesn't crash," but stable in the sense of "doesn't get upgraded every other week." It's what you install on a server and leave for a year. You don't want your webserver to be going through upgrades every other week. The only way to really get something that stable is to have fairly old software in it, so that you can ensure that all the major bugs have been worked out and you won't need to update for another six months at least, preferably a year. Of course, some always slip through, which is why there's security.debian.org for the security-critical ones, but for the most part you don't want intermittent upgrades. The upgrades will come all at once with the next release of 'stable', so you can schedule downtime to take the machine out of service and upgrade everything at once.
You should never, except in very rare cases, have to recompile your own kernel to get hardware working on Debian. The "stock" Debian kernel comes with zillions of modules for everything under the sun, and there are a few *-modules packages containing extras. There are plenty of reasons to recompile a kernel, but getting your network card working isn't one of them.
The biggest problem is finding out what the hell module to install. It's not exactly as simple as seeing "I have X network card, so I'll install the X module." Many network cards are based on other companies' chipsets, and you have to load the right driver for your chipset. So your card with some random brand name on it might internally be based on the Tulip chipset, in which case you need to load the 'tulip' module. This information isn't often very easy to find, especially if you're someone who doesn't even know that network cards are generally based on a few generic chipsets that get licensed and rebranded (which the majority of computer users don't know).
It's even more fun when you try to tell people it should've been intuitive that they need to load the 'emu10k1' module to get their Soundblaster Live! working.