Their huge majorities? What majorities? In the senate, there's 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans and two independents that are mostly Republican. Yes, if it comes to a vote the Democrats can outvote the Republicans - at least, they could if they had some sort of party discipline, which they don't (as you mention). However, the Republicans still have the power to keep any issue they don't want voted on from actually coming to a vote. They've been using every trick in the book to delay any vote they think will go against them until the Democrats just give up. Consider the filibuster, for instance - the Democrats are helpless against it, because it takes sixty votes to stop one and they don't have sixty votes. It's turned legislation into a war of attrition, and that's why almost nothing has actually been done.
Further, this new Democratic majority means that almost all of the new Democrat representatives are junior members of Congress, which means that they have less actual power - they don't know who's who, they don't have powerful positions in the committees where the real work gets done. On the other hand, the Republicans that are still in Congress are mostly well-entrenched; they've been there for years, they head important committees, they know who to talk to to get things done, they know which curry places will give you the shits. They've got the home-field advantage.
So no, it's not just a simple matter of "whoever has a majority wins".
Why has Mozilla Foundation avoided fixing the biggest bugs in Firefox, the memory leaks? Many, many people have complained about the memory leaks for the last 5 years, at least, as did the parent comment.
And how many people have actually found memory leaks? How many people just think they're the victim of a memory leak, and actually don't understand what Firefox (or its plugins) are doing? How do you even know that they specifically aren't fixing memory leaks?
Seriously, your whole post is just badly thought out.
I've got Windows 32bit with 4 GB of memory installed. It shows 3.31 GB of RAM available, and I know for a fact that some of the ram gets reserved for the onboard video card.
So yeah, he got robbed, even though it's only a few megabytes.
I love the irony here! Assuming the parent is in fact single, you just barely managed a 50% logical statement rate for this post. If the parent poster isn't single, that goes down to zero.
That's just because all philosophers realize that it's basically been downhill for their profession since Ancient Greece. After all, pure theory can only get you so far - and we got that far three thousand years ago.
Provided of course that you can prove you're female, a virgin, aged between 18 and 21, fnord and have no pesky living close relatives. fnord Oh shit did I really write that?
The summary and press release it links to both completely miss the part where this is "News for Nerds". This paper is apparently the first time Plato's writings have been stichometrically analyzed by computer. Somehow, people have managed to miss him while analyzing other works. Apparently, it was commonplace back then to arrange parts of your work according various mathematical structures, though honestly I'm not sure how you get from that to this press release; I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
Seriously though, RTFP. It's not written very densely at all.
Yeah, Windows 7 gives you a login screen really fast. And then you log in, and it actually finishes booting up.
Seriously, Microsoft has been hiding their terrible boot times like this for years. When Ubuntu gives you a login screen, it's ready to go. When Windows XP/Vista/7 gives you a login screen, that means you're only about halfway through the startup process; even though you may have logged in, your computer will still be unusable for a while afterwards.
Now, I'm not saying that Windows 7 isn't faster than previous versions of Windows. I'm just saying that if you measure from power on to usable computer - and not login screen! - Windows is and has usually been worse than almost anything else.
Even the Catholic church used to agree with you. Back when they and their priests ran brothels and it was widely accepted, pedophilia within the church was exceedingly rare. If anything, the church itself has become the poster child of what happens when you condemn and outlaw a species' natural, biological imperative; which is in fact, contrary to their own bible's teachings.
Hell, the Pope used to be able to pass the papacy down to his son if he wanted. This whole celibacy bullshit is modern.
The N900 is basically a commercially available development model. I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you're willing to go hack around in the terminal a little and maybe do some programming on your own; if you think that the terminal is where you catch your flight, you'll probably be happier with an iPhone or Android or something, honestly.
On the other hand, if you're willing to do some hacking, the benefits can be enormous. I've got fucking AdblockPro running on my N900's browser - MicroB is just a specialized version of Firefox, so the plugin works. It doesn't Just Work (tm), but if you mess around with permissions enough it works eventually. ABP is kind of slow on a mobile computer (I think it relies heavily on regexes or something), but it's nowhere near as slow as downloading all those goddamn ads.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a video nerd, but I honestly can't tell the difference between those three pictures. I mean yeah, they're all different, but in terms of "quality" I would say they're all about equivalent. If you showed them all to me individually I would be totally unable to pick out which was which (except the x264 baseline one, it's a bit lighter than the others for some reason)
It was just too awesome not to mention; I've been wanting to talk about it for months. Unfortunately the topic of the practical applications of relativity doesn't come up very often.
Actually! I was looking this up at one point for some reason I forget, but:
You cannot explain the yellowish color of gold* without relativity. If you just use classical chemistry, it should be silvery-white, just like silver. It's also the reason why mercury is one of two elements that are liquid at room temperature; relativistic forces screw with the electrons, making them bind more weakly. Although the reasons why these things happen do come from a level outside of your bounds (it has to do with electrons, which are smaller than atoms) the effects are things everyone takes for granted.
Gold would not be golden if it weren't for relativity! I just find that so amazing.
*It's also how you explain the yellowish color of cesium, but that's not something most people are familiar with.
Islam, for example, is the largest religion in the world today precisely because of its military efforts in the first few centuries of its existence.
While a lot of military expansion certainly did happen under Islamic leadership, it really isn't the largest religion in the world. Not even close.
It's funny because that's a common Christian theme - that they're persecuted, that they're the underdogs, the minority, even when they have an overwhelming majority. It's a lot easier to feel self-righteous (another Christian theme) when you think you're downtrodden. Just look at the "War on Christmas"! Oh noes, WalMart greeters are saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas"! Help, help, we're being oppressed because a large company is acknowledging the fact that not everyone is Christian!
That's human interaction for you, guess what? Women are prone to as much if not much more drama when it comes to discussions.
Indeed! My wife joined WeightWatchers recently, and got access to their forums. Even these forums that are populated mostly by women are full of flamewars and hate (and all the other good stuff that shows up in a forum). The only difference is that they're heavily regulated, due to the fact that you basically have to pay to get in.
(2) few games dispite being the only phone with solid GL, and
May I present you with: DrNokSNES. Just grab ROM dumps of your favorite SNES games (that you own, of course) and they'll be with you everywhere. Controlling them on the N900's keyboard is a bit wonky* (but then everything is), so I mainly stick to turn based games like the Final Fantasies or Tactics Ogre.
It's a leetle bit buggy, but once you figure out how to work it you'll be good to go.
*If you're feeling especially geeky, you can hook a Wiimote up to your N900 and play almost anything that way.
I frequently sign petitions for things that I would vote against, simply because I believe that the issue deserves to be addressed.
Merely signing a petition does not mean that you agree with it; it means that it is an issue that you think needs to be settled. You do not achieve a just society by saying "no, we won't even vote on that" where "that" is a moderately important issue.
Then do it. It's not like there's some magical proprietary hard drive connectors in there; the only thing you have to do is flash the hard drive's firmware with one the Xbox recognizes.
Easy, for me at least to answer. Popular football causes violence, racism, hours lost at work, wasted money, hours of TV and news coverage is lost; and a small minority. who are already rich, are the only ones to benefit.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
You are only seeing the downsides because you choose to ignore the upsides; how many people's quality of life becomes better due to these games? There is more to life than just work work work after all.
Also, saying that football causes violence and racism is like saying the Ku Klux Klan caused violence and racism - they don't, they're just an excuse to be violent and racist. If your people weren't already violent and racist, football wouldn't cause them to behave that way.
Those things can be flaky. A lot of the sensor equipment my wife's lab works with goes over serial, and the lady in charge of that stuff has this one USB to serial adapter that she swears is the only one that really works. Apparently every other one she's ever tried randomly craps out on you - even adapters that are theoretically the same model.
Because I currently have three boxes sitting in the corner of my living room taking up space, causing a cable mess, wasting electricity, and just generally being annoying.
We need the oil in our tanks, not in our oceans. I don't care if it takes an extra decade, as long as they don't fuck up the Gulf. The only thing that will suffer are the oil companies' ridiculous profit margins, and somehow I find myself at peace with that.
I'm just waiting for the day I hear someone say "we can't build any more oil rigs; no insurance will cover it, because they can't afford to clean up another Deepwater Horizon".
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Their huge majorities? What majorities? In the senate, there's 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans and two independents that are mostly Republican. Yes, if it comes to a vote the Democrats can outvote the Republicans - at least, they could if they had some sort of party discipline, which they don't (as you mention). However, the Republicans still have the power to keep any issue they don't want voted on from actually coming to a vote. They've been using every trick in the book to delay any vote they think will go against them until the Democrats just give up. Consider the filibuster, for instance - the Democrats are helpless against it, because it takes sixty votes to stop one and they don't have sixty votes. It's turned legislation into a war of attrition, and that's why almost nothing has actually been done.
Further, this new Democratic majority means that almost all of the new Democrat representatives are junior members of Congress, which means that they have less actual power - they don't know who's who, they don't have powerful positions in the committees where the real work gets done. On the other hand, the Republicans that are still in Congress are mostly well-entrenched; they've been there for years, they head important committees, they know who to talk to to get things done, they know which curry places will give you the shits. They've got the home-field advantage.
So no, it's not just a simple matter of "whoever has a majority wins".
And how many people have actually found memory leaks? How many people just think they're the victim of a memory leak, and actually don't understand what Firefox (or its plugins) are doing? How do you even know that they specifically aren't fixing memory leaks?
Seriously, your whole post is just badly thought out.
I've got Windows 32bit with 4 GB of memory installed. It shows 3.31 GB of RAM available, and I know for a fact that some of the ram gets reserved for the onboard video card.
So yeah, he got robbed, even though it's only a few megabytes.
I love the irony here! Assuming the parent is in fact single, you just barely managed a 50% logical statement rate for this post. If the parent poster isn't single, that goes down to zero.
That's just because all philosophers realize that it's basically been downhill for their profession since Ancient Greece. After all, pure theory can only get you so far - and we got that far three thousand years ago.
It's okay, I've covered for you.
The summary and press release it links to both completely miss the part where this is "News for Nerds". This paper is apparently the first time Plato's writings have been stichometrically analyzed by computer. Somehow, people have managed to miss him while analyzing other works. Apparently, it was commonplace back then to arrange parts of your work according various mathematical structures, though honestly I'm not sure how you get from that to this press release; I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
Seriously though, RTFP. It's not written very densely at all.
Yeah, Windows 7 gives you a login screen really fast. And then you log in, and it actually finishes booting up.
Seriously, Microsoft has been hiding their terrible boot times like this for years. When Ubuntu gives you a login screen, it's ready to go. When Windows XP/Vista/7 gives you a login screen, that means you're only about halfway through the startup process; even though you may have logged in, your computer will still be unusable for a while afterwards.
Now, I'm not saying that Windows 7 isn't faster than previous versions of Windows. I'm just saying that if you measure from power on to usable computer - and not login screen! - Windows is and has usually been worse than almost anything else.
Hell, the Pope used to be able to pass the papacy down to his son if he wanted. This whole celibacy bullshit is modern.
The N900 is basically a commercially available development model. I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you're willing to go hack around in the terminal a little and maybe do some programming on your own; if you think that the terminal is where you catch your flight, you'll probably be happier with an iPhone or Android or something, honestly.
On the other hand, if you're willing to do some hacking, the benefits can be enormous. I've got fucking AdblockPro running on my N900's browser - MicroB is just a specialized version of Firefox, so the plugin works. It doesn't Just Work (tm), but if you mess around with permissions enough it works eventually. ABP is kind of slow on a mobile computer (I think it relies heavily on regexes or something), but it's nowhere near as slow as downloading all those goddamn ads.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a video nerd, but I honestly can't tell the difference between those three pictures. I mean yeah, they're all different, but in terms of "quality" I would say they're all about equivalent. If you showed them all to me individually I would be totally unable to pick out which was which (except the x264 baseline one, it's a bit lighter than the others for some reason)
It was just too awesome not to mention; I've been wanting to talk about it for months. Unfortunately the topic of the practical applications of relativity doesn't come up very often.
Actually! I was looking this up at one point for some reason I forget, but:
You cannot explain the yellowish color of gold* without relativity. If you just use classical chemistry, it should be silvery-white, just like silver. It's also the reason why mercury is one of two elements that are liquid at room temperature; relativistic forces screw with the electrons, making them bind more weakly. Although the reasons why these things happen do come from a level outside of your bounds (it has to do with electrons, which are smaller than atoms) the effects are things everyone takes for granted.
Gold would not be golden if it weren't for relativity! I just find that so amazing.
*It's also how you explain the yellowish color of cesium, but that's not something most people are familiar with.
It's funny because that's a common Christian theme - that they're persecuted, that they're the underdogs, the minority, even when they have an overwhelming majority. It's a lot easier to feel self-righteous (another Christian theme) when you think you're downtrodden. Just look at the "War on Christmas"! Oh noes, WalMart greeters are saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas"! Help, help, we're being oppressed because a large company is acknowledging the fact that not everyone is Christian!
Vice versatile? Seriously? Does nobody actually speak English any more? Or is that just a side-effect of your adult onset ADHD?
Indeed! My wife joined WeightWatchers recently, and got access to their forums. Even these forums that are populated mostly by women are full of flamewars and hate (and all the other good stuff that shows up in a forum). The only difference is that they're heavily regulated, due to the fact that you basically have to pay to get in.
It's okay, he's just cosplaying a douchebag.
May I present you with: DrNokSNES. Just grab ROM dumps of your favorite SNES games (that you own, of course) and they'll be with you everywhere. Controlling them on the N900's keyboard is a bit wonky* (but then everything is), so I mainly stick to turn based games like the Final Fantasies or Tactics Ogre.
It's a leetle bit buggy, but once you figure out how to work it you'll be good to go.
*If you're feeling especially geeky, you can hook a Wiimote up to your N900 and play almost anything that way.
I frequently sign petitions for things that I would vote against, simply because I believe that the issue deserves to be addressed.
Merely signing a petition does not mean that you agree with it; it means that it is an issue that you think needs to be settled. You do not achieve a just society by saying "no, we won't even vote on that" where "that" is a moderately important issue.
Then do it. It's not like there's some magical proprietary hard drive connectors in there; the only thing you have to do is flash the hard drive's firmware with one the Xbox recognizes.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
You are only seeing the downsides because you choose to ignore the upsides; how many people's quality of life becomes better due to these games? There is more to life than just work work work after all.
Also, saying that football causes violence and racism is like saying the Ku Klux Klan caused violence and racism - they don't, they're just an excuse to be violent and racist. If your people weren't already violent and racist, football wouldn't cause them to behave that way.
Those things can be flaky. A lot of the sensor equipment my wife's lab works with goes over serial, and the lady in charge of that stuff has this one USB to serial adapter that she swears is the only one that really works. Apparently every other one she's ever tried randomly craps out on you - even adapters that are theoretically the same model.
Seriously? This is why they invented closets.
We need the oil in our tanks, not in our oceans. I don't care if it takes an extra decade, as long as they don't fuck up the Gulf. The only thing that will suffer are the oil companies' ridiculous profit margins, and somehow I find myself at peace with that.
I'm just waiting for the day I hear someone say "we can't build any more oil rigs; no insurance will cover it, because they can't afford to clean up another Deepwater Horizon".
I mean hey, it works for nuclear, doesn't it?