You're making a totally different argument from the one I responded to.
"Density" is a measure of population per unit area. The US is similar in density to Sweden and Norway. (And Canada.) Density determines the cost of achieving broadband connectivity, because it directly determines the cost of running fiber to each house.
The grandparent poster said, OK, sure they're equally dense, but THE US IS BIGGER!!!!
This makes no sense, because physical size doesn't determine cost. In fact, the US is bigger, but it also has more people. Which means it's a larger market at the same density, which means that, compared to Sweden and Norway, we should get economies of scale in our broadband. So ours should be better, but in fact, it's much worse.
If you're making an argument about the variance of density, that's a different story. The response then is, there are many areas of the US that are as dense as any area in those countries. So why can't the US even get "highly dense areas (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia...adequately serviced."?
Fundamentally, it comes down to two things. Weak regulation of monopolies by Bush's FCC (and to a lesser extent Clinton's). And the fact that the American people always assume we have it better than everyone else, and refuse to believe the statistics proving we don't.
First of all, the US is a shit-ton larger than those countries...When you take the lack of density and spread it out over an area that is many multiple times larger than norway AND sweden combined
...you get what is called "economies of scale" and reduced costs.
Why does anyone ever make these "US is huge!" types of arguments? China's huger, and look what they've done in the last 20 years. I put it down to the US's biggest cultural problem: irrational American exceptionalism. Too often Americans assume we can't learn from any other country, because we're the exception to every rule. We're the United States of America, goldurnit!
Well, that's one of the arguments for extending the copyright to life. The argument for life + n years is that you could write a best-seller and then die tomorrow, which would screw your heirs. Call it the John Kennedy Toole rule.
But there are other possibilities available, which don't place such a ridiculous burden on the commons. George Martin is probably a better writer now than when he started (most genre writers tend to improve over time, if only because they're so bad when they start!) He could rewrite his old books to remove inconsistencies with the newer versions. Or he could come out with new editions entirely.
In the Victorian era, when copyright terms were 42 years, writers were constantly revising their books -- mostly for the better. For example, Darwin wrote something like 8 editions of the Origin of Species.
Tou managed to whinge for two paragraphs without providing any evidence for your views whatsoever.
Yes, some smokers don't die from smoking. Surprisingly, scientists and epidemiologists are also aware of this. That has no effect on the statistical fact that smoking is the largest preventable cause of death worldwide. Even secondhand smoke is astonishingly dangerous, as the grandparent post showed.
You complain about FUD, but you appear to have swallowed the tobacco industry's FUD completely. Congratulations, this puts you in the 44th percentile on the libertarian IQ scale, slightly above John Stossel and slightly below Michael Crichton.
It's not so much that apple products have prestige, it's that a product from "High Tech Computer Corp. Inc." has anti-prestige. It screams of some knockoff you might buy in a Hong Kong electronics mall.
And, although Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturers have improved (notably by manufacturing American and Japanese designed devices under contract) that's not far from the truth.
There's a reason Apple puts that "Designed in California" blurb on their products. Although it does look a bit silly, I'm surprised other companies haven't caught on.
They should have handed the governance and rebuilding efforts at that point over to a conglomeration of willing Islamic coutries.
You're right about "fighting them over there" being bunk, but the rest of your post is full of wishful and revisionist thinking.
Remember how Bush had to cobble together a "coalition of the willing" formed of our longstanding allies Britain and Australia, plus whoever small island nations we could bribe with aid? And how there weren't any Muslim countries in said coalition?
Yeah, that was because the US didn't have how UN or even NATO approval to invade. Without that, plus a lot more bribery, no Muslim nation was going to let their soldiers get blown up in Iraq. Hell, most of our ostensible allies in the Middle East even denied us the right to fly over their country to attack Iraq.
In the words of Colin Powell, "You break it, you bought it."
Add-ons are a great mechanism for prototyping and developing new features, or features wanted by some small fraction of the userbase.
But how do you guarantee the quality of the add-ons, or that there will be a high quality add-on for any desired feature? You can't. If you look at the history of tab control on Firefox...some of the most popular, most widely advocated add-ons were leaky, crashy, and had a ridiculous number of options. The built-in tab management in Firefox 2.0 is a huge relief.
Did you benchmark startup time? It was appalling in Mozilla 1.0. It was so slow that I haven't used any versions of the Mozilla/Seamonkey Suite since then.
Phoenix/Firefox's startup time was close enough to IE that it made the decision to switch easy.
That's not even a leak -- it's just using a lot of RAM to do something. Unless you can show that RAM never gets reclaimed, it's not a leak.
It's certainly not the memory leak(s) everyone is complaining about. Although I personally have never experienced any major leaks.
Sadly, Mozilla printing is notorious for being a black hole that no-one wants to work on. But at 200MB, it sounds like your bug is likely to get fixed.
Actually, it's pretty much only Scalia who thinks he's smart enough to evaluate climate change. He got smacked down in oral argument:
"Scalia observes that there is a difference between an "air pollutant" and a "stratospheric pollutant." Milkey interrupts: "Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere."
the problems originated in the fact that we negotiated such crappy contracts with them
Yes, but why did Bush's government negotiate crappy contracts?
Might just be typical Bush Administration heckuva job incompetence, might be a typical giveaway to Republican-supporting companies.
Or, it could be corruption of procurement officials, as in the Boeing scandal.
"'I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR [Halliburton] represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed' in 20 years working on government contracts" -- Bunnatine Greenhouse, top Army procurement officer
Landsea is the only one of your sources under 65. I think he's a credible scientist, but he only works on hurricanes and isn't skeptical about the overall phenomenon of global warming. Even if he's 100% right, the other impacts of global warming (sea level rise, drought, famine) are worse.
That's Rob "One impressive piece of execution is that when you fire the machine up it plays a WAV file of a Ferrari race car revving its engine. That alone is worth the relatively low $1,899 price of admission" Enderle.
Google and Apple and Mozilla actually prove your theory's bunk.
Slashdot readers are mostly optimists about technological progress in general and IT in particular. We like companies that are actually driving innovation, like Google, Apple and Mozilla.
We are deeply cynical about entrenched monopolies and oligopolies like the old IBM, Microsoft, the oil and auto industries, whale oil, buggy whips and incandescent lightbulbs. Especially when they pretend to be innovators, at a convenient time for their lobbyists' endeavors.
You were right about one thing, though. We are pissy. Welcome to USENET, N00b.
Why would you trust GE? They haven't earned your trust, among other things they have a terrible environmental record. They may be trying to improve, but they're starting at the absolute bottom.
GE also has a huge public relations and lobbying staff. What do you think companies have PR departments for? It's to respond to crises like this. Australia bans incandescent bulbs, California starts talking about it -- and if it snowballs across the nation, suddenly GE's looking at writing off whole factories and a couple billion dollars. At that point, ethics go out the window.
So someone in the PR department calls up the head of whatever R&D department they have left and says, hey, do you have anything we can use to make a case that banning incandescents isn't justifiable. So some proposal which was too costly and was sitting on the shelf suddenly becomes the subject of a media blitz, even though it's best case vaporware, worst case FUD.
Why are you so credulous? Have you learned nothing from the auto industry's 30 years of broken environmental promises?
$91 million is the budget of the entire Sierra Club and all its activities. Only a small part of that goes to raising awareness of climate change is a small part, and none of that funds climate research. $57 million is the budget for the entire NRDC (same story).
The oparating expenses of Exxon Mobil are $300 billion per year, roughly 2,500 times both environmental groups combined.
Slashdot Mirror
"Density" is a measure of population per unit area. The US is similar in density to Sweden and Norway. (And Canada.) Density determines the cost of achieving broadband connectivity, because it directly determines the cost of running fiber to each house.
The grandparent poster said, OK, sure they're equally dense, but THE US IS BIGGER!!!!
This makes no sense, because physical size doesn't determine cost. In fact, the US is bigger, but it also has more people. Which means it's a larger market at the same density, which means that, compared to Sweden and Norway, we should get economies of scale in our broadband. So ours should be better, but in fact, it's much worse.
If you're making an argument about the variance of density, that's a different story. The response then is, there are many areas of the US that are as dense as any area in those countries. So why can't the US even get "highly dense areas (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia...adequately serviced."?
Fundamentally, it comes down to two things. Weak regulation of monopolies by Bush's FCC (and to a lesser extent Clinton's). And the fact that the American people always assume we have it better than everyone else, and refuse to believe the statistics proving we don't.
Why does anyone ever make these "US is huge!" types of arguments? China's huger, and look what they've done in the last 20 years. I put it down to the US's biggest cultural problem: irrational American exceptionalism. Too often Americans assume we can't learn from any other country, because we're the exception to every rule. We're the United States of America, goldurnit!
"Now that I have the prize, I can finally meet some chicks" -- James Watson, 1962
Well, that's one of the arguments for extending the copyright to life. The argument for life + n years is that you could write a best-seller and then die tomorrow, which would screw your heirs. Call it the John Kennedy Toole rule.
But there are other possibilities available, which don't place such a ridiculous burden on the commons. George Martin is probably a better writer now than when he started (most genre writers tend to improve over time, if only because they're so bad when they start!) He could rewrite his old books to remove inconsistencies with the newer versions. Or he could come out with new editions entirely.
In the Victorian era, when copyright terms were 42 years, writers were constantly revising their books -- mostly for the better. For example, Darwin wrote something like 8 editions of the Origin of Species.
Tou managed to whinge for two paragraphs without providing any evidence for your views whatsoever.
Yes, some smokers don't die from smoking. Surprisingly, scientists and epidemiologists are also aware of this. That has no effect on the statistical fact that smoking is the largest preventable cause of death worldwide. Even secondhand smoke is astonishingly dangerous, as the grandparent post showed.
You complain about FUD, but you appear to have swallowed the tobacco industry's FUD completely. Congratulations, this puts you in the 44th percentile on the libertarian IQ scale, slightly above John Stossel and slightly below Michael Crichton.
It's not so much that apple products have prestige, it's that a product from "High Tech Computer Corp. Inc." has anti-prestige. It screams of some knockoff you might buy in a Hong Kong electronics mall.
And, although Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturers have improved (notably by manufacturing American and Japanese designed devices under contract) that's not far from the truth.
There's a reason Apple puts that "Designed in California" blurb on their products. Although it does look a bit silly, I'm surprised other companies haven't caught on.
DVD cases are made to be slightly too large to fit into typical clothing pockets. So in that way, they're just like those old CD longboxes.
Storage compatibility with VHS tapes is an afterthought.
You're right about "fighting them over there" being bunk, but the rest of your post is full of wishful and revisionist thinking.
Remember how Bush had to cobble together a "coalition of the willing" formed of our longstanding allies Britain and Australia, plus whoever small island nations we could bribe with aid? And how there weren't any Muslim countries in said coalition?
Yeah, that was because the US didn't have how UN or even NATO approval to invade. Without that, plus a lot more bribery, no Muslim nation was going to let their soldiers get blown up in Iraq. Hell, most of our ostensible allies in the Middle East even denied us the right to fly over their country to attack Iraq.
In the words of Colin Powell, "You break it, you bought it."
But how do you guarantee the quality of the add-ons, or that there will be a high quality add-on for any desired feature? You can't. If you look at the history of tab control on Firefox...some of the most popular, most widely advocated add-ons were leaky, crashy, and had a ridiculous number of options. The built-in tab management in Firefox 2.0 is a huge relief.
Phoenix/Firefox's startup time was close enough to IE that it made the decision to switch easy.
That's not even a leak -- it's just using a lot of RAM to do something. Unless you can show that RAM never gets reclaimed, it's not a leak.
It's certainly not the memory leak(s) everyone is complaining about. Although I personally have never experienced any major leaks.
Sadly, Mozilla printing is notorious for being a black hole that no-one wants to work on. But at 200MB, it sounds like your bug is likely to get fixed.
(no links from slashdot to bugzilla, so copy & paste)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16625 4
Actually, it's pretty much only Scalia who thinks he's smart enough to evaluate climate change. He got smacked down in oral argument:
"Scalia observes that there is a difference between an "air pollutant" and a "stratospheric pollutant." Milkey interrupts: "Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere."
there's still a ban* on cruel and unusual punishments
*does not apply if "The Decider" dubs you a terrorist. Not valid in leased US territories within Cuba or overseas military bases.
Snider represents the National Federation of the Blind.
The National Federation of the Blind sold their integrity to Diebold for $1 million dollars. They do not deny that there was a quid pro quo, although they have issued a vague, non-denial denial.
the problems originated in the fact that we negotiated such crappy contracts with them
Yes, but why did Bush's government negotiate crappy contracts?
Might just be typical Bush Administration heckuva job incompetence, might be a typical giveaway to Republican-supporting companies.
Or, it could be corruption of procurement officials, as in the Boeing scandal.
"'I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR [Halliburton] represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed' in 20 years working on government contracts" -- Bunnatine Greenhouse, top Army procurement officer
Landsea is the only one of your sources under 65. I think he's a credible scientist, but he only works on hurricanes and isn't skeptical about the overall phenomenon of global warming. Even if he's 100% right, the other impacts of global warming (sea level rise, drought, famine) are worse.
The fact that you're bringing out Seitz, who was completely senile by the time the oil companies were putting his name on press releases, discredits you completely.
Lindzen thinks that the earth's climate is warming with 98% certainty. He would only take a 50-1 bet against it.
Tim Ball has never worked on climate change, has no quantitative ability, and is basically obsolete. He sues his critics for telling the truth about him.
Is that the best you can do? Your denialist sources suck.
That's Rob "One impressive piece of execution is that when you fire the machine up it plays a WAV file of a Ferrari race car revving its engine. That alone is worth the relatively low $1,899 price of admission" Enderle.
The "computer guru" who authored the most idiotic product review ever.
I'd rather hear from Dvorak than this guy.
It has to be pronounced as an S, otherwise my favorite 70-80s music joke doesn't work:
Did you hear that Crosby, Stills and Nash are forming a new supergroup with the former lead singer of Chicago?
Yeah, they're calling it Crosby, Stills, Nash et Cetera.
Was his wife's name Valerie Plame?
Same s**t, different authoritarian boss.
Google and Apple and Mozilla actually prove your theory's bunk.
Slashdot readers are mostly optimists about technological progress in general and IT in particular. We like companies that are actually driving innovation, like Google, Apple and Mozilla.
We are deeply cynical about entrenched monopolies and oligopolies like the old IBM, Microsoft, the oil and auto industries, whale oil, buggy whips and incandescent lightbulbs. Especially when they pretend to be innovators, at a convenient time for their lobbyists' endeavors.
You were right about one thing, though. We are pissy. Welcome to USENET, N00b.
Why would you trust GE? They haven't earned your trust, among other things they have a terrible environmental record. They may be trying to improve, but they're starting at the absolute bottom.
GE also has a huge public relations and lobbying staff. What do you think companies have PR departments for? It's to respond to crises like this. Australia bans incandescent bulbs, California starts talking about it -- and if it snowballs across the nation, suddenly GE's looking at writing off whole factories and a couple billion dollars. At that point, ethics go out the window.
So someone in the PR department calls up the head of whatever R&D department they have left and says, hey, do you have anything we can use to make a case that banning incandescents isn't justifiable. So some proposal which was too costly and was sitting on the shelf suddenly becomes the subject of a media blitz, even though it's best case vaporware, worst case FUD.
Why are you so credulous? Have you learned nothing from the auto industry's 30 years of broken environmental promises?
What a waste. Intel should steal a page from Exxon's book.
For the meager sum of $10,000, this computer professional will gladly write a paper about the awesomeness of Intel CPUs.
The Carlos Castaneda-influenced beatnik stoner, since he can interrogate the ducks. Can climate researchers talk with ducks?
$91 million is the budget of the entire Sierra Club and all its activities. Only a small part of that goes to raising awareness of climate change is a small part, and none of that funds climate research. $57 million is the budget for the entire NRDC (same story).
The oparating expenses of Exxon Mobil are $300 billion per year, roughly 2,500 times both environmental groups combined.
That's a lot of astroturf money.