It's not slower, it just takes a bit more strength to press a key. A really, really small amount of strength. I've got both a Northgate OmniKey and a Dull membrane keyboard here and I defintely do better on the Northgate. Guess it has to do with the feedback (or lack of thereof on the Dell).
The date on my Northgate at home (which I bought new) is 1988 and I have a problem with neither speed (avg. 105 wpm) nor carpal tunnel - probably because it does take a bit more energy to press the keys...
In Europe much of the culture was shaped by an elite that held intellectuals in hig esteem - kings and princes had their court astronomers, alchemists, poets, musicians etc, the upper classes followed suit by supporting the same things, so being intellectual was a high status thing.
Why don't you ask the pesants and serfs what they thought? Oh, that's right, nobody cared. They didn't exist to the upper classes.
Sure, it's great to have both the leisure time and the money to invest in the arts and education, but if you have neither, what purpose does it serve?
America, on the other hand, has never had kings and has always had their misgivings about that very thing;
Of course we don't. Monarchy was pretty much the last thing that the people who set up this country wanted. America has and always will have a deeply ingrained mistrust of any type of strong central government. It waxes and wanes from time to time, but it will always be there.
This, however, has nothing to do with how intellectuals are viewed. For a very large part of its history, America has been a land of farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen. Americans were a very pragmatic people because they had to be - education above a very basic level wasn't terribly useful on a day-to-day basis. People with education weren't looked down upon, but it an education wasn't something that everybody expected to have. Intellectual pursuits just didn't bring in the hay or sell the groceries or feed the children. And it certainly wasn't work.
Really? Because of the preparation that they need to do after and before the school year, their "3 months off a year" works out to just over a month, if they're very lucky. And those vacations? They're usually filled with grading, preparation, continuing schooling that they need to do to keep their credentials. I went on a trip last weekend with a couple of good friends, one of which is a teacher. She spent almost the entire weekend preparing materials that she was going to be passing out to her class this week. Some vacation.
I'll save you the math, statewide the average income is 34.5k/year for an entire family.
Do the other employees in the state have to buy, without hope of reimbursement, work materials needed for their work but not supplied by their employer?
Incidentally, the friend I refered to earlier works for a private education company. She's kept on a year-to-year contract with no guarantee of renewal and no benefits. Why does she do it? She loves teaching and wasn't able to get in in the public schools. As you said, it's all in who you choose to be exploited by.
Now generally recessions are a problem of herd mentality. Plenty of people who haven't lost any money are deferring purchases because they're worried that they may lose money, and that restricts the flow of money further and effects industries that were not effected by the original troubles.
Or maybe it's caused people to reexamine their priorities.
I pay about as much for gas as I did last year at this time because I drive a lot less now than I did when gas was less costly. I'm lucky in that I live in an area with good public transit so almost all of my driving is discretionary. My grocery bill is actually less than last year - even though individual items are more expensive - because I only buy what I need, rather than what I want. I'm going to delay a planned house purchase because my condo has dropped to 30% of what it sold for last year.
I'm not crying poor. I've just chosen to reevaluate my spending habits because there are no guarantees of what the future holds and I'm not getting any younger.
And what (or rather, who) is going to resurrect it? What event or person is going to change the national priorities to include something that appears so purely without use as a space program?
The mix of events - the Cold War, optimism for the future and a the number of scientists trained in rocketry from the Second World War - that made it happen in the United States the first time was unique. Once dead, without that trigger and without those circumstances, no American space presence - manned or robotic - will occur again.
That may be true, but that doesn't address how used paper is disposed of - which is part of the problem. It may cost more to make recycled paper, but at least the waste paper it's made from isn't ending up in a land fill or a dump.
And who is going to operate these systems when they are in the polling place? The county I work in pays $85 for 16 hours work, which means that the only people that they're likely to get as an election official are the unemployed or retired - most of which have little to no knowledge of how to troubleshoot system problems. I've worked as an election official in six elections and I've been the only one in the place that has any experience with troubleshooting.
Many people have asked why the systems are so complex and so expensive. The systems themselves have to be as bulletproof as is realistically possible. They are going to used by people with little to no computer experience in an environment that is extremely variable - voting places can be in schools, garages, churches, basements, firehouses, anywhere there's space - and operated by election officials that have all of three hours training on how to use the systems. And most of the training is on changes to the process - which changes pretty much every election cycle.
As another poster said, this will become better as the populace in general understands these machines, but, right now, that's not the way things are at the polling booth.
Does Canada have 50 provinces, each with different rules on how votes are to be tabulated? And, even then, do those rules change within the province? California alone has fifty eight counties and each one is left free to develop any type of system they want (within limits). Some of the few things that they absolutely have to do is open and close at the same time, have the same types of election officer, be auditable (the process) and report their results to the California Secretary of State. How they tabulate those results is up to them. The procedures that they put in place are too.
The vote in the US doesn't scale because it was never meant to be nationwide - the Presidential vote is literally a collection of thousands of small administrative areas, each with their own rules, all trying to vote as one. The only way that this will ever change is if all of the States agree to adopt the same rules and procedures. This will never happen.
10/21 The rest of the world, in a "surprise" strike, nukes the US back to the stone age, and then, for a good measure, again, back to the primordial slime age. All US citizens abroad, all their spouses, children and anyone who says a word of sympathy towards them are then hunted down, tried, and duly executed.
After which they'll start nuking each other just to make sure that nobody gets any funny ideas.
Also, on both Windows and Linux, it's easy to get to the computer's root partition (C:\ or/)... on OSX, I have yet to be able to get to / in finder, although I can get there in the terminal?
Because Apple feels (usually for pretty good reasons) that a user has no reason to go there.
Applications are installed in the Application folder, documents and files go into the Documents folder in the user's home folder and that's about the only access that most users need.
Messing with the lower-level file structure or files directly - rather than through utilities - isn't something that Apple wants people to do, so it doesn't serve much of a purpose to let users access them. It may drive Linux and Unix users nuts, but it makes sense.
If scientists are swiping there ideas from Torchwood episodes
It seems that Torchwood's writers aren't above using other's ideas to good benefit. The creature in that episode was suspiciously like Chicken Little from Fred Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.
He wouldn't, but don't you think that he may act differently if he was in the can rather than controlling it remotely? I'd think that an operator would tend to look at a remotely-controlled suit as more expendable and might get into situations where the suit is more likely to be "killed" if they didn't have to worry about being injured in the process.
As I remember, it did. But I would think (and, no, I haven't done the math) that the lack of air resistance on the light dust/dirt might cause it to fall a bit faster than one would expect to due to lesser gravity.
Letter carriers don't come to my house. I live in a condominium. They don't go to my sister's either. She lives in a newer housing tract that has a mailbox cluster for every eight houses. And my friend who lives in a 50-unit apartment? He's never seen the mail person - they only have access to the mailboxes, not the units.
I have a Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC, which has a detatchable keyboard. I've used the stylus with Microsoft's character recognition software and I've used the on-screen keyboard but I always go back to the keyboard for anything other than entering the XP password or entering a URL. It's not very big and it just works better.
No, not really. I'm well aware of how things work in the real world and how it's massively unlikely that we'll ever see a viable third party candidate.
I don't have to like it, however. I'd like to see someone different (to quote Leo McGarry) "because I'm tired of it year after year after year after year having to chose between the lesser of who cares?"
No, he'll be voting for a Green or Libertarian candidate.
I've been voting since 1976 and only rarely wanted the candidate that I voted for to win more than I've wanted the the competition to lose. In the last election Kerry didn't interest me at all, but I voted for him anyway because I liked Bush a whole lot less.
Maybe it's time to vote for the candidate that we actually want. Only then will the third party candidates have a chance at winning.
No, when farmers find that they'll get paid more for corn than what they're growing now, they'll start growing corn rather than the other crop. They can start with lima beans. Or squash.
Taking their license away would potentially hurt the customers even more. The solution is much simpler - money. Fine them, and keep raising the fines until it becomes more cost effective for Comcast to behave.
Which Comcast will turn around and pass on to their customers. Either way, Comcast customers are pretty much screwed. Comcast knows this and so does the FCC.
Slashdot Mirror
The date on my Northgate at home (which I bought new) is 1988 and I have a problem with neither speed (avg. 105 wpm) nor carpal tunnel - probably because it does take a bit more energy to press the keys...
Why don't you ask the pesants and serfs what they thought? Oh, that's right, nobody cared. They didn't exist to the upper classes.
Sure, it's great to have both the leisure time and the money to invest in the arts and education, but if you have neither, what purpose does it serve?
America, on the other hand, has never had kings and has always had their misgivings about that very thing;
Of course we don't. Monarchy was pretty much the last thing that the people who set up this country wanted. America has and always will have a deeply ingrained mistrust of any type of strong central government. It waxes and wanes from time to time, but it will always be there.
This, however, has nothing to do with how intellectuals are viewed. For a very large part of its history, America has been a land of farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen. Americans were a very pragmatic people because they had to be - education above a very basic level wasn't terribly useful on a day-to-day basis. People with education weren't looked down upon, but it an education wasn't something that everybody expected to have. Intellectual pursuits just didn't bring in the hay or sell the groceries or feed the children. And it certainly wasn't work.
Really? Because of the preparation that they need to do after and before the school year, their "3 months off a year" works out to just over a month, if they're very lucky. And those vacations? They're usually filled with grading, preparation, continuing schooling that they need to do to keep their credentials. I went on a trip last weekend with a couple of good friends, one of which is a teacher. She spent almost the entire weekend preparing materials that she was going to be passing out to her class this week. Some vacation.
I'll save you the math, statewide the average income is 34.5k/year for an entire family.
Do the other employees in the state have to buy, without hope of reimbursement, work materials needed for their work but not supplied by their employer?
Incidentally, the friend I refered to earlier works for a private education company. She's kept on a year-to-year contract with no guarantee of renewal and no benefits. Why does she do it? She loves teaching and wasn't able to get in in the public schools. As you said, it's all in who you choose to be exploited by.
What peril of backing up to CD/DVD/Blu-ray does the great unwashed just not get?
Or maybe it's caused people to reexamine their priorities.
I pay about as much for gas as I did last year at this time because I drive a lot less now than I did when gas was less costly. I'm lucky in that I live in an area with good public transit so almost all of my driving is discretionary. My grocery bill is actually less than last year - even though individual items are more expensive - because I only buy what I need, rather than what I want. I'm going to delay a planned house purchase because my condo has dropped to 30% of what it sold for last year.
I'm not crying poor. I've just chosen to reevaluate my spending habits because there are no guarantees of what the future holds and I'm not getting any younger.
The mix of events - the Cold War, optimism for the future and a the number of scientists trained in rocketry from the Second World War - that made it happen in the United States the first time was unique. Once dead, without that trigger and without those circumstances, no American space presence - manned or robotic - will occur again.
No, "acts of God" refers to any loss that a warranty or an insurance company can weasel itself out of covering.
This isn't true in politics only - it's always harder to create than destroy.
Of course this is the same government that gave soldiers a front-row center view to atomic bomb explosions, isn't it?
Does it biodegrade when it's absorbed all of the oil and liquid nastiness that surrounds it when it's in the same fill as the rest of the garbage?
Shields down, please. It wasn't an implied insult. VB.NET still uses BASIC. What does the "B" in "VB" mean, anyway?
That may be true, but that doesn't address how used paper is disposed of - which is part of the problem. It may cost more to make recycled paper, but at least the waste paper it's made from isn't ending up in a land fill or a dump.
Many people have asked why the systems are so complex and so expensive. The systems themselves have to be as bulletproof as is realistically possible. They are going to used by people with little to no computer experience in an environment that is extremely variable - voting places can be in schools, garages, churches, basements, firehouses, anywhere there's space - and operated by election officials that have all of three hours training on how to use the systems. And most of the training is on changes to the process - which changes pretty much every election cycle.
As another poster said, this will become better as the populace in general understands these machines, but, right now, that's not the way things are at the polling booth.
The vote in the US doesn't scale because it was never meant to be nationwide - the Presidential vote is literally a collection of thousands of small administrative areas, each with their own rules, all trying to vote as one. The only way that this will ever change is if all of the States agree to adopt the same rules and procedures. This will never happen.
After which they'll start nuking each other just to make sure that nobody gets any funny ideas.
Because Apple feels (usually for pretty good reasons) that a user has no reason to go there.
Applications are installed in the Application folder, documents and files go into the Documents folder in the user's home folder and that's about the only access that most users need.
Messing with the lower-level file structure or files directly - rather than through utilities - isn't something that Apple wants people to do, so it doesn't serve much of a purpose to let users access them. It may drive Linux and Unix users nuts, but it makes sense.
It seems that Torchwood's writers aren't above using other's ideas to good benefit. The creature in that episode was suspiciously like Chicken Little from Fred Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.
Maybe a negative feedback system would work...
As I remember, it did. But I would think (and, no, I haven't done the math) that the lack of air resistance on the light dust/dirt might cause it to fall a bit faster than one would expect to due to lesser gravity.
Letter carriers don't come to my house. I live in a condominium. They don't go to my sister's either. She lives in a newer housing tract that has a mailbox cluster for every eight houses. And my friend who lives in a 50-unit apartment? He's never seen the mail person - they only have access to the mailboxes, not the units.
I have a Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC, which has a detatchable keyboard. I've used the stylus with Microsoft's character recognition software and I've used the on-screen keyboard but I always go back to the keyboard for anything other than entering the XP password or entering a URL. It's not very big and it just works better.
I don't have to like it, however. I'd like to see someone different (to quote Leo McGarry) "because I'm tired of it year after year after year after year having to chose between the lesser of who cares?"
I've been voting since 1976 and only rarely wanted the candidate that I voted for to win more than I've wanted the the competition to lose. In the last election Kerry didn't interest me at all, but I voted for him anyway because I liked Bush a whole lot less.
Maybe it's time to vote for the candidate that we actually want. Only then will the third party candidates have a chance at winning.
No, when farmers find that they'll get paid more for corn than what they're growing now, they'll start growing corn rather than the other crop. They can start with lima beans. Or squash.
Which Comcast will turn around and pass on to their customers. Either way, Comcast customers are pretty much screwed. Comcast knows this and so does the FCC.