What your professor probably was referring to is the fact that geometry objects are indexed by their bounding box. The index is still certainly a spatial data structure (an R-Tree variant). I'm sure you can construct a case where indexing based on the bounding box fails terribly (for instance, an operation you use for further selection may have little correlation to the relative positions of bounding boxes). I think most people wouldn't run into that, however. Bounding boxes also have the advantage that the index can be implemented the same way no matter what type of geometry is stored in a column, or even if the column is heterogeneous.
I don't have any thoughts about the more general question, but PostgreSQL is much better at storing spatial data than MySQL. MySQL has spatial functions built in, but it only supports a subset of the OpenGIS functions (basically anything that can be done entirely with bounding boxes). PostgreSQL uses an external modulem PostGIS, which supports the full OpenGIS specification and a bunch of other extension functions besides. I've used MySQL by default simply because it is more familiar to me, but I've switched to PostgreSQL for my current project simply because of the spatial data module.
In the first few posts, I've seen a lot of relatively lacking-in-clue replies asking how CherryPy is different from ASP.NET, mod_python, FastCGI, etc. With most Apache-based web platforms, one process will handle many requests, but you cannot guarantee that every request will be handled by the same process: by default, apache starts multiple (possibly multi-threaded) servers, and creates and destroys them as necessary.
CherryPy, on the other hand, runs every request from the same process by using a thread pool instead of a process pool. This means that any global variables you change will be visible to any request. In many cases (keeping in mind memory restraints), you can share items in memory that would otherwise have to go through the database, which can help performance and make keeping track of state easier. Of course, multithreaded data sharing places its own demand on the programmer: the Python core is inherently thread-safe, but no programming language can protect you from race conditions and the like.
I've played around a little bit with CherryPy, and writing in it definitely feels Pythonic. It may still need some more development before it is fully mature, but it's something to at least keep an eye on.
(On a side note: I don't know how the IIS/ASP.NET process model works. It does let you store data across an application, but you are limited to a single Application hashtable, probably to be orthogonal to the Session and Viewstate objects and to reduce the likelihood that a programmer not experienced with concurrency would shoot him/herself in the foot.)
Just FYI: iTunes still gives just as much money to the "bloated corporate entities that overcharge for music while they screw the artists". See Downhill Battle for an admittedly biased perspective (that nonetheless gets the facts right in terms of where the money goes).
Also, I agree with your perspective that the money you spend is a vote; but while it is a vote for the band, it is also a vote for the System. Buying merchandise or going to a concert (if you live in an area that bands actually go to; i.e., not where I live) is one way you could vote for the band, but not the RIAA, with your dollars.
Yes, but have they ever bothered to keep statistics on how many people per capita get pushed down a flight of stairs? Maybe there has been a rash of those lately...;)
Maybe I would be surprised about what is running in the background... but so would Adobe, because this was one of those new-fangled MSI installers that detect what you have open. It pointed an open instance of acroread 6 and refused to proceed until I closed it. So perhaps the reboot request was "we found this obvious usage and killed it, but still, we have no idea whatsoever if these DLLs are in use by some other random process on the system. So you should close three days' worth of workspace and take a 5-minute break to pacify us."
I was reasoning that anyone who wasn't familiar with that song would assume that I lifted it from somewhere rather than flowing forth two lengthy verses of lyrical genius in pretty much the amount of time it would have taken to type it by hand.
On a related note, is it sad if I have the song memorized?:-p
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). This is a test of the emergency lameness system. This is also a test of the emergency uber-lameness system. Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. The lameness filter is really freaking annoying. Your comment still has too few characters per line. Try altering your rhyme scheme to one with more feet. This is your lameness filter. This is your lameness filter on drugs. At this rate, there is no way your comment will ever be posted. At least, not until the story is long past the front page.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby Uhh, uh-huh, yeah Uhh, uh-huh, yeah It's all about the Pentiums, baby It's all about the Pentiums, baby It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby) It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby) Yeah
What y'all wanna do? Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers? 9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard? Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard? Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM I never feed trolls and I don't read spam Installed a T1 line in my house Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse Upgrade my system at least twice a day I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him "Money" for short I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support It's all about the Pentiums, what? You've gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen You've got white-out all over your screen You think your Commodore 64 is really neato What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito? You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half? You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette You're the biggest joke on the Internet Your database is a disaster You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar And postin' "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOL-er I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller You're just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby) It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby) It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby) It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
Now, what y'all wanna do? Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers? 9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Uh, uh, loggin' in now Wanna run wit my crew, hah? Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do? They call me the king of the spreadsheets Got 'em printed out on my bedsheets My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight My digital media is write-protected Every file inspected, no viruses detected I beta tested every operating system Gave props to some, and others? I dissed 'em While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin' It does all my work without me even askin' Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide I believe that your says "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-b
The one tiny good point Dvorak makes here is that the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law." That's a clarification to the license that is at least worth discussing.
Other than that point, though, the article is worthless. The same principle that always must be pointed out with the GPL applies to CC as well: by default, copyright gives you *no* rights to copy except fair use, so any of these licenses can only *add* rights. In the case of the GPL, they add "you can copy this freely as long as you publish the source to any changes you redistribute", etc. The CC licenses work exactly the same way, with a different set of rights given.
It's stupid from the perspective of the RIAA, perhaps. Quite frankly, though, university admins care far more about bandwidth than they do about stopping the Reefer^H^H^H^H^H^HMP3 Madness. If everyone and their brother never downloaded from the outside world but shared their entire MP3 collection on the dorm LANs, the admins would be a happy bunch. UIUC, by the way, gives students a ~750MB quota per 24-hour period -- but the quota does not apply to connections inside the uiuc.edu domain. Combine that with sufficient internal mirrors for the legal stuff and everyone is happy except for the RIAA. And, honeslty, raise your hands if you pity them.
Anyone? anyone? Beuller? anyone?
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
You would be surprised. The PEAR DB API is vastly slower than the lower-level mysql_ calls. It introduces several layers of indirection, quoting, etc., which will be noticable if you have to run many small queries at once.
It has some quirks, too; who would have thought that, for a certain query that needs to run many times with different parameters, using PEAR's prepare function would be slower than interpolating the parameters yourself and building a new query each time? I've been told that using ADODB (another DB-independent API for PHP) induces less overhead. But I digress...
I agree that theoretically, a DB abstraction is just a mapping of calls, and not making use of the proper abstractions is usually a Bad Thing. Making use of a crappy abstraction, however, is a Worse Thing:-p.
Re:One of pillars of success: manual
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
I agree that the manual is wonderful.
I especially like this table, which elegantly illustrates where weak typing[*] can creep up to bite you and why it is not necessarily easier than strong typing.
That the manual is so comprehensive and easy to access is also important when you constantly have to look up the names of common functions, because half of them follow C naming conventions (strcmp, etc.), half of them have prefixes (array_*), half of them follow no convention (htmlentities, etc.), and none of them are in any sort of namespace.
[*] I don't mean dynamic typing; I mean weak typing as opposed to strong typing. A language could be dynamic and still enforce the type of common sense that prevents 5 + "10 little piggies" from equaling 15.
What do you do with something like OpenOffice.Org, then, which requires about 10,000 dependencies? Should each GTK+ application come with its own statically linked copy of GTK to be carried in memory separately for each app?
The natural response, of course, is to say: "no, that's an unnecessary reduction ad absurdum. We can just declare (by some means similar to the LSB) that all applications must use GTK+ 2.4."
But then what do you do six months down the road when you start to see applications written for GTK+ 2.6? Now, either you have to convince every application developer to stick with 2.4 (unlikely); distribute those applications statically linked (ugly, see above); or explain to your users why they have to upgrade to the next version of your distribution to run what they want to run.
Given that sort of choice, I'd think most users and developers would rather work on making packaging systems more friendly instead of abandoning them altogether.
I don't get it. Can you elaborate how his random snippet talking about communing with the dead means less than your random snippet talking about death being eternal? And explain why neither one is allegorical or poetic language?
Your solution is even better than that. Record companies would now be faced with the delicious choice of either paying $X_LARGE_SUM/year or giving the artists copyright over their own works!
... on the other hand, history shows that they would only find some way to put this law to use to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of their clients. *sigh*.
To muddy things up, though: Judaism is not very big on literal readings of the Bible: partly because there really isn't such a thing, and partly because of a strong oral tradition (i.e. the Talmud) that interprets things, sets out laws, etc. So it is true that certain bible verses discount the possibility of an afterlife; however, one probably could find verses suggesting the opposite if one wanted to. And all that doesn't have very much to do with what Judaism itself thinks about it.
In regards to *that* -- commentaries speak all the time about "this world" and "the world to come", but there isn't a single, universally-accepted theology about what that's supposed to mean. The grandparent was essentially correct in that there is a traditional Jewish view of a sort of purgatory; however, there are a half-dozen other ideas as well. Compared to Christianity, Judaism simply doesn't focus on the afterlife as much.
Yay Linux sightings, but: what does it mean if two random slashdot users both saw those seats needing a reboot? Tell them you saw a BSOD instead, and we'll just not take credit for that particular system...
Having said that, I suspect when things like this become compatable with a better VR technology that doesn't produce the eyestrain, the newer technology will come down in price...
There's a Dilbert along those lines (paraphrased): "The two primary forces driving the world are money and testosterone. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed."
Nifty. I've seen various attempts to do the same thing for Linux, such as makefile-resembling solutions, etc etc. I can't for the life of me understand why major Linux vendors haven't gotten behind one of these methods and made it work well.
The startup scripts really are a dependency tree: certain utilities require networking, for example. But there's no reason that gdm has to wait for tor to start up; and on a dual-processor system, the existing UNIX method is an even more egregious waste of cycles.
I suggest that you either fiddle with ACPI's various sleep states, or try out software suspend. The fact remains that a computer + an operating system + the dozen or so utilities/services you want started combine to make a complex system, and startup times are not likely to get better any time soon. Reducing startup time piecemeal sounds like a Sisyphean task; if leaving the machine on 24x7 is not an option, then suspend-to-disk and the like (as per above) are nice ways to sidestep the problem.
You can argue over strict gun control all day, and there's a certain sense in, for example, a homeowner's right to protect his dwelling with firearms. That's why it's such a contentious issue. But are you really suggesting that the average citizen should have the right to military firepower? That makes sense from a "fight the military if it turns evil" standpoint -- but other than that, it is absolutely insane. Think about how much damage a single kid can do with, say, an uncle who doesn't lock up his guns well. Now imagine how much damage that kid could do with a machine gun. Regulating small guns and keeping them from the hands of criminals is difficult -- but the government seems to have done a good job in keeping rocket launchers and machine guns away from just about everyone, and I, for one, am satisfied in keeping it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
What your professor probably was referring to is the fact that geometry objects are indexed by their bounding box. The index is still certainly a spatial data structure (an R-Tree variant). I'm sure you can construct a case where indexing based on the bounding box fails terribly (for instance, an operation you use for further selection may have little correlation to the relative positions of bounding boxes). I think most people wouldn't run into that, however. Bounding boxes also have the advantage that the index can be implemented the same way no matter what type of geometry is stored in a column, or even if the column is heterogeneous.
I don't have any thoughts about the more general question, but PostgreSQL is much better at storing spatial data than MySQL. MySQL has spatial functions built in, but it only supports a subset of the OpenGIS functions (basically anything that can be done entirely with bounding boxes). PostgreSQL uses an external modulem PostGIS, which supports the full OpenGIS specification and a bunch of other extension functions besides. I've used MySQL by default simply because it is more familiar to me, but I've switched to PostgreSQL for my current project simply because of the spatial data module.
In the first few posts, I've seen a lot of relatively lacking-in-clue replies asking how CherryPy is different from ASP.NET, mod_python, FastCGI, etc. With most Apache-based web platforms, one process will handle many requests, but you cannot guarantee that every request will be handled by the same process: by default, apache starts multiple (possibly multi-threaded) servers, and creates and destroys them as necessary.
CherryPy, on the other hand, runs every request from the same process by using a thread pool instead of a process pool. This means that any global variables you change will be visible to any request. In many cases (keeping in mind memory restraints), you can share items in memory that would otherwise have to go through the database, which can help performance and make keeping track of state easier. Of course, multithreaded data sharing places its own demand on the programmer: the Python core is inherently thread-safe, but no programming language can protect you from race conditions and the like.
I've played around a little bit with CherryPy, and writing in it definitely feels Pythonic. It may still need some more development before it is fully mature, but it's something to at least keep an eye on.
(On a side note: I don't know how the IIS/ASP.NET process model works. It does let you store data across an application, but you are limited to a single Application hashtable, probably to be orthogonal to the Session and Viewstate objects and to reduce the likelihood that a programmer not experienced with concurrency would shoot him/herself in the foot.)
Just FYI: iTunes still gives just as much money to the "bloated corporate entities that overcharge for music while they screw the artists". See Downhill Battle for an admittedly biased perspective (that nonetheless gets the facts right in terms of where the money goes).
Also, I agree with your perspective that the money you spend is a vote; but while it is a vote for the band, it is also a vote for the System. Buying merchandise or going to a concert (if you live in an area that bands actually go to; i.e., not where I live) is one way you could vote for the band, but not the RIAA, with your dollars.
Yes, but have they ever bothered to keep statistics on how many people per capita get pushed down a flight of stairs? Maybe there has been a rash of those lately... ;)
Maybe I would be surprised about what is running in the background... but so would Adobe, because this was one of those new-fangled MSI installers that detect what you have open. It pointed an open instance of acroread 6 and refused to proceed until I closed it. So perhaps the reboot request was "we found this obvious usage and killed it, but still, we have no idea whatsoever if these DLLs are in use by some other random process on the system. So you should close three days' worth of workspace and take a 5-minute break to pacify us."
You're not kidding. Acrobat 7 still asks you to reboot -- I suspect because they're too lazy to detect what version of Windows you're running.
The other possibility, of course, is that Acrobat actually *does* require a reboot... a fact which I would find scary, indeed.
I was reasoning that anyone who wasn't familiar with that song would assume that I lifted it from somewhere rather than flowing forth two lengthy verses of lyrical genius in pretty much the amount of time it would have taken to type it by hand.
:-p
On a related note, is it sad if I have the song memorized?
Hmm, ignore the following text and scroll down?
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). This is a test of the emergency lameness system. This is also a test of the emergency uber-lameness system. Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.5). Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
The lameness filter is really freaking annoying. Your comment still has too few characters per line. Try altering your rhyme scheme to one with more feet. This is your lameness filter. This is your lameness filter on drugs. At this rate, there is no way your comment will ever be posted. At least, not until the story is long past the front page.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
Yeah
What y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
Installed a T1 line in my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K
I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him "Money" for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support
It's all about the Pentiums, what?
You've gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen
You've got white-out all over your screen
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster
You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster
Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar
Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And postin' "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOL-er
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
Now, what y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Uh, uh, loggin' in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got 'em printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is write-protected
Every file inspected, no viruses detected
I beta tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed 'em
While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'
It does all my work without me even askin'
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide
I believe that your says "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-b
You're absolutely right. I should have read the license rather than trusting Dvorak's word on anything.
So, the entire article was worthless. I guess we all so that one coming.
The one tiny good point Dvorak makes here is that the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law." That's a clarification to the license that is at least worth discussing.
Other than that point, though, the article is worthless. The same principle that always must be pointed out with the GPL applies to CC as well: by default, copyright gives you *no* rights to copy except fair use, so any of these licenses can only *add* rights. In the case of the GPL, they add "you can copy this freely as long as you publish the source to any changes you redistribute", etc. The CC licenses work exactly the same way, with a different set of rights given.
It's stupid from the perspective of the RIAA, perhaps. Quite frankly, though, university admins care far more about bandwidth than they do about stopping the Reefer^H^H^H^H^H^HMP3 Madness. If everyone and their brother never downloaded from the outside world but shared their entire MP3 collection on the dorm LANs, the admins would be a happy bunch. UIUC, by the way, gives students a ~750MB quota per 24-hour period -- but the quota does not apply to connections inside the uiuc.edu domain. Combine that with sufficient internal mirrors for the legal stuff and everyone is happy except for the RIAA. And, honeslty, raise your hands if you pity them.
Anyone? anyone? Beuller? anyone?
You would be surprised. The PEAR DB API is vastly slower than the lower-level mysql_ calls. It introduces several layers of indirection, quoting, etc., which will be noticable if you have to run many small queries at once.
:-p.
It has some quirks, too; who would have thought that, for a certain query that needs to run many times with different parameters, using PEAR's prepare function would be slower than interpolating the parameters yourself and building a new query each time? I've been told that using ADODB (another DB-independent API for PHP) induces less overhead. But I digress...
I agree that theoretically, a DB abstraction is just a mapping of calls, and not making use of the proper abstractions is usually a Bad Thing. Making use of a crappy abstraction, however, is a Worse Thing
I agree that the manual is wonderful.
I especially like this table, which elegantly illustrates where weak typing[*] can creep up to bite you and why it is not necessarily easier than strong typing.
That the manual is so comprehensive and easy to access is also important when you constantly have to look up the names of common functions, because half of them follow C naming conventions (strcmp, etc.), half of them have prefixes (array_*), half of them follow no convention (htmlentities, etc.), and none of them are in any sort of namespace.
[*] I don't mean dynamic typing; I mean weak typing as opposed to strong typing. A language could be dynamic and still enforce the type of common sense that prevents 5 + "10 little piggies" from equaling 15.
Not that I'm bitter, of course...
What do you do with something like OpenOffice.Org, then, which requires about 10,000 dependencies? Should each GTK+ application come with its own statically linked copy of GTK to be carried in memory separately for each app?
The natural response, of course, is to say: "no, that's an unnecessary reduction ad absurdum. We can just declare (by some means similar to the LSB) that all applications must use GTK+ 2.4."
But then what do you do six months down the road when you start to see applications written for GTK+ 2.6? Now, either you have to convince every application developer to stick with 2.4 (unlikely); distribute those applications statically linked (ugly, see above); or explain to your users why they have to upgrade to the next version of your distribution to run what they want to run.
Given that sort of choice, I'd think most users and developers would rather work on making packaging systems more friendly instead of abandoning them altogether.
I don't get it. Can you elaborate how his random snippet talking about communing with the dead means less than your random snippet talking about death being eternal? And explain why neither one is allegorical or poetic language?
Your solution is even better than that. Record companies would now be faced with the delicious choice of either paying $X_LARGE_SUM/year or giving the artists copyright over their own works!
... on the other hand, history shows that they would only find some way to put this law to use to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of their clients. *sigh*.
To muddy things up, though: Judaism is not very big on literal readings of the Bible: partly because there really isn't such a thing, and partly because of a strong oral tradition (i.e. the Talmud) that interprets things, sets out laws, etc. So it is true that certain bible verses discount the possibility of an afterlife; however, one probably could find verses suggesting the opposite if one wanted to. And all that doesn't have very much to do with what Judaism itself thinks about it.
In regards to *that* -- commentaries speak all the time about "this world" and "the world to come", but there isn't a single, universally-accepted theology about what that's supposed to mean. The grandparent was essentially correct in that there is a traditional Jewish view of a sort of purgatory; however, there are a half-dozen other ideas as well. Compared to Christianity, Judaism simply doesn't focus on the afterlife as much.
Yay Linux sightings, but: what does it mean if two random slashdot users both saw those seats needing a reboot? Tell them you saw a BSOD instead, and we'll just not take credit for that particular system...
There's a Dilbert along those lines (paraphrased): "The two primary forces driving the world are money and testosterone. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed."
Nifty. I've seen various attempts to do the same thing for Linux, such as makefile-resembling solutions, etc etc. I can't for the life of me understand why major Linux vendors haven't gotten behind one of these methods and made it work well.
The startup scripts really are a dependency tree: certain utilities require networking, for example. But there's no reason that gdm has to wait for tor to start up; and on a dual-processor system, the existing UNIX method is an even more egregious waste of cycles.
I suggest that you either fiddle with ACPI's various sleep states, or try out software suspend. The fact remains that a computer + an operating system + the dozen or so utilities/services you want started combine to make a complex system, and startup times are not likely to get better any time soon. Reducing startup time piecemeal sounds like a Sisyphean task; if leaving the machine on 24x7 is not an option, then suspend-to-disk and the like (as per above) are nice ways to sidestep the problem.
You can argue over strict gun control all day, and there's a certain sense in, for example, a homeowner's right to protect his dwelling with firearms. That's why it's such a contentious issue. But are you really suggesting that the average citizen should have the right to military firepower? That makes sense from a "fight the military if it turns evil" standpoint -- but other than that, it is absolutely insane. Think about how much damage a single kid can do with, say, an uncle who doesn't lock up his guns well. Now imagine how much damage that kid could do with a machine gun. Regulating small guns and keeping them from the hands of criminals is difficult -- but the government seems to have done a good job in keeping rocket launchers and machine guns away from just about everyone, and I, for one, am satisfied in keeping it that way.
*feeds the troll
Since when was I implying that oral sex is nonsexual? "Fucking" could simply refer to some types of sex but not others.
But way to tie in Bill Clinton and moral relativism all based on a simple semantic misinterpretation. Karl Rove would be proud.
No, technically, he's not... ;-)