"On average, Mac users let their computers age much longer than PC users do (I've heard twice as long quoted a few times)"
I think that's about right. It certainly is for me. My quicksilver is from 2002, and was going to be replaced in late 2006 or early 2007. I may extend that a year with the Mactel switch in progress.
The computer before that was purchased in late 1995. So 6.5 years on that box (which the daughter is still using) and 5 or six on this one looks plausible.
Now I've upgraded hard drives, and video cards about midterm on both of them, and the RAM and processor in the 7500 too, but the expense was been about 1/3 the cost of a new computer for the 7500, and about 1/10 for the quicksilver, so I can't really complain.
Our analog TV went dark Jan 2, 2004. All four translators went off the air here in Soap lake WA, leaving us with just channel 39's continuous "God Is Great!" broadcasts.
So after a month, we got satellite dish. The kids use it to watch cartoons, and we occasionally watch a movie, or the Weather Channel. Our evening news fix has been replaced by the Internet. The older kids are starting to lose interest in TV now too, so the satellite dish may end up abandoned too. Watching TV in the hope of something interesting is just too inefficient a use of time.
They are not so much anti-energy as they are pro-poverty. I think they want everyone back to the 1870's, but with vaccinations this time. There is an awful lot of pining for the joys of working on your 10 acre subsistance farm, then doing handicrafts for sale in town (to them I guess) in your copious spare time.
I grew up on a farm, and don't remember much spare time. I'll take my job as a metallurgist anytime. And if the squash bugs wipe out the garden, well, at least I won't starve.
On a related question, when are the Courts coing to realize that Nature-worship is a religion and use the First Amendment to close them down a few turns?
Nearest rental place is about 25 miles. And they don't have pickups, just panel vans. Two people have to go to town to get a truck, two people back home (in separate vehicles), run errand, two people back to town, drop off truck, then drive back home together. Each round trip kills an hour for two people. The actual errand takes an hour for 1. So, you've killed three times more actual time, and five times more person-hours than having your own truck. And you've driven the car 100 miles, and the rental truck 50 miles more than the errand took. Saving big gas there!
Also, the rental place is not open on Sunday, or after 4 on Saturday. Rentals sound like a good idea until you have to actually use them.
And the $40 does not include mileage or insurance. So, in return for massive inconvenience, in the end you get to save nothing.
"Someone please explain to me the need for SUV's and trucks when only a single person is driving in it..."
As a pick-up owner who is usually the only occupant, I'll be happy to. It's cheaper than owning a car and a truck. I need the truck features maybe once a month. (Today, in fact, was a carport in kit form, 42" wide, 9 'ft long, and about 300 lbs. Last month it was a new freezer, etc.) The "excess gas cost" of driving the pickup to work is about 500 gallons/year. (15,000 miles/yr at 15 miles per gallon in the truck vs 30 miles/gal in a small car.)
So, at $2.25 per gallon (today's price) that is $1125. The cheapest car I can find is about $12,000. Therefore, we are looking at about a 10 year ROI, NOT COUNTING the registration, licensing and insurance, or maintenance costs. A 12 year ROI is about the least you can really expect.
Now, if you work for a company with an accountant or know an accountant, ask them if an investment with a 12 year payback period is a good idea.
So, if you never need the pickup, or never need to tow anything, or never have more than 4 in the vehicle (applies to SUV owners) then buy the car. Otherwise, it makes more sense to have just one vehicle that can handle the largest credible mission, and use that for everything. If you need two vehicles in the family, then one commuter-special, and one SUV makes a great deal of sense.
Note that this argument has not stopped me from using a motorcycle to commute during the warm months:-) but that is not purely economics either. The 51 mpg is just a fringe benefit.
"Other than price, I don't understand why anybody would NOT want to use Office for OS X."
Other than the price is all I need. $350 is just too much. I have no use for powerpoint at all, and word processors are a dime a dozen, given I don't need the full power of Word. So, all I am really interested in is Excel. And even Excel is not worth that much.
IF Bill will sell me Excel alone for $99, I'll buy it. Otherwise, something else will have to do.
On that topic, is Gnumeric compatable with Tiger yet? I want to have a "spread-off" between that and Neo-office. Since both Abiword and Neo-office are acceptable for word processors, the winning spreadsheet determines which suite I get.
"One of these days the rich real realize that it's the poor that go to war.... and the poor may just point the guns back at the rich."
From the preface of my copy of Clausewitz, during a discussion of the formation of the first citizen armies in Europe:
"Political opposition came from those who feared an armed citizenry more than they feared foreign invasions. A peasant with a gun may get ideas about his own place in society. In fact, the most energetic proponents of a mass army were the liberals who envisaged far reaching social reforms as prerequisites of strengthening the nation."
The court screwed the pooch today. Unfortunately, we are the ones who will pay.
Re:A Much More Accurate Look Ahead
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1
"A couple people can live quite comfortably off of a small solar panel in a temperate climate"
Right. Wisconsin is officially a temperate climate. Try living through that winter with a small solar panel. Are you giving up hot water? Central heat? Any heat?
I used to live in Winnemucca Nevada. There, I could have run the electrical loads (including the swamp cooler) of my single-wide mobilehome off of roof-mounted solar panels. I still would have needed a propane tank or a natural gas connection to keep the hot water, stove, and furnace going.
If I had gone off the grid there, I also would have had to figure out how to get water up 400 feet from the bottom of the well. That was not in my solar cell budget. so add either more solar cells, or a windmill, and more batteries either way.
It is doable, but a "small solar panel" will barely keep the radio and a few lights on.
Re:A Much More Accurate Look Ahead
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1
good link! I don't agree with everything, (biodiesel gains 60% net energy, and GM crops could improve that further) but the points are well taken. And, as always, America will wait until the last minute and then panic.
Actually the scenario sounds similar to "UK survival in the 21st century" by John Busby. It was linked to here on/. last year. Also thought provoking. I didn't believe everything there either, but it also pointed out the changes the end of cheap energy will bring. And it explains why Blair was ready to head to Iraq too. The UK is really over a barrel energy wise.
About Access not being on the Mac, the excuse from M$ was that Access had lots of low level x86 assembly code, and it just wasn't practical to bring it to the Mac. If the Mac is running a Pentium, then that argument goes away.
So what do you think the new excuse from M$ will be for no Access on the Mac? Sounds like a good topic for a/. poll!
Even before the Mac version of appleworks was Resolve. It was based on Wingz (a UNIX spreadsheet). It worked, but was slow, and had bugs and generally was a version 1.0 product.
They killed it about 6 months after I bought it. Grrr.
Years later I bought Claris Impact, which was intended for presentations. I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on it. It worked great as a low end desktop publishing program. And I did my defense presentation on it as well. Then Steve killed that program, and every other program but Filemaker and Appleworks when he came back.
Apple makes great hardware, and a great OS, but I don't trust them on software. They are also into proprietary formats (Appleworks 6 being one of them). Unless it comes on the CD/DVD with the OS I'm unlikely to use Apple software unless it uses a standard format so I can get my data back.
So, iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie are gone from my newly upgraded 10.4 box. (I never used the last two anyway, so no loss there.) The pro level stuff may have a decent lifetime, but I can't help think Steve will get bored with consumer level apps again, or decide he needs to drop Apple software products to appease the developer community, especially with another platform transition to suck up resources.
"College can provide a wonderful education, if the student is ready for it"
And that is a big IF. I started college at 27, and the half-dazed 18 year olds wandering around the place were a constant source of amusement. Not to mention the profound pontificating of the editors of the student paper. Clueless!
I'm sure most of them are sorted out now, but the real world was undoubtedly quite a shock when they met up with it. And this was at a land-grant university. It must be even worse at a liberal arts school. The mind boggles.:-)
I don't need a dancing robot, or a drawing robot. I need a fruit picking robot. Strawberries, raspberries, cherries, apples, etc.
A weed pulling robot sounds good too. If it can tell a pigweed from a cucumber, there is a market for it.
Just our luck humans end up with the field work, and the robots end up sitting on their ass spewing Vogon-class poetry, and telling us the reason we don't like it is our lack of a classical education.
"All thats collapsed, Be was bought out, SCO was too, Alpha, Tru64, OpenVMS were too, Ultrasparc and Itanium and PARISC are dying, MIPS is dead, OS2 is dead, the diverse mainframes are dead, and we're seeing even more industry consolidation, and later the demise of some of the companies who couldnt differentiate enough".
Intel was the sole survivor of the processor wars. Now all processors are Intel.
"But what if I want one copy for my MP3 player, one on a CD for my car, and one for my wifes car?"
No, you burn 3 separate CD's either of the same playlist, or different playlists.
Then, if you want, re-rip the CD back into the same format it came from. I did some blind testing in the wife awhile back, and she couldn't tell the difference between the origianal itunes track and the re-ripped CD. I also did some detailed examination of the waveforms of original and re-ripped, and although there were differences, they were very minor.
I went one step farther and reburned and re-ripped the burned track again, and still didn't see or hear significant degradation. Granted, it does get worse every time, so eventually you will hear it. But once in and out does not cause a significant loss.
So, if the Greenland glaciers are melting, then there is a lot of "new" land available for use. This land is owned by the government of Denmark? Can you buy from them? Do you have to be a Danish citizen? How does one emmigrate to Denmark? How does one become a Danish Real-estate agent? How do you Market retirement homes and estates in Greenland?
Come on people, opportunity is beating down the door! Less wailing and gnashing of teeth and more ambition is what you need.
" Any Joe Programmer can pick up a cheap $200 bare bones PC and a copy of Linux and be programming the next great thing. He doesn't need management to do this."
Good point. For me to work in my profession requires a $100 million dollar chemical plant. Which is why I'm beholden to a corporation, and not an independent contactor. When step 1 is "erect 2 each, 80 foot high, 6 ft diameter reaction columns with 2" thick walls, made of Alloy 800H" the barriers to entry are pretty substantial.
"Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it. "
And this sort of babble is a fine example why I have turned anti-environmentalist. Most of the energy in this household goes to heating water, pumping water, and heating the house in the winter. (TV and surfing the net are a pretty small proportion) I have no intention of moving back to an 1870's life style. Hell, there is a picture of my father taking bath in a washtub when he was in his early twenties, because the old farm still didn't have an indoor bathroom at the time. And this was about 1955.
I ain't going back to the "good old days". Period. End of discussion. If you want to find better ways of making electricity, I'm open to ideas. But the lights better damn well come on when I flip the switch.
Geothermal power sources are generally salty and laced with hydrogen sulfides. This makes then amazingly corrosive. They also tend to scale up the heat exchangers, filling the tubes with solid rock.
And, although renewable on geological terms, the rock bodies can cool off in human time scales. You are mining the heat. Rock has a lower heat capacity than water, and poor conductivity. So when you cool down the hot rocks, it'll be a few centuries before it heats up again.
It's one of those great ideas that doesn't quite work out. Well, in some places it does work, but not everywhere.
This is the third 10.3 security update without a corresponding fix for 10.2.8, which is officially still supported. At the least they should confirm that the patches either don't apply to 10.2.8, or that 10.2.8 is really defunct. Just letting it trail off is....
However, it would be wise to remember that the Brits sucked us into WW1 on false pretenses, basically setting up the Lusitania to take the hit, create an incident, and get the US into the war. (They probably thought they could get the people off safely since it had enough boats and was reasonably close to shore. The second explosion wasn't anticipated.)
Also, to be fair, I would point out that the Brits are securely settled in the southern oilfields of Iraq, The British share of North sea oil production has peaked (Norwegian production is still climbing) and much of the now-discredited intellegence came from the Brits, (the non-existant attempt to get enriched uranium from Africa, and whatever the famous "Sexed up" report that lead to the "suicide" of the person who talked to Mr. Gilligan of the BBC. (By the way, is he still accounted for?)
By the way, in WWII, Churchill new that Pearl Harbor was going down, but didn't tell the US, partly because he though we already knew, and partly because he didn't want anyone to know that they had the code broken. (The latter is why he let Coventry burn as well.)
The Brits look out for the Brits. The French look out for the French. Whether the US's continuous do-gooding is idealistic or stupid only history will tell.
"who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?"
More than you think. For over five years I got up at 5 to 5. Before that, for a couple of years I was in Idaho Falls where the local radio station played Reveille every morning at 5 AM. They expected someone to be getting up.
Now I get to sleep until 6 AM. Total Decadence!
As an unrelated aside, if it's over 40 at 6:30 AM, I'll take the motorcycle (at 52 mpg). If it's under 40, I take the truck (16 mpg) So pushing the ride to work closer to sunrise (when it's coldest) will force me to burn more gas, not save gas.
"Doesn't anyone find it odd that open source software seems to be so threatened by software patents and closed source products seem fine? "
Apple charges an extra $20 if you want to watch MPEG-2 with Quicktime. I don't know if Bill rolls it into the cost of Windows, or charges extra too. So the big boys with a revenue stream just pay for it one way or another.
Novell could code up a closed player too, and license the codec for SUSE. They probably will if VLC and Mplayer go down.
What annoys me is the assumption that the hand recount was somehow more accurate than the machine recount. I had to do a study of human-based QA for my employer a while back, and people just plane suck at that sort of thing.
The correct answer was the margin of error (by people or by machine) was larger than the margin of victory. By a lot. Therefore, the election was a tie. The next step for a tie is to send it to the Legislature. Since that body is controlled by Democrats, they would have elected what's-her-name anyway. So, in the end she would have gotten the job anyway.
(Besides, I really doubt the assorted felons would have voted for the ex-attorney-general.)
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"On average, Mac users let their computers age much longer than PC users do (I've heard twice as long quoted a few times)"
I think that's about right. It certainly is for me. My quicksilver is from 2002, and was going to be replaced in late 2006 or early 2007. I may extend that a year with the Mactel switch in progress.
The computer before that was purchased in late 1995. So 6.5 years on that box (which the daughter is still using) and 5 or six on this one looks plausible.
Now I've upgraded hard drives, and video cards about midterm on both of them, and the RAM and processor in the 7500 too, but the expense was been about 1/3 the cost of a new computer for the 7500, and about 1/10 for the quicksilver, so I can't really complain.
Our analog TV went dark Jan 2, 2004. All four translators went off the air here in Soap lake WA, leaving us with just channel 39's continuous "God Is Great!" broadcasts.
So after a month, we got satellite dish. The kids use it to watch cartoons, and we occasionally watch a movie, or the Weather Channel. Our evening news fix has been replaced by the Internet. The older kids are starting to lose interest in TV now too, so the satellite dish may end up abandoned too. Watching TV in the hope of something interesting is just too inefficient a use of time.
They are not so much anti-energy as they are pro-poverty. I think they want everyone back to the 1870's, but with vaccinations this time. There is an awful lot of pining for the joys of working on your 10 acre subsistance farm, then doing handicrafts for sale in town (to them I guess) in your copious spare time.
I grew up on a farm, and don't remember much spare time. I'll take my job as a metallurgist anytime. And if the squash bugs wipe out the garden, well, at least I won't starve.
On a related question, when are the Courts coing to realize that Nature-worship is a religion and use the First Amendment to close them down a few turns?
"Or, you could just, I dunno... RENT A TRUCK."
Nearest rental place is about 25 miles. And they don't have pickups, just panel vans. Two people have to go to town to get a truck, two people back home (in separate vehicles), run errand, two people back to town, drop off truck, then drive back home together. Each round trip kills an hour for two people. The actual errand takes an hour for 1. So, you've killed three times more actual time, and five times more person-hours than having your own truck. And you've driven the car 100 miles, and the rental truck 50 miles more than the errand took. Saving big gas there!
Also, the rental place is not open on Sunday, or after 4 on Saturday. Rentals sound like a good idea until you have to actually use them.
And the $40 does not include mileage or insurance. So, in return for massive inconvenience, in the end you get to save nothing.
"Someone please explain to me the need for SUV's and trucks when only a single person is driving in it..."
:-) but that is not purely economics either. The 51 mpg is just a fringe benefit.
As a pick-up owner who is usually the only occupant, I'll be happy to. It's cheaper than owning a car and a truck. I need the truck features maybe once a month. (Today, in fact, was a carport in kit form, 42" wide, 9 'ft long, and about 300 lbs. Last month it was a new freezer, etc.) The "excess gas cost" of driving the pickup to work is about 500 gallons/year. (15,000 miles/yr at 15 miles per gallon in the truck vs 30 miles/gal in a small car.)
So, at $2.25 per gallon (today's price) that is $1125. The cheapest car I can find is about $12,000. Therefore, we are looking at about a 10 year ROI, NOT COUNTING the registration, licensing and insurance, or maintenance costs. A 12 year ROI is about the least you can really expect.
Now, if you work for a company with an accountant or know an accountant, ask them if an investment with a 12 year payback period is a good idea.
So, if you never need the pickup, or never need to tow anything, or never have more than 4 in the vehicle (applies to SUV owners) then buy the car. Otherwise, it makes more sense to have just one vehicle that can handle the largest credible mission, and use that for everything. If you need two vehicles in the family, then one commuter-special, and one SUV makes a great deal of sense.
Note that this argument has not stopped me from using a motorcycle to commute during the warm months
"Other than price, I don't understand why anybody would NOT want to use Office for OS X."
Other than the price is all I need. $350 is just too much. I have no use for powerpoint at all, and word processors are a dime a dozen, given I don't need the full power of Word. So, all I am really interested in is Excel. And even Excel is not worth that much.
IF Bill will sell me Excel alone for $99, I'll buy it. Otherwise, something else will have to do.
On that topic, is Gnumeric compatable with Tiger yet? I want to have a "spread-off" between that and Neo-office. Since both Abiword and Neo-office are acceptable for word processors, the winning spreadsheet determines which suite I get.
"One of these days the rich real realize that it's the poor that go to war.... and the poor may just point the guns back at the rich."
From the preface of my copy of Clausewitz, during a discussion of the formation of the first citizen armies in Europe:
"Political opposition came from those who feared an armed citizenry more than they feared foreign invasions. A peasant with a gun may get ideas about his own place in society. In fact, the most energetic proponents of a mass army were the liberals who envisaged far reaching social reforms as prerequisites of strengthening the nation."
The court screwed the pooch today. Unfortunately, we are the ones who will pay.
"A couple people can live quite comfortably off of a small solar panel in a temperate climate" Right. Wisconsin is officially a temperate climate. Try living through that winter with a small solar panel. Are you giving up hot water? Central heat? Any heat? I used to live in Winnemucca Nevada. There, I could have run the electrical loads (including the swamp cooler) of my single-wide mobilehome off of roof-mounted solar panels. I still would have needed a propane tank or a natural gas connection to keep the hot water, stove, and furnace going. If I had gone off the grid there, I also would have had to figure out how to get water up 400 feet from the bottom of the well. That was not in my solar cell budget. so add either more solar cells, or a windmill, and more batteries either way. It is doable, but a "small solar panel" will barely keep the radio and a few lights on.
good link! I don't agree with everything, (biodiesel gains 60% net energy, and GM crops could improve that further) but the points are well taken. And, as always, America will wait until the last minute and then panic.
/. last year. Also thought provoking. I didn't believe everything there either, but it also pointed out the changes the end of cheap energy will bring. And it explains why Blair was ready to head to Iraq too. The UK is really over a barrel energy wise.
Actually the scenario sounds similar to "UK survival in the 21st century" by John Busby. It was linked to here on
4 years? patent filed for in 1996?
You know, the Apple II GS had a multimedia control system in system 6, back in '91 or so.
have to go look and look up what it could do.
About Access not being on the Mac, the excuse from M$ was that Access had lots of low level x86 assembly code, and it just wasn't practical to bring it to the Mac. If the Mac is running a Pentium, then that argument goes away. So what do you think the new excuse from M$ will be for no Access on the Mac? Sounds like a good topic for a /. poll!
Even before the Mac version of appleworks was Resolve. It was based on Wingz (a UNIX spreadsheet). It worked, but was slow, and had bugs and generally was a version 1.0 product.
They killed it about 6 months after I bought it. Grrr.
Years later I bought Claris Impact, which was intended for presentations. I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on it. It worked great as a low end desktop publishing program. And I did my defense presentation on it as well. Then Steve killed that program, and every other program but Filemaker and Appleworks when he came back.
Apple makes great hardware, and a great OS, but I don't trust them on software. They are also into proprietary formats (Appleworks 6 being one of them). Unless it comes on the CD/DVD with the OS I'm unlikely to use Apple software unless it uses a standard format so I can get my data back.
So, iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie are gone from my newly upgraded 10.4 box. (I never used the last two anyway, so no loss there.) The pro level stuff may have a decent lifetime, but I can't help think Steve will get bored with consumer level apps again, or decide he needs to drop Apple software products to appease the developer community, especially with another platform transition to suck up resources.
"College can provide a wonderful education, if the student is ready for it"
:-)
And that is a big IF. I started college at 27, and the half-dazed 18 year olds wandering around the place were a constant source of amusement. Not to mention the profound pontificating of the editors of the student paper. Clueless!
I'm sure most of them are sorted out now, but the real world was undoubtedly quite a shock when they met up with it. And this was at a land-grant university. It must be even worse at a liberal arts school. The mind boggles.
I don't need a dancing robot, or a drawing robot. I need a fruit picking robot. Strawberries, raspberries, cherries, apples, etc.
A weed pulling robot sounds good too. If it can tell a pigweed from a cucumber, there is a market for it.
Just our luck humans end up with the field work, and the robots end up sitting on their ass spewing Vogon-class poetry, and telling us the reason we don't like it is our lack of a classical education.
"All thats collapsed, Be was bought out, SCO was too, Alpha, Tru64, OpenVMS were too, Ultrasparc and Itanium and PARISC are dying, MIPS is dead, OS2 is dead, the diverse mainframes are dead, and we're seeing even more industry consolidation, and later the demise of some of the companies who couldnt differentiate enough".
Intel was the sole survivor of the processor wars. Now all processors are Intel.
"But what if I want one copy for my MP3 player, one on a CD for my car, and one for my wifes car?"
No, you burn 3 separate CD's either of the same playlist, or different playlists.
Then, if you want, re-rip the CD back into the same format it came from. I did some blind testing in the wife awhile back, and she couldn't tell the difference between the origianal itunes track and the re-ripped CD. I also did some detailed examination of the waveforms of original and re-ripped, and although there were differences, they were very minor.
I went one step farther and reburned and re-ripped the burned track again, and still didn't see or hear significant degradation. Granted, it does get worse every time, so eventually you will hear it. But once in and out does not cause a significant loss.
So, if the Greenland glaciers are melting, then there is a lot of "new" land available for use. This land is owned by the government of Denmark? Can you buy from them? Do you have to be a Danish citizen? How does one emmigrate to Denmark? How does one become a Danish Real-estate agent? How do you Market retirement homes and estates in Greenland?
Come on people, opportunity is beating down the door! Less wailing and gnashing of teeth and more ambition is what you need.
" Any Joe Programmer can pick up a cheap $200 bare bones PC and a copy of Linux and be programming the next great thing. He doesn't need management to do this."
Good point. For me to work in my profession requires a $100 million dollar chemical plant. Which is why I'm beholden to a corporation, and not an independent contactor. When step 1 is "erect 2 each, 80 foot high, 6 ft diameter reaction columns with 2" thick walls, made of Alloy 800H" the barriers to entry are pretty substantial.
"Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it. " And this sort of babble is a fine example why I have turned anti-environmentalist. Most of the energy in this household goes to heating water, pumping water, and heating the house in the winter. (TV and surfing the net are a pretty small proportion) I have no intention of moving back to an 1870's life style. Hell, there is a picture of my father taking bath in a washtub when he was in his early twenties, because the old farm still didn't have an indoor bathroom at the time. And this was about 1955. I ain't going back to the "good old days". Period. End of discussion. If you want to find better ways of making electricity, I'm open to ideas. But the lights better damn well come on when I flip the switch.
Geothermal power sources are generally salty and laced with hydrogen sulfides. This makes then amazingly corrosive. They also tend to scale up the heat exchangers, filling the tubes with solid rock.
And, although renewable on geological terms, the rock bodies can cool off in human time scales. You are mining the heat. Rock has a lower heat capacity than water, and poor conductivity. So when you cool down the hot rocks, it'll be a few centuries before it heats up again.
It's one of those great ideas that doesn't quite work out. Well, in some places it does work, but not everywhere.
This is the third 10.3 security update without a corresponding fix for 10.2.8, which is officially still supported. At the least they should confirm that the patches either don't apply to 10.2.8, or that 10.2.8 is really defunct. Just letting it trail off is ....
However, it would be wise to remember that the Brits sucked us into WW1 on false pretenses, basically setting up the Lusitania to take the hit, create an incident, and get the US into the war. (They probably thought they could get the people off safely since it had enough boats and was reasonably close to shore. The second explosion wasn't anticipated.)
Also, to be fair, I would point out that the Brits are securely settled in the southern oilfields of Iraq, The British share of North sea oil production has peaked (Norwegian production is still climbing) and much of the now-discredited intellegence came from the Brits, (the non-existant attempt to get enriched uranium from Africa, and whatever the famous "Sexed up" report that lead to the "suicide" of the person who talked to Mr. Gilligan of the BBC. (By the way, is he still accounted for?)
By the way, in WWII, Churchill new that Pearl Harbor was going down, but didn't tell the US, partly because he though we already knew, and partly because he didn't want anyone to know that they had the code broken. (The latter is why he let Coventry burn as well.)
The Brits look out for the Brits. The French look out for the French. Whether the US's continuous do-gooding is idealistic or stupid only history will tell.
"who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?" More than you think. For over five years I got up at 5 to 5. Before that, for a couple of years I was in Idaho Falls where the local radio station played Reveille every morning at 5 AM. They expected someone to be getting up. Now I get to sleep until 6 AM. Total Decadence! As an unrelated aside, if it's over 40 at 6:30 AM, I'll take the motorcycle (at 52 mpg). If it's under 40, I take the truck (16 mpg) So pushing the ride to work closer to sunrise (when it's coldest) will force me to burn more gas, not save gas.
"Doesn't anyone find it odd that open source software seems to be so threatened by software patents and closed source products seem fine? "
Apple charges an extra $20 if you want to watch MPEG-2 with Quicktime. I don't know if Bill rolls it into the cost of Windows, or charges extra too. So the big boys with a revenue stream just pay for it one way or another.
Novell could code up a closed player too, and license the codec for SUSE. They probably will if VLC and Mplayer go down.
What annoys me is the assumption that the hand recount was somehow more accurate than the machine recount. I had to do a study of human-based QA for my employer a while back, and people just plane suck at that sort of thing.
The correct answer was the margin of error (by people or by machine) was larger than the margin of victory. By a lot. Therefore, the election was a tie. The next step for a tie is to send it to the Legislature. Since that body is controlled by Democrats, they would have elected what's-her-name anyway. So, in the end she would have gotten the job anyway.
(Besides, I really doubt the assorted felons would have voted for the ex-attorney-general.)
Mike S.
Soap Lake WA.