T-Mobile and AT&T run their 3G on different frequencies, so unless your device happens to support both, you'll only get 2G data with your old device when you switch.
That begs the question: Why weren't you being fully careful?
(For those who don't know, "begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy where the conclusion is assumed in the proposition's premise. The correct phrase here is "raises the question". Alas, it seems that this battle has been lost; nobody seems to know what begging the question actually is anymore.)
If someone is driving with their knees, they may not be obviously driving recklessly--the danger is only actualized when the driver needs to react quickly to an obstacle, at which point it's too late. That said, a cell phone is only one of many things that can cause distraction, and the law should be based on the observed behavior of the driver. I'm not entirely sure what that benchmark would be, but it needs to be written in a way that it can be fairly and consistently applied. That's why cell phone laws are so popular--a violation is easy to detect.
It is well known that the candidate who drops the most money on his/her campaign is the one who 'wins'. There is a lot of money out there for politicians who are willing to support the desires of these parasites, especially now that money has been ruled 'free speech'.
Does this mean I have a right to money?
The use of money is free speech, which means you can use your money however you want.
In reality, though, you can't. You can't send money to places like Iran or North Korea. You can't buy drugs as a way of speaking in favor of drug rights. You can't fund organizations that are conspiring against America (interestingly, our political parties are exempt from this one). You can't directly sell Senate seats (Rod Blagojevich found that one out the hard way).
In other words, the use of money is free speech except when it's not.
Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"??
I'm going to have to mark this one "Cannot reproduce".
Yes, I find that Google makes corrections to my queries, but more often than not it's when I'm intentionally searching for something that is misspelled (e.g. a band name), a foreign-language word or phrase, or is otherwise an unusual permutation of words. When I didn't want the correction to happen, it's frustrating, but I think more often than not it improves my results (you don't think about the times where it helped you, but rather the comparatively few times where it got something wrong). Anyhow, one trick that everybody should know is if you want a term matched exactly in the results, put a + sign before it (this is particularly useful when intentionally misspelling a word). This will prevent any correction, reformulation, or expansion that Google might otherwise do on a term.
It seems that the summary excerpts on Google are somewhat better than those on Bing (Bing has a tendency to pick the wrong paragraph for the excerpt). Therefore, I'm more likely to get my answer in the excerpt without having to click a link.
Another example of where you won't click is a search for a place nearby. On Google, if I search for "pizza" I'll get a list of 7 nearby pizza joints complete with address and phone number. On Bing, I'll get a few excepts from local pizza places which may or may not contain the contact information. Yet another example is searching for movie times. If I search for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", both search engines will give me showtimes at cinemas nearby. The difference is Google also provides the address in the summary (if, for instance, I'm traveling and don't know where the cinema actually is). On Bing, I'd have to click the name of the theater to find the address.
Yet another example is the stock search. While both search engines will give me a quote and a chart if I type a ticker symbol, Google does a better job on other market-related searches. For instance, if I search for "dow jones", Google will give me the chart and quote just as if I typed a ticker symbol, whereas Bing will not. If I just type "dow", Google assumes that I am looking for the Dow Jones average (probably correctly), whereas Bing gives me the price for Dow Chemical.
Complicating matters further is that the average Bing user is probably less technically savvy than the average Google user (since many Bing users are using it just because it was the default). This means that they also probably don't know how to search well. From personal experience with my technically illiterate family, they type in a bad search query and then just start randomly clicking results hoping it'll be what they want, even when a result is obviously spam or otherwise garbage.
Yet another complication is Google's instant search results. You get results as you type--for a long query, you might see 3 or 4 sets of results before you're done with your query. Do these "partial queries" count against Google?
Measuring user satisfaction with a search engine is extraordinarily difficult to do, but I think this methodology is flawed. There are two measures I would use: First, see whether the first result a user clicks was relevant. If a user clicks on multiple results in a search, that should probably count against the search engine (it means that the first click did not answer the user's question). Furthermore, a user clicking to page 2 should count against the search engine. As for queries with no clicks, it's difficult to say whether it should be counted in favor of the search engine. It may have been a typo, in which case the query was quickly reformulated to be correct (and the original query should not count). Alternatively, the person may have found the answer without clicking, in which case it should count for the search engine. There's also the possibility that the person did not find the answer and did not bother clicking through to page 2. In this case, I'd look for a reformulation of the query more than 15-30 seconds after the original one (anything less would be more indicative of a typo than the failure of the search engine).
While both parties certainly have huge corrupt elements, people like you are part of an informal, equally dangerous party: the "It's All Bullshit" party. People like you disbelieve everything you hear from any person who might have a political affiliation because none of them could possibly know anything. While you are right to take a politician's words with a grain of salt, people like you take the complete opposite position and assume that any opinion on any important issue cannot be right.
I can't be an expert on everything, so I have to defer to experts on other subjects. When economists say that x is how we fix the economy, I believe them. When a structural engineer says that a bridge is not soundly constructed, I believe him. When climate scientists agree that climate change is happening, I believe them. I don't take it completely blindly, of course--I'll read some of the papers and investigate differing opinions (after all, I'm a scientist too)--but I can't claim to know the reality of the situation any better than those who devote their careers to it.
To say that you know better than an expert is not only profoundly arrogant, but it's how progress in the world is impeded. I am frustrated every time a development occurs in my field and I read the opinions of average people who have no understanding of how it really works. People panic about it, question its utility, or just consider it bunk. Remember Watson (the Jeopardy-playing system)? It was a very impressive achievement in question answering and yet maybe 1 in 10 of of the comments demonstrated any understanding of it. I tried to explain things to the lay folk who thought it was bunk or that it was in some way "fixed", but they just wouldn't believe it. To these people, the accountant or even the burger flipper knows more about question answering than the information retrieval expert.
No. Global warming, with suitable data, could be proven false, just like you need suitable data to prove it true. If I make the claim that climate change is real, you could prove it wrong if you performed some significance tests on the data and showed that climate change is not happening (in other words, a climate where the average temperature is not increasing) with some level of significance (say, p
I recently read an article where one of the more skeptical climate scientists said that climate change had not been proven to p <.05 due to insufficient data, but that it was close (p <.07 or thereabouts). This does NOT mean that climate change is not happening, but rather that there is only a 93% chance that it is happening (whereas a scientist will usually want at least 95% or even as much as 99% to affirmatively make a claim). There has been no research whatsoever, though, to demonstrate to any reasonable p-value that climate change is not happening. So while we may not have irrefutable proof of climate change (depending on whom you ask), I'm going to go with the 93% chance it is real and not the 7% that it's not.
More importantly, politicians should be taking the problem of climate change seriously. If we thought an asteroid were going to hit Earth with a 93% probability, we would be taking that a lot more seriously. Since global warming doesn't strike all at once, though, we somehow think it's OK to ignore it.
By that logic, Windows computers shouldn't be called PCs either, since they don't run DOS or OS/2 anymore. Windows machines and modern Macs are all x86/x86-64.
Of all the customizations you could have picked that are difficult or impossible on OSX, you picked one of the easiest ones there is. Here's one that actually is, to my knowledge, impossible or at least extremely difficult: changing the font size on the menu bar. While it doesn't affect me, this would be a huge issue to someone who is visually impaired. And no, changing the resolution to something lower than native resolution is not the proper solution.
There are also lots of other things you can't change, from the purely cosmetic (changing the appearance of the title bar, for instance) to the incredibly annoying (OSX spewing._ and.DS_Store files all over network shares), to the unsolvable without a $20 program (the awful mouse acceleration curve that makes it feel like you're dragging your cursor through mud).
Let's face it: the people who made OSX envisioned exactly one way to do almost everything, and if you don't like that way of doing it, tough shit. I own a Mac, and it was a very frustrating experience after years of solely using Linux. I still have (and use) my Mac, but I regularly run into issues where the only answer is that there is no solution. That said, I still prefer it over Windows. Windows may be a bit more customizable, but I can't productively use any machine without a real terminal. The Windows command prompt is merely a toy shell in comparison. (Yes, I know there's Cygwin, and I do have it installed on the machines that have a Windows partition, but I seldom have a reason boot into Windows anyway).
Side note: Why is it that every stupid little program on OSX costs $20? A tool that would be freeware on Windows or open-source on Linux, that does just one thing, seems to invariably cost about $20 on OSX. It's absurd. Oftentimes, I can write a shell script in minutes that does the same thing as a $20 program, minus the GUI. It seems that Mac still has the reputation of being for people with too much money, and every lousy shareware vendor wants their piece of the pie.
It can't run it legally, and you're very likely to have issues with hardware unless you very carefully buy each component to work properly.
I don't like Apple's high prices or the fact that they make it difficult to use OSX on a non-Mac computer, but you have to understand that Apple is in the hardware business, not the software business. The only way they can make the margins that they do is by keeping OSX exclusive to their hardware. There's also the added benefit (from Apple's perspective) or detriment (from the perspective of someone wanting to run OSX on non-Apple hardware) of not needing to support hardware configurations outside the scope of the few configurations they sell.
You misunderstood the study. It said that 1 million people who fly 10 times a week will result in 4 cases of cancer over a lifetime, not 4 cases of cancer per week. Using your number of 12.17 million people flying per week, and then assuming that all make a return trip in the same week, and rounding up, we get 25 million person-flights a week. Using the numbers from the study, this should result in 10 additional cases of cancer in a lifetime among everyone who flies
That said, while it's only 10 people of the millions who fly, it's still 10 people too many when the measures are not effective. But don't exaggerate the impact to try to strengthen your argument.
You have a misunderstanding of what deflation is. Deflation means that prices for goods in the currency go down (due to the increasing value of the currency). This is the opposite of inflation, where prices go up because the currency loses value. So yes, the fact that the value of a Bitcoin has increased by several orders of magnitude is indeed evidence that it's deflationary, thus encouraging hoarding.
If enough people want to use the currency it will work. If everybody is obsessed with trying to game it and nobody uses it then it won't.
The greed of the speculators will kill it. It's easy to say "don't try to game it", but that's just what people will do. This is similar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. If everyone plays nice and tries to use the currency, everyone will collectively be better off, but an individual will always be better off playing the market (given the deflationary nature of Bitcoin).
Very true. I think every kid has dropped a book at or walking to/from school at least once. With a book, you pick it up and keep moving. With an eBook reader, you end up with a ~$100 paperweight.
I guess it's possible for someone under the age of 20 to have not seen either format.
I guess it depends where you live. Some of the biggest vinyl-heads I know are young'n's.
This is true. While I'm not quite under 20 (I'm 22), I have a pretty big vinyl collection. It helps, though, that there's a great used vinyl shop very close to where I live, where the vast majority of the million records (literally) is $5 or less.
I don't know a single liberal who considers "liberal" to be pejorative. Meanwhile, people on the right throw around the term as though we're actually insulted by it.
I am proud social liberal (not to be confused with Democrat!). The political parties have lost their way and, if anyone, that's you should be vilifying. Leave the real liberals (and the real conservatives, too) out of it.
As for "progressive", that term has been in use for over a century, and is not synonymous with "liberal" (though they often go together).
You don't seriously think that a fraction of a watt of RF (using a high estimate, 1.6W/kg * 0.2kg = 0.32W) is actually causing harm, do you? The WHO, being extra cautious, said that they don't have enough evidence to say whether or not a cell signal can cause cancer. Understandable, since cell phones haven't been around long enough to do long-term studies. Keep in mind, though, that other things generally considered benign, such as coffee, are in the same WHO list.
If you're concerned about your cell phone causing cancer, I would recommend you adopt a nocturnal schedule, because the sun is harming you much more than a cell phone ever will. You should also avoid microwave ovens. Furthermore, find out where every TV and radio broadcast tower is (those can go as high as 100,000 watts!), draw out a healthy buffer zone around each, and make sure you don't go too close. Alternatively, build a Faraday cage, put some wheels on it, and get inside.
I suspect that most of the upgrade problems are caused by installing drivers that aren't in the official repositories. I have never had a problem with a system that had only packages from the repos installed. One of my machines has been upgraded in place, version by version, since 6.06; another, since 7.04; and others since 8.04, 8.10, and 9.10. All of them have been upgraded, version by version, to either 10.10 or 11.04 (and I even upgraded to alpha builds on one of those machines!), and not one of them has ever had a problem with the upgrade.
(One thing that all five of those machines have in common is nVidia graphics. I don't have any experience with upgrading a system that has Intel or ATI graphics, so maybe the upgrades aren't so smooth there.)
But sometimes they predict "partly cloudy" and a tornado ends up striking. While they didn't explicitly say "no tornadoes", a forecast of "partly cloudy" (maybe even with a "0% chance of precipitation") pretty clearly says there's going to be no tornadoes.
Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile and AT&T run their 3G on different frequencies, so unless your device happens to support both, you'll only get 2G data with your old device when you switch.
It seems perfectly cromulent to me.
That begs the question: Why weren't you being fully careful?
(For those who don't know, "begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy where the conclusion is assumed in the proposition's premise. The correct phrase here is "raises the question". Alas, it seems that this battle has been lost; nobody seems to know what begging the question actually is anymore.)
"Irregardless" is what happened when someone decided "irrespective" and "regardless" should be combined into one word.
If someone is driving with their knees, they may not be obviously driving recklessly--the danger is only actualized when the driver needs to react quickly to an obstacle, at which point it's too late. That said, a cell phone is only one of many things that can cause distraction, and the law should be based on the observed behavior of the driver. I'm not entirely sure what that benchmark would be, but it needs to be written in a way that it can be fairly and consistently applied. That's why cell phone laws are so popular--a violation is easy to detect.
It is well known that the candidate who drops the most money on his/her campaign is the one who 'wins'. There is a lot of money out there for politicians who are willing to support the desires of these parasites, especially now that money has been ruled 'free speech'.
Does this mean I have a right to money?
The use of money is free speech, which means you can use your money however you want.
In reality, though, you can't. You can't send money to places like Iran or North Korea. You can't buy drugs as a way of speaking in favor of drug rights. You can't fund organizations that are conspiring against America (interestingly, our political parties are exempt from this one). You can't directly sell Senate seats (Rod Blagojevich found that one out the hard way).
In other words, the use of money is free speech except when it's not.
It's because of Hampster Dance. 13 years later, people still think it's spelled "hampster".
Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"??
I'm going to have to mark this one "Cannot reproduce".
Yes, I find that Google makes corrections to my queries, but more often than not it's when I'm intentionally searching for something that is misspelled (e.g. a band name), a foreign-language word or phrase, or is otherwise an unusual permutation of words. When I didn't want the correction to happen, it's frustrating, but I think more often than not it improves my results (you don't think about the times where it helped you, but rather the comparatively few times where it got something wrong). Anyhow, one trick that everybody should know is if you want a term matched exactly in the results, put a + sign before it (this is particularly useful when intentionally misspelling a word). This will prevent any correction, reformulation, or expansion that Google might otherwise do on a term.
It seems that the summary excerpts on Google are somewhat better than those on Bing (Bing has a tendency to pick the wrong paragraph for the excerpt). Therefore, I'm more likely to get my answer in the excerpt without having to click a link.
Another example of where you won't click is a search for a place nearby. On Google, if I search for "pizza" I'll get a list of 7 nearby pizza joints complete with address and phone number. On Bing, I'll get a few excepts from local pizza places which may or may not contain the contact information. Yet another example is searching for movie times. If I search for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", both search engines will give me showtimes at cinemas nearby. The difference is Google also provides the address in the summary (if, for instance, I'm traveling and don't know where the cinema actually is). On Bing, I'd have to click the name of the theater to find the address.
Yet another example is the stock search. While both search engines will give me a quote and a chart if I type a ticker symbol, Google does a better job on other market-related searches. For instance, if I search for "dow jones", Google will give me the chart and quote just as if I typed a ticker symbol, whereas Bing will not. If I just type "dow", Google assumes that I am looking for the Dow Jones average (probably correctly), whereas Bing gives me the price for Dow Chemical.
Complicating matters further is that the average Bing user is probably less technically savvy than the average Google user (since many Bing users are using it just because it was the default). This means that they also probably don't know how to search well. From personal experience with my technically illiterate family, they type in a bad search query and then just start randomly clicking results hoping it'll be what they want, even when a result is obviously spam or otherwise garbage.
Yet another complication is Google's instant search results. You get results as you type--for a long query, you might see 3 or 4 sets of results before you're done with your query. Do these "partial queries" count against Google?
Measuring user satisfaction with a search engine is extraordinarily difficult to do, but I think this methodology is flawed. There are two measures I would use: First, see whether the first result a user clicks was relevant. If a user clicks on multiple results in a search, that should probably count against the search engine (it means that the first click did not answer the user's question). Furthermore, a user clicking to page 2 should count against the search engine. As for queries with no clicks, it's difficult to say whether it should be counted in favor of the search engine. It may have been a typo, in which case the query was quickly reformulated to be correct (and the original query should not count). Alternatively, the person may have found the answer without clicking, in which case it should count for the search engine. There's also the possibility that the person did not find the answer and did not bother clicking through to page 2. In this case, I'd look for a reformulation of the query more than 15-30 seconds after the original one (anything less would be more indicative of a typo than the failure of the search engine).
While both parties certainly have huge corrupt elements, people like you are part of an informal, equally dangerous party: the "It's All Bullshit" party. People like you disbelieve everything you hear from any person who might have a political affiliation because none of them could possibly know anything. While you are right to take a politician's words with a grain of salt, people like you take the complete opposite position and assume that any opinion on any important issue cannot be right.
I can't be an expert on everything, so I have to defer to experts on other subjects. When economists say that x is how we fix the economy, I believe them. When a structural engineer says that a bridge is not soundly constructed, I believe him. When climate scientists agree that climate change is happening, I believe them. I don't take it completely blindly, of course--I'll read some of the papers and investigate differing opinions (after all, I'm a scientist too)--but I can't claim to know the reality of the situation any better than those who devote their careers to it.
To say that you know better than an expert is not only profoundly arrogant, but it's how progress in the world is impeded. I am frustrated every time a development occurs in my field and I read the opinions of average people who have no understanding of how it really works. People panic about it, question its utility, or just consider it bunk. Remember Watson (the Jeopardy-playing system)? It was a very impressive achievement in question answering and yet maybe 1 in 10 of of the comments demonstrated any understanding of it. I tried to explain things to the lay folk who thought it was bunk or that it was in some way "fixed", but they just wouldn't believe it. To these people, the accountant or even the burger flipper knows more about question answering than the information retrieval expert.
No. Global warming, with suitable data, could be proven false, just like you need suitable data to prove it true. If I make the claim that climate change is real, you could prove it wrong if you performed some significance tests on the data and showed that climate change is not happening (in other words, a climate where the average temperature is not increasing) with some level of significance (say, p
I recently read an article where one of the more skeptical climate scientists said that climate change had not been proven to p < .05 due to insufficient data, but that it was close (p < .07 or thereabouts). This does NOT mean that climate change is not happening, but rather that there is only a 93% chance that it is happening (whereas a scientist will usually want at least 95% or even as much as 99% to affirmatively make a claim). There has been no research whatsoever, though, to demonstrate to any reasonable p-value that climate change is not happening. So while we may not have irrefutable proof of climate change (depending on whom you ask), I'm going to go with the 93% chance it is real and not the 7% that it's not.
More importantly, politicians should be taking the problem of climate change seriously. If we thought an asteroid were going to hit Earth with a 93% probability, we would be taking that a lot more seriously. Since global warming doesn't strike all at once, though, we somehow think it's OK to ignore it.
By that logic, Windows computers shouldn't be called PCs either, since they don't run DOS or OS/2 anymore. Windows machines and modern Macs are all x86/x86-64.
Of all the customizations you could have picked that are difficult or impossible on OSX, you picked one of the easiest ones there is. Here's one that actually is, to my knowledge, impossible or at least extremely difficult: changing the font size on the menu bar. While it doesn't affect me, this would be a huge issue to someone who is visually impaired. And no, changing the resolution to something lower than native resolution is not the proper solution.
There are also lots of other things you can't change, from the purely cosmetic (changing the appearance of the title bar, for instance) to the incredibly annoying (OSX spewing ._ and .DS_Store files all over network shares), to the unsolvable without a $20 program (the awful mouse acceleration curve that makes it feel like you're dragging your cursor through mud).
Let's face it: the people who made OSX envisioned exactly one way to do almost everything, and if you don't like that way of doing it, tough shit. I own a Mac, and it was a very frustrating experience after years of solely using Linux. I still have (and use) my Mac, but I regularly run into issues where the only answer is that there is no solution. That said, I still prefer it over Windows. Windows may be a bit more customizable, but I can't productively use any machine without a real terminal. The Windows command prompt is merely a toy shell in comparison. (Yes, I know there's Cygwin, and I do have it installed on the machines that have a Windows partition, but I seldom have a reason boot into Windows anyway).
Side note: Why is it that every stupid little program on OSX costs $20? A tool that would be freeware on Windows or open-source on Linux, that does just one thing, seems to invariably cost about $20 on OSX. It's absurd. Oftentimes, I can write a shell script in minutes that does the same thing as a $20 program, minus the GUI. It seems that Mac still has the reputation of being for people with too much money, and every lousy shareware vendor wants their piece of the pie.
It can't run it legally, and you're very likely to have issues with hardware unless you very carefully buy each component to work properly.
I don't like Apple's high prices or the fact that they make it difficult to use OSX on a non-Mac computer, but you have to understand that Apple is in the hardware business, not the software business. The only way they can make the margins that they do is by keeping OSX exclusive to their hardware. There's also the added benefit (from Apple's perspective) or detriment (from the perspective of someone wanting to run OSX on non-Apple hardware) of not needing to support hardware configurations outside the scope of the few configurations they sell.
That's TWO decades.
+1
No, not 3!
How many are going to encounter an issue, figure out how to replicate it, then go file a bug report? None?
I've done so several times with the Music beta, so it's at least one.
You misunderstood the study. It said that 1 million people who fly 10 times a week will result in 4 cases of cancer over a lifetime, not 4 cases of cancer per week. Using your number of 12.17 million people flying per week, and then assuming that all make a return trip in the same week, and rounding up, we get 25 million person-flights a week. Using the numbers from the study, this should result in 10 additional cases of cancer in a lifetime among everyone who flies
That said, while it's only 10 people of the millions who fly, it's still 10 people too many when the measures are not effective. But don't exaggerate the impact to try to strengthen your argument.
If enough people want to use the currency it will work. If everybody is obsessed with trying to game it and nobody uses it then it won't.
The greed of the speculators will kill it. It's easy to say "don't try to game it", but that's just what people will do. This is similar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. If everyone plays nice and tries to use the currency, everyone will collectively be better off, but an individual will always be better off playing the market (given the deflationary nature of Bitcoin).
Very true. I think every kid has dropped a book at or walking to/from school at least once. With a book, you pick it up and keep moving. With an eBook reader, you end up with a ~$100 paperweight.
I guess it depends where you live. Some of the biggest vinyl-heads I know are young'n's.
This is true. While I'm not quite under 20 (I'm 22), I have a pretty big vinyl collection. It helps, though, that there's a great used vinyl shop very close to where I live, where the vast majority of the million records (literally) is $5 or less.
I don't know a single liberal who considers "liberal" to be pejorative. Meanwhile, people on the right throw around the term as though we're actually insulted by it.
I am proud social liberal (not to be confused with Democrat!). The political parties have lost their way and, if anyone, that's you should be vilifying. Leave the real liberals (and the real conservatives, too) out of it.
As for "progressive", that term has been in use for over a century, and is not synonymous with "liberal" (though they often go together).
You don't seriously think that a fraction of a watt of RF (using a high estimate, 1.6W/kg * 0.2kg = 0.32W) is actually causing harm, do you? The WHO, being extra cautious, said that they don't have enough evidence to say whether or not a cell signal can cause cancer. Understandable, since cell phones haven't been around long enough to do long-term studies. Keep in mind, though, that other things generally considered benign, such as coffee, are in the same WHO list.
If you're concerned about your cell phone causing cancer, I would recommend you adopt a nocturnal schedule, because the sun is harming you much more than a cell phone ever will. You should also avoid microwave ovens. Furthermore, find out where every TV and radio broadcast tower is (those can go as high as 100,000 watts!), draw out a healthy buffer zone around each, and make sure you don't go too close. Alternatively, build a Faraday cage, put some wheels on it, and get inside.
And don't drink coffee, either.
Or you could read the article and see that American Airlines had a contract, and that the court is just forcing them to abide by it.
I suspect that most of the upgrade problems are caused by installing drivers that aren't in the official repositories. I have never had a problem with a system that had only packages from the repos installed. One of my machines has been upgraded in place, version by version, since 6.06; another, since 7.04; and others since 8.04, 8.10, and 9.10. All of them have been upgraded, version by version, to either 10.10 or 11.04 (and I even upgraded to alpha builds on one of those machines!), and not one of them has ever had a problem with the upgrade.
(One thing that all five of those machines have in common is nVidia graphics. I don't have any experience with upgrading a system that has Intel or ATI graphics, so maybe the upgrades aren't so smooth there.)
But sometimes they predict "partly cloudy" and a tornado ends up striking. While they didn't explicitly say "no tornadoes", a forecast of "partly cloudy" (maybe even with a "0% chance of precipitation") pretty clearly says there's going to be no tornadoes.