Actually, about 65% of what US consumers buy is made in the US. It is a myth that nothing is made here. It's mostly the clothing and consumer electronics and other cheap plastic shit which are so completely outsourced.
I don't have any further knowledge of the Metro interface, but I would have to assume that to be of much use or to make it look decent, you'd have to use Windows-specific hooks in their implementation of HTML/CSS and Javascript.
If you wanna see a real arcade museum, go to Musee Mecanique in San Francisco. it's got a lot of great old mechanical arcade games from the early 20th century. They're all still playable and mostly functional, and they've modded the operation mechanisms with modern quarter slots like you'd see in a modern arcade game. They also have a few of the more classic digitial arcade games scattered throughout. Truly a magnificent place!
I've personally helped someone upgrade their ubuntu version on the same computer from version 5.04 to version 9.10, and each version in between, and ended up with a stable system. So it's certainly possible to do so, even if on some hardware it does not work out that way.
I think it's just as likely that because Noor hosts the Egyptian stock exchange and several large companies, and otherwise serves a relatively small percentage of Egypt's internet connections, the government actually *wanted* to leave them on for as long as possible. Staying in the good graces of the business and financial community in the country and the world is an important part of staying in power, so it's no wonder they would hesitate to disconnect the ISP serving much of the business community through the stock exchange and such.
Now the government is in panic mode, so they're pulling out all the stops, including shutting down a nerve center of their economy.
I hate when people say they disagree just to proceed to lay out some unrelated bit of knowledge they have floating around in their head, for their own gratification...
Please realize that the fact of the Persians being the most advanced civilization before the Arabs/Muslims is in fact orthogonal to the Muslims being the most advanced later on. The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
The reality is that the US prison system is formed around the principle of punishment. If threat isolation was the primary motivation, our prison system would look much different than it does.
The system we have is descended from the mode of Christian thought that when a sin(crime) is committed, penance.is needed in order to make the person right with God. So, the prison system is set up as a kind of forced penance through societal punishment, This is why we still have the death penalty, too, while most other developed countries do not.
Judging Amtrak by its balance sheet is not very useful unless you have an agenda of not promoting transportation by train in this country(in favor of automobiles and airplanes, for example).
In fact, if you believe that travel by train is useful and efficient for society, then Amtrak should be considered public transportation that needs to be subsidized by the government. If its balance sheet isn't looking good, then it needs more incentivization and subsidy from the federal and state governments. Both automobile and airplane travel are subsidized much more heavily than Amtrak, and I would make the argument that train travel has been neglected here, especially compared with most every other developed nation.
For example, I'm travelling with my wife 750 miles for Thanksgiving and evaluated the travel options. It turns out that renting a car and driving those 750 miles is by far the cheapest way to travel, and as a bonus we'll have a car to use at our destination. Why should this be? It's sort of backwards that obtaining use of a personal transportation vehicle should be so much cheaper than travelling in one vehicle with 100 other people and being dropped off at a station/airport.
To keep it on topic, the premise you're offering is different from the one I'm offering. You look at Amtrak as a failure because of non-solvency in its current state(conservative perspective). I look at Amtrak as the path to a more efficient national transportation system that should be funded as such because it burns less fossil fuel and uses less resources per person per mile(liberal perspective).
Given our different premises, both our logics work out, but our different premises lead us to different conclusions.
The project does not need to be adopted. There are a number of companies contributing to what is considered the major legitimate fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice: http://www.documentfoundation.org/
Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.
What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.
There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.
First point is that Unity is still a GNOME Desktop. It's just a different UI shell on it. So Ubuntu will still be following much development from the GNOME guys.
Second point is that Ubuntu is already well known for not sticking to upstream implementations. A corollary is that Ubuntu has been developing UI enhancements for quite a while now, so it's not a new thing somehow that they've just decided on today.
See: Ubuntu Netbook Edition, which is now quite stable in Ubuntu 10.04; Ubuntu's custom font which is default in Ubuntu 10.10; the Ayatana UI project which developed the whole indicator panel and notification system.
If you want to make that argument then you would need a corollary to go along with it that any law that treats a corporation like an individual would have to be abolished as well.
GP made a reference to Starcraft. In Starcraft, Terran fighting units are "trained". The Zerg race, which is a race of bug-like creatures, "hatches" its fighting units out of eggs.
So, GP is implying that geeks are of the Zerg race.:-)
"Out of 53,000 men, over 11,000 died within 14 yrs? Who the hell were they following, 70 yr olds? Sure no one died of, oh I don't know, old age? "
No one dies of "old age". Everyone dies from something specifically identifiable. Dying from "old age" or "natural causes" is just a cover term for a number of common later life diseases that eventually cause death. This study could reveal that some of those "natural causes"-type diseases are brought on more quickly by sitting still.
First, traditionally developed crop varieties are great in that they are selected for in order to grow the best in hyper-localized regions of the world, and to have the particular nutrients needed for the people of a particular region to balance their diet, and they keep the local ecosystem more healthy by naturally meshing with the soil and critters that are around. This is simply not done with GM crops right now, and the GM industry prefers going with a monoculture, because it's easier to keep track of. Our crop varieties have dwindled so much these days, to where we only use one or two varieties of most crops in the industrial ag system. Crops aren't being adapted to their environment. We're forcing them to work everywhere. This endangers our food supply because if a sickness hits a crop, it can spread like wildfire to all the identical crops around.
There may be an identified toxin in some traditional varieties, but what if those toxins are naturally counteracted by eating in combination with the other parts of that traditional diet? Nutrition science is sooooo primitive right now, and influenced so much by big industries, so that I would not entirely trust the FDA, USDA, etc to tell me that something is healthy or not, because the science just has not gotten to that point yet. Sure they can tell you the chemical makeup of a food and most of its nutrients, but they have no idea how that will mesh with the rest of your diet. The least healthy people in the world are those under the jurisdiction of the FDA/USDA, while those eating traditional diets under the jurisdiction of no food regulator are *always* more healthy.
The problem is not that GM food is particularly harmful in itself, but moreso the tactics that companies like Monsanto take in order to make themselves fantastically wealthy at the expense of the average farmer.
The 'terminator' crops, which can't produce past the first generation, when applied to a staple crop, endangers the food supply, especially in poorer areas. Once the majority of farmers in a country choose to use this kind of GM crop and throw out their old seed, they've become dependent on Monsanto for their food supply, and if they don't pay up, they starve.
The legal aspect of GM crops is the biggest danger, and until that's settled out so that crops cannot be patented and farmers cannot be sued for simply having a GM seed blow into their field, then we should avoid GM crops as a policy.
The problem with using that theory is that the police are a special case, compared with most other government employees.
The whole reason for having a government and a political system is to manage wealth/resource distribution and conflict resolution *without* violence if at all possible. The police are in fact a last resort in our system. Their primary role is as an official sanctioned violent force to stop perceived infractions of law, even if this means violent action against its own citizens. We would rather not have to use them, as violence is what we are all trying to avoid by forming a government for our society in the first place.
When we see *excessive* violence by the police, this is (or should be) intolerable to society, because allowing more violence than necessary from the government goes against the very purpose of forming a government and support it with our money that we pay in taxes. We need to make sure that minimal violence is used by the government against its own people, and camera surveillance of police is certainly the best way to do this.
In effect, all this means that just as police are a kind of paradoxical violent force in a system designed to avoid use of violent force, our trust of the police should be just as divided.
The problem is the assumption that we have to use corn at all. Corn is highly subsidized by the government, which is the reason it's used in every which way the agri-business folks can think of, like feeding it to the majority of cattle, turning it into ethanol fuel, and extracting cheap high-fructose corn syrup from it. We have massive corn production that increases every year, and there is a constant scramble to find ways to create demand for all of the supply.
But we don't need to use corn in these ways. If we didn't grow so much damn corn, we wouldn't need to find these wacky uses for it, like feeding it to an animal that gets sick trying to digest it. The most sane thing to do is stop the excess corn production outside of maybe chicken(and similar animals) feed and food products made directly from corn, like tortillas and corn meal and such.
Ubuntu/Canonical has a commitment to only including FOSS software with its default installations. That includes the Ubuntu One client, which is open sourced. The proprietary part is the web service that the client connects to. Just wanted to clarify:-)
That's not too bad for an atom processor. OpenOffice is not particuarly designed with netbooks in mind. Also, it depends what else you were running. That is, did you test the performance immediately after login, or after a week of having the system running? What else was running at the same time?
The 1.5 minutes for saving is not that great, though.
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Actually, about 65% of what US consumers buy is made in the US. It is a myth that nothing is made here. It's mostly the clothing and consumer electronics and other cheap plastic shit which are so completely outsourced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-wbmake.1.20332814.html
"Thirty years ago, U.S. producers made 80 percent of what the country consumed, according to the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an industry trade group. Now it is about 65 percent."
I don't have any further knowledge of the Metro interface, but I would have to assume that to be of much use or to make it look decent, you'd have to use Windows-specific hooks in their implementation of HTML/CSS and Javascript.
The same fine-grained control is also available on facebook. It is simply not as well exposed as with Google+.
If you wanna see a real arcade museum, go to Musee Mecanique in San Francisco. it's got a lot of great old mechanical arcade games from the early 20th century. They're all still playable and mostly functional, and they've modded the operation mechanisms with modern quarter slots like you'd see in a modern arcade game. They also have a few of the more classic digitial arcade games scattered throughout. Truly a magnificent place!
I've personally helped someone upgrade their ubuntu version on the same computer from version 5.04 to version 9.10, and each version in between, and ended up with a stable system. So it's certainly possible to do so, even if on some hardware it does not work out that way.
Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg
So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.
I'm pretty sure you mean the intersection, not the union. Your notion of union is actually more the political one than the set theory one.
I think it's just as likely that because Noor hosts the Egyptian stock exchange and several large companies, and otherwise serves a relatively small percentage of Egypt's internet connections, the government actually *wanted* to leave them on for as long as possible. Staying in the good graces of the business and financial community in the country and the world is an important part of staying in power, so it's no wonder they would hesitate to disconnect the ISP serving much of the business community through the stock exchange and such.
Now the government is in panic mode, so they're pulling out all the stops, including shutting down a nerve center of their economy.
I hate when people say they disagree just to proceed to lay out some unrelated bit of knowledge they have floating around in their head, for their own gratification...
Please realize that the fact of the Persians being the most advanced civilization before the Arabs/Muslims is in fact orthogonal to the Muslims being the most advanced later on. The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
The reality is that the US prison system is formed around the principle of punishment. If threat isolation was the primary motivation, our prison system would look much different than it does.
The system we have is descended from the mode of Christian thought that when a sin(crime) is committed, penance.is needed in order to make the person right with God. So, the prison system is set up as a kind of forced penance through societal punishment, This is why we still have the death penalty, too, while most other developed countries do not.
Since the courts decide what is constitutional, it seems we would have a problem if the federal courts are handing out these orders.
Judging Amtrak by its balance sheet is not very useful unless you have an agenda of not promoting transportation by train in this country(in favor of automobiles and airplanes, for example).
In fact, if you believe that travel by train is useful and efficient for society, then Amtrak should be considered public transportation that needs to be subsidized by the government. If its balance sheet isn't looking good, then it needs more incentivization and subsidy from the federal and state governments. Both automobile and airplane travel are subsidized much more heavily than Amtrak, and I would make the argument that train travel has been neglected here, especially compared with most every other developed nation.
For example, I'm travelling with my wife 750 miles for Thanksgiving and evaluated the travel options. It turns out that renting a car and driving those 750 miles is by far the cheapest way to travel, and as a bonus we'll have a car to use at our destination. Why should this be? It's sort of backwards that obtaining use of a personal transportation vehicle should be so much cheaper than travelling in one vehicle with 100 other people and being dropped off at a station/airport.
To keep it on topic, the premise you're offering is different from the one I'm offering. You look at Amtrak as a failure because of non-solvency in its current state(conservative perspective). I look at Amtrak as the path to a more efficient national transportation system that should be funded as such because it burns less fossil fuel and uses less resources per person per mile(liberal perspective).
Given our different premises, both our logics work out, but our different premises lead us to different conclusions.
Just to correct you here as well, Oracle have not dumped OpenOffice.org.
Check the copyright notice on http://www.openoffice.org/
The project does not need to be adopted. There are a number of companies contributing to what is considered the major legitimate fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice: http://www.documentfoundation.org/
Not correct: http://www.openoffice.org/
Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.
What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.
There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.
First point is that Unity is still a GNOME Desktop. It's just a different UI shell on it. So Ubuntu will still be following much development from the GNOME guys.
Second point is that Ubuntu is already well known for not sticking to upstream implementations. A corollary is that Ubuntu has been developing UI enhancements for quite a while now, so it's not a new thing somehow that they've just decided on today.
See: Ubuntu Netbook Edition, which is now quite stable in Ubuntu 10.04; Ubuntu's custom font which is default in Ubuntu 10.10; the Ayatana UI project which developed the whole indicator panel and notification system.
If you want to make that argument then you would need a corollary to go along with it that any law that treats a corporation like an individual would have to be abolished as well.
GP made a reference to Starcraft. In Starcraft, Terran fighting units are "trained". The Zerg race, which is a race of bug-like creatures, "hatches" its fighting units out of eggs.
So, GP is implying that geeks are of the Zerg race. :-)
The French and Italians heavily favor of bread/pasta products in their diets, yet they have much lower obesity than in the US.
"Out of 53,000 men, over 11,000 died within 14 yrs? Who the hell were they following, 70 yr olds? Sure no one died of, oh I don't know, old age? "
No one dies of "old age". Everyone dies from something specifically identifiable. Dying from "old age" or "natural causes" is just a cover term for a number of common later life diseases that eventually cause death. This study could reveal that some of those "natural causes"-type diseases are brought on more quickly by sitting still.
Moonlight 2 was indeed released months ago. I currently have the Moonlight 3 alpha installed on my machine.
First, traditionally developed crop varieties are great in that they are selected for in order to grow the best in hyper-localized regions of the world, and to have the particular nutrients needed for the people of a particular region to balance their diet, and they keep the local ecosystem more healthy by naturally meshing with the soil and critters that are around. This is simply not done with GM crops right now, and the GM industry prefers going with a monoculture, because it's easier to keep track of. Our crop varieties have dwindled so much these days, to where we only use one or two varieties of most crops in the industrial ag system. Crops aren't being adapted to their environment. We're forcing them to work everywhere. This endangers our food supply because if a sickness hits a crop, it can spread like wildfire to all the identical crops around.
There may be an identified toxin in some traditional varieties, but what if those toxins are naturally counteracted by eating in combination with the other parts of that traditional diet? Nutrition science is sooooo primitive right now, and influenced so much by big industries, so that I would not entirely trust the FDA, USDA, etc to tell me that something is healthy or not, because the science just has not gotten to that point yet. Sure they can tell you the chemical makeup of a food and most of its nutrients, but they have no idea how that will mesh with the rest of your diet. The least healthy people in the world are those under the jurisdiction of the FDA/USDA, while those eating traditional diets under the jurisdiction of no food regulator are *always* more healthy.
The problem is not that GM food is particularly harmful in itself, but moreso the tactics that companies like Monsanto take in order to make themselves fantastically wealthy at the expense of the average farmer.
The 'terminator' crops, which can't produce past the first generation, when applied to a staple crop, endangers the food supply, especially in poorer areas. Once the majority of farmers in a country choose to use this kind of GM crop and throw out their old seed, they've become dependent on Monsanto for their food supply, and if they don't pay up, they starve.
The legal aspect of GM crops is the biggest danger, and until that's settled out so that crops cannot be patented and farmers cannot be sued for simply having a GM seed blow into their field, then we should avoid GM crops as a policy.
The problem with using that theory is that the police are a special case, compared with most other government employees.
The whole reason for having a government and a political system is to manage wealth/resource distribution and conflict resolution *without* violence if at all possible. The police are in fact a last resort in our system. Their primary role is as an official sanctioned violent force to stop perceived infractions of law, even if this means violent action against its own citizens. We would rather not have to use them, as violence is what we are all trying to avoid by forming a government for our society in the first place.
When we see *excessive* violence by the police, this is (or should be) intolerable to society, because allowing more violence than necessary from the government goes against the very purpose of forming a government and support it with our money that we pay in taxes. We need to make sure that minimal violence is used by the government against its own people, and camera surveillance of police is certainly the best way to do this.
In effect, all this means that just as police are a kind of paradoxical violent force in a system designed to avoid use of violent force, our trust of the police should be just as divided.
The problem is the assumption that we have to use corn at all. Corn is highly subsidized by the government, which is the reason it's used in every which way the agri-business folks can think of, like feeding it to the majority of cattle, turning it into ethanol fuel, and extracting cheap high-fructose corn syrup from it. We have massive corn production that increases every year, and there is a constant scramble to find ways to create demand for all of the supply.
But we don't need to use corn in these ways. If we didn't grow so much damn corn, we wouldn't need to find these wacky uses for it, like feeding it to an animal that gets sick trying to digest it. The most sane thing to do is stop the excess corn production outside of maybe chicken(and similar animals) feed and food products made directly from corn, like tortillas and corn meal and such.
Ubuntu/Canonical has a commitment to only including FOSS software with its default installations. That includes the Ubuntu One client, which is open sourced. The proprietary part is the web service that the client connects to. Just wanted to clarify :-)
That's not too bad for an atom processor. OpenOffice is not particuarly designed with netbooks in mind. Also, it depends what else you were running. That is, did you test the performance immediately after login, or after a week of having the system running? What else was running at the same time?
The 1.5 minutes for saving is not that great, though.