but if you exclude electronics you will not see much in the way of revolutionary changes in in the things we use each day;
About 30 or so countries have either come into existence or ceased to exist in those 20 years. Yeah, we Europeans and Americans have largely sat on our asses and missed most of the fireworks, but in many parts of the world, those 20 years brought considerable changes.
20 years of improvements in electronics hasn't had much of an influence on food, shelter, transportation.
Really? Go back another 20 years. In the early 70s, the capacity of planes trippled, making air travel affordable for regular people for the first time. Ever since, the number of passenger-miles has doubled every 10 years, that's exponential growth.
Then there was the oil crisis. Not sure about the States, but over here in Germany, we had car-free sundays, mandated by law, to save fuel. My mother still has a book from the early 1980s predicting that by 2010 or so, car travel would be a luxury due to continuously rising fuel prices. And that wasn't some joke in a blog, that was from an expensive study done by the Shell corporation.
On food, back in 1992, there was serious doubt whether we would be able to feed the next couple billion people. By 1992 standards, we should have a world-wide food crisis today. Obviously we don't. Gene-manipulated crops are partially responsible, because they allow us to grow stuff in places where nothing much grew 20 years ago.
Probably, this is/. and not a scientific study, isn't it? But that is why I explicitly say what kind of people I'm talking about. So yeah, it's just people in my vicinity that I know and probably not a representative sample. But it's the sample I have at hand.
Probability isn't failing us, human understanding of it is. Imagine something that can happen to you or someone else, doesn't matter what. It's one of those "once in a million years" things. How often do you think it really happens? Yepp, that's right, all the time. With a world population of over 7 billion, this "once in a million years" event happens to about 20 people every day.
As for nuclear reactor blowups, they actually happened pretty much on schedule. Someone did the math not too long ago. While the statistical security is impressive (something like "one catastrophic event every 20,000 years"), considering the number of world-wide nuclear reactors and the time they've been running, statistically speaking we're pretty much right on the money.
The only place where probability theory fails us is with the dreaded black swans - the events that are not only highly unlikely, but so extraordinary that nobody really thought of them. A tsunami in Japan isn't exactly one of them. They have so many tsunamis there that they have a dedicated tsunami warning system.
Have you considered that maybe the majority of/. readers simply doesn't want videos?
We came a long way with the Internet. The medium has the convenience of multimedia with the control of books. The best part of it is that I control how I consume. I can have/. open in a window to the side, or in the background. I can tab over there when something is compiling or rendering or uploading, check a story or a few comments and switch back to whatever I'm really doing at the time.
More importantly, I can ready carefully or skim over stuff. Most stories get but a glance to see if there's anything that stands out as interesting.
Videos don't work that way. They take a lot of control out of my hands. I'm a quick reader, but I can't speed up the video. I can't really skim over it the way I can with text. While I can pause and rewind, it's more work than on a written text.
Really, online videos are a step backwards in most cases. Most of the stuff on youtube doesn't really deserve a video. Two screenshots and three sentences would cover it just as well. But grabbing your smartphone camera and uploading the crap without any editing is much easier, isn't it?
You want to improve/. or move it forward? How about you listen to the criticism of the fans first and shelve any cute ideas until you have the basics covered? The editing quality on/. is as horrible as ever. Pay a couple good editors. 10 times the benefit of moving pictures.
There's Wine, there is Parallels/VMware, there is Bootcamp. I myself have a windows partition on this iMac specifically for games. But, more and more games are coming out for OS X, and I make it a big part of my buying decision.
20 year predictions are generally little more than glorified guessing.
Think back 20 years. That's 1992. That means no Facebook, no Google, no Slashdot either. You'd run Windows 3.1 or if you are amongst the geekiest of the geeks, Linux 0.1 or so. But you had to roll it on your own because there are no distributions (Slackware started in '93).
Yugoslavia had just started breaking apart. The war in Afghanistan just ended. I'm talking about the soviet invasion.
That's for context. Now on the long-term "visions". We had the Earth Summit , so climate change was already on the agenda.
Economically, there was no Euro. The economical collapse of Russia was yet to come, as was the economic crisis of the Asian nations. Had you asked people what the future would bring, they would have likely extrapolated from Black Wednesday the way we would extrapolate from the current financial crisis. Chinas rise to power was just beginning and most people, including experts, wouldn't have predicted it, because it was in late 1992 that the government turned towards even a bit of capitalism.
In healthcare, we didn't yet have bird-flu and pandemics, AIDS was the scare of the day. We also didn't have LASIK, stem cells or any of the other recent advantages. Antibiotics were considered undefeatable by many.
And so on and so forth. There's a lot of big events that a prediction made in 1992 would've missed completely. Yes, we can extrapolate population growth somewhat, but we can't account for inventions in agriculture, for example.
There's no such thing, and hasn't been for at least five years. Ever since the move to Intel, a lot of IT professionals have adopted Macs. Amongst the people I know, more people with solid IT knowledge have moved to Mac than ignorant people. More and more, windows is where those who don't know any better remain left behind. Almost everyone I know who knows his IT is using either OS X or Linux as his primary OS.
Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?
Nobody sane ever claimed that. The fact of the matter is that the relation between windows-based malware and Unix-based malware (heck, let's sum all Unix variants up, doesn't make a difference) is still so ridiculous that a new Mac virus gets headlines, while 100 new ones for windows are added to the pattern definitions every day and nobody even notices.
Even considering popularity, and even assuming a power-law distribution, the Unix systems should have at least a few percent malware market share. But the real number is closer to less than 0.1%
Yes 600k is impressive. Definitely worth a worry. Still every single major windows virus has that beaten before lunch.
So in light of that data, for all practical purposes and compared to windows, Unix systems are relatively safe from malware.
resulting in us having to put up with all of the political bullshit that goes on
Most of it goes on because of managers. Granted, in that game, if you're the only group without one, you are disadvantaged.
Yes, managers have their place. However, theirs is a job that is stuck in the 18th century. Much of it should be handled by specialists or group consensus. It is high time that we redefine the job of management, but of course that won't happen anytime soon because it would be managers who'd have to introduce the new concepts......and it would turn out that most of them should be let go because they don't have any relevant skills.
One day says nothing about long-term results. It really is as simple as that. Run that experiment again with a full month, then you can say something worthwhile.
That's interesting, but I'm suspicious about built-in encryption. I'd rather run my own encryption and, for example, put an encrypted virtual volume on Dropbox. Never tried if their syncing is smart enough to not re-sync the whole of it when I only change on file inside, though.
To avoid being in a similar situation you have to keep a local backup in addition to the cloud.
Time Machine, yes.
Now if someone knows about a service that allows me to store an encrypted copy of my TM backup somewhere online, automatically updated once a day or so, then I'd be all happy.
This is why I'm a fan of Dropbox. It doesn't store my data in the cloud, it stores a copy of my data in the cloud. If my Internet connection goes down, or Dropbox goes away, all my data is still here, right on my harddrive.
I'm ok with using a web-based service. I know what data it has and it has a specific purpose. It isn't half my life. But I would never make the cloud my primary data storage, and anyone who does is either stupid or ignorant or both.
Do they have actual evidence? Do they have a reasonable cause to assume this? "may" means nothing. Heck, I'm not even disagreeing much, by sheer volume of data and stupidity of people, I wouldn't take any bets that there isn't any kiddy-porn on there somewhere. Maybe just some manga with drawn characters appearing to be underage (which in many jurisdictions qualifies as child-porn).
But the real issue is that "may" should never be a qualifier for anything. The US government may be hiding aliens. Obama may have a secret grudge against me personally. Saddam may have had WMDs we just never found. Bin Laden may still be alive. Today may be Wednesday.
All of those "may" are true in a sense, but they are of very different likelihoods. So stop with the "may" bullshit and tell us how likely it is and why you think so.
Seriously, if I were a judge and one party came forward with an argument like that, I'd fine them for disrespecting the court. Obviously, they think I'm as stupid as fuck if they try to convince me what is essentially an empty argument devoid of any content whatsoever.
In order to provide an alternative to IE on Windows 8, Firefox needs a Metro UI.
Says who? Based on what evidence?
I'm getting more and more unhappy with the FF development process. These guys need to get off the "innovation for innovation's sake" boat and check in with their userbase again. How about you put your time into solving that stuttering youtube-videos issue that's been plaguing the browser since around 2009?
But, of course, a new UI is more "visible". The FF dev team has encountered the bikeshed problem and is completely unprepared to handle it. They're doing stuff like an HTML5 MMO demo. Which, while being an interesting project, doesn't address any of the core issues.
I've been using FF since long before it was called that (anyone remember the year it had three name changes?). But recently, I'm thinking very seriously about moving to either Chrome or Safari. Mostly because between the rapid releases for no good reason and all the bullshit nonsense they pour their time into, and all the pointless UI changes just because, I don't see the project going anywhere. Does it even have a vision anymore?
They already have. Many, many videos are blocked here in Germany because the GEMA or SME or whatever other crappy music-mafia content parasite organisation wants to be paid for every view.
And it's not just music videos, including official band channels. It's also videos where you hear a song in the background.
They probably held a brainstorming session on how to make the general public pissed off most efficiently as an April Fool's prank and then nobody noticed that the notes were found by a secretary and sent down the chain of command to be actually implemented. It's the only rational explanation I have.
But that huge amount of 'lost revenue' doesn't seem to show up in the French recording industry,
But it does. Right there in the decline. Check with a hundred of your closest friends if the following sentence is true: "The more exposure to new music I have, the more likely I am to go and buy some."
Music isn't like food. You don't notice its absence much. If you go without your iPod for a month, you're not going to miss it all that much after the initial adaptation is over.
If you reduce the amount of music that people have available, you reduce the demand for music.
The "government intervention == evil" meme has to die.
Government always intervene in the market. By their very existence, they can not not intervene. At the very least, the government provides and enforces the laws that allow the contracts the market is based on to function.
The question isn't if you want government intervention, but which kind and how much. Like in all things real-life, there is no black and there is no white, it's not a binary matter.
Government dictates who gets what health care? Definitely sucks.
Frankly, the "government == evil" meme has to die as well. Government isn't evil. A government (i.e. a specific one) can be evil. I really dislike our current government, for example ("our" being Germany here, our current chancellor is the worst ever by a large margin and most of the ministers hold comparable records). But I enjoy living in a society that has rules and where I pay other people to take care of stuff I don't want to be bothered with like taking the trash away.
So the correct government intervention in healthcare to ensure that society gets what society wants and not what the market wants, is something I very much support. Because the free market may be the best approach to economic problems, but not all problems in our world are economic in nature.
The really difficult challenges will the legal, not physical, problems.
Over here in Germany, for example, the category this type of aircraft falls into is by law not allowed to cross residential areas in low-altitude flight (I think that's under 300 m, but not sure on that detail). Which rules out any kind of takeoff or landing from the immediate vicinity of your home. If you need to drive to the airport, there's not much avoiding the traffic jams, is there?
Well, it does have V/STOL capability, with a runway requirement of less than 200m many people in the countryside could start it from their driveways.
But I thought the same thing on the legality. If I can only take off and land from a real airport, then its slow speed and low reach doesn't make it competitive for anything. Drive to local airport, waiting for takeoff slot, flying over at 180 km/h max, land at local airport, drive to destination - for most places within the operating range, even considering traffic jams, taking a real car and driving the distance at 240 km/h max but without the detour to the airport is going to get me there just as quickly.
Women typically don't have the same sex drive as typical men (although some do).
Pffft. Sex drive varies wildly between humans, no matter what gender. I know plenty of women who can't get enough as well as women who aren't all that much into it - and the same for men. Of course if two people from the opposite ends meet, that's not going to go too well. Same as any other major drive.
Yeah, I'm making generalizations. This is/. and not some personal coaching session.:-)
The actual healthcare market doesn't work like that.
In the US and other countries where the market participant on the buyer side is an individual, prices are horrible because the sellers dictate them. When you are ill, you don't exactly have a choice between accepting the price offered or walking away. You can pick the lowest available price, but you can not not buy.
In the countries where the market participants on the buyer side are large groups, i.e. mandatory insurance companies or a universal health care bureaucracy, they are big enough to put pressure on the suppliers and tell them to lower prices or else. The chance of an actual market price being created are much higher.
And that's not just theory, the numbers support it. It's not just that the US spends more in total, it is that almost every specific treatment is a lot more expensive.
As a previous poster pointed out, trojans care not if it's Windows, Linux, Mac OSX or BSD because the user is the weak link, not the OS.
True in theory.
Real life begs to differ, though. Geeks regularily forget about real life. In your head, your password policy grants your users great passwords at a theoretical complexity of 10^18. In real life, the actual complexity is closer to 10^7 due to patterns.
Same with the trojans and other malware. Yes, theoretically some classes of malware could be just as easily targeted on OS X or Linux. In reality, though, OS X has about 15% market share and less than 1% virus share, while Linux has 5% market share and much less than 1% virus share.
Speculations about whether that's for reasons of technology, psychology or ROI may be interesting, but the simple facts are that the number of known malwares for all non-windows OSes combined doesn't even register as a rounding error in the count of windows malware, and does not even remotely resemble the respective market shares.
won't bother, since I assume they only take questions in Farsi, or maybe Arabic as well, neither of which I speak
I thought checking that was trivial - like, going there and having a look - and then it turns out that our news agencies are still deep within the middle ages. How can you write a whole article about a website without providing the URL ???
Fortunately, we have Google. But it appears the site is slashdotted - at least it's slow: http://shahamat-english.com/
but the site is in english, so I don't see why they wouldn't be answering questions in english.
Slashdot Mirror
but if you exclude electronics you will not see much in the way of revolutionary changes in in the things we use each day;
About 30 or so countries have either come into existence or ceased to exist in those 20 years. Yeah, we Europeans and Americans have largely sat on our asses and missed most of the fireworks, but in many parts of the world, those 20 years brought considerable changes.
20 years of improvements in electronics hasn't had much of an influence on food, shelter, transportation.
Really? Go back another 20 years. In the early 70s, the capacity of planes trippled, making air travel affordable for regular people for the first time. Ever since, the number of passenger-miles has doubled every 10 years, that's exponential growth.
Then there was the oil crisis. Not sure about the States, but over here in Germany, we had car-free sundays, mandated by law, to save fuel. My mother still has a book from the early 1980s predicting that by 2010 or so, car travel would be a luxury due to continuously rising fuel prices. And that wasn't some joke in a blog, that was from an expensive study done by the Shell corporation.
On food, back in 1992, there was serious doubt whether we would be able to feed the next couple billion people. By 1992 standards, we should have a world-wide food crisis today. Obviously we don't. Gene-manipulated crops are partially responsible, because they allow us to grow stuff in places where nothing much grew 20 years ago.
Probably, this is /. and not a scientific study, isn't it? But that is why I explicitly say what kind of people I'm talking about. So yeah, it's just people in my vicinity that I know and probably not a representative sample. But it's the sample I have at hand.
Stupid lesson.
Probability isn't failing us, human understanding of it is. Imagine something that can happen to you or someone else, doesn't matter what. It's one of those "once in a million years" things. How often do you think it really happens? Yepp, that's right, all the time. With a world population of over 7 billion, this "once in a million years" event happens to about 20 people every day.
As for nuclear reactor blowups, they actually happened pretty much on schedule. Someone did the math not too long ago. While the statistical security is impressive (something like "one catastrophic event every 20,000 years"), considering the number of world-wide nuclear reactors and the time they've been running, statistically speaking we're pretty much right on the money.
The only place where probability theory fails us is with the dreaded black swans - the events that are not only highly unlikely, but so extraordinary that nobody really thought of them. A tsunami in Japan isn't exactly one of them. They have so many tsunamis there that they have a dedicated tsunami warning system.
Have you considered that maybe the majority of /. readers simply doesn't want videos?
We came a long way with the Internet. The medium has the convenience of multimedia with the control of books. The best part of it is that I control how I consume. I can have /. open in a window to the side, or in the background. I can tab over there when something is compiling or rendering or uploading, check a story or a few comments and switch back to whatever I'm really doing at the time.
More importantly, I can ready carefully or skim over stuff. Most stories get but a glance to see if there's anything that stands out as interesting.
Videos don't work that way. They take a lot of control out of my hands. I'm a quick reader, but I can't speed up the video. I can't really skim over it the way I can with text. While I can pause and rewind, it's more work than on a written text.
Really, online videos are a step backwards in most cases. Most of the stuff on youtube doesn't really deserve a video. Two screenshots and three sentences would cover it just as well. But grabbing your smartphone camera and uploading the crap without any editing is much easier, isn't it?
You want to improve /. or move it forward? How about you listen to the criticism of the fans first and shelve any cute ideas until you have the basics covered? The editing quality on /. is as horrible as ever. Pay a couple good editors. 10 times the benefit of moving pictures.
I don't think your IT friends play games :(
There's Wine, there is Parallels/VMware, there is Bootcamp. I myself have a windows partition on this iMac specifically for games. But, more and more games are coming out for OS X, and I make it a big part of my buying decision.
20 year predictions are generally little more than glorified guessing.
Think back 20 years. That's 1992. That means no Facebook, no Google, no Slashdot either. You'd run Windows 3.1 or if you are amongst the geekiest of the geeks, Linux 0.1 or so. But you had to roll it on your own because there are no distributions (Slackware started in '93).
Yugoslavia had just started breaking apart. The war in Afghanistan just ended. I'm talking about the soviet invasion.
That's for context. Now on the long-term "visions". We had the Earth Summit , so climate change was already on the agenda.
Economically, there was no Euro. The economical collapse of Russia was yet to come, as was the economic crisis of the Asian nations. Had you asked people what the future would bring, they would have likely extrapolated from Black Wednesday the way we would extrapolate from the current financial crisis. Chinas rise to power was just beginning and most people, including experts, wouldn't have predicted it, because it was in late 1992 that the government turned towards even a bit of capitalism.
In healthcare, we didn't yet have bird-flu and pandemics, AIDS was the scare of the day. We also didn't have LASIK, stem cells or any of the other recent advantages. Antibiotics were considered undefeatable by many.
And so on and so forth. There's a lot of big events that a prediction made in 1992 would've missed completely. Yes, we can extrapolate population growth somewhat, but we can't account for inventions in agriculture, for example.
Mac users generally
There's no such thing, and hasn't been for at least five years. Ever since the move to Intel, a lot of IT professionals have adopted Macs. Amongst the people I know, more people with solid IT knowledge have moved to Mac than ignorant people. More and more, windows is where those who don't know any better remain left behind. Almost everyone I know who knows his IT is using either OS X or Linux as his primary OS.
Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?
Nobody sane ever claimed that. The fact of the matter is that the relation between windows-based malware and Unix-based malware (heck, let's sum all Unix variants up, doesn't make a difference) is still so ridiculous that a new Mac virus gets headlines, while 100 new ones for windows are added to the pattern definitions every day and nobody even notices.
Even considering popularity, and even assuming a power-law distribution, the Unix systems should have at least a few percent malware market share. But the real number is closer to less than 0.1%
Yes 600k is impressive. Definitely worth a worry. Still every single major windows virus has that beaten before lunch.
So in light of that data, for all practical purposes and compared to windows, Unix systems are relatively safe from malware.
resulting in us having to put up with all of the political bullshit that goes on
Most of it goes on because of managers. Granted, in that game, if you're the only group without one, you are disadvantaged.
Yes, managers have their place. However, theirs is a job that is stuck in the 18th century. Much of it should be handled by specialists or group consensus. It is high time that we redefine the job of management, but of course that won't happen anytime soon because it would be managers who'd have to introduce the new concepts... ...and it would turn out that most of them should be let go because they don't have any relevant skills.
One day says nothing about long-term results. It really is as simple as that. Run that experiment again with a full month, then you can say something worthwhile.
That's interesting, but I'm suspicious about built-in encryption. I'd rather run my own encryption and, for example, put an encrypted virtual volume on Dropbox. Never tried if their syncing is smart enough to not re-sync the whole of it when I only change on file inside, though.
To avoid being in a similar situation you have to keep a local backup in addition to the cloud.
Time Machine, yes.
Now if someone knows about a service that allows me to store an encrypted copy of my TM backup somewhere online, automatically updated once a day or so, then I'd be all happy.
This is why I'm a fan of Dropbox. It doesn't store my data in the cloud, it stores a copy of my data in the cloud. If my Internet connection goes down, or Dropbox goes away, all my data is still here, right on my harddrive.
I'm ok with using a web-based service. I know what data it has and it has a specific purpose. It isn't half my life.
But I would never make the cloud my primary data storage, and anyone who does is either stupid or ignorant or both.
Notice the magic word "may".
Do they have actual evidence? Do they have a reasonable cause to assume this? "may" means nothing. Heck, I'm not even disagreeing much, by sheer volume of data and stupidity of people, I wouldn't take any bets that there isn't any kiddy-porn on there somewhere. Maybe just some manga with drawn characters appearing to be underage (which in many jurisdictions qualifies as child-porn).
But the real issue is that "may" should never be a qualifier for anything. The US government may be hiding aliens. Obama may have a secret grudge against me personally. Saddam may have had WMDs we just never found. Bin Laden may still be alive. Today may be Wednesday.
All of those "may" are true in a sense, but they are of very different likelihoods. So stop with the "may" bullshit and tell us how likely it is and why you think so.
Seriously, if I were a judge and one party came forward with an argument like that, I'd fine them for disrespecting the court. Obviously, they think I'm as stupid as fuck if they try to convince me what is essentially an empty argument devoid of any content whatsoever.
In order to provide an alternative to IE on Windows 8, Firefox needs a Metro UI.
Says who? Based on what evidence?
I'm getting more and more unhappy with the FF development process. These guys need to get off the "innovation for innovation's sake" boat and check in with their userbase again. How about you put your time into solving that stuttering youtube-videos issue that's been plaguing the browser since around 2009?
But, of course, a new UI is more "visible". The FF dev team has encountered the bikeshed problem and is completely unprepared to handle it. They're doing stuff like an HTML5 MMO demo. Which, while being an interesting project, doesn't address any of the core issues.
I've been using FF since long before it was called that (anyone remember the year it had three name changes?). But recently, I'm thinking very seriously about moving to either Chrome or Safari. Mostly because between the rapid releases for no good reason and all the bullshit nonsense they pour their time into, and all the pointless UI changes just because, I don't see the project going anywhere. Does it even have a vision anymore?
They already have. Many, many videos are blocked here in Germany because the GEMA or SME or whatever other crappy music-mafia content parasite organisation wants to be paid for every view.
And it's not just music videos, including official band channels. It's also videos where you hear a song in the background.
They probably held a brainstorming session on how to make the general public pissed off most efficiently as an April Fool's prank and then nobody noticed that the notes were found by a secretary and sent down the chain of command to be actually implemented. It's the only rational explanation I have.
But that huge amount of 'lost revenue' doesn't seem to show up in the French recording industry,
But it does. Right there in the decline. Check with a hundred of your closest friends if the following sentence is true: "The more exposure to new music I have, the more likely I am to go and buy some."
Music isn't like food. You don't notice its absence much. If you go without your iPod for a month, you're not going to miss it all that much after the initial adaptation is over.
If you reduce the amount of music that people have available, you reduce the demand for music.
The "government intervention == evil" meme has to die.
Government always intervene in the market. By their very existence, they can not not intervene. At the very least, the government provides and enforces the laws that allow the contracts the market is based on to function.
The question isn't if you want government intervention, but which kind and how much. Like in all things real-life, there is no black and there is no white, it's not a binary matter.
Government dictates who gets what health care? Definitely sucks.
Frankly, the "government == evil" meme has to die as well. Government isn't evil. A government (i.e. a specific one) can be evil. I really dislike our current government, for example ("our" being Germany here, our current chancellor is the worst ever by a large margin and most of the ministers hold comparable records). But I enjoy living in a society that has rules and where I pay other people to take care of stuff I don't want to be bothered with like taking the trash away.
So the correct government intervention in healthcare to ensure that society gets what society wants and not what the market wants, is something I very much support. Because the free market may be the best approach to economic problems, but not all problems in our world are economic in nature.
The really difficult challenges will the legal, not physical, problems.
Over here in Germany, for example, the category this type of aircraft falls into is by law not allowed to cross residential areas in low-altitude flight (I think that's under 300 m, but not sure on that detail). Which rules out any kind of takeoff or landing from the immediate vicinity of your home. If you need to drive to the airport, there's not much avoiding the traffic jams, is there?
Well, it does have V/STOL capability, with a runway requirement of less than 200m many people in the countryside could start it from their driveways.
But I thought the same thing on the legality. If I can only take off and land from a real airport, then its slow speed and low reach doesn't make it competitive for anything. Drive to local airport, waiting for takeoff slot, flying over at 180 km/h max, land at local airport, drive to destination - for most places within the operating range, even considering traffic jams, taking a real car and driving the distance at 240 km/h max but without the detour to the airport is going to get me there just as quickly.
Women typically don't have the same sex drive as typical men (although some do).
Pffft. Sex drive varies wildly between humans, no matter what gender. I know plenty of women who can't get enough as well as women who aren't all that much into it - and the same for men. Of course if two people from the opposite ends meet, that's not going to go too well. Same as any other major drive.
Yeah, I'm making generalizations. This is /. and not some personal coaching session. :-)
The actual healthcare market doesn't work like that.
In the US and other countries where the market participant on the buyer side is an individual, prices are horrible because the sellers dictate them. When you are ill, you don't exactly have a choice between accepting the price offered or walking away. You can pick the lowest available price, but you can not not buy.
In the countries where the market participants on the buyer side are large groups, i.e. mandatory insurance companies or a universal health care bureaucracy, they are big enough to put pressure on the suppliers and tell them to lower prices or else. The chance of an actual market price being created are much higher.
And that's not just theory, the numbers support it. It's not just that the US spends more in total, it is that almost every specific treatment is a lot more expensive.
As a previous poster pointed out, trojans care not if it's Windows, Linux, Mac OSX or BSD because the user is the weak link, not the OS.
True in theory.
Real life begs to differ, though. Geeks regularily forget about real life. In your head, your password policy grants your users great passwords at a theoretical complexity of 10^18. In real life, the actual complexity is closer to 10^7 due to patterns.
Same with the trojans and other malware. Yes, theoretically some classes of malware could be just as easily targeted on OS X or Linux. In reality, though, OS X has about 15% market share and less than 1% virus share, while Linux has 5% market share and much less than 1% virus share.
Speculations about whether that's for reasons of technology, psychology or ROI may be interesting, but the simple facts are that the number of known malwares for all non-windows OSes combined doesn't even register as a rounding error in the count of windows malware, and does not even remotely resemble the respective market shares.
I'm not sure they get the irony, but their contact person has a gmail.com e-mail address.
So a) anything he receives or writes probably gets copied to the NSA in realtime and b) he's supporting the US advertisement industry.
won't bother, since I assume they only take questions in Farsi, or maybe Arabic as well, neither of which I speak
I thought checking that was trivial - like, going there and having a look - and then it turns out that our news agencies are still deep within the middle ages. How can you write a whole article about a website without providing the URL ???
Fortunately, we have Google. But it appears the site is slashdotted - at least it's slow:
http://shahamat-english.com/
but the site is in english, so I don't see why they wouldn't be answering questions in english.