The term focuses on what people can’t do. It establishes the standard as “hearing” and anything different as “impaired,” or substandard, hindered, or damaged. It implies that something is not as it should be and ought to be fixed if possible.
It doesn't imply a damned thing. It says it clearly, IMPAIRED.
(Impair) To weaken, make worse, to lessen in power, diminish, or relax, or otherwise affect in an injurious manner.
Functional hearing is part of the baseline for human capability.
If you are not able to hear, then that is something that is not functioning within normal parameters.
This lacking functionality makes it harder to perform some tasks. There is no arguing with that.
Non functional or impaired hearing is a negative state.
It is a missing function.
Just because someone has been deaf their entire life and doesn't know what they are missing doesn't change that.
Just because GP poster is too insecure to accept that he has a defect that must be worked around, adapted to, overcome, OR CORRECTED doesn't change the fact that said defect exists.
hard to keep track of the correct nomenclature to describe myself
I really don't understand this.
Why do you even need "correct nomenclature"?
Language has a wonderful habit of providing words to describe things, and English is pretty damned complete.
You have a Vagina == You are female.
You like to have sex with members of the same sex == You are homosexual.
You like to have sex with members of the opposite sex == You are Heterosexual.
You like to have sex with members of either sex == You are Bisexual
You like to have sex with members of other species == You are Omnisexual (or perhaps Genusexual if you prefer other primates)
You like to wear pants, play football and drink beer with the guys? == You are masculine.
You like to wear dresses, dance, and shop? == You are Feminine.
Why is there a need to complicate things even more?
DO you mind explaining where your final example equation managed to pull two new variables from?
p+c = g+s+w+m+i+c
Became
n*b = g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c
What are n and b supposed to represent?
Additionally, even if we just examine (g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c)
i-c looks like you're trying to say that the investors will eat the cost of the fine.
What planet do you live on where the management is going to try and take the money from the investors (who have the power to complain directly) when there are a thousand or a million annonymous customers to pass the cost to instead?
I always laugh when some sanctimonious prick decides to demean someone else for making a damned good point that he missed.
Actually, no. I just get irked.
Raising prices or adding an extra fee to a customers bill WHEN THE CUSTOMER IS LOCKED INTO A CONTRACT works because the changes are still cheaper than the cost of breaking contract.
These companies don't add the fees to new contracts, they hit the locked in customers first.
Additionally, a LOT of people in the US don't have multiple options for many of these services.
Hell, I CAN'T switch my electrical service to another company despite them charging $15 a month to pay for damages from a hurricane 8 YEARS AGO.
The only power provider in my state is BARRED from running cable in my city because of a Right-of-way monopoly contract with the current provider.
[1950s announcer voice]
But now, thanks to the wonders of the modern internet, this unfortunate soul has a keyword to an entire new realm of knowledge!
[end announcer]
Most people don't realize this, but there are 3 types of information.
Things you know
Things you are aware you don't know
and
Things you aren't even aware exist.
This last category is the reason for almost all cases of "reinventing the wheel".
Also, assuming something must have been done before and searching for it doesn't mean you will find the magic term in a reasonable amount of time.
Now our good friend who writes "pee-jyo" (and the other 300 people who see this thread) has the opportunity to look up pinyin.
Additionally, even if they don't look it up today, now they are aware that it exists and may remember that fact in the future.
Small businesses who know better but can't afford the extra expense of an additional server when they barely use the resources on the primary one do this also.
Holy run on sentence batman!
Are you a business owner? I suspect not, and here's why:
Actually, I am a business owner. I would link the company, but since we mostly handle local customers it wouldn't be effective advertising anyway, but feel free to google my nick.
The primary focus of my business is CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, not profit.
If a customer isn't happy, they don't bring friends to your business. Meanwhile, 2 happy customers who know each other will attract other people in their social circle. ( It's called "Word of mouth advertising" for anyone watching from the sidelines. )
Blizzard's customer support has gone from moderately good to completely horrible over the few years since the merger.
This, combined with several other decisions, has left large portions of the original user base feeling ignored, and even worse, exploited.
They're CATERING TO THEIR MARKET.
They are catering to a new market, actually.
Activizzard at some point decided to stop catering to the long term players with 5 year subscriptions, and started catering to the "Instant gratification"/"reward addict" crowd instead.
To make the game more accessible, they tailored the content to be less demanding. Shorter dungeons, easier bosses, more use of different difficulty levels, higher drop rates, etc.
To cater to the "achievement addicts", they initiated actual achievements, guaranteed point rewards for playing content, and allowing higher level gear to be purchased from vendors.
Additionally, they added point caps to prevent player from gaining new items too quickly, and increased the power level of items dramatically.
This worked fairly well in the short term, blizzard brought in several MILLION new subscriptions from this new untapped player base, and initially only lost a few hundred thousand long term subscribers. Overall, from a modern business standpoint, this time period was a smashing success.
However, this smashing success had it's drawbacks.
For example, Many of the long term "hardcore" players who left were the ones who made up the most vocal part of the social community. These were the people who were willing to teach new players how the game worked, spent hours on end joking in the chat channels, ran leveling guilds like mine, and organized huge world events (like the 400 player raids on opposing capitol cities).
For a lot of less hardcore players (like myself), this community was an extremely large part of why they continued to play the game. The completely random interactions with other players added uncertainty and excitement, and did an amazing job of keeping the same repetitive content from getting boring. Without those vocal and extroverted people, there is nothing to distract players from the "endless grind" portions of the game during the quiet times between content releases.
Secondly, the "instant gratification" crowd have short attention spans. After these players have seen the content, they want something new to do. NOW. If the game doesn't cough up new content on a very rapid schedule, they start losing players to other "more interesting" games. ( Just look at the drop in numbers after the announcement that 4.3 was the last big content patch in Cataclysm)
Third, the reward addicts also need new content, better gear, more power, etc.
There is a huge post on the battle.net forums from a developer asking for input regarding the "item level squish" that they may have to do to handle the exponential increase in item power from the last expansion.
There's even a nice graph and everything. SOURCE
Lastly, Providing new content on a near constant basis is expensive. It costs more developer time, and it causes an inevitable loss in quality.
Blizzards motto for new game a
Less than 1% of the desktop market can't justify development for an entire alternate platform?
Maybe not, but if you plan ahead and use platform agnostic development practices porting or running on other platforms is no where near as hard as it used to be.
1% of the market might not be enough to develop a completely separate version if you're using directx, but opengl based games can be ported with very little headache with a little bit of advanced planning.
Just look at the humble bundle packs success. Sure, access to 1% of the market is not worth it but virtually assured sales to 0.5% of the market is a substantial amount of profit.
At this point, the hardest part of selling to the linux crowd is letting them know the game is compatible, and I know for a fact that most of the developers I work with will purchase a game that is linux ready just to have something to do at work while waiting on a compile.
I personally check Peguspy for new game options of a regular basis.
In other words, most businesses and their employees.
I would argue quite the opposite, most business and employees actually only need a small subset of the features that Microsoft's products have, and most of these features have been replicated or improved upon by free software.
Be careful with using the google servers as latency tests.
Google tends to purchase server space in or near the data centers of major isps in order to decrease latency, and the 8.8.8.8 Ip address is actually a distributed shared IP. (google "anycast" for more info)
It's entirely possible that for you 8.8.8.8 is inside your isps network, and thus artificially low. Additionally, if you wait for your isps route cache to expire and ping the same address again, you may be directed to a different server.
What server you are using doesn't matter for one time tests, but if you are trying to log latency over time or diagnose an issue it can cause some major headaches.
A better choice is to run traceroute/tracert, and select a server just outside of your Isps network (for example, my isp purchases thier pipe from level3, so I use level3's primary gateway address).
Speedtest.net uses donated server space to provide geographically local testing servers.
I should know, I managed the connection for one for 3 years.
If you have a 15ms report from speedtest, then your Isp is either providing the server space itself, or is the Isp for the company that is hosting it.
This is good for testing your last hop speeds, but not for getting an accurate estimate of your Internet speeds.
(I can get 75Megabit/11ms to other businesses on the same Isp node, but our speed to the next node is throttled to 20Mb, and latency spikes once I hit the main gateway to the net)
Try clicking on a server that's a little bit farther away to get a more accurate report.
Additionally, If you have access to a system outside of the Isp's network (at work, a vps, or even friend at a coffee shop down the street) you can run same tests from the opposite end of the pipe.
If A-B,B-C, and C-D look bad from outside and C-D,D-E,E-F look bad from the inside, then it's a pretty safe bet that the link between C and D is the problem.
Meanwhile, If C-D looks fine from the outside, but A-B,and B-C look bad then something is wrong with the internal routing on C.
Testing from both ends is important, as it shows you that the problem isn't a configuration issue or an intermittent problem with your hardware. It also is very good at pinpointing single point failures.
The problem with pandora's business model is that they still play advertisements after you pay for a subscription.
I would pay between 5-10 dollars a month for the service if they dropped the ads, but I am NOT willing to pay $3/month for what should be an ad supported service.
Especially when I can just use a smart playlist and my local library instead.
It can be difficult to update (bios/firware update?)
It can't be used on different systems. (I want my laptop and desktop and netbook to at least be similar systems.)
It is "customized" by the oem. (yay, another sybian/andriod style compatibility/UI nightmare)
It can't be easily backed up by an end user.
It is yet another layer of crap to break.
It has a tiny list of available software that has to be installed via an "app store".
It's virtually impossible to for an end user to know exactly what it is running behind the UI.
Additionally, On the laptops I've seen it on, it doesn't actually access 90% of the hardware (Usb-wifi/3d graphics/printer/scanner ?), and if I remember correctly is actually a locked efi partition with hooks directly into the bios.
That's why I'm ignoring it personally.
Now, if they can get it to be a fully featured os frontend for linux without the hardware dependent crap, maybe it could gain traction as a window manager instead of being just another piece of crappy bloatware that I uninstall.
There are two simple reasons that expressgate appears to work so well.
1) it only uses the hardware that is part of the motherboard. (see apple for how this works)
2) It's limited to only 3 or 4 activities and a few simple games.
Anyone (and everyone) can build a locked down device that plays music, surfs the web, and can play a few games on very specific hardware. (look at every handheld console in the last 4 years along with the entire smartphone/tablet market).
The entire point of a generic PC operating system is flexibility.
The single common thread with almost every successful linux distribution is the idea that the USER SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE.
Almost every single linux user I know of lists "the freedom to change things to work the way I like" as a primary motivation for switching.
"I can continue to use my $(unusual hardware peripheral)" is also right up there in the top 10 reasons.
If you don't need the ability to adapt to new requirements or to add completely new software/hardware then why are you buying a PC?
Go get a tablet, an hdmi monitor, and a bluetooth keyboard, just like my grandmother.
I hate to feed the troll, but people reading this thread might not be aware of this.
FACT: Attempting to clean a virus with the same os it was designed to infect is NOT a good idea.
There are a lot of viruses that are designed to exploit things like malformed shortcut files, bugs in the way windows mounts hard drives, or even bugs in the code that checks for the amount of free space on a drive. Ref:(google: "lnk exploit")
If you connect a drive infected with one of these viruses to a windows computer, it WILL get infected.
Most of the examples I gave have been hotfixed via windows update, but new exploits are discovered daily.
Move the drive to a different system, scan using live cds or a write protected linux drive, and flash the bios of the original pc.
Otherwise you run the risk of the virus infecting your cleanup system.
I would agree with your harmonics theory, except for the local geographic details I outlined here.
To summarize, the area I'm referring to is in southern louisiana. The entire area is basically mud, and is rather geologically active.
We tend to have several Magnitude 3-5 quakes a year, but the mud absorbs so much of the vibration that we usually don't even notice.
If the local wells are somehow hitting the resonant frequency of our mud, it seems that it would be trivial to establish what that frequency is and adjust the procedure to avoid it.
Or am I missing something?
Hmm. Perhaps you are right, but there is something going on above and beyond the math.
Allow me to match your anecdote.
I have also been near one of these wells during a frakking operation, I have family members who are close enough to one to watch while they are pumping.
There are cracks in the foundation of the house that only formed after the well went live, and the tremors that i've personally felt were considerably more active than "Just a big bang".
For the record, I live in Southern Louisiana. The entire southern half of the state is on so much mud that most of our population isn't even aware that we had a 5.3 quake last year, or that we have had 74 earthquakes with magnitude greater than 3.0 in the last 10 years and 4 greater than a 4.0 in the last 2 years.
However, everyone in the parish (our version of a county) knows when they start frakking at any of the 4 wells in the area. (to the point of commenting about it to the workers when they go to the grocery store after work).
It's not a nuclear bomb, but there is definitely some noticeable vibration.
Perhaps you are in a less geologically active area, or perhaps the company working your area is more responsible than BP:Amoco, but it doesn't change the fact that thousands of people have stories just like mine
Perhaps someone should start a kickstarter to fund some impartial research into this, starting by correlating recorded activity and epicenter data with known start and stop dates of wells going into and out of production.
All of this data is already available via sites like http://neic.usgs.gov and sonris, we just need someone to sit down and correlate it.
I think this article probably explains part of my concerns better than I could here.
As a small quick summary, frakking can and has caused increased geological activity.
To directly address your question:
While the actual amount of energy being added to the area during frakking is relatively small, the amount of energy that is released is anything but small.
The amount of energy released is enough to cause vibration that can be felt on the surface in many areas, sometimes even several miles away.
With that much energy being released, it's not very hard to imagine that there has to be at least SOME movement in the layers of earth between the working zone and the surface.
After all, by it's very design, frakking is more effective in areas with more natural pressure built up.
Now, I will acknowledge that there are probably parts of the world where this technique would be perfectly safe.
However, I would also suggest that those "safe" zones aren't going to be very profitable in comparison.
After all, why work an area that you have to frakk for a year before it starts producing when there are areas where a single crack will get the oil flowing?
Or to rephrase:
After all, Why use a whole bushel of hay to kill this camel, when that one over there only needs a single straw?
Slashdot Mirror
The term focuses on what people can’t do. It establishes the standard as “hearing” and anything different as “impaired,” or substandard, hindered, or damaged. It implies that something is not as it should be and ought to be fixed if possible.
It doesn't imply a damned thing. It says it clearly, IMPAIRED.
(Impair) To weaken, make worse, to lessen in power, diminish, or relax, or otherwise affect in an injurious manner.
Functional hearing is part of the baseline for human capability.
If you are not able to hear, then that is something that is not functioning within normal parameters.
This lacking functionality makes it harder to perform some tasks. There is no arguing with that.
Non functional or impaired hearing is a negative state.
It is a missing function.
Just because someone has been deaf their entire life and doesn't know what they are missing doesn't change that.
Just because GP poster is too insecure to accept that he has a defect that must be worked around, adapted to, overcome, OR CORRECTED doesn't change the fact that said defect exists.
hard to keep track of the correct nomenclature to describe myself
I really don't understand this.
Why do you even need "correct nomenclature"?
Language has a wonderful habit of providing words to describe things, and English is pretty damned complete.
You have a Vagina == You are female.
You like to have sex with members of the same sex == You are homosexual.
You like to have sex with members of the opposite sex == You are Heterosexual.
You like to have sex with members of either sex == You are Bisexual
You like to have sex with members of other species == You are Omnisexual (or perhaps Genusexual if you prefer other primates)
You like to wear pants, play football and drink beer with the guys? == You are masculine.
You like to wear dresses, dance, and shop? == You are Feminine.
Why is there a need to complicate things even more?
And coupled with an injunction against raising prices on existing services for a minimum time period.
DO you mind explaining where your final example equation managed to pull two new variables from?
p+c = g+s+w+m+i+c
Became
n*b = g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c
What are n and b supposed to represent?
Additionally, even if we just examine (g+s+w+m+(i-c)+c)
i-c looks like you're trying to say that the investors will eat the cost of the fine.
What planet do you live on where the management is going to try and take the money from the investors (who have the power to complain directly) when there are a thousand or a million annonymous customers to pass the cost to instead?
I always laugh when some sanctimonious prick decides to demean someone else for making a damned good point that he missed.
Actually, no. I just get irked.
Raising prices or adding an extra fee to a customers bill WHEN THE CUSTOMER IS LOCKED INTO A CONTRACT works because the changes are still cheaper than the cost of breaking contract.
These companies don't add the fees to new contracts, they hit the locked in customers first.
Additionally, a LOT of people in the US don't have multiple options for many of these services.
Hell, I CAN'T switch my electrical service to another company despite them charging $15 a month to pay for damages from a hurricane 8 YEARS AGO. The only power provider in my state is BARRED from running cable in my city because of a Right-of-way monopoly contract with the current provider.
Always wanted to see a different agent than Mr. Bond.
Where's Agent 4-0-4?
[1950s announcer voice] But now, thanks to the wonders of the modern internet, this unfortunate soul has a keyword to an entire new realm of knowledge! [end announcer]
Most people don't realize this, but there are 3 types of information.
Things you know
Things you are aware you don't know
and
Things you aren't even aware exist.
This last category is the reason for almost all cases of "reinventing the wheel".
Also, assuming something must have been done before and searching for it doesn't mean you will find the magic term in a reasonable amount of time.
Now our good friend who writes "pee-jyo" (and the other 300 people who see this thread) has the opportunity to look up pinyin.
Additionally, even if they don't look it up today, now they are aware that it exists and may remember that fact in the future.
Small businesses who know better but can't afford the extra expense of an additional server when they barely use the resources on the primary one do this also. Holy run on sentence batman!
Dear GOD please use pinyin! The sounds in chinese correspond to different works depending the accents used!
Similar to how the word Oh can be used differently in english.
Oh? soft sound with a lifting to the end of the sound
Oh! Sharp sound, clipped ending
Except that in chinese, the different sounds correspond to completely different words.
If you don't indicate the right tones, both of you just left yourselves open to some seriously nasty jokes......
Are you a business owner? I suspect not, and here's why:
Actually, I am a business owner. I would link the company, but since we mostly handle local customers it wouldn't be effective advertising anyway, but feel free to google my nick.
The primary focus of my business is CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, not profit.
If a customer isn't happy, they don't bring friends to your business. Meanwhile, 2 happy customers who know each other will attract other people in their social circle. ( It's called "Word of mouth advertising" for anyone watching from the sidelines. )
Blizzard's customer support has gone from moderately good to completely horrible over the few years since the merger.
This, combined with several other decisions, has left large portions of the original user base feeling ignored, and even worse, exploited.
They're CATERING TO THEIR MARKET.
They are catering to a new market, actually.
Activizzard at some point decided to stop catering to the long term players with 5 year subscriptions, and started catering to the "Instant gratification"/"reward addict" crowd instead.
To make the game more accessible, they tailored the content to be less demanding. Shorter dungeons, easier bosses, more use of different difficulty levels, higher drop rates, etc.
To cater to the "achievement addicts", they initiated actual achievements, guaranteed point rewards for playing content, and allowing higher level gear to be purchased from vendors.
Additionally, they added point caps to prevent player from gaining new items too quickly, and increased the power level of items dramatically.
This worked fairly well in the short term, blizzard brought in several MILLION new subscriptions from this new untapped player base, and initially only lost a few hundred thousand long term subscribers.
Overall, from a modern business standpoint, this time period was a smashing success.
However, this smashing success had it's drawbacks.
For example, Many of the long term "hardcore" players who left were the ones who made up the most vocal part of the social community.
These were the people who were willing to teach new players how the game worked, spent hours on end joking in the chat channels, ran leveling guilds like mine, and organized huge world events (like the 400 player raids on opposing capitol cities).
For a lot of less hardcore players (like myself), this community was an extremely large part of why they continued to play the game.
The completely random interactions with other players added uncertainty and excitement, and did an amazing job of keeping the same repetitive content from getting boring. Without those vocal and extroverted people, there is nothing to distract players from the "endless grind" portions of the game during the quiet times between content releases.
Secondly, the "instant gratification" crowd have short attention spans.
After these players have seen the content, they want something new to do. NOW. If the game doesn't cough up new content on a very rapid schedule, they start losing players to other "more interesting" games. ( Just look at the drop in numbers after the announcement that 4.3 was the last big content patch in Cataclysm)
Third, the reward addicts also need new content, better gear, more power, etc.
There is a huge post on the battle.net forums from a developer asking for input regarding the "item level squish" that they may have to do to handle the exponential increase in item power from the last expansion.
There's even a nice graph and everything. SOURCE
Lastly, Providing new content on a near constant basis is expensive. It costs more developer time, and it causes an inevitable loss in quality.
Blizzards motto for new game a
Newsflash: Activision bought blizzard. The company focus has changed. MONEY is now the reason to make new games, not FUN.
Less than 1% of the desktop market can't justify development for an entire alternate platform?
Maybe not, but if you plan ahead and use platform agnostic development practices porting or running on other platforms is no where near as hard as it used to be.
1% of the market might not be enough to develop a completely separate version if you're using directx, but opengl based games can be ported with very little headache with a little bit of advanced planning.
Just look at the humble bundle packs success. Sure, access to 1% of the market is not worth it but virtually assured sales to 0.5% of the market is a substantial amount of profit.
At this point, the hardest part of selling to the linux crowd is letting them know the game is compatible, and I know for a fact that most of the developers I work with will purchase a game that is linux ready just to have something to do at work while waiting on a compile.
I personally check Peguspy for new game options of a regular basis.
Anyone who needs to run Windows-exclusive apps.
In other words, most businesses and their employees.
I would argue quite the opposite, most business and employees actually only need a small subset of the features that Microsoft's products have, and most of these features have been replicated or improved upon by free software.
Especially where Office is concerned.
Be careful with using the google servers as latency tests.
Google tends to purchase server space in or near the data centers of major isps in order to decrease latency, and the 8.8.8.8 Ip address is actually a distributed shared IP. (google "anycast" for more info)
It's entirely possible that for you 8.8.8.8 is inside your isps network, and thus artificially low. Additionally, if you wait for your isps route cache to expire and ping the same address again, you may be directed to a different server.
What server you are using doesn't matter for one time tests, but if you are trying to log latency over time or diagnose an issue it can cause some major headaches.
A better choice is to run traceroute/tracert, and select a server just outside of your Isps network (for example, my isp purchases thier pipe from level3, so I use level3's primary gateway address).
Speedtest.net uses donated server space to provide geographically local testing servers.
I should know, I managed the connection for one for 3 years.
If you have a 15ms report from speedtest, then your Isp is either providing the server space itself, or is the Isp for the company that is hosting it.
This is good for testing your last hop speeds, but not for getting an accurate estimate of your Internet speeds.
(I can get 75Megabit/11ms to other businesses on the same Isp node, but our speed to the next node is throttled to 20Mb, and latency spikes once I hit the main gateway to the net)
Try clicking on a server that's a little bit farther away to get a more accurate report.
Additionally, If you have access to a system outside of the Isp's network (at work, a vps, or even friend at a coffee shop down the street) you can run same tests from the opposite end of the pipe.
If A-B,B-C, and C-D look bad from outside and C-D,D-E,E-F look bad from the inside, then it's a pretty safe bet that the link between C and D is the problem.
Meanwhile, If C-D looks fine from the outside, but A-B,and B-C look bad then something is wrong with the internal routing on C.
Testing from both ends is important, as it shows you that the problem isn't a configuration issue or an intermittent problem with your hardware. It also is very good at pinpointing single point failures.
How about we start using a new measure?
.
How many other people think that you are smarter than them?
That should correct for at least part of the selection bias.
The problem with pandora's business model is that they still play advertisements after you pay for a subscription.
I would pay between 5-10 dollars a month for the service if they dropped the ads, but I am NOT willing to pay $3/month for what should be an ad supported service.
Especially when I can just use a smart playlist and my local library instead.
Why is the linux community ignoring Expressgate?
It can be difficult to update (bios/firware update?)
It can't be used on different systems. (I want my laptop and desktop and netbook to at least be similar systems.)
It is "customized" by the oem. (yay, another sybian/andriod style compatibility/UI nightmare)
It can't be easily backed up by an end user.
It is yet another layer of crap to break.
It has a tiny list of available software that has to be installed via an "app store".
It's virtually impossible to for an end user to know exactly what it is running behind the UI.
Additionally, On the laptops I've seen it on, it doesn't actually access 90% of the hardware (Usb-wifi/3d graphics/printer/scanner ?), and if I remember correctly is actually a locked efi partition with hooks directly into the bios.
That's why I'm ignoring it personally.
Now, if they can get it to be a fully featured os frontend for linux without the hardware dependent crap, maybe it could gain traction as a window manager instead of being just another piece of crappy bloatware that I uninstall.
There are two simple reasons that expressgate appears to work so well.
1) it only uses the hardware that is part of the motherboard. (see apple for how this works)
2) It's limited to only 3 or 4 activities and a few simple games.
Anyone (and everyone) can build a locked down device that plays music, surfs the web, and can play a few games on very specific hardware. (look at every handheld console in the last 4 years along with the entire smartphone/tablet market).
The entire point of a generic PC operating system is flexibility.
The single common thread with almost every successful linux distribution is the idea that the USER SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE.
Almost every single linux user I know of lists "the freedom to change things to work the way I like" as a primary motivation for switching.
"I can continue to use my $(unusual hardware peripheral)" is also right up there in the top 10 reasons.
If you don't need the ability to adapt to new requirements or to add completely new software/hardware then why are you buying a PC?
Go get a tablet, an hdmi monitor, and a bluetooth keyboard, just like my grandmother.
I hate to feed the troll, but people reading this thread might not be aware of this.
FACT: Attempting to clean a virus with the same os it was designed to infect is NOT a good idea.
There are a lot of viruses that are designed to exploit things like malformed shortcut files, bugs in the way windows mounts hard drives, or even bugs in the code that checks for the amount of free space on a drive. Ref:(google: "lnk exploit")
If you connect a drive infected with one of these viruses to a windows computer, it WILL get infected.
Most of the examples I gave have been hotfixed via windows update, but new exploits are discovered daily.
Move the drive to a different system, scan using live cds or a write protected linux drive, and flash the bios of the original pc.
Otherwise you run the risk of the virus infecting your cleanup system.
I would agree with your harmonics theory, except for the local geographic details I outlined here.
To summarize, the area I'm referring to is in southern louisiana. The entire area is basically mud, and is rather geologically active.
We tend to have several Magnitude 3-5 quakes a year, but the mud absorbs so much of the vibration that we usually don't even notice.
If the local wells are somehow hitting the resonant frequency of our mud, it seems that it would be trivial to establish what that frequency is and adjust the procedure to avoid it.
Or am I missing something?
I commented on another post further up, but I would like to clarify in thread.
There are several of these wells near where I live, and you can definitely tell when they are cracking.
I'm not talking about a minor vibration either. First a small quake, followed by aftershocks that can be felt for several miles.
These are the deepest land based wells in the state, and some of the deepest well the bp owns, so they aren't working close to the surface, either.
Hmm. Perhaps you are right, but there is something going on above and beyond the math.
Allow me to match your anecdote.
I have also been near one of these wells during a frakking operation, I have family members who are close enough to one to watch while they are pumping.
There are cracks in the foundation of the house that only formed after the well went live, and the tremors that i've personally felt were considerably more active than "Just a big bang".
For the record, I live in Southern Louisiana. The entire southern half of the state is on so much mud that most of our population isn't even aware that we had a 5.3 quake last year, or that we have had 74 earthquakes with magnitude greater than 3.0 in the last 10 years and 4 greater than a 4.0 in the last 2 years.
However, everyone in the parish (our version of a county) knows when they start frakking at any of the 4 wells in the area. (to the point of commenting about it to the workers when they go to the grocery store after work).
It's not a nuclear bomb, but there is definitely some noticeable vibration.
Perhaps you are in a less geologically active area, or perhaps the company working your area is more responsible than BP:Amoco, but it doesn't change the fact that thousands of people have stories just like mine
Perhaps someone should start a kickstarter to fund some impartial research into this, starting by correlating recorded activity and epicenter data with known start and stop dates of wells going into and out of production.
All of this data is already available via sites like http://neic.usgs.gov and sonris, we just need someone to sit down and correlate it.
I'm glad you liked it.
I think this article probably explains part of my concerns better than I could here.
As a small quick summary, frakking can and has caused increased geological activity.
To directly address your question:
While the actual amount of energy being added to the area during frakking is relatively small, the amount of energy that is released is anything but small.
The amount of energy released is enough to cause vibration that can be felt on the surface in many areas, sometimes even several miles away.
With that much energy being released, it's not very hard to imagine that there has to be at least SOME movement in the layers of earth between the working zone and the surface.
After all, by it's very design, frakking is more effective in areas with more natural pressure built up.
Now, I will acknowledge that there are probably parts of the world where this technique would be perfectly safe.
However, I would also suggest that those "safe" zones aren't going to be very profitable in comparison.
After all, why work an area that you have to frakk for a year before it starts producing when there are areas where a single crack will get the oil flowing?
Or to rephrase:
After all, Why use a whole bushel of hay to kill this camel, when that one over there only needs a single straw?
Fraccing is just not that high energy
And a single straw doesn't weigh enough to cause any noticeable harm to a camel.