You need a large number of users out there using clients which support DHT and PEX first. DHT was available a long time before it was really particularly useful.
There's easily obtainable databases of "AS" numbers that map IP ranges to organizations and/or countries, and embedding that into the client would also be a fairly simple exercise.
In fact, Torrent already has this feature: if you look at the 'Peers' tab, it'll try to work out what country each peer comes from and display an appropriate flag just to the left of the IP. All that's needed is an option to allow the user to prioritize connections to peers from the same country.
Yeah, I just don't get why people don't use FLAC for their own CDs.
Because most people haven't heard of FLAC, and even if they had heard of it, they wouldn't know how to use it. Also, very few of the tools that people actually use for ripping CDs and playing back audio (WMP, iTunes, iPods, etc.) support FLAC, and mp3/aac/wma is simply 'good enough'.
That's traditionally due to poor literacy rates and it's not a good thing. Linguistic drift is the reason much of the written works of the English language are opaque to most current English speakers. I want people in 300 years to be able to easily and intuitively understand my papers. I don't want them having to do a running translation of "too" to "2" and so forth.
Do you have any evidence for that? Linguistic change occurs in every natural language, and it always has. I see no reason to assert that improved literacy would reduce linguistic change. In fact, it seems to me that it is increased literacy that has caused the problems we have with English spelling today -- the written record has remained somewhat constant despite substantial changes in pronunciation, leaving us with words like 'knight' which sound nothing like what you'd expect.
Most linguists these days accept that linguistic change is unavoidable, so I'm not really sure how you've been modded +5 informative. (I'm not a linguist, but I am a linguistics major.)
I don't have a good grasp on the intricacies of DVDs, but if you're saying that information is recorded on DVDs in three parameters, then yes, it could be called 3-dimensional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension
No, because it's not an Apple product (the music player app on the iPhone is actually called 'iPod'). Besides, the original claim was that the iPhone is "no iPod [...] in terms of features". The iPhone has all the features of the iPod -- and if the same is true of your brother's blackberry, then it would also be unreasonable to claim that it's "no iPod in terms of features".
Back in the days of Aristotle, we knew that gravity was a constant downward force.
Constant downward acceleration, not force. If it were constant force, heavier objects would fall slower than lighter ones. Although I guess we can't really apply the Newtonian definition of 'force' to Aristotlean physics..
The English spoken in Britain today is just as different from the English spoken at the time of American settlement as American English. Why should British English be any more correct just because the language originally came from there?
Why should the term English refer to British English when used without qualification? Why not Old English, or Middle English? Like it or not, 'English' describes a whole bunch of languages/dialects, all derived from Old English, not the language spoken in England. It is perfectly sensible to use the term 'British English' to identify a certain dialect of English.
English has a lot of French vocabulary because French was the language of the ruling class in England for a very long time. However, there is much more to a language than vocabulary. Generally speaking, English is considered more similar to the other West Germanic languages (such as Dutch and German) than the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.). (I don't speak French or Dutch, but I am majoring in linguistics.)
German didn't borrow its grammar from Latin any more than English did. English and German are both West Germanic languages and have quite similar grammars. (Modern German and Old English are even more similar; Modern English differs from Old English largely as a result of French influence.) The Romance languages - French, Portugese, Italian and Spanish, amongst others, are the ones that have Latinate grammars.
Valid points, but the GP was arguing that the new interface is objectively inferior:
Whoever is designing the interfaces at Microsoft seems to be living in a fantasy world where functionality is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is "wow".
To take one example, I think it was rather stupid of Microsoft not to provide a 'classic mode' for Office 2007, but I think once you learn it, the ribbon interface is an improvement over the menu system.
Have you actually tried learning the Office 2007 interface? It's different, but if you unwilling to accept change, why not just stick with 2003?
2007 is difficult to use to start with if you're used to the old interface. I think it's a far more intuitive interface, though - if you took somebody who'd never used Office before, they'd pick up 2007 much more quickly..
You say private insurance companies make profit like it's a bad thing. All private companies exist to make profit.
Those in favour of public health insurance argue that the benefits of public health insurance (overall better public health, which ultimately reduces the total cost of healthcare and congestion in the healthcare system) outweigh the costs (the inability to opt-out). I'm inclined to agree with them, but I haven't really researched the topic enough to have much certainty in my decision.
Congratulations on saving so much money - I definitely think that's a skill more people could use these days.
My point was that most people don't have money saved, and that's why insurance is valuable to them.
If you can cover any medical expenses that might come up, more power to you -- but not everybody has that luxury, and it's not always due to their bad spending habits.
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You need a large number of users out there using clients which support DHT and PEX first. DHT was available a long time before it was really particularly useful.
There's easily obtainable databases of "AS" numbers that map IP ranges to organizations and/or countries, and embedding that into the client would also be a fairly simple exercise.
In fact, Torrent already has this feature: if you look at the 'Peers' tab, it'll try to work out what country each peer comes from and display an appropriate flag just to the left of the IP. All that's needed is an option to allow the user to prioritize connections to peers from the same country.
A famous philosopher once said that philosophy allowed him to do by choice what others did by the rule of law
Could you source that quote? It sounds interesting.
Yeah, I just don't get why people don't use FLAC for their own CDs.
Because most people haven't heard of FLAC, and even if they had heard of it, they wouldn't know how to use it. Also, very few of the tools that people actually use for ripping CDs and playing back audio (WMP, iTunes, iPods, etc.) support FLAC, and mp3/aac/wma is simply 'good enough'.
That's traditionally due to poor literacy rates and it's not a good thing. Linguistic drift is the reason much of the written works of the English language are opaque to most current English speakers. I want people in 300 years to be able to easily and intuitively understand my papers. I don't want them having to do a running translation of "too" to "2" and so forth.
Do you have any evidence for that? Linguistic change occurs in every natural language, and it always has. I see no reason to assert that improved literacy would reduce linguistic change. In fact, it seems to me that it is increased literacy that has caused the problems we have with English spelling today -- the written record has remained somewhat constant despite substantial changes in pronunciation, leaving us with words like 'knight' which sound nothing like what you'd expect.
Most linguists these days accept that linguistic change is unavoidable, so I'm not really sure how you've been modded +5 informative. (I'm not a linguist, but I am a linguistics major.)
It's a common slang term for 'arrive' here in Western Australia (and probably the rest of the country).
But it's fairly trivial to remove the limit. Surely anybody tech-savvy enough to run a server could work this out?
I don't have a good grasp on the intricacies of DVDs, but if you're saying that information is recorded on DVDs in three parameters, then yes, it could be called 3-dimensional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension
How is this a misuse of the word 'dimension'? It doesn't necessarily refer to a spatial dimension.
No, because it's not an Apple product (the music player app on the iPhone is actually called 'iPod'). Besides, the original claim was that the iPhone is "no iPod [...] in terms of features". The iPhone has all the features of the iPod -- and if the same is true of your brother's blackberry, then it would also be unreasonable to claim that it's "no iPod in terms of features".
What's wrong with linking to that Wikipedia article? It summarizes, cites and links to the relevant statutes which are authoritative.
Back in the days of Aristotle, we knew that gravity was a constant downward force.
Constant downward acceleration, not force. If it were constant force, heavier objects would fall slower than lighter ones. Although I guess we can't really apply the Newtonian definition of 'force' to Aristotlean physics..
Should the French get the final say on how to spell the large proportion words we use in English that were borrowed from French?
How many doctors do you know who speak Latin?
The English spoken in Britain today is just as different from the English spoken at the time of American settlement as American English. Why should British English be any more correct just because the language originally came from there?
Why should the term English refer to British English when used without qualification? Why not Old English, or Middle English? Like it or not, 'English' describes a whole bunch of languages/dialects, all derived from Old English, not the language spoken in England. It is perfectly sensible to use the term 'British English' to identify a certain dialect of English.
I'd argue that it's more correct to speak the way most native speakers would than to avoid splitting the infinitive.
English has a lot of French vocabulary because French was the language of the ruling class in England for a very long time. However, there is much more to a language than vocabulary. Generally speaking, English is considered more similar to the other West Germanic languages (such as Dutch and German) than the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.). (I don't speak French or Dutch, but I am majoring in linguistics.)
German didn't borrow its grammar from Latin any more than English did. English and German are both West Germanic languages and have quite similar grammars. (Modern German and Old English are even more similar; Modern English differs from Old English largely as a result of French influence.) The Romance languages - French, Portugese, Italian and Spanish, amongst others, are the ones that have Latinate grammars.
The parents were arguing about ethics (which are a matter of opinion), not law.
Fine, but the GP was claiming that they would never pay for an internet-based service because they won't pay for intangible objects.
You're just saying that last.fm isn't worth 3 euros a month to you, which is completely reasonable.
To take one example, I think it was rather stupid of Microsoft not to provide a 'classic mode' for Office 2007, but I think once you learn it, the ribbon interface is an improvement over the menu system.
Have you actually tried learning the Office 2007 interface? It's different, but if you unwilling to accept change, why not just stick with 2003?
2007 is difficult to use to start with if you're used to the old interface. I think it's a far more intuitive interface, though - if you took somebody who'd never used Office before, they'd pick up 2007 much more quickly..
You say private insurance companies make profit like it's a bad thing. All private companies exist to make profit.
Those in favour of public health insurance argue that the benefits of public health insurance (overall better public health, which ultimately reduces the total cost of healthcare and congestion in the healthcare system) outweigh the costs (the inability to opt-out). I'm inclined to agree with them, but I haven't really researched the topic enough to have much certainty in my decision.
Congratulations on saving so much money - I definitely think that's a skill more people could use these days.
My point was that most people don't have money saved, and that's why insurance is valuable to them.
If you can cover any medical expenses that might come up, more power to you -- but not everybody has that luxury, and it's not always due to their bad spending habits.