It's less about its size, and more to do with its orbit, which is not (mostly) circular like all the other planets. Pluto's orbit actually takes it closer to the sun than neptune at times, which is a decidedly un-planet-like thing to do...
"We have 45 salespeople with laptops who put their Windows laptops to sleep all the time without problems, but that's only because they shut down or restart once a week to avoid freezes, etc.
We have about 4-5 Mac laptops over the last 6 years that are always left in sleep mode, and I'm talking continuous sleep mode for up to a year at a time. We've never had a problem with Mac laptops going into or coming out of sleep mode."
So you're comparing the level of hardware failure of 45 machines that are getting used heavily to 5 machines that hardly get used at all? I'm not surprised the windows machines are losing when you're examining the situation from such a biased viewpoint.
Have a look at the Cash for Questions scandal that happened in the UK a few years ago. I think that nicely illustrates what can happen when lobbying is viewed so differently
IIRC, Canada has strict limits on where donations can come from, and sets a strict upper limit, in an attempt to stop bribery and corruption. I believe in the UK the source of all donations to party funds have to be openly doccumented for all to see, also in an attempt to keep the system nice and public. Is there anything like this in the US?
Then where do you draw the line at what is useful spending and what is not? Having highways across the country doesn't affect the rights of citizens, does it? How about those marching bands in the army? They're not protecting me!
By your definition, you could argue that most of the US spending, which you are forced to pay, is not necessary. Lets take a look at the US government...
Department of Housing & Urban Development? If people want houses, they can spend the money themselves! Can't afford a house? Build your own, ya lazy bastards!
Amtrak? That financial black hole doesn't do anything for my rights! Trains? TRAINS? If I want to travel by rail I'll buy myself one of those hand-operated cart things.
Nasa? Hubble's photos don't keep me safe at night! Mars rovers? Unless they're tracking down and killing those bloody martians, then I don't want anything to do with it! Weather satellites? Stick your head out a window!
Department of State? Those wasteful bastards spending all that money on foreigners - it's a disgrace! They're not American, so what do we care? The fight against international HIV/AIDS? If you want to stop thousands of people dying from a horrible disease, then be my guest, but count me out!
Now, Homeland Security... That's $30billion well spent!
Although I agree that windows is far too buggy and is slow to be patched when a problem emerges, comments like "But if the vulnerabilities weren't there in the first place there would be far fewer problems" are BS - are you trying to tell me that no one has ever hacked a *nix box?
The worrying thing is that GCHQ would never want this to happen, ever. The government has a whole organisation there devoted to computer security, and they didn't ask what they thought...
Stating that something not present in the Magna Carta excludes it from Common Law is like saying "If you can't do it in DOS you can't do it in XP" - or, as this is slashdot "If you can't do it in Multics, you can't do it in Linux"
Perhaps my wording, "primarily second language", was confusing I never stated that 800mil use English as a primary language - indeed, if I did this would be refuting rather than reinforcing my point. To clear up what I was trying to say - Around 800mil people *can* speak English in India, but the majority of those 800mil use it as a secondary language.
Unfortunately, I have no references to back this up, and, indeed, your 300mil statement may be correct. Unfortunately, either way, it doesn't have a huge relevance to the original point.
The US has no National-Government level official language as written in, say, the constitution. Therefore your statement that English is not the Official language in the US is somewhat misleading, as there is no other language that is. All National-level legal documents and laws, including the Constitution, are written in English. And so, although it is not specifically stated, English IS as near as damned to an official language as you can get. There is no other language that has anywhere near the same penetration and (for lack of a better word,) influence as English. If you wish to be pedantic, English is the language used for all things _Official_, which, I suppose, could be viewed therefore as making it the official language.
Saying English is only one of two official languages in an officially bilingual country is somewhat absurd, as noting that French is an official languages does not aid any point of relative argument. If you want to argue statistics, English is the official language of all but ONE province in Canada, and only ONE is officially bilingual.
Again, my point was not to exclude India from my posts, nor offend the minority of Canadian or American citizens who do not speak English fluently, nor was it to make any broad statements about the future of language. I agree to your point - that India contains, as has been pointed out in both my previous and your previous post, a major english speaking population group. However, to explain why India was omitted, the point originaly was to merely to illustrate a view on an issue in the most straight-forward manner possible, and talking about India would have simply, in my opinion, have diluted the simplicity of the statement and either confused people or been entirely superfluous and excessive, adding in unnecessary complexity. It was *not* a post about the makeup of the English language, and so I did not feel that a detailed breakdown of the distribution of the language was necessary.
I think you both missed the point of the post, and got your facts horribly wrong.
Maybe half a million people speak Irish as their first language. Between Scots gaelic, Welsh and Irish language speakrs there are maybe a million people in the British Isles who don't speak English as their first language... so, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the population. In all honestly, it's probably closer to 1.
A large majority of the French population, despite common stereotypes, can speak english, although I'd obviously never claim it was a language in particularly high use, unlike for those who speak Welsh or Irish as their primary language who often have to revert to English for many every-day things. Of course, this is all within limited experience, and I'd love to know if there are any language experts around who can confirm or correct me here:)
India has about 800mil english speakers, give or take - but, again, primarily second language IIRC, although it is somewhat more prevalent than in France.
I appologise if I offended anyone for missing out their country. I simply grouped up the obvious ones where english is the primary, de juro, de facto, language. That's 65million english speakers in the British Isles, 325mil in North Nmerica, 25million in Australasia.
I could have included the Phillipines, where there are maybe 50million English speakers, but I believe most of those are second language. South africa only hits about 35mil english speakers, oddly enough:P
I haven't read many comics, but I have read most of planetary after a friend shoved some copies into my hand and made demands. The thing with Planetary is, although I thought it used the whole premise well, as a great way of telling a story, but the series as a whole lacked that novel-like depth being discussed earlier. It almost came off as if the writer had an idea, and wanted to do it in a multi-book story arc but had to cram it into a fraction of the pages. I felt a little unfulfilled.
Compare with something like Astro City, where although some arcs are short, others are much longer - they take as much time as they need in order to be told properly. I'd highly recommend Astro City if you want a different take on the traditional super-hero story. Confession and Tarnished Angel stand out as two particularly strong sets within the series, and both are available in book form.
OK, I appologise for my hyperbole. I got caught up in nuke frenzy;) I accept that, should nuclear strikes be called, then portions of the population in remote locations would bear little immediate brunt and the chance of a saturation pattern that would cover the maximum ammount of landmass possible would never be called for nor co-ordinated successfully.
Of course, the P and GP posts refute the nukes-wipe-out-everything part of the story, but in my post I talked merely about *portions* of the world being nuked - they don't touch on the rather scary idea of a dangerous bio-weapon going wild.
The basic point still stands - between bio-weapons and nukes and all sorts of other natural and un-natural things that could go wrong, we have the capacity to REALLY screw things up for ourselves, and if things go absolutely tits-up, I think our ancestors would probably have more important things to think about than remembering how to translate ancient greek
Are you kidding me? A CITY? You do realise that we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every living thing on this planet, right? Destroying a civilisation nowadays doesn't require the destruction of a city by a marauding army. That's far too much effort...
A Biological Weapon is accidentally released. In an attempt to protect the population, nuclear weapons are fired at supposed infection hot-spots. Anarchy errpupts as the deaths from this plague start killing all over the world, spread by the rapidity of travel as allowed by jumbo-jets. The Bio-agent and bombs kill all but 0.01% of the population of the planet and make 75% of the survivors sterile. Remaining Food crops are destroyed as nuclear winter sets in. Simply finding sufficient food is an almost impossible task.
Do you really think keeping the internet running or teaching your kids to read is as important as finding food for them?
It does not take a huge ammount of time for an abandoned house to start to crumble. It does not take long for the freshly unprotected contents of a crumbling house to be destroyed by the environment. It works the same with Library buildings and books.
Language standardisation is largely due to modern communications. Assume the UK and Ireland, the USA and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand, are each cut off from one another - the three major English Speaking parts of the world. Without communications to keep the language similar, local dialogues will develop resulting in harsh accenting. With illiteracy ubiquitous, English turns into Engrish, Australish and Redneck. The written word is no longer recognised. Technology falls back to the dark ages.
Certain tasks take a certain amount of time, and you can't just throw more money at a problem and expect the time they take to decrease in a linear fashion. This is basic business computing theory. You get to a certain point where adding in extra personnel actually slows down the process.
Slashdot Mirror
It's less about its size, and more to do with its orbit, which is not (mostly) circular like all the other planets.
Pluto's orbit actually takes it closer to the sun than neptune at times, which is a decidedly un-planet-like thing to do...
"We have 45 salespeople with laptops who put their Windows laptops to sleep all the time without problems, but that's only because they shut down or restart once a week to avoid freezes, etc.
We have about 4-5 Mac laptops over the last 6 years that are always left in sleep mode, and I'm talking continuous sleep mode for up to a year at a time. We've never had a problem with Mac laptops going into or coming out of sleep mode."
So you're comparing the level of hardware failure of 45 machines that are getting used heavily to 5 machines that hardly get used at all? I'm not surprised the windows machines are losing when you're examining the situation from such a biased viewpoint.
Have a look at the Cash for Questions scandal that happened in the UK a few years ago. I think that nicely illustrates what can happen when lobbying is viewed so differently
IIRC, Canada has strict limits on where donations can come from, and sets a strict upper limit, in an attempt to stop bribery and corruption. I believe in the UK the source of all donations to party funds have to be openly doccumented for all to see, also in an attempt to keep the system nice and public.
Is there anything like this in the US?
Then where do you draw the line at what is useful spending and what is not? Having highways across the country doesn't affect the rights of citizens, does it? How about those marching bands in the army? They're not protecting me!
By your definition, you could argue that most of the US spending, which you are forced to pay, is not necessary. Lets take a look at the US government...
Department of Housing & Urban Development? If people want houses, they can spend the money themselves! Can't afford a house? Build your own, ya lazy bastards!
Amtrak? That financial black hole doesn't do anything for my rights! Trains? TRAINS? If I want to travel by rail I'll buy myself one of those hand-operated cart things.
Nasa? Hubble's photos don't keep me safe at night! Mars rovers? Unless they're tracking down and killing those bloody martians, then I don't want anything to do with it! Weather satellites? Stick your head out a window!
Department of State? Those wasteful bastards spending all that money on foreigners - it's a disgrace! They're not American, so what do we care? The fight against international HIV/AIDS? If you want to stop thousands of people dying from a horrible disease, then be my guest, but count me out!
Now, Homeland Security... That's $30billion well spent!
Score:2, Insightful
:P
hehehehe.... Question is, was it given that score due to irony, or stupidity?
Although I agree that windows is far too buggy and is slow to be patched when a problem emerges, comments like "But if the vulnerabilities weren't there in the first place there would be far fewer problems" are BS - are you trying to tell me that no one has ever hacked a *nix box?
Lawyers are the only socially acceptable cannibals in the western world ;)
The worrying thing is that GCHQ would never want this to happen, ever. The government has a whole organisation there devoted to computer security, and they didn't ask what they thought...
Yeah, I know since I got my two extra arms I've been playing two instances of Q4 lots more.. ;)
Are you a lawyer?
:)
Stating that something not present in the Magna Carta excludes it from Common Law is like saying "If you can't do it in DOS you can't do it in XP" - or, as this is slashdot "If you can't do it in Multics, you can't do it in Linux"
Law is progressive. Like most things
Perhaps my wording, "primarily second language", was confusing I never stated that 800mil use English as a primary language - indeed, if I did this would be refuting rather than reinforcing my point. To clear up what I was trying to say - Around 800mil people *can* speak English in India, but the majority of those 800mil use it as a secondary language.
Unfortunately, I have no references to back this up, and, indeed, your 300mil statement may be correct. Unfortunately, either way, it doesn't have a huge relevance to the original point.
The US has no National-Government level official language as written in, say, the constitution. Therefore your statement that English is not the Official language in the US is somewhat misleading, as there is no other language that is. All National-level legal documents and laws, including the Constitution, are written in English. And so, although it is not specifically stated, English IS as near as damned to an official language as you can get. There is no other language that has anywhere near the same penetration and (for lack of a better word,) influence as English. If you wish to be pedantic, English is the language used for all things _Official_, which, I suppose, could be viewed therefore as making it the official language.
Saying English is only one of two official languages in an officially bilingual country is somewhat absurd, as noting that French is an official languages does not aid any point of relative argument. If you want to argue statistics, English is the official language of all but ONE province in Canada, and only ONE is officially bilingual.
Again, my point was not to exclude India from my posts, nor offend the minority of Canadian or American citizens who do not speak English fluently, nor was it to make any broad statements about the future of language. I agree to your point - that India contains, as has been pointed out in both my previous and your previous post, a major english speaking population group. However, to explain why India was omitted, the point originaly was to merely to illustrate a view on an issue in the most straight-forward manner possible, and talking about India would have simply, in my opinion, have diluted the simplicity of the statement and either confused people or been entirely superfluous and excessive, adding in unnecessary complexity. It was *not* a post about the makeup of the English language, and so I did not feel that a detailed breakdown of the distribution of the language was necessary.
I think you both missed the point of the post, and got your facts horribly wrong.
:)
:P
Maybe half a million people speak Irish as their first language. Between Scots gaelic, Welsh and Irish language speakrs there are maybe a million people in the British Isles who don't speak English as their first language... so, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the population. In all honestly, it's probably closer to 1.
A large majority of the French population, despite common stereotypes, can speak english, although I'd obviously never claim it was a language in particularly high use, unlike for those who speak Welsh or Irish as their primary language who often have to revert to English for many every-day things. Of course, this is all within limited experience, and I'd love to know if there are any language experts around who can confirm or correct me here
India has about 800mil english speakers, give or take - but, again, primarily second language IIRC, although it is somewhat more prevalent than in France.
I appologise if I offended anyone for missing out their country. I simply grouped up the obvious ones where english is the primary, de juro, de facto, language. That's 65million english speakers in the British Isles, 325mil in North Nmerica, 25million in Australasia.
I could have included the Phillipines, where there are maybe 50million English speakers, but I believe most of those are second language. South africa only hits about 35mil english speakers, oddly enough
Hope that helps clear things up!
I haven't read many comics, but I have read most of planetary after a friend shoved some copies into my hand and made demands. The thing with Planetary is, although I thought it used the whole premise well, as a great way of telling a story, but the series as a whole lacked that novel-like depth being discussed earlier. It almost came off as if the writer had an idea, and wanted to do it in a multi-book story arc but had to cram it into a fraction of the pages. I felt a little unfulfilled.
Compare with something like Astro City, where although some arcs are short, others are much longer - they take as much time as they need in order to be told properly. I'd highly recommend Astro City if you want a different take on the traditional super-hero story. Confession and Tarnished Angel stand out as two particularly strong sets within the series, and both are available in book form.
whoops, indeed you are right about that dead-ness... please exuse the time-travelling in my post there :P
OK, I appologise for my hyperbole. I got caught up in nuke frenzy ;) I accept that, should nuclear strikes be called, then portions of the population in remote locations would bear little immediate brunt and the chance of a saturation pattern that would cover the maximum ammount of landmass possible would never be called for nor co-ordinated successfully.
Of course, the P and GP posts refute the nukes-wipe-out-everything part of the story, but in my post I talked merely about *portions* of the world being nuked - they don't touch on the rather scary idea of a dangerous bio-weapon going wild.
The basic point still stands - between bio-weapons and nukes and all sorts of other natural and un-natural things that could go wrong, we have the capacity to REALLY screw things up for ourselves, and if things go absolutely tits-up, I think our ancestors would probably have more important things to think about than remembering how to translate ancient greek
Are you kidding me? A CITY? You do realise that we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every living thing on this planet, right? Destroying a civilisation nowadays doesn't require the destruction of a city by a marauding army. That's far too much effort...
A Biological Weapon is accidentally released. In an attempt to protect the population, nuclear weapons are fired at supposed infection hot-spots. Anarchy errpupts as the deaths from this plague start killing all over the world, spread by the rapidity of travel as allowed by jumbo-jets. The Bio-agent and bombs kill all but 0.01% of the population of the planet and make 75% of the survivors sterile. Remaining Food crops are destroyed as nuclear winter sets in. Simply finding sufficient food is an almost impossible task.
Do you really think keeping the internet running or teaching your kids to read is as important as finding food for them?
It does not take a huge ammount of time for an abandoned house to start to crumble. It does not take long for the freshly unprotected contents of a crumbling house to be destroyed by the environment. It works the same with Library buildings and books.
Language standardisation is largely due to modern communications. Assume the UK and Ireland, the USA and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand, are each cut off from one another - the three major English Speaking parts of the world. Without communications to keep the language similar, local dialogues will develop resulting in harsh accenting. With illiteracy ubiquitous, English turns into Engrish, Australish and Redneck. The written word is no longer recognised. Technology falls back to the dark ages.
Not quite so ludicrous
Certain tasks take a certain amount of time, and you can't just throw more money at a problem and expect the time they take to decrease in a linear fashion.
This is basic business computing theory. You get to a certain point where adding in extra personnel actually slows down the process.
He should be constructive?
Ever heard of this thing called "linux"? Yeah, that's kinda his thing... You know. Being constructive.
Everyone should be using the google toolbar to spellcheck their posts nowadays.
It's "DICTATOR", come now...
Surely the real challenge would be to try to do it posthumously?
I think you're all missing the important point here... arm around your *girlfriend*?
Come now, this is slashdot..
psh... that's so 1860's...
hehe :P
damnit, why did my mod points have to come YESTERDAY and not today? *grumble grumble*
...and compared to the *thousands* of games offered on windows or windows-and-console only?
The simple fact is, Windows is THE platform for PC gaming, and naming a handfull of games that run on linux doesn't change that fact.