I have a fairly low UID (though there are obviously almost 10,000 people with lower UIDs), and it really is by chance: In the early days of Slashdot a co-worker pointed the site out to me, so I dropped by and created an account, and promptly forgot about it. Sometime later when I came back and used a different ID for a while, until I remembered this one and, thanks to Hotmail (I have been very thankful that I've used hotmail as a core email for a lot of services: During the same period of time my private emails have changed probably 6 times), recovered my password.
Damn, I was getting primed to use the engine metaphor to explain how ridiculously useless Mhz is (why are so many people so defensive of it as a mesure? These people apparently would be lining up to buy a 8086 if they ran it at 3Ghz : It must be _really_ fast then, right?). It's actually a perfect metaphor, because so many engine specs are held as singularily valuable, when in reality they have little value with the context of the whole package. For instance, does it matter if an engine does 18,000RPM if it puts out 25HP? Does it matter that the old Mustang 5.0L engine put out about 220HP when a new Nissan 3.5L engine puts out 255?
I am prone to believe that the simplistic among us like one nice, simple number that they can fawn about and caress, hence why AMD catered to them with the AMD ratings.
Over- and under-population is merely a subjective measure of what's tolerable per person, and the pro-immigration stance of "Well we need them to save us from de-population" is absolutely ridiculous : What happens if the population starts contracting? Oh, right, the GDP (at least on the whole, which has absolutely nothing to do with the lifestyle or personal wealth of an individual) will drop and old age security, built on a tenuous "bet on the future" falsity, will need to be rebuilt. Big deal. The world-calamity claims regarding these scenarios have been grossly overblown by the pro-immigration camp, as if we should actually be grateful that people will move here.
This is a real sore point because here in Canada there has been a major push to open the door to immigrants from around the globe, all based on the absurd "we must keep growing" philosophy. Yet at the same time policies to encourage the growth of our native population stagnates (nationalized daycare, for example). And before a knee jerk wanker, of which there are countless, comes in crying about how I'm a racist, please realize that there are Canadians, right now, pure 100% blood Canadians, of every race and religion, and these are the people who I think should have a reasonable ability to have children and live good lives, perpetuating the traits of this country that make it such a immigration destination in the first place.
Firstly, lets come to an agreement that there is such a thing as "genetics", and this perpetuates traits like intelligence along reproductive lines. Secondarily there are social and environmental traits like criminality, etc. If you did a comprehensive study, I guarantee you that the most prolific breeders are those lower on either scale (like always I make no claims that this is all inclusive : There are geniuses with excellent money making skills with a dozen kids, just as there are people in the lower realms with no children). The observation is that it's the worst traits of humanity that are perpetuated, and it's the exact opposite of classic "Survival of the fittest" : A survival of the non-fittest, death of the fittest, if you will.
It's funny how reproduction in the whole falls into an "evil to discuss" category, at least in regards to "white man" : If a "white man" discusses observations regarding reproduction, it's an evil, Hitler-esque, racist plot to oppress people(s).
Where I got what? The idea that it's hard to have a traditional life anymore? The idea that the least capable people are parts of the planet are acting as the breeding grounds? Sorry, I didn't need anyone to tell me this: It's a logical conclusion.
Re:Are we really richer?
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I completely agree, yet we're now at the point where it's exactly the opposite: In Canada we've had to continually increase immigration to keep the population from contracting, as the "native" birth rate is far below the necessary 2.2 or so. Many advanced European countries, such as Italy, are much further along this curve and have a serious population implosion in the near future. It's a bizarre irony that the world has taken a "reverse Darwinism" : Those least capable of supporting offspring are having them by the dozen, and those theoretically most capable aren't. I fear for the genetic future of the planet.
Sidenote: Personally I think the premise of population contraction is a fantastic one -> Contrary to any "Straight from China/India/Some other obscenely overpopulated area of Earth" BS about North America or Europe being "underpopulated", it seems to me that already we're grossly overpopulated, and we continue it based on outdated, unsustainable notions of drawing graphs of GDP growth, home value growth, etc, all of which is supported only by a perpetually increasing population, yet at the same time the net wealth of all of us is decreasing (soon we'll all have no National parks, no rural areas, and we'll all be just so grateful that the GDP rate increased 4.7%, watching the screen at the end of our tiny habitat-cube
I find it interesting that the article on how rich we are nowadays fails to take into account inflation, or adjusted dollars, or even a spending parity analysis.
The way I see it as this: To live in a large city where you can earn a fair wage costs unbelievable amounts (look at the rents for the New York City area, to live in a tiny closet), but if you live in a smaller town the likelihood of you working in a intelligence/reasonable paying field drops dramatically (unless it's in a core, location sensitive field like the medical field). The reality is that it is now next to impossible to afford kids, and very likely a married couple will have both spouses working. In the 50s/60s the standard model was the mother at home, keeping the home, the father working a job, one or two cars, and a home full of kids (i.e. 3 - 5 kids). Now I can't even imagine the financials necessary to make that work.
Just meandering.
Re:Redhat and Mandrake proprietary? Since when?
on
Open Source Limitations?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
He covered Redhat in services, and VA has HEAVILY gone the way of proprietary code with Sourceforge (the fact that no one cries foul on here astounds me regarding that): VA had to turn to what, ironically, most of its mouthpieces cast as pure evil, to have a hope of surviving. I presume that Mandrake makes a living on services.
By the same token, the fact that an artist has worked hard making music is all good and fine. That doesn't mean that artist is entitled to any money from it. His sweat and tears is worth, in dollar terms, exactly what the free market says it's worth. And the free market, thanks to technology, is now in a position to say it has zero ECONOMIC value. If the artist is uncomfortable with this new reality, he can either look for other revenue streams as he performs for pleasure... Or he can find a job like the rest of us.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Regardless of whether or not you think the state of music was at its peak in the 80s (hint: It wasn't. I love 80s music because it defined my youth/teens, but I have the wisdom to realize that it's the same crap music that was made, and the same crap music that continues to be made), it is theft to illegally copy music. The LAW entitles them to their royalties if you decide that you want to listen to it (if you argued that you decide not to listen to it, then all power to you, but that isn't the gist of what you're saying). I was going to go into countless metaphors of where one could break the law and social convenants and get what they want for free, but it's a worthless game: Either you understand the basic tenants and contracts that maintain this thing we call society, or you believe that it's all some anarchy held together by the strings of technology. If you believe the latter, then I worry for the society you believe we are headed into.
I completely and absolutely agree with you. In fact, during times of my misguided youth I was a fan of the "warez" scene, but lost all interest because the noise to signal ratio was just far too high: I would rather go to the store and spend $50 for the game than spend night after night grabbing incomplete copies with bizarro little errors that strangely made it past all of the error checks, etc. I know friends who tried to get the new Eminem album, only to encounter countless screwed up copies, looped copies, etc.
I have no doubt, whatsoever, that this isn't the act of digital vandals, but rather is a concerted effort by publishers to discourage piracy (and personally I applaud them for a pretty brilliant move, though I'm sure some "GIVE ME EVERYTHING FOR FREE! IT'S MY RIGHT!" weenie will claim that this is a violation of some amendment or other). It's quite a brilliant stroke really: Put servers covertly on all the networks serving up bogus songs (which, because of laziness, will propagate to more and more servers as people download the flawed copy and don't audition and delete it) or bogus warez files (or servers that mysteriously disconnect/freeze at 98%), and you'll build such an inconvenience around it that the $15 price of a CD or $40 for a game becomes quite palatable.
Of course there are technical solutions to piracy legitimacy, but all of them either centralize the data, or require you to explicitly become a part of the criminal process, and things like that are easy to crack by the strong arm of the law. The decentralized, everyone-is-an-equal aspect of the P2P networks is a curse as much as a benefit.
That's pretty vague. What makes the SPARC better than the StrongARM? As one of the prior posters mentioned: It's mostly a perception thing that we think of these PDAs as slow. I recently picked up a Toshiba e310, and was grimacing over its limitations, until I realized that it has 192x more memory (including the flash card), and a CPU that is over 200x faster (given that a 8Mhz 68000 pushed about 0.8 MIPS, and the 206Mhz Strongarm does about 220 MIPS) than the Atari 512ST that I owned as a youth: The Atari ST that seemed virtually limitless, on which I played some great games, and did programming in C++ and GFA Basic (and others did MIDI composition, document publishing, etc). This is ignoring the fact that the 512ST was worlds ahead of the prior generation like the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe. These little PDAs pack a tremendous amount of punch for their size.
Sure you do. I had problems with digital cable so they stuck a 6db or so signal amplifier in the basement, plugging it into an electrical outlet.
and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.
Maybe he means that the unshielded are the exception: There's something wrong with the cable (maybe a break in the shielding) so it no longer is shielded
It uses PocketPC 2002, a variant of Windows CE which, while carrying a similar API and sharing some GUI elements, has nothing to do with the x86 Windows lines (i.e. it isn't remotely a "Stripped down version of Windows 98"). PocketPC 2002 is very streamlined for the types of operations that people do with their PDA, and for that it works very nicely.
I just bought a e310 a couple of days ago, and came across quite a few articles that stated that Toshiba is keeping the e570 very quiet, not even releasing it to retailers, but instead they want it purely for enterprise customers. I actually found it on http://www.cendirect.com (A Canadian place that I buy from) for less than the lesser equipped e310 (the 570 is at a sweet price), however my main criteria was size and battery life, so I still went with the e310.
So what you're saying is that because of CRC or other hash value restricted entropy, you should just pile on the layers? Well what if the applications error detection algorithm misses 1 in 6 quadzillion errors? Do you put another algorithm over it?
The point is that TCP already supports a pretty feature rich set of error detection and correction features, and many people add another layer purely because of ignorance, not because they know a better way.
Of course y-modem-G made sense when you already had an error correcting connection (sort of like people putting their own error correction in TCP streams, despite the fact that the TCP itself is error corrected), like v42 or MNP5.
What happened to you in Canada that made you so fervently anti-Canadian (in another post you claimed that you were a Canadian awaiting a green card?)? The continual references to stereotypical "Canadianisms" like "aboot" (which is more of a Minnesota/Winsconsin thing, like most supposed Canadianisms, but alas..they mock it on South Park, so surely it must be true! Ha ha, dumb Canadian hosers!) is just sad: You have some deep seated anger issues that you need to work through I think.
Canada is a country of 30,000,000 people, and they can all express whatever opinions that they want, within bounds of not not promoting hate, and that's ay okay. Mary Walsh makes fun of George Bush: So be it-It's a comedy show for crying out loud (oh, goodness, South Park and the Simpsons made fun of Canada...damn those Americans! The fact that you brought up This Hour Has 22 Minutes as some sort of example boggles the mind) I'm _very_ thankful that we don't have the sort of pseudo-free society where every belief is tempered by a raised brow of inappropriateness, or even more frighteningly, supposed "patriotism". No matter how much you are a Bush fan, just wait until election time comes around, and the 9/11 honeymoon is over...
It wasn't an "Active Al-Queda" cell, but that was the dramatization of the OPP (disputed by the actual intelligence agency of CSIS), however they actually did not break the law so they weren't arrested (although they were under apparent heavy scrutiny). I have no doubt that their current whereabouts is well known to whoevers justiction they entered. The drug thing is just dumb: The US has drugs POURING in every border (because they have a very, very large portion of the population that partakes of drugs), primarily in the Gulf region. Are the departments "on the take", or are they just realizing that it's a useless battle that has proven to be a complete waste of time and money (the US dumps billions into anti-drug crusades, yet strangely the street price keeps dropping due to overwhelming supply). Oh, God, we're not falling hook line and sinker for the myopic, unbelievably unrealistic approach of the DEA...we must be second rate!
Of course every single one of the 9/11 terrorists waltzed directly into US airports from foreign ports, never having touched Canada, but that didn't stop the US media from immediately looking North. If there is one trait that the US is guilty of, it's looking externally to solve every problem.
As far as heroin and pot: You have got to be kidding. Firstly, maybe the US could stop being a source of explosives, handguns, machine guns, etc, before it DARES to complain that its own people are busy buying illicit drugs (there is no supply without a demand). The US exports crime, it doesn't import it, so there's a VERY good reason why US calls for better borders, etc, fall on deaf ears: How about they do something themselves first before looking North for a scapegoat?
And this whole "anti-American" BS is such ridiculous tripe (you a reader of the National Post by chance? It pushes that same sort of garbage, or at least it did before readership fell through the floor and they changed the editorial slant): Yeah, a lot of Canadians have issues with certain traits of certain Americans, just as people in Minnesota are "anti-New Yorkian" and they don't like a lot of New York traits, and New Yorkers are anti-West Coastian. Get over it for Christ sake. Boo frickin' hoo, some Canadians don't like over militarization, damn them!
How in the world did you acquire enough mod points to post at 2? Such (anally) inflamed, trolling rhetoric must be some sort of karma-suicide attempt (however it's buried deep enough that it'll be missed).
Regarding Canada's military: I'm extremely proud of the fact that we do have a small military, and what we do have is incredibly effective in the type of assaults where they are needed (apart from having US F16s dropping bombs on them during training exercises). Any chest thumping pride over having an oversized military (and being directly responsible for arming much of the world that you ironically need the large military to defend yourselves against) is such blatant ignorance that it boggles the mind: I suppose you consider North Korea to be a real power house, first rate nation? Nazi Germany was a real model to be admired? WW II Japan was something all nations should strive for?
My cable modem runs at 2.5Mbps (though normally I get about 1.5) downstream, 500Kbps downstream, and the service is fantastic, and I pay something like $44.95 CDN (~$30 US). The system works beautifully up here because we have a large, powerful phone company, and some large, powerful cable companies, and they are tooth and nail fighting each other to get your business : If cable pisses me off, I'll get HSE, and vice versa. Other options have floated around on the fringe (a radio internet system called "LookTV", among others), but the current low prices prohibit their success so far (again: If the prices did rise, then the alternatives would too).
To make matter even more interesting, the phone company sells a satellite TV service to try to take cable customers away from the cable companies, and the cable companies sell digital cable to try to keep customers from the phone companies, hence the broadband cable is another selling point : I have resisted even considering satellite TV merely because I use and enjoy my broadband cable, and along with it comes cable, making it convenient for me to get the whole package.
I guess my point is this: Even with only two true competitors, capitalism works fantastically. I think some parts of the US are screwed because either they are one and the same, or some of the players are colluding with others. Anyways, cheers.
P.S. Recently both the phone and the cable companies have announced tiered services, and in some cases minor price increases, however all have been quite fair and I wouldn't consider it gouging.
Huh? Actually he specifically said that the Radeon 8500 had several features that are superior to the GF4, but that driver implementation were keeping them from their potential. I may have missed it, but I saw nothing about any next gen ATI in there.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think it's funny that you think it's your business that anyone thinks that someone else's reproductive activities are their business.
I have a fairly low UID (though there are obviously almost 10,000 people with lower UIDs), and it really is by chance: In the early days of Slashdot a co-worker pointed the site out to me, so I dropped by and created an account, and promptly forgot about it. Sometime later when I came back and used a different ID for a while, until I remembered this one and, thanks to Hotmail (I have been very thankful that I've used hotmail as a core email for a lot of services: During the same period of time my private emails have changed probably 6 times), recovered my password.
It isn't very poorly implemented?
Damn, I was getting primed to use the engine metaphor to explain how ridiculously useless Mhz is (why are so many people so defensive of it as a mesure? These people apparently would be lining up to buy a 8086 if they ran it at 3Ghz : It must be _really_ fast then, right?). It's actually a perfect metaphor, because so many engine specs are held as singularily valuable, when in reality they have little value with the context of the whole package. For instance, does it matter if an engine does 18,000RPM if it puts out 25HP? Does it matter that the old Mustang 5.0L engine put out about 220HP when a new Nissan 3.5L engine puts out 255?
I am prone to believe that the simplistic among us like one nice, simple number that they can fawn about and caress, hence why AMD catered to them with the AMD ratings.
Over- and under-population is merely a subjective measure of what's tolerable per person, and the pro-immigration stance of "Well we need them to save us from de-population" is absolutely ridiculous : What happens if the population starts contracting? Oh, right, the GDP (at least on the whole, which has absolutely nothing to do with the lifestyle or personal wealth of an individual) will drop and old age security, built on a tenuous "bet on the future" falsity, will need to be rebuilt. Big deal. The world-calamity claims regarding these scenarios have been grossly overblown by the pro-immigration camp, as if we should actually be grateful that people will move here.
This is a real sore point because here in Canada there has been a major push to open the door to immigrants from around the globe, all based on the absurd "we must keep growing" philosophy. Yet at the same time policies to encourage the growth of our native population stagnates (nationalized daycare, for example). And before a knee jerk wanker, of which there are countless, comes in crying about how I'm a racist, please realize that there are Canadians, right now, pure 100% blood Canadians, of every race and religion, and these are the people who I think should have a reasonable ability to have children and live good lives, perpetuating the traits of this country that make it such a immigration destination in the first place.
Firstly, lets come to an agreement that there is such a thing as "genetics", and this perpetuates traits like intelligence along reproductive lines. Secondarily there are social and environmental traits like criminality, etc. If you did a comprehensive study, I guarantee you that the most prolific breeders are those lower on either scale (like always I make no claims that this is all inclusive : There are geniuses with excellent money making skills with a dozen kids, just as there are people in the lower realms with no children). The observation is that it's the worst traits of humanity that are perpetuated, and it's the exact opposite of classic "Survival of the fittest" : A survival of the non-fittest, death of the fittest, if you will.
It's funny how reproduction in the whole falls into an "evil to discuss" category, at least in regards to "white man" : If a "white man" discusses observations regarding reproduction, it's an evil, Hitler-esque, racist plot to oppress people(s).
Where I got what? The idea that it's hard to have a traditional life anymore? The idea that the least capable people are parts of the planet are acting as the breeding grounds? Sorry, I didn't need anyone to tell me this: It's a logical conclusion.
I completely agree, yet we're now at the point where it's exactly the opposite: In Canada we've had to continually increase immigration to keep the population from contracting, as the "native" birth rate is far below the necessary 2.2 or so. Many advanced European countries, such as Italy, are much further along this curve and have a serious population implosion in the near future. It's a bizarre irony that the world has taken a "reverse Darwinism" : Those least capable of supporting offspring are having them by the dozen, and those theoretically most capable aren't. I fear for the genetic future of the planet.
Sidenote: Personally I think the premise of population contraction is a fantastic one -> Contrary to any "Straight from China/India/Some other obscenely overpopulated area of Earth" BS about North America or Europe being "underpopulated", it seems to me that already we're grossly overpopulated, and we continue it based on outdated, unsustainable notions of drawing graphs of GDP growth, home value growth, etc, all of which is supported only by a perpetually increasing population, yet at the same time the net wealth of all of us is decreasing (soon we'll all have no National parks, no rural areas, and we'll all be just so grateful that the GDP rate increased 4.7%, watching the screen at the end of our tiny habitat-cube
I find it interesting that the article on how rich we are nowadays fails to take into account inflation, or adjusted dollars, or even a spending parity analysis.
The way I see it as this: To live in a large city where you can earn a fair wage costs unbelievable amounts (look at the rents for the New York City area, to live in a tiny closet), but if you live in a smaller town the likelihood of you working in a intelligence/reasonable paying field drops dramatically (unless it's in a core, location sensitive field like the medical field). The reality is that it is now next to impossible to afford kids, and very likely a married couple will have both spouses working. In the 50s/60s the standard model was the mother at home, keeping the home, the father working a job, one or two cars, and a home full of kids (i.e. 3 - 5 kids). Now I can't even imagine the financials necessary to make that work.
Just meandering.
He covered Redhat in services, and VA has HEAVILY gone the way of proprietary code with Sourceforge (the fact that no one cries foul on here astounds me regarding that): VA had to turn to what, ironically, most of its mouthpieces cast as pure evil, to have a hope of surviving. I presume that Mandrake makes a living on services.
By the same token, the fact that an artist has worked hard making music is all good and fine. That doesn't mean that artist is entitled to any money from it. His sweat and tears is worth, in dollar terms, exactly what the free market says it's worth. And the free market, thanks to technology, is now in a position to say it has zero ECONOMIC value. If the artist is uncomfortable with this new reality, he can either look for other revenue streams as he performs for pleasure... Or he can find a job like the rest of us.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Regardless of whether or not you think the state of music was at its peak in the 80s (hint: It wasn't. I love 80s music because it defined my youth/teens, but I have the wisdom to realize that it's the same crap music that was made, and the same crap music that continues to be made), it is theft to illegally copy music. The LAW entitles them to their royalties if you decide that you want to listen to it (if you argued that you decide not to listen to it, then all power to you, but that isn't the gist of what you're saying). I was going to go into countless metaphors of where one could break the law and social convenants and get what they want for free, but it's a worthless game: Either you understand the basic tenants and contracts that maintain this thing we call society, or you believe that it's all some anarchy held together by the strings of technology. If you believe the latter, then I worry for the society you believe we are headed into.
I completely and absolutely agree with you. In fact, during times of my misguided youth I was a fan of the "warez" scene, but lost all interest because the noise to signal ratio was just far too high: I would rather go to the store and spend $50 for the game than spend night after night grabbing incomplete copies with bizarro little errors that strangely made it past all of the error checks, etc. I know friends who tried to get the new Eminem album, only to encounter countless screwed up copies, looped copies, etc.
I have no doubt, whatsoever, that this isn't the act of digital vandals, but rather is a concerted effort by publishers to discourage piracy (and personally I applaud them for a pretty brilliant move, though I'm sure some "GIVE ME EVERYTHING FOR FREE! IT'S MY RIGHT!" weenie will claim that this is a violation of some amendment or other). It's quite a brilliant stroke really: Put servers covertly on all the networks serving up bogus songs (which, because of laziness, will propagate to more and more servers as people download the flawed copy and don't audition and delete it) or bogus warez files (or servers that mysteriously disconnect/freeze at 98%), and you'll build such an inconvenience around it that the $15 price of a CD or $40 for a game becomes quite palatable.
Of course there are technical solutions to piracy legitimacy, but all of them either centralize the data, or require you to explicitly become a part of the criminal process, and things like that are easy to crack by the strong arm of the law. The decentralized, everyone-is-an-equal aspect of the P2P networks is a curse as much as a benefit.
Doh...I did programming in _C_ on it, not C++. Sorry about any confusion this may have caused.
BTW: If there are any Atari fans out there, I came across this site that is quite a walk down memory lane.
That's pretty vague. What makes the SPARC better than the StrongARM? As one of the prior posters mentioned: It's mostly a perception thing that we think of these PDAs as slow. I recently picked up a Toshiba e310, and was grimacing over its limitations, until I realized that it has 192x more memory (including the flash card), and a CPU that is over 200x faster (given that a 8Mhz 68000 pushed about 0.8 MIPS, and the 206Mhz Strongarm does about 220 MIPS) than the Atari 512ST that I owned as a youth: The Atari ST that seemed virtually limitless, on which I played some great games, and did programming in C++ and GFA Basic (and others did MIDI composition, document publishing, etc). This is ignoring the fact that the 512ST was worlds ahead of the prior generation like the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe. These little PDAs pack a tremendous amount of punch for their size.
If you are from the future, then why doesn't your posting history show more first posts? Clearly you must be lying!
You don't have any signal amplifiers
Sure you do. I had problems with digital cable so they stuck a 6db or so signal amplifier in the basement, plugging it into an electrical outlet.
and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.
Maybe he means that the unshielded are the exception: There's something wrong with the cable (maybe a break in the shielding) so it no longer is shielded
It uses PocketPC 2002, a variant of Windows CE which, while carrying a similar API and sharing some GUI elements, has nothing to do with the x86 Windows lines (i.e. it isn't remotely a "Stripped down version of Windows 98"). PocketPC 2002 is very streamlined for the types of operations that people do with their PDA, and for that it works very nicely.
I just bought a e310 a couple of days ago, and came across quite a few articles that stated that Toshiba is keeping the e570 very quiet, not even releasing it to retailers, but instead they want it purely for enterprise customers. I actually found it on http://www.cendirect.com (A Canadian place that I buy from) for less than the lesser equipped e310 (the 570 is at a sweet price), however my main criteria was size and battery life, so I still went with the e310.
So what you're saying is that because of CRC or other hash value restricted entropy, you should just pile on the layers? Well what if the applications error detection algorithm misses 1 in 6 quadzillion errors? Do you put another algorithm over it?
The point is that TCP already supports a pretty feature rich set of error detection and correction features, and many people add another layer purely because of ignorance, not because they know a better way.
Of course y-modem-G made sense when you already had an error correcting connection (sort of like people putting their own error correction in TCP streams, despite the fact that the TCP itself is error corrected), like v42 or MNP5.
What happened to you in Canada that made you so fervently anti-Canadian (in another post you claimed that you were a Canadian awaiting a green card?)? The continual references to stereotypical "Canadianisms" like "aboot" (which is more of a Minnesota/Winsconsin thing, like most supposed Canadianisms, but alas..they mock it on South Park, so surely it must be true! Ha ha, dumb Canadian hosers!) is just sad: You have some deep seated anger issues that you need to work through I think.
Canada is a country of 30,000,000 people, and they can all express whatever opinions that they want, within bounds of not not promoting hate, and that's ay okay. Mary Walsh makes fun of George Bush: So be it-It's a comedy show for crying out loud (oh, goodness, South Park and the Simpsons made fun of Canada...damn those Americans! The fact that you brought up This Hour Has 22 Minutes as some sort of example boggles the mind) I'm _very_ thankful that we don't have the sort of pseudo-free society where every belief is tempered by a raised brow of inappropriateness, or even more frighteningly, supposed "patriotism". No matter how much you are a Bush fan, just wait until election time comes around, and the 9/11 honeymoon is over...
It wasn't an "Active Al-Queda" cell, but that was the dramatization of the OPP (disputed by the actual intelligence agency of CSIS), however they actually did not break the law so they weren't arrested (although they were under apparent heavy scrutiny). I have no doubt that their current whereabouts is well known to whoevers justiction they entered. The drug thing is just dumb: The US has drugs POURING in every border (because they have a very, very large portion of the population that partakes of drugs), primarily in the Gulf region. Are the departments "on the take", or are they just realizing that it's a useless battle that has proven to be a complete waste of time and money (the US dumps billions into anti-drug crusades, yet strangely the street price keeps dropping due to overwhelming supply). Oh, God, we're not falling hook line and sinker for the myopic, unbelievably unrealistic approach of the DEA...we must be second rate!
Of course every single one of the 9/11 terrorists waltzed directly into US airports from foreign ports, never having touched Canada, but that didn't stop the US media from immediately looking North. If there is one trait that the US is guilty of, it's looking externally to solve every problem.
As far as heroin and pot: You have got to be kidding. Firstly, maybe the US could stop being a source of explosives, handguns, machine guns, etc, before it DARES to complain that its own people are busy buying illicit drugs (there is no supply without a demand). The US exports crime, it doesn't import it, so there's a VERY good reason why US calls for better borders, etc, fall on deaf ears: How about they do something themselves first before looking North for a scapegoat?
And this whole "anti-American" BS is such ridiculous tripe (you a reader of the National Post by chance? It pushes that same sort of garbage, or at least it did before readership fell through the floor and they changed the editorial slant): Yeah, a lot of Canadians have issues with certain traits of certain Americans, just as people in Minnesota are "anti-New Yorkian" and they don't like a lot of New York traits, and New Yorkers are anti-West Coastian. Get over it for Christ sake. Boo frickin' hoo, some Canadians don't like over militarization, damn them!
How in the world did you acquire enough mod points to post at 2? Such (anally) inflamed, trolling rhetoric must be some sort of karma-suicide attempt (however it's buried deep enough that it'll be missed).
Regarding Canada's military: I'm extremely proud of the fact that we do have a small military, and what we do have is incredibly effective in the type of assaults where they are needed (apart from having US F16s dropping bombs on them during training exercises). Any chest thumping pride over having an oversized military (and being directly responsible for arming much of the world that you ironically need the large military to defend yourselves against) is such blatant ignorance that it boggles the mind: I suppose you consider North Korea to be a real power house, first rate nation? Nazi Germany was a real model to be admired? WW II Japan was something all nations should strive for?
My cable modem runs at 2.5Mbps (though normally I get about 1.5) downstream, 500Kbps downstream, and the service is fantastic, and I pay something like $44.95 CDN (~$30 US). The system works beautifully up here because we have a large, powerful phone company, and some large, powerful cable companies, and they are tooth and nail fighting each other to get your business : If cable pisses me off, I'll get HSE, and vice versa. Other options have floated around on the fringe (a radio internet system called "LookTV", among others), but the current low prices prohibit their success so far (again: If the prices did rise, then the alternatives would too).
To make matter even more interesting, the phone company sells a satellite TV service to try to take cable customers away from the cable companies, and the cable companies sell digital cable to try to keep customers from the phone companies, hence the broadband cable is another selling point : I have resisted even considering satellite TV merely because I use and enjoy my broadband cable, and along with it comes cable, making it convenient for me to get the whole package.
I guess my point is this: Even with only two true competitors, capitalism works fantastically. I think some parts of the US are screwed because either they are one and the same, or some of the players are colluding with others. Anyways, cheers.
P.S. Recently both the phone and the cable companies have announced tiered services, and in some cases minor price increases, however all have been quite fair and I wouldn't consider it gouging.
Huh? Actually he specifically said that the Radeon 8500 had several features that are superior to the GF4, but that driver implementation were keeping them from their potential. I may have missed it, but I saw nothing about any next gen ATI in there.