Last I checked Canada was a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy (and is also somehow a federation of states), not a republic. However given the actual political situation, your point still stands, although I'm not sure that a Monarch necessarily requires any social mandate or social contract to rule or theoretically needs to feel bound by any constitution.
Personally I don't mind advertising too much, if I'm looking at a site that is helpful or one I like, then I certainly don't mind, the only times where I can actually say I find it intrusive is on sites that are there purely for ad revenue, usually with content scraped from other sites, and those I can detect almost entirely (using a manual process no less) by the fact that they are infested with advertising, so in a sense gratuitous and inappropriate advertising is a deterrent all on its own, sure I am giving whoever is responsible for those sites revenue on that one instance where I come across the site, but then that's it, surely advertisers must realise that sites like that are not generally going to generate revenue anyway.
So I guess you could say I do most of my ad-blocking mentally, with an added bonus of blacklisting useless sites at the same time.
As a side note, I find it quite interesting when you compare the web in general (and the advertising therein), second life (and the commercial mess that particular sim already is and appears to be aspiring to become) and real life (I spent a moderate period of my life in Hong Kong, a place where the adverts and neon certainly add to the atmosphere) and try and figure out which advertising actually works. I seem to find that I buy things that I hear about from others, much more than what I see advertised. maybe its time for people to be able to get cash for real life referrals for any type of product (you could fill out a form to say who recommended what when you pay for your shopping....). Advertising only really seems to work when the advertiser has a novel product, that is useful or attractive *and* it is not already well known.
Oh and cold calling (telephone or in person) and junk mail (whether email or real mail) never work, If I want a credit card, I'll talk to my bank and then shop around, if I want double glazing, I'll find someone to do it.
Funny, maybe I should take my own views into account when I organise my own advertising.
Although if the Firefox code base remains open, and as long as extensions can be written, there is nothing to stop anyone from creating ad-blocking extensions, after all it is something that many people seem to like, moreover if there is (however unlikely it may be) a concerted effort to prevent ad-blocking technology within Firefox there is always the option of creating a fork with those countermeasures removed.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea that the Mozilla Foundation *appears* to be dependent on Google's advertising revenue, and I can see how that *could* impact decision making, but I dont see a whole lot of alternative funding streams, nor a threat that could not be overcome, that is after all why we like open standards and open code, no one person or group truly has 100% control and it is nearly impossible to take something that is free and open and turn it into something proprietary and closed..
To save you having to watch it again, (although feel free) here is an updated version, I assume its close to what you were thinking
Brian:Are you the Open Document Foundation? Reg: Fuck off! Brian: What? Reg: Open Document Foundation. We're the Open Document Alliance*! Open Document Foundation. Cawk. Francis: Wankers. Brian: Can I... join your group? Reg: No. Piss off. Brian: I didn't want to code this stuff. It's only a job. I hate closed source formats as much as anybody. ODA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh. Reg: Schtum. Judith: Are you sure? Brian: Oh, dead sure. I hate closed source formats already. Reg: Listen. If you really wanted to join the Open Document Alliance*, you'd have to really hate closed source formats. Brian: I do! Reg: Oh, yeah? How much? Brian: A lot! Reg: Right. You're in. Listen. The only thing we hate more than closed source formats are the fucking Open Document Foundation. ODA: Yeah... Judith: Splitters. ODA: Splitters... Francis: And the Popular Alliance for Open Documents. ODA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters... Loretta: And the Open Document Alliance. ODA: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters... Reg: What? Loretta: The Open Document Alliance*. Splitters. Reg: We're the Open Document Alliance*! Loretta: Oh. I thought we were the Open Document Group. Reg: Open Document Alliance*! Francis: Whatever happened to the Open Document Group, Reg? Reg: He's over there. ODA: Splitter!
* I Know its ODF Alliance but that doesn't work as well and this is, after all humour/satire.(Based on Movie "the Life of Brian")
Depends on the ebook,.lit's seem to be the 'least' easy to convert using grep and a regex, what with DRM and compression so for that I use 'clit'(Seriously), most of my ebooks were palm pdb's and there are millions of conversion tools around for those although I cant remember what I used, probably something called pdb2txt or similar, I don't tend to buy them in that format any more, but at least the option is there. Anything html I strip the html (mainly because I prefer to keep just plain text files around, I don't read many books with pictures, and diagrams on a 320x240 are hardly worth it. Plus with plain text you can play with the layouts more easily using just the reader) although html is supported on opie-reader anyway.
The main downside I find is simply finding places that sell decent e-books at a decent price without to many hoops to jump through on the DRM side (I'm on Linux so luckily conversion is easy, but not really something I want to have to do) although project gutenburg has kept me entertained for probably hundreds of commute hours.
Upgrade to something like Familiar, (or anything down the Open Embedded line) pretty much everything you mentioned goes away, battery life improves, you can watch full length DVD's (albeit at a small resolution), plus as a bonus you can use the unstable releases and retain those MS random lock ups, but in exchange for more features. Oh and if you use a PDA for reading Ebooks, then Opie-Reader is definitely the way to go, the best reader, once you have converted them all to text or html of course (but then I do that whenever I get an ebook anyway).
Actually, AFAIK Knowingly misleading the house (i.e. lying to the house of commons) is a pretty serious thing to do, and, generally requires an apology and may be followed by being sacked. Creatively not answering questions, misunderstanding questions or generally poking fun at whoever is doing the asking is fine, the louder the better. Personally I think all elected bodies should have arcane rules on language ("the other place"), a decent amount of pageantry and the atmosphere of a pub where the supporters of rival football teams have accidentally ended up in the same room and are debating a controversial penalty decision. Oh and having a *non* elected upper house (one that is not directly elected and somewhat immune from short term public opinion) is necessary to ensure that knee jerk legislation and short term measures do not become law, although how well that is working at this time is debatable.
Don't worry about it to much, we 'Eurotrash' have effectively been priced out of the US market, more for you to get your teeth into.
Saying that, *IF* we are really lucky and the dollar continues to fall (£1 (GBP) = @ $2.10 (USD) atm), maybe I'll be able to put a full tank of petrol into the car without re mortgaging the house (good job I don't fall into the 'sub-prime' bracket when it comes to credit.), although it's probably more likely that OPEC will consider pricing in Euros and really kick up a storm.
Bah, I Know some would disagree (newyorkcitylawyer being one of them) but in my opinion it should always be up to a jury to ascertain guilt and then a judge to set a reasonable sentence (after all you can appeal a sentence in most places, even if you don't intend to appeal the verdict). Of course this relies on common sense on the part of judges (and it may mean that electing judges is not such a great idea (but then I am not sure how it ever is) as you don't want politically motivated sentencing). Why we feel that a judge can dispense 'justice' but is incapable of making an informed decision about sentencing is beyond me, I know I'd rather be at the mercy of a judge in possession of all the relevant facts about a case to be fair and sensible about sentencing* than rely politically motivated guidelines.
*The same, in my opinion, goes for precedents, each case should be judged upon its merits, not based on other different cases, with sentences being determined by effectively a third party. Although I do understand that there are quite a few people who would disagree with me on the basis that the level of uncertainty that would be introduced into the legal process would be so great as to irrevocably damage the process.
Punishment under law should be for crimes that have been committed, and can be proven to have been committed, not what could potentially have been done along the way, punishing for what potentially could have happened would set a dangerous precedent. As an example, someone arrested for making a threat with a knife should not receive the same punishment as someone who stabs someone, bot are serious offences but one is considerably worse. Even in this case they are apparently only being charged with things that they actually did (even if some of the charges are potentially vague...and as you pointed out, it seems the norm to use every charge possible and see what sticks) not what they might have done, or far worse, potentially could have done. One would hope that the magistrate or judge that deals with this case will give due consideration what was done, and not what could have been done when sentencing.
The worrying thing is that there appear to be an huge number of people who are so incredibly desensitised to the type of imagery that you describe, that they would not suffer any palpable effects after seeing something similar, not just those people (like fire-fighters, paramedics, soldiers etc..) who could reasonably be expected to have direct experience of such things on a regular basis, but simply people who cannot distinguish real from fake, and more importantly seem to lose the ability to extrapolate the impact or consequences of things shown in the real imagery, a real inhibitor to empathy and understanding.
IT only fails if the 512 is in, doesn't seem to matter which slot its in though, I haven't actually bothered to check how memtests work in detail, so I haven't gone any further with it oh and its bog standard no brand 144 pin PC100.
Its *definitely* the RAM that is the issue here, I know because I have tried to find a workaround or a fix using the rather large pile of other laptops and bits thereof that I have lying around my office and the only thing I haven't yet been able to replace is the RAM, moreover the symptoms are right for it to be a RAM issue, I know that there are a million other issues that could give similar indications, but really in this case its probably the 5 year old stick of RAM. Not to mention everything works fine if I take out the suspect RAM and replace it with something I know works. If it makes people happy I will make time to fix it and post a progress report in my journal.
See 'geeks' gouge innocent customers in shops, on Slashdot everybody tries to troubleshoot for you for free, madness, if people knew about this we'd put all those naff computer repair places (well and the good ones) out of business!
Probably not citizenship but I bet quite a few places may grant asylum. Cuba might be worth looking at, it looks like a nice place, I was going to go there on holiday at one point so you may want to think about it, I would guess that most of the western world would simply see you as running from a legitimate (and it is mostly apart from the size of the fine) civil judgement and deny any claims you may try to make.
Its the RAM because if I remove the 512 and replace it with a 64 (or leave the 256 in place on its own) the issue disappears, with the 256 in either slot, the graphics card has 32Mb on board, I cant run a memtest though as the test fails. I would leave the laptop with just the 256 but its dog slow (the additional 64 makes little difference).
OK now I am amazed, given the 1000 dollars you show as the monthly cost of healthcare + servicing student debt, I thought Id just check to see how much comprehensive private health would cost me in the UK if I went private, the quote was £57/m or about $114 for me and my partner, never mind the fact that we'd be covered under the NHS, next off as far as collage debt is concerned, my partner pays maybe £150 a month on her university loans of £12k ($24k), so that's a total of about $300, throw in repayments on a £100,000 ($200,000) home at £600 ($1200) and at $1614 were still $386 short of that, I'm fairly sure that covers my monthly travel costs.
So it would appear that there is some gouging going on, something that especially impacts on the less wealthy, and on top of that we have this extremely intrusive employment process. I think I am finally beginning to understand this whole 'big business' dominance and lack of consumer rights that you hear about the US, I mean I am and have been aware of them, but I have never quantified them in this manner.
Thanks for that, food for thought. Oh, and yes I think there would be a bit of an outcry if the situation were the same in Europe, if only from the unions, I would hope our politicians dont have the nerve to attempt to emulate the US in these matters.
My laptop has a definite RAM issue, it doesn't appear to be too serious as it only very infrequently suffers any major crashes or hangs, but on boot it repeatedly reports that the 'system memory has changed' quoting the new value as something between 618Mb and the real value of 768Mb. I really should swap the 'stick' out, but I hardly use the damn thing.
(all right it has 2 'sticks' of RAM, I was going to write stick and see if anyone called me on it, to assess how altruistic the Slashdot community may be compared to the gouging geeks but then realised it may make me look a little stupid... not hard,. but still. (damn peer pressure))
I think I 'did something else', I mentally merged a couple of posts, notably the parents reference to budget cuts and somehow applied it to your post. Ah well at least I made what I feel are some valid points, even if they appear to be slightly redundant in relation to this thread.
I'll grab a coffee and then hopefully normal service will resume.
I haven't seen one, but I cant quite see how useful it would be, after all you can swap out a card to ensure that the problem is with the card, but generally cannot swap out the memory on the card (well you can on the MGA cards that I have on the shelf but they are a little old....) so identifying the actual failure beyond the fact that it is on the card probably wouldn't help (except in a small number of fairly specialised circumstances). It may be useful if you were seeing a performance degradation I suppose, but every graphics card failure I have seen has been either terminal or rendered the card unstable (artefacts on screen and regular crashes, that one was memory apparently). Still it would certainly be interesting.
Assuming the drive contains data with a value that exceeds $2000*
*Although family photographs, home videos etc.. are probably easily worth that
Also on the price I have seen a hardware failure render a RAID'ed SCSI disk array *very* broken, leading to some rather bad writes, cost to recover? $64k at the current exchange rate, at least they implemented a backup system fairly rapidly thereafter.
In terms of funding, the Iraq war costs half a billion dollars more a month than the Vietnam war at its peak, and yes, that's adjusted for inflation, it doesn't take into account other factors like the actual government tax revenue and other expenditures but given that the US is further in the black than ever and more than anyone else it is sufficient to nullify at least your financial argument.
As for manpower, it is clear that the Vietnam war was a significantly higher drain both in terms of actual numbers and in terms of percentage of population, but again we cannot compare the 'quality' of the troops involved in terms of education, or what they would be doing if they were not at war (one would suggest that for the current conflict, a large proportion would be in the military anyway). However, I am not sure that either war would put a significant strain on the pool of people required for this project.
What is more significant in my opinion (after all comparing wars is futile as they are incomparably different in almost all areas, except financing) is that the Apollo program was driven in part by to the US rivalry with the USSR, there is no equivalent rivalry at this time, as 'Terrorism' is not a threat that could be said to pit US culture and capability against 'Terrorist' culture and capability. (The media / government / propaganda appears to be trying to create a similar rivalry with china but its not there yet) Of course if the Taliban or Al-Qaida decide to try and set up a base on the moon then that situation will change.
In short, I don't doubt that the US is capable of mounting such a program, I am however sceptical that it has the political or financial will to do so at this time.
Re:How to win the moon race
on
The New Moon Race
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
100 years changes pretty much everything given the current and past rates of change and development, but the change is gradual, people forget what things were like 20 years ago. If people are looking back in 100 years and realising that the choices that were made in the past toppled the US as a dominant super power and didn't provide them with all they hoped and dreamed about then they will only be in the same position as the UK or France today. Things change, you have to make those choices now and hope that they stand the test of time. Personally I think that 5 or more independent efforts to get back into and develop space travel and associated technologies are not the ideal solution, much better to have one concentrated use of our combined efforts. Saying that rivalry goes a long way to spur people on, and not engaging in it at all may enable one to reap the benefits without the risks (if others do try). Which is the best option will be clear in 50 years, and will appear to have been obvious in 100.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think that in a country of 300 million that is "a diverse country with diverse ideas" there'd be more than 2 major political party's.
Last I checked Canada was a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy (and is also somehow a federation of states), not a republic. However given the actual political situation, your point still stands, although I'm not sure that a Monarch necessarily requires any social mandate or social contract to rule or theoretically needs to feel bound by any constitution.
Whatever works I suppose,
Personally I don't mind advertising too much, if I'm looking at a site that is helpful or one I like, then I certainly don't mind, the only times where I can actually say I find it intrusive is on sites that are there purely for ad revenue, usually with content scraped from other sites, and those I can detect almost entirely (using a manual process no less) by the fact that they are infested with advertising, so in a sense gratuitous and inappropriate advertising is a deterrent all on its own, sure I am giving whoever is responsible for those sites revenue on that one instance where I come across the site, but then that's it, surely advertisers must realise that sites like that are not generally going to generate revenue anyway.
So I guess you could say I do most of my ad-blocking mentally, with an added bonus of blacklisting useless sites at the same time.
As a side note, I find it quite interesting when you compare the web in general (and the advertising therein), second life (and the commercial mess that particular sim already is and appears to be aspiring to become) and real life (I spent a moderate period of my life in Hong Kong, a place where the adverts and neon certainly add to the atmosphere) and try and figure out which advertising actually works. I seem to find that I buy things that I hear about from others, much more than what I see advertised. maybe its time for people to be able to get cash for real life referrals for any type of product (you could fill out a form to say who recommended what when you pay for your shopping....). Advertising only really seems to work when the advertiser has a novel product, that is useful or attractive *and* it is not already well known.
Oh and cold calling (telephone or in person) and junk mail (whether email or real mail) never work, If I want a credit card, I'll talk to my bank and then shop around, if I want double glazing, I'll find someone to do it.
Funny, maybe I should take my own views into account when I organise my own advertising.
Although if the Firefox code base remains open, and as long as extensions can be written, there is nothing to stop anyone from creating ad-blocking extensions, after all it is something that many people seem to like, moreover if there is (however unlikely it may be) a concerted effort to prevent ad-blocking technology within Firefox there is always the option of creating a fork with those countermeasures removed.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea that the Mozilla Foundation *appears* to be dependent on Google's advertising revenue, and I can see how that *could* impact decision making, but I dont see a whole lot of alternative funding streams, nor a threat that could not be overcome, that is after all why we like open standards and open code, no one person or group truly has 100% control and it is nearly impossible to take something that is free and open and turn it into something proprietary and closed..
To save you having to watch it again, (although feel free) here is an updated version, I assume its close to what you were thinking
Brian:Are you the Open Document Foundation?
Reg: Fuck off!
Brian: What?
Reg: Open Document Foundation. We're the Open Document Alliance*! Open Document Foundation. Cawk.
Francis: Wankers.
Brian: Can I... join your group?
Reg: No. Piss off.
Brian: I didn't want to code this stuff. It's only a job. I hate closed source formats as much as anybody.
ODA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh.
Reg: Schtum.
Judith: Are you sure?
Brian: Oh, dead sure. I hate closed source formats already.
Reg: Listen. If you really wanted to join the Open Document Alliance*, you'd have to really hate closed source formats.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh, yeah? How much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right. You're in. Listen. The only thing we hate more than closed source formats are the fucking Open Document Foundation.
ODA: Yeah...
Judith: Splitters.
ODA: Splitters...
Francis: And the Popular Alliance for Open Documents.
ODA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
Loretta: And the Open Document Alliance.
ODA: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
Reg: What?
Loretta: The Open Document Alliance*. Splitters.
Reg: We're the Open Document Alliance*!
Loretta: Oh. I thought we were the Open Document Group.
Reg: Open Document Alliance*!
Francis: Whatever happened to the Open Document Group, Reg?
Reg: He's over there.
ODA: Splitter!
* I Know its ODF Alliance but that doesn't work as well and this is, after all humour/satire.(Based on Movie "the Life of Brian")
ribbons gibbons.
Depends on the ebook, .lit's seem to be the 'least' easy to convert using grep and a regex, what with DRM and compression so for that I use 'clit'(Seriously), most of my ebooks were palm pdb's and there are millions of conversion tools around for those although I cant remember what I used, probably something called pdb2txt or similar, I don't tend to buy them in that format any more, but at least the option is there. Anything html I strip the html (mainly because I prefer to keep just plain text files around, I don't read many books with pictures, and diagrams on a 320x240 are hardly worth it. Plus with plain text you can play with the layouts more easily using just the reader) although html is supported on opie-reader anyway.
The main downside I find is simply finding places that sell decent e-books at a decent price without to many hoops to jump through on the DRM side (I'm on Linux so luckily conversion is easy, but not really something I want to have to do) although project gutenburg has kept me entertained for probably hundreds of commute hours.
Upgrade to something like Familiar, (or anything down the Open Embedded line) pretty much everything you mentioned goes away, battery life improves, you can watch full length DVD's (albeit at a small resolution), plus as a bonus you can use the unstable releases and retain those MS random lock ups, but in exchange for more features. Oh and if you use a PDA for reading Ebooks, then Opie-Reader is definitely the way to go, the best reader, once you have converted them all to text or html of course (but then I do that whenever I get an ebook anyway).
Actually, AFAIK Knowingly misleading the house (i.e. lying to the house of commons) is a pretty serious thing to do, and, generally requires an apology and may be followed by being sacked. Creatively not answering questions, misunderstanding questions or generally poking fun at whoever is doing the asking is fine, the louder the better. Personally I think all elected bodies should have arcane rules on language ("the other place"), a decent amount of pageantry and the atmosphere of a pub where the supporters of rival football teams have accidentally ended up in the same room and are debating a controversial penalty decision. Oh and having a *non* elected upper house (one that is not directly elected and somewhat immune from short term public opinion) is necessary to ensure that knee jerk legislation and short term measures do not become law, although how well that is working at this time is debatable.
Don't worry about it to much, we 'Eurotrash' have effectively been priced out of the US market, more for you to get your teeth into.
Saying that, *IF* we are really lucky and the dollar continues to fall (£1 (GBP) = @ $2.10 (USD) atm), maybe I'll be able to put a full tank of petrol into the car without re mortgaging the house (good job I don't fall into the 'sub-prime' bracket when it comes to credit.), although it's probably more likely that OPEC will consider pricing in Euros and really kick up a storm.
Bah, I Know some would disagree (newyorkcitylawyer being one of them) but in my opinion it should always be up to a jury to ascertain guilt and then a judge to set a reasonable sentence (after all you can appeal a sentence in most places, even if you don't intend to appeal the verdict). Of course this relies on common sense on the part of judges (and it may mean that electing judges is not such a great idea (but then I am not sure how it ever is) as you don't want politically motivated sentencing). Why we feel that a judge can dispense 'justice' but is incapable of making an informed decision about sentencing is beyond me, I know I'd rather be at the mercy of a judge in possession of all the relevant facts about a case to be fair and sensible about sentencing* than rely politically motivated guidelines.
*The same, in my opinion, goes for precedents, each case should be judged upon its merits, not based on other different cases, with sentences being determined by effectively a third party. Although I do understand that there are quite a few people who would disagree with me on the basis that the level of uncertainty that would be introduced into the legal process would be so great as to irrevocably damage the process.
Punishment under law should be for crimes that have been committed, and can be proven to have been committed, not what could potentially have been done along the way, punishing for what potentially could have happened would set a dangerous precedent. As an example, someone arrested for making a threat with a knife should not receive the same punishment as someone who stabs someone, bot are serious offences but one is considerably worse. Even in this case they are apparently only being charged with things that they actually did (even if some of the charges are potentially vague...and as you pointed out, it seems the norm to use every charge possible and see what sticks) not what they might have done, or far worse, potentially could have done. One would hope that the magistrate or judge that deals with this case will give due consideration what was done, and not what could have been done when sentencing.
The worrying thing is that there appear to be an huge number of people who are so incredibly desensitised to the type of imagery that you describe, that they would not suffer any palpable effects after seeing something similar, not just those people (like fire-fighters, paramedics, soldiers etc..) who could reasonably be expected to have direct experience of such things on a regular basis, but simply people who cannot distinguish real from fake, and more importantly seem to lose the ability to extrapolate the impact or consequences of things shown in the real imagery, a real inhibitor to empathy and understanding.
IT only fails if the 512 is in, doesn't seem to matter which slot its in though, I haven't actually bothered to check how memtests work in detail, so I haven't gone any further with it oh and its bog standard no brand 144 pin PC100.
Its *definitely* the RAM that is the issue here, I know because I have tried to find a workaround or a fix using the rather large pile of other laptops and bits thereof that I have lying around my office and the only thing I haven't yet been able to replace is the RAM, moreover the symptoms are right for it to be a RAM issue, I know that there are a million other issues that could give similar indications, but really in this case its probably the 5 year old stick of RAM. Not to mention everything works fine if I take out the suspect RAM and replace it with something I know works. If it makes people happy I will make time to fix it and post a progress report in my journal.
See 'geeks' gouge innocent customers in shops, on Slashdot everybody tries to troubleshoot for you for free, madness, if people knew about this we'd put all those naff computer repair places (well and the good ones) out of business!
Probably not citizenship but I bet quite a few places may grant asylum. Cuba might be worth looking at, it looks like a nice place, I was going to go there on holiday at one point so you may want to think about it, I would guess that most of the western world would simply see you as running from a legitimate (and it is mostly apart from the size of the fine) civil judgement and deny any claims you may try to make.
Its the RAM because if I remove the 512 and replace it with a 64 (or leave the 256 in place on its own) the issue disappears, with the 256 in either slot, the graphics card has 32Mb on board, I cant run a memtest though as the test fails. I would leave the laptop with just the 256 but its dog slow (the additional 64 makes little difference).
I should have pointed that out initially.
OK now I am amazed, given the 1000 dollars you show as the monthly cost of healthcare + servicing student debt, I thought Id just check to see how much comprehensive private health would cost me in the UK if I went private, the quote was £57/m or about $114 for me and my partner, never mind the fact that we'd be covered under the NHS, next off as far as collage debt is concerned, my partner pays maybe £150 a month on her university loans of £12k ($24k), so that's a total of about $300, throw in repayments on a £100,000 ($200,000) home at £600 ($1200) and at $1614 were still $386 short of that, I'm fairly sure that covers my monthly travel costs.
So it would appear that there is some gouging going on, something that especially impacts on the less wealthy, and on top of that we have this extremely intrusive employment process. I think I am finally beginning to understand this whole 'big business' dominance and lack of consumer rights that you hear about the US, I mean I am and have been aware of them, but I have never quantified them in this manner.
Thanks for that, food for thought. Oh, and yes I think there would be a bit of an outcry if the situation were the same in Europe, if only from the unions, I would hope our politicians dont have the nerve to attempt to emulate the US in these matters.
My laptop has a definite RAM issue, it doesn't appear to be too serious as it only very infrequently suffers any major crashes or hangs, but on boot it repeatedly reports that the 'system memory has changed' quoting the new value as something between 618Mb and the real value of 768Mb. I really should swap the 'stick' out, but I hardly use the damn thing.
(all right it has 2 'sticks' of RAM, I was going to write stick and see if anyone called me on it, to assess how altruistic the Slashdot community may be compared to the gouging geeks but then realised it may make me look a little stupid... not hard,. but still. (damn peer pressure))
I think I 'did something else', I mentally merged a couple of posts, notably the parents reference to budget cuts and somehow applied it to your post. Ah well at least I made what I feel are some valid points, even if they appear to be slightly redundant in relation to this thread.
I'll grab a coffee and then hopefully normal service will resume.
I haven't seen one, but I cant quite see how useful it would be, after all you can swap out a card to ensure that the problem is with the card, but generally cannot swap out the memory on the card (well you can on the MGA cards that I have on the shelf but they are a little old....) so identifying the actual failure beyond the fact that it is on the card probably wouldn't help (except in a small number of fairly specialised circumstances). It may be useful if you were seeing a performance degradation I suppose, but every graphics card failure I have seen has been either terminal or rendered the card unstable (artefacts on screen and regular crashes, that one was memory apparently). Still it would certainly be interesting.
I read "getting gouged by greeks", mental image was of some sort of amphitheatre and gladiators with tridents.
Not sure why.
Hold on, are you suggesting systematic trouble shooting and diagnosis?
Heathen,
I use the 'WAG' method myself.
Assuming the drive contains data with a value that exceeds $2000*
*Although family photographs, home videos etc.. are probably easily worth that
Also on the price I have seen a hardware failure render a RAID'ed SCSI disk array *very* broken, leading to some rather bad writes, cost to recover? $64k at the current exchange rate, at least they implemented a backup system fairly rapidly thereafter.
In terms of funding, the Iraq war costs half a billion dollars more a month than the Vietnam war at its peak, and yes, that's adjusted for inflation, it doesn't take into account other factors like the actual government tax revenue and other expenditures but given that the US is further in the black than ever and more than anyone else it is sufficient to nullify at least your financial argument.
As for manpower, it is clear that the Vietnam war was a significantly higher drain both in terms of actual numbers and in terms of percentage of population, but again we cannot compare the 'quality' of the troops involved in terms of education, or what they would be doing if they were not at war (one would suggest that for the current conflict, a large proportion would be in the military anyway). However, I am not sure that either war would put a significant strain on the pool of people required for this project.
What is more significant in my opinion (after all comparing wars is futile as they are incomparably different in almost all areas, except financing) is that the Apollo program was driven in part by to the US rivalry with the USSR, there is no equivalent rivalry at this time, as 'Terrorism' is not a threat that could be said to pit US culture and capability against 'Terrorist' culture and capability. (The media / government / propaganda appears to be trying to create a similar rivalry with china but its not there yet) Of course if the Taliban or Al-Qaida decide to try and set up a base on the moon then that situation will change.
In short, I don't doubt that the US is capable of mounting such a program, I am however sceptical that it has the political or financial will to do so at this time.
100 years changes pretty much everything given the current and past rates of change and development, but the change is gradual, people forget what things were like 20 years ago. If people are looking back in 100 years and realising that the choices that were made in the past toppled the US as a dominant super power and didn't provide them with all they hoped and dreamed about then they will only be in the same position as the UK or France today. Things change, you have to make those choices now and hope that they stand the test of time. Personally I think that 5 or more independent efforts to get back into and develop space travel and associated technologies are not the ideal solution, much better to have one concentrated use of our combined efforts. Saying that rivalry goes a long way to spur people on, and not engaging in it at all may enable one to reap the benefits without the risks (if others do try). Which is the best option will be clear in 50 years, and will appear to have been obvious in 100.