Because they save lives? Enough accounts of accidents were parachutes could or did save peoples lives. Take a mid-air collision for example. Usually causes massive damage to the wings/controls, so even a crash landing is not possible. And you don't need an ejection seat to bail out, adrenaline and will-to-survive go a long way.
I used to fly sailplanes/gliders and while a few years back, people only used parachutes for aerobatics or cross country flights (is actually mandatory to wear chutes when doing those), now it is much more commonplace.
No, the crash area fell just outside of that region. And you won't be able to spot it on the current Google Earth photo's either, as they still pre-date the crash.
Almost. Most providers here have a FUP (Fair User Policy). So you have an unlimited plan, but if you belong to the top whatever-percentile and/or there is congestion somewhere on the network, you may get a letter/email asking you to watch and reduce your bandwidth-usuage. In practice, this means you have to be moving serious amounts of bandwidth though, e.g. Terabytes per month.
they only sell the chipsets, and other manufacturers put them into cards.
Nowadays, they sell the chips and the reference design (e.g. that's why most cards look more or less the same). Haven't seen their own branded cards here (Netherlands) for a long time.
Every iPod sold is 100 mp3's not bought. Every iPhone sold is 200 mp3's not bought. Every overpriced telco-subscription with insane sms costs is about 30-50 mp3's not bought (and that is every month). Music is being killed by gadgets, video, gaming, messaging, etc. Everyone seems to have picked the budget consumers had for music and now try to call it their own. I used to buy 10 - 20 CD's a year, now I buy games, DVD's and hardware/gadgets.
First across the channel (pure) soaring flight was in 1939; Geoffrey Stephenson in a Slingsby Kirby Gull 1. Pretty darn impressive (former glider pilot myself). Just a normal winch launch, so he actually had to do it with thermaling.
That isn't really so. Digital has built in error-correction, which works pretty well under at the first stages of signal degradation. At the same time, depending on the hardware, some errors can also be more or less hidden by the MPEG-decoder. Second, digital in digital TV is just digital data over an analogue carrier wave. So it isn't the kind of digital (on/off) people think it is.
True, but you can work around the copyright of database compilations by not using the original database. Not possible in all cases where very specific data is involved. The reasons why database compilations are copyrightable in Europe is simply the fact that compiling a (good) database can take quite a bit of effort (e.g time and money), with some exceptions to the rule (e.g. your average phonebook).
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Free markets do not work like that. Free markets fix things when there is an substantial economic incentive. Broadband infrastructure is expensive, time-consuming to lay down, dominated by strong players with political capital and related technology changes rapidly. Given those, why would the free market invest (tens of) billions of dollars in a long term, difficult and risky project? If you have billions of dollars, there are many many more ways to make more money in much less time. Free markets don't magically fix things for consumers. Free markets are about providing the opportunity for capital to move freely and as a result, make the best use of said capital. That's it. The issue is that people apply all kinds of benefits to "best use", as in no monopolies, cheap products, etc., which just isn't how it works. Especially not in the short term.
I also live in a small city in the Netherlands btw. I can choose dozen of ISP's, but only one which is faster than 8 Mbps. Not sure about the figures, but despite what the OPTA (Dutch Telecom Watchdog) says, there does exist a monopoly for "fast" internet in a considerable part of the Netherlands (wet finger approach: 25-35%). And moving to an area with faster internet??? That is rather a ridiculously expensive solution.
Run one of the Javascript benchmarks in a browser and you'll be surprised how much memory your browser can eat up. I've seen Firefox @ 450MB and Chrome @ 600MB, just by running some heavy Javascript code. While the speed increases are great, 500MB memory usage for just a browser is a lot.
We are moving towards another World War 'right' now.
Most ppl are too busy with their favorite diversion to notice.
5 years ago I saw a news-report about the "next" World War, which featured several military strategist. The issue is that the build-up is too slow for the naked eye of the average person and there are a lot of variables and uncertainties. Plus the vary naive view of the population that wars are something in the past, at least in the West. In any case, WW4 could be 10 years, could be 25, could be never if we had sane and reasonable politicians and leaders.
It's is not a MS joke, it is a Vista-one. There is a difference and there is nothing wrong with bashing Vista.
I could post my own horror-stories about Vista, but I guess most people who touched Vista will have enough of their own. And you will not hear me bash XP. XP wasn't perfect, it still isn't perfect, it wasn't safe, it still isn't safe and never will be really safe, but it is and has been good enough for me not to bash XP or MS.
Not that easy. Growing clouds is one thing (doable, in fact, growing clouds at sea has been proposed in order to combat global warming, and it wasn't expensive). But clouds don't necessarily rain out and not at the spot were you would want them. Another issue is that you need favorable winds. But it indeed is likely to be easier and cheaper than irrigation, just not as reliable.
Indeed, but if we put enough energy behind it, we could combat rising sea levels at the same time. The downside is that desalinization is fairly energy intensive, though there is enough potential for solar energy in the Sahara.
The problems would be money and political stability in the Sahara region. My country (the Netherlands) has to invest over 100 billion euros the next century to keep the rising sea and extra rainwater out. I'm rather curious to know how much of the Sahara could be irrigated with that amount and what the effects on the climate and sea-levels would be.
China has almost 1.5 Trillion US Dollars in reserve. That is a whole lot of dollars and much more than they need. They could use those dollars, by trading them in on the Foreign Exchange Market for Euro's (or an other currency) on a large scale, to manipulate the value of the Dollar.
I've been using it for several years and as far as I am concerned, it is one of those apps which is worth the money. But your mileage may vary, especially if you use FF and Adblock exclusively. The only downside of Admuncher is that its programmers are perfectionists (it originally was, and largely still is I think, written in assembler (!) ), which means development is slow. Hardly no bugs and it really blocks ads very well, but it does miss some features I would like to see.
There have been significant gains in knowledge and technology, but that doesn't mean that there are no costs related. AFAIK it is fair to set standards higher, if at the same time we (the West) are willing to pay the price in all of our Chinese made products. And that is where you hit a snag. Consumers want a lot of things, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. Corporations want a green image, but not if it impacts the bottom line too much. Yet they all expect China to deliver them masses of consumer goods, at low prices and now without any environmental impact?
Slightly besides the point, but many people (if not all) in China are not too happy themselves with the current pollution levels. And they have a better understanding how it impacts their lives and health than we did during out industrial revolutions. So I'm pretty sure they are working towards solutions, in fact they are, just look at the use of solar energy and the number of companies involved in development.
WTF. You actually have a law for... cutting grass in a timely fashion??? Is that a normal thing in the US, or is it something that you only find in certain towns/cities?
Impulse does suck, as it doesn't work under WINE. Stardock Central did, meaning you could install games easily under *nix (though not all games worked under WINE, but my favorite, Space Rangers 2, did).
Slashdot Mirror
Because they save lives? Enough accounts of accidents were parachutes could or did save peoples lives. Take a mid-air collision for example. Usually causes massive damage to the wings/controls, so even a crash landing is not possible. And you don't need an ejection seat to bail out, adrenaline and will-to-survive go a long way.
I used to fly sailplanes/gliders and while a few years back, people only used parachutes for aerobatics or cross country flights (is actually mandatory to wear chutes when doing those), now it is much more commonplace.
No, the crash area fell just outside of that region. And you won't be able to spot it on the current Google Earth photo's either, as they still pre-date the crash.
Except he didn't have a parachute with him (which I honestly don't understand).
The Netherlands
Almost. Most providers here have a FUP (Fair User Policy). So you have an unlimited plan, but if you belong to the top whatever-percentile and/or there is congestion somewhere on the network, you may get a letter/email asking you to watch and reduce your bandwidth-usuage. In practice, this means you have to be moving serious amounts of bandwidth though, e.g. Terabytes per month.
they only sell the chipsets, and other manufacturers put them into cards.
Nowadays, they sell the chips and the reference design (e.g. that's why most cards look more or less the same). Haven't seen their own branded cards here (Netherlands) for a long time.
Every iPod sold is 100 mp3's not bought. Every iPhone sold is 200 mp3's not bought. Every overpriced telco-subscription with insane sms costs is about 30-50 mp3's not bought (and that is every month). Music is being killed by gadgets, video, gaming, messaging, etc. Everyone seems to have picked the budget consumers had for music and now try to call it their own. I used to buy 10 - 20 CD's a year, now I buy games, DVD's and hardware/gadgets.
Like write access to NTFS
pkg_add -r fusefs-ntfs . Lo and behold, write access to NTFS
First across the channel (pure) soaring flight was in 1939; Geoffrey Stephenson in a Slingsby Kirby Gull 1. Pretty darn impressive (former glider pilot myself). Just a normal winch launch, so he actually had to do it with thermaling.
That isn't really so. Digital has built in error-correction, which works pretty well under at the first stages of signal degradation. At the same time, depending on the hardware, some errors can also be more or less hidden by the MPEG-decoder. Second, digital in digital TV is just digital data over an analogue carrier wave. So it isn't the kind of digital (on/off) people think it is.
True, but you can work around the copyright of database compilations by not using the original database. Not possible in all cases where very specific data is involved. The reasons why database compilations are copyrightable in Europe is simply the fact that compiling a (good) database can take quite a bit of effort (e.g time and money), with some exceptions to the rule (e.g. your average phonebook).
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Free markets do not work like that. Free markets fix things when there is an substantial economic incentive. Broadband infrastructure is expensive, time-consuming to lay down, dominated by strong players with political capital and related technology changes rapidly. Given those, why would the free market invest (tens of) billions of dollars in a long term, difficult and risky project? If you have billions of dollars, there are many many more ways to make more money in much less time. Free markets don't magically fix things for consumers. Free markets are about providing the opportunity for capital to move freely and as a result, make the best use of said capital. That's it. The issue is that people apply all kinds of benefits to "best use", as in no monopolies, cheap products, etc., which just isn't how it works. Especially not in the short term.
I also live in a small city in the Netherlands btw. I can choose dozen of ISP's, but only one which is faster than 8 Mbps. Not sure about the figures, but despite what the OPTA (Dutch Telecom Watchdog) says, there does exist a monopoly for "fast" internet in a considerable part of the Netherlands (wet finger approach: 25-35%). And moving to an area with faster internet??? That is rather a ridiculously expensive solution.
Run one of the Javascript benchmarks in a browser and you'll be surprised how much memory your browser can eat up. I've seen Firefox @ 450MB and Chrome @ 600MB, just by running some heavy Javascript code. While the speed increases are great, 500MB memory usage for just a browser is a lot.
We are moving towards another World War 'right' now. Most ppl are too busy with their favorite diversion to notice.
5 years ago I saw a news-report about the "next" World War, which featured several military strategist. The issue is that the build-up is too slow for the naked eye of the average person and there are a lot of variables and uncertainties. Plus the vary naive view of the population that wars are something in the past, at least in the West. In any case, WW4 could be 10 years, could be 25, could be never if we had sane and reasonable politicians and leaders.
better != good
With one-liners like that, you should become a consultant.
It's is not a MS joke, it is a Vista-one. There is a difference and there is nothing wrong with bashing Vista.
I could post my own horror-stories about Vista, but I guess most people who touched Vista will have enough of their own. And you will not hear me bash XP. XP wasn't perfect, it still isn't perfect, it wasn't safe, it still isn't safe and never will be really safe, but it is and has been good enough for me not to bash XP or MS.
How do you intend to drown in liquid oxygen? It is so cold that you've frozen to death before the Liquid Oxygen reached your lips.
Not that easy. Growing clouds is one thing (doable, in fact, growing clouds at sea has been proposed in order to combat global warming, and it wasn't expensive). But clouds don't necessarily rain out and not at the spot were you would want them. Another issue is that you need favorable winds. But it indeed is likely to be easier and cheaper than irrigation, just not as reliable.
Indeed, but if we put enough energy behind it, we could combat rising sea levels at the same time. The downside is that desalinization is fairly energy intensive, though there is enough potential for solar energy in the Sahara.
The problems would be money and political stability in the Sahara region. My country (the Netherlands) has to invest over 100 billion euros the next century to keep the rising sea and extra rainwater out. I'm rather curious to know how much of the Sahara could be irrigated with that amount and what the effects on the climate and sea-levels would be.
The EU has figured this one out ... secret laws! http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=31
China has almost 1.5 Trillion US Dollars in reserve. That is a whole lot of dollars and much more than they need. They could use those dollars, by trading them in on the Foreign Exchange Market for Euro's (or an other currency) on a large scale, to manipulate the value of the Dollar.
I've been using it for several years and as far as I am concerned, it is one of those apps which is worth the money. But your mileage may vary, especially if you use FF and Adblock exclusively. The only downside of Admuncher is that its programmers are perfectionists (it originally was, and largely still is I think, written in assembler (!) ), which means development is slow. Hardly no bugs and it really blocks ads very well, but it does miss some features I would like to see.
http://www.admuncher.com/. Works with every browser, including Chrome.
There have been significant gains in knowledge and technology, but that doesn't mean that there are no costs related. AFAIK it is fair to set standards higher, if at the same time we (the West) are willing to pay the price in all of our Chinese made products. And that is where you hit a snag. Consumers want a lot of things, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. Corporations want a green image, but not if it impacts the bottom line too much. Yet they all expect China to deliver them masses of consumer goods, at low prices and now without any environmental impact?
Slightly besides the point, but many people (if not all) in China are not too happy themselves with the current pollution levels. And they have a better understanding how it impacts their lives and health than we did during out industrial revolutions. So I'm pretty sure they are working towards solutions, in fact they are, just look at the use of solar energy and the number of companies involved in development.
WTF. You actually have a law for ... cutting grass in a timely fashion??? Is that a normal thing in the US, or is it something that you only find in certain towns/cities?
Impulse does suck, as it doesn't work under WINE. Stardock Central did, meaning you could install games easily under *nix (though not all games worked under WINE, but my favorite, Space Rangers 2, did).