But without forks, we'd have a single unified Linux which everyone would use. Who would want that?

People who like spoons.

I'm getting 65 Meg down and 12 Meg up on my commiecast connection in Seattle... we pay for 50/10...

...That said, they had to come out and work on the lines, as before we were lucky to get 12 Meg down and 5 Meg up...

Just tangentially, it sounds like people living in the parts of town where the previous mayor was talking about implementing municipal broadband all got upgraded infrastructure, probably as the ISP majors tried to argue that municipal broadband wasn't needed. In contrast, I'm in Northgate, still reasonably dense and still well within in the city limits, but our neighborhood was outside of the areas marked for municipal broadband rollout -- and I'm still stuck with 4 down / 1.5 up.

Cheers,

Not all of us think that. Some of us think "Puny European Countries". Have you seen an overlay of Europe verses the USA?

Have you seen a map of Europe? All of it, I mean. I have. Your map sure doesn't look like it. Apparently Poland is no longer European? Or Hungary? Or Finland? Etc.

Here's a slightly better example. Just eyeballing, it looks like all of Europe together (including places like Greece and Romania and Finland, etc.) is probably bigger than the lower 48 states of the US.

And please, stop with that ridiculous "population density" canard. Finland has better broadband than the US. Iceland has better broadband than the US. Former Soviet Bloc countries Bulgaria and Romania have better broadband than the US. Heck, even Utah has better broadband than most of the rest of the US, and Utah isn't exactly known as a cheek-by-jowl, high-population center. I live in Seattle, within the city limits in a reasonably dense part of town, and I can only wish I had a 50mbps symmetric up-down connection for $70 a month. Instead, the best deal I could find was an entry-level business plan bundled with phone service at 4mbps down / 1.5mbps up, for roughly $125 a month. Laughably bad, painfully expensive, infuriatingly limited.

The key common thread in the success cases is that the major ISPs don't get to dictate broadband policy. Population density and size of the country pretty much has jack shit to do with the issue (unless you want to go into meta-arguments about the size and density of a polity and how that impacts public policy).

Cheers,

Are you talking ANSI graphic animations..? ;)

I'm getting 65 Meg down and 12 Meg up on my commiecast connection in Seattle... we pay for 50/10...

...That said, they had to come out and work on the lines, as before we were lucky to get 12 Meg down and 5 Meg up...

Companies can be and are sued for giving to charity. It's not illegal because it can be in the (financial!) best interest of shareholders in a variety of ways (encouraging further investment, improving the corporation's image to customers, ... many more) Of course shareholders have other interests, but those interests are not why they are investing. They might choose to invest in one company over another for those reasons, but they are investing in the first place to make a profit. Otherwise it's not investment, it's giving to charity.

What, besides profit, is in the best interest of all of the shareholder of a publicly traded corporation? Giving to charity and sponsoring events are examples of enlightened self-interest. Take it too far and you will be sued by your shareholders..

But they're both named K-vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel-nski.
That can't be a coincidence.

Have you published your understanding of human nature somewhere? I'd love to see the equations.

There is a legal obligation to focus on profits.

source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex... (aka the first google result for "fiduciary duty")

The :-P was intended as a hint.

If you don't want anyone to see it, don't photograph it in the first place. For every file stolen from the cloud, many more are stolen directly from the user's machine. For all intents and purposes, anything "digital" equals world access.

Depending on how it's spelled in Japanese, it could be tons of different words.

Looking just at how it's spelled in romaji (the Roman alphabet), Kibo has no macron over the "o", which, strictly speaking, means a short "o" value. (Instead of syllabic stress as used in English, Japanese uses a concept called a "mora" by linguists, referring to the time length of a sound.)

(Also, because Slashcode is still not unicode-compliant, and is fundamentally US-centric, I'm using the ^ circumflex over vowels instead of the overbar macron, which Slashcode just eats and refuses to display.)

Kibo with a short "o" could mean:

• one's youngest aunt
• the size, scale, or scope of a thing
• the Buddhist divinity Hârîtî, sometimes viewed as a goddess of childbirth and children
• a family's death register

Meanwhile, kibô with a long "o" could mean:

• hope
• something planned and hoped for
• a plan, planning
• a deadly crisis, a critical moment
• an unusual or wild plan
• prayerful hope
• the sixteenth night of a lunar month
• starving poverty
• a devilishly clever plan or plot
• the fourteenth night of a lunar month
• hopeful anticipation
• deception, glamour
• slander, blame, strong criticism
• a plan to ensnare or entrap someone
• a shortage or deficiency after running out of something

This range of meanings for the Japanese word kibo or kibô is almost silly, it's so broad. I hope this might begin to explain why written Japanese still uses kanji (Chinese characters) -- all of the above meanings that fall under one or two romaji spellings are each spelled differently when written in kanji.

Anyway, for the satellites, I'm pretty sure the intended meaning must clearly be youngest aunt. Or maybe it's a plan to ensnare or entrap someone? :-P

Cheers,

Our entire government seems to think the constitution can be superseded by any other law whatsoever, as if the constitution being the highest law of the land doesn't actually overrule anything that contradicts it. It's as if the constitution is completely meaningless. Sigh.

Stop throwing the constitution in our faces, it's just a goddamned piece of paper.

we will stop throwing it in your face when you fucking understand that it is the law of the land and NOTHING superceeds it, no matter how much you totalitarians want it to

I may be wrong here, but I believe that kelemvor4's comment was in reference to a purported quote of George W. Bush, wherein Bush was snappily replying to GOP leaders who suggested that what Bush proposed doing was unconstitutional. It seems that the quote might be apocryphal.

Cheers,

Much as Budgenator said, the haline in thermohaline refers to salt.

There is a common pattern in some words with Greek and Latin roots, where the Greek will start with H while the Latin starts with S. So it is here with haline (Greek root) and saline (Latin root).

Other examples include Greek hyper and Latin super ("over, above" -- remember that the Y in Greek roots was often pronounced more like an ü, and not like the /ai/ sound of English eye or hyper), Greek hypo and Latin sub ("under, beneath"), Greek hept- and Latin sept- ("seven").

Cheers,