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Comment Re:Firefux (Score 4, Informative) 144

Your tone is flamebait, but your question is valid. Firefox has a project called MemShrink whose focus has been on reducing memory usage. In the time they've been going they have found and fixed leaks in Firefox; come up with better ways to find leaks in add-ons, which were the biggest culprit; changed how Firefox handles memory used by add-ons to eliminate virtually all such leaks; and optimized Firefox's memory management in a bunch of non-buggy cases.

So yes, if memory usage is what drove you away from Firefox you should take another look.

Comment Re:I don't get it. (Score 2) 336

I don't know about Britain (where carrying pistols was hardly unheard of in the nineteenth century), but I don't know that I've ever heard this as an argument for gun control in the U.S. It seems an odd argument: It would definitely work to make carrying a weapon more difficult for the law-abiding, but the only way to make it less desirable would be if it indeed made it nearly impossible for criminals to get access to weapons.

And British gun control has led to knife crime and to forms of knife control that look downright silly from this side of the pond.

Comment Re:Prior use (Score 1) 354

It's hard to tell from context whether you're not from the US or you're an American who has never used seven-digit dialing.

In the US, the first three digits of a ten-digit telephone number are the area code. Traditionally if you were calling someone who was in the same area code you were in you would not dial the area code but only the last seven digits of the telephone number. If you needed to call someone outside your area code, pressing 1 first allowed the telephone network to know that you were dialing a ten-digit number.

It used to be that when an area code ran out of telephone numbers, it would be split into multiple area codes. This meant that some numbers would change in the first three digits, which is inconvenient. The modern practice is to add a new area code that applies to the same geographical area as the old one, but that means that someone living next door to you may have a different area code than you do; the solution is to make everyone dial the full ten digits regardless of area code.

I think landline practice (7- or 10-digit dialing) still varies by region, but all modern cell phones use ten-digit dialing.

Comment Re:Two steps forward, one step back (Score 4, Informative) 218

When I bought mine you had to go looking for the Ubuntu machines page; when you got there it explained very clearly, in non-technical language, that if you don't know what we're talking about you don't want one: go over here to buy a Windows machine. They thought that out ahead of time and were very clear about it.

Comment Re:Not really immune (Score 2, Insightful) 577

Do you really think that? A dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist Christian that thinks the Apocalypse is a good thing because he gets to meet his BFF Jesus that day, in charge of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world?

Are you privy to some quirk of Santorum's eschatology that makes him more dangerous than previous theologically-conservative presidents, none of whom has yet provoked a nuclear holocaust?

Comment Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use (Score 2) 403

Let me know when your favorite MS Office alternative can open and flawlessly display every Office file that I have, or may receive from somebody else. I also need a guarantee that files I create with it can be sent to people using MS Office, and they'll be able to use them without incident.

In all reality, MS Office doesn't offer that kind of guarantee.

Comment Re:Random? (Score 4, Informative) 486

The blazon (the heraldic technical description) of the arms is what officially defines them, and it doesn't include the particular sequence of digits; it just says "in base a bar wavy Sable inscribed with zeros and ones Or."

So even if it means something, that particular sequence is just the artist's interpretation; somebody else who redrew the arms would be entitled to change it. Most likely, it's just what the artist liked visually.

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