Here is another long tough one and I hope you can help. Again, thank you for the utmost professional services that you have done in the past. Your dedicated returning #1 Customer.  Questions regarding essay below:

1. What are three key points to draw from the reading? 2. What types of reasoning did you identify in the article? 3. Can you identify any arguments with unstated premises? 4. In the reading, find a deductive argument, create a syllogism from it, and write it down. Is this syllogism valid? 5. Create a truth table "if possible", based on this deductive argument. 6. Identify an example of inductive reasoning. Can you explain what sub-type of argument this is?

Abstract (Document Summary) As the new year begins, no such consensus exists among Democrats about why Sen. John Kerry was defeated, and the party is locked in a battle of interpretation over just what went wrong. Was it values? Terrorism and Iraq? A better Republican get-out-the-vote operation or a rush of Hispanics to President [George Bush]? A gawky candidate with little to say?The confusion, in part, is a result of the hasty -- and often flawed -- analyses that have come to mark politics in the age of the Internet and nonstop news cycles. The urge to explain immediately why Mr. Kerry lost was aggravated by what many pollsters viewed as flawed exit polling that led analysts initially to overstate factors like the role of values and the number of Hispanic voters who fled Mr. Kerry for Mr. Bush. This was, the argument goes, an election shaped by the fears and memories of Sept. 11, and memories of Mr. Bush's steely performance in the days after the attacks. Voters were averse to changing presidents in what was effectively a time of war -- and Mr. Kerry, never a particularly likable candidate, never gave them a reason to do it. With the exception of a few Democratic outliers in Ohio, few people dispute that the election for president is done and decided: President Bush won and John Kerry lost.But as the new year begins, no such consensus exists among Democrats about why Mr. Kerry was defeated, and the party is locked in a battle of interpretation over just what went wrong. Was it values? Terrorism and Iraq? A better Republican get-out-the-vote operation or a rush of Hispanics to President Bush? A gawky candidate with little to say?Presidential elections often produce a clear story line, a lesson for winners and losers alike. Not this one, at least not yet, and that is a matter of increasing concern for Democrats who would like to learn from the past as they face a series of critical decisions, including picking a new party chairman and laying out a plan to avoid even more losses in the 2006 Congressional races. And there is the immediate tactical question of how stridently to push back against Mr. Bush's efforts to change Social Security and the tax code.It's hardly any wonder that Democrats these days seem to be marching in so many different directions. Post-loss squabbling between the party's left wing and its moderate faction is nothing new.But the very ambiguity of the 2004 election results has pushed the party into new sets of arguments, the resolution of which could have far-reaching implications for the next class of Democratic candidates for Congress and the next presidential election. For example, did Democrats lose because they were seen as lax on ''values,'' which was the early verdict on the Kerry loss, or because they were seen as weak on terrorism?The confusion, in part, is a result of the hasty -- and often flawed -- analyses that have come to mark politics in the age of the Internet and nonstop news cycles. The urge to explain immediately why Mr. Kerry lost was aggravated by what many pollsters viewed as flawed exit polling that led analysts initially to overstate factors like the role of values and the number of Hispanic voters who fled Mr. Kerry for Mr. Bush.''We all have come up with our individual thoughts, but as far as coalescing on what happened -- I don't think there's been a determination about what really happened,'' said Harry Reid, the new Senate Democratic leader. ''It's not that easy to figure out.''Presumably, this will all be figured out in time. But for now, uncertainty is fueling the Democrats' angst as they trek again through the electoral desert.The so-called values issue was the first widely-used explanation for Mr. Kerry's loss, after 22 percent of respondents in exit polls listed ''values'' as the main factor in their presidential votes. For a while after Election Day, it was rare to hear a Democrat talking without hearing a mention of God, church or the need for the party to learn how to talk about abortion rights and gay marriage.Joe Manchin, the new governor of West Virginia, a Democrat whose anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-gun-control views lifted him to a double-digit victory even as Mr. Kerry lost his state by 13 points, said last week that he had little doubt about why Democrats lost the presidency and seats in the House and Senate.''It's the values -- my goodness, it's the values,'' he said, adding: ''But to allow any other party to say that the Democrats aren't for family values, they are not for people who go to church, they are not for people who like to go hunting -- that's wrong. For the Democrats to sit back and allow that to happen, is even more wrong.''But the importance of values is disputed by more than a few Democrats, who obviously would prefer not to follow a plan that might irritate some fairly crucial parts of the base, be they secular Democrats, abortion rights advocates or supporters of gay marriage.''Values obviously are important,'' said Terry McAuliffe, the national Democratic party chairman, whose term expires in February. ''But clearly, the overriding issue in this election was terrorism and national security. You don't get to those other issues until you have checked the box on national security.''Timothy J. Roemer, a moderate former Indiana congressman running to be Democratic chair, said: ''We did not have a very compelling message about how to make Americans feel safer in a post 9/11 world. The message was more about Iraq, where our base voter was, than it was about talking through how, for instance, Truman and President Kennedy made Americans feel safe in the Cold War.''Senator Charles E. Schumer, the new head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued that the problem this year was broader than issues like terrorism or values, saying that Democrats never laid out a program of what they would do should they win the White House.''You could describe George Bush's overall campaign message and theme in eight words: 'War in Iraq, tax cuts, no gay marriage,''' Mr. Schumer said. ''And these weren't just slogans. For better or for worse, he tried to implement all three. And the challenge for Democrats -- we don't have to do it in eight words -- but we have to have a succinct program -- not just slogans, like better health.''And there's more. Mr. Reid said Mr. Kerry lost in large part because he did not spend enough time campaigning for rural voters. ''We got crushed in rural Nevada,'' he said.Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said that Democrats, despite their best efforts, had been outgunned on voter turnout by Republicans and that they didn't push back hard enough against what she described as false attacks.''I don't subscribe to any of these notions that we have to examine our conscience as to who we are,'' Ms. Pelosi said. ''We know who we are. We know what we stand for. We'll make it clearer in the non-presidential election year what the differences are between the Democrats and the Republicans.''For all the clutter and clatter, interviews this week suggest that the outlines of a consensus may be emerging among Democrats and Republicans on why the election turned out the way it did, aided by the passage of time and additional studies and polling.Fittingly enough, this consensus would bring everything back full circle to what both parties were saying a year ago in trying to predict the outcome of the race.This was, the argument goes, an election shaped by the fears and memories of Sept. 11, and memories of Mr. Bush's steely performance in the days after the attacks. Voters were averse to changing presidents in what was effectively a time of war -- and Mr. Kerry, never a particularly likable candidate, never gave them a reason to do it.

1. What are three key points to draw from the reading? 2. What types of reasoning did you identify in the article? 3. Can you identify any arguments with unstated premises? 4. In the reading, find a deductive argument, create a syllogism from it, and write it down. Is this syllogism valid? 5. Create a truth table "if possible", based on this deductive argument. 6. Identify an example of inductive reasoning. Can you explain what sub-type of argument this is?

Here is one for a person who is in the computer field as a programmer or specializies in the computer field. Questions at the end of this essay. Full Text (2436 words) Abstract: Firefox Version 1.5, an open-source Web browser, has several issues according to the more than 600 people who responded to an online query about their experiences with the new version of the browser. Firefox is reported to have loading difficulties, high memory and CPU use and browser freezes and crashes. Users report high memory usage and freezes in version 1.5 of the open-source browser, but not everyone is having trouble A PICTURE IS EMERGING of Firefox 1.5 that's less than positive. Issues cited by the more than 600 people who responded to an online query about their experiences with the new version of the browser include loading difficulties, high memory and CPU use, and browser freezes and crashes. New features in Firefox 1.5 include automatic browser-updating functionality and the ability to check for multiple extension updates simultaneously. The new browser automatically disables, but leaves installed, any extensions that don't explicitly support it. It also is able to drag and drop reorder tabs, provides a significant reworking of the Options user interface, and lets you one-click to delete private data (such as user names and passwords) if you think you're being attacked by a phishing scam. And not everyone's experience has been troubled. More than 60% of the readers of InformationWeek .com and its sister publications who responded report they had no problems with the browser software. There's no statistically valid way to draw hard conclusions about how many people are having stability issues based on this small sample. A rough guess: The number of people having serious problems is probably well under 10% of all those who've installed Firefox 1.5. UNHAPPY USERS Despite their small numbers, the people having problems aren't happy, and many are reporting the same woes: * Firefox's use of physical and virtual memory is exceptionally high. * CPU usage spikes to 100%, usually while loading a Web page. * The browser freezes up for seconds, minutes, or permanently. * It won't launch until errant "firefox.exe" processes are removed from Task Manager. * The new version crashes, usually while loading a Web page. * It has trouble loading specific pages, but there's no commonality as to which pages won't load. * The initial launch of the browser loads slower. * Third-party application hyperlinks, such as a link in an E-mail, take a long time to open a new Firefox tab or launch the browser. One of the fallacies about software bugs is that, for a problem to be real, everyone has to have it. That's just not true. It's far more common for a widely distributed application like Firefox to have a long list of problems that only a small percentage of users experience. If multiple people in a selection of 600 have the same problem, it's most likely a real issue. The page-compatibility issues are particularly inconsistent. Of the many Web pages that readers reported having problems displaying in Firefox 1.5, we haven't been able to reproduce a single one. They all work for us. At the same time, we've had trouble with other pages that won't load properly or at all. The problem may have nothing at all to do with Web-page rendering and more to do with some intermittent overall aspect of program reliability, such as caching issues. MOZILLA RESPONDS Mozilla executives have expressed interest in our findings but don't appear fazed by the problems readers report. "We have more than 10 million downloads of Firefox 1.5, and the overwhelming feedback we've received ... has been positive," engineering VP Mike Schroepfer says. "We have heard some reports [of high memory use], and we're working through them now in hopes of a successful resolution. It's our goal to make Firefox users happy." The next release of Firefox, version 1.5.0.1, is expected late this month or early February. The two main goals of that release are security and stability, Schroepfer says. Other than the issue of high memory usage, Mozilla isn't working on any problems readers identified, Schroepfer and products VP Chris Beard say. So problems like high CPU usage, program freezes and lockups, and long pauses before a tab or the browser opens from hyperlink clicks in other applications might not be fixed in the next version of the program. One reader found Firefox 1.5 using a large amount of memory. One reason Mozilla might not be seeing many reports on the program-freezing issue is that Firefox's builtin crash-reporting functionality, the TaIk-back 1.5 extension, doesn't report freezing incidents. It's tripped only by an actual Firefox crash, and in most cases, the freezing issue rights itself after a few minutes. The high-memory-usage problem was evident in previous versions of Firefox. But some people report that it's worse in this version, with Firefox displacing as much as 250 to 500 Mbytes of physical and virtual memory on a Windows PC with 1 Gbyte of RAM. Of all the problems, this is the most commonly reported. It's unclear whether it's linked to high CPU usage and program freezing, but it's at least conceivable that it might be. POSSIBLE CAUSE This is purely speculation, but it's possible that Firefox 1.5's new Back and Forward button caching functionality-which speeds up the display of recently viewed Web pages-is contributing to the memory problem. There's a new small module in Firefox known as bfcache, which supports that performance improvement, Schroepfer says. Looking at the details about how much data bfcache stores, it doesn't appear that would be enough to cause the problems. The browser .sessionhistory.maxjotal _viewers setting in Firefox's about:config settings area, which is similar to the Windows Registry, stores only five pages on machines with 512 Mbytes of RAM, for example. Many of those who reported they aren't having trouble wonder whether the people who are experiencing difficulty didn't properly uninstall previous versions (especially beta versions) of Firefox before installing Firefox 1.5. A related point is whether people reporting issues might not have poorly written Firefox extensions installed or extensions that might have been improperly tested for Firefox 1.5. Based on comments people have made in their E-mails, many are having trouble with cleanly installed versions of Firefox 1.5 that have no extensions or themes installed. MEMORY TEST A substantial number of Firefox users have experienced the browser's penchant for using copious amounts of memory. We decided to test this by visiting some typical (but not excessively) graphics-rich Web sites, to see how that would affect memory usage. We ran Firefox 1.5 in Windows XP in a consistent pattern over the course of a couple of hours. We opened new pages in tabs until five to seven tabs were open, closed all but two of the tabs, and then waited a few minutes to repeat the process. Red lines show physical RAM accessible to Firefox, and green lines show physical RAM accessible only to Firefox. Upward movement matches points at which we opened new tabs. We opened about 80 pages in tabs this way. At all times, one tab was a Weather Underground page opened to the San Francisco weather radar, which is a looping series of six optimized JPEGs. The other tabs were opened to pages on the site with an archive of nature and weather photos. These photos were all JPEGs and none was more than 20 Kbytes. In fact, most of them were less than 15 Kbytes. Instead of using a sterile, SafeMode Firefox 1.5 for this test, we decided to use a real-world setup. So we installed Adblock and Flashblock, turned on JavaScript, and turned off Java. That left us using two common extensions but not Flash or Java. The screen shot below shows a custom Performance Monitor setup for the test, which graphs several key memory statistics for firefox .exe. The red lines show physical RAM accessible to Firefox, and the green lines show physical RAM accessible only to Firefox. The two lines move up in steps that match the points when we opened series of new tabs, and the level areas match times when we closed the tabs and then waited before opening a new set. Although we repeatedly went back to only two open tabs and minimized Firefox to the task bar, Firefox almost never gave back a single megabyte of memory after the first 30 minutes or so. Did Firefox do this? Did one of the two extensions play a part? Could it be the Flash or Java plug-in (the former blocked, the latter disabled) making a monkey out of Mozilla? It really doesn't matter, because they aren't the ones whose names appeared in the Task Manager next to some ungodly amount of RAM. Even if something else is feasting on all that system memory, it's Mozilla that gets stuck with the tab. Firefox has problems with Windows, that's clear. How does it fare on Linux and Mac OS systems? We worked with version 1.5 on both Linux (using Xandros and the latest Ubuntu distro) and a current version of Mac OS X, in addition to Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 installs. In both cases, the jury is still out: Although we can't send either the Linux or Mac OS versions of Firefox 1.5 to the doghouse without better evidence, we're also not willing to let either of them off the hook just yet. Part of the conflict is a matter of too small numbers: Of the reader E-mails we received on this subject, 10 were from desktop Linux users. Of those, only one person noted definite signs of a memorymanagement problem on a Linuxbased Firefox 1.5 install. Of the E-mails from Mac users, we saw only a few complaints, including one that reported freezes and the need to force the Firefox program to quit, and two that reported identical problems using scroll bars in Firefox 1.5 (a bug we can't duplicate). Once again, it's a case where maybe Firefox on OS X isn't oinking its way through acres of RAM the way it so often does on Windows-or maybe enough people just haven't complained loudly enough yet. RECOMMENDATIONS If Firefox is an everyday professional tool for you, you might want to hang back on installing the new version, at least until Firefox 1.5.0.1 is released. In our experience, Firefox 1.0.7 is far more stable. If you don't use the browser very often, odds are that you won't have problems, so version 1.5 is a better bet in that scenario. We also recommend backing up your Firefox user profile before installing Firefox 1.5. Some people are reporting an issue with corrupted user profiles when they try to uninstall Firefox. If you plan to install Firefox 1.5, your first step should be to remove any and all previous Firefox installations using Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel. (Doing this leaves behind all your customizations, bookmarks, cookies, extensions, and themes, which will be picked up by version 1.5 when you install it.) You might also consider wiping your Firefox plug-ins, extensions, and themes before uninstalling your previous version of Firefox. It adds more work, but it's less likely that you'll encounter the problems that some people have had if you upgrade that way. -SCOT FINNIE AND MATT MCKENZlE, INTERNETWEEK [Sidebar] Firefox 1.5 Users Speak Out Of the more than 600 messages we've received to date on the latest version of Firefox, about a quarter offer up something like these: Firefox 1.5 frequently freezes for a few minutes, most often when opening a link from another program. It also spikes in CPU usage during these freezes. Several sites always cause Firefox to just hang. I've had to stop visiting a couple of these sites, it was so frequent. The rendering seems to have gotten a little worse in version 1.5. PDFs have never been that reliable in Firefox, but at least in 1.0.x they worked most of the time. I find they rarely work in the newest version. All of this is on a completely clean profile as well on a clean install, so it cannot be blamed on a faulty upgrade or extensions. -Shane McAliece * I'm having problems with Web pages loading incompletely and improperly. It's a crapshoot as to when I'll experience these problems. Sometimes the pages load fine, other times not. What's troubling is that sometimes it looks like I'm losing my Internet connection when the pages won't load at all (and I get the Firefox equivalent of a 404 message). Then a minute later, everything will be fine. -Betty Nakamoto * I'm getting "Page not found" or "Site not available" messages at least 15 to 20 times more frequently than ever before, which is especially vexing since I'm often simply going from page to page on the exact same site at the time! -Scott Thompson * It doesn't render many pages correctly, particularly on The Motley Fool, where I use it the most. Some links don't show; text isn't formatted properly (runs off the screen). Once IE comes out with tabbed browsing, I may drop it. -Paul Knudsen * Memory usage has shot way up! On my machine, Firefox 1.0.7 used to use about 10O Mbytes. Now Firefox 1.5 shows 250 Mbytes or more [based on Windows Task Manager's Processes tab]. -Richard Frisch * I have three major issues with this release. 1) I'm among those who've seen Firefox grow to over 350,00Ok in memory. 2) I've seen it consume up to 40% of my CPU for extended amounts of time for seemingly no reason, even while idling. My PC is a 2-month-old Dell 600xps/dual processor, so this program is eating up serious CPU cycles. 3) This morning Firefox kept crashing and wouldn't stay up for more than 15 minutes at a time. -Kevin Mahanay * I've encountered the 100% CPU freeze-up problem. And it comes close to making the operating system useless. Some Web pages fail every time I try to load them. -Rob DuWors [Sidebar] One Way To Curb Memory Spikes If Firefox 1.5 generates high memory numbers, try this setting change: * Access about:config by typing that exact phrase in the browser address bar and pressing Enter. * In about:config, look for this setting: browser.cache .memory.enable. Set its "Value" to "true," and follow these steps: * Right-click anywhere on the about:config window area and choose New and Integer from the pop-up menu. * The New Integer Value box will open. Type this setting name into the dialog box: browser.cache.memory.capacity * The Enter Integer Value box will open. The default setting is -1 and should preserve Firefox's existing mode of operation. * Mozilla provides more information about specific settings at kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity. For RAM sizes between 512 Mbytes and 1 Gbyte, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128 and 512 Mbytes, try 5000. If you have less than 128 Mbytes of RAM, that's probably the cause of your Firefox issues.

Questions: 1. Does the article use words appropriate for its audience? Give examples of words that are not appropriate for the audience. 2. Is the information organized in such a way that it flows logically? 3. What are the rhetorical tools used to make the arguments more persuasive? Give an example of a rhetorical device you would use to make the article more interesting and persuasive. 4. Does the piece create a compelling statement of the problem? If not, provide a sample problem statement that your colleague can use to create a more compelling introduction.