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The Harvard Sentences used to test, that are mentioned in the article, seem to be missing a key phrase:

I had an idea that we parked our car in the Harvard Yard.

(Boston Dialect article here or here.)

Are you sure those aren't just "rumors on the Internets" ?

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/linuxslshepia .htm

The VirTra Damocles ??

You might be convinced that a reactor can withstand a 747 hitting it, but they reckoned the twin towers would cope too didnt they?

Nope, the WTC towers were only engineered to specs expected to withstand the impact of a 707, the largest airplane in widespread use at the time they were designed.

Also, it's much easier to build something impact-proof that isn't 1000 feet tall. The Empire State building withstood a B-25 bomber crash in 1945 without serious structural damage-- planes are inherently a lot more fragile than buildings.

If "Defense" is so important to the charter, they should make up their mind about keeping it in the name.

That's because of the huge $2 Billion dollar federal government subsidy from the enormous tax break for >= 6000 lb vehicles

Naw, your probably right. It's the Saudi oil cartel that is controlling the development of the automobile and exerting mind control on the consumer. That's what it is.

Who do you think lobbied for that tax break/subsidy? Do you think it was the oil industry, or the environmental lobby.

Some Anonymous Coward wrote:

Why do you think all the jobs are being outsourced? American workers are getting too fat with their outrageous pay. Why? Because of the Unions - they're useless now and that's why things made in the US cost so much.

I think you've been listening to the AM talkshows too much, or to some other mouthpieces of the Bush administration.

I'll admit that the unions are a factor in making US-manufactured goods less competetive than those produced in the third world, but there's a reason for this. Do you know what working conditions were like in the mines and factories of the USA before unions? Do you have any idea what they're like, today, in China, India, Indonesia, etc.? Get rid of the unions, and that's the kind of place where your 12-year old daughter could be working, right here in the good ole US of A (that is until she loses her arm in a packing machine, at which point she'll be fired on the spot, and made to pay for the damage to the machine).

Here's an interesting quote I found here, attributed to Business Week:

In 2000, the average CEO salary reached an unbelievable 531 times that of the average hourly worker.

Executive salaries and the ever-increasing cost of litigation and employee benefits (since the government seems to think we don't need health insurance) adds a lot more to the cost of your "Made in the USA" article than any union could.

You missed a big point in not specifying that all patents, trademarks, and copyrights can only be held by natural persons. Such a restriction deftly limits the unfair advantage of potentially immortal corporations.

Cable TV is already starting to put commercials on most channels. When people don't stop paying for it in droves enough to cut into profits, it makes sense to their business. They don't particularly care. "Show me the money!" Right? This will likely happen over time with any Internet-based Video-On-Demand service.

The same rule applies with DRM. The MSN Music Assistant controls DRM in your downloads from their services. This has caused problems for some as one might expect (not particularly surprising.) However as long as people are willing to shell out dollars for the product to make them number one, the company has no incentive to change. After all, we don't see Microsoft wooing the Linux crowd, right?

Geographic size

russia being the largest

check for yourself

Do you really want him to be your current president?

2. There is no such thing as "US English." We will let Microsoft know on your behalf.

From Notice of revocation of independence.

I wonder if the Exchange Server Drones did.

Is that these silly little Pez players will have 16 times the storage capacity of Sony PSPs for half the price.

(PSP specs | Pez mp3 specs)

Taken.

A quick Google search revealed that you can also remove an entry from the registry manually with details found at here. I did this myself, installed the 1.02 version, and all seems to be running smoothly.

No offense here to Larry Niven (big SF fan here) but Archimedes has prior art for them since 2200 years or so.

You're just wrong.

First, a quick google pointed to an interesting figure on the total number of atheists (I hadn't had a reason ever to google it before) 12% of adults nationwide. Just a little more than sixteen total? :-)

Interesting that you expect me to have read a random webpage about atheism. I am no doctorate, just a layman. But, for kicks and giggles, I'm going to read your webpage. Okay? Now, will you do me the favor of reading mine?

And just for the record..Evolution is a theory. Not fact. Least, last I checked...anyone got any links that prove evolution as a FACT? I know, I know..stirred the hornet's nest again...Troll probably..but I am curious..

There are also audio lessons and more stuff there in mp3 format, you can take with you offline on your mp3 player.

All free too. http://german.about.com/ is alright too.

At least, riding on one of those, we'll be sure to segue into the new trusted architecture without ever falling over!

Well, I guess most of us will.

How to permanently disable administrative shares:
http://windows.about.com/od/administrationforexper ts/l/aa013100a.htm

The point is still valid: Windows does share everything by default, but you need a password. Given people's unimaginativeness with passwords on their home machines, that is hardly a hurdle.

While few browsers are or have ever been 100% compliant on EVERY DETAIL of a published standard, only Microsoft (of the remaining major broswer vendors) has a history of DELIBERATLY ignoring standards or DELIBERATLY incorporating non-standard extensions into their browsers. They've been doing this since IE 1.0.

And, no, I'm not a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person. But the history here speaks for itself.

That's really funny, because history tells us exactly the opposite. Either you're too young and don't know your history, or you're intentionally spreading FUD. Please read about Netscape and tags like blink, spacer, multicol, center, keygen and others, for example here or, to see how the problem was regarded at the time, here.

So, do you think you may be a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person after all ?

1 in 5 Americans have binged in alcohol recently

1 in 5 Americans have some form of disability

1 in 5 Canadians fell asleepat the wheel

1 in 5 computers is infected with some kind of virus or trojan"

Dating violence affects 1 in 5 teenage girls

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This message has been recommended by 4 out of 5 dentists

Disclaimer, Craig Shergold was a kid with cancer who became a internet hoax. Please take this as a joke and don't bother him.

Actually you are misusing the word agnostic. Agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive. You can be an agnostic atheist, in fact most agnostics are atheists. Agnosticism means that you believe that knowledge of god is inherently unattainable. It says nothing about whether you believe in a god. Saying you can't be an agnostic and an atheist is like saying you can't be blonde and tall.

Further, people go on a lot about the word disbelieve. Disbelief does not mean believing the opposite. It can mean simply not having the belief in question. Not believing in a god does not necessarily mean you believe there is not a god. There is a subtle difference here but any intelligent person can understand the nuance.

For further reading see Austin Cline's excellent articles on atheism and agnosticism

All people are either theists or atheists. Simply put, an atheist is not a theist. If you aren't a theist, then by definition you are an atheist.

Of course, it's fun to realize that if you lose 80% of your investment, you have to manage a gain of 400% to get back to even.

Not if you use dollar cost averaging. Because you buy more shares when the falls, your average price per share is lower and it's much easier to get back to even or better. I started investing near the peak of the bubble, and one of my aggressive mutual funds is about as volatile as the Nasdaq and went down around 80%. But it's subsequently doubled and I have a net gain from it, even though it's still only about a third of what it was when I started.

Says who?

Says the Founding Fathers. The whole point of the House/Senate duality was to prevent fickle desires from quickly becoming law when the greater national interest is not being served.

The Chinese language has many dialects. The government decrees mandarin as the official spoken dialect. http://chineseculture.about.com/cs/language/a/dial ects.htm

Clearly you are right.
How does posting an item on e-bay for auction merit going to a certification class for auctioning?
Although it sure would be nice to send some sellers to class on e-bay auctioning...

WinFS will actually be a layer of abstraction above whatever underlying filesystem (FAT32/NTFS) the system is running on. It won't be a new filesystem at all. It holds metadata about each file and makes it easier and faster to find things.

Gee... sounds an awful lot like slocate, long available on Unix. A nice tool to have, mesays.

That said, slocate has a few clear deficiencies...

1) It *ONLY* indexes the name! Why not grab the modify time, etc and allow for neat searches, like "all files called foo updated between feb 11 and feb 19th". Yes, you can use find. But find can take hours or days. (see point #2) Now, what you have to do is use locate, then pipe through ls, and then grep out from there - messy and cumbersome at best.

2) On a system with lots and lots of files, the updatedb command can take hours or days! Why isn't there an API that can be hooked to, so that writing files to disk also updates the slocate database? Would it be possible to write something that reads the journal on an ext3 system for recent changes, avoiding the expensive, time-consuming poll of every single file on the system?

Yes, I know I haven't fixed it already, but despite having the itch, I haven't the skills to hack together fixes to these issues. How long after WinFS before somebody suddenly gets similar ideas with the slocate codebase?

Can the slocate people beat Microsoft to the punch? Stay tuned, ladies, gentlemen, and Unix...

For that to happen, there are well documented specific conditions that the service member would have to not meet before there would be a seperation from the military.

Exactly.

As expensive as it is to get mass up into orbit, which would be cheaper:

Shuttle weighs 4.5 million pounds
Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds

Cost per pound to orbit is something like $10k per pound, low ball.

So launch costs for a new hubble would be about $245 million.
Launch cost for the shuttle seem to run around 1Billion per shot. That leaves 755 million to build a new hubble and apply the refits. The original hubble cost 1.5 Billion at launch, which I presume includes launch costs, development costs and such, of which building costs would actually be pretty cheap, seeing as how we still have the plans to use in building another one.

The mere thought almost makes me feel nauseous enough to skip high tea.

Funny that you'd have a High Tea, the commoner's (working class) supper mean, when your language speaks of a more rarified upbringing; I'd expect you'd be more likely to have an Afternoon Tea? http://coffeetea.about.com/cs/culture/a/aftervshig h.htm

My geeky friends and I were into Diplomacy http://boardgames.about.com/od/gamehistories/p/dip lomacy.htmfor awhile in high school. Great fun, but don't play too much. The required backstabbing can wear on friendships. We also used to play a great deal of the dice game Cosmic Wimpout http://www.cosmicwimpout.com/.

That's sort of true. The US gov't has separation of powers (unlike HM's unitary form of gov't), so on matters where the state has power, the case law and precedent (and for that matter statutory law) are separate. The supreme court of the US can still intervene, but this is somewhat rare these days since the current composition of the SCOTUS is somewhat sympathetic to federal separation of powers. For example, a presidential election (a federal matter) will get them to cross swords with the FL Supreme Court, but they are completely aloof from the Terry Shiavo case, where the conservative legislature & governor are in a colossal turf war with the liberal court.

The federal system is divided up into districts, nine of them, I believe. These districts are created by congress, but the judgeships are tenured appointments. (By contrast, Congress is prohibited from redrawing state lines.) Since all nine districts are using the same statutory law, there is more cross-pollenization of case law than what you see on the state level. Though even states have a penchant for "harmonizing" statutory law (the UCITA, for example, was proposed as a "standard" set of laws that could be passed in a single stroke).

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. "No software" may be a problem with the DS for the foreseeable future, but there are 24 launch titles for the PSP, and more (such as GTA) during launch week/launch month.

These are far more titles with far bigger names than the PS2 had at launch; now with a million PSPs promised, and with a price not significantly higher than the Nintendo DS, they should have the critical mass they need.

Remember, this is Sony, not Sega; they're good at the marketing thing. This is also not a dying Atari or an inexperienced Nokia.

You didn't even mention the hottest chick on the show - Olivia Wilde. She is the girl who is constantly making out with Mischa Barton.

Columbus calculated the earth's size at about 1/4th the correct size.

Your statement that the only difference between governmental involvement and private enterprise being that some corporations got involved neglects the fact that water prices DID rise in the case of Bolivia and that the root cause WAS the handing of the water utilities over to foreign companies in the name of capitalism. I couldn't find much in English other than Palast's stuff. But if you can read Spanish, you will see the humanitarian effect of handing over the water to Bechtel.

• www.gvom.ch
• www.socialismo-o-barbarie.org
• www.aguabolivia.org
• www.whrnet.org

Point is that privatization of shared resources has historically resulted in profits to businesses at the expense of the consumer. It's not just a matter of changing hands from governmental owners/regulators to private industry. Part of the mandate of government is to serve the people. This is NOT a mandate of business. If you have been following WTO, and US business models of late, you will note that they all include the ownership of government officials.

In French, using "tiers monde" to designate non-poor countries is unthinkable, as the word "tiers" strongly suggests poverty, because of the expression "tiers état". So "tiers monde" will probably always denote poor countries.

But of course no one said that the English expression "third world" will always have the same meaning : the meaning of expressions evolves with time.

If you're right, then the couple "third world"/"tiers monde" should be added to the list of false cognates, like
actual/actuel (=present)
journey/journée (=day)

The fastest jet plane in the world is still the SR71 Blackbird. It flew at Mach 3.35 or 2,275 mph (3,660 km/h). The circumference of the earth is 24,859.82 miles (40,008 km). So that means the Blackbird would do a flight around the world in 11 hours. Unfortunately it only had a range of 2,590 nm (4,800 km), so it would have to refuel at least 9 times. In a way, it's amazing that someone can build a plane that can carry enough fuel and still do the trip in less than 8x the time.

Well, then, Anonymous Brave Guy, allow me to rebut a few specific points. Apologies if I have misconstrued or misquoted any.

1) People who enforce laws shouldn't be required to have all of them memorized.

Well, I'm going to agree that the average street cop doesn't need to know tax law. But I assert that someone who enforces one very small specific subset of laws, e.g. TSA law enforcement, should in fact have a VERY thorough understanding of what is and is not illegal within the purview of those laws. That IS their job. Otherwise, that person may enforce personal preference or prejudice rather than the laws, or allow illegal activity to continue and thus endanger the lives of passengers. I'll go further and suggest that there should be on duty at all times some TSA enforcement person who has a written copy of such laws available for public perusal and for agent reference. This is my opinion, of course, not fact. I'd like to go on record as vigorously disagreeing with both your opinion and the factual basis underlying it.

2. Common sense suggests that a law requiring ID to board a commercial airliner exists and is reasonable.

Common sense is neither.

More specifically, I would assert that common sense suggests that if there is a law requiring you to show said ID, it can be found without having to break it first. That wasn't the case. The author might have tried to find such a law (the fine article doesn't say), perhaps in reaction to a previous TSA enforcer's actions*, or out of a desire not to have to tell every random stranger in a uniform that he was an epileptic, and couldn't.
(*Having flown several times in the last year, I can relate from experience that TSA people can often be rude, unpleasant, and leave one with a sense that one's privacy and dignity has been invaded unnecessarily. )
Common sense suggests that if one searches diligently to find a law prohibiting or requiring some pattern of behavior, and can't, then that law doesn't exist. That wasn't the case.

3. Making the scene that he did was unnecessary.

How else do you find out about secret laws, other than breaking them? Clearly we can't trust our lawmakers to be open about what's illegal. Applying common sense, as we've seen above, won't do either.

As mentioned previously, he may have had perfectly legitimate reasons for not wanting to show his papers - excuse me, for not wanting to show or have a TSA-approved photo ID.

Turning this around, common sense suggests that hiring a lawyer to file a court case to ask the government whether a specific law exists is unnecessary. However, this is what you said was "the correct answer." I'm thinking that perhaps common sense means something else when you say it. Maybe that's why we have laws instead of asking everyone to rely on their common sense...?

4. The TSA enforcement people reacted appropriately to this incident, as they would to a threat against the President.

I didn't really understand this - I'm hoping this was you being unclear in your phrasing, rather than as simple-minded as it appeared. Joking about assassinating the President is not a particularly parallel case. It's explicitly illegal, a Federal crime, and the law is readily available for citizens to read. Moreover, the foreigner who jokingly makes such a threat will quickly meet some nice Treasury Agents, probably members of the Secret Service, each of whom is perfectly capable of telling him exactly which laws he has broken. They will be polite, knowledgeable, and very serious.

TSA agents pulling a man out of line without being able to cite the relevant law is not reasonable or appropriate. This is NOT a personal fiefdom for agents to throw around personal power; this is a sensitive position in which agents are tasked with enforcing laws to protect "transportation"**. The agent's responses, FTFA, suggested that he pulled Gilmour at least in part because he

here in canada, we have a 1-tier school system

If you go deeper into the thread, you'll see another screenshot where MS Antispyware shows John Kery + Jane Fonda as a high-level threat.

John Dvorak didn't invent Ethernet - Bob Metcalfe did

I hate to keep replying to myself but this is a good starting point for a review of math programs... http://linux.about.com/library/howto/scientific_co mput/blsc4.htm
The program octave, which uses gnuplot for the backend, looks particularly interesting.

but I live in Denver , you insensitive clod.