Slashdot Mirror

Exactly.

The higher the speed, the more the shock waves become compressed into a series of cones stacked inside each other rather than the spheroids typical at slower speeds. Taken together, the passage of these shock waves through a plane perpendicular to the direction of travel would look a lot like circular ripples.

(you think I'm kidding, don't you?)

No.

This seems very similar what Fairtunes was doing years ago.

Oddsock even had/has a Winamp plugin for it http://www.oddsock.org/tools/gen_fairtunes but seems fairtunes.com is no longer and just a parking page now. Here's some more info from 2000 http://www.bizreport.com/news/66/ and some google action http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=fairtunes.com&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

"When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion"
No results found for "When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion".

"who claimed that they developed ideas independently"

No results found for "who claimed that they developed ideas independently".

"If the offense is blatant copy-infringement"
No results found for "If the offense is blatant copy-infringement".

"When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion"
No results found for "When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion".

"who claimed that they developed ideas independently"

No results found for "who claimed that they developed ideas independently".

"If the offense is blatant copy-infringement"
No results found for "If the offense is blatant copy-infringement".

"When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion"
No results found for "When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion".

"who claimed that they developed ideas independently"

No results found for "who claimed that they developed ideas independently".

"If the offense is blatant copy-infringement"
No results found for "If the offense is blatant copy-infringement".

How much more information would it take to identify this guy to his wife? Or to someone who might want to embarrass him for some reason?

...is the strictest, though?

I've read radical feminists who would view pretty much any diamond, alcohol, or shampoo commercial I've ever seen as obscenity. Hell, there's an article online (ICBATG) about the Firefly episode "Mrs. Reynolds" by some wingnut (Allecto, IIRC), which talks about it portraying homoeroticism, advocating misogyny, and showing sexual slavery positively/jokingly. I'm quite sure she'd find Firefly obscene.

The problem (well one of them) is that the 'strictest community' is inevitably going to be radical to some degree, and not representative of the larger community. That's pretty much tautological. They'll be a group more interested in changing the mores of society than in actually addressing the individual instance of a crime.

For the fun of it:
One of my favourite Bradbury lines: in Usher II from the Martian Chronicles

"I can choose not to carry (a cellphone), but if there's a huge antenna in my neighbourhood, I can't choose not to be within (its range)."

Of course of you drive down the main street of North Vancouver and look near the top of every building with any height, you'll see dozens of cel antennas.

The question whether we should be cruel enough to point that out.

Desolation Sound is generally nice at that time of year, with temperatures between 6 and 20 degrees celcius. All you need is a kayak or other kind of boat, and there are even out-of-the-way places with public internet access and grocery stores that you could easily nip in to every once in a while (never the same one twice, of course).

So If I'm on Chromium right now...
Awesome Averaging 1 bug per picture (some with multiple, some without), at 500 dollars each...

I'll take my 25 Billion billion please. Keep the change.

it's lifespan [...] it's event horizon

"it's" is a contraction of "it is", not a possessive.

Sorry, you were saying something funny about high school education?

One "Carl", several "Carls"; and it's "Carl's" possession.
One "it", several "its"; and it's "it's" possession.

"It's" is both possessive and a contraction.

Uh yeah... no. First off, "Carl's" possession refers only to the single Carl who possesses something. If you have a group of Carls and you're referring to their possessions you have two possibilities:
1. The group as a collective owns something: The Carls' fan club
2. The members of the group individually own things: The Carls' cars.

However, it refers specifically to an item in the singular. As a result you don't have several its. Instead you end up with those, them and what-not. So in your example above:

One "it", several "its"; and it's "it's" possession.

"It's" is both possessive and a contraction.

You have "it" the subject. "Its" which refers to an object owned by the "it", and you have "it's" which is a contraction for "it is." It doesn't matter if the "it" represents a group or an isolated individual, the subject is singular.

I know this post contains further grammatic errors, the subject here is the use of its and it's. I apologize for further muddying the waters with my contribution.
Read more about its / it's here:
Eats, shoots, and leaves

To continue, while I'm here ;), Some things are: too important to patent if you believe Mr. Jefferson. And as a matter of fact in the founding of the United States of America it was a close call whether patents should be allowed at all. The promoting the progress bit won out narrowly. Today, I believe this should be re-examined. We have reached the critical mass where if someone does not do it, someone else will. Therefore, the promoting the progress bit is not as valid. But stagnation rules the day, the slow slide into irrelevance because of a lack of keeping up with the times. There are many vested interests who manipulate issues to their own ends so I doubt we'll see a honest look at the issue any time soon. Perhaps, in the mean-time, when it comes to patents just emulate ironically those who appear to have that little bit right: China. Hell, distribute your software out of nations that are not stupid and let the USA wallow in itself for this issue.

Want Open to win? Stop being bloody purists. See, Ubuntu Software Commercial Survey for a pragmatic approach. Ubuntu is a bridge, get the Windows people over first and once they know what they're doing they can compile their own Gentoo. Commercial software on Linux is also such a bridge, let it in: as long as the core operating system is Open who gives a crap. If the commercial is amazingly good compared to the Open then it will survive while the Open matures. But don't deny your users the commercial because you're being a dick about it. Follow the Linux philosophy: Openness, including commercial. Then work with it yourself, I have converted two of my family-members desktops over to Ubuntu within the last month, not including my own. If I wasn't using a "stupid" distribution it wouldn't have happened because I have no idea of the required options while building your kernel. Support the bridges, they all lead into Open.

I find this kind of awareness experiment absolutely fascinating! -I think it is deeply related to many things in our reality, and the ability of people to ignore changes in order to exist within a logical continuum is what is meant by being Asleep versus Being Awake. There are SO many things in 'official' reality which don't add up and which take a form of cognitive dissonance, (the term people studying this stuff have come up with to explain the general insanity of people's lack of reaction to weirdness in the world), to live with.

Here's the study I think you are referring to. . .

And here's a treat: some videos of "Change Blindess" experiments.

-FL

I also tried this and my clipboard contained http://www.test.com/.
Maybe due to running Seamonkey instead of Firefox?
Yes, trying with Firefox I get the google redirect, http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.com%2F&rct=j&q=test&ei=C3ZTS_OqM5DusQPUzPX9Bw&usg=AFQjCNH21KLjC0CBkjon2DwD_CZ0HApLMw
So it is a Firefox thing.

Try this search:
http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=test [google.ca]

When I right click on the first result and select "Copy Link Location" this is copied into clipboard:

I did that, and here's the output from my clipboard:

http://www.test.com/

Someone else has apparently discovered that what you're describing only happens in Firefox. Maybe it's Mozilla's fault? Or maybe there's an extension that's doing this?

They do go to the appropriate site, the problem is with copying.
Example:

Try this search:
http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=test

When I right click on the first result and select "Copy Link Location" this is copied into clipboard:
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.com%2F&rct=j&q=test&ei=oVVTS-OLLZDaNvi07ckK&usg=AFQjCNH21KLjC0CBkjon2DwD_CZ0HApLMw&sig2=XUrAwjyb2j3qHcQzz4LwTg

While the actual URL is:
http://www.test.com/
Which is visible at the bottom of each result. For longer URLs though, it is truncated and you won't be able to copy the proper URL unless you open that result. For a single URL it's a minor inconvenience, but not when doing it several times.

They do go to the appropriate site, the problem is with copying.
Example:

Try this search:
http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=test

When I right click on the first result and select "Copy Link Location" this is copied into clipboard:
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.com%2F&rct=j&q=test&ei=oVVTS-OLLZDaNvi07ckK&usg=AFQjCNH21KLjC0CBkjon2DwD_CZ0HApLMw&sig2=XUrAwjyb2j3qHcQzz4LwTg

While the actual URL is:
http://www.test.com/
Which is visible at the bottom of each result. For longer URLs though, it is truncated and you won't be able to copy the proper URL unless you open that result. For a single URL it's a minor inconvenience, but not when doing it several times.

wtf has this got to do with "letting the market decide"? your talking about kids braclets, they are hardly in a position to decide anything. I would suggest once the market knows these bracklets are made with a dangerous heavy metal, it will decide. fail.

Sir —

The market's invisible hand rewards those selling cadmium bracelets because they are cheaper than other kinds; people buy them in the belief that they are essentially equivalent in every way but price (and, interestingly, looks). However, as per the article, these bracelets are not equivalent in their health effects - the cadmium bracelets present an enormous health hazard. I agree that if people knew the presence of cadmium and its effects, they would not buy cadmium laden bracelets. However people do not know, they have any way of knowing such a thing, and as most people would presume that such a toxin would never be in children's bracelets there is unlikely to be inquiry by most purchasers (many are also likely aware that the salesperson knows as much about the heavy metal content of the bracelet as they would know about ... virtually anything, hence there is no source of information that can be accessed with reasonable levels of effort).

With enough money one can ensure the market never "knows". A well funded company that has purchased all its competitors and has inroads into multiple marketing vectors can present whatever image they feel appropriate. Your rebuttal would seem to be premised on a society made up predominantly of informed, conscientious consumers. That is not the society we now live in. Consumers today are at best uninformed, indifferent, and short-sighted. On average they are self-indulgent, misinformed, and impulsive.

For example, look at the food production and distribution system in the United States. People who eat meat at fast food joints are consuming (albeit in small portions) sterilized faeces and ground up other humans. Heck, Monsanto's still around, and doing rather well, in spite of well known criticism.

Alas, I would disagree with the assertion that the market can self-correct in all cases (the formula is rather simple - if the profit minus the cost of mitigation is greater than the cost of continuing to sell a bad product - continue to sell). Perhaps if the culture changes and people become conscious of their consumables we will see a change in the type of market. But for now, if the market were left to decide, and the avenues of information were paid to ameliorate criticism, there could continue to be a healthy market for cadmium laden bracelets that are cheaper than alternatives and purchased in the absence of education, awareness and forethought.

As much as the claim "a bunch of Imams got together and basically stated that Math and Science were of the devil" plays into contemporary stereotypes, it is a very superficial and incomplete assessment.

What happened was a period of scientific breakthroughs and constant progress in conjunction with the expanding empires of Islam from Andalusian Spain, to Kashgar in Western China.

Then, several events started the slow but steady decline. The first was the Mongol invasion from the east, which destroyed Baghdad as a seat of science (and government) for the Muslim east. Great libraries were lost in the event. The Silk Road trade was eliminated, and with it all the hinterland that produced luminaries such as Al-Farabi, Al-Biruni and many more for many centuries.

The second was the Reconquista in Spain which took several centuries. Again, untold amounts of books were burned or lost.

Then following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, 1492 saw two events: the final fall of Muslim Spain, and Columbus' discovery of America. With the wealth of the Americas, Europe now had access to new trade and riches, and developed many technologies for sailing, trade, military, ...etc. No longer were they constrained by the Muslim Orient being a barrier between them and trade limited to India and China.

Then came the rejection of modern technology: the most stark example is the printing press. While Europe started the Renaissance, and printed books started an intellectual revolution, the printing press was rejected in Muslim lands. I am not sure why, but perhaps the Ottoman authorities feared it as a means of insubordination. Regardless, the end result was 3 centuries of relying on manuscripts only, causing poor dissemination of knowledge.

You can see the effect even in religious disciplines, for example, jurisprudence: the later commentators were just compilers/editors/summarizers of earlier texts. Even they declared that the "door to ijtihad has been closed", and all that has been said has been said, nothing new was to come about. This decline happened under late Mameluke and Ottoman rule.

This was soon followed by the colonialism period from Mughal India (1700s by the British East India Company), North Africa (France 1830s), Egypt (Britian 1882), Palestinian mandate, and the rest of it.

Following World War II, military dictators came to power (Nasser, Sukarno, Assad, Saddam, Qaddafi, ...etc.)

At least the Arab countries have not yet recovered from those last 2 stages.

For more on Science under Islam, watch this awesome BBC documentary: Science and Islam - Episode 1.

The three episodes are described here:

• Science and Islam: The Language of Science
• Science and Islam: The Empire of Reason
• Science and Islam: The Power of Doubt

Also articles, books and talks by Dr. George Saliba (Columbia University) are highly recommended in this regard. He is interviewed in the above documentary.

Minor correction: I meant jurors, not jurists

I've also seen similar questions having lots of great voted answers on StackOverflow.com. For example, see these similar questions: http://www.google.ca/search?q=Teach+Year+Old+To+Program%3F+site:stackoverflow.com

You're right. And similar laws exist in many countries. But I've seen plenty of disclaimers on government websites that include a "Disclaimer of Endorsement". It basically says that although a product may be mentioned, it isn't meant to imply an "endorsement, recommendation, or favoring" by the government.

So, maybe he can acknowledge the software used as long as there is a suitable disclaimer attached.

I'm not saying Solaris is slow, I'm simply aware of some people (see its derogatory moniker here) who disparage it for being slow and I wanted to know if their complaints are warranted. If they aren't, then great, I might try out Solaris on my next computer.

chinese news

google.ca translate

Go to Yelp. Look at what it is.

Go to Google, Enter Google Maps. Type in "Restaurants in "

Notice the Ratings and reviews all along the left bar.

Tell me, what does Yelp Offer that Google does not have already coded. (Keep in mind that Google has tons of services already built, as you can see here.

8 Billion web pages, which one, exactly, are you looking for?
8 Billion. And that's a very conservative number. How do you find what you don't know what you are looking for? I'll describe my setup to cut through the information overload of today's world.

Most of these functions are built into my browser, Chrome, through extensions but other browsers are more than capable of doing them as well: especially Firefox. Internet Explorer is the most limited here but even it can access most of these functions through straight web-interfaces - although clunky.

The basis of all the following systems is the RSS Feed. It is a method of condensing a website into a synopsis of stories which are then linked to. The place to begin with RSS feeds is to get yourself a Gmail account. This single log-on will allow you to access the whole range of Google Web-Services. After you do that you sign up for Google Reader with your gmail login. You can then begin to add feeds from your favorite web-sites to that. You can, in Chrome, use an extension called: RSS Subscription to easily add feeds from your favorite web-sites to Reader. Once you have a good amount of feeds subscribed, the next step is to set up a Feedly account. Feedly integrates completely with Google Reader so you don't need reader other than a place to store your subscriptions. Feedly provides a magazine like summary of all of your favorite web-sites in one easy to use place through the magic of RSS Feeds. Now, on your second monitor you set up another web-site called Lazyfeed. I like to have this browser set to full-screen. Lazyfeed is organized by topics instead of web-sites and constantly updates as new stories appear on the web. Be specific in the topics you are interested with. Going beyond all of this, and all these services integrate seamlessly with this as well, is to use the micro-blogging service Twitter as a method to find the latest sites. Twitter can be clunky as a web-page, but again, if you integrate it into Chrome using an extension such as Chromed Bird then it actually operates in a very fluid manner. Twitter is another means of aggregation, you follow people who are interesting and if they find you interesting they follow you: providing links the entire time. The whole of these systems allows you to cut straight through all the fluff and find what interests you - even if you don't know what that is!

ProTip: When viewing items in Lazyfeed they all have an RSS button so you can subscribe to the complete feed in Reader and by extension Feedly!

Another, but less related system - especially if you download lots of books - is to use: Google Desktop which provides a side-bar and more importantly an indexer which will look inside all your files and provide Google Search to them. Very useful for going deeper.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS - RSS Description
http://www.google.ca/reader/ - Google Reader
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd - RSS Subscription Extension
http://www.feedly.com/ - Feedly
http://www.lazyfeed.com/ - Lazyfeed
http://twitter.com/ - Twitter
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic - Chromed Bird
http://desktop.google.ca/en/?ignua=1 - Google Desktop

http://digiphile.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/linking-tweeting-and-social-search-on-the-human-curated-web/ - Article on social search
http://oneforty.com/ - Th

8 Billion web pages, which one, exactly, are you looking for?
8 Billion. And that's a very conservative number. How do you find what you don't know what you are looking for? I'll describe my setup to cut through the information overload of today's world.

Most of these functions are built into my browser, Chrome, through extensions but other browsers are more than capable of doing them as well: especially Firefox. Internet Explorer is the most limited here but even it can access most of these functions through straight web-interfaces - although clunky.

The basis of all the following systems is the RSS Feed. It is a method of condensing a website into a synopsis of stories which are then linked to. The place to begin with RSS feeds is to get yourself a Gmail account. This single log-on will allow you to access the whole range of Google Web-Services. After you do that you sign up for Google Reader with your gmail login. You can then begin to add feeds from your favorite web-sites to that. You can, in Chrome, use an extension called: RSS Subscription to easily add feeds from your favorite web-sites to Reader. Once you have a good amount of feeds subscribed, the next step is to set up a Feedly account. Feedly integrates completely with Google Reader so you don't need reader other than a place to store your subscriptions. Feedly provides a magazine like summary of all of your favorite web-sites in one easy to use place through the magic of RSS Feeds. Now, on your second monitor you set up another web-site called Lazyfeed. I like to have this browser set to full-screen. Lazyfeed is organized by topics instead of web-sites and constantly updates as new stories appear on the web. Be specific in the topics you are interested with. Going beyond all of this, and all these services integrate seamlessly with this as well, is to use the micro-blogging service Twitter as a method to find the latest sites. Twitter can be clunky as a web-page, but again, if you integrate it into Chrome using an extension such as Chromed Bird then it actually operates in a very fluid manner. Twitter is another means of aggregation, you follow people who are interesting and if they find you interesting they follow you: providing links the entire time. The whole of these systems allows you to cut straight through all the fluff and find what interests you - even if you don't know what that is!

ProTip: When viewing items in Lazyfeed they all have an RSS button so you can subscribe to the complete feed in Reader and by extension Feedly!

Another, but less related system - especially if you download lots of books - is to use: Google Desktop which provides a side-bar and more importantly an indexer which will look inside all your files and provide Google Search to them. Very useful for going deeper.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS - RSS Description
http://www.google.ca/reader/ - Google Reader
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd - RSS Subscription Extension
http://www.feedly.com/ - Feedly
http://www.lazyfeed.com/ - Lazyfeed
http://twitter.com/ - Twitter
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic - Chromed Bird
http://desktop.google.ca/en/?ignua=1 - Google Desktop

http://digiphile.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/linking-tweeting-and-social-search-on-the-human-curated-web/ - Article on social search
http://oneforty.com/ - Th

Which points to this area: http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=65N+036E+&sll=49.891235,-97.15369&sspn=45.043582,77.607422&ie=UTF8&ll=64.472794,26.103516&spn=31.006926,77.607422&t=h&z=4 making this explanation very plausible.

The evidence is mixed: a recent paper that compared temperatures at half a dozen stations world-wide over the better part of the 20th century showed no evidence for warming and contradicted model predictions for those locations; on the other hand ocean temperatures do seem to be increasing.

You do realize that a lot of glaciers and polar caps are melting?. Oceans, being composed of fluids more viscous than the atmosphere, don't exchange heat as well as the atmosphere.

Yes, It is.

an 8hr drive is probably a pretty short plane ride. Compare it with this drive and see how all of a sudden it's not that bad.

Heck, I haven't even left the province of Ontario with this example, let alone traveled to a different country. In order for me to leave home, cross into another country and then cross into a third country (Mexico) I'd have to drive 30h at the least. An 8h drive or shorter flight from Amsterdam to Copenhagen sounds like a short sidetrip to me. I've had successful relationships with longer distances between points.

Yes, It is.

an 8hr drive is probably a pretty short plane ride. Compare it with this drive and see how all of a sudden it's not that bad.

Heck, I haven't even left the province of Ontario with this example, let alone traveled to a different country. In order for me to leave home, cross into another country and then cross into a third country (Mexico) I'd have to drive 30h at the least. An 8h drive or shorter flight from Amsterdam to Copenhagen sounds like a short sidetrip to me. I've had successful relationships with longer distances between points.

A whole other debate entirely, yes, but I agree.

It would in fact be interesting to directly correlate the quality of the printed word in local papers on a chart of average education level achieved for the region.

Personally I glean a lot of random news from Google News because I use it as a homepage, but most of my heavy reporting comes from the CBC, who do some fantastic journalistic work.

what it is

I see meta-moderating as more like this:

http://images.google.ca/images?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=darth%20vader%20brita&lr=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change ... you have to view source, THEN scroll down

That's true if you click a link from, for example here, but not true if you click a link from a Google search result (first result is the same link as before). In the latter case, just scroll down and read your answer.

The whole idea of "push" media spawned back around 1995 with Pointcast, Marimba, BackWeb and others. It was The Next Big Thing(TM) and it was going to change the way we used the internet. Of course at the time most people were still using 28.8K dialup at home and didn't want to wait for an hour while all your new content downloaded as soon as you connected.

Most of this was much more general than just pushing podcasts, but the whole idea of subscribing to a "channel" that updates you and automatically downloads when new content is available is what push media was all about. I could go on, but Wired Magazine headlined this in their March '97 issue, or just google it.

let's turn that around, and use the evolutionist's argument against him.

Fail #1: "evolutionist" isn't a word.

Weird. Google seems to think it is, along with a crap load of dictionary sites:

http://www.google.ca/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=define%3A+evolutionist&meta=&btnG=Google+Search

When you'd rather attack the messenger, than debate, especially when the attack on the messenger is _provably wrong_, then you don't have much of anything to stand on, do you?

http://www.google.ca/search?q=lawyers+disbarred+2009

This year, how many IT people were permanently booted from their line of work because of negligence/malfeasance?

Well, there is graphic granite.

(A bit late for a reply, but still.)

It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman."

You might be interested in Kenneth Henshall's explanation about the colorful origin of this character.

(Unfortunately, this is very atypical of kanji/hanzi — most of them are quite boring, which doesn't help at all when it comes to memorizing them.)

there's nothing stopping Google from turning around and doing the exact same thing.

But really, why would they? Google's results often contain links to exactly the same places. And arguably more useful places, too.

Google Dodecahedron and you get #1 wikipedia.com - #2 wolfram.com

I tried using Wolfram Alpha, but every time I do it tells me "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input."

Even if it was the case (someone merely stating their bad opinion of a news network isn't much of an intimidation, even if it is from someone important with political influence), genuine intimidation of the press by presidents and personnel at their command has occurred historically for a long time.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=immaculate+conception%2C+human+egg+fertilization&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

-40 Fahrenheit and -40 Celsius are the same.

and Google. Google is still up.

The arguments posed in this thread are amusing at best, confused at worst. Perhaps the thing we need to learn collectively might be that our culture's perceptions on ourselves, the world and the universe are flawed. Only in the culture that has emerged in the past one hundred years do we consider 'civilized' society one where it's acceptable to manufacture consent, to use the science of psychology against each other in marketing and media, that war and violence are acceptable ways of conflict resolution. Only in this culture do we think that 'it's someone else's problem, they can deal with it' is acceptable. This separation of selves may have been necessary, but it's up to each one of us to do the internal defragmentation and recoding of our own 'programs'.

2220? Seriously, anyone who has watched the fast pace of evolution in computer technology should be able to step back and see the parallel ratcheting up in pace in other fields, like pharmaceuticals, finance, space exploration and environmental studies. Everything is on a schedule. Anyone who can't see this is likely in denial. There's certainly a lot of fear spread about the Long Count date.

I don't know, but it seems to me that the selfishness, greed and lack of regard for the environment we inhabit is something that cannot be sustained by the planet, and even society in general. The manipulation and disenfranchisement of the Other has reached epic proportions that have never been seen before in all of history. We are literally tearing each other apart. And people have come to believe that Nature is flawed, forgetting that humans are an intrinsic part of nature. Ridiculous ideas like putting mirrors in space to reflect light from the sun away from earth only serve to illuminate the collective darkness some seem to want to sustain. The tipping point we stand at today is one of responsibility. What will we chose to not stand for? Fate is something we each hold in our own hands.

The Mayans weren't counting days. They were counting something different. That idea is going to be foreign to anyone who thinks days are nothing but a linear sequence. I think anyone will agree that today's Gregorian calendar is more of a financial calendar. I see the Mayan's tzol'kin as more of a space-weather prediction system. Just because we're only now discovering the evidential existence of space weather doesn't mean that ancient civilizations didn't have their own unique ways and frames of understanding these concepts.

One of the best introductions I've found to the Mayan Calendars is Ian Xel Lungold's presentation called The Mayan Calendar Comes North.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-8689261981090121097

The most important thing any seeker can remember, whether they be a mystic or informational, is that too many journalists screw up the story. The only way to cut through the chaff is to feel one's way forwards.

and "Exchange Web Services" is Patented!

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0113001.html

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=846&q=%22Exchange+Web+Services%22+patent+microsoft&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

How can you know what the share is, if you've no legit data?

It's simple math. So you've got 1.3 billion people in China, we sold 244 copies, so that's a 99.9999812% piracy rate. It's obvious.