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Thrust reversers cannot be used on a wet, slippery runway due to the very reason that it's wet and slippery and consequently the reverse thrust would blow more water under the landing gear. Why not? Reverse thrust does not rely upon friction. I my thirty years of air travel I cannot remember a single time when reverse thrust wasn't used. Go and have a read and post up your apology once you have. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=reverse+thrust&i e=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offici al&client=firefox-a would be a good start. C:\>

At the top of the wired blog comments right now is this one: Wikimedia Foundation employee removes source about Wiki Scanner funding by Anonymous Vishal-WMF, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, has removed evidence from a news story that uncovered that Virgil, the scanner's creator, was HIRED by the Wikimedia Foundation! News story that was removed by Wikipedia Employee (not admin, EMPLOYEE): http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?at_code=428814 Backup archive link in case the WMF 'vanishes' the evidence: http://www.webcitation.org/5RAEP2kAl Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_G riffith&diff=prev&oldid=151814656 Yet Wired has claimed that this is a "false claim": "Update: 8/17/2007 A Wikimedia Foundation employee really did edit Virgil Griffith's entry today, but only to cut a false claim that Griffith was employed by the foundation to create the scanner. " So what makes Wired assume that it is a false claim? This is the same guy that brought us Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services, and he is stating something as fact, not as an opinion. "On July 26, OhmyNews alleged that Wikipedia may have been infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. The story attracted more than 50,000 readers in just three days, was highly debated on the Web, and translated in several languages. Wikipedia quickly reacted to the news and hired Virgil Griffith, one of the best known American hacker, to investigate the matter." Yet Wikipedia claims its "unreliable". Wikipedia has used ohmynews as a source in 192 of their articles: and has been used in Google news 460 times: http://news.google.com.au/news?hl=en&ned=au&q=ohmy news&btnG=Search+News Virgil Griffith does claim that he wasn't paid by Wikipedia: http://virgil.gr/31.html and the Wikipedia staff went so far as to remove the links, and then ban the IP address of the person who had inserted them: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: Log&type=block&page=User:123.2.168.215 Daniel Brandt claims that it is far too expensive for him to have done it himself: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43697 But perhaps he really did do all of this just to make himself popular. Spend a few thousand dollars, including the $349 to do the reverse IP lookups: http://www.ip2location.com/ip-country-region-city- isp.aspx , saved presumably through his time as an unemployed student and spent several hundred hours creating something that does nothing more than make him well-known. Perhaps it'll help him to get a job sometime in the future? And perhaps its all one almighty coincidence that all this has happened just a week after Wikipedia was reeling after the massive censorship about the SlimVirgin scandal. Oh, and also note that another IP that reverted edits to the article belonged to Jayjg, the person most closely related to SlimVirgin: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43641 Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. And this over an issue in which we've proven that the CIA edits Wikipedia with a definite aim, as have many other industr

>> Well let's ignore the "i.e." that I don't think Torvalds actually spelled out and read what this really is saying...

Actually, that's exactly what he said:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=torvalds+%22I+pe rsonally+consider+anything+%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&a q=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

No, there is an OpenGL option.

I suppose it all depends on whether some low IQ, anal retentive, privacy invasive pervert, at which ever three letter agency is looking to fill their quota, or has a grudge against you, or just doesn't like your slashdot postings.

And shit, what do you know, it is all digital, so no matter what they want to put against your name, the can just edit the logs and voila, a complete record of nefarious search entries, now, you prove different.

When it comes to refining, filtering and tweaking your net searches, the only place it should be stored is locally on your computer, it is only your business and no one else's, as for google the proctologist of the Internet, and it's ilk, you can do what ever you like, legislation to force the respect of other people's privacy will be jammed down your greedy maws whether your lobbyists like it or not ;).

> anyone who analyses the literature will hate neuromancer and most other cyberpunk as well.

>> Incorrect. My wife has a masters in English and she informs me that Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is part of what they call 'the literary canon'.

>>> No offense, but the fact that your wife has a Master's in English doesn't mean squat.

In this case it does matter. Your post's GP made an assertion as to what a group of people ("anyone who analyses the literature") thinks of Neuromancer ("will hate [it}"). The parent said that his wife belongs to a group of people who profesionally analyse the literature, and that she reports that group does not hate Neuromancer, but rather considers it a classic (that is what "part of what they call 'the literary canon'" means).

How is that irrelevant?

> There is no more or less informed opinion when talking about appreciation of art: it's all entirely subjective.

But there is a clear informed opinion when talking about current consensus on a given work. The Mona Lisa is universally considered a masterpiece in academic circles, primary school textbooks and the popular media, regardless of what your (or mine, for that matter) entirely subjective impression of it may be.

And Neuromancer is now rutinely included in reading lists by English Departments the world over, whether you know someone with a CS degree who can't operate a toaster or not.

Here.

Google Video: http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-166095 432964105847&q=good+bad+copy&total=254&start=0&num =10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Nice insight - thanks for the info. I was unaware of this particular incident.
Interesting that if I search Google for some random stuff 'windows undelete':
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=windows+un delete&btnG=Google+Search&meta=/
I see ads.

However, if I search for 'Louis Vuitton':
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Louis+Vuit ton&btnG=Google+Search&meta=/
There are NO adds at all.

One could argue that if you are wealthy enough, there is no need to participate in google-adword wars of attrition - simply sue Google for an amount sufficiently larger than the adword-related revenue and you will effectively OWN that adword as no competitors will appear on the page. Seems to have worked for 'Louis Vuitton'.

Nice insight - thanks for the info. I was unaware of this particular incident.
Interesting that if I search Google for some random stuff 'windows undelete':
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=windows+un delete&btnG=Google+Search&meta=/
I see ads.

However, if I search for 'Louis Vuitton':
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Louis+Vuit ton&btnG=Google+Search&meta=/
There are NO adds at all.

One could argue that if you are wealthy enough, there is no need to participate in google-adword wars of attrition - simply sue Google for an amount sufficiently larger than the adword-related revenue and you will effectively OWN that adword as no competitors will appear on the page. Seems to have worked for 'Louis Vuitton'.

I don't know how Ubunghole can be gaining "marketshare". The only people moving to Ubunghole are people switching to the latest distro.

Then, once Ubunghole looses that "new distro smell", they will simply move on to something else.

Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, was able to install software without requiring the user to move around files manually and edit config files. Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, would just work.

I don't know how Ubunghole can be gaining "marketshare". The only people moving to Ubunghole are people switching to the latest distro.

Then, once Ubunghole looses that "new distro smell", they will simply move on to something else.

Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, was able to install software without requiring the user to move around files manually and edit config files. Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, would just work.

I don't know how Ubunghole can be gaining "marketshare". The only people moving to Ubunghole are people switching to the latest distro.

Then, once Ubunghole looses that "new distro smell", they will simply move on to something else.

Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, was able to install software without requiring the user to move around files manually and edit config files. Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, would just work.

"And yet everything has a value."

Unobtainium is worthless. Next up, a rant....(not aimed at "you" personally).

The Australian system is similar to the UK's NHS, so much so that we look after each others tourists for "free". I was an asthmatic teenager when the "establishment" told us universal health care was a communist plot that was crippling the UK and would bankrupt the country. 30+yrs later and we are far from bankrupt, we have "world class" prevention, care, teaching and research. I belive "the system" saved my son's life and it definitely kept me out of bankruptcy.

As for footing the bill for "non-taxpayers" (depending on political expediency the Australian term for non-taxpayers is either "bludgers" or "battlers").

I spent all of my 20's at the "trailer trash" end of the socio-economic scale. Happily, I am now in the "high income" bracket where I am supposed to "top up" with private cover for stuff such as dentistry and silcone tits - personally I prefer the extra $500 "fine" at tax time and pay for my own dentistry...anyway...When you do the math it turns out I am paying to cover 5-6 non-taxpayers, yet I have only two (grown) kids and I'm no longer married (to the lazy bitch...sorry...that just slipped out, see the "political expediency" comment earlier).

The reason I am not only glad but proud to pay the levy is that I hope the system works for those 5-6 people as well as it did for me in the past. The reason I don't buy "mandatory top up" insurance is because it is medicinal "fluff" that I can afford. Most of all I don't want a return to the partisan politics where one side refuses to acknowledge the inherent "social evil" in a system that can routinely take eveything the patient's family has, and then promptly hang the patient with red tape.

How do my costs compare to the cost of similar cover in the US?

From comparing notes with one or two US slashdotters in the past I belive my 1.5% levy on taxable income is considerably less than HALF of what similar cover (and care) would cost in the US, the exact ratio varies from state to state. Not very scientific I know, but I also know that the death rate from asthma in the US has now overtaken that of Australia, this is despite Australia having one of the highest incidence rates in the world. Make what you will of the facts and figures and competing "-isims", I know first hand it's not me and my five "battlers" who are getting "ripped off".

A restaurant chain in Australia also goes by the name Lazy Moes. They use signage which definitely appears to be in a similar style to that on the Simpsons. At least to the same extent as the popular culture references used in the show.

ATI have crap drivers? So do nVidia!

I've an ex-nVidia who came over to ATI. Why? Crap Drivers. There's one called the "nv4_disp Infinite Loop Bug" that's been around for years. It's across generations of nVidia hardware. The really bad thing is you can't talk to nVidia about it (and yeah, there have been petitions and web pages galore, all to no avail). nVidia don't accept user feedback, period.

Anyway, got sick of the lockups so kissed nVidia goodbye and couldn't be happier. Now using a new ATI x1950 card now. Nice card, includes Shader 3.0 support, and the driver is rock stable on my system. Not a single lockup, bug, hang, glitch or anything. Heard criticism of ATI's drivers (from a buddy feeing ATI for nVidia!) which worried me, but took the gamble and couldn't be happier. At least you *can* make a support request to ATI. nVidia won't talk to you. That was a factor.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=nv4_disp+%22infi nite+loop BTW the bug only affects certain configurations (nobody knows what), sporadic and sometimes it goes away and comes back. At its worst, your system will hang 4 times a day. Sadly, no, it hasn't been fixed!

BTW on Shader 4.0 John "Doom n' Quake" Carmack says take your time: Shader 3.0 is great, but developers are only just getting around to that as it is. There's really no need for Shader 4.0, which only runs under Vista anyway. (oh Microsoft, will you ever learn?)

Carmack's interview: http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200701/N07. 0109.1737.15034.htm

I agree, it sounds good in theory but I doubt that their own massive reservation systems are suddenly going to optimise for fuel as opposed to overall profit. Unfortuantely the only practical way to reduce emmissions from the global air transport system is to increase the cost of oil (ie: less people/freight flying).

I haven't RTFA but I'm guessing that it's a PR stunt to cloud the issue of fuel subsidies that are bestowed apon most airlines around the world enabling them to "run at a loss" on one or more routes.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ev1&start=0&ie=u tf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official

Seems to me the oil companies are just making sure we keep using oil and make sure no competing infrastructure exists to provide vehicles with energy.

As I understand it, Mozilla DO do something like this with firefox.

When you perform a search with the default firefox screen (with it's Firefox customised Google) Google is notified of this fact and kick back some money to Mozilla.

When you perform a search from Firefox's search box you'll also notice that it's identifying you as a Firefox user, here take a look:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=test&le=en&sourc eid=mozilla-search&start=0

Note the sourceid in the querystring.
Nefarious? That's for you to decide.

Even more accurate now.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+ anticompetitive+illegal&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

They've forced xenu.net to be delisted from google

Are you sure?.

Apologies, my felony -- sorry about need for link twink http://www.google.com.au/enterprise/gsa/onebox.htm l

They don't. You can buy a very nice search engine hosted on Google hardware. Check out http://www.google.com.au/enterprise/gsa/onebox.htm l/

Nice. Ignore the whole argument except that. No bias there....

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=successful+hirin g+of+clairvoyants+by+Police Find your own.

The LAND attack, both classically and in the Vista stack during the RC, is caused by a buffer overflow.

And, of course, those _never_ happen on other platforms.

What this means is that the Vista stack does not use routines that do proper bounds checking.

Right. Because what applies to one part of a piece of software probably being worked on by hundreds of people clearly applies to all of it.

The Microsoft media centre software uses Microsoft's media frameworks and thus is an application which supports and utilizes DRM, to which I am opposed.

Why don't you list a few ways that Media Center's DRM further restricts what you can do.

Linux is faster today than it once was, even on older hardware, provided you have enough ram for the newer kernel.

Thank you for defeating your own argument.

Not to mention, there are numerous benchmarks showing 2.4 is faster than 2.6 in some areas.

a) That's not what I'm talking about - most of those threads/processes are doing almost nothing and b) if your number of context switches is not getting all that high, then running multiple threads and/or processes is not onerous anyway.

I'll say again, anyone seriously loading up a modern machine is almost certainly running multiple threads (ie: multithreaded application), if not multiple applications.

What resource-intensive tasks - that people would actually be running on Vista - are you thinking of that are single-threaded ?

I doubt it, but neither I nor google know what a "pushbike" is.

You are a liar.

Do you mean a scooter?

I mean a pushbike. Otherwise known as a bicycle, as the first link Google shows makes quite obvious.

They don't fulfill the same function at all, so that is an idiotic statement and you are an idiot for making it.

By the definition of "same function" you are apparently using, they do - they carry around people and goods.

You might note that it's actually easier to see what you're running with the Alt-Tab powertoy on Windows XP than with Flip3D.

That depends. Flip3D has the advantage of live window thumbnails. It also better shows what Alt+TAB is doing.

I've already told you that I'm not a mac lover. Get off the mac tip, I don't give a shit about the mac either.

I never said you did. I am continuing the discussion *you* started comparing Expose to Flip3D. If you don't want to discuss OS X compared to Windows, don't start discussions that do so.

I think OSX is an idiotic half-measure. They should have gone with BeOS. BeOS was fast on a dual 66MHz system. OSX is of about average but not amazing speed on a dual 2.0GHz system.

Of course it is. It's doing a lot more. Even if OS X was a shining example of fast OS for its functionality, you would still expect it to be slower than BeOS.

BeOS was a single-user, half-implemented OS with dismal hardware support. You cannot validly compare any version of BeOS to OS X and draw meaningful conclusions about what *might* have happened.

You know, reading all kinds of things I haven't said into my statements doesn't make you any smarter. There's no need to do it in a resource-intensive way. It can be done as resources permit so you are not slowing down the user. And you can scan the most recently modified documents first so that the most relevant documents will be indexed first.

You still have to do the full scan, which is going to slow down the system no matter how nicely you *try* and do it.

Incidentally, my anecdote that Vista's indexer has no perceivable impact on performance during the initial index carries as much weight as yours stating the contrary.

That's not what's happening here, and to suggest that it's simply the usual delay is utterly disingenuous. Dozens of major corpora

Poor Darl, going from getting pwned by geeks with a clue, to getting pwned by Bubba who has a "raging clue" .

http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-456022 3634477555563&q=raging+clue

hmmm, not the only thing wrong at google this week...

http://maps.google.com.au/ narrows it down by at least 90%, and after 5 minutes, I would say that there is about a 30% chance that your name is John Lynch... (and I haven't even started to read your 2000+ comments yet(and I'm not going to))

"The explanation has been provided."

But has failed to convince these guys who correctly categorise "The Electric Sky" as a popularization and point to an excellent critique of the book.

If you are so eager to be a skeptic then start testing YOUR ideas and acknowledging their known flaws. If you do have the courage to test your convictions you will also notice that these "established scientists" are actively looking at alternatives to the big bang that involve plasma, including those that appear in popular science.

"Regulating breathing", interesting meme you have there but I don't think you thought it through from both sides. Oxygen makes up ~1/4 of the atmosphere, hypothetically if we somehow raised that figure significantly we would be in danger of incinerating the surface of the planet.

"Normally we think of pollution as something that poisons people in some way"

The word pollutant has lots of meanings to lots of people but it basically boils down to mean "something that is not supposed to be in a particular environment", for example water and sugar are both "pollutants" in your petrol tank.

Water vapour: You should read your link again, if you pump huge amounts of water vapour into the air it will simply rain a bit harder somewhere else (we sure would appreciate that here in Australia). Air at a specific presure and temprature holds a specific amount of water vapour. Water vapour takes ~10 days to cycle through the atmosphere and fall out as rain. The stability of the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere at any particular time certainly keeps us from freezing, however this stability means it cannot by itself change the climate, in other words, global humidity is determined by global climate.

Hmmm, that doesn't seem to be true to me. In both languages they can go before or after. After may be more common, but I wanted the emphasis gained by putting it before.

Indeed it is. But are you unaware of its other uses? At the beginning of a sentence it can be causal, translated as "because", "since" or "as".

Yep, car is the equivalent of comme, the difference being that car introduces following subordinate clauses, whereas comme introduces preceding subordinate clauses.

What I put seems the most natural to me. If I have a look on Google, stuff like Je passe mon temps sur le net à surfer get far fewer results than stuff like Je passe mon temps à surfer sur le net. And certainly what I wanted to say was "I spend my time repeating clichés on Slashdot", not "I spend my time on Slashdot repeating clichés".

Yeah, I am a bit non-standard with my hyphen usage. I can't bear to completely separate it from the noun when I know it is a prefix in origin.

I don't speak American English, but I did live in Bordeaux a few years ago and chat online with young French people; and I observed that super and hyper were common slang intensifying adverbs. One could also say très or vachement. They've probably totally fallen out of fashion now, and I am probably out of date, but my use of them has nothing to do with science fiction, American English, French Slashdots, or anything similar.

Bah, that just showing off!

Hmmm, that doesn't seem to be true to me. In both languages they can go before or after. After may be more common, but I wanted the emphasis gained by putting it before.

Indeed it is. But are you unaware of its other uses? At the beginning of a sentence it can be causal, translated as "because", "since" or "as".

Yep, car is the equivalent of comme, the difference being that car introduces following subordinate clauses, whereas comme introduces preceding subordinate clauses.

What I put seems the most natural to me. If I have a look on Google, stuff like Je passe mon temps sur le net à surfer get far fewer results than stuff like Je passe mon temps à surfer sur le net. And certainly what I wanted to say was "I spend my time repeating clichés on Slashdot", not "I spend my time on Slashdot repeating clichés".

Yeah, I am a bit non-standard with my hyphen usage. I can't bear to completely separate it from the noun when I know it is a prefix in origin.

I don't speak American English, but I did live in Bordeaux a few years ago and chat online with young French people; and I observed that super and hyper were common slang intensifying adverbs. One could also say très or vachement. They've probably totally fallen out of fashion now, and I am probably out of date, but my use of them has nothing to do with science fiction, American English, French Slashdots, or anything similar.

Bah, that just showing off!

Actually, according to Google this is authentic news

It's not trolling to point out that this was news at least 10 days ago. The Age in Melbourne last updated their story on May 21, though Google indexed it there on the 20th.

Mod parent +2 Apology.

"What you are confusing is atheism and what we might call 'anti-theism'. The first is absense of a belief, the second is positive belief or faith in an absense. They are certainly not the same thing."

Hmmm, I looked it up with a google "define: atheism" and got this from princeton (top of the list)...

1. The doctrine or belief that there is no God. (your "anti-theism")
2. A lack of belief in the existence of God or gods. (your "atheisim")

While I agree they are not the "same thing", I think it's fairly clear there are two sub-categories of atheist, I think I can safely say my comment implies type #1, at the very least the word "know" should have given the reader a strong clue.

"This is unclear thinking, and philosophically empty."

I see your insult and raise you a snarky remark about your comprehension skills and Horatio. ;)

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=tortilla+crisis

I doubt that there are 1,000,000 people in the world who know about robots.txt

That would be 1,820,000 pages at least. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not common knowledge in the applied field. Seriously, if you look up information about publishing web pages, and especially about search engines, you're going to run into info about robots.txt pretty soon. It's an accepted standard that's been around for well over 10 years now.

Nihilism is defined as a belief in "nothing". Nihilisim by definition cannot be a team sport, the fact that extreme right wingers have an ethos (a set of beliefs) implies they do in fact belive in "something" and therefore cannot be categorised as nihilists. To take it a step further even a belief in nothing is still a belief, a strict nihilist is really a I_don't_know_and_don't_care_ist who lives purely on instinct alone, a reptilian brain in a human body so to speak.

The attraction of nihilism to extreme groups is that it serves as dogma to encourage the destruction of the current system (whatever that may be). The 9/11 attackers and other assorted terrorists have also been called nihilists, but screaming praise to God while flying a plane into the "enemy" does not strike me as having a lack of a belief system (no matter how twisted it is).

I don't know, a real google search seems to match quite a few.

Doh!

The first 8 results are for the new hi-def drives on google at the moment...

Yes - plenty of people. It was quite intentional. Parker and Stone discuss it on the (IIRC) 5th Series DVD commentary.

Here's my experience with a "free" "upgrade" to VISTA. I didn't even think you might not be allowed to dual boot. I'm a developer. I should have thought.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.games.micros oft.flight-sim/browse_frm/thread/87ae9b5715aa9220/ aadcae3403b448e6?lnk=st&q=&rnum=54&hl=en#aadcae340 3b448e6
http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.games.micros oft.flight-sim/browse_frm/thread/3ec1191e7c81b8e9/ ?hl=en#

I'm still having dramas adding the state I live in to my address, and I've been told not to expect a VISTA upgrade DVD until April.

Microsoft may have some of the smartest developers on the planet but it's a company run by arrogant fools. If they make it really hard to be legit, they'll reap what they sew. Unfortunately if they go down they'll take a lot of people with them, and if this DRM BS stands it makes the PC a less useful too. It's a no win.

Here's my experience with a "free" "upgrade" to VISTA. I didn't even think you might not be allowed to dual boot. I'm a developer. I should have thought.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.games.micros oft.flight-sim/browse_frm/thread/87ae9b5715aa9220/ aadcae3403b448e6?lnk=st&q=&rnum=54&hl=en#aadcae340 3b448e6
http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.games.micros oft.flight-sim/browse_frm/thread/3ec1191e7c81b8e9/ ?hl=en#

I'm still having dramas adding the state I live in to my address, and I've been told not to expect a VISTA upgrade DVD until April.

Microsoft may have some of the smartest developers on the planet but it's a company run by arrogant fools. If they make it really hard to be legit, they'll reap what they sew. Unfortunately if they go down they'll take a lot of people with them, and if this DRM BS stands it makes the PC a less useful too. It's a no win.

It's quite possible, look into NSPD 35.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=nspd+35+nu clear+weapon+deployment&btnG=Search&meta=

Not sure what to beleive myself.

Which vaccination caused brain damage?

Triple antigen.

What was mechanism?

First noted by Professor Gordon Stewart, the most likely cause considered to be the pertussis component of the triple antigen vaccine. Dr PM Jeavons (The Lancet 25/10/1975) suggested seperating out the pertussis component of the triple antigen to reduce the risk of brain damage.

Has the failure in the 1950s production of polio vaccine been corrected since then?

The Polio vaccine is no longer administered (at least in the country I live, not sure about the US/UK), so it is unlikely that it is still produced in any quantity.

And since everyone in the US was vaccinated for polio, and that caused 20% of the population of the US to develop cancer, why hasn't anyone told the trial lawyers about it?

Not everyone in the US was vaccinated for Polio, it varied from state to state. The contamination was a single batch believed to be manufactured in Europe, and put an estimated millions at risk.

Are your claims of vaccination side-effect related to the vaccines themselves, or just to flawed manufacturing processes?

The vaccines themselves. And they are not claims. They are well documented side effects in medical journals. I would add citations, but every time I've tried in the past my post seems to be blocked by the lameness filter.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.

There is (or it's the software, which is the more likely alternative). It is _not_ "just how Windows performs".

Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV).

Front Row is a poor cousin to Media Centre. (Congratulations on getting MythTV up and running though, it's quite a struggle.)

And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.

It doesn't matter that you have two licenses. You still can't do anything with them without a machine that doesn't already have MacOS on it. In this, it is identical to a Windows updgrade version.

Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot.

Stop lying. I said Vista and OS X *and every other GUI on the planet* share common features.

That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system.

Sure. Just as obviously as OS X is a knockoff of Microsoft's system. I mean, they both have some similar high level functionality that looks and acts vaguely the same.

I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X?

No, *your* argument (and the article's argument) is that Vista is a MacOS knockoff because it supposedly copied things from OS X.

*My* argument is that there's nothing in Vista that could qualify as a "knockoff" of OS X because it's all either a) shared amongst numerous GUIS or applications (menus, windows, search, etc), b) an obvious progression of technology (3D acceleration, live search) or c) only similar in a superficial and meaningless sense (Flip3D and Expose).

Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.

Indeed. The ideas that just because two systems have some vague similarities, one copied the other, and that two developers extremely active in the same field, striving for the same broad goal, could not independently come up with somewhat similar ideas, *are* absurd arguments.

Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.

You need to do some more research. Smalltalk isn't just a language spec.

And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple.

I don't want a detailed list. A few examples will suffice.

By the logic (and examples) presented thus far, OS X is *at least* as much a knockoff of Windows (and other Microsoft software).

(OMG !! They both have mouse pointers !!! And menus !!! And windows !!! And search !!!! THE HUMANITY !!!!)

Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.

They are completely different task switching paradigms. Not to mention Flip3D is the same task-switching methodology that's been around since Windows 95 (or even 3.x, depending on your point of view), with somewhat updated visuals - hardly a "knockoff". About the only common