Microsoft Eyes UK Digital TV Provider

xiox writes: "This story by the BBC claims that Microsoft are planning to "rescue" the failed digital TV provider in the UK, ITV Digital. This would enable them to get a large share of the British TV market, as the British Government has decided that all TVs will have to switch over to digital by 2010."

Comments

Enough Microsoft already!

[awptic]

My god, have we nothing better to write about than Microsoft? Looking on the front page, I see FOUR stories about Microsoft. There's gotta be something more newsworthy, even for slashdot this is bad.

[OT] Airline_Sickness_Bag - Biology and geology

[leonbrooks]

Sorry, a certain lame weblog which shall remain nameless elected to archive the discussion between my second-last and last post to it. You offer no email address. Shall we continue?

biological evolution has certain prerequisites, and these prerequisites can be eliminated by examining geology.

Geology indicates that the earh is very old, about 4 1/2 Billion years old.

Even if you accept that extrapolation, and there's countless good reasons for not doing so (and yes, I'll post on that if you like), geology's findings are hostile to any reasonable (or even unreasonable) approximation of a pre-biotic environment in which chemical evolution could possibly operate. So you must invoke Hoyle and Wickramasingh's aliens - or some similar mechanism - in order to get biological evolution even a chance at starting.

And I leave you with a qute from no less than Francis Crick:

If a particular amino sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be? [...] This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose that the chain is about 200 amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just 20 possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is 20 multiplied by itself some 200 times. This is conveniently written as 20 to the 200th power, and is approximately equal to 10 to the 260th power[...]. moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense [...] The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time." -- Life Itself: Its' origin and Nature, 1981, pp. 51-52.

Note that Francis hasn't addressed things like the onservation that most amino-amino bonds are not peptide. Oh, well. Is Francis Crick a Creationist?

Just in case the scale eludes you, the universe has about 10E81 atoms in it, and has existed (in theory) for roughly 10E17 seconds. If you combined every atom in the universe with every other atom, every second, you'd still be shy roughly 10E150 universe lifetimes of enough time to get even odds.