I've held the same general opinions of Ballmer's bluster that Linus mentioned ever since I saw the words attributed to good ol' Steve. The reasons can be summarized very quickly:
1) Microsoft has lots of patents, and patents=innovation (at least according to those analysts who gave Microsoft the Innovation Trophy, having surpassed IBM a few months back in their eyes.
2) Microsoft's patent portfolio remains strong if it doesn't lose defenses against infringement. The easiest way to accomplish that seems to be that they don't even attempt to defend a good number of their patents (they just make vague claims about infringement that aren't legally binding).
3) Vague patent infringement claims do indeed cause FUD in regards to their competitors' products.
4) Microsoft probably knows quite well how shoddy many of its patents are. If they were to be struck down on grounds of obviousness or prior art, they would not only lose their FUD leverage, but their patent portfolio would shrink too.
5) By failing to defend their patents against infringements they allege are occurring, they risk losing the ability to defend them. The principle is much along the lines of adverse possession in real property (cf. the "land-grab" case in Boulder, where one couple claimed they regularly trespassed on their neighbors' land over several years, and since the actual owners never stopped them, they were therefore were entitled to take possession of land for themselves). As with real property, if the owner of intellectual property fails to step in and enforce their rights as owners, they stand to lose their ownership altogether. But in the case of IP, the fact that a shoddy patent simply exists in their portfolio is perhaps more important than its actual (utterly worthless) contents.
What I'd really like to see is for the folks backing Linux find a way to legally compel Ballmer to put-up or shut-up. If he was making those sorts of allegations against an individual, he could be sued for slander, and he would have to prove to the court that his statements were truthful or he'd be on the hook. But since it's Linux, he can make all the slanderous and defamatory statements he pleases, and apparently nobody can do anything about that from a legal standpoint. As long as that status quo remains, there's a cloud hovering over Linux, whether there's an inkling of truth to it or not. Linux backers have not been afforded the chance to defend the honor of their project.
Starting over is sometimes a good thing. When I made the break from the MSDOS-based Windows to NT oh-so-many years ago, it was pretty much a clean break. I had a lot of old software that no longer worked, but NT was stable and allowed me to do so much more. It was a significant change in platform, a lot of drivers just didn't exist (so I had to be choosy about hardware), and there was a learning curve involved-- but once I figured out the basics, I found the losses to be far outweighed by the gains, and after the first week or two (during which I started wondering what I'd gotten myself into and if I should just forget about it and reinstall Win95), I never looked back.
Fast forward a few years, I repeated that process with Linux after suffering through one XP-reactivation call too many (I change & upgrade hardware frequently, so sue me! Oh, wait...please don't!). I've been on Kubuntu for going on two years now, and haven't looked back. The bad taste from the reactivations caused me not to even look back during the first week off Windows. That, and Wine runs many Windows applications better than *real* Windows did, so there really wasn't any problem there.
So what does this have to do with Vista? I think Microsoft made a huge mistake in their approach. They failed at everything in regards to this project. If they wanted a revolution, they should've basically started over from scratch, and left the end users with choices or options to bridge the chasm. By clinging to some legacy functionality, they hobbled the developers, and I think we've all heard how poorly-implemented the backwards compatibility is despite their efforts. Vista wasn't a matter of having one's cake and eating it too, as they tried to hawk it, it was more of a case of dropping your cake on the ground and having a filthy cake you wouldn't want to eat anyway. I've used Vista, I've supported end users who use it, and I've experienced firsthand how unremarkable, bloated, and annoying it is, despite the gimmicks. Microsoft may have gotten somewhere if only they'd revisited the NT development model, reinvented their flagship OS technology, and put a team of developers on making a compatibility layer like Wine to allow users to run older applications. Vista really just seems like XP with some new gimmicks and security measures cobbled-on, and a whole lot of marketing hype. It's apropos to draw parallels between Vista and ME, because ME had basically all of the same attributes and was a failure for the same reasons.
I don't feel all that sorry for the people who fall for these scams. The cons are preying on their greed, and all it takes is a little common sense to realize if you have no special qualifications, nobody is just going to email you out of the blue and hand you huge bundles of cash to basically do trivial tasks. The only qualifications for most of these tasks are:
Live in the USA
Have a bank or Paypal account
Be greedy and gullible
Have a pulse
These scams work because the first can be tailored to match whatever demographic the scammer is pursuing, the second is the way the scammer profits (can't extract blood from a turnip, after all), and almost everyone meets the last two qualifications.
This is most certainly NOT "money laundering", the money's not dirty or ill-gotten. It's a trick whereby a scammer makes a "sale", has the greedy victim accept the payment, and then forward the bulk of the money...but having accepted the money makes the victim criminally liable for the fraud since they become an unwitting accomplice.
It's much the same situation with a newer version of this scam I discovered on eBay a year or so ago. I bought an item at a too-good-to-be-true price, knowing it was probably a fraud...but made sure I kept myself covered. I made the payment via Paypal (to an account with a few hundred transactions and in good standing), expecting not to receive a product and then just having to file a chargeback. I received the product though, and it was everything that was advertised. I got even more suspicious when I saw who shipped it (one of the largest internet/brick & mortar retailers), and observed that their retail prices were far higher. Putting the pieces together, I alerted the mule and the retailer quickly, got my money back and halted the scam before the the scammer had managed to get any of the money. The icing on the cake was when she asked me if I wanted to be a mule too, giving me a few more details about who and where "she" was (probably another level of separation in there, but who knows...I passed along the info I was able to extract).
How that version of the scam worked was that the scammer lines up a mule, often with a good reputation and a Paypal account. The scammer sells something, directs payment to be made to the mule, and then pays for the item itself with a stolen credit card, instructing the merchant to ship the item to the "real" customer's address. The customer then receives the goods, thinks all is well, the mule's money is good and gets forwarded, and the merchant eventually loses because they chose to ship to an address that they failed to take the simplest fraud prevention action on, verifying that it is a legitimate address for the credit card used to pay for the transaction, though they theoretically could try to pin it on the customer.
The best way to avoid fraud continues to be to realize if a deal or job prospect seems too good to be true, it probably is, and to do whatever you can to verify the trustworthiness of anyone you're sending money to unless you have a way of protecting yourself. If you wouldn't just give them YOUR hard-earned money and trust them to look out for your own best interests, you shouldn't be engaging in any financial transactions with them, period.
I hope this works to make KDE a stronger project. I don't think it's necessarily a Bad Thing to have free software benefiting the commercial realm and vice versa (regardless of what RMS thinks). It's the best of both worlds to have free software, and to have vendors making money from adding value to parts of a free software core, whether it's in the form of support or increased compatibility with proprietary devices.
Why would they settle for being a corporate sponsor of GNOME, even if they have someone sitting on the board, when they could gain a greater stake in the direction of development by becoming an owner of part of the technology and development team?
While this whole CD thing is hardly relevant at this point in time, since Kubuntu with KDE4 hasn't been officially released (folks will have to wait for Heron or will be limited by the pre-release distribution methods), it's unnecessary to buy a k/ubuntu CD...there's always Shipit.
Then there's always keeping an eye out for a Linux geek (some would argue they're recognizable) and striking-up a computer-related conversation with him or her. If they happen to like a particular distro, there's no way you WON'T have a disc in your hands within minutes (proceed with caution, they can be tenacious even after you've accepted the disc!).
I think I'll just ignore the other aspects of a serious response to a silly comment. It's no more realistic to expect KDE4 to run on an old 2000-vintage box with a relatively small amount of RAM than it is to expect Windows Vista's Aero interface to work on a 2005-vintage box.
The Co$ gives me one more compelling reason to use "$" in a mocking fashion!
I also like to think of $cientology as a good example that illustrates the origins of religions. Whether you're talking about Christianity or Star Trek, it's just another example of a charismatic individual using his fantastic imagination to come up with an utterly baseless and bizarre explanation for the way things are. And then convincing the masses that he somehow knows what he's talking about, and deserves their money and allegiance for sharing the knowledge with them. All it takes is to follow the money to see what the real game is.
...some people seem to feel the need to fill it with whatever garbage they can find to put in it. And there just wasn't much knowledge on that bookshelf when the Holy Bible was authored.
Science does use some placeholders (i.e., they make educated guesses based on the best research at the time), while things like macro-evolution are still theories, there are still compelling pieces of evidence that point to it occurring systematically.
One such example involves our equine friends, who seem adept at blurring species lines. Consider that nobody who's remotely competent and familiar with these species would confuse a zebra, ass, and horse with each other. But yet any of these species can produce hybrids in any combination with the others. Some of the hybrids are fertile...not very fertile, but fertile in somewhat uncommon instances. The old Latin idiom that translates, "When a she-mule gives birth", is roughly equivalent to the modern expression, "Once in a blue moon". That is to say, the Romans recognized that mules could produce viable offspring, just not very often.
Now that in itself doesn't mean much. For a species to macro-evolve into another, it has to change *and* procreate successfully (and subsequent generations must also have some ability to do the same). But what this does point to is an extreme degree of genetic similarity that would indicate a rather recent macro-evolutionary divergence. These equines seem to have shared a common ancestor in the distant path, they grew apart from each other, and the sum-total of micro-evolution that occurred in each population over time resulted in three distinct species, that are too far apart to be defined as one species, but still close enough to retain a high degree of social and genetic compatibility.
Of course, the placeholder comes in because science has no examples of such a common ancestor. No such fossils have been discovered, and quite likely won't be (fossilization is an extremely uncommon occurrence, and the chance of weathering or excavation ever exposing any given fossil from its entombment in the Earth's crust are even more remote still. But until more is discovered about how these equids are so similar, yet distinct, a good scientist would just install a best-guess placeholder and make it clear that's all it is. The Creationist reaction seems to be to come up with a relatively bizarre explanation that involves an extreme degree of magical thinking, which also has no logical basis, no supporting evidence whatsoever, and could not be reached as an independent conclusion by someone who hadn't been taught the specifics of the Creationist's religion. There's no room in science for that sort of garbage.
I hope I live to see the day when the majority of adults in the USA give up the magical thinking of religion (c'mon, invisible friends who have special powers and quirky, psychotic personalities are for kids!), and realize they can reason things out and reach halfway reasonable conclusions. Another Museum of Willful Ignorance going out of business is an encouraging sign.
...is to have the RIAA compensate this individual for the full copyright-violation value of every last song they alleged that she infringed on. The law should have no mercy, just as they've argued Jammie should have none, and they must pay around $10,000 per song for every song they alleged that Tanya downloaded and shared. Maybe even treble damages, in that their investigation and prosecution was allegedly malicious. After all, if they refused to listen to reason and harassed this woman and her daughter for months, and screwed-up their lives and forced the woman to risk what few assets she has to pay for lawyers, it's only right that the judgment stings the RIAA and the record companies that collaborated with them just as they were trying to sting the woman they victimized. There should be no lawsuits of the nature of what the RIAA pursues without substantial risk should they lose because they failed to do their due diligence in building an airtight case.
See, the problem with this propaganda is that it's just attempting to sugarcoat what the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) did to Galileo and explain it all away. Pope Benny sounds like a lawyer, trying to convince everyone that black is really white after all, and many others are attempting to trivialize the damage that was done by trying to paint Galileo as being in the wrong.
The reality of the situation is that no, the RCC's dogmatic stance that the Earth is the center of the universe was not explicitly mentioned in the Holy Bible, but it was an extension that was "reasoned" through Christian philosophy. You know, the same, old, tired crap about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, trying to reconcile "God's Law (including the bits about persecuting homosexuals et al.)" with so-called "Natural Law", and it fit the purpose of the dogma at the time to reason that the Earth is the center of the universe and mankind was the center of the Earth's existence, for that humankind-centric view was the basis of much of the philosophy. It used "logic" to discover man's place in the grand scheme of things, and that place was front-and-center.
The RCC set a ludicrously high bar of "proof" to anything that would challenge their dogma. In the end, ALL of science is pretty much a collection of theories, and no real scientist will ever claim differently. Everything we know is subject to being rewritten if an Earth-shattering discovery takes place. Even well-respected theories that have stood the test of time are sometimes prone to receiving minor modifications as underlying principles are understood better. What science really is, is making observations, devising a method to further test them, and then discussing them. Which is exactly what Galileo did. No, he didn't prove anything at all. He made an observation, built a theory around it, and put forth his theory for public scrutiny.
Of course, the RCC has plenty of circular arguments at its disposal to declare itself "truth" and "absolutely proven". Science can NEVER measure-up, from a theological perspective, to that degree of delusional logic. Science will always be uncertain relative to the unwavering belief in mythological truths that have no objective basis or means to prove or disprove. In the eyes of a RCC theologian, no scientist will every prove anything. Pope Benny established that in that speech, as he attempted to reason how the RCC was correct to persecute Galileo. The rational seems to be that attempts to think freely, or to encourage others to think and reason, MUST be punished for the public good. The RCC apparently feels that ignorance of anything they don't explicitly approve on theological and scientific grounds is in the public's best interest.
On another of the comments posted above, of course Galileo worked for the Church. Almost nobody at that time wasn't a slave to church-dominated society in one way or another. The Pope headed governments, kings answered to him and were bound to do his bidding. There was no education except through the church. There were no jobs in higher education except for the church. The church was the be-all, end-all of everything, they had perfect monopolistic lock-in. It took brave heroes, the ramifications of whose deeds transcended their goals, such as Martin Luther and Galileo to stand up against this tyranny and thought-policing, and open the door for independent research and more objective scientific and theological orders. The RCC was, of course, the police too, and placed Galileo under house arrest. This is far more serious than the trivialization that Galileo was rightly censored for speaking out against his employer's viewpoints. If it was so trivial, fire the guy. They were able to arrest and confine him because they controlled nearly every aspect of everyone's lives. Those people who stood-up against the church's attempts to suppress and censor opened the door for secular thought and secular governments. Martin Luther and Galileo helped to make science and philosophy things th
It's foolish, as many have pointed out, to take advice from a fast-food company's CEO.
There's also a large component of lifestyle in addition to food intake that contributes to obesity. Lifestyle includes the level of daily activity, and certainly flailing around a WII or getting worked-up at a game is still pretty low on the activity scale, while still a bit above, say, sleeping or reading. Lifestyle also includes dietary choices, such as what to eat and how much.
The latter is what I'm getting at in my subject line. For some reason, hunger is somehow "evil" and must be waged war upon! I can confidently say that starving is a bad thing. This notion that, if a child anywhere in the USA (and apparently the UK too per this article) is experiencing a pang of hunger from missing a meal or an afternoon snack, the society will collapse into a bloody revolution or something, is almost as silly as my hyperbole in this sentence. I think if more kids were brought-up to eat when they became hungry, and only eat enough to "not be hungry for a few hours", obesity wouldn't be such a problem. Choices on what to eat also factor in, but McDonald's isn't the sole culprit. When I'm hungry, I eat at the first reasonable opportunity, and eat only enough to keep me from being hungry until slightly before my next opportunity to eat. If I get too hungry between opportunities, I'll graze on snacks. If I'm not hungry at a given opportunity to eat (such as lunch), I pass up the opportunity. I'm on the lean side, that's probably one of the factors.
I also think a lot of the bad eating habits have to do with that crap kids' parents insist on, such as "cleaning your plate" and "thinking of the starving waifs in Ethiopia who have no food". You know what? I came to the realization when I was rather young that eating all my food, when I KNEW it would make me uncomfortably full, simply wasn't going to vicariously help ANY of the suffering, starving children in Ethiopia. I was happy I wasn't starving, but being uncomfortable by eating too much wasn't going to make me any more grateful for having food.
Moreover, I think anytime a parent has to tell a kid to clean a plate on a regular basis, they're not paying enough attention and are basically force-feeding the poor thing. I have four animals in my household (cat, dog, horses), and they usually aren't hitting weight extremes. All it takes is paying attention to whether they're looking a bit too much on the fleshy or thin side, and adjusting the amount or richness of their diets accordingly. I don't worry too much if they *want* more, I do make note of if they're leaving a lot behind (except in the case of the cat, who regulates her intake on free-choice well enough), and go by the old rule of thumb, "ribs shouldn't be seen, but should be easily felt with minimal pressure". Parents and caretakers who fail to pay attention to these things with an objective eye and make decisions accordingly are responsible for their fat-ass kids, not video games, not McDonald's, not society, Iran, or anyone else. The buck stops with the parents. You just can't generally trust children or animals to make appropriate dietary decisions for themselves.
The full article does explain that the standard of "quality" is determined by "who won in court in a patent defense suit". IBM and Microsoft both have comparably deep pockets to wage legal wars of attrition against anyone who wishes to challenge them. They probably also have the wisdom to not pursue lost causes, which is why Ballmer is quick to spread FUD on how Linux infringes on Microsoft IP, but refuses to cite even a single patent. The point I'm making is that the IEEE is judging the strength of Microsoft's entire patent portfolio based on the percentage of successful defenses, coupled by the sheer number of patents it holds. Failure to defend a patent because it may not be defensible in the first place isn't reflected in the figures.
Having watched both companies over many years, I see a lot more substance and innovation behind IBM's R&D and its products, and markedly less so from the Microsoft camp. Anecdotally, I can't recall IBM EVER having a spokesperson come out and bluster that another company or project is infringing on their patents, they act on those things. Microsoft's propensity to bluster says a lot; sure, a lot of their patents stand-up to scrutiny, but there are likely quite a lot that are utterly indefensible and they know it. They just want to cling to the empty patents and so they don't even attempt to defend them. It would be impossible to truly judge the strength of a patent portfolio until every last patent was either confirmed or tossed-out.
I'd expand on this to say that it goes beyond resolution and pixel size, the primary difference is that some folks' brains also don't process visual inputs the same way. Quite a lot of what we *think* we see is not reality, our brains smooth over gaps. What's particularly interesting about most display technology is that it takes (what I'm guessing is) a representation of a pure, colored image in the machine, blasts it out to a screen that's comprised of lots of primary-colored dots, and those dots are picked-up by many more primary-color sensors in our eyes, and then re-assembled into a pure, colored image by our brain if all goes well. Even though that image never existed in the first place, and even if it did, our eyes never even actually saw it as such, either.
ClearType has always looked a little fuzzy to me, probably because even on the most fine-grid-pitch/tiny pixel LCD displays (such as the 1920x1200 17" Dell LCD I use at home), I can see the grid, and I can see those tricks that allow parts of a "pixel" to fall outside of the grid enclosing that pixel. Conventional type rendering, even if the curves and some strokes are a little jagged due to the limitation of displaying diagonal lines or curves in square-pixel blocks, appears very clean and sharp to me, even though I can see the flaws. It's just a greater flaw, as far as my own perception goes, to color outside the lines.
Along the lines of other comments, quantity does NOT necessarily equate to innovation or quality. A very tangible and relevant case-in-point would be in the scientific research realm. This is an anecdote on of my professors dropped in emphasizing the importance of doing GOOD work rather than LOTS OF POOR-QUALITY work.
The most prolific published author of biological research papers lived around the turn of the 20th century. His name eludes me at the moment, and the reason is that his work didn't stand the test of time, and his name has sunk into obscurity. He churned out research papers at an incredible pace, mostly classifying new species, but unfortunately for his legacy, his work was rather shoddy. A large percentage of his papers failed to remain standing after enduring the rigors of peer review, many falling even when he was still alive.
At the time I heard the anecdote, a researcher named Hobart M. Smith was overtaking that 'record' of quantity, but the vast majority of Dr. Smith's papers hold-up to scrutiny. His work is just higher quality, which makes it inherently more meaningful than the sheer volume.
So what's more meaningful to us today? Microsoft innovation, or IBM's innovation? IBM has revolutionized the tech industry time and time again with stunning advances in hardware technology, whereas Microsoft screams about how Linux 'infringes' on hundreds of its patents, which it won't even elaborate on because its execs are likely well-aware those patents would get revoked because they either wouldn't stand the tests of obviousness or prior art. Would Microsoft really rival IBM if it was suddenly stripped of all its dubiously-valid patents?
The differences here are primarily quality. Patent-bully Microsoft doesn't hold a candle to IBM innovation.
While Vista might be a crappy host OS, they could at least see that Linux makes the Windows Vista Experience (tm) better. But only so long as you only have to have that experience when you're booting or the host OS crashes.
I can't complain too much about CompUSA's exorbitant prices. That made for a lot of stale merchandise, and I made out like a bandit about a year after Linksys revised the WRT-54GS wireless routers to where they cut the memory and NVRAM to low levels that barely ran any 3rd-party firmware. I happened to find several of an older revision that had the maximum memory & NVRAM ever offered on that series of router, and while the price (somewhere around $80, when everyone else was selling them for $65) would've been laughable for the new model, I bought all the stale models they had on the shelf, roughly a dozen, and resold all but one at a decent profit. The clerk seemed a bit baffled as to why someone was suddenly buying so many of an item they apparently rarely sold in the year they'd been sitting on the shelves. If the local store doesn't get sold and has a liquidation sale, I might even have a reason to drop in, the prices might be halfway reasonable on non-hard-to-find merchandise too.
I wish there was a Microcenter closer to where I live, as it is, it's generally worth an hour's drive to get there. I like how they don't play the PSP games, how they have a great selection, and very reasonable prices. And then there are the bargain bins, which really make the trip worthwhile if they happen to have something I need. CompUSA was only ever good for something I needed in a pinch and would pay any price to get ASAP for a client's need. I usually lost my profit margin on the parts-chasing, but it kept my clients happy.
If everyone around you is immunized, but you are not, there is ZERO BENEFIT to you getting immunized.
Let me guess, you learned this from a video on You Tube? Immunization is like bricks in a dam. Strong bricks give you a strong dam. But one weak brick can spring a leak which can erode the dam until even the strong bricks fail.
You're on-target with the theory behind immunization, but the post you quoted is thinking more along the lines of game theory. So here's a hint, conspiracy theorists: If you want to play the selfish game like that, you're better-off NOT TELLING ANYONE ELSE. Otherwise, other people around you may take your advice and won't be immunized either, and if you're not, you may die a horrible death...unless you get immunized. In which case there's a great benefit from immunization, because you get to watch lots of stupid people die horribly. Maybe the parent didn't really deserve to be modded down so brutally...he was just trying to save the world from stupid people.
Agreed. Many of the objections to immunizations are shaky at best, but the science behind them is simple: they're a lower-risk way to fight a high-risk disease. Immunizations are NEVER without risk, and when the NIH and pharmaceutical companies lie and say they're perfectly safe (with all the potential side effects in the tiny print), the kooks come out of the woodwork to make the situation sound worse than it is. Anaphylaxis, local discomfort or irritation around the injection site, cysts near the injection site, contraction of the disease itself, and other complications are all potential outcomes. But reducing the ravages of nasty childhood illnesses (that can be very dangerous to adults) sure beats a little discomfort in the vast majority, and even the tiny chance that a few people will have horrible consequences.
The bottom line: If there's negligible risk from the actual disease, the risk of vaccination may outweigh the potential benefit, and the folks affected by the decision need to make an INFORMED decision. Countless more people suffered and died from smallpox itself than died to the vaccine, and thanks to their gambles or sacrifices, nobody is dying from smallpox in this day and age, OR the vaccine either since it's unnecessary.
Oh, and the other bottom line is that the research was a waste of time of Captain Obvious proportions. The same sorts of nutters who think that vaccines are evil conspiracies will view that research as part of the grand conspiracy, while normal people will continue to seek the advice of qualified professionals regarding family wellness and health issues.
I guess I do tend to be a bit sentimental when it comes to projects that pique the general public's interest in science, which the HST did. It's good for research, but on another level, even though most people have no idea how it works and the implications of what they're seeing, the images excite people, which is a PR coup for NASA and the fields of astronomy and cosmology. PR is nearly as important as actual research, since research is costly and someone needs to pay for it. HST keeps NASA in the headlines (this is the second round of publicity since the announcement that they were going to abandon it in space to burn).
So let's face it: COBE is fantastic science, but it means absolutely nothing to most people. They don't know what it does, they don't understand or care about the science behind it, and probably assume it's just a waste of money. HST is fantastic science, but people are dazzled by pretty pictures and can catch a glimpse into just how it's enabling scientists to do fantastic things. It seizes the imagination, and NASA can only achieve what the public's imagination is willing to fund (to borrow a phrase from Jack Black's funny anti-piracy PSA, "No money, no rocket sauce...").
I'd like to see the HST recovered somehow and put on display. Sure, that'd be expensive (and may be impractical to bring back down even if a replacement was deployed on the same mission), but it's an icon that panders to the public interest. That's worth every penny IMHO when the budget for space exploration is facing the ax, even if it's less-than-pragmatic from a purely scientific point of view.
Actually, that's probably just SpeedStep or whatever they're calling it now. When the mobile CPU isn't being taxed, it'll drop to half-speed or less to save power. As soon as you throw a load at it, it'll dynamically scale upwards to full speed. It's easy to monitor this on Kubuntu, a mouseover on the power manager icon shows what speed the cores are running at with a glance, at idle it'll show the current speed with half of the bar graphs filled, when it's being hammered, the bars fill up and the display shows the full core speed. Windows does exactly the same scaling, it's just hidden.
I would also note that you could disable SpeedStep in the BIOS on older Thinkpads (and likely other makes & models too). Doing so would fix the processor at the lower speed (lest you think you're going to get it to run full-tilt all the time), but avoided some of the serious performance problems associated with the way Windows was managing SpeedStep, I don't know if that issue has since been fixed.
...but not the disease. So a bunch of botnet-herder script kiddies and other ne'er-do-wells who exploit a situation are in jail. Did they patch even a single one of the compromised Windows systems that were a part of the botnet? No, they "disrupted" the botnets, which supposedly is going to reduce their ability to be compromised for criminal purposes in the future. I'm sorry, but unless they somehow repaired the exploits, or confiscated the compromised machines and thus removed them from the internet, they're still a bunch of junkers spewing malicious packets and waiting for some new bot-herder to take the helm, hazardous to the infrastructure as well as all the other computers they share the "tubes" with.
The fundamental problem is a single-user operating system that had networking capabilities cobbled-on, but that still is set up like a single-user environment where trust and security weren't perceived as issues. I'd like to see Microsoft step-up to the plate and put effort into developing exciting extras to be bundled with security updates that would at least make their users get more motivated about patching. Of course there's more to security than that, but we're all going to have to live with the mess Microsoft has made with pretty much every OS up to (and quite possibly still including) Vista, for years to come. Barring any proactive effort on Microsoft's part, it seems to me like the FBI has some responsibility to track down computers used in crimes and do something just a bit more permanent than just "reducing" their ability to facilitate criminal activity in the future.
This is a very good distinction to make, since dilution and misuse of the term stands to weaken the more important issue. The primary difference here is that of what amounts to an information toll-road, versus QoS traffic shaping. I can understand where Comcast is coming from (I don't necessarily agree with the way they went about their traffic shaping, but I understand why they did it), the latter is primarily a decision that the ISP is making in the majority of its users' best interests, while the former is an ISP or backbone-maintainer decision that is in its own best interests to the detriment of everyone from service providers to consumers.
The largest part of the problem in the traffic shaping issue seems to be that ISPs are cheap and unwilling to buy the appropriate amount of bandwidth they need for peak usage times. To compensate, they feel it's acceptable just to crack-down on the heaviest downloaders...but not only those downloaders, but anyone who has the misfortune to be trying to use the same protocols as the worst offenders. But in their view, they're keeping costs down and ensuring that the "average" user won't suffer a severe service degradation (well, substantially worse than the normal service typically is).
What's wrong with the whole Network Neutrality situation is that the internet will lose a lot of its value for everyone if content is marginalized or access is restricted arbitrarily simply because corporate greed shapes the traffic rather than bandwidth consumption. At least from my perspective, the limited anarchy of the bulk of the internet is what makes it the important resource that it's become. Censorship of content, based only on how much money a consumer or service provider is willing to cough-up for access, is abhorrent.
ObDisclaimer: IANAL
But most forum software tends to carry a disclaimer to protect the forum host, which says something to the effect that anything posted on the forum becomes their property forever to redistribute in any manner they please to indemnify them. They may (or may not) pass along that indemnity to users of the forums.
But to the point, this isn't really your problem. It's the plagiarist-dev's problem. He may have obtained permission from the source after seeing the code and deciding it would fit the bill. He may have just written it himself previously and recycled it on the forum and in the current project. Or he may just made some assumptions and figured nobody would be the wiser. The ultimate question is, would you be reasonably expected to discover this plagiarism, and held responsible for not telling anyone? If not, you might want to just keep on walking, in the remote chance anyone will ever notice or care, it's still on him or someone else on the team, and probably not you since you're the new guy. If you're terrified of it being pinned on you, only then open that can of worms.
Makes you wonder if it's that bad code though that's causing problems, since it was lifted verbatim, possibly without enough changes to fit your application, or just has some dumb error.
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I've held the same general opinions of Ballmer's bluster that Linus mentioned ever since I saw the words attributed to good ol' Steve. The reasons can be summarized very quickly:
1) Microsoft has lots of patents, and patents=innovation (at least according to those analysts who gave Microsoft the Innovation Trophy, having surpassed IBM a few months back in their eyes.
2) Microsoft's patent portfolio remains strong if it doesn't lose defenses against infringement. The easiest way to accomplish that seems to be that they don't even attempt to defend a good number of their patents (they just make vague claims about infringement that aren't legally binding).
3) Vague patent infringement claims do indeed cause FUD in regards to their competitors' products.
4) Microsoft probably knows quite well how shoddy many of its patents are. If they were to be struck down on grounds of obviousness or prior art, they would not only lose their FUD leverage, but their patent portfolio would shrink too.
5) By failing to defend their patents against infringements they allege are occurring, they risk losing the ability to defend them. The principle is much along the lines of adverse possession in real property (cf. the "land-grab" case in Boulder, where one couple claimed they regularly trespassed on their neighbors' land over several years, and since the actual owners never stopped them, they were therefore were entitled to take possession of land for themselves). As with real property, if the owner of intellectual property fails to step in and enforce their rights as owners, they stand to lose their ownership altogether. But in the case of IP, the fact that a shoddy patent simply exists in their portfolio is perhaps more important than its actual (utterly worthless) contents.
What I'd really like to see is for the folks backing Linux find a way to legally compel Ballmer to put-up or shut-up. If he was making those sorts of allegations against an individual, he could be sued for slander, and he would have to prove to the court that his statements were truthful or he'd be on the hook. But since it's Linux, he can make all the slanderous and defamatory statements he pleases, and apparently nobody can do anything about that from a legal standpoint. As long as that status quo remains, there's a cloud hovering over Linux, whether there's an inkling of truth to it or not. Linux backers have not been afforded the chance to defend the honor of their project.
Starting over is sometimes a good thing. When I made the break from the MSDOS-based Windows to NT oh-so-many years ago, it was pretty much a clean break. I had a lot of old software that no longer worked, but NT was stable and allowed me to do so much more. It was a significant change in platform, a lot of drivers just didn't exist (so I had to be choosy about hardware), and there was a learning curve involved-- but once I figured out the basics, I found the losses to be far outweighed by the gains, and after the first week or two (during which I started wondering what I'd gotten myself into and if I should just forget about it and reinstall Win95), I never looked back.
Fast forward a few years, I repeated that process with Linux after suffering through one XP-reactivation call too many (I change & upgrade hardware frequently, so sue me! Oh, wait...please don't!). I've been on Kubuntu for going on two years now, and haven't looked back. The bad taste from the reactivations caused me not to even look back during the first week off Windows. That, and Wine runs many Windows applications better than *real* Windows did, so there really wasn't any problem there.
So what does this have to do with Vista? I think Microsoft made a huge mistake in their approach. They failed at everything in regards to this project. If they wanted a revolution, they should've basically started over from scratch, and left the end users with choices or options to bridge the chasm. By clinging to some legacy functionality, they hobbled the developers, and I think we've all heard how poorly-implemented the backwards compatibility is despite their efforts. Vista wasn't a matter of having one's cake and eating it too, as they tried to hawk it, it was more of a case of dropping your cake on the ground and having a filthy cake you wouldn't want to eat anyway. I've used Vista, I've supported end users who use it, and I've experienced firsthand how unremarkable, bloated, and annoying it is, despite the gimmicks. Microsoft may have gotten somewhere if only they'd revisited the NT development model, reinvented their flagship OS technology, and put a team of developers on making a compatibility layer like Wine to allow users to run older applications. Vista really just seems like XP with some new gimmicks and security measures cobbled-on, and a whole lot of marketing hype. It's apropos to draw parallels between Vista and ME, because ME had basically all of the same attributes and was a failure for the same reasons.
I don't feel all that sorry for the people who fall for these scams. The cons are preying on their greed, and all it takes is a little common sense to realize if you have no special qualifications, nobody is just going to email you out of the blue and hand you huge bundles of cash to basically do trivial tasks. The only qualifications for most of these tasks are:
These scams work because the first can be tailored to match whatever demographic the scammer is pursuing, the second is the way the scammer profits (can't extract blood from a turnip, after all), and almost everyone meets the last two qualifications.
This is most certainly NOT "money laundering", the money's not dirty or ill-gotten. It's a trick whereby a scammer makes a "sale", has the greedy victim accept the payment, and then forward the bulk of the money...but having accepted the money makes the victim criminally liable for the fraud since they become an unwitting accomplice.
It's much the same situation with a newer version of this scam I discovered on eBay a year or so ago. I bought an item at a too-good-to-be-true price, knowing it was probably a fraud...but made sure I kept myself covered. I made the payment via Paypal (to an account with a few hundred transactions and in good standing), expecting not to receive a product and then just having to file a chargeback. I received the product though, and it was everything that was advertised. I got even more suspicious when I saw who shipped it (one of the largest internet/brick & mortar retailers), and observed that their retail prices were far higher. Putting the pieces together, I alerted the mule and the retailer quickly, got my money back and halted the scam before the the scammer had managed to get any of the money. The icing on the cake was when she asked me if I wanted to be a mule too, giving me a few more details about who and where "she" was (probably another level of separation in there, but who knows...I passed along the info I was able to extract).
How that version of the scam worked was that the scammer lines up a mule, often with a good reputation and a Paypal account. The scammer sells something, directs payment to be made to the mule, and then pays for the item itself with a stolen credit card, instructing the merchant to ship the item to the "real" customer's address. The customer then receives the goods, thinks all is well, the mule's money is good and gets forwarded, and the merchant eventually loses because they chose to ship to an address that they failed to take the simplest fraud prevention action on, verifying that it is a legitimate address for the credit card used to pay for the transaction, though they theoretically could try to pin it on the customer.
The best way to avoid fraud continues to be to realize if a deal or job prospect seems too good to be true, it probably is, and to do whatever you can to verify the trustworthiness of anyone you're sending money to unless you have a way of protecting yourself. If you wouldn't just give them YOUR hard-earned money and trust them to look out for your own best interests, you shouldn't be engaging in any financial transactions with them, period.
I hope this works to make KDE a stronger project. I don't think it's necessarily a Bad Thing to have free software benefiting the commercial realm and vice versa (regardless of what RMS thinks). It's the best of both worlds to have free software, and to have vendors making money from adding value to parts of a free software core, whether it's in the form of support or increased compatibility with proprietary devices.
Why would they settle for being a corporate sponsor of GNOME, even if they have someone sitting on the board, when they could gain a greater stake in the direction of development by becoming an owner of part of the technology and development team?
While this whole CD thing is hardly relevant at this point in time, since Kubuntu with KDE4 hasn't been officially released (folks will have to wait for Heron or will be limited by the pre-release distribution methods), it's unnecessary to buy a k/ubuntu CD...there's always Shipit.
Then there's always keeping an eye out for a Linux geek (some would argue they're recognizable) and striking-up a computer-related conversation with him or her. If they happen to like a particular distro, there's no way you WON'T have a disc in your hands within minutes (proceed with caution, they can be tenacious even after you've accepted the disc!).
I think I'll just ignore the other aspects of a serious response to a silly comment. It's no more realistic to expect KDE4 to run on an old 2000-vintage box with a relatively small amount of RAM than it is to expect Windows Vista's Aero interface to work on a 2005-vintage box.
The Co$ gives me one more compelling reason to use "$" in a mocking fashion!
I also like to think of $cientology as a good example that illustrates the origins of religions. Whether you're talking about Christianity or Star Trek, it's just another example of a charismatic individual using his fantastic imagination to come up with an utterly baseless and bizarre explanation for the way things are. And then convincing the masses that he somehow knows what he's talking about, and deserves their money and allegiance for sharing the knowledge with them. All it takes is to follow the money to see what the real game is.
I find something to make better, break it in the process, and then fix it. Remember, if it ain't broke, you're not trying hard enough! (--Red Green)
...some people seem to feel the need to fill it with whatever garbage they can find to put in it. And there just wasn't much knowledge on that bookshelf when the Holy Bible was authored.
Science does use some placeholders (i.e., they make educated guesses based on the best research at the time), while things like macro-evolution are still theories, there are still compelling pieces of evidence that point to it occurring systematically.
One such example involves our equine friends, who seem adept at blurring species lines. Consider that nobody who's remotely competent and familiar with these species would confuse a zebra, ass, and horse with each other. But yet any of these species can produce hybrids in any combination with the others. Some of the hybrids are fertile...not very fertile, but fertile in somewhat uncommon instances. The old Latin idiom that translates, "When a she-mule gives birth", is roughly equivalent to the modern expression, "Once in a blue moon". That is to say, the Romans recognized that mules could produce viable offspring, just not very often.
Now that in itself doesn't mean much. For a species to macro-evolve into another, it has to change *and* procreate successfully (and subsequent generations must also have some ability to do the same). But what this does point to is an extreme degree of genetic similarity that would indicate a rather recent macro-evolutionary divergence. These equines seem to have shared a common ancestor in the distant path, they grew apart from each other, and the sum-total of micro-evolution that occurred in each population over time resulted in three distinct species, that are too far apart to be defined as one species, but still close enough to retain a high degree of social and genetic compatibility.
Of course, the placeholder comes in because science has no examples of such a common ancestor. No such fossils have been discovered, and quite likely won't be (fossilization is an extremely uncommon occurrence, and the chance of weathering or excavation ever exposing any given fossil from its entombment in the Earth's crust are even more remote still. But until more is discovered about how these equids are so similar, yet distinct, a good scientist would just install a best-guess placeholder and make it clear that's all it is. The Creationist reaction seems to be to come up with a relatively bizarre explanation that involves an extreme degree of magical thinking, which also has no logical basis, no supporting evidence whatsoever, and could not be reached as an independent conclusion by someone who hadn't been taught the specifics of the Creationist's religion. There's no room in science for that sort of garbage.
I hope I live to see the day when the majority of adults in the USA give up the magical thinking of religion (c'mon, invisible friends who have special powers and quirky, psychotic personalities are for kids!), and realize they can reason things out and reach halfway reasonable conclusions. Another Museum of Willful Ignorance going out of business is an encouraging sign.
...is to have the RIAA compensate this individual for the full copyright-violation value of every last song they alleged that she infringed on. The law should have no mercy, just as they've argued Jammie should have none, and they must pay around $10,000 per song for every song they alleged that Tanya downloaded and shared. Maybe even treble damages, in that their investigation and prosecution was allegedly malicious. After all, if they refused to listen to reason and harassed this woman and her daughter for months, and screwed-up their lives and forced the woman to risk what few assets she has to pay for lawyers, it's only right that the judgment stings the RIAA and the record companies that collaborated with them just as they were trying to sting the woman they victimized. There should be no lawsuits of the nature of what the RIAA pursues without substantial risk should they lose because they failed to do their due diligence in building an airtight case.
See, the problem with this propaganda is that it's just attempting to sugarcoat what the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) did to Galileo and explain it all away. Pope Benny sounds like a lawyer, trying to convince everyone that black is really white after all, and many others are attempting to trivialize the damage that was done by trying to paint Galileo as being in the wrong.
The reality of the situation is that no, the RCC's dogmatic stance that the Earth is the center of the universe was not explicitly mentioned in the Holy Bible, but it was an extension that was "reasoned" through Christian philosophy. You know, the same, old, tired crap about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, trying to reconcile "God's Law (including the bits about persecuting homosexuals et al.)" with so-called "Natural Law", and it fit the purpose of the dogma at the time to reason that the Earth is the center of the universe and mankind was the center of the Earth's existence, for that humankind-centric view was the basis of much of the philosophy. It used "logic" to discover man's place in the grand scheme of things, and that place was front-and-center.
The RCC set a ludicrously high bar of "proof" to anything that would challenge their dogma. In the end, ALL of science is pretty much a collection of theories, and no real scientist will ever claim differently. Everything we know is subject to being rewritten if an Earth-shattering discovery takes place. Even well-respected theories that have stood the test of time are sometimes prone to receiving minor modifications as underlying principles are understood better. What science really is, is making observations, devising a method to further test them, and then discussing them. Which is exactly what Galileo did. No, he didn't prove anything at all. He made an observation, built a theory around it, and put forth his theory for public scrutiny.
Of course, the RCC has plenty of circular arguments at its disposal to declare itself "truth" and "absolutely proven". Science can NEVER measure-up, from a theological perspective, to that degree of delusional logic. Science will always be uncertain relative to the unwavering belief in mythological truths that have no objective basis or means to prove or disprove. In the eyes of a RCC theologian, no scientist will every prove anything. Pope Benny established that in that speech, as he attempted to reason how the RCC was correct to persecute Galileo. The rational seems to be that attempts to think freely, or to encourage others to think and reason, MUST be punished for the public good. The RCC apparently feels that ignorance of anything they don't explicitly approve on theological and scientific grounds is in the public's best interest.
On another of the comments posted above, of course Galileo worked for the Church. Almost nobody at that time wasn't a slave to church-dominated society in one way or another. The Pope headed governments, kings answered to him and were bound to do his bidding. There was no education except through the church. There were no jobs in higher education except for the church. The church was the be-all, end-all of everything, they had perfect monopolistic lock-in. It took brave heroes, the ramifications of whose deeds transcended their goals, such as Martin Luther and Galileo to stand up against this tyranny and thought-policing, and open the door for independent research and more objective scientific and theological orders. The RCC was, of course, the police too, and placed Galileo under house arrest. This is far more serious than the trivialization that Galileo was rightly censored for speaking out against his employer's viewpoints. If it was so trivial, fire the guy. They were able to arrest and confine him because they controlled nearly every aspect of everyone's lives. Those people who stood-up against the church's attempts to suppress and censor opened the door for secular thought and secular governments. Martin Luther and Galileo helped to make science and philosophy things th
It's foolish, as many have pointed out, to take advice from a fast-food company's CEO.
There's also a large component of lifestyle in addition to food intake that contributes to obesity. Lifestyle includes the level of daily activity, and certainly flailing around a WII or getting worked-up at a game is still pretty low on the activity scale, while still a bit above, say, sleeping or reading. Lifestyle also includes dietary choices, such as what to eat and how much.
The latter is what I'm getting at in my subject line. For some reason, hunger is somehow "evil" and must be waged war upon! I can confidently say that starving is a bad thing. This notion that, if a child anywhere in the USA (and apparently the UK too per this article) is experiencing a pang of hunger from missing a meal or an afternoon snack, the society will collapse into a bloody revolution or something, is almost as silly as my hyperbole in this sentence. I think if more kids were brought-up to eat when they became hungry, and only eat enough to "not be hungry for a few hours", obesity wouldn't be such a problem. Choices on what to eat also factor in, but McDonald's isn't the sole culprit. When I'm hungry, I eat at the first reasonable opportunity, and eat only enough to keep me from being hungry until slightly before my next opportunity to eat. If I get too hungry between opportunities, I'll graze on snacks. If I'm not hungry at a given opportunity to eat (such as lunch), I pass up the opportunity. I'm on the lean side, that's probably one of the factors.
I also think a lot of the bad eating habits have to do with that crap kids' parents insist on, such as "cleaning your plate" and "thinking of the starving waifs in Ethiopia who have no food". You know what? I came to the realization when I was rather young that eating all my food, when I KNEW it would make me uncomfortably full, simply wasn't going to vicariously help ANY of the suffering, starving children in Ethiopia. I was happy I wasn't starving, but being uncomfortable by eating too much wasn't going to make me any more grateful for having food.
Moreover, I think anytime a parent has to tell a kid to clean a plate on a regular basis, they're not paying enough attention and are basically force-feeding the poor thing. I have four animals in my household (cat, dog, horses), and they usually aren't hitting weight extremes. All it takes is paying attention to whether they're looking a bit too much on the fleshy or thin side, and adjusting the amount or richness of their diets accordingly. I don't worry too much if they *want* more, I do make note of if they're leaving a lot behind (except in the case of the cat, who regulates her intake on free-choice well enough), and go by the old rule of thumb, "ribs shouldn't be seen, but should be easily felt with minimal pressure". Parents and caretakers who fail to pay attention to these things with an objective eye and make decisions accordingly are responsible for their fat-ass kids, not video games, not McDonald's, not society, Iran, or anyone else. The buck stops with the parents. You just can't generally trust children or animals to make appropriate dietary decisions for themselves.
The full article does explain that the standard of "quality" is determined by "who won in court in a patent defense suit". IBM and Microsoft both have comparably deep pockets to wage legal wars of attrition against anyone who wishes to challenge them. They probably also have the wisdom to not pursue lost causes, which is why Ballmer is quick to spread FUD on how Linux infringes on Microsoft IP, but refuses to cite even a single patent. The point I'm making is that the IEEE is judging the strength of Microsoft's entire patent portfolio based on the percentage of successful defenses, coupled by the sheer number of patents it holds. Failure to defend a patent because it may not be defensible in the first place isn't reflected in the figures.
Having watched both companies over many years, I see a lot more substance and innovation behind IBM's R&D and its products, and markedly less so from the Microsoft camp. Anecdotally, I can't recall IBM EVER having a spokesperson come out and bluster that another company or project is infringing on their patents, they act on those things. Microsoft's propensity to bluster says a lot; sure, a lot of their patents stand-up to scrutiny, but there are likely quite a lot that are utterly indefensible and they know it. They just want to cling to the empty patents and so they don't even attempt to defend them. It would be impossible to truly judge the strength of a patent portfolio until every last patent was either confirmed or tossed-out.
I'd expand on this to say that it goes beyond resolution and pixel size, the primary difference is that some folks' brains also don't process visual inputs the same way. Quite a lot of what we *think* we see is not reality, our brains smooth over gaps. What's particularly interesting about most display technology is that it takes (what I'm guessing is) a representation of a pure, colored image in the machine, blasts it out to a screen that's comprised of lots of primary-colored dots, and those dots are picked-up by many more primary-color sensors in our eyes, and then re-assembled into a pure, colored image by our brain if all goes well. Even though that image never existed in the first place, and even if it did, our eyes never even actually saw it as such, either.
ClearType has always looked a little fuzzy to me, probably because even on the most fine-grid-pitch/tiny pixel LCD displays (such as the 1920x1200 17" Dell LCD I use at home), I can see the grid, and I can see those tricks that allow parts of a "pixel" to fall outside of the grid enclosing that pixel. Conventional type rendering, even if the curves and some strokes are a little jagged due to the limitation of displaying diagonal lines or curves in square-pixel blocks, appears very clean and sharp to me, even though I can see the flaws. It's just a greater flaw, as far as my own perception goes, to color outside the lines.
Along the lines of other comments, quantity does NOT necessarily equate to innovation or quality. A very tangible and relevant case-in-point would be in the scientific research realm. This is an anecdote on of my professors dropped in emphasizing the importance of doing GOOD work rather than LOTS OF POOR-QUALITY work.
The most prolific published author of biological research papers lived around the turn of the 20th century. His name eludes me at the moment, and the reason is that his work didn't stand the test of time, and his name has sunk into obscurity. He churned out research papers at an incredible pace, mostly classifying new species, but unfortunately for his legacy, his work was rather shoddy. A large percentage of his papers failed to remain standing after enduring the rigors of peer review, many falling even when he was still alive.
At the time I heard the anecdote, a researcher named Hobart M. Smith was overtaking that 'record' of quantity, but the vast majority of Dr. Smith's papers hold-up to scrutiny. His work is just higher quality, which makes it inherently more meaningful than the sheer volume.
So what's more meaningful to us today? Microsoft innovation, or IBM's innovation? IBM has revolutionized the tech industry time and time again with stunning advances in hardware technology, whereas Microsoft screams about how Linux 'infringes' on hundreds of its patents, which it won't even elaborate on because its execs are likely well-aware those patents would get revoked because they either wouldn't stand the tests of obviousness or prior art. Would Microsoft really rival IBM if it was suddenly stripped of all its dubiously-valid patents?
The differences here are primarily quality. Patent-bully Microsoft doesn't hold a candle to IBM innovation.
While Vista might be a crappy host OS, they could at least see that Linux makes the Windows Vista Experience (tm) better. But only so long as you only have to have that experience when you're booting or the host OS crashes.
I can't complain too much about CompUSA's exorbitant prices. That made for a lot of stale merchandise, and I made out like a bandit about a year after Linksys revised the WRT-54GS wireless routers to where they cut the memory and NVRAM to low levels that barely ran any 3rd-party firmware. I happened to find several of an older revision that had the maximum memory & NVRAM ever offered on that series of router, and while the price (somewhere around $80, when everyone else was selling them for $65) would've been laughable for the new model, I bought all the stale models they had on the shelf, roughly a dozen, and resold all but one at a decent profit. The clerk seemed a bit baffled as to why someone was suddenly buying so many of an item they apparently rarely sold in the year they'd been sitting on the shelves. If the local store doesn't get sold and has a liquidation sale, I might even have a reason to drop in, the prices might be halfway reasonable on non-hard-to-find merchandise too.
I wish there was a Microcenter closer to where I live, as it is, it's generally worth an hour's drive to get there. I like how they don't play the PSP games, how they have a great selection, and very reasonable prices. And then there are the bargain bins, which really make the trip worthwhile if they happen to have something I need. CompUSA was only ever good for something I needed in a pinch and would pay any price to get ASAP for a client's need. I usually lost my profit margin on the parts-chasing, but it kept my clients happy.
You're on-target with the theory behind immunization, but the post you quoted is thinking more along the lines of game theory. So here's a hint, conspiracy theorists: If you want to play the selfish game like that, you're better-off NOT TELLING ANYONE ELSE. Otherwise, other people around you may take your advice and won't be immunized either, and if you're not, you may die a horrible death...unless you get immunized. In which case there's a great benefit from immunization, because you get to watch lots of stupid people die horribly. Maybe the parent didn't really deserve to be modded down so brutally...he was just trying to save the world from stupid people.
Agreed. Many of the objections to immunizations are shaky at best, but the science behind them is simple: they're a lower-risk way to fight a high-risk disease. Immunizations are NEVER without risk, and when the NIH and pharmaceutical companies lie and say they're perfectly safe (with all the potential side effects in the tiny print), the kooks come out of the woodwork to make the situation sound worse than it is. Anaphylaxis, local discomfort or irritation around the injection site, cysts near the injection site, contraction of the disease itself, and other complications are all potential outcomes. But reducing the ravages of nasty childhood illnesses (that can be very dangerous to adults) sure beats a little discomfort in the vast majority, and even the tiny chance that a few people will have horrible consequences.
The bottom line: If there's negligible risk from the actual disease, the risk of vaccination may outweigh the potential benefit, and the folks affected by the decision need to make an INFORMED decision. Countless more people suffered and died from smallpox itself than died to the vaccine, and thanks to their gambles or sacrifices, nobody is dying from smallpox in this day and age, OR the vaccine either since it's unnecessary.
Oh, and the other bottom line is that the research was a waste of time of Captain Obvious proportions. The same sorts of nutters who think that vaccines are evil conspiracies will view that research as part of the grand conspiracy, while normal people will continue to seek the advice of qualified professionals regarding family wellness and health issues.
So let's face it: COBE is fantastic science, but it means absolutely nothing to most people. They don't know what it does, they don't understand or care about the science behind it, and probably assume it's just a waste of money. HST is fantastic science, but people are dazzled by pretty pictures and can catch a glimpse into just how it's enabling scientists to do fantastic things. It seizes the imagination, and NASA can only achieve what the public's imagination is willing to fund (to borrow a phrase from Jack Black's funny anti-piracy PSA, "No money, no rocket sauce...").
I'd like to see the HST recovered somehow and put on display. Sure, that'd be expensive (and may be impractical to bring back down even if a replacement was deployed on the same mission), but it's an icon that panders to the public interest. That's worth every penny IMHO when the budget for space exploration is facing the ax, even if it's less-than-pragmatic from a purely scientific point of view.
I would also note that you could disable SpeedStep in the BIOS on older Thinkpads (and likely other makes & models too). Doing so would fix the processor at the lower speed (lest you think you're going to get it to run full-tilt all the time), but avoided some of the serious performance problems associated with the way Windows was managing SpeedStep, I don't know if that issue has since been fixed.
...but not the disease. So a bunch of botnet-herder script kiddies and other ne'er-do-wells who exploit a situation are in jail. Did they patch even a single one of the compromised Windows systems that were a part of the botnet? No, they "disrupted" the botnets, which supposedly is going to reduce their ability to be compromised for criminal purposes in the future. I'm sorry, but unless they somehow repaired the exploits, or confiscated the compromised machines and thus removed them from the internet, they're still a bunch of junkers spewing malicious packets and waiting for some new bot-herder to take the helm, hazardous to the infrastructure as well as all the other computers they share the "tubes" with.
The fundamental problem is a single-user operating system that had networking capabilities cobbled-on, but that still is set up like a single-user environment where trust and security weren't perceived as issues. I'd like to see Microsoft step-up to the plate and put effort into developing exciting extras to be bundled with security updates that would at least make their users get more motivated about patching. Of course there's more to security than that, but we're all going to have to live with the mess Microsoft has made with pretty much every OS up to (and quite possibly still including) Vista, for years to come. Barring any proactive effort on Microsoft's part, it seems to me like the FBI has some responsibility to track down computers used in crimes and do something just a bit more permanent than just "reducing" their ability to facilitate criminal activity in the future.
This is a very good distinction to make, since dilution and misuse of the term stands to weaken the more important issue. The primary difference here is that of what amounts to an information toll-road, versus QoS traffic shaping. I can understand where Comcast is coming from (I don't necessarily agree with the way they went about their traffic shaping, but I understand why they did it), the latter is primarily a decision that the ISP is making in the majority of its users' best interests, while the former is an ISP or backbone-maintainer decision that is in its own best interests to the detriment of everyone from service providers to consumers.
The largest part of the problem in the traffic shaping issue seems to be that ISPs are cheap and unwilling to buy the appropriate amount of bandwidth they need for peak usage times. To compensate, they feel it's acceptable just to crack-down on the heaviest downloaders...but not only those downloaders, but anyone who has the misfortune to be trying to use the same protocols as the worst offenders. But in their view, they're keeping costs down and ensuring that the "average" user won't suffer a severe service degradation (well, substantially worse than the normal service typically is).
What's wrong with the whole Network Neutrality situation is that the internet will lose a lot of its value for everyone if content is marginalized or access is restricted arbitrarily simply because corporate greed shapes the traffic rather than bandwidth consumption. At least from my perspective, the limited anarchy of the bulk of the internet is what makes it the important resource that it's become. Censorship of content, based only on how much money a consumer or service provider is willing to cough-up for access, is abhorrent.
ObDisclaimer: IANAL But most forum software tends to carry a disclaimer to protect the forum host, which says something to the effect that anything posted on the forum becomes their property forever to redistribute in any manner they please to indemnify them. They may (or may not) pass along that indemnity to users of the forums. But to the point, this isn't really your problem. It's the plagiarist-dev's problem. He may have obtained permission from the source after seeing the code and deciding it would fit the bill. He may have just written it himself previously and recycled it on the forum and in the current project. Or he may just made some assumptions and figured nobody would be the wiser. The ultimate question is, would you be reasonably expected to discover this plagiarism, and held responsible for not telling anyone? If not, you might want to just keep on walking, in the remote chance anyone will ever notice or care, it's still on him or someone else on the team, and probably not you since you're the new guy. If you're terrified of it being pinned on you, only then open that can of worms. Makes you wonder if it's that bad code though that's causing problems, since it was lifted verbatim, possibly without enough changes to fit your application, or just has some dumb error.