Making the BIOS settings accessible to more stupid people will not make computer maintenance easier. Anyone too dumb to figure out how to use BIOS as it exists now has no business being there in the first place.
As has been noted by many before, coagulants would have been a better idea for cleanup, but dispersants proved to be more important to the task of making the oil slick look smaller in all those satellite photos. What's more important? Cleaning up this stuff, or reducing the PR damage to BP?
Eventually, they'll go out of business and be replaced by vendors selling oil from a more responsible company. That's how capitalism works, or at least that's how it's supposed to work.
...is that the regulation is generally written by the very industries whose behavior the legislation is supposed to curtail. This is a consequence of our corrupt campaign financing system in which large corporations have more say than voters in what our government does. If you don't believe me, just look at how the supposedly-socialist Obama administration is using government resources to prevent reporters from taking photographs of wildlife injured by the oil spill. This serves no purpose other than to help BP manage their PR crisis, and certainly isn't in the best interest of the public.
Patents don't mean diddlysquat anyway if you're a small start up going up against the big dogs. They will simply steal your idea anyway, then if you try to sue them, they will keep the case tied up in court long enough for the legal costs to drive you out of business. The only patents that are worth squat if you're an individual or a small business is a chemical patent, because a chemical either is or isn't a particular chemical, and no amount of fancy lawyerspeak will ever manage to obfuscate that fact.
The problem with software patents is that large corporations can patent things that are obvious or that everyone is already doing anyway, then use complex legal cases to drive their competitors out of business.
I used to post on liberal message boards. You know what I found? I wasn't learning anything. Sure, some conservatives would show up for "debate" but in practice, any conservative statement would be overwhelmed with responses, most of which were utterly stupid or ill-informed. So of course the conservatives responded mostly to the stupid responses, because who wouldn't go after the lower-hanging, easily-debunked fruit? Good liberal arguments ended up being ironically ignored by both the conservatives there and by most of the liberals.
Furthermore, the ideologically homogeneous environment led to an in-breeding of memes that produced insane conclusions that could not be dislodged by any amount of evidence nor reason (e.g. 9/11 conspiracies, belief in autism-vaccine links, etc.).
I've come to appreciate places like FRDB.org (formerly Internet Infidels). It's still a relatively homogeneous environment (mostly atheist), but the forum is well moderated, and poor arguments get swatted down by people on both sides of a given debate. This leads to an environment where I actually learn things and even change my mind about serious issues (e.g. I once believed in the autism-vaccine link).
If you go into a well-stocked library and only read books about Clifford The Big Red Dog, you're not going to get any smarter at best, and may actually get dumber. The Internet is — unsurprisingly—the same way.
I have a 23" 1920x1080 set on a $50 pivot mount, and I can indeed verify that message boards, articles, and other text-heavy pages look great in a vertical orientation.
The military all too often makes things secret not because it is sensitive, but because it would generate bad PR. This is not how a democratic government is supposed to function. If you don't like living in a country with a transparent government, you can always move to places like North Korea.
I have a hard time believing that there isn't some kind of law against this kind of thing given the sensitivity of intelligence information, but I still concur with the person you were responding to: why is this kind of information being suppressed at all by a (small d) democratic government?
I don't personally have experience with Comcast, I only know the horror stories I hear from friends. I can however corroborate that Wide Open West has bangup support. They still have strange and stupid problems with their service like most other ISPs, but their tech support people are generally more helpful.
Whenever one species dies out, it leaves behind an ecological niche for some other species to take advantage of. For instance, the rise of mammals is directly tied to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The total number of species in the world is not going to decrease at a constant rate.
...they use the method I mentioned to "prove" to non-Christians that the universe cannot possibly be more than 4,000, 6,000, or 10,000 years old. Many people who get into arguments where this "proof" is used fail to catch the underlying problem (that the population growth rate is not following an exact exponential curve: it would have gone up and down in the past in response to environmental factors, wars, etc.).
The name-counting from the Bible is how they originally arrived at the numbers they can't agree on (which interestingly originally came from a rabbi), but they're willing to throw any spaghetti against the wall they can in attempts to "prove" their existing belief to themselves and to others.
Allowing people to have an advantage by using 'bots to play the game for them has long been a bane of MMORPGs. Yes, it is stupid that people run a program to play the game for them, but keep in mind that legitimate players have to compete with these 'bot players for resources (e.g. crafting materials), and they really shouldn't have to.
...that they keep insisting that hundreds of millions of years was not enough time for the species we see today to evolve, but that the small number of animals in Noah's ark was able to evolve into a much larger number of species over the course of the last 4,000 years. They never seem to pick up on the incongruity of those two sets of ideas.
If you didn't know Steve Jobs is draconian in his treatment of developers, you haven't been paying attention.
I'm not some Microsoft/*NIX fanboy here to bash Apple. I was working IT in the Mac world for years, and the only thing that shocked me more than the way Apple treats users is the way Apple treats developers.
What's good and bad about Microsoft over the years is that they generally bend over backwards to let developers do any damn thing they please, including things that are stupid, unsafe, and/or insane. Apple is good and bad for pretty much the opposite reasons.
If the purpose of said government institution is to promote and fund research, then this is exactly the sort of thing that should be done with the research they've done. This money will go towards other research, which could end up producing another similarly useful patent that benefits us all.
There have been so many abuses of the patent law in recent years and so many stories on patent abuses here at/. that many people just automatically get their knickers in a twist at the mere mention of the word "patent". I have to admit that this was my own initial reaction until I started reading the posts like yours in this discussion.
Which obviously could not be the case. This is the same sort of erroneous statistics that lead to creationist "proofs" that the world is only 4,000/6,000/10,000 years old by assuming that the current human population growth rate is exactly the same as it has been throughout history and counting backwards.
...despite what you were told in school, the definition of "species" has become considerably fuzzier than "can mate". It is not a cut-and-dried designation at all anymore, which obviously complicates counting the total number of species on the planet.
This source includes discussion on what counts as a species.
No one is presenting the Greek religion as a scientific fact in a science class. I dare say that if someone did, our friendly neighborhood creationists and you would stand up and scream about violation of the Establishment Clause.
We do not "teach the controversy" of opposing views of evolution for the same reason we don't "teach the controversy" about geocentrism in opposition to heliocentrism, or about belief in a flat Earth as opposed to a spherical Earth. Children have enough to do in science class without having to be burdened with learning about things that are demonstrably false, much less presenting those demonstrably false things as some kind of legitimate scientific viewpoint.
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It acts like female hormones once it gets inside the human body. Not good for adults, but really bad for babies.
Making the BIOS settings accessible to more stupid people will not make computer maintenance easier. Anyone too dumb to figure out how to use BIOS as it exists now has no business being there in the first place.
As has been noted by many before, coagulants would have been a better idea for cleanup, but dispersants proved to be more important to the task of making the oil slick look smaller in all those satellite photos. What's more important? Cleaning up this stuff, or reducing the PR damage to BP?
Eventually, they'll go out of business and be replaced by vendors selling oil from a more responsible company. That's how capitalism works, or at least that's how it's supposed to work.
...is that the regulation is generally written by the very industries whose behavior the legislation is supposed to curtail. This is a consequence of our corrupt campaign financing system in which large corporations have more say than voters in what our government does. If you don't believe me, just look at how the supposedly-socialist Obama administration is using government resources to prevent reporters from taking photographs of wildlife injured by the oil spill. This serves no purpose other than to help BP manage their PR crisis, and certainly isn't in the best interest of the public.
Patents don't mean diddlysquat anyway if you're a small start up going up against the big dogs. They will simply steal your idea anyway, then if you try to sue them, they will keep the case tied up in court long enough for the legal costs to drive you out of business. The only patents that are worth squat if you're an individual or a small business is a chemical patent, because a chemical either is or isn't a particular chemical, and no amount of fancy lawyerspeak will ever manage to obfuscate that fact.
The problem with software patents is that large corporations can patent things that are obvious or that everyone is already doing anyway, then use complex legal cases to drive their competitors out of business.
I used to post on liberal message boards. You know what I found? I wasn't learning anything. Sure, some conservatives would show up for "debate" but in practice, any conservative statement would be overwhelmed with responses, most of which were utterly stupid or ill-informed. So of course the conservatives responded mostly to the stupid responses, because who wouldn't go after the lower-hanging, easily-debunked fruit? Good liberal arguments ended up being ironically ignored by both the conservatives there and by most of the liberals.
Furthermore, the ideologically homogeneous environment led to an in-breeding of memes that produced insane conclusions that could not be dislodged by any amount of evidence nor reason (e.g. 9/11 conspiracies, belief in autism-vaccine links, etc.).
I've come to appreciate places like FRDB.org (formerly Internet Infidels). It's still a relatively homogeneous environment (mostly atheist), but the forum is well moderated, and poor arguments get swatted down by people on both sides of a given debate. This leads to an environment where I actually learn things and even change my mind about serious issues (e.g. I once believed in the autism-vaccine link).
If you go into a well-stocked library and only read books about Clifford The Big Red Dog, you're not going to get any smarter at best, and may actually get dumber. The Internet is — unsurprisingly—the same way.
I have a 23" 1920x1080 set on a $50 pivot mount, and I can indeed verify that message boards, articles, and other text-heavy pages look great in a vertical orientation.
Tinfoil hats actually amplify government mind control rays! Putting on tinfoil hats is exactly what they want you to do! ;)
The military all too often makes things secret not because it is sensitive, but because it would generate bad PR. This is not how a democratic government is supposed to function. If you don't like living in a country with a transparent government, you can always move to places like North Korea.
I have a hard time believing that there isn't some kind of law against this kind of thing given the sensitivity of intelligence information, but I still concur with the person you were responding to: why is this kind of information being suppressed at all by a (small d) democratic government?
I mean, this is a democracy with a transparent government, not North Korea, right? *sigh*
Shame on our democratic government for trying to keep things like this a secret.
I don't personally have experience with Comcast, I only know the horror stories I hear from friends. I can however corroborate that Wide Open West has bangup support. They still have strange and stupid problems with their service like most other ISPs, but their tech support people are generally more helpful.
Whenever one species dies out, it leaves behind an ecological niche for some other species to take advantage of. For instance, the rise of mammals is directly tied to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The total number of species in the world is not going to decrease at a constant rate.
...they use the method I mentioned to "prove" to non-Christians that the universe cannot possibly be more than 4,000, 6,000, or 10,000 years old. Many people who get into arguments where this "proof" is used fail to catch the underlying problem (that the population growth rate is not following an exact exponential curve: it would have gone up and down in the past in response to environmental factors, wars, etc.).
The name-counting from the Bible is how they originally arrived at the numbers they can't agree on (which interestingly originally came from a rabbi), but they're willing to throw any spaghetti against the wall they can in attempts to "prove" their existing belief to themselves and to others.
Allowing people to have an advantage by using 'bots to play the game for them has long been a bane of MMORPGs. Yes, it is stupid that people run a program to play the game for them, but keep in mind that legitimate players have to compete with these 'bot players for resources (e.g. crafting materials), and they really shouldn't have to.
...that they keep insisting that hundreds of millions of years was not enough time for the species we see today to evolve, but that the small number of animals in Noah's ark was able to evolve into a much larger number of species over the course of the last 4,000 years. They never seem to pick up on the incongruity of those two sets of ideas.
If you didn't know Steve Jobs is draconian in his treatment of developers, you haven't been paying attention.
I'm not some Microsoft/*NIX fanboy here to bash Apple. I was working IT in the Mac world for years, and the only thing that shocked me more than the way Apple treats users is the way Apple treats developers.
What's good and bad about Microsoft over the years is that they generally bend over backwards to let developers do any damn thing they please, including things that are stupid, unsafe, and/or insane. Apple is good and bad for pretty much the opposite reasons.
If the purpose of said government institution is to promote and fund research, then this is exactly the sort of thing that should be done with the research they've done. This money will go towards other research, which could end up producing another similarly useful patent that benefits us all.
There have been so many abuses of the patent law in recent years and so many stories on patent abuses here at /. that many people just automatically get their knickers in a twist at the mere mention of the word "patent". I have to admit that this was my own initial reaction until I started reading the posts like yours in this discussion.
Which obviously could not be the case. This is the same sort of erroneous statistics that lead to creationist "proofs" that the world is only 4,000/6,000/10,000 years old by assuming that the current human population growth rate is exactly the same as it has been throughout history and counting backwards.
...despite what you were told in school, the definition of "species" has become considerably fuzzier than "can mate". It is not a cut-and-dried designation at all anymore, which obviously complicates counting the total number of species on the planet.
This source includes discussion on what counts as a species.
No one is presenting the Greek religion as a scientific fact in a science class. I dare say that if someone did, our friendly neighborhood creationists and you would stand up and scream about violation of the Establishment Clause.
We do not "teach the controversy" of opposing views of evolution for the same reason we don't "teach the controversy" about geocentrism in opposition to heliocentrism, or about belief in a flat Earth as opposed to a spherical Earth. Children have enough to do in science class without having to be burdened with learning about things that are demonstrably false, much less presenting those demonstrably false things as some kind of legitimate scientific viewpoint.
Templeton funded this research, didn't they?