This proves that the global warming skeptics are horribly right. Global warming is being caused by disturbances in the solar system. However, it turns out that this is actually an invading Cylon fleet of six basestars, and the wreckage we see, is sadly, the Battlestar Galactica.
Nothing remotely like this was considered in anything like the Challenger timeframe (1986) -- or anytime after the Shuttle's CDR -- which was well before the "late 1970s."
Dang. Guess I'm just totally wrong. However, I will at least say that while my analogy is wrong, my overall point still stands, in that, the space shuttle is much, much roomier than the new spacecraft:
I'd love for you to tell me where you heard this..
You and me both. I got that impression from some Rockwell literature (that I still have) from the late 1970s. Best I can find on the internet are some plans about that kind of thing that were aborted since the Challenger. The Air Force conception was that the astronauts would bring a satellite into the cargo bay, close the doors, pressurize it, work on it, then send it back out into space. But, satellites got more reliable, the Challenger blew up, and those ideas all sorta went by the wayside. Plus, when they do work on stuff in space, they just wear the space suits and go for it.
But was it hubris, callousness, or bean counting? One from each column?
Well, no. The Shuttle is a lot heavier than the Orion capsule. The escape system described here is designed to pull the little capsule away from the booster quickly. In the case of the shuttle, the whole thing is way to big for that.
However, in the shuttle, it is a -lot- roomier than the Orion is on the inside. The shuttle is basically a re-usable station. The orion, on the other hand, is basic transportation. Think, inside of 737 for six astronauts, versus, inside of VW Beetle, for 4.
My really stupid shooter, Independent (which you can reg code 1138), has that exact thesis. A guy goes to another planet on a one way trip.
Seriously, I've given this some thought, and one way trips to another planet aren't unthinkable. There's always going to be someone that doesn't like the Earth, for perhaps religious or political reasons, and moving to another planet always seems like an attractive option.
With ideas, the value comes from the act of creation, not from the idea itself. An original idea is worth a great deal more than a copy, but attempting to use property as a metaphor hides this.
The thing of it is, we're living in a world whose economy was predicated on marking up the cost of duplicating an idea to fund its development. By unlinking the two, we cannot forget that we still have to arrive at some alternative for funding ideas, lest, we do not get them. At least with the copyright model, a free market could exist such that could participate in the funding of an idea by consuming it as a product.
Now, without IP for content, there's really no way to monetize an idea, in a free market sense, and so, they aren't going to be monetized, invested in, and so on, in the same way. If we attempt to circumvent that by creating a federal bureacracy that doles out funding for researching new things, then, what we'll have really done is sort of enslaved ourselves in order to gain free content. Everyone will be able to copy everything, but, the only stuff that will be produced will be what the Feds pay for through taxes, and that's a fairly troublesome course.
Clearly, we need a mechanism that allows IP to get funded, but, allows for unlimited copying, so as to get the best of both worlds. These goals seem at odds with each other, but maybe they do not have to be.
Once again, we need new ideas. How rare they truly are!
That's the silliest argument ever - somehow, if a publisher lets everyone else duplicate their stuff, then, they will get more money. The whole point of modern thinking on copyright is that you don't need publishers any more. Anyone can make a million copies of something any more. While I for one tend to side with those who favor strong copyrights, you can't help but notice that the idea of a centralized publishing agent, any more, is just obsolete. You don't need a service to distribute something, because computers do it so very naturally. It sucks for those who want to write or engage in creative arts, but, hey, there's plenty of people out there that used to shovel coal by hand before steam engines came along. Technology is cruel that way. Attempting to carve out a copyright space in the digital age is just government interference in an economy whose most efficient course is to allow unmitigated copying.
A country should be judged on the basis of how much freedom its people have, not by the fact that there are people elsewhere who have it worse off.
That's fair, but when making those judgements, don't go and say that the USA is like China or Iran when it comes to political freedom, when it isn't. Americans and Europeans that go and say silly things like "oh, Bush is a Nazi turning the USA into like Nazi Germany, or he's no different from Iran", really have no idea what they are saying. It's propaganda that sounds good, but it simply isn't true.
Now, does that mean that I like the war on terror? No, I don't. I don't like the PATRIOT Act. I don't like the idea of a Dept of Homeland Security. But... at the same time, I think we can simply say that we don't like these institutions at all, rather than say that they are "like China". Because, they aren't.
hat is plainly false. Iran, for all its faults, legally recognises Jews and has the middle east's largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Some 25000 Jews live there. Iran, while being rabidly anti-Israel, makes a distinction between Jews and Zionism (not that that justifies their policies in any way)
The Iranian parliament is debating the death penalty for apostasy, or converting from Islam to another religion. That's what I'm talking about.
How many here would decry the Chinese and assorted third world countries for censorship of the internet, and yet, here we (in the US) act no differently. It makes me wonder how many things we just don't see, because the DNS entry doesn't even show up.
In China, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up either dead or in jail.
In the USA, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up rich.
In China, there are no Koses, no Limbaughs, no Gores, no Moores, no one that criticizes the regime or calls for political change. In Iran, well, its illegal to even be jewish.
Actually, not so lucky. The wireless card was $50, but they had it at Best Buy and it was already noted on some web sites as having Linux drivers. So I had to look.
The nation and its people has to be subjected to the needs of the industry, to make the country "strong" by making its industries strong. Social plans and services have to take a backseat to the needs of more industrial output and cheaper production. I
The thing is, that's the classic "leftist" argument about capitalism == fascism, and again, its not. You can't have efficient production when government is involved on either side of the aisle. This is why, when GM was in what many analysts called its death throws, the response from George Bush was to say: "GM should build better cars", whereas Barack Obama offered a massive state intervention into GM if they would only build the sort of cars his political party preferred.
It's the central planning that is the problem. Once you have a national industrial plan, you've doomed yourselves to be inefficient. This is why socialism regimes or regimes that intervene on behalf of the people usually wind up impoverishing them. The best a government can do is encourage free trade, competition, and free flow of capital. If you do those things, you can't be facist because all of those things mean you are not subject to the whims of the state. If you don't do those things, you pretty much are going to wind up robbing yourselves of the talents of entrepreneurs, and you aren't going to get economic growth.
Germany could not have won this war. No matter what angle you look at it, it was by no means able to take on the world. But they had very powerful "allies" and some coincidences that played into their hands in the early years of the war.
Germany could have won the war, had they kept the USA out, and not invaded Russia until Great Britain was defeated. For that to happen, Germany has to ramp up military aircraft production, AND, build up her Navy. It's a much, much longer war for Germany but in the meantime the UK is gradually starving out because she ultimately won't be able to keep up with the consolidated GDP of an entire Western Europe at Germany's disposal. From there, Germany could go and invade Russia, and then, she has a much greater chance of succeeding as there won't be an allied lend lease supplying Russia with tons of stuff.
That's the street price for a new Vista. What you say is to pretend that you have an upgrade, and knock the price down to $250. But I didn't have an upgrade, and advocating your sort of the theft would be wrong in my eyes, and, incidentally, in the eyes of Microsoft.
Again, you're lying about the price when I already proved its a fair bit less than $400. And where do you get your numbers from? You think that the price difference (which is 249, not 400 as you claim) means that it should perform that many times faster? What utter nonsense.
Let's see, it costs 400 times as much, and yes, it is $400 as I claim, because that is the price that the local stores carry the full version for, and according to my situation, to be legally licensed, the full version is what I need.
he value in my opinion is that you have 1) support 2) pretty much all hardware will work with MS OSes 3) there's a lot more quality software for Windows than Linux and support for said software is better
Well, no. The problem with Vista right now, especially in 64 bit land, is that there are not lot of drivers for it. In fact, there are more drivers for Linux than Vista 64 bit.
and because i'm programmer 4) the platform is easier to develop for.
It depends on what you are doing. I find that the Windows SDK has taken a nosedive as of late, and the once vaunted Windows Help has degraded to the point of total uselessness. Visual C# is good for business applications, I'll give you that, but I like to program in C++ and there Windows does not have so many advantages, largely because Visual C++ is basically unmaintained for native code development. In the case of assembly language, I think the AT&T syntax used by GNU is a lot clearer than Microsoft syntax, and I like the way the Linux calling convention is, better.
Besides, for christ's sakes, the Visual Studio tool chain is still only 32 bit only. Go looky at that little asterik that means WOW32 emulation when you run Visual Studio in Windows 64 bit land. By comparison, the whole C++ tool chain for Linux is 64 bit native, and you can tell when you use them.
Finally, do you ever get those weird crashes in C++ on Windows where you are inside the kernel and there is no call stack available? What's up with that? Under Linux, you have the sources to the entire OS, so you can trace everything all the way through, if you want to.
Well, if you're that hard up that a few hunderd dollars will screw you, it sounds like you have problems managing your money
Maybe I do. But I fail to see in the list of fiscal priorities, why an operating system of all things is something that I should pay that much money for. I mean, if Linux costs me a $1 to download, and Vista is $400 list, then, is Vista 400 times better than Linux? No, its not. It doesn't use 400 times less memory. It doesn't make my computer run 400 times faster. It doesn't make my computer have 400 times the features. In fact, Ubuntu comes out of the box with MORE stuff than Vista does, because a Linux distro will give you all of the applications and features that are available to Linux. Granted, OpenOffice sucks compared to MS Office, but, Ubuntu gives you -everything-, even if it is not as good.
So you didn't save as much, and good luck if you ever want to use wireless with that Ubuntu computer.
I am wireless with the Ubuntu computer. I didn't have to do anything. When I installed Ubuntu, I got the little wireless icon on my upper right hand corner, hit connect... to my wireless network, and it completely worked, just like the little wireless icon on my Windows XP does.
Over 60 years after his system has been proven to be flawed and doomed to fail. You don't have any similar laws, in no country, for speeches from Lenin, Che or even Stalin.
The problem with Hitler wasn't that his system was doomed to fail. Lenin's was doomed to fail, Che's was, and so was Stalin's. But Hitler's system wasn't doomed to fail. Would it put Humanity into a new sort of dark ages, yes? But was it doomed to fail? No. Hitler did conquer all of Europe and, came quite close to taking over Russia as well. To this day, people can look at Hitler and say, yeah, he very well could have taken over the western world, had he played his cards differently.
Nazi's terrify us, because, the philosophy has some things in common with what we know. Nazis believed people are competitive, and so do capitalists. Nazis believe the state can unleash that competition in people, and so do the capitalists. Nazis even believe that culture matters and cultures compete, and so do capitalists. But the difference is that, armed with that knowledge, a democratic capitalist country like the USA (and even Europe) believes in trying to compete through the goods that are produced and services delivered, to improve humanity as a whole, whereas, the Nazis believe that competition should be taken to the ultimate level, to war, as part of the natural order of things. Instead of trying to outproduce or outbuild your rivals, the Nazis would prefer to try and destroy them.
Ultimately, their philosophy failed, because, while the Nazis were obsessing about the destruction of their rivals, their rivals, the Allies, obsessed about producing more than them. The allies built more aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, bombers, tanks, trucks, mines and machine guns, and with those weapons, won World War II, and imposed a framework based on competition through production upon the entire world. But even within those allies there are those who whisper the Nazi idea, instead, that a rival should be destroyed, rather than outproduced...and it is against those who whisper such falsehoods that we must stand.
I have a dual Opteron with a fairly decent graphics controller that would be an ideal candidate for Vista x64 Ultimate. But, for about $400 cheaper, (or $200 if you get the system builder edition), I downloaded Ubuntu and it works great.
Taken together, Microsoft's actions of the last few weeks : decreasing the price of Vista, giving away Visual Studio to Students, publishing specifications, all point towards an effort to attract developers to their platform. Even the channel partnerships that I railed about earlier are structured to attract developers. Clearly, Microsoft knows something that we don't know, and, I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass for them to be really concerned about it. I wonder how much trouble Microsoft realizes it is in.
There is a demographic factor going on as well. A lot of we formerly reliable Windows zealots are now in our 30s and 40s, and suddenly money that would be spent on graphics cards and Windows upgrades is now getting plowed into our over-priced houses and our children. It's like, I would have stayed up in line to get Vista Ultimate the day it came out, but instead, I bought diapers, soy milk and a thomas the tank engine train set for my son. Having jonesed for some sort of an upgrade to my PC, I went with Ubuntu instead, and its pretty satisfying.
Linux has hit that point where, it may not be the best in terms of a consumer operating system, but its often good enough, and installing it just works.
Are you freaking kidding me? There are many studies the show no relationship between sunspots and global climate trends. That as an interesting idea in th 70's. Now it's dead.
Well, now we can actually engage in the best science of all. We can TEST it. Empirical test results trump the best of any model imposed on data collected after the fact. We are here today, and can predict the earth will get cooler or will get warmer. Last year, it got cooler, and the cycle was late by a year. There are no sunspots this year, so far, and the cycle appears to be late, again. Yeah, there was the magnetic flux thing but only one sunspot has turned up, not the hundreds we're supposed to get. So, you can say that the earth will get warmer because of greenhouse gasses, and I will say that it will get cooler because of the extended solar minimum. Would you like to wager $1 on it? I'll see your global heating and raise you one little ice age!
You seem to have confused free-thinkers with religious types. Last I checked, free-thinkers don't have tele-evangelists trying to convince people to give them lots of money.
Sure they do. Everyone does. The Sierra Club is not a religious organization, but it has evangelists begging for money. Every organization is essentially religious, in how it operates.
Sorry, the solar minimum occurred in January 2008, when the new solar cycle started. Anyway, when did anyone say that the sun doesn't have an effect on global temperatures? That's a strawman argument.
The solar minimum is ongoing, because there are no sunspots. Oh wait, there was one. Also, the number of predicted sunspots has been revised radically down. Show me lots of sunspots, then I will believe you.
Slashdot Mirror
This proves that the global warming skeptics are horribly right. Global warming is being caused by disturbances in the solar system. However, it turns out that this is actually an invading Cylon fleet of six basestars, and the wreckage we see, is sadly, the Battlestar Galactica.
We're all DOOMED.
Nothing remotely like this was considered in anything like the Challenger timeframe (1986) -- or anytime after the Shuttle's CDR -- which was well before the "late 1970s."
Dang. Guess I'm just totally wrong. However, I will at least say that while my analogy is wrong, my overall point still stands, in that, the space shuttle is much, much roomier than the new spacecraft:
SS Habital Volume: 71.5 cubic meters
Crew Model: 10 cubic meters...
The fabber should be able to recycle things made via a similar fabber
So your fabber is going to make steel in the basement?
I'd love for you to tell me where you heard this..
You and me both. I got that impression from some Rockwell literature (that I still have) from the late 1970s. Best I can find on the internet are some plans about that kind of thing that were aborted since the Challenger. The Air Force conception was that the astronauts would bring a satellite into the cargo bay, close the doors, pressurize it, work on it, then send it back out into space. But, satellites got more reliable, the Challenger blew up, and those ideas all sorta went by the wayside. Plus, when they do work on stuff in space, they just wear the space suits and go for it.
The shuttle's cabin is nowhere near 737 size. More like a six or eight seat business jet.
That cargo bay is pretty roomy though, and it can be closed and pressurized, if the astronauts feel a need to do jumping jacks in orbit, and what not.
But was it hubris, callousness, or bean counting? One from each column?
Well, no. The Shuttle is a lot heavier than the Orion capsule. The escape system described here is designed to pull the little capsule away from the booster quickly. In the case of the shuttle, the whole thing is way to big for that.
However, in the shuttle, it is a -lot- roomier than the Orion is on the inside. The shuttle is basically a re-usable station. The orion, on the other hand, is basic transportation. Think, inside of 737 for six astronauts, versus, inside of VW Beetle, for 4.
My really stupid shooter, Independent (which you can reg code 1138), has that exact thesis. A guy goes to another planet on a one way trip.
Seriously, I've given this some thought, and one way trips to another planet aren't unthinkable. There's always going to be someone that doesn't like the Earth, for perhaps religious or political reasons, and moving to another planet always seems like an attractive option.
With ideas, the value comes from the act of creation, not from the idea itself. An original idea is worth a great deal more than a copy, but attempting to use property as a metaphor hides this.
The thing of it is, we're living in a world whose economy was predicated on marking up the cost of duplicating an idea to fund its development. By unlinking the two, we cannot forget that we still have to arrive at some alternative for funding ideas, lest, we do not get them. At least with the copyright model, a free market could exist such that could participate in the funding of an idea by consuming it as a product.
Now, without IP for content, there's really no way to monetize an idea, in a free market sense, and so, they aren't going to be monetized, invested in, and so on, in the same way. If we attempt to circumvent that by creating a federal bureacracy that doles out funding for researching new things, then, what we'll have really done is sort of enslaved ourselves in order to gain free content. Everyone will be able to copy everything, but, the only stuff that will be produced will be what the Feds pay for through taxes, and that's a fairly troublesome course.
Clearly, we need a mechanism that allows IP to get funded, but, allows for unlimited copying, so as to get the best of both worlds. These goals seem at odds with each other, but maybe they do not have to be.
Once again, we need new ideas. How rare they truly are!
That's the silliest argument ever - somehow, if a publisher lets everyone else duplicate their stuff, then, they will get more money. The whole point of modern thinking on copyright is that you don't need publishers any more. Anyone can make a million copies of something any more. While I for one tend to side with those who favor strong copyrights, you can't help but notice that the idea of a centralized publishing agent, any more, is just obsolete. You don't need a service to distribute something, because computers do it so very naturally. It sucks for those who want to write or engage in creative arts, but, hey, there's plenty of people out there that used to shovel coal by hand before steam engines came along. Technology is cruel that way. Attempting to carve out a copyright space in the digital age is just government interference in an economy whose most efficient course is to allow unmitigated copying.
A country should be judged on the basis of how much freedom its people have, not by the fact that there are people elsewhere who have it worse off.
That's fair, but when making those judgements, don't go and say that the USA is like China or Iran when it comes to political freedom, when it isn't. Americans and Europeans that go and say silly things like "oh, Bush is a Nazi turning the USA into like Nazi Germany, or he's no different from Iran", really have no idea what they are saying. It's propaganda that sounds good, but it simply isn't true.
Now, does that mean that I like the war on terror? No, I don't. I don't like the PATRIOT Act. I don't like the idea of a Dept of Homeland Security. But... at the same time, I think we can simply say that we don't like these institutions at all, rather than say that they are "like China". Because, they aren't.
hat is plainly false. Iran, for all its faults, legally recognises Jews and has the middle east's largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Some 25000 Jews live there. Iran, while being rabidly anti-Israel, makes a distinction between Jews and Zionism (not that that justifies their policies in any way)
The Iranian parliament is debating the death penalty for apostasy, or converting from Islam to another religion. That's what I'm talking about.
How many here would decry the Chinese and assorted third world countries for censorship of the internet, and yet, here we (in the US) act no differently. It makes me wonder how many things we just don't see, because the DNS entry doesn't even show up.
In China, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up either dead or in jail.
In the USA, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up rich.
In China, there are no Koses, no Limbaughs, no Gores, no Moores, no one that criticizes the regime or calls for political change. In Iran, well, its illegal to even be jewish.
So yeah, there are differences....
The GPLv3 is much, much more specific about that. Specifically:
Yeah but what if the work is licensed GPL V2?
No, you're simply got lucky with drivers.
Actually, not so lucky. The wireless card was $50, but they had it at Best Buy and it was already noted on some web sites as having Linux drivers. So I had to look.
The nation and its people has to be subjected to the needs of the industry, to make the country "strong" by making its industries strong. Social plans and services have to take a backseat to the needs of more industrial output and cheaper production. I
The thing is, that's the classic "leftist" argument about capitalism == fascism, and again, its not. You can't have efficient production when government is involved on either side of the aisle. This is why, when GM was in what many analysts called its death throws, the response from George Bush was to say: "GM should build better cars", whereas Barack Obama offered a massive state intervention into GM if they would only build the sort of cars his political party preferred.
It's the central planning that is the problem. Once you have a national industrial plan, you've doomed yourselves to be inefficient. This is why socialism regimes or regimes that intervene on behalf of the people usually wind up impoverishing them. The best a government can do is encourage free trade, competition, and free flow of capital. If you do those things, you can't be facist because all of those things mean you are not subject to the whims of the state. If you don't do those things, you pretty much are going to wind up robbing yourselves of the talents of entrepreneurs, and you aren't going to get economic growth.
Germany could not have won this war. No matter what angle you look at it, it was by no means able to take on the world. But they had very powerful "allies" and some coincidences that played into their hands in the early years of the war.
Germany could have won the war, had they kept the USA out, and not invaded Russia until Great Britain was defeated. For that to happen, Germany has to ramp up military aircraft production, AND, build up her Navy. It's a much, much longer war for Germany but in the meantime the UK is gradually starving out because she ultimately won't be able to keep up with the consolidated GDP of an entire Western Europe at Germany's disposal. From there, Germany could go and invade Russia, and then, she has a much greater chance of succeeding as there won't be an allied lend lease supplying Russia with tons of stuff.
From today's sun watch
"The sun is again blank as short lived sunspot 983 has disappeared. The solar flux is very low as well."
It's a disaster of a year. Get ready for the ice age.
I never said you should. Just don't lie about the cost to make your point
I didn't lie about my price. Best Buy - Windows Vista Ultimate full edition is $400.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8112598&st=Vista&type=product&id=1158317974609
That's the street price for a new Vista. What you say is to pretend that you have an upgrade, and knock the price down to $250. But I didn't have an upgrade, and advocating your sort of the theft would be wrong in my eyes, and, incidentally, in the eyes of Microsoft.
Again, you're lying about the price when I already proved its a fair bit less than $400. And where do you get your numbers from? You think that the price difference (which is 249, not 400 as you claim) means that it should perform that many times faster? What utter nonsense.
Let's see, it costs 400 times as much, and yes, it is $400 as I claim, because that is the price that the local stores carry the full version for, and according to my situation, to be legally licensed, the full version is what I need.
he value in my opinion is that you have 1) support 2) pretty much all hardware will work with MS OSes 3) there's a lot more quality software for Windows than Linux and support for said software is better
Well, no. The problem with Vista right now, especially in 64 bit land, is that there are not lot of drivers for it. In fact, there are more drivers for Linux than Vista 64 bit.
and because i'm programmer 4) the platform is easier to develop for.
It depends on what you are doing. I find that the Windows SDK has taken a nosedive as of late, and the once vaunted Windows Help has degraded to the point of total uselessness. Visual C# is good for business applications, I'll give you that, but I like to program in C++ and there Windows does not have so many advantages, largely because Visual C++ is basically unmaintained for native code development. In the case of assembly language, I think the AT&T syntax used by GNU is a lot clearer than Microsoft syntax, and I like the way the Linux calling convention is, better.
Besides, for christ's sakes, the Visual Studio tool chain is still only 32 bit only. Go looky at that little asterik that means WOW32 emulation when you run Visual Studio in Windows 64 bit land. By comparison, the whole C++ tool chain for Linux is 64 bit native, and you can tell when you use them.
Finally, do you ever get those weird crashes in C++ on Windows where you are inside the kernel and there is no call stack available? What's up with that? Under Linux, you have the sources to the entire OS, so you can trace everything all the way through, if you want to.
Well, if you're that hard up that a few hunderd dollars will screw you, it sounds like you have problems managing your money
Maybe I do. But I fail to see in the list of fiscal priorities, why an operating system of all things is something that I should pay that much money for. I mean, if Linux costs me a $1 to download, and Vista is $400 list, then, is Vista 400 times better than Linux? No, its not. It doesn't use 400 times less memory. It doesn't make my computer run 400 times faster. It doesn't make my computer have 400 times the features. In fact, Ubuntu comes out of the box with MORE stuff than Vista does, because a Linux distro will give you all of the applications and features that are available to Linux. Granted, OpenOffice sucks compared to MS Office, but, Ubuntu gives you -everything-, even if it is not as good.
So you didn't save as much, and good luck if you ever want to use wireless with that Ubuntu computer.
I am wireless with the Ubuntu computer. I didn't have to do anything. When I installed Ubuntu, I got the little wireless icon on my upper right hand corner, hit connect... to my wireless network, and it completely worked, just like the little wireless icon on my Windows XP does.
Over 60 years after his system has been proven to be flawed and doomed to fail. You don't have any similar laws, in no country, for speeches from Lenin, Che or even Stalin.
The problem with Hitler wasn't that his system was doomed to fail. Lenin's was doomed to fail, Che's was, and so was Stalin's. But Hitler's system wasn't doomed to fail. Would it put Humanity into a new sort of dark ages, yes? But was it doomed to fail? No. Hitler did conquer all of Europe and, came quite close to taking over Russia as well. To this day, people can look at Hitler and say, yeah, he very well could have taken over the western world, had he played his cards differently.
Nazi's terrify us, because, the philosophy has some things in common with what we know. Nazis believed people are competitive, and so do capitalists. Nazis believe the state can unleash that competition in people, and so do the capitalists. Nazis even believe that culture matters and cultures compete, and so do capitalists. But the difference is that, armed with that knowledge, a democratic capitalist country like the USA (and even Europe) believes in trying to compete through the goods that are produced and services delivered, to improve humanity as a whole, whereas, the Nazis believe that competition should be taken to the ultimate level, to war, as part of the natural order of things. Instead of trying to outproduce or outbuild your rivals, the Nazis would prefer to try and destroy them.
Ultimately, their philosophy failed, because, while the Nazis were obsessing about the destruction of their rivals, their rivals, the Allies, obsessed about producing more than them. The allies built more aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, bombers, tanks, trucks, mines and machine guns, and with those weapons, won World War II, and imposed a framework based on competition through production upon the entire world. But even within those allies there are those who whisper the Nazi idea, instead, that a rival should be destroyed, rather than outproduced...and it is against those who whisper such falsehoods that we must stand.
I have a dual Opteron with a fairly decent graphics controller that would be an ideal candidate for Vista x64 Ultimate. But, for about $400 cheaper, (or $200 if you get the system builder edition), I downloaded Ubuntu and it works great.
Taken together, Microsoft's actions of the last few weeks : decreasing the price of Vista, giving away Visual Studio to Students, publishing specifications, all point towards an effort to attract developers to their platform. Even the channel partnerships that I railed about earlier are structured to attract developers. Clearly, Microsoft knows something that we don't know, and, I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass for them to be really concerned about it. I wonder how much trouble Microsoft realizes it is in.
There is a demographic factor going on as well. A lot of we formerly reliable Windows zealots are now in our 30s and 40s, and suddenly money that would be spent on graphics cards and Windows upgrades is now getting plowed into our over-priced houses and our children. It's like, I would have stayed up in line to get Vista Ultimate the day it came out, but instead, I bought diapers, soy milk and a thomas the tank engine train set for my son. Having jonesed for some sort of an upgrade to my PC, I went with Ubuntu instead, and its pretty satisfying.
Linux has hit that point where, it may not be the best in terms of a consumer operating system, but its often good enough, and installing it just works.
Are you freaking kidding me? There are many studies the show no relationship between sunspots and global climate trends.
That as an interesting idea in th 70's. Now it's dead.
Well, now we can actually engage in the best science of all. We can TEST it. Empirical test results trump the best of any model imposed on data collected after the fact. We are here today, and can predict the earth will get cooler or will get warmer. Last year, it got cooler, and the cycle was late by a year. There are no sunspots this year, so far, and the cycle appears to be late, again. Yeah, there was the magnetic flux thing but only one sunspot has turned up, not the hundreds we're supposed to get. So, you can say that the earth will get warmer because of greenhouse gasses, and I will say that it will get cooler because of the extended solar minimum. Would you like to wager $1 on it? I'll see your global heating and raise you one little ice age!
You seem to have confused free-thinkers with religious types. Last I checked, free-thinkers don't have tele-evangelists trying to convince people to give them lots of money.
Sure they do. Everyone does. The Sierra Club is not a religious organization, but it has evangelists begging for money. Every organization is essentially religious, in how it operates.
Sorry, the solar minimum occurred in January 2008, when the new solar cycle started. Anyway, when did anyone say that the sun doesn't have an effect on global temperatures? That's a strawman argument.
The solar minimum is ongoing, because there are no sunspots. Oh wait, there was one. Also, the number of predicted sunspots has been revised radically down. Show me lots of sunspots, then I will believe you.
How will you enforce a charge during off peak policy?
Do what utilities do already - enact a demand charge portion of residential bills.