Windows -> SuSE conversion is really really easy. YaST, etc. . . makes configuration very similar to Windows style tasks; at least everything has a GUI analog.
I'm not (yet) wealthy by any metric, but I find Wow & Eve Online to be efficent usages of my entertainment budget (plenty of bang for the buck).
Before I started seriously playing MMOs, I found my self spending a huge amount on entertainment. Cable TV with 3 premium channels. 3-4 movies a month. $40 for a fancy dinner here and there, and the occasional $40-$100 night out drinking on the town.
Buy 1-2 CDs, and you hit the $15. Buy one DVD, and you hit the $15.
Now, think like a capitalist. You pay X dollars, and get Y hours of entertainment out of it. My girlfriend and I, instead of seeing a movie or going out to the clubs, we stay home and play WoW. On average, we probably put in 10-20 hours a month. That means approximately $1.15 per hour for my entertainment. Do you think you get 20+ hours of entertainment out of one DVD? What about one CD? What about 1 movie ticket?
Or even a moderately priced $10 meal. Do you get 8 hours of entertainment out of it?
I have MMO accounts. I purchased some gym passes. I get monthly salsa lessons. And I cut out the premium channels, reduced my phone minutes to a reasonable 600, stopped going to movies, and stopped eating out of house.
The result? More $$ in my pocket. And I get to play in this beautiful game world with live support, constantly updated content, and PvP that I really do enjoy. Now, maybe WoW is too simple for all the leet games out there, but my GF and I get quite a kick out of it. And when I really want to deal with something crazy sophisticated, I pull up Eve.
I don't understand your indignation at this idea of "subscription" gaming. Running WoW is expensive (tons of bandwidth). Updating WoW is expensive (a dedicated team of designers, GMs, network admins, etc. ..)
These are real costs associated with producing a game. Obviously, they turn a profit, but unlike, say, AT&T, or Comcast, Blizzard is pretty damn reponsive to its customer base, and doesn't bilk people using micropayments.
I guess some aesthetics may balk at the idea of paying $$ on entertainment at all, but I don't really get that. I'm not saying I spend all my cash on "fun", but there's safely room in my budget for $45 a month towards entertainment, without stopping me from buying a house, going to graduate school, or even *gasp* building up a meager savings account.
Of course, you seem to say that you are willing to purchase games, in which case I point you back at my $$ per hour question. My games of choice cost me $1.15 per hour of playtime. How many hours of play time do you get out of your $50-$60 Xbox/360/PS2/GC/Windows games? Do you average at least 45? And if so, by how much? Do you really believe I'm paying a significant premium?
Let's say I'm willing to pay TWICE what you pay for the online "experience", and for competing against thousands of players. The equivalent price point for you would be $0.67 cents per hour, or approximately 90 hours for a $50 game.
*shrug* I don't think I've played any console or PC game (except a few, choice, excellent strategy games) for more than that.
This crap is based on IE. If anyone believes that an IE engine browser will be safe & private, I'd like to send you some information literature regarding some beach front land in Louisanna.
*shrug*. This shit has been in the news for days now. What the fuck; it's practically a prank. There's nothing here to see folks, other than some moron pretending to release a browser by repackaging pure-shit. You're supposed to ignore stuff like this; just like the guy who claims he'll prove the water carborator works, but only after you buy his $19.99 (plus $24.99 shipping & handling) Automobile Water Carborator upgrade kit.
The ACID test is not a CSS compliance test. It's more like a CSS torture test.
IIRC, Konqueror and a heavily patched Webkit (they share a similar code base, of course) are the only browsers that pass ACID 2.0 . Oh, and Opera, of course; but that's because Opera tends to be light years ahead in terms of rendering engine design (I do dislike the Opera UI, though). Even Opera on mobile devices passes.
Take a look at the results here. Look at the screenshots. Firefox fails the test, but it's pretty close. IE7 is miles and miles away. But either way, the test is not terribly relevant; ACID is a test of invalid CSS, to see how the browser handles broken code. I think that in terms of standards, a CSS compliance test is more relevant. Not that IE does well there, either.
Most of the reviews I've read chide MS for creating an interface that looks far, far different than anything else in the OS.
The average person does NOT like MS's new interface design. For the most part, there is a huge majority of people who run XP in "classic" mode, enjoying all applications in a one-size-fits all, boxy, ugly as sin, tan/grey everything Windows 2000-style interface. In particular, placing tabs above the menu bar seems to incite hatred; people find it confusing.
Joe Blow doesn't like UI changes; even if they could potentially increase efficency. The only people that are really moved by whiz-bang UIs are young gamers and UI engineers.
By the way, the Apple startup sound is more akin to the PC Bios Boot-Beep. It's a hardware test, and it will play a different sound if there is a video card failure or ram failure, something which prevents the system from reaching the GUI.
Don't come off as 100% nice and friendly. Don't try and be kind and giving (off the bat). Be 80% rude, demanding, and heartless.
Once you've achieved that image, crack lots of jokes. About yourself, about others, about politicans, about whatever.
Honestly, the women I've made friends with in the workplace have taken this approach. The bitchiness immediately scares away lovesick puppies, but a good sense of self-deprecating humor will eliminate any barriers (bitchiness-based or gender-based) between yourself and your coworkers.
Obviously, this will require a thick skin, and furthermore, it requires a degree of self-consciousness, and an element of manipulation. I recommend reading The Art of Seduction. It's very important to establish a balance; you want people to be interested in hearing what you have to say, whether it be humourous, cruel, or serious. At the same time, a bit of evil makes it quite clear to all around you that you're not interested in love/sex.
Oh, and when you end up going out to drink with coworkers, leave before people get totally trashed (if they do that). Insenstive, sexual, cruel things come out of groups of drunk men, and no amount of threating/training/manipulating is going to change that. It's a part of many men's lower psyche that has simply not evolved out of the human brain yet, and large amounts of alcohol lower the sociological barriers surrounding this dark morass.
Yes, TCP/IP offloaders, crypto offloaders, physics offloaders, FFT offloaders, have all existed. The only accepted offloader that has succeeded is the GPU, and that is because it was subsidized by the high end graphics people and people with game addictions. The cost/benefit of the other offloaders has not proven itself. Especially when you consider the rate of increase of the CPU speeds and the bottleneck of getting the data to the offloaded chip and back again.
And every once in a while you here an Intel engineer talking about how dedicated GPUs won't be necessary in the future, that 3D rendering will fall before the onslaught of increase CPU power.
Sometimes, you can train better with sugar than with a rod.
While I don't believe schools should = entertainment, there's definitely something to be said for the following two positions:
A) Students pay more attention when entertained, and apply themselves better when they are interested, and B) Old-school institutions of learning which relied upon the "hard" sciences/history, and whose course work involved studying classical works, mathematical reptition/reguritation, and the ability to memorize vast piles of text books sucked. The idea that these stodgy old places really excelled as placed of "citizen creation/training" is absurd.
Today's schools are far closer to the genuine article of "learning", where students pursue knowledges because the teachers have managed to motivate them to do so. The places where this has failed to occur are because of implementation failures, not architectural design flaws.
Equating striping copyrights with human rights are ridiculous.
I've never heard a justification to understanding copyright as a fundamental human right. The legal basis for the U.S.'s copyright regime is clearly stated in the constitution, "to promote the arts and sciences."
Copyright is a monopoly grant to content producers in the hope of inducing them to produce more. Copyright does not exist on the same plane as freedom of speech, or freedom for persecution on the basis of race.
I buy the tag line of the article, in the sense that if future OS releases from MS experience the same rate of delay/feature removal, we won't see another OS from MS till some time after Infinium and 3D Labs release their flagship products.
But no, I don't see MS shifting to an alternative development paradigm.
The phone companies (of which there become fewer and fewer every year) _must_ be heavily regulated, because the entire phone system was built through government intervention. The phone system was built as a heavily subsidized monopoly; if it wasn't for Uncle Sam and AT&T, we may have had the cable companies replace the phone system entirely much earlier on.
Instead, vast sums of money were spent on the behemoth.
Until you can demonstrate that the current phone system remains a competitive landscape, heavy regulation will be necessary to maintain some kind of consumer fairness. I'm quite a libertarian, but until we see a true free market in the phone system, we'll have to keep up the red tape.
The phone companies are making billions of dollars utilizing a system that the U.S. government built for them. They didn't invest in it, we, the people, did. The phone companies should be nationalized into one giant entity, have all of their assets stripped by the federal government, and then privatize the physical access region by region. That _might_ be enough shock treatment to resolve the current, ugly situation.
As it is, we've spent billions upons billions of dollars, we we're promised fiber optics years ago, and the primary phone comany (SBC/AT&T) is deploying a "fiber" solution that is not speed competitive with the cable providers (6 Mbps, max, 1 HD stream). Something's broken here, and something smells funny. The problem is regulation; the ugly frankenstein monster we've built needs to be ripped apart and sold for parts.
In short, the AT&T anti-trust ruling didn't go far enough, because the old AT&T, as an entity, was only broken up, not completely destroyed. It should have been privatized, and have it assets redistributed by the market. Trolls like you do not seem to understand that the history of the phone system in the U.S. reads like an anti-free-market textbook.
I'd argue that that number is probably accurate, but isn't a definitive indiciator in and of itself.
Consider pollution (Cuba's a small island nation less industrialized that the U.S.) Consider obesity (Cubans are by and large less overweight than Americans) Consider climate (Cuba's weather is significantly better than most of the U.S.)
There are definitely alternate factors, and I'd argue that Cuba has quite a few in its favor. Cuba, the island within the Carribean, is quite close to heaven. The problem is Casto.
Furthermore, even though Cuba is quite poor, that so much of the GDP percentage wise is spent on healthcare must make a difference, as well. That Cuba has the highest ratio worldwide of doctors to citizens probably makes a difference, as well; but that doesn't mean Cuba is "well-rounded", or that economic spending there accurately reflects the will of the people.
Dictators don't fail all around when they do something. Having a dictator makes it easier for them to realize their dream, and in this case, one of Castro's dreams was a comprehensive healthcare system. I don't think this justifies this regime, but you should at least acknowledge that just because a nation is a dictatorship doesn't mean that fail 100% at everything they try.
Nested TrueCrypt volumes should do the trick. While some of the more paranoid may believe that the NSA can break into TrueCrypt type stuff (I don't), the powers that be surely aren't going to blow their load on a simple RIAA anti-P2P case, now are they?
If they are really unable to find scientists willing to test it, then perhaps they can send it to me. I'd like to power my computer and charge my mobile phone please, to save on my electricity bill. I'll test it for free.
I'll one up you.
I'll fly my investors out to their facility. If they can demonstrate the machine actually works, I'll raise them as much operating capital as they need. Of course, they'll have to accept being vetted by my choice of experts; however, I (and my experts) are more than willing to sign any NDAs/non-competes they might need.
More than that, we'd be willing to commit to funding the venture, and on their terms, too.
The problem is it is horseshit. Pure crap. Utter phooey. That's why we're spending the big bucks on other, less exotic, but real schemes like BioFuel. Hell, I'd believe the Helium-3 buzz over this nonsense.
Even from a commercial standpoint, what they say makes no sense.
I have colleagues with a great deal of money made from investments in the oil markets. They literally waste millions searching for alternative, "future" energy sources. These are people that hire all kinds of crackpots, hoping that eventually they'll find the next big thing.
If these guys (Steorn) are for real, and they actually have redefined physics, and they actually can make a machine that produces electricity for free, they don't have to sell anything. Vast amounts of venture capital are avaliable, and they could literally take the energy market by storm.
$1 million, $10 million, $100 million, whatever. However much it takes; if they can actually demonstrate that they can produce free energy. Once you can produce free energy, you don't need to sell magnetic energy creators; you can just sell electricity, and drive all the old fashioned fossil fuel/nuclear companies under. And the venture capitalists I know would love that, and are more than willing to settle for a fair share (all the operating capital they could need, 20% or so ownership).
The problem is, it's all bullshit. These people can't produce any energy; and therefore, they have to sucker people into purchasing bunk energy producing machines.
Here's the relevant line from the article. It's a quote from a company scientist.
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.
From the article.
Once you say, "[Energy is] literally created", you're full of shit.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Ever. For any reason. Not without altering the structure of the Universe. There's really nothing more to it.
I'm all for innovative energy harnessing. I'd love to see unique research into zero-point energy, allowing us to generate antimatter. I'd love to see people create practical applications for high-energy particle physics. I love pie in the sky ideas; I think they are the revolutionary things that vault humanity in to new eras of development.
But creating energy from nowhere? Bull-fucking-shit. And no "emperical" testing is going to convince me, either.
You want to redefine the laws of physics? Fine. Show me the alternate model. Otherwise, crawl back into that hole you came from. I'll never, ever believe the claims of a random inventor over the body of physics, unless it can be backed up with some decent theoretical explanations, and it can be shown that there are errors in the body of physics.
HIV is an STD, people. In most cases, HIV is transfered via sexual contact between either a man and a woman, or a man and a man.
One might even go as far to say that HIV is a Male Sexually Transmitted Disease. In fact, statistically, you can probably count the number of Woman to Woman HIV transmissions on your fingers and toes
Realistically, Female to Female transmission probably does occur on some level, but en gross, it is rare. If you solve Male to transmission, the primary means of infection are transfusion and needle sharing; and vaccinating most men would resolve this as well.
If Birth Defects are involved, there remain a couple questions: A) Do birth defects result from the male side? (Rare, but a possible side effect; sperm deformation). B) Can vaccinated individuals carry the virus? Are vaccinated individuals infectious? C) Is the vaccine useful for wiping out existing infections? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still be effective? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still prevent transmission.
Given that it is an STD that is extremely difficult to transmit female to female, vaccinating all men will take a significant bite out of the problem without risking birth defects. This would immediately reduce HIV from a worldwide epidemic to a niche population disease (probably HIV positive gay women whom have multiple sexual partners), one which would be much easier to address via testing/standard prevention techniques, and would also be a much smaller probably area to focus medical resources on.
Mankind can afford HIV cocktails for.25% of the population. We cannot afford HIV cocktails for 25% of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
Wikipedia does NOT block access to Chinese users.
China's government blocks access to Wikipedia. I would not be surprised if China's government blocked access to Slashdot.
Does that mean Cmdr Taco should prevent posts from people who are commie bashing? I think not.
Let me point you here:b oard.html
http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/key
Applications, including the Finder (see Chapters 6 and 7)
command+H
Hide current application
command+option+H
Hide all other applications
command+M
Minimize active window to the Dock
command+option+M
Minimize all windows in active application to the Dock
command+`
Cycle through current application's windows (add the shift to cycle backwards)
command+,
Open application preferences dialog (not universal yet, but becoming more common)
SuSE.
It's easy, really.
Windows -> SuSE conversion is really really easy. YaST, etc. . . makes configuration very similar to Windows style tasks; at least everything has a GUI analog.
It only avoids anti-aliasing when Windows avoids anti-aliasing. That means anti-aliasing works in WinXP bottles ;-).
It depends on your budget, really.
.)
I'm not (yet) wealthy by any metric, but I find Wow & Eve Online to be efficent usages of my entertainment budget (plenty of bang for the buck).
Before I started seriously playing MMOs, I found my self spending a huge amount on entertainment. Cable TV with 3 premium channels. 3-4 movies a month. $40 for a fancy dinner here and there, and the occasional $40-$100 night out drinking on the town.
Buy 1-2 CDs, and you hit the $15. Buy one DVD, and you hit the $15.
Now, think like a capitalist. You pay X dollars, and get Y hours of entertainment out of it. My girlfriend and I, instead of seeing a movie or going out to the clubs, we stay home and play WoW. On average, we probably put in 10-20 hours a month. That means approximately $1.15 per hour for my entertainment. Do you think you get 20+ hours of entertainment out of one DVD? What about one CD? What about 1 movie ticket?
Or even a moderately priced $10 meal. Do you get 8 hours of entertainment out of it?
I have MMO accounts. I purchased some gym passes. I get monthly salsa lessons. And I cut out the premium channels, reduced my phone minutes to a reasonable 600, stopped going to movies, and stopped eating out of house.
The result? More $$ in my pocket. And I get to play in this beautiful game world with live support, constantly updated content, and PvP that I really do enjoy. Now, maybe WoW is too simple for all the leet games out there, but my GF and I get quite a kick out of it. And when I really want to deal with something crazy sophisticated, I pull up Eve.
I don't understand your indignation at this idea of "subscription" gaming. Running WoW is expensive (tons of bandwidth). Updating WoW is expensive (a dedicated team of designers, GMs, network admins, etc. .
These are real costs associated with producing a game. Obviously, they turn a profit, but unlike, say, AT&T, or Comcast, Blizzard is pretty damn reponsive to its customer base, and doesn't bilk people using micropayments.
I guess some aesthetics may balk at the idea of paying $$ on entertainment at all, but I don't really get that. I'm not saying I spend all my cash on "fun", but there's safely room in my budget for $45 a month towards entertainment, without stopping me from buying a house, going to graduate school, or even *gasp* building up a meager savings account.
Of course, you seem to say that you are willing to purchase games, in which case I point you back at my $$ per hour question. My games of choice cost me $1.15 per hour of playtime. How many hours of play time do you get out of your $50-$60 Xbox/360/PS2/GC/Windows games? Do you average at least 45? And if so, by how much? Do you really believe I'm paying a significant premium?
Let's say I'm willing to pay TWICE what you pay for the online "experience", and for competing against thousands of players. The equivalent price point for you would be $0.67 cents per hour, or approximately 90 hours for a $50 game.
*shrug* I don't think I've played any console or PC game (except a few, choice, excellent strategy games) for more than that.
Why is this even news? Why does anyone listen?
This crap is based on IE. If anyone believes that an IE engine browser will be safe & private, I'd like to send you some information literature regarding some beach front land in Louisanna.
*shrug*. This shit has been in the news for days now. What the fuck; it's practically a prank. There's nothing here to see folks, other than some moron pretending to release a browser by repackaging pure-shit. You're supposed to ignore stuff like this; just like the guy who claims he'll prove the water carborator works, but only after you buy his $19.99 (plus $24.99 shipping & handling) Automobile Water Carborator upgrade kit.
The ACID test is not a CSS compliance test. It's more like a CSS torture test.
IIRC, Konqueror and a heavily patched Webkit (they share a similar code base, of course) are the only browsers that pass ACID 2.0 . Oh, and Opera, of course; but that's because Opera tends to be light years ahead in terms of rendering engine design (I do dislike the Opera UI, though). Even Opera on mobile devices passes.
Take a look at the results here. Look at the screenshots. Firefox fails the test, but it's pretty close. IE7 is miles and miles away. But either way, the test is not terribly relevant; ACID is a test of invalid CSS, to see how the browser handles broken code. I think that in terms of standards, a CSS compliance test is more relevant. Not that IE does well there, either.
I actually haven't been reading that at all.
Most of the reviews I've read chide MS for creating an interface that looks far, far different than anything else in the OS.
The average person does NOT like MS's new interface design. For the most part, there is a huge majority of people who run XP in "classic" mode, enjoying all applications in a one-size-fits all, boxy, ugly as sin, tan/grey everything Windows 2000-style interface. In particular, placing tabs above the menu bar seems to incite hatred; people find it confusing.
Joe Blow doesn't like UI changes; even if they could potentially increase efficency. The only people that are really moved by whiz-bang UIs are young gamers and UI engineers.
It is NOT mandatory.
o pper/Startup%20Chime%20Stopper.html1 005165919533
Turn down your sound (in the OS X volume control), or mute your speakers.
Restart.
Tada! No startup sound.
There are also applications and Applescripts that will do it automatically for you:
http://alphaomega.software.free.fr/startupchimest
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2003
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16780
By the way, the Apple startup sound is more akin to the PC Bios Boot-Beep. It's a hardware test, and it will play a different sound if there is a video card failure or ram failure, something which prevents the system from reaching the GUI.
No, I'm actually serious.
Don't come off as 100% nice and friendly. Don't try and be kind and giving (off the bat). Be 80% rude, demanding, and heartless.
Once you've achieved that image, crack lots of jokes. About yourself, about others, about politicans, about whatever.
Honestly, the women I've made friends with in the workplace have taken this approach. The bitchiness immediately scares away lovesick puppies, but a good sense of self-deprecating humor will eliminate any barriers (bitchiness-based or gender-based) between yourself and your coworkers.
Obviously, this will require a thick skin, and furthermore, it requires a degree of self-consciousness, and an element of manipulation. I recommend reading The Art of Seduction. It's very important to establish a balance; you want people to be interested in hearing what you have to say, whether it be humourous, cruel, or serious. At the same time, a bit of evil makes it quite clear to all around you that you're not interested in love/sex.
Oh, and when you end up going out to drink with coworkers, leave before people get totally trashed (if they do that). Insenstive, sexual, cruel things come out of groups of drunk men, and no amount of threating/training/manipulating is going to change that. It's a part of many men's lower psyche that has simply not evolved out of the human brain yet, and large amounts of alcohol lower the sociological barriers surrounding this dark morass.
....What kind of havok spam of this nature could cause.
I can't believe "serious" issues like this get discussed over standard e-mail. E-mail isn't secure, people, and e-mail can be forged.
Yes, TCP/IP offloaders, crypto offloaders, physics offloaders, FFT offloaders, have all existed. The only accepted offloader that has succeeded is the GPU, and that is because it was subsidized by the high end graphics people and people with game addictions. The cost/benefit of the other offloaders has not proven itself. Especially when you consider the rate of increase of the CPU speeds and the bottleneck of getting the data to the offloaded chip and back again.
And every once in a while you here an Intel engineer talking about how dedicated GPUs won't be necessary in the future, that 3D rendering will fall before the onslaught of increase CPU power.
Sometimes, you can train better with sugar than with a rod.
While I don't believe schools should = entertainment, there's definitely something to be said for the following two positions:
A) Students pay more attention when entertained, and apply themselves better when they are interested, and
B) Old-school institutions of learning which relied upon the "hard" sciences/history, and whose course work involved studying classical works, mathematical reptition/reguritation, and the ability to memorize vast piles of text books sucked. The idea that these stodgy old places really excelled as placed of "citizen creation/training" is absurd.
Today's schools are far closer to the genuine article of "learning", where students pursue knowledges because the teachers have managed to motivate them to do so. The places where this has failed to occur are because of implementation failures, not architectural design flaws.
Equating striping copyrights with human rights are ridiculous.
I've never heard a justification to understanding copyright as a fundamental human right. The legal basis for the U.S.'s copyright regime is clearly stated in the constitution, "to promote the arts and sciences."
Copyright is a monopoly grant to content producers in the hope of inducing them to produce more. Copyright does not exist on the same plane as freedom of speech, or freedom for persecution on the basis of race.
Real men network with token ring.
I buy the tag line of the article, in the sense that if future OS releases from MS experience the same rate of delay/feature removal, we won't see another OS from MS till some time after Infinium and 3D Labs release their flagship products.
But no, I don't see MS shifting to an alternative development paradigm.
This is horseshit.
The phone companies (of which there become fewer and fewer every year) _must_ be heavily regulated, because the entire phone system was built through government intervention. The phone system was built as a heavily subsidized monopoly; if it wasn't for Uncle Sam and AT&T, we may have had the cable companies replace the phone system entirely much earlier on.
Instead, vast sums of money were spent on the behemoth.
Until you can demonstrate that the current phone system remains a competitive landscape, heavy regulation will be necessary to maintain some kind of consumer fairness. I'm quite a libertarian, but until we see a true free market in the phone system, we'll have to keep up the red tape.
The phone companies are making billions of dollars utilizing a system that the U.S. government built for them. They didn't invest in it, we, the people, did. The phone companies should be nationalized into one giant entity, have all of their assets stripped by the federal government, and then privatize the physical access region by region. That _might_ be enough shock treatment to resolve the current, ugly situation.
As it is, we've spent billions upons billions of dollars, we we're promised fiber optics years ago, and the primary phone comany (SBC/AT&T) is deploying a "fiber" solution that is not speed competitive with the cable providers (6 Mbps, max, 1 HD stream). Something's broken here, and something smells funny. The problem is regulation; the ugly frankenstein monster we've built needs to be ripped apart and sold for parts.
In short, the AT&T anti-trust ruling didn't go far enough, because the old AT&T, as an entity, was only broken up, not completely destroyed. It should have been privatized, and have it assets redistributed by the market. Trolls like you do not seem to understand that the history of the phone system in the U.S. reads like an anti-free-market textbook.
I'd argue that that number is probably accurate, but isn't a definitive indiciator in and of itself.
Consider pollution (Cuba's a small island nation less industrialized that the U.S.)
Consider obesity (Cubans are by and large less overweight than Americans)
Consider climate (Cuba's weather is significantly better than most of the U.S.)
There are definitely alternate factors, and I'd argue that Cuba has quite a few in its favor. Cuba, the island within the Carribean, is quite close to heaven. The problem is Casto.
Furthermore, even though Cuba is quite poor, that so much of the GDP percentage wise is spent on healthcare must make a difference, as well. That Cuba has the highest ratio worldwide of doctors to citizens probably makes a difference, as well; but that doesn't mean Cuba is "well-rounded", or that economic spending there accurately reflects the will of the people.
Dictators don't fail all around when they do something. Having a dictator makes it easier for them to realize their dream, and in this case, one of Castro's dreams was a comprehensive healthcare system. I don't think this justifies this regime, but you should at least acknowledge that just because a nation is a dictatorship doesn't mean that fail 100% at everything they try.
The better answer is to use encryption.
Nested TrueCrypt volumes should do the trick. While some of the more paranoid may believe that the NSA can break into TrueCrypt type stuff (I don't), the powers that be surely aren't going to blow their load on a simple RIAA anti-P2P case, now are they?
On the other hand, the ability to blow up a small town could potentially make you very, very rich, as well.
Just pick the right town.....
If they are really unable to find scientists willing to test it, then perhaps they can send it to me. I'd like to power my computer and charge my mobile phone please, to save on my electricity bill. I'll test it for free.
I'll one up you.
I'll fly my investors out to their facility. If they can demonstrate the machine actually works, I'll raise them as much operating capital as they need. Of course, they'll have to accept being vetted by my choice of experts; however, I (and my experts) are more than willing to sign any NDAs/non-competes they might need.
More than that, we'd be willing to commit to funding the venture, and on their terms, too.
The problem is it is horseshit. Pure crap. Utter phooey. That's why we're spending the big bucks on other, less exotic, but real schemes like BioFuel. Hell, I'd believe the Helium-3 buzz over this nonsense.
Even from a commercial standpoint, what they say makes no sense.
I have colleagues with a great deal of money made from investments in the oil markets. They literally waste millions searching for alternative, "future" energy sources. These are people that hire all kinds of crackpots, hoping that eventually they'll find the next big thing.
If these guys (Steorn) are for real, and they actually have redefined physics, and they actually can make a machine that produces electricity for free, they don't have to sell anything. Vast amounts of venture capital are avaliable, and they could literally take the energy market by storm.
$1 million, $10 million, $100 million, whatever. However much it takes; if they can actually demonstrate that they can produce free energy. Once you can produce free energy, you don't need to sell magnetic energy creators; you can just sell electricity, and drive all the old fashioned fossil fuel/nuclear companies under. And the venture capitalists I know would love that, and are more than willing to settle for a fair share (all the operating capital they could need, 20% or so ownership).
The problem is, it's all bullshit. These people can't produce any energy; and therefore, they have to sucker people into purchasing bunk energy producing machines.
Here's the relevant line from the article. It's a quote from a company scientist.
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.
Smells like crap to me.
"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.
From the article.
Once you say, "[Energy is] literally created", you're full of shit.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Ever. For any reason. Not without altering the structure of the Universe. There's really nothing more to it.
I'm all for innovative energy harnessing. I'd love to see unique research into zero-point energy, allowing us to generate antimatter. I'd love to see people create practical applications for high-energy particle physics. I love pie in the sky ideas; I think they are the revolutionary things that vault humanity in to new eras of development.
But creating energy from nowhere? Bull-fucking-shit. And no "emperical" testing is going to convince me, either.
You want to redefine the laws of physics? Fine. Show me the alternate model. Otherwise, crawl back into that hole you came from. I'll never, ever believe the claims of a random inventor over the body of physics, unless it can be backed up with some decent theoretical explanations, and it can be shown that there are errors in the body of physics.
Steorn demonstrates neither.
HIV is an STD, people. In most cases, HIV is transfered via sexual contact between either a man and a woman, or a man and a man.
.25% of the population. We cannot afford HIV cocktails for 25% of the population.
One might even go as far to say that HIV is a Male Sexually Transmitted Disease. In fact, statistically, you can probably count the number of Woman to Woman HIV transmissions on your fingers and toes
Realistically, Female to Female transmission probably does occur on some level, but en gross, it is rare. If you solve Male to transmission, the primary means of infection are transfusion and needle sharing; and vaccinating most men would resolve this as well.
If Birth Defects are involved, there remain a couple questions:
A) Do birth defects result from the male side? (Rare, but a possible side effect; sperm deformation).
B) Can vaccinated individuals carry the virus? Are vaccinated individuals infectious?
C) Is the vaccine useful for wiping out existing infections? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still be effective? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still prevent transmission.
Given that it is an STD that is extremely difficult to transmit female to female, vaccinating all men will take a significant bite out of the problem without risking birth defects. This would immediately reduce HIV from a worldwide epidemic to a niche population disease (probably HIV positive gay women whom have multiple sexual partners), one which would be much easier to address via testing/standard prevention techniques, and would also be a much smaller probably area to focus medical resources on.
Mankind can afford HIV cocktails for